Wednesday, April 16, 2003
Leopold's, The People's Record Collective (or Nothing Lasts Forever)
Leopold's Records in Berkeley, California, a controversial entrepreneurial venture absolutely representative of the times, was finally started up in early 1970 after a series of on campus meetings. The store was created on a small loan of something less than $1700 from the associated students organization. Four people attended the early pre-org meetings. Jason was wispy and slight in a black turtleneck, his blond hair pulled back in the popular ponytail of the times, and he always wore a navy-blue capote in the form of an English bobby's cape as he spoke at the front of the borrowed room. Bill wore drip-dry longsleeved polyester shirts, an "Isro" (which was the Jewish version of an Afro) and iguana-skin cowboy boots that were rumored to have cost three hundred dollars. There were a couple of other people there, too, dressed every bit as badly.
After discussion, Leopold's was named in honor of Leopold Stokowski.
Why honor Leopold Stokowski:
1. Stokowski was one of the greatest conductors of all time. "Born in London on April 18, 1882, he started his musical career as an organist. In 1903, he took the post of the principal organist at St. James' Church in London, situated in a small side street to the famous Piccadilly. Although only 21 years old, he became soon well-known and after two years he received an offer of St. Bartholomew's Church in New York, which he accepted gratefully. The congregation there loved him especially for his uncommon musical repertoire. But he went too far. In 1908, he was thrown out after he had concluded a service with 'Stars and Stripes Forever' with all the organ-stops pulled out."
(That was a famous story. There's a version of that event scripted into a 1960's Yul Brenner movie ("Once More With Feeling"???) where as conductor he has the piccolo section stand for their part in the song. Stokowski was a movie star, too. He conducted in "Fantasia", which introduced countless millions of people all around the world to classical music. Anyway … Stokowski!)
(clarification 11.19.10 Just to clarify, Stowkowski didn't really want to include the Stars and Stripes Forever .... it was an obligatory closing of the time, a theatrical contrivance demanded by convention ... so he played it, but blasted it ....)
The movie which I vaguely remember because it's like 50 years since I've seen it explored somewhat his troublesome reluctance as a minor plot twist, then tidied up the ending and so mistold the story in the long run, because in the screen play Yul (as Stowkowski) fell for a girl, and had the piccolo section stand up all for her ... Hollywood ..... Fantasia .... Disney .... )
2. Stokowski had a sense of humor. He sported an improbable Slavic accent despite being born and raised in England
3. Stokowski drove one of the Dymaxion cars (which R. Buckminster Fuller had designed.)
The store was conceived as a direct reaction to the way "the record collective" perceived the entertainment industry. People figured that the people (i.e., mostly students) would be buying records anyway, and Leopold's would act as the middle man. Leopold's would give the people the records they wanted to buy and donate the profits to fund community activities. This was an important concept, a self-supporting enterprise that would hopefully support community groups. And by providing a product that people wanted. If the system that created the entertainment was a big screwed up system, at least the end result could be socially useful. If the musicians were screwed up by their own system, either exploited "made-for-hire" artists or the opposite (the others who profit excessively from the screwed up system), and even if they turned into pigs themselves, we could still get some good out of them.
Even if they all were trying to pretend they were like us by singing a benefit concert here and there, while the result was sometimes laudable, we didn't need to ask any special favors of them, either. We didn't need their benefits and we didn't need their donations. We didn't need to ask them to do a goddamn thing. We could make use of them, too, but in a way that they all had agreed to -- sell the records they had made to be sold. In a way we could play out that old show biz joke, "Just shut up and sing!" So, it's true, I helped to a small degree to start up Leopold's, and worked closely early on with a few of the members. The Record Collective was a direct response to disbelieving "The Big Lie" that any of these people working as recording artists however rich and famous they got to be were "independent" in any way.
Leopold's moved into a cubicle that had been recently abandoned by Cleo's, one of those brand new 3-cents a copy photocopy businesses that had started up. They'd succeeded wildly and had moved down the hall into larger quarters.
Leopold's started up with an inventory of four or five records. These were special orders for records that the buyers wanted (the same people who were at the pre-org meetings). Mine was an album of the collected hits of Huey "Piano" Smith & The Clowns. I chose that record because in an era when many serious things were going on, people tended to take themselves seriously. No one in their right mind can take themselves too seriously when trying to sing along with the chorus of "Don't You Just Know It" and it is a good safety valve.
Leopold's could not afford stock, and in the beginning would special order records. Leopold's succeeded, purchased merch to stock the bins in the store, and prospered for a number of years. They had to move their location several times. Partly as a result of expansion, sometimes the landlords would raise the rent. With one notable exception, the locations were always situated at the top of steep flights of stairs as ground level shops had premium rent. This made it a challenge to get the boxes of records up the stairs, as each box of 50 lp's weighed close to forty pounds. The workers in the "record collective" earned wages that fell within the acceptable range for like work in the area, they were something like $4 per hour back then. Although people working there would be "comped" by the powers that be, sported to free tickets to all concerts, of course in the corporate hope that the record store people would "push" particular records. Those were the hotsy-totsy years of Fillmore, Avalon, and boogie-woogie-woogie parlors, but the freebies for the most part were generally disregarded by the workers. I never went to those shows.
Leopold's kept the costs of running the business down, made plenty of mistakes, and provided much needed funds to support the activities of community groups. This was an exciting venture in the early years. It was educative as well, allowing people to see and experience first hand not just the kinds of things people go through to create a business venture and learn the price of mistakes. Also, the venture allowed people to witness first hand the types of tactics competitors would resort to as stock and trade in their corporate success. The current manager of what became The Record Store, for instance, was particularly hostile to the very idea of Leopold's while the other record merchants in the neighborhood, having come up in Berkeley, were not so threatened. In fact, the students spontaneously picketed what would be the future location of The Record Store when it was revealed what the construction alterations were about: The Record Store had decided to move into giant quarters nearly next door to Leopold's. People loved Leopold's.
That's because Leopold's responded to people's needs. With all the new records coming out, people were reluctant to take a risk on an unknown product when "only one track is any good." (That's when records were $5, mind you). As the store was in a busy part of town, full of traffic noise, other distractions, and given to large groups of people who needed a hang out, Leopold's opted not to set up listening stations for any record in print but allowed people to check out records for $1 for three days to see if they wanted to buy them. Always on our toes, a person would have to "join the club" and front the full price of an album as the membership fee, in the event they moved or something and forgot to return the rented record, or heavens forbid were trying to run a scam on the place. People could rent ANY record in the store, their choices weren't preselected for them by us. Of course, the manager of the The Record Store heard of this rental scheme and began voiciferously lobbying for his version of ... of (he barely could find a concept that would excuse his response to what he saw as a competetive threat, and he reached to find a politically correct phrase that would win him community support, but settled on "copyright protection.") Until it was pointed out to him that listening to a record might make a person want to buy it, and there was no assurance the consumer would buy the record only from Leopold's. They might decide to buy it any place. He began fraternizing with the Leopold rental desk on breaks, and asking the names of the most popular rented records. He, I am sure, believed he was being energetic, proactive, and clever. We thought what a lazy dumb shit.
The campus area in Berkeley is always a busy area, but this Leopold's enterprise sprung forth in the maelstrom of the demonstrations. The tear gas and the police barricades made it difficult to deliver a shipment of records from the record jobbers. One time the pickup truck was trapped a half block from the store with a riot going on around them, people were running about, the cops in riot gear were running and swinging their truncheons, the tear gas was swirling, and a cop came over and told them to get out of the area by beating his truncheon on the hood of the truck a few more times than was necessary to get the message across.
One of the best ads was a handbill for a new bootleg record, announcing it was available at "Leopold's, the People's Record Collective" and there was an advertising motif borrowed from a paint manufacturer, a large can of paint pouring over the earth and beginning to spread saying "Cover the Earth". (That was the only bootleg that Leopold's ever knowingly sold and it only was offered only after much discussion. I'll tell that story another time, if you think you're interested in how Leopold's had a visit from a representative of a big famous rock group.)
One of the best things Leopold's did was to act as host for the Community Memory Project, which is kind of where you are today, thanks to some visionaries. (Here are some more community memories of them.)
Though fueled by some of the more admirable motivations, Leopold's eventually lost focus and disappeared as the active community groups wound down. But it served an important purpose while it existed for those few years, and also provided funds to fuel community actions and activities.
Where are they now? I don't know. One of the four persons involved from the days of the pre-org meetings stayed on for many years, managing the store to the bitter end, until it became a private profit venture. In the mid-seventies, he commuted to Sacramento to get the name Leopold's registered under his sole ownership as the name was due to expire the next day. The rest of the early dreamers, well, you know, moved from Berkeley and haven't been seen or heard from since. (Here's another account of Leopold's which mentions another Bill, not the person I referenced above, but that only goes to prove there were always a lot of bills attached to Leopold's).
During those decades following the '70s, the Leopold's name was sold and a few little ersatz-Leopold's popped up, ugly brown and orange phony little plastic record cottages; feeble appendages of a big record store corporation that just didn't have the stuff to win the solo monopoly rights to operate as The Record Store and so has just folded its corporate flags. I'd said goodbye to the real Leopold's many decades past. As for the corporate megastore, stick some glittery fringe on the epaulets of your satin jacket and blast out an offtone parody of taps from a cheap gold-tone plastic trumpet as the corporate flag is lowered.
But always wish a happy birthday to Leopold Stokowski and try to remember the real driving spirit behind Leopold's, the store named in his honor.
How Community Memory Came to Be, Part 1
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Lee Felsenstein, as told to Bernard Aboba
The Origins of Community Memory
The Community Memory Project had its origins in my quest for the right medium for the growth and realignment of communities. I had been through the 1960s in Berkeley, and had seen episodic community creation in 1964 with the Free Speech Movement.
As a result of the Free Speech Movement, tens of thousands of people realigned their idea of who they were and what they were doing, and as a side effect, it became legitimate for people to open up conversations with strangers. A lot of barriers disappeared, and they discovered matches and possiblities they didn't know existed. Haight-Ashbury and the "Summer of Love" were an offshoot of that.
In 1969, during the crisis of People's Park, a lot of energy went towards the construction of the park, but there was also an openness to experimentation. I was an engineering student at Berkeley during this period, and so I tried to use the technical skills I had in the service of this process. I started by working in the underground press, with the Berkeley Barb.
I saw the Berkeley Barb as a possible mechanism for nuturing a community, but it didn't stay that way. As it grew, the structure inherent in the print medium reasserted itself, and it became a paper whose purpose was to attract attention to itself, rather than to attract attention to other people.
In 1971 I dropped out of Berkeley and went to work at Ampex Corporation in Redwood City. I was sent to The Service Bureau Corporation to learn Basic; in those days minicomputers were brand new, and service bureaus were where they were used. We had selectric terminals, and the instructors were quite full of themselves, and would delight in telling us how the terminals were typing more slowly because they had turned off the computer in Los Angeles and were now using the system in Kansas City. From this I understood that this medium was independent of geography. The other thing they taught us was that you could make a file public to various degrees; a file could be made accessible to your account only, to other groups of users, or to everyone.
Putting the two capabilities together, I understood that you could create a system independent of geography where a number of interest groups could exist, and where people could join in ongoing conversations. This was the medium that could faciliate the kind of community self-building that I was interested in. All that remained was to facilitate access to the technology.
In 1969 there were many switchboards, which were people with index cards and telephones that were listed in the underground press. People would call them with resources that were available, and then other people would call looking for information. There was never much of a filing system, and so the people running the switchboards got burned out.
I had investigated the switchboards in Berkeley, such as the Free Church Switchboard, and so I wanted to see if my engineering skills could help the organization of the files. What I found was that the Free Church was more interested in being a church than a switchboard.
At that time, someone told me about a computer in San Francisco that people wanted to use for good things, and gave me the phone number. This was Resource 1, a non-profit corporation that was a splittoff of The San Francisco Switchboard. The other half of the split was The Haight Ashbury Switchboard, which only recently closed up shop.
Resource 1 was run by people who had left the Berkeley Computer Science department after the invasion of Cambodia: Pam Heartt, Cris Macie, and Chris Newstroup. They started out by soliciting donations of computer time on mainframes for use by community groups.
The Resource 1 people, because their organization started out as a Switchboard, decided to get a computer to act as a common file area for the switchboard. They began a process of fund raising, and solicited a donation of a Xerox Data Systems 940, serial number 4. Only 57 of these devices ever existed, and that one had previously served at SRI, and was owned by TransAmerica Leasing. Resource 1 then raised $20,000 for a 58 Mb drive the size of two refrigerators, and we built a hard disk controller for it.
I started hanging out at Resource 1 in the late fall/winter of 1971, and when I went back to school at Berkeley and finished my degree in June of 1972, I was put in charge of maintaining the mainframe. The person who was supposed to teach me how to do this disappeared on the day that it arrived, and showed up months later without an explanation.
We started writing an information retrieval system. I was stimulated by Abe Greenblatt, a legendary MIT hacker who passed through town and got us all fired up about writing a retrieval system in 24 hours. Thus was born the Resource One Generalized Retrieval System (ROGERS). By that time I had brought Efram Lipkin into the project. Efram was in Berkeley and was looking for something socially useful to do with his computer skills.
It took about a year to get the keyword indexing working, so that you could index things under any number of words. We then went back to the switchboards, and said "here is this powerful tool. All you have to do to connect to it is to rent teletypes for $150/month." Well, the people at the meeting had no knowledge of computers, and only one of them had even known that we were working on this. We hadn't talked to them in advance, and it turned out that the switchboards were not interested in doing the work to reconceptualize their card files, or paying for something so speculative.
We had built a tremendously powerful system and there was no one to use it, so we began to explore possible uses. One was facilitating libraries. We thought of becoming a library like the Bay Area Reference Council, a library of libraries. This is where you called to find out where something was if your library didn't have it. Today they call this interlibrary loan.
But when we took it to the librarians, they said "what you have is a library with no books on the shelves. Why don't you get some books and come back to us?" We were trying to sell shelves to libraries! This gave Efram the idea of putting terminals out on the street to see what information we could collect. We went to Berkeley and at that time Leopold's Records was owned by the Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC) and controlled by the student senate, with the goal of driving down record prices.
Community Memory goes online
We presented our case to the Senate, and they thought it was a great idea to put a terminal in Leopold's. We got a used model 33 teletype donated to us by Timeshare, and build a cardboard soundproofing box for it. A Timeshare executive named Roy Worthington was very helpful, and he came up with the name Community Memory. We installed it with a 110 baud modem, on a phone with an Oakland number, which would give us unlimited calls to San Francisco. On August 8, 1973 we opened up the first terminal.
One of us had to be in the store at all times, standing next to the teletype, which was in front of a bulletin board used mostly by musicians. We would ask people "Would you like to use our Electronic Bulletin Board, which is on a computer?" Almost without exception the people who heard this brightened up, and said "can I use it?" This was a record store, so the people were mostly of student age, who were going to more receptive, and we targeted it that way.
Our assumption was that people would use it mostly for finding housing, cars, and jobs. However, since the system was located next to a musician's bulletin board, all the musician's information traffic moved over to the terminal, and music and musician's items became the largest identifiable group, which was a bit of a surprise. We also found that a much wider range of items was entered than we thought was possible. People were entering typewriter graphics, and poems. They were inputting little literary works, and selling and buying the strangest things. I could see that it was functioning as a kind of public place that otherwise didn't exist.
Like other similar systems, Community Memory stemmed from the EIES system, which was a conferencing system that had been set up at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. But there is a difference between conferencing systems and bulletin board systems. I believe that Community Memory was the first bulletin board system, and we developed our BBS software through an empirical process, one that could not have been done commercially.
It was clear that it was popular, and in January we changed over to Hazeltine 1500 CRT terminals, and moved it out of Leopold's Records to the Whole Earth Access store, which was then on Shattuck Ave. Whole Earth Access was at that time a catalog store for alternative cultures. You could get wooden stoves there, which you couldn't buy anywhere else.
These terminals didn't make noise, and didn't require anyone to stand next to them. We also opened a terminal at the Mission branch of the San Francisco Public Library, where we knew the librarian. There was a another terminal in Berkeley at our offices on Dwight Way, and one in the offices of Vocations for Social Change, so we had a four terminal network.
The system had a number of flaws. There was no clustering of items, and it was too easy to invent new keywords. There was no incentive to group items under a single keyword, so it began to be hard to find things.
Nevertheless some important things happened, such as a learning exchange item that turned up in the first month. We seeded the system with questions such as "Where can you get good bagels in the Bay Area?" In 1973 there were not good bagel shops in the Bay Area, as there are today. We got some expected answers, but one was unexpected. That was that one should call the following number, and an ex-bagel maker would teach you how to make bagels.
So here was a learning exchange being offered, where the person offering it wasn't asking for anything in return. This was the kind of exchange that had been postulated in Ivan Ilych's Deschooling Society, which discussed alternatives to institutional education. I don't know if anyone ever learned to make bagels, though.
Another thing was that someone started entering a lot of information on lock picking and how to cheat the newly opened BART system, and encouraged his friends to put their information on, using the common keyword OUTLAW. He would come in and use the system, prowl around, and attach comments to items, saying "see OUTLAW."
This had been predicted in 1971 in a paper by Chris Beaty, who had attempted to set up a computer bulletin board system in Los Angeles that was surpressed by the Los Angeles Times. There were government agencies that said that to advertise cars you had to have a car dealers license or own a newspaper, and they used this as a pretext to shut down the system. In his paper, Chris described the function of the gatekeeper or information sharer, and this person fit the description quite well.
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Lee Felsenstein, lee@interval.com, last modified: 1/18/94 ¶ 4/16/2003 12:12:00 PM
Leopold's Records in Berkeley, California, a controversial entrepreneurial venture absolutely representative of the times, was finally started up in early 1970 after a series of on campus meetings. The store was created on a small loan of something less than $1700 from the associated students organization. Four people attended the early pre-org meetings. Jason was wispy and slight in a black turtleneck, his blond hair pulled back in the popular ponytail of the times, and he always wore a navy-blue capote in the form of an English bobby's cape as he spoke at the front of the borrowed room. Bill wore drip-dry longsleeved polyester shirts, an "Isro" (which was the Jewish version of an Afro) and iguana-skin cowboy boots that were rumored to have cost three hundred dollars. There were a couple of other people there, too, dressed every bit as badly.
After discussion, Leopold's was named in honor of Leopold Stokowski.
Why honor Leopold Stokowski:
1. Stokowski was one of the greatest conductors of all time. "Born in London on April 18, 1882, he started his musical career as an organist. In 1903, he took the post of the principal organist at St. James' Church in London, situated in a small side street to the famous Piccadilly. Although only 21 years old, he became soon well-known and after two years he received an offer of St. Bartholomew's Church in New York, which he accepted gratefully. The congregation there loved him especially for his uncommon musical repertoire. But he went too far. In 1908, he was thrown out after he had concluded a service with 'Stars and Stripes Forever' with all the organ-stops pulled out."
(That was a famous story. There's a version of that event scripted into a 1960's Yul Brenner movie ("Once More With Feeling"???) where as conductor he has the piccolo section stand for their part in the song. Stokowski was a movie star, too. He conducted in "Fantasia", which introduced countless millions of people all around the world to classical music. Anyway … Stokowski!)
(clarification 11.19.10 Just to clarify, Stowkowski didn't really want to include the Stars and Stripes Forever .... it was an obligatory closing of the time, a theatrical contrivance demanded by convention ... so he played it, but blasted it ....)
The movie which I vaguely remember because it's like 50 years since I've seen it explored somewhat his troublesome reluctance as a minor plot twist, then tidied up the ending and so mistold the story in the long run, because in the screen play Yul (as Stowkowski) fell for a girl, and had the piccolo section stand up all for her ... Hollywood ..... Fantasia .... Disney .... )
2. Stokowski had a sense of humor. He sported an improbable Slavic accent despite being born and raised in England
3. Stokowski drove one of the Dymaxion cars (which R. Buckminster Fuller had designed.)
The store was conceived as a direct reaction to the way "the record collective" perceived the entertainment industry. People figured that the people (i.e., mostly students) would be buying records anyway, and Leopold's would act as the middle man. Leopold's would give the people the records they wanted to buy and donate the profits to fund community activities. This was an important concept, a self-supporting enterprise that would hopefully support community groups. And by providing a product that people wanted. If the system that created the entertainment was a big screwed up system, at least the end result could be socially useful. If the musicians were screwed up by their own system, either exploited "made-for-hire" artists or the opposite (the others who profit excessively from the screwed up system), and even if they turned into pigs themselves, we could still get some good out of them.
Even if they all were trying to pretend they were like us by singing a benefit concert here and there, while the result was sometimes laudable, we didn't need to ask any special favors of them, either. We didn't need their benefits and we didn't need their donations. We didn't need to ask them to do a goddamn thing. We could make use of them, too, but in a way that they all had agreed to -- sell the records they had made to be sold. In a way we could play out that old show biz joke, "Just shut up and sing!" So, it's true, I helped to a small degree to start up Leopold's, and worked closely early on with a few of the members. The Record Collective was a direct response to disbelieving "The Big Lie" that any of these people working as recording artists however rich and famous they got to be were "independent" in any way.
Leopold's moved into a cubicle that had been recently abandoned by Cleo's, one of those brand new 3-cents a copy photocopy businesses that had started up. They'd succeeded wildly and had moved down the hall into larger quarters.
Leopold's started up with an inventory of four or five records. These were special orders for records that the buyers wanted (the same people who were at the pre-org meetings). Mine was an album of the collected hits of Huey "Piano" Smith & The Clowns. I chose that record because in an era when many serious things were going on, people tended to take themselves seriously. No one in their right mind can take themselves too seriously when trying to sing along with the chorus of "Don't You Just Know It" and it is a good safety valve.
Leopold's could not afford stock, and in the beginning would special order records. Leopold's succeeded, purchased merch to stock the bins in the store, and prospered for a number of years. They had to move their location several times. Partly as a result of expansion, sometimes the landlords would raise the rent. With one notable exception, the locations were always situated at the top of steep flights of stairs as ground level shops had premium rent. This made it a challenge to get the boxes of records up the stairs, as each box of 50 lp's weighed close to forty pounds. The workers in the "record collective" earned wages that fell within the acceptable range for like work in the area, they were something like $4 per hour back then. Although people working there would be "comped" by the powers that be, sported to free tickets to all concerts, of course in the corporate hope that the record store people would "push" particular records. Those were the hotsy-totsy years of Fillmore, Avalon, and boogie-woogie-woogie parlors, but the freebies for the most part were generally disregarded by the workers. I never went to those shows.
Leopold's kept the costs of running the business down, made plenty of mistakes, and provided much needed funds to support the activities of community groups. This was an exciting venture in the early years. It was educative as well, allowing people to see and experience first hand not just the kinds of things people go through to create a business venture and learn the price of mistakes. Also, the venture allowed people to witness first hand the types of tactics competitors would resort to as stock and trade in their corporate success. The current manager of what became The Record Store, for instance, was particularly hostile to the very idea of Leopold's while the other record merchants in the neighborhood, having come up in Berkeley, were not so threatened. In fact, the students spontaneously picketed what would be the future location of The Record Store when it was revealed what the construction alterations were about: The Record Store had decided to move into giant quarters nearly next door to Leopold's. People loved Leopold's.
That's because Leopold's responded to people's needs. With all the new records coming out, people were reluctant to take a risk on an unknown product when "only one track is any good." (That's when records were $5, mind you). As the store was in a busy part of town, full of traffic noise, other distractions, and given to large groups of people who needed a hang out, Leopold's opted not to set up listening stations for any record in print but allowed people to check out records for $1 for three days to see if they wanted to buy them. Always on our toes, a person would have to "join the club" and front the full price of an album as the membership fee, in the event they moved or something and forgot to return the rented record, or heavens forbid were trying to run a scam on the place. People could rent ANY record in the store, their choices weren't preselected for them by us. Of course, the manager of the The Record Store heard of this rental scheme and began voiciferously lobbying for his version of ... of (he barely could find a concept that would excuse his response to what he saw as a competetive threat, and he reached to find a politically correct phrase that would win him community support, but settled on "copyright protection.") Until it was pointed out to him that listening to a record might make a person want to buy it, and there was no assurance the consumer would buy the record only from Leopold's. They might decide to buy it any place. He began fraternizing with the Leopold rental desk on breaks, and asking the names of the most popular rented records. He, I am sure, believed he was being energetic, proactive, and clever. We thought what a lazy dumb shit.
The campus area in Berkeley is always a busy area, but this Leopold's enterprise sprung forth in the maelstrom of the demonstrations. The tear gas and the police barricades made it difficult to deliver a shipment of records from the record jobbers. One time the pickup truck was trapped a half block from the store with a riot going on around them, people were running about, the cops in riot gear were running and swinging their truncheons, the tear gas was swirling, and a cop came over and told them to get out of the area by beating his truncheon on the hood of the truck a few more times than was necessary to get the message across.
One of the best ads was a handbill for a new bootleg record, announcing it was available at "Leopold's, the People's Record Collective" and there was an advertising motif borrowed from a paint manufacturer, a large can of paint pouring over the earth and beginning to spread saying "Cover the Earth". (That was the only bootleg that Leopold's ever knowingly sold and it only was offered only after much discussion. I'll tell that story another time, if you think you're interested in how Leopold's had a visit from a representative of a big famous rock group.)
One of the best things Leopold's did was to act as host for the Community Memory Project, which is kind of where you are today, thanks to some visionaries. (Here are some more community memories of them.)
Though fueled by some of the more admirable motivations, Leopold's eventually lost focus and disappeared as the active community groups wound down. But it served an important purpose while it existed for those few years, and also provided funds to fuel community actions and activities.
Where are they now? I don't know. One of the four persons involved from the days of the pre-org meetings stayed on for many years, managing the store to the bitter end, until it became a private profit venture. In the mid-seventies, he commuted to Sacramento to get the name Leopold's registered under his sole ownership as the name was due to expire the next day. The rest of the early dreamers, well, you know, moved from Berkeley and haven't been seen or heard from since. (Here's another account of Leopold's which mentions another Bill, not the person I referenced above, but that only goes to prove there were always a lot of bills attached to Leopold's).
During those decades following the '70s, the Leopold's name was sold and a few little ersatz-Leopold's popped up, ugly brown and orange phony little plastic record cottages; feeble appendages of a big record store corporation that just didn't have the stuff to win the solo monopoly rights to operate as The Record Store and so has just folded its corporate flags. I'd said goodbye to the real Leopold's many decades past. As for the corporate megastore, stick some glittery fringe on the epaulets of your satin jacket and blast out an offtone parody of taps from a cheap gold-tone plastic trumpet as the corporate flag is lowered.
But always wish a happy birthday to Leopold Stokowski and try to remember the real driving spirit behind Leopold's, the store named in his honor.
How Community Memory Came to Be, Part 1
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Lee Felsenstein, as told to Bernard Aboba
The Origins of Community Memory
The Community Memory Project had its origins in my quest for the right medium for the growth and realignment of communities. I had been through the 1960s in Berkeley, and had seen episodic community creation in 1964 with the Free Speech Movement.
As a result of the Free Speech Movement, tens of thousands of people realigned their idea of who they were and what they were doing, and as a side effect, it became legitimate for people to open up conversations with strangers. A lot of barriers disappeared, and they discovered matches and possiblities they didn't know existed. Haight-Ashbury and the "Summer of Love" were an offshoot of that.
In 1969, during the crisis of People's Park, a lot of energy went towards the construction of the park, but there was also an openness to experimentation. I was an engineering student at Berkeley during this period, and so I tried to use the technical skills I had in the service of this process. I started by working in the underground press, with the Berkeley Barb.
I saw the Berkeley Barb as a possible mechanism for nuturing a community, but it didn't stay that way. As it grew, the structure inherent in the print medium reasserted itself, and it became a paper whose purpose was to attract attention to itself, rather than to attract attention to other people.
In 1971 I dropped out of Berkeley and went to work at Ampex Corporation in Redwood City. I was sent to The Service Bureau Corporation to learn Basic; in those days minicomputers were brand new, and service bureaus were where they were used. We had selectric terminals, and the instructors were quite full of themselves, and would delight in telling us how the terminals were typing more slowly because they had turned off the computer in Los Angeles and were now using the system in Kansas City. From this I understood that this medium was independent of geography. The other thing they taught us was that you could make a file public to various degrees; a file could be made accessible to your account only, to other groups of users, or to everyone.
Putting the two capabilities together, I understood that you could create a system independent of geography where a number of interest groups could exist, and where people could join in ongoing conversations. This was the medium that could faciliate the kind of community self-building that I was interested in. All that remained was to facilitate access to the technology.
In 1969 there were many switchboards, which were people with index cards and telephones that were listed in the underground press. People would call them with resources that were available, and then other people would call looking for information. There was never much of a filing system, and so the people running the switchboards got burned out.
I had investigated the switchboards in Berkeley, such as the Free Church Switchboard, and so I wanted to see if my engineering skills could help the organization of the files. What I found was that the Free Church was more interested in being a church than a switchboard.
At that time, someone told me about a computer in San Francisco that people wanted to use for good things, and gave me the phone number. This was Resource 1, a non-profit corporation that was a splittoff of The San Francisco Switchboard. The other half of the split was The Haight Ashbury Switchboard, which only recently closed up shop.
Resource 1 was run by people who had left the Berkeley Computer Science department after the invasion of Cambodia: Pam Heartt, Cris Macie, and Chris Newstroup. They started out by soliciting donations of computer time on mainframes for use by community groups.
The Resource 1 people, because their organization started out as a Switchboard, decided to get a computer to act as a common file area for the switchboard. They began a process of fund raising, and solicited a donation of a Xerox Data Systems 940, serial number 4. Only 57 of these devices ever existed, and that one had previously served at SRI, and was owned by TransAmerica Leasing. Resource 1 then raised $20,000 for a 58 Mb drive the size of two refrigerators, and we built a hard disk controller for it.
I started hanging out at Resource 1 in the late fall/winter of 1971, and when I went back to school at Berkeley and finished my degree in June of 1972, I was put in charge of maintaining the mainframe. The person who was supposed to teach me how to do this disappeared on the day that it arrived, and showed up months later without an explanation.
We started writing an information retrieval system. I was stimulated by Abe Greenblatt, a legendary MIT hacker who passed through town and got us all fired up about writing a retrieval system in 24 hours. Thus was born the Resource One Generalized Retrieval System (ROGERS). By that time I had brought Efram Lipkin into the project. Efram was in Berkeley and was looking for something socially useful to do with his computer skills.
It took about a year to get the keyword indexing working, so that you could index things under any number of words. We then went back to the switchboards, and said "here is this powerful tool. All you have to do to connect to it is to rent teletypes for $150/month." Well, the people at the meeting had no knowledge of computers, and only one of them had even known that we were working on this. We hadn't talked to them in advance, and it turned out that the switchboards were not interested in doing the work to reconceptualize their card files, or paying for something so speculative.
We had built a tremendously powerful system and there was no one to use it, so we began to explore possible uses. One was facilitating libraries. We thought of becoming a library like the Bay Area Reference Council, a library of libraries. This is where you called to find out where something was if your library didn't have it. Today they call this interlibrary loan.
But when we took it to the librarians, they said "what you have is a library with no books on the shelves. Why don't you get some books and come back to us?" We were trying to sell shelves to libraries! This gave Efram the idea of putting terminals out on the street to see what information we could collect. We went to Berkeley and at that time Leopold's Records was owned by the Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC) and controlled by the student senate, with the goal of driving down record prices.
Community Memory goes online
We presented our case to the Senate, and they thought it was a great idea to put a terminal in Leopold's. We got a used model 33 teletype donated to us by Timeshare, and build a cardboard soundproofing box for it. A Timeshare executive named Roy Worthington was very helpful, and he came up with the name Community Memory. We installed it with a 110 baud modem, on a phone with an Oakland number, which would give us unlimited calls to San Francisco. On August 8, 1973 we opened up the first terminal.
One of us had to be in the store at all times, standing next to the teletype, which was in front of a bulletin board used mostly by musicians. We would ask people "Would you like to use our Electronic Bulletin Board, which is on a computer?" Almost without exception the people who heard this brightened up, and said "can I use it?" This was a record store, so the people were mostly of student age, who were going to more receptive, and we targeted it that way.
Our assumption was that people would use it mostly for finding housing, cars, and jobs. However, since the system was located next to a musician's bulletin board, all the musician's information traffic moved over to the terminal, and music and musician's items became the largest identifiable group, which was a bit of a surprise. We also found that a much wider range of items was entered than we thought was possible. People were entering typewriter graphics, and poems. They were inputting little literary works, and selling and buying the strangest things. I could see that it was functioning as a kind of public place that otherwise didn't exist.
Like other similar systems, Community Memory stemmed from the EIES system, which was a conferencing system that had been set up at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. But there is a difference between conferencing systems and bulletin board systems. I believe that Community Memory was the first bulletin board system, and we developed our BBS software through an empirical process, one that could not have been done commercially.
It was clear that it was popular, and in January we changed over to Hazeltine 1500 CRT terminals, and moved it out of Leopold's Records to the Whole Earth Access store, which was then on Shattuck Ave. Whole Earth Access was at that time a catalog store for alternative cultures. You could get wooden stoves there, which you couldn't buy anywhere else.
These terminals didn't make noise, and didn't require anyone to stand next to them. We also opened a terminal at the Mission branch of the San Francisco Public Library, where we knew the librarian. There was a another terminal in Berkeley at our offices on Dwight Way, and one in the offices of Vocations for Social Change, so we had a four terminal network.
The system had a number of flaws. There was no clustering of items, and it was too easy to invent new keywords. There was no incentive to group items under a single keyword, so it began to be hard to find things.
Nevertheless some important things happened, such as a learning exchange item that turned up in the first month. We seeded the system with questions such as "Where can you get good bagels in the Bay Area?" In 1973 there were not good bagel shops in the Bay Area, as there are today. We got some expected answers, but one was unexpected. That was that one should call the following number, and an ex-bagel maker would teach you how to make bagels.
So here was a learning exchange being offered, where the person offering it wasn't asking for anything in return. This was the kind of exchange that had been postulated in Ivan Ilych's Deschooling Society, which discussed alternatives to institutional education. I don't know if anyone ever learned to make bagels, though.
Another thing was that someone started entering a lot of information on lock picking and how to cheat the newly opened BART system, and encouraged his friends to put their information on, using the common keyword OUTLAW. He would come in and use the system, prowl around, and attach comments to items, saying "see OUTLAW."
This had been predicted in 1971 in a paper by Chris Beaty, who had attempted to set up a computer bulletin board system in Los Angeles that was surpressed by the Los Angeles Times. There were government agencies that said that to advertise cars you had to have a car dealers license or own a newspaper, and they used this as a pretext to shut down the system. In his paper, Chris described the function of the gatekeeper or information sharer, and this person fit the description quite well.
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Lee Felsenstein, lee@interval.com, last modified: 1/18/94 ¶ 4/16/2003 12:12:00 PM
