Kingston High School Memories - the Underground Newspapers 1969- 1971

It was the end of the sixties.

It would take a few more years before we realized that it was also the end of a generation. Hippies, flower power, and psychedelia permeated our music, fashion and language.  As disorganized as it sometimes seemed, its one common denominator was that it was driven by students.

Students were all over the news. Hundreds of thousands took over the streets of Chicago, the president’s office at Columbia University, and the grounds of the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War. 

As High School seniors, we were mesmerized by the power of our own generation.  We proudly wore black arm bands, canvassed neighborhoods with petitions and marched in candlelit peace parades down Broadway.  We had the power to change the world, even though to do so, we still needed a parent’s permission slip.

In 1969, a group of Kingston High School seniors, disillusioned with the club news and football scores that dominated the school newspaper, DAME RUMER, had created their own underground paper and named it ISSUES.  Their intent was to write serious news that would be important to High School students.  One of their first topics was the demise of the Humanities program.  Kingston High School had recently offered a successful, innovative hybrid-curriculum course that was 3 hours long and incorporated History, English and Art, each presented by its respective teacher.  However, due to scheduling, expense or department politics, the program was dropped.  This was the perfect “cause” for a hard-hitting, fledgling tabloid, and, like a dog with a bone, ISSUES interviewed staff, pounded out articles and demanded answers as to how this decision made any educational sense. Clearly, this was a subject that would never have seen the light of day in the pages of the dowdy DAME RUMER.  Although they never got their answers and the course stayed dead, ISSUES had successfully established itself as responsible student journalism.  (The program did eventually come back as a single-period English class taught by Dick Schaeffer and Joe Happeny, which I had the pleasure of taking.)     

When the editors and staff graduated they passed ISSUES down to someone they believed would maintain its journalistic integrity.  They chose Dennis, the younger brother of one of the original editors.

At the time, I was writing poetry and getting it published in the Kingston High School literary magazine, REASON & RHYME.  It was all tortured soul verse. The stuff that emerges from the dark angst of a teenager, who, of course, is still being fed, clothed and sheltered by his family.  To the young, wide-eyed women who read them, however, the agonized stanzas marked me as “sensitive”.  In fact, one of them, enamored with the mystery of james michael naccarato (no caps, please), would become my first wife.

Dennis knew of me through these poems, and one day asked if I would like to join the staff of ISSUES.  I had already joined the staff of the school newspaper, but, although its very capable editor, Dan Guzweich, would go on to a successful career in journalism, DAME RUMOR, more club than newspaper, was not feeding my starving creative soul.  So I told Dennis yes, and soon I was collating pages of ISSUES as they flew off the rollers of the YWCA electric mimeograph machine.

This was serious business.

I still remember the day I came across a copy of THE ORACLE, New Paltz College’s student newspaper.  Printed as a large, fold-out was a drawing of a pig dressed as a police officer with his revolver protruding from his zipper. This was way, way over the top. It was irreverent.  It was incendiary.  It was offensive.

It was... inspirational, and that’s when my friend Vince Vurchio and I decided that ISSUES wasn’t revolutionary enough.  We needed to start our own underground newspaper.

Mike Walton, our friend and our boss at McDonald’s where Vince and I worked, funded the purchase of a hand-cranked mimeograph machine.  I think it cost about $130.00, a hefty sum when McDonald’s was still promising change back from your dollar.  We set it up in my basement, and soon produced the very first edition of REVELATION.

Our editorial direction was clear.  REVELATION would take an unrelenting stand on behalf of all that was right or, perhaps more accurately, left and its radical counter-culture positions would both incite and inform.  We would be fearless, but just in case, we decided to keep our identities secret.  Vince signed his pieces with the symbol for the square root of 3, which in math was a radical.  I was Winston Orville Pope, or “W.O.P”, a nickname bestowed on me years earlier by Vince and which today would have landed both of us in therapy sessions discussing our low self-esteem.  REVELATION’s logo was a closed fist clutching a pen.

We tried to be on the edge, or over the edge, and flirted with half truths, sort of a precursor to Fox News.  After Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit priest, his brother Philip, also a priest, and seven other Catholic activists burned 378 stolen draft files in a parking lot using homemade napalm, our headline read “Society of Jesus Priests Turn from Crucifix to Plastic Explosives”.  We published quotes out of context. Thomas Jefferson’s call for revolution in 1821: “God forbid we should ever be twenty years without a rebellion...The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants”.  Abraham Lincoln on equality in 1858: “I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races”.  We reviewed inflammatory books, and even had Zap Comix-like cartoons drawn by fellow students.

Of course, we couldn’t actually sell the paper.  First, we didn’t want anyone to know it was us. Second, it was against school policy...something about “grounds for expulsion”.  Third, we didn’t want anyone to know it was us.  So we instructed our salespeople to set the paper down on a desk or on “The Wall in front of the high school, then pick up the quarter that was left in its place. Slick!

Over at ISSUES, Dennis was not happy.

REVELATION, this crude, irresponsible upstart, would only stain the noble and responsible objectives of his beloved ISSUES, and worse, it ran the risk that both would be grouped together as “those student papers”.   He suspected Vince had something to do with it and he repeatedly asked me if I knew who was putting it out.

Taking that fearless, unrelenting stand on behalf of all that was right, I lied, and denied knowing anything about it.

It came to a head one afternoon as I was helping to finalize the latest edition of ISSUES.  As usual, Dennis was ranting about REVELATION and its lack of professionalism, responsibility, accountability.  The list went on.  At the very last minute before it was attached to the mimeograph machine, Dennis added to his front page this brief note in a box:  “We prefer REVELATION by John”.  We finished the edition which was set to be sold the next morning at “The Wall”.

That morning both ISSUES and REVELATION hit the street, and on the front page of REVELATION was this note:  “To our comrades on ISSUES...John says thank you.”

Dennis lost his mind.

Of course, the next REVELATION edition had also been almost finished and after Dennis made his “John” comment I couldn’t help but respond and we rushed it out for the same day.

Dennis narrowed his suspects to the small group who had been with him when he wrote his ISSUES comment.  I finally confessed, and to his credit we continued to be friends.

We published a couple of more editions, then school and, more importantly, girls, lured us away from our unbridled commitment to social responsibility and back to the reality that we were only sixteen years old.  In the end, REVELATION went out with the proverbial whimper, but, looking back, the fun we had was bang enough.