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efusing permission to the VDC. On the hip sideof the hip-radical fusion, Miller owned The Store,a Telegraph Avenue business that specializedin selling drug paraphernalia. In April 1969, hecampaigned as a Yippie-style candidate for theBerkeley City Council with an election slogandesigned to appeal to the drug culture: “To get ahead, you have to vote for a head.” 21Tornabene sometimes claimed he had run awayas a teenager from an Arkansas boarding schoolor that he was the grandson of prominent ChicagoMafia boss Sam Giancana, but he actuallywas raised in a comfortable, middle-class Chicagosuburb. He had played a pivotal behindthe-scenesrole at the 1968 Democratic Partyconvention. In Lincoln Park for the Yippies’ “Festivalof Life,” designed to contrast with the “Conventionof Death,” he tried to park a flatbed truckto use as a platform for a rock band. When Chicagopolice denied the truck entrance to the park,the subsequent confrontation became the firstepisode of what an official government study, theWalker Report, later termed “a police riot.” 22Delacour, Schlesinger, Angelo, Glusman, Albert,Curtis, Read, Lyon, Goldberg, Bardacke, Miller,and Tornabene formed a diverse group of parkfounders who defy simple characterization as“culturally alienated” hippies or “politicallyactive” radicals. The Berkeley of the 1960sembraced hippies who were disenchanted withthe military draft and the Vietnam War alongsideradicals who were far more influenced byGroucho Marx and John Lennon than by KarlMarx and Vladimir Lenin. Political activists andthe counterculture coexisted, sometimes distinctlyapart, sometimes side by side, and sometimesthoroughly absorbed into the fused beliefsof hip-radicals. 23In April 1969, the park founders—labeled “streetpeople” and defined as “an amorphous assemblageof hippies, yippies, students, and othersfalling into no classification” by Time magazine—decided to issue a call for volunteers to help create“a cultural, political, freak-out and rap centerfor the Western world.” Their appeal appearedin the April 18 edition of the local radical undergroundnewspaper, the Berkeley Barb. The articlestressed a communal approach that rejectedleadership roles (“Nobody supervises, and thetrip belongs to whoever dreams”). Paul Glusman,though, later recalled that Michael Delacour’senergy and commitment to the People’s Parkproject provided the incentive to spur other parkbuilders into action: “Mike Delacour stood headand shoulders above everyone else in initiatingthe park. He said, ‘Let’s build a park on Sunday,’and nobody believed him. But on Saturday hehad a truck of grass sod parked in front of theMed [the Caffe Mediterraneum] and was scouringaround Berkeley for the shovels.” 24On the following day, Sunday, April 20, workbegan with the participation of a hundred ofthe so-called street people. According to RobertScheer in Ramparts magazine, Delacourwas again the central figure: “The people whocame to work were the type that resists ‘leaders’and much credit is given to Delacour for havingdeveloped a style of leadership that stressesexample, rather than exhortation. He simplyworked the hardest at different jobs.” WendySchlesinger wrote about “the tangible feeling ofaccomplishment” she derived from being partof “a sod chain” that unloaded and planted tentons of sod. After reflecting upon the diversecomposition of the “sod chain,” her satisfactiongrew even more profound: “Right in the middleof anarchist, polarized, confused Berkeley, peoplegot themselves together instantly, without anydirector. . . . No one of us, be she or he, big orsmall, could have unloaded the ten tons by himor herself. But, together an exhausting task wasturned into an exhilarating frolic.” 25At the end of their first day of effort, workers hadcleared an area in the northeast corner of Lot1875-2 and planted $300 worth of shrubs and1