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Episode: 1386
Title: HPR1386: Hacking Public Policy: The Underground Press
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1386/hpr1386.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 00:42:20
---
Hey, everybody. Welcome to another edition of Hacking Public Policy. I'm your host, Bob
Tragellis, as you might recall. You might have heard my last edition for Hacker Public
Radio on energy democracy, where I actually just copied over one of my regular shows from
this week in energy.tv to Hacker Public Radio, and it was where we had a South, in South
Korea, a solar blogger who interviewed both myself and my co-host Kirsten Hossberg in
Germany about energy democracy, and we defined it. In this edition of Hacking Public Policy,
we're going to talk about the underground press. And joining me today is Ken Wattsberger. He's
the founder of Zinfini Press. He's also was heavily involved during the prime years of underground
paper in Lansing, Michigan, called Joint Issue, which will get into why it was named Joint Issue. I
was very surprised, actually, because when I first saw the paper, I just figured it was referring
to marijuana, but it was referring to two papers that joined together. But in any case, what happened
was a friend of mine who lives here locally in Reno. She happened to have a little pile of these
underground papers in her garage. She was cleaning up, and so I took a look at them, and I've always
been fascinated by the underground press having been, or and still am, a community organizer and
often wondering how they organized around the Vietnam War and so on and so forth back in the late
60s or early 70s, when there wasn't any internet, because all I've known is the internet. So Ken,
why don't we start off with, why don't we define underground press? You say you have a little bit
different definition than the formal ones we see online. So why don't we talk about that a little bit?
What was the underground press? Well, okay. Well, first of all, thanks for having me on the show.
It's a pleasure to be here. The underground press was the dissident press, the anti-war press,
the independent press. Basically, it was an alternative to the corporate press. The corporate press,
the establishment press, the straight press. Those are some of the terms for that press. But
basically, those were the newspapers that were supported by big business. They were the newspapers
that supported the war down the line. If the government said this is what's going on,
that's what they reported without challenging it. And we were the ones who were going overseas
to die. And so we had to, obviously, look a little bit more closely. And what we discovered
was that they were lying to us. This was a big surprise. I mean, nowadays, you assume
the government's going to lie. I think that's the legacy of the Vietnam War. Because before that,
certainly in the community that many of us came from, it was assumed that the government was
totally down the line. Whatever they said, that's the way it was. Love it or leave it was the
expression that we kept hearing when we opposed the war. So the underground press, the term
underground was somewhat romantic. But nevertheless, it was clearly outside of the mainstream. And
we were the ones who were not beholden to the big interests. We didn't have money supporting
us, big businesses supporting us. And we didn't care if we did. I mean, basically, the idea
of the underground press, we have to find out what's really going on. And we did.
Right. And yeah, the underground press, of course, is kind of was lifted here where we have the
first amendment. So we got freedom of speech and freedom of the press. But it was lifted, I guess,
from wartime World War II, you're, I suppose. Well, World War II, clearly, when they sit
underground press, what they meant was that if we get exposed, we die. I mean, the simple is bad.
So we're talking about French liberators and people that were opposing Germany and so on.
Very much, very much. So in fact, in fact, on the little logo for Micah Press, which was the
publisher that we created in order to publish the first edition of my book, Voices from the
Underground Insider Histories of Vietnam, your underground press, was a white rose. And the
symbolism behind the white rose was that that was the name of a group that actually,
of brother and sister, I believe, who posed Hitler during World War II. And they got exposed
and they were killed. Oh, wow. Wow. Well, fortunately, that wasn't happening here in the United
States sort of. Well, I could tell stories in communities. I mean, certainly, certainly the Black
Camphors would not say, well, thank God it's not happening here because it was happening to them
left and right. Right. And another group too. Well, and then we could talk about Kent State.
But before we go there, before we talk about what really launched the underground press, I guess,
in the like 1968 era, let's first define, you know, because you did do, you did teach at Michigan,
State University and Michigan University. Oh, you said Michigan University and you did
did teach journalism. So why don't you give us the working definitions of objective journalism
and versus editorializing and then kind of trying shoehorn in the underground press and how it
kind of mixed the two. Well, in journalism school, maybe still, I don't know, but maybe still
they teach what's called objective journalism, the idea that that a journalist is
supposed to have an opinion that we're supposed to teach just the facts, the objective, in other
words. And as soon as you start saying, I believe or something like that, you're moving into
opinion, you can't do that. So you've got to be objective. This is why the idea of sharing both
sides of the story. The belief here, the myth here, is that every story has two sides,
which means only two sides. There are no shades along the way. This is why if you're in a few
a Democrat, you have to know if you're a Republican. The implication is those are the only two sides.
This is also why newspapers have editorial pages that further the myth of objective journalism,
that the myth here is that it's all the facts everywhere else, but on the editorial page,
that's where the opinions are shared. But in reality, you can't do an article that doesn't have an
opinion in it. I mean, even a weather report has an opinion. If you think of it, you know, if you
look at, like I'm from Michigan, if I look at the weather report, it's going to focus on the cities
in Michigan, because that's where most of the readers of our newspapers would be. So that's an opinion
now. That's the, it's slanted, in other words, in favor of Michigan. So it's not really objective.
So what undergone press did was we said, let's not pretend that we're being objective. We're not.
We have an opinion, and we're going to express it. In addition, the, often, we were participants
in the events that we covered. There was no pretense that, you know, you've got the activists,
and then on the side, you've got journalists who have to watch everything. We were actually
involved in everything. We would go, we would demonstrate that we, you know, run home and write
up the article, right? The, you know, we talk about the demonstration that we were part of.
You know, we would get busted along with everybody else, and we'd write about it from the inside.
So that was, that became known as participatory journalism.
Oh, okay. And that was, that was a huge difference. I mean, you read the, the undergone press to
see that all the time, the stories. You know, when we would, you know, as a community organizer,
what we did was we got people who were involved in all the different events that were happening
around town, all the different co-ops, all the different groups that were going on. And we
would get them to write up their own stories. Right. You know, that's how we built the paper.
Right. And it was an organizing tool, as you talk about in one of your articles, or well,
your article in the first edition of Voices of the End of the World. But before we go more in-depth
there, you know, drill down on those topics. Let's also define the factions of the time.
You know, I was reading some of this stuff. I was in middle school, junior high school at the time,
early high school, back in the early 70s. And you know, I wasn't really paying attention to these
things. My, my focus was on other things at the time. But what a liberal, I was kind of surprised
to see that liberal was used in a more, kind of more in the older sense, in the 18th and 19th
century sense sort of in some of the reading I've been doing in your Voices of the Underground.
So why don't we define the differences between who was a liberal, who was a conservative,
who was a radical, who was a yippy, or what a yippy was, and what a hippie was?
Don't worry, you're covering a lot of ground there. Well, do it quickly.
Well, okay, we'll just start with the idea of a liberal. You know, we always consider the
liberals our worst enemies. I mean, nowadays when someone talks about someone being a liberal,
when the right talks about someone being a liberal, they're implying that they're
finding radicals because our country has shifted so far to the right. But when we looked at
liberals, basically a liberal with someone who you could always count on to say what you wanted to
hear. But then when it came time to voting, they always voted against you. They always had a good
reason. It was a good liberal reason in other words. That's why we interpreted it. I mean,
conservatives, you knew you hated them because you knew they were always on the wrong side,
but at least they admitted it. I mean, they would say, hey, we're on the wrong side. You know,
they didn't use those words, of course, to them was the right side. But my perspective,
they were clearly on the wrong side, but you knew that. You know, they didn't make any pretence
of otherwise. So you could at least trust them in that sense. The liberals, you couldn't trust
because they always said that they would support you, and they didn't. They always had a reason
why not to support. So those were the big political differences. Radicals, you didn't have too many of
in Congress. But the idea of a radical is someone who wants to get to the root. That radical comes
from that word root. They want to get to the root of the issue. So that was what a radical was.
Then, hippie was... Well, that was a lifestyle thing. I mean, anybody who had long hair,
who smoked pot, they were the hippie culture. And the hippies were the Abbey Hoffman and Jerry
Rubin were the main founders of the hippies. Basically, what they wanted to do was to
have the hardcore politicos who were straight-laced, but nevertheless were very radical.
And then you have the hippies who were smoking dope and listening to music and all that.
Basically, they were all on the same basic side of the issue. In other words, they weren't pro-war.
But what the hippies did was they tried to merge the two. They tried to take the radicals
and then you got the hippies and bring them together. And so you have the hippie lifestyle,
perhaps, but becoming more radicalized. So, okay, well, pure hippie then maybe might be thought of
as being more apathetic, whereas a hippie would be more activist, maybe? Perhaps, perhaps. I mean,
I mean, really, those were technical definitions. In fact, again, it was a merger. I mean,
from where we were coming from, if you were smoking dope, it was better than not smoking dope.
I mean, we were all against the war. Some were actively protesting. Some were just smoking dope,
not doing anything. So, basically, around the right side, the idea of the hippies was to get
those guys who were on the right side, but weren't doing anything to do something. We had the
smoke-ins, the beans, the lovins, and everything that ended with Ian was good. And we would get them,
we could get everybody there, and it would be a lot of dope going around. But nevertheless,
there was a lot of political activity happening also. I'd go there, I'd be passing out papers
the whole time, passing out flyers, talking about upcoming meetings. A lot of people wouldn't come
to them, but somewhat. That's how we recruited people. Cool. Well, yeah. And we want to get a little
drill down a little more into that because organizing, to hack public policy, you have to organize.
And of course, you have to organize, you have to have tools for outreach. And of course, this is where
the underground press comes in. Now, let's set the stage a little bit of what it looked like at
the end of the 60s and into the early 70s with respect to college life and college students. I
quickly looked up working college students and what that was like as far as the percentage of
16 to 24-year-old college students who were enrolled full-time and employed from 1970 to
2005 and according to, I don't know, some association of professors or something like that.
Back in 1970, your percentage was, oh, maybe 32% of college students were enrolled full-time
and working part-time. And then into the 2000s, it bounces around about 50%. So what I was
curious about was what the leisure time was like for college students at the time because there
seemed to me, I didn't live it because I was too young at the time, but looking back at it,
it just seemed like it was more focused and that students seemed to have more zeal for activism
at the time. And I wondered what elements informed that and animated that. And my correct or was it
because you were just mentioning that there weren't that many people, a few people would show up to
meetings and things of this sort, which seems to be the same problem that we have in today's time.
Well, I think sometimes we're too harsh on this generation, the young folks today.
I mean, a lot was happening in the 60s and the 70s. For one thing, it was new, it was exciting.
I mean, it's good necessarily. People are dying, but I mean, there was an excitement about it.
It was new and the media wanted to cover it. The fact that we were dying certainly intensified
our need to do something. Now, Americans are still dying, but they're choosing to go overseas.
I don't know why they want to do that, but they volunteered to go into the army back then
there was the draft. So you had people coming into the war who did not want to be there. I mean,
people who were anti-war organizing against the war, all of a sudden they're in Vietnam,
they didn't suddenly become pro-war. In fact, there were hundreds of underground newspapers
in the military. So that's changed right now. We don't have that right now.
The economy is so much worse now. Some incredibly worse that students are just, I think,
overwhelmed with debt. I mean, this is a serious organizing issue, Frank, that I'd like to see
students doing a lot more organizing around student debt. There is some. I'm aware of it only
because I've got my own kids who are either in college or paying for college and hugely in debt.
I mean, the debts that I can't even see, you know, like a house payment kind of a debt is crazy.
So I'd like to see more students doing organizing around that. I mean, there are different issues.
The ecology now is much more serious than it was then. I mean, the ecology was just becoming
a big issue as the war was ending. I remember a friend saying, okay, now that the war's over,
what should I do next? I think I'm going to get involved in the ecology. You know, I remember
thinking, oh yeah, I guess that's the new issue. And they'll do that too. You know, a lot of anti-war
people moved into that area. So did most of this activism, was it occurring on the college
campuses and wasn't so much the blue collar folks, you know, maybe it worked everywhere?
Okay. That's a good question. If you look at my book, now plug it right now. It's called
Voices from the Underground. It's a four-value set of books called Voices from the Underground
Series. That's the updated version of what came out that I mentioned that came out in 1993.
It's a series of histories of individuals, individual underground papers, rather, as written by
key people on each of the papers. So I wrote the history of the Lansing area, Lansing, Michigan.
And then I used that as the prototype. I said to everyone else, here's what I did into a similar
piece with years. And then I worked with them to help them to expand it and so on. But what I found
was that the Underground Press was everywhere during the Vietnam era. The anti-war movement was
the largest, most diverse anti-war movement in the country. I mean, in our history, there has
never been one that's as large as diverse and was everywhere. And so the Underground Press
reflected all of those voices. I mean, all of the Underground papers were united against the war.
But beyond that, they spoke to different audiences. So you had the gay press, the lesbian press,
the feminists, the black, the Native American, the Puerto Rican, the military underground press,
the prisoners' rights, the rank and file. You know, the workers, you had the counterculture,
the new age, the senior citizens. The great panthers came out of that period. So you had underground
papers everywhere. And what I found was, I found in representatives of all of these or many of
these different genres, so to speak, of underground newspapers. And I worked with them to tell their
individual histories. And so what you've gotten in the voices from the Underground series is this
incredible diversity of what the anti-war movement was, as reflected in histories of different
underground newspapers. But they were everywhere. They were so huge. There was a lot of them
in the campus. You always thought of the campus community, but it was way more than that. It was a
lot more than just that. Right. And then I guess another thing that really animated it,
besides the having skin in the game with respect to the draft, was the incident, the tragic
or horrific incident at Kent State University. Do you want to talk about that? Where four students were
shot by Ohio National Guardsmen? Well, yeah. That's significant to me personally, because
that was the event that drew me into the movement. I mean, there were lots of other incidents
around the country. People getting killed for one reason or another. And all of these incidents
of police brutality did the exact opposite of what the police wanted. They didn't shut people
up. They got them pissed off and more committed. So in my case, it took Kent State. That was 1970.
When you say the phrase, Kent State, people just know what you're talking about. It's not a college,
it's an event. And yeah, there was an anti-war rally early May 1970, May 4th, and four students
were killed by National Guards and Guardsmen. And as a result of that, students' strikes swept
the country. It was amazing. You know, one at a time, two at a time, colleges were going out on
strike. And schools were shutting down because no students were going to classes. And this just
happened all around the country. And so I was at Michigan State at the time. And I got involved in
the activities that really would not be the intention of being a radical, as much as just
trying to figure out what's happening. I was exciting, but I wasn't yet politically committed
to it because I didn't really understand it all. And so I went to an event one day. It was a
discussion on racism. And as it turned out, our president happened to be black. In fact, he was the
first black man to be named president of a major university. And the university was having,
of course, a field day in the PR department. Well, this is so cool. So we invited him. We invited
him to come to the event. It was a discussion of racism. Well, of course, instead of coming, he sent
all of his friends. And so what they did was a surrounded student union where the meeting was
there. I want to say friends, of course, I'm talking about the police from East Lansing,
from Lansing, from Eam County, from the state of Michigan. They surrounded the student union.
And then one by one, they began arresting all the people inside. And as it turned out,
because I happened to have been one of the last ones to enter the building, I was the closest
one to the entrance. And so when they began the arrest, I was the first one arrested. And
usually when the first one is arrested, what does that mean? He's probably the leader. You know,
they get the hardcore first. So they arrested me. They started dragging me away. And the last thing
I saw before they pulled me outside was one guy looking at someone else and going, who's he? Because
they were getting me first. But anyhow, I turned out a hundred and a hundred of us,
where 132 of us were arrested and got thrown into solitary confinement. And all these things
are going on. And I'm saying, hey, I'm not supposed to be here. I'm the future of our country.
You know, I'm supposed to be working my way up the ladder. And so you look around and you see
what's going on. And you realize all the people who are arrested with you are good people.
And by the time I emerged from solitary confinement, that was a radical.
You know, I dropped out of college, moved in with a friend who'd gotten busted with me,
and turned out he was working on local underground paper then. And so I started going to meetings
with them. And you know, little by little, you know, next thing you knew, I was one of the
hardcore members of the paper. Right. And then what's such a blow-mind is that this was just a
teaching on racism and cut rated by the cops. You know, and this is just, you know, speech free
assembly. I mean, what they did was they waited until after the after hours. Yeah, I mean,
it was an incredible discussion, you know, and it was important. I mean, you know,
that racism was a really important issue with it. I mean, it still is, of course. But it was an
important issue then. And so we felt it was important to stick around, even though it was past
hours. We thought this was certainly worthy of an exception. So what the assistant manager did,
was he called up the cops and they came and busted us off. So, but again, you know, they're
hopeless to break it up. What it didn't say, it was just intensify it. Right. So anyway,
all these different things that were going on at that time, a million different issues were going
on with feminism. I don't think we've even mentioned yet. But of course, the draft and then the
Kent State thing, this created a lot of anger amongst the radicals. And of course, we saw more,
I guess more engagement than we do these days, because there seems to be the anger, seem to be
amongst the radicals in the 60s, 70s, where it could be comparable to, or the anger say in the
underground press in the 60s, 70s could be compared to the right wing shock jock type AM radio. Do
you have any thoughts on that? I was, because when I was reading through some of this stuff, I was
thinking, in reading the joint issue, I was thinking, you know, this kind of sounds almost
with translate into how you hear the shock jock, you know, from the right wing today on AM radio
and the anger from the right and the tea party and so on and so forth. Is this kind of
similar things, do you think? I suppose the intensity of the anger could be similar.
There is a difference in the fact that they're lying. If you only have to look at the facts
so long to realize that they're not saying them. So there was that difference there, and of course
they're financed by big money we weren't. ours was a lot more grassroots than theirs was. I mean,
they, you know, the grassroots on the right really is not as grassroots as grassroots as
as grassroots. Because yeah, because you know, it's really a lot of big money that's supporting
the whole thing. It's a pop propaganda campaign, I guess, whereas the underground press was just
trying to figure out what was going on and explore the issues. Uh-huh. I mean, the similarities,
like I said, in the anger, I sense that there's a certain similarity there, but I see the
right-wing rank and file being so misled. I mean, it's so pathetic. I think, honestly speaking,
the tea party is one of the dumbest parties on record. I mean, I just, I can't see. I've never seen
a group of people who are so united against their own interests. I mean, that's the big,
that's the big difference quite frankly. You know, we were, we were protecting our own interests.
You know, we were going to die or not. They're fighting their own interests. I mean,
I mean, healthcare is such a major positive to so many of these people. I mean, how many of them are,
who are fighting against, you know, Obamacare are unemployed and don't have any health insurance.
Right. And then there's thing, no, Obamacare, no socialized medicine, you know, they don't even know
what that means. But they're on medical issues. Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. But you know, exactly the same,
protect my Medicare, you know, which is socialized medicine. So it's so many, it's crazy. I mean,
that's the big difference. You know, we were, you know, we were educating, we were encouraging
education, their discouraging education. I mean, when you think about it, you know, when you see
what the, what the right is doing to the, to, are the schools, you know, to the university. I mean,
they're decimating them. And, and there has been no record that, that, you know, the, the
so-called schools of choice are any better. In fact, they're underperforming in many cases.
But it's, it's just creating more segregation, more class division, you know, I mean,
now those are the goals. And so these, these, these changes don't help the bank and file, you know,
from the, from the Tea Party, not at all. But they're fighting against us, you know. And they
really should be on our side. They really should be. I think, really, I think Obama has done a,
you know, Obama, who is not so much always on our side either, has done a real poor job of
doing outreach to the Tea Party. I mean, he should really be out there going, hey guys, you're on
my side, you know, you know, they hate you, you know. Those guys hate you, who were financing you.
You know, he hasn't, he hasn't gotten it together to say that, which, which is amazing. I mean,
he's such a great public speaker, but, but he hasn't said that yet.
All right. Well, there are some things going on within the Tea Party that are kind of interesting,
especially down in Georgia with respect to energy policy. You've got a lot of folks
in the Green Tea Party faction that's broken out that's, you know, against the monopoly
utilities and so on and so forth. I hope to be interviewing one of them shortly for my
other show. But let's get back to the underground press. So anyway, in your voices of the underground,
from the underground in the first edition, I love this little dedication in the beginning here,
where it says contributors to this, I'll say four volume said it says two volume. It was only
two volume, I guess, at the time. Well, I'll say, but before you go there, let me explain why it was
two volume and then finish your thought. Okay. The first edition that came out in 1993,
the first volume was a huge book. It was over 600 pages laid out in an 8.5 by 11,
two column form. In other words, in other words, it was literally four book. And those, that huge
volume is now what's the four volume series that you know today. But volume two from the first
edition was a resource guide. You had an annotated bibliography of books and articles about the
underground press, a directory listing of special collections, libraries that have major holdings
on the underground press. So it was a resource guide. Given the internet, it didn't make any sense
when I was updating volume one to also update volume two as a book, because books get
outdated so fast, resource guides are so outdated. So it really needs to become another website.
I just haven't had the finances to do that yet. But the volume one of the first edition is what's
now the four volume set. So anyhow, go back to what you were saying. Still struggling with the
finances. Yeah, always. There's no difference there. Yeah. Anyway, so the contributors too, I'll
just use read it verbatim, but contributors to this two volume set of voices from the underground
pay tribute to Tom Payne, whose common sense would not have been syndicated in England to
updinson Claire and other turn of the century muck rakers, whose pens forced changes in labeling
laws, child labor laws, and other issues that primarily affected poor people. And to all the other
dissident pens throughout world history, who gave us our tradition of independent reporting and
analysis. That's something that seems to be sorely lacking, of course, in the corporate press these
days. Do you have any thoughts on that that you want to elaborate on? Well, which one do I want
me to elaborate on? Well, let's go to, well, why don't we jump to the mission I found in your article
here. Kind of the mission of joint issue, joint issue saw itself you write as a tool in the struggle
for that collective community. It would be a community newspaper owned and operated by community
people not to serve the community, but to be the community, which, which I thought was a really
great way of looking at this thing. It's more of a community bulletin board in that it's like
the community rather than speaking to the people, it's the people speaking. Right. The defining
community was actually a regular activity. We're always defining what is community and what is
joint issue. The traditional format of a newspaper is you've got the hierarchical, you've got
the editor, the publisher, the editor, the various levels below that. What we tried to do was be
more of a collective. In other words, breaking down the hierarchies and sharing in the decision-making
and not having one person loading it over everybody else. That was always the effort. The reality
always competed with the effort. I mean, the reality was that a lot of people
wanted to be part of the decision-making process, but then they would leave when the actual
work had to get done. You were left with the same people doing the work all the time, and then
those people could get easily frustrated. Why are we letting everyone else help with the decisions
if they're not going to do the work? It was always the struggle. The effort was always there. The
vision was always there. Sometimes it worked really beautifully. Other times, you had to struggle.
Plus, of course, there was always turnover. People were coming and going. This was never a paid
position. People always were coming and going. Even if one group had made one definition,
then another group would come and say, we don't like that and they change it. It was always
a struggle there, but it was a wonderful effort and it was a dynamic experience. I mean, just all
that talking, even though there was nothing solid that worked the same day in and day out,
it was that process of thinking and creating that was incredibly dynamic and incredibly exciting.
And defining the community too, when you say to community bulletin, the concern was always
what if some hardcore right-wing wacko comes along and says, well, I'm in the community. I want
this article to go in there. Do we have to do it? Of course, we never did. It was clearly a left-wing
paper and it was going to stay that way. But we had to deal with those issues. At what point do we
say, no, we can't do that? We weren't going to allow anything that was blatantly racist or blatantly
sexist or blatantly agious, all the negative ifs we didn't want in there. And that was clear.
We would not allow those. That was okay. We were pretty consistent with that all along.
Right. Well, I found that kind of interesting in this one edition that I have from February 21st,
the March 5th. It was the special ecology issue in 1970. One of the first articles here was
this open meaning that you guys had at the MSU Union. I had just kind of a, it sounded like a round
table type of discussion about who should be allowed to, as you were just discussing, contribute
to the paper, participate in the paper. And I was recognized how kind of closed it was.
Folks were saying like, J.I. joined issues should exclude young Republicans. J.I.
should exclude people like those who support McGovern in Muskie. That it should remain radical.
One person did say one person that would have been much like myself said, well,
where's that? I can't seem to find it. We shouldn't, you know, shouldn't be blocking people from
participating in this sort of a thing. But I was rather surprised kind of how closed it was.
What came out of that, do you recall? I mean, I presume that you were probably at that meeting.
In 1972. I'm going to be novice there. I struggled to remember the exact details of the meeting,
but it was similar to the other meetings. Yeah, I mean, you had people at different levels.
I mean, some people who worked on the paper were hardcore left, I mean, way to the left,
you know, some of the, you know, the very political parties, the left political parties that
most of us didn't belong to. But others were more on the liberal side, you know,
ready to vote for McCartney. You know, looking back at it now, McCartney seems a lot more radical
than he was then. Back then, looking at McCartney, for a lot of us, he was still a Democrat. You know,
we couldn't quite see the significance of what he was doing. This is the
factor of, you know, a factor of us being young, you know, most of us didn't come from radical
backgrounds. You know, we didn't study radicalism in high school so that by the time college
happened and we got involved in it, we were hardcore knowing what we were doing. I mean, we were
figuring out what we were doing as we were going along. And, you know, so we made a lot of mistakes,
but the effort was to be as open as we could be. I mean, regardless of what came out of that
particular meeting, the reality was that we always had people at all extremes of the left.
No, no young Republicans. We would not have allowed that. On the other hand, they wouldn't have
wanted it part of it anyhow. Well, and then, you know, some things that when I was browsing through
a couple of these issues that I found really surprising was, well, sadly, many of the themes were
very familiar and still ongoing today. But what I thought was very cutting edge. I always had
the impression that the counterculture movement of the 60s, early 70s wasn't inclusive of the
homosexual community and that the homosexual community was still very much in the closet at
the time. And I was kind of surprised to see articles that were so openly discussing homosexuality.
You want to talk about that for a few minutes? They were discussing it, you're saying?
Yes. In your poll. Good. Okay.
Yes. Okay. Good. I thought you were going to say you're as bad as human beings falling out.
No, no. I was. That's that. Okay. This is not my, this is not my area of expertise, but I always
was under the impression that the counterculture of the 60s was, you know, the homosexuality was
still very much in the closet. Well, it was coming out then. It was coming out then. I mean,
the expression is coming out, but the reality was that it was. I mean, you know, 1969, you know,
Stonewall is what I mentioned then. Stonewall was, it was a bar in New York, but it was a gay bar.
Gay lesbians hang out. And, you know, the cops used to regularly rate it. And usually the tradition
pretty much was that the gays would, you know, they would disperse or they'd go get jails or whatever
they did. But then a few days later, everything would settle down and get back to business as usual.
But this one particular evening, they said, no, enough of this. And they flocked back. And it was,
it had repercussions, of course, all around the country and literally around the world. And,
and as a result of that, actually, the liberation fronts, GLF,
the liberation fronts spread out, you know, they sprung up all over the country. And a lot of them
put out their own newspapers. And these were the gay papers. One of them was called Fag Rag,
a paper out of Boston. And the history of Fag Rag is in insider histories, part two,
in my book, which is actually volume three of the series. But it's insider histories, part two.
And a lot of lesbian papers came out of that also. One of them was called the Furies,
which is also in that same volume, a history of that. But, so yeah, but, but previous to those
papers, gays were on the regular, so to speak, underground papers. And yes, some people on the left
weren't comfortable with gays. And it took a, it was all part of the education. So, but it
meant happening. You know, gays were fighting. They, you know, we're part of this too. We demand
equal in the same way that women were, you know, the feminists and the lesbians were saying,
no, we're part of this too. You know, we have our own issue. We're all against the war,
but we've got our own issues too. And so these are all being fought out on the underground press.
I mean, it was an incredibly dynamic, incredibly dynamic. And no matter how far left you went,
there were still factions, you know, fighting over nuances. And it's okay, that was part of growth.
You know, people were speaking out for the first time, expressing themselves. And so,
there was a lot of excitement. And, but a lot of, you know, a lot of challenges, you know,
people competing with each other with their interpretations of what should be. But we had a,
we had a good, I think, a good feminist and lesbian and gay presence. Actually, one of the papers
that became joint issue, you know, you correctly analyzed the name. Originally, there were two
papers, one called Generation and one called Bogue Street Bridge, that united. This was at the
end of 1969, just before the year ended. They came together and they combined their staffs,
they combined their resources, and they put out an experimental joint issue. And that's where
the name came from. Of course, it was upon the first issue. The first issue showed on page one,
you had the generation logo on the top, the red apple, the Bogue Street Bridge apple on the
bottom. And then in the middle, you had a hand that was holding a joint. And it said joint issue.
And that was the first joint issue. And then later on a paper, those first lancing underground
newspaper, these were all in East Lansing. The first underground newspaper in Lansing was called
Red Apple News. And that later joined also and became part of joint issue. But Red Apple News had
a strong feminist and lesbian presence, because of the people who were part of that paper. And so
when they became part of joint issue, they brought that consciousness with them. Right.
Why don't we talk now a little bit more about the heyday of joint issue, which I guess was like
71, 72 era. And how it was non-higher article that just these different that we've been already
talking about these different communities would come in and attend open meetings and maybe
participate for one issue because they had a topic that they wanted to get out there, something
they were organizing as this being as an organizing tool. But then of course, you had several core
people who probably ended up doing the bulk of the work. But can we talk about that? Because I
saw it very much. I was kept thinking that, wow, Occupy was kind of a startup, a flare-up of
this sort of community type thing going on that we saw Occupy a couple of years ago in the fall.
I guess what two years ago now. But it was very non-hierarchical and it was all different
communities that were coming together because of the tension from our corporate government that we
have. So why don't we talk about how joint issue worked through that and how it was established.
And then of course, in compared to other underground presses where some of them they charged for
additions, the joint issue was free. You were ad supported and then as you got bigger, I guess you
needed to kind of tighten up your editorial on your articles to make sure they're a little more
accurate and stuff and I just saying stuff because it sounded cool as you write in one of your
in their book here. Well, the initial paper is why I told you the ones that became joint issue.
They were founded by individuals and those people obviously were the paper but their goal
always was to bring more people into the paper and it's to their credit that as more people came in,
they were welcomed. I mean, there always was a welcoming effort. There always was, as I recall,
you know, when you're new on a paper, you don't always feel it. But our effort was always to
try to bring new people in. I remember when I was new on the paper, you know, I didn't feel
comfortable talking either. I mean, I didn't feel like I was up to par with the intel that
Gemsia, you know, I mean, I didn't understand the issues the way they did. I didn't feel confident
expressing my opinions and yet they would call on me anyhow. Ken, what do you think? You know,
and that was really important. I mean, you know, it was important in enabling me to become
confident ultimately and it brought me into the paper. And so we always, you know, as I became
one of the insiders, I always tried to do that to new people. And that was the purpose of our
community meetings and our open meetings when we discussed what was going to go in each issue
where it became a problem for us was that when somebody, you know, we always voted on what
issue, what articles would go in. And so you'd have somebody who had nothing to do with the paper
up till that point, but had an article would come with a few friends and then they would vote.
And so there'd be a lot of votes in favor of that article and then they would disappear. They
never work on the paper. And so that's where, you know, a little bitterness comes in. You know,
we're trying to be open. They're ripping us off. So there was always, there was always this
trouble between trying to be open and trying to acknowledge that, you know, that we have to get
worked on and the, you know, certain people are going to do it. Okay. Well, great. So the paper,
the Underground Press, well, as we mentioned, your issue was free. I guess others did charge. I
guess the two that came together to become the joint issue, both charged for their publications.
And it was a joint issue that finally went to free. But so the, so people who contributed,
all you really needed was a typewriter and you could type out an article in a specific width,
I guess. And then you guys just sat around and pasted all the stuff up onto whatever the size
of the paper was going to be. And then you used what photography and you did because of offset
printing. Where did you, where did you access, you know, the photos and offset printing? And how
did you get your print paper? Because, you know, you were up to 10, 10, 12,000 issues at one point.
That's a lot of paper. Well, we obviously didn't use out, you know, we didn't have all the paper
ourselves. There were printers in the area, you know, printers that did newspapers. You know, we
had some of the shopping guides, you know, the small tabloids that, you know, had ads in them or had,
you know, sold with classifieds, those kinds of newspapers. We found some of those printers
that were going to work with us. I mean, a lot of them weren't. They didn't want to handle the
material that we were doing. But we always were able to find one or two that could. So, yeah,
we would have paper that was the size of the pages that we were going to be laying out. We,
you know, we got those from the printer. And anytime we would take an issue to the printer,
we'd always get new blank pages to take back to the office. So we could lay them out. But we
would type the articles using margins that were the size of the two columns or the three columns,
whatever our layout was. And we would just type them up in those columns. And then we would
lay them out. We'd use the scissors so that, you know, if you had, say, three column inches,
and then all of a sudden a picture appeared, you couldn't, you couldn't lay out four column
inches because the last inch would overlap the picture. So you would, so you would just take the
first three and then you would cut. And now you'd have another inch that you had to place somewhere
else. So you'd go to the next column, read, go to another page, and put a continued note on
the bottom. But yeah, we had to lay out every page using glue stick or, you know, Elmer's glue,
or, you know, some kind of a glue. And so that was a fun part, actually. A lot of fun doing
the layout. But it was obviously different than the computer. I mean, using the computer,
you can magically, you know, lay out. I mean, we didn't have that. But it was fun. It was artistic.
I mean, it was very exhilarating. Well, and you had, and you had some artists that were hanging
out too that would do political comics and then just little doodles so you could fill in
little gaps and spaces and things of the sort. Oh, yeah. We put slogans all over the
take-up hitchhikers and, you know, dumps up to the FBI and tip the dishwasher. That was always one
of my favorites because I was a dishwasher back then. So we put those all of them. And I love the
community aspect of it and the community both and board sort of a thing, you know, that there's
going to be a meeting over here about wages, boycott this restaurant because they're not paying the
the waitresses and the cooks and, you know, they pick up the hitchhikers and so on and so forth.
Well, that was great. Now, that was great. I mean, it was really, it was a great organizing
tour. I mean, people related to it and plus there was something powerful about being able to hand
a newspaper to somebody. You know, it's in the process. I mean, that's one thing missing today
in the social media. And the social media, of course, has its own advantages. Obviously,
you know, it's incredibly powerful for what it does. But one of the disadvantages is that you
can't hand it off the same way. You can't run into a stranger in the street and, you know, talk
about what you're doing and then hand them a paper when you're doing social media. So that was
clearly an advantage. It was a lot more personal and organizing, you know, organizing is a very
personal experience. I mean, you know, if you're ever a labor organizer, you learn that the
organizing is done one at a time. You can speak of rallies and all that and hopefully get a lot
of people involved. But ultimately, a lot of the organizing, the unionizing is just one person
of the time, you know, knocking on doors or whatever. So with us, it was handing out newspapers.
Right. And that's sort of where I want to try and bring the show in for a landing here is that we
want to start comparing a contrasting with two day versus yesterday with the underground press.
In your case in Lansing, who was the corporate paper or news sources there in the
Lansing area region? Well, we had the Lansing State Journal. Okay. Then in Detroit, you had to
take free press in the Detroit news. Right. Um, other types of those. And not to conflate the
Detroit free press, which still exists today. And I often read it with, with being an underground
press like the LA free press, which was underground so that don't complain. It was the Detroit free press
was the corporate paper. Right. Right. So then you were competing with them or well, you weren't
really competing with them. You were just your own voice in a more community voice. And, and so
talk about your circulation and how it grew and what it was at its height, I guess.
Okay. When before drawing issue, when you had the Boke Street Bridge and and generation,
I entered the underground press through generation. And in fact, one of the first meetings that I
ever attended was the one where the two staffs came together to, you know, to merge and become
joint issue. But, but I came in through the generation side. And we used to print, we used to
print about 3,000, 4,000. And then we would just stand on the corner and try to sell them. We'd sell
them for 15 cents. You know, we'd sell a few, but it was hard to make ends meet. So we raised it
to 20 cents. We didn't lose anybody, but we didn't gain anybody. But at least we, you know,
it was a nickel more. So we gained a little more money. But still wasn't enough. We went up to
25 cents. And it was the same thing. You know, people who used to buy the paper still bought the
paper, but new people was hard to get. But, but we were still not making ends meet. And it was,
to me, I hated standing on the corner hawk and papers. I just didn't like it. It seemed like I
didn't enjoy it. Plus, it seemed like an energy drain. We could have been up to research and organizing
it here. We were trying to sell papers. And I had this idea. I said, you know, we used to sell
advertising at at at ridiculously low prices. People on the paper didn't really think of the
of the the ads as being worthy of paying the bills. I mean, it was like token, you know, the
head shops, the advertisers, the leather shops, the advertisers, you know, but they didn't really think
in terms of of we never thought that this was actually a value to them. We thought that they
were really just being nice to us. But I thought it was the potential, you know, that if we could
raise the price of the ads to make them actual ad prices, I mean, worthy of, you know, to be more
of what they're actually worth. And then we could increase the circulation. In other words, if we could
double the size of the price of the ads, we could actually afford to print 10,000 and give them
away. Rather than printing 3,000 and spending days of the time trying to sell them and still losing,
we could actually make money this way. We could, you know, and so I had this idea, why don't we sell
the ads? And of course, I was hoping that one of the heavies would come forth and do it,
you know, because I was just I was so new, I was just throwing out ideas. But they also
didn't mean we'll sell the ads. You know, that was the first time I realized that if you have
an idea, you got to be prepared to implement it. And I was too embarrassed to say I couldn't
do it. So I did it. And I spent six weeks selling ads and I actually sold enough to raise the,
you know, to print 10,000 and give them away free. And in the summer of 1971, July 14th, as a
matter of fact, I believe was the date. We actually, we came out with the first free join issue.
And it created incredible noise. I mean, credible excitement. We were running up and down the
streets giving papers away. People didn't know what was hitting them. But it made major news.
And so that fall for the first time we were able to actually create a schedule where we knew
that every week we every other week we would come out with a new issue. And that it was an
already debate for because we had ads, you know, to go all the way from September through December.
In other words, that semester. And we continued to do that. And so we were able to finally come out
on a regular basis. And at one point we increased the price again and came out of 15,000. And the
advertisers were delighted because they were, yes, but it was reading the paper. And so they were getting,
you know, they were gaining a certain prestige because they advertised and joined issues. So really
it was great business for them. And so that's how we supported ourselves. A few of the other papers
around the country saw what we were doing. Paper on Madison, paper called Free For All.
They copied that model. Paper in Columbus, Ohio. Columbus Free Press took that model. Other papers
did differently though. We co-cress a lot of them. You know, they sold drugs and used the money.
Others had rich financiers, you know, the Liberals, who maybe didn't vote the right way,
but at least they gave us money. Some papers were supported through the Liberals. Others had
you know, fundraisers. A lot of the bans were, you know, way behind us. And they would give us,
you know, they would put on concerts and raise money. So there were various ways to raise the money.
But the idea, again, was this was a strong community effort that everybody wanted the papers
to come out. I mean, it was, there was no way we could do one on our own. We had a lot of help.
And it was really wonderful. And it was interesting, at least with respect to the joint issue anyway,
because you guys were all volunteer, was that you were just trying to get the paper published
with that first one that came out free. It says in your article here that it was a 16-page
or you, I guess in six weeks time, was able to sell $300 worth of ads and you ended up costing
about $305 to print it. So you lost one of the dollars, but you guys were selling it on a lost pocket
change. That was a victory for us. And when it came to ads, you weren't beholden. I mean,
there was definitely, it seemed a very strong firewall between your sponsors or advertisers and
the content. And that, you know, you didn't really care. You didn't accept ads from, and especially
once you started getting larger circulation, you wouldn't even accept ads from banks and insurance
companies, Jacobson's department stores, which I guess was a big department store chain,
and barber shops. We had principles. We had our principles, yeah. No ads from barbers.
That was right, right. One landlord didn't use any of them.
Anyway, so how do you think this translates now to modern times? Of course,
the underground press is more or less into the alternative press. And we have a paper here that's
an alternative weekly called the, you know, news and review. And their model is very much that
of joint issue and that the editions are free and it's ad supported. But the content is not
nearly as radical as once was, at least in the underground press. So, you know, we have the
alternative presses out there. And then, of course, then you have the monster in the room,
a gorilla in the room, which is the internet, which back when you were doing the joint issue and
distributed around the Lansing, what southeast Michigan area, if people wanted alternative news,
that was pretty much the one source they went to. I guess there was a couple of other papers that
would pop up and disappear and so on. But you had a focused audience and there wasn't so much
the delusion that we have now that's caused by the internet with Twitter, Facebook, and blogs,
and so on and so forth. And it seems like it might have been easier back then to organize a movement
or to at least, you know, get the message out about things that are going on within the community
and concerns of the community and what the community members, concerns are, you know, through the
underground press, then it is now with so much going on, such as, you know, even netcasting like
what we're doing today. There's just so much other, it seems to be deluded. Can you, do you want,
do you have some thoughts on that? Well, you've actually expressed a main thought. There's so much
that it's hard to discriminate. It's just good or bad. I don't know. I would argue that it's
better to have too much than not enough and right now we have too much. I mean, there's so much,
but it's, I mean, I can't say it's bad. I think we just need to educate people more. I mean,
people need to become educated to be able to discriminate between what's good and what's bad.
I mean, if people, if people can't listen to Fox and realize that they're lying to you,
then we're in real trouble. I mean, they are. I mean, you know, it's not just that they're
right-wing, they're right-wingers who are that disagree with, but at least they're being honest.
You know, they just have a different interpretation than I do. But Fox knew it's just, you know,
the crap that they put out there is, you know, you don't have to listen to too many to realize
that they're contradicting themselves or changing the story just to, you know, to fit the moment.
It's, you know, shock journalism. Yeah, it's just shock journalism to get clicks for ads,
you know, for sponsors. Yeah, but it, it's also, it also affects a lot of people. I mean, a lot of
people believe that. And it, it, it raises me. I can't believe they do, but they do. They do,
and they need to be educated. And, you know, I don't have the total answer on how we educate people
to come back from that. But, you know, sometimes it just takes, go ahead.
Yeah, well, that's one of the things that I got into early on when I first got on Facebook
several years ago. I got into it with, with a journalist here for our corporate paper,
the, you know, Gazette Journal. And we were going back and forth about, about the differences
between the internet and blogs and internet and, and calling internet news. And I guess maybe
something confirmation bias would come into this where you're looking for the news that kind of
confirms which are pre, you know, which are already predisposed to be thinking. Whereas with
a newspaper, you do have even with corporate media, of course, you, you have, you sit down with
a newspaper at the table and you're eating or whatever that's when I read newspapers. And you're
exploring, you know, you don't know what's on the next page, particularly, you know, in one
section, you know, okay, here's the world news, but you don't know if it's going to be talking about
China or Iraq or what it might be talking about. And then, of course, the local stuff, you know,
so there's this discovery as you're going through a paper. And this would apply, of course,
to the underground press as well, which I was really, I mean, it was just, it was all over the map
and very interesting. Whereas with the internet, you tend to kind of get funneled into those particular
sources that are confirming what you already know, you know, do you see that as being an issue?
Well, that, I think that's always, I mean, and that probably was so even back then somewhat,
you know, you find your comfort zone, your recent magazines, newspapers that confirm what you believe.
I mean, I think one issue is there's a hard, it's getting harder to distinguish between news
and entertainment. And, you know, newspapers, the papers, we still traditionally think we need
to go for news. They become more entertainment than news. I mean, you don't see much in the way of
investigative journalism anymore. You know, I mean, I've seen the reporter journalists, in fact,
who are saying, what am I doing in this business? I can't earn a living because I want to investigate,
nobody wants to pay me to investigate. You know, but I mean, we need more of that. We need to return
journalism to its function. You know, when you have journalists becoming friends of the politicians,
you know, and the better friend you are, the more likely you are to get the story from them.
But of course, the story from them is their story. And it's not necessarily the truth. And if you're
trying to become friends, you're not, you know, you're betraying your role as a real journalist.
Right. And so, I mean, I would like to see journalism schools doing more to remind students
of what a journalist is. You know, that's why I'd like to see more schools studying the underground
press. You know, I'd love to see, I'd love to see my book picked up quite frankly, you know,
because it talks about when journalism was really journalism. And we need more of that. We need
a whole lot more of that. Most journalism schools don't even talk about the underground press,
let alone, you know, actually have a course on the underground press.
Indeed. Well, of course, then, I guess, to round this off, then our discussion and to keep
with the theme that I'm trying to develop with Hacker Public Radio on hacking public policy,
of course, the underground press and new media now and social media is all important today with
getting the word out and educating the public, whether you're talking to a very focused audience
or a very fragmented audience nowadays. But nevertheless, it's still another thing that we need to be
aware of in this whole thing that we call community organizing with respect to HDR and the interest
of most HDR listeners as far as IT goes and Linux and open source and free software. Of course,
there's a lot going on in that can be done these days in activism to get more of a message out
there to folks and to oppose problems where we see the proprietary close source software going
into our public schools. Of course, the LA school system recently announced this is the latter
October 2013 that they're going to be getting iPads for every single one of their students,
which is just absolutely disgusting from an open source free software perspective. And if you want
to organize against something like this and actually start talking about it, the media,
the various media, the alternative press nowadays and the corporate presses are two tools that you
need to use. So this was pretty much our reason for the show, but plus, I'm just curious to talk
to somebody that was involved in the underground press. It was always a very fascinating thing for
me growing up in the Los Angeles area at the time. So Ken, why don't you plug the things that
you're up to now, what you're doing and where people can find you and your websites and so forth?
Well, I appreciate that. I talk briefly about my book. It's a voices from the Underground
series. It's actually four books. You can find them at voicesfromtheunderground.com.
I talk about what the underground press is. I talk about the, you know, all the different,
you know, what's in each one of the books. And there's some interesting stories in each one.
So you can get a good feel of which histories are in each one of them.
Plus, I have just some other stories of mine from the period. So that's happening right now.
I'll plug in the book. I'm trying to get that out there, but I'm also working on a really
interesting project to digitize underground newspapers from the period. You know, technically,
nobody was really thinking about copyright back then. People were just writing for the cause,
but technically, as soon as you put, you know, words to paper, you own the copyright to it.
So my challenge has been to come up the list of papers to digitize and then to figure out
who the copyright holders would be and then, you know, get permission. But we've got an incredible
response from this. If you go to a site called Reveal Digital, two words, Reveal Digital,
but they're crammed together, of course, .com. Reveal digital.com. You'll see the beta site.
Our goal is to digitize thousand papers representing about a million pages worth of work
in four years. That's our goal right now. So what you've got on the beta site,
what you've got on the beta site is 75,000 pages. In other words, it's really just a fraction.
And all you've got there is the feminists and lesbian papers and the military papers,
and not even all of them. It's just a representative sample because we wanted libraries to see what
the site looked like because we're going to be going to libraries for our funding. But what we're
doing, we're using a unique economic model. It's called cost recovery equals open access. What that
means is that once we've sold enough to the library market to recover our costs and our expenses
and our salaries, we'll be going to open access, which means become free to all other libraries.
So you know, you always rely on certain libraries to support it with the idea that others will
get it for free. And the library community is pretty good at that. But anyhow, so that's what we're
doing. So it's a huge project. Very exciting. We're going to have underground papers. We're also
going to have alternative papers. We're going to have literary papers, anarchist papers. We're
even going to have right wing papers in this collection, although I haven't actually started
my outreach to them yet. But so it's a huge collection. Libraries are really excited about it.
I'm really excited about it. It's a chance to bring a lot of the underground papers
back from, you know, right now they're sitting on dark shelves of special collections libraries
all around the country. I mean, they are there. It's just that nobody sees them. And they're getting
old. They're aging. They're they're yellowing. They're crumbling. And so our project, the goal is
first goal is to preserve them, you know, by scanning and digitizing them. And the second is to
make them accessible by creating this huge collection. It'll be the largest collection ever,
you know, digital collection of these papers. And it's bringing them together. You know,
different libraries may have incomplete runs of different titles. So by working with all the
different libraries, we're able to fill in all the blanks and all the gaps and and create
complete runs. So this is these are the two big projects that I'm working on right now.
Have you talked to, you know, the various states all have these humanities non-profits? And I
think there's a national endowment for the humanities. Have you talked to these folks? I'm sure
you'll be very interested. Well, this is the company is actually a for-profit company. So we're
not able to get we're not going to be able to get funds from from, you know, non-profit type
places. But what makes it unique is that this is a almost anti-profit project. I mean,
obviously, we're going to pay our salaries. You know, we're not, you know, we can't afford to
to not do that. But, you know, once we reach the open access, you know, the mark in the right
number, the cost, what we call our sales threshold. Once we reach that, it goes into open access.
And that particular collection then will not bring any more money in because it's now free.
But meanwhile, we'll be working in other collections. We're looking at some of the groups from that
period, you know, that not necessarily on the ground papers, but just some of the political groups
talking to them, Liberation News Service, which was the LNS Liberation News Service. That was
like the AP and UPI of the Underground Press. And they used to put out packets three, you know,
three packets a week. Our news packets that they would send out to members and members could
or subscribers. And the subscribers could then use them. We belong to LNS. So we're working
with LNS folks now to digitize all the packets. So that'll be another collection, you know,
related to the Underground Press collection. But I'll be later on. And we're talking to some other
groups too. We haven't signed the deals yet. So I don't want to, you know, say too much about who
they are yet. But we're in early stages, so but we're getting a lot of interest. They're
excited about the whole economic model. Okay. And give listeners your website again.
Voices from the Underground.com. Voices from the Underground series. So it's voices from the
Underground.com. That's where you can find the book. My other books are my Zenfony Press
website. A-Z-E-N-P-H-O-N-Y. Zenfonypress.com. That's where all my other books are. So thanks for
the chance to plug that. And we'll have those links with the show notes to this edition of HDR.
Radio. And joining us today was Ken Watts Berger, right? Very good. Very good. Get it
glows enough. Good. And thank you so, so much for your time. And it was just, you know, wonderful
to talk to you and get the first person perspective from people from somebody that was, you know,
intimately involved with this Underground Press movement in its heyday. And good luck to you
and all your projects. Okay. And thanks for inviting me. You're doing good work. So keep it up.
I appreciate that. Thanks.
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