RAG MEMOIRS: Fall 2005 

Kate Braun  Thorne Webb Dreyer  Gavan Duffy  Cam Duncan  Chris Durden  Lars Eigner  Hunter Ellinger  Alice Embree  Bob Erler  Dennis Fitzgerald  Nick Hopkins  Richard Jehn  Jeff Jones  Connie Lanham Moreno  Val Liveoak (Grigassy)  Alan Locklear  David MacBryde  Bill Meacham  Carol Neiman (aka Sarito)  Doyle Niemann  Scott Pittman  Dick Reavis  Linda Rountree Gann Porter  Steve Russell  Sharon Shelton-Colangelo  David Sonenschein  Marcelle Stevens (nka Paula Moore)  David Waddington  Mary Walsh  Mariann Wizard 

And ... you can still add your memoir

Richard Jehn    RDJehn@aol.com

I never worked for The Rag.  Well, I don't think I did anyway.  But as I search the Internet to ensure my cooking Web site is coming up properly, I find a page that lists me as author of an article in The Rag (23 October 1967 - Page 5: McCallum high school (Richard Jehn)).  WOW, the things that slip through the sieve of my memory astonish me.  Or was it just all the dope I was smoking at the time?

I DO remember selling the Rag on the corner of Guadalupe and 24th for months from August 1967 through the Winter, and perhaps beyond that.  In fact, that activity was a critical source of income for brief periods in my short career as an independent child in Austin.  To clarify, I was a child of Austin, born and raised there.  I tired of my life with parents at a tender age (16), so moved to a rooming house near 23rd and Pearl (it actually burned down that Winter sometime, after I had moved to Dallas for a short while, thankfully).

As I read these memoirs today of people who were more closely associated to the Rag than I, I felt a powerful connection to all of you, regardless of whether I actually knew any of you or not.  You wrote of things that I remembered and of things that I still care about, and of memories that belong to all of us, I think.

It's a joy to know that something like this can live on almost 40 years later.   [Top]

Jeff Jones    Pacifica, California

      Development Consultant Jeff Jones has assisted approximately 40 Bay Area non-profit arts organizations to develop three-year strategic plans and has designed and implemented successful fundraising strategies for over 100 Bay Area groups over the past 20 years. 

      Since 1980 he has authored over 3000 successful grant proposals, for clients such as the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the MEDEA Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women, the San Francisco Gay Pride parade Committee, the Dyke March, the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival, Chinese Cultural Productions, the Dance Brigade, La Pena Cultural Center, La Galeria de la Raza, the Luggage Store, the Queer Cultural Center and numerous others.

      In 1990, he received the San Francisco Human Rights Commission's annual Achievement Award for his work is combating cultural discrimination.  An  unpublished report documenting institutionalized discrimination in the San  Francisco's arts funding patterns was distributed throughout the country by the National Endowment for the Arts and launched a nationwide debate about cultural equity.   [Top]

Connie Lanham Moreno

     I worked on The Rag for about a year altogether – from January 1968 until June 1969. There was a break in the middle when I worked for Liberation News Service (LNS) in DC and NYC and then traveled to Cuba with a delegation of SDS activists.

     The Rag was instrumental in getting me involved in The Movement. In those days the paper was an Austin-Houston venture. I was a fairly apolitical freshman at the University of Houston -- involved with the Student Humanists and developing an opposition to the war in Vietnam. The Rag published a letter I wrote about a peace vigil I attended at the LBJ Ranch. I was hooked! Soon Muckraker Harvey Stone had me distributing the paper in Houston and writing articles.

     When I finally moved to Austin I settled into the grunt work of the paper – typing, doing that terrible rub-on type for headlines and doing paste-up. In Austin I got a job in a print shop. I remember actually shooting negatives of the paper’s layout and burning the plates for the printer – to save money. The “guerilla” propaganda and production skills I learned on The Rag served me well in later years. I’ve produced leaflets in strange places – even on the hoods of cars.

     I spent six years in Austin – in and out of school. I never did finish my degree. Mostly I worked in the anti-war/anti-imperialist movement. The last year I was in Austin I worked on the Daily Texan when Michael Eakin was elected the editor. I wrote Op-Ed pieces and editorials -- mostly on the efforts to negotiate an end to the war in Vietnam and on the aftermath of the coup in Chile.

     When I left Austin I moved to Mexico City, then later to Los Angeles. I’ve been here for 30 years – working in the trade union movement most of that time. For the first ten years I volunteered on organizing drives and strikes – of undocumented workers. Then I first took a union staff job – organizing garment workers -- about 20 years ago. But for most of the past two decades I’ve worked with non-teaching school workers in East Los Angeles and South Central LA.

     For years I did support work for the Salvadoran unions during the war. I went to El Salvador during the war on trade union delegations. For the past nine years I’ve spent every vacation traveling throughout the developing world. And after more than 30 years I finally went back to Cuba. My daughter and I went on a trip called “Following in Che’s Footsteps.” We were in good company. There were other ‘60’s folks like me – with their kids.   [Top]

Val Liveoak (Grigassy)   PO Box 10372, San Antonio TX 78210; 210-532-8762;  valliveoak@juno.com

     Ragstaff memories:  I was involved with The Rag from 1972-76. I wrote a few articles, went to a few staff meetings and pasteup nights (in 72 or 73, friends had to pry me away around 11pm to attend a surprise birthday party—for me!) and I sold The Rag in ‘72-73, mostly on the Drag by the UT Co-op. My son EddieGrigassy at 3 years old was probably the youngest Rag vendor, before he went off to Three Candles Nursery School. Working with The Rag was one of many things I did as part of the Austin scene—I also worked at the Auto Co-op, Peoples Community Clinic, and participated in food co-ops, guerrilla theater, protests, War Resisters League, the Bread and Roses School, the Austin Community Tax etc.

     I live below the Federal taxable income, in an intentional neighborhood in San Antonio. I worked as an RN for 20 years and now am a full-time volunteer. I coordinate of Friends Peace Teams, a Quaker program I co-founded in 1993, and facilitate Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) workshops. My peacework has taken me to El Salvador (1986-90), and I’ve done AVP in prisons and communities in the US, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Burundi, Rwanda, Kenya and most recently in St. Croix. Yeah it’s a hard job but someone’s got to do it.   [Top]

Alan Locklear

     I carried the very first issue of The Rag in the back of my VW bug from Larry Freudiger's house to the Rag office where we collated and folded it.  I wrote a few articles and sold The Rag on the street off and on until I  moved to Berkeley in 1970.  I did some layout, hauled some papers from the printers and unloaded a lot of bundles of papers.  I was Pizzaman for a time.

    I continued to work for The Rag peripherally during the late 60's, as an adjunct to my involvement with SDS. With Doyle Niemann, Bill Meacham, Nancy Sweeney, Martin Murray and our "Liberator 500" (really!!) mimeograph machine, I started the New Left Education Project and pamphleteered for ayear or so until Martin and I were busted by the University.  We were sued, along with The Rag. The suit wound up establishing the right of students to sell political literature on campus.

    I organized Ecology Action of Austin (still operating as Ecology Action of Texas) while working on The Rag in 1969, and wrote and compiled radical ecology articles for The Rag leading up to the first Earth Day.  I have been active in environmental politics ever since.

    My eco-articles were illustrated by Marie Valleroy who I met in November, 1969, in the Rag office in the basement of the old "Y".  Marie and I married in 1979 (the best thing to come out of my Rag experience). We live in Oregon, in a solar house with an organic garden out back.  Marie is a physician and I volunteer with several community and environmental organizations and our food co-op.   [Top]

David MacBryde     davidmacbryde@web.de

Through the Looking Glass:  Confessions of a rather buttoned-down Yalie who read the Rag.

     I came to Austin to study in John Silber`s philosophy department. That started out interestingly – I even got a “National Defense Act” scholarship – but turned into a horror trip, e.g. the department’s treatment of Larry Caroline.  Luckily I read the Rag. That opened me up. It “blew my mind” – out from grayness and into wonderland. I had studied a lot in New Haven, and worked with IBM and in radio astronomy. But it was Reading the Rag that opened up vistas, of the wide world and within.

    That was quite a trip, actually lots of trips. And I am currently in Berlin, Germany.

    Of course it was not just Reading the Rag.  What impressed me was that there were real people, or people trying to be real, out and about in Austin working together (and not so together) and producing value. At 10 cents a cheep thrill, but of inestimable value creation.  As a journalisticenterprise one could argue about the value of any particular article or artwork, but it was indisputably the case that a “counter” reality was being created – as a journalistic product in an otherwise gray and unwise media landscape, and importantly as a real bunch people really out there really trying, warts and all. (Philosophically, this was “experimental ontology”,the active part of social ontology, seeking to change what “is” is, what our social reality is.)

    I sure valued those efforts, warts and all. And the Rag reflected not only the immediate production of the Rag, but touched on, was touched by, all manner of (sometimes ill mannered) efforts in Austin – e.g. an article on the creation of Armadillo Press (“The Peoples Friend, the Tyrants Foe”, an IWW print shop), and much much more, from gardens to the stars – from theWilhelm Reich Memorial Pool up Barton Creek to the old Hunnicutt House, and beyond. For democracy and justice, and against terror in Chile and South East Asia. Just look back, in joy and sorrow, with successes and failures, at the rich variety of individual and community (better: communities) efforts down home in Austin. Hopefully, with computers and video, the RagReunion can be a focus and help make publicly available more personal and political history of Austin Biographies of Changes, personal and social, warts and all  -- if people can do their ABCs as Alice Embree asks.   [Top]

    I will try to write more – somewhere – about “then”, like my article about my and the other Shuttle Bus Drivers (ATU) victory,  and about what happened later, life after the death of the Rag, the demolition of the Hunnicutt House, and the end of efforts such as the “Bread and Roses Center”. Here I will just note that I am living in Berlin, Germany, where for example it was nice to partake in a huge event, with hundreds of thousands of people (the largest ever in Berlin, and even appreciative police), and which I did not have to help organize, where in effect the whole population (well over 80%) agree, me too, about a whole lot, and disagree with the current US misadministration.

    One “urgent” matter – in two years I will go on pension. (With my biography it will be a small pension – “too little to live on, too much to die on”.) I won't starve. I will be looking for cheep thrills. I was also around SDS in Germany – same letters, but also many different meanings for different individuals. It may be time – and delighted that Jeff Jones has also serendipitously thought a lot about this – to start considering, seriously and for fun and “cheep thrills”, doing something like “Seniors for a Democratic Society” – maybe internationally:  “Seniors for Democratic Societies”.  For a start-up, or up-start, see www.sds-international.net   [Top]

Bill Meacham

     I joined the Ragstaff in the summer of 1969.  I had come to Austin to the UT graduate department of Philosophy in September, 1968, and had almost immediately joined the radical anti-war movement, having been active in it – and before that, the Civil Rights movement of the early ‘60s – in the northeast.  Judy Smith announced an organizing meeting for people who wanted to join work on The Rag, and I showed up. The meeting was in the basement of the old “Y” at the corner of 22^nd and Guadalupe. You walked down some steps or else came in through a window into a large, messy space full of typewriters and tables and paper and people.

     The Rag was a kind of home for me, certainly a community of like-minded people and a place where I could fit in. We wrote about the war (at that time “the war” referred to the war in Vietnam), about life style, about the university administration, about the farm workers’ struggle for justice and a decent wage, about other workers’ struggle for justice and a decent wage, about music, about culture, about city council politics, and on and on. I wrote a lot, particularly about the city council and music. I covered the city council because we wanted to cause change locally as well as globally. I wrote record reviews because then I got to keep the records that the record companies would send in hopes of creating demand for their product. Later on, I wrote a lot about co-ops. We were all about creating radical, revolutionary change, change in the society in which we found ourselves, and change in our own lives. We lived in communal houses, shared meals, work, music and dope, and talked endlessly about capitalist imperialism and how to overcome it. The lifestyle was not just sex, drugs and rock-and-roll (the drugs and rock-and-roll were plentiful, but the sex was a little spotty, at least for me). The lifestyle was about community and treating people well and living in such a way that everyone was included and nobody was ripped off. And that’s what our politics were about. We attempted to live our politics and politicize our lives. In large part we succeeded, at least for a time.

     I was a flamboyant character. I would sell The Rag on campus on Monday mornings, singing and playing my harmonica and hollering out “Getcher Rag, getcher Rag! Underground newspaper, good for your mind!” I recall pissing somebody off who had a music appreciation class in one of the classrooms around the mall and did not like my harmonica. A lot of people bought the papers! I remember another person coming up and staring and listening intently as I played a riff from a jazz song, "The creator has a master plan: peace and happiness throughout the land." There was a big rally about the war at the end of which we were planning to march to the Capitol. Gavan Duffy and I sent them off from the stage with a rousing rendition of “Dien Bien Phu, ’72.” Steve Russell and I went to San Antonio to sell Rags with a cover story about some boondoggle scheme to pipe water all over Texas. We got busted and paid our bail with nickels, dimes and quarters.  Pissed off the cops! It was rebellious fun to piss off the cops, but it could get dangerous.  I was busted for allegedly slashing a tire in a protest against the university’s plan to ban non-students from the Chuckwagon, a cafeteria in the student union where we all used to hang out. I got beat up in jail by some inmates – I’m sure I was placed in that cell for that purpose – and afterwards became a proponent of non-violence for a time.

     In some ways it is painful to remember those times because I had a lot of anger and fear and anxiety that were not fun to live with. Although I could get on a stage and exhort crowds impressively, I had trouble being really close with people.  I had a lot of admirers but felt like I had few close friends. I felt lonely and isolated despite being in the Rag community.

     One of the things that alleviated those feelings was the Supper Club.  About thirty of us would meet twice a week for supper.  Two people would cook, two others would clean up, and the rest would just show up and eat. The cooks and clean-up crew rotated, so everybody worked hard about twice a month and we all got to eat and hang out with our friends.  A particularly memorable meal was piping hot soup served in Jim Wheelis’ non-airconditioned upstairs apartment in July. Another was a delicious dish of grubs served as an appetizer in the old Hunnicut House, since torn down, on 12^th street near the county courthouse. I popped one in my mouth and bit in. It had the texture of a grape and tasted rather bland. Most of the meals were just hanging out and eating with friends. The Supper Club is one of the things I miss the most.

     Another form of community was co-ops: housing co-ops and food co-ops.  There was even an automobile co-op, which was actually a worker-owned collective. I got involved in the co-op movement by attending a meeting in the role of reporter, and then I kept going and promoting co-ops in The Rag because here was a group of people deliberately and consciously living a life of community and creating a viable alternative to the oppressive capitalist system around us, an economic entity in which the consumers were the owners and had power over the enterprise.

     Power was the main issue. We did not like big government waging war on small countries far away who posed no threat.  We did not like big business mistreating workers so some could get rich at the expense of others. We did not like big university administrations telling students and non-students where they could meet and what the could talk about.  We did not like people telling us what to do.  We did not like authoritarian and hierarchical organizations in general, and the organization of the Ragstaff reflected that bias.

     The Ragstaff basically consisted of whoever showed up to do the work of putting out the paper, and those who did so repeatedly over a long period of time were recognized as having some moral authority, but no right to actually tell anybody else what to do.  Somebody thought up the phrase “Brought to you by the miracle of functioning anarchy,” and that was a good description. We made decisions by consensus, decisions about what articles to run, what to put on the front cover, how much to charge for the paper, where to sell it and whom to allow to advertise in it. Sometimes the meetings were long and rancorous, but more often just long and untidy. Anarchic, as it were.

     Friday and Saturday nights were layout nights, when we typed up copy and pasted it down on big sheets of paper that we would take to the printer. There was a nice sense of freedom. Each of us would volunteer to lay out a page or two, often the page that contained their own article. You could be creative in arranging elements on the page, finding suitable graphics for decoration, fitting elements together. This made for some double-page spreads that looked attractive and others that looked chaotic. The Rag often looked rather amateurish, but it always had a sense of vibrancy and immediacy that (we thought) was compelling.

     We had some victories.  Before my time, The Rag won a Supreme Court case allowing us to sell the paper on campus.  We (and many others) eventually eroded support for the war and ended it. We were consistently anti-racist and pro-feminist. Today there’s still work to be done, but the place of people of color and of women in the USA is much better than it used to be, and we had a hand in that.

     We had some defeats. After a huge march against the war – 40,000 people marching illegally past the Capitol – we printed lots of extra copies of the Rag, hoping keep the momentum going and make some extra money.  We sold a bunch on Monday.  Tuesday morning we came in and found that the office had been broken into and all the papers stolen! Our opponents had pulled a dirty trick.

     The Women’s Liberation movement was in full swing and was pretty much a done deal in the Ragstaff.  Judy Smith, Linda Smith, Lolly Smith, Barbara Hines, Vic Foe and several others were a strong cadre of women who did not run things – nobody ran things – but had very strong influence.  Judy Smith, in particular, was a Valkyrie who had endless energy, good sense and compassion.  I was particularly struck by her insistence that we were not trying to be opinion leaders. According to Judy our role was not to get other people to think like we did, but to get them to think for themselves. Because of the oppressive nature of leadership in traditional hierarchical organizations, nobody wanted to be a leader, but it was clear that Judy was a strong one.

     There were ways we could have done better, but we did not have the tools to do so. Despite our anti-racist stance, we were pretty much a white, middle-class movement. We made some alliances with black movements, but rarely made close friends. We did not know how to get rid of our internalized fear of people different from us. We did the best we could.

     The Ragstaff eventually dispersed and people went their own ways. I was only marginally involved at the end, having gotten a job in the Inter-Cooperative Council of housing co-ops. I helped Alan Pogue clean out the office, which had moved to offices upstairs at 2330 Guadalupe. We found a twenty-dollar bill, big money back then, and my recollection is that Alan got it.  It was the end of an era, an era that ranged from the middle of the Civil Rights movement past the end of the Vietnam war.

     There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then. I worked in housing co-ops and Wheatsville Food Co-op for several years, then worked my way up through high-tech to my current position as project manager and requirements analyst for a major computer manufacturer. I got married, had a child, and got divorced. My daughter has graduated from college and is smart as a whip. I am happily re-married to Patricia Michael, a brilliant artist, mystic and landscape designer.

     I found a way to heal much of the emotional distress I was carrying around: Re-evaluation Counseling, or Co-counseling (http://www.rc.org/). Rag folks would be interested in this because it has a very good analysis of how internalized oppression operates to keep people submissive, and a good program for eliminating it. I’ve been meditating for years and now lead Sufi Dancing, also known as Dances of Universal Peace, on a regular basis.

     The Rag was an integral part of The Movement, as we called it, for social justice.  It was a collective, a place to hang out, a newspaper, and a community. I’m glad to have been part of it.   [Top]

Carol Neiman (aka Sarito)    carol_neiman@msn.com

     The Rag was all about the people, for me. I washed up on the shores of the University of Texas in 1966 out of desperation – either accept the scholarship that arrived in the mail, and try once more to fit myself into the straitjacket of academia, or face certain brain death in a series of low-paid, girl-college-dropout jobs. Imagine my delight when I discovered I didn’t have to do either!

     The very first day I walked into the Chuck Wagon, I spotted all these interesting looking people hanging out at  a couple of tables. They had a kind of light around them, a sparkle in their eyes. Lots of hair, comfortable clothes. They laughed, they were animated. Their shoulders were noticeably un-stooped, apparently free of the excessive burdens of textbook slavery.   

     Before I knew it I had been swept off my feet by a Mad Hatter, stopped going to my classes, gone  through the looking glass into a wonderland of intelligent, funny, creative, risk-taking creatures with a contagious passion for creating a totally new kind of world. A world where there were no boundaries and nothing to divide people from one another. I’d found my university at last.

     Been chasing the light and dissolving boundaries ever since – from the Ozark Mountains to China, from Boston to India, from London to Brussels, Koln to  Tuscany. Now in New York City, as editorial director for Osho International Foundation, taking acting & playwriting classes on the side.   [Top]

Doyle Niemann    Mt. Rainier, MD     301-864-1746 home    doyleniemann@comcast.net 

     I came to Austin in 1968 on a transfer from the University of Nebraska already questioning the War in Vietnam and the “history” I had been taught.  The Rag – and the community around it – helped continue that process.  The Rag had news and information available nowhere else.  And it was FUN!  I was much more active in the political scene in Austin at the time than I was with the Rag and only wrote a few articles, but the experience writing for the Rag and working around it set me on the path that has gotten me (perhaps ironically) where I am today:  to Space City News in Houston with Thorne and Vicky, Cam and Sue, Dennis and Judy, to The Great Speckled Bird in Atlanta, In These Times in Chicago, economic research, Community Jobs and Rural America in Washington, DC, and then into labor-oriented communications, local politics and, most recently, law school.  Now, I’m a local prosecutor and elected state official, but the critical thinking, independence, irreverence and ability to work with diverse (and even weird) people that was first fostered on the Rag continue to serve me well.    [Top]

Scott Pittman     Santa Fe, New Mexico

     Scott Pittman here, I can't remember what years I was involved in the RAG, Thorne Dreyer was editor and Carol Neiman was major heavy lifter.

    Two issues that stand out in my mind are my photo graph of two lions gettin it on in the Brekenridge Zoo in San Antonio which lead to me going to the grand jury on obscenity charges, and photos taken from the boot of an MG?? of a narc convention at a motel, I didn't get caught on that one.

     I would love to see everyone and perhaps could make it in September.   [Top]

Dick Reavis

In bios for jobs and such, I usually describe myself as a “Texas journalist currently employed as a professor of journalism at North Carolina State University.” Of course, the whole tale is longer than that…..

When the founders decided to start the Rag, they invited me in, I suppose, because they knew that my father operated a small-town Texas newspaper. They must have figured that I knew something about the business.

I didn’t know and didn’t want to know. I had no ambitions, and I sure didn’t want to become a journalist.

I didn’t help with the first issues, and didn’t write for the paper for, I believe, more than a year. Afterwards I wrote to advance causes which were of interest to me, not out of any desire to develop a skill that didn’t immediately open the way to the Revolution. I didn’t believe in journalism; I believed in theory and action.

In late 1967, I formed a group inside of SDS, Friends of the Progressive Labor Party. Our differences with other SDS members soon became so bitter that I did not attend the Rag reunion, fearing that in some quarters, bad memories might be alive even now.

In late 1969, FPL ousted me, on pretty good grounds, and my wife, Becky Brenner, whom most of you probably knew, divorced me. What followed PL for me was a wandering in the political wilderness. A group of us ex-PLers got together in New Orleans and tried to figure out what to do with the rest of our lives.

We didn’t come up with any clear answers, but while there, I began to write about the affairs of the longshore union for the Daily World, organ of the CPUSA. A wildcat strike broke out. The Times-Picayune minimized it, but whenever anything noteworthy happened, I’d telephone the World and dictate a story. The following morning I’d pick up a couple of hundred copies at the airport and with help from friends and strikers, distribute them at the longshore hiring hall. It was an exciting time. I learned daily journalism.

By 1974, however, I’d begun to believe—correctly, I think—that the U.S. has entered into a right-wing drift. It seemed to me that I needed to go inside the System, develop my skills as best I could, and wait for about 20 years, when politics, I believed, would probably swing towards the Left again. So I took an interim job on my dad’s newspaper, in Dumas.

That move to Dumas pretty much ended my activism. Journalists have to be fair, impartial, neutral and bereft of bias, after all. Their opinions, and they have plenty, are based on fact, not belief. That being true, they are denied First Amendment rights.

By 1977, I was tired of the rural newspaper routine. I returned to Austin, finished a book on Mexican immigration, and before long, started writing for Texas Monthly. In 1981, I went onto the magazine’s staff, where I stayed until ’90, when I quit. During that time I also wrote Conversations with Moctezuma, a well-regarded book on Mexico.

Since leaving TM I’ve held several jobs in journalism. I am well-known, though unfortunately, in conspiracy circles, for a book on David Koresh and the standoff at Waco. The Ashes of Waco is the primer for that subject. It’s (surprisingly!) still in print.

The trajectory of my life has left me with no hope of retirement except Social Security. I’ll have to keep working as long as I can. Now turning 60, I am of course worried about the elements of survival.

The 20 years of rightward drift that I expected in the early 1970s has turned to 30 and more. In the years that followed my expulsion from PL, I realized that I had been a poor leader, and should henceforth be only a follower. I have since been waiting for someone or some group to speak in my name. Who among you will call Seniors for a Democratic Society to order?   [Top]

Linda Rountree Gann Porter

     My grandpa, Charlie Dunn http://www.famoustexans.com/charliedunn.htm, liked the hippies. The hippies liked him. He said they weren’t as dirty as people said and they were nice and polite for the most part. They would walk down to Capitol Saddlery on Lavaca to see him, not that they could afford the boots he made, but because they seemed to know an artist when they saw one.

     So, he wasn’t nonplussed to find out that his grand-daughter was involved in the anti-war movement and wouldn’t have been surprised to have seen my name on the masthead, the very few times it appeared in 1967 and 1968.

     I was almost 21 and the mother of a 3 month-old when my glamorous girlfriend Marilyn said she was selling ads for an underground paper and I might enjoy helping out. We were great friends: we sewed together, she babysat Baby Lizzy, so I followed her lead to The Rag.

     And there I did some typing, made some coffee, and listened and listened. I had never heard such talk in my life. Long discourses on politics, ins and outs of how a democracy should work. Sometimes the language of opposition and, gasp, revolution, hit me hard and I would have to remember to breathe. I was hooked. Nothing in my background as a Marine brat of a hard shell Baptist from West Texas prepared me for the awakening I experienced.

     As a side-bar, my macho NCO Marine father visited us in Austin in April of ’67 to see Baby Lizzy, having just returned from 13 months in Da Nang. He was grieving the breakdown of Marine honor and was mortally tired, though not injured by the fragging attempts on his life. He sat in the rocking chair by the window in our cramped “married student” housing, rocking the baby and reading The Rag and any anti-war material I could gather. He returned to his duty station in Quantico and resigned, years before he intended. He was 43 years old and a 23 year veteran, heartbroken and quietly angry. The scrapnel in his shoulder never stopped reminding him of the victory on Sai Pan in 1944 nor the loss of honor of this country he perceived as early as 1966 nor the loss of his bond to the Marine Corps.

     I’ve kept The Rags that I collected (I hope I paid my 15 cents), a talisman of my time in Austin before I ran East (everyone else was heading West, you see). I taught school, started a dropin program for homeless kids in Claremont, New Hampshire, and eventually settled on a mountain top. There I raised kids and goats. And wrote and did menial tasks for another rag, The Granite State Alliance.

     I returned to Austin in the fall of 1977, hoping to fill in again at The Rag, but, alas, it was gone. Social work appealed to my now raised consciousness so I went back to school. It seemed the only profession that would allow me to teach people how to “work the system” to get what they needed. My love has been working with people with disabling psychiatric illnesses, teaching and lending ego when hope seemed too far away, self-determination a concept not for those who have not.

      And thank you organizers of the Ragstaff Reunion for providing an opportunity to travel back in time and an opportunity for Ragstaffers to reconnect. Onward through the fog!   [Top]

Steve Russell

     I worked on The Rag regularly from 1969 to 1972 and wrote for it on occasion later.  I moved to the Daily Texan with Michael Eakin when he was elected.  I needed the money and wanted the audience of people who didn't agree with me.

     I survived the Texan through Buck Harvey's administration--Harvey was a leftie ringer who got in essentially because he was a sports writer and nobody suspected him.  I finally got nailed for referring to non-union wine as "scabrous dregs," and that was the end of my Texan column.

     While on the Texan, I did an internship in the Valley with the United Farm Workers.  At the same time I got pretty involved with electoral politics on the left-Demo side, where a coalition was forming.

     When I graduated from law school, there was an opening on the Justice of the Peace Court for the precinct that included UT.  I ran before the ink was dry on my law license.  My opponent had ten years experience, was the incumbent Student Attorney, and outspent me 2-1.  The primary difference between us was I was focused on civil rights and he was focused on consumer law.  However, I was not anti-consumer and he was not anti-civil rights, so it is probably a correct result that I lost, 53% to 47%.  I was very proud to be endorsed by The Rag.  I was not endorsed by the Texan, which had fallen back into Greek hands.

     A couple of years later, the left-liberal/Chicano/Black/labor coalition had a majority on the City Council and as a result I got appointed to the Municipal Court, and one term later I was presiding judge.  Refusal to do favors from the Bench for a councilman led to a probable loss of that office, so I ran for County Court at Law and to everybody's surprise (including my own) I won, and continued getting reelected until I left the Bench in 1995 to teach criminal justice at The University of Texas, San Antonio.

     Indiana University came along and made me an offer I could not refuse, and I find myself moved from a majority minority school to a very white one.  Along the way, I got involved in tribal politics and served two terms as President of the Texas Indian Bar Assocation.  Few people in Austin knew of my dual citizenship--just girlfriends, some on The Rag, and some people in the Valley who heard me state my citizenship as "Cherokee Nation" if I was in a perverse mood when crossing from Mexico.   [Top]

Sharon Shelton-Colangelo     210-348-2340. sharoncolangelo@sbcglobal.net

      I think it was the spring of 1967.  Though I had studied journalism when I was in school and had worked for the Daily Texan, my main job at the Rag was as a typist. For those of you who never had that unique experience, let me explain that not only did we type up all the Rag articles on old Underwood manual typewriters, but we typed the articles twice. The first go-round, we left little exes after the last word on the line to fill the column. In that way, we could see how many spaces we needed to leave the second time we typed in order to have justified lines.  Needless to say, this was tedious work and it was mostly done by women, though this had not yet become an issue.

      Nevertheless, my Rag story involves what may have been my first moment of women’s consciousness.  During those days, we had a nude on the centerfold and when sales were down, we would put the nude on the front page. During one of our low sales periods, we were discussing who would be the nude that would be on the front page, and someone said, “What about you, Sharon? You haven’t been the nude.”

      Well, I hadn’t been the nude, but something inside me rebelled against the idea of taking off my clothes to sell theRag. It wasn’t that I was a prude. I certainly had gone skinny dipping and I talked about the sexual revolution as much as anyone. But I did not want to pose for the Rag, and after countering accusations that I was being provincial (after all, I was from Wichita Falls), I heard myself saying, “Why not have a male?” “Why not a male nude?”

      A male nude? Everyone laughed. That wouldn’t sell Rags. What a ludicrous thought! But even as we all laughed (me included) I did exchange some meaningful glances with some of the other women present. Why was it our bodies that sold Rags? How was this different from what happened in the larger society? It wasn’t much later that we had a women’s meeting in SDS, an announcement which initially by the way drew similar laughter. That meeting, though, rapidly changed everyone’s consciousness, men and women.  But for me, the real transformation took place when that inexplicable NO welled up inside me at the thought of posing nude on the cover of the Rag.

      Today, my Rag experiences have helped shape the person I became. I currently teach Women’s Studies to underserved students at  Northwest Vista College in San Antonio, am actively involved with a group that is fighting a Wal-Mart on environmentally sensitive land in the Hill Country, and remain thankful that there is something in us that says NO to injustice.   [Top]

David Sonenschein     dsonen@myway.com

     Came to Austin for grad school in mid-1968, started reading the Rag from then on, and began hanging around the collective late 1969-early 1970 I think, helping mostly with typing, layout and paste up; sold from the Rag Cart a few times. Wrote pieces (articles, blurbs, poetry, a cartoon, etc) as the situation or subject seemed to call for, nothing regular, much of it I think unsigned. Left town in 1973.

     Returned to Austin in 1974 but didn’t do anything for the Rag; didn’t seem the same. Worked as a clerk for a few years, then quit to do some research at the request of Madalyn Murray O’Hair; only one article got published from that and the book deal with her fell through. Returned to being a data clerk about 1978, reading and writing on the side. Published one book in 1983, then had to flee town in 1984. Worked construction and as a cook for a few years, then as a data clerk till laid off in 2004. Published a two volume book in 1998.

    Work on the Rag, and knowing the people around it, helped focus a number of things in my own political and intellectual evolution. It was the right thing at the right place at the right time. It was the basis for the deepest sense of community I’ve ever had, but it was volatile and short-lived.   [Top]

Marcelle Stevens (nka Paula Moore)

My great grandfather, an abolitionist, volunteered out of Kentucky for the Union Army; his wife, Sarah, was a Cherokee. My fraternal and beloved grandfather was a Norman Thomas socialist, so when I arrived at UT in the summer of 1965 (summer school) I was primed for SDS although I was not consciously aware of my familial heritage or ethos until later. However, I was warned by a Blanton dorm floor monitor to stay away from SDS, so I did. By the next and my second year at UT I felt enormously alienated. My dad was a welder in a steel fabrication plant and my mother was a garment worker; my ways were working class and I simply did not fit in despite some high profile associations. I longed for a life that meant something and despised the sorority, fashion-centric and shallow atmosphere. As a freshmen, I had participated in a letter writing group to soldiers in Vietnam, and what I learned made me sympathetic to the opposition.

Thus I found myself in 1967 eagerly awaiting the Thursday publication of the Rag, which I got on the main mall each and every week. When Harry Ransom sanctioned the suspension of those students for protesting the Vietnam War (Alice Embree among them) I was angered. I was surprised when I rounded the approach to the Main Mall and saw several thousand students demonstrating! We had our own free speech movement, it seemed. Wearing a white dress, pink shoes with bows and ratted hair, I cut my first class to listen to the radicals speak, some of whom had returned from Mississippi registering people to vote. I attended numerous open-air meetings, which followed. I began to dress like the people who returned from Mississippi…frugally, unpretentiously, in work clothes. That summer I had a huge fight with my mother over buying boots. I let my hair grow long.

In those days, there were a whole host of issues, but for me, none was more important than what I now realize was the overthrow of an apartheid system (Jim Crow) that supported feudal economic relations (sharecropping). Both my grandfathers (white) were sharecroppers so when I heard the song, "Before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave" I understood it and believed it deeply for myself, as well as for others.

Someone like me does not rationally join a movement; one does so out of overwhelming passion and as some kind of step out of an impossible life. I volunteered at the Rag, and wound up getting a small job as a secretary there. I dropped out of school, fully intending to go back the following semester.

My proudest day at the Rag was when a girl from Bennington who volunteered, whose name I have forgotten, went with me down off the campus to Congress Street to sell the Rag to non-students. I did not think we would return alive. I thought the Klan would surely kill us! We did return, and sold six papers, which taught me a big lesson.

I never really fit in with the Rag people, who were middle class or upper class. Unfortunately for me, I was not a typical white working class person – I was unusual politically -- so much so that everyone thought I must be an FBI agent! There was not a single person in the Austin movement like me, white, from a rural working class background, and I often felt misunderstood and out of place. I also realize now that I had enormous emotional "issues" that seem to go with the territory of being working class in America.

I took a free ride to California after SDS spilt in 1969, knowing that there would be little movement in Austin (I also had no family support to continue school). I went to Cuba to cut sugar cane in the 10 Million Ton Harvest, then became a Maoist because I liked their work in the San Francisco working class, I went to China in 1972, which was a great experience for a working class girl from Texas, then dropped entirely out of the movement in 1986 after many heart breaks and difficulties, both personal and political, just in time to raise a beautiful, smart daughter as a single working mother in Ronald Reagan’s America, which, I assure you, was not easy.

But in the 1960s and 70s, we changed the world, we overthrew Jim Crow and that happened, no matter how we are slandered, and its just done, whatever they say about it, done and it made a huge difference in the lives of millions of people.. So it was worth anything any of us put up with or suffered.

When it comes to the Vietnam War, I find it laughable when the right accuses us as a generation of causing the US defeat…that honor belongs to the Vietnamese and their allies. In hindsight, I think we more took advantage of the situation to civilize ourselves a bit, so they benefited us far more than we them.   [Top]

David Waddington     Dallas, 2005

Rag Fragments

     A young freshman, a barefoot boy with cheek, wanders into the Rag office responding to the call for shit workers. A dazzling new world of grizzled leftists, radical women, socialists, communists, hippies and intellectuals was revealed in all its squalid glory. I remember a passioned discourse from Harvey Stone, the musings of Dave Mahler, wandering the campus with Gary Thiher looking for a screen for the Benefit Screening of the Magical Mystery Tour. Thanks for the (sour) Apple Corps. (Did they ever pay up?)

     I don’t remember when I started selling the Rag, but did so on a regular basis on the West Mall with regular discussions with a Dean from the Student Union. I don’t remember his name, but I do remember his horned rim glasses. I do remember being served an injunction to not sell on campus, meeting with ACLU lawyers, giving depositions to the state’s attorney.

     Many of these details have since faded from my mind. Not the Friday night someone brought a copy of the first Dylan bootleg to a Saturday layout session. Listening in the room upstairs in the old Y building. Who had the Mexican Jumping Hash?

     Long copy approval meetings with passioned argument and debate. The meetings were open to all and it seemed like all elements of the community would come to present their agenda: Larry Jackson from the East Side, Don Cox from the Oakland Black Panthers,

     The Milo Minderbinder Memorial Food Co-op, a screening of the Zapruder film on a bedsheet in the Y auditorium,

     Long, long hours on Saturday nights doing layout. Eggs and pancakes at Uncle Van’s and the Plantation. The Rag never would have happened without the legenday Pizza Man. (Thanks Alan!) Excitement happened whenever Jim Franklin crawled in through the basement window, redolent of Patchouli and herbs, down into the Rag Office with the Vulcan ad or perhaps a cover or centerfold. Finally the nights ended with a trip downtown to the Bus Station to put the layout sheets on a bus to Seguin or Waco, trusting the printer to do his job.

     Faces of friends, flashes of memory, the final years of hope and optimism. They hold a special place in my heart.   [Top]

Mary Walsh     mew@cbsnews.com

     Maybe it was my thick New York accent, maybe it was because I got arrested at my first campus protest (Waller Creek) or that I didn't sing the Eyes of Texas in the cafeteria, but the plain truth was that I couldn't blend into into the social scene at Kinsolving as a freshman in September 1969. I was 18 years old, fresh from Woodstock and plenty excited to be away from home for the first time. But I had no community until Martin Murray suggested I start working at the Rag. Mostly I did grunt work there, typing, maybe writing some headlines. I tried writing a piece or two; they were terrible and never saw print. But there were exciting ideas in the room; I tried to absorb them all.  I remember wonderful late nights putting the paper together. I was hearing about things like women's liberation for the first time. I also loved selling the Rag. We'd wait for the paper to come in from the printer, grab a stack and fan out across campus. Everybody had their spot. One favorite memory was Bill Meacham on harmonica, selling the Rag and singing "Rag Momma Rag." He was so good.

     I didn't stay in school long, however. There were demonstrations about everything from the war to the Chuck Wagon. My grades sucked. The U.S. invaded Cambodia, students were killed at Kent State and that was just about it for me. I dropped out of school, ran away with Bob Bower to build a house on an island off the coast of Maine (torturing my parents). In September 1972 I was single again and back at the University. Connie Lanham and Cam & Sue Duncan made room for me in the house on Pearl Street (rent was $85/month split 4 ways). A couple years later I started working for the Daily Texan. Two reporters who were heroes to me at the time died young - Michael Eakin was murdered, cancer killed Ken McHam.

     Fast forward: After editing the Daily Texan in 1976-77, I went to the Rome Daily American in Italy, then started with CBS News Washington in 1979. Some of the last 26 years has been the work-a-day world of any reporter: forest fires, hurricanes, serial murderers, government screw-ups like the Challenger explosion, terrorist attacks like Pan Am 103 and 9/11. From 1989-93, I was in the Tokyo bureau & traveling all over  Asia. - Vietnam, Myanmar, China, Thailand, the Philippines, etc. etc. I'm happy to talk with you about any or all of this. In 1991 I covered the first US invasion of Iraq from  Amman Jordan. My personal best from those years, however, was a series of stories we did on prison camps in  Serbia. The footage we shot of beaten and starved Muslims in those prisons was later included in the movie "Welcome to  Sarajevo." In 1993 I landed with the Marines when they went into Somalia but I wasn't there for that other movie "Blackhawk Down."

     Even though we're allowed to be discrete in these memoirs, I'm going to go ahead and get this out so there are no surprises. I now cover national security for CBS News; that means the Pentagon and intelligence agencies. I'm the producer for correspondent David Martin. I know a lot of soldiers a lot of generals, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That does not make me a warmonger. That does not make me friends with Rumsfeld. I cover these people. I don't get invited to their parties. I'm proud of my work - we've done strong stories for Sixty Minutes Wednesday on soldiers forced to Iraq by the Stop Loss policy and on PTSD, for example - and I'm very glad to be where I am, trying my best to get information out of the government. And that is harder all the time.   [Top]

Mariann Wizard

A Song for Alice Fire-Bringer

I see you as I saw you then:
In your white dress,
A smile all across your face.
Holding hands with a friend,
Skipping in together,
To everyone's surprise,
Quiet Alice, singing:
"A spoonful of sugar,
makes the medicine go down,
the medicine go down,
the medicine go do-own..."

In my mind,
That picture is as clear now
As when it was snapped,
Lit by the flash of your
Thousand candle-power smile!
I see you as I saw you then:
Loafers and knee socks,
Mind like an arrow,
Frame like a longbow!

Shy Alice, with an almost-respectable air of
"Good-Girl-Gone-Bad" —
Yet speaking out for justice,
Standing up to be heard,
The steel in your voice
Gave a spark to mere words;
Helped us take the heat:
Two logs burn longer than one!

I see you still as I saw you then:
In your sad face,
Eyes bright with tears alone,
Holding out your hand to me,
Shattered, freezing, numb:
With gifts of fire and speech.
Constant Alice, you saw me born;
Gave me my name;
Heard my first words —
Mother, Sister, Teacher,
You led me from the dark
With those eyes.

O, if speech were flint,
And flesh were steel,
Then poetry would scrape fire
From mortal lips!
But words lie unspoken,
And flesh forgets.
We burn now mostly in metaphor,
Brave midlife surgeries,
Take our medicine without complaint.

Memories stagger, lurch, take flight,
But these I still sing:
Sugar and salt,
Fire and steel,
And Alice Fire-Bringer,
Goddess, dancing, see her reel!
See her real.

- mariann garner-wizard  © 08/06/05   [Top]