Thursday, August 18, 2022

Inside Old Boxes


 Among my possessions recently reclaimed from storage is an old cardboard box painted pastel green. It dates from the 1960s, when I went away to college. I guess my parents painted the box to make it stronger.

Inside were many copies of Rolling Stone containing articles of mine I’ve not read since I wrote them in the 1970s.

But there also was this (above), a piece in Life magazine about student protestors, including a picture of me being escorted out of an occupied building by the cops, under arrest.

We had been occupying the Washtenaw County Building in support of local “welfare moms,” mostly black, who were being denied a decent level of benefits at the time in our view.

It was 1968 and the campuses were erupting with similar protests, mainly over civil rights or anti-war issues. This was the only time I mixed my nascent role as a journalist with political activity, and wouldn’t you know, I ended up criminalized and photographed in Life magazine.

Of course, at the time, I was proud of what I’d done. I wrote about it in the college paper. The charges of trespassing on public property, to which I pled, carried no actual penalty beyond a day’s labor in a local park.

But once there, I and my fellow convicts refused to cut down the trees as we were instructed to do, as an environmental protest. Thinking back on it, we must have been a royal pain in the behind for the authorities.

They chose to ignore the fact we didn’t serve our sentence, trying turning instead to more pressing matters, such as the bombing of the local CIA office, which led to the indictment of John Sinclair, and that brought John Lennon to Ann Arbor to sing in his support.

One thing led to another for me and within a few years I was editing pieces Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono produced for SunDance magazine out in San Francisco.

A few more years and I was at Rolling Stone.

At the bottom of the files in the old box was my FBI file, which I obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The Bureau kept track of me starting with that arrest in college and my work for an underground paper. It tracked me as I relocated to San Francisco to work at SunDance and through the years at Rolling Stone.

Much of the information in that file is blacked out in the classic way the FBI edited files prior to releasing them under the FOIA. 

There’s also non-FBI notes I saved such as a note from Jann Wenner thanking me for sharing some of the information with him after I’d left Rolling Stone in 1977.

Many other letters, clippings, files and memories pored forth out of that old cardboard box painted pastel green. I’m pretty sure my parents never imagined that that box would end up with the stuff it did. 

Or that my life would turn out the way it did.

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