![\"\"](\"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/Neil-H-218x300.jpg\")
Neil Herring, alto saxophone<\/p>\nNeil Herring, alto saxophone<\/p>\n
“a chance to live my politics”<\/p>\n
I was born in 1939 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.\u00a0 My father was an immigrant from a shtetl<\/em> in Lithuania called Ponadel.\u00a0 My mother was first generation.\u00a0 Her people were from Ponadel too.\u00a0 My father came as a teenager and eventually he brought his mother and all of his siblings over.\u00a0 Their native language was Yiddish.\u00a0 Two of my cousins on his side were natives too. Both parents’ families settled in Worcester.\u00a0 I never lived there.\u00a0 My mother and father moved to Brookline, a suburb of Boston.<\/p>\n My father had a fourth grade education but by the time he settled in America he was fluent in about five languages.\u00a0 First he sold woolens in Boston and then he was what they called a contract manufacturer of boy\u2019s clothing.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t have his own factory but he would have garments made at factories that had down time.<\/p>\n I got more of a Jewish education than most of my peers.\u00a0 My father was conservative and my mother was reform.\u00a0 I finished the local Hebrew school and went on for two years at the Hebrew Teachers College in Brookline.\u00a0 There was a high school section and the language of instruction was Hebrew.\u00a0 I was fluent in Hebrew by the time I was fifteen.<\/p>\n On the other hand, by the time I was Bar Mitvah’d I was a confirmed atheist.\u00a0 I read Bertrand Russell and that\u2019s what convinced me that religion made no sense at all.\u00a0 My father made a deal with me; he said, \u201cYou have gone to Hebrew school longer than any of your friends so I\u2019ll be very happy if you go to Hebrew high school but as far as I\u2019m concerned whenever you want to quit, you can quit.\u00a0 You won\u2019t hear a peep out of me.\u201d\u00a0 He kept his word about that. I decided to keep going to the high school because I was so interested in Hebrew as a language and in the literature.\u00a0 It was a really different experience of Hebrew than reading prayers in the synagogue.<\/p>\n If you don\u2019t speak a language, it slips away every day but If I go to an Israeli film, I still get about twenty-five percent.\u00a0 I think I was an unusual American kid because I studied Latin and then French in high school.\u00a0 I became close friends with an exchange student from Paris. So I was also fluent in French by the time I was fifteen, a trilingual American.\u00a0 (Nobody, by the way, studied Spanish in Boston.)\u00a0 And then later, I lived in Japan for a year.\u00a0 I could carry on a simple conversation in Japanese.<\/p>\n I played music in high school\u2014sax and clarinet.\u00a0 I had my own little dance band.\u00a0 We played weddings and Bar Mitzvahs.\u00a0 I had studied violin first and then piano.\u00a0 When I started on clarinet I liked it more than the other two so I took clarinet lessons and eventually decided to pick up the saxophone.\u00a0 There was this terrific piano player who I\u2019m still in touch with.\u00a0 He\u2019s a professor of music at Cornell.\u00a0 We had a bass player who was younger than us.\u00a0 And we played gigs.\u00a0 We had a fake book with every song that anyone could ask for.\u00a0 When I went to college–it wasn\u2019t a conscious thought; in fact, I think I took my clarinet\u2014but I never played again until just before I retired.<\/p>\n My father wanted me to go into his business.\u00a0 I told him for years that I was not going to be interested in that.\u00a0 So I headed for college.<\/p>\n I hated Yale undergraduate because it was two-thirds preppie.\u00a0 Very few high school kids like me.\u00a0 I was an alien.\u00a0 I had started reading the existentialists when I was still a kid.\u00a0 Some of them were communists so I read Marx and Engels and American Marxists and intellectually I was a pretty convinced Marxist by the time I went to college.<\/p>\n I spent seven years at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, four years undergraduate and three years at law school. In \u201961, I married a townie.\u00a0 I was 22.\u00a0 Her father owned a drug store.<\/p>\n Law school was very different.\u00a0 There were small classes and mostly progressive students and I was able to learn labor law and constitutional law.\u00a0 I became a labor lawyer.\u00a0 For me that meant being on the side of working people, not on the side of the bosses.<\/p>\n I went into the army for two years as an officer during the Vietnam War but I never left Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri.\u00a0 I had always wanted to live in the San Francisco Bay Area so I tried to get a job there after leaving the army but I couldn\u2019t get a government job in that city.\u00a0 The head of the National Labor Relations Board’s regional office there said, \u201cWell, I can\u2019t give you a job here but there\u2019s a new regional office opening in Los Angeles.\u201d\u00a0 So I decided, \u201cWell okay, I\u2019ll get a solid job there and after a little while I\u2019ll be ready to move to San Francisco.\u201d\u00a0 I stayed in LA for fifteen years.<\/p>\n I worked for the National Labor Relations Board for about two years.\u00a0 It was good to learn the ropes of labor\/management relations and to get to know the specialists, the practitioners in LA and to get some trial experience but I had no intention of remaining in government employment.\u00a0 I went with a law firm and stayed for five years.\u00a0 They were the \u201cred\u201d law firm in town.\u00a0 I left them with one other fellow and we formed a partnership, the two of us.\u00a0 My main client, the ILWU (editor: International Longshoreman Workers Union<\/em>), was kicked out of the CIO for being communist led in 1948.\u00a0 They would organize anyone; they didn\u2019t have to be connected with maritime trades.\u00a0 They organized US Borax that mined borax in the middle of the Mojave Dessert.\u00a0 That local was my main client for 40 plus years. US Borax sponsored \u201cDeath Valley Days\u201d.\u00a0 (editor: One of the longest running radio and television Western series. Ronald Reagan famously hosted it in 1964-1966 just before running for and winning Governor of California.<\/em>)\u00a0 They had a Reagan mentality too.<\/p>\n I also represented individual rank and file workers including union members who wanted to clean up their corrupt local unions.\u00a0 I was probably the only union lawyer in LA who was willing to sue crooked unions.<\/p>\n The unions I represented, you never wanted to mess with them.\u00a0 They could close down the Port of Los Angeles.\u00a0 I mostly enjoyed it.\u00a0 It was definitely a chance to live my politics which had been radical since I was sixteen years old, but after a while, especially when Reagan was coming to power, I enjoyed it less and less.\u00a0 I was a litigator.\u00a0 I was a trial lawyer.\u00a0 When you\u2019ve tried cases for twenty-five years, you\u2019ve seen every scummy trick defense lawyers can pull on you.\u00a0 It\u2019s not funny any more.<\/p>\n I was with my first wife about 15 years, ten of them married.\u00a0 We had three children.\u00a0 The oldest is 58, then 57 and almost 52.\u00a0 The two oldest are daughters, the youngest is a son.\u00a0 In the late \u201860s the feminist movement got stronger and some of us who had children wanted to raise our children as anti-racist and feminist, so we put together an urban collective in the west side of LA called May Day.\u00a0 We\u2019ll have the 50th anniversary of its founding this September.\u00a0 The kids all think of themselves as quasi-siblings because May Day lasted seven years.\u00a0 When we started there were 13 children and 12 adults.\u00a0 Nine of the 13 kids were in diapers.\u00a0 We had a major diaper-washing scene every day.<\/p>\n My then wife had feminist friends with kids.\u00a0 We were looking for at least two or three other couples who had the money to buy an apartment complex and the politics to live collectively, to make decisions by consensus and raise our children to be avid feminists and anti-racists.\u00a0 We thought living together was the only way that the women in the couples could really pursue their own vocations.\u00a0 Each of us would do child care and cook one day a week and by rotating those chores the kids would have male and female role models.\u00a0 It was an attempt to put into practice left wing feminist child raising.\u00a0 We found two other couples with the money.\u00a0 One of them were small-\u201cc\u201d communists like us and the other couple were progressive, and then we had enough capital to buy the place, an 8-unit apartment complex.\u00a0 We all paid rent based on an elaborate formula that included how many kids each family had and what their income resources were.<\/p>\n My two oldest kids, who were 7 and 5, had been raised in a nuclear family.\u00a0 They were the oldest kids to join this collective.\u00a0 It was a big adjustment for them.\u00a0 For the others, like my one year old, it was like having ten siblings the same age.\u00a0 I think it was hard for my kids because I divorced a year after being there.\u00a0 At least half of the couples divorced.\u00a0 Once the women could have their own vocational lives, they could look at their husbands and say, \u201cOkay, I don\u2019t need him for money anymore.\u00a0 Do I really want to be with him?\u201d\u00a0 And half of them answered in the negative.\u00a0 At the same time the kids had a lot of quasi-parents they could lean on.\u00a0 My ex-wife stayed at May Day for about a year but she was kind of abrasive and the collective decided she had to go rather than me.\u00a0 But she moved nearby and my kids went back and forth.\u00a0 I was a more-than-50-percent parent with my three kids.<\/p>\n The collective lasted seven years.\u00a0 There was a gradual dissolution.\u00a0 There was no enmity.\u00a0 One couple left because they wanted to go to an area with better schools.\u00a0 Another couple decided to have a nuclear family home.\u00a0 There came a point where there weren\u2019t enough people committed to the ideal to keep it going so we made a consensus decision to disband it in 1977.\u00a0 When we liquidated there was a formula for those who had paid rent but had not put up capital to buy the complex.\u00a0 They had helped to accumulate equity in the building so they shared in the benefit of the sale.<\/p>\n Dena and I had gotten together in \u201874.\u00a0 So after the collective broke up we lived in a middle class single family house for three years but the longer I lived in LA the worse it had gotten.\u00a0 First of all, I had decided to quit law by 1980.\u00a0 I was sick of it.\u00a0 As the country turned right, there was no point in trying to get labor law justice out of the system so I decided to give up practicing law and didn\u2019t pick it up again until \u201888.\u00a0 I retrained as an ESL teacher.<\/p>\n Dena, who had moved to LA at age 12, said, \u201cI\u2019m leaving LA in 1980 and if you want to come with me that would be really great but if you don\u2019t want to come with me, I\u2019m leaving LA in 1980.\u201d\u00a0 She had grown up in a little town on Lake Erie, a suburb of Erie, Pennsylvania.\u00a0 There was a GE plant there and her father was a United Electrical Workers organizer.\u00a0 Her family got red baited out of Erie and they moved to Los Angeles.\u00a0 Because of McCarthyism he could never get a job there.\u00a0 \u00a0He never worked again.\u00a0 \u00a0Her mother did get work as a legal secretary in LA.<\/p>\n We started making weekend trips and looked all over the Bay Area.\u00a0 Even though our house in LA had doubled in value in three years it wasn\u2019t enough to buy a home in the Bay Area.\u00a0 Dena had a brother in Marin County who told us, \u201cFor the amount of money you have, you\u2019re going have to go to Sonoma or Napa County.\u201d\u00a0 We eventually narrowed it down to Sebastopol.<\/p>\n By that time my daughters had pretty much been living by themselves.\u00a0 The older one was in college.\u00a0 The younger daughter was sharing an apartment with her sister.\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure it was a good idea but they were living by themselves.\u00a0 And my son, then 12, had to decide for the first time in his life which of his two parents he would go live with because I was going to be 400 miles away LA.\u00a0 He decided to come up here and live with Dena and me.\u00a0 That was a huge shift in his life because he went from a progressive living collective with lots of quasi-siblings, and then multi-ethnic schools to a nearly all-white school and community.\u00a0 It was a tough transition for him.<\/p>\n And I think it was hard for Dena to step-parent him and hard for him getting used to having a step-parent.\u00a0 So he lived here between age 12 and 16.\u00a0 Then he went to live with his mom for a while.\u00a0 And then he went to live in Europe for a year.<\/p>\n Jeffrey\u2019s been living the life I dreamed.\u00a0 Because he is able to make a living anywhere, he has now lived all over the world.\u00a0 He has a business online.\u00a0 First he was providing costumed entertainers at kids\u2019 parties, like birthday parties.\u00a0 But he realized that he could make more just renting out the costumes.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t have to train entertainers.\u00a0 You wouldn\u2019t believe what people are willing to pay to entertain their two and three year old kids.\u00a0 And he makes a living whether he\u2019s in Thailand or in India or Africa.\u00a0 Right now he\u2019s in Accra, Ghana.\u00a0 He\u2019s lived abroad now going on six years. I saw him once about a year and a half ago.<\/p>\n I often Skype with my younger daughter who now lives in Lisbon, and we have long wonderful conversations.\u00a0 She also has a 21st century job; she\u2019s an online counselor.\u00a0 She calls it life coaching.\u00a0 No credential but she gets people to pay her sizeable amounts of money to counsel them on sex, love, and intimacy.<\/p>\n The older daughter is the most conventional of my children.\u00a0 She\u2019s the only one who got a college degree.\u00a0 On the eve of her 15th birthday she had run away from home and stayed away for a whole year, joined a traveling circus in the rural South.\u00a0 For a short while she was a professional dancer.\u00a0 Then she trained as a paralegal and she\u2019s worked for a Century City law firm for twenty something years.\u00a0 I said, \u201cI\u2019ll give you the money to go to law school.\u00a0 You can make five times the money for what you\u2019re doing.\u201d\u00a0 But she didn\u2019t want to go to law school.<\/p>\n From \u201980 to \u201986 I was an ESL teacher at the Santa Rosa Junior College.\u00a0 Then Dena and I decided to go live in another country for a year.\u00a0 We chose Japan.\u00a0 She had no teaching experience but I had a very good resume so our strategy was to get her a job first and that worked.\u00a0 We had a variety of jobs teaching English in \u201987 and \u201888.\u00a0 We traveled all over Japan and worked a little less in the summer so we could go to Southeast Asia and China.\u00a0 At that time you really couldn\u2019t travel in China without booking some kind of guide.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t read Chinese.\u00a0 There was very little English signage.\u00a0 It was a real different experience than being in Japan where we spoke the language and knew our way around.\u00a0 In China we knew nothing.<\/p>\n A very important part of my life was in 1982 when I joined M.E.N.. (editor: Men Evolving Non-violently<\/em>) I was co-facilitating long term peer counseling groups there and wrote all the manuals on how to do group therapy.\u00a0 I was there twenty-seven years.<\/p>\n Starting before I retired, I have increasingly done volunteer work. M.E.N. was the main thing but I was also a volunteer for Food for Thought in Forestville (editor: \u201cproviding healthy food & love to people living with HIV and other serious illnesses\u201d<\/em>).\u00a0 I was there for six or seven years.\u00a0 Dena was on the board of directors. After I left M.E.N. I got into senior peer counseling, mostly one on one.\u00a0 About half of them are self-referred and the other half come from agencies.\u00a0 I do typically twelve weeks, one session a week, usually in the senior\u2019s house though Covid19 has presented problems.<\/p>\n The senior counseling is totally different.\u00a0 In M.E.N. we were trying to change men\u2019s attitudes and behavior.\u00a0 In counseling seniors you\u2019re really not trying to change anything.\u00a0 You just try to listen and help them cope with the problems of being old.\u00a0 The agency, West County Community Services, is wonderfully led, brilliant female leadership.\u00a0 Their big mantra is the difference between being and doing.\u00a0 It\u2019s an independent non-profit but it\u2019s County funded.\u00a0 The County gets a huge bargain.\u00a0 For two staff\u2014a director and an assistant director\u2014they get thirty-five volunteers who don\u2019t get paid and we see hundreds of people that the county might otherwise be providing counseling for.<\/p>\n The biggest disappointment of my life is not having grandchildren because I really dig kids.\u00a0 My daughters never wanted to have children and my son, I think it\u2019s too late–though he\u2019s got a girlfriend in her late 20s.\u00a0 \u00a0About five or more years ago I was thinking, \u201cIf I\u2019m not going to have grandchildren, what can I do to have children in my life?\u201d\u00a0 I started volunteering in kindergarten.\u00a0 So I\u2019ve been doing that once a week until Covid-19.\u00a0 My grandparent friends are all having a really rough time because they can\u2019t go see their grandchildren.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve been in this house forty years.\u00a0 It will all end in ten days.\u00a0 (editor: Neil was in the process of packing to move.<\/em>)\u00a0 This is a two story house.\u00a0 My office and music studio is upstairs.\u00a0 It\u2019s an acre and a third, a lot of land to take care of, so we decided that we wanted to drive less and walk and ride bicycles.<\/p>\n Music is my first endeavor now.\u00a0 From 17 to 62 I never played but once I was nearing retirement I decided that music would be a good thing to get back into.\u00a0 So I practiced on my own for about a year and thought, \u201cOkay, I\u2019m serious enough about this to take lessons.\u201d\u00a0 I studied with Roy Zajac (editor: principal clarinet for the Santa Rosa Symphony.<\/em>) for about ten years.\u00a0 We became close personal friends.\u00a0 He\u2019s a great guy.\u00a0 And somewhere along the line\u2014although Roy hates the instrument\u2014I decided to go back to playing saxophone.\u00a0 Not long before I joined New Horizons I got myself a beat up alto.\u00a0 I had played tenor in high school.\u00a0 I had taken some lessons from a dud of a teacher in high school but basically I knew how to play the saxophone, which I think is an easier instrument.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been a sub in a clarinet quartet.\u00a0 We\u2019ve been playing together ten feet apart.\u00a0 (editor: This was during the shelter-in-place because of the pandemic.<\/em>)<\/p>\n I have a woodwind quintet that keeps setting–then cancelling–a date for practice: bassoon, French horn, oboe, flute and clarinet.\u00a0 \u00a0(Since the 19th century a huge amount of woodwind quintet music has been composed.)\u00a0 \u00a0It was going fine before the virus.<\/p>\n I miss playing music with other, larger ensembles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Neil Herring, alto saxophone “a chance to live my politics” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-578","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=578"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/578\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":638,"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/578\/revisions\/638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nhbsc.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}