Phil Lehman

The situation was actually an interesting "searching for my identity" thing that we were all going through at the time...and it was actually pretty confusing.

I'd just graduated flight school and was on my way to Viet Nam. I was on a 2-week leave before being sent over and staying with soon-to-be-wife at her apartment on Parnassus...just above the Haight.

Having been pretty much of a f**k-up for the last number of years since coming back from Japan (first stop - Menlo), I was feeling pretty good about having turned things around and earned my wings and a Warrant Officership. Actually, I am really quite proud of having accomplished something worthwhile. Then two things happened:

• Wanting to show off my achievements a little, I drove down to Menlo one afternoon. It was during Thanksgiving break, so there wasn't much activity. I did run into Mr. Cunningham, however, who'd been my English teacher and dorm master in Patterson Hall. I told him what I'd done...finally made something of myself, and then stood quietly awaiting his praise for having finally gotten a grip on my potential. He looked at me and said "Well look...can't you defect to Canada or something?"
• Several days later, I went out to SFO to pick up a guy I'd been in flight school with who was flying in to spend a few days "partying" in SF before we both shipped over. He was wearing his uniform because it was a requirement to fly under orders. On the way back to the apartment, we drove up Haight...remember, this was November of '67.
  We pulled up to a boulevard stop sign and there was a hippie in full regalia sitting on top one of the big blue postal boxes. He looked in the car....took a hit off the joint he had and said "Go kill some kids, Marine"....

Puzzling times. Not ever forgotten, of course. Not a "fun story"...sorry, Phil

Phil Lehman

‘Made a few trips to Los Angeles again...down Interstate 5 and passed by the turn off for Firebaugh...'still cracks me up that I've thought about you every time I see that sign. Strange how things like that work.

I went to the blog site again and saw the Eat Your Vegetables picture. Jeeeezus - what I wouldn't giv'e to have a few of those years back! Doniger...Leanse...Lubliner...Phinizy...Harriman...wow.

I remember the circumstances and remember all the stuff around it (including that whack-job teacher that caused it all...the burn-behind-the-ear-with-the-pipe thing). We all got in some trouble for it, but I think the teacher got released...maybe not but my sense of fair play wants to remember it that way. Our first "cause célèbre"!!

Thanks for the effort, Bill...I hope all is well with you and all the rest of the guys. I've got an interesting story about the Haight-Ashbury days if Liza wants to hear about it. The story also includes an encounter with Cunningham (teacher/dorm master)...just to add a little more meat to it. Stay in touch...

Guil Gaylord

While at Menlo, I took a year's subscription for $20 to the campus newspaper, "The Coat of Arms". My first issue has arrived, and it is 16 large pages of full color student reporting on everything from "Sex and Menlo" (a survey) to a stormy faculty resignation, to a fashion show, and much more.

It can be had for a check sent to The Coat of Arms at Menlo at 50 Valparaiso Avenue, Atherton, California 94027.

Guil Gaylord (11/03/2008)

I was in Palo Alto on October 6 and spent a wonderful afternoon on the Menlo campus. I met for some time with Norm Colb, Diane Clausen, the development head, and Liza Bennigson, the alumni chief. Liza and Diane then took me for a tour of the campus. All three of them could not have been more gracious. All three were most interested in Menlo as a boys boarding school. They seemed surprised when I told them that the school was the most important event of my life, teaching me focus, efficiency, hard work, how to get along with others and, more importantly, how valuable good friendships are. So it was like a family, they asked? I said yes, and in too many cases was a family for functional orphans, and was also like the military experience. Of course, they had heard a lot of stories of the old days from Derf.

The school campus is now totally revamped, except for Douglass Hall, which is much unchanged, and very nice. It is more like a small college campus than a school campus, and the atmosphere is quite gentle and upbeat. I spent quite some time on the Menlo College side, where the campus remains largely unchanged from the time of our shared use of it. The auditorium and "new" cafeteria are still there, the "old" cafeteria is a library, the sweetshop is still in operation, and the Freshman dining Hall, where we lunched with the 49ers in training, is now the bookstore. The college seems much smaller than the school and has a faculty of about a dozen.

Of course, you probably saw much of this at the last reunion.
Liza gave me a CD from the 2006 Reunion of the Class of 1966, titled "Sharing Memories", which I will bring to the 2009 reunion or send to you earlier if you like. I have not yet had a chance to listen to it.

Doug Williams (5/20/08)

Judging from your description of the party, I think I know why I don't remember it!

Guil Gaylord (5/19/08)

Jesus, she is going to go crazy when I send her your e-mail! Somehow, I forgot about Tim and may not have been aware of Matt's progress. At Stanford, I had the freedom to go to the Avalon and Fillmore Ballrooms in the very early days, when you sat on the floor and listened to the Dead, the Jefferson Airplane and others. I was also on the staff of the Stanford Chaparral (humor mag, of course I was the business manager) and a few times Gracie Slick and Jorma Kaukonen came to the office and "hung" with us. Slick was as you know fabulously beautiful, and recently had a nice tongue-in-cheek interview in Interview magazine with pix only of the old days. She is now an artist.

Doug Williams (5/19/08)

OK, well if it's old H/A days, I spent over a year working sound at the Straight Theater on Haight St. I left school to play music, but ended up doing sound since there was little interest in instrumental solo guitar. We had 5 bands a night, 6 days a week in '67 and '68. The Straight had a lot of good bands, but never the Jefferson Airplane (they were contracted to Bill Graham). Janis was fun-She always blew out one of our speakers. No one else did, but she had a lot of power in her voice.

Phil Lehman (5/20/08)

Is this the same Doug Williams we went to a party at during the summer of '63 and my next door neighbor from Tokyo showed up and got drunk, left the party and got into a really, really bad accident? That was one helluva party. I seem to remember driving up from LA in a friend's car that I'd borrowed (he and I had gone to school together in Tokyo and he was going to the Menlo Business School....I think Wolff and Krieger and maybe Pete Leanse might have been with me but....I AM 62 guys and things are slipping.

Bill Phinizy (5/19/08)

Tell her you attended school with the aforementioned Bill Wolff, Robbie Krieger of the Doors, and Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, as well as a few other luminaries in those years: Matt Kelley and Tim Hovey.
Bob Weir came up through the lower school and was at Menlo up until his sophomore year when his parents had him transferred to a boarding school in Colorado.

When he joined the Dead, he took several Menlo classmates into the entourage: Tim Hovey, deceased (cf. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0397024/bio), and Matt Kelley (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Kelly_%28musician%29).

Matt formed the band Kingfish and toured with Bob Weir.
When I was in the Air Force during the Viet Nam War, I was stationed in Omaha, Nebraska (SAC Headquarters) and dating a Kappa Alpha Theta from Nebraska University (Drop dead gorgeous but dumb as a bag of hammers.). Bob Weir and the Dead came to town and I was on the blower to score some freebie tickets (which Bob gladly offered). So I took her and she got a chance to go backstage where she could meet Bob, Jerry Garcia, TC, and Pig Pen. The guy she really thought was cool was Owsley Stanley (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owsley_Stanley) who got rich synthesizing and selling LSD before it was illegal. He was doing the sound for the Dead and reveling in sound equipment that included a bank of Tektronic 465L scopes (going for about $3-5,000 each at the time). Needless to say, her mind was blown.So, you see, that had you not become an attorney nor I gone into the USAF, we might very well have become part of the "60s" that your daughter reads about....of course, "60s" has new (and far less exciting connotations) for us now. *sigh*

Guil Gaylord (5/19/08)

Nice memoir! When my younger daughter (an artist fascinated with all things from Jack Kerouac on) heard about Robby K., she was firmly convinced that I was famous by association. Then, she heard about Dennis and was doubly convinced. Now, I have a Bill Wolff story to tell her!

Bill Phinizy (5/19/08)

About three years ago, Mike Kenner, Tom Love, Dennis Feldman, and Bill Wolff and I got together on the occasion of one of Tom's trips to SoCal to peddle books. Whenever Tom would come into town, he would be at the nearby Disneyland Hotel and we would use the occasion as an excuse to hoover up all of the unspoken for reservoirs of Myer's Rum. He and I and Mike, etc. went into the Valley to meet with Dennis and Bill.

You may or may not know that Bill Wolff was one of the movers and shakers in the (then) nascent acid-rock scene in Southern California. He and Bob Krieger embarked upon that wonderful odyssey almost immediately upon graduation from Menlo. Bill hooked up with a group called The Peanut Butter Conspiracy and still played with Bob from time to time. We all spent the Summer of '64 surfing and otherwise partying (my substance of choice being the rather prosaic 12-ounce doses of Coors, Bud, Miller, and Brown Derby). From there, they went on to UCSB, the trail went dark, and I did not see them until I was waiting in line to register for classes in my sophomore year at UCLA. Bill and Bob recognized me and took the opportunity to insinuate themselves at that point in line (I didn't mind, but those behind me grumbled a bit). Again, they disappeared and of course, about a year later, the Doors burst upon the scene. I didn't hear from either until I hooked up with Bill at the aforementioned session in the Valley.

I always regarded Bill as one of the brighter people I have met (and still do). He was/is articulate, witty, a gifted musician, and, unbeknownst to a lot, I hear he was a very good gymnast (I remember him doing some outstanding tumbling during our last M-Day). Based upon what I read and knew from our times together at Menlo and that Summer he was, in the acid rock scene, not a king but a kingmaker. His encouragement and friendship with Bob Krieger gave Bob his start in the guitar and, arguably, put him on the path to his stellar success.

..well, I had been a software developer these last forty years and was surprised to learn that Bill had picked up a smattering of this skill back in the 90s. At the meeting, Dennis, who was responsible for the "Species" movies, was largely discouraging in his advice about Bill getting a script looked at/bought. I suggested that he also look to that as a possible stop-gap while he ironed out his attempts at screenwriting.
A few e-mails over the course of the next few months revealed that he was successful in that endeavor. It was a "tough double" as we used to say in track, but Bill pulled it off. And that was in a very, very tight IT job market.Not to make the above sound like a eulogy or obit, I just wanted to add Bill to the pantheon of '64 heroes.