Pensacola during the (anti) War Years
An Interview with Connie, editor of the Fish Cheer

Why did you start the Gulf Coast Fish Cheer?

Well, a number of people just kept thinking that there needed to be some sort of alternative media. There needed to be something that represented the voice of what was going on then, because we were in the middle of the Vietnam War, involved with civil rights.

The events of 1968 really galvanized a bunch of people, I know it did me. I had always stayed interested in politics, because I grew up with a political father, but he was going to die think that Richard Nixon was the greatest president ever, so we were different. But '68 made me start looking at things different, especially with Kent State. That our government had stooped so low as to shooting it's own people...I thought that was probably the worst thing that could have occurred. To think that we were no better than any Communist countries we were supposed to be against.

Then it was somebody, I'm pretty sure it was Lee Stamp, who called a meeting and the word just kind of went out and the alternative community talked about what we wanted to do. I know we talked for quite a while for several months in determining what we wanted to do. We had input from people who wanted to do the politics, and we had input from the people that wanted just an artistic freedom. All we had going for us mediawise was Channel 3 on the TV and the Pensacola News Journal, which at that time had a morning and evening edition, and they were both pretty straight laced.

We were close enough for many of us to go to Atlanta or New Orleans and see alternative media presented there and say why can't we do this here, even though we were a little late. But it was good because papers like the Great Speckled Bird in Atlanta were willing to work with us. Some of us went up there and spent some time learning the ropes. It all kind of fell together like it was something that was meant to be.

Did you do it as an expression of what was going on in Pensacola at the time, or did you think it could be a vehicle for change?

I think we looked at it more as a way to get information out about things that were going on that you couldn't find out about in Pensacola, if you were just living here in Pensacola. The paper put us in touch with a lot of people then. We were on everyone's god almighty mailing list and it took forever to get off them. I even got mail from Kim Il-Sung of North Korea for, I think, three years. I wish I hadn't had to throw it out. He sent me all his little green books. All kinds of stuff that's really weird. I wasn't into those kind of politics. And of course everything was free back then. If the Bird ran an article or the Oracle on the West Coast then you had rights to reprint it, and it made it easy until we got more into finding writers. And of course many people think they can write, but they can't. And I even look back on the some things that I wrote and go "oh my god". It was really a training ground. And then we had just wonderful artists.

I know there were other underground newspapers around that time that received an extraordinary amount of harassment from authorities and such. Regionally, papers like the NOLA Express in New Orleans and another in Oxford, Mississippi were monitored heavily by the police and FBI , even taken to court for various civil liberties charges. Did anything similar happen with the Fish Cheer?

Cops didn't bother us as much, but there were a few individuals who seemed to want to harass us, and most of them were from cop families. Let's see...we got shot upon one night while we were working in the house. Some people shot through the windows, and that was exciting.

(Mac interjects in the background "Were the windows open?")

Yes

("Then it didn't break the glass")

It only put a hole in the screen. Thank you. Actually I don't think they were shooting to hurt us, just...and somebody set Wes's van on fire one time outside the house, that was also exciting.

("It's always hard to fire a VW van up")

Alright, keep it down back there. Anyway...

I know that when we would go to Mobile and we'd be selling the newspaper at the concerts and sometimes people would harass you a little bit, but generally everyone was pretty mellow, except those few individuals...

How was the paper distributed?

By hand. John was big on that. He would load up his car of the moment. And we had I don't know how many spots. Head shops, leather shops, and of course over to the porn theatre (in Navy Point) and some places like that. A lot of our sales were just going to the concerts and hocking it there. And we had a subscription list.

Were there any people standing on the corners yelling "Fish Cheers for sale"?

Probably in front of that dang building that everyone was living at on Cervantes. Yeah, you just took the opportunity. It was actually a lot of give away, just to get it out there and in everybody's hands. But we did do some subscriptions.

What was Pensacola like during the war years?

Well, Pensacola is a military town and you can imagine what that was like. And it was cranked up during those years. There was a lot going on. Now, I always felt kind of "caught in between" because I was raised in a military family. And the whole time that I was being against the war, I was also involved in doing things on the base. I never had any disrespect towards anyone who went to Vietnam, and especially those who came back wounded. To that we needed to get some attention to. But I just wanted the whole war machine to stop and for Washington to realize it was the wrong thing to be doing to people. I lost a number of people to Vietnam, one a classmate and a number of young men that I dated. And because it was (during) Vietnam, in Pensacola there were men everywhere. If you went to the clubs dancing, even if you went with the band, you still ended up dancing with the military men and getting to know them. It was a sad time. This was definitely a Democratic area back then too. Not Republican like it is now. It was very much good ol' boy, redneck politics, which it still is in a lot of ways. But back then it was really hard core. So a lot of what we were doing wasn't very well tolerated with certain people.

Now you mentioned the vets, and I was reading ads for groups like the Concerned Officers Movement running out of the base, and other anti-draft groups. I even saw one or two articles written by sailors. What were your interactions with the soldiers and sailors here?

We just tried to be an open forum for everybody. So many of the military guys, they looked different from us because back then the military said you look a certain way. But the ones that came around were not gung-ho war machines. Like some people were, and always will be. It's just something that the military creates sometimes. But they were quite acceptable and they themselves were looking for a place where they could be accepted and they could talk in a way that they couldn't do on a navy base as much, because you don't want to pick a fight with your commander.

I was really impressed and somewhat surprised with the heavy feminist slant. Especially coming out of Pensacola. Was that a response to the Women's Liberation movement nationally, or a reaction to living in a small town?

Well, actually I think that without the women, we might not have organized into anything else. The women had the skills they had learned from the Women's Movement and then brought that to a new category. Because we had some very strong women. One of the professors at the University, who ended up getting fired from UWF for something,* his wife, she was a strong woman. Almost over the top. I mean some of it got to be somewhat of a stretch, but to each their own. Anyway, we're all in different spots. We had her and she had been organizing different women's things. And I had been involved because I had the luxury of being raised by a woman who doesn't understand that she's a feminist. I was not raised as the typical 50's southern girl, of course because I was raised by a mother who had been reared in the west.

Did you grow up here in Pensacola?

I was born here in Pensacola and daddy was active military until I was 10 so we ended up most of our time back then was in California, where my mother was from. And I feel that is what has shaped me more than anything else. Then, when daddy retired when I was 10 we came to Pensacola, because this is where his parents and brothers and sister had settled so this is where he wanted to live. But I think I got my first touch of freedom and a much better education from primary school than I would have gotten here. Then being reared by a mother who was quite liberal.

Actually my father, even though he was a through and through Southerner...he had a hard time finding a decent paying job when he we came back so he was home a lot. My brother and sister were like 10 and 12 years younger, so they were babies. So he washed clothes, cleaned house, cooked dinner, changed diapers and did all the things men are patting themselves on the back for doing now. He told us that he could do it better than we could do it anyhow, so what the hell. So I got raised by odd parents. They're not the typical Southern parents, although I am very proud of my Southern heritage. I'll still stand up for the playing of Dixie, but that's ok because I took my knocks in the civil rights movement, too. So I don't have a problem with that. I'm sorry if other people do. There's a difference between slavery, "Dixie", and what your background is. On top of that, all of my family, my daddy's side were just as poor as the blacks. They were all white trash tenant farmers. My daddy was the first one to get away from that by joining the Navy, and they thought he was rich because he had a regular paycheck.

But then you come back to a place where in the 70's you still have places that say "colored entrance."

Back to the Women's movement, (Pensacola) was no different from any other town in America, I don't think. Now you hear so much about what was going on in the big cities, but I think across the country...that this was happening in all towns. You still had people who wanted to live with a certain mindset, but you've got the women whose parents came out of World War II, like me, who were being sent to college and were being educated. And were not being sent to college to find a husband, which is what would have happened in my mother's generation. My mother always told me that you could do anything that you wanted to do, and I'm sure I wasn't the only girl hearing that. It was going on all across the country. And our parents wanted things to be better for us than it had been for them, especially since so many of them had come through World War II and the depression. It was a very difficult time. But there was resistance, as there is still resistance today to women doing certain things. But everything was open to us. Yes, there were battles to be fought and still are. Women certainly don't get really get into the top as often and in the numbers they should, but it's just slow to change things. But I just think that this was happening all over the world. Otherwise I don't think it would have gelled into legislation as quickly as it did if it were really such a scattered thing.

Now I know that a lot of movements that were going on at the time, like with women's lib, gay rights, civil rights were certainly overshadowed by the anti-war movement. The Fish Cheer has a pretty broad focus, not just anti-war, but...Was the war the primary focus, or were there other equal focuses, like racism, women's rights, etc.?

I would have to say that the war was the focus because the when the war was over, the newspaper was over. Then we'd all use the paper as a way to talk about those things, but also to bring up other subjects like the women's movement, sexual orientation, and so many different things. But by the time the war ended I think a lot of people were ready to make the next step towards a career move. So they wanted to distance themselves, unless they, for say as an artists, could use some of that. Or as a writer, you could use some of that. But otherwise they were kind of starting to get into much more of a flow of things like their parents. They were starting to get married. Starting to have children, buy houses...so you lose people because of that. But then some people took their energy and put it into nothing but, let's say the women's movement or wherever. And a lot of people were finishing college. So this is a great thing to do when you're in college, but once you get into the "real world"...but then some people continued on. It always amazed me the people that continued on.

What about with activism and demonstrations within the town? Like, I'm sure that if you were writing about a lot of this, then chances are you'd occasionally take it to the streets, too. Right?

Well, we tried to do some of that. I showed you some of the pictures of the End the War (rallies), then a couple of things at the University of West Florida, and a number of things at Pensacola Junior College. There was quite an active group at PJC...they had a number of things going on. I don't remember them as well because I was at the University. But I know that they kept doing little things. And whatever chance we had to make our point. I don't remember if this made it into the paper, I mean it wasn't a paper sponsored event, but we also chained ourselves to the trees at University Mall because it was a pecan grove and we didn't want to see it all cut down. So we chained ourselves to trees for a day or two. Oh it was beautiful up there where that parking lot is now...So we were always involved in little things like that. We marched any number of times with the Black community for different things, too. Jesse Jackson was in and out of town a good bit back then, and Martin Luther King before that was in town at least one time. Most of that was involved with education issues, and we were all interested in that, too.

You said you occupied the roof of the UWF Library once.

Oh yeah, the roof of the University library. God knows why. We were probably pissed off about something. It was easy to get pissed off about things back then. (laughter). And you didn't care who else you pissed off while you were doing it. As you get older you learn to compromise.

What was the Fish Cheer house like? The group of people who put the paper together?

I could get into trouble for this (laughter). We'll we weren't all living together and we were quite the assortment of people who, like Lee who worked as a DJ and was a student. Pat, who was an artist, she was very talented. She was usually working and was sort of involved with Wes when he was going through his metamorphosis, and that was kind of strange with her and him and everything he was going through. (she had told me earlier that Wes, one of the founders of the Fish Cheer, was opening up and coming out of the closet when the paper was going on. She believes he died of AIDS in the mid 80's, but wasn't for sure. -ed). We had several people involved with us who were involved with illegal activities, so that always made things pretty interesting. But they were also pretty loose with their extra cash. So..(laughter)...you couldn't turn down anything. As for me, I was working in the school system as a teachers aide. So you know many of us had regular kind of jobs.

Is that that was where a lot of the paper's funding came from?

Yes, if we ran short we'd all chip in. It wasn't expensive to do things back then. It seems that now everything is outrageously expensive. It just seemed cheaper then. And we took our paper and drove it to Havana, which we loved. We loved while we were having it printed in Havana, we'd always put in this little square that said the newspaper was printed in Havana. But we wouldn't say Havana, Florida. (laughter). Oh yeah, and I forgot about Ed. Ed must have been out at the University. He ended up going to Cuba one summer and working in the cane fields.

What do you think is the function of the underground press?

Then or now?

Both.

Well, then there was nothing but an establishment press, whether we talk about newspapers or magazines. Now I know that there had always been like the union paper or Communist line books, magazines, and things like that. But in Pensacola, there wasn't even that. Nowadays there seems like there is a lot more. Look at what you've got (she points to all the zines and underground papers in the bookstore-ed). All the different kinds of alternative media that's available. There just wasn't that much of it. And in the Southeast, certainly not. Like I said, you had to go to Atlanta, New Orleans, or Jacksonville to get anything different around here. There was just nothing. Tallahassee was dead. I guess if you went to Gainesville, because of the student population you'd find some alternative media there, needless to say. But you had to drive for a while to find something. So it just really served a big need for the community.

Now, I know a lot of this is being overshadowed by the growing war, but what do you think of the anti-globalization movement. Like with the WTO protests in Seattle and so on. Do you think that that is a continuation of everything from the 60's and 70's (and 80's)?

I think it is. I mean, I was plum fascinated because I was just out of the loop. And then that whole thing came up in Seattle about the WTO and I thought Far Out! I really did. And I thought that this is something that people need to be made aware of. Here's a group of young people, basically who I felt were putting their lives on the line, and getting treated so poorly for it. I mean, and that was what amazed me too. I was like, Wait a minute, what's been going on for the last 30 years. I thought we could march and protest and not have this response from the government. I was really flipped out. So it made me start paying a little more attention to what the WTO was and what's going on with that. So that was a good eye opener for me.

You know, too. If we hadn't had the war, I'm not sure if anything would have come of that. You got to have some kind of galvanizing event happen. Like with Seattle it was with the WTO meeting. And they made headlines, so they made progress. If you can make the headlines. If you can get on the media. Everything has to be planned around when that last shot can be shot and put in the studio. Even though it's a bigger time frame now than it was in my day. But we knew that if you didn't have something done by 4 o'clock it wasn't going to make the evening news. Maybe initially we weren't as savvy with the media as we soon became, but you learned. But now the media is so used to being used that they're on top of you before you're ready to even use them. I'm sadly disappointed in the media, in where it has gone. I used to be proud to say that I was a member of the media. I am not any longer. I just don't like the direction that it has gone.

With Seattle, it made me think that there is hope. That there is a generation out there that can find a cause to rally to. Now this whole thing with September 11th though, I don't know. I'm suspicious. I think we need to be very careful. I'm not happy with the bill that congress signed giving the president the powers that they did to take individuals rights away because you think that they might be terrorists. I just think that's scary. I'm not saying that something shouldn't be done or some legislation shouldn't be passed, but it's just too broad a power, but congress is very good at that.

It seems like it's just a lot of opportunists that are really jumping at it.

Yes!

Like they feel that this is their chance to get through everything they wanted, like drilling for oil in Alaska (and here in Florida), Star Wars programs, what have you. And they know they can do it because if you even question George Bush's logic, then you're a traitor.

That's right. This is something that my dad and I...we didn't speak to each other for years. He got to the point that he thought I was a Communist. As I tried to explain to him, he raised me to be a very patriotic person, and I believe I am and was back then. I felt my country was moving in the wrong direction and it was my right as a citizen to say "I don't think this is right. Let's stop and rethink it." I consider that just as patriotic, but he didn't because I was questioning his government.

(We go on to talk about the war in Afghanistan)

Were there many radicals around back then?

Maybe a dozen (laughter)

Where did everybody hang out?

At my house. My house.

What about at the Krispy Kreme across the street from the Fish Market?

Krispy Kreme was just convenient because it was 24 hours, but really it was just where you went when you were wacked out of your mind and you wanted a cup of coffee and maybe a donut at 2 in the morning. Nowadays in Pensacola there ain't anything open at 2 in the morning and 30 years ago there certainly wasn't anything going on at that time.

I remember a coke dealer who I used to love to hang with over there, we'd drink coffee and eat crackers for hours and hours until they ran us out. But this was not a place for politics. Truthfully however, we usually hung out at my house. If it wasn't the Commons at UWF or PJC, it was at my house.

Why did the Fish Cheer stop publication?

Like I said earlier, the focus of why we were doing it really came to an end and everyone headed off in their own direction. People got jobs, got married. It was natural. I don't think it was any one event that did anything. I don't think it was money. It was just suddenly everyone started going in different directions and one or two people wanted to continue with this. I was still hanging around town, then.

What did you do after the Fish Cheer?

When the Fish Cheer ended, I did just what I did for a long time-worked and went to school. In '72 I started back in college. In the summer of '72, I went to California. I hitchhiked out. That was fun. That was the year the Rolling Stones said they were doing one of their last concert tours. It seemed like everywhere I went, they had just been there. Like I was following the Stones. That was an interesting trip hitchhiking. A good way to see the country.

I was always doing something workwise or just taking off. I helped start the Vietnam Veterans Against the War here in Pensacola and (helped with) the Gainesville 8 trial, and I worked with the American Indian Movement, but that was in '74. Then got married and had a family a little later. Took care of my husband when he was dying and went back and finished school.

Are you optimistic about the future?

I have to be. I have two children. So I have to be. Otherwise they might turn into dark brooding creatures.

Gotta keep your head up.

You really do. You have to.

(Right about then, the mail man came into the store wearing latex gloves and as soon as he left, a cabbie with a huge rat tail and army flak jacket comes in and we decide to end the interview on a positive note before the place gets creepy with paranoiacs)

· New York Times "Intolerance in America" by Stephen Milligan. 1/23/71

· ** The Gainseville 8 were members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War who were arrested at the 1972 Republican Presidential Convention for trying to disrupt it. They were tried in Gainesville, but had legal proceedings here in Pensacola as well.

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