Paul Howes

The juiciest bit I can contribute is the three years I belonged to SDS.

The Students for a Democratic Society.

Yes. And that is really what it stood for. It was really a fascinating organization. Contrary to what you may have seen in the media, it was primarily, first and foremost, a social organization for people to get together and have a good time.

What is still very clear to me was an awakening (to) the need for young people to become involved in politics because, maybe the old folks weren’t doing such a good job, and maybe they shouldn’t be left to run everything to their own devices. Or at least they needed some more input than what they were getting, because they were pretty messed up.

Did SDS members wear Chairman Mao pins?

They wore all kinds of pins. Let me explain one thing about it. There were actually two organizations. Well, actually three. There was the national SDS . . . Which the way the US press and everything operates, you know, they like to have somebody in charge, somebody who is responsible. So there was this meaningless, hollow core, except for a few people who were good speakers and wanted to have their ideologies publicized or debated – or at least get them out in the public some way or another.

So these guys had the National SDS, which the news media just loved. They had, it seemed to me, daily press conferences because, for a long time there it was vogue to have something on SDS every day in the newspaper, no matter what (they) could dig up. It was almost like ambulance chasing.

So there was this national organization which was pretty good people, but from my viewpoint, they didn’t have any reason for existence other than for interfacing with the news media. Then there were the real organizations that were all over the nation. I guess the best ones were in Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Boston and Boulder – at least that I had heard about.

Those four cities had really good SDS’s that did a lot of educating. They were involved in local politics in a positive way. I know a lot of people didn’t see it that way at all, but I saw it as very positive, and in every sense of the word . . . trying to make things better for everybody. There were lots of chapters and sometimes they’d get in trouble too, of course. Any new or different organization is going to attract new or different people, and every now and then that includes a few crazies. But I can tell you exactly how they were dealt with . . . I’ll give you a specific example.

One time we were doing guerrilla theater at the UMC. There was a group within SDS who were good actors. That was the medium that they understood and they wanted to express that, so they formed a guerrilla theater called the Up Against the Wall Mother Fuckers. I was a member for awhile, and the best thing we did, sometimes spontaneously – sometimes spontaneous even for us, and always spontaneous for the audience – we would just do little events on the CU campus. One that I was involved in and we particularly enjoyed (was one in which) we were trying to show people how Humphrey, Nixon and George Wallace was the same thing.

So this consisted of nothing more than me and this other fellow hiding behind this table that we had overturned at the UMC in the Alferd Packer Grill – and I’d pop up. I was wearing this three-sided helmet that had three faces on it – Humphrey, Nixon and Wallace. So I’d pop up with one face facing forward, I never said a word, I was just a head, helmet operator, or whatever. This other fellow, I don’t even remember his name or anything, he would say something that Humphrey said. So I’d pop down, pop back up with the next face showing, then he’d say something that Nixon said. These were usually quotes, and if they were quotes, then we’d make it obvious that they were quotes.

Then I’d pop up again and Wallace would spout something, and anyone who was really paying attention would realize those fuckers were all the same. I mean, one of them is a racist and one of them is crazy, but basically they all think alike. They all have the same ideas. They all belong to the military-industrial complex. They all view war as a necessary part of life. That’s the way these people are. They believe that you have to have a war like you have to have food or babies or the sun . . . that it’s all on the same level.

The Boulder Free School originated out of SDS – It was an SDS resolution. So was the Recreation Center. And one of the last things, a resolution . . . a splinter-group of SDS pushed for a referendum, or it was some kind of election on campus where we taxed ourselves. This started in the ‘60s where students voluntarily taxed themselves for a recreation center that they would never get to use. Now that’s a revolutionary idea!

Former City Councilwoman Gwenn Dooley talked about a divide and conquor strategy to destroy organizations like SDS during the ‘60s by Conservative groups. Would you care to comment?

That’s exactly right. (It is) one of their favorite tactics. They, them, the ruling class, whoever. Divide and conquer is a very effective tactic. Co-optation is one their favorite tactics. Do you know what that is?

You mean to take someone else’s idea and then dilute it, right?

Yeah. They’d like infiltrate and find something that was, and is, a popular and charismatic idea, and then try to take it over as if it was their property. I don’t know if they perceived SDS as a national organization. But they certainly wanted to provoke it and speak of it in that manner. It looks like more of a big thing in the media if they can talk about ten thousand revolutionaries.

Like the Weathermen?

Well, they wanted to portray the idea in the media that the SDS were a bunch of vandals and violent communist dupes or rabid active communists trying to destroy the government. Once these guys got a hold of an idea, the tactic was to dilute it or pervert it. Either dilute it until its meaning was inconsequential, and thereby discarded by the media or otherwise by people who would be paying attention to it. Sometimes it wouldn’t take that much changing, to take some action that would make it gross – or negative.

Would you say that Kissinger’s trip to Red China was sort of that idea of co-opting somebody else’s idea?

I don’t see that relationship. But Kissinger was one of the few people in government that could think for himself. I still don’t know what his real goals were, except that he is a crony of Rockefeller. He’s been Rockefeller’s mouthpiece his whole life. And the two of them, I think their major goal was to continue what they have to this day – which is operational control of the Trilateral Commission.

I mean, the Trilateral Commission is not supposed to have leaders, right? Theoretically, but it does. It really does have leaders. And Rockefeller, the family, consistently has been the most effective leader through people like Kissinger.

There was a leader who was very accomplished at the divide and conquer tactic named Joe Coors. I’m sure you’ve heard of Joe Coors. He had waged many little campaigns of war against . . . . Well, he made it look like he was trying to (eliminate SDS from campus). But his real goal was to neutralize this hotbed of political activity because, in fact, there were thousands of people in Boulder who were thinking, who were paying attention to the way which the local, national, and global politics were being perverted . . . and he was pretty successful!

Do you remember Cameron Bishop who blew up the power lines to the Coors plant that manufactured ceramic warheads for missiles? Was he in SDS?

Well, Joe Coors said he was, but as far as I know, he was just an individual. Unfortunately, as you know, there are (dangerous) people throughout society, like John Hinkley. Society, as a whole, is full of people who are already messed-up, and they’re just waiting for an opportunity to do something.

It most often manifests itself in domestic violence, in my opinion. Like (people) will beat up their spouse or kids, ‘cause that’s the safest thing to do while they’re at home with the blinds closed. A lot of these people are walking around, charged with violence, looking for an outlet. And some of them are politically motivated and others just want to get in groups. I think Bishop was one of those guys. The interesting thing is what they charged him with for blowing up the power lines in Golden. It was sabotage of a defense plant – which is a capital crime in wartime, which is very serious. They were really after him. Did you know there was a war plant in Golden? Most people don’t. They made ICBM nose cones and a lot of other stuff used by the military.

Was Bishop in any way affiliated with CU? Did people know him?

Oh yeah! He was around more than once. He was obviously personally volatile and violent – and that turned off most people. People in SDS were just ordinary people, and they were just as turned off as anybody else by a walking powder keg looking for an explosion.

There was a motto at SDS that said: “The ends don’t justify the means.” We felt that (that slogan) was always a delusion – to think that the means were different from the ends. There were certain elements of SDS that wanted to turn to violence. There was one guy who was always trying to get people to conspire with him. He wanted to get guns and go after . . . I can’t remember whom anymore. He wanted to go to Washington and start shooting people. I think he wanted to shoot (Hubert) Humphrey.

There were always people who were into violence that would show up now and then. Those people were counseled, and from my recollections, most of them were so married to their violent traits that when they realized that they didn’t have a bunch of cohorts to join them, without exception, they disappeared.

Some people thought (people like Bishop) were planted infiltrators. And we did have planted infiltrators. We were also robbed once, seemingly by the CIA or FBI. No one knows for sure, but they broke into our office at CU and there were card files full of stuff. One of them was an obvious, classic money box. There were a few hundred dollars in it, but they didn’t take that. They didn’t give a shit about a few hundred dollars. They took the card file and that had everybody’s name, address, and telephone number in it. So that was very obviously the authorities trying to build up their case, their evidence, (and) their intelligence.

You talked about a drugstore in Nederland where some hippies got thrown out. Well, I ran into that (in Boulder) at German’s Donut Shop. I was married at the time and I went down there with my wife, who was a very natty dresser. She looked very fancy and spiffy all the time and I was pretty clean cut, except I had long hair. And people behind the counter, there were four or five people ahead of us in line, they went out of their way to tell me “You might as well leave now, because we’re not going to serve you.” That was about 1971. That was the only time I was ever thrown out of a place in Boulder.

The only other time I was ever thrown out was at the Pioneer Inn in Nederland, at about the same time. I just went up there and a bunch of cowboys came up to me and said, “Do you want to leave horizontally, or do you want to leave vertically?” Without obviously threatening me more than that, they were obviously wanting me to believe that they were willing to do more than that, so I left. I didn’t want to stay anymore.

It wasn’t a groovy place at all. It was a place full of cowboys drinking, smoking, and getting drunk. And there wasn’t anything happening there any fun, anyway. If they hadn’t said anything, I would have left there in five minutes anyway. So they just shortened my visit by four minutes.

Do you remember Walt and Hank’s Tavern on Pearl Street?

The Skank Tank . . . because of Skanky, the stuffed dog. Walt or Hank had a dog named Skanky, and when he died, he had him stuffed and stuck him up there behind the bar – behind all the dusty, scrungy filth behind the bar. But if you looked up there behind the filth, there was this stuffed dog. It was a dog-dog, a regular old dog, but it was stuffed. It was your run-of-the-mill dog, and it wasn’t a real nifty taxidermy job, either.

That was a famous place. But everybody I knew called it the Skank Tank. They had a real good juke box and they had real good pool tables. People would wait for hours in there to play pool, because they were cheap and they were good – and mostly it was another bar to get drunk in. I remember it smelled. They had rugs in it – and the rugs were soaked with beer, twenty four hours a day. You could feel them squish under your feet a little.

Copyright 2026  S. Byron Gassaway