The Eucalyptus Trees by David Ray Skinner

The Eucalyptus Trees by David Ray Skinner

https://vimeo.com/481914962

In the summer of 1975, I left my job as a reporter for the Sevier County Times (an East Tennessee weekly newspaper) to travel to the West Coast. That September, I was in the Bay Area; I had friends in the Haight (in San Francisco), plus, the family of a kid who had picked me up hitching (in Oregon) had invited me to move in to their house in suburban Clayton, which was only a mile from the BART, which could get me into the city in less than an hour. There was a lot of cultural and political upheaval in the area, including the Symbionese Liberation Army's (the SLA) kidnapping the year before of Patty Hearst, the granddaughter of American publishing giant, William Randolph Hearst. I thought it might be interesting to do a story on the kidnapping and send it back to my former newspaper. So, one morning in the middle of September, I took the BART to Berkeley to try and locate her apartment, from which she had been abducted. Once in Berkeley, I stopped at a newsstand close to her apartment, at which time I learned from the news seller's radio that Patty just been freed/arrested across the bay in San Fran's Mission District, so I decided to go over to the campus (University of California Berkeley), so see what the students were saying. Once there, I met this guy named Curt, who invited me to a "virtual picnic" in the school's "Eucalyptus Grove." After the picnic, he invited me to his church over in the city to a "real" picnic/dinner, and he gave me a card with a map. My friend (whose family I was living with) agreed to drive me over to the church dinner, but when the night came, he had to work late, and we never made it. A few weeks later, I headed back to Tennessee, without ever visiting the church. Several years after that, I was living and working in NYC, and one morning on the front page of the newspaper, I discovered just what had happened to the church—it was Jim Jones' Peoples Temple and they ended up dead in the jungle in northwestern Guyana. As disconnected as the "The Eucalyptus Trees" may seem, there actually is a connection. To meet the ransom demands of the SLA, Patty's father, Randolph Hearst quickly put together "People in Need," a program to provide millions of dollars of food to thousands of need Bay Area residents. Jim Jones got involved with "People in Need" to "help distribute" the food and money. However, he was soon ousted from the program.

Uploaded 2020-11-21T02:04:25.000Z Aerials and Satellites Wakefield