No, it was not the day the Barnum & Bailey clown errantly shot the dwarf from the circus’ smoky cannon into the crowd. Nor the time the Russian citizen tried to thwart an elephant escape by grabbing her by the trunk. Not even the night the girl on the flying trapeze missed her partner’s catch and fell to the net below while part of her costume remained on the swing. We’re talking Subterranean Circus here, a noble institution which edified and enlightened the city of Gainesville, Florida from 1967 to 1990 for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish til paraphernalia laws did them part.
Before we celebrate the highlights, we should mention the star-studded cast of hundreds which brought the store to life, a happy band of pirates which woke every day with a song in their hearts, the result of psychedelic sugarplums having nightly danced through their heads. As with any enterprise, of course, there were players and there were players, workers who made the highlight reels, spent years honing their hippiecraft, rose above the retail norms of mere mortals. Remember the names on the following list of major Circus personnel. Not only will they come up later in this broadcast but you’ll need them for the final test.
The Subterranean Circus All-Star Team
1. Pamme Brewer. There might have been no Circus without Pamme. Bill Killeen’s girlfriend at the time, Pamme posed nude in BK’s Charlatan magazine, testing the limits of the University of Florida’s en loco parentis rule (and that of virtually every college in the land) which allowed the school to act as a parent to the student. Brewer contested UF’s punishment and a spectacular trial ensued with Pamme’s ACLU lawyer Selig Goldin winning the day. A second printing of the Charlatan brought in a net profit of $1200 dollars, seed money for the subsequent Circus.
2. Dick North. Dick lived with Bill, Gerald Jones and Newt Simmons in the famous House on Sixth Street, which had a sign advertising the Church of The Redeemer on the front yard croquet grounds. When Bill and Pamme began discussing a book & poster store, North suggested selling marijuana pipes, which he would make from lamp parts. Dick manned the store’s counter for several years before moving across the street to open the Apollonian Alternative, where he concentrated on exceptional brass work and practiced esoteric Eastern religious rituals.
3. Danny Levine. Salesman extraordinaire and Life of the Party who was hired at the behest of Brewer, who knew him from the Art Department. Levine had recently arrived from San Francisco, where he spent many months being crazy, leading to some reticence on Bill’s part. After he sold 50 pairs of bellbottoms on his first day of work, Killeen went out looking for more crazy people.
4. Bob Sturm. Deliberate in manner, clever in evaluating a person or situation, Sturm presided at the Circus counter for many years, as dependable a store manager as anyone could hope to find. He drove in at the same time each day in his nifty little Porche and he brought with him each day his cute little .45, which he kept on a shelf to his right, resting on the Bambu papers. Bob seemed almost sad that nobody ever tried to rob the place. Later, his brother Rick joined the crew and, of course, brought his pistola. Desperadoes waitin’ for a train. Or a stickup. Love and Peace, y’all. Or else.
5. Rickie Childs. What more can you say about Rickie? He was our token minority employee, not only Black but Gay and a churchgoer to boot. RC knew everybody in town, was a total devotee to fashion, hung around for eighteen years and even had his own Cola. He was constantly happy and had a throng of admirers who would buy clothing only from him. One day, he talked Bill into sponsoring a Black “girl” occasionally named Patricia in the Miss Florida Contest, which was sort of a transvestite Super Bowl. She won. “Oh Boy,” grinned Rickie, “Now we can go on to the state competition!” No, Rickie, we can’t.
6. Michael (Jagger) Hatcherson. One of The Three Amigos, with Rickie Childs and Debbie Brandt and a card-carrying member of the Winter Park Mafia, Jagger was a mood elevator with a long memory for the shortcomings of others. Famous for his verbal jousts with Jim (Waterbedman) Hines, not a one of which he ever lost. Hatcherson, a cutiepie, wore an over-the-top pageboy haircut straight out of either Prince Valiant or Monty Python, but the girls loved him anyway. Model for the original Happy Face.
7. Harolyn Locklair. Bill’s second wife, a fashion model from Miami he met in the Circus. Known to have stopped traffic when she crossed University Avenue in her short shorts. Harolyn was a major asset in garment-buying trips to New York, where she knew the fashion ropes and crafts-buying trips to Mexico, where she spoke the language. Married to Bill at the Gainesville Airport park by itinerant minister Danny Levine. Small world, right?
8. Debbie Brandt. A rare female Architecture Major who went rogue and got into the fashion business. Debbie was a mainstay at Silver City, where she kept things light, kept sales up and won a national award for listening to all 76 of Rickie’s romantic tales of woe. Hired by then-big time Landlubber jeans company right out of school and made their Southeastern sales representative at 22 years of age. Later ruined much of her image by marrying a guy in a rock band.
9. Rod (The Biker) Bottiglier. Rod traveled down to Gainesville from Valdosta every weekend for his bottle of Rush, then decided to save a little money by just moving in. He owned the world’s cleanest Harley-Davidson and kept it that way by only riding the thing in emergencies. Bottiglier was a self-professed Martial Arts whiz and our security officer who delighted in disarming shoplifters while simultaneously scaring the bejeezus out of them. Spoke his own odd language, which contained heretofore unknown nouns. Best known for bringing to town the lovely and talented Sandy Youngblood, also a Circus crew member.
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| Washington Square, NYC. East Coast Hippie Headquarters in the 1960s. |
Great Moments In Circus History: Number 1, The Opening
When I started the Charlatan magazine in college, my friends were dubious. “What do you know about publishing magazines, Bill? You’re going to lose all your money.” Right, but isn’t that what they told elementary-school dropout Colonel Sanders when he started to talk about selling chicken?
My pal Mike Garcia hovered over me in Greenwich Village while I selected the original inventory for the Subterranean Circus, fretting over how I could ever sell this growing mass of posters, buttons, incense and other select stock. “There aren’t very many hippies in Gainesville, Killeen. You’re going to get stuck with all this stuff.” I looked back at him and smiled. “Don't you ever listen to Bob Dylan?” I asked him. “The times, they are a-changin’. The hippies are on the way. Besides, who says I have to sell it all to hippies? New movements always have outliers”
If the retail mavens were correct and location was everything, we were a few steps off the beaten path, but only a few. We rented a 30x80-foot warehouse building just off busy University Avenue from the Standard Fertilizer Company for an astounding $75 a month. The place was set back a car’s length from the street, perfect for parking three or four vehicles in front. Needless to say, the building needed a little work.
When we had the water turned on, it sprang from several pipes in all directions. The fusebox was a mare’s nest of jumbled wiring. Almost none of the many fluorescent lights were viable and the bathroom looked like something from an Edgar Allen Poe story. We didn’t need to worry about airing the place out, though. At the very rear was an enormous cooling fan, big enough for an airplane hanger. Alas, the first time we turned it on, it sucked every loose piece of paper right back into its hungry maw. But hey, what do you want for $75 a month?
Eventually, we got everything in working order, though the bathroom would never be mistaken for a toilette in The Plaza. We filled the front room with wall posters, including a batch next to the front window which were respondent to an aptly-placed color wheel. We loaded the front counter with several brands of cigarette rolling papers. We were still distributing stock in various parts of the place when people began knocking on the windows, wondering when they could get in. We felt we were a day or two from being ready for business, but what the hell. “Come on in,” said Dick North, the smiling greeter. “But if you want something, you’d better have the right change. We have no money yet.” We were open from 3 p.m. to 5 and we made $27. Next day, we made $54. A day later, Pamme Brewer was on the front page of the Gainesville Sun with a rose in her teeth. It was all downhill from there.
Number 2, The Giant Boutique Show
So it really was a wonder all the stuff that we bought sold.
We were glad we made it out alive, though we’d really hate to go;
We’ll be back next year to procure more gear from The Giant Boo-teek Show.
When we opened the Subterranean Circus, we had to search high and low for appropriate inventory. After posters, buttons, incense and a few items of clothing, the possibilities were scarce. Dick North constructed some cheap pipes from lamp parts and we bought a few bongs from the kids coming back from Viet Nam, but you couldn’t just call Vito at the House of Paraphernalia and glom onto some smoking gear. We located a couple of women in the Manhattan alphabet neighborhoods who were stitching together Cossack and Nehru shirts, but that was a now-and-then thing. When we found we couldn’t keep those in stock, we hired our own crew of women to make them, supervised by Pamme Brewer and we kept their little Singers humming until the dawning of the awesome National Boutique show at the edgy McAlpin Hotel in Manhattan. Never has the NYC Police Department missed so many opportunities for massive drug arrests as it did by ignoring the shenanigans at the NBS.
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| Richard Allen, Bill Killeen & Harvey Budd: "We're not here to make no trouble; we're just here to do the Sub Circus Shuffle!" |
Would You Like A Joint With That?
Some gave you big show discounts, some gave you contraband.
And others beckoned you inside their private selling rooms
And opened up their secret stash, the better to consume!
It would only be a slight exaggeration to suggest that there was more marijuana in one building during the National Boutique Show than existed on the entire island of Jamaica at any given time. Doubters should remember that the hotel had 25 floors while Rastaland has only one. During show week, the bottom 13 floors were given over to exhibit rooms, while many of the exhibitors stayed in rooms above. The scent of pot permeated the entire hotel and buyers negotiating the corridors on the sales floors often needed fog lights.
Many of the small manufacturers and wholesalers which arose to fill the needs of the exploding head shop population were hippies, themselves, and not necessarily adept at business. It was perfectly natural for many of them to light up a joint every time a customer came into the room. Head Imports out of Colorado was a perfect example. More or less operated by a personable chieftain named George, these people almost insisted on pleasure before business. Since you were friends after ten minutes of palaver and weed management, George then invited you to Boulder to sit in his hot tub and swim in his river. If you wanted to buy something after all that, fine, but no big deal. Surprisingly, Head Imports lasted for years in spite of its soft-sell predilections. There were plenty of others much like it. The notion of slick modern businessmen capitalizing on the new hippie lifestyle was somebody’s pipedream and remained so for many years. The first of the capitalist outlanders to arrive were the big jeans companies which dug for gold on the shores of Loveland.
As with all good things, the reign of the McAlpin eventually came to an end. After several years, the show managers moved it to the Coliseum and then to the fancy new Javits Center. The sales booths were then open for all passersby to see and there were no hotel room doors to close and shut the infidels out. The vendors might as well have been selling sewing machines, things were so alarmingly proper.
The long-time pipe-builders and incense-makers and poster artists continued on, as did their customers, but with less of a bounce in their step, their smiles withered a bit by the faded glory of the once-brilliant hippie expo. They still gathered at night in restaurants and bars, however, memories alive with tales of dope and derring-do at the old hacienda, and inevitably they raised their glasses in a common toast:
“Here’s to the glorious Hotel McAlpin---brave, courageous and bold. Long live her fame and long live her glory and long may her story be told!”
That’s all, folks….
Next Week: More astounding moments in Circus history as the crew heads for Atlanta, opens Silver City and recalls Gainesville's infamous Halloween Balls. Oh, and there was that once-in-a-lifetime kiss.
