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Pete
Liederman
Sometime in my junior year at Tam, when I realized the girl
inviting me to go parking was not interested in driver
training, my feeling about High School, till then a bit depressed,
brightened considerably.
After a year at San Jose State, remarkable mainly for discovery of
Beatles music and hearty burgundy, I set out across country with a
buddy in an old Fiat. After a wreck in Richmond that forced us to
plug up the radiator with chewing gum, we were on our way on an auto
journey where we used as much oil and water as gasoline.
Abandoning the car in New York, my cousin and I hitchhiked around
Europe from Ireland to Warsaw. Got briefly detained by the police in
Venice for reckless boating, and in Poland for trying to exchange
money on the black market, but mostly fell in love with traveling.
In the Fall of 1964, joined some other journalism students sharing
an apartment in a sleepy student backwater of San Francisco called
the Haight Ashbury district. Within a year it seemed like
being liberal, casual, and out of the mainstream was sexy and in and
I was living about three blocks from the center of the universe.
Despite distractions, picked up a journalism and Poli Sci degree
from SF State. In 1968 the travel bug hit again and I worked for a
while picking apples on a Kibbutz in Israel. Although there wasn't
supposed to be any war going on, every few days we could hear
artillery fire up at the Lebanese border. Once walked up the road at
night, which I'd been warned not to do, and found myself facing down
the barrel of a rifle. Somehow or other blurting out
"Amigo!" seemed to work.
Later, on a hill near an oasis above the Dead Sea I had what I
still regard as a religious experience. I eventually wrote and
illustrated a very short book to try to capture the essentials of it.
Also, wrote an article for the old Berkeley Barb about visiting
Czechoslovakia which was a very upbeat place in the summer of 1968
and was just about to be invaded.
In 1969, I was back, doing public relations work and living in Tam
Valley. The Viet Nam war was in full swing. I had a low draft lottery
number and had run out of deferments. Uniforms and recycled jungle
colonial wars were clearly not my thing, neither was jail. It's a
much longer and funnier story than I can tell here, but basically I
spent two days in the Oakland Induction Center playing entirely by my
own rules while the draft apparatus played by theirs. They wound up
telling me I was temporarily deferred and asked me never to return.
In once sense I did anyway, and starting 1974 and for the next
several years I worked as a civilian for the Navy in Alameda. I have
to admit I developed a higher degree of respect for the Naval
officers than most civilians I have ever worked for.
Skipping numerous jobs, addresses, girlfriends, sweethearts, and
Kilo, (a large furry mongrel dog), and a decade or so: In 1984, I
decided to get active within the Sierra Club, and one day up at their
lodge at Donner Pass volunteered to help put out a newsletter for a
group of anti-nuclear-weapons activists. A woman who also
volunteered, Lara, became co-editor, later co-weditor (I am still
under Mr. Wallace's influence when it comes to puns).
We got married in a small town in Scotland where our paths managed
to intersect with parents and in„laws who were also traveling
that summer. Lara is a scientist doing research on the chemistry of
air pollution. Our son David is now 14 years old.
I got involved in a group called the Tamalpais Conservation Club
that, among other projects, was working to dismantle the derelict old
Air Force Station on the ridge of Mt. Tam just below the radar domes.
The Station consisted of about 30 abandoned and dangerous buildings
on one of the most spectacular scenic points of the Bay Area.
I got the group behind a petition drive, and worked with Senator
Boxer's office to procure federal money to take the old wooden
buildings down to their foundations. The place has sort of classical
ruin feel to it. Go visit. Also helped raise private money for some
open space purchases on the ridge between Mill Valley and Corte Madera.
Deciding to fulfill an old ambition, I went to law school at
nights, and passed the bar in 1999. At the start of 2001 I took an
early retirement from the government, and I have been working full
time since as a civil lawyer in association with two other solo
practitioners„mostly real estate law.
For the present, my office is adjacent to our house in Berkeley
and looks out into huge old pine trees.
For those of you who know my brother John Piehl, (class of '60),
he's living happily up in Bandon, Oregon. |
