Remembering Walter Bowart
by Paul Krassner

Whenever my parents vacationed in Las Vegas, they always brought back silver dollars for my brother, my sister and me. When they celebrated their 40th anniversary in the late 1960s, I had an idea for a gift. On a round wooden tray the size of a large pizza, taken from an old lamp, there would be caricatures of us siblings, each with a silver dollar for our heads.

I called my friend Walter Bowart–editor of a radical New York underground paper, the East Village Other, who was also a fine artist. I asked if he would draw those three figures. He said yes and invited me to his home. Later he told me he had been depressed and contemplating suicide, but that, karmically, his perception of the round wooden tray symbolized the Wheel of Life, so he had an epiphany and changed his mind.

There are a couple of 1960s myths about Bowart that I’d like to clear up, just for the sake of accuracy in countercultural history.

One was about the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS), a network of underground papers formed–according to a manifesto written by its founders–to “warn the civilized world of its impending collapse.” Of course, “underground” was technically a misnomer, since it was well known who published those papers and where more copies could be obtained. (A true underground paper was the Outlaw, secretly published and distributed inside San Quentin Prison by anonymous inmates and guards.)

Eventually, 600 publications in the U.S. and abroad were included in UPS which, said Art Kunkin, publisher of the Los Angeles Free Press, “was the way the news about the oppositon to the Vietnam War was circulated, and also about ’60s culture, music and so forth.” UPS had a policy of allowing its members to freely reprint each other’s material, which gave readers the sense of a national movement. UPS also helped papers defend themselves an increasing number of legal assaults.

The myth is that Bowart came up with the name of the syndicate when an interviewer asked him what it was called. At that moment he saw a United Parcel Service truck go by, prompting him to tell the reporter that the organization was called UPS. I’ve heard that same tale about HIGH TIMES founder Tom Forcade, though he came to UPS after it had been named. But here’s what John Wilcock, co-founder of the East Village Other, tells me:

“It seems impossible to correct Bowart’s wise-crack about the UPS truck. I guess it’s funnier than the true story, which is that as we all sat around in the EVO office, me at the typewriter typing up the manifesto that we collectively produced, I–with memories of the French maquis [a secret army consisting predominantly of rural guerrilla bands in the French resistance during World War II]–suggested ‘Underground’ which then became Underground Press Syndicate.”

The other myth has to do with the Great Banana Skin Hoax. An obituary in the Los Angeles Times stated that EVO editors “were intrigued by the idea that a substance common to LSD and bananas could trigger sensations in the brain.” Here’s the actual event:

The office of the East Village Other was across the street from my magazine, The Realist. I dropped by one time when the editors–Bowart, Alan Katzman and Dean Latimer–were discussing a book, Morning of the Magicians, in the context of learning that LSD released serotonin in the brain and wondering if it could be found in nonchemical substances. Mistaking serotin, which is found in bananas, for serotonin, they inadvertently launched the notorious prank. The Berkeley Barb picked up the report, UPS and then the mainstream wire services spread it around the country.

It quickly became public knowledge that you could get legally high from smoking dried banana skins. In San Francisco, there was a banana smoke-in, and one entrepreneur started a successful banana-powder mail-order business, charging $5 an ounce. Agents from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs headed for their own laboratory, faithfully cooking, scraping and grinding thirty pounds of bananas, following the recipe in the underground press. For three weeks the Food and Drug Administration utilized apparatus which “smoked” the dried banana peels.

The Los Angeles Free Press in turn promoted yet another hallucinogenic–pickled jalapeno peppers, anally inserted. All over Southern California, heads were sticking vegetables up their asses. And, at a benefit for the San Francisco Diggers, I mentioned on stage that the next big drug would be FDA. Sure enough, Time magazine soon reported that there would be “a super-hallucinogen called FDA.” Silly me, I thought I had made that up.

Anyway, I’ll miss Walter Bowart and his twin towers of awareness–mysticism and conspiracy–but he has spun off the Wheel of Life into what he believed would be another level of consciousness.

Paul Krassner is the author of “Porn Soup” and publisher of the Disneyland Memorial Orgy poster, both available only at paulkrassner.com.

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