Esquire – College Issue – September 1967

An Open Letter to Flunk Outs & Patriots

Hey, G.I.! How do you like it over there in Vietnam, tiptoeing between the punji spikes, woofing up all those good C-rations. nearly getting zapped by your own artillery? Last year the campus, this year the camp—and you've only yourself to blame. Wish you hadn't flunked the 2-S test, don’t you? Sorry about that, soldier. Too late now. But we've got news for you: you're better off where you are.

During your junior-year abroad, baby, all hell has broken loose back home. That clean-cut. sociable student president: gone. New prexy wears a beard and probably got elected on an anti-fraternity platform. The football captain is finished as the local hero, replaced in the hearts of your old classmates by the campus hippie who sells marijuana. Anarchy reigns; restrictions, requirements, rules are all going up in banana smoke. Equality for ail; even the valedictorian has disappeared along with the abolition of class ranks (actually a draft-dodging plot).

The pot party has replaced the beer blast; and the top rocks sing more about being high than of being in love. Love, incidentally, has been appropriated by a new bunch of Love Cultists who wear daffodils in their hair while they protest against the war you have to fight. Forget J.R.R. Tolkien: Frodo’s dead. Stranger in a Strange Land is grokking it to the top of the campus best-seller list, followed by its psychedelic buddy, the I Ching. Marvel Comics? Passe: this year the tops in pulp are the Underground newspapers which carry the latest word on flipping out. And flipping out is exactly where it’s at. Students at Harvard have taken to climbing over the roofs of the tallest buildings in the Yard; at the University of Oklahoma they are blowing bubbles; at Columbia they are flying kites from the top of the building in which the Pulitzer Prize Committee has convened. The Civil Rights movement is dead, replaced by the narcissistic Student Rights hassle—baby, they think they've got troubles.

All in all, fella, you got out just in time. But if you really want to serve your country you'll come back. Back to the American campus, armed to the teeth.

This section drawn by Mouse Studios

Defenders of the Faith

While you’re off fighting in Vietnam, you may be wondering who's back home minding the university. Sharp eyes, keen minds and sturdy patriots, that’s who. J. Edgar Hoover, for one: his F.B.I. agents regularly dip into student files (at Berkeley, Michigan and elsewhere) looking for tinges of pink, and pay student informers from $100 to $450 a month for information. They are aided by members of "Red Squads" (Intelligence Divisions) of local police forces who circulate during student demonstrations taking photographs of leaders and other faces in the crowds. California’s Governor Ronald Reagan, like other hard-core realists, maintains a cautious surveillance of intellectuals. He once criticized a Midwest college for "subsidizing intellectual curiosity.". It was also Reagan who proposed tuition for the University of California, explaining that it would “get rid of undesirables might think twice how much they want to pay to carry a picket sign.” The marijuana watch falls to undercover agents and university presidents like Cornell’s James A. Perkins, who turns over to the law anybody who's been caught with marijuana on campus. Congressman L. Mendel Rivers sees to the draft objectors, once proclaiming angrily, “College deferments may be a thing of the past. This is fair warning to every college student in America." And Rivers (Chairman House Armed Services Committee) has power.

The adults on the opposite page would be helpless without the aid of second-story men. And there is no dearth. R.O.T.C. men at the University of Washington have been trained by the U.S. Army to spy on fellow students, particularly members of left-wing organizations. Charles Ode- gaard, the President of the University, protested that the future Army officers were told not to take notes at a training session, during which they were shown a map of the West Coast with various left-wing headquarters marked. Odegaard also charged that R.O.T.C. men were to collect files on radical students, being warned that “If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck and lays eggs like a duck, then it’s a duck.” At Brigham Young University, anti-duck President Ernest Wilkinson asked eleven like-minded students to give him information on leftish faculty members, according to student Ronald Hankin, a former Bircher. On the pot front, non-student Linda Hobbie was asked to pose as a student at Fairleigh Dickinson University and entrap an undergraduate. She failed. At the Air Force Academy, three unnamed Air Force cadets blew the whistle (same one heard two years ago) and grounded thirty-two cheaters and eight others who knew but kept silent. And, finally, it was Michael Wood of the National Student Association who singlehandedly broke the cover on the story of C.I.A. subsidies of student organizations.

The Student as Potential Assassin

Nobody wants another Dallas, least of all the Secret Service. So when the Feds got wind that somebody had written on the outside of an envelope, "Johnson's war in Vietnam makes America puke," they swung into action. The handiwork was traced to Chuck Papke (above), a Zoology student at the David campus of the University of California. Soon Papke began to notice strange things: a helicopter circling over his apartment, a peculiar noise on his telephone line, an Oakland collection agency filing suit and freezing all the money in his bank account. Two Secret Service agents, Larry Sheafe and Roger Grunwald, arrived at the door one evening and told him he was being investigated, because the statement he wrote on the envelope had been interpreted as a threat on President Johnson's life. "If enough people puked on the President," Agent Sheafe claimed, "it would kill him."

The New Student President

David Harris of Stanford. He preached peache, oppposed the draft, tangled with fraternities, fought for educational reform, and then quit. His phone is tapped

by Gina Berriault

On the night of Octobor 20, 1966, twenty masked Delta Tau Delta men surrounded their student body president on the street of the Stanford campus, escorted him to an empty lot and, with electric clippers plugged into an outlet inside a dormitory, shaved off the abundant hair of his head. "They expected me to fight back," Harris recalled when I spoke to him about the incident. "I figured I had a captive audiance so I had a fifteen-minute conversation with this guy with a wolf mask who was holding my right leg--talking about education. After they shaved my head I said, 'Look, I've cooperated with you so far so we'll make a deal--you spare my beard.' And they did, after a big debate. I had to go to Michigan the next week and it was freezing cold."

Fraternity men find themselves confused by changing times. If those masked twenty were laboring under the biblical superstition that when the locks are shorn the strength ebbs they must have been surprised to learn that the strength increased. Or if the assault was a diversionary tactic, an attempt to make the issue the length of their adversary's hair because the real issue was even more intolerable—changing times—one, at least, among them, traced and questioned by a reporter from The Stanford Daily, admitted some decree of self-probing: "Harris really showed the Delts a lot of class. He made us feel sorry we did it.” It was his way of conceding that the men. bearded or unbearded, elected these days to the presidency of the student body in more universities than a few may be men of courage and conscience.

Students in these changing times are challenging the arbiters of the academy and of the hierarchical regions above and beyond. Within the past year or so several dignitaries have been met on the campuses by large and vociferous demonstrations. At Stanford, Vice- President Hubert Humphrey, emerging from the auditorium into his protective wedge of police and Secret Service men, ran for his car to escape some thousand angry students; Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara was forced from his car—a police wagon—and onto the hood of another car by eight hundred Harvard students who wanted to ask him a few questions before he left the campus; while students at Berkeley, some silently, some not, greeted U.N. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg with picket signs and a walkout by five hundred persons when that gentleman came by to pick up an honorary degree. A solid wall of one hundred fifty students blockaded the Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin in his office until he wrote the check that bailed out eighteen students arrested earlier for demonstrating against the campus-recruitment campaign of the Dow Chemical Company, manufacturers of napalm. At the University of Michigan, the Student Council lifted itself right out of the administrative Office of Student Affairs after administrators, during summer vacation when most students were away, handed over to the House Un-American Activities Committee the membership lists of student organizations opposed to the war in Vietnam. And so it follows that the men elected to student offices now. at universities around the country, are not keepers of those sacred flames of ritual and protocol and administrative decree.

Columbia’s David Langsam, Cornell’s David Brandt. Berkeley’s Dan McIntosh, Amherst’s Steve Cohen, San Francisco State's Jim Nixon. University of Minnesota’s Howie Kaibel, University of North Carolina’s Robert Powell. University of Houston’s Richard Gaghagen, University of Michigan’s Ed Robinson range from the “thoughtful middle,” as distinguished from the old unthinking middle, to the Far Left, and their force has been felt in everything from the structuring of the new experimental colleges within the universities to the refusal by several university administrations to comply with the ranking mechanism of Selective Service. And among these leaders, David Harris—the young man tackled by the twenty old guards—is the one most often cited by student editors and other presidents. “He gathers disciples around him wherever he goes,” said one disciple, and since he has spoken at so many campuses across the country he has gathered quite a number.

After meeting Harris for the first time at the 1966 National Student Association Congress at the University of Illinois, Neil Reichline, editor of the U.C.L.A. Daily Bruin, kept his staff up night after night to discuss Harris’ ideas on education, and through the pages of the Bruin brought about a great surge of interest in reform. “I was confronted by him and he blew my mind,” Reichline recalls. “Dave’s views on educational reform, on the Vietnam war, on the draft, are not based on political expediency. They follow naturally from his life-style, his mentality. His concern for his ‘soul,’ for his values, and for himself as a valuable person are manifested in his concern for the communities that he exists in, whether they are his school, city, or nation. He confronts you with this mentality, this concern for community, and you just can’t pass over it without some self-examination, some thought on your role as a human being and how you’re going to relate to other human beings. You can’t meet Dave Harris and not change your life in some way." Ed Robinson, the president who cut the cord between the student government and the administration at the University of Michigan, describes him this way: “Not only is Harris intelligent, he takes the next step and applies that intelligence to thinking about his surroundings, and then he takes another step and draws some conclusions, and then he takes the farthest step and acts on the basis of those conclusions. In this step-by-step progress we fall down somewhere, most of us.” The students are not alone: David Harris was one of several persons invited to participate in a meeting on students and the draft, called by Kingman Brewster, President of Yale. And in the editorial offices of The Stanford Daily, a file card, on the wall for months after David’s resignation, read: “I don’t know what Dave’s reasons are for resigning and maybe that’s beside the point. His A.S.S.U. administration has taken its toll on him and, I think in the long run beneficially, on official Stanford. But he’s been there long enough for all of us to see his real stature, his authentic qualities of greatness. How often do you see a man who. in being himself, can help you be and find yourself; in whom you’re able to detect no deviousness at all; whose compassion is no less compassionate for being unsentimental; who cares like hell about the world he lives in and can somehow go on loving and believing in the people who inhabit it, even while he protests the ways we go on lousing it up? For all his sharp, unremitting criticism—in part, of course, because of it—all of us, and all of Stanford, and the whole college and university scene in America are better for having him where he’s been.” The card was signed B. Davie Napier, Dean of the Chapel and Professor of Religion.

On the front door of the pale-green shingle house in the Negro neighborhood of East Palo Alto hung a penciled sign reading: Go Around to the Back Door. (His study room is in the back of the house, I learned a few minutes later, and if any other tenant of the house had been playing a record loudly, my knock would have gone unheard.) He opened the front door anyway, because two neighbor children, roaming in and out, saw me from an upstairs window as I made my way through the high grass; I heard them calling to him. He is a tall and strongbodied young man with thick, blond hair, sideburns—the beard is gone, he shaved it off one day for whatever significant or insignificant reason— pale blue eyes, rimless glasses, and a substantial moustache that makes him appear a few years older than his twenty-one. He had interrupted his part-time job at Kepler’s bookstore, owned by a prominent pacifist, to meet me. On the bright yellow wall of the living room hung a large photo of Charlie Chaplin with cane and derby, and a restaurant stove took up a good part of the floor space, a relic of the time Harris and the other tenants of the house were implementing plans— failed ones—to open a small cafe in Palo Alto. The window of his study looked out on a huge, fallen tree, an old blue bus with flowered curtains, serving as bedroom for one of the students of that communal house, and more high grass. The two neighbor boys, grammar-school age and loud talkers, gazed in from the hallway until they were asked to close the door. Out in another room a Bob Dylan record began and someone shouted from the kitchen, “The water's boiling!” An old suede jacket, mended carefully in a dozen places, hung from the closet door, boots were strewn on the floor, and a mother cat and four kittens lay atop a soft pile of clothes in a corner of the open closet.

The young man in the sagging, upholstered chair under the small photograph of Gandhi was scheduled to address in four days a massive peace mobilization in San Francisco. A senior, one of five students majoring in Social Thought among thirty in the Honors Program, an independent study program for self-motivated students, he was also teaching a class at the Free University of Palo Alto called “A Life of Peace and Liberation in the U.S.” Ashes fell from his cigarette into the crevices of the chair—his fingers are nicotine stained down to the middle knuckles—and as we talked books slid from the chair's wide curved arms. On the windowsill and on the shelf were Nietzsche. Kierkegaard, A.J. Muste, the Upanishad. I asked him about his use of the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes.

“We never just open it and read it like a book.” he said. “We treat it like a friend around here. We treat it like a living thing.” Would he turn to it before his speech? To oblige me he turned to it then, first tossing three Chinese coins onto the rug six times. The result of this encounter with chance led him to the hexagram that in turn directed him to a page of the text:

"The weight of the great is excessive. The load is too heavy for the strength of the supports. ... It is an exceptional time and situation; Therefore extraordinary measures are demanded. It is necessary to find a way of transition as quickly as possible, and to take action. This promises success. For although the strong element is in excess, it is in the middle, that is, at the center of gravity, so that a revolution is not to be feared. Nothing is to be achieved by forcible measures. The problem must be solved by gentle penetration to- the meaning of the situation. . . . Then the changeover to other conditions will be successful. It demands real superiority: therefore the time when the great preponderates is a momentous time."

“It’s like taking a sighting off the top of a wave,” he explained. “It gives you a sense of the forces of life around you and finds your relationship to those forces for that moment."

His heavy build. Levis and sideburns suggest a farm laborer in the town of Fresno. California, where he grew up. the son of an attorney, and worked in the packing sheds; or they suggest a figure in an old labor photograph of the West, posing by dray horses and by timber. "He used to wear a big buckle on his belt.” one of his friends was later to tell me. “and when he spoke he was always shifting it up because his Levis were over-washed and loose. They were washed so much they were faded out to grey.” He probably resembles his grandfathers and probably hopes that he does. One was a wood craftsman in Fresno—“1 go over to his workshop—he’s dead now but his workshop is still there—and pick up scraps of what he'd been doing. 1 have a goblet he made on a lathe, the walls of the wood are thin as glass— all out of one piece.” The other grandfather worked in the open-pit copper mines in Utah. He talks with a fast mixture of beat jargon, academic terms, and words in common usage, and there is an accent that’s Southwest. the rural parts.

Up to a few years ago a university for the offspring of California aristocracy, Stanford—its arcaded yellow stone buildings on an almost unbelievable number of acres of thick grass, oaks, and date palms—now has endowment funds sufficient to grant scholarships to the sons and daughters of the less affluent, and Harris is one of these recipients. When he came to Stanford in 1963 he was, according to his own description, an all-American frosh type, a state finaljst in competitive speech from Fresno High who made innocuous speeches of no content, and a three-year veteran on the football team. Mississippi hit in that year, and the freshman dormitory at Stanford became a communication center for the South. In the Fall of 1964. in his sophomore year, he went South with a carload of Stanford students. With four others he entered Quitman County, Northwest Mississippi, wilderness territory. Their lives were constantly threatened and one of that group was kidnapped and beaten. "Essentially, when I was in Mississippi it wasn’t as big a thing as when I got back, because when I got back I really started thinking about what I’d done there. Mississippi blew my mind. From there I got involved in the whole antiwar activity, from there it was a natural educational progression. The South wasn’t just a boil on the face of America. The hate and brutality there were indigenous to the way America lives.”

At evening programs on the campus he spoke about Mississippi, he spoke against the draft, against the war in Vietnam, and he criticized the educational system at Stanford. “It’s all one thing. Once someone gets involved in Peace there’s no turning back from it. it’s a style of life, not something considered politics removed from one. It makes dealing with others a very direct expression of one’s being.” In his junior year he was approached by a group of students to run for president of the student body. He agreed to run in order to force the other candidates to face the issues, but he preferred to lose. He won. in the largest balloting in Stanford’s history. "The platform was a long list of changes based on the attitude that Stanford is not educating and has no understanding of what education is. Students have no right of control over their own lives. It's a system calculated on the impotence of the students in that it makes everything the student does something outside himself. What that does is teach people to be powerless. We started from the initial statement that education is something that happens in your mind, the mind learning itself, learning how to use itself. It’s a very inner process and the function that teachers traditionally serve in most of the cultures of the world—where they haven’t gotten to modern industrial teaching which is essentially a training mechanism—is one of spiritual guidance. Not only should a teacher know things but ho should have an understanding, a wisdom about things, beyond simply knowing them. So that a teacher provides himself as a mirror to the other person’s mind and gives that person a glimpse into his own mind SO he can then start educating himself. That’s what education is and it isn't this whole social system at Stanford, the superficialities. They rigidify the students here into cogs for the great American wheel. Most people who teach at colleges are doing it for very simple security reasons and they don’t like people to rock the boat even though they make a big thing ibout intellectual inquiry and all that. A professor will allow you to put down the administration but will get offended f you say the faculty is irrelevant, which they are. by and large, except for maybe ten people, and they're relevant as people because they’ve developed a •nyle of living that really has relevance to other lives. Then we talked about who runs the universities, that they shouldn’t belong to the trustees because they should belong to the people who are really involved in the spiritual process of learning, they should belong to the students and anyone who wants to enter into it.” One of the other planks of the platform was the abolition of fraternities. "It’s all one thing." Nothing is separable from the rest.

After his election, Harris met for the first time with J.E. Wallace Sterling, President of Stanford. He went into the latter’s office with beard, work shirt, I a? vis, and moccasins. "He has a smooth way of dealing with people.” Harris told me. “He never made it clear to me that he might have been dismayed by me."

As president of the student body, Harris led a Stanford delegation to the National Student Association Congress and proposed to the liberal caucus— roughly about one half of the five hundred people there—a resolution calling for immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam. Debate in the caucus lasted until four-thirty in the morning. The resolution failed; the one that passed the caucus and eventually the Congress called for a ceasefire and negotiations, and drew this comment from Harris: “If you come out with this resolution, you will be raying that you feel strongly about the war but you don't want to say it.” Another resolution proposed by Harris, calling for abolition of the draft and formation of a draft-resistance movement. was also softened by the liberal caucus and passed by the Congress. After some "soul sessions” a radical caucus was formed and walked out on the liberal caucus. For liberals Harris has no favorable word. “They recite all the American virtues—‘We are :oyal American citizens who believe in America. La de da de da de da. . . They fall on their knees to President Johnson and say, ‘Please reconsider, there may be something wrong with the war.’ That way of doing things— bribing people, getting to their egos, all kinds of insidious things. What they’re doing is further entrenching the whole attitude that brought this war about.” On the N.S.A., in particular: “The only time members ever get together is for that Congress where they pass policy declarations and no- body does anything about them. The rest of the time it’s run by a kind of oligarchic bureaucracy. Most of the people who go to N.S.A. and involve themselves look upon themselves as future Congressmen and Senators.”

At the end of February, 1967. Harris resigned from the presidency of the Stanford student body. "The job had >ecome a trap for my mind,” he explained to me. “I’d done my bit for •uucation, I’d given over two hundred speeches at Stanford and was repeat- ng myself. I'd lost real communica- tion with students because they treated me like a famous figure, they’d just sit and watch me do it and weren’t putting themselves on the line.” Another reason he gave at the time of resignation was: "My contribution has basically been to say things to the community that up to this point the community was afraid to say to itself. I was just a spokesman for a basic way of seeing the university that 1 felt had to be articulated if there was going to be any health}’ notion of education.”

I asked him to name the literature that was most meaningful for him. The list was long, including "almost every religious document,’’ among them the Buddhist scriptures, the Bible, Lao-Tzu’s The Way of Life. Gandhi. Jung. Fromm, Marcuse. Marx, as sociologist rather than economist, Cassirer. Of the novelists—Faulkner, Joyce, Conrad, and of the poets— Tagore, Lorca. “They all come closer to understanding man than anyone else, in their own unique fashion." He writes poetry himself and some of it has been used in a poetry class that another of the student-tenants, Bill Shurtleff. teaches in the garage, where he also sleeps. A small volume of the combined poetry of Jeffrey Shurtleff. an honor student in the humanities, and David Harris is being put together within a cover designed for it by the photographers of the group, students Lary Goldsmith and Otto Schatz; the name given this enterprise—The Peace and Liberation Commune Press.

Harris came to his decision about the draft alone. He belongs to no organization, only the one he and some other students at Stanford and Berkeley have founded—the Bay Area Organizing Committee for Draft Resistance. His first step against the draft was his participation in the sit-in in President Sterling’s office, protesting Stanford’s acceptance of draft tests. "Student deferments are immoral,” he said at that time. "They weed out the people who can afford an education.” In June. 1966, he sent back his student deferment, intending to apply for a conscientious-objector status, but not on a religious basis. A few months after he gave up his deferment, he made his decision about the draft, alone one summer night in his study. "I was just sitting there when all of a sudden, just out of the back of my mind, came the statement: Well, you’re not going to cooperate with them. My first thought about jail really frightened me. I'd never thought about going to jail for a principle against the draft. But from then on I knew what my principle was. I sent them a letter, then, saying I believed myself to be more of a conscientious objector than the law allows because I didn’t believe in the law. I said I was going to break that law. The law is immoral and there's no being moral within an immoral law.”

Reclassified 1A. Harris took his preinduction physical in his hometown, Fresno. “I knew I wasn't going to go along with them, but I wanted to see what they did, who went into the Army. I got to the last table and the doctor there said, ‘Hey, Mac, this is this guy Harris, he’s the guy who’s going to refuse.'” Harris was informed by mail that he was fit; a month later he was informed that he was not. The board had changed its mind, classifying him 1Y— temporary physical or psychological disability—until September. 1967, at which time it will reconsider classifying him back to 1A and Harris will fail to honor the directive to appear for another physical. “What I think about Peace in my own mind, how fully I’m understanding it, helps the growth of Peace in the world. In that sense what I’m doing is a very religious thing. I can't go out and talk about Peace if I don't feel in my own mind that I’m living it as fully as I can. So it's simply a question for me of keeping my own sense of integrity, which is what allows me to do all this against the war and against American society as it is now. It’s essentially my own feeling of integrity. I think that any movement is better for the fact that the people in it are following their highest understanding, and if that means going to jail ... I feel that I couldn't talk about the draft if I wasn’t out in a position facing jail. We have an obligation to speak to the people of the United States, and the act of going to prison is itself a statement ami a much more powerful one to the American consciousness than taking a C.O. or going to Canada. I have a basic hang-up about being run out of any place. 1 was run out of too many places in Mississippi.”

I asked him if he had his speech prepared for the mobilization on Saturday. He said that he never prepared speeches. “I don’t speak about anything that has no relevance to my life. I usually meditate before I speak. You get your mind down to a single point, a pinpoint, and when you reach the pinpoint you go through and come out clean, everything starts opening up and filling out, a fresh vision of everything. In speaking, I try to get to that pinpoint and then I get up and speak. Two years ago meditation was far from my life. I developed it from more and more contact with Eastern thinking, Eastern music. They have a whole different rhythm to their thinking, a much slower, a more cyclical kind of rhythm, and my life just started getting into that kind of rhythm. I'm calmer now, I used to get frenzied. Everything that happens isn’t earth- shaking. It’s like a quantum jump, you break through into a new world. I think there’s a danger, though, in the American, the Western, reaction to Eastern thinking. They try to make themselves Easterners, which to my mind is illegitimate. You can't run around being an Indian if you’re an American, you’re not part of that culture. You go to the Haight-Ashbury, it’s all very speeded up. very hectic, which is the exact opposite of what I associate with Eastern thinking. I’m not saying you can’t learn from it. but what they take is the rote form and they think they've reached Eastern thought when all they've got are the cultural mechanisms. American society understands life in terms of fetishes and can only understand the spirit as a fetish. The people of Haight- Ashbury should ask themselves how much of what they're doing is fetish ridden. Then the culture there is organized around drugs and I think drugs are not a spiritual vortex. There’s a great danger in their seeing things in terms of drugs. Love exists regardless of acid. Drugs can be useful but the nature of that activity is a minimal one. Acid stands knee-high to Peace. The son of a British Prime Minister—about a month before he died of an overdose of heroin he was talking to some friends about shooting smack and he said, ‘At Cambridge everything is just around the corner. But when you go into your room and tie-off and shoot-up. everything is right there in your lap.’ The real problem is how you can make a culture that’s right there in someone's lap.”

He talked about the war in Vietnam: "Johnson is having a hard time holding the whole thing together. I think his next move is a big escalation, invade Laos and Thailand and Cambodia and North Vietnam, and to do that he’s going to have to double his manpower there and that's when the big climax is going to come, because all those people who are on student deferments are going to get called. If they escalate, there's not going to be a student deferment for anybody except engineers and medical students, and all those people in school now are going to be faced with that question by next year. He’s going to try doing it first without being repressive, then he’s going to get this opposition from the youth and he’ll try to clamp down. The chances of anybody saying the kind of things we’re saying now in a year—they'll harass you and bust you. That is, if you start getting people, and it’s clear we’re starting to get people."

He is positive their phone is tapped. "I know from Mississippi how it sounds, anything can foul up your phone when they put a tap in. In Mississippi we could hear the sheriff moving around in his office. I don’t know who they're tapping for—one of the guys who lives here was subpoenaed by H.U.A.C. last summer in Washington for organizing that Stanford blood drive for the North Vietnamese civilians and I'm doing my Peace thing. They interrogated me when I came back from Mississippi because I was saying things about an agent back there who called me a nigger lover. They're meticulous. Every time we have a rally at Stanford there’s always an F.B.I. agent there with his camera, with telescopic lens, taking pictures of everybody."

On Saturday morning, April 15. the marchers gathered at the foot of Market Street, filling up all the side streets for blocks, and when I found David Harris he was with his friends from Stanford and Berkeley, handing out, each from an armload, the Draft Resistance Committee’s “We Refuse to Serve" declarations. By the time the students, numbering one-half to two- thirds of the 65,000 marchers, got started, the head of the procession had already reached Kezar Stadium, four miles away. Long hair and beards, if not the rule, were common in that massive contingent, along with fringed buckskin boots and the heavy kind, sheepskin vests, massed strings of beads. The placard, America, go back, you’re going the wrong way, may have verbalized one meaning, at least, of the costumes: they were out of the West of the last century, of a time before this country went that wrong way —if any reckoning can be made of the time when any country took that turn —and the new frontier these students were advocating was way out beyond the one the late President gave that name to. The rest of the world was no territory for a General by the Dr. Strangelove name of West! More Land! but a great frontier for the spirit. The fragrance of incense sticks drifted through the air that was sometimes misty, sometimes clear and warm, and the Eye of God. the diamondshaped colored-yarn symbol the Mexican Indians carry through their fields, was carried here down the main street. I saw Harris first on one corner, then another as he moved along between the students and the spectators. He was usually findable, being taller than most, but sometimes obscured by the placards and banners.

From a high-sided truck, Country Joe and the Fish, with beards, sheepskin vests, shoulder-length hair, a fur cap on one, and green peace signs painted on their cheeks, rolled out a tremendous rock dirge that set an hypnotic, solemn pace for the mass of students and resounded against the grey facades down the side streets and up Market Street and against the nudie movie where life-size cutouts of a soldier and marine were up on the marquee along with. "This is U.S. Service-men Appreciation Week,” and where A Good Time with a Bad Girl was showing. Further along the way, out near the stadium, musical accompaniment was furnished by three young men beating pots and pans up on a sixth floor balcony and by a Bob Dylan record blaring full volume out of wide- open apartment windows where two elderly women sat with their elbows on the sills, and by a girl serenely sitting on a concrete wall and singing in a high, clear voice “Krishna . . . Hari.”

By the time Harris reached the stadium most of the marchers were already in the bleachers and the speakers assembled on the platform out in the center of the green oval field. With him up there were Mrs. Martin Luther King, Julian Bond, the Georgia legislator, Robert Vaughn, the Man from U.N.C.L.E., Judy Collins, several clergymen, others. He was the only one in Levis and Levi jacket. He spoke very little to those on either side of him, then not at all as he began his meditation. While the others rose and spoke to the filled stadium, their voices blaring out in several directions through the clusters of red loudspeakers on the field, I saw him bend his head to his knees for a time. When I looked again he was sitting upright, his legs crossed, and one foot shaking restlessly.

Country Joe and the Fish, out of their truck and down on the track, struck up with electric organ, guitars, and voice their I-Feet-Like-Fm-Firin'- to-l)ie Rag, familiar to students since the early Vietnam march in Berkeley in 1965 that was halted at the Oakland border by a line of helmeted police. On the track before them a crowd gathered and couples danced to that ragtime mockery of wartime acquiescence.

Come on all of you big wrong men;

Uncle Sam needs your help again,

He's got himself in a terrible jam;

Way down yonder in Vietnam.

So put down your books and pick up a gun;

We’re gonna have a whole lot's fun.

'Cause it's one. two. three. "What are we fightin for?”

"Don't ask me I don't give a damn”;

Next Stop is Vietnam

And it's five, six, seven, open up the pearly gates

There ain't no time to wonder why,

Whoopie! We're all gonna die!

Just before Harris began to speak, down across the field and into the parking lot out of sight behind the stadium wall drifted a black-clad parachutist from an unseen source, his white and black and yellow chute inscribed with the word LOVE.

Harris loomed over the microphone, his face and voice impassioned: “We have to realize we’re mistaken if we call this war Johnson’s war or if we call this war the Congress’ war. This war is a logical extension of the way America has chosen to live in the world. This war is the logical end of the American system that we’ve built, and I think that as young people facing that war, as young people who are being confronted with the choice of being in that war or not, we have an obligation to speak to this country, and that statement has to be made in this way: That this war will not be made in our names, that this war will not be made with our hands, that we will not carry the rifles to butcher the Vietnamese people, that the prisons of the United States will be full of young people who will not honor the orders of murder. . . .”

When he had finished his speech he strode out across the green field to an exit, like a man with no time to lose.

Roommates

Harvard

The traditional college roommate has always been a 280-pound bathless behemoth chosen for you by a sadistic dean of admissions. When you tried to sleep, he snored; when you were studying, he played records, and by the end of the year you really learned how to hate. But the love generation is finding a way out, in ever increasing numbers. In Cambridge, for instance, Anne McConnell. Radcliffe '67, moved off-campus with Paul Mattick, Jr., a Harvard student. The parents who knew made no objection: Harvard didn't seem to care and Radcliffe, because Anne was officially in residence at one of the dorms, didn't know. “About a third of our friends are married." says Paul, “another third just live together, and the rest are. well, still looking for each other." Paul and Anne have come to no conclusion about marriage; he cooks, she irons and they do the laundry together.

Cornell

According to Cornell's records this girl whom we'll call Carol lives in a frame house in Ithica and he ("Mitchell") lives around the corner. Actually they both live here, together with another couple, two other guys and two girls. "We aren't trying to put anything over on Cornell; it's just that we want to live together," Mitchell says. Carol, Cornell '67, majored in Philosophy; Mitchell is a junior in Honors English. The only real problem has been the landlord, who, like Cornell, doesn't know the setup. "One morning he came barging in while I was in bed," Mitchell remembers. "I threw the covers over my head just as he came in, and for five minutes he talked to me thinking I was Carol. I just mm-hmmed in a falstetto." Neither knows how long they will live under the same roof: marriage is only one of many possibilities.

Harvard

"Our parents know." says Ned Shure. He and Patsy Pepper share an apartment with another couple two blocks off-campus at the University of Michigan. An English major. Ned dropped out after two years and now runs the Student Book Service. Patsy is still enrolled in Education. At Michigan male students may move out of the dorms after they have completed their sophomore year, and women when they are twenty-one. Some of them take apartments together. Ned and Patsy share domestic responsibilities with the other couple in a six-room apartment in Ann Arbor. They have a casual relationship: marriage is not really a question yet: at least they never discuss it.

Photographed by Dan Wynn

Berkeley

The way Steve Brauch tells it. one fall night during his junior year at Berkeley he and some friends were walking down the street singing, when Maureen's room-mate leaned out of her window and joined in. Banter followed. the boys invited themselves in. and that's how Steve and Maureen met. Eventually Steve moved in permanently He and Maureen like living together without the legal binds of marriage: they found the one nude party they went to a bore: they have moved a few times, and they live at their present address because the landlord allows dogs.

Zen Basketball, etc. at San Francisco State

by Herbert Wilner

Who knows how to play? The student? The teacher? Who cares?
A guided tour through the hippiest college

Of the more than eighteen thousand students now attending San Francisco State College, only a handful will join the Alumni Association after they graduate. Of the more than one thousand faculty members, most of whom teach here with a provincial pride of place, only a few would insist that San Francisco State should be the college of choice for their own children. Of the wealthy great-name families in the Bay Area who make financial contributions to the institutional life of the community, none contributes substantially to San Francisco State. They give generously, however, to the established empires, Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley. In highway miles, San Francisco State lies almost exactly between these two neighboring academic countries, and the shadows they cast would have seemed large enough to keep the in-between place forever in the shade.

But for a variety of reasons, many of them more nationally important than the recent instant history of the college itself, S.F.S. is worth looking at. It is, in fact, with peeps here and there in professional journals and even in the mass media, being looked at. There is more to its picture than the present prominence of its ninety-four-acre city campus as a second neighborhood for the hippies of Haight-Ashbury who haven’t yet dropped out. It might well be that S.F.S.’s newness, its lack of traditions, its unpredictable and generally older streetcar students, its young faculty and its young come-and-go administrators, its compulsion to be anti-Establishment, its willingness out of conflicting necessities to absorb and to improvise, it might be that this unformed character is the source of its brash and eccentric spirit. And it might be true that this spirit is peculiarly suited to a noisy confrontation with some of the unanswered questions about the new industry we call college education in America.

The necessities confronting S.F.S. are of essentially different kinds, and they grind against each other like gears which were never designed to mesh. In the first place, there is the monstrous bureaucracy which presides over the State College System in California. It has so many offices and officers, so many bureaus and boards and channels, so many regulations, and produces so many tons of mimeographed material full of unreadable statistics and incomprehensible prose that one has to believe there is a clerical factory here large enough to have run the British Empire—Gilbert and Sullivan fashion—a century ago. What is hard to believe is that all of this Kafka-machinery was designed to reach the individual student who comes to class at S.F.S.— bearded, long-haired, or plain—and demands nothing more complicated of his education than that it should interest him and mean something. If it doesn’t, he may drop the particular course. If he drops enough of them, he drops out. The clerks and computers of the college’s own huge bureaucracy will record his vanishing. The figure will be forwarded to the higher stations of the bureaucracy off campus. Added to other such figures, it will finally issue forth as another unreadable document.

To expect S.F.S., which is at its new campus a child of thirteen years, to emerge from the bureaucratic maze which governs the seventeen other state colleges, as well as itself, into an identifiable character and spirit is like asking of a State Department staff member that he speak in his own voice. But it has happened. It has been going on steadily for the ten years I have taught at S.F.S. and it points to the other necessity which the college confronts: an intense desire to make its own destiny in its own character and by its own spirit, the bureaucrats be damned. (But when you damn them openly, the gears of the opposing necessities grind with a public noise. As they did last fall when several members of the English Department joined in a reading on campus of a published poem banned by the San Francisco police for being obscene, the reading making local headlines which prompted one member of the off-campus governing boards to suggest that proposed faculty raises had something to do, after all, with proper faculty behavior. The character and spirit of the college cannot be tagged in a phrase, for there is no long-lasting tradition with which to associate it. But it certainly has something to do with San Francisco itself, and it is surely affected by the life-entangled histories the students bring with them to the campus.

A glance at the campus itself returns something unmistakably and unimpressively institutional. Its ninety-four acres are located on what used to be sand dunes in the southwestern comer of the city. It is not far from the zoo, the Pacific, an artificial lake, and a municipal golf course. It is bordered on two of its sides by the nests of modem housing projects. Its own twenty or so new buildings, if you are sensitive to architecture, are offensively unimagined. On the other hand, they might be regarded as unfortunately suited to the traditionless spirit of the place. They are all so ruthlessly functional, so arrogantly plain, so insistently rectangular or square, so regularly banded or punched with windows that it is easy to believe they all arrived on the same day in huge cartons marked Easy-to-Assemble New Campus. Not one of the buildings bears a personal name. They are all designated by the faculties and subjects they house—Humanities, Natural Sciences, Education, Psychology—as if that too had been stamped on the original cartons. They give off a timid quality of being subject to recall, as if the cartons might be hauled out again, the buildings recrated, and the whole campus shipped back to the manufacturer. But if one is disposed to look at the brighter side of his own metaphors, he can pretend the buildings were designed to make the human condition prevail over the masonry which houses it.

The most telling feature of the physical arrangement doesn’t belong to the college. It is the municipal streetcar marked “M" which passes one of the college’s comers on a main artery of the city’s north-south traffic. For S.F.S.—despite its two new Residence Halls on campus which house eight hundred overprotected students—is essentially a streetcar college. As such, it shares some of the characteristics of similar institutions throughout the country: a higher average age for its students; a full program of evening courses; part-time jobs in the city for most of its students: a sense of personal connection with the college that is limited for many of its students to individual professors and a particular department; a general lack of interest in the college’s sensibly modest athletic programs.

Above all, S.F.S.’s identity as a streetcar college ignores the idea of the campus as a fortress, or a retreat. By way of that overcrowded “M” car, or the student’s own auto, some of the city’s living implications are brought to the college, and some part of the college is returned to the city. More than anything else, this transportation accounts for the living day working its influence upon the general academic intention.

I came to S.F.S.’s English Department and Creative Writing Program after two years of teaching at ...

Painting the Ocean Red, Etc. At Colombia University

by Dan Carlinsky & Bernard Lefkowitz

Why not?
Every day is Christmas for members of the Warmth Movement, and anything is possible

Inside the elevator a Phi Beta math major in a faded blue work shirt leans against his rake. Columbia: 37 divisions, 17,000 students. A short girl with a tawny complexion and almond eyes threads her needle. Columbia: annual budget, $127,500,000. An Exeter alum in a wrinkled Brooksweave stares into his orange- painted barrel filled with clothing. Columbia: twenty-one Nobel Prize winners. A varsity wrestler spins the wheels of the caboose of his electric-train set. Columbia: landlord, Rockefeller Center.

Seventh floor. The elevator door slides open, the four turn left, climb a short flight of stairs. They stand now at the always open door to the attic of the Columbia Journalism Building. They stand under a simple crayoned sign: warmth.

A year ago the walls were a dirty beige color and hundreds of dust-covered volumes were stored here. Now the color scheme is red with irregular splotches of orange. In one comer a rabbit named Gandalf munches lettuce, and a monkey named Milton chews the cover of An Introduction to Organic Chemistry. In the center of the attic, a theology student performs a mock-serious marriage. “Do you think it'll last?” asks the groom. “Until we get bored,” says the bride, in mini-skirt. Red and blue light bulbs flash forty times a minute and twin graffiti proclaim: Satan is DEAD and WE LUV.

At the doorway, the four students announce their arrival. Rake: “Why were there only two guys down at the collective farm? There are thousands, millions of rocks to pick up. I can’t do it all.” Needle: “I need help. I’ve got four shirts to mend from the last sew-in.” Barrel: “He gave me everything. His records, his socks, his shoes, his razor, his sarape. It’s all his love offering. Everything." Caboose: “I need a motor for a Lionel chief. Anybody got a motor for a Lionel chief?"

They are plotters, these four, and all the rest who have painted daffodils on barren walls and raised com where weeds grew. Here at the warm core of cool Columbia, they plot the gentlest of social revolutions.

What is revolutionary about electric trains and Monopoly games; about mending tom shirts and distributing clothes in orange-colored barrels to the poor of Harlem and Bedford- Stuyvesant; about tending a collective farm next to the birthplace of the Manhattan Project; about renting bicycles to students for fifteen cents an hour, designing an outdoor cafe on a crowded urban campus or painting an attic bright colors? On the surface, nothing, really. In fact, the idea—the word philosophy brings a blush—behind this movement is so straight, so square, so feverishly romantic, that it would embarrass the creator of Search for Tomorrow. “Our values are truth, beauty, love,” says Ronald Lane, the twenty-one-year-old sociology major who founded the organization called Warmth. “We want people to think differently about what’s important to them," says Jonathan Krown, son of a wealthy Long Island builder. “Why shouldn’t you trade a mink coat for a nice red apple? Why hasn’t somebody cleaned up the Lower East Side? Why hasn’t anyone dyed the Atlantic Ocean red? It would be so beautiful.” Or, as Jim Gagne, fraternity man, psychiatrist-to-be, explains, “I was looking for a Christmas spirit. Here’s where it’s at”

Thus powered by its own version of Life Can Be Beautiful— at Columbia or in Harlem—encouraged by the dedication of fifteen or so true believers, inspired, partially, by the mystics of Haight-Ashbury, and financed with a $300 subsidy from the university. Warmth proceeds in its revolution. Perhaps a year is too short a time to reshape embedded values, but this is the way one organization has begun the task:

Love offerings for the ghettos: Warmth negotiates to buy a bus (“$200 is our top price”), plans to paint it in favored hues and load it with barrels filled with clothes and appliances, solicited from teachers, students and residents nearby. (“Remember, this is not charity. They must give away something that they like, too, even if it's a ball of yam in exchange for a fine pair of pants. The idea is that giving and taking become beautiful in themselves.”)

Sweep-ins: the target is those New York parks missed by former Parks Commissioner Thomas Hoving, starting with Morningside Park, adjacent to the Columbia campus. Several hundred students arrive with brooms, inexhaustible supplies of Day-Glo paint (pink for rocks, blue for garbage pails) and half a truckload of fertilizer. Object: to discover the green that lies beneath a carpet of broken bottles, orange peels and other, more exotic, garbage. “It’s such a beautiful idea,” Mayor John Lindsay said recently. “I plan to pitch in on some of the sweep-ins myself. Beautiful.”

Happiness graduation ceremony: in Riverside Park on Manhattan’s West Side, presentation of diplomas ("This is to certify that you have graduated from mediocrity to happiness”) followed by a scream-in at which thousands “yell as long and as loud as they have to.”

Collective farm: on a 95- by 120-foot dirt plot on the Columbia campus, fifteen students on their knees pick up rocks and toss them into metal tool chests. It is the only farm, collective or capitalist, in Manhattan. Object: to grow com, potatoes, beans, radishes and carrots. Says Yale Psychology Professor Kenneth Keniston, author of The Uncommitted, a major study of alienated youth, “The idea of a collective farm on a campus is absolutely delightful. It’s the perfect cry against the machine.”

Making Columbia livable: a bike-rental stall; an outdoor cafe designed by architecture students; for anyone who wants it, free breakfast in the Warmth attic, served on dishes donated by the university dining rooms; a woodworking shop; a do-it-yourself restaurant where students will cook their own meals; ice-cream shacks where a dozen flavors are sold at discount; Operation Warm Welcome, a service to match visitors with Columbia apartment dwellers willing to put someone up overnight without charge; quick-cash soda-bottle return (“Please leave deposit bottles when you’re through with them. If someone needs money he can pick up a couple of bottles and cash them in”).

Making Columbia lovable: kite-flying from the roof of Butler Library (3,700,000 volumes); nonverbal communication sessions, in which two hundred students gather in the attic to carry on silent discussions through finger-painting, the rhythm of raga rock, and bubble-gum sculpture, while two floors below student journalists practice verbal communication in a TV studio; Sadie Hawkins Fortnight, a magic time when “girls ask guys out and friendliness is not aggressiveness.”

And more: alienation booths for the bugged to sit in, punching bags for the hostile to slug at; a student ombudsman for the aggrieved: the complete collection of Parker Brothers games for mind-weary intellectuals.

For John Sloma, an editor of the undergraduate literary magazine and a prime Warmth attic addict, it all adds up to a convenient retreat. “I first came to the attic sew-ins, at which Barnard girls mend the torn shirts and buttonless jackets of Columbia undergraduates, attract two hundred or more participants. Many of Warmth’s casual members say they are drawn to the attic because of the relaxed, undirected atmosphere there, and incidentally because it can be a good place to make a date.

David Rynerson. an eighteen-year- old apple-cheeked freshman from Portland, Oregon, helped Lane paint the entire Warmth attic during one weekend last December. “I’m kind of a shy guy," he says, “and my social life at Columbia was pretty much limited to the laundry agency, where 1 worked. 1 mean, you don’t meet too many girls there. 1 don’t do too well at dances and mixers because 1 don’t have much of a line. I came up here because I thought, well, you don’t need much of a line at a nonverbal communication thing or to play Monopoly with a Barnard girl or to ask a young lady to sew a button on your shirt. You know, I ripped three buttons off my shirt once so I could go to a sew-in. But the funny thing is, I’ve almost forgotten that I came up here just to meet girls. I’ve worked on the farm, and painted the attic and built things. The Warmth attic is a very nice place to just go and do your thing.”

Although Warmth has gained a mass following on campus as a localized non-organization, there are some who would make it into a collegiate complement of the Diggers who live in San Francisco’s hippie Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. Jonathan Krown. a sometime Warmth leader who has initiated most of its off-campus explorations, believes the amorphous Diggers are powering a social revolution in America: “It's really what’s happening. Their love is destroying the great coldness floating around us. You have to be close to a place like ‘Hashbury’ to understand it. It's a tremendous feeling. The Diggers—those are the ideas we need here."

It was Krown who served as catalyst for the public Happiness Graduation Ceremony, the Harlem program, and the Park Sweep-in. But not without some small resistance from those who are afraid of spreading Warmth too thin. "I don’t approve of the Diggers,” says Barnard student Janet Tang. “They’re out trying to save the world. A lot of that type might bring the pot element into this. If we got busted. . . .” One disaffected Warmth organizer, Robert Levine, says. “I just don’t think the world is ready for this. They might want to change the world but they can’t act as if it’s already changed. I got nothing against love . . but I just can't believe these people.”

It’s two weeks before spring planting on the collective farm. The sunny Saturday afternoon has brought a dozen students out to till the soil. The only implements they use are two pitchforks and two rakes, purchased with the proceeds from a light show. Piled under a tree are many packages of vegetable seeds contributed by a seed company.

In one corner of the field a mophaired eight-year-old boy is busy picking up pebbles. A student looks up from his raking and says, "That’s Peter. He lives near here and one day he asked us if he could plant flowers. So we gave him that little corner. It’s our best soil." On the sidewalk outside the campus, an elderly woman in a blue suit, wide- brimmed hat and veil stops to watch. “I guess,” she says to no one in particular, “that’s the way they earn money. I used to do gardening after school when I was young. . . . You’re getting paid, aren’t you?” A pretty, dark-haired girl looks over her shoulder at the woman. "Oh no, we're not taking money for this,” she says. "You're not? Isn’t that wonderful!” Raising one gloved hand she points to a kid with a beard. “Isn’t he just too cute for words? A farmer."

On the sidelines a girl has arrived with a pitcher of lemonade. A few feet away another girl in corduroy pants and a sweat shirt picks up rocks and gathers them into a small pile. She plows up the dirt with her hands. Two boys passing by shout at her, “What’s this?” The girl says, “It’s Warmth.” “What are you doing?" they ask. “I'm planting morning glories. They let you plant whatever you want here. It's great for us poor displaced country girls.”

Ronald Lane, graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, sociology student at Columbia University, watches.

"Isn’t this amazing?” He laughs. “Isn’t it amazing. Just like I thought it would be. You know what someone called our attic yesterday? The world's largest tree house. And this is the world’s largest sandbox.

“It’s unbelievable what you can do with love. Do you know, we could go around the country and get thousands of loving people, wonderful people, and all move to like, Nevada. We could take the state over. It would be our state. We could open our own stores, and build our own communities. . . . We could work together and help everybody and laugh and give things away and be given things out of love and change our names and laugh at fear. We could make it the warmest place in the world." W-

Confessions of a Campus Pot Dealer

I turned on 200 fellow students at U. of Mich

by "Ric"

---

][The author and dealer, on the descent from a rocky belladonna high, peers at left through a bookshop window in Ann Arbor.<br><br>Photographed by Oan Wynn

This isn’t a confession. It’s more like letting you in so maybe there’ll be a slight chance you won't walk around spilling all that typical misinformation I hear and read wherever I go. For instance, after the big midwinter bust in Detroit, some professor came on the late news and gave his sixty-second serious-dangers-of-narcotics speech, which he picked up from a 1937 ad. After four years of college I can tell. You’re flying blind, middle-class-land, and it’s fear and Plymouth Rock hardheadedness that makes you tear down Maypoles. Not much of a change since Sixteen-twenty. Anyway I’ll lay off the message. Don’t get scared so soon—let me entertain you.

I’m a pusher. I should say I was a pusher. Attention system: I am no longer. Just in case you’re interested. I quit because it became a hassle. Too much business—I developed this real capitalist outlook. Sitting in my room with the door locked making stacks of my money. I caught myself and got out. Like Hesse’s Siddhartha. He went to the river. I just went straight. Good boy me, diploma in hand ready to step into my slot—but that’s another story.

I pushed in my senior year at the University of Michigan, starting I remember after I quit this incredibly boring job showing early-morning educational movies. We were sick of buying lousy grass at exorbitant prices around Ann Arbor, so over Thanksgiving we all chipped in and bought a pound in New York through one of our business associates who lived there and knew a fairly reliable contact. It cost four of us about thirty-five dollars apiece and after weighing it on these great homemade blind-justice-type scales we each wound up with four honest ounces. Then the idea hit—we could sell a couple, make back our investment, and still have buckets to smoke ourselves. So, we cut the stuff up—this is a technique we eventually got down to a real science— and packaged the ounces in baggies. Now we had to find a market. At the time, see, we were just looking for a few friends who might want a decent deal, and we’d come out with free grass. So I phoned up a chick I knew who smoked quite a bit and asked her to look around. About a half hour later she called back with an order for three ounces. We were in business. Our pound went within two days and people were lined up begging for more. What could we do? You have to understand that this is a pretty common way for pushers to get started. They’re not these crummy, slinky, little junkies you read about turning school kids on to pot and dirty pictures. It’s the puritan ethic, people, the capitalist way—make a buck. Sure, simple supply and demand—like loan companies and bootleg liquor—hell, like used-car lots and Gimbel’s basement. Nobody’s a nonprofit organization. One of my partners is an economics major. He filled us in on the real story: just business as usual in the true American tradition.

Before I started pushing I was a long-haired sometime-student Ann Arbor fringe member, cashing my monthly check from upper-suburbia home, and after I started I was just the same—only I was independently wealthy, my parents could save their money for Miami Beach. I mean I didn’t make a fortune—just enough for records and repairs on my car and of course reinvestment. After our first success we decided the market could easily bear a kilo at a time—which is two-point-two pounds (thirty-five ounces) and costs usually around two hundred and fifty dollars—naturally the more you buy the cheaper it is. We got hold of a Detroit contact through an amazing kid—a Wanderer dropout who knew everybody and everything that was happening, especially the younger hippies and old-time hard-core heads. See, each of us eventually developed his own clientele, from the Wanderer’s friends to fraternity straight people just getting into the thing. Anyway, we TyJ began in full swing after Christmas with a trip into Detroit for two W kilos. I didn’t go along and I didn’t ask questions so I can’t tell you ° much about it. Except that it was bad sugar-cured grass that dried up to nowhere near four and a half pounds, but got sold eventually for a not-too-disappointing profit. Fact is, the New Yorker and the Wanderer had to put up the cash, so they took charge of the whole bit. During that time all I got was free grass and lots of customer inquiries. Then rumor filtered in about a big bust, snow started pouring down, and Midwest winter doldrums hit us. Everybody was still jumpy about the fifty-six heads they hauled in in Detroit—we locked up all the grass, pipes and paper in a sympathetic sorority house and sat uptight. This was very safe but I remember one slushy night we drove all over Ann Arbor looking for the silly chick who had the stuff in her room while customers complained and we pined for a pleasant high. In short the situation got a bit grim, and the New Yorker decided now was a good time to make it down South—with Wanderer, who grabbed a ride just out of the clutches of the local narcos.

A few days before they left we gathered up some money and drove into Detroit so that I could be introduced to our contact and start a regular transaction while the others were in Florida. We drove through a few streets of Jesus Saves churches and parked next to a typical grey row of Victorian monstrosities turned into student apartments. Looked pretty much like the rest of Detroit, I guess. We knocked on an upstairs door of one of these places and a skinny chick answered. I was nervous the contact would close up because he didn’t know me, but the chick said he was sick anyway and wasn’t selling. We argued for a while about telephone arrangements that had been made and the hassle to drive here in rush hour, but she held her ground and stared us down. After a few minutes we left, pissed off. The whole place smelled like chicken soup. See, big pushers are real too.

Well, now we were in sort of bad shape—not even a joint to smoke ourselves. We killed time drinking cough syrup for about a week, and then one day our fraternity partner got a great surprise package from the capital city—an almost full kilo of beautiful grass in a plain brown wrapper. Maybe a little risky but it did get through addressed to Zelda Zero or something. And we were back in business. This was just before the University of Michigan's two-day spring break at the beginning of March and we wondered if anybody would be around to buy. We opened up sales with a few discreet phone calls after spending half a night cutting and weighing and smoking (for testing purposes) and by suppertime the next day we were clean. Not even a pipeful left between us. Our enterprise was really rolling. It gave us enough money to fly East for the vacation—half fare of course. I mean we weren’t lighting our cigarettes with dollar bills. In fact, after every sale I got tighter and tighter, like J. Paul Getty. I told you that’s why I quit.

Time in college is measured between vacations, so I called the two months after Christmas until spring break our building-up period, and after that, from March till we went home at the end of April, our solid establishment time. We started pushing with comfortable regularity. We got a motto: Buy low. Sell Highs—sort of cute. The important thing was we made a name for ourselves in town. Sometimes it got a little out of hand. One night my straight room-mate brought back incredibly blown-up reports of our business from a sorority house I didn't even know existed. Our big boast was that we never promised, we delivered. There were endless stories circulating about the kilo of Acapulco Gold (supposedly good grass) somebody’s gonna get for seventy dollars, but these same characters always showed up for a few ounces whenever we sold, complaining about our prices and our small amounts. Next week, forever ma liana he’d be in the Gold—just doing us a favor for the time being. Also we were strategic. Like G.M. stockpiling for the big year, we’d hold up on our sales until we were sure that the market was empty and then we’d open up shop to lines of ten-dollar bills.

We alternated buying between Detroit and New York, and although New York City was more chancy, because of the distance, the grass was infinitely better and a lot closer to the real weight—never more than an ounce or two off. Detroit was dishonest through and through. One time sticks in my mind. The contact —he’d gotten over his flu I guess— called us later in March with a great deal on good grass. And he was anxious to get rid of it. All three of us drove in the next afternoon bulging with money and went up to his crummy room. He had a friend along, a dark greasy guy with his two-year-old daughter, who cried the whole goddam time. There’s a technique to buying; first you bullshit, sit around and talk about business, busts, play the guitar, look at his psychedelic pictures. Everybody’s real friendly and phony. Nervous. Then you say, "Well, we'd like a kilo.” They go, "Yeah, sure, fine”—give you some wine. You wander around a little bit more and finally you ask what’s the price. You look at their eyes which start to sneak all over the place.

"Two ninety,” they say.

"What? Two ninety! Come on, we never pay more than two and a half. That’s the standard rate.”

And you hassle. So after we’ve made it clear, they give us a line about the guy who owns the stuff wants two ninety. It’s not their fault, but the greasy guy goes, "I'll put up twenty bucks.” This guy won’t call marijuana any of the regular names like grass or pot—he’s gotta call it "weed” and "boo” (I was waiting for "maryjane”). And the contact says, “Sure, I'll put up another twenty and we’ll take, lemme see”—he figures it out too fast—"one seventh of the kilo." But what the hell, we wanted the grass. It was a prime time to push in Ann Arbor. Wanderer had left New York by then, leaving us without a contact there. And the little kid’s crying was really bringing us down. So of course we gave in. They took the money and disappeared for a half hour. I figure they went to the greasy guy’s place where they had it stored—probably around the corner—laughed for a half hour, and came back. It’s not hard to figure. They poured out this damp pile of seeds and stems, “It’s good weed, man.” Yeah, it looked like the Sequoia National Forest. Then they took a coffee jar and measured out their one-seventh—five "cans” (he wouldn’t call it ounces), packing it in so they got at least six. And that was it. Friendly good-byes all around. We were still hopeful on the way home that we’d get anyway around thirty ounces. It looked like quite a bit sitting in its week-old National Enquirer wrapper. We rushed in and put it on the scales: a bare twenty-five “cans.” We got burned. It meant in sales a hundred and twenty-five dollars short. That hurt. And we felt bad that all our customers were going to get a mighty weak amount for their parents’ money. What do you expect? Dishonesty breeds dishonesty. For instance, later on we got a real kilo from New York and sold whopping real ounces —almost. A pusher is not without a conscience. One consolation is that we heard those two got busted big later on. Which I guess I wouldn’t wish on anybody.

Obviously we stopped buying from Detroit then and there and the rest of the year was relatively normal. Quiet, steady pushing to our quiet, steadily complaining, no-face, noname clientele. It’s funny. On my rare trips to campus and classes from my almost upper-suburban instantelectric apartment just down the road, the only people I ever recognized among the thirty thousand were my customers. But it’s not like the local merchant who tips his hat to his clients as he walks to church. There wasn’t even the slightest bit of recognition shown between us. Not a glance. Strictly business—a different world entirely when I was a pusher than when I was a student. And not a chance the twain ever met.

Anyway the snow finally melted in Ann Arbor and the temperature soared to sixty during the last few weeks and I took to sunning myself. I explained it all in the beginning. I closed the store, got stoned, and relaxed on my roof—spent all my money on nothing and went back to being poor. Believe me, businessman, it’s just as good.

Now, let me explain. I’ve sort of mentioned a lot of terms I figure you should be conversant with after all those Time and Saturday Evening Post stories about the worthless addicted New Generation, but I’ll fill you in anyway from my side of the fence.

Grass—marijuana—is a minor psychedelic weed, grows almost everywhere. You always hear about police burning a vacant lot full of it in some big city. And when we get it from the big suppliers it’s either in a pile of loose stems, seeds and leaves, or compressed into different-size blocks. Our job is to cut it and clean it and package it for sales. We chop it up first on a grater then push it through a strainer until it's fine. Seeds can be mashed between two bricks and mixed in, but the stems are a problem. If we were going to sell only top-rate pot we'd take out all the seeds and stems, and market just the finely ground leave?, but that would cut our profit a few hundred percent. The trick is not to cut the stuff too fine because the customer would much rather buy a fuller bag of crap than a thinner bag of really beautiful stuff. We measure ounces by eye—that is if we get an honest deal and there are around thirty-five ounces in the kilo, we split the stuff into thirty-five piles and pour them into little manila envelopes. Most often though, we get burned to some extent, so we have to create arbitrary ounces—anywhere from a half to almost a full ounce, and sometimes we’ve really been taken, like the time I told you we got two kilos of grass that was cured in sugar (an expedient to dry it) and still damp. It looked big and weighed a lot, but in less than a week it dried up and shrank away to some fluffy, gluey, worthless waste in the bottom of a shopping bag. In such cases we’re forced to beef it up with green tea, which makes your throat into raw meat after a couple joints, but otherwise not even an old-time hard-core smoker can tell the difference. See, we figure on a three-hundred-percent return on our investment. An ounce sells for twenty-five dollars. That means we pay no more than eight bucks for the same amount—no matter how thin it is. Smaller quantities are even more dishonest. A nickel bag—five dollars' worth—should be a fifth of an ounce but we always get at least seven nickels to one ounce, or three dimes—ten dollars’ worth each. If you stretch it you can make forty or even fifty dollars on one ounce by selling it in nickels and dimes. I can never understand the guy who comes in every other day for a skimpy nickel instead of saving a while and getting a whole ounce at half the price. I mean it's not like he’s hooked on it. Customers are funny. Some hassle for an hour before they buy and some don’t even open the envelope. We always give them the same blurb: “It’s good grass, man, and it cost us a fortune—you’re getting a good deal.” They usually pay.

You wouldn’t believe the cross-section of people coming in to buy. It’s impossible to type our customers—they’re not all long-haired dropouts by any means. You figure: there are thirty-one thousand students at the university plus a couple thousand hangers-on and a few hundred highschool hippies—all potential customers. And we four businessmen had our finger on the whole action. My clientele revolved around one intellectual sorority and their non-student very hippie friends. I also took care of a lot of people just getting into the thing. See, our business wasn’t just sales, we were our own promotion men. We turned newcomers on by the living room full—even the straightest, strictest Wasp chick would come out after an evening of logical argument and pipes of grass convinced and stoned. And back for more soon. My fraternity partner turned on half his house overnight and when I saw these ultraconservative kids a few weeks later their hair was already starting to grow. What an influence. The frat-head’s customers also were two or three other fraternities and sororities, mostly beginners who didn’t argue about price and quality, but smoked in huge quantities—because they were beginners it took them a lot to get high. Every once in a while we’d run into a real case—someone who just couldn’t get high. So we’d empty out a closet, give him a huge pipeful, a couple packs of matches, and stick him in. The closet would fill up with smoke and after an hour of breathing pure grass instead of air he’d stumble out completely stoned. Success. People know when they're high. It’s when they stop asking how they should feel—and start smiling. We turned on one very orderly crabby type straight man with about a nickel bag (enough for about five heads to get stoned on) and he sat there grinning like an idiot, listening to an incredible Ravi Shankar raga, just saying very quietly, “Yeah. That's nice.”

New Yorker’s clientele was quite different. They were the real smokers, mostly from one arty-type section of town that has withstood the modern cement-cube apartments, and from the M.U.G.—the Michigan Union Grill—where the high-schoolers and the more showy hippies hang all day. Half of them are students, if that many, and they’d usually follow Wanderer for grass back to New Yorker’s apartment, which was strategically placed between their psychedelic pads and the Union.

There were thousands of these people—invariably long-haired, young, messed-up and pleasant. There were so many, in fact, that our fourth partner, the Econ-head, dealt almost exclusively to the excess and took over the whole bag when New Yorker left. These were the real heads, into a lot of different drugs, stoned a good portion of the time, dead against the system—looking outside the U.S. for their futures—wanting to be left alone by Middleamerica, but dependent on parents’ money or else totally broke. Bored too, not at all productive from a straight-person’s point of view. But there’s something— hard to pin down—between heads that there isn’t between people outside. A sort of understanding, and acceptance, an easiness at first meeting like you already know them, very little arguing or bad humor. A group smoking can be loud and laughing but never destructive like a bunch of drinkers. Listening to records is big —all different kinds, from The Blues Magoos to Debussy. Being quiet is big too, and simply sitting. With patience enough for everybody else and an ocean of peace. You sit and stare and just can’t figure why They’re out to bust you. I could be sent down for ten years if I got caught pushing one crummy nickel, and I’ve had some close calls.

One time going through customs at Kennedy Airport some very nosy officer found an old hash pipe I'd never even used in my trunk. I gave him a quick line about sentimental value and an old Arab in Tangiers, but he didn’t buy it. The pipe was nothing —what concerned me was the matchbox full of acid and opium in my pocket. They got a shopping cart, loaded my luggage on it. and pointed to this little scary-looking room— three of them with their hungry goddam eyes glued to me. So I nodded and very nonchalantly stuck a cigarette butt in my mouth, pulled out the matchbox, lit the cigarette and casually tossed the box in a garbage can. They searched every inch of me and my belongings and I just smiled. Clean. Legal. I got it all from a grade-B French-secret-agent flick. Thank God for the mass media.

You see then how an underworld is created. Every one of us is Wanted—bv the local police, the state police, the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the F.D.A. —you name it, and so we go below ground. Wait, now, don’t get the idea we’re always slinking around in alleys and talking code over the phone. Hell, if you’re that uptight it stops being enjoyable—it’s just not worth it. We’re still functioning members of society, intelligent and reasoning—but we’ve got a subculture below the surface where it’s really happening. We know what dope is in town and what isn’t and how much it costs and who might be a narco and what’s going on in City Hall and the whole Midwest abortion scene—to help poor careless chicks.

We know about Lieutenant Stauden-meier, the local heavy who runs around “busting” people and confiscating pornographic movies. He’d love to see a University of Michigan like it used to be—Mary Poppins playing at all the theatres and for kicks a screaming Saturday-night pantie raid. He’s not much of a threat. Neither is the university. As a matter of fact, they have an eyes-closed policy about the whole thing. It’s all politics—they just switched presidents and don’t need any adverse publicity. But one professor, I remember, a guy named Pollard, came out in the student newspaper with this expose on the campus scene: he told everybody there were only about two hundred smokers and twenty acid-heads. Christ, I know I’ve had more than that just in my living room this year, but I won't complain—it’s reassuring to see how far off the system is.

Sure you can say our whole bag is a game maybe but it’s a group— and I won’t accept the crap about being completely independent. Everybody needs an empathetic ear. Security man. Simple and basic. The same reason the A.M.A. or the John Birch Society sticks together. The difference is we don’t push our point.

And if you're wondering what I mean when I say drugs, stay close. I’m talking about every mind-bender we can get our hands on—every psychedelic, hallucinogen, consciousness-expanding, brain-changing tablet, capsule, liquid, powder, vegetable that’s ever been smuggled into this country or sold at the corner drugstore. It sounds sort of like a soma holiday and everybody’s scared to death of a Brave New World but— two things: just look around for a few minutes. Have you ever eaten a frozen chicken pie? Or a fifteen-cent hamburger? Or filled out forms for a big university? Or, man, just seen a computer—an electronic brain? And next, listen: don’t criticize till you try. Aldous Huxley himself took mescaline.

Okay—the drugs: Marijuana’s probably the mildest. It makes you high. I can’t describe it any better than that. Hashish, the unripe pollen from the marijuana plant, has similar effects but usually a lot stronger. One joint of good hash is easily enough to turn on two people for a solid high. It comes in little brittle cubes that you break up and smoke or else it’s already in powder form. Sometimes it’s cut (mixed) with opium. It's got a beautiful sweet smell and taste, but a brutal price tag—around here it goes for a hundred to a hundred and fifty dollars an ounce. Supposed to be magic I guess. Anyway, very exotic. We pushed a whole ounce broken into tiny cubes at twenty-five per and never got a complaint. Ah, the sophisticated Midwest.

And amyl nitrite vials—poppers— are always good to snort while you’re stoned. They’re legal—for heart conditions or asthma and they speed up your blood so it’s like your head is an atom-bomb test. Wild. They only last for a minute or so, which is good, and one is enough for quite a few people.

The new kick is banana peels but I've smoked them and they run a pretty distant second to grass. And they taste just like you'd expect burning banana peels to taste. I can live without it. And there’s always the old standby—glue sniffing. It gives you an odd echoey-type high but it’s very dangerous and you inevitably wind up stuck together from the leaky bag. Then there are the downs—the codeine or fake codeine cough syrups. You can buy them at quite a few drugstores in Ann Arbor, but now they’re starting to get wary of the same wild-eyed hippies coming in every five minutes with a bad cough. One of the syrups has a very long-name synthetic codeine in it end it’s not bad but another is chock-full of the real stuff—it’s an amazing experience. You drink a bottle, which is a bit hard to get down, and then wait for your body to go away. You’re lying, eyes closed, making pretty, silent hallucinations, listening only to very soft instrumental pieces— Faure, Saint-Saens, Brahms, Sibelius —at total peace in a dream; that’s the closest we get to the junkie’s world.

At the other extreme are the forwards—Dexedrine, Methedrine— speed that dries out your mouth, opens your eyes, and glues you on the ceiling. I used to take them for studying all night or fast term-paper production and I hated the comedown shakes and nausea—it was a necessary evil for scholastic success. I never realized how many people took the stuff for a high, either by popping (swallowing) capsules, or sniffing crystals or mainlining pure Methedrine. A Meth-head is easy to spot— he’s always licking his lips because he’s dry and his eyes arc always opening wide like he can’t see well enough. And he chain-smokes and eats candy bars and catches serum hepatitis from the needle. The one point in speed’s favor is the energy you get, but I don’t trust the creativity of it. I’ve seen it dissipated too many times—dancing to one song all night, talking for six straight hours about nothing. You can see I don’t much like it.

But that’s nothing compared to the horror drug—belladonna. You can get it in patent medicines for asthma —they’re legal and available. And let me warn you: you might not come back. One night six of us swallowed a heaping teaspoonful mixed with water—it’s thick green and unbearably bitter. The rest of the evening was just a horrible nightmare of sounds and moving and nagging nausea, exhaustion and restlessness at the same time. We lost our motor facilities like drunkards and the Econ-head couldn't make intelligible sounds and when he did it was only a string of disconnected words. I lay on my bed and had a long conversation with nobody, and I’d shake my head and say. Wait, there isn’t anybody here. And they’d all answer, “Right!" Real. Absolutely concrete. I figure we took O.D.’s (overdoses). It expanded our pupils so I couldn’t have read the “E" on an eye chart. And it didn’t go away until late the next day. I know people who say they’ve had quarter and half teaspoonfuls and a relatively pleasant time. I don’t believe it.

And, last of all, L.S.D. You've all heard about it. It sells for between a half-cent to as much as two cents a microgram and you usually take anywhere from two hundred and fifty to a thousand mikes a trip. It’s hard to get in larjje quantities at a good price so we never pushed any, which is a shame because it sells like wildfire. There are similar compounds— psilocybin, mescaline, peyote—but acid is far stronger, one of the few new experiences you’ll ever have—a true consciousness-expander—man, a revelation. I’ll try to tell you what it’s like: It was just at sunset in a Swiss skiing village on the top of a mountain and some chick and I walked up the road floating in fog so we couldn’t see one inch except tiny water pearls in her hair. Mufllcd. Dead like seashells on our ears. And a million miles away clicking skis coming down the slope like velvet, creamy soft, you can’t believe it. Then all of a sudden two people appeared in front of us. Talking. Faded. And gone. Shhhhhh-hhhhhhhhh then bang, we looked back and it’s crystal-clear sunset snow and a dark green forest in one second. Pinpoint skiers going home. And we turn around, OH wow. The whole sky is purple and the valley is filled from side to side with clouds so you could walk across and the sun is exactly between two peaks, pure red, and we stood and laughed because it was fiction to be so beautiful and not a way in the world to say it.

And that’s the real story.

But that was in Switzerland a long time ago. Here: Picture a quiet night in conservative little Ann Arbor. The library is full of studiers. The bars and the movies are doing a light business. The law-abiding burghers are home reading the latest National Review. But somewhere, behind everybody’s back, there are all these people smoking and tripping and flying— experiments in seeing tonight, maybe —we worked it out—almost two thousand people eyes open and hands out for any mind change—a funny kind of courage—they’re illegal and all set to blow up everything inside, for simple reasons, like—“Just look.” they’d say. That’s all. Very smug together, and you people start looking. More and more. Around campus I see so many smiling stumbiers now where not even a year ago there were just three-piece suits and circle pins. One time a bunch of us high on acid went into the local straight ice-cream parlor to buy fantastic colored cones. The guy wouldn't take our money. He said, “Save it. Stay stoned."

Mapping the Varieties of Innocence From Antioch to Bob Jones

So much for the University of Michigan (see previous pages); now for a look at the nation. At right, candid-camera glimpses of 1967 campus life, with further explanations below. Read and learn: 1) the various prices of pot (which is always smoked in private, never publicly), and the punishment for first offenders; 2) liquor regulations; 3) the hours that girls are allowed to visit men in their dormitory rooms; 4) the latest campus kick; 5) the local hippie hangouts; 6) Law and Order, the elements of restraint. If you've been wondering why, in spite of Vietnam, they’re all smiling—here’s your answer: TEXAS Kick: Slipped-Out Week during which everything was protested and things like yo-yos were everywhere. Hippie hangout: The Chuck Wagon. Girl guests: unwelcome in men’s dormitory rooms. Liquor: 21. Pot: $20 an ounce; 2 years to life. Law and Order: Captain Gann of the Austin Police. YALE Hippie hangout: Exit Coffee House. Liquor: encouraged on campus (Yalies drunk off-campus is a thought too horrible for deans to contemplate). Pot: S2O-S25 an ounce; 5 to 10 years and $S00-S3,000. Girl guests: till seven weeknights, midnight weekends. Kick: student-run film-ins. Law and Order: Lt Ahearn. ANTIOCH Girl guests: it’s up to each dorm to decide; ergo, often all night. Hippie hangout: The Front Lawn or The Glen. Liquor: beer at 18; the campus is dry, but enforcement is lax. Pot: $15 an ounce; 2 to 5 years and $ 10,000. Law and Order: Sheriff Russell Bradley. BOB JONES Pot: there isn’t any. You get expelled here for smoking a Kent. Liquor: soft drinks. Girl guests: prim, proper, arms-distant Hippie hangout: none. Kick: none. Law and Order: Dr. William Liverman, Dean of Men. IOWA Hippie hangout: Little Bill’s. Liquor: 21. Girl guests: not allowed in men’s quarters. Pot: $20 an ounce; 2 to 5 years and up to $2,000. Kick: occasional pot and L.S.D. parties. Law and Order: Sheriff Maynard Schneider. OHIO STATE Girl guests: as of this fall, junior and senior girls can stay out as long as they want. Visiting hours are till midnight during the week, one a.m. on weekends. Kick: sparsely attended be-ins and anti-war demonstrations. Pot: 25 cents a joint; 2 to 5 years and $10,000. Liquor: beer at 18. Hippie hangout: Charbert's Char-Bar. Law and Order: arch-conservative Columbus Dispatch. OKLAHOMA Kick: a “Gentle Thursday Love-in" featuring bubble-blowing, marbles, hopscotch, wearing Boy Scout uniforms. Hippie hangout: The Escaton. Girl guests: unwelcome. Pot: $25 an ounce; up to 5 years and/or $1,000. Liquor: girls can drink beer at 18; boys, dry till 21. Law and Order: D.A. Preston Trimble. CHICAGO Hippie hangout: The Other Side. Kick: old movies at the Bandersnatch. Pot: $20 an ounce; 2 to 10 years and $5,000. Girl guests: welcome till two and three a.m. Liquor: 21, and campus is dry. Law and Order: narks. Two men from the Bureau of Drug Abuses disguised themselves as students last year (one called himself "Roy Schwarz”) and tried to cut the grass. MINNESOTA Girl guests: a few hours a day but the door must be halfway open, one light must be on and all feet must be on the floor. Liquor: not within a mile of the Administration Building. Pot: $25 an ounce; 5 to 20 years, $10,000. Kick: a love-in to welcome C.I.A. recruiters last year. Hippie hangout: The Extemporary. Law and Order: James O’Meara, head of morals squad. KENTUCKY Kick: A Hug-in. Girl guests: unwelcome. Pot: $20 an ounce; 2 to 10 years and up to $20,000. Liquor: 21, campus dry. Hippie hangout: The Nexus. Law and Order: Executive VJP. for Academic Affairs, A. D. Albright. MISSISSIPPI Liquor: there is strong stuff in Yoknapatawpha County but nearest beer is 30 miles off. Girl guests: not permitted. Pot: unpriceable; too rare a commodity. Hippie hangout: private off-campus apartments. Law and Order: Tom S. Hines, Director of Student Activities. MIAMI Girl guests: it hardly matters; curfews are strictly enforced and women are not allowed in men’s dormitories. Pot: $25 an ounce; 2 to 5 years or $5OO-$5.OOO. Liquor: 21, campus is dry. Hippie hangout: The Gaslight Cafe. Kick: a few "happenings" held in classes. Law and Order: Ray Bellinger, Narcotics agent. HARVARD Kick: scaling the tallest buildings in the Yard. Pot: $30 an ounce; 2*/i-3^,Zz years or up to $1,000. Liquor: 21, but the campus is wet. Girl guests: “parietal hours" last till seven weekdays and midnight weekends. Hippie hangout: The Bick, The Blue Parrot Law and Order: Councilman Al Velucci (considered a paper tiger). BERKELEY Kick: paranoia, personified by hallucinations involving Assistant Dean James Sicheneder (a campus cop) who is nicknamed "Dean Fuzz." Hippie hangout: Telegraph Avenue between Haste and Dwight Way. Liquor: 21, campus “dry.” Pot: $10 an ounce; 1 to 10 years and up to $20,000. Girl guests: “open doors" once a month. U.C.L.A. Kick: a group called the Provos pulled off stunts like scattering marijuana in the library books. Pot: $10 an ounce, so it was an expensive stunt (and the library fine could have been $20,000 or 1 to 10 years). Girl guests: occasional open houses. Hippie hangout: The Headquarters, a psychedelic bookshop in Westwood. Law and Order: the L.A. Police. COLORADO Kick: light shows in a big bam off-campus. Hippie hangout: Clancy's Bookshop, on the Hill. Liquor: beer at 18. Girl guests: few. Pot: $2 a matchbox; 2 to 15 years. $10,000. Law and Order: unidentified narks.

Tune Up, Turn Disestablishment, Drop Out

What did Annapolis do for Papa John Phillips? Just what Minnesota did for Bob (Dylan) Zimmerman. Nothing

Here is a selection from the freshman yearbook of an imaginary school that might be called the Rock College of Dropouts. All of the students have two things in common— they perform rock and roll, and they once went to college. Not many matriculated with plans for a performing career, much less one in rock and roll. But as you can see. they’ve changed a lot since then.

The obvious tonsorial developments (which aren’t so trivial, if General Patakos of Greece, or Lance Brady, who was tarred and feathered for wearing his hair long at a pro-Victnam parade in New York, are to be taken seriously) signal a more elemental change, a new social stance. Mike Esposito went to Syracuse University to study fine arts, Felix Cavaliere to study medicine. In 1962, both left, Esposito a graduate. Now. Esposito has turned public and Cavaliere has moved toward the arts, and each finds himself involved in the public art of the Sixties—rock and roll.

Art, nothing—rock and roll never had much to do with college before now. Stars like Bill Haley, Chuck Berry. Elvis Presley, Dion. Ray Charles, and The Shirelies seemed more like high-school dropouts, vulgar charlatans who ground out noise for juvenile delinquents. Kids were expected to lose their taste for the music when they reached college. If they didn’t switch to Stan Kenton and Frank Sinatra (or Mantovani and Patti Page) they would be seduced by modem jazz or folk music. Maybe they’d even learn to like Beethoven.

Times have changed. Now, juvenile delinquents go to college, and it’s getting harder to tell them from the responsibles. Some long-haired J.D. types from Liverpool and London (one of whom. Mick Jagger, put in time at the London School of Economics) have won the Queen’s eternal gratitude in the process of transforming that debased, mindless stuff into the art music of our time— or of this year, anyway. The reverberations in this country were seismic. And the kids in the colleges, which is where one learns to revere art, shook right along with them.

As the aesthetic level of the music has risen, so has the educational level of the performers. It is a rare group with college appeal that doesn’t include an ex-collegian. But the group that doesn’t include a member who stopped at high school is also rare. Jim McGuinn of The Byrds, Zal Yanovsky of The Lovin’ Spoonful, and Denny Doherty of The Mama’s and The Papa’s have never been to college. They don’t seem to have suffered, either.

Integrating our school was difficult. As always, much of the best rock and roll is Negro, but except for Carla Thomas, none of the important soul performers in the Motown and Atlantic stables has had any college. This was hardly their choice — James Brown recorded Don’t Be a Dropout because he was one himself. Miss Thomas, who is now getting her Master’s in English at Howard University, has started a Carla Thomas Scholarship Fund at Arkansas AMkN in Pine Bluff. “I cannot say that education has been the champion of all my endeavors because I worked just as hard to become a successful entertainer,” she explains. “However. I do feel that talent can best be perfected and exhibited when education is the main support.” Booker T„ of Booker T. & The MG’s. who graduated from Indiana University in music, apparently agrees.

The other Negroes at Rock come from The Sth Dimension. Two girls in the group. Florence LaRue and Marilyn McCoo, are graduates. Groups like The 5th Dimension and Harpers Bizarre, which favor the soft, jazzy sound and are really only rock by genealogy and association, invariably boast several graduates. Indeed, Art Garfunkel of Simon and Garfunkel, the first prophets of easy listening rock, has been at Columbia almost without a break since 1958; it makes you wonder if his twentysixth birthday will ever arrive.

Most of the other graduates at our college are older bohemians who came late to rock and roll, like Dave Getz of Big Brother 8t The Holding Company (who won a Fulbright in 1964) or Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg of The Fugs. (Besides Brooklyn and The New School for Social Research, Kupferberg says he has attended “Queens College, Long Island University, Columbia University, Yiddishcr Lerer Seminar un Folks Universitet, and Brooklyn State Hospital.” His generation took school seriously.) Indeed. San Francisco hippie groups commonly range from ex-grad students down. Phil Lesh of The Grateful Dead studied under Darius Milhaud at Mills in 1962, but Bill Weir, the group’s rhythm guitar, says: “I dropped out. but I dropped out of high school— five of them. As far as I’m concerned I’m in college now—you know, the International University of Good Times."

Weir is as much an exception as Lesh. The majority of serious rock performers went to college as a matter of course, looking eager and brushed like everyone else. Then something happened. Rick A nd ridge of The Seeds loved computers but hated computer school. Steve Stills of The Buffalo Spring- field took a look around the University of Florida during orientation week and never bothered to matriculate. Steve Katz of The Blues Project attended C. W. Post on Long Island for a couple of years. He drank a lot of beer and was always leaving the room during class, a doubly appropriate gesture. "I sat in class and listened to political science and I knew it was bullshit. College has nothing to do with life."

These were promising kids. John Phillips of The Mama’s and The Papa's entered Annapolis after winning high-jump championships in two states. He lasted six months. Elvin Bishop of The Butterfield Blues Band got ninety-nines on his College Boards and won a National Merit Scholarship. He majored in physics at Chicago, got good marks, and taught himself blues guitar, sitting bemused in the dorm stairwell night after night, in two and a half years his marks started to tail and he quit.

Intelligent college dropouts with artistic pretensions are nothing new. In the past, they have often affected campuses as individuals—Mario Savio is doing that now. But because of their media exposure the rock dropouts are more potent. They are the most visible representatives of the hippie subculture that is having such a profound effect on campus life. And the effect works both ways.

Their epitome is Paul Williams, a slight, pimply kid with a curtain of lank hair over his intelligent eyes. Williams is not a musician; he writes prose; he is not a typical hippie—his sloppiness is traditional bohemian. But hippie culture is anonymous anyway, and any hippie who makes a name for himself, be he writer or illustrator or rock-and-roll star, is atypical by definition. At nineteen, Williams has made a name for himself by editing and publishing a magazine called Crawdaddy ! He is, of course, a dropout, having completed a little less than a year at Swarthmore, and he doesn’t expect to return. Why should he?

The first issue of Crawdaddy! was organized, written, and printed (that is, mimeographed—the magazine is now offset) by Williams during a four-day intersession in January, 1966. It was conceived as a biweekly review of pop singles; it has evolved into a (purportedly) monthly “magazine of rock," with album reviews, interviews, a gossip column that is the wonder of the industry (people will tell Williams things they would never tell some straight reporter or agent) and general interest articles, like The Aesthetics of Rock, the work of a Hawed genius and Yale graduate philosophy dropout named Richard Meltzer. (E.g.: “The unit of rock significance is the whole of rock ’n’ roll, and this is not merely the result of the failure of reduction, as Hegel’s unit of historical significance, as all of history seems to be. Just as per- missable (sic), anyway, is the Jamies’ position in Summertime, Summertime, which resembles Hegel’s end of history, ‘No more studyin' history.' ’’ Yes. he is joking, sort of.)

Crawdaddy! is a peculiar phenomenon. Journalists like Richard Goldstein and Jann Wenner call it academic; Kurt Von Meier, a practicing academic at U.C.L.A., calls it beautiful. It is both. Here is Williams: “. . . Rock has absorbed mainstream music, has become the leader, the arbiter of quality, the music of today. The Doors, Brian Wilson. The Stones arc modern music, and contemporary ‘jazz’ and 'classical' composers must try to measure up." Or: “Rock, because of the number of senses it can get to (on a dance floor, eyes, ears, nose, mouth and tactile) and the extent to which it can pervade those senses, is really the most advanced art form we have." Williams denies vigorously that his writing is academic; he says it is “warm." And it is. His essays have both the rudimentary academicism and the fervor of a college English paper. So much so that if rock can be said to permit criticism, then Williams is a good critic, adolescent hippie or not. Which makes him the representative of a classic problem. To carry the critical banner of an artistic revolution is almost self-defeating. The eternal dilemma of the avant-garde is only intensified in a world in which the banana high gets from the California underground to the village Voice in less than a year, and from the Voice to Newsweek in less than a month. Rock has made incursions into the academic community. But the academic community has also made incursions into rock.

Let’s start with the students. Five years ago, there were jazz, folk, pop and (yes) rock coteries at every college, in descending and (for the most part) mutually exclusive intellectual order. Now they have coalesced. Five years ago an LP by a true jazzman (not a Brubeck) or a true folk singer (not Peter, Paul and Mary) might make money but could not hope for widespread distribution. Today, albums by The Fugs and The Blues Project, groups that have never had a big single, can lx? counted on to hit the top fifty or so. Undergraduates who would have been Ornette Coleman or Joan Baez fans in 1962 are buying rock. Even students of classical music are turned on by The Beatles and The Supremes. And with artiness a way of life on the most pedestrian campuses and portable stereos as ubiquitous as bookcases, the audience is larger proportionately as well as absolutely.

Of course, tastes vary, and some very uninspired rock is popular among college students. But even the ersatz stuff must be avant-garde in appearance—The Blues Magoos call their music “psychedelic" and The Monkees call an album Headquarters. But the more esoteric campus tastemakers are not satisfied with appearances. Inevitably, like Williams, they bring to the music aesthetic standards, perhaps refined, perhaps inchoate. When they make music themselves these standards will apply. Their music may still have the kind of folk vitality that has always been the prime value of rock and roll. It may still be fun. But fun and vitality survive with more difficulty in an environment of consciously aesthetic standards, even when they themselves are the standards. Hippie culture shows many of the characteristics of a folk culture. Student culture does not. It is too conscious.

Furthermore, students do influence their teachers, and among college professors there is a growing interest in rock and roll. Here, the process is slower. Kurt Von Meier, who does things like burning books on the U.C.L.A. campus (he claims it took two hours to get a reaction, all he wanted), raised departmental eyebrows when he began mentioning rock and roll in his art history lectures. In fact, he was almost fired in what is now brushed over as a misunderstanding. Von Meier says he can justify “giving lectures in rock and roll by saying it’s not the individual subject matter that counts—anything can be studied. But actually that's kind of a cop-out. There is another level that the administrators and the art historians. God knows, will be the last to understand. The greatest rock- and-roll tunes have intrinsic worth as rock and roll. That’s the strongest defensible position.”

Von Meier is collaborating with Carl Bclz, an assistant art history professor at Mills, on a history of rock and roll that should be published next year. Belz has also included rock in his art history lectures, but Mills, which is noted for its avant-garde music program, has given him little trouble. In fact, it authorized a small grant to complete the book; it sponsored a series of lectures by him on rock and roll; and the Tape Music Center at Mills produced a conference on rock in association with the University of California Letters and Science Extension at Berkeley. (A series of four was planned, but only two—“Rock *n' Roll” and “The Generation Gap”— got sufficient enrollment. “Communication” and “Alienation” flopped. Styles do change.) Swarthmore has sponsored a rock festival and folk festivals at other colleges are going electronic. Interest among sociologists, especially media-oriented ones, is high. If only as a facet of paunchy America’s obsession with youth, such enthusiasm is hardly surprising.

Significantly, though, it rarely extends to the music faculty. Peter Winkler, a young classical composer who is earning a Ph.D. at Princeton, jokes that he would like to do his thesis on Berlioz and The Beatles. He is so pessimistic about his chances that he doesn't even plan to submit the topic. His department chairman. Kenneth Levy,says such a thesis might be "proper if the person had the proper orientation, knew the inside and the outside.” Levy and many of his fellows use phrases like “nice harmonies,” "extraordinary taste,” and "original sounds” to describe the music of The Beatles, by far the most sophisticated rock musicians. But that’s as far as it goes. Those with side interests in popular music are especially vehement. Composer Milton Babbitt, an expert on the American popular music of the late Twenties, refuses to hear The Beatles’ Strawberry Fields Forever through to the end. One department chairman known for his fondness for jazz calls rock "the grossest manifestation of the most vulgar sim- plemindedness.” If there is a music professor anywhere with an interest in the aesthetics of rock and roll, he is keeping himself well-hidden.

Among classical music students, however, things are different. Winkler reports high interest among other grad students at Princeton. Wayne Kirby, who plays bass for a group called The Wind In The Willows and also studies double bass at Juilliard, says more than half the students there dig rock. This is more than the generation gap in action. It has to do with the possible exhaustion of traditional aesthetic places) and provide lyrics that make good sense within the framework. Composers show a similar sophistication. But rock cannot approach the complexity and subtlety of classical music, or even good jazz, and remain rock. Arthur Berger, who holds the Naumberg Chair of Music at Brandeis University, is one academic who seems to have an understanding of some of this.

“All sound isn’t of one kind,” Berger says. “The Beatles are current for a number of months and then they fade. Art music is not entertainment music because art is not consumed. The fact that other kinds of art can develop doesn't replace what’s going on unless that happens to wear itself out.”

Once again, whether The Beatles mightn’t remain current for more than a couple of months is immaterial. The point is that rock does not succeed classical music. It does not even run alongside classical music. It is a different thing. In fact, it is new as entertainment as well as art. It should not be appreciated, but absorbed on a subconscious level. It should bombard the senses. Even at its most obscure it must remain far more accessible than “classical” music. Accessibility, like fun. is part of its aesthetic. The perplexing question is what happens when all those students in grad school come to understand this? Let us assume that the other tradition is dead. Environmental art, including rock, is the new tradition. Does that mean a rock establishment in the universities?

Father John Culkin, Director of the Communications Center at Fordham University, thinks it could happen: “Never underestimate the power of formal education to ruin anything." Peter Winkler, who doesn't think he’ll ever compose rock because his own education has already rendered him unfit, prays Culkin is wrong. But maybe Kurt Von Meier has the answer. He thinks college is becoming passe.

“In the next couple of years I figure nobody who’s really worthwhile will even start college anyway." he explains.

Soon, the rock and roll dropout may be a thing of the past.

The Word Gets Out

by Michael Lydon

If not on campus, then off campus. If not in the open, then Underground. In the End. there is the Word, Loud and clear

“Students are niggers. When you get that straight, our schools begin to make sense,” Jerry Farber, a teacher at California State College in Los Angeles, wrote in a March issue of the Los Angeles Free Press. “Students...are politically disenfranchised. They are in an academic Lowndes County.” The faculty and administration make all the important decisions, Farber argued. “The students get to choose their own Homecoming Queen. Occasionally, when student leaders get uppity and rebellious, they're either ignored, put off with trivial concessions, or maneuvered expertly out of position."

It was a great article, angry, brutally to the point, and, ironically, just the sort of thing that a student might have published at his peril. Precisely because of the situation Farber depicts, his article could not have appeared in a campus newspaper. It would have been too strong, but worse it would certainly have offended someone who could have taken action against the student editor. For at California State College, as at virtually every other university in the nation, there is administrational censorship, tacit if not explicit, of the campus press. College administrations have the upper hand, particularly at a time when an expelled college man is at the mercy of a voracious military draft. The range of news “fit to print” on campus is carefully circumscribed. now more than ever.

College students in search of a place to publish uncensored copy, or a publication in which to read it, have to look off campus. They find what they are looking for in the Underground Press Syndicate, a loose confederation of some thirty-odd cheaply printed weeklies and monthlies which have sprung up around the country in the last few years. It would be inaccurate to say that the Underground Press was formed as a direct result of campus censorship—dissatisfaction with the commercial press as a whole was the main stimulus—but their nearness to and frequent preoccupation with the campus scene have allowed the U.P.S. to fill in neatly where the censored college papers leave holes. The Los Angeles Free Press, which printed Jerry Farber's article, is one of the syndicate’s leading papers.

Whereas the college dailies, humor magazines and literary reviews are usually dependent on their colleges for office space, subsidies and printers—let alone student status for their editors—the Undergrounds are beholden to no one. An Underground paper can move its offices if the landlord objects; a student editor is less mobile. So it’s “Yassuh" and “Nosuh” in academia.

The students have two options if they want to rebel: write for the Underground Press, which many of them do and for which some are punished; or publish on campus and be damned, and they usually are.

The consequences of rebellious publishing via campus periodicals follow a depressing pattern. The administration suppresses; the students (sometimes aided by the faculty) fight back; then the administration gives halfway and pretends the status quo ante has been reestablished. In the past year, there have been dozens of campus incidents involving censorship and suppression. Some of the more noteworthy follow.

March, 1966: Benny Cason, editor of The Florida Alligator, the newspaper of the University of Florida at Gainesville. was fired by the “student” Board of Publications for writing editorials critical of state politicians, including the then Governor Haydon Bums. Immediately Andy Moor was named editor; next day the president of the university removed Moor and. in effect, the new managing editor, Yvette Cardozo. There were seven charges (all put forward without detailed evidence) including bias, inaccuracy, and “constant and unprofessional harassment of state government officials and friends of the university.” The editors were not returned to their jobs.

Spring, 1966: After the University of Massachusett’s humor magazine Yahoo printed a cartoon of a priest pulling a rabbit out of a chalice, the State Senate condemned the cartoon and made plans to set up a commission to investigate student publications. University President John Lederle said that the cartoon was in bad taste, but the students were entitled to their mistakes. However the university withheld funds from the magazine, and it has not been able to continue publication.

October. 1966: The September issue of El Burro, the University of Texas at El Paso’s humor magazine, first annoyed the administration with a cartoon cover of a man despondently carrying away a cross, while a Mod girl in bell-bottom slacks stood proudly in its place. The clincher came in October when the magazine featured a fictitious interview between Jesus and John Lennon. The editor was fired, and the magazine was suspended for the rest of the fall term.

October, 1966: Tommy DeFrank, editor of Battalion, the newspaper of the Agricultural & Mechanical College of Texas, was fired for what was called “his constant needling of the administration." DeFrank’s explanation: “I was guilty of crossing | A&M’s president] Earl Rudder, and that's one thing you just don’t do."

October. 1966: Charles Kaska and Thomas Breslin, two daring journalists at Monmouth College in New Jersey, wrote in their independent monthly, The Hawker, that college trustee Marcus Daley was a “political hack” and that the college should “exorcise [him]." Whereupon they were warned not to distribute the magazine on campus; they refused the warning and were suspended and asked to leave campus. When they returned they were arrested for trespassing. Although they were subsequently cleared of the civil charges. Mr. Kaska and Mr. Breslin are no longer at Monmouth.

In January of this year there was a rash of incidents:

At Johns Hopkins, the student paper, the Newsletter, printed a ballot for the Man of the Year. The reader could vote for Richard Speck. Charles Whitman, the Cincinnati Strangler, or for President Johnson, described as “a Texas plowboy who has come a long way in the American crime business.” It accused him of murdering Kennedy, Oswald, Ruby and others, and said his “hobby is bombing defenseless people.” University President Milton Eisenhower reacted in rage and had the co-editors suspended. Asked if the suspension was a violation of freedom of the press, Eisenhower replied: "Don’t ask a stupid question like that. That newspaper is subsidized by the university. It is paid for by us. It is a house organ." Two days later he calmed down, and the editors were reinstated.

The Daily Bruin of the University of California at Los Angeles was unwise enough to print a long review of a book of drawings by George Grosz in its weekly supplement. Intro. The review, by graduate-student and art-critic Jerome Small, included four-letter words and a reproduction of a Grosz drawing of a woman with her skirt raised and a man petting her. Los Angeles County supervisors and two Republican students leaped to the attack. Intro was suspended. Governor Ronald Reagan, who had just voted to fire U.C. President Clark Kerr, commented, “Anybody who would print anything like this is sick.” The two students filed a suit in Los Angeles County Superior Court to prevent publication of “filth and pornography." The case was dropped, and when the furor died down, the student Communications Board allowed Intro to resume publication.

Cornell’s literary magazine, The Trojan Horse, was confiscated by the head of the campus police who charged that it violated the state's anti-obscenity law. The article in question was Selections from a Journal by David Murray, which detailed the sexual experiences of Murray, a nonstudent resident of Ithaca. The Horse's printer had refused to set Selections, which the editors then had mimeographed and stapled into the magazine. The editors were arrested by the county district attorney. Richard Thaler. A mob of students prevented police from removing the fourteen arrested from campus. Over the final-exam break the students quieted down, and shortly thereafter a State Supreme Court justice ruled that Selections may have been “garbage and trash." but was not legally obscene.

The Faculty Committee on Student Activities nt Queens College in New York City removed Alan Orenhcher from his post as editor of Phoenix, the college newspaper, for printing an article analyzing the power structure of the deans’ offices. The committee also placed the entire editorial board on disciplinary probation. An appeal was successful in removing probation and having Orenlichcr returned to office after a week.

February, 1967: It took the threat of a strike of The Michigan Daily’s staff to force the University of Michigan’s Board of Student Publications to allow Roger Rapoport to become editor. His offense had been writing in the Daily that Regent Eugene Power. President of University Microfilms, Inc., a nationwide firm that had contracts with the University Library, was in conflict of interest. That the state attorney general subsequently found that Power’s positions as president of University Microfilms and as regent of the university were in conflict and that Power resigned seemed to have no bearing on the case as the Publications Board saw it.

February. 1967: Being a part-time police reporter for The Arizona Republic was what did in John E. Polich, editor of Arizona State University’s State Press. The rule against holding an outside job while editor had been passed half an hour before Polich took office. Half the staff resigned in protest, but Polich is no longer editor.

March-April, 1967: The Boston University administration had a hard time handling Ray Mungo, editor of the B.U. News. In long editorials which he backed up by statements from experts, he called for the impeachment of President Lyndon B. Johnson, for abortion reform in Massachusetts. and the legalization of marijuana. Mungo sent the Johnson editorial to Speaker of the House John McCormack. A student-led committee collected 6.000 signatures on a petition, which they delivered to McCormack, expressing their disagreement with the editorial; but an apology for the editorial was sent to every member of the House of Representatives by the President of Boston University. Then it was discovered that the petition had been run off in the university public relations office, had been written with the help of university personnel, and that the university had given the students money for their trip to Washington to present the petition to the Speaker.

Such open cases of oppression from college administrations are probably few compared to the hundreds that involve more subtle forms of restraint. Not every student editor is threatened with expulsion, but a short friendly call from the dean can have the same effect on a more timid editor. The broad result is a campus press a bit tamer than it would like to be and certainly less controversial than its readership would like to see it. Thus the popularity of the Underground Press. Off-campus papers, not always tied to any campus at ail, are completely unfettered by deans and. so far, unmolested by the police. “If I want to read what the Red Squads and narcotics agents are up to,” says a Berkeley co-ed, "I read the Berkeley Barb. For the usual day-to-day stuff I read The Daily Californian.” In the Underground papers, anything goes, whether it be four- letter words, suggestive photographs or controversial news items. The syndicate is a year old.

The Press Unchained

To begin at the beginning, in the Spring of 1964 in Los Angeles, Art Kunkin, then thirty-six, a tool and diemaker by trade and an intellectual by inclination, was out of a job. In an article written for the East Side Almanac, the sheet of Mexican-American community leaders in the slum of East Los Angeles. Kunkin had accused Lyndon Johnson of incompetence and ignorance in his handling of the Mexicans' complaints at a conference held two weeks before Kennedy was killed. Weeks later.

F.B.I. men were asking his employers if he were a Communist; despite his protests that he was an anti-Communist Socialist of the Norman Thomas school, in no time he was fired. He decided to start a newspaper. He was an editor on East Side Almanac, knew a bit about printing and, as a Socialist bred in New York, had a few ideas about community politics. So he put $15 into a letter asking for help, and in response got $200 in ads and enough stories for an issue. On the floor of his living room he pasted up his first logo, a black square within which “Los Angeles” sat in a tight, white rectangle, and below it. in tall capitals, “Free Press” stood on its own. “Puritanism scores victory” was the first head, a banner over a report of the Scorpio Rising obscenity trial. The run was five thousand copies.

That was the beginning, simple and small, of the Underground Press, one of the more peculiar by-products of life in Credibility Gulch. Just over a year later Max Scherr, onetime lawyer and author of law textbooks, put capital left over from the sale of his bar and New Left hangout, the steppenwolf, into the Berkeley Barb. That October, Walter Bowart and Allan Katzman decided the village Voice of New York was missing the boat and started The East Village Other; after a few issues, John Wilcock, a writer for the Voice, joined them. In 1966 the papers grew like grass: Austin got The Rag, Detroit The Fifth Estate, East Lansing The Paper, London (Ontario) International Times (I.T.), Toronto Satyrday, San Francisco The Oracle, and Mendocino, California, The Illustrated Paper. Nineteen-sixty-sev- en has seen dozens more, over half of them existing at the fringes, or within easy reach of university communities. The Underground Press Syndicate, a brainstorm of E.V.O. editors, formed to attract advertising and create an editorial copy pool, can hardly keep up with them all. "Any paper that calls itself Underground and writes asking to get in, gets in," says E.V.O. editor Allan Katzman. "We don't believe in checking them.” Amazingly enough, few if any of the papers have folded, and most are even putting a little money in the bank. Best of all they print what they want and no one touches them. Few have suffered much more than occasional harassment. Circulation for the thirty-odd papers is now over 300,000.

By now the Underground papers are an accepted part of the scene, by campus hippies as well as campus "straights.” In bookstores and newsstands, they are right up there with The New Republic, National Review, and Life. Street vendors casually work the same corners as Jehovah’s Witnesses pamphleteers and the hawkers of Muhammad Speaks. Resembling stylistic combinations of high-school newspapers and foreign- language weeklies, they report the events of the community of hippies, politicos, acid. pot. the universities and speed heads, teeny-boppers, dropouts, rock musicians, poets, and peace workers who want to read and write about themselves. Taken together they are like a Comintern for the new movement, spreading the word and keeping the faith alive.

The Underground paper exists because today’s hippie, in college and out, is obsessed with communication. Unlike the stereotyped, other-worldly

Beat who made individual poetic statements, the hippie now feels he can speak in a popular language. There is a community to speak to. The movement is something anybody can join. The Beats were a few people; their followers could only imitate their life-styles. For the folk wave you had to play a guitar. Now existence is passport enough, and if you can read at all, nothing in the Underground papers will be over your head. You hardly need to know how ____ to write to work on them; as a rule they are a stylistic disaster area.

Apparently endowed with a messianic vision of the new world a-coming, the papers have an overpowering solemnity of purpose. At the first syndicate conference, hosted by the Haight-Ashbury’s Oracle last March, the editors joined hands with a five-point program (eleven sub-points spelled out the details): “1. To warn the ‘Civilized World’ of its impending collapse. 2. To note and chronicle events leading to the collapse. 3. To advise intelligently to prevent rapid collapse and make transition possible. 4. To prepare the American people for the wilderness. 5. To fight a holding action in the dying cities.” The conference achieved a sort of divinity with the blessing of the seerlike presence of one Rolling Thunder, an emissary of the Hopi and Shoshone nations. Rolling Thunder, reported E.V.O., “told of ancient prophecies written in cave petroglyphs and confirmed by many visions . . . how ‘after the gourd of ashes fell from the sky' it was written that ‘man would enter a time of great trial.’ At that time, he explained, the Hopi nation would recognize that Indians had been reincarnated as white men. It is these 'longhaired gypsies’ who are now taking part in the re-tribali- zation . .. who are these reincarnated Indians.”

Reincarnated Indians running newspapers! A mindblowing image if ever there was one. Yet many of the editors believe it. At least they believe they are publishing for a new tribe which has the power to usher in a new social order. In ways, they resemble the small-town editors of the movies: upstanding men of vision and impeccable integrity who speak their minds come hell or high water, sure that the pen is mightier than the sword and that the truth shall make men free. But the papers were never envisaged by M-G-M, and their editors would look out of place in Silver Screen.

None of the editors or papers are typical of the movement. In fact, were they not encompassed by the U.P.S., it might never occur to one to link them. Some, like New York’s IF.7..V., London’s Peace News , and Chicago’s Peace Brain, speak entirely to readers in the actively pacifist wing of the movement. The Paper, The Rag, Oberlin Other, Madison, Wisconsin's Connections (one of whose editors, Robert Gabriner, was once editor of The Cornell Daily Sun), Berkeley’s Barb and Gainesville, Florida’s Crocodile are closely tied to campuses. They are like a grab bag of everything the straight campus papers won’t or are not allowed to print. To ensnare readers they include unhip subjects like sports and movie listings of any and everything that’s in town. The Illustrated Paper is very hip and druggy. but tiny and mimeographed. The Fifth Estate is competent, but seems to be a dull imitation of something the editors are sure is happening somewhere else. The LT. is best for bright snippets from correspondents on the variety of contraceptives available in Hamburg, and who is cutting pot with what for how much in Athens. Philadelphia's Grafiti is Underground only by nature of its near illiteracy: an article headed “Prevent Total Government" ends a quick discussion (maybe a thousand words) of “the history of total government and fascism" with this relevant point: “Nowadays college is becoming compulsory. Even though few people can afford tuition. The solution has become scholarships. John Hershey [sic] wrote The Child Buyer to explain the scholarship system.”

E.V.O., Free Press, Oracle, and Barb are the best of the lot and the only ones that can lay claim to being originals. By and large the others are inferior permutations and imitations of elements in the key four. The four can be bad—everybody squirmed at a Barb headline, "Kennedy’s Killers Known." over a story on a routine Mark Lane radio talk. But when they’re bad, they're bad on their own terms, and that reads better than imitative incompetence. Taken together, they cover the movement as a whole; separately each settles in its own niche. Each has an uncanny one-to-one relationship with its audience. Know them, and you know their scenes.

The Barb (circulation 22,000) is Max Scherr’s. A young-looking fifty-one, with wildly flowing hair and beard, Scherr lives like the Hugh Hefner of the Underground. Except for trips to the printer, he almost never leaves office or house; the latter is a grey, decrepit, columned mansion built in the 1870’s. From the outside it looks haunted; inside it’s like a stage-set slum. There, in pajamas and carpet slippers, Scherr works most of the night and does his sleeping in the day. “I sleep and work,” he says with a soft smile lost in hair. “I like to fed the whole paper, so I edit it all, even the ads.”

Having grown up years before the first drug hippie made the scene. Scherr is a political editor of the old school. He thought of calling the paper The Pinch Penny Pricker, with the motto, “To prick their consciences and ours," and it still takes the position, as one editor put it, “of the person under the state.” A muckraking paper with a bitter edge, it devotes some of its space to stories of police brutality under headlines like "Berkeley Fuzz Shifty as Shannon Shafted," that one over a report on unfair treatment to a Trotskyite candidate for city council. Scherr is proud of the number of stories it has; over the weekend he jots down hundreds of story ideas on scraps of paper, distributing them on Monday to his paid staff (at present, one) and to the regular volunteers. As many as get done by Thursday morning go into the paper.

In almost two years, the casual system, combined with volunteered tips, has turned up an impressive number of scoops. A cozy letter signed “Careful Shopper" gave the first printed recipe for a banana high. The Barb documented charges of discrimination at the scaffolding plant of Berkeley Mayor Wallace Johnson; it broke the story of drugs and undercover peace action among sailors at LeMoore Naval Air Station; and reliable rumor has it that local commercial press expanded their coverage of student radical activity after countless news beats in the Barb.

As do other campus-oriented Undergrounds, the Barb also scores beats on the Berkeley student paper, The Daily Californian (one of whose reporters is a Barb staffer), in covering the more controversial aspects of university life. After February’s march on Sacramento against Reagan’s proposed university budget cuts, the Barb was able to prove that “Dean Fuzz”—Special Assistant Dean of Students and campus police sergeant James L. Sicheneder—is an informant for the city police and keeps files on student political dissenters. Far more than any campus publication, the Barb is the voice of Berkeley’s protest movement.

The paper can tell it like it is. A February issue dissected race relations among the hippies and discovered that their love was largely lily- white. Scherr has snagged a first- rate columnist in Marvin Garson, husband of Barbara Garson of Mac- Bird fame, who writes “The Ombili- cal” on politico-general affairs; in one column he argued convincingly that the Monkees were C.I.A. dupes.

Success rolls off Scherr. Scoops? “All point-of-view stuff. 1 just go after what I know the commercials miss.” He’s in the black, but “I am a very poor businessman. I just pay my bills on time, so everybody thinks I’m rich. Can I help it?”

Truth he is not sure of— “At least I know you can’t report it”—and he thinks the paper is dull. “I counted up the other day and, you know, onesixteenth of the paper was schedules and programs. We give space to details of things like peace marches. Who wants to? It’s boring, but nobody else will do it, so we have to. We have to be of our community, keep to indigenous issues. Berkeley’s political, so we’re political. But it’s changing. They don’t want to attack any more; they want to love. They want to view, not read. So we’ll change, expand to fit.” The change will come none too soon. Already many hippies, who refer to it as a “hate sheet,” and even many radicals feel that the Barb carps too long and too often.

At the far end of the viewing spectrum is The San Francisco Oracle (claimed circulation 50.000), a mindflash mag to end mind-flash mags, voice of the Haight-Ashbury, and one of the loveliest things ever done to newsprint. It began last October in black and white, but now, thanks to a nameless benefactor who came, taught the secrets of split-fountain printing, and left, it mixes its copy with dazzling four-color swirls and mind-blowing visions of mandalas, Indians, women, sex, and art nouveau underbrush. The Oracle lives for beauty. Its editors seemingly never tire of finding metaphors to evoke its wonder. "The paper is more like a mother than a father, a mother at whose breast 50,000 people feed,” says Allen Cohen, twenty-seven, editor and guru-in-chief. “It isn’t Underground; it’s more on the moon than it is on earth . . . it’s an oracle like the Delphic oracle, but there are no priests to interpret the babble; we send the babble out ... on newsprint it creates something beautiful, and it. you knew, makes a lot of people feel good."

Despite an in-groupy atmosphere around its Haight Street offices—if an apartment littered with sleeping bodies and the products of at least three head shops can l>e so-called— and the frequently wordy and self- indulgent article. The Oracle’s written content can be very good indeed. An eighteen-page taped conversation, grunts, stumbled sentences and all, between Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Zen master Alan Watts became less a discussion than a cutting cim'nia verite portrait of the participants: "Leary: 'I think we should get them to drop out, turn on. and tune in.’ Ginsberg: ‘Yeah, but they don't know what that means even. . . . Don't be so angry!’ Leary: I'm not angry.’ Ginsberg: 'Yes you are.’" When the great Ken Kesey controversy (was he going to put acid in the Trips Festival Kool-Aid, and was it right or wrong?) exploded last October, The Oracle stepped back and printed the feelings of all the principals. It was perfect coverage of a community crisis in confidence. The conclusion, by hippie terms, was a fair one: Kesey was wrong, but putting him down proved the hippies were still not free of fear.

Scherr says The Oracle only covers the events of the mind, but the mind is reality in the Haight, and The Oracle covers it to perfection. It serves as the forum for new ideas (that hippies, for instance, are the children of a new Aquarian age, an age which by strict astrological calculation is not due for six hundred ninety-three years). It is perhaps the only paper to make obituaries moving: (Harvey) "was killed by a speeding drunk advertising man on the Bay Bridge. Harvey dug building things of wood, and taking walks, and seeing flowers. ... He would have become a father in two more months." It even has a gossip column, called The Gossiping Guru, with sweet items like. "Many of us are waiting eagerly for the next edition of Tim Leary's Psychedelic Prayers to come out. It is an ideal gift, in view of the number of friends and acquaintances of U.S who are planning their voyages.” Its "Trips rage" is the only complete hippie calendar. “People read us as a newspaper, but not to find out what taxes there are, what Johnson has done, and uglinesses like that,” says Cohen, "but to see beautiful art that throws them into a world that they have forgotten or only dimly remember.”

The East Village Other (circulation 32,000) is trying to find that world but by a different route. Maybe it is harder to be a mind hippie in New York where the scene is one of America’s ugliest slums, and where the winters are cold and the summers are hot. but anyway E.V.O. comes off as just a bit uptight. For E.V.O. whose logo features an eye looking disdainfully on the world, morality is as important as beauty, and the harsh world of politics has not dropped so cleanly away. E.V.O. doesn't mind being ugly. "Zodiac Mindwarp.” a monthly comic newspaper, is filled with horror movie imagery of rape and killing: the paper is filled with similar cartoons and anal puns: a parody of the programming on TV called “The Turd Voice" ami a question that filled one back page. “Are Mental Iinpatients the Enema?'’

But the first of its many saving graces is its humor. It is the only Underground that is really funny, with its luscious Slum Goddesses, Joe Brainard’s Believe It or Not ("W.W. Loo taught school in Lien. Minn.— although he had no hands- he frequently whipped unruly youngsters with his empty sleeve”). Porky Pig giving his classic sign-off. "T . . T . . TH . . THat’s all Folks." beneath a mushroom cloud, and reprints of sixth-grade essays on what is a beatnik. According to local-school kids, their neighbor beatniks "never heard of a baby carrgie they carry their babys in their arm like a fool making themselves tire,” and they "smoke something that makes them act funny.”

Yet like the other Undergrounds, its aim is super-serious. "We founded E.V.O.,” says editor-poet Allan Katzman, thirty, "because the Establishment press had entirely copped out. After ten years the village Voice had, too. It had something to lose.

We were artists, and this was also an artistic endeavor because we were restless with art; the avant-garde was being eaten up by the Establishment.” Now the paper’s purpose, says Katzman, is “to convince people that they are not crazy. We know we’re not crazy, but a lot of people haven’t learned. We’re also religious; we say, ‘Yes, Virginia, hate is bad.’ That makes us super-political, political through morality.”

It’s difficult to keep that many strands straight, but in the chaotic offices on Second Avenue, the staff, largest of any of the Undergrounds, with ten full-time writers and editors, somehow manages it. E.V.O. skips detailed police coverage of its own turf, but gives extended coverage to the far-out art scene and to long and generally well-written essays on aspects of American life: "American Phantasmagoria: Permutations and Combinations for L.B.J."; “Los Angeles: 1984 Begins,” by publisher Walter Bowart; and “Whitecoat Conspiracy,” about the bureaucratic machinery that can send the sane to mental hospitals.

Sometimes E.V.O. reads like the National Inquirer. Under a grisly photo of a man holding the wincing, bleeding head of another man, Philip Procter wrote an appreciative article about Tony Agpaoa, a Filipino healer who likes to perform surgery with his bare hands: “With only his bare hands, he is purportedly able to lay open the flesh of a completely conscious human being, reach inside, remove organs or bits of tissue, and then reclose the wound—no pain, no infection, no scar.” Bowart likes to rely on standard brain-whirl-big-word prose for his prophetic essays: “The danger comes from the rapid transformation since the atomic bomb of the ionosphere affecting the electromagnetic structure of our minds as well as the weather and magnetic field which has produced a subtle but radical change in environment and produced with the help of electromagnetic extension and psychedelic chemicals atomic children . . . sequential circuital thinking encounters linear mechanical thinking."

For Art Kunkin and his Free Press, life, news and prose are a much simpler affair. A gentle man who looks like Trotsky (“An accident— I wear my beard this way because once I had a full beard, then changed it when I changed girl friends”), Kunkin has the restless curiosity of the true liberal journalist. “1 see this as a period before a new party of opposition to the present system is established. All parties I suspect; even the best degenerate. But my job is to insure a dialogue for the new party. Free debate should reign in my paper. No one must feel excluded.”

The Free Press is no less than what he says. It has printed ads for the right wing as well as for the Communist Party; it was the only paper in Los Angeles and probably in California to print the anti-L.S.D. law in full; it did the same with the District Attorney’s opposition to anti-obscenity proposal, proposition 16. Its fairness gets grudging respect from the normal enemies of the Underground. During the Sunset Strip riots last November, the police captain of the Hollywood precinct gave press passes to some of the paper's volunteer reporters and photographers, while the downtown headquarters refused to recognize the Free Press as anything more than a “cultural trade weekly.” Strip businessmen, ordinarily behind the cops and against the teeny-boppers, wrote as a group to Kunkin praising the balance of his coverage.

But, says Kunkin, the Free Press has a tone that precludes its being a cool and neutral participator in the scene. Having founded this first of all the Undergrounds, he followed the only model available, The Village Voice. He deliberately geared it to the middle-class, left-wing intellectuals who had listened to his political commentary on the Pacifica FM station, KPFK. But as the Vietnam war escalated, the hippie movement spread, and police crackdowns became more obvious, Kunkin toughened the paper’s approach and widened its appeal.

Of all the Undergrounds, the Free Press is the best newspaper. With its expert combination of news, features and columns, it’s like an underground version of the late Herald-Tribune. Ron Cobb is one of the best political cartoonists in the country; his heavy line expresses a mordant imagination that can conjure up chilling images, like a snowfall of pills falling on a sweet Christmas-card scene of rural America. One front-pager was a leaked report of a secret vice-squad teaching session, written by one of the cops present. It told of one instructor giving a class his rules on homosexual arrests: “Once you have a violation, make the arrest. Don't wait for it to develop into something more serious. No," he said to laughter, “don't wait around for a grope.” In the week of the Spring Mobilization March in San Francisco, the Free Press dared print a vicious attack on the march from a New Orleans New Lefter: "All the old left will come out and bask in the afternoon sun of liberalism. Johnson will say he too is seeking peace.” Former Beat diarist Larry Lipton speaks his mind in Radio Free America: “Of would-be J.F.K. assassins there was no dearth: it was just a ques
tion of who would get the first shot at him. J.F.K. was, in November, 1963, America’s most wanted man.”

Kunkin runs the show quietly. "It makes me happy. We're shaking people up like I never thought possible. You know, we used to be broke. We’d open up the office candy machine for money to buy dinner. Now we just grow. Who can stop it?”

So the presses roll on, and the Undergrounds divide and multiply, carrying the Word like broadsheets of a revolution. A few Undergrounds are even cropping up on campus now. At the University of Wisconsin, the biweekly independent Connections has come upon the scene with considerable bravado, citing the then Chancellor Robben Fleming's "cold war technocrat mentality.” And at Stanford, there is Resistance. an angry periodical published by The Experiment (Stanford’s version of a free university). Its first issue was headlined “Misuses of the University”; another article charged Stanford ami members of its faculty with flagrant and mercenary militarism. Of course they are not really Underground. Nothing could be easier or safer to produce, distribute, and sell than an Underground paper, unless it is banana peel. But the word creates a romantic spell and, with it. the papers and the revolution they herald become as great as the believer’s power of imagination.

"The U.P.S. is the most important journalistic event since Henry Luce founded Time,” says Max Schorr. "We’ve had external immigrants to this country, who have had strange clothes and ways, then slowly assimilated in. Now we have internal emigrants, who are assimilating out.” "We are fighting the war of leisure time," says Katzman, who is planning to set up a ham radio link between the U.P.S. office in New York and the office of The San Francisco Oracle to pass the word even faster. The U.P.S. also plans to send a daily mimeographed news sheet to all member papers. "We have taken the middle-class ideal of leisure time underground by being dropouts. The dropouts will win.” As demanded of him. the Oracle’s Allen Cohen becomes truly oracular: “The Harb and The Oracle, the political papers ami the mind papers are twins. They are like Castor and Pollux even if they don’t know it. The activist papers are the new gods that defeat the old gods. But meanwhile the foundations of the new kingdom that will prevail must be laid. That is what the mind papers do. Man has been separated from man by fear and the city. We, the Aquarian youth, shall begin the new tribal culture where peace and love will reign. We are the new Indians.”