Re: S.D.I.

10/03/18 - posted by MVT

Every neighborhood has its punks, working class and poor neighborhoods more so than affluent neighborhoods.

My family moved to the Inner Sunset in 76 when I was 7. Having moved there from the Western Addition, which at the time was still predominantly Black, I was pretty stoked to no longer be in the minority.

The Inner Sunset was more diverse than the Outer Sunset, and the Asian contingent (Filipino and Chinese, mostly) was already pretty big and growing.

I arrived towards the end of the WPOD era and the beginning of the SDI era. I grew up with a lot of them, though pretty early on realized that you had to like to fight to belong, so I found other friends. My friends were pretty mixed; Irish, Italian, Mexican, Jewish, Other White, Filipino, Black.
We were skaters.

The WPOD ( white punks on dope/ white power or death/white pride or die...depending on who you talked too) were tough white kids staking their claim in a changing neighborhood. Despite their name they weren’t skinheads out jumping people. SDI, were the next generation and less about being White and mostly about partying and fighting. Though most of them were Irish, Italian and other white, there were some Greeks, Palestinians, Filipinos and Mexicans too.

Some of them were clearly headed for a life of crime but a lot of them were just rowdy, fun loving hoodlums who would go on to become plumbers, electricians, contractors, firemen, cops and real estate tycoons.

We called them Sunset Heads. I admired and aspired to their fearlessness and hated them for causing every party in the Sunset to end early when they would show up, drink all the beer, start a fight, throw a brick through the window and take off just before the cops showed up.

We rode their coattails as the Sunset was pretty safe from punks from other neighborhoods who knew better than to show up in our neighborhood.

They were punks but they were our punks and some of them were my friends!