The killings at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo have provoked much discussion about the freedom of expression. Ed Wasserman, the dean of University of California Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism — who has lived in Paris and read the magazine — says it was “targeted because it promotes a very rude brand of satire that is integral to French culture, a brand that emphasizes derision.”
Wasserman says American satire is pretty mild by comparison. This wasn’t always so. In the 1960s, he notes that there was a satirical U.S. magazine similar to Charlie Hebdo called The Realist, which ran outrageous pieces on religion, sex, racism, LSD, pot, abortion, Vietnam and nuclear war.
I regularly bought The Realist at Clancy’s Bookstore on Boulder’s University Hill. The magazine was so popular that the store ordered 200 copies of each issue. The proprietor was a sprightly, witty, loquacious, 4-foot-1-inch man named Clancy Sheehy. I was introduced to him when I was a junior high student by a CU student teacher who liked an anti-war essay I had written.
From 1961 to 1967, the store was a great place to hang out, particularly for University of Colorado students and faculty members. Clancy told the Daily Camera, “This is my miniature stage on which are played 150 dramas daily. People get together here to sing, discuss politics and philosophy, have poetry readings. Students come here with little problems and big questions.”
In January 1965, Len Barron — a CU student in his 30s — found out that Clancy was in financial trouble. He helped organize a testimonial program to honor Clancy and raise money for the store. Tickets were $5 each. The event included music, drama and poetry reading. It filled the University Memorial Center’s Main Ballroom. English professor James Sandoe read the poetry of Kipling. The university Jazz Band performed. Charles Nilon, CU’s first black professor, gave a moving tribute to Clancy. Drama students did Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood. Anthropology professor John Greenway performed folk songs. Sociology professor Howard Higman imitated Eleanor Roosevelt. About $3,000 was raised.
Dave Morton, a friend of Clancy’s who helped run the store, says Clancy wanted his store to be like City Lights in San Francisco, the bookstore and publisher founded by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti which was a voice of the Beat Generation of the 1950s.
Morton says, “Clancy worked his ass off. He put in 11 to 12 hours a day.” The two huge plate glass windows of the store (which was on the second floor) were shattered by bricks at least twice, Morton says. No one was caught but Morton assumes the perpetrators were probably rightwingers who disliked the store.
In November 1966, Clancy, who was then 39 years old, was arrested for selling an indecent item. He was charged with committing an “indecent or filthy act” and “with possessing or exhibiting to sell or offering for sale an indecent or lewd book, picture or other thing whatever of an immoral or scandalous nature.”
Goodness gracious, what disgusting thing did he do? According to the Daily Camera back in 1966, he sold a button (on consignment for a CU student) “using a four-letter-word in which the single vowel has been replaced by an asterisk.” The button said “F*CK CENSORSHIP.”
CU students were planning a protest when Clancy went to Municipal Court but he asked them not to.
On January 6, 1967, Judge Hansen dismissed the charges and ruled that the two ordinances were unconstitutional, abridging the rights of free speech.
The conflict over Clancy’s button might seem silly today, but Judge Hansen’s decision represented a larger legally sanctioned shift in attitudes over the notion of civility which was happening in the ’60s, according to historian Kenneth Cmiel. Traditional social etiquette was challenged by polite blacks sitting in at segregated restaurants, by counterculturists desiring more authentic social relations and by student radicals strategically disrupting things for political reasons. There were excesses, but America would become a more relaxed and informal society.
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This opinion column does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.
