Part of a tribal historian’s role is collecting and preserving that history in all its formats — oral histories, street posters, miscellaneous ephemera, accounts of the moment, etc. There are many sources for this material. Here is a recent acquisition of the Digger archive.

This is a poster I’ve seen reprinted in various places but never in person until last week. It’s the main poster that has come to be associated with The Orkustra, a musical group that fashioned themselves the “first psychedelic electric symphony orchestra” and performed in San Francisco from the fall of 1966 to mid-summer, 1967. After a process of soliciting musicians, holding auditions and rehearsals, the group forged a “comprehensible form of improvisational music” and began performing in local venues, offering what the founder of The Orkustra called a “counter-culture musical adventure.” The group performed at the Love Pageant Rally, one of the defining events of the Haight-Ashbury on Oct 6, 1966 (commemorating the outlawing of LSD on that day). They performed at the New Year’s Wail in the Panhandle on Jan 1, 1967, the event that the Hell’s Angels threw in appreciation of the Diggers and the inspiration for the Communication Company instant news service. The Orkustra (the shortened form of their original name “The Electric Chamber Orchestra”) played at the Invisible Circus on Feb 24, 1967. One of the (many) interesting things about this event was the life-changing moments that took place for many of the participants. I’ve written about Cecil Williams and his epiphany about the Church that the Invisible Circus provided. Another person whose life was affected was Bobby Beausoleil, the young musician who had formed The Orkustra as a result of a vision he had in Golden Gate Park. Kenneth Anger, the underground filmmaker, approached Beausoleil after the group performed the opening set at the Invisible Circus, and offered Beausoleil the lead role in his film “Lucifer Rising.” Beausoleil accepted and moved into a different orbit. The Orkustra would continue as a group until mid-summer.

Here’s an account by Beausoleil of the band’s involvement with the Diggers:

Our first significant performance, and a defining one for the band, took place on a Sunday afternoon in the Panhandle section of Golden Gate Park. It was the very first in a series of free concerts that would take place in that location, organized by the notorious Diggers. By this time, hundreds of young people had already migrated to the Haight community, and more were arriving every day. Many of them had but recently left the homes of their parents on a wing and a prayer, arriving in the Haight with little or no money, no street experience, and ill-prepared to provide themselves with the necessities of basic survival. The Diggers had declared it their mission to coordinate relief efforts, finding and providing essential food, clothing, communal housing, and medical treatment to the migrants, all free of charge. The free Sunday concerts in the park were urban guerrilla theater events staged by the Diggers, all in the spirit of fun and good times, to bring a sense of harmony and unity to the growing throngs of erstwhile hippies. In addition to live music, huge pots of savory vegetable stew were on hand for anyone who might be hungry. The Orkustra’s association with the Diggers was initially an outgrowth of simple proximity to one another. The old warehouse on Page Street that we used for a rehearsal studio was located directly across the street from a row of derelict wooden garages that the Diggers had procured and made into their headquarters. Above the doors of the garages was a whimsical sign proclaiming them to be “The Free Frame of Reference,” the Diggers’ free store, where second-hand clothing, blankets, kitchen utensils, and sundry household items could be had for the asking. As members of The Orkustra and some of the Diggers encountered one another on a daily basis, a casual relationship was formed. Emmett Grogan, one of the Diggers’ founding members and chief instigators, took a particular shine to The Orkustra. He liked our free-form musical style and devil-may-care attitude, being so much like his own nature, and invited us to play the first of the free concerts in the Panhandle. A makeshift stage was set up under the trees and a generator was brought in to provide electricity to power the amplifiers. As we began to play, a crowd grew quickly around us. Our performance was very well received by everyone save for the cops who showed up to inform us that the crowd exceeded the number of people who could lawfully be gathered in a public park without a permit. We were allowed to play one more song before we had to shut it down. We made it a long one. Thereafter, the Diggers made prior arrangements with city officials to obtain permits, and with a flatbed truck to serve as a stage and power source, the weekend concerts in the Panhandle became a regular feature of life in the Haight for some time. The Orkustra played that venue several times, along with The Grateful Dead, The Charlatans, Big Brother, and other San Francisco rock band luminaries of the period. We played so many of the Diggers’ events, in fact, that we became known in some circles as The Diggers’ band. One of the most memorable of those events was the inaugural ceremonies that launched the infamous Invisible Circus festivities at Glide Memorial Church, wherein The Orkustra performed musical accompaniment for a troupe of half-naked female belly dancers who had been brought in for the expressed purpose of kick-starting the event. Our collective efforts were a rollicking success from my point of view, but the church fathers and city officials saw it from another perspective.

The Orkustra’s outlook fit neatly with the Diggers emphasis on autonomous group spaces. Beausoleil explained why the group preferred nightclubs to the Fillmore auditoriums. “Smaller venues are more intimate, increasing the likelihood that the energies of the audience and the performers will become commingled in a transcendent experience.” Just as happened at the Invisible Circus.

P.S. There’s another connection to the Diggers. The image of Emmett Grogan appears in the poster. Anyone find it?

Source of Beausoleil memoir: https://ebay.to/2m1hsZB (it has appeared elsewhere but this one is dated June 2003). After his involvement with Kenneth Anger, Beausoleil ended up in Los Angeles where he became involved in the  Charles Manson coterie and was subsequently arrested and convicted for the group’s first murder ordered by Manson. He is currently serving a life sentence in the Oregon prison system.

The poster here is announcing the “Peace Illumination Walk” held in New York City on Friday Dec 23 1966, one month after the “Love & Peace & Freedom” walk that was announced in the companion poster (pictured in the previous posting). Another early Peace March in opposition to the Vietnam War. As my previous discussion mentioned, there was a small window where a jubilant ecstatic tenor outweighed an angry and vengeful tone that slipped into the “movement” of the 1960s. This is that moment.

Historians (and other social scientists) think and work and research in two dimensions. There’s the vertical. And then there’s the horizontal. Take Pompeii as an example. The vertical aspect is the moment in time that was frozen with the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD. Archaeologists (primarily) and historians study the ruins to reconstruct that lost moment. The graffiti on the walls, the perfect frescoes in the long-ago atria, the petrified corpses in last gasp poses. Each remaining artifact has a place in the reconstruction. The deeper you go into the analysis the fuller the picture of that one moment. Vertical thinking digs deep.

On the other hand, horizontal thinking casts its nets across far distances — both of time and space. Wikipedia has adopted this approach with its “List of Years” pages. Each page documents known events that took place around the world during the same year. Historians need to keep both perspectives in their work. To ignore the larger context runs a risk of missing a key element in the story.

That brings us to the image above. This was a poster designed for a protest of the American Vietnam War. The protest took place on Nov 5 1966 starting at 11am in Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan, New York City. It was a march through city streets. The protesters eventually ended up in midtown Manhattan for a rally at 2pm. This was 1966 — three years after the first protest against the war organized by the War Resisters League. And seven years before all U.S. combat troops would be pulled out of a war that a generation of American youth had come to loathe.

What’s so interesting about this poster — from a horizontal historical perspective — is the moment in time. Fall of 1966. Think of what else was happening on the radical social and cultural landscape of America at that moment.  In September, the Artists Liberation Front announced their program of Free Fairs in San Francisco. The Black Panthers formed in Oakland in October and issued their revolutionary Ten Point Program. The Diggers formed in the same month as the Panthers, issuing a series of street manifestos and offering the first of a series of Free community services. Lenore Kandel’s Love Book would be busted along with three booksellers in November in San Francisco, leading to the coalescence of resistance by a community that would embrace the concept of love as their siren call the following year — the Summer of Love. And as this poster clearly evidences, the American Peace Movement had fully surfaced.

The fall of 1966 thus was a moment in which the politics of ecstasy was in ascendancy. Soon, the winter of discontent would seek to erase the memory of this moment of hope. The Peace Movement would become the Anti-War Movement. As such, perhaps it was inevitable — in confrontation with societal powers, the blush of hope is soon burnished. But just as rivers can flow underground before surfacing in unexpected places, so can avant-garde culture fade then reappear. Who knows when? Who knows where? Keep a horizontal perspective to know the answer.

*Image courtesy of Museum of the City of New York.

My friend Frank notified me that a local bulletin board had a listing for sale of a copy of The Mother Earth News, volume 1, number 1 (Jan 1970). Somehow, Frank (who is a collecting wizard in his own right) knew that this particular issue had a copy of the Digger Bread recipe. Last year, I completed the Digger Bread & Free Bakery(ies) page and one of the clippings I included from 1970 mentioned the forthcoming premier issue of TMEN and a listing of articles, one of which was the “digger bread” recipe. Due to Frank’s swift alertness, I was able to obtain this issue and scan the article. Here then is the recipe that Mother Earth News printed in their premier issue:

[Note: for background info on “digger bread” and the Free Bakery, refer to link above.]

Note the “correction” at the bottom of the recipe. This was obviously added by the editors at Mother Earth News. If any curious reader will compare this version to the original recipe that the All Saints Church diggers published, there are several differences worth mentioning. First, of course, is the mistake in the amount of water. In the original recipe, it was “2-1/2 cups warm water.” Here (before the correction) it is “1/2 cup lukewarm water.” Obviously somewhere along the line the “2” got dropped in transcription. (The editors at Mother Earth News realized this, but their version only uses 1-1/2 cups of water and a banana, an innovation of their local baker.) Another interesting difference (although, in reality, just a difference of emphasis) is the discussion of whole wheat flour. The original recipe stated emphatically, “White flour, or bleached whole-wheat, is not allowed for Free Bread.” The recipe (above) says, “Nasty old white flour will never do!” So, the emphasis on whole wheat versus white flour remains; the emphasis on Free has been dropped. Undoubtedly the baking of bread was (by 1969) more of a daily, communal operation — rather than a revolutionary act.

The Homebrew Computer Club was an important nexus in the underground computer culture that developed in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1970s. Out of this informal grouping of computer hobbyists, freaky engineers and long-hair technologists came several of the early computer companies that would quickly develop and spread the Personal Computer revolution and ultimately the Internet/World Wide Web domain two decades later. In the traditional telling of this history, the influence of the San Francisco Diggers has been completely overlooked and overshadowed by the rise of the commercial products of the computer revolution—Apple, Microsoft, IBM PC, etc. But the Diggers played a key role in the early culture of the computer underground that continues to this day in the form of open-source software and the idea that the Internet should remain Free. Here’s the proof (i.e., evidence) of this thesis.

Fred Moore was one of the founders of the Homebrew Computer Club. The history of this group is well documented.* But one aspect of Fred Moore’s philosophy has never been mentioned. Fred was inspired by the Diggers. I will delve into this in more detail but for now, after long desire to get this document posted for all to share, here’s one of Fred’s digger-inspired manifestos. He wrote this in 1974.

Put Your Trust in People, Not Money

(published anonymously by Fred Moore, 1974)

Money is obsolete, value-less, anti-life, etc. The use of money displaces trust, causes alienation, fragments community, tends to reduce everything and every being to a commodity, etc. Money is the economic language of our present society. Buying, selling, renting, and charging interest are the rituals that maintain and reinforce the myth of the market economy. The myth is that everything has a monetary price. And the only value is price.

Money is a symbolic tool. Yes, and in using that tool over and over we have subjected ourselves, our social relationships, and the ecology of our environment to that tool—so that now we are finding that we are not the master of the tool, but the tool has become the measure of us and our world. Money is God.

*Here’s an excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. This is an account of how Steve Wozniak met Steve Jobs and Woz’s early inspiration to give away his Apple computer for free, and how Steve Jobs convinced him otherwise.

Woz was usually too shy to talk in the meetings, but people would gather around his machine afterward, and he would proudly show off his progress. Moore had tried to instill in the Homebrew an ethos of swapping and sharing rather than commerce. “The theme of the club,” Woz said, “was ‘Give to help others.’” It was an expression of the hacker ethic that information should be free and all authority mistrusted. “I designed the Apple I because I wanted to give it away for free to other people,” said Wozniak.

This was not an outlook that Bill Gates embraced. After he and Paul Allen had completed their BASIC interpreter for the Altair, Gates was appalled that members of the Homebrew were making copies of it and sharing it without paying him. So he wrote what would become a famous letter to the club: “As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Is this fair? . . . One thing you do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? . . . I would appreciate letters from anyone who wants to pay up.”

Steve Jobs, similarly, did not embrace the notion that Wozniak’s creations, be it a Blue Box or a computer, wanted to be free. So he convinced Wozniak to stop giving away copies of his schematics. Most people didn’t have time to build it themselves anyway, Jobs argued. “Why don’t we build and sell printed circuit boards to them?” It was an example of their symbiosis. “Every time I’d design something great, Steve would find a way to make money for us,” said Wozniak. Wozniak admitted that he would have never thought of doing that on his own. “It never crossed my mind to sell computers. It was Steve who said, ‘Let’s hold them in the air and sell a few.’”

Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs (pp. 61-62). Simon & Schuster.

Here’s a scan of Lew Welch’s piece “A Moving Target Is Hard To Hit” which the Communication Company printed and distributed on Haight Street in the pre-Summer of Love (March, 1967). I was talking with my friend Mel Ash today and it turns out we two were similarly affected by Lew Welch’s outpouring of poetic genius. I thought I had posted this scan on the Digger web but it turns out I only have the xerox that I made in 1974. I will have to update the catalog to remedy that oversight. But in the meantime, here’s for you, Mel (and Lew).

The hypocrisy of political correctness. The City removed the tableau on the other side of this monument* in San Francisco’s civic center that depicted a Native California Indian in a subservient pose with two Spanish figures (missionary, vaquero). And yet this statue remains depicting the miners who flocked to California after news of the discovery of gold in 1848 at Sutter’s mill first spread to Yerba Buena (the Spanish pueblo that would become San Francisco) then nationwide. The Forty-Niners (depicted below) on the whole were a catastrophe for California Indians, much more so than the Spanish and subsequently Mexicans had been. The Forty-Niners carried out what can only be called genocide on the Native peoples.

WHY NOT TELL THE HISTORY INSTEAD OF HIDING IT AWAY?

*known as Pioneer Monument, located on Fulton between Larkin and Hyde.

In the history of the 1960s Digger movement in San Francisco and the West Coast, there is an arc of events and a continuity of intention that can be discerned starting in the late 1950s with the Beat poets and avant-garde happenings amidst the burgeoning social movements of the period. The Diggers themselves formed out of a nexus of radical arts and social consciousness that swirled around the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Haight-Ashbury formations that took place in 1965 onward. Ecology was always an important aspect of this continuity. When the Diggers dispersed from their daily activities on the streets of San Francisco after the Summer Solstice 1968, many moved to rural outposts with the intent of creating new social formations as they had done in the urban context. Planet Drum was a signal moment in 1972 when Peter Berg and Judy Goldhaft returned to the City from their travels to remote communes and country families. Planet Drum at first was a communication medium — periodic bundles distributed to a wide-flung network to stay in touch with others who were attuned to the idea that would come to be known as “bioregion.” Later, Planet Drum was the name of the non-profit foundation that was incorporated to engender awareness of and communication with all manner of bioregional groups and activities across the continent and worldwide. Planet Drum Foundation is still active with dozens of programs and projects.

The San Francisco Public Library’s Wallace Stegner Environmental Center is hosting a retrospective exhibit on the history of Planet Drum. This exhibit takes place from September 1 through November 29, 2018. For anyone close by, it is well worth the visit.

Click here for more information on the exhibit. The collage of images (above) are a selection of the informative placards in the current exhibit. Judy Goldhaft will host groups of 5-20 people who are interested in a guided tour of the exhibit. Contact Planet Drum (415-285-6556 or mail@planetdrum.org) to make the arrangements.

The Angels of Light were one of the groups that survived the Fall of the Haight in the late 1960s and became part of the thriving Free Commune movement in San Francisco in the 1970s. The Angels had broken away from The Cockettes in 1969 to perform Free Theater for other communes and the counterculture community in the Bay Area. “Free” was an inviolate principle, which had been passed down from the original Diggers in the Haight starting in 1966. The Diggers had held an event called the “Free City Convention” on May 1, 1968, at the Carousel Ballroom. It was at this event that Ralph met Jet and Irving and Hibiscus from the Sutter Street Commune. The rest is history.

Here is a photo from a protest the Angels organized in 1973 at the paid showing of “Pickup’s Tricks” a film that Gregory Pickup produced in part from footage he had taken at an Angels performance. Paid shows (like this film) were boycotted in the Free community.

Came across this article from the East Village Other in 1967. It highlights Jim Fouratt and his escapades as a digger in New York after he left San Francisco in 1967. (See below for transcription of the article which appeared in the 8/19/67 issue of the paper.)

Transcription of the text:

A Fouratt is a small furry digger who gets arrested all the time.

Jim Fouratt used to be a member of Progressive Labor, he was active in the civil rights movement, and before that a child actor. Recently he has completed the cycle and has become a digger, or in effect returned to being a child actor.

Doing his thing in Newport he was thrown out of the city for distributing obscene literature which was in reality a poem by Gary Snyder. He was arrested in Newark after the riot for “inciting a riot” which was in reality giving away free food, but to be sure the police also charged him for “passing out food without a license” and “refusing to obey an officer’s command” who merely asked, “What are you, a boy or a girl?”

“I guess there is something about me that makes cops go crazy. I’m a coward. I’m not afraid to die, but I don’t like violence. I don’t carry flowers but you should choose your weapon,” Fouratt explained one day after collecting a number of nights in jail in his biography.

“My only weapon is peace and love. We’re in such a hostile society that sometimes love or peace, or that kind of approach seems dangerous to the people with guns, and they treat me as if I’m carrying the same weapon they are.

“I seem to bring out a confrontation. But my confrontation is more on a sexual level with the cops. Maybe their masculinity is threatened by my hair? I really thought about this a lot, wondering why my friend Abbe Hoffman, who’s got as much hair and does just as many things as I do doesn’t get arrested.”

“I never tried to get arrested. I just do my thing and if it means getting arrested, then that happens when it happens.

“The beautiful thing about Newark was after I got arrested the only trouble I had was with the cops. I got into jail and the people were beautiful in jail, and they really turned on to the idea of the diggers and acid and the whole psychedelic thing.

“These were people who had been in there for 20 days and hadn’t even been allowed to make their phone call. I got them phone calls so they could get out. There’s a lot of work to be done in jails.”

Every Sunday night there will be a digger benefit at the Scene, a night club at 301 W. 46th St. Jim Fouratt might be arrested even there.

“Yes, I’ll have a stage arrest. That’s how I’m beginning to feel.”

East Village Other, Aug 19, 1967, pg 3