History

Comics and crosswords are some of the most interesting parts of the daily newspaper, especially when you’re reading archival issues. Here’s the “Daily Crossword” from the Charlottetown Guardian, February 3, 1949, from a beta version of IslandNewspapers.ca. I’ve prepared a PDF version for those of you who want to print it out and party like it’s 1949. (I’m particularly partial to 4 down).

The opening of a brand new Exploratorium yesterday in San Francisco got me thinking about its old home in the Palace of Fine Arts and a facsinating event that took place there 42 years ago this June.

In the Whole Earth Epilog, published in October 1974, Stewart Brand spins a long, rambling, and compelling tale of the “Whole Earth” enterprise over the previous three years, starting from the story of “Demise Party” in June 1971:

So, in June 1971, we had the Demise Party celebrating the self-termination of The Whole Earth Catalog, and all in all it was a rout. 1500 people showed up. The Exploratorium staff had their museum weirding around us at full steam. A band called The Golden Toad made every kind of music from bluegrass to bellydance.  A non-stop non-score volleyball game competed for loudest activity with balloons full of inhalable laughing gas. And then at midnight Scott Beach announced from the stage that these here two hundred $100 dollar bills, yes, $20,000, were now the property of the party-goers. Just as soon as they could decide what to do with them.

The party was reported on in great detail for the Rolling Stone article “The Last Twelve Hours of the Whole Earth Catalog” (issue #86) which began:

The Demise of Whole Earth was a wake, and like any good wake it lasted until early morning, what with 1500 people haggling over the deceased’s estate.

The estate – a wad of 200 $100 bills – was a surprise “educational event” sprung by Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand on the former Whole Earth employees, contributors, and reviewers who had come to celebrate the publication of The Last Whole Earth Catalog. By the time of the party, June 12th, they had probably all digested an earlier education event, Brand’s decision a year and a half ago to stop publishing his successful Catalog this summer.

The $20,000, however, proved too much to deal in a single night, and by 8 AM the 1500 guests dwindled to 20. In the end the 20 delegated one of their number to hold the money, which itself had dwindled to $14,905, until they could reconvene to decide what to do with it. He stuffed the money into his jeans and drove off into the sunrise.

That article, by Thomas Albright and Charles Perry, was reprinted in early editions of The Seven Laws of Money (itself a compelling read).

Miraculously, there is video of the Demise Party; you can see it in this montage of news clippings and other Whole Earth material at about 23:20:

The invitation to the Demise Party appeared in the March 1971 Whole Earth Catalog supplement (conveniently available online):

Among those who attended was Richard Brautigan, as related here:

The evening had just gotten started (hosted by Scott Beech, music by The Golden Toad) when all the glitterati of S.F. started showing up, including Richard Brautigan and another man passing out a “free poem” entitled “Lichen.”  I tried to get the two of them to autograph the poem, which was printed on legal-sized, greenish paper. Both refused. Instead of stamping the backs of hands (so people could come and go), we had these stacks of self-stick diffraction gratings from Edmund Scientific to put on people’s foreheads. Both refused.

In Stewart Brand’s own tale of the party and its aftermath, he goes on to relate the story of POINT Foundation and its mechanism for handing out grants (emphasis mine):

It was not a bad overture for the founding of POINT, the foundation that took over from Portola the dispensing of Whole Earth’s soon sizable income. Dick Raymond and I appointed a board consisting of ourselves, Huey Johnson from the Nature Conservancy, Mike Phillips from Glide Foundation, Jerry Mander (radical ad-man), and Bill English from Xerox. The seventh director was always a guest, called “Elijah,” different each time we met.

The first thing we did was give up on my “Mountain Fantasy” notion of a bifurcated high hard community - too pushily experimental.  Instead we focussed on being a needle in the gaseous foundation world.  We ruled that none of us could be with POINT more than three years.  We dispensed (Jerry Mander’s brilliant stroke) with group decision about money - each director had $55,000 a year to give out at his unchallenged discretion.   We funded quickly and without fuss, usually preferring to do without proposals and such.  We held board meetings on salmon boats at sea, in tipis, in Glide’s sex room, at the Black Panther school in Oakland.  And our grants were maybe no worse than other people’s - they’re listed in entirety in the Summer ‘74 Co-Evolution Quarterly if you’re interested.

Huey Johnson and Jerry Mander, who fought constantly, were the best funders.  Dick Raymond and I were terrible.  Now there’s mostly a new set of directors, whose qualities we shall see.   The main lesson I learned was: it’s not enough to give money to someone who’s very good.   They must also be in the grip of an overwhelming idea which is very good; otherwise a hideous paralysis will take them over and, in addition, freeze your friendship.

My parents owned copied of the Whole Earth Catalog, and I’ve accumulated my own collection over the years (to the point where I’ve had enough extra copies that I’ve been able to share them with fellow travellers); I was a Whole Earth Review subscriber in later years, and a Well member too. If there’s an underlying rhyme to my reason, its roots can likely be found somewhere in the Whole Earth enterprise, for which I owe Brand and his coconspirators a great debt.

Regular readers may recall a project I undertook last month to create a montage of covers of The Guardian newspaper from 1912 to mark the newspaper’s 125th anniversary. It only seemed appropriate that, when 2012 ended, I would do the same thing for the 2012 volume of the paper.

So I wrote some code – you can grab it here and try it out for yourself – to scrape cover thumbnails from the Pressdisplay.com site where they are cached for use in presenting the digital edition of the newspaper, then stitched the images togother using ImageMagick and the result looks like this (you can download a 62 MB JPEG image or look at this version in zoom.it if you want to explore in more detail):

Here’s an undated postcard from Charlottetown (from from here via here, originally from Doug Murray, Postal Historian), showing “Sunnyside,” along Grafton Street between Queen and University:

And here’s a front-page illustration from the September 28, 1904 issue of The Guardian, showing the paper’s home on the occasion of the installation of a new press (a Cox Duplex Angle-Bar Press).

It is ironic that, in a front page story celebrating a new generation of printing technology, the newspaper spelled its own name wrong.

The Guardian is the middle building in the postcard above, later the home of Holman’s, which was later torn down to make the Grand Homburg Hotel. While generally destroying the block and “preserving” the Holman building in only the weakest sense, the Grand Homburg did maintain the general structure of the windows you see in Guardian illustration:

One of the unsung aspects of the University of Prince Edward Island is its pioneering involvement in the early Internet: under the leadership of Jim Hancock (Director of Computer Services from 1972 to 1997), UPEI, among other things, participated in the NetNorth, CA*Net and CANARIE initiatives, hosted Prince Edward Island’s first connection to the Internet, and registered the country’s first “.ca” domain, upei.ca, in 1988.

The upei.ca domain name registration’s anniversary is coming up on Sunday: 25 years ago, on January 12, 1988, the domain was registered with John Demco at the University of BC, a name well-known to any of us involved in the early Internet in Canada, as he was the go-to guy for all .ca domain name registrations for many years (back when they were free, but encumbered by many restrictions; that’s how I ended up, for a time, with the domain name digitalisland.kingston.pe.ca).

While the university’s work in this regard had tremendous benefits for the institution itself, it benefited Prince Edward Island as a whole in many other ways. In my case it made for my first contact with PEI when I was applying for a job here – an email from Morley Pinsent using the CA*Net email system hosted by UPEI that was free to any Islander who asked – and, once I relocated here, it was my conduit to the greater world through my email address caprukav@atlas.cs.upei.ca (I still remember the day in 1993 when, as a meek 27 year old, Earlene Gallant handled the paperwork to sign me up for this).

UPEI’s work led to PEINet, which became (via a 14.4 kbps leased line connection) the conduit for the first webserver on PEI, at the PEI Crafts Council, to join the network; later, it was on PEINet’s web host that I created the first versions of www.gov.pe.ca. Through this all, the counsel of Jim’s successor as Director of Computer Services, Dave Cairns, was extremely valuable (the best piece of advice Dave ever gave me: hard drives will always fail, eventually, and maybe tomorrow).

All Islanders owe a great debt to the University of PEI for its vision in this regard; to help mark the occasion, I printed up a ceremonial poster on the letterpress this afternoon, and I’ll stick them up around town and campus over the next few days: