Posted on 02/01/2006 12:06:37 AM PST by nickcarraway
Stew Albert, a prominent anti-Vietnam war activist, an early supporter of the Black Panthers and a founder of the Yippie radical protest group, died Monday at age 66 in Portland, Oregon. The cause was cancer.
Mr. Albert was a catalytic figure in the Bay Area's emerging New Left political movement of the 1960s, helping to combine white anti-war activists with Black power advocates and hippies.
In 1967, Mr. Albert and fellow radicals Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman formed the Youth International Party, melding serious protest with outrageous street theater satire to stage events that became icons of the era.
They ran a real pig named Pigasus for President in 1968, showered dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in a protest against greed, and tried to levitate the Pentagon to exorcise what they called its "evil spirits."
Todd Gitlin, a professor of sociology at Columbia University who has written extensively on the sixties, described Mr. Albert as thoughtful man who embodied the humor and insouciance of the New Left. "He was an original," Gitlin said.
Stewart Edward Albert was born Dec. 4, 1939 in Brooklyn. His father was a city clerk who kept a pail of sand in the front hall to put out fires in case Japan bombed their house. As Mr. Albert wrote in his wry 2004 autobiography, "His was the unspectacular childhood of a not especially promising kid."
After graduating from Pace College in New York City, Albert worked briefly as a clerk. But in 1965, lured by the legend of bohemian writer Jack Kerouac, he rode a bus cross country to City Lights book store in North Beach.
Within days, Mr. Albert had smoked marijuana with the beat poet Allen Ginsberg and was working for the
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
That's like, a bummer, man.
Yippee!
What a waste, man! That money could have been used to buy drugs for the homeless!
By the beat generation.
Was he found on the waterbed in his van or in his mom's basement?
L
On the waterbed, in his mom's basesment, the van was left outside, Silly.
MM
Goodbye forever, old fellas an' gals
goodbye forever, old sweethearts an' pals
My bad. I'm surprised he managed the energy to crawl inside. Must have been some killer weed in a baggie by the bed.
Nam Vet
LOL
He didnt crawl, just slithered in like the reptile he was.
MM
Rain or not, it was a better day in Oregon.
http://hometown.aol.com/stewa/stew.html
Stew Albert's Yippie! Reading Room
Funny thing is, Kerouac denied that he was the forefather of the student radical crowd and had nothing but contempt for them. In a piece for the NY Times shortly before his death in 1969, he wrote "So who cares anyhow that if it hadn’t been for Western-style capitalism so-called. . .or Laissez Faire, free economic byplay, movement north south east and west, haggling, pricing, and the political balance of power carved into the U.S. Constitution and active thus far in the history of our government. . .I wouldn’t have been able or allowed to hitchhike half broke through 47 states of this union and see the scene with my own eyes, unmolested? Who cares, Walt Whitman?" For all his unconventional bohemianism, Kerouac loved America until his dying day.
So go hug a tree....
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