by Dana Gurnee

When thinking of more to say about the Life of Mike, I keep returning to 1967. Still the chronological approach, but it’s something. And I write it to put it out of my mind.

I first met Michael in 1962, in biology class at Wilson High School in Long Beach. He and I, along with a girl named Lenore, were the only sophomores allowed to take this “difficult, seniors-only” course. We had to pass a tough test to qualify, and the teacher of the class made a big deal about us and the A’s we always got on papers and exams, hoping to shame the seniors into doing better. Just a tiny morsel of evidence that Michael was a bright, shiny object back then. (As for Lenore and me, someone else will have to make that call.)

Michael and I never “touched” outside of class. He was tall and handsome and debonair and classy and witty, while I was just witty. Maybe. He played trombone in the band and marched in a Rose Parade. He was a cross-country runner who consistently placed second or third, behind a boy who was near Olympian in his speed. Michael always had a job, such as the paper route that John Harding mentions. When Michael could drive, he went all the way to Los Angeles on dates and spent more than $5. He got good grades, back when good grades still meant excellence. And he and his brother handled most of the household chores, while his parents worked full time and enjoyed cocktails. He could do it all. He was the hippest man alive. Hard-working, too.

After high school, Michael attended Long Beach City College for two years, and then transferred to UCLA in 1967. During his LBCC years, he was a pal of Larry Menshek, who put Michael and me together when Michael was looking for a roommate to share the expenses of an apartment.

I was about to begin my third year in a UCLA dorm, but wanted something more grown-up and adventurous — something more conducive to certain forms of recreation and consumption, you might say. And I needed a hip guy to help me get going.

So Michael and I became roommates at 1519 Colby Avenue, in West L.A., about five miles from campus, just around the corner from Shari’s, a wonderful 24-hour coffee shop where hamburgers were 85 cents and coffee had just gone up to 15 cents.

Soon after starting at Colby, Michael had three part-time jobs so that he could pay his way and still go to classes. In the wee hours of the morning, he delivered L.A. Times newspapers to the UCLA dorms, using his motorcycle with sidecar to carry the dozens of thick papers. In the early hours of the evening, he worked in the paste-up department of the UCLA Daily Bruin, with his fast skills doing far more than his fair share of the work. And on weekend nights he worked at UCLA Medical Center doing odd jobs that occasionally included taking bodies to the morgue, using a special code to bypass all the floors. He got in trouble once for miskeying the code, causing the door to open in the lobby while he had a stiff.

Through all this, Michael attended classes and did quite well in them, I think because excelling in them was based not on learning, but on raw artistic talent. His major was graphic arts, continuing an interest he had when he was a baby. He finished all the tough academic stuff at LBCC, so his UCLA grades were based on producing objects of art, and that he did, using his superb skills as a designer, illustrator, typographer, and letterer. He was like the young Bob Dylan writing songs: The output was beautiful and magical, and seemed effortless.

Meanwhile, I was working part-time jobs, too — paste-up at the Daily Bruin and doorman at a theater — spending too little time studying at home, often missing the large classes with hundreds of people in them. In upper division, exams were essay questions, and getting A’s or B’s required little more than legible handwriting, decent syntax, and liberal bias. (I might have had higher grades had my name not been a girl’s name.)

All this was against the backdrop of Vietnam and protest, LBJ and Nixon, acid and pot, the new music, and all the rest. Michael went along with the social movements with great glee and appetite, but he did not haunt political gatherings or carry signs or organize levitations of the Federal Building. But he was a “leftie” on the way to hippiedom.

In those days, I felt — Michael, too, I’m sure — that we were fighting to survive, i.e., to stay out of the war and to stay in the U.S.A. The alternative to our draft deferments seemed like death. We believed that old men with limp dicks were jealous of our perpetual erections, and wanted us out of the way so that they could get the girls. In retrospect, these views are profoundly unfair and naive, but so it goes.

From September 1967 to June 1968, we watched with awe as things got worse and worse, yet also more exciting. Nine months then would equal 10 years today. Maybe 20.

When RFK was assassinated, I was working at McCarthy headquarters in Westwood, answering incoming calls. My first knowledge of what was happening came when a caller accused us at the headquarters of pulling the trigger. Michael came to the place to watch TV with the McCarthyites. A couple of hours later, Michael took me back to Colby in the sidecar. We walked the 200 feet to Shari’s for hamburgers and pints of coffee. Michael said he had extra time to drink coffee because the Times would have to redo its front page, meaning there was no reason to arrive at the usual time to load up the sidecar.

In its way, this was a life’s highlight, aided greatly by Tareyton cigarettes, which, of course, we could smoke anywhere we felt like.



by Dana Gurnee

Well, I’ve been overwhelmed with images and memories, as if given a dangerous mind-bending drug. I first was tempted to wait a few weeks, and to put those memories all together in a long, coherent, sequential narrative. But now I think I will poke in random fashion, starting not with 1967, when Michael and I became roommates at UCLA, but starting with something that intrudes more insistently: the UCLA humor magazine that Michael led in 1968.

Michael somehow heard that the humor magazine’s editorship was legally up for grabs every year. For decades, the editorship had been held by one fraternity or another. The existing humor magazine, Satyr, prided itself on its comic-strip character Captain F-Q, who drooled over amply endowed cartoon co-eds. It wasn’t a bad publication, and its “ownership” seemed entrenched and pleasing to the powers that were.

But Michael decided to try to take it over, along with me and a group of pals, mostly from his graphic-arts classes. Those were terrible, tumultuous times, with Vietnam, the assassinations, the Chicago convention, the Nixon election, yadda yadda. Somehow Michael was able to persuade a UCLA decision committee that it was time for the humor magazine to better reflect the times — to have a less-conservative feel, to have a modern design, and to have “girls” play a role, too, as actual staff members. Outrageous!

We were stunned when Michael pulled it off. And it stunned the Old Guard, who laughed off Michael’s challenge, and perhaps did not make a strong play to renew their sinecure.

However it came down, Michael got the job.

The poor overseers had NO IDEA what Michael and his staff would produce. The magazine had full-frontal nudity (female, of course) on the inside cover, pubic hair and all. (But the photo was tastefully grainy.) This was two years before Playboy did the same.

The center spread was a nude picture of Michael, sans dick, with a whole bunch of phallic symbols on a separate page, which could be cut out to create a “Pin the Penis on the Person” poster. Thoughtful man that he was, Michael had the reverse side of this page blank, so that cutting out items would not destroy content.

The magazine’s cover had the words PEN and IS, slightly touching, but leaning strongly in opposite directions. To the casual observer, the magazine’s title was PENIS. But the careful observer would see the 5-point Helvetica Light type on each side of PEN and IS, and then see the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword.” Jejune now, but dangerous then. (Honest!)

The pages were full of political protest and social commentary and drug references. One page was a drawing of Hubert Humphrey with a Hitler mustache. The words on it: “Mein Humpf.” This was from a sign that Michael carried at a violent demonstration that took place at the Century Plaza Hotel in the summer of 1968, when LBJ was spending the night. I think Michael was beaten by the cops that night. But maybe that was someone else. It’s funny what one is unsure about after 48 years.

The back cover was a U.S. flag with about 400 stars on it. Every square inch of the magazine was something shocking and new for 1968, with typography, design and graphics that were new to behold. Even the size — square and large — was new.

In the telling, it seems sadly naive and staid. It’s like trying to explain why we once thought that Bob Hope was funny. It’s all about context. And back then, this magazine was a disappointment for the UCLA administration. There was an article in the L.A. Times about its disturbing departure from the tradition of campus humor magazines everywhere.

Even during the magazine’s production, there were problems. The typesetters refused to type in certain words, or to type entire pieces. But Michael was able to break in to the typesetters’ room, and he then figured out how to use the computers and the programs to produce the type we needed to paste up the magazine. He knew how to it all! After that, he and I worked on the type machines between 2:00 a.m. and 5:00 a.m. for several nights, and somehow the magazines were made, though with many horrible typos that made it to print.

We sold the magazines for 75 cents each — if my memory serves, 25 cents more than the price of the old humor magazine. We sold them by standing on the various campus walkways, sometimes suffering taunts and threats, but mostly enjoying warm support.

It all ended when Michael was fired. This happened because I turned over 200 copies of the magazine to some campus official, who told me that he wanted to place them in an off-campus bookstore to make more money. I thought this was pretty neat. But a few days later, another campus official came in to do an audit of the money we had collected. Guess what? We were $150 short. I did not get a receipt for the 200 copies that were taken, and the other official denied taking them from me. The evidence was irrefutable: We were crooks.

So Michael was accused of embezzling and was fired, with the “deal” being that if he agreed to leave the magazine peaceably, he wouldn’t be expelled from school. Michael and I knew what we were up against, so we slunk away.

The magazine, by the way, was called De Press. The experience revealed what would be (and already were) trademarks of Michael’s character: his energy, his talent, his ability to quickly figure out almost anything, his being always on the leading edge, and his uppitiness (to get control of the magazine even for a couple of months).

The next issue of the humor magazine returned to the Old Guard. Today, I see the previous editor’s name often listed as a writer on a popular cable show. Google indicates that the magazine is still called Satyr. I can find nothing about De Press.