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Famous Long Ago: My Life and Hard Times With Liberation News Service, at Total Loss Farm, and on the Dharma Trail
Book by Ray Mungo
573 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1970
2 people are currently reading
61 people want to read
About the author
Raymond Mungo
33 books6 followersRaymond Mungo (born 1946) is the author, co-author, or editor of more than a dozen books. He writes about business, economics, and financial matters as well as cultural issues. In the 1960s, he attended Boston University, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Boston University News in 1966-67; and where, as a student leader, he spearheaded demonstrations against the Vietnam War.
In 1967, Mungo co-founded the Liberation News Service (LNS), an alternative news agency, along with Marshall Bloom. LNS split off from College Press Service (CPS) in a political dispute. The founding event was a notably tumultuous meeting that transpired not far from the offices of CPS on Church Street in Washington, D.C.. Mungo descriptively details this event in his book, Famous Long Ago: My Life and Hard Times with the Liberation News Service.
In 1968 he moved to Vermont with Verandah Porche and others as part of the back to the land movement.
Mungo continued to write through the 1970s and 1980s; however in 1997 his career path took a different turn. He completed a Master's Degree in counseling and began working with the severely mentally ill and with AIDS patients in Los Angeles. Mungo visited France in 2000 and briefly considered relocating there.
In 1967, Mungo co-founded the Liberation News Service (LNS), an alternative news agency, along with Marshall Bloom. LNS split off from College Press Service (CPS) in a political dispute. The founding event was a notably tumultuous meeting that transpired not far from the offices of CPS on Church Street in Washington, D.C.. Mungo descriptively details this event in his book, Famous Long Ago: My Life and Hard Times with the Liberation News Service.
In 1968 he moved to Vermont with Verandah Porche and others as part of the back to the land movement.
Mungo continued to write through the 1970s and 1980s; however in 1997 his career path took a different turn. He completed a Master's Degree in counseling and began working with the severely mentally ill and with AIDS patients in Los Angeles. Mungo visited France in 2000 and briefly considered relocating there.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 28, 2009
Mungo's book is one of only two accounts ever published of one of the most bizarre and pivotal confrontions in American counterculture history. Hippie-gothic legend at its best, and every work is true. The other account, BTW, is Steve Diamond's WHAT THE TREES SAID. Not sure it is in print. OK, get this: It's the world Premier of the Beatle's Yellow Submarine, to benefit Liberation New Service, the only reliable news source on the Indochina war, and a staple of the underground/alternative press -- but with a growing Marxist influence. During the screening, the LNS hippies steal the presses from LNS Commies and escape to a remote farm near Montague, Mass, where they have quietly started a commune . . . Great plot device, except that it's true. That was 1968. The ending is still being written.
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February 13, 2024FAMOUS LONG AGO: MY LIFE AND HARD TIMES WITH LIBERATION NEWS SERVICE, by Raymond Mungo (published by Beacon Press in 1970)
JEFF KEITH’S COMMENTS FOR GOODREADS, 2024
I would give this book four stars on the Goodreads scale. I decided to reread it this winter, several decades after I first read it. It’s a memoir of the author’s life from around 1966 to ’69, and was published just a short time after the events that it describes. My opinion is that by publishing these adventures so soon, some of the story comes across as a little half-baked. For example, he periodically interrupts his narrative to insert poems, often of a mystical type, and I found those boring.
I think it’s great if people from our generation can preserve accounts of our radical-type adventures in the 1960s and ‘70s. There were a variety of terms for people like us, things like “hippies,” “dropouts” and “freaks.” The latter term was used constantly, but is widely misunderstood nowadays, so I usually add nouns to it, such as “freak culture” or “freak society.” Ray Mungo uses that term a lot in this book, and it’s found throughout my old diaries.
Mungo is around my age, just a shade older than the beginning of the Baby Boom, which means that he was 21 or 22 at the time he describes in this book. He and his best friend Marshall Bloom were the prime movers running the left-wing news service called the Liberation News Service. They had both previously worked on college newspapers. Like so many of us back then, they were taking a lot of drugs, and I imagine that contributed to the air of chaos a lot of their venture.
They didn’t specify openly what the political persuasion was of the news service, and eventually there got to be tensions between what Mungo calls anarchist-type people and Marxist-type people. That caused a split, and the anarchistic-type people left. I saw some of the same things in my own life as a radical, and I know how ugly and painful those things can get.
A book like this brings back many of my own memories of the late sixties, amplified by my own diaries and albums. That was some of the earlier part of the time when this country was kind of exploding with rebellion over objections to the war in Vietnam, and so many young people (such as me and my family and friends) were dropping out of respectable society, taking drugs, and so on. Since Ray Mungo got this book published in 1970, it sounds kind of weird to hear him saying that “the movement was over,” just because he and his friends got burned out and moved to a farm in rural New England. A lot of peace/antiwar stuff continued to happen through the early 1970s.
JEFF KEITH’S COMMENTS FOR GOODREADS, 2024
I would give this book four stars on the Goodreads scale. I decided to reread it this winter, several decades after I first read it. It’s a memoir of the author’s life from around 1966 to ’69, and was published just a short time after the events that it describes. My opinion is that by publishing these adventures so soon, some of the story comes across as a little half-baked. For example, he periodically interrupts his narrative to insert poems, often of a mystical type, and I found those boring.
I think it’s great if people from our generation can preserve accounts of our radical-type adventures in the 1960s and ‘70s. There were a variety of terms for people like us, things like “hippies,” “dropouts” and “freaks.” The latter term was used constantly, but is widely misunderstood nowadays, so I usually add nouns to it, such as “freak culture” or “freak society.” Ray Mungo uses that term a lot in this book, and it’s found throughout my old diaries.
Mungo is around my age, just a shade older than the beginning of the Baby Boom, which means that he was 21 or 22 at the time he describes in this book. He and his best friend Marshall Bloom were the prime movers running the left-wing news service called the Liberation News Service. They had both previously worked on college newspapers. Like so many of us back then, they were taking a lot of drugs, and I imagine that contributed to the air of chaos a lot of their venture.
They didn’t specify openly what the political persuasion was of the news service, and eventually there got to be tensions between what Mungo calls anarchist-type people and Marxist-type people. That caused a split, and the anarchistic-type people left. I saw some of the same things in my own life as a radical, and I know how ugly and painful those things can get.
A book like this brings back many of my own memories of the late sixties, amplified by my own diaries and albums. That was some of the earlier part of the time when this country was kind of exploding with rebellion over objections to the war in Vietnam, and so many young people (such as me and my family and friends) were dropping out of respectable society, taking drugs, and so on. Since Ray Mungo got this book published in 1970, it sounds kind of weird to hear him saying that “the movement was over,” just because he and his friends got burned out and moved to a farm in rural New England. A lot of peace/antiwar stuff continued to happen through the early 1970s.
April 25, 2021
Pretty good and fun to read snapshot of life in the 60s, wild adventures, very Tom Robbins Thomas Pynchon-y rhythms and all that. I liked how in the beginning he was like "read this stoned or straight,stop and never pick it up again... " etc etc. it was quick and adventury and of course I was judg-y about some of the politics and esp descriptions of travel in japan and india. I also really liked the relatively horrible descriptions of canoe-ing through all the pollution in the NE during that time,i guess it was right around the silent spring era. anyway. I had never heard of the liberation news service and i'm glad it was a thing. the fight over the press was amazing.
Want to read
March 19, 2010I would love to read this book so much. If someone wants to mail me a copy I would be soooo haaaapeeeeeee.
June 25, 2015
Talks lots.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews