Tomorrow, Siobhan and I pack up all our cares and woes, here we goes singing low, bye-bye blackbird! We’re leaving on a jet plane, don’t know when we’ll be back again because there are 3800 miles of open ocean between here and Paris and no convenient little islands with airports, just in case. And shit has been alleged to happen. Why just recently on June 1, 2009, Air France Flight 447 took the big dive with 228 disappointed passengers and crew aboard. Did we mention we have to cross the Atlantic twice?
I figure my bride and I have been lucky all our lives, and luck has a way of catching up with you at the worst times, like the afternoon I fell off a roof and sprained my ankle just before our neighborhood baseball team played John Kelly’s east side boys. It’s the Cosmic Arbiter’s way of tapping you on the shoulder and telling you to stop doing silly stuff, like walking into gunfire or flying in a fragile bubble over a major ocean at 30,000 feet for eight hours. Why, oh why, did we eschew the sensible ocean liner? True, the Andrea Doria went down off Nantucket in thick fog in 1956, but 1660 passengers and crew were rescued and only 46 met King Neptune. I’ll take those numbers anytime.
Too late now, I guess. Anyway, we’re as ready as possible with our compression socks and airline seats which lay back into beds. We’re wearing our “JFK IN ‘60” campaign pins, hoping the Jackie-loving French will take pity and not throw lighted matches at us. Kathleen Ellison, our hostess, has gone out and bought air conditioners to fight off the European heat wave and Gilbert Shelton has been warned we’re on the way. But just in case we die grisly deaths at the bottom of the sea, we wanted to say it’s been fun knowing you (in most cases) and tell you to forever keep your freak flags flying in spite of it all. And somebody make sure to go over and tuck Chuck LeMasters in at night. See you in the next life.
When First We Came Unto This Town…
“It’s a long and dusty road, it’s a hot and a heavy load, and the folks you meet ain’t always kind.”---Tom Paxton
Gainesville, if I never see you again, you’ve been berry berry good to me. I originally came to town in 1963 with my first wife, Marilyn Todd. We found a decrepit old apartment in Old Gainesville near the Thomas hotel and started doing a little work for Jack Horan and Bob Dixon, who were publishing the off-campus Old Orange Peel in competition with UF’s New Orange Peel, captained by the famed cartoonist Don Addis. The magazine was doing well enough but Jack and Bob had delusions of grandeur and decided to print 10,000 copies of a Spring break issue and have us haul them to Daytona in our refurbished but aging 1950 Cadillac hearse. We got a little cash and a free room for three days at the Beach, so what the hell.
Being young and inexperienced in weights and measures, however, all of us failed to consider that 10,000 magazines weighed approximately 7000 pounds, or roughly as much as 50 full-grown men, which is a lot of bodies to pile in a 13-year-old hearse with senior issues. For one thing, the brakes were adequate but not of award-winning quality, and when we went rattling over a bridge heading into Daytona Beach, they gave up the ghost. We had to circle a used-car lot about 25 times before we came to a stop. Nonetheless, task accomplished, General Horan.
Sad to say, the Old Orange Peel did not sell as well to strangers as it did to UF students and the boys had 7000 left over, which we were not eager or obligated to take back. Jack agreed to stuff 2000 in his car and pay us a huge bonus to haul the rest back to Hogtown. This unexpected good fortune allowed Marilyn and I to enlarge upon our daily diet of pancakes, potatoes, and ground beef cooked in 1000 exotic ways. Poor as churchmice, we shed a tear of regret and emigrated to the city of seven hills, Tallahassee. If there was to be a college humor magazine in our future, it could not start up in a town which already had two of them.
Tallahassee Lassitude
After living in hotspots like Austin and Gainesville, a relatively inexperienced youngster might assume all college towns are interesting, exciting, intellectually-oriented and fun. Then there’s Tallahassee, capital of the Florida panhandle, moribund to a fault, filled to the brim with criminally ignorant conservatives, a frat-rat fantasyland where the word “stimulating” is kept in a hidden box in a locked room. Marilyn and I found a cheap cellar apartment near Leon High School owned by a besotted couple who lived above us and restaged the Battle of Thermopylae in their living room every evening. Nonetheless, I started working on the Charlatan and Marilyn took on the chore of selling ads to a magazine that didn’t exist. She was good at it, too, because not many women as stunning wandered into Mr. Biffburger’s place, smiled and sat down. Also, our prices were cheap.
Of course, not a printer in town had any interest in taking on such a venture. More than one of them rubbed his chin and opined, “Well, I’d like to help you but we have a lot of church customers…” I wound up hitching to Albany, Georgia, where a tough old guy named Wilson Smith was managing a worthy print shop after moving there from Maine. Smitty had church customers, too, but take my word for it, Maine breeds independent children who take no blather from anybody. We printed in Albany for a couple of years until we finally moved to Gainesville and Smitty was just too far away…but I’ll never forget his benevolence or those hitchhiking odysseys through the pecan groves of Georgia in pig trucks and sleeping inside the print shop across from a strip joint. I have stories even Kerouac couldn’t tell.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Charlatan was selling like crazy at tables outside student haunts like the Sweet Shop and Bob’s Book Store. Bob, actually, was eventually hassled by FSU, so we had to move down a few feet. The Tallahassee Catholic Women’s Club kept complaining about us until the cops finally came by, picked me up on vague charges and confiscated the magazines. Helpful students ran over to Marilyn’s table at the Sweet Shop and warned her to pack up. “Are you kidding?” she said. “Now we’re going to sell out over here.” And she did. The cops never paid her a whit of attention. An ACLU lawyer quickly got me released and the magazines returned and the police never bothered us again. Now the college kids thought we were really hot stuff. We fought the law and the magazine won.
Take Me Right Back To The Track, Jack!
“We’re going back to where we both belong. Back to sing our favorite song.”
It wasn’t long before we were selling more magazines and advertising in Gainesville than we were in Tallahassee. We tipped our hats politely and sang along with Big Brother Bob Emery: “So long, small fry, it’s time to say goodbye…”
We found an affordable apartment somewhere near the northwest city limits of Hogtown owned by a character named Marcel Marty and set up shop, almost immediately running across a needed asset, photographer Gerald Jones. GJ did amazing work, had a sophisticated lab in his little house just north of where the Gainesville Mall would locate and would have been the answer to an editor’s dreams but for one thing. Gerry was a narcoleptic, capable of falling soundly asleep in an instant without warning. You can imagine the problems driving or with one’s sex life. Forget the snooze alarms, Jones was immune to clanging clocks, insistent phone calls and rap-rap-rapping on his chamber door. We hired him anyway and he persevered through apnea and bad dreams to eventually become the photographer of the famous Pamme Brewer brouhaha, gaining great fame. Alas, he fell asleep and missed his Walter Cronkite interview, but c'est la vie.
The appearance of Pamme Brewer on the scene led to the eventual flight back to Texas of Marilyn Todd, who deserved a better husband and got one in Austin, where she lived happily ever after.*** Pamme became a presence at the infamous NW 6th Street house, where I lived with Dick North, Newt Simmons and tagalong Gerry Jones. When one of the (as the newspapers like to describe them) “scantily-clad” UF girls featured in the Charlatan was hauled in and threatened with expulsion by the UF administration, we went to war with the university, arguing for the abolition of the en loco parentis rule which allowed schools to enforce codes of conduct for students outside of class time. Obviously, we needed a test case but finding a subject would be near impossible with suspension or expulsion pending. That’s when Pamme stepped in and offered to be the glamorous guinea pig. Bill said no at first, but she was adamant. “Right…it’s okay for somebody else to risk it, but not your girlfriend. Don’t be a hypocrite!”
Okay, then. The rest is legend. UF attacks, thousands of students pound the walls of the hearing room to jelly, the trial is moved to the Law School Auditorium, Pamme wins and Walter Cronkite has another good story, even without Gerald Jones, who finds a nice job in Atlanta. As a major result, the University of Florida discontinues en loco parentis and before long so does every other public college in the country. All us smug rascals celebrate. Then, almost before you know it, it’s September of 1967 and time to get down to business. Does anybody here know how to open a head shop?
Those Daring Young Men And Their flying Trapeze
After all was said and done with the Brewer fandango, reprints of the Pamme issue had netted us a whopping $1200. Snicker if you will, but for a barely-scraping-by Garfield Street lad of 27 years and nary a bank account, that pile of cash looked like the contents of Scrooge McDuck’s money bin. Summer had always been a cash flow nightmare since UF was devoid of students and no magazines were published between May and September, so the brain trust of the Charlatan house gathered to develop a plan. I had seen a couple of head shops pop up in San Francisco so the first thought was a headshop/counterculture book store. “We also need to sell pot pipes,” said roomie Dick North. Okay, but where do we get them? “I can make them with lamp parts and plumbing screens,” said Dick. Our other housemates were less enthusiastic. Newt Simmons said “Those head shops work in California but we don’t have any hippies here.” “We will,” I told him. It often takes a while, but the West Coast inevitably comes east.
We put ads in underground publications searching for merchandise to sell but there were no wholesalers yet. I decided to head to Greenwich Village, where retail poster and paraphernalia stores like The Infinite Poster and the Psychedelicatessen were thriving. Maybe some of them would think about selling bulk to us. Turned out they would.
We opened the Subterranean Circus on a weekday in September of 1967 in an 80x30 converted fertilizer warehouse just off University Avenue on SW 7th Street. Critically, it was a building with six parking spaces out front. We weren’t ready, but people kept knocking. We made $27 the first afternoon. Next day, it was $54. The third day, the Gainesville Sun ran a photo of Pamme out front with a rose in her teeth, and we made over $100. Twelve months later we were averaging just under $1000 a day. We didn’t even have a cash register and we never got one because business was brisk and registers just slowed down transactions. A side benefit of our open till was that it gave the impression we had a tiny gross, and we never were robbed. Any bill over a ten went in an envelope on the shelf under counterman Bob Sturm’s .45.
The early success of the Circus led other young entrepreneurs to open small businesses, something that had been reserved for older folk previously. Miamian Ira Vernon started a jeans shop called Tuesday Morning with Florida Gator defensive back Steve Tannen, and Doug Bonebrake opened a health food emporium called Mother Earth. Eateries like Snuffy’s and the Morning Glory Juice Bar seemed to be popping up daily. After we bought the entire corner, we leased a building to ex-Gator offensive lineman Dan Iannarelli, which became the notorious Dan’s Beverages, open til 2 a.m., where anything could happen and usually did. Youth business became a runaway train with the advent of hippie clothing manufacturers, the dawn of waterbeds and the wealth of wholesalers of paraphernalia of every description arriving on the scene daily, selling everything from bongs to suspect bananas. It was, indeed, the dawning of the Age of Aquarius and we just happened to find ourselves in the middle of the maelstrom. Some guy name Donald Luskin once said, “I’d always rather be lucky than smart.”
Whenever it’s goodbye to Gainesville, we leave with gratitude and wonder, thankful for the opportunity to partake of her largesse. Tom Paxton once told us it’s a long and dusty road, a hot and a heavy load, and the folks you meet ain’t always kind. Maybe he never made it to Our Town.
Post Script:
Okay, I just found out about the Azores, God bless them. They’re in the mid-Atlantic, have adequate runways and are “routinely used for major diversions.” I feel better now. Of course, it’s still a long way to the Azores.
That’s all, folks….except for one thing below.
***For anyone interested in more details on Marilyn Todd, there is a grand column about her called The Girls of Summer in the blog archive of January 31, 2013. The archive is available via the box just under the PIE logo. Get your Kleenex, it’s a tear-jerker.
