 And since there is the saying that journalism is the first draft of history, we are very pleased to have one of our local longtime journalists here to give us a talk about the early days on the Valley Advocate back in the 1970s. Mr. Chris O'Carroll was an editor at the Valley Advocate magazine from 1975 to 1980. Most of that time he was arts and entertainment editor, then he was briefly managing editor. After his years at the newspaper he worked as a freelance journalist and a writer and editor at various magazines published at UMass. Chris had done some acting in his pre-advocate days and eventually left journalism to focus on performance, earning his actor's equity union card, and also appearing at stand-up comedy clubs around the country. Today he works primarily as a poet, his satirical verses on current events, satires getting harder to do these days I understand, on current events appear frequently at light magazines poems of the week and his 2019 collection that Jokes on Me has been praised as a hilarious book, an erudite book and truly moving. So having followed all those other career paths since 1980, Chris says he may not remember much about his time at the advocate. Is it one of those situations where if you remember it then you weren't there? That's what they say about the 60s. But with a resume like this I think we're all looking forward to the stories that he can tell. So take it away Chris. Well thank you George. Thank you to the Amherst History Society and Museum and thank you all for being here. When people hear that I used to work at the advocate they generally anticipate lurid tales of sex and drugs and rock and roll on the frontiers of hippie journalism. You will be happy to hear that yeah that's pretty much what I have to offer today. I should stress that my perspective on the advocate is specialized and limited as any individuals would have to be. I spent most of my time at the paper in the back pages with the arts and entertainment coverage. A big part of what the advocate was all about but not the whole story. I switched to managing editor at a somewhat fraught and chaotic time in the paper's history and I didn't much enjoy my few months in that role. My post-advocate journalism career was all about feature writing not hard news. So I was as out of place in the front pages as I had been happily at home in the back. Furthermore I do not have present at the creation cred. The advocate was already a year old in the fall of 1974 when my wife and I moved to Amherst and I showed up at the advocate's Amity Street office as a 23 year old freelance writer looking for work. The debut issue the previous year had featured an unflattering cover story about a group that some of you probably remember the brotherhood of the spirit cult in Franklin County. My wife and I had recently parted company with a similarly bizarre communal cult in New York City. So obviously a hookup between me and the advocate was bound to happen. I came to the newspaper with no formal journalism training and no college degree. I was a theater school dropout with one season of Cape Cod summer stock acting to my credit and a few years of whack job new age cult membership. Although after dropping out of college in 1970 I did occasionally earn some walking around money by hawking the Phoenix and the real paper on the streets of Boston. So I was already a player of sorts in the alternative journalism biz. Fortunately for me, our cult had published a few magazines for which I had done some writing. So I had some clips as we call them samples of my published writing that I could show to local editors. The first person I met at the advocate was the editor Linda Mattis. At that time they did not have one editor for the news section and one for arts and entertainment. Linda did it all. She was a fairly recent Mount Holyoke graduate, a Springfield native and I was very lucky to work with her as my first editor. She paying attention to her edits I learned how to make my articles for the paper better, livelier, tighter, more readable and I also started learning how to be a good editor for other writers which would come in handy before long. A couple of years later in 1976 Linda was a Jimmy Carter delegate to the Democratic National Convention. Evidently I was not the only up-and-comer she knew how to spot. At the time I met her Linda was married to Ed Mattis, one of our two publishers. The other publisher was Jeff Robinson whose wife Christine Austin did stuff on the business side of the operation that I don't pretend to know much about. Ed and Jeff had met as reporters on a big city daily. I think the Hartford advocate and their professional friendship had led in time to those two couples running this company. New mass media doing business as the Valley advocate. The other two key people that you need to know about at the paper were Mitch Young the advertising director and Gib Fullerton the production manager. As you know the advocate was a free paper cover price of zero. We gave it away. We made all of our money from advertising. So it was Mitch and his team of ad reps who saw to it that the bills got paid and kept our slender paychecks coming. Mitch had been one of the thousands of anti-war demonstrators tear gassed and arrested in Washington DC at the May Day demonstrations in 1971. So he eventually shared in the settlement when the ACLU sued and Congress approved payments to compensate those demonstrators for flagrant violations of their civil rights. So even though Mitch and his team of ad reps with a corporate looking ones who wore formal business attire while the rest of us dressed pretty cash, he enjoyed a serious aura of counterculture authenticity. As production manager Gib was responsible for getting the physical nitty gritty of getting the paper ready for the press each week. I think he had been a UMass student and had done production work at the collegiate. In any event he was formatively competent and efficient. He was also the designated straight arrow in the paper's upper management. Over my years at the advocate I got high pretty often with Jeff and Christine and Mitch. Rarely if ever with Linda and Ed never with Gib. By the way I should say that it was we were under the we understood at the time that our casual pot smoking around the advocate office was pretty much an open secret among Amherst officials. Some local contact had told our publisher Jeff Robinson everybody at town hall knows that the roof is about to lift off over at the advocate and Jeff loved quoting that. If if we had been a black newspaper or a Spanish language newspaper at exactly the same location smoking exactly the same amount of weed I'm pretty sure we would have been busted. Hey I am not too stoned to be aware of white privilege especially once I've had a few decades to mull it over. In the advocates heartily pro weed culture other staff members enjoy teasing Gib about his abstemious ways but he always gave as good as he got in that banter. Somebody would mockingly offer him a hit on a joint and he would wave it away with a deadpan. I've seen what that stuff does to you man and it scares me. With the size of the advocates typesetting and paste up crews Gib had more people reporting to him than anybody else on the staff. What exactly are typesetting and paste up crews I hear you asking they are relics of the past that's what desktop computers were lurking in the decade ahead but at that time the advocate was using technology that now seems as quaint as hand cranked party line telephones and old black and white TV shows. In the newsroom the editors and reporters were still working on a mix of electric and manual typewriters. The the equipment in our typesetting room was only a little bit more high-tech than that but still mysterious enough to baffle me as you will be able to tell from my awkward attempts to describe it. We did not print the paper ourselves but pasted it up on pasted the pages up on thin sheets of cardboard called flats which we then drove to a printing plant in Connecticut where the flats were photographed to create plates for their press. So the people we called our typesetters were not print shop workers arranging lead type to be inked and pressed against the pages. They were typists working on keyboards that somehow generated digital files which the typesetters could transmit to a machine that we sometimes called a printer although it was really more of a photographic developer. On paste up day that machine would be spewing out a non-stop stream of copy in different sizes and typefaces headlines photo captions calendar listings classified ads the uh oh and of course you know stories laid out long and narrow to match the width of our columns all of that stuff would emerge from the machine kind of damp and photochemical smelling and we had wires overhead where we would use clothes pins to hang up the copy until it was dry enough for the paste up crew to handle. Now we talked about pasting up the paper but in fact the adhesive we used was soft wax which was easier to you peel off and re-stick on the cardboard as we moved copy around on the flats um every uh I I spent a lot of time in in the paste up room over my years at the advocate and for me that hot smell of molten wax is the signature advocate scent even more than the smell of bad coffee and good weed but I am getting a little bit ahead of myself here. I did not know any of these people and I didn't know any details of the newspaper production process that first day when I knocked on Linda's door hoping to rustle up some some freelance writing work. I by that time I had already scored a little bit of work at the Amherst record. I was covering local politics in a minor way by reporting on various board meetings so I had those clips to show. I also mentioned my acting experience and told Linda I might be able to write about local theater. She told me that she would be interested in articles about the theater programs at the five colleges and she suggested that by way of a tryout I start with Hampshire College. The the chair of the Hampshire theater department turned out to be a very interesting guy with a lot to say. I enjoyed interviewing him and that article got me my first advocate byline. Now this would be a good time to mention that if you go looking for the name Chris O'Carroll in the advocate archives you won't find much. That is my legal name now but until I went to court to make it official that was a stage name and pen name that I adopted a few years after I left the advocate. At the time I worked there my name was Charles Smith. My father Frank Smith was the Dean of Humanities and Arts at Hampshire College and the quasi anonymity that that family name bestows was a journalistic asset to me on my first advocate assignment when the chair of the theater department had no idea that he was being interviewed by the Dean's son. I used to by the way I used to tell my my dad that he could make Hampshire sound cooler if he would change his title to Dean of Humanities Arts and Entertainment but I never managed to sell him on that concept. After Linda published that first article of mine she kept giving me additional assignments some more theater pieces other topics as well. I forget exactly what the pay was like 10 or 15 dollars per article it was pretty meager and I was trying to crank out as many as I could. In a fairly short time the newspaper offered me a weekly deal they would pay me I think it was 35 dollars a week for everything I wrote that week plus my first few hours of paystop work in the production room. That arrangement was a bonanza for me every other week. Right around that time New Mass Media had started publishing its second newspaper the Hartford advocate. It would become a weekly eventually but it was still a bi-weekly at that point. So one week we do just the Valley Advocate and I'd get paid for a few hours of production work. The next week we do the Valley Advocate and the Hartford Advocate both and I would rake in the box. Now every day every week at the paystop day was always there was a special energy to paste update. It was a was a grand team effort it was methodical yet there were pleasing elements of anarchy to it as well. I remember when we usually had a five college radio station playing in the paystop room and when Johnny Paycheck's song Take This Job and Shove It was getting a lot of airplay it became kind of a tradition to take a break from work whenever that song came on and dance around the paystop room singing along rockously to the lyrics take this job and shove it I ain't working here no more. I think that people created those interludes by phoning in frequent requests for the song. It was sometime in early 1975 that Linda offered me the job as arts and entertainment editor. What was going on at that time is that New Mass Media had expansion on its mind. In addition to the new Hartford paper we were looking ahead to an upcoming Springfield edition and that would involve Linda in an executive editor role overseeing managing editors in the Amherst and Springfield offices. So she was ready to hand off the back pages and focus on new goals. One of the best things I did in my new job as arts and entertainment editor was persuade Linda to hire David Sokol as the paper's music editor. My starting salary was I think $120 a week. I don't know what his was but it would be virtually impossible to overestimate how much he contributed to the paper's quality and good reputation. He's well known today as a chronicler of the Iron Horse, as a champion of the late Ed Vadis and other outstanding Valley musicians. Back then he did a great job of making the advocates coverage an essential part of the Valley music scene. David was already a freelance writer for the advocate when I came on the scene so I don't get credit for being the first one to spot his talent but I can claim that I was the editor who spotted visual arts writer Laura Holland. Like David Laura kept writing for the advocate for years after I left and in fact she was still doing cover stories for preview magazine right up until it stopped publishing. I remember once in connection with something Laura had written for the advocate a male museum director got in touch with her to suggest that there really hadn't been that very that many really outstanding important female artists and because Laura is more of a class act than I am she did not reply are you effing kidding me dude instead she just marshaled her facts and escorted him on a tour of some of the girls of our history. To his credit he wrote back thanking her and acknowledging how impressed he was by her grasp of the topic. In spite of how much she cared about women in the arts Laura could also be a dissenter from popular enthusiasm as when she wrote about being underwhelmed by Judy Chicago's iconic installation the dinner party. Laura was standing by that gigantic triangular dinner table she was leaning over to get a closer look at one of the plates and a woman suddenly materialized next to her and whispered it's all right to kneel. Laura thought that was a bit much and she said so in print I don't think that she's the only critic who has rolled her eyes at the dinner party for being a little high on its own landmark in art history fumes but that was not a popular opinion at the time and I admired her courage I learned a lot over the years editing Laura's copy and she is one of the old advocate friends that I am still in touch with. Another one is Nick Grabe named that is probably familiar to you because Nick was a prominent journalist for many years in Amherst as a an editor and a writer for the Amherst Bulletin. Then as local history buffs are aware Nick shifted from reporting on the local news to making local news in a big way as a member of the Charter Commission that reimagined Amherst's town government before all of that he had a short career as an editor at the advocate where he met the freelance writer who is now his wife. Nick was hired and fired during my years at the advocate and years later they tried to rehire him but he turned them down to stay at the Bulletin and he invited me to the party that he threw to celebrate that decision. During the time that he was managing editor in the advocate's Amherst office he headed off a potential crisis when the managing editor at the Springfield office decided that he was going to resign dramatically with an editorial denouncing the publishers for whatever perceived crimes against him personally or journalistic ideals in general. That other editor and I never really cared for each other so I did not feel the loss deeply when he decided to quit and I was glad that Nick was there at paste up that weekend to keep the guys farewell screed out of the paper. I have always been more attuned to the words than the pictures where newspaper and magazine production are concerned but I have to acknowledge that in addition to good writers there were an awful lot of good illustrators, cartoonists, photographers over the years making the paper look really good. The one with whom I developed the most enduring friendship was photographer Don Young. Don had a long post-advocate career in New Orleans where among other things he did a lot of important work documenting the effects of Hurricane Katrina. His photos have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Village Voice, the New Yorker and I don't know how many white photo journalists have worked in the Smithsonian's Museum of African-American History and Culture but Don has. My wife and I had our two children during my time at the Advocate and some of our favorite baby pictures are Don Young photos. He has been an important family friend for as long as we have been a family. Don and I went out on countless stories together and we enjoyed rousing each other about the words or the pictures were the really important part of journalism. Back at the office we frequently slipped into his dark room to smoke a joint together and that happened so often that there were rumors among some members of the staff that Don and I were lovers sharing more than weed in that dark room. Now there was more than one woman on the staff who had dated Don and my wife and children were fairly frequent visitors to the office so Don and I were both pretty pleased that people thought we might be cool enough to be bisexual. We all know that the Valley is full of good writers and I can't claim that all of them have passed through the Advocates pages at some point in their career but I want to say a few words about some who did because caring about good writing was always an important part of our identity. Janet Alps, a former poet laureate of Northampton is now a prominent figure on the local literary scene and the local martial arts scene. Back in the 70s she was a student with obvious talent and Linda Mattis had her writing for the advocate about the Northampton lesbian feminist community. Jonathan Haar was an advocate editor before he made a splash with his book A Civil Action which became the basis for the movie of the same title a non-fiction legal thriller about toxic dumping and contaminated water. Steve Diamond wrote for the Liberation News Service before he became an advocate editor and published the memoir What the Trees Said Life on a New Age Farm. Some years later he also published the novel Panama Red about a legendary drug dealer and an international cannabis legalization movement. Before I get too carried away congratulating the advocate on all these cool people that it brought together over the years I should acknowledge one thing that was glaringly obvious about us obvious to ourselves and obvious to anybody who had any dealings with the paper. We were a very white operation no black editors and we did not hire our first black reporter until the late 70s well after the Jimmy Carter election. Like so many young white liberals in the 70s maybe white liberals of any age in any decade we knew in our hearts that we were on the right side where racial justice issues were concerned and we just took it for granted that we had the intelligence and the empathy to write meaningfully about black concerns and black lives. It was our privilege not to know how much we didn't know how much we had yet to learn from perspectives and life experiences vastly different from our own. I remember talking once with an advocate writer who had just a white guy who had just come back from interviewing Bob Marley the Jamaican reggae star. In fact he had just come back from getting high with Bob Marley sharing a spleef with the ultimate rasta reggae man. That was a big deal for a suburban white boy and the way this writer told the story on himself they were in Marley's hotel room they were smoking and talking and the musician was saying things about racism and oppression and the writer remarked in a kind of stoned epiphany way that even though he knew he could get arrested for what they were doing in this moment he didn't feel oppressed and Marley just gave him a long look. You don't feel oppressed? Don't fuck around man. He probably said mawn rather than man but I don't do a good Jamaican accent so I didn't try. I think that story sums up where a lot of us advocate white folks were probably at around that time. Hip enough to get it if the black guy called us on something like that but clueless enough to say I don't feel oppressed in the first place. Obviously you can learn a few things writing about arts and entertainment. One of the great things actually about covering that beat for a smart weekly newspaper is that there is essentially no subject you don't get to write about from the political issues of the moment to timeless themes of human interaction. Artists have their eyes on all of it. We used to have an arts or entertainment cover story at the advocate at least once a month. One especially timely cover story that I remember had to do with the movie The China Syndrome starring Jane Fonda as a TV reporter who uncovers serious safety issues at a nuclear power plant. Now nukes were a big issue for the advocate and its readership so naturally we took notice of that movie. We interviewed Jane Fonda and her then husband Tom Hayden. We packaged that interview with our review of the movie and we had the whole thing on our cover the week that Three Mile Island melted down. The whole country was talking about a catastrophic nuclear accident and there we were with a cover story that was all Hollywood glam and yet had tapped in to some hard news mother load. There's another arts and entertainment cover story that I think about every time I hear the song lyrics newspaper men meet such interesting people. Now just for the record both women and men who wrote for the advocate met a lot of interesting people and considered that one of the major perks of the job. I have heard Marcel Marceau speak because I got to talk with him backstage at UMass. I interviewed Richard Wilbur one of the great American poets of the 20th century when one of his Molière translations was opening at Smith College. I got to talk with Pete Seeger at a big anti-nuke concert staged by musicians united for safe energy. I met a convicted heroin dealer at a poetry reading by former prisoners from a jailhouse writing program and one memorable week I got to dance with feminist author Marge Piercy at a coffee house in Northampton and a couple days later sat down for an interview at UMass with porn star Harry Reems, Linda Lovelace's deep throat co-star. Either one of those encounters would have scratched my such interesting people itch for the week. The two of them back to back was a priceless gift from the gods of incongruity. Piercy was in Northampton because a local theater was staging a play that she had co-authored, a play about racism and busing and school desegregation in Boston. My wife had read a lot of Piercy's novels and I am a big fan of her poetry. At that time I was not a published poet myself. Even if I met her today I would have to work at being cool and not starstruck. I still don't know why she insisted on taking a dance break in the middle of our interview except that the venue where we met had music so why not? Had I been a better dancer that would have been a great opportunity for relaxation and personal connection. Emma Goldman reputedly said that she did not want to be part of the revolution if there was no dancing involved. However where my personal dancing is concerned without that the revolution would do just fine. The other visiting celebrity that week Harry Reems was at UMass to star in a play that was the culmination of a new script competition that UMass was eager to publicize. The chair of the theater department was very keen to tell me about their bold decision to cast a porn star who was embarked on a campaign to reinvent himself as a legitimate actor. The chair was also a little bit anxious about what kind of rude fun the advocate might have with this story. I mean UMass is one of the 800 pound gorillas of the local establishment so we scruffy anti-establishment alternative journalists might seize this as an opportunity for a barrage of raunchy jokes at the university's expense. As it turned out Reems had kind of a flair for telling stories about his life and the way he related to his notoriety it was his calling card and it was an albatross around his neck. That tension made for a really interesting article. Now we knew there would have been more aesthetic virtue to putting Marge Piercy on the cover that week but we went the other way calculating that the porno guy probably had a greater clickbait potential. Of course we did not have the word clickbait in those days but we had a pretty good feel for the underlying concept. Now I have used the word alternative to describe the advocate's journalism and back in the day that word used to appear on our cover every week. I will hold this up and hope that the reception is good enough that you can see the alternative in the Pioneer Valley. That's that's how we build ourselves right under the name of the paper on the front cover every week. It became something of a game in the production department to change the words around so that it read the pioneer in the alternative valley. I eventually got wise to that game and would often do a last minute check to make sure that the flats were going off to the printer with the words in the officially approved order. Different people who work at the advocate have different stories about how often the altered version made it into print. I don't have any reliable information on that score but I am glad that people kept playing that game. I mean the pioneer in the alternative valley. It's not an incredibly wiki switcheroo. I imagine most of our readers didn't even notice let alone you know whooped it up at the hilarity of it all. Still, a subversive irreverent attitude towards authority figures was part of the advocate's personality. So it made sense for people who worked there to be irreverent about the paper itself. So I'm glad that they did get the pioneer in the alternative valley into print at least a few times. In a comparable vein I had fun fooling around with our nickname the avocado. I don't know who first called the advocate the avocado. The first person I heard it from was Sam Lovejoy and he was clearly using it as a dismissive nickname not an affectionate one. So I knew we had to seize that one for ourselves, glom onto it and claim it for our own. So I did that by using our movie ratings. Instead of assigning a film one to four stars we would assign it one to four avocados. Actually our lowest rating was not one avocado our lowest rating was the pit. That rating system was just silly enough to make me feel good about us and I was totally jazzed the first time I was standing in a theater lobby and I heard somebody in the crowd say this movie had better be good they gave it three and a half avocados. Our silly little self-mocking joke had become part of the public discourse. One interesting thing about that signature self-descriptive word alternative I don't think we ever actually figured out how to define that. We were muddling along in I know it when I see it territory. You know we wanted alternative journalism to be funkier than mainstream journalism but we wanted it to be less rough around the edges than the so-called underground newspapers that had come before us papers with whom we shared say our opposition to racism and sexism and the war in Vietnam and we shared our support for sexual freedom and legal drugs and environmental protection. We wanted to hang on to an underground vibe of rebellion and playfulness and just plain naughtiness. At the same time we wanted to be perceived as every bit as professional as mainstream journals to as reliable as steady and that that whole betwixt and between set of self-images and goals worked okay for us from day to day but probably never coalesced in coalescing to a real definition. I remember when the New Yorker covered an alternative journalism convention in New York City I think it was Kelvin Trillin who made fun of the advocate in particular and alternative journalism in general for not being able to say exactly what it was that made us alternative. As I recall he said the best anybody could come up with was that we wanted our writing to be more sprightly than traditional journalism. Now admittedly sprightly is not a word that has a real manifesto ring to it but it's not actually a bad description of the kind of lively irreverent effects we were going for in our writing. We wanted to give our readers the the fundamental objective who what when where why how that traditional journalism aims to deliver and we also wanted to stir a good measure of subjectivity and personality into the mix. Offhand rude remarks about public figures, casual openness about sex and drugs, a hip colloquial contemporary vocabulary, accessorized from time to time with all the words you can't say on TV. Now I am pretty much a First Amendment absolutist so hooray for our right to talk dirty in print. Sometimes to be sure we were getting carried away like kids with a new toy. I remember one music review in which the writer introduced the idea of people who are so stupid they can't tell piss from white wine and then he kept repeating variations on that phrase all the way through the review. Hey I'm the editor who signed off on running that review so I'm allowed to look back and snark at it. Sometimes though you know Bob Marley would say don't fuck around man in an interview and being willing to print that quote enabled us to communicate something of real substance. Also you know sometimes being comfortable with cussing a blue streak was just a competitive advantage in the journalism biz as we discovered one summer when the Yankees came to Fenway Park. I forget which late 70s season this was Red Sox had started out strong but were going to fold late so that year. Our sports editor was at Fenway Park for the game. He was in the visiting team's locker room with a bunch of other reporters talking with New York slugger Reggie Jackson. Somebody pointed out to Jackson that the season was one-third over and the Red Sox were eight games ahead of the Yankees in the standings. If things kept on at that pace the Yankees were on track to finish the season 24 games behind the Red Sox. Reggie Jackson said if the Red Sox finish the season 24 games ahead of us I will suck your dick. Now it might have been fun to delve into the gender politics of that remark but all we did was revel in being the only paper that would print it. A lot of people had heard him say it but because of the uptight editorial policies at their papers we got the exclusive. Linda Mattis was not one to try stifling the the voices of the editors and writers who worked for her but she was less of a taboo language enthusiast than than some of us. I remember she used to run articles about western mass interests in conflict with the political and economic power concentrated in the state capital to the east and she would refer to those articles as skirmishes in the advocates Buck Boston campaign. Buck Boston. That's about as non-PG as Linda's diction got in print. Although she did decorate one wall of her office with the Warren Zevon lyrics send lawyers guns and money the shit has hit the fan which I mentioned because everything did well and truly hit the fan in 1980. By that time Jeff O'Connell had been our editor for a couple of years. He was one of the best editors we ever had. At the same time Linda's marriage with Ed was breaking up and she and Jeff were falling in love. The emotional currents around the office got pretty intense there for a while. Linda and Jeff were going to be leaving the paper. Nobody knew what the next chapter was going to be like. The smart thing for me to do really would have been just to hunker down in the arts and entertainment section and see what developed and in retrospect I really can't say why I didn't do that. Maybe I was afraid of some unknown editor showing up with a vision for the paper that would somehow disrupt my life in the back pages. Maybe I thought journalism was going to be my profession for the rest of my life so it made sense to stretch myself beyond arts coverage. I really don't know but when Linda and Jeff floated the idea of me taking over as managing editor I thought it over in a confused sort of way and I decided to go for it. It was the wrong decision but the consequences were not catastrophic. For one thing F.S. Frail the woman who took over for me as arts and entertainment editor was at least as good in that job as I had been so the back pages did not suffer and I was working in the front of the paper with a team of four really smart talented reporters so my shortcomings as a news guy did not plunge us into dysfunction. Also my tenure as managing editor lasted only a few months. Before the end of that year my wife had finished her master's degree in the UMass history department and decided that she wanted to prepare for her doctoral studies with a semester in England at a university with a well-known Victorian studies center so after six years the advocate and I said a cordial goodbye to each other and our family flew off across the ocean. Now by the end of this year the end of 2020 my last day at the advocate will be 40 years in the past and for half of that time I was living out on the Great Plains because my wife was teaching at a university in Kansas. So I lost even a reader's week to week familiarity with the paper but we still picked it up on visits back east to our family. I still stayed in touch with a few old comrades so I felt some kind of tenuous connection to the paper at any rate. When my wife retired from her Kansas university and we got back to where we once belonged it would have given me great pleasure to be across the old curmudgeon reading the advocate every week and grumbling these kids today don't know anything about how to put out an alternative newspaper but in fact it looked to me like these kids today were muddling along as well as we ever did they they really cared about the subjects they were writing about they were really well informed about them they cared about good writing they were putting out an enjoyable newspaper every week and they gave every indication of having fun doing it um I hold on just a second I have to admit I have not been following the advocate since it since it went online only but right up until the end the ink and paper version struck me as a quality fish wrapper a rag to be proud of I uh I hope having been part of the advocates early years I hope that people who were part of the last days of the newspaper will someday be able to look back across the decades and remember their time at the advocate as as fondly as I remember mine I I thank you all for your your time and attention here and George who introduced me will be emceeing the the question and answer period afterwards so if anybody has any questions if anybody who worked at the advocate has any corrections or amendments they they think need to be added George is is in charge so let's take it away with the Q&A well thank you very much and as the man said it's now time for question answers I see some names that I recognize from old time valley advocates so um does anyone have quest if you have a question unmute yourself and ask the question and we'll take it from there someone question okay someone raised their hand I know that was that was that was nick my name who's name you may recall from my having taken it in vain at some point in my talk um can you unmute yourself microphone icon in the lower left hand corner of your screen there you are there he is now um I just have something to add to what you said about the um the logo the alternative in the Pioneer Valley and becoming a a game uh-huh I actually once witnessed the co-publisher do that so it was just a lowly production I also remember once uh going to a um an advocate Halloween party and noticing a very attractive tall woman dancing very sinuously and it gradually dawned on me that it was the publisher in drag how many papers could say that thank you for your talk that was wonderful reliving those years with you and great seeing you Mary and you too nick I can't believe it and Stephanie and Betsy I can't see Betsy but I know she's on here um so I've been googling you all while I was listening I you know I wanted to add um I remember and I wanted to get your help what was the name of the sort of competitor paper that sprung up for a few years or there were several of them well there was a weekly when we were there the Valley Optimist no it was also a spilled ink fresh are you thinking of fresh ink fresh ink you know for me that was that was one of the best times for us I mean I think the competition was good for us and I learned I learned that about life and about competition that that sometimes when you it brings out the best in in whatever your efforts are so I remember being motivated by the things they did that we hadn't done um or that you know oh we did this and they didn't do it so it was just that was an exciting time but um I loved what you had to say Chris and uh uh you know I think if somebody were doing a dissertation on this or an oral history I think it would be so interesting to hear this story as it was told by David Sokol and by Nick Grabe and by Stephanie Kraft who is who I think was there from the very beginning right Stephanie oh you're muted I just about uh Stephanie was uh just unmute I don't think she there's a microphone icon in the lower left hand corner of your screen Stephanie and you just click on that click on that to unmute it there now you're muted all right um the paper started up in 1973 and I came in 74 okay yeah I definitely was there when I when I started she uh she was already an established advocate writer when I first met Linda and and she kept on writing uh well nigh to the very end yeah yes uh until two oh short while before and I do remember that the article I you got ten dollars a week ten dollars an article very I remember when I got a big raise to 15 well I guess that was uh one of the veins of my existence how poorly I paid the freelance writers the quality of the writing that they were doing for us uh measured against what I was able to pay them every week the the contrast was the imbalance was stunning oh and Mary was so talented with her column on the road wasn't that wonderful yeah and then it was so it gave me that opportunity um and I really really appreciate it oh uh well I can just say that I remember you talked about the tensions uh when you know I remember other people falling in love and I remember tensions among editors or between editors I mean it was uh but it was filled with interesting people and it was kind of like um I don't mean to infantilize people but we were very young and we were pretty inexperienced and we were all about adventure taking chances and it was kind of like um you know teenagers when their parents go away and you know we we had a lot with a lot of fun but you know I think well anyway it was a great experience to be part of Mary were your clips the best things about the job were good people to work with and uh an amazing community of artists to write about there were always stories that we were eager to write because there was so much creative activity going on in the valley and there was a wonderful audience here wonderful readers fine readers who um pitched in with interest and helped the paper keep going I think that the the audience had a lot to do with the advocate and its rise and its survival I think you're right the size of the community was such I'm sorry I'll shut up I'll just get this one out um the size of the community was such that you could be known so one of the things that was fun but I think also made us was contributed to our success is that people knew who you were and you know you'd go places and people would talk about your stories or they tell you like you'd get I'd get letters from people saying I got a story idea for you sure so that was really a you know a very rich part of the experience yes because the the stories grew out of the sources and then the sources read the story it was a loop in which the the stories grew from the community and then the community you wrote them and then the community read them and it was a wonderful wonderful instead here's another idea because even then there were parts of the country where fewer and fewer people were reading print but in this valley they did they still Chris um there's one aspect of your contribution to the advocate that I don't think you mentioned and that was that for a brief period you were writing opinion columns and one of them that I remember distinctly was uh at a time when no one had been there would been no capital punishment in America for several years and it was just going to be reinstated and you wrote a column about how if we really believe that executions deter murder we should televise them live on television you remember who wrote that Mary no that's it that's a it's Charles Smith point of view I would never know Norman Mailer got executioner song a whole non-fiction novel out of Gary Gilmore's execution I I got a one-page satirical column in the advocate recommending televised execution so yeah who's the real winner me or Norman Mailer that hello Chris Chris Roman it has been a theater writer for the advocate now for probably longer than I was ever a theater writer and don't tell him I said so because I don't want to be got a swelled head but I think he's a better hi Chris in my day hi everybody yeah I'm a Johnny come lately I didn't get to the advocate until 1986 and I've been there ever since in fact with the advocate on hiatus I'm the only person who's contributing to the advocate at the moment I don't think I have any readers except the people who I email to to alert that I put something up but since the platform is still there I contribute theater pieces occasionally and I hope it's going to come back online as a as a paper anyway and and possibly as a paper paper listening to you Chris the thing that I miss about having contributed to the advocate for most of the time that I've been doing it is what you say about all the great people that you worked with because I worked alone when I first started working at the advocate the offices were in a mill in in Hadfield and it was a great old building but I would come in and write my second draft on on an old Apple computer well it was new then and it would get I forget Stephanie what's the term for the electronic transmission from from Hadfield down to New Haven Chris I really I don't know how did we send things down there um I was not no I was not a technically skilled production person and I can't I don't know yeah so so I would I would prepare a six inch floppy disk and give it to the production people who would stick it into something and send it on a phone line down to the printing plant in New Haven um right there was since since those days I haven't been to the advocate regularly at all I've probably been into the office on con street I don't know half a dozen times in 10 years so listening to you remember what it was like in in the the hurly burly of an actual newspaper office I'm kind of jealous very impressed at that the the community that you developed there it was it was a very enjoyable chapter series of episodes in my life it was I'm very glad I wanted to mention a couple other stories that the advocate did I had nothing to do with them but I think they were at the time they were really significant and well one was the um uh dancer called cedar rampasad do you remember she had been oh bed you did that story yes that was really big I remember steve turner writing about three mile island mm-hmm gary nelson writing about um who was the child star who's uh you know the uh uh brook shields oh oh I was thinking of another big one too I mean there were some you know very um important I mean I think it was really important journalism at certain times not every single week but writer that Mary just mentioned gary nelson he was a reporter for the advocate who had previously been a member of the brotherhood of the spirit uh called that's right I forgot about that he had a very distinguished career at daily newspapers around the country yes he was on an investigative team at some alaskan newspaper that won a Pulitzer prize yes which is exactly one more Pulitzer than I've ever won so um speaking of prizes gary was the main writer for a very prestigious national award that the advocate won in 1979 and I remember it well because Mary and I were both involved in that in a smaller way than um than gary was but that was a very big deal it was about the impact of shopping malls on um downtown businesses it was the new england press association no that was a different award this was the media awards for economic understanding this champion international that sponsored it we got to go to new york to a really fancy awards event at the um that yes it was really fun we definitely put stories on yourself karen no other organ was writing about was writing about the things that we did I was just wondering if you could say a little bit about the uh advocates involvement with the anti-nuclear movement um okay this this is karen smith my wife whom I also mentioned at uh one point or another in the talk um yes we we did an awful lot of uh of uh nuclear anti-nuclear movement coverage back in the late 70s a no nukes bumper sticker was as iconic in the valley as a black lives matter lawn sign is today that was it was a big big local issue and uh we did a cover story when sam lovejoy committed his famous act of vandalism and civil disobedience not our first ever cover was an anti nuclear story and he um uh we we did a lot of coverage of the clamshell alliance and their their big anti seabrook demonstration and other anti nuclear activities that was that was definitely a cause with which we were associated uh because it mattered so much to so so many of our readers thanks oh people it's been a joy to see you i'm sorry it's just about one o'clock and I have to say goodbye but it's glad you could be here today Stephanie wonderful especially Mary I didn't expect to see you this is just wonderful Chris Betsy there's Betsy nice to meet you Chris Roman yes so since this is an intimate group and this is I mean I know everybody in our I've met Chris I'm moving back to the valley after being away for 32 years and I'm so excited I'm I'm going to move to north Hampton once COVID's over or you know and open up because I didn't want to move there and not know anybody but I didn't know that I mean I hadn't thought about all these good connections so I'm very excited to come back and what a wonderful place you all live in I learned a lot of good things about this area from Mary's column uh her on the road column I live in Pelham now not far from Lilac land I discovered Lilac land in a Mary young column you used to come into the office with your columns and all full of excitement about the interesting people you had met researching them and so even when I didn't get to go out on those assignments with you I still felt like I was in on the game because you were so excited to talk about the people you had met and the quality of your writing Mary back then was among the best at the paper well thank you Nick I'd like to think that it's it isn't just back then but I I'm going to get back to doing more writing hopefully I'm better but thank you very much and really thank you for giving me the chance that you did I mean that's the thing at the advocate it was so full of opportunity you just saw something you want nobody hardly ever did somebody say oh no don't do that or you know there was just you saw an opportunity and you could grab it are you seeing that it was I who offered you that column because you named it Nick and I I was I was never crazy about the name but I was so delighted that I mean it was so amazing to be it the real thing was I wrote that that whatever that short political thing was you gave me that and I was no good at it I remember Gary Nielsen said you don't grok politics he said it in a very kind way but he was absolutely right and as a kind of concession prize you gave me this column to write features because you know that's what I really like to do and then you you came up with the name so that's why I know it was you well when I was at the Worcester magazine I stole the concept and found somebody to write a page two feature called on the road ah so there's Jack Kerouac and Mary and somebody in Worcester and and Charles Carrault you know all right well uh George I feel like I should thank you for convening this group well you're entirely welcome I think it might be time to uh go off the air and adjourn to the nearest bar actually to thank Jeff and Emerson media for all the technical work Emerson media you see that's how we've matured other in the past it would have been Don Young's darkroom if it hadn't been for the past we wouldn't be here I suppose right okay well thank you all thank you very much I think we're going to close thank you Jeff thank you George thank you everybody for being here