In Full Swing

Free School Begins Second Year

OB’s free school, the OB Community School, began its second year in the Fall of 72. The local branch of a network including hundreds of free schools across the state and nation, OB’s school had become a non-profit corporation with state tax exemption, and was granting legal high school diplomas. Run by a collective that tried to make decisions on a consensual basis, the free school had opened up in an older, one-story house on Voltaire Street. Dennis Doyle, Tom Kozden, David Diehl and Linda Taggart were some of the original members of the collective and nominal “teachers.” In a Rag article, the collective ran a statement:

The sun is rising again as O.B. Community School begins our second year of alternative community education. We are not the ordinary school. We are a place where learning takes place. Learning how to live in harmony with life. Not how to control or be controlled. That is our theory, that is our structure, that is our life.

We are an alternative to the public school. Our students are not students, our teachers are not teachers. We are all friends and we depend on that relationship for all our mutual learning. We talk with each other about our desires, our problems and our adventures. We learn about ourselves and life by being together and sharing.

We do things. We garden, we build structures, we travel, we become a part of our community. You have probably seen us before.. We have been to city council sessions, to the libraties and bookstores, we have picnics at the ocean and the parks. We get involved in our community and learn first hand.

We are a small school – and more important we are a happy school. We like to make new friends. Soon we will be starting a new school year. If you are interested in becoming a part of a significant, for real learning situation, come over and talk with us.

OB Free School & Ecology Action take to the streets in anti-high rise demonstration, fall 1972.

Food Co-op Moves Into Store Front

After about a year of being a food co-op operating out of sheds and houses, the OB Food Co-op in August 1972 made a huge move and opened up as an actual food store – still a cooperative – in an older house at what was then 4859 Voltaire Street. With regular hours, a garden in the backyard, shelves and counters built by local carpenters donating their skills, and staffed by volunteers, OB People’s Food Store sold inexpensive organic foods. Its opening had been a major leap and accomplishment for the alternative network in Ocean Beach, not to say a major plus for the community – as there was no other organic food store around. The Rag wholeheartedly supported it, and in the birthday issue, ran a page and half article about the store opening and encouraged people to shop at the storefront. The article recounted:

The original food co-op had emphasized 5 basic principles, which were: (1) break down the alienation that exists in our community; (2) Do away with hierarchy; (3) Operate on non-profit basis; (4) Give the small farmer and gardeners a chance to sell their produce; (5) Try to offer organically grown food at the lowest prices possible.

At the outset, the store could not afford to pay for any staff. Some volunteers were “paid” with food, but the non-profit market only marked wholesale prices up by 20% as a general rule. Basic items, like bread and milk, had only a few cents added to their wholesale cost. Its plans were enumerated:

Soon the OB Store, if every thing goes well, will be able to drop down to 15% or even 10% mark up. The store wants to charge just enough to support three or four full time people, who get just enough to eat and a place to live.

The store’s basic aim is to get away from the corporate stores and agribusiness; at the same time supporting small farmers and OB people who want to sell their garden crops through the store. The store collective also will be making homemade granola and yogurt.

OB People’s Food Store
4859 Voltaire Avenue, Ocean Beach California
Unknown woman, Rick Rothman (center) and Katy Marsh (right) in front of People’s, c. 1972)

The Anti-Development Movement Intensifies

Back in the early 1970s, the ecology movement was very young. The first Earth Day was held in June 1970. Just eight years earlier in 1962, biologist Rachel Carson had published her “Silent Spring” in which she described a possible environmental scenario that due to the collapse of the songbird populations from DDT and other poisons, the spring was “silent.” This first inkling of environmental consciousness in this country began the transformation of how we think about and act within our ecology.

One of the ways this new ecologically-minded thinking took hold in Southern California was in a high-tide of pressure for public access to the Pacific Ocean. There were plenty of areas where there were wall-to-wall expensive homes that literally sealed off from the public direct access to the coves, cliffs, rocks, sand and water of the coastline. Clamor for this increased public access to the coast developed in San Diego as well., resulting in the passage of the 30 Foot Height Limit in 1972. Led by a genuine grass-roots movement to place it on the ballot, the height limitation was voted into policy for the City. This tremendous victory for quality of life politics meant that for a certain yardage from any coastline or waterway, no buildings could be built above 30 feet – or roughly three stories. This was very significant for future development at the coast and in Ocean Beach.

Yet for most of 1972, there was no 30 foot height limit, and there was no OB Planning Board, there weren’t too many controls or restrictions on development, and there weren’t the widely held beliefs that most hold today about saving the environment, preserving openspace, recycling, about global warming.

However, Ocean Beach was in front of most communities in terms of the ecology. There had been OB Ecology Action Committee, begun in 1970, that had been instrumental in halting the jetty project; there was the on-going movement to save Collier Park; there was a general dislike for higher density, traffic, etc., and by the point in the early seventies, there was a resistance growing to the urban plan for Ocean Beach, the Precise Plan, which was promulgated by a financial elite association.

One of the first organizational manifestations of OB’s resistance to the Precise Plan, was the formation of the OB Planning Organization (OBPO). The main contribution that this group provided to the community was to conduct a door-to-door poll of OB residents to garner their opinions about a variety of development-related issues.

As the mid-June 1972 Rag (Vol.II, No.12) reported:

The following statistics were taken from the survey that was conducted by the Ocean Beach Planning Organization (OBPO). Results were released this past April 1972. 8,500 households in Ocean Beach were hand-delivered the surveys and 2,805 of those surveys were returned, i.e., a return of 33%, an outstanding return by any statisticians analysis. The percentages given below are from those surveys that were returned.

• 90.4% like small town character of Ocean Beach;
• 83.8% feel there should be population limit in Ocean Beach;
• 90.0% felt “high rise” should be prohibited in Ocean Beach;
• 87.3% favor a moratorium on all new building construction in Ocean Beach until a comprehensive plan is approved by a majority of the residents.

Flushed with such substantial support among OB residents for the anti-development positions of grassroots activists, as clearly evidenced by the survey’s results, there was a surge in educational and organizing efforts by OBPO, Ecology Action and the Rag. In October 1972, the Rag – in conjunction with the ecology group – published a special issue, slim but on special paper, which was more of a broadside against four particular apartment developments either then under construction or soon to be. It was a call to arms for the community to come to terms with the rate and scope of apartment development. It decried the evictions of those whose homes were being replaced by apartments. On the front cover was a mock “special invitation to land speculators and developers” to come to OB and make big money by investing in high density development, and “just buy the land, evict the present occupants, (mostly working people, retired elderly, and ‘hippies’), sell their outdated houses to the Mexicans, then build on up to your heart’s content.” The Special Issue was hand-delivered to every house from the beach to Ebers Street.

The “Green OB”

Inside the special October ’72 issue was a loose poster-sized sheet, blank on one side. The other side had the large OB initials popularized by the Rag, with the peace sign inside and fist gripping the top of the”O” , in green. It was the “Green OB” – made famous over time by residents and activists. The special issue proclaimed: “Help keep OB Green – Display the Green OB”.

There had been an earlier version of the Green OB, distributed by a group calling itself the OB Collective. In May of that year, they put out their version with the intent it was a “people-helping-people” poster, as reported by the mid-December OB Rag (Vol.III, No.6):

… the green OB was to have been a “people-helping people” trip. A person who was getting hassled bay the Police could come to a nearby Green OB house and get a witness and support, a woman who was getting hassled by some man could seek refuge in a Green OB house. If your dog had just been run over, if your child had just banged up her knee, help could be found in a home displaying the Green OB; hopefully most houses. Unfortunately, the project never received the necessary energy and was put aside.

But the Rag announced “a rebirth” of the Green OB, as so many had been distributed in the Special Rag issue, that dozens of the posters were been displayed in windows across OB. It was now being a symbol of “community support and togetherness, and unity against the developers.” The Green OB had be come a symbol of OB’s solidarity against development. A windshield survey was once conducted by Charlie Marshall and Frank Gormlie, and they counted about 80 posters being visibly displayed, mainly in windows on residences and apartments throughout OB.

(continue to “The Rag Matures” or “The Early Politics“)