''The Oracle of the City of San Francisco'', also known as the ''San Francisco Oracle'', was an

underground newspaper The terms underground press or clandestine press refer to periodicals and publications that are produced without official approval, illegally or against the wishes of a dominant (governmental, religious, or institutional) group. In specific rece ...

published in 12 issues from September 20, 1966, to February 1968 in the

Haight-Ashbury Haight-Ashbury () is a district of San Francisco, California, named for the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets. It is also called the Haight and the Upper Haight. The neighborhood is known as one of the main centers of the countercultu ...

neighborhood of that city. Allen Cohen (1940–2004), the editor during the paper's most vibrant period, and Michael Bowen, the art director, were among the founders of the publication. The ''Oracle'' was an early member of the Underground Press Syndicate. The ''Oracle'' combined poetry, spirituality, and multicultural interests with psychedelic design, reflecting and shaping the

countercultural A counterculture is a culture whose values and norms of behavior differ substantially from those of mainstream society, sometimes diametrically opposed to mainstream cultural mores.Eric Donald Hirsch. ''The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy''. Ho ...

community as it developed in the Haight-Ashbury. Arguably the outstanding example of psychedelia within the countercultural "underground" press, the publication was noted for experimental multicolored design. ''Oracle'' contributors included many significant San Francisco–area artists of the time, including Bruce Conner and Rick Griffin. It featured such beat writers as

Allen Ginsberg Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with Lucien Carr, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of th ...

Gary Snyder Gary Snyder (born May 8, 1930) is an American poet, essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist. His early poetry has been associated with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance and he has been described as the "poet laureate ...

Lawrence Ferlinghetti Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti (March 24, 1919 – February 22, 2021) was an American poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. An author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and ...

and

Michael McClure Michael McClure (October 20, 1932 – May 4, 2020) was an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he found fame as one of the five poets (including Allen Ginsberg) who read at the famo ...

History

The initial impetus for the paper came from Allen Cohen and

head shop A head shop is a retail outlet specializing in Drug paraphernalia, paraphernalia used for consumption of cannabis and tobacco and items related to cannabis culture and related countercultures. They emerged from the hippie counterculture in ...

owners Ron and Jay Thelin, who offered to put up the seed money to found an underground paper. In the summer of 1966 a number of meetings were held in the Haight-Ashbury district to discuss the idea of starting a paper, attracting an eclectic group of interested people. The result of these meetings was a paper called ''P.O. Frisco'' which lasted for a single 12-page tabloid issue dated September 2, 1966, under the editorship of Dan Elliot and Richard Sassoon (a 31-year-old Yale-educated poet who had once been

Sylvia Plath Sylvia Plath (; October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet and author. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for '' The Colossus and Other Poems'' (1960), '' Ariel'' (1965), a ...

's boyfriend), operating out of a storefront on Frederick Street in cooperation with members of the radical Progressive Labor Party. "P.O." stood for "Psychedelphic Oracle," a title suggested by Bruce Conner. ''P.O. Frisco'' was a compromise between the various factions involved in founding the paper which wound up satisfying no one, and the Thelin brothers threatened to terminate their financial support unless the paper was completely reinvented. A second attempt began out of new offices behind the Print Mint on Haight Street, under new editors George Tsongas and John Bronson. The new paper, ''The San Francisco Oracle,'' started with issue number #1. This paper did not yet have the dense verbose and graphically rich psychedelic design the ''Oracle'' later became famous for, but it soon acquired those attributes. Bronson and Tsongas edited the first two issues of the new ''Oracle'' and then left after a fight with Cohen and Gabe Katz, who became the paper's new art editor starting with issue #3 while Cohen took over as editor, a role he maintained until the end. One week after the redesigned ''Oracle'' #3 appeared on the streets around November 8, 1966, editor Cohen was busted in the Thelins' Psychedelic Shop for selling a police vice squad officer a copy of

Lenore Kandel Lenore Kandel (January 14, 1932, New York City – October 18, 2009, San Francisco, California) was an American poet, affiliated with the Beat Generation and Hippie counterculture. Biography Although Kandel was born in New York, her family l ...

's book of verse, ''The Love Book.'' This case became a free speech ''cause célèbre'' around the country. The ''Oracle'' quickly developed a stable core group of staffers which included, among many others, Michael Bowen, Stephen Levine, Travis Rivers (a Texan friend of

Janis Joplin Janis Lyn Joplin (January 19, 1943 – October 4, 1970) was an American singer and songwriter. One of the most iconic and successful Rock music, rock performers of her era, she was noted for her powerful mezzo-soprano vocals and her "electric" ...

, he was at that time the manager of the Haight Street branch of the Print Mint), George Tsongas, who had returned to the paper, staff artists Dangerfield Ashton, Ami McGill, and Hetti McGee, poet Harry Monroe, Gene Grimm, and Steve Lieper. After issue #5, the paper moved into the premises formerly occupied by Michael Bowen at 1371 Haight Street near Masonic. The new offices were open 24 hours a day. Starting with issue #6 the paper switched printers from Waller Press (which later served as the printers for the '' San Francisco Express Times'') to Howard Quinn Printers. At the Howard Quinn shop the paper's artists were allowed to come in on Sundays when the paper was being printed and experiment with the presses, and it was at this time that the revolutionary split-fountain rainbow inking effect was perfected. This involved placing makeshift wooden dams in the ink fountain and using them to feed different colored inks simultaneously into the fountain, which produced a rainbow effect which was a bit difficult to read but visually arresting. The more colorful ''Oracle'' was an instant success and the paper had to go back to press on successive Sundays to run off more copies. The paper's circulation, which had started with a modest 3,000 copies and gradually grew to about 15,000 copies by issue #4 and 50,000 copies by #5, ran off 60–75,000 copies of #6 and even more of #7. Starting with #6 every issue went back to press for at least a second printing, sometimes with changes in content. At its peak, the publication's print run was about 125,000, but its editors estimated that ample pass-around readership brought their circulation above half a million. The influential sprawling thematic pieces that ran in the ''Oracle'' include the astrologers' symposium on the Age of Aquarius in issue #6, with Ambrose Hollingworth, Gayla (Rosalind Sharpe Wall, an associate of John Starr Cooke), and Gavin Arthur; and the "

Houseboat Summit The ''Vallejo'' is a houseboat in Sausalito, California, United States. It was originally a passenger ferry in Portland, Oregon, known as ''O&CRR Ferry No. 2'', in the late 19th century. After falling into disuse in Portland, it was transported t ...

" in issue #7 which brought together

Alan Watts Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British and American writer, speaker, and self-styled "philosophical entertainer", known for interpreting and popularising Buddhist, Taoist, and Hinduism, Hindu philosophy for a Wes ...

, Allen Ginsberg,

Timothy Leary Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) was an American psychologist and author known for his strong advocacy of psychedelic drugs. Evaluations of Leary are polarized, ranging from "bold oracle" to "publicity hound". Accordin ...

, and Gary Snyder for a long, free-ranging discussion on the houseboat owned by Watts and Elsa Gidlow through their Society for Comparative Philosophy. . It began with Watts posing the question "Whether to drop out or take over?" Elsa Gidlow, a quiet counterculture engine in her own right, contributed an essay to that same issue entitled "Sounds From the Seedpower Sitar". Issue #5, the "Human Be-In" issue, was the launching pad for the Gathering of the Tribes held in Golden Gate Park on January 14, 1967. Issue #12, which was to be the last, featured an uncut transcript of a symposium at Masonic Auditorium entitled "2000 A.D." with Alan Watts,

Herman Kahn Herman Kahn (February 15, 1922 – July 7, 1983) was an American physicist and a founding member of the Hudson Institute, regarded as one of the preeminent futurists of the latter part of the twentieth century. He originally came to prominence ...

and

Carl Rogers Carl Ransom Rogers (January 8, 1902 – February 4, 1987) was an American psychologist who was one of the founders of humanistic psychology and was known especially for his person-centered psychotherapy. Rogers is widely considered one of the f ...

Successors and imitators

After the paper folded, ''Oracle'' staff who had left the city and relocated in Middletown, California, put out a single one-shot issue of a 24-page psychedelic tabloid paper called the ''Harbinger'' in uly1968, with contributions by Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, Michael Hollingshead, and others. In November, a new ''Oracle'' called the ''San Francisco Oracle of the Spiritual Revolution'' was launched, publishing 7 issues between November 1968 and November 1969. Published in Larkspur, CA and edited by Phillip Davenport (1943–2001), a disciple of Murshid Samuel Lewis (Sufi Sam), it had a more spiritual focus and included material relating to Stephen Gaskin, Sufi Sam,

Ram Dass Ram Dass (born Richard Alpert; April 6, 1931 – December 22, 2019), also known as Baba Ram Dass, was an American spiritual teacher, guru of modern yoga, psychologist, and writer. His best-selling 1971 book '' Be Here Now'', which has been d ...

, and other gurus of the San Francisco scene, as well as the usual underground fare. A monthly psychedelic Los Angeles paper with neopagan overtones, called ''The Oracle of Southern California'', existed for about a year; the first issue was published as ''The City of Los Angeles Oracle'' in March 1967.''Southern California Oracle'': Description and contents
/ref> Some members of the ''SF Oracle'' collective were involved in starting another paper, '' San Francisco Express Times,'' which published from January 24, 1968, to March 25, 1969, at which time the paper's name was changed to ''San Francisco Good Times,'' appearing under that title from April 1969 to August 1972. In 1967 students at San Francisco State College distributed a one-off eight-page tabloid parody of the ''Oracle'' called the ''Orifice,'' edited by Ben Fong-Torres.

References

External links

Allen Cohen biography and writing

* ttp://www.rockument.com/haimg.html Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s

PBS ''American Experience'' documentary companion website

{{Hippies, state=collapsed Alternative weekly newspapers published in the United States Newspapers published in the San Francisco Bay Area Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco Hippie movement History of San Francisco Counterculture of the 1960s Defunct newspapers published in California Newspapers established in 1966 Newspapers disestablished in 1968 1966 establishments in California 1968 disestablishments in California

History

Successors and imitators

See also

References

External links