Starting an underground newspaper

From out overstocked archives

Sam Smith – We started the Gazette, forerunner of the Progressive Review,  with rub-on letters for headlines, and later used a complex, malodorous and malfunctioning machine that required each headline be typed on film using an alphabet mounted on the circumference of a disc that was a foot in diameter. The results were routed on movie projector-type ratchets through three small containers to be developed, fixed and washed.

Our typesetter was an IBM Executive typewriter (later a pair of IBM Selectrics). Each mistake was retyped, the corrections excised from the paper with a razor blade and then affixed with rubber cement. At the end of an issue our dining room floor was covered with confetti.

My wife Kathy fell comfortably into the questionable notion that one should publish a newspaper from one's house. She was listed on the masthead as 'Editor's Wife' and wrote a column of the same name. I thought it described her ubiquitous role pretty well while also providing a hint of Thurberesque menace. When the women's movement arrived, however, I would be informed by several staffers that what I thought was wrong. By this time, Kathy and I had decided that putting out a publication together and staying married wasn't all that easy. We opted for the latter. Kathy became an historian and we thereafter followed the rule that I would take care of everything from the 1960s on and she would take care of everything before. It's worked pretty well as the anniversary of our marital and publishing adventures have marched hand in hand down the decades.

Sally Crowell became the Gazette's first regular staff member, and her new son, Ted, became the first client of the paper's day care center (AKA the living room floor) It soon became clear, however, that the paper needed its own quarters. We moved into a storefront on 8th Street NE.  I splurged on a big sign with The Capitol East Gazette in gold P.T. Barnum type on a black background. It made me feel that now I was running a real newspaper.

The Gazette was part of a explosion of underground, alternative and community journals of the period. The explosion had political roots, but also technological ones. The 1960s happened along just as conventional newspapers were switching from hot type to offset printing. The new machinery was expensive and, because of its efficiency, idle much of the time, especially at weekly publications. Printers were scrambling for any work they could get. The result was that a tabloid press run of 10,000 to 15,000 could cost less than $400.

There were other economies as well. The Underground Press Syndicate, started in 1967, eventually included several hundred papers willing to share stories and graphics without charge. The resulting journalistic synergy was remarkable. These were papers unhampered by the ambivalence that would come to afflict later independent media -- publications unable to decide whether they were an alternative, conventional journalism or merely its farm team. In the underground press, we knew which side we were on.

The Gazette was also blessed by a steady stream of talented folk who provided copy, let us use their columns or otherwise looked kindly upon us, among them Chuck Stone, Charlie McDowell, Erbin Crowell, Jim Ridgeway, Larry Cuban, Tuli Kupferberg, Paul Krassner, Anton Wood, Anne Chase, Marcia Feldman, Jim Ramsey, Carl Bergman, and Mitch Ratner. Long before Tony Auth won a Pulitzer, the Gazette ran his cartoons. Zippy the Pinhead and Dave Barry were also introduced to Washington readers through the Gazette. And the paper featured Archihorse, the only urban planning comic strip in the country (by John Wiebenson) and the only regular column written by a jail inmate.

Kathy kept saying that the Gazette ought to have an arts section. Though I played jazz, I seldom read cultural criticism and regarded myself pretty much a philistine. I finally told Kathy that if she really wanted an arts section she'd have to find one. She shortly came back with Joel Siegel to cover movies and Tom Shales to write about drama. Siegel went on to be a local cinematic guru and Shales was hired by the Washington Post's Style section, becoming its famed syndicated television critic.

When Style began, Tom had written a Gazette column in which he quoted someone as saying, "What the Post needs now is a section called Substance." After he went to work for the Post, Shales continued to write for the Gazette under the pseudonym of Egbert Sousé, a W.C. Fields character. A Post editor, however, discovered the disguise, which is how the Gazette lost its drama critic. Nonetheless there was no shortage of fine cultural criticism thanks to Andrea Dean, Cris Wittenberg, Jean Lewton, Val Lewton, Sally Crowell, Ed Merritt, Patti Griffith, and Richard King.

There was also an elusive correspondent named Josiah Swampoodle who described himself as "purveyor of split infinitives for more than 30 years." Swampoodle covered the news that others didn't.

Then there was Roland Freeman. Roland had introduced himself by screaming at me over the phone. We had run a striking front page shot of two karate students sent us by the Southeast Enrichment Center. When I answered Roland's call, I quickly learned that the photo had been his, that we should have given him credit, that he was a poor black drop-out who was working at a car wash trying to break into photography and how could we have been so cruel and so forth. Normally, I would have felt chastened, but Roland's aggressiveness sparked an uncharacteristic response: I started yelling back at him.

"Listen, you say you want to be a photographer?" I shouted.

"Yeah."

"And you want credit for your work?"

"That's right."

"Well, I'm gonna to tell you how to become a photographer and get full credit for your work."

"OK. I'm listening."

"What you do is you go and get yourself a fucking rubber stamp that reads 'Credit Roland Freeman, Photographer, all rights reserved' and you stamp every photo you take with that stamp and then you'll be a real photographer and I won't print anymore of your frigging photos without giving you credit."

We both quieted down and the next thing I knew Roland was the Gazette's photo editor. Later he would win the first photographic grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and become a nationally known photographer and an expert on African-America quilting.

o

The meat and potatoes of our coverage were the endless meetings taking place in the community, not a few of them spurred by questions as to what to do and who should do it with the money coming from the war on poverty. Everyone knew Robert's Rules of Order and its locally sanctioned addenda: "Mr. Chairman, I have an unreadiness." Sometimes meetings broke up in pandemonium. One was literally turned around after the chair declared it illegal. The vice chair, a minister and cab driver who wore a clerical collar around his neck and a coin holder on his belt, stood up in the back of the room and announced that the meeting would go on and requested everyone to turn their chairs around. Most did, leaving the chairman speechless in what was now the rear.

The meetings may have seemed chaotic but they were actually part of a community coming alive, of power being transferred to better places, and of the anarchistic results of discovering hope. And you met some wonderful people covering the story, people like the Reverend Imogene Stewart of the Revolutionary Church of What's Happening Now.

And public housing activist Lucille Goodwin. Ms. Goodwin, it seemed, spent all day on the phone. … Everyone knew just what Lucille Goodwin meant even if they hadn't understood what she said. One day, though, she ended her call with a message that hung around. "You know how you got to treat them people downtown?" she asked, and then without waiting offered the solution: "You gotta technique 'em."

o

Techniquing them was made considerably harder by the fact that Washington was, without a trace of rhetoric, a colony. Washingtonians reacted to the city's political status in varied ways. Some resigned themselves to it; some ignored it; some were not aware of it; some capitalized upon it and some fought to change it. To the poor of the city the matter often seemed quite irrelevant compared to their more immediate problems. To the businessman with contacts on the Hill and at the District Building (and to those he contacted), the situation was in many ways quite satisfactory. To long-time residents, the District's status appeared as sadly inevitable as the summer humidity. And among those oriented towards the federal government -- the powerful and the wealthy -- the city was seldom mentioned except as an impediment to automobile travel, a threat to their personal safety, or a dwindling source of reliable maids.

But there are still many people who threw themselves into the problems of Washington with vigor, if not always with wisdom, They became accustomed to failure and to having their efforts ignored by the government, by the federal and suburban oriented press, and by their friends. Many of them adopted the city. Commissioner and later Mayor Walter Washington came to DC from Georgia. Marion Barry moved from Tennessee, and activist Julius Hobson was born in Alabama.  It became not only a city but a cause