§ I once wrote columns for The Georgia Straight.

That was back in its hippie days. I wasn’t a hippie but

ry

a my then employer, The

Vancouver Sun, was on strike m and my pen itched.

A book has now been put on the paper titled, Whar The Hell Happened? Meaning. how could a hippie rag rise to the ranks of routine journal-

a isn? Well, we all have to grow Eup. The Straight is 30 years

Maes Of age; its publisher, the

@ once-hairy Dan McLeod, has B had a haircut, and the place i is 4 Now quite corporate, where it too was hairy. mw =» « Hairy or not, the Straight 8 was involved in great battles for freedom of the press fay when being left-wing and us g weird were not in fashion. Today such things are very ; I uch i in fashion. And in gov- a ernment. Hence the paper’s Bl respectabily ; It was born in 1967 dur- ing the Summer of Love. wm Most of its stuff was crazy. iB But a lot of the reaction was Crazy, too. - Tt was a time ‘when some # stores put up notices that iB they would not serve men am with long beards and long

m mailbox

Dear Editor: mI read the Aug. 13 article, & “NV choir hits a high note” by ai Layne Christensen. It reports, the cast ‘of Joseph and she S Technicolor Dreamcoat ... Andrew Lloyd Webber's “Christian” musical. At my x Sunday school, — Temple ag Sholom Synagogue, I learned faa that this is a Jewish story. 1 was a told that Joseph and his broth-

‘The Thread Bear

hair; when the Mayor of Vancouver, “Tom Terrific,” (aka Tom Campbell), had hippies arrested and cleared off the grounds of the old courthouse; and, when the city had a self- appointed town fool, Joachim Foikis, who ran around the streets in a jester’s cap and bells, inton- ing that the nuclear end was nigh,

Vancouver was not dull. It was 2 comic opera.

The Straight awarded magistrate (later judge) Larry Eckhardt The Pontius Pilate Certificate of Justice. The citation read as follows:

“To Lawrence Eckhardt, who, by closing his mind to justice, his eyes to fairness, and his ears to equality, has encouraged the belief that the law is nor only blind, but also deaf, dumb, and stupid. LET HISTORY JUDGE YOUR ACTIONS — then appeal.”

This resulted in criminal libel charges. The courts threw them out.

Police Chief John Fisk got the Heinrich Himmler Humanitarian Award. His citation read:

“To John Fisk, who has striven, despite the terrible restrictions of the Canadian Legal Code, to maintain the splendid police tradition established in Germany, Russia, South Africa, and Selma, Alabama. YOU HAVE WITHSTOOD THE ENEMY — such as progress, civil libertics, and legal equal- ity.”

° Mayor Campbell got The Happy Crapshaw Award, Crapshaw being the man who

ers are the fathers of the people of Isracl, and the 12 brothers became the 12 wibes of Isracl. 1 had to laugh at the thought of Layne Christensen going to church and thinking, that these “people of the book” were not the Jewish people, but were the forerun- ners of Cluistianity. A. Walker North Vancouver

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between 1927 and 1934 pre- dicted the end of the world 72 times and made his views known by threatening to jump off bridges.

Campbell’s citation said he had proven thar the lip is faster than the mind.

McLeod & Ca, also faced nine obscenity counts, none of which were upheld.

Men's private paris often featured prominently in the cartoons, a dog was shown peeing on a fire hydrant, and the cops didn’ tike an ad placed by a man who wanted a girl for “muffdiving.”

The latter caper was dis- missed by Judge Bernie Isman, who said he had never heard of the word.

Another abortive com- plaint was about a syndicated interview with “Cynthia Plastercaster,” a Los Angeles

“chick” who made statues of penises. (Syndicated, presum- ably, by the underground press.)

The book contains one of my brilliant pieces. It stated that artists and actors are bums, had always been bums, and always would be bums, operating on the government grant circuit. Even in those days (1978) I was hated by the politically correct, who had not yet been invented.

When my byline appeared in the paper, theatre critic

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Tom Shandell and book reviewer Alan Twigg resigned in disgust.

There's nothing less liber- al than a liberal.

I was also the subject of a libel writ issued by Eric Denhoff, a later chairman of the Transit Commission and an NDP crony. I forget what it was that stirred his bile but whatever it was it never got to court. There was much strange company: Stan Persky, David Suzuki, who claimed that coffee was more dangerous than LSD, Laurier LaPierre, Harry Rankin, Paul Watson, Bob Geldof, now “Sir” Bob in the UK, and many others.

Yes, the Straight carries pretty straight stuff these days. So much so that it went to Hollinger boss David Radler to ask how he could possibly allow me to write controversial columns about the holocaust.

Let’s hope it hasn’t for- gotten where it came from. And that a redneck stood up for it.

— The North Shore News believes strongly in freedom of specch and the right of all sides in a debate to be heard. The columnists published in the News present differing points of view, but those views are not necessarily those of the newspa- per itself.

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