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
David Waddington
Mary Walsh
Mariann Wizard
And ...
you can still add your
memoir
Kate
Braun
As "Joyce Braun"(my
legal name due to adoption; thirty years ago I began uncovering the facts
and found my birth name: Lillian Katherine Lindsay -- hence, Kate, my
name of preference) I was a shitteworker aka typist for The Rag from fall of
1968, I think, until Greenbriar School became a reality in fall of 1970 or
thereabouts and I shifted my priorities to alternative education. Where
they stayed for the next 15 years. Until I got totally burned-out on
meetings! The Rag gave me a place to discover more about myself and led
me to a friendship with Mariann Wizard that I cherish more with every passing
year. The Rag was also the connecting link to Greenbriar School, which I
will always consider the most and most intense political activity of my
life. For my time, money, blood, sweat, anger, and tears, there's nothing
more political than the way our children's minds are formed/influenced.
But don't get me started.
After Greenbriar I worked a retail
sales job for about 8 years, then segued into the realm of professional
psychic-ness, thanks to much prodding by Pat Cuney, where I continue to follow
my Generational Directive to help people (Pluto in Leo in a natal chart sets
the Generational Directives; most people born between 1936 and 1956 have Pluto
in Leo). Now that I've been my own boss for about 15 years, I wouldn't
have it any other way. Those interested in exploring their connection
with Spirit should feel free to contact me to discuss the possibilities, either
by phone (512-454-2293), e-mail (kate_braun2000@yahoo.com),
through my website (www.tarotbykate.bigstep.com),
or in conversation during Rag Reunion Weekend.
I tend to remember
"oddities" and this Rag-memory is one of them. It was a warm
day, sunlight streaming into the Rag office on 23rd St. I don't remember
who besides me was there, we were all occupied with what each of us was doing --
in my case, typing/justifying an article. The screen door opened and this
guy came in. No one I knew, no one I noticed much. But the
conversation he had with whomever he had it with remains a fond memory and this
is it:
Ragperson: Hi. The
Guy: Hi. Is Thorne Dreyer here? Ragperson: No. He's out of the office right
now. The
Guy: Well, how 'bout that Gary Thiher. He here? Ragperson: No, he's out, too. The
Guy (triumphantly): I knew it! There's no such people.
They're all made up names!
And he went away, letting the
screen door slam behind him. We laughed. I still get a good giggle
out of this memory.
[Top]
Thorne
Webb Dreyer (Houston)
I was conceived in Houston
during a creative collaboration between a newspaper journalist and an abstract
expressionist. So I guess I always
knew I’d become a Funnel.
My parents gifted me with the
following premises: question everything no matter the source, treat all people
with dignity, be true to your beliefs; ignore the ridicule of the small minded,
and do it all with a little style.. So I came to Austin primed, tilted to the
left, committed to the core, and possessed of an evolving sense of social
justice.
In Austin’s counterculture and
especially among the sds crew, I met folks whose thinking went deeper then one
dimension and whose lifestyles grew directly out of their beliefs and
perceptions. They embraced freedom and individuality, not as concepts but as
guidelines.
I found a teacher and dear friend in
Gary Thiher and a special soul mate and muse in Carol Neiman.
I was wired and inspired.
The Rag was a unique experience: Something palpably historic was happening. And
we were granted the opportunity to be a part of it, even to help shape it.
Carol and I not only lived The Rag, we lived in The Rag office. We
all threw ourselves into the process and learned as we went along. Remember,
we’re talking pre-history here. For
us, “cut and paste,” meant, well, “cut and paste!” The
smell of rubber cement still lingers.
We learned as we stumbled along –
surviving manic extended work sessions with a kind of goofy comraderie.
And the result was a scrappy imperfect “little tabloid that could” -- and damn well did! The
Rag gave voice to a diverse bag of cultural rebels and political rousers,
reported news no one else did or in ways no one else dared, raised the hackles
of the old birds in power, and helped coalesce a community of interest into a
community of resistance.
What was not to like.
After The Rag I worked with
Liberation News Service in New York and then helped start Space City News
(later Space City!) in Houston and was a broadcaster and programmer at KPFT
(Pacifica). In my later efforts I was lucky enough to build upon the skills I
developed in those Rag days and, in my work, to remain true to my core beliefs.
I worked some in theater for which I’ve had a life-long affection; I studied
acting in Houston with Cecil Pickett and in New York with Bill Hickey. I wrote
for Texas Monthly and others. I worked in community development for the City of
Houston. I ran a public relations business, working mostly for progressive
political candidates, arts institutions, entertainers and charities. I produced
large scale events, booked jazz musicians.
I have worked as a bookseller and am
a collector of books and art.
In the early seventies the Space
City! offices and my peacenik mom’s art gallery were targets of the Knights of
the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan’s
bullets and car bombs and weaselly proclamations didn’t stop us.
I have also survived confrontations with a sneaky foe of a rather different sort, chronic
depression, and intend to outlast that paper tiger as well.
Alas, that Spring should vanish with the Rose!
That Youth's sweet-scented Manuscript should close!
The Nightingale that in
the Branches sang,
Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who knows?
Just keep your eyes on the prize.
Don’t lose touch with your Buddha nature. And keep the whole damn thing in
perspective!
Best nutshell I’ve got to offer.
[Top]
Just after I
dropped out of the University of Houston, I gravitated to Space City! during the Spring of 1969. I was in the office when a Klansman tossed a pipe bomb through
the front door. It shattered every
window and jangled every nerve. Paul
Spencer happened by the next day and suggested that I move to Austin to sing in
the rock band he was forming. Comparing
the prospect of a rock band to the prospect of more pipe bombs, I jumped at the
opportunity. The band dissolved when
Paul, hearing of his Chuckwagon indictment, blew town, but Paul had meanwhile
already recruited me for The Rag.
I served on The
Rag off and on from 1969 to
1973. I spent part of this period back
in Houston, working with the prior (1966-1968) generation of Rag staffers at Space City! and/or at KPFT (Pacifica Radio). Mostly I participated in layout and sales
for The Rag (sales often served as
his sole source of income). I also
wrote several articles, the most significant of which was a cover story –
“Millennium ’73” in the November 26, 1973 issue – covering the Guru Maharaj Ji
spectacle at the Astrodome. It argued
that the Guru was a fraud. The success
of this article meant much to me, as it provided me the confidence to pursue
writing further, first as a journalist and later as a scholar.
Returning to
Houston, I worked mostly at KPFT from 1974 to 1976, serving as its news
director for two years. I returned to
the University of Houston in 1976 and entered MIT in 1979, where I secured a
doctorate in political science. From
1982 to 1985 I researched at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and at
Northeastern University. In 1985 I
returned to Austin to serve on the faculty of the UT Government
Department. In 1989, I was lured away
to the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University,
where I remain today. My main academic
research interests include international affairs and the development of
qualitative research methods. I still
sing and play guitar.
[Top]
Cam Duncan Rag Memoir, 1969-75 camduncan@igc.org
My connection with the Rag began in 1969, after
helping to launch Houston’s ‘underground’ paper, Space City!, earlier that
year. One of my jobs was to deliver Space
City! to about 20 outlets in Houston – newstands, bookstores, head shops,
Liberty Hall, Of Our Own, and other watering holesfor the city’s small but growing radical
activist community. Occasionally, our
Rag comrades would send down a few bundles of Rags, and I would take both
papers along on my delivery route. Half
of the Space City! collective had worked previously on the Rag, and our ties
with Austin ran deep.
I moved to Austin in 1972 to enter graduate
school, and to do solidarity work with activist movements in Latin
America. A project of student
activists, the Latin America Policy Alternatives Group (LAPAG) was one of many
forces in Austin’s counterculture that were given a voice in the pages of the
Rag. In organizing rallies to denounce
UT’s Institute for Latin American Studies for giving a platform to apologists
for the Chilean military government, in reviewing films from the Third World
Film Series, or announcing fundraising benefits for victims of repression in
Latin America, we always had access to the Rag...if we had the patience to sit
through an interminable, chaotic Rag issue meeting. I only wrote a few stories for the Rag,
but for Austin activists of the 70s, the Rag gave us asense of solidarity and purpose, a way to focus
the anger and profound sadness we shared as victims of the same policies that
devastated Vietnam, Chile and other Third World countries.
This attribute of the Rag, Space City! and other
alternative papers was pivotal to the development of political movements in the
Vietnam era, and to my own political activism. The youth of
Texas protested the Vietnam war and acts of racist violence and sexist
oppression in part because theircollege and underground papers were accurately
reporting the reality of what was happening in Vietnam, in acts of G.I. civil
disobedience at places like Ft. Hood, and in minority neighborhoods in their
own cities.
I’ve worked in the labor movement for most of
the past 30 years, first in Puerto Rico, then in Washington DC, where I now
live – except for a five-year stint campaigning against NAFTA for
Greenpeace. I’m fortunate to be able to continue doing labor education and promoting
workers’ rightsand solidarity among trade unions in the Americas in my job with
the global union federation, Public Services International (www.world-psi.org). And I still promote subversive media, only now it’s by editing a
PSI newsletter on public employee union campaigns in N and S America.
[Top]
Chris Durden drdn@mail.utexas.edu
Chris Durden did occasional typing,
layout and pasteup on the Rag between fall of 1968 and spring of 1973. Maybe a
few unsigned sidebars were
written. Some facts were checked and some were provided.
He served as a naturalist-guide at many RagStaff events answering the inevitable insect questions.
When Jim Franklin designed the opening
poster for the Armadillo World Headquarters, Durden provided the quadruplet
baby armadillos and Bill Walsh provided the "quarters".
Chris has since traveled to South and
Central America, Europe and Africa collecting insects and fossils which he has
researched at Texas Memorial Museum. He was "butterfly wrangler" on
the Paramount film "Leap of Faith", where he was assisted by Bea who
lives in Helena, Montana. Chris guided some natural history tours and hosted a
transgendered support group in the nineties. In the oughties he is retired,
observing nature, writing, photographing and helping out. Like most who came to Austin he has not
left.
[Top]
Lars Eighner (aka Larry Nader)
lars@larseighner.com
http://www.larseighner.com/index.html
I first became aware of the Rag sometime in 1968, or
thereabouts. At any rate, the Rag was still in the old
YMCA at 22nd and Guadalupe, where I went at first for an
SDS meeting and thereafter for meetings of the
Worker-Student Alliance, which was the public face of Dick
Reavis's Friends of Progressive Labor. Now it seems to me
there was something about borrowing telephone service from
the Rag, or else the Rag was borrowing telephone service
from someone else. In any event it involved someone with a
screwdriver making informal wiring arrangements after dark.
Occasionally our meetings were interrupted so that someone
in our group could make those adjustments, and so I learned
the Rag had offices in the Y building.
At that time, we were not supposed to regard the Rag as an
entirely desirable or reliable instrument of social change.
It didn't really have what you would call a class analysis
or a proletarian perspective. There was stuff in it about
drugs and rocknroll. There is a story yet to be told about
the Worker Student Alliance and the Friends of Progressive
Labor, and this is not the place to tell it. But in short,
Progressive Labor and all of its subsidiaries were very
stern Marxist-Leninints, and having fun was not on the
agenda, so I had nothing much to do with the Rag, except
reading it, until these organizations were disbanded in
Austin, and I was fairly disillusioned.
So far I as know, I began gay literature in Austin with a
rather rambling, semi-fictional rant which today might be
titled "Brokeback Housing Co-op" that ran to four episodes
begining the July 5, 1971 Rag. I remeber nothing about it.
(Of course a Ginsberg interview had run in the Rag in 1967,
and there had be plenty of imported items, including news
briefs in which I first read Huey Newton's statement about
gay people and first got news of Stonewall, but I mean
something written in Austin by someone gay in Austin about
being gay in Austin.) I was living in The Campus Guild
men's housing co-op at the time and I wrote under the name
of Larry Nader, which was a nom de guerre I had acquired in
WSA.
I left Austin for a couple of years during the disaster I
often refer to as my first "marriage," and when I returned
Austin had changed considerably. The Rag still existed and
I contributed a couple of articles, but by that time Gay
Austin (followed by Gay Texas and Connections) had begun to
happen and that was the path I took, still using the Larry
Nader name, until I realized the time had come to start
writing seriously.
Lars Eighner (aka Larry
Nader) [Top]
Hunter
Ellinger hunter@ellinger.org
hunter.ellinger.org
When the Rag was founded, I was a math/science teacher in Nigeria (Peace
Corps), but I started reading it as soon as we got back in mid-1968, then
taking it to the printer from 1969 on (my first trip was 1/26/69, the day
that my second child was born). My work with the editorial group was from
1972 until about 1975, when I became a full-time single dad, which I loved
but absorbed all free time for several years. When I resurfaced, the Rag
had dissolved.
While I felt quite at home in the ragstaff, I was atypical in several
ways. I was a red-diaper baby, whose parents had come to Texas as union
organizers in the late 1930s; I was a techie (physics and software); I was
already in a well-paid non-student job; and I was a parent (four kids).
This last distinction I shared on the ragstaff only with the mother of
these kids, Mary Birdsong, who wrote city-oriented articles until she went
off to medical school (after surprising people with a 40% vote in the 1973
city council race).
The writing niche I found was Last Week’s News, which gave me a chance to
concisely point out how complex and ephemeral events can be understood in
terms of a handful of unified and enduring principles (very like science
teaching, actually). But of course I was also always happy to add my voice
to the continuing arguments such as electoral politics (I’m a Fabian
Democrat).
The operating-procedures changes during my ragstaff time included the
switch to honor-system vending racks rather than street salesmen
(resulting in more copies distributed but less money collected), as well
as the internalization of the process of making press negatives for the
issues, which cut printing expenses in half but added ragstaff labor that
reduced the time available for writing.
My political trajectory after the Rag has been into co-ops (mainly
Wheatsville), education (community college trustee and annexation
elections), and grass-roots Democratic Party politics. But this tame
resume does not reflect any repentance for leftishness, and I disagree
with the often-expressed opinion that the most important current trends
are rightward and that the generation-ago actions of which The Rag was a
part didn’t move things forward substantially. That’s what a lot of people
in the fifties thought about the thirties – until the sixties
hit.
[Top]
Alice
Embree
alice@nuevoanden.com
I was there at
the beginning - typing, pressing down headlines, and hand lettering
mastheads. The first office was 2506
Nueces (where we plotted a women’s sit in at the draft office). The next one I remember was 910 West 26th.
I would “borrow” an IBM selectric from my
straight job to type Rag copy into the wee hours of the morning. I didn’t write an article until November
1967. Frank Erwin had canceled the UT
Chilean Exchange program because of “that Embree girl” and I wrote my side of
the story.
In the spring of
1967, Frank Erwin put six UT students on disciplinary probation for giving a
speech in an unauthorized location (the west mall). I was among the five who were both card-carrying SDS members and
Ragstaffers. The Rag provided the first
hand accounts of the free speech fight that ensued. I left Austin in August of
1967 and was in New York until December 1969.
I worked with the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) and
with RAT newspaper. The women’s movement was emerging as a major political
force. When I returned to Austin in
1970, I did street theater with a “Women’s Cranky.” I chopped vegetables at Saatva and the Delta Diner where we fed
striking shuttle bus drivers free and featured menu items like “Smash the State
Casserole.” The Rag, still the vehicle
for political debate, had been transformed by the feminist movement. Women like Judy Smith didn’t take a back
seat to anyone and everyone typed their own articles. I wrote one of my first poems after Janis Joplin died and it was
printed in The Rag, then borrowed by Space City and the Texas Observer.
In SDS, I was
inspired by the concept of participatory democracy – the revolutionary idea
that people should participate in decisions that affect their lives. This led to direct action and the Rag was
an extension of this. If the straight
media didn’t cover the important cultural and political issues, then create new
media. So, we did. The underground press was the connective
tissue for what we called “the movement.”
It spread ideas. It was how
Austin activists learned about the strike at Columbia, People’s Park, the Black
Panthers, Timothy Leary and it was how the rest of the country found out about
Gentle Thursday, Austintacious, armadillos, the Oleo Strut, and UT’s excesses.
Post Rag, I
lived on an Ozark commune; I met Carlos Lowry through the Austin Committee for
Human Rights in Chile and married him.
We have two kids - a son, 23, and a daughter, 21, both college seniors. I was a printer at Red River Women’s Press,
a clerical worker at UT; I finished my abandoned B.A. and a Master’s degree; I
worked for 16 years as a child support planner at the Attorney General’s
Office. I’m still paying my union dues
to the Texas State Employees Union, but I retired in October 2004 in time to
have double knee replacement surgery and work on the Rag reunion.
[Top]
Bob
Erler’s Memoir including his spouse Mary and
their children Susannah and John:
In 1966, Mary and I, along with our baby Susannah, moved
down to Austin so I could enter the graduate program in Philosophy at UT. From 66 to 69, Mary, who was working on her
PhD in English at the University of Chicago taught classes at both UT and
Huston-Tillotson College. Both Maryand I had been involved
in social action groups as undergraduates. I had been intrigued by the
anarchist vision of people such as Paul Goodman and Dorothy Day, and so when
the SDS started up at UT, I became involved and moved on to The Rag. I did various office boy tasks such as
picking upGilbert Shelton’s
cartoons and getting them to the Rag office in time for the printing. I also did a few reviews. Mary did some art
work and together we did a column on good but cheap places in Austin to shop
and eat. Our son John was born in
Austin in 68.
In fall of 69, we moved to Racine Wisconsin, where for two
years, I was chair of the philosophy department at a small college now
defunct. In 71, we returned to Austin
to start, along with several other Rag folk, the Greenbriar Free School. We
left Greenbriar in 73 and I studied library science at UT and a librarian at
Travis County jail. In 1980, we all ended up in the Bronx, Mary a professor at
Fordham and Bob a librarian at various colleges but also active in anarchist
activities, such as a monthly forum on social and political topics and a
walking tour of historic radical sites.
Susannah returned to Austin and has been active in various
areas including producing radio shows on public radio. John returned to Austin
for graduate study in classics but has moved on to being a comedian in The
Sinus Theater and on KOOP.
[Top]
Dennis
Fitzgerald denfitz@dccnet.com
I was privileged to be in the
delivery room at the birth of The Rag.
“Breathe, breathe, breathe!” It was a long, hard labor. But what a beautiful child she
was. For just over a year, I changed my share of dirty diapers and
delighted in watching her first tentative steps. And then we both had
other places to go.
The Rag was where my friends and I
tried to figure out who we were. We were hardly more than kids, taking
our own first steps into the “real” world, and trying to make sense of the fact
that there was so much there that affronted our ideals. Things were a lot
meaner and shallower than they were supposed to be. That wasn’t anything
we were prepared to conform to, nor, given our idealistic bent, anything
that we could in good conscience ignore.
We were a group that found each
other and clicked because we shared a common, albeit kind of fuzzy, notion
about what was right and what was wrong and what was really important.
But we didn’t have a home for all that; we fit with each other, but we didn’t
seem to fit anywhere else.
The Rag was our owner-built home, a
place of safety and purpose, where we could define who we were and get on with
the job of saving the world from itself.
Since then, more or less
sequentially, I have been: staff member at the SDS regional office in San
Francisco; sales manager for a small import company; co-founder of Space City!;
communard in Arkansas; assistant city editor at the Houston Chronicle; editor
of a rural community newspaper near Vancouver, British Columbia; carpenter;
sawmill worker and union representative; freelance journalist; social and
environmental policy manager for a multinational forest company; retired
sophist. I have been supported and challenged in all this by
two feisty women, two beautiful daughters and many, many cherished friends.
[Top]
Nick
Hopkins nhopkins@mailer.fsu.edu
I first came to live in Austin in 1958, straight out of Texas A&M and into the Austin
beatnik scene, the counterculture movement of the day (see Ted Klein's
forthcoming "The River"). By 1960
I had finished my MA studies in Linguistics and had been hired to work on a
University of Chicago research project in Chiapas, in southern Mexico. I spent the next two years in Chiapas documenting varieties of Tzotzil (a Mayan
language), and came back to Austin to finish writing my MA thesis in the spring
of 1962. I rented an apartment in
"The Ghetto," a run-down apartment complex near 29th and Guadalupe, said to be
one of the places Janis Joplin had lived while I was gone. From
there I was off to Chicago for graduate studies in Anthropology, including a
year (1964-65) in Huehuetenango, Guatemala, documenting another Mayan language
(Chuj). With a Chicago PhD in hand
I returned to Austin as an Assistant Professor in 1966.
Shortly
thereafter, I was attracted by the activities of the Free Speech Movement on
the UT campus. This was the
precursor of the anti-war movement in which people learned to confront
authority with massive popular demonstrations. It
melded quite smoothly into the anti-war movement as things developed over the
next year or so.
Anyway,
about 1967 I was beginning to see things in a different light and look for
actions I might take. I made a
stab at working for the McCarthy campaign, but discovered that cold calls on
the telephone were not for me... By
about 1968 I was working for the Rag. I
went in on weekends to do mainly page layout, or whatever needed to be done. I think the Rag was one of the most important things that was happening. Its
very existence created a feeling of community; there was somebody else out
there that wasn't lock-step orthodox. It
supported a lot of street people as well. For
me, one of the most important lessons was that a bunch of ordinary people –
including street people, speed freaks, acid heads, academics, intellectuals,
ideologues and bomb-throwing revolutionaries – could get together and work
towards a product.
I
worked first in the basement of the Y Building at 22nd and Guadalupe, and then
moved to the 24th (?) street location, above a drugstore. I
painted the Rag logo on the windows. One
of my favorite memories there is the night Steve Russell, then the music
critic, came in with the first Santana album and played it all night.
I
was one of the few faculty members of SDS (which meant, at that time, I
attended meetings), and I participated in the national meeting of SDS that was
held in Austin. As I recall, that was the year Dick M/F and his New York motorcycle gang moved to
Austin, and I remember them bathing (naked, what else) in the fountain across
from the Newman Center, where SDS was meeting.
All
this probably cost me my job. In
1970 I got married (to Kathryn Josserand) and went to Milwaukee for a year,
returning to go up for tenure at UT. I
was nominated for tenure by unanimous vote of the department, but was turned
down at some higher level, at the beginning of 1971. When
I tried to find out what was going on, I was stonewalled by the administration,
who wouldn't even tell me where (much less why) the decision had been made. It
smelled.
In retrospect, I'm sure I was on a list of subversives. I
knew from a friend in Campus Security that my name had come across their desk
as a probable dope dealer, since I "made frequent trips to Mexico."
In any case, it was time to move on.
There
was a presidential campaign going on, and we put our energies to organizing
(and ultimately carrying) our precinct (and the county ) for McGovern.
The Watergate hearings were underway, and we swore to my mother-in-law that if Nixon won, we were
leaving the country.
In
1972 Kathryn and I took positions in Mexico, working for an agency of the
Mexican federal government to train Mexican students to work with indigenous languages (the
Centro de Investigaciones Superiores del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e
Historia, aka CIS-INAH). We did field studies all over Central Mexico, visiting remote locations, interviewing
and recording speakers of Otomi, Mazahua, Nahuatl, Totonac, Mixtec, Popoloca,
etc. We immigrated, that is, we
went through a multi-year process of moving from Tourist to Visitor to
Immigrant to Immigree status, finally achieving permanent residency after
nearly ten years. We ran an
apprentice program, giving short courses as needed and taking students to the
field, educating them about dealing with people of another culture (even
Mexican anthropologists tend to see Indians in economic terms, as peasants, not
in cultural terms, as people who have a different view of the world). I
eventually moved on to a faculty position in a metropolitan university
(Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana – Iztapalapa). In
both institutions, our students were mostly from the Mexico City middle class,
the kind of people who would end up in government jobs. It
took us some time to realize that we were training the oppressors, not the
oppressed. But we also got to
train a lot of Indians along the way, and we were instrumental in the
foundation of an MA program in "ethnolinguistics" for Indian-language speakers
that has now trained several generations of students.
In 1976 we happened to be in Austin when Linda Schele was giving one of the first of her Maya
Workshops, and realized we had contributions to make to the decipherment of
Maya hieroglyphics, which we had both studied years earlier. We
began a research program on Chol, one of the modern languages most closely
related to the language of the Classic inscriptions. We
still get back to Austin every Spring for the annual workshops, and we have
traveled around the country giving weekend workshops of our own at museums and
other institutions (about 70 so far). We
also introduced Linda to the Guatemalan Indian linguists in Antigua, did the
first glyph workshop for them with her, and return periodically to do short
courses for them. They have come
to use the Mayan hieroglyphs as a symbol of their cultural heritage, and many
activists have taken Classic Maya names as pseudonyms (especially useful during
the years of violence).
In
1982, when the politics and the pollution finally got to be unbearable, we left
Mexico City and returned to the US to look for academic jobs.
Unfortunately, in that period, nobody over 30 could expect to be interviewed, much less hired. All
academic positions were staffed at the lowest possible level. So
for several years we lived off of research grants, gifts from my father, and
the income from a lecture and tour company we founded (Jaguar Tours); we still
lead tours to Maya archaeological sites and villages, and have a faithful
clientele of intelligent, educated non-specialists who had sense enough not to
go into academics as a profession.
In
1991, Kathryn got a university job in Florida, and we (God bless us) have been
in Tallahassee ever since. This is
a state that ranks near the bottom in almost any measure of educational
investment other than football. For
more than ten years I have been teaching as a part-time (Adjunct) professor
(without benefits), and have finally reached the age of "retirement" (can you
retire if you didn't have a job?). I'm
now drawing Social Security and working on a National Endowment for the
Humanities Fellowship to digitize and archive our field recordings of
indigenous languages from the 1960s to the present. We
have three years to go before Kathryn can retire, and it's going to be a hard
struggle to make it. There is a
top-down management style in the state and university that is extremely
oppressive (kiss ass up, kick ass down). And
of course for us it's Bushes all the way up. Jeb!
(that was his campaign slogan, "Jeb!" – that should tell you something) has
privatized everything he could, so that critical state services are badly
managed and over budget, and former career civil servants are working for lower
wages for the companies that replaced them.
If someone offers you a job in Florida, just walk away from it. It's
a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live here.
We're
not active politically except in the sense that living is a political act.
I still think that the workers should own the means of production, but I don't see that happening
any time soon unless it's through the stock market. On
the other hand, once the menace of the Soviet Union was out of the way and it
was safe to talk about it, Marxist theory has surfaced in academia, and a lot
of students just learn it as basic economic theory, not politics, so maybe
these ideas will survive. In the
60s I was no fan of the doctrinaire left because of the elitist anti-democratic
maneuverings (begging the pardon of the many to whom this doesn't apply), but
it was nothing compared to working in Mexico, where all acts are political
acts, and politics overrides any other considerations (like morality, ethics,
truth, etc.). At one point we discovered that the Mexican anthropologists were opposed to ethnicity,
since if you identfy youself as a Tzotzil or whatever, it gets in the way of
your class consciousness; so the best thing to do for the Indians is to reduce
them to an amorphous rural proletariat, and then you understand how to deal
with them.
So
I despair that good ideas can be warped into bad actions, and that people of
good faith can fuck each other over and feel righteous about it. On
the other hand, I am encouraged by the memoirs that show that people have
carried on in their own ways and that the Movement had positive effects on
individual lives. I happen to
believe that it was one of the major factors in ending the war in Vietnam. Just
think of what it would have been like if there had been no movement against the
war and all that it stood for. With
all due respect to the Vietnamese, it ended a lot sooner because of what was
happening in America.
So,
that's my story and I'm sticking to it. As
a Sartrean existentialist, having done at every point what I thought was right,
all things considered, I don't regret a moment of it. (Although
it sure could have gone better!!)
May
the Intelligent Designer Bless You All, and Keep On Truckin',
Nick
Hopkins
[Top]
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 22nd
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 12th
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. |