Dressed for Success

Teaching and Learning and Caring Blog

EL PASO — I began thinking about how people dressed and how much money they had when I lived in East Oakland.  I kept thinking about it for many more years. I lived in East Oakland for about a year with a husband who just returned from Vietnam and had some months left to serve at the Oakland Induction Center, least favorite hangout of young men in northern California at the time. The neighborhood we lived in was almost as crazy and rough. On Sundays I swept condoms and hypodermic needles from the sidewalk. Sly and the Family Stone practiced until all hours within earshot, and a badass motorcycle gang roared up and down east 14th.