Activist Grows With the Times

In 1969, Michael Picker fought the law and the law won.

It was the heyday of “Hair” and hating the Establishment when the 17-year-old honors student was suspended from Santiago High School for refusing to shave his mutton-chop sideburns.

Picker went to court, lost, and wound up receiving his diploma by mail.

Other long-haired symbols of the 1960s radical movement are long-since shorn. Abbie Hoffman is dead. Jerry Rubin discovered est, yoga and health foods, and at last report was running a New York company that produced parties for yuppies at Manhattan nightclubs.

But Picker’s sideburns--and his activism--proved more permanent. He went on to become local president of a clerical workers union, helped the United Farm Workers, campaigned for Jerry Brown, became an expert on toxic waste issues, and lectured at UCLA.

Now he is the West Coast director for the National Toxics Campaign, and one of six sponsors of the Environmental Protection Act of 1990, which the group is striving to place on the ballot. Among other things, this “Green Initiative” would ban some hazardous chemicals and require companies to use less of others, buy up $300 million worth of threatened redwood trees, tighten controls on pesticides and establish a $500-million oil spill response fund financed by oil companies.

In a recent telephone interview from his office in Sacramento, Picker said he has few regrets about filing the lawsuit against the Garden Grove Unified School District 21 years ago.

“If I was ever to do it again, I don’t think I’d have done it differently, but I wish I’d done it a little more civilly,” he said.

“It’s easy to be hot under the collar about your hair when you’re 17. I just wish I’d been hot under the collar about the curriculum.”

Even now, Picker says, his sideburns are “someplace below my earlobe,” and probably wouldn’t pass the dress code of 1969. Not surprisingly, he frowns on the Disney Co.’s recent decision to forbid facial hair on employees aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach.

“Certainly they wouldn’t tell anybody who had sideburns or a mustache that they couldn’t spend money at the Queen Mary,” he noted.

The Garden Grove school district’s 1969 policy did indeed state specifically that sideburns must not extend below the earlobe. In a two-day trial, Picker’s attorney contended that the rules were vague and violated the student’s constitutional right to freedom of expression.

The judge disagreed.

“Beards can be banned in high school, so when does a sideburn become a beard?” Orange County Superior Court Judge Claude M. Owens was quoted as saying at the time. “It is reasonable to have a limit, or one could say a beard is only an extra-long sideburn.”

Owens found the dress code reasonable, and ruled the district had the right to enforce it. But, according to Picker, the court also found that the school district could not deny Picker his diploma.

“The sad story was that half the football team had longer hair than mine,” Picker said. “It’s just that I was visible, and as a student leader, I was starting to ask questions, and it was irritating to them.”

The football players, he said, kept their hair under their helmets during games.

Picker said his parents, who still live in Garden Grove, were generally supportive of his case but told him he would have to earn the money to pay for his own defense.

During the court fight, Picker met a community organizer who “told him how other people who had problems, but no power, had confronted those issues, and that there were other ways to do that than go to court.”

Since then, he says, he has fought both winning and losing battles, and has even been in several positions of authority himself. But he has not lost the quality of “just not being willing to take a simple answer to a complex issue--and I think that I’m still asking a lot of questions.”

Picker said some of his high school classmates have taken similar paths. One former member of the Santiago High School student government is now a labor leader in Oakland, and another is helping Picker redesign the logo for the National Toxics Campaign. Another friend, a San Francisco activist, died of AIDS four years ago, he said.

“One of my friends from high school is a (beer brewer) in Mendocino, and we talk about beer and not hair,” Picker added. “He’s losing his, so it’s a delicate subject.”

Picker hasn’t been invited back to speak to students at his alma mater, but says that if asked, he would tell them how much work needs to be done--work for which they are not necessarily being prepared.

“And don’t ever think that the book is closed,” he said.