The years I was in high school were years when America was seriously rocked by protest demonstrations, mainly about (a) the war in Vietnam and/or (b) officials trying to stifle protest demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. I was largely indifferent to both causes which, in hindsight, seems odd to me. My age was such that I was soon to be draftable and sent off to fight that war…so you'd think I'd have cared a lot about it. Somehow, I didn't. For no particular reason, I just felt things would work out and I wouldn't have to go…and when it was my year, things worked out and I didn't have to go. +

But in my high school days, I was largely apathetic to that issue and many others that were then protested by folks my age. And to the extent I had political views they were largely — you may find this hard to believe — Conservative. Not too Conservative but Conservative. I was not however supportive of the many Conservative leaders we had.

You can do that, you know…support a cause but not everyone who advocates for it. In many a case, I agree with what a politician says he or she wants to do but I don't think they'll really do it. Or sometimes I feel they're exploiting the matter for votes and/or donations but don't believe what they're saying.

In 1969 — the year I graduated from University High — the mayor of Los Angeles was a man named Sam Yorty who was pretty right-wing, as were many members of the L.A. City Council. I thought they were all pretty inept and dishonest, Yorty especially.

I also felt that way about the Governor of the great state of California, as well. His name — you may have heard of him — was Ronald Reagan and as you may have heard, he went on to become President of the United States. I thought wrongly he would forever be the worst person to ever occupy that position in my lifetime…but then I'd thought that about Richard Nixon too. Those men were not the only reason my politics changed but they were certainly contributing factors.

A lot of my memories of University High School involve campus unrest, protests and the odd hills some people chose to die on. The same would be true in my didn't-stick-around-long-enough-to-graduate days at U.C.L.A. but this is about my time at Uni. Some of those tumultuous times involved a little underground newspaper called The Worrier. The official school newspaper at Uni was called The Warrior but a tiny cabal of students got together and published a cheaply-printed counter-argument to it called The Worrier.

They gave it out, preferably but not exclusively for a dime donation, on street corners one block from the school. If you accepted one on your way to class, its distributor would caution you to keep it hidden from teachers and school administrators. Interestingly, some of my teachers then found ways to let it be known that they admired the spirit behind the paper and, occasionally, certain articles in it. I doubt that anyone on this planet would agree with everything in it. Its editor and publisher certainly didn't. They just felt that Free Speech involved extending that right to everyone.

At heart, The Worrier had two main goals. One was to end the war in Vietnam and the other was to get the principal of University High, a Mr. Foley, fired. It pursued these goals with equal fervor as if both were within its reach and they did sorta manage the latter. Mr. Foley wasn't fired but he was transferred to a different high school. One of the loudest arguments involving The Worrier was how much credit it could claim for his reassignment. (In my opinion: A little.) Another was how much better things were at Uni with him gone. (In my opinion: Not a bit of difference. You now the term, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss?")

Most of those who wrote for The Worrier did so under pseudonyms but the main guys behind it signed their real names to it and paid some price for that. Most were transferred to other schools — in at least one case dripping with irony, to the school Mr. Foley was now running. I heard third- or fourth-hand of other punishments that were levied against those who contributed to the paper but no one punished one of its columnists, Charles Marvin. That may have been because he was not as Liberal as others who wrote for this underground paper…though he did take a lot of shots at "Ronnie Raygun," as he insisted on calling our then-governor. It may also have been because no one knew who Charles Marvin really was.

His columns got a tad more attention than what others were writing for The Worrier. The comedian Mort Sahl was then hosting a local radio show in Los Angeles and the Worrier's editor, who worshipped Sahl and tried to emulate him in some ways, would take each new issue down to the radio station and present Mort with the latest copy, hot off the press.

Sahl praised the paper as a whole, more for its very existence than its content. He would occasionally single out Charles Marvin's writings and even read them aloud on the radio. And Newsweek, when it wrote a piece on underground student newspapers, quoted the mysterious Mr. Marvin. He didn't get a lot of attention but the fact that he got any at all — and was not aligned with the politics of the paper as a whole — soon led to him no longer appearing in The Worrier.

A few years ago, I went rummaging through my crates and crates of stuff to see if I could find any copies of the paper but I couldn't. I may have thrown them away without realizing it. But oddly enough, I recently found two issues of The Worrier, scanned and posted to the Internet. The edition for February 7, 1967 can be found here and the issue for November 11, 1967 can be found here. Only the first of these carries a Charles Marvin column. He was gone long before the other one was published.

His writing is crude and nowhere near as clever as he thought it was at the time…but he kept on with it. Under his real name, he later had a decent career as a professional writer and, amazingly, he's still at it. Why, just this morning, he wrote and put up the blog post you're reading at this very minute.