A tribute to the San Francisco Diggers by Jay Babcock
Author: Jay Babcock
I am an independent writer and editor based in Tucson, Arizona. I publish LANDLINE at jaybabcock.substack.com
Previously: I co-founded and edited Arthur Magazine (2002-2008, 2012-13) and curated the three Arthur music festival events (Arthurfest, ArthurBall, and Arthur Nights) (2005-6). Prior to that I was a district office staffer for Congressman Henry A. Waxman, a DJ at Silver Lake pirate radio station KBLT, a copy editor at Larry Flynt Publications, an editor at Mean magazine, and a freelance journalist contributing work to LAWeekly, Mojo, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Vibe, Rap Pages, Grand Royal and many other print and online outlets. An extended piece I wrote on Fela Kuti was selected for the Da Capo Best Music Writing 2000 anthology. In 2006, I was somehow listed in the Music section of Los Angeles Magazine's annual "Power" issue. In 2007-8, I produced a blog called "Nature Trumps," about the L.A. River. From 2010 to 2021, I lived in rural wilderness in Joshua Tree, Ca.
Emmett Grogan, from sometime in the ’70s. Photographer unknown. Courtesy Max Grogan.
Sometime in 1972, or possibly 1973, freelance journalist Linda Gaboriau conducted an interview with San Francisco Diggers member Emmett Grogan in the Montreal apartment he shared with his wife, actress Louise Latraverse. The conversation, which centered on Grogan’s recently published 498-page third-person autobiography-novel Ringolevio (also: archive.org), was apparently intended for broadcast on CBC radio, which Gaboriau regularly contributed to.
(Note: It is possible that each of the above statements is factually inaccurate or incomplete. I will update this post as/if I get any new information.)
I don’t know if any or all of this interview was in fact ever broadcast. Some years ago, a member of the Grogan family passed me an audio transfer of the interview, which had been recorded on ⅛-inch tape. The family has recently given me permission to circulate the interview’s contents here. With assistance from longtime Diggers archivist Eric Noble, I created a transcript from the audio file a couple of months ago, and what follows below is a transcript, which I have lightly edited for clarity. Any errors in transcription or editing are mine.
“Come on, get used to it. Loosen up. You must liberate!”: Lenore Kandel (as quoted by Peter Berg in 2006) holding a copy of her Love Book.
Diggers.org archivist Eric Noble has posted the text of a previously unpublished 1998 interview with Lenore Kandel.
A very small portion of this hour-plus interview, conducted by French filmmakers Alice Gaillard and Céline Deransart, was used in their documentary Les Diggers de San Francisco. The remainder of the conversation has now been transcribed and edited for clarity and is now online. (I helped with some editing.) Go here to read it: https://diggers.org/lenore_kandel.htm
Lenore Kandel was a visionary poet, famed author of the controversial ‘holy erotica’ ‘The Love Book,’ an accomplished belly dancer and folk musician, the only female speaker at the Human Be-In (which occurred on her 35th birthday), and by many accounts, a major, imaginative, persistent force within the Diggers and the Haight scene in general, especially during the crucial 1966-1968 period. (Eric argues that it’s Lenore’s repeated, public use of “Love” that gave the “Love Generation” its name… I don’t know if I’m persuaded on that count [yet], but it’s possible!) She was involved in the early ’60s with Beat poet Lew Welch (they both appear, thinly fictionalized, in Jack Kerouac’s semi-autobiographical 1962 novel, Big Sur); published countless poems in small press magazines, chapbooks and the 1967 Grove Press collection, Word Alchemy (a posthumous 2012 collection of her complete poetic output is in print); appeared with boyfriend/Digger/Hells Angel Bill ‘Sweet William’ Fritsch in Kenneth Anger’s ‘Invocation of My Demon Brother‘; and, along with many other Diggers, was a featured poet at The Band’s ‘The Last Waltz’ concert.
An endearingly gentle-ecstatic Lenore Kandel reads a fresh poem at The Band’s The Last Waltz concert, Nov. 25, 1976.
Untreated injuries resulting from a 1970 motorcycle accident caused Lenore severe pain for the rest of her life; by the ’90s, when this interview was conducted, she was essentially homebound — but, as you will read, she remained intellectually alive, articulate and learned, playful and joyful. There are so many lovely passages in this interview. Yes, I wish Lenore had talked about her own family background, Fritsch, Hells Angels, all the incredible Diggers women, Diane di Prima, Emmett Grogan, Lew Welch, and on and on—but I am so grateful for what is here.
On a personal note, I had hoped to interview Lenore regarding the Diggers in 2006 with my documentary filmmaking partners; however, when I contacted her, she was in one of her periods when she was feeling unwell. She asked me to call back. In 2009, as my partners and I started to prepare a second trip to northern California to conduct further interviews, Lenore was at the top of our list. Before I called her to try and schedule, I did a quick Google search, and was saddened to learn that she had passed away the previous week.
Everyone that I subsequently interviewed about the Diggers talked about Lenore with great fondness, especially Phyllis Wilner and Vicki Pollack. (Peter Berg and Kent Minault also shared some vivid memories of her brilliance.) Unfortunately, there is almost no record—in print or otherwise—of Lenore herself talking at much length about the Diggers. So, I am especially happy that Alice and Celine shared the unexpurgated footage of their interview with Lenore with Eric—and that he has now made it available to everyone. Love wins.
Longtime Diggers archivist/historian Eric Noble has posted an edited transcript of a previously unpublished/unseen interview with Arthur Lisch, conducted in 1998 by filmmakers Alice Gaillard and Céline Deransart for their documentary film Les Diggers de San Francisco, released that same year.
For whatever reason, none of the footage from the interview made it into Les Diggers’ final edit.
Lisch, a lifelong artist-activist who played a major role in the Diggers’ activities, died in 2020. This is the only interview that I’m aware of where he reflected on the Diggers period at any length. I am so grateful that Eric was able to recover it, and it was my privilege to assist in the transcribing and (minor) editing.
Arthur Lisch and Emmett Grogan, January 1967. Photograph by William Gedney, courtesy Eric Noble at diggers.org. Eric discovered this photo and many others in the Gedney collection housed at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University.
Thanks everybody for the kind words and donations. As you may have noticed, I’ve used some of the funds to upgrade this site with WordPress; all ads have been removed, and the site now has a simpler address: diggersdocs.org
Meanwhile, I’ve been working on two major-ish projects.
The first is another in the Oral Histories series, this one a never-before-published long conversation with Nina Blasenheim and the late Freeman (Linn) House that I recorded at their home in 2010. I hope to have it for you before this year’s holiday season gets underway sometime this summer.
The second project is a bit different. I am working with close family members of the late Arthur Lisch (pictured above) to get a better understanding of who he was, how he came to be involved in the Diggers, what he did during that period, and what he did later. Arthur was a fascinating cat who played a major role in the Diggers story; although he is certainly present in contemporaneous media accounts and some scene/period histories, much of his specific work, ideas and impact has perhaps been overshadowed by other Digger voices. In an effort to set the record straight(er), I’m excited to share what I’ve been finding with everyone here soon… again, hopefully before mid-December sometime this summer.
There’s a few other things on the boil but I’m not yet sure if they’ll amount to much. We shall see.
Thanks again for reading. If you’d like to help cover the costs of this effort, donations of any amount at all are appreciated. Click here to get that happening.
Wow. December, 1966: Local (San Francisco) TV color news footage of a visit to the first Diggers Free Store/garage/studio location on Page Street, and an on-camera interview with the mysterious Billy Murcott (aka Billy Landout from Emmett Grogan’s Ringolevio), a Digger from early on and later the author of the visionary Mutants Commune manifesto. Tremendous find. Shocking, really, to see this turn up out of the blue after all of these years. And for you Deadheads: “Phil Lesh is seen helping to carry in a vat of soup” at 0:41.
Emmett Grogan, Harvey Kornspan and Richard Brautigan at an Artists Liberation Front meeting, 1967. Photo by Lisa Law, courtesy Harvey Kornspan.
I first interviewed Harvey Kornspan in August, 2010, after I had traveled hundreds of miles to interview many other Diggers in the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento and further up the coast, deep in northern California’s Emerald Triangle. This was a bit strange, given that Harvey lives in Silver Lake, less than two miles from the Atwater Village bungalow I was rented until 2008. For years I had been researching the Diggers, and there Harvey was all along, just a hop away.
But Harvey was not just a Digger, and he wasn’t just a local. Because unlike every other Digger I’ve ever met or contacted, before or since, Harvey had kept the figurative and literal receipts of the era. So not only did he have his wonderful memories — more of less: it was the ’60s, let’s be reasonable — but he also had unpublished letters, manuscripts, broadside drafts and business documents, as well as a sizable collection of flyers, newspapers, and other ephemera, which he was happy to share. (Some of them are shown here. Harvey is a mensch.)
For the uninitiated: in 2022, yes, the Diggers are little-known. But in 1966-8, such was the Diggers’ presence and notoriety that seemingly every reporter filing a story on the Haight included the Diggers in their account. “A band of hippie do-gooders,” said Time magazine. “A true peace corps,” wrote local daily newspaper columnist (and future Rolling Stone editor) Ralph J. Gleason. The Beatles’ press officer Derek Taylor would later write, “[The Diggers] were in my opinion the core of the whole underground counterculture because they were our conscience.”
So, as the counter-culture came into being, the Diggers were there, the Diggers were important, the Diggers were well-known, but crucially, though they acted in public, the Diggers were anonymous. Nobody knew who they were, where they came from, or how they did what they did. In short, they had a mystique: a group of LSD-fueled street anarchists with a philosophy/practice of “everything is free / do you own thing.”
I recently came across a March 1967 article from the Foghorn, a student newspaper published by the University of San Francisco, a private Jesuit school, that summed up the Diggers vibe succinctly:
The sign on the door said, “You are a digger.” About 50 people had accepted the invitation and moved into the house high in the hills over the Haight-Ashbury.
A cauldron of stew was cooking in the kitchen. The stew, eventually, would be trucked down to the Panhandle, free for anyone with a bowl and a spoon. No one know for sure who brings the food that goes into the stew. Some is donated, some bought, some stolen. The stew would be good today; someone had brought two chickens.
It’s all the work of the Diggers, a mysterious, amorphous group in the Haight-Ashbury dedicated to given things away free and “doing their thing.” They have been evicted from more than half a dozen flats, apartments, and store fronts in the six months of their existence in San Francisco.
One place of refuge is the All Saints Episcopal Church on Waller, where Father Leon Harris has let the Diggers use his church kitchen to prepare the food for the Panhandle for three weeks now.
“The Diggers are industrious, cheerful and benevolent,” he said. “They also give away free clothing and find lodging for homeless people. It seems to me they put a lot of professing Christians to shame by their goodness.”
What follows is a consolidation of various conversations with Harvey, which, to some degree, builds on my previously posted Diggers oral histories, and, as it includes the inside story of why the Altamont disaster happened, offers something of a conclusion. So, many incidents and personages are spoken of without context, or only in passing. My advice to the casual-but-curious reader is to simply let any unfamiliar/unexplained bits pass. Keep reading, you might get something out of the next part.
This is the tenth interview in my series of Diggers’ oral histories; the others are accessible here. For more detailed information on the Diggers, consult Eric Noble’s vast archive at diggers.org
I have incurred not insignificant expenses in my Diggers research through the years. If you would like to support my work,please make a donation in my PayPal TipJar. All contributions, regardless of size, are greatly appreciated. Thank you!
Harvey Kornspan: I was born in Youngstown, Ohio. My dad sold used cars, had a very successful business. Not rich, middle class. Jewish, both sides. My mom was a homemaker. I have a sister who’s four years older and a brother with Down Syndrome.
A contemporary report on the Diggers via the University of San Francisco’s student newspaper, The Foghorn, from March 10, 1967. USF is a private Jesuit university.
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