The late Ken Kelley, radical journalist and follow migrant from Michigan to San Francisco in the early Seventies, with a bunch of his friends and colleagues, including yours truly. Ken is wearing the sports jacket.
Ken co-founded (with Craig Pyes) SunDance magazine, which was one of many attempts to capture the energy, anger, rebellion, and idealism of the era.
Ken Kelley, me (in rear) and Kate Coleman
Since most of us could not get jobs in the "straight" media, which in any event we considered our "enemy" at the time, we simply learned how to start our own.
In the case of SunDance, we rented our space on Fillmore Street and then built our own offices. No pre-built cubicles were available in for media entrepreneurs in those days.
We had to learn the business from the ground up, including how to attract investors (ours included John Lennon and Yoko Ono), how to sell ads, and how to get our magazine distributed.
Thinking back, I realize this was before the trend toward specialization, when business leaders, academics, doctors, lawyers, workers and journalists were all still expected -- to one degree or another -- to be generalists.
Today, it's almost a lost art -- the generalist -- and the resulting fragmentation of our society is palpable. SunDance was not a boutique magazine. It occupied no particular niche.
It was about everything and was intended for everyone.
Well everyone under a certain age, that is...
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