May 15, 1967, Cleveland Plain Dealer

-- by Gerald M. Minnery

Some came booted and bearded. Others wore sneakers or sandals. Most wore long flowing (the girls, too).

It was a "happening" at Case Institute of Technology’s Strosacker Auditorium yesterday afternoon and the proceeds went to the defense fund for bookstore owner James Russell Lowell and Cleveland poet D. A. Levy.

Featured attraction of the "happening" was a reading by Allen Ginsberg, poet laureate of the "hippie" generation.

Feature attraction in the audience was about 600 was a 20-year-old girl "hippie" toting a live hawk on her gloved hand.

A FOLK-ROCK singing group from New York City called the Fugs provided the gyrations, comic relief and a few songs ("make your love today ‘cuz death is comin’").

Levy, who is awaiting trial on charges of publishing and disseminating obscene literature, read two of his poems.

Lowell, who has been charged with selling obscene material, sat on the stage and didn’t read anything.

The concert was staged to raise part of the $15,000 needed to defend the two.

Dr. Paul Zilsel, physics professor at Western Reserve University and member of the University Circle Teach – In Committee, cosponsor of the affair, got things started.

"I CAN GO down Euclid Avenue and buy all the commercially produced obscene literature I want," the professor stated.

""Mayor Locher’s callousness is obscene. The war in Vietnam is obscene. And the napalm is obscene. I would rather listen to Ginsberg than George Wallace or Gen. Westmoreland," he said.

Later, Ginsberg, with more beads around his neck than an American Indian, stepped to the rostrum.

"Mu gu chicky mu," he entoned, "mu mu chicky chicky mu."

What sounded like a Japanese Kabuki actor was, Ginsberg assured his audience, a Buddhist prayer.

EARLY SUNDAY morning the poet with more hair on his chin than the top of his head had met the Cleveland Police in The Coffee house, at 11501 Euclid Avenue.

The haven for "hippies" was closed by police nearly two weeks ago, but it’s owner reopened Friday night as "a protest." It was closed again Saturday night and reopened again yesterday.

Police said there were more than 200 persons crammed into the gathering spot yesterday. No one was arrested. Police confiscated a shotgun , a butcher knife and an eyedropper.

PATROLMEN were greeted with a Tibetan prayer by the bearded one.

He said he would return this summer to "do some social work."