While I'm not a pacifist, I was fascinated to learn about this grossly under-reported chapter in American history in Michael Doyle's new biography of Roy Kepler, "Radical Chapters." The highly engaging book, which I reviewed last month for the Weekly and in the Almanac, goes far beyond the facts of Kepler's life and does a masterful job weaving his actions into context, from the early 1920's all the way to the present day. But it's the American gulags that continued to percolate in my memory weeks after I finished the book. Kepler served in several such camps. So had his older brother, Earl, who received a 30-month prison sentence for resisting the draft but then was transferred to a labor camp after getting paroled 10 months into his term. Earl worked in a forest in Glendora for about a month. He died in a fire that was accidentally started by his cabin-mate -- a fire that left 95 percent of his body covered in second- and third-degree burns. I wondered as I was reading whether Earl was still a pacifist while on his deathbed. Or, for that matter, if he was still an atheist.
Roy, who was at his brother's side in the hospital, continued to shuttle between camps, including on called Germfask that was known as the "Alcatraz of CPS." I won't cover all the grizzly details of these camps, but I'm really glad that Doyle had. The camps, which shuttered in 1946, clearly had a lasting impact on people like Roy Kepler and his future book-store patrons -- the peaceniks, the beatniks, the flower children, the militant rebels, the pothead philosophers, the acid-sucking bohemians and the whimsical skeptics who two decades later would rise up against Vietnam, write their own radical chapters and become, in their own right, revolutionaries.
Michael Doyle, who is incidentally a former Palo Alto Weekly writer, will be reading from "Radical Chapters" on Oct. 16, from 7 to 9 p.m., at (where else?) Kepler's in Menlo Park.
Book review: Roy Kepler's war on war
Radical pacifism and the making of an institution
By Gennady Sheyner
Roy Kepler's life was a tale of two revolutions:
one that gave rise to war protests, draft resisters and the bohemian,
anti-establishment sensibilities of the late 1960s, and another one that
brought paperback books to the masses and, in the process, redefined
the bookstore as we know it.
But he didn't look like a typical revolutionary,
or, for that matter, a typical bohemian. He did not sport a Che beret,
hurl Molotov cocktails, shroud himself in beatnik black, or wear flowers
in his hair. While his associates favored group hugs, painted buses andspiraled-down, mind-bending acid trips, Roy Kepler saved his trips for
places like Livermore, where he was arrested in 1960 for protesting the
recently built nuclear lab; and Oakland, where he was arrested in 1968
after leading a peaceful demonstration in front of the Oakland Induction
Center, a transfer point for soldiers about to go to war.
As Michael Doyle illustrates in his excellent new
biography, "Radical Chapters: Pacifist Bookseller Roy Kepler and the
Paperback Revolution," Mr. Kepler was a sharp, unsentimental
businessman, known less for his own personality than for those of wild,
world-changing bohemians who populated his popular Menlo Park bookstore,
a landmark institution that plans to reopen its own next chapter later
this month. But while he often wasn't the loudest or the wildest man in
the room, he was, above all, a leader, a man who parlayed his own
lifelong pacifism into a broad anti-war movement and, in the process,
created a institution that continues to change and inspire bookworms in
Menlo Park and beyond.
Roy Kepler is brought back to life in this new
biography by Mr. Doyle, a journalist with the McClatchy newspaper chain
and a former Palo Alto Weekly reporter. Mr. Doyle's deeply sympathetic
and intimate look at Mr. Kepler's life and times follows its subject
from his humble upbringing in Denver, to his war-resistance efforts
during World War II and the Vietnam War, to his radical experiences with
new institutions such as the Free University and the Institute for
Nonviolent Studies, to his wild success in transforming his stuffy but
eclectic bookshop into the Bay Area's leading melting pot for
revolutionary thinkers.
Roy Kepler was born in Denver in 1920 and first
became a "radical pacifist" at the onset of World War II, a period when
being a conscientious objector didn't endear one to the general
population, particularly when the stance had no religious basis. His
brother, Earl, also a pacifist, received a 30-month sentence for
resisting the war and avoiding the draft. Though he was paroled after 10
months, Earl would never see happy days. He joined the Civilian Public
Service and was assigned to work in a forest north of Glendora, the same
camp where Roy was based. Within a month, a fire that was accidentally
started by his cabin-mate destroyed his cabin and left 95 percent of
Earl's body covered in second- and third-degree burns. He died in the
hospital.
Roy Kepler would spend his early 20s shuttling
through various work camps, including Germfask, a CPS camp in northern
Michigan known as the "Alcatraz of CPS." With morale plummeting because
of tedious labor, scarce supplies and aggression from residents of
nearby towns, Germfask men fought back with pranks, shattering a
3-gallon mustard jar in the kitchen, clogging latrines, covering the
floor in a layer of white flour topped with obscenities written in
coffee grounds, calling in sick in alphabetical order.
The camp was ultimately shut down and Roy went to
another camp in Minersville, in northern Sacramento Valley, where
conditions were nearly as dismal. Before long, the war was over, the
camps were dismantled and the civilian program was shut down. In March
of 1946, Roy Kepler became a
free man.
His freedom and the end of World War II did
little to diminish his opposition to war and conscription. In the late
1940s and early 1950s, he took part in antiwar protests and joined a
series of pacifist organizations, including the prominent and relatively
conservative War Resisters League and the smaller but more radical
activist group called the Peacemakers.
As a member of WRL, he did his best to encourage
nonviolent confrontation and, in 1947, he and his supporters spearheaded
a resolution stating that the League would promote "political, economic
and social revolution by non-violent means." He advocated tax
resistance and took part in protests opposing the 1948 draft, which
lawmakers instituted to counter the looming threat from the Soviet
Union. By September of that year, he climbed to the top of the League's
administration, becoming its executive secretary.
He fell into the book business almost by
accident. In the early 1950s, he enrolled in college, traveled to France
on a Fulbright scholarship, held a brief stint at the radio station
KPFA, got married, had a daughter, and took a job for Eastern News
Service, a distributor of books and magazines. The gig involved
extensive traveling and gave him a critical exposure to the publishing
business.
By the spring of 1955, he began contemplating his
own venture — a bookstore that would specialize in paperbacks, a new
book type that was largely viewed as vulgar by Stanford Bookstore and
other booksellers in the Palo Alto area. In May of that year, Kepler's
Books & Magazines opened shop at its first location, 939 El Camino
Real in Menlo Park.
Kepler's was one of three independent bookstores
that were just starting out in the early 1950s. Lawrence Ferlinghetti
opened the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco's North Beach
neighborhood in 1953. Three years later, Pat and Fred Cody opened the
first Cody's books in Berkeley — a store that attracted a strong
following from the city's anti-war crowd. Each sought to create
something greater than a place that sells books — a community where
browsing is encouraged and where connections form.
It is this quality that helped sustain Kepler's
through the era of chain bookstores and Amazon — forces that put many
independent booksellers out of business (Cody's, for instance, closed
down in 2006). Kepler's itself went through a series of close calls and
was rescued on more than one occasion by investors from the high-tech
field who used to patronize the venerable bookstore.
In 2005, with its finances in shambles, the store
was shut down and was saved only by a community outcry and an injection
of funds from a team of investors. Earlier this year, Roy's son and
longtime store proprietor Clark Kepler retired from the family business,
and Kepler's welcomed a new transition team led by former Kepler's
enthusiast Praveen Madan. The new Kepler's is scheduled to reopen in
late September.
Mr. Doyle's book, like Kepler's bookstore, is
loaded with cameos from legendary bohemians and storied pacifists, from
the civil-rights pioneer Bayard Rustin and troubled beatnik Allen
Ginsberg to the shaggy-haired rocker Jerry Garcia and the charismatic
Paly graduate Joan Baez, a prominent figure in Roy Kepler's life.
It was at Kepler's that Jerry Garcia, a store
regular, met his future Grateful Dead collaborators, the lyricist Robert
Hunter and bassist Phil Lesh. Ken Kesey stopped by the store in 1964 in
search of a driver for his bus, which would become immortalized in Tom
Wolfe's classic "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." It was here that a
curious young nerd named Steve Wozniak pored through computer books and
absorbed the knowledge he would later use to help launch another
revolution in Silicon Valley. And it was also here that Ira Sandperl, an
eloquent pacifist and Ms. Baez's intellectual guru, worked his
bard-like magic as a bookstore clerk.
Mr. Doyle devotes plenty of text to the tight
teacher-student bond between Mr. Sandperl and Ms. Baez. This includes
their establishment in 1965 of the Institute for the Study of
Nonviolence at Ms. Baez's Carmel Valley ranch. The venture, which Mr.
Kepler helped finance and which ebbed and flowed through several
locations before fizzling out in the mid-1970s, was one of many
alternative-education projects he would experiment with during the
Vietnam War era.
In 1965, he helped start the "Free U," a school
that by 1969 claimed to serve 1,275 students and that included among its
eclectic offerings nonviolence seminars, improvisational drama classes,
and courses on capitalism and neocolonialism. Among his more quixotic
efforts was a series of Peace Games, intense role-playing exercises that
would split participants into attackers and defenders and included
linked arms, mock executions and real tears.
Throughout the era of protests, experiments and
change, Roy Kepler remained a constant force — the adult in the room, a
man whose pacifist ideals remained fixed and yet tempered by realistic
expectations. Ms. Baez described him in a 1994 interview with the Palo
Alto Weekly as a "steady, solid, nonviolent rock," according to the
book. His wife, Patricia, even likened him to a statue once, "a
steadfastly unemotional man more easily admired than embraced," Mr.
Doyle writes.
Even when vandals hurled cherry bombs at his
stores and threatened to target his house in the late 1960s, Mr. Kepler
remained unflappable. While others in his circles saw mayhem and
violence as plausible tools in resisting the status quo, he remained
tethered to his pacifist convictions up until his death on New Year's
Day in 1994 at the age of 73.
Mr. Doyle doesn't try to veil his own admiration
for his subject. His portrayal of Roy Kepler and his inner circle is
intimate and deeply sympathetic. He consistently refers to Mr. Kepler,
Mr. Sandperl and Ms. Baez by their first names and he doesn't dig too
deeply into the philosophical underpinnings of Mr. Kepler's and Mr.
Sandperl's pacifist convictions. Nor does he raise any questions or
present any challenges to Mr. Kepler's and Mr. Sandperl's fixed
commitment to nonviolence — there are no discussions of "just wars" in
this book.
But the author does a masterly job in weaving Roy
Kepler's life into the colorful, rapidly shifting context of the Bay
Area in the second half of the 20th century and in explaining how this
principled visionary both shaped and was shaped by the zeitgeist around
him.
No comments:
Post a Comment