Space City (newspaper)

Space City!

Cover of the October, 28, 1971 issue. Artwork by Kerry Fitzgerald (Kerry Awn).
Type	Biweekly newspaper
Format	Tabloid
Owner	Space City News Collective
Editor	collective
Founded	1969
Ceased publication	1972
Headquarters	Houston, Texas
Circulation	10,000

Space City was an underground newspaper published in Houston, Texas from June 5, 1969 to August 3, 1972. The founders were SDS veterans and former members of the staff of the Austin, Texas underground newspaper, The Rag, including Thorne Dreyer, Victoria Smith, Cam and Sue Duncan, and Dennis and Judy Fitzgerald. Staffers included Bill Narum as Art Director. The first twelve issues of the paper were published under the title Space City News, which starting with issue no. 13 (Jan. 17, 1970) was changed to Space City! (with the exclamation point as a graphical design flourish) when it was discovered that another publication was already using the name.

Initially biweekly, the paper went on hiatus for two months starting in Feb. 1971 and then, with $3000 in the bank which they had accumulated through a series of fund-raisers, they resumed publishing in April 1971 as a weekly. After the hiatus the paper changed its focus and became more mainstream, shifting its target audience from dope-smoking revolutionary youth to the older "liberal intelligentsia" who listened to the local Pacifica Radio affiliate, KPFT, where other Rag alumni were working. At this time Space City! began to pay more attention to local news and electoral politics, which it had previously disdained, and added such traditional newspaper appurtenances as beat reporters and a city desk.

Space City! was published by a theoretically leaderless leftist collective, and for the first 18 months of its existence it pushed an agitprop antiwar/radical political message, leavening the politics with lively graphics and countercultural arts coverage. Sales, which were mostly by casual street vendors, averaged around 10,000 copies, both before and after it went weekly in 1971.

In 1972 a staff split led to the departure of a group led by former business manager Bill McElrath which formed a rival publication, The Mockingbird, publishing its first issue in April 1972. The Mockingbird itself suffered a split when several staffers subsequently left to form a third alternative paper, Abraxas.

During the three years of its existence the office of Space City! was attacked several times in drive-by shootings and one pipe-bombing, in which no one, fortunately, was seriously injured. The perpetrators were never identified but were suspected by some to be the same vigilantes, possibly KKK members, who bombed radio station KPFT twice in 1970. Infighting among the collective, staff burnout, financial difficulties, and the general decline of the underground press which paralleled the winding down of the Vietnam War led to the paper's demise. The final issue was vol. 4, no. 9 (August 3, 1972).

External links

• Gallery of Space City! covers by Bill Narum, 1960s Texas Music.
• Mankad, Raj, "Underground in H-Town,", OffSite, May 21, 2010.
• Interview with Thorne Dreyer (July 15, 1976), Oral History Archives, Houston Public Library.
• Dreyer, Thorne, "The KKK in the News Again. And Back in Sixties Houston", The Rag Blog, Feb. 9, 2009.
• Dreyer, Thorne, "What Ever Happened to the New Generation?", Texas Monthly, November, 1976, pp. 54, 96, 99.
• David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin, Michael Schudson, ed, A History of the Book in America: Volume 5: The Enduring Book: Print Culture, University of North Carolina Press (2009), p. 274.
• Rossinow, Doug, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America, Columbia University Press (1998), pp. 176, 393, 396, 406, 415, 431, 449, 455, 494.