The Baseball Tree

Back in the early 80’s I was living in San Francisco. I had recently gotten out of the Army and was hoping to pursue a career as a professional photographer. Although I was willing to take whatever jobs offered, mainly commercial, my dream was to do socially relevant photo essays in the manner of Eugene Smith or Margaret Bourke White.

I heard on the news that the San Francisco Housing Police was recruiting a special force of officers to work in a very troubled housing project known as the “Pink Palace.” With visions of a photo essay of project life from the inside dancing in my head I joined up and after about a week of training I was issued a night stick, a police band radio and a uniform and deposited one evening on the curb outside the infamous building where I was told to stay alert, check in by radio once an hour and “try not to get killed.”

I started patrolling the thirteen floors of the project looking for trouble, and for photos. Sometime around midnight a Swedish tourist staggered up to me out of the dark of the parking lot, his face streaming with blood. “They hit me with baseball tree,” he mumbled and then collapsed. As I started to call for an ambulance on my radio, I noticed that there was a fire department across the street so I ran over to it and pounded on the door.

A small window in the door opened and a man peeked through demanding to know what I wanted. I told him the situation and a moment later bells and horns sounded. Then the engine door of the station opened and about twenty firefighters, armed with axes, double-timed out of the station and over to where the injured man was laying. Forming a circle around the victim, they protected the one firefighter who was carrying the aid bag as he worked on the man, from a crowd of project residents who had gathered. A gang of teenage boys, who I suspect had committed the assault, strutted up and down showing off for their friends while the rest of the crowd of mainly black residents glared at the all white fire fighters.

Watching from the sidelines I thought of pulling out the camera that I had concealed under my jacket but lost my nerve when I reflected on the fact that after the fire fighters left I would be alone with this mob, a white man in a uniform with no weapon more formidable than a nightstick. Somehow I knew that this was not a neighborhood that took kindly to uniformed white men snapping photos without permission so I stood and looked on helplessly as some of the most intense photo opportunities of my life slipped by feeling ashamed of my cowardness.

I did not know it at the time but this was a wise move. How wise I was to learn some months later when I had to rescue a black reporter for the San Francisco Examiner from an angry mob when he pulled a camera out from under his jacket. In the ghetto camera equals Nark, which equals undercover informer, which equals trouble. Had I pulled out that camera I probably would not have lived through the night. I did not know it at the time but an armed undercover policewoman had been killed in that very building the night before.

Standing on the sidelines feeling shame and frustration I surveyed the scene before me. The raw light of a bare bulb illuminated the injured man lying in a pool of his own blood. He was sprawled on the floor of my tiny, grubby guard shack, a cinder block building equipped with bulletproof windows, pocked by dozens of bullet marks. The medic bandaged the mans’ head while the axe toting white firemen stood in an outward facing circle confronting a mob of angry black residents who yelled insults and gesticulated obscenely.

Above the door of the guard shack, some wag had pasted a bumper sticker that read: I (heart) San Francisco.