While at Berkeley High, Fay’s stormy relationship with her mother continued. Freed from the dreaded Anna Head uniform, she surreptitiously snatched her mother’s charge card plate to buy colorful plaid sweaters and skirts at Hink’s Department Store on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley. Of course, the new clothes did not go unnoticed and Ruby forced Fay to take them back. Fay also showed her rebellious streak by playing hymns on Sundays at a nearby Congregational Church. To the dismay of church elders and titillation of her peers, she sometimes improvised a few bars of popular music. This trend — the glee in seizing opportunities to test the tolerance of those in charge — continued throughout adulthood.
Fay Abrahams and her close friend Wendy Milmore circa 1951
As teenagers, Fay and Wendy liked to go on Saturday afternoon adventures by bus. On one trip to the De Young Museum in San Francisco, the curious girls strolled down restricted corridors and opened doors marked “Private.” Fay would delight all her life in opening closed doors at public institutions to observe their secret inner workings.
Fay joined Berkeley High’s Pro Musica Club and in tenth grade, at age 15, won an award as the best young musician in the Bay Area for her performance of Chopin’s “Scherzo in B Flat Minor.” Her prize was an opportunity to perform as a guest artist with the Oakland Symphony and a $50 gift certificate, which Fay spent on a faddish, long-fibered coat.
For the most part, neither Fay nor her close friends paired off with a serious boyfriend in high school. Once during her junior year, unbeknownst to her parents, Fay went out driving in the Berkeley Hills with a male friend and two other couples in his family’s car. Her date missed a turn on the hairpin curves of Tilden Park, throwing them both from the car, which then rolled over and was totaled. Miraculously, none of the passengers was seriously injured. The Abrahams were so relieved when they collected Fay at Herrick Hospital that they forgave her deception. The nearly calamitous accident made Fay nervous about car travel for years. She would cower in the back seat whenever Sam sped down the windy coastal road to Carmel for family vacations. Yet in her thirties and forties, Fay would herself speed recklessly behind the wheel, frightening passengers with her cavalier attitude toward their safety.
In high school, both Fay and her friend Hilde easily made the National Honor Society. Fay particularly excelled in English. She took great notes in her tiny, neat handwriting and was a voracious bookworm. Studying for the SATs, Fay embarked on a project of reading the dictionary and got through the L’s before she quit. She considered herself above frivolous pastimes. She read news magazines voraciously, even managing to hide Time magazine issues in her music book when practicing the piano. Fay likely appreciated Berkeley High principal Elwin LeTendre’s message to the graduating class of 1949. Noting it marked the centennial of the Gold Rush, the principal admonished seniors that “some philosophers think that gold is a curse…. I hope that you will find great values in other than material things.”3
Yet Fay’s awareness of the fight against racial injustice in America — what would become the cornerstone of her career — came slowly. Relatively few blacks lived in Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco until 1940. By 1946, when Fay entered high school, several hundred thousand blacks had migrated to the Bay Area. Many only found housing in the most undesirable locations. In Berkeley, that meant the flatlands below Telegraph Avenue. In Oakland, they poured into similarly neglected neighborhoods — the streets in both cities where Fay’s future Black Panther clients grew up.
When Fay started her junior year of high school, Time magazine printed a cover story on Jackie Robinson smashing the color barrier in baseball as National League Rookie of the Year. Prior to high school, Fay had not seen many blacks, except for a few cleaning women in her neighborhood catching the bus back to their own homes. No blacks attended Anna Head, and Fay’s group of friends at Berkeley High was strictly white. But Fay and Wendy noticed with curiosity when shacks arose on the outskirts of Berkeley and filled with poor black families from the Deep South. At Berkeley High, black students were almost exclusively placed in a different educational track from those bound for elite colleges and public universities. “Shred” member Joan DeLasaux was unusual in making friends with an African-American girl in her homeroom, to the strong disapproval of many white classmates.
Probably the best student in Fay’s high school class had been a Japanese-American, Margaret Ohara. Margaret’s family had been removed from the Berkeley community during the war as forced internees while Margaret was in junior high school. After the war, when the Ohara family returned, no one at school discussed that wrenching experience with Margaret. It was a taboo subject, as were the Depression-era troubles of Joan DeLasaux’s father. In the ’40s, one simply didn’t ask and didn’t tell.
Hilde Stern
Source of photos from 1949 Olla Podrida: Berkeley Public Library, https://archive.org/details/ollapodridaunse_40
Joan DeLasaux
Margaret Ohara
In junior high school, Fay’s friend Hilde from Hebrew School formed a group of self-described “shreds” outside the popular crowd and invited Fay to join them. Cross-cultural friendships like that of “shred” member Joan DeLasaux and an African-American girl in her homeroom were rare. Japanese-American Margaret Ohara was a top student whose family got sent to an internment camp when she was in junior high school. When she returended after the war, no one at school discussed that wrenching experience with Margaret. Nor did Joan DeLasaux share with school friends the Depression-era troubles of her father. In the ’40s, one simply didn’t ask and didn’t tell.
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Predestination or Free Will
“The freedom totally dominated me.” 1
— FAY STENDER LOOKING BACK IN 1972 AT HER COLLEGE DAYS
When the day finally came for Fay to depart for college, Sam, Ruby and Lisie accompanied her to the train station. Fay looked elegant, wearing a new mauve suit with matching stockings and pumps — a seventeen-year-old with a ticket to an exciting new world. Lisie also felt the importance of the occasion. She looked forward to being an only child and to the peace that would settle on the household when Fay left. Ruby and Sam had strong misgivings. Cal provided an inexpensive, first-rate education right there in Berkeley. Ruby particularly wanted to have her melancholy older daughter close at hand. She had not given up hope of guiding Fay to a career as a pianist.
Cal was also the first choice of the in-crowd at Berkeley High. Fay told her close friends that it took screaming and crying to get her parents to accede to her wish to go to Reed College in Portland, Oregon — the same prestigious private school that her friend Hilde had chosen. Tuition was several hundred dollars per year, about ten times the cost of Cal. Surprisingly, Fay had not confided her ambition to Hilde. Possibly, Fay feared losing the battle with her parents, who made Fay first attend a summer session at Berkeley, before acquiescing in her choice.
By 1949, when Fay applied, Reed had a national reputation as a left-leaning haven for intellectuals, individualists and iconoclastic fine arts majors not wanting to pursue the beaten path. Reed was the West Coast answer to Swarthmore College in the East. Most locals