I'd never do it again, not what I had to go through. I just went broke, I had no more money left. I was getting all the money I was getting from other sources, a few dollars here and a few dollars there, all going into the paper, and I finally wound up $25,000 in debt, which I still am, a little more than that, about $30,000. I was only selling 4000, 5000 papers a week. I sold each issue for ten cents. The publication costs were about $4000. I was getting about seven cents a copy, bringing in about $300 and some odd dollars a week, which wasn't enough to pay the rent and pay the girl in the office, and pay the linotype operator that I had working here, and give me a week's pay, and pay the drivers' who were taking out the stuff. I was in the hole at the rate of three or four hundred dollars a week. I stopped in June of '66.

Shortly after I closed the paper up, about four or five months, I was brooding, doing a lot of brooding over it. One morning I got up and collapsed, choking to death and they had to call a doctor, he analyzed my ailment as asthma at the time. Here I was a professional acrobat, used to run five-six miles in the morning, keep in condition you know. Asthma, me? Yeah. Nerves, he said. Take it easy and relax. I just walked around in a fog for a year and a half after it, the shock of it, you know, it will affect people that way.

If I ever start a career like that again, I certainly wouldn't devote my time to writing newspapers. I'd go into magazines or books, because the rewards are greater and the pressure isn't as great as it is in a newspaper. Your newspaper's all right for hack writers, these people who file straight reports, you know.

Last year I happened to be in the store one night down at the corner of Upton St. and Ed Beardsley, this fellow connected with the Avatar, came in and he had put them in the store to sell, and he asked Jimmy in the store, how they were selling, the clerk of the store how they were selling, and Jimmy said look up there and see how they're selling. I said what is it? He said a newspaper. I said something new? And this Beardsley said yeah. So I looked at one of the copies of Avatar. He asked me if I had ever seen a copy. I said no, I had heard of it, published up at Fort Hill. He said yes. So then the clerk said Fred here used to run a newspaper, the Midtown Journal. He said, you did? I said yeah. He asked me where I put the paper, I said up in my plant, up in Rutland St., it's vacant now. He said we're looking for a place. I said, well come on up and I'll show it to you. So I brought him up here and showed it to him, this room in here. He said it's not big enough. I said there's another room out there, there's two rooms. He said that's just ideal. It makes it perfect, it's just what we need.

I don't remember what I thought of the first issue. I glanced through it, and I tried to follow it. It was a little bit unusual, a little bit different than anything I had ever read in newspapers. So they just moved in here, and the first issue they put out here they all went into the can. They had a centerfold with the four-letter words in there. I thought, if they want to do it, it's all right, the hell, it's not my paper. I wish they had been here thirty years ago, they'd have thought my paper was a Sunday School sheet. I was in here the day the police came in and confiscated the papers. Since then, the police have quieted down, I guess they've read it several times and they don't think it's too bad.

They just finished building this meditating platform out back. They asked me if they could build it; and I said sure, if it helps them put out the paper, why not