Check out this high quality .pdf scan of the Mayday Tactical Manual from 1971.

Time is Running Out by Jay Craven

Jay says: "Here is a link to the May Day film - which issued the call to action for the event and was used as a key organizing tool. I probably owed it 100 times during my work on the road, to college, high school and community groups, leading up to May Day. [...] I finally tracked it down after a ten year search. And had it digitized."

Stew on the Philosophy of Hippie Revolution

“Abbie Hoffman Inside Scoop”

By Pat Thomas:

"Best mask ever!" - Judy

Check out this letter from Bui Van Nghi, Secretary General of the Vietnam-USA Society, wishing Judy a happy birthday this past week.

Here's a pic of me at the June 6, 2020 Black Lives Matter demo in Berkeley. I’d been feeling very frustrated about not being in the action. High risk, too old. But yesterday I marched with one cohousing neighbor on each side, neighbors who were, as Jessica called them, my "elder buffers." Thanks to them, I had a 6 foot distance from the other marchers. I wore my Frida Kahlo mask and didn't join the crowded rally across the street. I left when folks arrived in our grassy area, and walked home. Safe and sound. And so grateful I got to be true to myself by marching in the streets to protest brutal racism and vicious cops.

Observing April Fool's Day! - April 1, 2020 - A Paul Krassner Celebration

April Fool's Day PK Celebration! slideshow (4:20)

Selections from photo collections of Paul Krassner, family & friends:

• Nancy's "My little speech for Paul Krassner's Celebration" written for Howl Happenings event in NYC planned for today
• PK's Aug 30 1995 4-page hand-typed press release auto-bio

Paul Krassner and Nancy Cain in Malibu, 1986 (click to enlarge)

Liberation News Service: A New Documentary

Amidst the political and social turbulence of the 1960s, Liberation News Service (LNS) was a radical news service that featured news from and supplied news to 400 underground newspapers in the U.S. and around the world and faced a backlash from the government, the mainstream media and often violence from the police. Called the AP of the underground press, LNS is considered the forerunner to today's independent internet news gathering.

Click here to view the trailer.

STEW WOULD HAVE BEEN 80 TODAY, DEC. 4

Four years before he died in 2006, Stew wrote:
Stewie, If you think George Bush was a problem, we could really use your strategic wisdom now to defeat our truly terrible A-hole in Chief. All my love to you and all our friends in that great Yippie Cafe in the sky. I miss you.

—Judy


Visit Stew with CBS

Paul Krassner Has Joined His Pals

Now Paul has joined that circle of friends I found when I first met Paul in January 1968 - Anita and Abbie Hoffman, Stew Albert, Jerry Rubin, Phil Ochs, Bill Kunstler and so many many more. Paul also, before it was legal, helped women find abortion care. My love to you Paul and to all who once were Yippies and are now part of that great protest movement in the sky.

This earlier today from Michael Simmons:

Dear all,

He’s gone. Feel free to spread the word. Daughter Holly Krassner just e-mailed me and I have no further information...

Here’s the link to the FB page if people want to share memories.
https://www.facebook.com/honoringpaulkrassner/

And here’s the link to the gofundme if people want to know how they can help:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/in-honor-of-paul-krassner

Further memorials will be announced down the road.

Paul changed the world. He knew that having fun and demanding justice were not only compatible, but eternal mates. Please keep wife Nancy Cain, daughter Holly Krassner Dawson and everyone else in your hearts. I’ve been reminded this week that we’re all in this life racket together.

ABOUT PAUL KRASSNER (1932-2019)

I join all of you in this sad but not unexpected moment of his death. Grieving is an emotion over which we have no control; it is not linear, it comes and goes. I like to think that Paul is up there now in that great protest movement in the sky -- along with Stew, Anita and Abbie, Jerry, Phil, Eldridge, Bill Kunstler and so many others. I miss them all.

I first met Paul at Anita and Abbie’s apartment on St. Mark’s Place in April or May of 1968; I ingested Paul’s honey in Lincoln Park that summer and was there for his abbreviated testimony at the Conspiracy Trial in 1969. He, Stew and I remained friends from then on, through Stew's death in 2006 until today.

Of all the memories I have of Paul, perhaps the most vivid occurred during a conversation we had about 1962 -- before he and I ever met. Paul told me how he helped women obtain abortions. He had written an article in the Realist about a sympathetic physician in Ashland, Pennsylvania who provided abortion care to women. Abortion was illegal at the time. Paul did not publish the physican's name. After Paul’s article appeared, desperate women began to telephone him, he became what he called an "underground abortion referral service." This physician was arrested; Paul continued referring women to other physicans; Paul himself was subpoenaed but refused to testify; Gerry Lefcourt defended him and ultimately Paul's subpoena was dropped. Despite both of us being Yippies, in my opinion, helping women find abortion care when it was illegal was the most humane thing Paul did.

Paul also appreciated words. He insisted I call him a founder of the Yippies but call myself a Yippie original. At first I protested (of course) but soon I recognized that Paul was right. I now proudly call myself an original Yippie in everything I say or write. My deepest condolences to Nancy and Holly.

Paul Krassner: Nun Smooching In America

by MICHAEL SIMMONS

Originally appeared on Counterpunch.

When I was 12-years old in 1967, my father Matty Simmons published Cheetah — a slick magazine designed for what the press called “hippies.” It was a fine publication – top-shelf scribes like Tom Nolan, Robert Christgau and Ellen Willis contributed, editor Jules Siegel ran his legendary “Goodbye Surfing, Hello God” profile that announced to the world that Brian Wilson was a mentally ill genius and Mama Cass Elliott doffed her oversized duds and posed nude for a centerfold. But “slick” and “hippies” were oxymoronic and Cheetah tanked at the newsstand, folding in a year.

Though I was but a lad, I was paying attention and there was one contributor whose writings and exploits inspired in me a special delight that appealed to remnants of my mischievous childhood and a more sophisticated analysis of the ever so fucked-up world. That satirical terrorist was Paul Krassner.

I knew of Krassner because he was a regular guest on Radio Unnameable, Bob Fass’ all-night free-form radio show on noncommercial WBAI along with underground film director Robert Downey Sr. (father of Junior), comedic actor Marshall Efron, folksinger Phil Ochs and a political activist named Abbie Hoffman. They’d all madly riff till dawn and to this day I rarely laugh as hard as I did back then. Krassner chronicled his satirical pranks in his self-published magazine The Realist. My favorite was an anecdote in which he went to an airport with a lady friend who was dolled up in a nun’s habit and furiously smooched with her to the shock of fellow flyers.

One day my parents were tut-tutting about Krassner’s latest literary attack on bourgeois sensibility. Author William Manchester had written a JFK biography called The Death of a President, but widow Jackie Kennedy insisted that certain unspecified sections be deleted prior to publication. This piqued everyone’s curiosity because Mrs. Kennedy was successful in blocking access to these portions. Krassner published what he claimed were “The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book” in The Realist, recounting Jackie’s claims to have walked in on newly-sworn President Lyndon Johnson on Air Force One on November 22, 1963 as he inserted his penis into the dead JFK’s neck wound. “He was literally fucking my husband in the throat,” claimed the allegedly bowdlerized account. Krassner had a few people second-guessing: “Could it possibly – maybe – be true? LBJ is kinda crude, after all...” Most recognized it as untrue, though most (like Ma and Pa Simmons) also thought it tasteless, offensive, disgusting and despicable.

And then there were young people like me who thought it the greatest work of 20th Century satire.

With one rank frank prank, Krassner addressed the nature of power using the most crude metaphor imaginable, with allusions to what politicians not only do to each other, but to the public, i.e. fuck ‘em, as well as what LBJ and the military-industrial complex were then-doing to the Southeast Asian nation of Vietnam. The Kennedy piece also forced people to gauge their own credibility meter – what they were willing to believe. By publishing it (and initially refusing to take credit as the author), Krassner fucked the bleeding corpse of hypocrisy in its neck-wound by forcing the reader to ask themselves the question: what outrages thee, O holier-than-thou one?

Paul later wrote for National Lampoon, another magazine my father published. While The Realist continued on-and-off until 2001, Krassner co-founded and named the Yippies – politically active hippies – on New Year’s Eve 1967 and was an unindicted co-conspirator in the Chicago 8 trial. He managed to confound simplistic generalizations by running an underground railroad for abortion providers before Roe vs. Wade, as well as later briefly publishing Hustler. He won an award from Playboy for satire and the Feminist Party Media Workshop for journalism. He performed stand-up comedy and recorded comedy albums, wrote a small library of books and continued political activism, usually in the guise of being funny. He had more close friends who genuinely loved him than anyone I’ve ever known. A very short list of famous ones include Lenny Bruce, Ken Kesey, Abbie Hoffman, Kurt Vonnegut, Terry Southern and John Lennon and Yoko Ono. And he supplied 78-year old Groucho Marx with LSD – and tripped with him!

I finally met Paul in 1980 at the memorial for our mutual pal, National Lampoon co-founder Doug Kenney. Among other adventures, I accompanied he and wife Nancy Cain to Amsterdam in 2001 as their guest when he was inducted into the Counterculture Hall Of Fame at the Cannabis Cup. (“My ambition since I was three,” he quipped.) We remained close friends until the day he died, this past July 21st at his home in Desert Hot Springs, California at the age of 87. He leaves behind his beloved Nancy, daughter Holly Krassner Dawson, granddaughter Talia, brother George and eleventeen-trillion mutual Martians.

People ask me what he died of and the truth is we don’t really know. In 1979 he was covering the Dan White trial in San Francisco for the Bay Guardian. After ex-cop White was acquitted of murdering Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, a few thousand rightly aggrieved San Franciscans expressed their displeasure in the streets. A few set fire to a dozen police cars. The police responded by beating up random demonstrators, including reporters. Paul received a fractured rib, punctured lung and other injuries and the condition worsened with age. Increasingly crippled, he was in constant pain, but he honored his own vow to “never take legal drugs.” By the end, he was being surreptitiously dosed with morphine (shades of his lifelong Grateful Dead friendship – he had danced at the Egyptian Pyramids while they played!) and that relieved his considerable physical agony. He stopped eating, grew weaker and suffice to say that the non-violent Krassner died of anti-war wounds.

What always struck me about Paul was that his fundamental decency was his only ideology. He was “a nice guy” in the truest sense and ultimately that’s what guided his politics and social interactions. He was also against shutting down speech, so-called cancel culture, because anyone disagreed with what was said or with a person’s personal decisions or mistakes. He and I discussed our distaste for political correctness and he was nonjudgmental while simultaneously holding strong opinions on issues.

He never cared for his birthday, but I always sent him a note. This year’s read thusly: “You taught me how to be young, now you’re teaching me how to be…uh…the other thing!” He wrote back: “It’s a two-way street.” And he signed it “Cerebral Paulsie” – my little sick-joke nickname for him.

One last story. Longtime activist Mayer Vishner was one of Krassner’s lifelong Martian friends. He suffered from depression and in 2013 decided to kill himself and confided in Paul. “I told him that I’d miss him, but that was my problem, not his,” Krassner said later. He went on Bob Fass’ radio show after Vishner fatally overdosed on downers to discuss what happened. There were phone callers who were furious with him for not trying to stop Mayer or for not calling the cops. But Paul had too much respect for the individual’s right to choose – plus Mayer had trusted him and he wasn’t going to violate that trust. After hours of enduring rebukes with equanimity, it was time to wrap the show and host Fass bade Paul a simple adieu. “Well Paul, thanks for coming tonight. And let’s do this again real soon.”

You could practically hear Krassner shrug as he responded in the moment: “Well OK…but I’d have to find someone who wants to kill himself.”

I was listening to the show on my laptop here in Los Angeles and, much like I did in the 1960s listening to Krassner on the radio, I began to laugh uncontrollably. If Mayer hadn’t already died, he would’ve died laughing when he heard that. As for Paul Krassner, he lived laughing.

——————————————————————————-

In October, Fantagraphics will publish Zapped By The God Of Absurdity: The Best Of Paul Krassner. [https://www.amazon.com/Zapped-God-Absurdity-Best-Krassner/dp/1683961846 ]

As leader of Michael Simmons & Slewfoot, the front man was dubbed “The Father Of Country Punk” by Creem magazine in the 1970s. He was an editor of the National Lampoon in the ’80s where he wrote the popular column “Drinking Tips And Other War Stories.” He won an LA Press Club Award in the ’90s for investigative journalism; has written for MOJO, LA Weekly, Rolling Stone, Penthouse, The New York Times, LA Times, High Times, CounterPunch, The Progressive and Dangerous Minds; and scribed liner notes for Bob Dylan, Mike Bloomfield, Phil Ochs, Kris Kristofferson, Arthur Lee & Love and Kinky Friedman.

Michael Simmons is a musician and journalist. He can be reached at guydebord@sbcglobal.net.

Berkeley’s People’s Park was born 50 years ago today

Story at Berkeleyside by Tom Dalzell, author of the new book The Battle for People’s Park, Berkeley 1969.

With 'Flight of the Pigasus,' this crew will reenact a pig's '68 run for president

Story at the Chicago Tribune by KT Hawbaker

Judy on the Chicago Protests 1968
(Boston Globe, 6/6/18)

JUDY GUMBO —
OUR YIPPIE GIRL AT HOME IN BERKELEY

Judy Gumbo struck a martial pose in this cover photo of the Berkeley Tribe almost 50 years ago. She now lives in the Berkeley Cohousing community in West Berkeley.

Berkeley Cohousing lies on what was a family farm dating back to near 1900, with a farmer's daughter's cottage added. When the Coop Supermarket (more recently Andronico's) on University Avenue was built in the 1950s, several small houses were moved to the property and rented out.

(via Berkeleyside)

Opening Reception and Talk for The Battle for People's Park

Fri, September 20, 2019, 6:00 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.: Opening Receiption and Talk on The Battle for People's Park by Tom Dalzell.

Reception from 6:00 - 7:00 pm.

Talk featuring Photographer Nacio Jan Brown, Activist Judy Gumbo and book Author Tom Dalzell from 7:00-8:30 p.m.

At North Gate Hall, UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.



The Battle for People's Park, Berkeley 1969 commemorates the 50th anniversary of one of the most searing conflicts that closed out the tumultuous 1960s in an exhibition of remarkable photographs. In April 1969, a few Berkeley activists planted the first tree on a University of California-owned, abandoned city block on Telegraph Avenue. Hundreds of people from all over the city helped build the park as an expression of a politics of joy and the resulting struggle saw hundreds arrested, martial law declared, and the National Guard was ordered by then-Governor Ronald Reagan to crush the uprising and to occupy the entire city.

For a period of ten years, beginning in the mid-1960s, Nacio Jan Brown photographed virtually all of the major anti-war and social protest movement activities in the San Francisco Bay Area. His photographs were published widely in the “underground” press of the times. His work is in the collections of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, The International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, and the Library of Congress as well as the collections of numerous private collectors.

Berkeley-based author Tom Dalzell moved to California to work with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in 1971. He worked for the UFW legal department until 1980. Since 1981 he has worked for Local 1245 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, first as an attorney and since 2006 as the elected leader of the union. He has written extensively on slang, and since 2013 has blogged about Berkeley’s quirky material culture for his website Quirky Berkeley and for Berkeleyside.

Judy Gumbo is an original Yippie. The Yippies levitated the Pentagon to protest the War in Vietnam, brought the New York City Stock Exchange to a halt to satirize greed and ran a pig named Pigasus for President at the 1968 Democratic Convention. With her late husband Stew Albert, Judy helped build and defend People’s Park. Concurrently, she helped start one of Berkeley’s original women’s groups, who organized a march to People’s Park on May 15 to demand women’s equality and liberation. The women’s march disappeared into police violence against all those protesting the destruction of People’s Park.

Free and open to the public.
Seats are first come, first served.


Event Contacts
Julie Hirano - juliehirano@berkeley.edu
Press Inquiries - journalism@berkeley.edu

Support the Next Generation of Documentary Photographers
While photography was once a specialized art relegated only to highly skilled photojournalists, it is now an indispensable skill practiced in some form by nearly all our graduate students. In 2014, Berkeley Journalism's Center for Photography joined with the estate of photographer Jim Marshall— among the most renowned and prolific photographers of the 20th century— to launch the Jim Marshall Fellowships in Photography. Our goal is to raise $500,000 in funds dedicated to supporting the visual arts at the School. Donate online today at: http://givetocal.berkeley.edu/jimmarshallfellowships. Read about our 4th annual Marshall Fellow Drew Costley here.

Click here for campus map, including nearby parking lots.

Parking
Metered street parking is available in the commercial blocks of Euclid Ave, Hearst Ave and Ridge Rd.

ADA Accessibility
The ADA accessible entrance to North Gate Hall is located in the inner courtyard.

Visit Stew with CBS

50th Anniversary Teach-In —
The Battle for People's Park, Berkeley 1969

Wed, May 15, 2019, 7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.
Panel - Teach-In on the Park's Legacy of Protest & Resistance - The David Brower Center
2150 Allston Way, Berkeley, California 94704
Reserve tickets by emailing Emmerich Anklam at emmerich@heydaybooks.com

Berkeley’s People’s Park was born 50 years ago today

Story at Berkeleyside by Tom Dalzell, author of the new book The Battle for People’s Park, Berkeley 1969.

With 'Flight of the Pigasus,' this crew will reenact a pig's '68 run for president

Story at the Chicago Tribune by KT Hawbaker

Flight of the Pigasus

August 23rd, 2018
7-9pm
Location: Maria's Packaged Goods and Community Bar
960 W 31st St, Chicago, IL 60608

FREE
A re-staging of the infamous "Pigasus" press conference held at what is now Daley Plaza on August 23rd 1968, in which the Yippies nominated a pig for President of the United States. This moment of political theater set off almost a week of political unrest and remains a key memory of the counterculture. Fifty years later, "Pigasus" flies again in a live theatrical event that uses the 1969 Chicago Eight trial as a frame for re-examining this story and the benefits and limits of using theater, performance, and disruption to effect political change.

With musician Bill MacKay as musician and Yippie Phil Ochs; City of Chicago historian Tim Samuelson as Judge Julius Hoffman; National Lawyers Guild lawyer Jerry Boyle as defense attorney William Kunstler; author Pat Thomas as Tom Foran; artist Dmitry Samarov as magazine artist Franklin McMahon; Petunia the Pig as Pigasus; and Judy Gumbo and other witnesses of 1968 as themselves.

Read more about it at the Illinois Humanities 68+50 Project, which explores the legacy of the 1968 Democratic Convention.
Pigasus for President
(illustration by Randy Anderson)
Story on BBC Radio by Sarah Geis