The Free Press Remembered 

NEW REEDS FOR AN OLDHORN                                     

by Ted Rhodes 

            I first found out about the Free Press one evening while crouching on the floor of a home in Lakeside.  Father McNulty was there--so were Leonard Goldstein, Jeff Gibson, Wilbur Stump, and a roomful of others.  It was a meeting of the newly formed Fort Wayne Committee to End the War.

            Brought together by Judi Black and Carol Sandler earlier in the Fall, the group had begun to organize a series of public rallies and "moratorium" days in Fort Wayne including a Christmas eve candle-lit procession featuring a black, wreath-draped casket we were to bear from the Federal Building to the County Courthouse.  Concerns voiced at our meetings sometimes swung the poor agenda through a myriad of topics including our growing cynicism about the government and about what we were being told--or not being told--by a news media which seemed more preoccupied with pentagon sources and body count than with a negotiated peace settlement.  On one particular night the talk led to a young college student named George Relue who mentioned that he and a few friends were thinking of launching some type of alternative newspaper.  He, Tom Lewandowski, and Jeff Wentz had been involved in circulating a little mimeographed sheet called The Touch Stone out at I.P.F.W.  (We called it I.U.-P.U. back then, and the whole campus fit into one building.)  They now wanted to print something a bit larger. 

            The year was 1969, a year which found several of us from the peace group also involved in another war, the Allen County War on Poverty.  Our government wasn't faring much better on that front either nor was the news media.  Media coverage of the Inner City was--at its best--sketchy and,at its worst, either biased or nonexistent.  The timing seemed right for an alternative newspaper.

            Winter came with an eight-hour battle of the bands benefit out at the campus sponsored by the Students For A Free Society.  Eight hundred dollars were raised.  It was enough to get Babylon Publishers underway, and a commercially zoned house soon was rented on Barr Street directly across from the downtown YMCA and two blocks up from City Hall.  This one time livery stable-auto shop-beauty salon would become home to both the newspaper and to me, as George had asked me to join him.  I had accepted the offer and was present at 1017 S. Barr the evening forty people showed up to get the mighty presses rolling. 

            There was much disagreement over the selection of an appropriate name for the paper---not everyone concurring with George's fondness for "The Philadelphian," a rather oblique reference to a famous but unconfirmed epitaph of W.C. Fields.  Finally "The Fort Wayne Free Press" was taken as a compromise despite the fact that none of our issues would ever be free nor would Babylon Publishers ever actually own a printing press or even a waxer. 

            Our first issue was printed out in Roanoke and came out on February 11, 1970 as an eight-page tabloid selling for two bits.  The front page featured three news stories: the United Farm Workers' grape boycott, the local Christmas Eve peace march, and the recent firing of an I.P.F.W. Sociology professor named Joel Horowitz. 

            Advertisements in our paper were never bountiful, and what little money we were able to garner went fast.  Staff members would contribute five or ten dollars a piece each issue for the next year or so to cover printing expenses.  We changed to a printer down in Fairmont, then to another one north in Kendallville.  We had to move our operations to Adams Street when our Barr street home was leveled and turned into a parking lot.  We moved twice more before finally locating in an old tavern building belonging to the East Wayne Street Center. 

            During the first year we managed to publish only eleven issues of our so-called "biweekly."  Hopefully our politics were more correct than our mathematics.  A few of our less loyal readers called us an Underground Rag, but back then we preferred the term "open collective" and proclaimed right on our masthead that we were working towards "non-violent social change through active communication and community organization."  It gave us license either to write the news or to become the news, and I can safely say we did a little of both.

            We covered a lot of ground.  There were the peace marches and the confrontations: at a rally outside Grissom Air Force Base we were surrounded by members of the American Legion and the Ku Klux Klan; a state wide convention of the American Legion at the nearby Sheraton left us three broken windows; when Paul Mack of the Beaver Fifty-Five came up from Indianapolis to address a local peace rally, several Free Press staff members ended up on the front page of The News-Sentinel.

            There was early concern, too, about the poverty program, where Free Presser John Perlman and I worked.  We printed a focus on local poverty facts.  We wrote about migrant workers, the Township Trustee, and slumlords in the Inner City.  We covered the trial of black militant David Williams, arrested along East Wayne for raking leaves.  We ran an article by Wayman Lindsay on Fort Wayne and Black Panthers.  And several months after the death of Fred Hampton and the opening of the Conspiracy Eight trial, a few of us drove to Chicago to attend the First Annual Conference in Defense of the Black Panther Party.             

            When Mayor Zeis imposed a curfew upon the city due to supposed extraordinary "events" in the Inner City, it was Free Press reporters who were thrown out of the police station and threatened with arrest while trying to investigate a police report that a squad car had been hit by sniper fire.  It was a police report that could not be substantiated.  Judge Miller then set up a court of martial law and ran several hundred persons through it in blatant disregard to people's rights.   

            In the beginning they called us "hot heads."  When we wrote about the tear-gassing by police of black youth in the Inner City, they added "trouble makers" to the label.  When it was white youth getting tear gassed at Foster Park, such accusations reached their peak with the City attorney telling the other media in town The Free Press had instigated the riot itself.  We proved such charges were unfounded however and worked behind the scenes to help resolve the Foster Park incident.  In doing so we gained much credibility.

            The credibility of the Free Press steadily grew in the community as we expanded our coverage to women's issues, equal rights, labor, politics, poetry, the criminal justice system, consumer advocacy, health care, gay pride, music, theatre, film, and the environment--along with articles on astrology, of course, and the essentials of making good yogurt.  It was the Free Press that interviewed Rev. Langhinrichs upon his return from the Paris Peace talks, and our "Letters to Home" column featuring interviews with returning Vietnam Vets resulted in the formation of a local chapter of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.  Our involvement in the Mexican-American community lead to the creation of a second newspaper, JOAQUIN, which appeared both as insert to our paper and as a separate paper.  Our article on the income Allen County Sheriff Robert Bender recorded with the I.R.S. resulted in a civil suit against him and his eventual departure from the county.  And we wrote about what the other news media wrote.

            On a local talk show WANE-TV General Manager Reed Chapman once called the Fort Wayne Free Press the most objective news media in town.  It might have been an overstatement, but at the time it was an indication that the powers-that-be were beginning to take us seriously--or at least to read us.  It was safe to say that the mayor, the Police Chief, the City Council, the students out at the campus, a few folks at the Urban League, and more than a few folks at Dave's Hot Dogs were dog-earring pages of The Free Press.  We were making a fair number of rounds for an outfit with a circulation of less than two thousand newspapers every two weeks. 

            Despite the fact that The Free Press never reached financial high ground, it continued to publish for several more years until the mid-seventies, when it finally ran out of its last resources.  By then most of the Free Press staff members had moved on to tilt at other windmills, to raise families or to hold jobs that actually paid in genuine U.S. currency.*           

            If the local media had been doing their job, there never would have been a JOAQUIN, a Frost-Illustrated, or the Fort Wayne Free Press.  It is disheartening to realize the need for a Free Press still exists in Fort Wayne, but it is exhilarating to learn that the spirit still lives.  Welcome back!

(Ted Rhodes (AKA General Bull) moved back to California where he found a job in the film industry.  He lives with his family in Carpinteria where he spends his spare time still tilting at local newspapers and at developers trying to turn the land into one giant Southtown Mall.  A portion of his article first appeared in the January 11, 1973 issue of The Fort Wayne Free Press.)

[* George Relue was killed in a motorcycle accident at the age of twenty-one.  Susie Cook got married and moved to Roanoke to raise a family along with juggling a full-time job as a social worker.  Tom Lewandowski started up a family, ran successfully for New Haven City Council and is the current president of The Northeast Three Rivers Central Labor Council of the AFL-CIO.  Jim Defronzo (AKA Fishcakes) is Assoc. Prof. of Sociology at the University of Connecticut-Storrs and author of a new book, Revolutions And Revolutionary Movements.  Over 5000 students have now taken his course on world revolutions.  John Perlman got hired as a reporter for The News-Sentinel, later moved back to the D.C. area, and for awhile published his own newsletter before becoming a school teacher.  Chuck Graney became a geolist down in Texas and then quit that to try his hand at horses and saw mills and apple orchards in the woods of Indiana.  Dennis Winters moved to Boston.  Pat Fisher became Pat Smallwood and the director of the Victim's Assistance Office.  Fittie Rogers got a job at the State School where he still works when not delivering sociological tracts on Reggae culture.  Frank Yancey, Jr. learned Chinese in the Air Force, returned to I.U. for a degree in Business, and presently lives with his children in Lisle, Illinois where he works as a consultant for UPP Business Systems. Tommy Alvarez headed south for television work in Naptown.  Mary Doherty moved west and headed up the Division of Alcohol Programs for the City/County in San Francisco.  Allen Classen chased a newspaper career out to the Northwest.  Jim Whetstone moved to Tuscon to drive a taxi, where he still keeps all his cash in a coffee can.  Michael Patterson currently is the managing editor of Frost-Illustrated, Fort Wanye’s black weekly.  Jimmy Williams went back to prison.  Others scattered with less of a trace.  Virginia Petit was sighted a year ago in town, but Chip Kigar, Al Hein, Diane Pearsall, and the Hapners have left no footprints.  Gus Makreas must be out there somewhere too, still gazing at the stars.]  

    Reprinted from the resurrected Fort Wayne Free Press, circa 1991