The Guadalajara Reporter

‘Piece of My Heart’:  Reach-back moments appear in a scattered group of events that recall a Dionysian era that had rough bark

In an unusual, disconnected flock of days, there seemed to blossom a series of notable small and large events tagged by one observer as “reach-back days.”  And it was, to younger people, a long reach – touching the Sixties.  For people of a certain age, it was yesterday.  Locally, this coincidence of like-minded events was initially noted with the appearance of the Lakeside Little Theatre’s  September 19-October 7 performance of “Quartet,” an amusing and touching story of four successful, and now aging, opera singers who unexpectedly come together at a musician’s retirement home in England.

October 6, a friend attended a performance of “One Night with Janis Joplin” – a concert\theater play – at the Arena Stage of Washington D.C.’s Kreeger Theater.  He called me the day afterwards, ecstatic.  He and a good many others attended to mark Joplin’s death 42 years ago, in October 1970.  “The Queen of Rock’n Roll,” “The Queen of Psychedelic Soul” was 27 years old when she died 16 days after male rock icon Jimi Hendrix died, also of an overdose of heroin.

Another species of reach-back recently appeared in U.S. bookstores.  This was “Subversives; The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Ronald Reagan’s Rise to Power” by Seth Rosenfeld, former reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle.   “America never got over the ‘60s,” begins one review of “Subversives,” and goes on to prove it, citing Rosenfeld’s use of a trove of 300,000 newly declassified FBI documents.  They detail the U.S. government’s campaign against the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, among other felonies, and Reagan’s special relationship with J. Edgar Hoover.  That relationship began in the 1940s when Reagan became an FBI informer, listing actors he suspected of being “subversive.”  His relationship increased, Rosenfeld shows, when he became president of the Screen Actors Guild, and later when he was California’s governor.  FBI reports aided in destroying liberal – not communist – students’ lives and abetting the firing of Clark Kerr, the president of the UC Berkeley’s president.  (At one point the documents show Reagan’s snitching was as petty as it was cowardly and reckless: he snitched on a pretty young actress just because she embarrassed him at a cocktail party.  The FBI repaid him with favors, often feeding him information, some of it false.)

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