MARIO SAVIO DIESLOUD VOICE OF FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT

The voice that ignited a decade of protests on campuses across

America during the turbulent '60s has faded, lower than a whisper, with the

passing at dusk Wednesday of Mario Savio.

The 53-year-old leader of the Free Speech Movement died at 5:10 p.m. at Palm

Drive Hospital, just as admirers and students from Sonoma State University

were gathering for a vigil outside the Sebastopol hospital.

He suffered a heart attack Saturday and never regained consciousness.

His wife, Lynne, gave permission for doctors to disconnect the

silver-haired, pony-tailed Savio from life support systems that had been

keeping his heart beating, according to hospital officials.

Savio rose to fame in 1964 when he stepped atop a campus police car and

denounced administrators at the University of California at Berkeley for

stifling political activity on campus.

Traveling a roundabout route of activism and then introspection, academia

and finally anger over America's rightward shift, Savio ended up at Sonoma

State.

For the last five years, he has been an instructor in math, logic and

philosophy. He made his home in Sebastopol, where his lanky frame and long

stride cut a familiar silhouette down Main Street.

Savio's death prompted an outpouring of reflection on the 1960s from those

who best recalled his role in the history of American protest.

Tom Hayden, a fellow radical now in the state Senate, said: ''In the '60s

he was a powerful symbol of how an ordinary person could stand up and make

history. He symbolized the possibilities in all of us, to resist becoming cogs

in somebody's machine.''

Todd Gitlin, the former Berkeley activist now a chronicler of the 1960s,

said: ''He was a pure, Jeffersonian, small 'd' democrat. He believed that

speaking the truth, clearly and well, was the peak of democratic

citizenship.''

David Harris, the Vietnam-era war protester and draft resister who often

shared the stage with Savio, said: ''He was a brilliant speaker and an

extraordinary figure for the moment he appeared in. There hadn't been anything

like the Free Speech Movement before, and he epitomized that movement.''

To turn a now-trite phrase, Savio seized that moment and sparked a

movement.

He was a shy physics student at UC Berkeley when he felt a calling to

journey to Mississippi in the early 1960s to assist voter registration of

black voters.

There, he discovered civil rights and uncivil wrongs.

When he returned to the university, he found leafleting was banned and

students were being arrested for advocating civil rights.

His eloquent speech delivered from the roof of the campus police car on

Oct. 1, 1964, turned him into a model for decades of protest movements from

the Vietnam War to women's rights, from environmental protection to minority

rights.

For 32 hours, he and his fellow activists held forth on social issues as

the crowd grew.

First, a few hundred. Then, a few thousand. Then, finally, an estimated

10,000 people filled Sproul Plaza to hear speakers from the automotive pulpit.

Mainly, it is said, they came to hear Mario.

From that, the Free Speech Movement rolled through a series of campus

sit-ins, culminating in the Dec. 2, 1964, arrest of 800 people, the largest

mass arrest in state history.

Savio was one of the first escorted into the back of a paddywagon.

In the 1970s, Savio withdrew from public life, dropping out of Berkeley as

the anti-Vietnam War movement took the spotlight from civil rights causes. He

dropped out of Berkeley.

He taught at an alternative school in Los Angeles in the early 1970s,

married and began a life devoted to teaching and to raising the first of his

three sons. He earned a bachelor's degree in physics from San Francisco State

in 1984 and the next year obtained a master's degree.

In a 1995 interview with The Press Democrat, he said he came to Sonoma

County to live a peaceful life.

But, he said he could no longer hold his tongue when the 1994 national

elections indicated a conservative trend that ushered in measures such as

Proposition 187. Calling it a ''know-nothing-fascist'' law, he rallied public

opinion against the initiative that denied public benefits to undocumented

immigrants.

In the last two years, he took up other causes. He advocated workers'

rights at two demonstrations at Kaiser medical centers in the North Bay. He

spoke out against student fee hikes in the California university system.

He entered the hospital on Saturday after suffering a heart attack as he

was preparing his family for a move to a new home.

Contributions to assist the family can be sent to Savio Family Fund, in

care of ILE, Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, or contributions can be

made to the scholarship fund of Camp Winnarainbow, 1310 Henry St., Berkeley.

This story includes information from the Associated Press.