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--- Sender: tuckerpf@ix.netcom.com (Jeffrey Apfel) Subject: Pie throwingYou wrote: > >=20 >(1)=20 >Sender: "Aron \"Pieman\" Kay" <pieman@ns.calyx.com> >Subject: Re: Woodstock and San Fransisco >=20 >Hi; the 60's had left a profound effect (which is still being felt) by >society as a whole.and it is great that today's students are looking into= =20 >the 60's as part of their curriculum. Anyway, I was involved in it as a=20 >part of the yippies. Feel free to contact me: aron kay-the Yippie Pie Thro= wer >(Pieman@calyx.com)
Hello Pieman:
In that case I have two pie-related questions for you. =20
I've been interested the the chronology of pie-throwing in the sixties.=20
In his book The Sixties, Todd Gitlin recounts the story of how the=20 Diggers (Emmett Grogan and Peter Berg; summer of 1967) went to New York=20
and appeared on a tv show. Peter Berg was interviewed but, since the=20 mysterious "Emmett Grogan" was the man famous for fifteen minutes at=20 that point, the interviewer kept asking if Berg knew an "Emmett=20 Grogan". Berg said no, but that "there was an Emma Goldman" in the=20 audience at which point "Emma" (a Digger plant) rose to identify=20 herself. When asked to talk, she took out a pie and smooshed the=20 interviewer in the face.=20
Berg then addressed the audience directly (a la Howard Beale in=20 Network) on assuming freedom and walked off. Berg has apparently=20 maintained that, not only did Abbie Hoffman get inspiration generally=20 from the Diggers that he had just been exposed to at a conference in=20 Michigan (as Grogan and Hoffman discuss in their own books), but that=20 Hoffman got his initial notions of madcap media manipulation from Berg=20 from this altercation and others.
So part one of the question relates to whether you agree with this=20 Digger-Yippie handoff.=20
Part two comes in when we fast forward a year to 1968 (in those days a=20 *lot* culd happen in one year!) In Destructive Generation, Collier and=20 Horowitz write of a similar pie incident undertaken on a military=20 official by an SDSer at around the time of the development of the=20 Action Faction=96early 1968, I think, several months after the Digger pie= =20
incident. In fact, this period is described as a transition from=20 "American Mischief to American Mayhem". =20
Is there a tie between the Digger/Yippie pies and the Action Faction=20 pie? If so, what?
Jeff