Walton was a bit later than Pete in Boston
I had breakfast with Bill at the Parker house in late 82 there
A Dead thing lol
He was very pleasant and talked to everyone
He didn’t join till 84 or 85
Interesting character, to say the least. Definitely marches to beat of his own drum.
My BIL was a taxi driver in Eugene, Or. He picked up Walton at the airport several times to visit his orthopedic surgeon. He said that Bill was friendly and talked with him like an average person, not at all like a celebrity.
The proto-Antifa, fellow traveller Bill Walton is the one that I remember...
“It is hard to imagine a superstar basketball player calling for resistance to the US government during a press conference. But that is what Walton did in the spring of 1975, when he appeared with his friends Jack and Micki Scott at San Francisco’s Glide Memorial Church, the congregation pastored by the radical Black minister Cecil Williams. The Scotts had just resurfaced after going underground to avoid harassment from the FBI for harboring members of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), including Patty Hearst, the granddaughter of the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. After Walton apologized to the Scotts for agreeing to be interviewed by the FBI, he called upon Americans to undertake “the practice of noncooperation with the existing government because of the inherent evil of that government.”
“When Walton appeared with the Scotts at Glide Memorial, the Patty Hearst/SLA story was obscuring his own work as an activist himself. The press depicted Walton as a dupe of the Scotts. Yet even cursory observers of Walton’s career knew that the basketball star had developed his own political awareness. Since his college days, long before he met the Scotts, he refused to accept the role as the “great white hope” in a Black-dominated sport. Not only did he reject this position; he regularly highlighted the workings of white male privilege in press interviews. After his arrest at UCLA, he told sportswriter Billy Libby, “The Blacks have gotten a raw deal for a long time. A lot of my teammates are Black, and I really admire the way they’ve risen above their raw deal. They’re my friends and I feel for them. I know I’ve gotten twice as much as I deserve because I’m white.” He also told the startled sportswriter: “If a Black man gunned me down right now, I’d figure it was all right because of what whites have done to Blacks.” Just imagine a white athlete saying that today, especially in the aftermath of the Buffalo and Jacksonville massacres. They’d probably be driven from public life.”
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/bill-walton-activism/