Among the possessions I recently reclaimed from storage is a painted cardboard box. It’s pastel green and dates from the 1960s, when I went away to college. I guess my parents painted the box in an effort to strengthen it.
Inside were many copies of stories I wrote for the Michigan Daily. There also was a copy of Life magazine with a story about student protestors, which included a photo of me being arrested.
It was 1968 and the campuses were erupting with similar protests all over the country. This was one of the times I mixed my new role as a journalist with political activism, and wouldn’t you know, it ended up memorialized by Life magazine.
Of course, at the time, I was proud of what I’d done. 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 I and my fellow convicts refused to cut down the trees as we were instructed to do, as part of an an environmental protest. Thinking back on it, we must have been one big royal pain in the ass for the authorities.
They chose to ignore the fact we didn’t serve our sentence, turning instead to more pressing matters, such as the bombing of the local CIA office, which led to the indictment of John Sinclair, and 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 somewhat improbably editing pieces Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono produced for SunDance magazine out in San Francisco.
A few more years and I was a reporter at Rolling Stone.
At the bottom of the files in the 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 in Ann Arbor. It tracked me as I relocated to San Francisco to work at SunDance and throughout the years at Rolling Stone.
Including my stories on the FBI’s COINTELPRO illegalities.
Much of the information in that file is blacked out in the classic way the FBI redacted files prior to releasing them under the FOIA, but there was nothing in there of any consequence.
So that old cardboard box painted pastel green contains a lot of memories, too many really. I don’t have time to relive the past right now, so I closed it back up and put it away for another day.
(I first published a different version of this one two years ago.)
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