Fay’s niche largely remained brief-writing for Garry and Dreyfus as she shuttled her children to school and extracurricular activities, commuted across the Bay Bridge and spent much of her time at the firm scurrying between its law library and her office. Still separated in the spring of 1963, Fay told hardly anyone that she had rekindled a romance with her former fiancé, Bob Richter. After Fay rejected him following his release from prison in 1952, Bob had earned his degree at Reed and married another Reed student before moving to Iowa and obtaining an M.A.
During Fay’s first semester of law school in 1953, Bob had brought his new wife to visit Fay in Chicago. Fay did not see Bob again for almost another decade, while Bob volunteered for civil service and received a pardon from President Eisenhower, erasing his conviction. By the time Fay saw him again, Bob’s career had begun to take off. He had already assisted screenwriter Richard Maibaum and was now a producer and reporter for Oregon public television and radio. The New York Times also employed him as a part-time journalist.
Bob contacted Fay in the spring of 1963 and arranged to come down from Oregon for a weekend together. He was unhappy in his own marriage and knew that Fay remained separated from Marvin. Fay had Neal and Oriane that weekend and brought them along when she and Bob stayed at a beachside motel south of San Francisco. Unlike Stanley Moore, Bob enjoyed young children. He relished catching up with Fay as they walked along in the sunset with Neal on his shoulders and Oriane in Fay’s arms. Even more, Bob would cherish the memory of putting the two preschoolers to bed in an adjacent room so he and Fay could spend a torrid night together.
From then on, Bob visited Fay whenever he had business in California — once every month or two — until she reunited with Marvin in 1965. When Fay and Marvin separated again later on in their marriage, Bob and Fay discreetly revived their long-distance affair. At one point he proposed to her, but Fay resisted. They kept up sporadic trysts over an eighteen-year period, ending in 1979 shortly before she was wounded.
While separated from Marvin in the ’60s, Fay saw her old law school friend Alice Wirth Gray and her husband Gary fairly often. Fay confided to Alice that she and Marvin were planning to divorce and asked Alice to play matchmaker. Fay’s fantasy was someone with whom she could play “The Trout Quintet” arranged to be performed as a duet on a piano and string instrument. The challenging Schubert composition included a famous fourth movement that evoked the image of a trout skimming the surface of a river. Alice coincidentally knew an academic psychiatrist who was single, an opera buff and amateur violinist. He had also been looking for someone to accompany him on the piano playing “The Trout” transcribed for two musicians.
Alice excitedly told Fay about her psychiatrist friend and invited both to dinner at the Grays’ home to perform the piece for a few friends. After the performance ended, Fay stomped into the kitchen to speak with Alice privately. Alice assumed she was upset that the psychiatrist was not as accomplished on the violin as Fay was at the piano. No, an irate Fay turned to Alice and exclaimed, “You didn’t tell me he was a midget!”
In addition to seeing Bob Richter, Fay managed to renew her sado-masochistic relationship with Stanley Moore. He had finished his second book, Three Tactics, and was on the brink of accepting a professorship in philosophy at U.C. San Diego. Contradictory impulses never gave Fay much pause. As Neal and Oriane grew, Fay also felt a surge of religious identity that she had abandoned under Stanley Moore’s influence. Much to Marvin’s surprise, Fay determined to raise her children celebrating Jewish holidays.
Marvin had never exhibited an interest in following his family’s religious traditions, but Sam Abrahams always presided over a Passover Seder with a large family gathering that Fay and Lisie usually attended. Every year, the Abrahams extended family focused on the Exodus of Jews from Egypt and celebrated their freedom from bondage. Fay felt that her children would benefit from exposure to the Torah’s ideals of justice and freedom. She even sent Neal to an orthodox day school for a short time, with Marvin’s acquiescence.
Fay’s old friend Betty Lee (now going by her given name Ying and married name Kelley) came on a now rare visit to Fay’s home with her own five-year-old and was astonished that Fay had a menorah and toy dreidl. “What are you doing?” she asked. “I want the children to know their heritage,” Ying recalled Fay replying. Yet Fay shocked her parents just as much by taking Neal and Oriane and Lisie’s two young daughters, Linda and baby Lora, on an Orthodox Christian Easter egg hunt.
In the early ’60s, besides renewing a long-distance relationship with Bob Richter, Fay dated several local men. These included her old friend Stan Seidner, the perennial psychology graduate student and classical cellist. Stan now spent most days among the lost souls and panhandlers on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue. At the end of November 1963, Fay’s high school friend Hilde stayed a few days with Fay after Hilde’s own marriage had begun to crumble. In her short stay in Fay’s untidy apartment, Hilde met the unimpressive Stan and a couple of other men Fay was then seeing. They seemed to drop by Fay’s apartment at will.
Finding a rare moment for some private conversation, Hilde and Fay exchanged bitter observations of the inappropriate reactions of the men they were with as a national paralysis set in on the somber November day of President Kennedy’s assassination. Hilde’s husband had taken advantage of the halt in ordinary activity to sell his car. When the shocking news hit the airwaves, Fay had been shepherding a famous philosopher visiting the Bay Area. He wanted to take her to bed. “Men!” they said. But Hilde had been disconcerted by Fay’s chaotic approach to life as a single mother and viewed it as a cautionary tale.
Fay herself had grown unhappy with her current situation and longed for more stability. She and Marvin remained on cordial terms as they drifted toward divorce. Yet the idea of being totally on her own with two children and no husband filled Fay with increasing anxiety. As much as she disdained her sister’s safe life in the suburbs, Fay had her own traditionalist streak that counted on Marvin for security. The family still took camping trips together and socialized among the same circle of Leftist friends. In their spare time, both Fay and Marvin became increasingly active among friends supporting bold civil rights projects. Over the next two years Fay sought to entice Marvin to give their marriage another try. The excitement they both felt as they launched themselves into Movement activity was a powerful catalyst.
Source: San Francisco Public Library History Center, Stephen Vincent, “Tracy Sims and the Civil Rights Protests,” 1964.
Nineteen-year-old Tracy Sims (left) was one of the leaders of the protesters arrested in the spring of 1964 for picketing discriminatory hiring practices at the Sheraton Palace and Auto Row in San Francisco. Lead defense lawyer Beverly Axelrod stands center; co-counsel Mal Burnstein stands left behind Sims; defense team member Patrick Hallinan is to Axelrod’s right. The arrests resulted in the longest municipal court jury trial in the city’s history and almost bankrupted Axelrod. This ordeal was fresh in both Burnstein’s and Axelrod’s minds in the summer of 1965 when they opted to waive a jury for the trial of 155 representative Free Speech Movement protesters arrested in December of 1964 for occupying U.C. Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza –- a decision the civil rights lawyers later vowed never to repeat in a political trial.
∎ 8 ∎
Joining The Movement
There’s a battleOutside and it is ragin’….[T]he present nowWill later be pastThe order isRapidly fadin’
— BOB DYLAN, “THE TIMES THEY ARE A’CHANGIN”
Fay and Marvin’s circle of Leftist friends paid close attention when Dr. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) instigated the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Fay and Marvin joined thirty activists who formed East Bay Friends of SNCC. With mailers, radio pitches, house parties and garage sales, East Bay Friends of SNCC sponsored hundreds of events over several years’ time. In the