I\u2019m uncertain of the exact date of this letter. Helen\u2019s birthday was late January, and the Valentine\u2019s Day reference leads me to assume this letter was written sometime in mid-February.<\/p>\r\n
Three pages, handwritten on 3-hole-punched lined paper.<\/p>\r\n
\r\nDear Mother,<\/p>\r\n
Happy Birthday! and enclosed is a physical-plane (belated) manifestation of our best wishes for many happy returns, and toward organic health, both individual and of the environment (what\u2019s left of it)\u2026<\/p>\r\n
<\/p>\r\n
Dear Mother and Father,<\/p>\r\n
Happy Valentine\u2019s Day! I\u2019ve held off writing until I knew what I\u2019d be doing this quarter, and I started today\u2014\u2014this morning I took these papers with me expecting I might have any notes to make\u2014\u2014no notes required\u2014\u2014they became this letter\u2026<\/p>\r\n
I went to Napa State (Mental) Hospital today, starting as a volunteer in the Napa Project of Stiles Hall. (the campus YMCA)\u2026 (I\u2019ve arranged to get credit for this in my Crim.191F course, as a substitute for teaching computer science at San Quentin, which I was barred from, because I neglected to tell them on my application to work there, about my \u201clife of crime\u201d\u2014\u2014that I had been arrested when nineteen years old for (a bottle of beer) \u201cpossession\u201d! Yes! the Associated Warden who made the decision wouldn\u2019t give me an appointment to talk with him about it, just \u201cYou lied, and we don\u2019t want your kind of people working here\u2026 I\u2019ve made up my mind, and nothing will change it\u2026\u201d\u2014\u2014I wrote him a letter saying I had really thought that had been expunged from the record when I was twenty-one, and thought that writing down this misdemeanor record would only be confusing\u2026 Finally got a letter saying I was still excluded this quarter but if I re-applied for next quarter and made
xxx<\/strike> an honest confession of my crime that I would be re-considered\u2026 so maybe next quarter\u2026<\/p>\r\nIn the meantime, I\u2019m taking part in the Napa Project* and studying physics (electrostatics, magnetic fields as relativistic effects, and other fantastica)\u2014\u2014and dropped two math courses, the functions of a complex variable course because of not having quite enough prerequisites (I could follow the proofs but not make them up myself\u2026 yet), and the other because it didn\u2019t say<\/u> in the catalog that one computer program per week was the homework\u2026<\/p>\r\n
* hopefully, I can help to bring in the Light where for too long, people have tried unsuccessfully to sweep out the darkness\u2026<\/p>\r\n
We were promoted to assistant supervisors in the Shaklee family of distributors\u2014\u2014and we\u2019re sending John a money-back-guarantee-(you take the vitamins & the protein powder for a month,
xxx<\/strike> and if you don\u2019t feel all-round better you get money back)-plus-bonus-plan-(if you like the supplements, you can continue to buy them from John and get one free for every six you buy\u2014\u2014plus extras for referrals to new families\u2026)-form\u2014\u2014hope you will take advantage of this you-can\u2019t-lose opportunity to simultaneously benefit yourselves & your health & welfare, and benefit John\u2019s pocketbook & self-esteem as increasingly self-supporting member of society, etc. Must go study now\u2014\u2014more later\u2014\u2014love\u2014\u2014<\/p>\r\npeter, marcy, jed, joaquin<\/p>\r\n
Written in margin of last page.<\/span> P.S.\u2014\u2014we\u2019ve been getting fine compliments on your \u201cpreparation H\u201d, Dad\u2014\u2014the concensus: a joyous wine, if, like all Concords, a bit foxy\u2026<\/p>\r\n
Written in margin of first page.<\/span> P.P.S. Please pass on the three enclosed books to John when you\u2019re through with them\u2026<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n
Some notes:<\/p>\r\n
\r\n
- \u201cphysical-plane (belated) manifestation of our best wishes\u201d<\/dt>\r\n
- I assume this means \u201cbirthday present.\u201d<\/dd>\r\n
- Napa Project<\/dt>\r\n
- I don\u2019t know what this was. TSOR suggests that there was a program called the Napa Project that evaluated the effectiveness of drug-abuse education, but also suggests that that project didn\u2019t start until 1978, several years after this letter was written.<\/dd>\r\n
- \u201cone computer program per week\u201d<\/dt>\r\n
- I\u2019m not sure what Peter\u2019s concern was with writing one program per week; possibly just that it was hard to get enough computer time to do that?<\/dd>\r\n
- Shaklee<\/dt>\r\n
- Odd that neither Marcy nor Peter had mentioned Shaklee before now. I don\u2019t know how long they had been involved with it, and I don\u2019t remember how much longer they kept selling it. I think they also tried Amway for a while, later. This was back in the days before Multi-Level Marketing was a widely known thing. I gather that Shaklee has a better reputation than most MLMs, but I suspect that my parents thought it would be a good way to make money (as well as liking its products), and I suspect that they did not in fact make much if any money from it.<\/dd>\r\n
- \u201cpreparation H\u201d<\/dt>\r\n
- \u2026I have no idea what this was about. I guess just a wine that they had an unfortunate nickname for? I didn\u2019t know what foxy<\/a> meant in this context until I looked it up.<\/dd>\r\n<\/dl>\r\n\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In which Peter writes about what he\u2019s been up to\u2014school, Shaklee, etc. \u201cdropped [\u2026] the functions of a complex variable course because of not having quite enough prerequisites (I could follow the proofs but not make them up myself\u2026 yet)\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-peter","category-uc-berkeley"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=438"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":492,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438\/revisions\/492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/pmjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}