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There was a “rehearsal
dinner” get-together the day before, an organized morning bicycle ride, an afternoon gathering on the beach, the party
itself, the morning after brunch, etc. Personally I was rather curious but truth be told a tad anxious, so I only signed on
for the main event. The evening included the requisite ID badges complete with
our wild and crazy 1970 yearbook photos, a photo disk with lots more reminders of who we once were and a couple of other
lame souvenirs. Fortunately the people I most wanted to reconnect with also decided to attend.
Forty something years ago a small group of idealistic
young Long Beach High School students with lots of stuff on their minds got together to exercise their freedom of speech and
publish an alternative “underground” newspaper. Frox started out
as an unassuming plain-Jane affair printed on a hand cranked A.B. Dick Ditto machine.
You may remember these classics – the kind in which the material to be printed was typed or hand drawn on a “master”
which transferred the monochromatic purple image to a glossy piece of 8 1/2 x 11 paper leaving a faint whiff of the characteristic
solvent that kids would invariably inhale, killing off a bunch of brain cells as the teacher’s handouts were passed
out. There were only a limited number of pages you could print before the ink
on the master sheet became too faint to read so the circulation was restricted to about 150 copies – not nearly enough
for the school population of 1000+. The content varied from articles on pop culture
to opposition to the Vietnam War.
One of my favorites from the early days was an impromptu interview that my friend
Harvey and I did with B.B. King. We had gone to see B.B. in
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a relatively small club in
New York City before he had successfully “crossed over” and become popular within the established pop (i.e., white)
music scene. So the place wasn't too packed and before his first set
we somehow scared up enough chutzpah to tell the club manager that we were reporters for our high school newspaper and would
like to interview the King of the Blues. Miraculously he agreed to meet us back
stage between sets and we scrambled to think of what the hell we would ask him. We
started out really nervous but despite our age and naiveté, B.B. was the perfect gentlemen and helped us out by answering
our short questions with loquacious answers and interesting stories.
For some strange reason the
high school principal didn’t think our unsupervised journalistic endeavor was healthy for the fragile minds of the student
body and he declared Frox off limits on school property. When we chose to ignore
his arbitrary ruling he promptly suspended anyone involved in its publication or distribution.
Outraged, we took our fight to the Board of Education but were unceremoniously rebuffed. So we retaliated by contacting the New York Civil Liberties Union which agreed to take up our case. After a law suit was prepared the School District backed down, the principal swallowed
his pride, and we were given permission to distribute the paper as long as we agreed to avoid publication of libelous and/or
obscene material and we agreed to take on a “faculty advisor” (we found one who was totally sympathetic and adopted
a hands-off approach). The publicity surrounding our case including a detailed
story in Newsday only helped stimulate demand for Frox.
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