board of directors. One name sug-
The SDS trashed
the ROTC building,
threw paint on a
Navy recruiter and
dumped dead
animals on the desk
of a recruiter from
Allied Chemical,
which manufactured
DDT.
Left - Alan Haber: "He was the campus
radical. He had a beard and a lot of books
and he just knew a lot."
Above - Allison Friedman: "People were able
to turn to each other and express love,
mutuality, express a sense of common
humaneness."
Right - Richard Feldman today and a police
mug shot taken in Ann Arbor in 1970: "One
window breaks, the'war goes on, two
windows break, the war goes on, three
windows break, the war goes on ... The
people find better weapons, they find guns,
they find unity, they find strength."
doing something very different. Crack
was not done. Heroin was not used.
It's not the same kind of drug abuse.
It was a mind-expansion type thing.
And it was a middle-class phenome-
non. I mean, there was a lot going on
in Detroit, but not like it's going on
now."
Friedman is still involved on the
board of Common Ground, and is now
administrative director of mental
health and chemical dependency ser-
vices at Samaritan Health Center in
Detroit.
She sees a sharp contrast between
the always-questioning students of
her day and the down-to-business
students of today. Then, she said,
"The restraint and frustrations of the
1950s began to break down, and peo-
ple were able to turn to each other
and express love, express mutuality,
express a sense of common
humaneness in a very open and very
genuine and almost childlike way."
lbday, she said, the outlook is
more like, "Reality is reality. Money
is the gasoline that makes the motor
run?'
R
ichard Feldman, 40,
graduated from the
University of Michigan in 1970,
but not before being arrested three
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS 25
CLOSE U P
gested for the fledgling agency was
Open Suburb, but Common Ground
won.
Common Ground grew from its
beginnings in 1969 with seed money
of $15,000 to its present status as the
emergency screening center for
Oakland County, with a budget of
about $600,000. It moved last year
from Birmingham to larger quarters
in Royal Oak. Friedman was on the
staff of Common Ground until her
daughter was born, and later came
back part time in the crisis unit.
There, volunteers talked drug users
down from their fear and referred
them to other agencies. But Common
Ground didn't proselytize against
drug use for fear of scaring people
away.
"You couldn't preach," Friedman
said. "The facts are different now
Then it was experimentation. It was