This week in my family history project: Three letters from my father to his parents from early 1969, in which my parents become members of a Japanese church.<\/p>\r\n
But before I link to those letters, I feel like I should give some context that I left out last time. (Content warning for parental death.)<\/p>\r\n
Those of you who\u2019ve followed my posts of my mother Marcy\u2019s letters to her parents<\/a> and photos from her life<\/a> already have a fair bit of background on Marcy: she was the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, an only child, born and raised in Philadelphia, went to college at Antioch, moved to California, met Peter and moved in with him and got pregnant with me and embarked on the hippie lifestyle. In mid-1968, when this new set of letters starts, just after I was born, Marcy was nearly 23 years old.<\/p>\r\n (Marcy\u2019s father Jack died in May, 1969, of emphysema I think, at age 64; but there is no mention of his death at all in these letters, nor of Marcy\u2019s reactions to it.)<\/p>\r\n And if you\u2019ve read my posts about Peter\u2019s FBI file<\/a>, then you might know some of Peter\u2019s history up to this point too. But I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve given nearly as detailed an account of that as I have of Marcy\u2019s. So, some notes:<\/p>\r\n Peter was born in Washington, D.C., but raised in Oregon and Washington state. His mother, Helen, was of Norwegian descent; his father, George, was of assorted-British-islands descent. By his late teens, Peter was rebelling against his parents. He got a full four-year National Merit scholarship to Caltech, but flunked out after the first quarter for drinking too much. He went back to the Seattle area and attended UW for a couple years (living in a hammock in the campus steam tunnels for part of that time), but didn\u2019t graduate. In 1960, at age 20, he joined the Socialist Workers Party; he also wrote a couple of letters to his parents about his beliefs (first letter<\/a>, second letter<\/a>), which resulted in George reporting him to the FBI. In 1961, Peter took a trip to Mexico (trying but failing to get to Cuba), then came back to Seattle.<\/p>\r\n At some point he met and married a woman named Gail. They lived in various places\u2014including, at least briefly, NYC\u2014but fetched up in San Francisco in the mid-1960s. At which point Gail ran off with Peter\u2019s best friend. In early 1967, Peter slept with a woman named Penny, who got pregnant, but at the time, Peter didn\u2019t think the kid was his<\/a>. All during his twenties, Peter worked at a wide variety of jobs, including \u201cdishwasher, encyclopedia salesman, math paper grader, janitor, truck driver, house painter, hay bale bucker, lumper, ditch digger, well digger, relief dairyman, assistant mortician, technical typist and editor, freelance tutor and editor, \u2026\u201d (For Peter\u2019s full list of jobs, see Jay\u2019s comment on a post of mine<\/a>.) In San Francisco, Peter worked as a shipfitter-welder for the Naval shipyard, while getting immersed in the hippie lifestyle.<\/p>\r\n At some point in 1966 or 1967, Peter and Marcy met; we aren\u2019t sure how or where. Peter spent a few days in jail a couple of times (I think), for things like nonpayment of parking tickets. Marcy and Peter were non-legally married by a friend on Mt. Tam in mid-1967<\/a>, and legally married in February of 1968, in the month before I was born. In mid-1968, when this new set of letters starts, just after I was born, Peter was 28 years old.<\/p>\r\n (Here\u2019s a brief description I wrote in 2013<\/a> of what Peter was like: \u201cErudite, passionate, well-read, interested in ideas, compassionate, funny, angry, political, unable to let things go, mathematical, literary, fascinated by science and by mysticism, high-functioning alcoholic, infectiously enthusiastic.\u201d)<\/p>\r\n And in 1968, Grandma Helen was 60, and Grandpa George was 56. George was working as a teacher by then, and maybe Helen was too? Not sure. Their youngest son, John\/Dobe, was 19, so all four of their (living<\/a>) sons were out of the house by then.<\/p>\r\n (I\u2019m going to be 54 in a couple months. It\u2019s just plain weird<\/em> to notice that I\u2019m nearly the age that George was when I was born. I\u2019m now trying to imagine having a 28-year-old ne\u2019er-do-well son who has spent the last ten years rebelling against everything I believe in, but who keeps asking me for money to help support him and his wife and their infant kid.) (I mean, I don\u2019t want to be *too* sympathetic to George; he behaved quite badly in a lot of ways. But even so, interesting to me to be reading these letters at roughly George\u2019s age rather than Peter\u2019s.)<\/p>\r\n OK, onward to the letters.<\/p>\r\n\r\n