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Alternative Press Publisher Passes
The following
obituary was published in the Sunday, February 11 edition of the
San Francisco Chronicle.
John Bryan, a mainstay of the alternative press in San Francisco
and Los Angeles in the 1960s and later, died at his San
Francisco residence after a long illness. He was 72 when he died
Feb. 1.
In his last years, Mr. Bryan supported himself by working part
time in a Mission District bookstore, but in his heyday he was a
noted writer, editor, publisher and author for several
alternative newspapers and underground magazines.
He was a hands-on editor and publisher, performing most of the
work, including the production, himself.
“He was a one-man band, and the printing press was his musical
instrument,” said Paul Krassner, founder and editor of the
Realist, one of the most famous of the counterculture
magazines.
“He was an activist who believed strongly in justice for all,”
said A.D. Winans, publisher of the Second Coming Press in San
Francisco. “He was a strong union man and very political.”
In Mr. Bryan’s view, the government of the U.S. needed to be
changed. He despised injustice and felt the mainstream press was
full of reporters and editors who censored themselves to present
an establishment view of the world.
“He felt…that America needed an underground press with real
teeth, wildness and fearlessness both in language and in
content,” said author Gerald Nicosia.
The results were underground newspapers and magazines written,
edited or published by Mr. Bryan. They all featured bold content
and a strong political slant. Mr. Bryan was the first person to
publish the prose of underground poet Charles Bukowski.
Bukowski’s weekly column, "Notes of a Dirty Old Man,” ran for
years in Open City, a paper Mr. Bryan ran in Los Angeles.
Mr. Bryan believed in leftist politics and a free life and his
writers and his papers had few taboos. He was fined $1,000 by a
Los Angeles judge in 1968 for “preparing and distributing
obscene matter.” It was a picture of a nude woman that appeared
in an ad.
He was also arrested on other obscenity charges about the same
time, but charges were dropped when noted writers and poets came
to his defense.
John Bryan was born in 1934 in Cleveland. He was trained as a
conventional journalist and worked at the San Diego Tribune,
the Los Angeles Mirror, the Los Angeles Herald
Examiner, the Houston Chronicle, and both the San
Francisco Examiner and the Chronicle.
He quit the Chronicle in 1964 and started Open City
Press, San Francisco’s first alternative paper. In all, Mr.
Bryan put out three literary journals and four newspapers in San
Francisco, was managing editor of the Los Angles Free Press,
and founded Open City, another Los Angeles weekly.
In 1981, the Chronicle called him “The King of the
Underground Press,” a title he thought inapt, considering his
views on royalty.
Mr. Bryan was a one-man newspaperman, “ Warren Hinckle wrote in
the Chronicle in 1981. Hinckle described how Mr. Bryan
lived and worked in a basement apartment surrounded by printing
equipment.
“His living room was crammed with paste-up boards,” Hinckle
wrote. “The dining room was full of IBM typesetting equipment.
Bryan never slept…He couldn’t pay his witers, so he managed to
get them drunk instead.
Hinckle called him “the Peter Zenger of the underground
press…unconquered and ungovernable by the puny laws of
Journalism.”
Mr. Bryan was a conventional author as well. His biography of
Joseph Ramiro, a Vietnam War Vet who joined the radical
Symbionese Liberation Army, was well received. He also wrote a
book about Timothy Leary, the counterculture guru, and sold it
on the streets outside halls where Leary lectured.
Mr. Bryan never made any money from his various enterprises: he
paid his own salary out of the quarters he got from his
newspaper sales. Most of his publications were economic
failures. One of his last was called Appeal to Reason, a
title used by Thomas Paine, a great patriot of the American
Revolution.
“He was a man in the tradition of Tom Paine and LF Stone, “
Krassner said.
His final newspaper effort was called Peace News, which
he published with the late Allen Cohen, the publisher of the
Oracle. It came out not long after the events of September
11, 2001, and was distributed at anti-war rallies.
The Peace News was a one-issue paper; Mr. Bryan, who by
then had health problems, had finally run out of steam.
“In his last years,” Nicosia said, “he worked the sales desk at
the Abandoned Planet bookstore, where I’d sometimes drop in and
see him and chat about old times. I used to tell him, “You’re
the forgotten warrior,” and always get a big smile from him.”
Mr. Bryan was married, but he and his wife separated and she
died some years ago. He is survived by five children – Shauna,
Eve, Lisa, Jason and James – and several grandchildren.
A memorial service is pending.
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