The Free-Form Radio of KHIP

Thirty-some years ago, I was a struggling free-lance writer who wanted to write about a free-form radio station broadcasting out of Hollister, California. This station was carrying on the mission of a now-legendary station called KFAT, whose incandescent career is now enshrined in several tribute websites, a Wikipedia entry, and a book called Fat Chance by Gilbert Klein, who was one of its personnel. After I wrote the article, I shopped it around some of the local print people but failed to find any takers, so it went into the filing cabinet.

Fast-forward three decades, and here I am ... still a struggling free-lance writer (albeit one with a couple of self-published books doing reasonably well, thank you), and still a fan of that free-form format. A few years ago, two things happened that led to the webbing of this article:

I found a bunch of casette tapes I'd made of KFAT and the "Fat Fries" concerts they broadcast in the eighties, along with some tapes of KUNM, back in the Asylum Radio days, which I'd made while living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I hadn't been playing these tapes for years upon years, fearing that I'd degrade them even more than they already had been. But now that I had the means of transcribing them into digital format, I brought them out, cleaned the heads of the tape machine, played them into my computer, and once again found myself back in one of radio's Golden Ages.

I Googled "KFAT" and found that there were a host of tribute sites and other where the KFAT spirit was kept alive, including a radio station in Hollister, California that streamed its content over the Internet. Some of KFAT's guiding spirits had been involved in getting KPIG off the ground, and the concept, if not the content, was pretty much the same.

I remembered the article I'd written all those years ago, and found it buried in a folder in my filing cabinet. Since I already had a web site devoted to my tentmaking business, it was a fairly easy task to scan in the original article, convert it to HTML, and stick it on the web site. And now it's here, too.

So let's turn back the hands of time. It's 1986, and we're visiting a radio station where a bunch of music lovers are keeping a dream alive and kicking, against formidable odds. Here's how they're doing it...

Laura Ellen Hopper

Over the hill in Hollister, a 275 watt radio station is making waves. Broadcasting at 93.5 megahertz on the FM band, twenty-four hours a day, KHIP serves a feast of music that cuts across virtually every conceivable format of popular music, free-forming its own concept of radio as it should be done. In an industry where programming is increasingly being locked into place by playlists created days or weeks before, by programming experts who may never have even seen the stations they work for, KHIP does it the hard way -- a record at a time, in no particular order, to suit the flavor of the moment.

No playlist? No format? For a commercial radio station? Can these people be serious?

They're not only serious, but prospering. When I visited the station last winter and met the crew, I found out why. The people there are totally committed to the station and the music it plays. Each of them perceive the station as the last gasp of creativity in an industry that becomes more dominated by demographics and dollars every day. They are the holdouts, out to prove that their brand of radio will always have a respected place on the dial.

KHIP doesn't try to put any of the industry's standard labels on its format. "It's HIP music," says Amy Airheart, station manager and morning air personality, for whom the only useful categories are good music and bad music. The station specializes in spotlighting artists who, for various reasons, have never broken into the mass radio market -- the square pegs like John Prine, Sam Bush, Mary McCaslin, Tom Paxton, John Hartford, Kate Wolf, Levon Helm, Michael Murphy, and scores of others who don't fit into the round, machined holes of the broadcast world. At KHIP, you can listen to Asleep at the Wheel, the Dave Grisman Quartet, the Beat Farmers, and other bands that have found their own musical expression outside the stylistic confines of "country-western," "album oriented rock," or any of the other pigeonholes currently in favor anywhere else on the radio dial.

The first thing that strikes a visitor is the total professionalism of the people that announce and play the records. Their knowledge of popular music, particularly the more progressive forms of country-western music, is staggering. Any of them could be music directors, and in fact, they are, each for their own show. Name them a song, and they can tell you who wrote it, who sang it, on what label, at what time ... and then give you any number of other versions of the same song, on record labels you never knew existed. And then tell you which side of the record it's on, and which cut it is. Amazing.

Rob, the Sunday evening personality, drives down to Los Angeles to attend a concert of Danny and Dusty. Then he gets into his car and drives back ... fourteen hours on the road to hear two people that most of the music world hasn't even heard of. "They only perform together about twice a year," he explains. "It was worth the trip."

On another night, you can hear Sister Tiny composing a show practically out of thin air, weaving in requests to her own playlist, which is improvised. She goes to the record shelves, picks an album, plays a few bars of each song over the monitor to find the most appropriate song to follow the one she's got on the air, and cues the song. She'll fit each piece carefully into her sonic mosaic, fifteen times an hour, five hours a night. Not only will she not play a song twice during her show, she probably won't even play two songs from the same artist. And with hundreds of artists and thousands of records to choose from, why should she? She expects her listeners to be in for the long haul, just as she is, and she won't waste their time with a repetition. Keep moving, cover new ground. When the space shuttle Challenger blew up last January, she began her show that evening with a dazzling display of musical erudition, playing a handful of songs on air disasters that I'd never heard before (and I thought I'd heard a lot).

Sister Tiny's mastery of the media is matched by the other air personalities on KHIP. She's joined by Unkle Sherman, Amy Airheart, Felton Pruitt, and Cuzin Al, all from KFAT, a Gilroy station that managed in seven incandescent years to create a minor legend among performers and audiences in northern California before falling prey to the "contemporary mass appeal" of garden-variety rock and roll.

The FAT Years

The story of KHIP, in fact, began when a tiny Gilroy country-western station called KSND changed hands in 1975. The station was bought for $57,000 by Jeremy Lansman, who hired some programmers from Texas to program the station along the lines of KPFT in Houston or KOKE in Austin. The programmers hired Unkle Sherman, who came from what he calls a "one-lung radio station" in the Pacific Northwest (Sherman's free-wheeling music format would prompt KFAT to fire and rehire him more than once during his career with the station.) The station, now with the call letters of KFAT, began with Unkle Sherman, Buffalo Bob, and Terrell Lynn Thomas behind the mike, joined the following February by Cuzin Al and his Sunday evening bluegrass show. Lansman's wife Laura Ellen lent a hand in the programming, encouraging a trend to more "acoustic" music like bluegrass.

"The FAT radio equipment was at the bottom of the professional scale," Cuzin Al reminisced about the early years. Over the next few years, the station caught on with the listeners, carving out a small but devoted following. With upgraded studio equipment, a move to new quarters at the Old Gilroy Hotel, and a boost in broadcasting power that would enable it to be picked up from Monterey to Marin, KFAT moved into the big time.

People tuned in for the novelty and humor that they couldn't find anywhere else, only to hear music that transcended their notions of format. Sure, there was country and western, but not the Kenny Rogers and Charley Pride that the other C&W stations relied on. Here was old-time rock and roll, bluegrass, Tex-Mex, blues, rockabilly, Western swing, and even a little Hawaiian music. KFAT was "breaking" new artists like Willie Nelson, George Thoroughgood, Peter Rowan, Emmylou Harris, Lacy J. Dalton, and Weird Al Yankovich. "KFAT was a testing ground for a lot of companies," Sister Tiny told me. Unkle Sherman agreed, adding, "If we would play them, they would promote them." News was provided by the idiosyncratic Travus T. Hipp, a Bay area celebrity whose fame began as a bartender at the fabled Red Dog Saloon and continued with news and talk shows on KSAN and other local stations. With the addition of Amy Airheart to its lineup in January of 1980, KFAT was at its zenith. Despite its reputation among the more conventional broadcasters as a "cult station," an image it never cared to shed, it had become such big business that Lansman and co-owner Lorenzo Milam could sell the station in November for a half a million dollars.

When the new owner, a Chicagoan named Harvey Levin, arrived to take over the station, many of the staff felt the bubble was about to burst. One of Levin's first acts was to bring back the same programming staff that Lansman had used in 1975. The programmers fired Unkle Sherman (again); Airheart quit in February of 1981, fearing another format change. But she was rehired almost immediately, and even Sherman, who had worked for AM country stations in Marin and San Francisco in the meantime, eventually came back on board. The format would stay the same, Harvey assured them. With good ratings and a devoted following, it looked like KFAT was in the fat at last.

In two years, it would all be gone.

Harvey fell ill. He was found to have cancer and went into therapy in December, but stayed in constant contact with the station by telephone. By May he was dead, at the age of thirty-eight. KFAT observed twenty-four hours of commercial-free programming in his honor. In October, Levin's family sold the station to Western Cities Broadcasting for over three million dollars. "Radio was a hot property in 1982," Airheart told me, adding that when Western Cities sold the station recently as part of a package deal, the station's worth was estimated as $10 million.

When KFAT's employees were finally told of the sale, air personality Dale Evans, whose commercial parodies like the "DeLorean snowmobile" were some of the station's most popular items, was the first to quit. It was apparent that Western Cities had little faith in KFAT's format; it announced in November that the call letters would change to KWSS and that research would be undertaken to determine the format of their station. Although the staff had been given hints that their jobs would continue if they wanted them, they learned that Western Cities had secretly decided to fire them in January. At any rate, it was not hard to see the handwriting on the wall, and preparations were made for one final show of KFAT music before the change of format took place on January 3, 1983.

That show was KFAT at its finest. For over three hours, Amy Airheart and Dallas Dobro played their fans's favorite music, from Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys to Utah Phillips's "Moose Turd Pie," with mock commercials for Tree Frog Beer and the Idi Amin Hot Tub. Euphoria and desperation created a giddiness that could be felt by listeners all over the bay area and by the dozens of fans who crowded the studio to say goodbye. Lacy J. Dalton phoned to thank them for their support, and Chuck Wagon and the Wheels dropped in to perform an impromptu version of their song "Disco Sucks." Cy Coben recorded a special "Goodbye, KFAT" song. Turning serious toward the end, Amy and Dallas played the famous "I'm mad as hell" speech from the movie Network and John Hartford's somber "I Reckon" ("Had I not made this record, I still would have made these songs / And sung them to my family and my friends / and to myself ..."). After midnight, the new station staff still hadn't shown up, so the FAT crew ushered in the age of rock and roll on their station with Jerry Lee Lewis.

But it wasn't quite over after all. Although Dallas left the next day, and Amy quit the day after (she had used the air name "Nancy Drew" because her presence under the new rules "was a mystery to me"), Terrell Lynn Thomas and Sister Tiny continued for a while under Western Cities's new format rules, which called for tamer music and less personality. In two weeks, it really was all over. The station's call letters were now KWSS, the format changed to "album rock," plans had been made to donate the old KFAT record library to the Gilroy Public Library, and the old crew, excepting only afternoon man Steven Seaweed, was gone.

After the Fall

"It felt like a divorce," Cuzin Al told me. "When KFAT went off the air, it left a big hole." Al went back to public radio, working at KZSC, KKUP, KPFA, and KCSM (the latter still airs his bluegrass show on the last Sunday of every month). Dallas went to work for Goldsmith Seeds in Gilroy, eventually gravitating to Idaho to work in public television. Amy toured Europe for six weeks, returning to write commercials and do administrative tasks for classical station KBOQ in Marina. Unkle Sherman worked in non-commercial radio in various Bay area towns and learned to train draft horses, buying two.

But KFAT wouldn't die quietly. Not long after the changeover, former FAT personnel hosted a "Moose Turd Pie" party at the Old Gilroy Hotel. Conceived as a way for old fans to get together, it sparked the formation of FAT Records, which was to publish two catalogs and a cassette tape of FAT music before slipping into obscurity. Another organization to emerge from the wreckage was the Future Fat Format Farmers of America -- the FFFFA -- founded by Amy Airheart to secure another radio outlet for their music. "If we don't know within six months, I don't see much chance of it happening," Amy told the Gilroy Dispatch in March. "We know we have a big audience, because they're bugging us." The FFFFA tried to buy a radio station in Santa Cruz, but the owners refused to consider the sale.

The following February, Amy found another outlet in radio station KOCN in Pacific Grove, bringing in Laura Ellen, Sister Tiny and Unkle Sherman. The group worked there for half a year, but realized that the station's owner didn't share their passion for the format, and found it difficult to create their own style of music in the station's format of canned on-the-hour news and irregular sports programming. They discovered, though, that their "FAT format" was transportable from one station to the next, and that the market was there. During their tenure, KOCN went into the Arbitron ratings for the first time. But their search for a permanent home and a free hand continued. During the following winter, Unkle Sherman heard that a small station in Hollister was having trouble getting disk jockeys. In fact, KHIP owner Vernon Miller was getting ready to "pull the plug" if he couldn't find a way to turn the station's fortune around. At the time, KHIP was programming sixties and seventies rock, with a little new wave thrown in at night. Dave Powell, who was on his way out as station manager, talked with Sherman and asked him where a replacement might be found.

Sherman knew. Within days, he and Amy, along with Laura Ellen, presented Miller with a package that included the FAT format, Amy as station manager, and a host of KFAT graduates to comandeer the microphones and turntables. Miller agreed to try the package for a year, and the new KHIP was in business.

There was much to do. KHIP's facilities were, to put it kindly, primitive. Housed in a tiny two-story building on Washington Street in Hollister, it sported antiquated equipment. The transmitter, on Fremont Peak, was powered by batteries charged by a gasoline generator which had to be refueled two or three times a day. The station's power, authorized for 175 watts, actually varied between six to a hundred watts, depending on the condition of the batteries. On March 4, 1985, KHIP began its new lease on life. On the air that day were Unkle Sherman, Buffalo Bob, and Terrell Lynn Thomas, three of the people who helped launch KFAT in 1975. Former KFAT members Sister Tiny, Mark "Rocket Man" DeFranco, Felton Pruitt, and Cuzin Al were all on board within a week, and Travus T. Hipp's news and commentary (with what he calls "his particularly jaundiced eye") were piped in via telephone from Hipp's Cabale News Service in Silver City, Nevada.

Not six months later, disaster struck. The house next to the station burned to the ground, and the station itself was heavily damaged. Most of the equipment, including the station's relay link to its mountaintop transmitter, was destroyed. The record collection, mostly contributed from station employees, narrowly escaped the flames. Most of the KFAT memorabilia perished.

But in less than a week, the station was back on the air, operating out of a trailer between a tomato field and a truck stop near Gilroy. It was less than ideal for a radio station; the floor was so loosely sprung that a heavy foot fall would bounce the stylus right out of a record groove. But KHIP never lost its style. It instituted a Citizen's Band request line for truckers and possibly the world's first drive-up request window. The fire had another unexpected benefit, because the insurance settlement allowed the station to retool with more modern equipment when they found a new home two months later.

The station eventually found new quarters back in Hollister, only a block away from their old location. Housed in a suite of offices in the basement of 910 Monterey Street, it continues to play the music that nobody plays better. It's an informal atmosphere there, where members of the staff stay to socialize after their duties are over. The music they broadcast is the same music they listen to when they go home, the same music that a few of them play professionally in area nightspots.

It's no easier to hang a name on this format than it was in the days of KFAT. In fact, the format has changed somewhat from what it was then, perhaps reflecting the maturity of its originators and its audience. For one thing, KFAT's old taboo on playing blues in daytime hours is no longer observed. "Blues deserves to be played more," said Amy. Another change, she added, is the de-emphasis of humor and novelty music, which KFAT used to program at the rate of one per hour. (A quick air check in February, however, turned up Steven Wright, Rich Little, and plenty of other gems.) Cuzin Al, who brings his Sunday evening bluegrass show to KHIP three times a month, calls KHIP "KFAT with a degree in music." He notes that KHIP plays a lot of music recorded in the last three years, a point also made by Unkle Sherman and Sister Tiny. The biggest change, though, is a new respect for the music they play and the importance of serving the audience that craves it. "It means more now," Amy said, "because we know we can lose it."

What stands out most is the joy they share as the station becomes a success. "Once you've had good radio, it's hard to go back to bad radio," observed Travus T. Hipp during a recent visit to the station. "This is the last incarnation of air personality radio." He noted that the station's music requires some maturity to appreciate, a sentiment voiced by most of the other people I talked to. "It takes some thought to listen to KHIP," Laura Ellen told me during another interview. Reflecting on the uphill battle of KHIP in the past year, Cuzin Al could not conceal his optimism. "They said it couldn't be done," he beamed. "And here we are." And if the dissolution of a radio station, a fire, and a few earthquakes couldn't stop them, what can?

--- Written on February 19, 1986

Afterword (Updated April, 2022)

Well, those hopes turned out to be a little premature. KHIP was soon to go the way of its predecessors, victim to the changing economics of radio in the Reagan years. It took a little while longer, but Laura Ellen was given one more chance, and KPIG was born (or farrowed, I guess). Broadcasting from Freedom, California, it put the old FAT format back to work, with many of the same crew. It can be now heard not only in the Monterey Bay and Santa Cruz area but down the coast at San Luis Obispo. In 1995, it was the first station to put its signal over the Internet, so for about six bucks a month, KPIG can be found anywhere you can plug your 'puter into the World Wide Web. 

KPIG Online

And I'm relieved to report that it shows no signs at present of riding into the sunset.

You can find the PIG at http://www.kfat.com/, where you can find more links (the temptation to say "pork links" is mighty strong here, which is what happens when you listen to the PIG for a while). 

Other sites of interest are:

A tribute site founded by Laura Ellen before her untimely death in 2007, and not updated since, but with lots of good stuff.

http://www.metroactive.com/papers/cruz/06.27.96/kpig-9626.html

"Lard almighty," an article on KPIG by Kelly Luker that's almost as good as mine. Kelly fills in many of the holes in the history of the PIG and its personalities.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/06/05/mngqad3uj41.dtl

"Unconventional, unrefined kpig squealing into town", another fine article on KPIG by Maria Alicia Gaura, Staff Writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, on the occasion of the station's entry into the AM airwaves.

And, finally, there's Gilbert Kline's Fat Chance: We Were the Last Gasp of the Sixties and the Birth of Americana Music But Was America Ready for Us?, a book that documents KFAT's rise and fall. Gilbert did some talk shows for that station, and nowhere else can you find just what it was like to a part of that phenomenon, either as a listener or as a part of that madcap staff. I recommend it highly.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34052633-fat-chance

The Capitol, the Mob, and Me

©2021 by John LaTorre

As I watched last week’s assault on the United States Capitol, with an angry mob running up the steps of the building, I was reminded of another protest there, over fifty years ago. 

On those very steps, I was arrested by the District of Columbia Park Police. The date was June 11, 1969. The charge was trespassing, but it was really an attempt by the Nixon administration to silence a peaceful, orderly protest against the Vietnam War.

The demonstration was organized by A Quaker Action Group (AQAG), an association of some activists who wanted to put the anti-war tenets of the Society of Friends into a more concrete form. Their tactic was to have a group of demonstrators arrive on the steps of the Capitol and simply read the names of those who had died in the war. It was planned to be a number of demonstrations, where one group of demonstrators was to get arrested, and then another group would do the same thing the next week, and the week after that.

I was there because of a phone call by my friend Steve Burns. He and I had been doing a few things together in the previous year. We ran a coffeehouse in the attic of Levering Hall, the student center for the Johns Hopkins University, where we were both students. And we did some counseling for those who wished to avoid the draft for the war on the grounds of conscientious objection. 

On June 11, Steve gave me a call. “Do you want to go to D.C. and get arrested?” he asked. When he explained why, I told him I was in. He said that he’d be by to pick me up directly, and told me to wear the most conservative dress I had. I put on the only suit and tie I had, and off we went.

We were dropped off at a building with a meeting room, where we were briefed by the members of AQAG. The demonstration’s tactics were explained to us: we would assemble quietly in front of the Capitol, making sure not to block traffic. Then a book of the names of the soldiers who died in the war would be passed around, and we would each read a page and then hand the book to the next one. When the Park Police told us to move, we would refuse. We would submit to being arrested, and be taken to a holding cell, after which we would be arraigned in a court. All legal representation would be provided. If we were offered bail, we would collectively refuse on the grounds that the bail system was intended to benefit the rich over the poor, and that was something we could not ethically support.

George Willoughby chaired the meeting, and I remember that Bayard Rustin dropped in for a moment to commend us. I did not really know who he was at the time, only that he was an important figure in the civil rights movement. When the meeting was over, we went over to the Capitol and put our plan into action. I remember being a bit anxious, because my father worked for the government and I was afraid that there might be some repercussions for him. But I realized that for all my work against the war thus far, I had not yet taken the step that would put me forever among those who put something at personal risk to stop it. In each person’s life, there may come such a time. For me, it was that morning.

The demonstration went exactly as planned. The tourists saw a group of conservatively dressed men and women standing in an orderly group, passing a book around and reading from it. When they realized what we were doing, there were a few catcalls and some abusive language from them. But they finally grasped our sincerity to the cause of peace, and they fell silent. 

Two contingents arrived at that point. The first was the Park Police, who talked with Mr. Willoughby and instructed him to tell us to disband. He politely refused. Then the police talked to each of us, explaining that if we didn’t disburse, we would be arrested. “Do you want us to do this?” they asked me. Like my compatriots, I replied as I had been instructed: “We are here exercising our right of free speech. Do what you must do, as we are doing as we must do. We will not interfere.”

The second contingent was the news media. There were reporters and television cameras trained on us, recording events as they happened. In retrospect, I think they were anticipating, and perhaps hoping for, the sort of scene that would not transpire for another fifty-some years, with at least some scuffling and physical resistance. Instead, they got a couple of dozen well-mannered, docile resisters. Not a bat, a megaphone, or a thrown punch was to be seen. But they kept the cameras rolling anyway. As for the tourists, they were now quietly watching. They were seeing, perhaps for the first time, a public act of conscience, by people just like themselves. I have no idea whether it changed anybody’s opinion about the war, but it might have changed their opinion about the people who were opposing it. 

The time came for the policeman to put the handcuffs on me. I was startled to see tears in his eyes. He clearly didn’t want to do what he was doing. “I’m going to put the handcuffs on you,” he said. “Do you understand?” I said yes, and turned around and put my hands behind me. He read me my rights, and guided me away to a paddy wagon. 

We went to the jail, where we were photographed and fingerprinted. There we waited in a hot, stuffy holding cell for a few hours, until our arraignment came on the court’s schedule. At that session, we were all told that the charge would be trespassing and demonstrating without a permit. We were offered bail, and our lawyer explained that we would refuse it. Then we were released “on our own recognizance” which, translated from the legalese, meant that we were on our honor to show up in court at the appointed time. We were clearly not flight risks; in fact, we were looking forward to our day in court.

I was given a court date of August 6th,  and then sent home. That night, a friend of my brother, whom I had met three years earlier, was catching the evening news on television and happened to see the demonstration. He recognized me, and called out, “Hey, Joe! I think I just saw your brother getting arrested!” Well, our group planned to air our concerns to the public, and it seems we succeeded in doing that to the extent of being on national television, but I never considered that somebody I actually knew would be one of the viewers!

As it turned out, I didn’t have to appear in court; on June 30, all the charges were dropped. I got a notice in the mail in early July that read:

“This is to notify you that the above-mentioned case was dismissed by Judge [Harold A.] Greene on June 30, 1969 in accordance with his previous opinion in United States v. Nicholson (No.20210-59A) decided June 19, 1969. “

In that decision, the Court decided that the Park Service had not made a cogent case that the demonstrators were causing any interference with the normal affairs of either the Legislature or the tourists, and that the Park Police therefore had no reason to impede the demonstrators’ right of free speech 

An interesting, and perhaps significant footnote: Judge Greene would later be associated with another incident at the Capitol, far more violent than our demonstration. On November 7, 1983, a bomb exploded outside the Senate Chamber. It did $250,000 worth of damage, although the damage proved to be non-structural, and no one was injured. (The bombers made sure that the detonation would be after working hours, when nobody would be around.) Four years later, two women, already in prison for their part in similar politically inspired acts of destruction, were charged for their part in the bombing, The case would eventually be brought before Judge Greene. On December 7, 1990, he sentenced the two women to lengthy prison terms for conspiracy and malicious destruction of government property.  Bill Clinton would eventually commute one conviction just before he left office; the other had been paroled shortly before that, on August 6, 1999, after serving fourteen years in prison. 

What did that bombing have to do with what happened last week? It resulted in a strengthening of security measures in the Capitol, including a permanent closure of the area outside the Senate Chamber. That might have been one of the reasons why last week’s rioters might not have been able to penetrate the Chamber so easily. 

As I watched the coverage of last week’s riot, I was reminded once again of the Capitol’s role as a witness to history, and my small part in it. The rioters might have hoped to energize their base, and convince people far and wide of their theory that the election had been stolen from them. Did they change anybody’s mind about that? I don’t know. Did they change anybody’s mind about the character of Trump’s supporters? I don’t know that, either.

I hoped to change a few minds the day I made my own protest. I definitely changed my own mind about the role I could play in getting that dirty war shut down. But the differences are plain. We are seeing some of that mob now complaining that they’ve been “outed” by the media to their friends and family and employers, and were outraged at some of their fellows have been charged with crimes and subjected to police action. On the other hand, we were not afraid of having our reputations soiled, and of facing consequences; we calmly faced all of that, embraced it, and accepted the consequences with dignity. I feel good about that.

And in in our protest, nobody got hurt, and no damage was done to our national shrine. I feel good about that, too.

On Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Death

When Justice Ginsburg died, her final wish was that the process for choosing her successor would be delayed until after the next inauguration. In doing so, she hoped that it would be the deliberate decision of  a body that most truly represented the wishes of the American people, rather than a ploy by one party to grab as much power as they could from the opportunity.

Instead, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, has expressed his intent to push the decision through in record time, even before the election if possible, and certainly before the next inauguration. In doing so, he has expressly ignored the last request of a dying woman who, to the last, had the best interests of the American people at heart.  

He has repudiated the same logic that he himself used in thwarting Obama's nomination of  Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. (To refresh your memory, McConnell refused to even submit the nomination to the Senate, on the grounds that it was so close to a Presidential election that it be better if the debate were held until after the next president's inauguration, to better reflect the wishes of the people.)

In expressing the intent to rush a Supreme Court nominee to Senate approval, it seems to me that the Republican Party has clearly forfeited any semblance of decency and propriety in the interests of keeping their party and its values intact as long as possible. It obviously cannot be counted on to do what is right, what is moral, what is decent. 

Is there anybody out there that can defend this as the right course of action for any reason other than to advance the aims of the Republican Party? Is there anyone who can honestly think that it's a respectful homage to a distinguished servant of the people?

I have had enough of this. I will say once again that this nation has a cancer. It is a cancer that will eat away at the nation's most vital organs: the right of citizens to a fair election process, their right to equal protection under the law, the rights accorded to all human beings under international agreements, and the proper use of government to safeguard the health of its citizens. That cancer is the Republican Party, which has fought these things tooth and nail for the past half-century.

The cancer must be stopped, or it will kill us. Instead, we must kill it. I call for the death of the Republican Party and all its mechanisms. We must root it out, every cell and every poison that it creates.

You will say that there are many Republican lawmakers and governors who are good people, and who have their constituents' best interests at heart. If that is so, let them resign the party and run as candidates of another party, or as Independents. 

You will say that there are many Republican citizens who are good people, and do not hold the values that the current GOP embraces. Very well, then, let them stop subsidizing and supporting that party. Let them vote for Independents, or as members of another party. Let them make it clear to the rest of us that the Republicans can only survive on what corporate America gives them, and corporate America seldom has as much concern for you and me as it has for its own balance sheets. 

But, in the meantime, here is something that Republican Senators can do: nothing. They can refuse to approve any nomination for the Supreme Court until after the inauguration. In fact, it may not be necessary for them to take any action at all. They can simply refuse to show up, and thus deny the Senate the quorum it needs to conduct business. (There are ways to get around that, to be sure, but they will need to be tested for their validity, and these will take time.)

But here's the thing: this will be a Litmus test. If a Republican Senator even shows up on the floor for such an appointment hearing, he or she will be advertising their support for McConnell's agenda. They will be openly declaring themselves to be on the side of the forces of repression and against the forces of liberty. Pure and simple. We may not have the evidence to convict them of treason, but we have both the right and the duty to call them out and ask them to defend their actions, and to tell them that their ride on the Congressional gravy train is at an end.

So now it's time to see if the Republican Party can re-grow some of the integrity it displayed in the past, or whether it's asking to be torn down, stone by stone, until there's nothing left. Because if it can't reform, by God, that destruction is what I'll be helping to bring about. I promise to vote for no Republican, ever. I promise to donate to the campaigns of those who would remove Republicans from power. I promise not to be silent when Republicans abuse that power for their own ends. And I encourage each of you to do the same.

Let's kill this cancer. It's war.

The Parable of the Loaves and Fishes

©2020 by John LaTorre

There are two stories in the New Testament that tell how Jesus feeds the multitudes by miraculous means. In the first instance, he feeds five thousand people with five loaves of bread and two fishes. In the second instance, he feeds four thousand with seven loaves and two fishes. In each case, there is a lot of food left over.

For those of you who have trouble accepting the veracity of the story, I suggest an alternative more in keeping with the spirit of Christianity that Jesus espoused, a spirit that so many Christians have trouble accepting. It goes like this:

As usual, Jesus and his disciples had attracted a crowd, and he was concerned about how they were going to be fed if they got hungry. Some of his followers suggested that they send the people back to town, but Jesus said that there was enough food already there, so there was no need to send them away.

He knew that most of them were intelligent people, and reasoned that they would have some food of their own on hand, since one shouldn't walk into the desert without bringing enough food to tide them over. They'd already heard that his sermons would often go on for a long time, and they came prepared.

But there are always a few who aren't so intelligent, and it was these people that Jesus was worried about. He asked his disciples how much food they had on hand.

"Well, between us, we've got a few loaves of bread, and a couple of fishes. There's no way we can feed all of them with those."

"I've got an idea," Jesus said. "There are probably a few other people who brought more than they needed. Maybe if you ask them, they'd be willing to share."

So he had his disciples go around and ask each person how much food they had. If they had more than enough for themselves, or knew they could restock their stores back at their villages when they got home, the disciples asked them to turn over what they what they didn't need. That donation went into common baskets, into which the disciples had already put the loaves and fishes they'd brought.

The disciples pointed out that the bread would go stale anyway in another day or two, and the fish would go bad. So it wasn't that big a loss for the donors, and it would be a charitable act that Jesus would certainly approve of. For Jesus had told them plenty of times that selfishness had no place in his philosophy.

On the other hand, if some people truly didn't have enough to eat, the disciple told them to take what they needed from the common baskets.

If you've ever been at a potluck, you know that there's usually more food than anybody could eat, and there would be lots of leftovers. So it was in this case. All the people were fed, and it turned out that there was a lot left over, so much that it filled many baskets. The people were amazed, since they hadn't realized how many people could be fed when everybody shared what they had brought.

So Jesus gave the people a lesson in how, by sharing what they had, they could make the world a better place. Those episodes became garbled in repeated tellings, until they took the form of a divine miracle. And that's a shame, because what would have been a beautiful story about the value of sharing was transformed into a lesson in how you didn't have to worry about going hungry, at least while Jesus was around.

In a world where there's so much food that it rots in the field, yet some people go to bed hungry, it's a miracle that we can perform all by ourselves. Jesus showed us how.

Tropical Storm Doria or My Longest Day

                                             ©2020 by John LaTorre

Two of the strangest two days of my life actually seemed like one long day, because from the morning of August  28, 1971 to the morning of August 30, I got no sleep at all. 

It happened like this. A friend of mine and I attended the Philadelphia Folk Festival that year. Judy provided the car, and I provided the tent we’d be camping in … a pair of World War II surplus shelter halves with the necessary poles, ropes, and stakes. We arrived at Schwenksville on Friday, the 27th, in time to catch a few of the acts after driving up from Baltimore that morning. Then, after a picnic supper, we went to bed, and woke up to clear skies and some sunlight … the perfect weather for attending outdoor concerts.

The perfect weather didn’t last long, though. By noon, it was clouding over, and by late afternoon the rains came. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were caught in the tail end of Tropical Storm Doria, churning its way up the Atlantic seaboard. We got some dinner somewhere, probably from one of the food vendors there, but found that the evening’s entertainment had been cancelled because of the rain. So we went back to the tent.

And it rained, and rained, and rained. The strong wind blew the rain up the slanted side of the tent and into the gap formed by the two shelter halves, so that we were getting constant drips from the peak. And before long, the water was going over the campground in rivers. I dug a shallow trench around the tent, but it was easily defeated by the rushing water. So we huddled in the tent, in our soaked sleeping bags, trying to get even a little sleep. The water-softened ground could no longer keep the tent stakes secured in the constant wind, so I would have to get up every hour or so and re-stake the tent. There would be no rest for me that night.

By morning, I got out of the tent to find that ours, as leaky as it was, turned out to be one of the very few tents that hadn’t been knocked down by the storm. The campground looked like a disaster area. The rain had stopped, but it had turned the festival grounds into a sea of mud, and we didn’t wait around for the inevitable announcement that the festival would be cancelled for the weekend. We piled all our wet clothes and sleeping gear into her MG and headed for home, stopping first for breakfast somewhere on the road, and then at a coin-op laundry where we commandeered the biggest dryers we could find. A few hours later, the sleeping bags and most of our clothing were dry again, and we were back on the road. We probably had dinner when we got back to Baltimore, and she dropped me off at my apartment at sunset.

When I opened the door, the phone was ringing. It was my friend Bill Gross, whose father owned an appliance store in Brunswick, Maryland. Brunswick is located on the banks of the Potomac River, which can be prone to flooding. This year, with the rainwater left by Doria, the river was rising to historic levels, and it looked almost certain that it would flood at least part of the town. The appliance store was a two-story structure, with almost all of the refrigerators and washing machines and televisions on the first floor; the second floor was largely vacant.

Bill was trying to recruit as many friends as he could to help him and his father move what was on the first floor up to the second floor. Could I help? I told him I would, and gave up any hope of having that nice warm shower I was looking forward to. Bill was in front of my apartment house a half an hour later, in a post-war Chevrolet pickup truck he was restoring. The front seat was already filled, so I hopped into the cargo bed, thankful that the rain had stopped by then. We drove directly to Brunswick.

By the time we had arrived, the river had already overflown its banks and reached the edge of town. Bill’s father, known to the townspeople as “Judge Gross” or, simply, the Judge (since he was also the local magistrate), was waiting for us, and I think that Bill’s brother John Lynch was there, too. We were shown a hand-operated freight elevator, with which we would move all the stock from the first to the second floor, along with all the records of the business. The operation was painfully slow—we could only load one or two appliances at a time, and then it would be a question of somebody raising the car by means of a rope and a system of many, many pulleys. With luck, we could move one load of appliances every twenty minutes. So most of our time was spent in drinking coffee and waiting for the elevator car to return to the first floor for another load.

The store was right next to the tracks of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, which had a major yard in the town at the time. So a train would rumble through every once in a while, shaking the building. The house that Bill grew up in was right next door, and I realized how it came about that he could sleep through just about anything. (Earlier that year, he told me to wake him by phone so that he could drive us into Washington to get tickets for a Vladimir Horowitz concert, and he swore that he would put the phone under his pillow. I let the phone ring for over ten minutes without effect. Now I understood why.)

And I remember that, on the first floor, the Judge had set up a service area for the televisions and radios he sold, with storage racks for more electronic tubes than I’d ever seen in one place before (except, possibly, in the electronics wholesaler’s shop where I worked two years earlier). We debated whether to add the tubes to the load in the elevator car, or just carry them up the stairs, but either Bill or the Judge had decided that they weren’t going to be damaged by the floodwaters, so it wouldn’t be worth the effort to move them. 

And that was how I spent that night: wrestling appliances and televisions into the elevator, taking my turn at hauling the rope to lift the car, and keeping the coffee pot filled. From time to time, we’d go out and check on the progress of the river, which was slowly inching toward the store. By sunrise, the entire contents of the first floor (except for the tubes) had been moved to the second floor, including all the test equipment in the service area. We had done all we could, so Bill drove us back to Baltimore. On the way home, I was able to ride in the front seat, where I could look out the window and, in the light of the dawn, see acres and acres of flooded fields. It could have been mistaken for a huge lake, had it not been for the occasional church steeple or a house or barn cupola poking up from the surface of the water. It was then that I realized the extent of the destruction of the storm.

I phoned Paul Morris, my boss at the Baltimore City Health Department, and told him that I’d be late that morning, as I needed to shower and eat breakfast. When I told him about what I’d been doing for the past forty-eight hours, he said, “Forget about coming in. We’ll cover for you. Just get some rest, and we’ll see you tomorrow.” By that time, what was left of the caffeine in my body was starting to wear off, and his words were music to my ears. I took that nice warm shower I promised myself the previous day and then hit the sack.

As it turned out, that night’s work proved to be unnecessary. The river rose to the level of the top of the store’s front steps, Bill told me later, but the first floor itself stayed dry. After a week or two, all the stock had been returned to its proper place and the store was back in business. His dad was one of the lucky ones, though. Dorian proved to be the one of the costliest storms of that year’s hurricane season, breaking countless records for rainfall and causing seven deaths and an estimated $147.6 million in damages throughout the east coast, from North Carolina to Vermont. 

And it only cost me a couple of night’s sleep, and I had a story to tell now. So I was one of the lucky ones, too.

UP FRONT and Bill Mauldin

©2019 by John LaTorre

(This is an expanded version of something I posted on Facebook. I thought it deserved a more detailed review, so here it is.)

It's Veteran's Day today. I suggest you spend it doing what I often do: re-reading Bill Mauldin's remarkable Up Front.

I see the book from time to time in used bookstores, where it's usually filed under "Humor" because it consists mainly of the cartoons of soldiers that Mauldin drew for the Army's Stars and Stripes newspaper when he served in World War II. If you want to buy a new copy, you'll find that it's still in print after over seventy years, and still regarded as one of the definitive books of World War II.

Mauldin wasn't the first to chronicle a war in cartoons. There was a British artist named Bruce Bairnsfather whose work appeared during World War I and whose stock character of "Old Bill" would be the spiritual father of Mauldin's "Willie and Joe." Bairnsfather was a soldier himself, wounded by poison gas, shellfire, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Removed from the front lines, he convalesced in a London Hospital, where he began drawing war-related cartoons. The war was still going on after his discharge from the hospital, so he was reassigned to a training unit, where he came up with the "Old Bill" character that would make him famous. Unlike many of the cartoonists of the day, Bairnsfather strove for a realism that helped convey what the British soldier was actually seeing and experiencing, a technique that Mauldin admired and would soon make his own. Bairnsfather would eventually return to drawing cartoons for the Stars and Stripes and Yank magazine as an "official cartoonist" for the US Army during World War II, after which he sank into obscurity and died penniless in 1959.

While Bairnsfather was drawing for the Stars and Stripes, Mauldin was already making his own reputation, first with the 45th Infantry Division News and then the Stars and Stripes; by the end of the war, he would be drawing six cartoons a week for the latter newspaper. He accompanied the army's invasions and was eventually given a jeep and a free hand in visiting the front lines, as long as he kept drawing cartoons that reflected the common soldier's point of view. Like Bairnsfather, he would be wounded in action (by mortar fire) and be hospitalized, an occurrence that had the benefit of increasing his credibility with those soldiers. He ended the war with a Purple Heart, the Legion of Merit award and a Pulitzer Prize for his work.

But what sets the cartoons in Up Front apart from Bairnsfather's work is the commentary that accompanies the pictures. Mauldin's cartoons were often reprinted in newspapers back in the States, and the commentary was an attempt to let "the folks back home" know something about what inspired the cartoons, so they could make some sense of them. He did that, but he did something else, too: he wrote one of the classic books to come out of the Second World War.

"Me future is settled, Willie. I'm gonna be a perfessor on types o' European soil."

Mauldin tells about how ordinary farm boys and factory workers and clerks are transformed into combat soldiers, and how their lives change irrevocably. The soldier is no longer the boy who left home. He now lives with homesickness, rain, mud, sleeplessness, and "combat fatigue" (which is what they called PTSD back then). His sense of humor is now twisted, and his values are changed. Paradise for him now means dry socks, a hot meal, a warm bath, a stiff drink, and nobody shooting at him. He wonders if he has been forgotten by the folks back home. He gets wounded and spends a few days at a field hospital, but instead of going on leave, he goes back to his unit because he knows they need him there and he doesn't want to let his comrades down. He can feel pity and hatred and compassion all at once for the people he's fighting and for the civilian victims caught in the aftermath of the battles.

Mauldin relates all this flatly, without elaboration. You sense at once that he knows what he's talking about, because he's only telling you what he's seen and experienced it first-hand. He has a reporter's insight into what makes a good human interest story, and a storyteller's gift for telling it. He talks about good officers and bad officers, and the things that the Army is doing well or poorly.


In other hands, it might have come off as scathing indictments of the military, but Mauldin seldom editorializes. If you had asked him to do that, he would probably have responded with "Aw, shucks. I can't do that. I'm just a New Mexico farm boy who just happens to be able to draw a little bit." And he'd give you that broad farm-boy grin, and you'd walk away wondering how that rube could possibly be the same one who created such trenchant cartoons. Even with such a disarming persona, he would occasionally ruffle a feather or two, but he had a friend or two in high places that would take the heat for him. (One of his champions was General Eisenhower himself.)


After the war, he would continue to draw trenchant cartoons, eventually winding up as the editorial cartoonist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where he won a second Pulitzer Prize for his work. From there, he went on to the Chicago Sun-Times, which employed him for the rest of his career. When he retired in 1991, he was acknowledged as one of the great editorial cartoonists of the century.

He wrote a few more books, but his legacy will always be his first book, Up Front. It is, for my money, the best non-fiction book ever written on the American soldier in combat. Your library probably has a copy. Check it out and read it.

The Science of Flight

©2019 by John LaTorre

In 1957, the Russians sent a satellite into orbit, a feat that was beyond the capabilities of the United States at the time. This event sent shock waves through the American educational system. It may also, in some small way, have set the course of much of my life.

You see, one of the things that came out of this shock wave was a re-evaluation of the way science was taught in schools. The government declared that if we wanted to catch up to the Russians in the "Space Race," there had to be a greater emphasis in training students for a future in aerospace, at as early a level as they could absorb. It was with this grand intention that the government sent out educators to spark interest in aerodynamics.

My fourth-grade class was one of the beneficiaries of this new emphasis on aviation science. This would have been in the spring of 1958, before the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had been set up, but already the government was taking steps to put the educational program into effect. Some students in my class, myself included, received some special training in the form of two energetic men who evangelized the glories of aviation. The name of the program was "The Science of Flight" and was introduced, I am sure, not only in my elementary school but in hundreds, maybe thousands, of other elementary schools around the country.

Up to that point, my experience in the subject amounted to a few rides in the DC-3 passenger planes that Allegheny Airlines flew between Syracuse and Washington, D.C., a cross-ocean flight in something like a Pan Am  DC-6B, and the construction of numerous plastic models of rockets and space ships being offered at the time by Revell, Monogram, and Aurora. How that experience amounted to a résumé that qualified me for the class is more than I can explain, but there I was, watching the energetic men displaying models just like the ones I was building, along with model airplanes and cross-sections of airplane wings.

The two men handed out paper fresh from the mimeograph machine, still fragrant from the alcoholic ink. Crude purple line diagrams, looking as though they'd been sketched out only moments before the class began, indicated the form of an airplane's wings, with all the forces acting upon it: the upward arrow of lift, the downward arrow of gravity, the forward arrow of thrust, the backward arrow of drag. And I recall other fragrant pages with pictures of rockets on them, showing how all the stuff pouring out of the rear ends of these rockets created forward propulsion, even in the vacuum of space. But that's all I really remember about the class, apart from the fact that my ten-year-old mind kept drifting to the spring weather outside and how it could be put to better uses than sitting in a classroom.

But seeds were sown then. Years later, as I forsook a civil service career for a job as an instructor in the nascent hang gliding industry, I found myself teaching those principles of aerodynamics to my first-day students. Those old pictures came back to mind in the form of explanations of why hang gliders worked. There was no vector of thrust, of course, but there were my old friends drag and gravity and lift, still up to their old tricks. Gliding flight was simply a matter of transmuting the forces of gravity and lift into forward motion, all the while attempting to reduce drag to a minimum. It was all very clear to me.

Of course, it took many and many a flight on small hills and dunes before I could grant a hang glider the trust to bear my weight, so that I could launch one without a moment's doubt that it would obey those immutable laws of physics. And it would take longer to realize that, on a high, windswept cliff, I would be more comfortable strapped into a glider than merely standing on the precipice. But I submit that I would never have even taken up the sport if I hadn't been convinced that those laws of physics could be depended on.

Even later, when I started test flying prototypes and production models, that confidence never wavered, although I realized that this particular glider, on this particular day, might get it into its head to kill me if I allowed it to. It's not that the glider ignored the laws of aerodynamics, but that through a designer's misunderstanding of those laws or a flaw in the manufacturing process, it would apply its form to an unexpected interpretation of those laws, and it would be up to me to sense it and do what I needed to do to make those laws work for me and not for it.

As glider design progressed, designers would be looking for ways to increase lift and decrease drag with every trick they could think of, taking airfoil design and streamlining to lengths I could scarcely imagine when I took up the sport. These gliders conformed to exactly the same laws that the earliest, crudest ones did, but it was a deeper appreciation and a cleverer application of those laws that allowed us to use them to our advantage.

I haven't the slightest idea whether "The Science of Flight" inspired the number of would-be aeronautical engineers that it intended to, and whether it actually made a difference in the "Space Race" or beyond. But I have to give it credit for introducing the basics of aviation to me, so that flight would be not a mystery but a part of a rational, scientific world, where lift, like gravity, could taken on faith. It was with that same confidence in the laws, and the same trust in technology, that humans would fly higher and faster, and eventually land on the moon's surface itself. What seemed a miraculous leap in technology was really no miracle at all. Perhaps the real miracle happened long ago, when someone realized that our world operated on rational, scientific principles, and that once we figured those out, we could harness our imagination to the natural world, and see how far it would take us.