page_title: Thorne Webb Dreyer
section_title: Space City! and the KKK
hierarchical_section_title: Thorne Webb Dreyer / Space City! and the KKK
caption_attribution_description: English: Cover of Space City!, Houston, Texas, Vol. 3, No. 1, June 8, 1971, with photo of the underground paper's staff. Pictured, front row, from left: Victoria Smith (Holden), Sherwood Bishop, Tanya Phillips (on Sherwood's shoulders), Susie Le Blanc, [unidentified], Tina Phillips, Thorne Dreyer, Mark Wilson. Top row (from left): Russ Noland, Bobby Ray Eakin, Sue Mithun Duncan, Tom Hylden, Bryan Baker, Bill Narum, Lynne Bateman, Kerry (Awn) Fitzgerald, Vicki Gladson, Ernie Shawver, [unidentified], Judy Gitlin Fitzgerald, Jim Shannon. Above lampshade: Connie Mendez. Photo by Jerry Sebesta for Space City!
context_page_description: Thorne Webb Dreyer is an American writer, editor, publisher, and political activist who played a major role in the 1960s-1970s counterculture, New Left, and underground press movements. Dreyer now lives in Austin, Texas, where he edits the progressive internet news magazine, The Rag Blog, hosts Rag Radio on KOOP 91.7-FM, and is a director of the New Journalism Project.
  In June 2012 Dreyer topped a published list of Austin's most important political bloggers, and in 2011 received the noted Eddy Award for best Austin radio personality.
  Dreyer was "an influential journalist in the underground press movement of the 1960s and early 1970s," according to the documentary encyclopedia, Conflicts in American History, which included him in a series of 73 short biographies of key figures in "The Postwar and Civil Rights Era: 1945-1973" in the United States.
  He was a founder and editor of two of the most important of the Sixties underground newspapers, The Rag in Austin and Space City! in Houston, was an editor at Liberation News Service in New York, and managed Pacifica Radio's KPFT 90.1-FM in Houston.
context_section_description: In his book The Paper Revolutionaries: The Rise of the Underground Press, Laurence Leamer called Houston's Space City! "unquestionably one of the strongest underground papers in America." In Leamer's words, the paper "had a special importance in Houston since the city is a sprawled-out, Texas version of Los Angeles. The paper holds the radical community together."
  Space City! (originally called Space City News) was founded June 5, 1969, by Dreyer and Victoria Smith – who had worked together at LNS in New York – in coordination with former Rag staffers Dennis Fitzgerald and Judy Gitlin Fitzgerald, and community organizers Cam Duncan and Sue Mithun Duncan. The staff was run as a collective, with all editorial and production responsibilities being shared, and in the beginning the three couples also lived together in a communal home, sharing meals and chores.
  Space City! quickly moved to the fore of the second generation of underground papers—developing a reputation for its advocacy journalism, power structure research, and arts coverage – and it served as a center for the bustling Texas boomtown's peace and hipster communities while spinning off a host of other countercultural institutions.
  In a 1976 book about modern Texas folklore, Hermes Nye wrote that "the dark-haired bespectacled, lovely Victoria Smith and her compadre, dashing mustachioed Thorne Dreyer... helped lay the cornerstone of Houston's Space City!... a well written, sprightly sheet... [that] also had an eye for vivid, telling graphics and poetry of a high level." Historian Leamer wrote about Space City!: "There is a solid intelligence to the reviews and cultural articles... It is a radical journalism grounded in fact... resolved and balanced in content and full of common purpose..."
  John Siemssen, writing in Houston's Other, quoted former Space City! staffer Bobby Eakin: "Thorne [Dreyer] was the glue that held the paper together..." Eakin added, "When it was tense and they were ready to tear into each other, Thorne would hop on a chair and recite a [humorous] monologue."
  Unlike The Rag, Space City! met with violent opposition from some elements in the community, facing the wrath of right wing vigilantes openly identified with a local Ku Klux Klan group. As Victoria Smith wrote in Ken Wachsberger's Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press, "we endured break-ins, thefts, tire-slashings, potshots (including a steel arrow fired from a crossbow through the front door), and threats, both to staff members and advertisers."
  Raj Mankad wrote at OffCite that the Klan's violent actions against Space City! were part of a larger picture of "threats and acts of violence against progressive and radical institutions in Houston. The KPFT [Pacifica] station transmitter was bombed off the air twice. Bullets were shot at and yellow paint thrown on the walls of Margaret Webb Dreyer's gallery," which was located a few blocks from the Space City! offices.
caption: Cover of Space City!, Houston, Texas, Vol. 3, No. 1, June 8, 1971, with photo of the paper's staff. Thorne Dreyer is second from right in front row.
exif: {}