What follows is commentary about Volume 1, Issue 2 by the founders and editors. of The Advocate. To the best of our recollection, this issue was published sometime in January 1989. The full issue is visible below or by clicking here. Please note that these pages are Genius-enabled, meaning that visitors can add context, links or corrections to any of the copy simply by selecting and right-clicking it.

Page 1

Scott Berkey – As I check out the first page of Issue 2, I am struck by how little I remember about how Issue 1 was received. How did we distribute it and where? How the hell did we sell ads for the first Issue? It has got to be a small town thing. You have these relationships that you can depend on (exploit).

Brendan Kinney – This is the issue when The Advocate got officially banned from school grounds. We took aim at Duffy Miller, the principal, and it was an extension of our behavior in the classroom as well. Scott was a well-known pain in the ass by many of his teachers (primarily due to his high IQ).

SB – I am not contesting this, but I can’t say that I ever perceived this myself. I knew I had various run ins with a lot of different teachers and administrators but somehow in my mind my level of ass-ness fell within what I perceived as the norm for a high school student.

BK – This might also be a myth of my own creation.

SB – Amy (The Wife – Ed) says that it is definitely true and quickly walked me through a number of teachers and examples. If this topic gets explored more she would be a good resource.

BK – We both aggravated the powers that be (were?) in our own particular ways. I helped with a few *ahem!* demonstrations at school and protests of one kind or another. It was really Mrs. Harding’s fault!

SB – So, a photo. With Issue 2 come our first photos, a slightly reworked title banner, and a cleaner look. Issue 1 we used a basic word processor (pre-WYSIWYG) for the body of the articles and then a separate program for printing the headlines – on the dot matrix printer of course. Ah, the giants. Dot matrix printers milled out the pages of text with the tender touch of a planer smoothing a two-by-four.

Jamie Hill – If you had asked me, I would have still been able to name-check His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. Subsequent to this in-joke, I used “Remember that His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada says” as a non-sequitur preface to random thoughts well into college. It became a go-to catchphrase. Who had the excellent idea of integrating his quotes in this way? That still feels genius to me.

SB – His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada’s followers gave me a book of his wisdom at the Denver airport as I imagined I was in Airplane! The nuggets of the Swami’s wisdom became regular filler in early issues.

BK – I’d love to see the cover of that book. I have very strong memories of flipping through it and plucking pearls of wisdom to share. This wackiness carried over to The Devil’s Advocate (an alternative paper at Saint Michael’s College that was partially inspired by The Advocate), when we ran mock classifieds and giant ads for the letter Q, mostly to fill space.

SB – I think we lifted the practice from the White River Valley Herald. I don’t remember what they used for filler. When we moved on from laying out by hand and started using desktop publishing software to layout the pages completely on the computer we cheated the text around to fill the spaces and the Swami lost his podium.

SB – The live music review was probably desperation to have enough material to fill out an issue. Today with the ease with which information is shared over the internet it seems absurd that we had to scramble for enough content to try and publish on a nearly monthly basis, but it wasn’t just sloth on our part.

SB – Matt’s piece on insurance in remarkably cogent. I had remembered that everything that Matt Lion wrote for us was fiction or fictionalized.  So far he gets marks for having the most breadth in his portfolio.  (Upon further review,  in the insurance piece Matt says that he is twenty years old.  That means it is not a Matt Lion piece.  Some other Matt. – Ed.)

Page 2

JH – Calling ourselves Sex, Drugs, and Rock editors was super bold! I admire so much the don’t-give-a-single-fuck-ness of it.

SB – Howard Dean is our first celebrity fan. This is pre-Governor Dean when he was a low key affable small state politician. Howard didn’t know which of us gave him the paper and I have no idea either.

George H.W. Bush makes his first appearance. It was the end of the Reagan Era. Reagan was the 80s president. Carter’s floundering last year and Bush’s flat start don’t count. Having moved to the U.S. in the summer of ‘79 I didn’t really know America without Reagan. Even during the ‘80 campaign at only ten years old I was following politics. Not understanding it very well, I am sure, but I was keenly interested. I think I was a Kennedy supporter in the Democratic primary season and certainly didn’t recognize the significance of a sitting president facing such a stiff challenge to his re-election from within his own party. Thank goodness Bush won – well, other than the fact that he ramped up the war on drugs, launch the first Gulf War, and fumbled his way through a remarkably lackluster term – he was great fodder for us at The Advocate. I suppose Dukakis might have served as well, but we will never know.

As flaccid as the Bush presidency was, it was actually an amazing time for the world. After a half a century the Cold War ended and suddenly the world’s two largest militaries were no longer posturing on the brink of thermonuclear war. For me it took nearly a decade for it to set in that I no longer went to bed at night wondering if I would be vaporized in an unprovoked Russian attack or wonder at night if those flashes over the horizon were lightening or the afterglow of an H-bomb with Boston’s name on it.

BK – Movies like The Day After (which I watched from the stairs when we lived in Keene) were a pivotal and communal experience back in the days when we all watched the same five channels. I don’t know if it was planned propaganda, but it certainly helped stoke fear and hysteria.

SB – I am sure it is completely impossible for my son to understand. Even though for his entire life the U.S. has actually been at war and not at the brink of war, I don’t think he has ever fallen asleep at night pondering where the safest place in the house, or at school, or in the yard would be when Reagan decides he has had enough.

SB – I am a little perplexed as to why the Orange County Libertarians’ ad has the number printing twice. Could be we just decided to fill the space. Libertarianism was still a bit of a mystery to me at this point. Brendan worked for David Atkinson who was very active with the Vermont Libertarian Party and apparently chairman of the Orange County Committee at the time of Issue 2. David would go on to feature in the story of The Advocate and both Brendan’s and my post-Advocate political futures.

SB – Kent and Nora’s Main Street Cafe was the most prominent restaurant on Randolph’s Main Street and where I started as a dishwasher and quickly transitioned to waiter. Kent and Nora gave us free reign on the copy for their ads – for a while. I seem to remember at some point they weren’t pleased with one of the ads, but I guess that is a story for a future issue.

Page 3

JH – That computery font in the “This space ten bucks” teasers is fantastic. Also, the layout in this issue is much better than in the first issue.

SB – A lot of Vermont kids born in the late sixties and early seventies revered The Sixties. The Sixties is not a decade in the strict calendar sense but more of a mythical time: peace (and war) and love (and oppression) and rock ’n roll (and folk) and drugs (and more drugs). “Stop, Children, What’s That Sound?” is a piece that captures that hope of the progeny of the The Sixties generation that the end of the Reagan era would bring a new The Sixties. It wasn’t a selfish hope but a true hope. We revered the generation that in our eyes stopped the Vietnam War and brought down Nixon by being a royal pain in the ass.

BK – I certainly studied 60s icons like Kennedy, King, and Gandhi. I also idolized Abbie Hoffman, David Dellinger, and other “radicals” of the era. I even had the opportunity to meet Dave Dellinger, who spent his latter years living in Vermont, and brought him to SMC to speak. Later in life, I grew tired of pop culture’s fixation on the nostalgia of the 60s. But now I see GenX starting to get nostalgic and it’s going to drive our kids nuts. Sorry, kids.

SB – I don’t mean to diminish Jodi’s piece or the effort of those at RUHS at the time. Certainly the student population had never been so active on an important issue during my time their. As I remember it, the most worked up students ever got was over the ban on wearing hats to class. That too even spawned a meeting of students and administrators in the auditorium, but as an issue it is hardly in the same league as the sit in that Jodi and the others pulled off.

BK – I remember helping to organize the protest after rumors of a teacher hitting a student. It led to a mass walk out and students convened in the auditorium. I remember taking the stage and trying to moderate. I also remember some hysterical student leaders crying and shouting at us from the back of the auditorium. It ended peacefully and without severe repercussions. I also learned later that the rumor about the teacher was probably not true.

Page 4

SB – “The Thinking Page” was always a favorite of mine and one of the only features to appear in all ten issue of The Advocate. I am not sure that there was a clear mission for “The Thinking Page” – the whole of The Advocate was supposed to make you thinking. Still somehow each issue there were pieces that had to compete for a spot on the prestigious “The Thinking Page.”

Ah hah! In “Visions of 21 Year Old ‘Radical,’” Blaken White calls it, “…(in ten years new peace treaties will hopefully be signed which will probably have us throw away billions of dollars worth of weapons which we so call needed). Gee, we must really lack confidence in our intellectual ability to deal with one another huh?” And so we did. In the decades to follow The Advocate, billions of dollars worth of nuclear armaments became obsolete and were not replaced. Who was Blacken White? Can’t remember any more? Perhaps Scott Redman?Perhaps I have something in my archive. I guess we should send scans of The Advocate to all of our contributors that we can track down and see if they will take blame for any of the pseudonym pieces that we can’t pin on anyone else.

JH – “With politicians like Bernie Sanders in our government things can’t be all bad.” The more things change, huh.

SB – “Eltit Gnisufnoc” has a Shel Silverstein ring to it. Could be Jamie, Brendan, or myself though I don’t remember penning it. Some of the lines really are very familiar. If had to guess I would say Jamie. Something about the “cardboard, with stick shift wheels” says Jamie to me, but shouldn’t it have been, “cardboard car?” Hard to say. A part of me has a suspicion that this piece is plagiarized or at least very closely based on a previously published piece of work. It just has little riffs that seem too familiar even for being in The Advocate and if it is Jamie’s piece he did push the limits (and sometimes cross them) when it came to journalistic integrity as we will hear in future issues.

“Some Things We Think ‘R’ Funny” strikes me as a bit derivative of The Advocate. It’s shooting at the same target but it just doesn’t have the firepower to get there. I am sure we were eternally grateful at the time that someone sent us something that we could publish that we didn’t have to write ourselves.

BK – I think we wrote this one!

SB – Well, that would explain it. We hadn’t hit our stride yet.

SB – Now, “Idle Prodding” is classic The Advocate. This is a Lance Terry piece. Lance was one of Brendan’s posse. I didn’t really know him and I don’t think he contributed anything else, but this piece nails it. It plays right into all the trumped up fears about “youth” that persist today at a whole other level and then gives that a big: Fuck you for thinking of me that way! Still I am not sure that The Advocate or E.C. Nal would avoid a stint of counseling if such a piece were to hit the newsstands today.

JH – If a student were to write “IdLe PrOdDiNg” in 2019 they would be arrested by a SWAT team and brought up on federal terrorism charges.

BK – I observe that the Secret Service would have stopped by for “a chat.”

Page 5

JH – The hand-drawn smoke enhancements on the climate change photos are brilliant. “No, see, it’s pollution. Terrible pollution.”

SB – Wow. I guess the world didn’t heed our call for immediate action on The Greenhouse Effect (Global Warming today).

JH – It’s so monumentally infuriating how our little teenaged peer group seemed to know perfectly well 30 years ago that climate change was a thing that was happening, and which required urgent action … and then to have watched public understanding on that issue move backwards for three decades for a significant portion of our fellow citizens. It’s so depressing to see how brutally effective anti-science propaganda and lobbying have been on this front. The lack of political will to address this is in a serious and comprehensive way is no less infuriating to me now than it clearly was to us then; the only difference is that, with a more adult understanding of the forces at play, I feel less confident that it’s going to work out okay.

SB – I remember using pictures of the Branchwood Pine Panels chimney, but in my mind I associate them with the wood shavings that literally blew up the stack and rained down on our lawn and other lawns in the neighborhood. In springtime as the snow would melt the wood chips wouldn’t and the density of their coverage would get greater and greater.

BK – I remember Chuck Menzel had a “No-Decker” t-shirt that I somehow remember may have been related to a smokestack or proposal to build one??

SB – Decker was something else entirely. It was a proposed wood-fired electric generation plant. There were major regulatory incentives to build them. A lot of Randolph village people fought it because they said the truck traffic would cause the Main Street bridge to fail prematurely – but the damn thing was sixty-year old already at the time.

SB – I was sad to see Branchwood to go idle and eventually up in smoke, but I wasn’t sad to see that antiquated heating system shut down. Everything in the neighborhood eventually was washed clean by the rain of the perpetual smoky black residue.

SB – My “America” piece is admittedly not one that I wrote for The Advocate, but something I had in my archives. Probably from late ‘86 or early ‘87. After appearing in The Advocate it was reprinted in another youth-published paper started by a fan of The Advocate. I might have a copy somewhere. I can’t remember who the fan was or how they heard of The Advocate, but I seem to remember that they were out in the Midwest.

SB – Lance Terry has another piece and I hadn’t even remember that he was a contributor until we started this project.

Page 6

SB – Well, there is at least one photo of The Advocate in production I guess.  Time spent in the press room of The White River Valley Herald was a definite inspiration for The Advocate…

BK – The Herald was my first job. I remember reporting to the office and the secretary would count our pay out of a metal lockbox she kept in her desk drawer…the smell of the Herald office (as well as the press room) stays with me.

SB – Wait, with seeing Jamie in the press room makes me think that even though Brendan and I had talked about publishing a paper or magazine for years, it was Brendan and Jamie (still in high school together) who had decided to go for it and brought me into the fold. I think they must have made the arrangement with The Herald for the printing because I have no memory whatsoever of how that come to fruition.

Page 7

SB – Jill Montgomery, our Enigmatic Contest winner, was an employee of The Herald. I think she worked some in the press room, maybe in labeling and bundling the papers for distribution to homes and stores.  This is really a filler page no doubt about it.

JH – I don’t know that I had a single byline in this issue. What was I doing? Was I more on the editing / layout / production side of things?

Page 8

SB – RB Cameron Tree Experts and Lost Mountain Bake & Book Shop were pretty much with us the whole ride. Supportive of us both with advertising and in Lost Mountain’s case as a distributor and a contributor.

JH – I loved seeing the ad on the back page for Bruce Cameron’s tree service business. Bruce used to take care of the trees at our house, and I remember him as being what in retrospect I guess you’d call a hippie. I didn’t have that language quite yet then though.