SIDETRIPS


 

 

 

 

HERB CAEN

 

Someone’s trying to tar our local agitator,  Jimmy O’Shea, as a CIA agent. Not here ya don’t! We may not love our hometown crazies, reds, and radicals,   but we respect them  (and the other way round)
. . . . Emperor Norton, Jack London, Harry Bridges, Anton Refregier, Benny Bufano, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the Beats, the Diggers, the hippies, they’re ours and they’re the genuine article, no fakes. Keep your mitts off. That’s the kind of town we are.

 

 

And That Would Have Settled That, but the item never appeared, cut in favor of a prediction that the Oakland A’s would force the Giants to move to San Jose by 1975. No one ever believed Cathy and Jimmy were CIA assets except the members of Wheaties II, a splinter group from the Wheaties Youth Faction who believed every word in Hammer and Tongs because its editor was black. When the San Francisco chapter of Wheaties II joined Weathermen in 1969, Hank and Edna, recent recruits, acted as if they believed the memo — NOT in the way Jimmy and Cathy acted as if Walter had not caused them pain though the pain had forever distanced them from him, but to undermine the creds of those like Jimmy and Cathy who refused to join them underground.