4 Year Old Hippie4 Year old Texas hippie suspended from school...section A,column #1  Pie in the faceIn 1973, the most celebrated North American pie protester, the "Pie Man" Aron Kay flung his first pastry. In an interview with Canwest News Service, ...section B, column #1, 2 & 3 ZinnHoward Zinn dead at age 87... section A, column #2
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section A, section B
In Todays Edition
Leif Garrett Again || Hippies & Pot Heads Wanted || Ronnie Spector to perform || 4 Year Old Hippie || Howard Zinn || The Pie terrorists

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Ol' Hippie
 Hi hippies, we have made the decision to remove our stereo from the top of this page. This and other modifications we are making should improve the page load time, making it more enjoyable for you to scroll through our pages.
 BUT YOU CAN STILL LISTEN TO OUR STEREO. Just click
THIS LINK , to open a new window with our player. Let the player load, then *minumise the window to the bottom of your screen. Listen to the tunes while you scroll through our pages (or any other sites). Rock On !   Ol' Hippie
* Minumise our player to the bottom of your screen and ROCK ON
Question from an email : Hey Ol' Hippie, did you guys design Baby-Boomer-Rock-and-Roll.com to work best with Fire Fox ? from : I love hippie music

Answer : Not really. We wanted it to work in any browser. But being the old hippies that we are, and without any formal web design education, we just did the best we could.
  Turns out that BBR&R, like thousands of other websites is best viewed with FireFox.


Question from an email : I like Internet Explorer, can I still view baby boomer rock and roll ? from : Another old hippie

Answer : Sure anyone, even Another Old Hippie can view Baby-Boomer-Rock-and_Roll.com with any browser (but we do suggest you try FireFox)  SEE , can I make BBR&R look better with another browser ?  
Marijuana Sales Boost Northern California's Humboldt County

These are boom times for the marijuana trade, especially in Northern California's Humboldt County. Humboldt pot is sold throughout the country, including some of the many medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles.

Decades after back-to-the-land hippies first moved to the rural area, it remains a mecca for marijuana.

At the plaza in downtown Arcata, there are still wandering, tie-dyed souls playing guitar and bartering for handmade bongs. They openly buy, sell and trade small bags of primo weed.

Nick Larson and his buddy hitchhiked to town to see if the streets truly are paved with pot.

"We've heard stories all the way down: 'Dude, get down to Humboldt. You gotta try their weed, it's amazing!' " he says. "So we get down here and people are like, tossing handouts, and we're just like, 'Oh my god.' Like, whether it be trim or just straight buds, it's just amazing."

In Eureka, the town next door, a long line stretches outside the Humboldt Patient Resource Center. The pot dispensary is marked with the familiar green leaf logo and a Tibetan prayer flag.

"Truth is that Humboldt County is one of the best growers and distributors of marijuana in the world," says Lydia Katz, who's 22. He came to stock up on what he calls his "medicine." "People here understand how much a part of the life's blood it is. Truly, without weed, this county would go belly up. Our economy depends on it."
...more here
4 Year Old Hippie suspended from school for "Too long hair"
The story of Taylor Pugh, the 4-year-old preschooler suspended by the Mesquite Independent School District for his long locks, is making the cross-country rounds today. Thanks to this Associated Press video, MISD spokesperson Laura Jobe's hairstyle has now been called into question.
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Whos Busted Now ?
Leif Garrett Arrested
Again

Los Angeles, Sunday, February 07, 2010
 Former 1970s teen idol Leif Garrett has been releasedLeif busted again from jail on a charge he carried heroin into a Los Angeles subway station.

Los Angeles County sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore says the actor and singer was arrested for heroin possession and released on bond.

Whitmore told the Los Angeles Times the 48-year-old was shaking and sweating.

Whitmore says Garrett denied having drugs at first and allowed them to search him, then acknowledged that he had black tar heroin in his shoe.

Garrett has a history of drug use, including a 2006 arrest at another Los Angeles subway stop for having heroin.
Well Fuck, some of us never learn

He is due back in court on February 24.
It was not immediately clear if Garrett had an attorney.

Ronnie Spector to perform at Staten Island Feb. 13th

Ronnie SpectorSTATEN ISLAND, NY-- To say that Ronnie Spector had a tough go of it would be an understatement. Sure, she was the lead singer of The Ronettes, was inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, and she's hung out with The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Joey Ramone. Beach Boy Brian Wilson even called her "Be My Baby" the "greatest pop record ever made."

But Spector says she was a prisoner in her own home while married to musical genius (and, as of last year, convicted murderer) Phil Spector in the 1960s and '70s. Going from the top of the pops to a missing person, she watched the career of a lifetime effectively disappear, only to be revived with the help of the musicians who never stopped loving her sultry voice, from Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen to George Harrison and Eddie Money.
Source/By : Ben Johnson and silive.com
 
In anticipation of her pre-Valentine's Day show Feb. 13 at the Center for the Arts, Silive.com & Ben Johnson spoke with the native New Yorker about her musical history, sex symbolism and surviving in the business known as show.Below are a couple of Q's & A's from that interview.

silive.com : You grew up in a vibrant time for rock 'n' roll music, but also a pretty transformational era for race relations in America. In your autobiography you call yourself a "half-breed." Was it hard growing up in a mixed-race family?
Ronnie : I lived in Spanish Harlem. My father was Irish, my mother was black and Indian. So we fit right in. I mean the kids would make fun of you because you were light skinned, but that didn't bother me too much. They had every color up there. So I didn't grow up thinking race, because I lived it.

silive.com : You obviously became a sort of self-made sex symbol. Do you ever regret that, or did you ever feel like it took away from what you were trying to do?
Ronnie : LOL I have to laugh, because my whole intention was to walk out there and be so different that you had no choice but to pay attention. I liked being a sex symbol. What was wrong with that? We did it intentionally. I saw the other girl groups, The Crystals, The Angels, with the wide skirts on. I thought that looked so un-sexy. So we had an aunt that sewed, and she would make these long slits in our tight dresses, Chinese style. And these groups would wear wigs, but we used our own hair. Tease, and Aqua Net, then tease again, and more Aqua Net....Read the whole interview HERE

Abbie HoffmanWE SALUTE
Howard Zinn
  Howard Zinn, a professor, author and social activist who inspired a generation on the American left and whose book "A People's History of the United States" sold more than 1 million copies and redefined the historical role of working-class people as agents of political change, died Janurary 27, 2010. He was 87.
  Zinn apparently had a heart attack in Santa Monica, where he was visiting friends and scheduled to speak, said his daughter, Myla Kabat-Zinn. He lived in Auburndale, Mass.
Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn arrested at a Vietnam War protest in the late 60's as seen in "Howard Zinn:You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (with Matt Damon) "

Code Pink
Wanted :
Hippies, Dead Heads & Pot Heads
Dead heads and pot heads take note. While the straight economy goes up in smoke with double digit unemployment, job prospects for hippies are booming -- and not just for boomers.
  At the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) they're looking to hire an official Grateful Dead  archivist.
  And in Denver, where Colorado's medical marijuana industry is legally flourishing, there are these two recent job postings:
  The alternative newspaper Westword is advertising for a pot reviewer, asking for a short essay from applicants on "What Marijuana Means to Me".
  Similarly, a new biotech company, Full Spectrum Laboratories, needs scientists to test the potency of cannabis samples and salesmen to market their quality-control
They don't call it the Mile High City for nothing.
  Those doing the hiring say -- not surprisingly -- they are being inundated with applications...MORE

source: ABC NEWS
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Will Paul Rodgers be joining Aerosmith ?
  Paul Rogers name has been mentioned as a possible replacement (temp or permanent) for Steven Tyler, who is rehabing. Supposeadly guitarist Joe Perry asked Paul Rodgers if he would be interested in replacing Steven Tyler in AEROSMITH. However when Classic Rock magazine asked Joe about this he had this to say : ""I mean, obviously that would be a thought, because he is one of my favorite singers of all time, and I got a chance to meet him at Classic Rock Awards [in London] a couple of months ago. But I think that he's a really… him being English from that earlier generation, I don't think that it would work. I mean, it's more than just somebody who can sing. I would love to do — and I probably will — do some tracks with him. As a matter of fact, I think THE JOE PERRY PROJECT is gonna open a tour with them in April in England. The original BAD COMPANY is gonna get back together and they asked me to open the show. So we will be playing together, but I don't think that he'll be… We're young kids to him. I just don't think it's the right chemistry. Technically, I know he's got the chops — I mean, I know he can sing anything he wants — but I think that it's a little bit more than just if he can sing the songs."
  Paul, who has created groups like BAD COMPANY, FREE and THE FIRM said, "If you look at my history, my history is that of forming bands rather than joining them," Rodgers said. "I tend to want to form bands and then create new music within them. QUEEN was an exception and we joined forces because it just seemed to work when we played together. But as far as AEROSMITH [is concerned], I don't think I want to be joining bands and Steven Tyler is very much still alive. I would like to see them solve their problems and put the band together 'cause they're such a great band."


section A, section B (below)
advertisement from 1972
from 1972
The Pie terrorists
  Political protests take countless forms.
The hunger strike and the wildcat strike. The protest march and the protest song. The sit-in and the petition. They all have their place in history for combating the powerful.

  But none match the splendidly photogenic, questionably effective, sometimes delicious and always ludicrous act of throwing a pie in the face of authority.

  "It's the simplest form of political message," said Patrick Robert - also known as Pop Tarte - the founder of Montreal-based Les Entartistes, Canada's most active pie protest group.

  Last Monday, in an attack that Robert said could reinvigorate the 40-year-old form of protest, an animal-rights activist pied Federal Fisheries Minister Gail Shea square in the face.

  Liberal MP Gerry Byrne called the act "akin to terrorism," a comparison Robert said was, well, half-baked.

  "If it is seen as a terrorist act, the terrorists have won," he said.

Then, on Friday, a seal-hunt protester in Newfoundland was pied in the face by someone who supports the hunt.

  The flying pies have placed Shea and Friday's victim, in the company of the famous and infamous.

  Canadian victims alone include some of the most powerful political luminaries of the past 20 years, with names such as Chretien, Charest, Dion, Klein, Pettigrew, Rock and Parizeau peppering the list.

  While some targets, such as former health minister Allan Rock, laughed the incident off, others seemed less amused.

  Former Liberal leader Stephane Dion pressed charges when he was pied in 1999 by Robert.

  Shea's attacker has also been charged.

  When former prime minister Jean Chretien got a face full of custard at an event in Charlottetown in 2000, some law-enforcement officials called it a sign of rising civil disobedience not seen since the anti-war protests of the 1960s.

  Several political pie-throwing cabals exist around the world, including Les Entartistes and the Meringue Marauders from Canada, the Biotic Baking Brigade and Al Pieda from the United States and Internationales Patissiere from Belgium.

  Many of the groups sprang to life after a 1998 attack on Microsoft chairman Bill Gates by more than 30 cream commandos.

  Their attack, which left pie covering the computer magnate's glasses and shoulders, seemed to reheat the pie as a protest tool.

  Since then, high-profile targets have included conservative political pundit Ann Coulter, Swedish King Carl Gustaf, former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling, San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and actor Sylvester Stallone.

  Tracing the history of pie throwing, much is owed to cinema. The pie in the face is a slapstick gag dating back to silent films, and popularized by Laurel and Hardy and the Three Stooges. It has been comedic gold for nearly a century.

  In 1969, Belgian artist Noel Godin, who led the 1998 Gates mission, used a protest pie for the first time against another artist. But in 1970, it became political. Thomas Forcade, the founder of the marijuana-promoting High Times magazine, pied Otto Larsen, the chairman of a U.S. federal commission on obscenity.

  In 1973, the most celebrated North American pie protester, the "Pie Man" Aron Kay flung his first pastry.

  In an interview with Canwest News Service, he described pieing as "a form of character assassination."

  "Pies smash your demeanor, they take you down a notch," said the Winnipeg-born Kay.

"The only thing that gets hurt is your ego."

  Kay has several high-profile hits, including political commentator William F. Buckley, former CIA director William Colby and artist Andy Warhol.

  Of Kay's 40 or so strikes, his greatest, he said, was nailing G. Gordon Liddy, one of the central figures of the 1972 Watergate scandal.

  On the day Liddy was paroled in 1977, Kay borrowed a jacket and tie, strolled nonchalantly into the luxurious Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., and hit Liddy with an apple pie.
  "In honor of mother America," Kay said.
Some times a joint works as good as a pie
Some times a joint is as  affective as a pie. Mayor Ed Koch of NYC gets pot smoke at a ritzy party in NYC in Feb. 1979

  Kay, 60, retired from pieing since 1992, was introduced to a new generation when the Simpsons satirized him in 2004, enhancing his legend.

He remains a vehement supporter of the movement.

  "I am issuing a fatwa against Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and others of that ilk," he said, referring to two of the most controversial conservative commentators in the U.S.

"The pies must fly!"


BTO Heads to Court
 BTO
VANCOUVER, B.C. — Randy Bachman and Fred Turner fronted one of the hottest rock bands of the 1970's, selling millions of albums under the name Bachman-Turner Overdrive.

Now they're front and centre in a B.C. Supreme Court lawsuit in which Bachman's own brother and another former bandmate are suing the pair for using their own names.

Robin Bachman and Blair Thornton launched the lawsuit claiming Randy Bachman and Fred Turner signed away the rights to the Bachman-Turner Overdrive and BTO names in three separate contracts.

"Much as Coca Cola is synonymous in the world with Coke, so too is Bachman-Turner Overdrive with BTO," says the lawsuit filed last Friday.

The Canadian rock band from Winnipeg was best known for the songs "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet" and "Takin' Care of Business."

After the group broke up in 1977, the lawsuit claims Randy Bachman and Turner signed away the rights to the BTO name to their two former bandmates and agreed not to use the Bachman-Turner Overdrive name without the consent of the other parties.

The lawsuit states that Randy Bachman and Turner signed two further deals in 1984 and 2002, saying they wouldn't use the Bachman-Turner Overdrive name in connection to new recordings and live performances.

But in May 2009, the lawsuit claims that Randy Bachman's company, Ranback, registered several names with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the Canadian Intellectual Property Office including the names Bachman-Turner, B.T.U., and Bachman Turner Union.

It said Bachman and Turner have entered into contracts with concert promoters and agents to perform in Canada and Europe without the plaintiffs consent.....more
source : The Canadian Press
BTO website
BTO Vinyl Records
- one - two - three - four - five

 Some of Mr. Kay's & associates pie assaults

Pie assault 1
pie 2
pie 3
Nixon Bagman, Tony Ulasewicz gets creamed
Jerry Rubin
Jerry Rubin lands one on pro-nuker Edward Teller
Homophobe Anita Bryant faces fruit pie
Homophobe Anita Bryant faces fruit pie
Anti-feminist Phyliss Schlafly receives apple pie from Pie Man
Anti-feminist Phyliss Schlafly receives apple pie from Pie Man
Jerry Brown gets custard from Pie Man
Jerry Brown gets custard from Pie Man
Moynihan gets mocha cream from Pie Man
Moynihan gets mocha cream from Pie Man...see more http://www.pieman.org/pageb.html

AntiWar.com
You can't always get what you want, unless your Mick Jagger

   "I'd known Mick since I was a kid, and maybe most people thinkMackenzie PhillipsHigh on Arrival." their parents' friends are old and gross," Mackenzie Phillips writes in her new bombshell tell-all, book "
   "But this was Mick Jagger. Mick Jagger! He was hot. He had the most perfect ass in history."
   The wild child and "One Day at a Time" actress says she had sex with the Rolling Stones frontman during a raucous, drug-fueled party at the Central Park West home of her dad, folk-rock star John Phillips.
   "I've been waiting for this since you were 10 years old," Jagger allegedly told the then-18-year-old Phillips.  
   She says that she and Jagger had sneaked away while her dad was at the party, making the Stones singer a tuna-salad sandwich.
   "In the middle of our tumble, my dad came back and started knocking on the door, yelling, 'You've got my daughter in there!' " she writes. "I imagined he was more annoyed at losing the chance to show off his tuna-salad recipe than genuinely concerned about the defiling of his daughter.

The story is just one of many lurid anecdotes from Phillips' wild life of sex, drugs 'n' rock and roll.
   "High on Arrival" has already made jaw-dropping headlines for the 49-year-old's claim that she and her dad -- the former lead singer of the Mamas and the Papas -- had consensual sex on and off for 10 years.

The Purple Pill

One day, Mackenzie found a purple pill in her dad's bedroom.
   She instinctively took it. But it turned out not to be just any pill -- it was the last of the LSD pills made by the famous drug cook Owsley Stanley, and it was a collector's item among moneyed celebrity druggies of the time.
   "It was as if I'd crashed a normal dad's Porsche," she writes. "He said, 'You took my last hit of Owsley. You're grounded!' "

lesbian experience

Mackenzie also recalls how, as a teen, she went to a party hosted by the Kennedy family, and had a lesbian experience. "One of Andy Warhol's cronies was there with his niece. I got in big, big trouble for seducing the niece," she writes. "Her uncle was very upset, shouting, 'How dare you? She's just a child!' "
   Mackenzie also tells about being raped by a man who raped her at knifepoint. Rolling joints for her dad. And about being held hostage for several days in a drug den, she claims. The ordeal ended when her dad sent a guy named "Big Sal," who flashed a gun and rescued her.
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How Arron Kay became "The Pie Man"
I attended marches on behalf of the Chicano Moratorium and the Black Panther Party to protest the brutality which had been inflicted on them by the cops. Peoples Park, Venice, Ca., the 1966 Sunset Strip Riots,along with the struggles against racism and the Vietnam War were what shaped me into becoming the Pieman. Let 1,000 Pies Fly so as to paraphrase Chairman Mao.

One day in April, 1976, I got a phone call from a source in the underground press. The source told me that William F. Buckley was speaking at N.Y University. I conjured up a shaving creampie which landed on his head. Buckley would not press charges. Soon,I became known as the PIEMAN.
I partook in the National Marijuana Day smoke-ins at Washington Square Park and the protests surrounding the Democratic Convention in NYC and the Republican Convention in Kansas City. I also helped disseminate information about the conspiracy surrounding the AJ Weberman's book,
Coup d'Etat in America: The CIA and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy about the JFK Assassination and Watergate. Weberman has launched many new sites including Dylanology ,Garbology ,Acidtrip (alongwith a Java version of acidtrip and Bozoland .

Pieman.org
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Kathi McDonald solidifies her legacy as rock 'n' roll survivor
  Singer Kathi McDonald, set to make a rare appearance in Marin nextKathi McDonald week, is a little-known but fascinating figure in rock 'n' roll history. After decades of denial, she's learned to accept that she will forever be inextricably linked to one of rock's most tragic characters - Janis Joplin.
  The 60-year-old singer makes her home near Seattle now, but during the '70s and '80s, she was among the extraordinary collection of rock musicians who settled in Marin.
  "I lived in every single town in Marin," she said in a husky, lived-in voice. "Mill Valley, San Rafael, San Anselmo, Lagunitas, Forest Knolls. You name it, I lived there."
  The way she tells her story, San Francisco promoter Chet Helms invited her to audition for Big Brother and the
  Holding Company at the same time in 1966 that he'd recruited Joplin. Joplin was in Austin, Texas, 18-year-old McDonald in Seattle.
"Chet Helms called me and I hitch-
  hiked down, but I got there a little later than Janis did," McDonald told me the other day, speaking by cell phone from the Skagit Valley in Washington, where she was visiting a childhood friend. "She beat me to the punch."
  When Joplin left Big Brother to form the Kosmic Blues Band, McDonald replaced her, recording three albums: "Can't Go Home Again," "How Hard It Is" and "Be a Brother." In 1974, she also released a solo album, "Insane Asylum."
  "I used to hate it when people would say, 'You sound like Janis Joplin,'" she recalled. "I'd say, 'No, she sounds like me" ... READ MORE
Long John Baldry Band, featuring Kathi McDonald
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Kathi Mcdonald on YouTube
Kathi McDonald at CDUNIVERSE.COM || at AMAZON.COM
Roselle's Goal: End Mountaintop Mining

Mike Roselle made headlines in the '80s and '90s as the founder of Earth First!

ROCK CREEK, W. Virginia  -- Just a few months ago, three little coal company houses stood along the Coal River, gutted and near the end of their lives.

Now, those three little homes are considered the Appalachian base for Climate Ground Zero and Coal River Wind. Their new tenant, 54-year-old national environmentalist Mike Roselle, is setting up shop to get ready for a long summer of disobedience in the coalfields.
Mike RoselleBut he’s used to that.

Roselle started his life on the road as a yippie/lowbagger at 16, leaving Louisville, Ky., to first protest against the Vietnam War and then any supposed-environmental wrongs he felt needed righted.

Lowbaggers are part of a loosely tied alternative community that shares resources when living and traveling together.

Yippie is a term created by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, both of whom Roselle said he met in those early Vietnam protests. The Youth International Party (YIP!) merged hippie counterculture and New Left activities, according to UrbanDictionary.com.

Later, Roselle was the founder of Earth First!, an environmental movement that has made headlines across the nation in the 1980s, '90s and this decade for its nontraditional and sometimes aggressive attempts to protect wilderness.

Some areas where Earth First! members have been active recently, according to the group's Web site, include a tree-sit protesting development on Vancouver Island, British Columbia; protests of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska; and trying to stop seal slaughter in Canada.
...MORE HERE
source : 59 News


Was Jimi Hendrix Murdered 
Doctor Says, Very Likely

Jimi
  Dr. John Bannister, the doctor who tended to Jimi Hendrix on the night he died in 1970 says it is "plausible" that the guitarist was murdered.

    The doctor was speaking in relation to claims in a new book written by Hendrix's former roadie, James 'Tappy' Wright, that his manager Mike Jeffery had had the star killed.

    In his book 'Rock Roadie', Wright says that Jeffery admitted having Hendrix murdered shortly before he himself died in an aircraft accident.

    He alleges that Jeffery hired a gang to break into Hendrix's Notting Hill hotel room and force sleeping pills and wine down his throat.

    Bannister, who was the on-call registrar at the now defunct St Mary Abbots Hospital in Kensington on September 18, the day of Hendrix's death, has now backed up the roadie's theory, saying it: "sounded plausible because of the volume of wine" found in Hendrix's lungs and on his body.

    "The amount of wine that was over him was just extraordinary. Not only was it saturated right through his hair and shirt but his lungs and stomach were absolutely full of wine. I have never seen so much wine," The Times reports Bannister as saying.

    "We had a sucker that you put down into his trachea, the entrance to his lungs and to the whole of the back of his throat. We kept sucking him out and it kept surging and surging. He had already vomited up masses of red wine and I would have thought there was half a bottle of wine in his hair. He had really drowned in a massive amount of red wine."

    Wright says that Jeffery told him that Hendrix was "worth more to him dead than alive", and had filed a $2m life insurance policy on the guitarist shortly before his death.

Demand an investigation into Jimi's death. Sign the petition HERE

Woodstock A Festival of Love and Peace
What They Didn't Know, Woodstock's Secret

by Laurie Kirby - I’m proud of my small town’s worldwide association with peace. Many times during the 24 years that I’ve lived here, I’ve stood in peace vigils on the Village Green – and provided a bit of local color for visitors’ snapshots. Tourists and other assorted pilgrims are drawn to Woodstock by peace as well as by the festival that didn’t happen here (actually held at Max Yasgur's 600-acre dairy farm near the hamlet of White Lake in the town of Bethel, New York. Bethel, in Sullivan County, is 43 miles southwest of the town of Woodstock, New York).

  So I was stunned as I sat the other day in our excellent public library, examining an archive which they store in a remote closet. The documents told me that for six decades Woodstock’s largest employer has been making crucial, custom components for nuclear missiles.

  In the 60s and 70s, hippies graced the Village Green. A mile away, down a banal country lane, under the benign gaze of a statue of the Buddha, skilled workers assembled fans that were "critical to the success of nearly every U.S. military missile program," as the company’s promotional material boasted. And specially-designed Woodstock fans were busy in the skies over Vietnam in B-52 bombers, making possible the "Christmas Bombings" of 1972, which were the largest heavy bombing strikes launched by the U.S. since World War II.

  Today, Made-In-Woodstock components fly F-15s and F-16s and Apache attack helicopters over Iraq, rumble through Afghanistan in Bradley tanks, fire warheads from rocket launchers, and prowl the oceans in nuclear submarines.

  The Iraq War provided an upturn in Woodstock’s weapons contracts, as had the Vietnam and Korean Wars ("Woodstock Company Expands For War Work" was the headline of a local newspaper in the early 1950s).

  The Cold War work of Woodstock’s Rotron Inc. fueled the growth of the town and provided employment for some of its artists. The company, which also makes civilian products alongside its core military work, has been a notable supporter of community efforts such as the rescue squad. Meanwhile (although this only became known in the 1980s), TCE and other highly toxic byproducts of weapons production were contaminating the wells of neighborhood homes, who to this day can’t drink their well water or grow their own vegetables.

  In 1973, the company even received a Special Award from Rockwell International, maker of the Minuteman nuclear missile. "Year after year," the award said, "the Rotron fan has performed on the Minuteman missile program without a single instance of failure."

  Next to a model of a Minuteman, the award displayed a replica of one of Sir Francis Drake’s ships, likening Rotron’s contribution towards keeping the Soviets at bay to Drake’s turning back the Spanish Armada in 1588. (Today, the third generation of Minuteman ICBMs, now made by Boeing, are still a lethal nuclear threat – and still rely on Woodstock components.)

  I stared at the nuclear missile and the sailing ship. What does it mean, I wondered, that for 60 years Woodstock, with its hippie-granola-peace reputation, has quietly had an economy anchored in nuclear terror and arms manufacturing?

  It doesn’t mean that our tiny town is particularly evil. Rather the reverse: it means that Woodstock – like all towns – is both special and, at the same time, like everyone else.

  All over the United States, in every congressional district, communities depend upon the war economy. Our own weapons-components plant, though it looms large in our local economy, is a small fish in the huge and murky pond of military contractors.

  It means that, yes, even in Woodstock, too much of our hard work and creativity is expended producing products and services that go to war, that is, to desolation and waste.

  And it means that, together with towns around the world, we have a responsibility to turn our local productivity in a positive direction.

  Environmental, economic, and security crises are forcing us to rethink the economy. War makes all these crises worse. We can help to solve them by promoting peaceful, green manufacturing and services.

  In a recession, people are naturally afraid of rocking the boat when jobs are at stake. But so many things we actually need are desperately underfunded. Fixing our infrastructure, for example, and educating our children. When money is put into these, it creates more jobs (per dollar invested) than war production.

  Perhaps we shouldn’t, after all, follow the example of that plunderer and slaver Sir Francis Drake ... or any modern successors.

Laurie Kirby is a Professor of Mathematics at Baruch College of the City University of New York, and a Woodstock musician. He is a member of Woodstock Peace Economy.

No Weapons In Space !!!

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An easy way to adjust text size
To increase text size,hold the Ctrl key and turn the scroll wheel away from you. Similarly, to decrease text size, hold the Ctrl key and rotate the scroll wheel towards you.
Change Text Color
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This site contains copyrighted material, the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We belive this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law.In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in recieving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to : http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for puposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
FREE SPEECH

While we are a drug free website (we are just burnt-out from past drug use that occurred years ago) and do not  promote the use of illegal drugs, we are aware of the United States of America constitutional right of free speech. Therefore we support and are involved in the reform of marijuana laws....

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