Starting in April 1969 the San Francisco Express Times changed its name to Good Times, publishing under that title with a substantially different editorial policy, lasting until August 2, 1972.[2] In 2021, Newsweek referred to Good Times as an "anti-police and pro-violence" publication.[3]
Publication history
Express Times
Marvin Garson was a graduate of the University of California and a veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, where he edited an FSM newsletter, Wooden Shoe, along with his wife Barbara Garson. He started the Express Times with co-founder Bob Novick.[4] Some members of the San Francisco Oracle collective were also involved in the paper's birth.
The Express Times featured a weekly cooking column, 30 Recipes Suitable for Framing, written by Alice Waters and illustrated by David Lance Goines.[5] Regular contributors included Todd Gitlin, Greil Marcus, Paul Williams, Sandy Darlington, and Marjorie Heins.[6] Catherine Yronwode, later known for her work in the comics industry, co-wrote a weekly astrology column for the Express Times. Staff photographers were Jeffrey Blankfort, followed by Nacio Jan Brown and Robert Altman. Cartoons and illustrations were provided by Jaxon, the syndicated editorial cartoons of Ron Cobb, and Sharon Rudahl.[7]
During the year of its existence, highlights included extensive on-the-scene coverage of student rioting and the prolonged strike at San Francisco State University, and Lenny Heller's serialized novel of guerrilla warfare in the United States, Berkeley Guns.
In December 1968 editor Marvin Garson spent 20 days in jail in Chicago as a result of his participation as a journalist in a police and protester skirmish during the Democratic National Convention in August.[8]
Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act show that the Express Times was one of a number of underground newspapers successfully infiltrated by the FBI, which had a paid informant on the staff.[9]
Good Times
This article is about the San Francisco-based newspaper. For the Santa Cruz-based newspaper, see Good Times (newspaper).
Cover of Good Times (April 9, 1971)
The renamed Good Times paper debuted in April 1969; the all-volunteer editorial collective was made up of residents of the Good Times Commune.[10] Under this regime, the paper's contents and publication schedule were a good deal more relaxed than when it was the San Francisco Express Times.[citation needed]
Jesse Drew of the San Francisco digital archive Found SF described Good Times this way:
Good Times was the paper the radical left depended upon to keep up with the anti-war movement, the trials of political prisoners like the Soledad Brothers and Angela Davis, political corruption in San Francisco, and general communal information like vegetarian recipes and holistic health care. The all-volunteer collective put out Good Times on a regular bi-weekly, weekly, and then twice-a-week basis until sputtering out in the summer of 1972.[11]
Underground cartoonist Harry Driggs served as Good Times's art director and staff cartoonist; he recruited fellow underground cartoonists Trina Robbins[12] and Guy Colwell[13] as contributors (Collwell, in fact, joined the Good Times Commune).[13] Writer Nina Serrano wrote a series of articles on the Los Siete trial and contributed poetry to Good Times.
When Good Times decided to accept pornographic display advertising and classified sex trade advertising in early 1970, feminist staff members staged an action to prevent this from happening.[citation needed] When male staffers at Good Times tried to put out a special "Sex" issue, women staffers stole the mock-ups and page layouts and burned them.[citation needed]
Legacy
In 1977, Allan Francovich and Gene Rosow produced and directed a documentary on the newspaper titled San Francisco Good Times, which included appearances by such notable figures as Pete Townsend of The Who and Timothy Leary.[14]
Connection to the Zodiac Killer case
The History Channel's 2009 television program MysteryQuest speculated that a member of the Good Times Commune, Richard Gaikowski (1936–2004), was a possible suspect in the unsolved San Francisco Zodiac Killer case.[10] His appearance resembled a composite sketch of the killer, and a police dispatcher who had been contacted by the Zodiac, identified a recording of Gaikowski's voice as being the same as the Zodiac's.[15]
In 2021, Newsweek published an article that also mentioned Gaikowski in relation to the Zodiac killings.[3]
Underground comix are small press or self-published comic books that are often socially relevant or satirical in nature. They differ from mainstream comics in depicting content forbidden to mainstream publications by the Comics Code Authority, including explicit drug use, sexuality, and violence. They were most popular in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s, and in the United Kingdom in the 1970s.
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Trina Robbins is an American cartoonist. She was an early participant in the underground comix movement, and one of the first female artists in that movement. She is a member of the Will Eisner Hall of Fame.
Guy Colwell is an American painter and occasional underground cartoonist. Although not African-American himself, Colwell's comics often portray blacks in strong roles in stories of life on the streets. His "Figurative Social Surrealist" paintings reflect on the human condition, economic inequality, injustice, and alienation from the natural world.
The Berkeley Tribe was a radical counterculture weekly underground newspaper published in Berkeley, California from 1969 to 1972. It was formed after a bitter staff dispute with publisher Max Scherr and split the nationally known Berkeley Barb into new competing underground weeklies. In July 1969 some 40 editorial and production staff with the Barb went on strike for three weeks, then started publishing the Berkeley Tribe as a rival paper, after first printing an interim issue called Barb on Strike to discuss the strike issues with the readership. They incorporated as Red Mountain Tribe, named after Gallo's one gallon finger-ringed jug of cheap wine, Red Mountain. It became a leading publication of the New Left.
Sabot was a brief-lived underground newspaper published in Seattle, Washington by the Seattle Liberation Front from September 11, 1970 to January 13, 1971. Sixteen weekly issues were published in all. The paper was started as a replacement for the Seattle Helix which had published its last issue in June 1970. As with its predecessor, Sabot was from the beginning torn by political dissension within the radical political collective, centering on an internal struggle with feminists over issues of male chauvinism and editorial control and direction. After a few months the divided staff was no longer able to get an issue out and the newspaper quit publishing.
The San Diego Free Press was an underground newspaper founded by philosophy students of Herbert Marcuse at the University of California, San Diego in November 1968, and published under that title biweekly until December 1969, when it became the weekly Street Journal starting with its 29th issue. The paper's contents were a mix of radical politics, alternative lifestyles, and the counterculture, reflecting in part Marcuse's Frankfurt School Marxist/Freudian ideas of cultural transformation.
John Charles Bryan was an American newspaper publisher, editor, and journalist best known for founding and running the Los Angeles alternative newspaper Open City. He also published the San Francisco-based Open City Press and the Sunday Paper. In 1981, the San Francisco Chronicle called Bryan "The King of the Underground Press." Warren Hinckle of the Chronicle called Bryan a "one-man-newspaper newspaperman," noting that his apartment was crammed with printing equipment. Paul Krassner said that Bryan was a journalist in the tradition of I.F. Stone.
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