Table of Contents
The Patients’/Workers’ Rights Committee
The Threats and Intimidation Continue
Excerpt: Born on the Fourth of July
for TerriAnn Ferren
To care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan . . . —President Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865
This is the story of a few brave men who, though severely wounded in war, returned home to fight a different battle.
Introduction
Over forty years have now passed since that day in 1974 when we first entered the office of Senator Alan M. Cranston of California and began a sit-in which would quickly escalate into a hunger strike and touch the nation. Hurricane Street is a work of both memory and fiction. It is my own recollection of the strike and all that followed that spring and summer. Some names and details have been changed out of respect for people’s privacy, and to fill gaps in my memory. (One such memory gap is a meeting that took place early in the strike with Senator Cranston on February 13, 1974. Unfortunately, nothing substantive came of that meeting, which is probably why it didn’t lodge itself in my memory, and why I have not included it in this book.) For the sake of presenting a coherent story line, I have also taken the liberty of creating two characters: Tony D., who is essentially a composite of several sight-impaired Vietnam veterans I knew while I was a patient at the Bronx and Long Beach VA hospitals; and Joe Hayward, who represents a number of seriously wounded veterans I also knew during that period. In addition, I have combined the two AVM takeovers of the Washington Monument in the spring and summer of 1974 into one single action.
Each night during the strike after the lights were turned out, I would make entries in my diary using a small penlight. Some of the entries were very brief while others were quite long. Back then I sensed the need, even