The MC5, 1969. --photo: Leni Sinclair.
Front row: left to right: Dennis Thompson, drums; Wayne Kramer, lead guitar. Back: Fred "Sonic" Smith, rhythm guitar, Rob Tyner, vocals, Michael Davis, bass.
The author with anti-war activists, Dena Clamage and Leon Lindermann, looking out of the windows of the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam office that were smashed by bricks from Donald Lobsinger's Breakthrough group in 1966.
The office was at the corner of W. Warren and the John C. Lodge service drive, now a shopping center parking lot.
This photo by Leni Sinclair was part of an exhibition of work, "Motor City Underground," at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) in 2021.
Active duty anti-war GIs march in 1970 leading a peace demonstration.
What Really Happened:
Footnotes to Summer on Fire: A Detroit Novel
Why are there footnotes for a novel? Summer on Fire could give the impression of being an exact history of the weeks between June 10-August 7, 1967. It isn’t. The plot is fiction, but interwoven with actual events to which I tried to give fidelity to history.
Although many of the characters are based on real people, publications, and organizations, all of them, including the two main ones, are a hodge-podge of different personalities and none of them should be associated with actual persons in either their acts or conversations.
My goal in writing was to address questions of war, violence, racism, and the resistance to them. And, to hopefully present the story in an entertaining and engaging manner.
However, not everything portrayed should be dismissed as either fanciful or a plot device. Since the reader may find it difficult to assess what is historically accurate, these annotations note the origin of some of what is mentioned.
ERRATA
I tried to be as accurate as possible with the factual material in this novel, but some errors crept into the first edition. Corrections were made for the third printing, so some earlier errors were fixed. I appreciate all corrections. If you find any factual errors or have suggestions for footnotes, please let me know at pwerbe@gmail.com.
Information Page
No Copyright. Protecting this work from uncompensated reprinting isn’t a concern of mine. In fact, nothing could please me more than if someone else printed copies of this book. Here is an article I wrote about copyright protection.
The back cover photo was shot by Leni Sinclar
Why is Black capitalized and not white in the text of this book? From my years of writing for the Fifth Estate and other publications, I followed the guidelines for usage found in The Associated Press Stylebook. The news syndicate announced the use of capitalization for Black, but not white in 2020.
Dedication Page
This book is dedicated to Federico Arcos (1920-2015) because of the profound impact he had on my life, and so many of the group who publishes the Fifth Estate. He was the real antifa having fought against the fascists when he was 16-years-old during the Spanish Civil War and Revolution (1936-1939). This tribute to Federico in the Fifth Estate by David Watson sums up an amazing life. The dedication comes from what Federico would respond when asked if he was an anarchist.
Epigram
Marlon Brando's character's sarcastic reply in the 1953 film, "The Wild One," to the question asking him what was he rebelling against, summarized the inchoate sense about this society my boyhood friends and I also felt. We rooted for Johnny and his motorcycle gang because they dared to commit transgressions even though in the end they were brought to heel.
The jazz soundtrack for the film turned me onto that genre. It featured prominent West Coast musicians such as trumpeter Shorty Rogers and drummer Shelley Mann performing under changed names, i.e., Roger Short and Manny Shell because of contract restrictions. The EP that first brought the music to my attention is now an expensive collector's item.
Here's the complete film.
Chapter 1
P. 1 Vietnam Summer was a nation-wide effort to ramp up opposition to the war and had an office in the McKerchey Building near downtown Detroit. The building was demolished in 1970.
P. 1 There are many histories of the U.S. war of aggression against Vietnam. An excellent source of articles are in the Fifth Estate Vietnam Resource Page. A particular good account is David Watson’s “Looking Back on the Vietnam War: History and Forgetting,” which reports on the intense opposition to the conflict as well as its toll on the Vietnamese.
P. 3 What's a mimeograph machine that Michele was operating? It's a duplicator that saw use in thousands of labor and protest actions half a century ago. How people were notified of events before Facebook and texts. Here is a video of one and other obsolete duplication machines that can be used for DIY projects.
P. 3 There was no organization known as the Coalition of Radical Black Workers. It references the League of Revolutionary Black Workers that carried out radical labor organizing in Detroit’s auto plants. The history of the group is contained in Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, by Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin. It’s a good history, but the quotes attributed to me are severely distorted.
P. 5 The shooting of three socialists occurred on May 16, 1966, more than a year before the fictional setting in the novel. The victims, members of the Socialist Workers Party, were Leo Bernard, who died, and Jan Garrett and Walter Graham who were seriously wounded. The shots were fired by a right-wing assassin at Debs Hall, the Detroit headquarters of the Party, on Woodard Avenue and Selden.
I changed the names since I didn’t want to give the authoritarian socialist organization publicity, plus I moved the shooting event to a later date. However, all three victims deserve to be honored for their suffering, particularly Leo Bernard. The party paper is The Militant, referred to in the novel as The Hammer. Here's a full account of the incident
Chapter 2
P. 8 If you are reading an edition of this before publication of the fourth printing, my armaments advisor advises me that describing the "wuffer" shotgun as "small-caliber" is incorrect terminology. A 20-gauge is not measured in calibers and it is not considered small.
P. 9 The Fifth Estate, the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam, the Detroit Artists’ Workshop, the White Panther Party occupied space at the corner of W. Warren and John C. Lodge Freeway service drive. The storefronts were, in fact, owned by a dentist inappropriately named Hertz.
P. 9 The history of the early years of the Fifth Estate can be found in an article I wrote for the 40th anniversary of the publication, now in almost 60th year.
P. 9 The Artists Workshop personnel and the works they produced were the cultural and creative sector of the community.
P. 9 There is not much history available on the Detroit Committee to End the War
that was central in Detroit to opposition to the war.
Chapter 5
P. 18 The MC5, consisting of friends, Rob Tyner, Wayne Kramer, Fred “Sonic" Smith Michael Davis, and Dennis Thompson, did practice at one point in the basement of the Fifth Estate office. Two of the members wrote memoirs, the most compelling is Kramer’s.
P. 19 The Minor Key, open for only four years, 1959-1963, hosted all of the legendary greats of jazz from that era.
P. 21 The Fifth Estate advocated mutiny among the armed services, the right of GIs to organize into the American Servicemen’s Union, and a general strike at home to end the war.
P. 22 The group, NewFilm, is a play on the Detroit Newsreel collective that began filming a documentary about the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in 1970. It was completed by Stewart Bird, Rene Lichtman and Peter Gessner in association with the League. It is available as "Finally Got the News." The film group deserved more than the one flash on a meeting in progress, but such is the drawback of fiction. Here is a more complete appreciation of the work they accomplished.
P. 23 Dave Valler was accused of several bombings and eventually cooperated with the police.
Chapter 6
P. 26 Donald Lobsinger headed Breakthrough, a religio-fascist group, that menaced Detroit activists for three decades. Lobsinger was obsessive that only the American flag could be flown. He once attacked a neo-Nazi group that was waving a swastika banner.
It was widely held that the vandalism to the Fifth Estate and anti-war offices was done by Breakthrough members. John Sinclair wrote a poem following one incident.
P. 27. All of the groups listed were actual ones who opposed the Vietnam War.
P. 29 The Builders of Detroit Dinner took place in 1974, and the protest against it as related beginning on p. 61 is fairly accurate.
P. 29 The Zengakuren was a communist/anarchist student group that militantly protested U.S. foreign policy and against the Japanese government. The book’s character is based on an actual person who trained people in Detroit in the Snake Dance tactic in preparation for the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago.
Chapter 7
P. 33 The Grande (pronounced gran-dee) Ballroom's history is featured in the documentary, “Louder Than Love.” Its history in print is Leo Early's The Grande Ballroom: Detroit's Rock 'n' Roll Palace.
The Grande Ballroom line-up of the Grateful Dead and Tim Buckley is accurate, taken from the Concert Data Base where all of the concerts there are noted. However, Tim Buckley's song, "Get on Top," didn't appear until his 1972 LP, "Greetings from LA." Another case of me playing fast and loose with insignificant details in order to tell the fictional parts of the story in an interesting manner.
Same was true with the bands on the night of June 16, 1967 where only The Jagged Edge is listed rather than the dream bill of Janis Joplin and Cream. Janis's band played the Grande for the first time in March 1968 and Cream did a three-night concert in October 1967.
P. 34 The late Gary Grimshaw’s Grande original posters are now worth thousands. Part of the joke in mentioning their being discarded is that the disposal of them is what increased their value. Had everyone saved them because of their art, since thousands were printed, the originals wouldn’t command the high price they do today. Beautiful reprints are available.
P. 34 The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and the Orange Sunshine they produced is documented in the film, "The Sunshine Makers."
P. 35 There is much about Timothy Leary available everywhere. Latest is Errol Morris’ documentary about Leary’s companion, Joanna Harcourt-Smith, “My Psychedelic Love Story.”
P. 35 The late Sheil Salasnik was listed as the Fifth Estate’s Travel Editor and wrote about all things psychedelic. He had one of the last pure doses of LSD produced by the pharmaceutical company, Sandoz. Earlier in the year in which the novel is set, there was a Love-In on Belle Isle that ended in a police riot. Sheil described the part prior to the police attacks.
P. 36 Like all of the characters in this novel, Jeff is modeled on an amalgam of several friends and then enhanced. The strongest reference is to the late Allen Van Newkirk, who published, Guerrilla: A Free Paper of the Streets. What Allen passed out for free is now sold by collectors for as much as $2,000.
P. 37 There are many biographies of the radical psychologist, Wilhelm Reich. This is one I wrote in 1976.
P. 37 The scene with the poet happened at St. Mark's Church in Greenwich Village, not at Judson Memorial as written in the original edition. It occurred in 1969 and was one of Van Newkirk’s many capers. It’s mentioned in an article I wrote for the Detroit Metro Times in 2005.
P. 38 The Lee Plaza Apartments hadn't been abandoned in 1967 as I described, but, again, poetic license to cram everything into seven weeks in that year. The building was already in decline from its once elegant home for upscale renters by the time of the story, but hung on in different stages of collapse until it was finally closed in 1997. Today, it looks like it is described in the book, but there are plans to renovate it for seniors on housing vouchers.
P. 39. Russ Gibb was widely appreciated as the Grande impresario and credited with bringing concert rock and roll to Detroit in such a great room. Concert goers were shocked when they saw Russ had raised the price for a Cream concert from its usual admission fee of $2.50, and several launched a protest.
The confrontation between a tripping Paul and Uncle Russ is fanciful, but when I interviewed Gibb for a WCSX radio program almost 50 years later, he brought up the picket line. I heaped accolades on him for his role in the Detroit rock scene. Absolutely without warning, he gruffly said, “That’s not what you and your commie friends said about me. You called me a capitalist pig.” My response was to laugh. In fact, I didn’t have anything to do with the protest.
P. 39 The Fillmore Auditorium is the venue that inspired to Gibb to open the Grande.
P. 40 The Crucifucks didn’t form until 1982, but I know the drummer, and wanted to grab it from another era simply for the name. The Pigfuckers were a band, see the photo of them in the left column above.
P. 40 Gary Grimshaw did the poster for the Fifth Estate “First Anniversary Freak-Out.”
P. 41 The Monterey Pop Festival was held June 17-19, 1967.
P. 42 The “Fuck Authority” poster didn’t appear in the Fifth Estate until 1975 when it was printed as a 29”X22” insert in an issue of the paper. The magazine reprinted it in 2020 as a separate poster. It is no longer available.
Chapter 8
P. 45 Paul and Michele’s cat was named after anarchist militia leader, Buenventura Durruti who died in the Spanish Civil War and Revolution (1936-1939) fighting against fascism.
P. 46 A friend pointed out that in 1967, there were no baseball divisions as there are today. Just the American and National League
P. 47 The report of the anti-war march is a blend of numerous protests that occurred during the conflict. The descriptions of participants are based on real people. There often were militant side marches. The only time a demonstration of that size occurred in Detroit was following the murder of students by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University in 1970.
P. 47 Bo staff is actually redundant since bo means staff in Korean. Their use is demonstrated in this video by the amazing Jake Mace. Michele's skill didn't come close to what is demonstrated.
P. 49 Anti-war active-duty GIs were a key element in the opposition to the Vietnam War.
P. 49 Major General Smedley Butler USMC, turned on his masters and gave eloquent anti-war speeches in the early 1930s.
P. 50 The White Panther Party organized by John and Leni Sinclair was a potent cultural and political force for radicalizing young people. I was listed in one document released by the Detroit Police Red Squad as holding the rank of Midwest Minister of Propaganda for the party. Seeing this years later was the first I knew of my promotion to that rank.
P. 53 The Gray Panthers, that advocated against ageism, wasn't organized until 1970, but I placed them in the story three years earlier to show that the ferment of the times wasn't restricted to young people.
Chapter 9
P. 55 The People Declare the Peace group is modeled after The People’s Peace Treaty, formed in 1970 by student organizations from the U.S. and Vietnam. Here is the text. Numerous prominent Americans included members of Congress signed an ad in The New York Times supporting it. A right-wing web site lists some of the signers.
Frank Joyce and Karin Aguilar-San Juan co-edited The People Make the Peace: Lessons from the Vietnam Antiwar Movement, on the efforts of people-to-people peace efforts.
P. 56 The women of the Red Brigade named their affinity group after the American anarchist and feminist, Emma Goldman.
P. 61 The pamphlet “To Serve the Rich,” prepared for the Builders of Detroit dinner honoring the wealthy held in 1974 altered recipes from The Joy Of Cooking, a well-known cookbook at the time. The Eat the Rich Gang, of which I was a part, substituted human parts of detested politicians and cultural figures for the original ingredients. The protest is recounted in my history of the Fifth Estate above on P. 9, and mentioned in David Watson’s extension of the paper’s past.
The pamphlet was illustrated with clip-art comprising 24-pages. It was put together by a group of friends (me included) who specialized in playing radical pranks on well-deserving official targets. It was passed out free, but now is an historic curio that commands up to $75 from dealers.
The slogan being chanted by the protestors of "Eat the Rich," appears extensively in 19th century political and historical texts and is often attributed to Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I picked it up from a book by Terry Southern, The Magic Christian, which was also a 1969 movie starring Ringo Starr, Peter Sellers, and John Cleese.
CHAPTER 10
P. 65 Chipmunk’s Deli is a play on Alvin’s Finer Deli on Cass Avenue in Detroit near Wayne State University, that was the scene of great small venue rock and roll, brunch on Sunday, good deli lunches, and gathering spot for the community. An account is in Stephen Goodfellow’s “Tribes of the Cass Corridor” site.
P. 67 The 1943 Detroit Belle Isle race riot. An account of this grim incident was written by Michael Jackman, whose endorsement appears on the back of this novel. His book on the subject will appear soon.
P. 68 Monhegan Island, Maine is an actual place. The bottom third of the photo to the left shows a cemetery where my parents are buried. Here is a good representation of the island although unfortunately it's a promotion for Amazon. Still, the video makes me want to make reservations.
Chapter 11
P. 75 Rotation Slim was a real-life Detroit cop and was as brutal as portrayed. Isiah "Ike" McKinnon was beaten by Slim as a teen, and later became Detroit's police chief. He recounts the incident in his autobiography.
P. 78. The Dr. Ossian Sweet Incident and trial is best related in Kevin Boyle’s Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age.
P. 80 The Detroit Herald was an actual newspaper founded in 1919. There is little history of it online other than its existence, not even when it ceased publishing. It undoubtedly was part of the Associated Negro Press, a news service that supplied Black newspapers with twice weekly packets. It served 150 U.S. Negro newspapers and 100 in Africa.
Chapter 12
P. 83 The account of the candidacy of Jim Connolly for Congress in 1966 is a barely disguised portrait of my good friend, Jim Lafferty. He ran against Democratic U.S. Rep. Martha Griffiths, a vocal supporter of the Vietnam war. The historic James Connoly led the 1916 Easter Rising against English rule in Ireland. He was executed by the British soon after the failed revolt.
Chapter 13
P. 92 "1001 Ways to Beat the Draft" was written in 1966 by Robert Bashlow and Tuli Kupferberg, although usually only the latter received credit. Like the "To Serve the Rich" pamphlet, originals now command an inflated $30 for a copy. A PDF of "1001 Ways" is online. The “Jacket 2” website refers to it as “one of the great long poems of the New American (and Beat) poetry.”
P. 92 In 1968, Kiyoshi Kuromiya designed the Fuck the Draft poster and filled orders by mail. He was arrested by the FBI and charged with sending indecent material through the Post Office. Later that year, after beating the charges, Kuromiya defied the authorities by handing out 2000 of the posters at the Chicago Democratic Convention.
The photo is of Detroiter Bill Greenshields, a schoolmate of Fifth Estate founder, Harvey Ovshinsky, taken at random during a 1967 March on the Pentagon and used by Kuromiya unbeknownst to Greenshields. Although the FBI hounded Greenshields for draft card burning, he remains unrepentant. He was interviewed decades later about the poster.
P.93 Paul and Michele's devised spirituality on Paul's Conscientious Objector draft status application has a basis in the thought of American theoretical physicist and cosmologist Lawrence M. Krauss. He write: "Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.”
P. 95 The Anarchist Cookbook was published in 1971. An actual cookbook with that title was released in 2015. I reviewed both for the Fifth Estate.
P. 97 White Panther Party members John Sinclair, Jack Forest, and Pun Plamondon were indicted for the CIA bombing with the result being a major defeat for the government and a startling victory for civil liberties.
Chapter 15
P. 104 Everything about radical psychoanalyst, Wilhelm Reich, is portrayed here accurately. Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich by Myron Sharaf is an exhaustive recounting of Reich’s life. The whole book is linked.
Chapter 16
P. 110 Roger G. Thompson and other Communist Party leaders were sentenced to several years in prison following U.S. government show trials from 1949 to 1958 worthy of ones held by Stalin in the Soviet Union. Much like the Chicago 7 attorneys, those representing the Smith Act defendants were found guilty of contempt of court by the presiding judge who meted out prison terms to the lawyers. One was George W. Crockett, Jr., who served four months in federal prison, but went on to become a Detroit Recorder’s Court judge, and an U.S. Congressman.
P. 112 Frank Lloyd Wright’s Goetsch-Winckler House was built in 1939 in the Usonian style.
Chapter 17
P. 120 The Michigan State University Advisory Group was key component of nation-building in South Vietnam to circumvent the Geneva Accords. Wesley Fishel is often called “the man who started the war in Vietnam.” Politico published a recent article by a son of one of the Group members. Best line in it is a quote from Ramparts, the magazine that exposed the role of the school, “What the hell is a university doing buying guns, anyway?”
P. 122 Noam Chomsky's 1969 book, American Power and the New Mandarins is excellent on the arrogance of the academics who were complicit with the U.S. war machine in Vietam. It is still relevant and available cheaply online.
My publisher, Black and Red-Detroit, printed a chapter from it as Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship since it contains a concise history of the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War and Revolution. I wrote the introduction to it.
Chapter 18
P. 125 The creation of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1934 is recounted in Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazis Plots Against Hollywood and America.
P. 125 The hilarious exchange between U.S. Rep. Joe Starnes and Hallie Flanagan, director of the Federal Theatre Project actually occurred and is captured in the 1999 film, The Cradle Will Rock, directed by Tim Robbins.
P. 125 Euripides, a "5th century BCE Greek tragedian . . . BCE: before the common era, and CE: common era, is used to get Jesus out of the calendar, i.e., BC: before christ, and AD: Anno Domini, Latin for in the year of the Lord. Why only the latter is in Latin isn't clear. The attempt to give the recent designations religious neutrality still is rooted in the legend of one belief.
P. 126 "Operation Abolition," the 1960, 45-minute (16mm; not 35mm as in earlier editions) documentary film produced by the House Un-American Activities Committee, purported to show communist inspiration in the demonstrations against its hearing in San Francisco that year. The film is a disaster of propaganda, but worth watching. Not quite as exciting, but at least historically accurate is the ACLU rebuttal to the HUAC film titled "Operation Correction."
In 1961, Michigan Governor John Swainson banned the State Police from showing the film following its exhibition on the Michigan State University campus.
"Peter Werbe at Alvin's" 1984 Stephen Goodfellow Micropointalism on canvas
The author working an overhead projector at the Grande Ballroom as part of the light show, 1967. -photo Leni Sinclair
Fifth Estate goes psychedelic.
Sept. 1967
Back cover of book. Note figure with gas mask and see photo below.
Monhegan Island, Maine with Manana across the harbor.
Fifth Estate Rebellion issue.
Aug. 1-15, 1967
The author exiting the Fifth Estate office after it was tear-gassed by the National Guard during the 1967 Detroit Rebellion
--photo: Leni Sinclair
Federico Arcos in New York harbor, 1995.
Allen Van Newkirk, circa 1967, with a Honda Super Hawk, the same motorcycle I had.
-photo Leni Sinclair
Fifth Estate columnist, poet, author and co-founder of the Detroit Artists Workshop, John Sinclair, was busted by this undercover nark in 1965. Grande Ballroom poster artist, Gary Grimshaw, created this wanted poster with an unusual reward.
CHAPTER 19
P. 130 The Up were always in the shadow of their more famous White Panther Party bandmates, the MC5, but were an equal part of what WPP Chairman John Sinclair designated as “a total assault on the culture.”
The Shaggs were one of the stranger phenomenon of the 1960s rock scene. Their music was awful, but somehow appealing. Their only LP was re-released in 1999.
P. 132 Psychedelic light shows created trippy ambience for the music at the Grande Ballroom and other rock venues.
P. 136 The 1967 Rebellion was the second most destructive riot in U.S. history, eclipsed only by the toll of the 1863 New York City Draft Riots.
Chapter 20
P. 139 The 1966 disturbances on Kercheval Ave. presaged what happened the year following. Frank Joyce, who was, at that time, the coordinator of the Northern Student Movement, a civil rights group active on Detroit’s East Side discusses the incident.
P. 140 Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) was an anarchist theorist who developed the idea of social ecology. He wrote an early warning about the destruction of nature in Our Synthetic Environment under the pseudonym, Lewis Herber. His later theory of Libertarian Municipalism was adopted by the Kurdish Revolution. Other anarchists criticized him including Fifth Estate writer, David Watson in Beyond Bookchin: Preface for a Future Social Ecology.
P. 140 The San Francisco Oracle only published from 1966 to 1968, but had an outsized influence not only underground papers like the Fifth Estate, but on mainstream publications as well for its use of color and inventive images.
P. 141 The correct first name of Detroit's Mayor Cavanagh is Jerome, not James. A case of the mind skipping over errors since everyone, including me, should have caught this. It is corrected in later editions.
P. 143 The Saffran house designed by Minoru Yamasaki is fictional. The Detroit-based architect designed a few residences but is mostly known, and famously, for the World Trade Center. In Detroit, his work includes Wayne State buildings with his best being the McGregor Memorial Center. Also, the Gas Building downtown, and the Birmingham Unitarian Church. I still study Tai Chi at the latter structure. The discipline was taught by Yamasaki's daughter, Carol, for many years until her passing; an incalculable loss to her students and friends.
Chapter 21
P. 144 The 1937 Ford Security Department goon squad attack on UAW organizers was terrible, but paled in comparison to other massacres carried out by cops and National Guardsmen to suppress unionization. Notable are the Ford Hunger March Massacre in 1932 and the 1937 Republic Steel Memorial Day Massacre in Chicago. All told, cops, Guardsmen, and company goons killed 300 workers and wounded several thousand during the 1930s in their attempt to stop unions from being organized. The toll was even greater earlier in the century and in the 19th century.
P. 146 Len looks up in the sky and points out the constellations of Orion and Taurus. They are not visible in this hemisphere in July. In the third edition, this was corrected to the constellation Cygnus.
Chapter 22
P. 149 The history of Black Bottom's destruction is chronicled in this article that details how the the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
P. 150 One of the sections of I-75 that ripped apart Black Bottom and Paradise Valley is itself slated for destruction. It was realized way too late the damage it had done. I-375 will be turned into a boulevard with construction beginning in 2027.
P. 151 Joe's Records, a landmark store in Detroit music, where Joe Von Battle recorded jazz, blues, and gospel greats including a young Aretha Franklin, fell victim to fire in the 1967 Rebellion. This is the story of the store and its significance told by his daughter, Marsha Music.
P. 157 World War II gas masks were readily available from Army Surplus stores. The National Guard did lob a tear gas grenade into the Fifth Estate office.
CHAPTER 23
P. 166 Paul and Michele turn on WABX to listen to a format and with DJs that didn't begin broadcasting until early 1968. As with other elements, I played with dates in order to get as many elements of the era into a short period.
CHAPTER 25
P. 170 There were no snipers, but rather reckless, random shooting by the cops and Guard that was attributed to phantom snipers. This remains as a constant myth of the event although there is little or nothing to substantiate their existence. Sniper is an ominous term indicating a shooter firing from a hidden position but a July 27, 2017 Detroit Free Press account of the 43 riot dead, is instructive. Sniper fire is mentioned 8 times as the reason for death, but most of the explanations seem shaky at best. The other accounts portray summary street executions by police and Guard of looters.
Carl Smith, the firefighter who was killed after being "pinned down by sniper fire," is more suggestive of wild National Guard shooting. Jack Sydnor was said to have shot a cop before being killed. If this is the only actual case, that reduces the word snipers to a singular.
The report of the National Guard killing of 4-year-old is the most shameful. She was shot after her uncle lit a match and a Guardsman riddled the apartment with a heavy machine gun burst blowing the little girl's head off.
P. 172 The account of the Detroit police threatening John Sinclair and other White Panthers was actually worse than I reported. John's companion, Leni, was also present as was their recently-born baby, Sunny. John had Sunny in his arms as he screamed at the cops to get out of his house.
CHAPTER 26
P. 175 "Get the Big Stuff" and "City Ablaze" were the headlines that appeared on the front page of the August 1-15, 1967 edition of the Fifth Estate that is referred to as the "riot issue." It was then a bi-weekly.
P. 176 John Sinclair's "The Coat Puller" column describing the Rebellion is one of the best to capture the emotional content of the event.
CHAPTER 29
P. 184 The Algiers Motel Incident by John Hersey, now in a revised edition with a foreword by Danielle L. McGuire, remains an excellent although exceedingly depressing account of the summary execution of three unarmed Black teenagers by white Detroit cops. McGuire is working on a book about the murders.
Following a purposely weak prosecution of the three cops who murdered the three victims at the motel, and were exonerated, a People's Tribunal was convened that declared the police defendants guilty.
CHAPTER 31
P. 194 Paul mentions a Fifth Estate reporter, Sam Carrol, writing an article about the National Guard killing a man at a checkpoint. This refers to the actual reporting by Frank Joyce, then the newspaper's News Editor, on the incident and its follow-up.
CHAPTER 32
P. 202 The Wilhelm Reich Museum in Rangeley, Maine remains open and dedicated to displaying the research of Reich into the consequences of authoritarian personalities.
P. 202 Although most 1960s radicals were hostile to organized religion, exceptions to their thinking were people such as Dr. Martin Luther King, the Berrigan brothers, and other radical clergy. Buddhism of the philosophical variety advocated by Allen Watts gained wide appreciation.
P. 204 Paul stole the line about know where he was when Kennedy tried to kill him from the prominent atheist, Christopher Hitchens.
CHAPTER 33
P. 205 If you think Paul is a stickler for proper punctuation, English writer and essayist, Lynne Truss, wrote a whole book raging against the misuse of commas and apostrophes. Her 2003 Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, is both amusing and, more importantly, tries to safeguard the language in the age of online babble.
P. 205 In 1975, the Fifth Estate was prosecuted in Detroit Recorder's Court for publishing the Michigan Bell Telephone codes. A sympathetic jury found the paper not guilty even though it clearly was in violation of the law. Freed from legal threat, the next issue contained an article entitled, "How to Cheat Ma Bell," with the codes boldly displayed.
P. 209 If you are reading an edition of this before publication of the fourth printing, Custom Agent Pattengill is described as carrying "matching pearl handled Colt 1911s" that he wears with handles sticking out so he can cross draw them. My armaments advisor tells me this would not work with that model pistol, so in the new edition, they are replaced with the proper weapon, Colt M1917 revolvers.
CHAPTER 34
P. 213 Magic Fingers, the vibrating bed, was a feature of cheap hotels and motels in the 1960s and '70s. Perhaps every guest tried it once but never again suggesting why it disappeared so quickly after being so pervasive.
P. 214 Gideon International says it has distributed 1.8 billion Bibles by 2021 ensuring the book’s status as the number one bestselling title in history. Fortunately, their presence is diminishing.
CHAPTER 36
P. 223 In February 1924, 175 radical Industrial Workers of the World union members took on the Ku Klux Klan, by patrolling the streets of Greenville, Maine, after the KKK threatened IWW organizers.
Logging workers in the area were organizing for better pay and conditions when 40 Klansmen visited a boardinghouse where IWW members (known as Wobblies) were staying and ordered them to leave. Local Wobbly organizer Bob Pease charged that the KKK was doing the bidding of lumber companies, and told the local Press Herald that they opposed the IWW “because we want good wages, eight hours a day in the lumber camps and clean linen on our bunks."
The IWW was ordered to leave town by local authorities, but they defied both the government and the Klan, and took to the streets, declaring, “We are going to stick, and if the Klan wants to start something, the IWW are going to finish it.”.
P. 223 Red’s Eats lobster shack in Wiscasset, Maine charged $34.00 in 2021 for one of their famous lobster rolls. "Trip Advisor" agrees with Paul that the sandwiches are overpriced.
P. 224 The Laura B is the ferry from Port Clyde, Maine to Monhegan Island, and did see action during World War II in the Pacific.
P. 225 Although many pirates had a libertarian streak to them, English explorer David Ingram raided Spanish ships to capture enslaved Africans to sell for himself. His walk across North America remains remarkable.
CHAPTER 39
P. 239 Rockwell Kent’s artistic and political history is an engaging one. He did, in fact, build houses on Monhegan Island, Maine. His illustrations for Moby Dick were woodcuts, not ink drawings, as was written in the first edition of my book.
P. 240 Robert Henri. See “Evoking Spirit: The Anarchist Art of Robert Henri” by Quincy B. Thorn in the Fifth Estate, Summer 2019, for an essay on Henri (pronounced hen-rye).
P. 240 The Modern Schools provided an alternative to the nationalism and militarism
taught in the public schools.
P. 241 The Bolsheviks led by Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin destroyed the popular-based Russian Revolution and installed a state capitalist dictatorship. Here is a review I wrote of several books that document this history. Or, this account by Maurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control 1917-1921, should be enough to illustrate the dead-end of Leninist/Trotskyist politics.
The Bolsheviks immediately destroyed anything resembling opposition to their police state rule and began executing anarchists. See this article by Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman.
P. 244 Luigi Galleani embodied the spirit and action of revolutionary anarchism. See a Fifth Estate review of a biography about him from AK Press, Luigi Galleani: the Most Dangerous Anarchist In America by Antonio Senta.
Chapter 39
P. 243 Michele's reference to targeting Fort Dix reflects the Weather Underground’s 1970 plan to bomb the New Jersey army base during a non-commissioned officers’ dance. Ted Gold, Diana Oughton, and Terry Robbins, three of the people constructing the explosive device, were killed when it accidentally detonated.
P. 244 The Wall Street Bombing was the deadliest domestic terror attack until the Oklahoma City bombing 75 years later by a far-right, white nationalist group.
P. 247 The 11-minute “Time Has Come Today” by the Chambers Brothers broke the tradition of popular 3-minute songs although a version for AM radio was edited down to the excepted length.
P. 251 The Fifth Estate during the 1960s reported accounts of domestic anti-war bombings sympathetically.
CHAPTER 40
P. 253 The entire U.S. invasion, bombing, and occupation of Vietnam was a war crime of mass proportions. Most Americans are startled when they are told that upwards of four million Vietnamese were killed by the U.S. war machine, that suffered 60,000 fatalities. The village of Ngôi Làng Trên Ngon Núi is a composite of the fate that befell hundreds of similar targets of U.S. bombing.
P. 254 In the fourth printing of my book, a paragraph on this page reads:
"The B52 crew, all in their early to mid-20s, never set foot in Indochina on 22 bombing runs. As their plane headed northward, they all sang the Mickey Mouse Club TV theme song spelling out each letter of the rodent’s name—M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E. After the C, there was a parenthetical phrase sung at the show’s end. M-I-C—“See you real soon” that they repeated as they waved to the verdant Vietnamese countryside below. They would be back."
The insertion of the sentence about the rat's club was suggested by a section on a TV show in my friend Francis Shor's book, Soupy Sales and the Detroit Experience: Manufacturing a Television Personality, describing the connection between the Cold War and early television content. Shor references Stanley Kubrick's Vietnam War film, "Full Metal Jacket," where U.S. Marines sing the Club theme song as they march through the burning city of Hue they had just sacked.
BACK COVER ENDORSEMENTS
FRONT COVER ENDORSEMENT
The Laura B enters Monhegan Island harbor
Emma Goldman sat for three portraits painted by Robert Henri in 1915 following her release from jail for propagating birth control. In the 1930s, Henri’s next of kin, Violet Organ, (her real name) destroyed all three for reasons unstated.
Far right-wing activist, Donald Lobsinger, cent, with henchmen.
Photo is from Sue Marx's collection of wonderful photos, "Images From History: People Who Defined Detroit in the 1960s," that are available as prints suitable for framing.
Since I couldn't find The Pigfuckers on the internet, I thought maybe I had imagined the band. But, rock and radio historian, Kim Sulek, had this photo of the group in his extensive archives.
The incident on P.78 where the characters give the finger to a Detroit Free Press photographer was based on this incident although legal proceedings were those of John Sinclair for a marijuana bust. It was taken by a Free Press photographer but never used.
That's me, front and center.