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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Thursday, May 16, 1968
Underground press in Denver
Minorities speak out
By Diane Wengler
A short man with a full red beard, slightly receding long brown hair and glasses leaned over a beer in a downtown Denver bar and said;
"I like to think of myself as an ethnic transvestite."
The man was Rick Epting, editor of Denver's underground newspaper, the Mountain Free Press.
During the day, Epting leads a straight life as the man in charge of the photo archives and the information and news service at the Denver Post. But at night, he assumes the role of editor and high priest for the hometown newspaper of Denver's hippie community.
"I first became interested in the underground press movement while at the Post when I began noticing some discrepancies in what was and wasn't printed." Epiting said.
"Much of the news was controlled and suppressed—especially the anti-establishment point of view." he said.
Denver needed a paper to express the views of the city's minorities—the hippies and the Negroes in particular, Epting said. So he met that need with the first Denver underground, the Teleidoscopic Collage (T.C.)
"As an underground paper, we have an obligation to print fully the other side of the question."
The present underground, the Mountain Free Press is the result of a recent merger of Epting's paper, the T.C., and the Solid Muldoon.
The Solid Muldoon folded early in the year for lack of organization and finances. The T.C. was in good health but merged with the Muldoon to gain its staff members.
Solid Muldloon was an artsy-craftsy paper, mainly concerned with drugs and anti-establishment protest. The T.C. was also art, poetry, music, drug and hippie-oriented. But, through the merger, a quite new paper has emerged.
"I've been through the drug scene and the usual things that underground papers write about," Epting said. "We're doing something different this time."
"Civil rights and politics are the really important things right now," he said. "And you can't be a true underground unless you represent the minority groups. The sickness in society makes it hard to know what's going on—especially with minority groups. So we've donated space in the MFP to the Negro community to air their views and special problems."
The MFP is a unique blend of good illustration, somewhat chaotic layout and surprisingly good writing. Although it contains the usual bizarre want ads ("I am the world's greatest layer. 1025 E. 17th., Apt. 5, Chris. Between the hours of seven and midnight) and anti-establishment cartoons found in most undergrounds, its strength lies in its columns.
Mainline, a column about drugs, an exclusive series written by Edward M. Keating of Ramparts, the Free Press Theatre column, and the Portable Landscape, a music column add variety and class to the paper.
The news columns reflect Epting's own view on the purpose of an underground—to tell the other side. Epting makes no pretense of airing both sides of an issue.
"I'd like to have every article be an editorial," he said. "A paper can be objective by printing just one side—as the truth is usually one-sided."
The MFP is more concerned with satire than shock.
"I don't believe in using four-letter words for shock value," Epting said. "We've only used them twice—once in a letter to the editor and once in a poem by a University of Denver English professor."
Although the MFP is the voice for Denver's hippie community, Epting said he is neither a hippie nor militantly anti-establishment.
"We're not hippies—that's such a degenerate word," Epiting said. "Underground is the word for us—we're fighting."
An 8-12 page issue of the MFP is off-set printed every other month with a circulation of about 20,000. Thirty distributors in the Aspen, Boulder, Colorado Springs and Denver area sell the paper on consignment; subscribers receive their copies in the mail and hippie vendors hawk them on the streets.
The advertising covers about seven-eighths of the costs, with street sales covering the rest.
"There's a danger in depending too much on street sales, as that's how many of them go under," Epting said.
Because the MFP sometimes clears as little as $100 profit per issue, the 23 staff members receive little or no pay for their efforts.
"I worked for six months on the T.C. before I saw a cent of the money for me." Epting said.
However, Epting has a grand plan.
"I'd like to make the MFP a national publication."
Epting's goal is to make a couple of thousand dollars profit a month, enabling him to pay his staff and to devote all his time and efforts to the enterprise.
Denver, which is usually sensitive about being known as the hippie capital of the Midwest, has put pressure on the hippie community, which occupies a good portion of the downtown area. And the MFP has not been immune.
Last year, two vendors who were distributing the T.C. on a downtown Denver streetcorner were arrested under a 42-year-old law requiring news vendors to be licensed. However, several weeks before the arrests, Epting said he had gone to the safety manager's office but was assured no license was necessary. The office didn't even have the proper fee form and didn't recall ever having issued a permit for any newspaper, including the Post.
The police drive against the paper ended when Max Zall, Denver city attorney, termed unconstitutional the law on which the arrests were based, and dismissed the case.
Epting promptly filed a $24,000 suit in district court against the city and arresting officers. The suit charges that the arresting officers had said "repeatedly" they were going to "drive the hippies out of Denver." It also charges that the officers were conducting a "personal vendetta against the newspaper in an attempt to put it out of business."
The Denver Post came to the paper's defense in a Dec. 17, 1967, editorial which stated:
"Even though some citizens and some policemen may not like it, we consider it necessary to point out once again that the Constitution of the U.S. applies to hippies just as it applies to everybody else.
"When the First and Fourteenth Amendments forbid government abridgement of the press, they protect the right to distribute newspapers as well as to publish them."
The MFP has not been without its problems — friction between the combined staff still holding loyalties to the parent papers which merged, a failure to meet deadlines, financial and legal problems. But the plan is grand.
"Our function is to stay five years ahead of the times in introducing new ideas, said Philip Normand, art editor.
"An underground paper shouldn't just say everything's hopeless and everyone's uptight—rather they should suggest what's better and guide the people into positive alternatives.
"We must go farther and farther into humanity's problems because we are involved with humanity.
"I expect the MFP to try new things in communications to be hip. The paper should turn people on to possibilities to become as creative at they can. Expression is the only channel if you're alive."
"McLuhan said we are bombarded with so many facts we try to draw our own conclusions, and we often draw false ones. The highest thing you can do with the printed word is to try to get as clear a picture as possible."
Contained in the next six pages are interpretative news and feature articles written by students in Backgrounds of the News II
A WORKING TYPIST
Members of Denver's hippie community often help out with many routine jobs in putting out the paper. Here, a girl who says her name is "just Frankie" justifies type lines on the Justiwriter.
ARTWORK IMPORTANT. TOO
Original cartoons, ad layout, and psychedelic artwork are the specialities of art editor, Philip Normand. Normand, former art editor of Solid Muldoon, became art editor when Muldoon merged with Teleidoscopic Collage to form the present Mountain Free Press.
FINDS DAILY TASKS SIMPLE
Rick Epting, editor of the Mountain Free Press, puts in many long hours doing paste-ups for his offset underground newspaper.