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The year was near the end of the decade, maybe 1969. If I told you I remembered the 60s, you'd know I wasn't really there. Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, need I add California?

Protesting demonstrations and marches were common enough that we knew what to do and what to expect. We were part of a large crowd crowding into Sproul Plaza, a sprawling area in front of the University Administration Building bearing the name of the first system-wide President (1952-1958) of the University of California system, Robert Gordon Sproul. We were protesting, what? that day? It could have been against the Vietnam war. It could have been against racial injustice endured by the Black Panthers. It could have been against the general prohibition of political advocacy, e.g., free speech, on campus. I think we were protesting the University Administration's fencing off of newly-created Peoples' Park, four blocks from Sproul Plaza.

The previous weekend, scores of us had been digging on this vacant lot, planting trees, laying down broken pieces of cement sidewalk to become walking paths, erecting a bulletin board to enable our community to communicate with each other, putting up tents, building benches, tables, and a fire pit. A creative vegetable garden was begun, with psychedelic posters designating the plants in each row.  

Most of this city block had been home to affordable, run-down but cheap, housing for maybe three or four hundred people. Some were students others were ex-students, or future-students, or simply students of life. But the University decided to clear this block, except for the commercial properties on the Telegraph Avenue side, to rid the neighborhood of, well, protesters, vagrants, and worst of all, hippies. University spokespeople said they needed to clear this slum to make way for student housing. We protesters knew the University hadn't allocated money in their budget for affordable student housing, and that this site, in the long-range general plan, was number 50 in the list of potential housing sites, a list of 50 sites. 

So, we were mad. We were angry. We were alienated, justified, and self-righteous. There were many good reasons: the war, poverty, racism, and general anti-authoritarianism. But we expressed it creatively, beautifully, naturally, by turning the empty block into a park, a park for all the people, the first (and not the last) People's Park!  

On Thursday, May 15, a few weeks after that glorious, greening weekend, the University administrators hired contractors to erect a fence all around the park. At 4:30 AM, California Highway Patrol officers, commandeered by then-Governor Ronald Regan, ejected all the hippies who had been camping there, cooking there, singing and drumming and smoking well into late night's dawn there, and … also peeing and shitting there in the bushes.  

By Noon, we all knew what to do. We knew the routine. Big crowd meets in Sproul Plaza. Speeches through portable megaphones. Then we march down Telegraph, filling the street from storefront to storefront, chanting something like "Take back the park" and "The people united will never be defeated." 

The University knew the routine all too well also. And they were prepared, as they often were, by arranging for Berkeley and Oakland police to amass along the side streets, ready to flood into Telegraph, confront the mob, disperse it and push it back. They had the weapons, billy-club sticks and tear gas. We had power, the Power of the People!  

The University had something else that day as well, Alameda County Sheriff deputies, Blue Meanies. These men, were not used to, nor in any way sympathetic to, students, protesters, or hippies. In their eyes, we were communists, degenerates and perverts. They were big meaty, sweaty rednecks from somewhere out in Castro Valley where pigs and pig farmers bore a striking resemblance, and they were armed.  

I was an aspiring photographer, participating in the protests yet also keeping an eye open for that Henri Cartier-Bresson moment when everything - person, expression, lighting, shadow - came together and told a story. You had to act fast. If you stopped to look, that moment would be gone before you could raise your camera and squeeze in a photo. You had to see it with your intuition, you had to recognize it just before… So, that day, rather than try to see what was happening from inside the crowd where it's always difficult to get a clean shot, I climbed up the back stair of the building on Telegraph and Haste, the one adjacent to the now-fenced-in People's Park.  

On the roof, I saw two guys I knew from the little art cinema next door, another guy with a camera, and maybe two or three reporter types. From our rooftop vantage, we could see the street, see the where the crowd would be advancing down from Sproul. And from the other direction, down the street, we could see the Blue Meanies as they began filling into the street and slowly began advancing, shields up, toward the protesters. It looked like the confrontation might take place right in the intersection below, and I had a pretty good view.  

The only thing was that you had to be careful moving around on the roof. It was uneven and had lots of things like vents and skylights that you don't want to step on.  

I'm moving around gingerly, to get a good viewpoint to catch the action. I lean over toward the street to catch the army of police marching. I crawl over to the other side of the roof to catch the students approaching, now maybe half a block away. The cinema guys are just standing there, on the top, looking down, lighting a cigarette.  

Suddenly, I see a glint of light from the direction of People's Park. A cloud parted and the sun had begun to illuminate the fencing is just the way that would tell the story about the Park and why we were all protesting about it that day. I scrambled off the roof and down the stairway to get a good angle shot before the light changed and the Henri moment would be gone. A few seconds later, two shots rang out. 

As the Alameda Sheriffs marched into the intersection, facing the approaching crowd, one of them turned around and looked up. I don't know what he saw. Was it the flame from the cigarette lighter? Was it the reflection off that other photographer's camera? I dunno. The pig turned around, raised his shotgun, and fired, twice.  

One of the cinema guys (James Rector) was killed. The camera guy (Alan Blanchard) got blinded. I was on the back stairway and missed it all.  

Was I dumbfuckingly lucky? Or did something want me to live another day?