Isla Vista, California
Santa Barbara Police Department
May 8, 1970
“Janelle Martin.”
I jerked my head up and brushed a tangle of long blonde hair out of my eyes with my left hand. My right was handcuffed to the chair at the booking officer’s desk. I’d been sitting here forever. An hour ago, a few of my fellow UCSB students marched past me, their hands cuffed. They flashed me the peace sign behind their backs as they went by. At least eight of them were booked for arson, vandalism, and resisting arrest, and then taken to jail while I sat; my ass growing numb on the hard, wooden chair.
Finally, the booking officer returned.
“Get up, Sunshine. You have visitors.”
“My name isn’t Sunshine,” I muttered, as the officer uncuffed me from the chair.
“No?” The officer smirked. “Isn’t that your hippie name?”
I wanted to tell him I wasn’t a hippie. Or a flower child. I might’ve looked the part with the long, straight hair, peasant top and flared jeans, but hippies were about peace and love, and that wasn’t my scene. I was going to graduate UCSB in a year with a double-major in journalism and French. My scene was following the Big Story. The biggest stories.
And Vietnam was the biggest story of them all.
I never thought the war would come to sleepy little Isla Vista, but the protests have only been escalating among my fellow students. That night, a bunch of them shoved a dumpster full of burning trash through the glass doors of the Wells Fargo Bank. My Nikon Photomic caught it all on film…and then I got caught in a cloud of police tear gas.
Tears streaming and my lungs burning, I was accosted by cops in riot gear. I tried to tell them I was a reporter, but they didn’t listen. The flames of the burning bank looked like hellfire to my blurred vision, and the shadows and shouts of protestors and police created a frightening chaos. But of all the sounds tonight, the small tinkle of my camera lens breaking as the cops threw me to the ground, was the loudest.
As I walked with the booking officer, a pang of fear tightened my chest. I wondered if I’ve ruined my future. The officer led me to a small room that was probably used for questioning suspects. I expected to find a detective, waiting for me to rat out my fellow students.
Instead, my father was there.
A sense of nostalgia for simpler times rushed over me, like a tide. I wanted to be his little girl again instead of a twenty-year-old who’d been tear-gassed and arrested and was now in jail. But I had to be strong. I was tired of covering vanity pieces for the university sports teams, and this was my first real test as a journalist.
I bottled up my longing to hug my dad, and looked to the other person sitting beside him. A dark-haired woman, and for a split second, I thought it was my mother. But it was Helen Strumfield. My best friend sat beside my father, chewing nervously on her thumbnail.
Helen had been my friend since grade school. Since before the war; before any of the fires or sit-ins or marches. We used to eat ice cream sundaes and giggle over the Monkees.
A lifetime ago. Before the world went mad.
My father got to his feet as I entered, his face falling and in anguish to take in my soot-covered, bloodshot-eyed appearance.
“Janey,” he said, rubbing his fingers over his mustache. Helen tugged a lock of her brown hair, her eyes darting between my father and me.
“Hi, Dad.”
The urge to hug them both came back, fierce, but the idea of touching either of them with handcuffs on my wrists was too shameful. I sank into the chair opposite.
“Hi, Helen.”
“Hey, Janey,” she said in a small voice. But warm. My father’s was cold by comparison.
“So it’s come to this,” Avery Louis Martin stated. “Arrested for vandalism. For arson. For destruction of government property.”
The room was empty but for us, and yet he kept his voice low, as if the whole town of Isla Vista—or all of greater Santa Barbara—were there, listening in and snickering that the only daughter of the wealthy, upper-crust owner of Alato Winery & Vineyards wasn’t the good girl everyone thought she was.
“Do you have any idea what you’re done to the family these last few weeks? Never mind your poor mother. She couldn’t even get out of bed when Sergeant Hollis called tonight.”
“I didn’t do anything but take pictures. They saw me—a college student, looking like a protester—and grabbed me too.”
“They wouldn’t have, if you didn’t get so damn close,” my father said. “Why do you have to get so close?”
“Because I’m tired of writing puff pieces on the university debate tournaments, or yet another article on the swim team’s ‘hopes for a good season.’” I shrugged. “I wanted to find a big story and get right to the heart of it.”
“Is the heart of the story inside a jail cell?”
“It’s not in a locker room or out on a track,” I said.
He stared me down and I did not blink.
Finally, he folded his hand on the table, and put on his deep, I-mean-business boardroom voice. “I’ve made a decision. You’re not covering any more protests. And you’re not attending college, not at UCSB.”
I shot up straight. “What? Why? Where am I going to go?”
“You’re going to France, to finish your education away from all this nonsense.”
I gaped, honestly taken aback. And then I laughed. A dry and humorless one, but a laugh nonetheless. “France? You’re pulling my leg.”
“You’ll withdraw from UCSB immediately,” my father continued. “Your grades and your French fluency will be enough to get you into the Sorbonne, and if not, I’m prepared to pull some strings or line a few pockets if that’s what it takes. You’ll fly to Paris. I will arrange an apartment for you, and you’ll finish out the school year, then resume your studies in September.”
“So that’s how it goes? You just declare how it’s going to happen and so it does? I’m not one of your business ventures.” I shook my head incredulously. “And the Sorbonne? There is no Sorbonne. Haven’t you been paying attention? The revolution two years ago? The old buildings aren’t even usable.”
“The school is still operating, and you are going there to finish your degree.”
I gave my head a shake. “Dad…you can’t. There’s no story there. Not any more. In ‘69, sure. But now—”
“Now, no one is getting shot,” my father said, his voice heavy, his eyes heavier.
“This is ridiculous,” I said. “One arrest and you totally freak out.”
My father’s folded hands tightened. “A month ago, a college student just like you, was shot and killed at one of these protests, Janey. And there was that terrible shooting at Kent State just last week. Four young people, dead.” He shook his head. “If you keep covering the war, something might happen to you…Your mother and I are afraid.”
“You don’t have to worry about me—”
“Clearly, we do,” my father said, loudly.
“There’s nothing in Paris for me. No story…”
My father slammed his closed fist on the table, making Helen and I jump. “Your story, Janelle, is that you stay safe.”
“Safe,” I spat. “For you or me? Tell the truth, Dad. You and your fancy, rich clientele don’t want to see what this war is doing to us. To the boys who are called up to go and die. You don’t want to look at the photos I take, do you?” I shook my head, crossed my arms. “I’m not a helpless little girl you can ship overseas, like some kind of fragile piece of glass. Not gonna happen.”
“It is going to happen,” my father said. “To keep you out of jail. My friendship with Ted Hollis is the only reason you haven’t been booked already. But I don’t have to pull that string. I can set you up in a nice apartment in Paris, or you can sit in a prison cell in Chowchilla. Your choice.”
My heart clanged dully in my chest. “You’d let me go to prison?”
“What else can I do?” My father’s stern expression cracked to reveal the worry beneath.
Helen cleared her throat, reminding us of her presence.
“Might I have a word alone with Janey, Mr. Martin?” she asked in her timid, fluttery little voice that had never been lifted in protest.
My father gave me a final, thick look, almost pleading, and left the room. Helen waited until the door clicked shut, and then smiled at me sadly from behind her horn rims.
“Janey.”
“You agree with him,” I said. “That’s why you’re here. That’s why he brought you.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
She leaned over the rickety Formica table. “Because I’m worried about you, too. You kept getting closer and closer to the story, so that now you’ve become a part of it.”
I shifted in my seat, my handcuffs clanking as if to punctuate her words. Helen never said much. All through school, the kids called her Hush Puppy for her silence and her big, sad eyes. But when she did speak, when she was serious about something, you felt each word slug you in the gut.
“So what should I do?” I said. “Run to France and do what?”
“Keep reporting,” Helen said, “only from a safe distance.”
I snorted. “I don’t want to keep at a safe distance. I’m so sick of not being taken seriously. I want the big stories.”
“It’s not like Paris is sleeping,” Helen reminded me. “It’s a mess too. And what is left for you here, anyway? You spend all your time in the journalism department’s dark room. You don’t talk to me… I had to hear from Karen that Bobby dumped you. He said the same thing: you’re getting too involved in your work.”
I rolled my eyes. “Bobby’s boring and bad in bed. And you can quote me. Besides,” I added, “what’s wrong with hard work? I have to work twice as hard as a man in my field to get anywhere.”
“Maybe so, but what kind of work can you do from prison?”
“My father is bluffing. He’d never let me go to jail.”
“I agree, but the shootings, Janey. Those are real.”
I dug my thumbnail into a crack on the table, and tried not to think about how scared I was last night. “It feels like running away.”
“There will never be a shortage of stories.”
“Yeah, little ones,” I muttered.
Helen grinned. “I don’t know. Sometimes it’s the smaller stories that have the greatest impact.” She reached across the table to take my hand. “Find that story, Janey. Find one that looks like nothing on the outside, but once you crack it open…” She shrugged with a smile. “…Something incredible comes out.”
I pursed my lips, but my fingers curled around hers. “My dad’s secret weapon: Helen Strumfeld.”
“Your dad’s no dummy,” Helen said. “And he loves you, too.”
Tears stung my eyes, but I blinked them away. I wasn’t a crier. I needed my eyes to stay sharp and focused. To find the right photos to go with the best articles.
The big stories.