Longtime Diggers archivist/historian Eric Noble has posted an edited transcript of a previously unpublished/unseen interview with Arthur Lisch, conducted in 1998 by filmmakers Alice Gaillard and Céline Deransart for their documentary film Les Diggers de San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.
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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