#4 Summer of 1971 – Lewd Moose Commune
By Peter Olney
In early May, 1971 200,000 veterans, youth and students converged on Washington DC to “Stop the Government and Stop the War” as the call to action said. Peaceful protests of millions had not changed the minds of the rulers about the Vietnam War so many felt more aggressive actions were needed. On Monday morning, May 3 we organized ourselves into affinity groups and sat down at key intersections in Washington to block morning traffic and keep the government from functioning. While at the ground level all we seemed to be doing was pissing off angry commuters it appears in retrospect that the protest had impact. National Airport was closed as an emergency precaution due to the level of traffic disruption. President Nixon called the Army’s 82nd Airborne in with helicopters and 12,000 of us were arrested-the largest mass arrest in US history.
Several of my comrades from Harvard who had been jailed together in DC decided that we should all live together that summer. We recruited other friends: a total of eight in all to rent an old ramshackle house at the end of a cul-de-sac called Fiske Place in the Central Square neighborhood of Cambridge. We had a vague sense that we would function as a community and at least for the summer share resources and chores like cooking and groceries. The “Commune” was named Lewd Moose from the Seuss story, “Thidwick the Big Hearted Moose”. One of my sister communards thought I was big like Thidwick, generally good hearted, but “lewd” in that I failed to wash my dishes and clean up after meals.
Most of us had gainful employment. My two Harvard friends Buck B and Tom F were working on the assembly line at the General Motors plant in Framingham. My roommate Nucci and I worked at the New England Produce Center in Chelsea. We rode our bicycles every night about 5 miles to work the graveyard shift unloading giant trailers loaded with fruits and vegetables. We were members of the Teamsters union, but never saw a union representative. All we saw was a weekly deduction from our paycheck for union dues. We would unload trucks in from North Carolina loaded with cucumbers, watermelons or frozen crates of corn on the cob. It was hard, hot and sweaty work, but a piece of cake for two ex footballers. Watermelons were the best cargo, because every load would have a “damaged” melon that we would be obligated to take home to the commune. In fact we kept the Fiske Place household stocked with produce all summer!
Nucci and I would arrive back at Fiske Place in time to see some of our cohabitants leaving for their day jobs. Weekends were the only time when we would all hang out together. We took trips to Maine, to the beach and to the North End for the feast of Saint Anthony, but most of the memories I have of that summer are working with Nucci in the back of an icy trailer digging out crates of frozen corn.
The FBI seems to have thought the name Lewd Moose Commune implied a deep level of political commitment. They took us seriously enough to reference Lewd Moose in some of our files, but it was more a gathering of folks who shared some vague cultural and political and personal attachments. Some of us however have remained life long friends, and we even convened a couple of Lewd Moose reunions.
The most vivid memory I have of the summer occurred late one morning after I returned from lumping freight. My lifelong friend Jeff was living with us that summer with his girlfriend M.J.. Jeff’s brother was a big shot in the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), which dominated Harvard SDS while I was there. PLP was distinguished by its rigidity and workerism. Cadres always had short hair, got married and lived the idealized and imaginary life of the workers they so desperately were trying to rouse to revolution.
Jeff’s’ connection meant that the Party was interested in recruiting our Commune. That morning in July of 1971 we received a visit from two earnest looking PLPers asking for Jeff. Buck B answered the door and without hesitation led the two cadres upstairs to Jeff and M.J.’s bedroom. He opened the door to find them in bed together. The PLPers recoiled at the door, but Buck jumped into bed and gathered his communards in his arms and exclaimed, “Don’t worry we are one big happy family here.” Needless to say that was the last recruitment visit we received from the PLP that summer!
So Tree (from Treebeard, the Ent in ‘Lord of the Rings’) was an informant. Not a surprise in a way. Some “Lewd Moosers” wound up on a crew installing shelving at an insurance company outside Boston. Tree was supposed to organize that crew. Some folks on the crew wanted to talk union to the full time workers at the site, even organized a walkout. Tree always seemed to be encouraging provocative acts that did little but distance us from the regular employees. Now those “shenanigans” were a real farce.
Yeah, 5 mile bike rides each way sandwiched around a night of unloading produce in the mid-summer heat. That was probably the last time in my life that I was really in top shape. A lot of truckers were hauling the produce from down South. I remember in particular one Alabama truck driver watching us unload shirtless with our shoulder length hair and saying “you two are the healthiest looking hippies I ever have seen”.
“Healthy looking” and “hippy” are probably not the words that would be applied to the current 63 year old version of myself – a small town attorney and part time musician in Abingdon, VA, in need of hip replacement and losing a few pounds.
Valuable lessons in good business practice were learned that summer – like how to make sure that the crates on top of the pallet had good lettuce on the top, with the bad stuff buried deep.
Another journey in the spring of that year with some members of the “Lewd Moose” and others in a couple of VW vans (some stereotypes are accurate) got us to an island off Tarpon Springs, where we borrowed some grapefruit that had been left to rot on the ground, traded a scout troup hashish for hot dogs (they were, indeed, prepared), and got run off of state park property at gun point. We snuck back in later to catch the boat to the island, a tiny thing with a finicky outboard motor that kept quitting and had to take people in shifts.
That trip included a stop at the Fiddler’s Convention in Union Grove, NC, that had an incredible mix of real old time pickers (Clark Kessinger won ‘Best Fiddler’ and George Pegram toured the camp fires all night never refusing a request to show some novice the right way to pick “John Henry”) and young “hippy” bands like the Spark Gap Wonder Boys… rednecks and hippies. It was an amazing scene. A sweet young lady actually “embroideried” a flower on my jeans. People did that stuff back then: Dr. Hook didn’t just make it up for the “Cover of the Rolling Stone” song. One fellow traveler brought along his adventurous (and very hot) mom, who hooked up with a Vietnam Vet and departed our caravan. Was that just a different universe??
Anyway the trip confirmed in me a life long passion for Appalachian music. I met my wife, Sharon Trumbley, at the weekly Sunday afternoon jam session on the Cambridge Common, probably spent more time in law school studying mandolin than commercial paper, and after graduation went to the Appalachian coalfields of southwest Virginia, at least as much for the music as to work on setting up a legal aid program, spouse abuse shelter, food coops, etc..
Which is where I am now, playing in jam sessions 4 or 5 nights a week, and trying to find a way to retire so that I can get serious about the music. After all, not everybody can get as lucky as my favorite picking partner, Bill McCall, still going strong at 89 – a friend of the Carter Family and pall bearer at Sarah Carter’s funeral who still picks Carter Family and Jimmy Rogers music over any other. I’m the harmonica player in this band. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EX6FGxB9iUY Here’s one of me with Bill, on harmonica again. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=yqah7RezPxw
Some patterns seem to get settled when you’re 21 that far outlast the world in which they were created. Hope you and Christina found your way down I-81 again sometime soon.
Love, Nucci (Thomas C.Antenucci)
That’s it? I remember many another shenanigan! Also, as I recall, the “lewd” came from Jeff always going around half serious, shouting, “That’s lewd!” at Buck, me, etc. He laughed, but was also a bit of a lewd prude, emphasis on both words, himself. I remember he told everybody not to use his toothbrush, so naturally Buck and Tommy used it every day after he was gone. We were also spied on by a hippie named Tree, who had a yen for underage girls, but also was on the lam from the feds down in Maryland, for draft dodging, and they turned him into spying on us, and that is where the crazy gravitas of the file title, Lewd Moose Commune came from. The Moose part, was, indeed, Peter, who I thought had that nickname from Harvard football days. Ah, we all remember what we were and how that made us into what we are today. I always thought a good John Sales novella could be done with the Lewd Moose Commune title. Nobody ever really got the crazy, fun, and very political nature of those days all rolled into one. There was The Strawberry Statement (too nice) and Marge Piercy (too p.c. and all borrowed from Jonah Raskin,) etc. if you get what I mean. And now, my friends, tricky to remember all the details. So thanks, Peter, for supplying a few–All Best, Steve
(What am I doing right now? Watching Ecstasy with Hedy Lamar, c. 1933, about to pen a column on Andrew Viterbi, refugee from Italian facism, who, co-founded Qualcomm, on some IP from Hedy, and made himself a couple billion dollars–cell phones–much of which he’s given away. All America. All strange–)
Yes, it’s easy to play down the effects of such protest actions as yours, but the fact is that there were so many such throughout the country in those years–that is, against the racial injustice as well as the Vietnam War–that they did up to a considerable impact.
In any case, you promised that #4 was going to be about your year in Italy–some of us are looking forward to that episode.