Unusual Visit With One of Most Notorious Criminals

By Thomas Lorentzen SPECIAL TO THE

In the late 1960’s I was attending college here in the East Bay – first at Chabot College and then California State College, Hayward (now CSUEB). While going to college I lived at home with my parents here in Castro Valley. Classes would be taken at the colleges, but added learning would take place outside of the classroom. An important one was my weekly visits with Eric Hoffer in Berkeley.

As referenced in prior articles, Hoffer was one of our nation’s most noted writers on subjects like mass movements and the rise of totalitarianism. Each visit with him was of immense value. Sometimes a visitor would join us. No invitation was needed. It was known on campus that Hoffer would meet with anyone. All you had to do was walk in the door. A visitor from fall of 1968 is shared as it has timeliness to a national news story that happened last week.

Hoffer and I were visiting alone in an office at Bolt Law School on the Berkeley campus. A knock occurred on the door. I opened the door and invited the man in to join us. Hoffer asked him what brought him to join us. It was an interest in an article that Hoffer had written about the impact of automation upon the workforce. Hoffer asked him what he did for a living. He said he was a math professor at Berkeley. Hoffer got excited.