Category: Emmett Grogan

FAST LIFE: A previously uncirculated 1972 interview with Emmett Grogan by Linda Gaboriau

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.

Continue reading “FAST LIFE: A previously uncirculated 1972 interview with Emmett Grogan by Linda Gaboriau” →

An update

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.

All best,

Jay Babcock

Tucson, Arizona