Beatniks build a college and hilarity ensues

Of bongos, hallucinogens, a Zapatista fraud and agitated neighbors in Pacific Grove

By Joe Livernois

Before all those dirty hippies showed up to hear Jimi Hendrix at the fairgrounds, the Monterey Peninsula experienced a plague of filthy beatniks.

Sixty years later, it’s easy to ridicule the notion that earnest young idealists who dreamed of deconstructing the concept of bourgeois intellectualism had gathered in Pacific Grove to launch a populist university to the bongo beat of Marxism and LSD. But, in hindsight and in the final analysis, ridicule is certainly the only appropriate response.

This was in the 1960s, when a handful of free-thinking weirdos established a school of utopian ethics in Pacific Grove. The beatnik educators set up camp in an old mansion on Central Avenue and called it Emerson College. Needless to say, the puritanical souls who populated America’s Last Hometown weren’t especially open to the transcendental rhapsodies of Thoreau and Emerson. The locals watched the beatnik invasion with alarm, as though the Red Guard itself came goose-stepping down Lighthouse.

Much has been said about the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. We know how the mayor at the time, Minnie Coyle, literally clutched her pearls over the horrifying prospect that hordes of long-haired, dope-smoking hippies would upend the tranquility of her fair city for a weekend in June. That's all documented and firmly affixed to the Monterey Pop lore.

But it was the beatniks — the damned bongo-banging, poem-reading cool cats — that bothered the good people of Pacific Grove for a handful of years in the early 1960s. Pacific Grove was — is? — an uptight place, founded by Methodists as an empyrean retreat. The sale of alcohol wasn’t even allowed there until 1969. The locals go bonkers when out-of-towners deign to erect a motion picture theater in their town. So perhaps Pacific Grove wasn’t the place for a free-wheeling intellectual experiment certain to attract people who experienced life outside the Realm of Traditional Norms.

Emerson College. According to the late poet-historian Bonnie Gartshore, the institute's three-year history was either a “scholarly dissertation in the genesis of the free university movement or material for a standup comic’s monologue. In either case the facts would be the same.”

The utopian dream ultimately went up in a cloud of dust with the appearance of a large bulldozer, as city leaders demolished Emerson College due to the accumulation of on-campus filth and an abundance of building code violations.

If you’d like to see remnants of the college, take a look at the seawall at Lovers Point; concrete sections of the old building’s foundation were used to shore up the structure against ocean tides.

Emerson College never got the respect its founders thought it deserved. Locals referred to it as “Beatnik U,” and not in a nice way. Time magazine wasn't even that generous. When it published a feature about it in its Aug. 18, 1961, edition, the headline for the story read simply: “Kookie College.”

Kookie?

Maybe.

Consider that the only collegiate athletic program the school offered was judo, and that the judo team called itself the Transcendentalists. The team motto was: “It’s not whether you win or lose, but whether you can rise above the scene.” A mad flautist was often heard playing late into the night from the roof of the mansion. Alvin Duskin, one of the college founders, was once seen with Winston Elstob tossing books out the third-floor library window in what they called “a burst of anti-intellectualism.” For a brief period, the school harbored a self-styled Zapatista bent on overthrowing the Mexican government.

Emerson College was an experiment dreamed up by Mark Goldes, a Monterey Peninsula College professor. Goldes had made a study of higher education in America and asked his students to design the sort of university they’d want to attend. He wrote about his findings in the late 1950s: students preferred shorter, more intense classes, free, without grades or credits.

Enter Duskin, who was intrigued enough about Goldes’ findings to make a pilgrimage to Carmel Highlands for an audience with the educator. Duskin was a graduate student at Stanford University at the time. They talked for a full day — an agreeable meeting of the minds, you might say — and Duskin’s wife arrived the next day so they all could get Emerson College started.

They envisioned a free-thinking institution with a limited number of students, with faculty that taught because they enjoyed teaching, without the burden of drawing a paycheck or achieving tenure. Goldes told The Los Angeles Times that instruction at Emerson would focus on “the world view” and not on “inhibited, impersonal reflections.”

With great expectations, Duskin and Goldes found their campus, a grand building at 181 Central Ave. and they worked out a five-year lease with the owner for $200 a month. The mansion had been built by T.A. Work, a turn-of-the-century tycoon who had made his fortune on lumber and real estate development around the Monterey Peninsula.

The school opened in 1960 and immediately drew the attention of the local John Birch Society, a fire-breathing precursor to the MAGA bunch. They were welcomed to the community with a flaming cross on the front lawn late one night. Neighbors were suspected, but no arrests were made.

Antipathy was fueled somewhat by the news media, both local and national. They dispatched reports to readers dripping with “witty” skepticism, describing Emerson as some sort of geek show.

The essence of the school must have seemed menacing to the Puritan spirit of Pacific Grove. The college syllabus offered a small but earnest menu of course offerings. One of them was a course called “Utopias,” and the course description read: “Historical solutions and evasions of the problem of society, wherein they failed, the possibilities of success.”

Eleven students were enrolled at Emerson when it opened in 1960, though the student body lost enrollment within a couple of weeks when one of the pupils was committed to a psychiatric ward after he stabbed a bus passenger to death in a Greyhound in the Salinas Valley.

Emerson administrators, meanwhile, promoted the college and raised needed funds in San Francisco’s North Beach beatnik hangouts with well-publicized events.

One of those fundraisers, at the Coffee Gallery on Grant Avenue, drew the attention of San Francisco police who hoped to clear the sidewalk of about a 100 people trying to hear poets from outside the coffee house. Among the two dozen poets scheduled to perform at the “Orgy of Poetry” were Alan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, though Kerouac was a late scratch. In addition to the crowd outside the door, according to an account in the San Francisco Examiner, the officers heard what sounded to them like a criminal excess of four-letter words pouring from the coffee house. After checking with commanders, the officers finally moved along, without incident. Emerson raised a couple hundred dollars from the benefit.

Not long after, Emerson students took a road trip to San Francisco to protest the House Un-American Activities Committee, which famously sniffed out communists and made heroes of the likes of Richard Nixon. This political activity greatly concerned the Pacific Grove neighbors, especially when they learned that one of the students had been arrested during the protest. Overnight, according to Goldes, “Emerson went from being hailed as the coming Harvard of the West to being described as a communist cell.”

Duskin then went on a public-relations tour on behalf of the college, inviting himself to service club meetings so he could explain to Rotarians and Kiwanians that he wasn’t running a center for radicalism or sedition. But the effort backfired as Duskin miscalculated the level of local tolerance. His comments only aggravated the opposition.

Communist agitators or not, one thing was clear: The old mansion that served as the Emerson College campus was quite noticeably a pig sty, obvious to anyone with a pair of eyes. Even Duskin acknowledged the place was a mess.

The city’s chief building inspector declared the building was the filthiest thing he’d ever seen. He recommended the city revoke its permit to the college. But after hearing Duskin admit that college administrators had made some “naive” mistakes, planning commissioners agreed to give the college one more chance to clean things up.

Few observers were taking the college seriously. Time Magazine took its shot, and the snarky San Francisco newspapers were having a field day. In a report about Pacific Grove’s code enforcement efforts against Emerson, the San Francisco Examiner headlined its story “Like It’s Endsville for Beat College?” The subhead read “A Filthy Pad, Dad.”

But the Time magazine article stung the worst. Duskin whined that Time readers “would assume that my background is that of an ex-jazz musician.”

It also didn’t help that, for a period, the college appeared to be harboring a bonafide kook, a fellow by the name of Marcantonio Diaz-Infante. According to various accounts, Diaz-Infante promised to lead a “Zapatista” revolution in Mexico. It turns out that the smooth-talking Diaz-Infante had been swindling people wherever he went, and he was eventually convicted of fraud and kiting bad checks in Nogales, Ariz.

Within a year, inevitable academic politics seized the campus and Goldes quit in a huff. “I didn’t really care about power and Duskin did,” he declared. The handful of teachers that remained called for Duskin’s resignation, but he refused to leave.

The campus was a mess. Living conditions inside the building were ever more alarming. The administration’s relations with its staff was dysfunctional. Students were pretty much running the asylum, and most of them were dabbling in hallucinogens. The college librarian, who had created the upstairs library from the 2,276 volumes in his personal collection, sued the college to get his books back. The residents of Pacific Grove were upset with the radicalism and the late-night parties. 

Transcendental anarchy had turned to dark chaos.

Late in the evening on June 2, 1963, one of the “coeds” living in the house woke to the smell of smoke and saw small fires burning in the kitchen, the basement and a storeroom. There wasn’t a lot of damage, but the obvious arson was disconcerting, and Emerson students suspected a local neighbor tried to burn them out of town.

The fires were the last straw for the landlord, who terminated the lease. The college shut down within a couple of days of the arson. And then a fellow named Leon Sarsozo, who taught poetry at the school, surrendered himself to Pacific Grove police, all but confessing to the arson. He handed the cops a note that said: “I have spent a good year trying to make a living at Emerson College. I was setting up my pottery shop and supporting my family. I was under pressure that the fact that the college was collapsing and trying to avoid this was causing me extreme emotional strain. I’m relieved that nobody was hurt by my fault.”

Felony charges were later dropped against Sarsoza, but he was sentenced to a suspended six-month jail term and probation after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor.

A year later, the city sent a bulldozer to tear down the hopeless building.

Bonnie Gartshore, the historian, caught up with several of the professors and administrators about 25 years later.

“Things at Emerson had a passionate, brief life,” Duskin told her. “There were profound moments and low periods. The public couldn’t know about the profound moments — what went on in the heads and hearts of students and teachers — and what happened in the low moments tended to get in the newspapers.”

Another former teacher, Benjamin Saltman, remembered that students were mostly connoisseurs of peyote, magic mushrooms and cheap alcohol. But they were also invested in the philosophy of the educational experiment. “We were on the cusp between beat and hippie,” he said, “moving into the exalted and the ethereal.”

Saltman, who went on to teach at CSU Northridge, called it “the spiritual and intellectual adventure of a lifetime.”

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Postscript: Of the characters that emerged from the remnants of Emerson College, Alvin Duskin is probably the most notable. Duskin remained an entrepreneur/activist after the demise of the college. Even as he created his own successful clothing line in the San Francisco Bay Area, he referred to himself as a “pacifist-anarchist.”

The Alvin Duskin Company was a women’s fashion label he created in the 1960s to fund his various campaigns. He sold the company in the 1970s and went to work with Saul Alinsky for a time before branching into other entrepreneurial endeavors and progressive causes.

In the 1970s, for instance, he rallied voters in San Francisco against the “Manhattanization” of the city and led a couple of failed ballot measures that would have banned skyscrapers. At the time, he feared that skyrocketing rents would drive away the poets, authors and artists that make San Francisco special. He also campaigned against nuclear power and he promoted wind energy.

Duskin died in 2021.

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Sources:

• Monterey Peninsula Herald

• Weekend Magazine (Monterey Peninsula Herald)

• The Salinas Californian

• Emerson College brochure (August 1960)

• Time magazine

• Game & Gossip magazine

• The New York Times

• The San Francisco Examiner

• The Los Angeles Times

Photos from Game & Gossip