What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [125]
At home and flying on adrenaline from the experience, she applied for her first job since World War II, as an administrator for a start-up research study known as Project Community. Led by noted social psychologist William Soskin, a professor at UC Berkeley, the study was meant to examine addiction in the wake of rampant drug use in Haight-Ashbury and elsewhere in the sixties. After an initial interview, Soskin asked Betty for lunch. Ostensibly, Soskin—a former member of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society brain trust—wanted to hear Betty’s account of the Democratic Convention. He was smitten, hired Betty, and six months later they were dating. She was fifty-five when they married in 1976.
“We had a good and very Berkeley marriage,” Betty said. Soskin was a tall, pipe-smoking, cashmere-sweater-wearing social scientist. “I was his trophy wife. He got to look much more sophisticated than he really was because he had this exotic, pretty, youngish-looking wife. And I got ten years of travel, unbelievable exposure, and was a faculty wife,” she added. After more than thirty-five years of struggle and racial tension, life with Bill leveled the playing field. The Soskin’s living room became a meeting place for leaders in the new Human Potential Movement and friends who, like Soskin, were serious Tibetan Buddhists, including psychologist and LSD advocate Timothy Leary, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, and social psychologist and futurist Don Michaels. “After years of making oatmeal, wiping noses, kissing boo-boos, I found myself as curious as a twelve-year-old—with a thirst for knowing what I was only dimly aware of until that time,” she said. “I got my Ph.D. at the breakfast table.”
In 1978, grittier realities intruded into Betty’s idyllic Berkeley existence and pulled her back to Sacramento Street, galvanizing her, once and for all, as an advocate for public good.
Her son Rick had arrived for work at Reid’s Records one morning and found Mel in a coma in the back room, where he had been living for months. The neighborhood, in decline for years, had gotten drastically worse; there had been so many break-ins that Mel had taken to sleeping there with a rifle at his side. Betty rushed to her ex-husband. He had, it turned out, been diagnosed as diabetic but told no one. His body was so ravaged that after years of not having seen him, Betty barely recognized him. His decline was mirrored by the descent of the street. Drug dealers ruled the neighborhood, cruised the sidewalks, and conducted their business on benches outside the store and at crack dens and bordellos across the street. Given Mel’s desperate medical condition, Betty had barely noticed the street that day. At the hospital, Bill Soskin stood next to her at Mel’s bedside as the former athlete woke from anesthesia and was told his right leg had been amputated.
Betty left the drug research project. While she had become Soskin’s full-fledged partner, writing grants, editing research, and working as a co-drug therapist at schools where the program was run, her list of responsibilities had grown too overwhelming. Not only did it include tracking Dorian’s care and visiting her regularly at a boarding school; caring for her aging, ninety-plus-year-old father, blind and bedridden, and her mother; and shopping for Mel and chauffeuring him to medical appointments, she was about to add running Reid’s Records. She had once hoped the store would provide a financial legacy for her children. In the sixties, Mel’s uncle, Paul Reid, a successful insurance businessman and popular gospel deejay, had joined him in the record business. Together, they transformed Reid’s Records into one of the biggest outlets for gospel music on the West Coast. They staged major gospel concerts with the likes of James Cleveland, Shirley Caesar, and the Blind Boys. But after Paul died, the business tanked