Berkeley Riots - 1970

I first became a policeman in 1969 with the San Leandro Police Department in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. We had about 90 police officers total.

During that time the "students" and other life forms at or near the University of California at Berzerkley were periodically rioting about various social causes such as the war in Viet Nam. there was also a vacant lot in Berkeley near the campus that some local people had turned into what thy called "People's Park." The "money grubbing, burgeois, imperialistic, captitalist" owner of the land wanted to develop it and had the police try to evict the squatters who occupied it.

Berkeley PD couldn't handle all the rioting so we all got to go to Berkeley (I went two or three times) to help out.

On this one day, we were with a group of police officers from various departments and we were all kind of hanging out in reserve at the track stadium near the Campanile Bell Tower which is somewhat of a landmark for the University.

Suddenly a group of rioters who managed to get into the track stadium and up on the grand stands above us began lobbing cinder blocks down on us.

I, and some other officers near me, had just been issued a some "Ball" grenades. These marvelous devices are about the size of baseballs and when you pull the pin and throw them, they don't exactly explode, but CS gas (tear gas) puffs out of them in about a ten to fifteen foot cloud. They are pretty cool crowd control tools.

About five of us immediately lobbed some ball grenades over the top of the grand stand - about fifty feet up - and other officers ran around each end and we wound up with about ten good arrests (ADW on a police officer).

If you have never seen the UC campus in Berkeley, it is one of the most beautiful imagineable. It was a shame that every time I went there as a cop, it always had the smell of tear gas just hanging in the air.

One day, a group of CHP officers arrived sporting wrist-rocket sling shots and bags of marbles for ammo. They would get behind the rioting crowds and from about a hundred yards would shoot these marbles into the legs and feet of the rioters. I don't want anyone to think that I might have enjoyed watching the rioters jumping up in pain and grabbing their lower legs and ankles trying to figure out what had hit them, so I won't say any more about that.

Many years later when we basically had to watch rioters carry stolen goods out of burning buildings in Los Angeles during the Rodney King riots, I sort of wished we could have been issued sling shots and marbles just to make those rioters feel a teeny weeny bit uncomfortable while they were looting.

I recently watched South Pacific and enjoyed it a lot. The credits indicated the musical was based on James A Michener's Tales of the South Pacific. So i got it and read it. It was Michener's first book and was a collection of tales by different men serving in the South Pacific during World War II. Michener was a Lt. Commander in the Navy.

So I'm wondering if Rogers and Hammerstien will do a musical based on the ramblings of my Tales of Being a Cop. I think not.