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Rosco Bell

Regina
Dumont Working Class of 1973-77  

Remembering Absent Friends - Charlotte von Bezold

Jun 25 21

Rosco Bell

Charlotte von Bezold - March 6, 1948-December 12, 1984

I have struggled for some time with what to say about Charlotte that would convey both what she was like and what she meant to me. I have decided that I would write about the first time and the last time I saw her. The parts in between I leave to the reader’s imagination and discretion.

I met her in September 1967 in the arts coffee shop at the University of Waterloo, introduced by our mutual friend Henry Shields. She was nineteen and I was smitten. She was unlike any woman I had ever known, not that I knew very many, and I was taken with her immediately. In those days, women and girls were generally constrained by expectations of modesty and decorum. They were not, as Charlotte did, expected to talk about birth control on first meeting someone. That day, she told me about her experience trying to access the birth control pill from the university’s Health Services. I was painfully shy in those days and hardly knew what to say to a girl, any girl, let alone one so open about something so personal. She was very matter-of-fact and unassuming, as if we were old friends chewing the fat over coffee and grilled cheese sandwiches. She even laughed at my jokes and, again unlike any girl I’d ever known, she made me laugh at hers. In short, she was a revelation -- beautiful, smart and fun to be around. How could I have not fallen for her?

The last time I saw her was in October 1984. Gary Robins had told me she was very ill and if I wanted to see her again I should get to it. I called her at her home in Charlottetown and asked if it would be OK if I visited her soon. In typical Charlotte style, she said, “You mean, before I croak.” I had not seen her for several years, since around the time that her son, Ting, was born. I learned that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer about 18 months previously and had refused treatment for it, a decision that had alienated her from even her closest friends, try as they might to convince her to give up her disdain for the patriarchal medical establishment and do something about her fucking cancer! I knew it would be pointless to add my voice to the chorus of concern. I just wanted to be a good listener.

She told me how it was her uncle, a doctor in the States, who first noticed the lump on her chest. Once she got the diagnosis, she determined that she would not allow them to mutilate her body with a mastectomy, believing she could control it through diet and mental exercises. She showed me the cancerous growth on her breast, by now a multi-hued rosetta a couple of inches in diameter. She painted pictures of it. She joked about how cancer was a growth experience. She said her favourite TV show was “Die-Nasty”. I think she realized she had gambled and lost. While I was there, she finally broke down and got the pain killers she had refused until then. I remember being with her when the pills took effect and she relaxed and for a moment became more like the Charlotte I had always known. She didn’t need me to be her judge. She died six weeks later.

Tears do not come easily to me; I have only ever cried twice when someone has died. The first was when John Lennon was shot. The second was for Charlotte von Bezold. She told me once that I was like a tree – I don’t move around very much but I am always in motion. For me, Charlotte was like a butterfly – colours flashing in the sun, flitting and fluttering through the air, beckoning, aloof, just out of reach. Suddenly there, suddenly gone.

Living Together

Jun 12 21

Rosco Bell

One of the defining characteristics of the era was the proclivity of people to live in co-operative and communal housing. No history would be complete without some acknowledgement of this fact. Indeed, the very foundations of Dumont Press Graphix were conceived in a communal dwelling and involved most, if not all, of the communards therein.

The popularity of student-run co-operative housing actually got a kickstart in 1966 with the opening of Hammarskjold House on the eastern edge of the University of Waterloo campus. Named after Dag Hammarskjold, the second Secretary General of the United Nations, the residence was financed by the student federation; the building replaced a number of houses across the street that had been used as co-op housing, and served as a more affordable alternative to the Student Village.

My introduction to ‘Hammer House’ occurred in March 1968 after I, along with Cyril Levitt and Grant Gordon, was evicted from the neighbouring Waterloo Towers apartment building following an overly boisterous party. Given 72 hours to vacate, I was fortunate enough to find a room in the residence for the remainder of the term. I can’t say it was ideal. Residents were required to perform chores, or “fags”, as part of the deal and as one of the last people to move in I got the fags no else wanted, one of which was to empty the institutional-sized garbage cans in the cafeteria. Try to picture a disabled kid trying to shift around a bag of garbage that weighed almost as much he did. Students sure threw out a lot of food!

Meanwhile, the co-op divested itself of the houses across the street, except for the one which had been used previously as a kitchen for the residents. The co-op’s intention was to convert it to a coffee house so they leased it to a group of people who would carry out the alterations and run the coffee house in lieu of rent. Over the course of the summer of 1968, Jim Hunter, “Corli” Shirley and Graham Dadson built the coffee house in the basement, named it “Cape Fogo” and waited for the masses to pour in. Alas, the masses never showed up so they agreed to rent the house and invited me and Charlotte von Bezold to join them that fall. This became Waterloo’s premier hippy house and was known thereafter simply as “132”. One of the notable features of the house was the jukebox in the living room which had a never-changing collection of 60’s hits. I remember many a morning waking up to the gently soothing strains of “Harper Valley PTA”.

Soon after I moved in, as more and more people were being busted for smoking dope, Jim and I went and talked to a lawyer (Morley Rosenberg?) about our legal rights and subsequently printed a flyer entitled “What To Do When the Cops Show Up” which we distributed on campus. This was my first real taste of political activism.

The house became a bit of a landmark and home to a number of students, hippies and general ne’er do wells including several who later worked at Dumont. Meanwhile, across the street was the aforementioned Waterloo Towers, where a group of students lived en masse in a 10th floor apartment, sharing two bedrooms, the living room and the balcony.

The original 1968 tenants, Eddie Hale and Philippe Elsworthy, were eventually joined by Gary Robins, Mike Corbett and John Pickles, five hippies in the two-bedroom apartment; Jim Klinck moved in the following May; Roddie Hay showed up two weeks later and lived on the balcony for the next three months. Brian Switzman and Cyril Levitt became regular visitors, as did Brenda Wilson from the co-op house next door. Bryan "No Notes" Anderson and Gerrit Huvers also became regular visitors and eventually forgot how to find their way home. Larry Burko and Bruce Steele were Friday night regulars after Film Night (which Larry ran), but generally did find their way home before sunrise, which was handy, as all the beds, couches and assorted spaces were already full. On many levels, it felt like a cultural oasis. By July, there were nine people living in the two-bedroom apartment. Then they got evicted.

The denizens of 132 also used to socialize (read ‘smoke dope’ and ‘drop acid’) with their friends at 1009. Now, 132 may have had a jukebox, but 1009 had a TV and so it was that on the afternoon of July 20, 1969 a motley assortment of hippies and other adventurers gathered round the TV to witness the first moon landing. On a personal note, the event proved to be anti-climactic as I had dropped acid the evening before and stayed up all night so that when the astronauts set foot on the moon for the first time, I was sleeping peacefully beside the TV, oblivious to history.

However, the eviction from 1009 proved to be pivotal in the history of Dumont Press Graphix. Forced to find a new home, the residents, along with a few friends, fourteen people in all, moved into a new home at 192 King St. South. Forsaking the original moniker of “Pepperland” from the movie Yellow Submarine, they named their home the Gabriel Dumont Memorial Co-operative to honour the military leader of the Riel Rebellion, although it was most commonly known as 192. It subsequently restructured as the Gabriel Dumont Memorial Commune.

I moved into the house in 1970 soon after On the Line began publishing and plans were being developed for Dumont Press Graphix. I can’t say I had much to do with either of these initiatives, preferring to spend most of my days and nights (mostly nights) creating music with Nick Sullivan of Running Dog and His Electric Lackey fame, and in 1971 I moved to the farm at Markdale where I stayed for two years, eventually moving back to the city to work at Dumont.

Upon my return I moved into another house of renown, the House of Zonk, a big old farmhouse on the southern edge of Kitchener. At any given time it was home to 10-15 people, an ever-changing cast of characters bound together by a love of good times and good dope. It featured multiple bathrooms, a chicken coop, the largest kitchen and living room I had ever seen, and a real coal furnace. Real coal! Oh, the luxury!

Until I moved into Zonk I had been fortunate enough to have never been in trouble with the law, not for lack of trying. That changed one night after Larry Caesar was arrested for drinking wine while attending one of the local movie theatres. He also happened to be carrying a couple of joints, enough evidence to give the narcs cause to raid his home. Rumour had reached the ears of the constabulary that Zonk was being used to peddle drugs so this was just the excuse they needed to conduct a full-blown raid. After frisking the half a dozen of us who were home at the time, they herded us into the kitchen while they searched the rest of house. As mentioned, the kitchen and adjoining living room were huge and at one point, I noticed the cops were nowhere in sight, so I took the opportunity to get to the phone and called my brother who was a lawyer in Toronto. As the cops looked on, stonefaced, I had everyone speak to him in turn so he could advise them of their rights. The cops were not amused and exacted their revenge by making me accompany them to the station when they had finished their search. They let me leave at about four in the morning. They found almost no dope in the house but still charged everyone with possession, charges which were dropped at the first court appearance. Hippies one, cops zero ...

There were many such houses in Kitchener-Waterloo in those days. Some were co-ops providing cheap accommodations for students and low-income people. Others were full-blown communes where the residents shared everything – expenses, incomes, each other – in a grand experiment in alternative living. When I look back, I realize how important and formative the co-operative experience was to me and, I am sure, to many of my friends and the people reading this. We learned how to share, to be open with each other, to solve problems together, to support each other through the hard times and to celebrate the good. By writing this I hope to jog a few memories and inspire others to share their stories of co-operative living. I look forward to reading them.

-- with contributions from Gary Robins

 

So infused with the spirit of era (and no doubt a generous dose of marihooji), I wrote the following little ditty:

 

(To the tune of Solidarity Forever)

Mine eyes have seen the dishes piled up in the sink all night

Our electric bill is soaring ‘cause we won’t turn off the light

Tom and Mary are not speaking cause they had another fight

But the commune must go on

 

Refrain

Weeeee don’t want responsibility

Won’t get a job and raise a family

And we’re broke as you can plainly see

But the commune must go on

Remembering Absent Friends ~ Sandy Cameron

Feb 17 21

Rosco Bell

Robert Alexander Cameron, 1945 to 2004

Sandy Cameron never worked on staff at Dumont Press, but his association with student journalism, the alternate press and the Dumont community was longstanding. A lifetime resident of Saskatchewan who visited Kitchener-Waterloo regularly, Sandy was one of those hospitable fellow travellers who helped to build a strong link between Regina and the K-W communities.

Sandy was the first person from Regina I ever met. He worked for Canadian University Press (CUP) along with Gary, Liz and Ron. When a bunch of folks went to the CUP conference in Naramata in 1970 we stayed with some student radicals and hippies in Regina that Sandy introduced us to. 
 
Though my friendship with Sandy was really only cemented after I had left Dumont, he was a principal reason for my move to Regina. As in Waterloo, there were a lot of young people that had formed communes and coops and were involved in various counter-cultural activities. There was a familiarity and sense of community to Regina that made it an attractive destination for many K-W people like myself.
 
Sandy was a natural leader who had the unique ability to bring people together to make things happen. By the time I arrived in Regina in 1977, Sandy had begun to understand that making change in society couldn’t be limited to politics without there being a cultural component as well. To that end, he established the Saskatchewan Cultural Exchange Society. Initially, SCES was a sort of travelling circus cum art gallery that took artists and musicians from Regina and Saskatoon to various small communities throughout the province. Up to 15 people would pile into an old school bus and tour the province for weeks at a time, putting on shows and conducting workshops in towns, villages and First Nations communities that Sandy had contacted. No one got paid to be on the tours and the communities were not charged. The tours were financed by small grants from government agencies that Sandy solicited.
 
In time, the focus of the SCES changed to putting on workshops in more remote communities as funding increased and permanent staff were hired but in 1981, a different path emerged, thanks to Sandy’s leadership. Many of you will recall hanging out at the the Kent and Station hotels. In Regina, it was the Hotel Saskatchewan — the Sask — that brought people together. In 1980 the owners decided to “upgrade” the barroom, driving most of its patrons to find alternative spaces. After a few months, Sandy and some comrades decided to start their own bar. The way to get a liquor licence was by establishing a private members club for which you needed an existing non-profit organization. Enter the SCES. In a matter of a few months, a space was secured and a group of dedicated volunteers built a clubhouse — named, appropriately, The Club — that brought in bands on weekends and served as a place to meet your friends during the week.
 
The SCES still exists to this day, although The Club had to move to a new location following a devastating fire in 1989. Now, it is mostly involved with sponsoring workshops and with maintaining a performance space for community groups and local and touring bands.
 
None of this would have happened without Sandy’s stewardship and his ability to bring people together. He touched a lot of people’s lives and did so selflessly and without fanfare. His commitment to his community was deep and sincere and I never got the feeling there was anything else motivating him. He was one of the first of our generation to have children (five of them!) which probably kept him grounded and focused on the here and now. He was an art collector, a musician, a writer, and a pretty good cook. I’m happy to say, he was my friend.
 

Additional reflections and comments:

From Gary Robins in Regina:  Sandy was at the core of a number of Regina/K-W connections. Several of us met him (along with Norm Bolen and Ron Thompson at the CUP national conference at the Westbury Hotel in Toronto in December 1968. A year later, he made his first visit to Waterloo for the CUP conference at the University of Waterloo (chaired by Brenda Wilson and Frank Goldspink) in December 1969. 

A significant discussion at that gathering centred around the emergence of the alternate press in several communities across Canada and other countries, much of it spurred on by activist student journalists going out into their communities. Sandy and a fairly creative and energetic bunch from Regina had recently established a weekly alternate community newspaper, the Prairie Fire. Sandy was also elected to the CUP National Office at that conference. Of greater relevance though, was that the conference discussions also prompted Jim Klinck and Gary Robins to decide to start a community newspaper in Kitchener-Waterloo.

Two months later, Gary and Brenda Wilson (along with Tom Ashman and the Kennedy sisters) stopped in Regina on their way to the West Coast, spending a weekend there learning more about the alternate press and helping to produce an edition of Prairie Fire. Along with a caucus gang of fun-loving activists and writers, they also met Sandy’s partner Barb Cameron, and his daughter Kirsten. Two weeks later, Gary and Brenda stopped in Regina again on their way home to Waterloo, and helped to lay out and paste-up another issue of the paper. It was hands-on research, and they came back with a plan. On the Line published its first issue about four months later.

In April 1971 as he completed his term at the CUP National Office in Ottawa and headed home to Saskatchewan, Sandy stopped for the weekend in Waterloo and then stayed for three weeks. Dumont Press Graphix was about to open its doors, and the Gabe Dumont Memorial Commune was in the process of breaking up. It was a very interesting and exciting time, on many fronts. 

Sandy (and his red van) helped some of us with our extensive search to find a farmhouse to rent within commuting distance of K-W. We spent a lot of days on back roads exploring the Ontario countryside, finally settling into a nice quiet place by the Rocky Saugeen River, about eight miles southwest of Markdale, and only 70 miles north of K-W. It was idyllic, another rural hippie commune.

Sandy became an annual visitor to Waterloo, showing up with a van load of hippies, always looking to party. When I decided, in the spring of 1977, to leave Ontario and head west to the coast or somewhere in the mountains, it was Sandy who waylaid me in a local pub, during our stopover in Regina. He was encouraging almost to the point of being insistent. A strong and supportive community is always inviting. It still is. He was the main reason I ended up in Saskatchewan as well, and though he was sometimes tough to get along with, we worked together on a number of projects and remained close friends up to the time of his death in 2004.


2 more photos in this story.

A Trip to DC

Jan 11 21

Rosco Bell

Does anyone else remember when a bunch of us went down to a student press conference in Washington DC? It would have been in 1970, I think. All I remember is that we got kicked out of the Pentagon for trying to take photographs and that Firesign Theater was the featured entertainment for the conference.

A Brief History of Mine

Sep 04 20

Rosco Bell

I started at Dumont in 1973 having lived with or been friends with most of the people who set up the shop. I was probably more of a hippie than hard-core revolutionary and I liked the anti-authority non-hierarchical vibe the folks there engendered. I liked being able to learn all the various skills and jobs around the shop, with the exception of the bookkeeping, which I deliberately and carefully avoided. More on that later.

The thing that stands out most for me about my time at Dumont (and in K-W in general) is how non-judgemental I found people to be. We may have had differences of opinion but there was an atmosphere of acceptance and tolerance that made working there easy and enjoyable despite the pitifully low wages. Fifty years later and I still feel a warmth and comradeship towards so many people I came to know in those days.

Since I left Dumont in 1977, my life has seen many changes in direction. I moved to Regina where I still live. I spent the first few years here working in printing and publishing but I was soon drawn to the world of arts and culture. As in K-W, there was a thriving counter-culture in Regina which shared the same accepting, tolerant attitudes. The focus was less on changing the world through politics than on creating change through art, music, theatre, etc. The wages were just as pitiful, however. 

Regina proved to be a haven for a number of friends and colleagues from K-W, at least 10 of us by the early 80s, many of whom had worked at Dumont. Those that remain are still my closest friends. All are well-respected for their competence and willingness to share both their expertise and wisdom. 

Eventually I found myself working as manager of a small theatre company. Feeling the need to improve my managerial skills I enrolled in the Banff School of Arts Management. A prerequisite for the course was bookkeeping experience. Oh, joy! Oh, shit! My youthful indiscretion coming back to bite me? But bookkeeping practices had changed since my days of indifference. Mainly, it was all done on computers and I could handle computers. By the end of the course I was miles ahead of my classmates. When I returned home I had a skill that few of my friends had which soon translated into a full-time job which in turn lead to a home-based bookkeeping business which I still maintain part-time in my well-deserved retirement.

If there is one thing I learned from my time at Dumont it is to get involved, to try new things, to never stop learning. Even though we may not have overthrown the establishment, I believe we helped change the world in profound and significant ways and many of the causes we supported are now common-place if not main-stream. Feminism, environmentalism, inclusiveness, human rights, workers’ rights. We were/are on the right side of history. The challenge now is not to achieve these victories but to defend them.

Typesetters Got Rhythm

Nov 06 20

Rosco Bell

At the heart of Dumont Press Graphix was the typesetting machine. The Compugraphic 2961 was a state of the art (for 1971) electronic beast that automated (more or less) the process of turning one’s thoughts into readable images that could eventually be printed on paper. This was accomplished by first typing one’s thoughts on a separate machine (compositor) that produced a paper tape perforated with holes representing letters, numbers and punctuation that was then fed into the typesetting machine. The paper tape also included instructions about which font and type-size would be used. Inside the machine a strobe light and lens were situated inside a spinning drum surrounded by a negative film strip containing the character forms of a given font. By timing the spin of the film strip with the flash of the strobe, a roll of photographic paper was exposed to the various characters and a column of type was the result. By moving the lens inside the spinning drum closer or further away from the film strip, different sizes of type could be created. The film strip could have more than one font on it and the lens could be moved from side to side depending on which font was to be used.

This was not a silent process. The machine produced all manner of clicks and clanks and rat-a-tat-tats as the spinning drum stopped and started and the lens moved in and out and from side to side depending on which font and which size of type was being photographed. The noise wasn’t too bad if you were creating a long article using only one font and one size of type. For example, an article like this one. But it could get quite noisy if you wanted something with a number of different sizes or fonts. Each change was accompanied by some sort of sound as it required the parts inside the machine to move around. For example, an ad for a newspaper could include several different sizes of type and font changes. Regular, boldface and italic type each had its own separate character set on the film strip and changing from one to the other produced some sort of sound.

Usually, this cacophony of random sounds just became part of the background noise accompanying every day life in the shop. You got used to it and ignored it since you couldn’t do anything about it except close the door to typesetting room. Too bad if you were on compositor duty that shift. 

One day, I was working in the typesetting room and I fed a tape into the machine for processing. This time, the tape was programmed with a lot of changes, frequent changes, rhythmic changes, groovy changes! The sound was literally musical! Ho ho, I thought (at least, I think I thought that), this one’s a keeper, so instead of discarding it in the garbage as usual, I rolled up the tape and put it aside for safe-keeping. 

Soon after, Bruce Steele happened to be in the shop. Bruce was a freelancer for the CBC at the time and knew everything there was to know about sound. He also had his brand-new reel-to-reel tape-recorder with him. I motioned him into the typesetting room and made him listen to this special tape I had saved. He was only too eager to set up his machine and record it for posterity. It was one of my prouder moments working there.

You can imagine my delight a few days later when Bruce appeared on Peter Gzowski’s morning show on CBC Radio with his story of a musical typesetting machine in Kitchener complete with a recording of same. A national audience!  For Dumont’s very own typesetter! Oh, frabjous day! Fame and fortune, at last!

Well, a guy can dream, can’t he?

Alas, the musical tape is now lost to history, as is Bruce’s reel-to-reel, not to mention Mr. Gzowski. Fame and fortune did not follow, although Bruce went on to a long and illustrious career in broadcasting and TV. I’d like to think Dumont’s musical typesetting machine had something to do with his success. A guy can dream, right?

 

Running Dog Tales

Jan 02 21

Rosco Bell

Dumont Press Graphix was not the only counter-cultural institution to emerge from the Gabriel Dumont Memorial Commune in 1970. Though far from politically correct, the band Running Dog and His Electric Lackey showed that having fun could be just as subversive. 

The band was the creation of Nick Sullivan (aka Nick Savage) and Rosco Bell, both of whom later worked at DPG. Their performances, infrequent and at times incomprehensible, provided comic relief to the otherwise serious business of overthrowing the state. Their satirical songs were as likely to provoke outrage as raised eyebrows and quizzical grins. 

A major breakthrough concert occurred at the 1970 CUP conference in Naramata BC where the band played to a crowd of enthusiastic student journalists, many of whom were high on LSD. Accompanied by the Red Wobbly Chorus, the band put on a show for the ages, highlighted by a reading from The Little Red Book: Quotations of Chairman Mao — in Swahili. Survivors of the event say it still made as much sense.

Another notorious gig happened in a church in Toronto at a benefit concert for striking workers. The band opened for the legendary folksinger and union organizer U. Utah Phillips. The show proved to be a lesson from the Better Know Your Audience school of musical endeavours. The band was barely into the first song of their set when they elicited loud booing from some audience members who took issue with the lyrics of “Come to the Orgy”. The booing and catcalls were so disruptive the band stopped playing and attempted to leave the stage only to be surrounded by a group of angry militant lesbians who were not in the least swayed by the band’s protestations that this was, after all, satire. Before things got too ugly, the ever-resourceful Phillips took the stage and calmed things down with a soothing  rendition of “Solidarity Forever”. Who knows how it would have turned out otherwise.

By the end of the 70s the band had dispersed to various parts of the country and never performed in public again, except for a few impromptu get-togethers over whisky and marijuana. This past year, however, the band celebrated its own 50th anniversary by releasing The Running Dog and His Electric Lackey Anthology of Scurrilous Songs. The songbook is available for download at http://scott-sullivan.com/dogbook. A YouTube video based on a 1979 concert by Rosco Bell is also available at https://youtu.be/8innp_mCrBo.

 



1 more photos in this story.