Bio
I was born in Queens, New York, but grew up mostly in New Jersey during the 1950s. Eisenhower was president and Elvis was King. In 1963, for reasons related to the mild misadventures of young men with lots of energy and no goals, my brother David and I thumbed to California. We took off from the East Coast separately, agreeing to meet up in Los Angeles, at the apartment of an old girlfriend of mine. David arranged a ride to Chicago with a truck driver friend, then stuck out his thumb and headed to L.A. A few days later, with $40 in my pocket, and toiletries and changes of clothes in a duffle bag, my thumb went out at the George Washington Bridge. Eighty hours later, with absolutely no sleep and only pizza, French fries, donuts, and way too much coffee in my belly, I was on Route 66, driving the sleeping owner of a fast moving sports car, convertible top down, through the Mojave Desert, enjoying the endless, starlit sky and the thrill of being a twenty-year-old on the road.
Don Stannard-Friel
Streetwise Sociology Photo: Richard Rossi/NDNU Today
Years later, as a professor of sociology, I would use this experience in my Deviant Behavior classes at San Francisco State and Notre Dame de Namur University in discussions about causes and consequences of hallucinations. As I wound my way through the nighttime desert, more than three days of no sleep and really bad nutrition caught up with me: cows appeared in my path, then turned into tumbleweed (and visa versa), a slow-moving elephant crossed the road (I stopped to let it pass), and, finally, headlights penetrated my consciousness (or absence of) as an automobile coming right at me, on the wrong side of the road, left the pavement and flew over the top of the sports car, at which point I pulled over and went to sleep. The next thing I remember was the voice of the sports car owner, “We’re in L.A.”
Stories about my time in L.A. – sleeping in a laundromat, hanging out at MacArthur Park, learning from homeless men there how to sell my blood, and find work, food, and shelter at “Finney’s Flop House” – also found their ways into class lectures in various courses, as did other life experiences as my personal and professional lives evolved and intertwined. Storytelling, drawing on real-life experiences, became a fundamental part of my pedagogy, my teaching style. Crossing the country; working as a waiter at an ocean-side Malibu restaurant, which had seen much better times; living in San Francisco’s Tenderloin; driving a cab (and being held up at gun point); discouraging a friend, aspiring writer Paul Stine, from taking a job as a cabbie, but he did anyway, and was soon dead, murdered by The Zodiac Killer; participating in the campus strike at San Francisco State; living in the Haight Ashbury as it blossomed to become the center of the universe, and working for five years on the locked wards of the mental hospital that served the hippie neighborhood as the peace-and-love paradigm withered on the vine; learning how to trance from then-rookie, now prominent, witch-author Starhawk (trances that produced more material for my hallucination lectures, as did accidentally taking mescaline on the mental ward); teaching men in jail and women in prison; living in the pot-infested Santa Cruz mountains, including, for six months, at a Buddhist community (as a resident guest, not a practicing Buddhist); exploring pubs and stone circles in the U.K. and Ireland, and coffeehouses in San Francisco: all these experiences – and the stories of others I met along the way – became examples used to illustrate theoretical points and sociological concepts and issues in classes. Then, after more than two decades of teaching, I went back to the Tenderloin to write a book that became City Baby and Star: Addiction, Transcendence, and the Tenderloin, and in so doing, had some of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. But this time, instead of bringing the experiences back to the class, I brought the class to the experiences. Instead of telling the stories, we entered them, becoming a part of the narrative. Twenty years went by. Then, I wrote about our lessons and adventures in Street Teaching in the Tenderloin: Jumpin’ Down the Rabbit Hole.
Don Stannard-Friel (right), professor at Notre Dame de Namur University, walks with students in his Promise of the Inner City class, as they volunteer during the Homeless Point-in-Time Count in San Francisco. January 27, 2017
Photo: Lea Suzuki / San Francisco Chronicle / Polaris
When the book was published, I realized that I was done with teaching in the Tenderloin, and, after forty-four years, done with teaching altogether. I loved being a professor, college dean, and street teacher for all those years, but it was time to shift my focus. Fifty-four years after thumbing my way into San Francisco, having a great life there, marrying a wonderful woman, and raising four remarkable children, I moved to Davis, California, the university town where I got my PhD and the youngest of my kids lives with her family.
I was ready for a new life.
I am currently completing a book series, The Abraham Chronicles, works of magical realism/autobiographical fiction that draw upon my time teaching and researching in the Tenderloin, living and working in the Haight Ashbury, and my experiences with altered states of consciousness, when I studied trancing and psychic development with witch-author, Starhawk.