Please see our March 28, 2022 post here.
Originally posted March 26, 2021.
Sunday, March 28 will be the 50th anniversary of the Collier Park Riot. And the OB Rag remembers that moment each year at this time.
But whoa! Riot? What riot? Where is Collier Park and who is Collier? And why should we care? 50 years is a long time, dude.
What Was the Collier Park Riot?
The riot was a violent clash between young people in Ocean Beach protesting the Vietnam war and the sale of land meant for a park with San Diego police officers. During the afternoon of March 28, 1971, a peaceful crowd of hundreds of young OBceans and college students had gathered on a vacant hill site in northeast OB along Greene Street – on what was to become Collier Park – as part of an anti-Vietnam war protest and a ‘clean-up the park’ project.
There had been a huge anti-Vietnam war protest down at the beach, with speeches, guerrilla theater. Then the crowd marched the mile or so up Voltaire to the top of the hill on Greene Street. It was a protest to show support for the creation of a park – as the City was making moves to sell off all the land for apartment developments – but it was also a festive celebration on a Spring day
A free food line had been set up and dishes were being handed out. A local band started to set up on a nearby porch to play for the crowd. And there were plans to clean the block up.
Then a platoon of San Diego Police arrived; the picnic and festive-atmosphere evaporated when the event was declared an unlawful assembly and everyone was ordered to clear out in minutes. The crowd was stunned. Celebration turned to anger and when the police line charged people standing in the grass at Greene and Soto, most everyone scattered. Some didn’t and were arrested.
But the crowd, really pissed off by now, began to throw a barrage of rocks at the police. The police moved down Greene and pushed the crowd towards the ocean. And for hours, a street battle ensued. 50 people were arrested – some went to jail; a patrol car was burned; scores were injured and it was probably one of the wildest day in OB’s history. It certainly was OB’s most violent day.
Where Is Collier Park?
It’s a L-shaped neighborhood park in northeast OB. It’s bordered by Greene Street on its southern end and by Soto on its western side. Technically part of the Peninsula planning area, the space has been in OB for over a hundred years. Torry pines and Eucalyptus trees punctuate the massive green grassy area. People play Frisbee, play catch with their dogs; have picnics, play horseshoes. There used to be playground equipment but over time it crumbled into the dirt.
The land where Collier Park is today was donated to the city and “the children of San Diego” by DC Collier a hundred years ago or so. Now, part of the controversy surrounding the park has been successful efforts over the decades to slice sections off of the original landgrant by Collier. And in the earlly 1970s, the city wanted to sell the last remaining section off to developers to build apartments. But the community objected and built a couple of parks instead – Collier Park and later Bill Cleator Park..
Who is DC Collier?
Collier – or as he liked to be called – “Col. Collier” – was an early San Diego developer and became the father of Ocean Beach due to his many contributions to Ocean Beach and making it a true community. Probably one of the most significant things Collier accomplished was to build a successful trolley line out to Ocean Beach from San Diego. It was completed in 1909.
This new access made it possible to create an Ocean Beach community connected to the larger and growing metropolitan area of San Diego. It very well good be that Collier’s successful streetcar line was the turning point for Ocean Beach. San Diegans now could live at the beach and work or go downtown. This sped up housing in OB and a year later there were a hundred homes, where just two years earlier, there had been but 18.
Collier opened new housing tracts in OB; he graded and paved streets, brought in utilities, planned Voltaire and West Point Loma streets to be wide access streets. Also, in 1909-10, Collier with his own funds built the very first public school, a two-room school for the community, calling it the Ocean Beach School. (Collier accomplished many other things outside OB as well.)
Over the next couple of days, the OB Rag will publish more on the Riot, Collier, the park and why it’s all significant.
{ 17 comments… read them below or add one }
What an incredible moment in history. I feel grateful to have grown up with the knowledge of this event, I know it shaped my perspective in a lot of ways. Thank you for sharing!
Great history. I was there on March 28th, 1971 and helped organize this powerful action. We were signing a People’s Peace Treaty at the beach as part of this day. Jackie Tinbergen wrote a play against U.S. imperialism and intervention in Vietnam which we performed. I played Uncle Sam. After the play we marched to Collier Park, a day I will not forget.
You’re right on, Peter. I was the military man, in a borrowed Marine shirt, and brought the Viet Cong flag–the same one I raised at Disneyland in 1970 during the Yippie! Invasion. “Wham bam thank you ma’m, a whole decade in Viet Nam.”
Wow, it seems like hardly a decade ago we were at Collier Park throwing a barbecue to commemorate 40 years. Thanks as always Frank for keeping the memories of these important times alive.
I always appreciate knowing this history. For me, March 28th is the day I met my husband on the OB Pier in 1987. I was checking the OB Rag to see if the Pier is still closed and was reminded of the synchronicities. My husband was a Vietnam Vet, I was a peace activist, but we both loved the Pier! He’s been gone for almost 5 years, the Pier is still closed, and San Diego is in the Red Tier…
Great to hear from you Marcia. And thanks for your personal memories.
Yep, that day, and the years surrounding that day, impacted all of us that grew up in the beach areas or were in OB and participated/witnessed this POLICE RIOT. And obviously it still reverberates in our souls and has affected us ever since.
And exactly what has truly changed since we ran down the streets that day? The Fascist cops behavior? Doesn’t seem so looking around the country. BLM, Occupy Wall St., the knee on the neck or the bullet in the back…the continuation of Nixon’s drug war that was specifically targeted against black and leftist people? Same old same old.
The SD city leadership? Nope, still the same old same old greedy neighborhood destroyers masquerading as the ‘people’s representatives’ (are you listening Jen Campbell?) who are only out for themselves or the developers they take bribe money from in the form of ‘campaign contributions’ or the wink that tells them they have a cushy job waiting after their stint in government. The wealthy still pretty much get what they want when they want it (Jeff Bezos Mr. Amazon made over $7 million an hour in the first year of this pandemic, $65 BILLION!).
Police budgets that continue to grow all out of proportion to the need and now they have weapons designed for war they use on us! And the military is still running amok across the world enforcing US corporate rule for their profits (Marine Brig Gen. Smedley Butler’s little book WAR IS A RACKET should be required reading in high school) and destroying countries and overthrowing elected government (Venezuela did NOT elect the right wing authoritarian neoliberal Juan Guido, are YOU listening Pres. Biden?) while the money wasted on the military is impoverishing the rest of us with their insanely inflated budget.
Tell me, folks, just what has REALLY changed and improved our and all the other living beings on this planet’s lives? The bees are dying off, the oceans are going acidic, the insect world is depopulating, species are going extinct every day, the climate is teetering on the verge of complete collapse and…here we stand celebrating on tiny moment in time hoping, wishing, that what we learned that day really made a difference.
I apologize to those who read this rant and despair. I found out yesterday that a 14 year old daughter of a friend of mine tried to commit suicide. This is a girl who IS aware of the world around her, much like us on March 28 1971 and not stuck in some cell phone TV show fantasy who has been part of the protesters in Seattle…but she just became overwhelmed by all this and just…broke down. No, she’s not dead as she was found before she stepped completely out of this life…
Some of those that were there in 1971 continued to be active, continue to speak out, continue to rail against injustice, and we’re old and creaky and certainly can’t battle cops anymore, especially those cops that just LOVE to beat on protesters and there are certainly a lot of those everywhere we look aren’t there? A never ending parade of corrupt sadists will always have a job. Except of course when it comes to beating right wing Fascist protesters it seems. Imagine Jan.6th being all black people invading the Capitol, or a bunch of longhaired hippy surfer types? Imagine the FORCE that would have been used on us! Lots of dead bodies don’t you think? The government KNEW they were going to do that but…let it happen. So now we’re seen more unPATRIOT Act laws trying to be enacted that will most certainly be used against us… Read this one:
If Abbie, Why Not Trump?
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/03/23/if-abbie-why-not-trump/
Others that were at Collier and in OB that day have sort of forgot and were sucked into the vacuum cleaner we call obedience to their ‘betters’ in order to make a somewhat financially stabile life…though it really isn’t all that stabile as Covid Pandemic has shown us, is it? Big sigh. I was really good at throwing rocks, and running the hell away and ducking under swinging clubs and big heavy flashlights… My attitude about cops jelled that day, no doubt about it, and nothing I’ve seen since has changed my mind because, as I said above, same old same old.
I read a quote the other day by a Native activist. Paraphrased: Why am I negatively called an ‘Activist’ because I’m trying to protect clean water when corporations who dump toxic poisons that destroy water forever aren’t called Terrorists? That is a mouthful isn’t it? Winona Ryder I think it was…
Thoughts of a Native OBcean on a cold windy mountain morning after a massive windstorm and overnight power outage in NE Washington State,
sealintheSelkirks
So, Seal, you are claiming you were there that day? Do you recall seeing a patrol car on fire? Why don’t you describe what you saw.
I’ve been letting this sit in the back of my head for days wondering just exactly how to start to answer your question, Frank. Don’t want to upset you with another way-too-long story about what I remember from 50 years ago but I guess there isn’t a choice in the matter because that’s the way I write. I’ll start with this:
Had just turned 16 four months earlier after my stepmom had filed divorce against my dad the previous summer who had turned into an alcoholic. Both moved in different directions…without me. She was teaching English at Morse high then, he was at Mission Bay high, but I never saw her again. My dad bought a house in University City that I was not welcome in. He spent the next 20+ years with the curtains closed in that house because they were so rotten that I tried to open them in 1994 after he died and they just disintegrated…literally.
1970 I was dealing with Juvenile Probation as a ‘runaway’ after having been kicked out of Mission Bay High that summer. Probation transferred me to La Jolla High as a 10th grader that Fall living with some flaky dude foster parent who worked at the alt movie theater on the corner of Pearl and La Jolla Blvd who really only did it for the cash it generated from the county, but I was asked not to return to that school by Christmas though I’m in the 1970 Yearbook. Was I that bad? After a pretty abusive childhood and dealing with my second divorce as a 15 years old…probably. Angry kid. I was enrolled by Probation at Midway Continuation School behind the Frontier Drive-In after that both of which I don’t think exist anymore. Didn’t they try gentrifying that area, got rid of all the Navy’s strip clubs and bars?
Since it was my parents that were the runaways I felt that was rather unfair but the foster home thing didn’t work out at all, and by 1971 I found myself shuffling between my maternal Granny’s on Diamond Street in PB and paternal Granny K’s new apartment on Santa Monica(?) between Cable and Bacon in OB. I think they were still managing at that point like they did the apartments up on the cliff on Del Monte.
Sometimes I’d sleep on the couch at Aunt Carol’s in North Mission but she was having enough trouble with my cousins Tony & John that I didn’t really like it much. I also was sleeping under Hobiecats on Bayside Walk in MB, and under upside down boats when it rained… Fifty years ago life wasn’t so great.
So I was in OB that day staying at Granny K’s, had surfed in the morning and was with a group of other teens smoking joints (local OB? I don’t even remember what they looked like or names) around the corner from the Pier under the cliffs, past the old swimming pool. Best place to avoid the cops as they were too lazy to walk that far from their patrol cars. Donut bellies we called them…
One of the girls’ friends showed up saying there was a big ‘Be-In’ happening at the park and a bunch of people were out there. I had never even heard of Collier Park, never been there since I didn’t grow up in OB though I might have gone to Kindergarten there… Granny K loved Balboa Park and that’s where she’d always take me, Two hour or more bus rides from OB, one way, and then back. An all-day excursion.
Didn’t have a driver’s license much less a car being an essentially homeless 16 yr old, so I just kind of went along with the group I was with. Was more interested in the girls attention than anything else, and what else did I have to do that day? Was ditching from Midway School but since everybody did it wasn’t any big deal… We all stuffed into somebody’s old VW bus that carried the entire pack of us off.
They parked on a side street and we had to walk a couple blocks. There was already a big crowd of people hanging out. Some adults there told us that we should make ourselves useful and pick up trash and help out, so they handed us paper shopping bags and cardboard boxes and asked who’d be willing to help dig some holes and plant some trees and the girls were into that, so again I went along so I could hang out with the chicks. That’s what 16 yr old teenage boys do, try to impress the girls.
It wasn’t warm, March on the San Diego beaches back then was never freaking warm and the ocean air was always cold so most everybody was in long pants and coats and sweatshirts and stuff, but there was a photo published in the RAG a while back that very likely was me with a shovel bending over digging a hole with teenage girls around me helping plant a tree with my shirt off. It was better than picking up trash and the girls liked that. My hair had grown out quick after the bribery haircut the previous summer by my dad for a brand new Dewey Weber 6’8″ kicknosed roundtail shortboard. 1st picture top I’m sending with this is me standing in front of Granny K’s apartment building on Santa Monica with it under my arm about May 1970 which I was still surfing on in 1971. The bottom photo is me 1980/81 on OB shaper Topper Driggs 5’8″ potato chip twinfin surfing a big swell southside of the Pier.
According to the next photo of me I have from back then which came from relatives in Iowa when I hitched across the county in 1972 and stopped for a visit my hair had grown back to below my shoulderblades in two years. Sure doesn’t grow like that any more! It was in my Granny K’s stuff when she died. But that was two years without a family or a camera…I found no other photos of those three years after all the older relatives died off and I ended up with their picture boxes…
The second picture attached is the one published on the RAG that I think is me but I can’t see the face. But it very well could be. My hair went back to shaggy Beatles before growing back out by the next year.
____
One of the teens I was with lit a joint up and was told immediately to put it out by one of the adults. Did he want us all to get busted by the cops, are you stupid? The kid did but we snuck off a bit later and smoked some anyway out of the view of the adults.
There was a lot of people, and people were speaking about the War and people’s rights and I didn’t pay all that much attention. Hell, most of the time you couldn’t really hear much anyway, too big a crowd and everybody was talking loud. I was carrying my skateboard still, used it to sit on the ground with and somebody used it to make sandwiches for people since it was a longboard.
I found that board in my dad’s University City garage in 1994 after he died. Amazing how much old junk of mine he still had stored. It’s hanging in this house, a Champion Sidewalk Surfboard ‘Wakiki’ model (Waikiki spelled incorrectly!), a flat deck plank with loose ball bearing clay wheels that still roll. The blue racing stripes model with the picture of a longboard surfer on the deck…
So there were speeches, and petitions circulating in the crowd, and people were wandering around and pretty much just a big gathering when the cops started telling people to leave. Bullhorns? Or maybe that was other rallies that I remember those were used in. When they came towards us in a line with their billy clubs in their hands I didn’t see them at first because I was sitting on the ground at that point, but people started yelling and others started running and…things changed really really fast. When I stood up I saw cops wading into the crowd and grabbing people throwing them down on the ground, others jumping on them with handcuffs, cops chasing people trying to split and yelling at them to stop, swinging clubs at people. Wasn’t there a stage or something set up where the adults were giving speeches? I couldn’t see what was going on over there but there were people throwing bottles and rocks at the cops and I grabbed up a few and hucked them, too. I know I connected at least a couple because I saw them bounce off those stupid motorcycle cop helmets they were wearing. The other teens I was with said we’d best get the f**k out of there but none of us had any idea where the VW owner had gone to, and we just scattered trying to duck and dodge through the crowd and all the cops that were charging in. I ducked a cop billy club swinging at my head by holding my skateboard up while trying to get to the street. The tip of it smacked the board as I ducked and dodged sideways putting a splintered ding in the deck right in the middle of the printed surfer’s head while trying to run away. I just went and looked a minute ago. Covered with dust but the ding is still there. Of course it is, my memory isn’t that bad.
I sort of remember the cop’s face, what it looked like. But not really. A scary angry monster’s face. The face of the enemy. I fell down a couple of times, got knocked over by the crowd but I was what, a hundred-ten pound 5’4″ teenager in a mob of adults? Tore up my Levi’s and skinned my elbows. Some people I think ran towards Nimitz scattering down that way, probably heading for West Point Loma Blvd., but I headed towards my Granny’s on my skateboard going as fast as I could as cops with sirens raced past me in the streets. I wasn’t thinking at that point, just running. They didn’t even bother stopping me. Bigger fish to fry, like maybe you, Frank? You were one of the adults there, right?
People were screaming at that point, yelling and running and bluntly I was scared to shit. I’d seen what happens when cops attack from being with my Peace & Freedom Party activist stepmom at anti-war rallies in the late 60s when she took me on visits to her home at San Francisco rallies, and I KNEW just how bad it was gonna be and I was not going to hang around and get beat the fuck up by a bunch of Hoobler’s pigs. Wasn’t the Chief named Hoobler? Hoob the Boob.
Hell, I’d been watching them beat people since summer of ’67 on the beach and at anti-war rallies. People read my words about that in my Memories piece the Rag published. Anybody think that was a joke? You did NOT want to get grabbed by these guys. Sadistic bastards from hell and they liked what they were doing. Beating people is fun.
I skated all the way back to Granny K’s bleeding from both knees and both elbows. Long skate as the OB streets were not forgiving to clay wheels in those days. Got launched off it a couple times hitting rocks that stopped the wheels. By the time I got there cops cars were all over the beach area, and I’d gotten the evil eye a couple of times but I was just a kid and my hair wasn’t back to being a ponytail yet and I guess they were more interested in arresting the adults than a bunch of juveniles.
It was on the news that night and Granny asked me about it and I kept telling her that nobody was doing anything wrong, that I’d picked up trash and planted a tree and was just hanging out with my friends. She told me if I’d been in school I wouldn’t have gotten in trouble but being as I was already ‘in trouble’ it didn’t really matter much. She believed me about the cops attacking as it reminded her of the way cops acted during the Great Depression. They beat a lot of people then, too, and mobbed people under and arrested them for nothing that she saw happen, and then lied about it in the newspapers and on the radio (no TV in 1930).
It was a Police Riot not a people’s riot. It’s what they do, what they’ve always done, what they do now.
____
I’ve let this sit overnight after writing it in a burst of memory. Emotions are mixed up here, too, and I can’t really separate them out. And some of other memories have probably bled into this story. So this is what has come up since last night:
Six years later I was tackled off a skateboard and hung over the Boardwalk wall and rabbit punched in the kidneys a few times by a big cop who had tried to get me to sell him and his ‘girlfriend’ (another cop) some pot after some idiot told him I had some. I was living in James and Pam’s camper on Lido Court then and running my ding repair out of their front yard. Late in 1977 I guess, or early in 1978. Arrested on a Friday for ‘refusal to show ID’ which wasn’t even a crime then, and three days later at 2am I was let out of San Diego County downtown with ‘charges dropped’…but of course after the buses had quit running so I couldn’t get home. I was in surf trunks and a t-shirt and flip-flops without a dime to my name so I couldn’t call anybody. Way too far to skate home so I hitched to MB. And still pee’d blood for a couple more days from the beating…
The next cop riot I was in was during my first rock & roll band Fine Line blowing harmonica and playing my first set of conga drums at a Boardwalk gig between Kingston Court and San Luis O Place. The Boardwalk was packed as was the beach out beyond the wall. We had hundreds of people dancing, it was great! Friends out surfing said they could hear us we were so loud. Weekend, tons of people, and I have pictures of it. Same summer or maybe it was summer 1978? Traffic along the wall was dead stop, people were partying hard and nobody could get by without squeezing. Great time. Now I guess the city has doubled the Boardwalk width and gotten rid of all the front yards.
I’ve got some amazing pictures of that day taken by…probably redhead Pam I guess. James was the drummer. I wonder what happened to her after they divorced in the early 80s? Anyway, two cops came around the corner and barged into the crowd shoving people out of the way so they could arrest a teenage girl with a beer. That was it, their trigger. People started booing as the cops threw her down on the concrete and held her handcuffed, and Mikie Savage a local rowdy younger kid who lived on El Carmel Place launched a half full quart of Olympia beer at the cops by standing on the wall on the northside of the crowd and, by some bizarre chance of blind luck, it hit dead on squarely into the back of the head of one of the cops taking him right out and backwards over the wall onto the sand. Just clocked him! I WATCHED the bottle fly through the air from behind the mic I was blowing harp in. Slow motion it seemed like. HOLY SHIT!
Almost instantly a huge line of cops charged around the corner with their clubs out and waded into the crowd smashing people down. They were ready and waiting obviously. I again found myself running from cops but down Strandway Alley this time carrying two congas and my bag of harps & hand percussion… That was the Mission Beach riot when they closed MB down and were arresting people who happened to be in their front yards. Helicopters flying over screaming at people to stay in their homes and all the rest of police state tactics we have grown to love and enjoy, eh?
Another story from the beach war zones of the 70s I guess.
_____
It’s after 5pm, and right now I’ve been listening to DemocracyNow about the on-going trial of Derek Chavin the cop that murdered George Floyd. There’s a guy talking about how much money the police unions put into political campaigns and getting DAs elected ($30million+ in 2020) along with lobbying to get rules passed like ‘qualified immunity’ and other nefarious take-no-responsiblity-for-your-behavior rules that cops enjoy but we don’t.
So what difference between the Mafia buying judges and making political campaign donations, or Drug Cartels doing the same thing through their lawyers, and the cop unions doing the same thing to avoid being charged with crimes they commit? My question here, 50 years after I ran the hell away from a park I never had been to, is what has really changed? Fifty years and they’re still beating people, still killing people. And they still get away with it because after all they’re the enforcement arm of the Empire dealing with dissenting citizens. And they have a really powerful union…
And no, Frank, to answer your question I never saw a cop car on fire. I got the hell out of there as fast as I could and didn’t look back.
Again I apologize for the length of this piece of writing. I don’t seem to be able to keep them short very often, do I?
sealintheSelkirks
NOTE: My browser keeps saying my email server is taking too long to respond and it was doing this yesterday, too. My website popped right up, same webmaster, so I don’t know what’s wrong. Can’t send an email with the pictures I’ve mentioned obviously, so after I send this off I’ll get off dial-up and call his number. They’re closed after 5 so maybe tomorrow I can send the pics? The one that I think I recognize myself in it from a previous Collier Park Riot piece on the Rag was labeled: OB-collier-pkclean1
OMG – I’m so glad you didn’t make it a long one.
Yeah, well, dang it I did it again didn’t I? Ummm, can I use the excuse that I lose track of time when I’m writing? I do! Reading, too, for that matter. Suddenly I’ll have a hard time seeing the words on a page and it’ll be dark outside. Is that weird?
Hey, email is working again and I sent you the one with me the 1970 15 yr old surfer kid in OB, and the other of the Collier Park photo from an earlier RAG article today that really does look like me then. Look in your email box.
sealintheSelkirks
Okay, mi amigo. Do you recall being that that weekend after?
But he is a good writer !
Nothing stands out in my memory around then other than it might have been the week that Spring I was staying at Granny Cole’s on Diamond St. west of PBJrHigh running to catch a bus on Ingraham & Grand Ave to get to Midway School but didn’t see the jagged end of a broken bottle standing upright below the curb that went straight through my sneaker and most of the way through the middle of the arch of my right foot. Sometime around then anyway. Scar still can’t take stepping on a rock barefoot. I was out of the water and everything else for a while after that.
Why, is there something I missed or that I don’t remember and should? Wouldn’t surprise me.
Funny what pieces of memories your brain shuffles out, and then you realize just how many blank times there are when nothing was going on that didn’t shift from short-term to long-term memory, eh? Highlights of both good and bad of our time here on this planet, but they seem to be packed full of empty spaces! It’s amazing how many blank areas there are from when we were watching a freaking TV…but I can remember books read from back then. Books go into long-term memory I guess. Tactile and visual, smell of the pages, too, and not just audio/visual?
Aren’t computers based on how our brains function? No wonder they mess up so often… HA!
You did get the email pictures?
Do something fun today, Frank, and anybody else reading this.
sealintheSelkirks
Frank, I had an email this morning saying I should have titled it and sent it in as a separate article about Collier Park.
With the two pictures I mentioned! So…how about:
’71 Collier Park Police Riot; A 16 yr old’s Perspective
Heh heh!
And thanks for the compliment Jan Michael Sauer. If you’re interested I published a book last August that’s only available on my boardwarm.com website (and a couple local businesses). I hate what Amazon has done to bookselling and won’t go there. I’m hoping enough people will pay $20 so I can pay off the publishing cost on the credit card then I can publish the new one I’m working on! Tab on ‘Books’ then tab ‘more’ on the page that pops up to read about it and for other links to free reads of other published works (including OB RAG stuff)…
sealintheSelkirks
So Frank thank you for asking. Seal thank you for sticking with this thread. MOST of all thank you for the book you did publish, and the great things you have offered up for my brain to ponder on …
Thanks for the compliment, Carrie. And it warms my heart that you found good in my book!
sealintheSelkirks