Michael · Rossman

The expressive beauty of these photos and your haiku is touching. They make your ordeal easier to bear for me, anyway, and I suspect for you and many others who hold you constantly in their hearts and thoughts. Your multi-faceted expressive talents continue to burn strong and project intensely. Thanks for the keen effort you make daily on behalf of us all. Love, Liz

Dear Michael and friends,

I posted about your site and archives and your blog on my webpage, my main blog. This site gets about 120 hits a day and has over 100,000 hits total. Since my poetry and name is linked to almost 100,000 sites, including official media ones, anything on it rises to the top of the search engines. I also have a lot of links on this page, so that helps, too. I posted the poem inspired by your dream as well. I hope this helps to get your webpage out there. It deserves to be.

My heart and mind and Spirit is with you. I'm sending out healing vibes and warm wishes. All best to you and yours,

Your poet friend,

Lorna Dee Cervantes

http://lornadice.blogspot.com/2008/04/michael-rossman-at-birth-of-free-speech.html

http://lornadice.blogspot.com

here's the code to link, just get rid of the spaces before and after < and < /a >

< a href="http://lornadice.blogspot.com/2008/04/michael-rossman-at-birth-of-free-speech.html">Michael Rossman At the Birth of the Free Speech Movement < /a >

like this:

Michael Rossman At the Birth of the Free Speech Movement (http://lornadice.blogspot.com/2008/04/michael-rossman-at-birth-of-free-speech.html)

From far away - just to say, I love you, man. Though our paths diverge on the planet, there is so much in commmon with our love of the beauty of the world, the hope in the human race, and the irony of our fleeting endeavors.
David Stein

hi michael--sometimes people do small things that have enermous consequences in others lives--in the late 60's when i expressed interestin the counter culture you suggested i contact a ucsc professor, mark messer which started my connection to santa cruz, later when i had moved their you connected me to david sten\inberg and he and i started the men.s group. 35 years later we still meet and while david hasn't been a member for years mark messer still is. you introduced me to russall bass who through the munchie merchants got me into my own business for fourteen years, during which i ordered 200 dozen bagels for the hayward science faire from the bagelry in santa cruz. such a large order met i had to meet the baker and 27 years later nancy and i are still together. so the men's group is the locus of my social ife this last thirty years and nancy the locus of the rest, and there is a pretty good chance neither would have happened had i not know you. i am very happy with both parts of my life so thank you and keep on keeping on -love glenn

Hi Michael-

Cecily here-

I don't know you well- but was connected to you through Karen when she suggested I help you paint the downstairs unit in your house in 2001 for a few days.
I was in need of some pocket cash for my upcoming visit to see my daughter in Italy, and you kindly paid me for a skill that I am certainly not cut out for! You were so friendly and patient- never criticizing, just quietly repairing my drips, and giving me friendly tips.
I have been sending strong, healthy thoughts and energy to you through the earth,and the sea,and the mountains, by way of visualization in dancing. I have discovered a wonderful dance class at the Berkeley Y taught by a lovely woman named Heather Munro-Pierce. It is called Transdance, and it is a free form dance class combined with meditation, thoughts of renewal, prayer, and letting go.

I send much strength and love to you.

Hello Michael,
Lovely poem here, and the reading you did at the Bolshevik Cafe was breathtaking--for those of us in the audience as well as for you! THANK YOU for struggling in to bring it to us. I love your writing, and admire tremendously your dedication to it during these most difficult of times.
All my best wishes,
Adrianne Aron

Monday, May 12th

Dear Dear Michael - I sit with sober melancholy in front of my computer screen, scrolling through your platelets, so to speak, a photo of you playing your ubiquitous flute, that old wooden recorder that never failed to gather admirers round you with your siren songs, sitting on the lawn outside the C-Group dorms at the University of Chicago where I first met you. Scrolling down your blog - might we ever then have imagined such a thing! - I come cross a more recent shot, and recall you with that long and lustrous hair, the recorder and boyish good looks to lure those darling young maidens, hippy princesses in training, and the sixties hadn't even started yet!

You who urged me to come to Hyde Park and the University of Chicago, saying "Oh Harvard, you can get a pretty decent education there, but come to Chicago and learn to FIGHT!" You were speaking of the ongoing dismantling of the Hutchins Liberal Education Project, the rearguard action against Kimpton and the and the anti-intellectuals -- but already there was a glimmer in the air of what was to come, civil rights and civil liberties, SRP and Slate and the FSM and the VDC.... And then before I knew it you were gone from Chicago and back to California and to Berkeley where I found you next.

You had loaned me your copy of Garcia Lorca poems and a wonderful volume of Kenneth Rexroth's translations of Haiku from the Japanese, and spoke of introducing me to your sister when I came to visit in San Francicisco. And so you did, and we climbed Mt. Tamalpais and she told me the legend of the sleeping Indian princess, not unlike the ones I knew in Mexico, Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, where sacred mushrooms grow in magic profusion on the hillsides, and now your loving sister is feeding you mustard and platelets, what a great range of lifes's garden to contemplate and explore!

I could go on, Michael, but I know you have much on your mind, and really what I wanted to do was strike a little note of recollection of a long past we have shared, intermittently yet persistently. You have surely qualified as a 'leader' as you always jubilantly claimed, my first guide in Chicago and then in Berkeley and the Bay Area - and for while in San Diego, do you remember? With Carlos Casteneda, not yet famous- nor nearly as much so as you, who packed in all those virginal young seekers! But another story for another time, I trust. So to touch base with you, evoke a little memory of your parents who were so kind and gracious when I visited, and now 'little Lorca' who I recall riding on your shoulders well before my son was born and in turn rode on my shoulders, eliciting much the same reaction as young Lorca did then - and now as a physician himself, seeing his correspondence with you I am both bemused and impressed.... . You have done well, Michael, as an unconventional and industrious and strangely brilliant fellow, you seem to be once again my 'leader' in cosmic adventures, as when we got stoned together in those days gone by - I recall the last time, after a conference on altered states in San Francisco not so long ago and we went out for a meal at a little dive south of Market and compared notes after a long hiatus - I am thankful for that moment, Michael, and to have stayed gently in touch over these many years!

And so my thoughts and incantations are with you tonight, old friend - may the timeless wisdom of the sages, of kabbalah and the swirling branches of the sephirotic tree continue to protect you on your journey ayn soph .......

Love,

Peter

Mike was my best friend in high school; you see, my last name is Ross, so we naturally came together. I spent many long, languorous days tramping about the low-lying wilds of Tam, hunting down snakes and talking. Mike's dad was an old-time lefty, just as mine, so there was that going as well. The Rossmans' house was always alive, what with Mike, Jared, Lisa and Debby and constant music accompanying the activity. I remember one day Deborah complained bitterly that nobody came over to see her; Harold said for her just to wait a couple of years and she'd have no worries. Mike and I traveled to Chicago together. We took the City of San Francisco from the Oakland mole one Friday afternoon. Our families turned up en masse with food and luggage. We rode the equivalent of third class, surrounded by families, children and one very sexy young single woman. Mike and I actually ended up the capacious men's room where a group of guys on leave from Korea were killing off numerous bottles. Mike and I were big boys then, and we got drunk. The train stopped in Omaha in the late evening, and a man had to run point to pick up some more booze. We offered one of us. Ha! I was a 99 lbs. weakling, barely 18 and looked 16; Mike was shorter than I and lighter, 17 and looked 14. What a laugh. Mike's uncle Preston picked us up at Union Station; we must have smelled like cigarettes, stale chicken, and booze. He took us to dinner, thank goodness, and drove us down to the university. Mike stayed for two years at Chicago, We got together now and then, but we were in different worlds, I can remember sitting in the john on the fifth floor of his dorm, drinking, arguing and reading Cocteau's L'Ange Hurtebiste aloud to the resonating toilets. Mike returned to Berkeley, and I stayed in Chicago. When finally I returned to Berkeley in 1963 to start on my PhD, we caught up. Two things then happened. Alas, Mike insulted my first wife (not very hard to do), and she determined not to see him again. And then the idiots who ran the campus managed to create a miserable situation that very quickly ran away from them. Mike got deeply involved in the FSM. I was more concerned with the TA's Union, as futile a cause as I've ever associated with-- it was still non-existent when my son went to Berkeley for his PhD in Physics. But I did attend the meetings of the local and of the GSA-- the graduate students' Soviet-- though not as a formal representative of my retrograde Classics department. The last time I saw him was in 1967 while crossing campus from the old, now long gone, temporary buildings. We passed each other by-- we were both reading-- and when I realized who I had just passed, it was too late. After that I spent a summer in Berkeley in 1989, and I did call his home (no answer), and I believe I wrote a note.
The haze of time has blotted over so many different things we did, but my memories of his home in Fairfax are very clear. We rarely disagreed, but I was an academic and he was not. He devoted his life to what he was, a good man, a good friend, and a good helper. Can we ask more of a real mensch? I have thought of him many times over the past ten years, strangely enough, and I will miss him.
I don't know that I'll be able to attend a memorial service-- that will depend on personal circumstances-- but I would like to be kept informed if that is possible. I offer my condolences to his wife and children as well as Jared and Debby. May the earth rest lightly upon him.

Robert Ross
5050 s. lake shore dr. #814south
chicago, il. 60615
773-684-5695

A BRILLIANT MIND, A GOOD AND EARNEST HEART, AN INSPIRER OF OTHERS, A DREAMER, AN ORIGINAL MOVER, A CHANGE-AGENT.

THESE WERE THE TIMES WHEN A MILLION THINGS WERE TRIED AND SOME ACTUALLY WOUND THEMSELVES INTO THE LIFE OF THE COUNTRY.

FREE UNIVERSITIES.

EDUCATIONAL CHANGE.

A FREE AND LIVING MIND.

ALL THESE ARE THE THINGS THAT MICHEAL WORKED FOR IN THE EDUCATIONAL CHANGE MOVEMENT OF THE '60'S AND '70'S. IT WAS AN EXCITING AND CREATIVE TIME--IF A BIT AMORPHEOUS.

MICHAEL HAD A FINELY-TUNED AND VITAL SPIRIT THAT INSPIRED OTHERS AND MADE THINGS MOVE AROUND AND CHANGE.

LOVE TO YOU DEAR ONE. CANDACE

Early draft's of michael's: "On Learning and Social Change (before it was in book form) was printed and reprinted/ copied and circulated marked up and shared hand to hand and in Dayton Ohio in the late 1960's. it helped to put words to what we were experiencing. It gave a direction and synthesis that was comprehensible and actionable. It and his other work was nourishing.

The visit that Karen McLellan and Michael Rossman made to the University of Dayton (1970?) Helped strengthen the community there which developed around the idea of learning together. Even thirty years later when I meet friends from that time who have been living now all around the USA and some working for the United Nations, they remember those readings and KM-MR learning experiences with fondness and gratitude.

sincerely with the love of oneness

Adhiratha Keefe (adhiratha@aol.com)