Sixty years of alternative journalism

This is an updated version of something I wrote a decade ago. 

Sam Smith - I actually started in journalism more than sixty years ago. At the age of 13 I began a family newspaper - first handwritten, then typed, that lasted some 20 issues and dealt with everything with my mother's predilection for yogurt and wheat germ to UFOs, the H-bomb and the shocking fact that my youngest sister was allowed to ride her tricycle in the house while none of her five siblings had been.

I was further encouraged towards the trade  when as news director of the Harvard radio station, I asked a reporter to  interview Cambridge city councilman Alfred E. Velucci which helped cause the only riot of our time there.  Velucci suggested "paving Harvard Yard and making it into a parking lot" as well as turning Harvard into a separate state "like the Vatican in Rome." The story made the front page of the Boston Globe. That evening, after someone threw a typewriter out of a window at the Lampoon,  2000 student gathered - quickly taking sides on whether Harvard should become a separate state like the Vatican in Rome as well as letting the air out of all four tires of Mayor Eddie Sullivan's car when he came to quell the disturbance. Clearly journalism was where the action was.

A few other snapshots from my early days in journalism:

At the end of my sophomore year in college, getting a summer job as a radio newsman at WWDC, Washington DC. At the end of the summer they offered me a job when I graduated, which led me to graduate magna cum probation but with a job starting as a radio news reporter in Washington DC and being one of a handful of broadcast news reporters in town with battery operated tape recorder - so new that the engineers union wanted to send someone out with us to make them work.

Learning in a matter of months that America wasn't quite as I had been taught, as I covered the Jimmy Hoffa and TV game show stories as well as some of the first sit-ins and civil rights filibusters.

Interviewing Louis Armstrong in a hotel room on 16th Street and John F Kennedy right after he announced for president.  

Interviewing one of the last residents of Southwest DC in a house surrounded by hundreds of acres of rubble being caused by the first major urban renewal project in the country.

Working for Roll Call newspaper, covering Capitol Hill and where editor Sid Yudain let me be the resident poet, including writing a Christmas poem that took a whole page printed over a background image of Santa Claus and including the names of all 435 members of the House of Representatives.

Covering the attempt by police to shut down DC's only coffee house - Coffee n Confusion - which was being ably defended by Texas lawyer Harvey Rosenberg who said: "Personally, I must admit that I have very little knowledge of poetry, or the bohemian atmosphere that is found in Coffee n Confusion. But I have been informed by personages who have visited Paris that this is the way that numerous writers and poets have reached the French scene."

Starting one of the early examples of what was called the underground press: a magazine called The Idler. This would be followed by the Capitol East Gazette, serving the community near the US Capitol, and later the DC Gazette and then the Progressive Review.  

PublishingThe Idler, which in its first issue ran a five page report on civil rights protests in Mississippi. Plus items like “Lady from the phone company called up to find out whether we wanted our name listed in bold-face type in the new telephone book soon to come out. Would only cost us: $3.75 a month. She told us that ATWI had discovered that 75% of the people who use the phone directory have eyesight trouble. We don’t figure that the percentage is as high with our readers so we’re going to squeak by with the regular style of type. The lady said it would add to our prestige but far as we can determine it will only add $3.75 a month to our expenses. If we are wrong and you really do have trouble finding our number in the phone book, just dial Information and ask for The Idler. That even works in the dark.”

Being told by the Saturday Review of Literature that they couldn't run our ad because our publication was too radical.

Going to a party in Georgetown, meeting an attractive young woman from Wisconsin, going to get her a drink, forgetting to come back, finding her again at the top of the stairs around 11 pm, saying "I remember you. You want to get something to eat?" - her agreeing, some weeks later me proposing to her and  eight months later marrying her.

Being mistaken at four different demonstrations for an undercover cop, the one  pleasant confrontation being as I sat smoking a pipe near the Reflecting Pool and a long haired guy next to me said, "FBI?" and I said, "Nope" and he said "CIA?": and I said nope and he said "Smoke much" and I said, "Half and Half all day long," and he said "Cool" and gave me his love beads.

Getting tired of my wife complaining about the paper not having an arts section and telling her, "If you want an arts section, why don't you go out and get one" and two weeks later she helped begin what would later be a separate publication, the Washington Review of the Arts, which lasted for 25 years.

Having half our circulation department in jail and finding drug needles hidden behind stacks of papers in the office.

Having one of my advertisers - ex-CIA agent Harry Lunn, then running an photographic gallery, tell me in the aftermath of the 1968 riots that if anyone burned down his store he was going to burn down my house. And another advertiser, Len Kirsten of the Emporium telling of a woman who came in and saw the stack of Gazettes on the floor. "Isn't that a communist paper" she asked and Len replied, "No, the editor is a communist but the paper isn't"

Being visited at my office by a 9th precinct cop who would occasionally drop by to talk politics. Officer Donald Graham listened to me better in those days than he would later on as publisher of the Washington Post.  

Taking part in a day-long Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee boycott of DC Transit buses. 

After my article on the action appeared, having the local chair of SNCC - another 20 something named Marion Barry - come over to my apartment to seek help dealing with the press.

Later, sitting in the SNCC headquarters as Stokely Carmichael announced that whites like me were no longer welcome in the civil rights movement.

Sitting with John Neary of the Washngton Star  at 2:30 am in the basement of the House of Prayer for all People waiting for a successor to be chosen for Sweet Daddy Grace.

Getting a call from an angry young guy who was working in a car wash, complaining about me running one of his photos without credit. I pointed out that it had been sent with a news release from a community organization and added, "You wanna be a real photographer? I'll tell you how. Get a rubber stamp marked 'Photo by Roland Freeman. All rights reserved" and I won't run any more of your friggin' photos without credit." Two weeks later, Roland became the Gazette's photo editor later becoming an associate of Magnum, author of a number of books,  the first photographer to get a fellowship from the NEH and subsequently three from the NEA. 

Sitting in our smoky living room, watching the TV coverage of the 1968 riots, including what was going at that moment just four blocks north of us on H Street NE.  Going the next morning through the neighborhood and feeling - as troops marched past the rubble -  like I was in World War II Europe. Two of the city’s four major riot strips were in our circulation area - 150 businesses and 52 homes in our neighborhood had been damaged and things would never be the same. I told people later that too many of our readers wanted to burn down too many of our advertisers.

By the time all this had happened I had just hit 30 years of age.  I thought, this is kind of an interesting life and so I just kept going.

Some people have taken it personally, as though I did what I did simply to annoy them. Or as though I were a mugger of the mind, come to rob them of that  most precious possession: comfortable certainty.  But it was really more like Vaclav Havel said long ago when he was still a rebel:

"You do not become a 'dissident' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances."

Mark Plotkin starts his interview with me on WTOP this way: "How do you respond to those who say you're just outrageous, off the wall, beyond normal?" Here's part of what I told him: If you go back and read what I wrote ten, twenty or thirty years ago  it's hard to see what the problem was.  The FBI, in a rare of moment of literary eloquence labeled those who fought in the Spanish Civil War as  "premature anti-fascists." In this town timing is everything. Phil Hart once described the Senate as place that does things 20 years after it should have.

I think I was like a bad comedian; I knew the punch lines, I just couldn't get the timing right.  I came to think of myself not as a radical, but as a moderate of an era that had yet to  come.

In a nation ablaze with struggles and divisions, we are too often forced to choose between being a participant  in the arson or a member of the volunteer fire department.  But, as best as I can tell, my real impetus has not been  so much duty,  anger or virtue -  but a truly manic, grandiose and cockeyed optimism - a child's dreams and an adult's faith pounding tide after tide on the rocks of reality, thinking that maybe this time I'll float off.

Saul Alinsky  was once asked by a seminarian how he could retain his values as he made his way through the church, "That's easy," replied Alinsky. "Just decide now whether you wish to be a cardinal or a priest."

Like many, I have followed  the latter route and don't regret it at all.  Still,  even freedom and rebellion requires companionship, affection, support and love and I thank you for blessing me with it. Thanks for your encouragement, your patience and your tolerance. And please keep 'em  coming cause I ain't through yet.