Head First

One less nuisance for Portland, Oregon to worry about:

Stew Albert, one of the creators of People’s Park, a former editor of the Berkeley Barb and a founder of the Youth International Party—the Yippies—died Monday at his home in Portland, Ore.

He was 66, and an unreconstructed radical to the end.

According to longtime friend and almost-codefendant Paul Krassner, Albert died of liver cancer.

....Albert achieved his greatest notoriety during the Republican National Convention in 1968, when he and other members of the Yippies ran a counter-presidential campaign with Pigasus as their chosen standard-bearer.

Fellow Yippie Krassner, a satirist who now lives in Desert Hot Springs, said that he and Albert were originally slated to be prosecuted as defendants in what became known as the trial of the Chicago Seven, radicals charged with crossing state lines for the purpose of conspiring to incite protesters to riot at the convention.

Krassner said Albert may have been the first to have had his head smashed by a Chicago lawman during what was later characterized as a “police riot” by politicians and the media.