Chapter Seventeen
I had owned a Plymouth Barracuda which wasn't worth much so I didn't use it as a trade in on the nifty GTO I drove to San Francisco and which was subsequently repossessed there.
I was getting tired of walking everywhere I went so I decided to go back to Dallas, retrieve the 'Cuda, and return to Vancouver within a few days. A week, tops.
Problem was when I got back to Dallas it was gone. I'd left it parked at the Oak Lawn house. The first thing I did was to report it stolen to the cops but they said it had been over six months and the chances of my finding it were nil.
My former house mates had pretty much scattered by my return; though I learned through the grapevine a later tenant had loaded it up with his goods and towed like a trailer to, of all places, San Francisco!
I made a few calls and finally tracked him down.
I should have tried to become a great and famous Private Eye or bounty hunter or something.
He understood how pissed off I was and agreed on paying $400 for the car. I alerted the police that I'd found it and had been paid for it and all was well.
Case closed.
Two years later I was a student at Elkins Institute of Technology in Dallas learning how to be the great and famous radio disc jockey I’d “trained” for in front of Coke’s.
One morning I was called out of class to the administration office. I was told there were two FBI agents waiting to speak to me.
I spent a few very nervous moments as I walked downstairs and down the corridor to the front office wondering just what the hell the FBI wanted me for.
I hadn’t done anything that was worthy of their scrutiny; but when the FBI comes calling, even a saint might do a little sweating.
I'd never robbed a bank! And they couldn't pin the Lindberg baby on me.
Come to think of it, maybe I was the Lindberg baby!
Ok, I confess: I stole the habit of using my first initial and middle name from their boss Mr/Ms J Edgar Hoover.
But did that require two G-men to warn me off?
Two very big men in dark suits were waiting for me.
Why can’t they wear a nice plaid once in awhile?
They introduced themselves and asked me if I had ever owned a 1965 Plymouth Barracuda.
I told them I had one back in 1969 and that I'd sold it to a fella in 1970. Why?
"Well, we arrested him in Chicago last night for car theft and he's in jail up there right now. Did you report the car stolen?" one asked.
"Yes, but I reported it not stolen right away, and I explained to the police I'd been paid for it and there was no crime committed after all", I confessed.
Well, it hadn't been removed from the national computer that keeps track of such things and when the plates were run by a cop in Chicago it came up stolen.
I told them the guy was innocent and to let him go because he was the legal owner, now.
They agreed, saying he'd told them the car was in his father's name. He even had the title. They just wanted to make sure.
They apologized for disturbing me and vanished into thin FBI air. Poor guy.
Lesson: Don’t steal cars.
I never made it back to Vancouver. Instead I hung around Dallas; and, with the help of my friend and perennial mentor George Toomer, launched Claxon Magazine: a pop-culture alternative.
All the underground press of the day was spouting the "Off the Pigs; Sex Drugs and Rock and roll; and Fucking in the Streets!" philosophy popular with the more radical of the hippies then. Except in Paris, the latter seemed to be only a pipe dream.
But we weren't above spoofing either genre.
I originally wanted to call it "Symposium" and make it a collection of new ideas but George didn't think anyone'd know what that meant. We were sitting in a little coffee shop cum lunch counter and, as I gazed about the room, I just started throwing out words that might make a nifty title for our new rag: The Doorway, The Barrier, The Overhead Light, The Grill, The Pantyhose.
An old timey car drove by -a model T sort of contraption- and I noticed its horn.
"Claxon" sounded right and it stuck: a horn heralding a new age.
George was "pictures" and I was "words". He'd do all the art and layout and production work and I'd do all the editorial work. That meant George did all the work.
George Toomer and J David
Art "Smedley" Harding would write humorous pieces. Ken Word wrote reviews. I wrote whatever I felt was important at the time.
Yet-to-be Presidential spoiler Ross Perot was peddling his philosophy to anyone who'd listen and, mainly because it was his battle cry, "United We Stand" suddenly became a despised epithet amongst free thinking counter-culturists.
Claxon wasn't above poking fun at anything and was pretty good at being more cerebrally "underground" than the underground. It was Smedley's idea to switch two letters around and we came up with "Untied We Stand" which said it all for freedom. We published it as our motto and the dyslexic in-crowd tried to have us burned at the stake for going over to the other side.
Lesson: People will see what they want to see.
We only published four issues, but the final issue had a nude Chastity Fox, an area stripper/model, on the cover giving the finger over our caption: "X-mas is Christmas With an X Rating".
Her right breast was fully exposed.
That shot was published in the Dallas Morning News -uncensored- in a favorable article about the alternative press in Dallas. It was even broadcast on A.H. Belo's WFAA-TV, Channel 8: one of the most conservative stations in Texas and the country.
Understand that in 1970 Dallas, nudity was a major no-no. Grass was still a felony bust. Fellatio and cunnilingus between married couples was illegal. The Musical “Hair” was banned there.
And broadcasting exposed female nipples on A.H. Belo airwaves, for any reason, was probably #1 on their list of things never to do.
But Claxon got it done! We did what all the holier-and-hippier-than-thou competition would have given their community bongs to do. We broke the booby barrier!
The secret lay in the subtlety of the photograph. Although her nipple was clearly and discernibly visible, it didn’t really look like a nipple at all; but more of a shadow upon casual observance. And she was resting her chin on her fist, making the single-finger salute less obvious.
Oh, we were very happy with ourselves.
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