Lost another friend from long ago…
Update: Nice link from Rich Gedney of an article by Michael O’Connell in It’s All Journalism about John Wilcock (includes a 2017 audio interview):
It’s All Journalism: Underground Press Pioneer John Wilcock, 91, Dies
John Wilcock, Pioneer of the Underground Press, Dies at 91
by Robert D. McFadden
The New York Times
September 13, 2018
John Wilcock, a British journalist and travel writer who played a major role in the emergence of the alternative press at The Village Voice, The East Village Other and the Underground Press Syndicate, died on Thursday at a care facility in Ojai, Calif. He was 91.
He died after several strokes, said his biographer, Ethan Persoff.
In the 1960s and early ’70s, a freewheeling age of psychedelic drugs and antiwar protests, Mr. Wilcock led two lives. He was both the author of many “$5 a day” travel books and a driving force behind underground publications that, spurning traditional journalism, attacked political, social and cultural norms with bawdy language and comic-book imagery, all of it financed by sexually explicit advertising.
In a 1973 profile, The New York Times called Mr. Wilcock “an influential man nobody knows,” an “oracle of the nitty-gritty of inexpensive, traditional tourism” and “an apostle and chronicler of the radical underground” — although, the article noted, he looked “a bit too scruffy for a best-selling travel writer and far too straight for an underground celebrity.”
Mr. Wilcock had worked for news organizations in Britain, Canada and the United States, including The Times, and was the first news editor of The Village Voice before he helped found The East Village Other in 1965. The paper was named for Carl Jung’s definition of “the other” as “one who is outside society.”
The Other, known as EVO to its devotees, was one of the nation’s first underground newspapers. Published biweekly in New York until it folded in 1972, it had a circulation of 60,000 at its peak.
Read the rest of the article here.
