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The Eugene AUGUR: 1969-1974

Peter Jensen

Copyright © 1990 by Peter Jensen.

Jensen has been an activist for peace and freedom since 1960. In addition to teaching English at Lane Com- munity College in Eugene, he has published two books of poems: This Book ls Not a Mask for Tear Gas (1970) and When Waves Sprout Birds: Twenty Years of Poetry (1965-1985). He also works as a fundraiser for the Oregon Natural Resources Council, the largest member- ship conservation organization in the western states.

"Twenty years ago today," goes the Sergeant Pepper song and the memories of America's under- ground press. We thought we were Camus writing for Le Combat in Nazi-occupied France. An alien force had taken over our country: it talked peace and made vicious war; it owned both political parties. We were all that was left of the opposition, but we were every- where in the streets in mass demonstrations and sinking new roots in old communities all over America. Above all, the media had caved in and was reporting inflated, daily body counts for generals in Saigon and Washing- ton. For all our "freedom of the press," the press was just another chain of corporations acting like a line of skimpily dressed cheerleaders for the boys in grunt green, who were fighting against the will of eighty percent of the people in a small but tough country 9,000 miles away across the world's widest ocean.

By 1969, it was obvious that the National Libera- tion Front (NLF) of South Vietnam was winning its war. This fact shook the established American Empire to its core. On April Fool 's Day 1968, a Democratic president resigned. On Inhoguration Day 1969, a crooked, Republican lawyer from Orange County was sworn in as president of some of the people some of the time. We knew we were in for a long airwar bombing campaign to punish the NLF for winning in the countryside and megatons upon megatons of lies.

Most of the people who started underground papers in their towns were in their twenties or thirties and wereveterans (since 1960) ofthepeace and antiwar movements. Most were also far from home trying to

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live in college towns after they were done with school. The people who started the AUGUR in Eugene repre- sented both fronts: antiwar and alternative community. Both groups of activists were action-oriented: they set out to make the news and then write about it. This style of journalism was not new in America. American revolutionary journalist Tom Paine wrote George Washington's newsletter, Common Sense, after each battle explaining the strategic retreat to Valley Forge and the British warships' firebombing of Kingston, New York, a war crime to remember on the Hudson River. This kind of journalism demanded a very fierce, engaged objectivity. From the start in Eugene, antiwar demonstrations and new food co-ops, free clinics, and concerts got equal press.

What people called the "movement" of the Sixties and Seventies was an anti-Fascist movement. Other wings of this movement were: 1) the liberation move- ments of Third World people and native Americans; 2) the women's liberation movement; 3) a community- based war against narks who were dealing drugs; 4) the gay liberation movement; 5) the radical environ- mental movement; 6) the alternative, small business movement; and 7) what people called the hippy, alternative culture movement. Most of us tried to embrace all these wings: we wanted to forge a new majority. The AUGUR was started by a small crew of community activists around the Wootens' Odyssey Coffee House and the Oregon Country Fair; then it passed over to a group I belonged to--a collective of Students for a Democratic Society (SDSers) from the University of Oregon. But often, we could not serve all trends fully. At first, women on the AUGUR staff introduced our community to the basics of women's liberation. Later, around 1972, some lesbian and non- lesbian women broke off, because they wanted to concentrate on women's issues and because they had become "separatists." They established Women's Press, a nationally important publication that still exists today as a regional publication. News of the women's movement, however, continued to receive major coverage in the pages of the AUGUR.

The streets of Eugene were filled with demonstra- t o r s -a t least four major marches a year. The paper staff helped plan each march, called for it in the pages of our paper, went out and marched, spoke at rallies, took photographs, came back and wrote our stories and criticisms, sold ads, worked in the darkroom, did layout, took the paper to our printer, did distribution, and sold papers in the streets. Although some of us were experts, we held that everyone should learn to do everything. We tried to come out with a new edition every two weeks. We had a rotating editorship, whose role was to coordinate the story list, and an ad sales coordinator for every issue. Most of us had other part-

time jobs. Many of us counted on the income from each paper (a dime out of 25 cents) to help pay rents. We printed as many as 4,000 in each run, but we sent out almost 1,000 free subscriptions to prisoners, and we exchanged with many other collectives. Many of us got food stamps; for the first time, many of us lived below the poverty line while working hard and invent- ing new ways of cheaper and more natural collective living. I lived in an AUGUR collective house of two men and two women--a couple and two singles. I was too busy to worry.

At that time, Eugene had 54,000 inhabitants. Today, it has grown to 106,000, but it is still sur- rounded by a belt of farms and a further-out sea of cutover national and private forestlands. Organic agriculture and destructive forestrypractices dominated our paper from the start. In 1970, women from the AUGUR collective attended a conference on women's health issues in British Columbia. There, they met a Cambodian woman doctor, who had walked 700 miles in the jungles of Indochina and had flown to Canada from China. She told them of the massive numbers of cancers, birth defects, and miscarriages caused by spraying herbicides (among them, agent orange) to destroy the rain forests, which provided cover for the NLF. This was a war crime we called "ecocide." That same year, Air Force doctors halted the spraying, and an Oregon State forestry professor, "Spray for an A" Mike Newton, added water and sprayed Oregon forestlands with those same, banned herbicides. Thus began a twenty-year battle to stop the use of herbicides, which caused miscarriages, birth defects, and still-to-be- detected cancers in rural communities all around Eugene. The war had come home to America in an insidious way none of us had suspected; the fetuses of our people would suffer, while the so-called "right-to- lifers" were pro-industry and full of hypocrisy.

There were plans for a system of concentric freeways around Eugene and more nuclear power plants in Oregon. The AUGUR staff helped lead the fight against those gross developments, and quality of life issues are still at the heart of Eugene community politics. In 1972, we campaigned for and won a citywide referendum requiring a vote on all new limited-access, freeway proposals inside city limits. Some of us went into local politics: the Eugene City Council, the Lane County Commission, and the Oregon legislature. Many of us are still in activist organizations working for progressive social change, with this difference: we are now getting paid for our work.

It's interesting to note that all the underground papers had so much in common. We had fun looking over other papers; we put them on our mailing list and exchanged with most of the papers that are represented in this collection of essays, as well as others. We often

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took strength or articles or ideas from other papers. Some of our favorites were The Great Speckled Bird, The Berkeley Tribe, Akwesasne Notes, Off Our Backs, the Black Panther Party Paper, and the Ann Arbor Sun. Later, an underground press "syndicate" was born and our very own news service, Liberation News Service (LNS), was sent every week from New York. LNS provided us with the best graphics, cartoons, stories, and short news flashes from many sources. Eugene is over 600 miles from San Francisco or Seattle; we like it that way, but we needed big city information to turn out a good, small city newspaper.

There were many local roots here for radicals. Eugene was the hometown of Oregon Senator Wayne Morse, one of two senators who voted against the war from the beginning. Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion, lives up the hill in Pleasant Hill. In the early Seventies, both were frequent speakers, and they represented well, for a while, two wings of Eugene's identity at that time: the serious, political activist and the jesting, cultural trickster. In addition, the Woodsmen of the World, some of them IWW Wobblies and woodprod- ucts union activists, had built a dance hall here in 1932, and this WOW Hall was rebuilt and became a center for dances, concerts, poetry readings, theater, fund- raisers, and community talent shows.

We found places in the local economy to sink our roots for money. One of the most important phases of forestry--tree planting: replacing the 200 ancient forest species with ten-inch, Douglas-fir seedling, crop trees--was an unorganized and exploited part of the economy. The Hoedads were the first forestry workers' cooperative that did quality work at a living wage. This cooperative is just one of many that formed. Food production, farming, food distribution and sales, baking, restaurants, clothing, garages, music groups--people tried out all the basic parts of the economy in cooperative form. In fact, we could not have published the AUGUR without these businesses. They were our advertisers; they provided our staff with jobs; their retail stores were some of our most impor- tant sales counters. And the more we developed, the more we found that we had been preceded by a wave of Eugene area cooperatives in the Thirties. The local milk distributor was started by dairy farmers as a cooperative in the Great Depression. One of the plywood mills was owned by four remaining members of a larger cooperative. We found that, in many ways, the Thirties had laid down a foundation for us in the Sixties. We made it, because they made it.

The AUGUR office was a confusing, exciting place to work. People with good ideas mixed with people with half-vast ideas. We were full of courage and paranoia, wisdom and foolishness. The FBI tried to

shut us down. Agents approached our printer and tried to bully him, but he was an old union activist, and he smiled as he told us what he said to them: "I 'm a small businessman and a capitalist. These people always pay their bills, and I need their money. Besides, I think their paper is a kick!" (Our printer had been a jazz musician in the 1930s.) He always helped us plan our color bleeds on the cover, our "tie-dyed art" covers. The IRS tried to shut us down. Agents came to our staff meeting and asked all the wrong questions, like "Who's in charge here?" A circle of rather hairy people just laughed at them. The agents had never before met a tightly knit group of anarchists, and we had a lot of fun with them.

Both narks and local hard drugs dealers tried to shut us down. Agents threatened us from both sides of the "war on drugs." We were fond of publishing pictures of undercover narks busting local pot growers and smokers, and we were fed these photos by a large, shadowy collection of people, who called themselves "People Into Sabotaging Surveillance" (PISS). When we found that the owners at one drug paraphernalia store, who advertised with us, were dealing cocaine, we picketed them and published a story on their drug dealing. When we were visited by a local hood with polished black shoes, who offered us a drug profits deal, I ran for our camera, but he escaped while threatening us harm. Of course, once the Vietnam vets were back and organized into a 400-member Lane County Chapter of Vietnam Vets Against the War (VVAW), we felt a lot safer. In fact, once they took over organizing the demonstrations, we often defeated or stalemated the sheriff's department in the streets. Soon, Vietnam Vets and women were working as cops in the Eugene Police Department, and some of the police agents who attended our meetings were on our side!

One time, in 1971, we put out a paper for a demonstration that promised to be huge (4,000) by Eugene standards and, pretending this would be the start of the "revolution," we called on all demonstrators to wear wool watch caps, heavy jackets, and bandanas for tear gas. We knew no one sane would wear all that stuff on a hot, summer night in "mellow, little Eu- gene," so we organized a seven-person camera team that consisted of one photographer with a flash and six defenders, and we took photos of all men in watch caps and heavy jackets; they all turned out to be cops, which made a nice two-page spread of undercover cop photos. And we sang: "All we are saying is pull down your pants." When things got really heavy in Cambodia in Spring 1970, a couple of us were busted as part of the Eugene Thirteen, because we were on a list of folks who had held a bullhorn more than ten times each, and we were falsely charged with felony riot--"Must bust

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in early May/Orders from the D.A." (Bob Dylan)--under an unconstitutional law that had been passed to bust Chinese railroad workers. They had built Oregon's early rail lines in the late 1800s and then, once they were finished, were told they were not welcome to stay. We were part of this proud heritage. Charges were dropped three years later.

By 1973, with Watergate and all, the worm had turned on our enemies. I remember one peace demon- stration a month after Nixon had bombed Hanoi and Haiphong on Christmas and lost one-third of his bomber force. We were getting ready to march, but the Eugene City Council had issued us a march permit to start at 1:00 p.m., and our marchers were late in forming up. An older cop in a car told us we couldn't march, but a younger motorcycle cop with a beard drove up, and asked me, "Where are we going, brother?" I nearly cried; it was such a change.

Often, we felt out of touch with modern Amerika, which we always spelled with a "k" the way Franz Kafka and my Danish grandparents had. We felt like immigrants from another time zone. The origin of the AUGUR's name, meaning a bird priest from ancient Rome, was appropriate to Oregon, where there still is an environment with some birds to defend. Our paper's logo had a bearded old guy in a toga reading meanings (auguries) from the patterns of flights of birds and writing down Nature's messages. The Lower Willamette Valley used to be home to hundreds of thousands of waterfowl, hundreds of bald eagles, and the Kalapooyan tribe. Now we have a few wintering eagles we share with Alaska, 60,000 ducks in a good year in local, leftover wetlands, and nothing but stones, bones, and baskets left by the peaceful Kalapooyans.

Much has been written about the meaning of the culture of the Sixties, and in Eugene, a city the Wall Street Journal called "a mecca for the terminally hip," that culture lives on as a mainstream for a quickly aging generation. The AUGUR was one of the main- stays of that culture. We always had a poetry page, and I often edited it and printed the best local poetry I could find. Many of us did music and theater reviews; most of the music was political or rebellious. Remembering is as easy as putting on a tape. The San Francisco Mime Troupe was our favorite, and some of their local income went into printing our paper. The record stores were some of our truest advertisers. I always wondered why we were called the "alternative" culture. Sinatra was mainstream for his generation; why were the Beatles and the Grateful Dead not mainstream for ours? When I think of the passions and the big ideas of my own life, the culture of my generation is my blood's mainstream. What else was there: the death kulture of the Pentagon?

Much also has been written about sex, drugs, and nonviolence, and all that was a lot of fun for some of us. In Oregon, Nature gave us a somewhat gentler ride, as we tripped and skinny-dipped and tried to keep the faith. The movement here was quite artistic, and Nature inspired many of the graphics we printed in the AUGUR. There is something about a full moon rising out of a snow-covered volcano that neither a coyote nor a human being can resist. Nature makes us wail, and our photography, art works, and street guerrilla theater groups were full of the sexy juice of our mother Earth. Often, I felt we were overripe fruit dribbling down the chin of some giant faces, but, when I com- pared that image with the body bags from 'Nam, I knew that our little messes were just humanity living it up somewhere in the surrounding galaxy. When our time is evaluated, I want to be there to make the case for our generation's culture starting the American Renaissance, no matter how long it lasts.

The underground press was full of this rebirth of science and spirit. The highs and the lows, the excite- ment and the bitter pain were all part of that coming out of the womb of our parents' world. They had endured the Great Depression and helped to win World War II; we inherited their survival instincts and their victories. Our paper helped to unify people and give them a shared vision of what was happening. Stories on organic gardening flowed into stories on ancient poets flowed into stories on Vietnamese villages being bombed with flaming napalm, but rebuilding into tunnels and caves flowed into feminist writings about women's orgasms and health clinics flowed into struggles of Native Americans to keep the culture of Raven and Eagle alive flowed into saving French Pete Creek with its streamside hiking trail flowed into nutritional information on organic foods flowed into medical and mental health care flowed into viewing an eclipse of the moon at 4:00 A.M. flowed into community housing and historic preservation flowed into the AUGUR's cartoonists dueling the forces of darkness.

My main point is that cultural alienation ended: everything was connected to everything else, and our writing style was free to flow. Our paper layout reflected the electric rock-and-roll power of our culture. Sure it was new-lefty, trippy-hippy, but it moved us, because it was our own, and, if it failed us, we could always change. Anyway, you can't stick your foot in the same era twice. Here, by the Willamette and McKenzie rivers, it's obvious reality is always on the move. Often, we had to let those changes roll over the pages of our paper. Many layout nights, we were up until dawn making changes until the car left for the printer ninety miles away just up the Yaquina River from Newport on the Oregon coast.

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The AUGUR went under in 1974. Sure, we were burned out, but it's sffll hard to say why. We learned that publications also have lives of their own. Women's Press continued for a few more years. Some of the AUGUR staff helped create the next community-based paper, The WUlamette Valley Observer, which lasted from 1975 to 1984. Some of us started lO-point 5 arts magazine, which lasted from 1974 to 1981. In 1984, a new community paper, What's Happening, took over the niche first occupied by theAUGUR, and it is doing well today. What's Happening is a free paper that survives and pays decent wages on advertising income only. What a far cry from earning ten cents per copy of the AUGUR on the street corner to pay one's rent in the long-ago exciting times, when we thought we were making a revolution, and our excited readers thought so, too!

Now I 'm forty-seven years old, teaching college and working to raise money for conservation work in Oregon. I have an interesting box of all the old A U- GURs in my closet with a collection of photos with waxed backs. I tried to donate the papers to the periodical section of the University of Oregon's Library, but a friend there told me they didn't have the money to microfilm them. "They'll get stolen issue by issue," he said. So they're still in my closet, and almost everytime I clean, I get caught up and trapped in the past looking them over. Grassroots history is hiding in my closet. Actually, early in the history of the AUGUR, and I suspect this happened to most other "undergrounds" as well, Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, bought a library subscription and told us they had grant money (from Bell and Howell) to microfilm all the underground papers in America. So that's where our collective archives are for anyone interested in doing research on those times. We suspected that the CIA might have paid for all that microfilming, but who knows? Northwestern is one of the most heavily endowed universities. Anyway, leave itto the CIA to study the last domestic, democrat- ic upsurge, while the next one builds behind their backs like a tsunami. It was CIA intellectuals who said that once six percent of the Vietnamese were willing to pick up a gun the war was lost, but presidents don't listen to CIA "eggheads" either. By the time the White House and the Pentagon woke up, Vietnamese teenagers were armed to the teeth.

I don't know what can re-create those times for younger folks. Despite all the strange events between 1969 (and the end of the Vietnam War in 1975) and the present, I feel a connection to those times that will

not die. The revolution never happened; our generation has not come to power in America with a transforming vision for democracy. Yuppies replaced yippies in advertising. The Reagan years spread out against the sky like a war machine stalled within its own borders. The New Right enjoyed obscene amounts of media and money power--more than we even dreamed of--but what did it get them? Colonel North with chocolate cake on his face in Tehran? The idiot Contras? Reagan knighted by the English Queen? Tammy Bakker's eye make-up? Cocaine in Fawn Hall's nose? Dan Quayle next to the White House? A Supreme Kourt that says you can burn the flag some of the time, but you can't control your body all the time? With these people, the right to life ends at birth! They still don't know what the hell they' re doing. Remember Vietnam? Remember nuclear power? Remember Bhopal and Prince William Sound? They've been screwing up for decades and wasting the power of our country. Now, a trillion dollars deeper in debt, we still need a "rebirth of wonder."

But life, at the local level, goes on. The Vietnam- ese won their war for freedom and independence. The United States still needs a Solidarity movement and a radical, Gorby-type restructuring. Most of the liberation movements in the world have suffered and matured. Some have turned weird from too much pain. But the planet is in grave danger from the nonrenewable, world economy. We knew it back then, and we were fright- ened in the Sixties by our dark vision of the poisoning of the planet. That was like a bad acid trip back then. Now, we're twenty years further into the destruction, and the living Earth is in much more serious trouble, with continental-sized holes in the ozone over both poles and atmospheric warming. The destroyers of the planet can never say they weren't warned. Just as we chanted during the antiwar movement in the streets, they still need to respond when we say, "Join us!" Sometimes, twenty years ago today seems like yester- day. In the life of our species, twenty years is just one breath in and one breath out.

As the Voyager 2 space probe rounds Neptune and dives out of the solar system, it's painfully obvious that not all blue planets support life. Thanks to Carl Sagan and many others, the technology of the early Seventies is still sending us family photos from the outer planets. Thomas Jefferson wrote that each generation needs to make its own revolution. I 'm still waiting and writing. Goodbye, Voyager 2! Write if you find work.

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