Remembering William Schanen:
Printer, Publisher, and Unsung Hero in the Battle for Freedom of the
Press
http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframerss.php?linkid=2997
2/14/2011
by BILL BERKOWITZ
William Schanen II was a Wisconsin-based publisher and printer. In
the late 1960s -- when few others would -- he printed several
underground newspapers. An unheralded hero, he was faced with a
conservative-led boycott that severely damaged his business. He died
of a heart attack forty years ago this month.
--
William Schanen II was a publisher and printer in the small town of
Port Washington, Wisconsin. He believed deeply in freedom of the
press and risked his small business in the late 1960s -- when few
others would - by printing several underground newspapers. That
decision incurred the wrath of conservatives who organized a boycott
that severely damaged the business and the livelihood of his family.
He died of a heart attack forty years ago this month at the age of 57.
In 21st century America, a news-junkie - especially one interested in
alternative points of view -- has many options: websites, blogs,
twitter, You Tube videos, podcasts, Facebook posts, some 24/7 news
channel hosts, and even on occasion, local alternative newspapers.
Whatever the medium, cyberspace and more traditional environs pretty
much guarantee information-loaded (or laden) days.
For progressives, it wasn't always so easy to find alternatives to
mainstream news and viewpoints. We celebrate journalists and
reporters like Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, Ida M. Tarbell,
George Seldes, I. F. Stone that bucked conventional wisdom. They
were the national giants.
And, if you were lucky enough, you ran into a man like William
Schanen, someone who is not nearly as celebrated as the above-named
folks, but who left an indelible mark on his times.
The times were turbulent: the Vietnam War was raging and anti-war
demonstrations were taking place all across the country; the woman's
movement was coming alive; the counter-culture was booming with a new
consciousness and drugs and rock n roll leading the way; political
leaders were assassinated; the Black Panther Party was a force and
the government pushed back against all progressive political
movements -- COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) for example.
It was against this backdrop that hundreds of alternative/underground
newspapers, with new attitude and contrarian viewpoints - political
activists as citizen journalists -- sprang up across the country.
By the spring of 1970, we had run out of local printers. The "we" in
question was the group that a year earlier founded Lawrence, Kansas'
first underground/alternative newspaper called Reconstruction. Now
called Vortex - after having merged with the Kansas City Screw -- the
last printer willing to print the paper happened to be located in a
cave in a former quarry outside Liberty, Missouri, which
coincidentally was home to a very right-wing outfit called The Minutemen.
The cave company printed one issue of our paper. The front page was
headlined "KC Chief Pig Kelly [sic] Exposed: Insurance Fraud; Deals
Guns To Minutemen." Our story provided affidavits documenting that
the Kansas City, Missouri Police Department, headed by Clarence M.
Kelley -- who was later to become Richard Nixon's Director of the FBI
- was, among other things, involved in selling confiscated guns to
The Minutemen.
When we picked up our thousand copies at the cave, we were told in no
uncertain terms "to hit the road Jack-and don't come back no more, no more..."
Publishing Vortex out of a small office on Massachusetts Street in
Lawrence, we had managed to alienate and/or scare off all the local
print shop owners, and printers in Topeka, Kansas City, Missouri, and
even as far away as Wichita.
While finding a printer may not have been a problem for alt papers on
the Coasts, i.e. The Berkeley Barb, The Los Angeles Free Press, the
East Village Other, or The Rat, in the heartland, finding and keeping
a printer was a major struggle.
And that is where William Schanen came in.
Through the grapevine, we heard about a printer in Port Washington,
Wisconsin, who was willing to print underground newspapers. William
Schanen, owner of Port Publications in Port Washington, printed three
small weekly community newspapers. Schanen also printed a Milwaukee
underground newspaper called Kaleidoscope.
Local conservatives - led by Benjamin Grob, the co-owner, along with
his brother Ted, of a Grafton, Wisconsin machine tool business --
became outraged, accusing him of printing "obscene literature for
profit." Grob told The Milwaukee Journal that Schanen was "smut
peddling." They organized a boycott, urging local retailers,
organizations and individuals not to advertise in any of Schanen's
publications.
Facing massive financial losses, Schanen took on more underground
newspapers including the Chicago Seed, the Indianapolis Free Press,
and Omaha Nebraska's Buffalo Chip. He also agreed to print our newspaper.
A Vortexian voyage
Port Washington, we were soon to discover, is a small New
England-esque fishing village located about 30 miles north of
Milwaukee, on the banks of Lake Michigan.
Here's how it worked.
We put the paper to bed on a Monday afternoon. Three of us were
assigned to drive the layout sheets, and a check, to Port Washington
-- 600-650 miles north of Lawrence. We drove a not-so-new dark red
and gray Volkswagen bus. It was a ten to twelve hour trip, often
fraught with car problems. If we left at seven or eight on Monday
evening, we'd usually pull into Port Washington by five or six the
next morning.
We'd wait in the parking lot for the shop to open, deliver the layout
sheets, and wait for the job to be finished, which would be around
five that evening. On a nice day, we would crash on park benches by
the water. I doubt our bench crashing did anything to help Schanen's
reputation in town, although as I remember it, the locals were always
friendly. If it were cold and yucky, we 'd try to get some sleep in the bus.
When Schanen's printers finished, we'd load up the bus and head back
to Lawrence, arriving at five or six in the morning. By eight o'clock
we were on the KU campus hawking papers for 25 cents a copy to the
thousands of students passing by the Student Union.
Schanen sets up shop in Port Washington
More than seventy years ago, William Schanen II set up shop to
publish a newspaper on main street in Port Washington - in the same
building his father had built for his law practice. In his 1994 book,
"Hometown Wisconsin," Marshall J. Cook called Schanen "a pioneer" in
that he was "the first to apply a new technology called offset
printing to newspapering." The Schanen Press which was what he and
his wife Marie called it "put out a free eight-page shopper called
Ozaukee Ads," soon to be changed to Ozaukee Press. (Port Washington
is the county seat for Ozaukee County.)
Cook noted that it didn't take long for the paper to overtake its
competition and become the only one in town. His son, William
Schanen III, who currently runs the paper, told Cook that growing up
he "'was a fly on the wall ... just absorbing the whole scene' while
a 'parade of characters' passed through."
Schanen's business suffered tremendously from the boycott. In his new
book "Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise
of Alternative Media in America" (Oxford University Press), John
McMillian writes "in the tradition of Benjamin Franklin, [Schanen]
believed that printers were obligated to print even those things they
found objectionable."
"I don't agree with a lot of it," Schanen said of Kaleidoscope, "but
what are we supposed to do, get rid of everything we don't agree
with? There's an issue here that is much larger than Bill
Schanen." He later issued a statement that read: "My family and I
are dedicated to fighting the boycott. All we can hope for is that
fair minded people who understand our position, who respect the right
to the constitutional guarantee of the freedom of the press, and the
right of Kaleidoscope to this same freedom will come to our support. "
In a story
(http://www.reocities.com/enchantedforest/field/8106/TEXTS/KscopeStory.html)
about the history of Milwaukee's Kaleidoscope, Mike Zetteler wrote:
"The boycott of Schanen's newspapers was crushing, with a revenue
loss of up to 90%, forcing a cutback to one paper, the Ozaukee Press.
He sadly remarked during the course of the boycott that only 2% of
the weekly papers in Wisconsin supported him. And at the same time,
some industrial leaders were pressuring others to block job printing
orders as well as advertising in his weeklies."
Zetteler pointed out that both "before and after his death Schanen
was recognized for his dedication to a free press " through a number
of awards including the 1970 Elijah Lovejoy Award for courage in
journalism and Wisconsin Newsman of the Year in 1971.
McMillian reported in "Smoking Typewriters" that: "Although Schanen
won financial, moral, and editorial support from an alliance of
neighbors, the National Newspaper Association, the ACLU, the
University of Wisconsin's journalism department, and the neighboring
Milwaukee Journal, he was eventually forced to sell off two of his
three newspapers."
Forty years ago, in February 1971, at the age of 57, Schanen died of
a heart attack.
The story of Vortex, and the many other underground newspapers that
were printed in Port Washington, and their relationship with Bill
Schanen is the story of the courage of an extraordinary "ordinary
citizen," who not only believed in the freedom of the press, but also
acted decisively on it.
.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Sixties-L" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
