This interview was done by phone from Mexico, where Kingsley was volunteering at the time. He is now Executive Director of the Yolo County Democratic Central Committee in California.

b. 1977

Going to primary school in San Francisco, all the teachers were dying to meet my Dad. I would say, “He’s just my Dad. Why would you want to meet him?”

They said he was very famous and popular. Of course, at that age, you don’t know what that means. I just knew he was on the road a lot playing music. Then he became a lawyer.

I didn’t get to hang out with him that much until I was eight, and he took over as coach of my baseball team. That’s when we really got to bond. He loves baseball. My first memory of an activity with my Dad is playing catch in front of our house on Wool Street in San Francisco.
        
He was a good coach. If we had a great team, he was into winning because he knew that he could, but the other years it was just about fun.

In my experience, there were two kinds of coaches: the one who gave his kid on the team all kinds of favors, who son could do no wrong; and then there was my Dad. Everybody knew that I got no favors from being the coach’s kid. He made me the example. I was always the first kid running.

For a while, I did like music. My favorite first drum set consisted of Yuban coffee tins and spoons. I think I managed to ruin every spoon in the house. But basically, the story of my life is I find something, I get interested in it for a few years, and then I move on. That’s what happened to me with the drums, and with golf and a lot of things.

One thing I got from my Dad is that we both like pissing people off. We both like to stir the pot. I made the baseball team as a junior, but then in my senior year, I was sports editor of the school paper. We got a new baseball coach who was also the basketball coach. He had a kid on the team who was a sophomore and was getting more playing time than anybody. I found out he was actually padding his son’s statistics, and his son was supposedly but not really on a pace to break all the assist records in the league. I wrote a story about it, and the next thing I knew I somehow got cut from the baseball team.

I didn’t listen to Country Joe and Fish that much until my junior year in college when pot was real cool, and he had a couple of songs about pot. But generally, I didn’t listen to that music that much. I knew and liked his newer songs with the Dinosaurs much more.

My generation knows nothing about that 60s music, so all my life I’ve never talked about my Dad that much. My friends know the history, but I’m cooler than my Dad, they don’t need to know about him.

Because of him, I got interested in politics at a very young age. In sixth grade, I volunteered for Art Agnos’s mayoral campaign. As a thank you, he got me a Willie Mays autographed baseball. That was very cool.

The other bonding ritual in my house was sitting in front of the 11 o’clock news with a bowl of cereal, asking him, “Please let me stay up for the last bit of sports,” and the one show in our house that was watched the most was McNeil-Lehrer.

One of my biggest regrets is that I never got to talk with my grandfather more about his life. He didn’t like to talk about it. If I asked him about World War II, he would just say, “It’s an ugly thing,” and he wouldn’t say anything more. I gather his ship was sunk during the war, and he was shot as a union organizer and left for dead. I’ve got big shoes to fill if I want to live as interesting a life as my old man and my grandfather.

They both tried to change the world, and now I’m finding how hard that is just to change one kid’s life.

I’m here in Mexico working for Project Amigo, which was set up by a bunch old hippies from Humboldt County. They all know my Dad and think he’s cool. Anyway, they get Rotary clubs to sponsor various programs we’ve set up for education and housing. I am here to learn a culture, the language, but also to spread excitement about scholastic life. I think education broadens your choices and gives you a much greater capacity to choose. Another thing I learned from my father: freedom is a wonderful thing, and education and freedom have a direct correlation.

I work with the scholarship program. Tomorrow, I’m going out Ixtlhuacan which is a melon-growing community that supplies stores like Safeway with all their melons. These families have been poor all their lives, and even though their kids get good grades, the families face a lot of pressure to take them out of school after sixth grade and put them to work in the fields. Part of the problem is in Mexico, even in public schools after sixth grade school is not free. Enrollment fees can cost $750, and if a family only makes $4,000 a year that’s a huge amount of money.

What we do is pay those fees so the kids can go to school. Sometimes, we figure out what the kid would earn in the fields and pay that to the family so they’ll let their kid stay in school. Then, we keep track of them through what we call “homework clubs.” I run a couple of homework clubs. There are 20 kids in the Ixtlhuacan homework club. We give them lunch to make sure they get at least one nutritious meal a day. It’s also important for them to hang out with each other kids to know there are others who are going through the same experiences.

I’m there to hear their complaints and help with their English and algebra and basic science. All the kids are required to speak English, but their teachers don’t know how to speak it. They’re just as overworked and undereducated as everybody else, so basically the kids have had three years of English but can’t say, “Hi, my name is Juan.”

At another migrant camp I visit, the kids there are Indians, and they don’t even speak Spanish. It’s a sugar town called Queseria. They import their cutters from southern Mexixo and set up camps for them, because no locals want to cut cane. You breathe in ash all day, and you’re out in the hot field with a machete. A lot of the families speak speak a local dialect called Nahuatl, so our project has raised the money to build a school and furnish it with a teacher fluent in both Spanish and Nahuatl.

In that town, we only have two qualifying students for our program. As far back as my melon kids are, these Queseria kids are that much further. We even had to build bathrooms for them in their camps. When you close your eyes and picture a third world country, that’s it.

The hardest part is changing peoples’ attitudes. Mexico’s biggest strength is also one of it’s biggest weaknesses. That’s the family. The Mexican family has got to be the strongest thing I’ve ever seen, but the problem is they don’t help anyone outside the family. As a result, there are very few programs for their poor. Our program isn’t even nationwide. It’s in the smallest state of Mexico, in Colima.

It’s very hard to convince the kids that in the long run education will pay off for them. They’ve never had a family member make it past high school. They can’t imagine having a job that uses their minds and not their backs.

I’m here for six months. I’m not sure what I’ll do next. I definitely feel unequipped to change the world right now, so I’ll probably go back to school to acquire some more tools. What those will be I’m still deciding. A big part of me wants to go to law school. It’s almost natural to me. I’m more so a lawyer’s son than a musician’s son, but definitely a political son, definitely a rebel’s son, and that’s all right with me.