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Tides of Change

When Dan Hauser and his friend Wesley Chesbro won the Arcata city council race, their opponents did not concede gracefully. “I’m not a poor loser,” claimed Clyde Johnson, just before he called Hauser and Chesbro “rangatangs.” Then Johnson and the other disappointed candidates accused the winners of using dirty campaign tricks—just like President Nixon. Arcata’s weekly paper, the Union, ran the details of the post-election flap on its front page. That March of 1974, the national obsession with the Watergate scandal reached its peak. The president’s closest aides were on trial for burglary, wiretapping, and obstruction of justice. Nixon had become an international symbol of corruption, and the polls showed his public approval rating plummeting to an all-time low. So while Hauser and Chesbro could laugh off the comparison to an ape, when they were likened to the president the insult cut deep. It was a rough time to start a political career, especially in Arcata, an old logging town on the shores of Humboldt Bay in California’s damp northwest corner. The community was splitting in two like a redwood slat struck with an ax. On one side stood ranchers and timber workers, many of them descendants of the first pioneers to settle here in the 1850s. On the other were outsiders like Hauser and Chesbro, people who’d recently migrated to town to study or teach at Humboldt State University (HSU), and who’d decided to stay in this foggy enclave, 250 miles north of San Francisco. Now, for the first time, the outsiders controlled the city council. The old-time Arcatans felt like victims of an alien invasion. That feeling intensified when the national fad for high-speed nudity reached HSU. A few days after the election, four young guys ran naked through the University quad. Behind them, the crowns of the redwood trees at the edge of campus vanished into the fog. A cold rain fell as the earnest exhibitionists moved across the lawn, and goosebumps rose all over their bodies.