Nathan
Spooner Stories from Berkeley; Adventures
in the Slow Lane Grover Beach, CA: Nathan B. Spooner & Family
Publishing Company, 2006. www.nbspublish.com. 181p.
Nathan is a graduate of the University of California
(Philosophy) and did graduate study at San Francisco State College. His stories
covers the years 1963 to 1983, and takes the reader to the desert, the Northwest,
to southeast Alaska, back to New England, and out to sea – as well as to Berkeley. Most of the
narrative though takes place in Berkeley between 1963 and 1975 (the places and
people of those incredible years 1963 to 1965!). Here you meet some of the most
interesting personalities you can imagine. Some you will know (the Beatles,
Mario Savio, Annie) and others you wish you could have. Like Lucy and the Girl
in the Guitar Shop.
Nathan is
friends and at ease with world-class artists, accomplished academics, and with musicians
and writers and with lumberjacks, and with Tlingit and Haida commercial salmon fishing boat crew members. He
is at home with his history in early New England, and with the desert rats of
the Mojave, and with those in the highest of high academia, as well as in the
wildest of the northern forests, and on the turbulence of the open sea. He can discuss
Philosophy, compose and play music, work as a street musician, as a lumberjack
who can move fallen trees, and as a fisherman who can pull salmon into a boat
all day.
The
stories begin in 1963 when we meet Lucy in the Doe Library of the University of
California. You meet their friends, how they live, and the places where they meet.
You meet Professors Margen and tenBroek. The people and places are never
commonplace. Nor are the events of the time - with some ironic commentary on
the Free Speech Movement. There is graduation and work in The Steppenwolf on
San Pablo Avenue. Nathan meets Susan Liebovitz and will soon meet her younger
sister Annie. And to the Beatles concert
in Candlestick Park. Then in 1968 off to southeast Alaska and salmon fishing.
Here Nathan is a cook on a fishing boat with a Native American crew. A cook who
also loads fish and so much so that the boast sinks. Then to Oregon in the
Summer of 1969 and work as a logger. And back to the Bay Area and graduate
classes at SF State.
And now
music. And work as can be found and Life on Fulton Street. (Those wonderful 60s
when you could eat and pay the rent through part time work!) Then in 1973 a
trip back to New England. Relatives and Youngblood Farm. And then back to
Berkeley and street music, stage music, composing and writing, poetry readings,
and Annie. There are some flashbacks to memories of cross country road trips,
the time in the desert, and of a very kind man in a garage near Highway 99 in
the Central Valley in 1962 who gave Nathan’s iconic 1941 Chevy a new generator
on his word that he would pay later. Which he did. And then in 1975 off to
Alaska and the wind and the cold (real wind and cold cold!) until 1983 when the
narrative ends.
If I had
one quarrel with the book it would be the subtitle. This is a story that seized
life; it does not happen in any ‘slow lane.’ The writing is beautiful and
reveals a very likable voice behind the prose. Cal people will certainly want
to read Stories. And so will
anyone else who remembers these times – and anyone who wants to learn about
this seminal era. With all the rest that it is Stories from Berkeley is an excellent social history of its time
and place. Since Nathan wrote much of the book from notes he took at the time Stories would be a useful supplementary text for college courses.