 I would like to welcome Travis Rivers to the Haydash Ferry Video Oral History Project, welcome Travis. My name is Rebecca Nichols and I'll be moderating this interview. We're so pleased to have you here today. We are doing a piece on the Oracle. We would love to know more about you and even to take it further and find out what you're doing now and what your hope for the future would be. But at the moment I'd like to learn a little bit about you, Travis. Where were you born? Texas, Austin. And your parents? Also. What are your parents' names? Kenny Elizabeth and Lauren Travis Rivers. Do you have any brothers and sisters? David, James. And do you have any children? Yes, Lauren Travis Rivers. Lauren Travis Rivers. I know that you are a writer and a publisher and a manager and I'd like to know a little bit more about where you got interested in maybe managing or writing or any of the things. I would love to get on this tape to get to know you a little bit better. Well, I was writing poetry when I was a kid and I went to the University of Texas. I recorded some Texas blues artists for their folk library. I like to jokingly say I left Texas to not further embarrass my grandparents. It was at a time that was full of hope in the early 60s, an entire generation dashed with the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The entire country went through a year or so of deep depression and it affected me a great deal. I spent probably an entire year drunk and one day I was walking down the street in Austin and the newspaper flew down the street and wrapped around my leg and I could not kick it off. So I reached down and picked it up and it was a full page ad for a movie called Help. So I said, well, I could certainly use that. So I went to the flick. I sat through it three times. I saw almost everyone I knew that afternoon come into that theater. Austin used to be on a circuit of not nationally released films where you'd fill up a little card at the end of it. And halfway through the third sitting I realized that what I thought was there was there. You didn't have to. The world was yours to change. You could do anything you wished. So I went home, I painted a sign, put it up my front yard that said headed west yard sale. And I sold everything I had. I bought an old TR-10 which was an English touring car. Only a few hundred of them in the United States for 40 bucks. And I drove to San Francisco. It cost $18 to get here. About what year was this? Oh, 65. And at that same time I think Janice came back to Texas. I lived in Berkeley for a while. I heard that Margaret Mead's house was open in Big Sur. So I wrote him a note and she said that I could stay there. So I went down to Big Sur. And when I got there there was a family with three kids living in the house. I'm only going to kick them out. I asked around. The only place anyone knew that there was empty was owned by the witch, Amelia Newell. But you don't want to see her. So I went up to see Amelia. She was quite lovely. And she let me have a cabin she had on the west side of Highway 1. It's been about a year there. There were lots of interesting folks living in the rocks and hills near Gorda, the Blue Town Club. And Rodigan had just left. He'd written trout fishing in America in the next property over. One day I woke up and said, you know, I've been out here long enough. I think I'll go back to town. So I came up to San Francisco and went over to see my friend Moe at Moe's Books. Where was Moe's Books? In Berkeley. Okay. Part of what I did at the University of Texas is I had a bookstore called Travis Books. Go figure. And we sell antiquarian books. Texiana, Americana. And lefty stuff. Comic books. And one of the things that happened when I first got here was I needed to have some more money. So I took some of my books and I went around to the store, Shakespeare, Blacko, etc. And they offered me 10 cents a pound. Well, I wasn't going to sell the first edition of Elvis Huxley's Chrome Yellow for 10 cents a pound. But when Moe saw it, he offered me 600 bucks. So I knew I liked Moe. And over the fullness of time, I became kind of... I adopted him as my dad locally. So I walked in and he says, so God, I'm so glad to see you. I don't have time here. Go see this place and come back and tell me about it. Well, I mean, you know, I'm on foot. This address is in a place I have never heard of called Haydashbury. And so I figure out how to get there on the bus from Berkeley and come to Haight Street. It's all boarded up. Ron and Jay Thalen have the psychedelic shop. That's about it on the whole street. There was a bowling alley. There was a movie theater. There was the Habadashbury, which is where the drug story adventure was. On the sonic. And there was a jewel work across the street, very grumpy guy. And I liked the ladies at the Habadashbury. And so I went to the address. And it was the old Woolworths on Haight Street. Do you remember the address? Well, no, 17 something. But if you look in the early oracles, that was our office. Okay. And then I went back and Mo said, So what did you think? I said, it's a beautiful store. It looks like an old Woolworths. He said it is. I said, why did you send me over there? He said, I think I'm going to open a bookstore. I said, why? The place is boarded up. He says, well, they're students. I said, no, they're not. He said, well, there's San Francisco State, which is like three miles away. And San Francisco Community College up on the hill. And I am San Francisco College, whatever it's called. And I said, well, you know, it's not like you're two blocks from Sather Gate. I mean, they're students. They're not going to come to the store. He said, I already bought the building. It'd be a beautiful bookstore. Now, why did you send me? He says, I want you to run it. So we went about looking into that. We'd take about 60 days to get a permit. We'd have a rag dealers permit. We had to have a secondhand dealers permit to sell used books in San Francisco. So I said to Moe that maybe I should go to Texas for a few days. And because you could still borrow cars, then I borrowed a car. And I heard that Big Brother was auditioning singers. So I went over to Sea Chat. We've known each other since we were kids in Texas. And I said, I'm going to go, are you really thinking about having a girl singer in the band now? Because at one point I'd suggested that they get a girl that we do in common, Janice, to come. He said, we don't want no girl singers in the band. And he said, yeah. And I said, well, I'll check on her. I know she's doing better. So I went back to Austin to see my family. Janice decided that she wanted to come out here. So we drove back out. She auditioned two weeks later. She got a 30 minute standing ovation at the Evelyn Ballroom. I went before the council, the Board of Permits, and the promotion that had the jewelry store objected to Morris Moskowitz getting a used dealer's license for Hate Street because the next thing you know he'll be selling rags there. Well, I was shocking and upsetting to me. So Speestrock had opened a little beach shop, a couple of other people, a girl named Amy Madigan or something like that had opened a little store. Things were beginning to bubble a little bit. What year are we talking? It's still late 65. And I had this brilliant idea. We went to talk to Ron and Jay about it. They loved it. We had put together an argument that we couldn't get into the Hate Ashbury Merchants Association and association that their grandparents had actually started because of this guy at the jewelry store. So we started the Hate Ashbury Independent Proprietors. And we put little signs in people's windows by hip. And like, you know, built some ferment and they all went down for the second hearing and lots of people were there supporting them. But we were still denied a permit. We couldn't then have a permit to have a used bookstore there for a year. We couldn't go back for a year with one appeal. So we couldn't open a used store. We decided we'd open a new store. So we opened the print mint. By now the word had spread through the upper echelons of the social water in San Francisco. And we had lines of limos out front where grandmas were coming down from the hill to buy posters for all their grandchildren in college. We did more business the first month in business than the original print mint had done in its first year. In six months we had outstripped five years of their income. Wow. And... Where were the posters coming from? Oh, these were art prints, photographs. Were you producing them there? No, there was a burgeoning poster business out of New York basically. Lots of people were going in and getting the rights to some of the great photo libraries and pulling interesting shots out. Guys like Jim Marshall, for instance, the photographer, did one of my more favorite posters of the Jonian and her sister. Girls say yes to boys who say no. What's a wonderful poster. So these things... You think it's very long? Yeah. And so it became... It was a fad, but it became widespread because these posters were often graphically arresting and so one kid would see them and, where did you get that? Exactly. And so anyway. So your market didn't have to be when the people lived around the corner, people were coming from all over? Well, these women that lived up in the Pacific Heights who were very well off and had lots of grandkids, they were in their rooms in their daughters and sons' rooms in college and that, of course. I assume add some panache to the stuff. At any rate, Ron and Jay put out a little paper called The Psychedelic Oracle of San Francisco. They did about 5,000 pages. It looked like, to my eye anyway, it looked like a national inquire for long hairs. And at this time I'd already been approached by two groups of folks to start a newspaper. I'm a very busy boy. And both of them basically had this same sort of Berkeley bar kind of national inquires here. Thoughts about East Village Other Look, which I wasn't interested in doing at all. And so Ron came and asked me what I would do with if I were going to do a newspaper because he'd just done this one. So I said, well, I don't mean I like the name Oracle. It would be interesting to do something that would have the voice of the people in it as opposed to the voice of journalists. And so nothing happened. A few days later it came back and he said, why don't you call a, why don't we put up some papers and let's see if we can get some people to volunteer. So I called Mo and I said, you know, the guys across the street remember Ron and Jay. He said, we can't use the entire back of the building because we can't put the bookstore in yet. So maybe I could call a meeting back there and we could see if there was some interest in doing this newspaper. And he said, sure. So we had a meeting and literally... Do you know who was at that meeting? Ron, Jay, Steve Levine, Alam, Len Farrar. I think maybe Leeper was there. So at one point I said, so anybody interested in doing this and a bunch of people raised their hands and said, well, let's be here tomorrow. And Ron then left and came back with one of those... I remember there was a time when fire extinguishers in inexpensive apartments were a red can that said fire on the side and had sand in it. He brought back a fire bucket and it was full of little pieces of paper, postcards, and quarters, hundreds of them. And these were folks who had asked for a subscription and the assets from the first sale. So we put that in the bank and we did the human being issue. That's the first issue. After that. Do you know who did the cover? That was Bowen and Malus. And Salem Malus, yes. So at this point, first issue, you're a family of people putting this on. Was it strictly business for you guys? Friends, you were young... So this is a new meeting for these people. Who were the names of the people that were involved at this state of the game for this first issue to come out? Basically the ones that you just mentioned. Okay, and then did everybody have a job to do? Was there some? No, it was pretty loose. Absolutely no one wanted to do the money part of it. I mean, that's always the most thankless. The creative end is a lot more rewarding. Yeah, it requires you to keep books and stuff. So I just did that. And I gave the money to Ron. And then one day Ron came over and he had heard something. I was about to be canned from the printment. Because there was this youngster. One of the things I did was distribution was going to be a problem. So I saw all these kids who were showing up with no place to live, living in doorways and stuff. So I had this idea a few weeks before the first issue came out. And so I went around when I got back from Howard Quinn's printing presses with piles of newspapers. I went around to all the doorways and I gave the kids if they were willing to do it, 100 papers and told them that they would go out and sell these papers. They could keep the quarters or they could come back and buy more with... I was one of those kids but I wasn't in a doorway. I used to live. But the money from that bought our whole house dinner. We figured we put about $60,000 in the pockets of the kids on H-Street. One of the kids was a kid named Dangerfield Ashton who later became an artist with the operation. And my most favorite one was one of the first kids I recruited to sell the paper at the 5th issue. I saw him walking down the street. He had on shoes. He had on clean jeans. He had on a clean shirt. He was carrying two bags of groceries. You can only do that if you have a department and that made you probably have a girlfriend as well. It probably touched many more people than you, Eliza. Well, I was moved by that. At a certain point with the Oracle I remember from my end we knew when to go and get them these papers and others so your distribution was starting to move. So how many issues were there totally of the Oracle? There were at least 12. From when did it start and when did it start? 60, 60, 60, 80. About how often did they come out? Not enough. That was a huge problem. Production. Where were they getting printed? I did them all at Quinn's. Where did all the articles come from? The really big stuff you can't just fill in the issue. Some people have to write some things. The really big stuff came from large interviews taped and then transcribed. Probably the two most important ones were a conversation between Alan Watts, Ginsburg and Leary about what's going on. Just after the BN. And that was a big seller. And then we had this idea in 2008 in 1968. 32 years in the future. What do you think would be happening? We got the Esslin Institute involved. So it was Watts and non-directed psychology. He was one of the founders of the Esslin with Fitzboro but it's not Fitzboro. And and Herman Kahn. Herman Kahn created the incredible 50s. Put your head between your knees in case you were asked goodbye. He published a book in the late 50s called Thinking the Unthinkable which chronicled and quantified an atomic holocaust. And what will it do? And this brought about the backyard bomb shelter praise. He had just read the book called 2008. He was a very, very dark and sociopathic personality. He had been an original hire at the Hudson Institute. No, the Rand Institute and the Esslin Institute both arched and served with think tanks. And he was the only person we ever had to edit. He this was by the way our last issue. He What way did you edit? He had this unfortunate tick that said something socially reprehensible. He would go and we removed all the points. Because no one would believe that that was true. That he would actually do that on stage at the Long Sherman's Hall in front of three or four Tennessee people. Which is where it happened. And he suggested that we were already doing experiments being the scientific community in America with the pleasure zones of the brain. They were putting electrodes in watching monkeys zap themselves into starvation. Later that was let them have cocaine and get the same effect. You can also do that with small electrical impulses. He suggested that social malcontents might want to just sit about in the park with a little photoelectric cell on their helmet and just be an oblivion. And then he would go and go in. That I thought was our best issue ever. In the community where you realize it's not the oracles considered a capsule. A capsule in time of a way of thinking a way of looking at the news a way of looking at expression in a different way. Who would you want to think if you could grab a net and say well this we created this who in your world at that time would you want to think who you think contributed worked hard to have that unique creativity that would happen with the oracle besides yourself obviously who do you think had the passion and the motivation to keep this thing going. Well, Lynn Farrar Stephen Byn Lynn was there's a photograph of three kids standing at Haighton Ashbury that Jean Anthony did poster. That's me, Lynn, and the other girl is that's why Lynn has the portfolio or the young lady has the portfolio under her arm because we're actually out doing some stuff. Very famous shots in Jean Anthony's book Someone Love, yes. And the other girl lives above the Arctic Circle and has only been back once Wow, that's amazing. Well I asked you a question as you told the story about you know, 2000 back in 1965 66. If somebody was watching this video now 50 years from now that we are filming here in 2005 and looking to the future what would you hope? You're a very creative man I can tell you make big things happen and from your own vision where would you say people looking at this video or a history project as well as this tape how in the future somebody watching this tape how would you see the future 1500 years from now people taking whatever we did here and maybe being inspired by it in some way. How can you see what you hope in people in the future? Well every generation has the same aspirations, every generation has the same questions, every generation has the same real problems they have to make a living they have to live with their neighbors we can only hope that folks continue to get along and and remember you didn't just live quietly you stood up and took action Well it was a disturbing time just in closing the most two most horrible things that I witnessed as a youngster was the assassination of Kennedy followed in a few months by this youngster walking up to me and I mean he was clearly a country boy and I don't know what it was about me that made him ask me but I was near the undergraduate library at the University of Texas and he wanted where Vietnam was and I knew there was a big globe in the lobby and so I took him there and I showed him and he said I said it's here he says it's so small and I said yeah I said why are you interested because my brother was killed there last week so I said well you know it looks like the Gulf of Mexico I have assumed that there's oil there, there's always a real reason but after he left I vowed not to cut my hair until we were out huge money saving for you I didn't have to get a haircut until 71 well I want to thank you for being here Travis you've added so much we're going to have a discussion later with you and your colleagues on the article and my belief is that young people when they see this in the future will feel a little bit better about taking action when they see things that need to be changed and though there may be just one person's thought and belief and taking that first step is how you get from here to there and I want to thank you for being here