THE FREE VENICE BEACHHEAD and Me - 35 years of the Free Venice
Beachhead
By Chuck
Bloomquist
My first contact with Venice
was in 1951 when some fellow Marines and I came here to have a last night of
revelry before shipping out to Korea. What a great party; what a great
place!
I next returned in 1956 when I was
considering UCLA to further my education. I figured out that I could live in
Venice on my government pension and take the bus to the campus. However, I
didn't like the academic offerings at UCLA and so went to Berkeley
instead.
In 1959 I was back in Venice,
living at 28 ? Sunset Avenue and working at Packard-Bell Electronics Corporation
at Olympic and Bundy. Venice was a happening place with scores of beatniks,
music, Pacific Ocean Park, Lawrence Welk and Lawrence Lipton, John and Anna
Haag's poetry and politics at the Venice West Café on Dudley, The Gas
House, Big Daddy (Eric Nord), etc., etc. My interests, however, tended more to
the fairer sex. In 1961 I was
married.
After a year in Santa Monica
and four in Ocean Park we bought a house in Venice for $25,000. We raised six
kids here, all of whom are a credit to the community. And my wife and I are
still together and still in the same house. In addition to making a living and
raising kids, we worked on various community endeavors - the Ocean Park
Community Center, the original Venice Town Council, the Canal Festivals, and a
couple of 4th of July Parades. We came to know and greatly respect many of the
Venetian activists.
I was particularly
drawn to The Beachhead. At one point I made some overtures to join the
collective but was told, by one who shall remain nameless, that the collective
didn't need any dilettantes (such as I was presumed to be) mucking up the
process.
In May of 1977 I had a hip
replacement to ameliorate an old injury and was on the disabled list when I saw
the "Up for Grabs" issue of The Beachhead with its invitation to take it over.
I've always favored a free press, over the government if it came to that, so I
said, "What the hell," and went to the initial meeting. Ye gods! There must have
been two dozen people in Arnold Springer's upstairs living room on Electric
Avenue. Powerful people, with pagers and professional experience and clouds of
suggestions for resuscitating the old paper.
I felt that my nameless critic might
have been right, but I knew Arnold who seemed to be facilitating things so I
decided to come to the next meeting. This one was not nearly so well attended
and involved actually getting a paper ready to publish.
Over the next few meetings and issues
of The Beachhead, the collective shook out to a fairly stable and competent
group. In our first few issues we got our act together and established our
process.
Each issue was put together at
three Saturday meetings, although there was ad selling and collecting, research,
and typing, between meetings.
Our
first meeting recapped the last issue and laid out what articles, photos, and
stuff we were going to run.
Authors were
asked to read their articles. The collective read the submitted poetry, which
always arrived in avalanches. At the second meeting we got all the inputs
together and created headlines in a fun brainstorming session. One of my
favorites headed an article on a Japanese factory worker killed by an errant
robot. Bob Wells suggested "ET TU, D2." Another was Lynn Bronstein's head for an
article on Arafat: "Yassir, That's My Baby." Oh well, maybe you had to be there.
This was before computers. We relied
on typewriters and press type, extracting and pasting each letter to make a
headline, sort of like preparing ransom notes. The articles and ads were pasted
up on boards using wax so they could be moved. When finally laid out, the boards
were delivered to a printer in Glendale. Arnold retrieved them in his pickup and
members of the collective then delivered them to various stores and public
places. We usually ran 10,000 copies.
I
kept the books, logging in receipts and paying bills. I also harassed people who
were late to pay for ads. Tomas Burgers was one of our best advertisers, but
would never cough up his money without several personal visits.
My best collection story, however,
involved a small ad that we inherited from a fellow in Toronto, Canada offering
books for sale at a discount. Although we ran his $5 ad monthly and billed him,
he never paid. It turned out that my work required that I give a technical paper
at a Futures Conference in Toronto. While there, I called on the recalcitrant
advertiser in his office on a Saturday morning. He was stunned. I think he
actually made some partial payment, but definitely withdrew the ad.
We really pulled out the stops for the
100th issue - 28 pages with a special photo poster. This was September 1978. In
December 1978 we published the 10th anniversary issue, in which, among other
things, we listed all 160 collectivists who had a hand in putting the paper out
for the first decade.
Although the
collective membership changed from month-to-month, I remained a part of it until
November 1982. The photograph, at the right, taken in late 1979 is
representative of the staff during the five years I was with the
paper.
Others who were frequent members
of the collective during this period were Osah Harmon, Moe Stavnezer, Larry
Sullivan, and Elizabeth Elder. We put the paper together in Arnold's living room
on Electric for the first couple of years and then moved to Moe's place on
Amoroso for a while. Rol Morrow then offered us the upstairs of the Fox Venice
Theater for our meetings and production. We accepted and it worked well offering
ample space to store things between meetings. We dealt with all the hot issues
of the day, both local and in the world at large.
We solicited ads from local merchants,
held fund-raising parties, and sold tee shirts and posters to keep the paper
afloat. It was fun, worthwhile and rewarding. These were five of the most
interesting years of my life, But I was turning fifty and my large family
deserved more attention than was compatible with three missed Saturdays every
month. So I resigned. The collectivists, in a special tribute, printed an Extra
issue of The Free Venice Beachhead celebrating my fiftieth birthday.
The Beachhead, of course, continued
after I left and although it eventually fell on hard times, now, thanks to the
current collective, it is back and better (well, at least as good) as ever. I am
pleased to count myself among its loyal readers and supporters.
Posted: Mon - December
1, 2003 at 03:35 PM