When Venice, California, Was Drab, Rough, and Wonderful
As a Volunteer in the War on Poverty, I Spent 1967 in the ‘Last Oceanfront Ghetto in America’
Most young women born in the 1940s were raised on the nursery rhyme indicating little girls were made of “sugar and spice and everything nice.” My childhood vision of the future was to have 30 children and somehow find time to serve as a missionary in India.
But in the summer of 1966, after reading the exploits of Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey, the thought of returning to college seemed a waste of my youth. Three weeks into my junior year, I dropped my classes, “borrowed” my parents’ car while they …