Post Amerikan Obituary Wherin the Pantagraph reads the final rites to the 30 year old publication.
Past staff members of the Post Amerikan say the paper's impact included that it:
* Gave voice to viewpoints that usually weren't heard in mainstream media.
* Disrupted undercover anti-drug police operations in the 1970s.
* Forced a business to close in 1978. The business charged people for help finding apartments, but the Post believed it merely read the paper classifieds. The Post wrote about it and picketed. The business in 1978 posted a sign on its window: "Closed due to Post Amerikan radicals picketing and marching."
* Emboldened the gay and lesbian community.
* Helped, along with other media, to expose abuses at the McLean County Jail in the 1970s.
* Worked with media to expose financial abuses under ISU President David Burlow, as did other media.
* Forced Bloomington and Normal to rewrite vending ordinances to allow Post vending machines, and other machines, on public sidewalks.
----------
The Post Amerikan newspaper once ran a headline describing its own fate: "The newspaper that wouldn't die."
Times change; eras pass. The headline no longer applies.
The Post Amerikan newspaper folded with a simple telephone call in March.
It was an anticlimax for an underground newspaper with a loud, long tradition. But by now, two women were keeping the newspaper on a respirator.Without drama, they decided in their conversation that the Post's time had past, recalls Deborah Wilson, one of the women.
And so, barring some unexpected outpouring of volunteer effort to revive it, the Post Amerikan ends a 32-year run as Bloomington-Normal's underground newspaper. It ends a streak that, according to the Post, is the longest continuous run of an underground paper in the United States.
All that was left for them to do was mail a courtesy letter to subscribers, and Wilson wrote it in April in the expected Post style -- clever and casual.
Wilson wrote, in part: "There are those who say 'everything comes to an end.' That's a crock. Personally, we think that only good things come to an end. Bad mojo waxes eternal -- greed, arrogance, corruption, injustice, heartbreak -- the usual suspects."
The Post was irreverent, leftist, pro-choice, pro-gay, pro-minority, anti-war and the antithesis of mainstream press like The Pantagraph. The Pantagraph runs on money. The Post sold ads -- a meager $100 for a full page -- but ran on heart and energy.
The Post didn't die this spring because it was out of money. It always was out of money.
Practically every edition was potentially its last, said Wilson, a 14-year staff member, and the Post always was able to generate enough cash for the next issue. It could hold a benefit if needed -- and it occasionally needed one.
No, the Post Amerikan folded because it lacked people to produce it, said Wilson. Hopeful recruits would sometimes last just a month, she said. She noted that, unlike the first days in the 1970s -- and even into the 1980s -- people don't live in communes and on the cheap anymore, and they have jobs, college or both filling their days.
By the time of its death, the Post had nostalgia and little else.
Nostalgia doesn't put a paper to bed, but it does give the Post Amerikan its continued memory, for Post lovers and haters alike. It outlasted most other vestiges of the post-Vietnam days, including the Multi-County Enforcement Group, an undercover anti-drug unit, that the Post Amerikan work tirelessly to undermine.
Activist Silverstein
In spring 1979, Mark Silverstein's dining room table was filled with pieces of torn up police reports.
He and friends spent hours -- days -- piecing the reports together, as if building a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle.
They were preparing an expose on the Multi-County Enforcement Group (MEG) narcotics unit, based on MEG garbage. The Post had captured four bags of MEG trash and was assembling the reports and logs that agents had torn up by hand.
Silverstein had joined the staff seven years earlier, when a roommate was editor of the new, tabloid-sized, 1972 creation. Soon after, the Post decided to drop all titles and become a "collective" with no editors, managers or bosses of any kind.
It became a functioning anarchy, rotating coordinators of editions each month and basing an issue's content and layout on what came in from contributors and on the decisions of whomever showed up at pre-publication meetings.
Police through MEG had invaded the dope-smoking territory of the campuses and the counterculture. This became a rallying cause at the Post as the radicals struck back.
Because none of the dealers were big-quantity sellers with violent tendencies, the Post felt it safe and fair to warn friends by publishing the photos of MEG agents, Silverstein said.
They photographed police entering the courthouse. In one instance, a MEG officer fearing he would be photographed while walking into the courthouse -- and he would have been -- wore a ski mask and motorcycle helmet to hide his identity.
The Post still had its photograph: a surreal image of a man dressed in a suit wearing a mask and helmet. It also spawned an idea for guerrilla theater: A dozen or so Post staffers went to a MEG board meeting wearing masks and motorcycle helmets to mock the officer and the agency.
While taking its battle seriously, the Post kept a light touch. Thus, for its spring 1979 issue, the one on the MEG garbage, it couldn't help but chastise MEG for its failure to use the three paper shredders it had purchased with public money.
Funny?
The Post was funny as in witty, offbeat or ironic -- and funny in its own opinion, not universally shared.
Funny like an Easter-season cover art one year: A drawing of the Easter bunny on the cross, with the headline "He died for your teeth." Being Jewish, Silverstein didn't understand why the staffers thought it so hilarious and why Christians got so mad.
Funny like running a picture of McLean County Sheriff John King picking his nose.
Police were angry over the MEG photos and coverage but mostly let the Post insults roll off them like a war protester's insults, said Steve Brienen, who was both a Bloomington officer and McLean County sheriff between 1968 to 1998.
He disagreed vehemently with the paper's views. And he read it every month.
The Pantagraph was a regular target of ridicule, and Silverstein was so brazen that he pored through The Pantagraph files in the newspaper's own library looking for material.
He eventually was banned from the building.
The constant criticism of The Pantagraph wasn't personal, Silverstein says today.
The Post was local and counterculture. The Pantagraph just happened to be the mainstream paper from the same location, he explained. It ripped Pantagraphers at length and by name.
And Pantagraph staffers read it every month.
Unconventional coverage
The Post gave a different flavor of journalism, one of advocacy for the powerless, one in which the conventional sources of mainstream media weren't sources at all for the Post.
While The Pantagraph would quote official sources, like police, without counter-argument, the Post felt its openly biased reports could use unofficial sources without official responses, Silverstein said.
Said Silverstein, "The fact that an ordinary person said it was enough for us to report it in our newspaper."
The Post told stories of jail inmates, police suspects, women who complained about their gynecologists, apartment tenants, angry utility consumers, hospital patients and welfare recipients.
There were, as Silverstein described it, "stories of abuse of power that ordinarily circulated in private."
Silverstein was a major part of the paper for the simple reason that he did the work -- and didn't have another job. When he left for University of Illinois law school in 1986, he left a void in local coverage.
He now is legal director for the ACLU of Colorado.
The decline
In the 1990s and 2000s, the Post Amerikan kept a watch on local affairs but with less time and energy than during its first two decades. The Post's scoops were dwindling, along with its following.
Its circulation declined from 3,000 in the 1980s to 1,200 this year. It stopped putting papers in newsstand boxes in the late 1990s because many boxes were aging and others were destroyed by vandals.
One the last stories it broke first was in 2001, when the Post took Circuit Judge W. Charles Witte to task.
In juvenile court, Witte said to the parents of a biracial teen-ager, "You gave him a tremendous disadvantage in life in that he is multiracial and that, in the history of this stage of our life in this country, was a terrible burden to put on him."
When The Pantagraph initially passed on the story presented by the teen's outraged mother, the mother turned to the Post, and the paper gave it top story. (The Pantagraph later did report on it.)
Amorphous ideology
During and after Silverstein's days, the paper never defined an ideology, and so it didn't tell its writers what to say.
The staff once pondered how it would respond if KKK members wanted to contribute articles. It wouldn't publish them as staff stories but would publish such letters, along with replies, Wilson said.
And the paper did interview white supremacist Matt Hale, said Wilson, and wrote about his circular argument that the Holocaust didn't happen -- proven, Hale said, by the fact that there were so many Holocaust survivors.
The Post also availed itself to debate within the left, like point-counterpoint articles on whether the word "queer" was an acceptable word to describe gays.
The Post debated, within itself, an art show at ISU in which an adolescent girl was painted in erotic poses, and it debated whether hate-speech ordinances properly suppressed vile viewpoints or merely pushed them underground while violating free speech.
The Post denounced racial profiling by police and racial stereotyping of gangs.
Gay-related issues were a priority, partly a reflection of gay staff members who gave the effort.
As a paper for the powerless, it relished victories, too.
When Bloomington's council passed a gay rights ordinance in 2003, after decades of struggle on the issue, the Post offered up a celebratory headline: "Hell freezes over."
GRAPHIC: Mark Silverstein protested against drug enforcement with the typewriter and in person, as seen in a 1975 photo of an Illinois State University rally. In 1977, Post Amerikan protesters mocked a drug agent by wearing masks and motorcycle helmets as they surrounded Bloomington Police Chief Harold Bosshardt, who headed the MEG narcotics agency's board.
LOAD-DATE: May 18, 2004
The Pantagraph (Bloomington, Illinois)May 16, 2004 SundaySECTION: FOCUS; Pg. G1LENGTH: 1697 wordsHEADLINE: Passing of the post;Twin Cities loses radical voice with end of alternative paperBYLINE: Steve Arney