... until Steve or whoever makes this posting thing easier to do. I don't even know if I've succeeded yet.
OK.
I guess I have a longer connection to Dumont than practically anyone except Steve. I was there from 1976 to 1987, from (sadly) after the First Fifth, which was before my time, till the very bitter(sweet) end.
I do think we have a story to tell, and it's not just of the Merry Prankster variety. Don't get me wrong, there were many Merry Moments, but Dumont was so much more than a youthful escapade. It was probably the most important formative experience of my entire life. And we are famous in a minor way far beyond our circle. The thing we did was amazing.
When I look at the list of people who are at this point involved or at least being communicated with, I realize I hardly know any of you. It seems at this time the thrust is towards the first five years, the early years of dreamers who weren't quite ready to leave their heady radical university days, and who then went on to something else. Remembering Dumont fondly as some kind of youthful folly.
I was glad to see the composite pic that Steve put together and was posted recently, because this is much more the Dumont that I knew.
I think Steve should put together the T shirt design, and that it should be a collage of just a few of the many wonderful things we did, often in collaboration with WPIRG. Of course the Chevron would be there, the Mercury Paper, the Weston Paper, the Supermarket Tour, Hysteria, Healthsharing, Steve's anarchist publications, the things we did with Black and Red, Between the Lines, and of course our very backbone in the economic survival department, Labour/Le Travailleur. And so much more. Oh yeah, and Kopy Kwik, where would we have been without them?
I doubt if I will make it to the reunion, it is a long way from the Slocan Valley to Kitchener, in many ways. Also, it being this time in my life, I have another 40th anniversary this summer, that of the Vallican Whole Community Centre, which was where I was before I came to Dumont, and where I came back to.
I'll be glad to remember endlessly with my friends and comrades, however, and try to recreate some of what we had, to whatever end. It was quite a shock to me to realize it has been over 23 years since I left Dumont. We are all getting older and we need to be speaking our truth, both the good times and the bad, about what we accomplished and what it all meant. We can lose our herstory so easily.
It is the middle of the night here. Once I started thinking about this I couldn't sleep anyway so I thought I might as well take the plunge into this multilogue.
In sisterhood and solidarity
Moe Lyons
It does occur to me this is too public a venue for saying things that impact other people. Not only personal things, but questions like, can we even talk about Bulldozer et al., or even "camerawork"?
ReplyDeleteSomething was said about creating a more secure way of communicating, what would that look like?
moe
Moe's right about the generational discrepancy, and this has been the case for all the Dumont gatherings going back to about 1987, I think. The organizing group here in Kitchener have now got a probably complete list of everyone who ever worked at Dumont, along with a far larger list of people who took some sort of interest in it, especially by getting their publications typeset at Dumont, either commercially or non-commercially. I'm working on trying to find contact information for all these people, and it will probably be late this weekend before I've the list organized.
ReplyDeleteClearly, this blog is not the place to display or discuss names of people who might not want public exposure in this context, so that's why a few of us are trying to decide on the best private system for managing such information. But the system will not necessarily be simpler, I'm afraid, since it's going to require people to login possibly twice and to learn some input conventions for collaborating on the data. Even though I've been lucky to get today off of work due to a moderate storm, I'm still juggling lots of projects, so a new system will take at least until next week to sort out. It will also allow us to consolidate e-mail addresses into a mailing list, which both protects privacy for those who want it and makes it unnecessary for everyone to keep their own address list up to date.
Moe's suggestion for a T-shirt design I think is more appropriate for a series of posters, and I'm keen on doing something like that, especially since I've got lots of the artwork used for such political projects over the years at Dumont. I don't have a scanner big enough to handle these things, so I need to work out a high-quality method of shooting them with a digital camera.
Thanks for your comments, Moe. They are further encouragement to create a comprehensive history of Dumont. I certainly agree with your perspective on the importance of Dumont in the political life of a lot of people.
I agree that Moe is correct, the establishment of Dumont Press had a significant impact on a number of progressive organizations and publications that went far beyond the walls of the shop or our regular meetings to explore the practicalities of industrial democracy and workers control.
ReplyDeleteYes, the contract to produce the Chevron got us rolling, and Kopy Kwik kept us grounded, but right from the beginning there were important collaborations, with the Canadian Women's Educational Press and the Body Politic, the Brantford Free Press and the Confederation of Canadian Unions (CCU). There were also publications like The Food Paper and A Beginners Guide to the Struggle in Ireland, the rebirth of On the Line (for a time) and the K-W Free Press.
But mostly there was a sense of connection and a sense of community as we all struggled to put form to new ideas and possibilities. Our efforts did attract people like Moe, from other parts of the country, to come to Kitchener to become part of the co-op. It's fascinating to see how many of us from Dumont ended up going into adult education or community-based organizing and popular education. What was formed and nurtured at Dumont continues on for so many of us, and that continues to draw us together, as fellow travelers or as family, for impromptu potlucks, memorable roadtrips, or celebrating the life of a colleague or friend we have lost.
We have roots that matter, and our personal experiences from our association with Dumont Press remind us of all of that. In 1981 I was working for a while at a photolab in Prince Rupert, B.C. and playing softball on the local CBC team. There was a guy on the team, a CBC technician originally from Peterborough, who had worked on the alternative community paper there (I can't remember the name, though Notes would remember). When he found out I had worked at Dumont, he told me, "Wow, Dumont Press! You guys were our heros!"
Actually, when I think of youthful follies I think of working the 10 pm to 6 am shifts with Rosco, doing the camerawork to get the paste-ups and page negs done when the Chevron was twice a week and we were also publishing the student papers from WLU and Conestoga College, with the music cranked up real loud listening to Peter Frampton and his talking guitar with Rosco saying, "How does he do that?" Or the middle of 1974 during the publishing span of the K-W Free Press when I caught every single Thursday morning sunrise as we put the paper to bed, with Dufort freaking out when the copy didn't fit and Michael Rohatynsky and I regularly trying to calm him down.
They were indeed heady times, and what we were trying to do was new and unique, and not always successful, but nonetheless profound. We did have many good times along the way, but our Dumont roots continue to guide much of our practice and our sense of community. It's pretty cool.
By the way, note to Steve, the first Dumont reunion was actually in 1985, in Bruce Mines. The 1987 gathering was also in Bruce Mines, 1989 in Oxbow, 1991 in Waterloo, 1994, back in Bruce Mines and 2000 in Waterloo. Those of us K-W expatriates living in Saskatchewan always take the opportunity to gather for food, wine and visiting whenever any of the old gang wanders into town.
Personal note to Moe: Too bad I left Dumont just after you had arrived... we missed out on a lot of interesting times together...
Hi all. It's been a while. There are a couple of names missing from the list of organizations that Gary, Steve and Moe have compiled in this post and comments. The Jimuel Briggs Society (Primary Sources) and New Hogtown Press (too many titles to mention). I was there pretty close to the beginning of both of those organizations' relationship with DPG, and with the initial continuing one with LLT that grew out of Primary Sources, which was started on the CompuGraphic and finished on the VIP.
ReplyDeleteWhat Gary says about DPG's reputation is absolutely true. A few times I've stumbled through trying to recount my personal life history, watching eyes glaze over and people look at their watches, until they hear the phrase "Dumont Press." I got introduced at a Christmas brunch a few years ago as having been associated with DPG and every head in the room of a certain age turned.
I had not really thought much about any of this until I stumbled into Mel's 65th birthday party and Janet told me to go into the next room because all my old friends from Dumont were there. It took me a while to put names to faces I had not seen for thirty years or so. I'm trying to put together a sensible narrative of how all this played out and all the things I learned. I will get it done sometime after tax season.
Until then, there are a couple of things that I would suggest:
1. THE QUESTION ABOUT SECURITY: The easiest way to make any blogspot blog more secure is to do what I suggested to Steve via e-mail:
"In the blogspot public settings you can instruct Google, the owner of Blogspot not to make your blog content available to search engines ("Let search engines find your blog?)" Because I found the blog by doing a Google search, this suggests to me that you answered the question "Yes." If you really want a blog that is available to DPG folk and their trusted friends, "No" is the safest and easiest setting. There are other ways to let friends know about new posts (automatic e-mail, rss feeds, having people bookmark the site, etc) without letting the whole world in on what Gabe is up to."
Also using first names only (see the third paragraph of this comment) is another tried and true method to keep malign outsiders guessing, according to some of my Trotskyist friends.
2. MAKING IT EASIER TO POST: If you were trying to sell Blogger or Wordpress twenty-five years ago, they both would have failed as too hard to use. The easiest way to post items to either kind of blog that I've found is Windows Live Writer. It's part of Windows 7 and gives posters access to almost everything that MS Office has in formatting, much more easily than fiddling around with html code in Blogger or Wordpress's "WYZIWYG" "editors."
More anon.
Russell Hann*
*Joe Briggs works at New Hogtown Press in Toronto, Canada and takes the blame for almost everything that goes wrong. From time to time he takes time away from his many duties to partake of the culture and politics of Ward 31 and the world beyond. He posts the results here. On most Tuesday evenings from May Day to Labour Day, he slips away to play softball with The League. (www.theleague81.ca).
Dumont, to me…
ReplyDeleteAll these years later I see Dumont Press Grafix in the greater context of ‘what happened to me at Waterloo’. Certainly, it was life-changing in ways that I could never have imagined.
When I returned to the U of W in the fall of 1969 I was returning from Ottawa to the campus where I’d quietly got my BA in ’67. I’d been teaching for two years, including 1968 -- during which had occurred: the Chicago convention, the assassinations of King and Kennedy, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia. I was ready for change, but what I found at Waterloo was not what I’d left: in the meantime Waterloo had transformed into ‘the red campus’. Demonstrations, all night political meetings, communes -- and red jack shirts were the norm. I still see Charlotta and Bernadine at the 2am-podium, Phillipe in his world war one flyer’s hat and googles, and Nick and Roscoe entertaining us with “Pain, Sorrow and Torture”. So engrossing; so much fun – and, at times, so painful.
I had actually been raised in Kitchener and my father’s family homestead was actually across the street from ‘the King Street commune’, by Carlings brewery. So not only had the university been transformed, but now there were drug-crazed hippies on the streets where I’d lived…
Within a surprisingly short time I became one of them.
Of course, Dumont grew out of all that. To me it was putting our evolving politics into practice. It’s what made things real. I vividly recall the meetings where, with Gary and Eddy (our ‘experts’), we convinced the two universities and the college to let us typeset their newspapers. Heady stuff to steal those contracts from the KW Record! …And the white Econoline capers: night time scavenger hunts for building materials, pre-dawn drives to Toronto for printing – and later morning campus delivery stops. Who can forget learning how to type on those heavy old tape-typewriters – and actually learning to read the punched codes for corrections. The waxer, paste-ups, galley sheets, the Robertson camera. I loved it – and it was our achievement.
It was all so intense.
Yet, it was so brief in the context of a whole life.
Thanks, all of you for the experience and the memories. I look forward to seeing you in the summer.
Peter Lang