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Hieronymous
Aug 8 2020 01:43
Today was a very emotional day for me. Having written the above post about Mike, so many memories came cascading back. And lots of sadness. It wasn't just the loss of Mike, because so many other from that generation died much too young. I'll get to that later.

Mike and I worked together at a lefty call center in downtown Berkeley (I wrote an account of my experience there called "Predicative Dialing for Dollars"), literally starting the same day in 1990. I remember after the orientation the guy who trained us went out with us to a restaurant for an evening meal break. That guy pitched unionizing with the ILWU, while both Mike and I argued back and preferred the IWW. The ILWU won out. We became a union shop, but over the next several years we had an informal work group at the call center, around a core of a half a dozen of us -- including some of us who were housemates at a communal house in Oakland. We had each others' back and this helped us exercise control of the work process, but we also covered for each other when we missed work for radical actions like demos and riots. Mike got arrested at a few of the latter, and we usually could cover for him. My memory isn't clear, but I think he got busted during the Rodney King Uprising and when he missed too many days the bosses fired him.

Thinking back on it now, Mike was a great comrade to have as a workmate. When fighting the boss, he could be super articulate and strong. Yet at mass demos, like when the 1st Gulf War started in 1991, he was a loose canon and was most likely the first guy to throw a brick through a bank's massive plate glass window in San Francisco's Financial District. I'm sure he was part of the militant group that broke through police lines, clearing the way for the tens of thousands of the rest of us to rush onto the Bay Bridge.

As Black Badger mentioned, it's a miracle Mike made it to his 60s, especially since in his youth he drank and smoked too much. Another comrade, Chris Delvecchio, worked with us at the call center, lived in various collective house with us as well, but died in New York City a week shy of his 24th birthday in 1993. Chris and I had our own 2-person study group, as we read all the Situationist classics together; he gave me my first copy of Jeremy Brecher's Strike!. Another People's Park activist, Dave Nadel, who was co-founder of the amazing Ashkenaz music club in Berkeley, was killed after being shot point blank in the head at the venue in 1997. He was 50 years old. A couple years before, another defender of People's Park who was also an anarchist, Bob Sparks died at 57 in 1995.

The most controversial to die young was the propaganda-by-deed anarchist Rosebud, who was shot by UC campus police after she'd broken into the university chancellor's mansion in the pre-dawn hours in 1992, probably on a kamikaze mission to kill the chancellor. She was 19. Her death occurred in the early a.m. hours of the first day of the semester and when our protest turned into a riot, many fresh new students joined in and helped us fight the cops all night. It was also one of the rare occasions when we outflanked the cops a couple times, even chasing them down the street as they attempted to escape a fusillade of rocks, bottles and bricks.

Again, Mike was a wingut, self-admittedly so. But if you were arguing with your boss, or battling in the pigs in the streets, he's the guy you'd want to have your back. He was always dependable in that way. But so were Chris, Dave and Bob. To outsiders, they were a bunch of troublesome nuts. But they were my heroes, warts and all. I miss them all.