Those of us who hit the ground in 1940 lived in authoritarian times. You heeded your parents, obeyed the nuns (mostly), respected the mayor and admired the President. If your mother got a note from the principal, you were wrong and she was right, case closed. The most dreaded sentence you could hear after a lapse in judgment was “Wait until your father gets home.” To make matters worse, we had four (count ‘em 4) cops living in the neighborhood. We either toed the line or kept our transgressions on the downlow. It wasn’t any different in other neighborhoods, or cities, for that matter. We were under the heel of the boot, and even the soft slippers of the monsignor. Still, there were occasional murmurs of resistance. A few of us in Catholic high schools started noting some inconsistencies in our religious tenets. When we dutifully brought them to the attention of the Marist Brothers who taught us, we were given short shrift rather than deft explanations. I can recall one particularly grumpy conversation about God being an “uncaused cause.” It ended with “Sit down, Mr. Killeen, we’ve heard enough out of you today.”
About this time, the Beatnik Era began picking up speed despite its adherents’ disheveled lifestyle and disagreeable attitudes. What started with a few disenchanted writers and novelists like Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac blossomed into a full-scale phenomenon by 1957 when Kerouac’s occasional stream-of-consciousness On The Road novel introduced us to a cast of characters who were playing a very different ballgame. Every adventurous young boy in America suddenly imagined hitting the road, living off the land and exploring the country with Sal Paradise. Sal took his orders from noone, flew by the seat of his pants, shot first and asked questions later. Nobody cared when the once iconic J. Edgar Hoover railed against “Communists, Eggheads and Beatniks.” Slim tolerance for beatniks morphed into further investigation, amusement and gradual acceptance. The original beats even became a tourist attraction in San Francisco’s North Beach. Everyday people started using words like “cool,” “crazy,” “dig” and “like.” Suddenly, it was alright to challenge authority…maybe even cool.
Despite being accepted by a dozen colleges, most of them closer to home, I opted for relative independence, getting on a train and heading for Stillwater, Oklahoma. It wasn’t as much fun as hopping a boxcar but sometimes you have to compromise with the mother who’s footing the bills. By this time, many of us in college recognized some fraying in the system. The once-admired college president was often now more of a political appointee than an educational leader, a peace-keeper inserted to deter the natives from getting restless.
At Oklahoma State, I sought to revive the moribund campus humor magazine and was introduced to the novel concept of red tape. Rather than simply telling you no, the administration employed a tool called a “committee” to pass judgment on unsavory projects. Apparently, the OSU Alumni Association found the previous magazine raunchy and disagreeable and wasn’t in the mood for a do-over. I decided to publish the Charlatan anyway and sell it illegally in the dorms. That’s what Sal Paradise would have done.
Now back in those days, universities had “advisors,” trusty old academicians familiar with the system who would help new students adjust to college life. My adviser called and said we needed to have a little meeting about my new project. He was a kindly old fellow, a mellow ex-journalist counting off his days and truly sympathetic with his advisees. We’ll call him Mr. Mann. Mr. Mann smilingly advised that the University had weaponry in their arsenal. They could kick you out of school if you became too much of a problem. It’s fine to be a rebel when there’s nothing to lose, a whole different story when someone can “revoke your privileges.” He didn’t exactly ask what would Mother think if OSU kicked me out on my ass, but he made his points clear enough. I told him that in a few years Franki Valli was going to write a song telling me to walk like a man, talk like a man, so I might as well get an early start. He smiled and wished me good luck. Nobody kicked me out of school, but they became very testy when I printed a “University Is Going To Hell” issue. Sometimes it just takes one person to start the ball rolling. After the dawn of the Charlatan, the OSU college newspaper started calling out the administration on several fronts. Nobody threw them out, either.
In the process of running the Charlatan, I ran across other college humor mags across the country who were fighting their own battles. The best of these was the exceptional University of Texas Ranger in Austin, edited by Bill Helmer, who maintained a clever balance between being outrageous and infuriating the UT magazine censors. Gilbert Shelton, a cartoonist on the Ranger staff, began a correspondence which lasted many months, and eventually visited me at my Massachusetts home one Thanksgiving. It was there the first rumblings of a Wonder Wart Hog comic strip took place. I wrote the script for the first one and it was published the following year. Shelton said he would be returning to Austin as Ranger editor in 1962, following Helmer’s reign, and he invited me to come, sleep on his hair couch and help him put out the magazine. In mid-summer of that year, I pulled up in his driveway in my Cadillac Superior Model Hearse, which was on its last legs, the victim of a disagreeable radiator. As I pulled to a stop at his door, the radiator gave one giant heave of smoke and its last breath of hot water flew into the blue Texas skies. Gilbert Shelton emerged from his condemned apartment with a smile. “Well, Killeen,” he said, “you sure know how to make an entrance.”
Austin-town
To say the following weeks were revelatory, exciting and productive would be a gross understatement. The Ranger staff was seriously deranged, especially one Joe E. Brown, who got drunk one night, climbed to the top of Austin’s tallest building and scrawled “Fuck You, Sky King!” in yellow paint. on the roof. I asked him why. “Because I want to make sure he sees it when he flies over,” said Joe. Oh, okay, I get it now.
Then there was Ranger poet-laureate Lieuen Adkins, a master punster and heavy drinker, who still lived at home with his parents. Adkins had a curfew and if he didn’t make it home in time, he slept on a sofa on the porch. Lieuen was like the coyote to Shelton’s Roadrunner in the old cartoons, always just a little too inept to fool the master, as a story in Shelton’s letter below illustrates. On one occasion, Lieuen finally attracted a girlfriend, a wild high-school girl named Tami Dean, who plotted to interrupt his virginity one night when her parents were out of town. All went well until the father unexpectedly returned to find his daughter en flagrante delicto. Which would have been bad enough if he hadn’t been a prominent member of the English Department faculty. By now you can easily guess what Adkin’s major was.
Later that year, Lieuen decided for some reason to become a candidate for the Student Senate, despite no previous political experience. He somehow talked himself into thinking he had a realistic chance. On the night of the election, he squirreled himself away with a bottle of whiskey while the ballots were being tabulated, only mounting the steps of the counting-house when the results were posted on a giant green chalkboard. When he saw the sad vote totals, he went into a disappointed rage and ran at the board, trying to punch a hole in it. “He failed, of course.” wrote Shelton.
The Summer of 1962 was filled with glorious events like the Great Waterballoon Wars, which began when Joe E. Brown and the West Side Boys invaded the impregnable fortress of the East Side Boys, also known as Shelton’s apartment. Seeking to place Lieuen Adkins in a safe place where he could do no harm, Shelton posted him upstairs, guarding the ammunition dump. Spies of the West Side Boys learned of this folly, sneaked in early and tied up Lieuen. When the battle started, they began picking off East Side Boys below from the ammunition dump balcony to the befuddlement of all, leading to yet another verse in the eventual Ballad of Lieuen Adkins.
The Summer of ‘62 was an awakening for many of us, a jailbreak, a first attempt to push the envelope to its limits. After all, who among us had ever before enjoyed gagging down peyote, traipsing through bridge tunnels listening for bats or sailing across Lake Travis, picking off errant floating detritus with pistols? Not many. Due to the blessings of good fortune, we recently stumbled upon an antique missive from Gilbert Shelton to Bill Helmer, a genuine relic recalling recalling some of the pleasures of those good old days. You’ll laugh until you cry.
A Letter From Gilbert Shelton To Bill Helmer, August 1962
”Greetings, Helmer. A wild summer season has just come to a close this morning with the departures of Joe Brown and Karen Kirkland, Joe home to Oklahoma and K.K. to San Antone, leaving a destitute Shelton in Austin to live on other folks’ charity. Tony Bell went home about a week ago, Bill Killeen hitchhiked to Houston yesterday to start a new era in the Adventures of Poddy in the city of his birth. My brother went home to College Station simultaneously. And here is Shelton, trapped in Austin with only the birds and Lieuen Adkins, the Super-Sparrow, to talk to. It’s been a good time,though---old Shelton’s got lots of prizes.
Looks like I’ll not be able to make it to N.Y.---only twenty days left before registration and I have to write a Ranger and a delinquent seminar paper in the interim. And besides, I’m broker’n a doodlebug. Cashed a check for $1.50 at Faulkner’s this morning and the guy said he sure hated to take the fifteen-cent check-cashing charge but he had to. I ate and drank for free yesterday at a foreign student picnic out at Ted Klein’s new lake house, but unfortunately they started opening the beer early in the afternoon and didn’t get the food until late, resulting in the near destruction of Shelton and his crew, who hadn’t eaten since noon the day before.
The Great Gin Bottle Caper
For the two days before that, Lieuen had unwittingly supplied much liquor for Gilbert, Karen and Joe: he started buying gin, which unfortunately (or fortunately, as the case may be) looks just like water, so when he hid his still-unfinished bottle in the closet when he left (still can’t take liquor home) we found it after a diligent search and drank it all up and filled the bottle back up with water. Lieuen came in the next day, got his bottle, mixed a drink and had drunk about half of it when Killeen, aware of the plot, walked over and picked up the gin bottle, asking Lieuen what he’d give him if he’d swill it, straight, hot and completely, and Lieuen promised free meals for all if such a deed were to be accomplished, knowing Killeen to be a teetotaler. Killeen drank it down. Lieuen continued to gape in wonder for several minutes before a dim light of realization started to appear. We made him buy us hot dogs. And Lieuen, plans of vengeance rapidly forming in his pea mind, got another bottle of gin, drank part of it, switched the remainder to another bottle, and filled the original bottle up with water and hid it again in the closet, bidding us farewell with a smug grin. We found both bottles, drank the gin, replaced it with water and re-hid them. The first rule of war, Lieuen, is never to underestimate your foe.
Days Of Wine & Peyote
Karen missed the midnight bus to San Antone and had to catch the 5:00 one, at which time it was discovered that between us there was not enough money for a single ticket, so we had to go wake up Joe in the middle of the night to borrow 50 cents, and then the bus was late so we both sat on the benches in front of the capitol and played Nothingville. Joe left later this morning in his ailing Renault with nothing but one dime and a credit card to sustain him.
Ted Klein and Co. seem to be happy as can be. Ted has gained fifteen pounds. They’ve got another artist living with them, somebody I didn’t recognize from the old days. Frank and Robbie Stack were in town for a few days and we had a beer-bust over at Jon Bracker’s house, but I didn’t have much of a chance to talk to Stack.
Right after school was out, Joe and Tony and Hugh Lowe and I whupped up a big batch of peyote, simmering it on the stove and then straining the bilious green juice through a cloth. You only have to drink 2 to 4 ounces of this juice for a good high. Maybe I’ll do it again tonight---Joe left some behind. Anyway, we split up into teams, Joe and Hugh at their house and Tony and I at mine, so that when we got sick the lavatory facilities wouldn’t be overcrowded. Gilbert got sick first and worst: I could only hold the mixture and my soda-pop down for fifteen minutes, and then during the next 45 minutes I had four great retching-sprees, while Tony only had two. I certainly wished I were dead there for a few minutes: peyote makes you sick from vertigo, motion-sickness, rather than just stomach irritation. Yecchh. But then after I had finished being sick and lain thrashing on the bed for a while, everything became all right and I had a good high that lasted for six or eight hours, during which time we walked all over town marveling at things.
And then there was the day that Tony and I, following the example of The Great Helmer, boarded up the bathroom door and made a swimming pool out of Shelton’s bathroom. The water only got about 18 inches deep, though.
Finally finished up the first Ranger. It looks pretty good, although it is primarily cartoons. There’s a picture of ol’ Helmer in it.
Ah hell. Nothing else has happened newsworthy. And I’m not expecting much of anything to happen, either. Maybe now I can get some work done. I’m writing a book of amazing adventures, deriving my inspiration from Gilbert’s adventures of the past year, which, I might add, never ceased to amaze old Gilbert himself. Aw hell damn. Drop a line. Ranger address. I might even be sleeping in the Ranger office from now on if it doesn’t cool off here. Later….Shelton”
Epilogue/bill killeen
Well, it didn’t cool off one bit, didn’t even rain for 55 straight days. When it finally did early one evening, the UT powers-that-be lit up the Texas Tower a bright orange in celebration and Janis Joplin pulled off her upper garments and ran around a parking lot half-naked in the rain.
As for not expecting anything to happen…well, Gilbert was pretty much incorrect about that. There was the very exciting First Annual Bicycle Race and Treasure Hunt (which Gilbert won) where clues were left in busy places like the Austin Police Station, Scholz Garten, etc., in which the three dozen competitors had to dash through rowdy mobs to find them. There were the non-stop antics of disaster songwriter John Clay, who penned Road To Mingus (“A decent person ain’t got no chance against a reckless, speedin’ train”) and (Anson Runaway (“As they got bigger, they took bigger things, becoming a juvenile criminal ring”). There was the propitious discovery of Threadgill’s music room and cheese bar, where pickers from the UT English Department meshed comfortably with rednecks. And there were the weekly Wednesday Folksings at the UT Student Union, so spectacular they caused Janis to quit her waitress job at the Pancake House to participate. Janis later hosted the ultimate late-night party at her digs where a songfest broke out, drawing carloads of police and the best one-liner of the summer. When asked by the cops if she knew there was a little old lady dying next door, Janis said, “No, but hum a few bars and we’ll fake it.”
Austin, 1962---The Way We Were. There was no place like it. Ever. Oh, and yes, there is now a song titled “There’s A Little Old Lady Dying Next Door.” But you already figured that one out, didn’t you?
That’s all, folks….
