Harvey Kornspan – Diggers Docs

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 So not only did he have his wonderful memories — more of less: it was the ’60s, let’s be reasonable — but he also had unpublished letters, manuscripts, broadside drafts and business documents, as well as a sizable collection of flyers, newspapers, and other ephemera, which he was happy to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!

— Jay Babcock (babcock.jay@gmail.com), July 27, 2022

Jay Babcock: Where’d your grow up?

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.

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In 2010, I drove to northern California from my home in Joshua Tree to interview as many living Diggers as would talk to me. Each conversation over those few days felt like a breakthrough—a motherlode of historical detail and insight beyond what I had gleaned from book research. And each Digger I interviewed was excited to learn that I was headed to Humboldt County to interview Jane Lapiner and David Simpson at their forest home. This couple, together since April, 1967, was beloved by other Diggers. If I was interviewing them, it meant that I was really doing my work. Instant Diggers cred.

In 2022, 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.”

Jane Lapiner and David Simpson were in their mid-20s during the Diggers period. Jane was a single mother from New York City with a background in leftist, avant garde dance; David was a Chicago-bred lefty dropout from the University of Wisconsin, who’d been a competitive boxer in high school, shared a house with pre-stardom Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs, served in the Coast Guard and was trimming trees in the East Bay when… But hold on, I’m telling their stories, instead of letting these award-winning storytellers tell it themselves.

What follows is a consolidation of conversations the three of us had one night and the next morning inside their farmhouse home, warmed by a wood stove and good food. I am grateful for their hospitality, and the life-example they continue to set (for example, see: “Judge Dismisses Case Against Four Septuagenarian Rainbow Ridge Activists,“ North Coast Journal, Dec. 15, 2020). There are some ‘60s people who went back to the land and didn’t fail. Jane and David are those people.

David Simpson and Jane Lapiner at home, 2010. Photo by Bob Doran for North County Journal

Please note that this conversation has not been edited down for a general audience. 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’ll like the next part. You’ll see why these two are so beloved.

This is the ninth interview in my series of Diggers’ oral histories; the others are accessible here. For more 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 drop a nickel or more in my TipJar. All donations, regardless of size, are greatly appreciated. Thank you!

— Jay Babcock (babcock.jay@gmail.com), March 5, 2022

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Tag: Harvey Kornspan

How the Deal Really Went Down: Behind the scenes with San Francisco Digger (and counterculture Zelig) HARVEY KORNSPAN

“We had a far more profound effect on society than we really understood, and some of us paid for that”: An epic conversation with JANE LAPINER and DAVID SIMPSON of the San Francisco Diggers