Fort Hill

When I first encountered the people on Fort Hill was the night I
walked up there in the first snow of the winter. Though I never
became a member of the Process I did wear a black Bobbie's cape. At
the Fort Hill tower monument a young man approached me and asked me
what I was doing there. I asked him the same question. He told me he
was a member of Mel's group and was on patrol. I asked him if he
carried a gun. When he said "Yes" I laughed at him.

Jon

"Friendly Fifty on Fort Hill -- Better Way for People?
Robert L. Levey, Staff Reporter

Four wooden buildings - vaguely Victorian and outwardly shabby -
face the monument of Fort Hill in Roxbury. There is a park and
patchy grass, but the neighborhood kids litter it with broken
bottles. The view is the most spectacular that can be found in the
city below the top of a skyscraper.
Boston pinwheels around with Fort Hill at the center. That is where
the 50 or so people in those four houses want to be. They look to
the stars - in which they have great faith - and they look out from
that high Roxbury hill with the earnest belief that they have found
a better way for people to live together - honestly, without fear
and in friendship.

Fort Hill is at the center of the city and at the heart of Boston's
hippie underground.

Most of the people living there have experimented with mind-altering
drugs at some time. They put out an underground newspaper that is
under attack in Boston and Cambridge as an obscene publication.

They have forsaken most of the middle-class values to which the
average person is bound. Few of them are formally married. They
dress with indifferent informality or eccentric care. They spend
long nights talking in groups - criticizing each other, probing in
vivid detail each other's thoughts.

Anyone is welcome to visit the four houses lining the park on Fort
Hill, but to stay there you must become part of the communal scene.
There are no free rides - there is no room for social parasites.

Jim Kweskin, who has gained considerable fame performing with his
Jug Band, lives in the end house with his wife Marilyn and their
child. He explains that "the one thing demanded in this community is
work of some kind. You have to supply something. Either you might
get a day job and bring in money or you have to work on the paper or
you have to do physical labor fixing up the houses or all of these
things."

And there is more to it than that. People who live in the Fort Hill
community must get along with each other. It has existed for a year
and a half as an unintended experiment in community living and it
has become the anchor for Boston's hippie movement.

ENGINEER
Next door to Jim is David Gould's [sic: Gude] house. He was a
recording engineer in New York before coming to Fort Hill with his
wife Faith and two children. Like everyone in the community, David
is a deep believer in astrology. As for the community, David says
everything we do here is just getting to know each other better.
Whether it's sweeping up the hill or working on the paper. And when
we've really gotten to know each other, we're going to make the most
beautiful music the world has ever heard."

Eben Given lives next door in a house where one downstairs room has
been converted into a main dining room for the community. People
trickle in at supper time and there is food to eat. There is no
special plan to the eating arrangements, just as there are no
specific rules in the community.

Jesse Benton's house is at the end of the row, set back a strange
cement and stone fence and a small garden.

GUIDE
Mel lives there. Mel Lyman is something like the guide for the Fort
Hill community. He is about 30, gaunt, with a reedy voice and gentle
manner. Everyone at Fort Hill admires Mel. They talk about him a
lot . . . about how he has been into and out of all the scenes from
the West Coast to the East Village. He was into the drug scene early
and then out of it. He still visits New York to see his friend Andy
Warhol and catch up on the underground movie scene.

Mel has performed with Jim's Jug Band and he writes for the paper.
He likes yoga, guitar playing, women, attention and making people in
the Hill community work hard at whatever they choose to do.

The Fort Hill people regard their uncompromising life-style not so
much as a rebellion, but rather as an example. Jim says "it's not a
question of telling people how to live. It's just living our lives
the way we want to and letting anyone who wants to look - see that
it can work."

SPOKESMAN
But when people come to see what is happening on Fort Hill, they
often approach with fear in their eyes. Lew Crampton, 27, an Ivy-
educated East Asian expert, lives across the street in a fourth-
floor apartment. He has become an eloquent spokesman for Fort Hill
and keeps bringing people from the "straight world" up to the
community to meet his friends.

"We get people coming in here shaking like a leaf," says Crampton.
The fault for this fearful attitude of strangers rests with the news
media that have interpreted the hippie movement as a roaring drug
and sex orgy.

People in the community freely admit that they have used marijuana
and some of the more potent hallucinogens like LSD.

They admit the formal act of marriage is generally ignored by
couples living there. But as Crampton explains, "what is natural up
here does go, but there isn't the scene of wild, free love where a
man walks into a roomful of girls and says: 'You, come with me.'"

Sometimes Fort Hill seems more like a work camp than a hippie
community. During the Summer the residents became their own
department of public works. "We fixed up the hill," Jim
explains. "We bricked up the tower, we cleaned up the area. We cut
the grass in the park. That's a city responsibility. We are
maintaining this city park."

RENOVATING
They are also gradually renovating the modest buildings in the
community which were picked up for a couple of thousand dollars
each.

And most of the Fort Hill people have something to do with "The
Avatar" - their controversial underground newspaper. The paper is
produced with considerable skill and has contained some provocative
avant-garde writing.

It has also contained some very frank sex talk and some satirical
obscenity. During the campaign that Cambridge Mayor Daniel J. Hayes
launched against the hippies in October, "The Avatar" - which had
editorial offices in Cambridge - was banned from newsstands there.

The paper has moved to Rutland st., South End, but Boston police
raided the premises two weeks ago, made one arrest and confiscated
2000 copies of the paper.

Since the official crackdown on "The Avatar" the paper's editors,
Wayne Hansen and Brian Keating, have responded with bolder
obscenity. The paper has included violently obscene attacks on the
police and a recent issue had a center-fold designed around four
dirty words.

RESPONSE
The editors say they have no particular interest in pursuing the
obscenity campaign, but that they are harassment from police and
city officials.

Most of the paper's legal problem thus far have come from selling it
on the streets. Hundreds of Boston hippies have made a little money
picking up a stack of the papers at the office and hawking them in
Harvard sq. or the Charles st. area of Beacon Hill. Many have been
arrested for peddling obscene literature.

The Fort Hill people hope to raise enough money to fight the matter
in the courts.

But the paper is not an end in itself for the people at Fort Hill.
They are planning new projects like underground movie-making,
creating an environmental show, starting a school for the kids who
live there, forming music groups, making records.

Lyman say of "The Avatar" - "it's just another experiment. And if
they stop us from being what we are in that area, we'll just be what
we are in another area."

MOVEMENT
The people at Fort Hill have been the hippie route. "The movement is
like a love affair," says Crampton. "You take the first step and
fall in love with the flowers and bells and buttons. Then you get
into drugs and after a while you get tired because it's taking you
nowhere. You start feeding on your own sickness. But it's like
you're married to it, and you've got to find your way out. You've
got to understand what you're into (involved in) and then build
something out of it."

"We're building a new world," says Crampton with the enthusiasm of
an apostle. "And we're starting right here." Many members of the
Fort Hill community talk about leaving to start similar communities
in other parts of the country.

PRETENSIONS
Kweskin says the world they are trying to build is one where they do
not fear their neighbors and where they strip away pretensions about
themselves. "There isn't this getting together in the straight
world. And they're so afraid for their possessions. They're afraid
for what they own . . . afraid it's going to be destroyed or hurt."

The Fort Hill people are the older end of Boston's hippie scene,
though few of them have reached 30. There are children to bring up
and property to care for.

To be sure, they have dropped out of straight society. But Fort Hill
has a substance that most of the superficial hippie scene lacks. The
people there have been through the drug scene and are now trying -
as a visible underground movement - to make a new kind of life for
themselves and any others who would join them.

They know that the outside world looks at them as something to
fear. "There's a certain fear, built up about us," says
Kweskin. "People think we're something freaky. They think we're
always taking LSD and running around with our clothes off."

But Kweskin thinks the fear runs even deeper, "They're afraid of us
because an awful lot of people in this world are afraid of love. It
embarrasses them." 

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