Lefties come home for reunion of Berkeley Barb underground paper

The first issue was on Aug. 13, 1965, and that 50th anniversary was honored by a week of reverence that included an art opening, a daylong scholarly symposium and a film festival to come.

The glamour event was a private reception followed by a public concert at the Freight & Salvage Coffeehouse.

“This is the last gasp for the ’60s,” said longtime Barb writer, editor and photographer John Jekabson, who carried around postcards of a picture he took of riot police in Sather Gate, to help spark the memories.

The picture, taken in May 1969, could have been captioned “Barbarians at the Gate,” because that’s the nickname Barb staffers had adopted in the lead-up to the reunion.

Barb reporter Phineas Israeli took one look at the riot photo and said, You had to run from the cops a lot.

Israeli covered the Black Panthers, and that was a beat considered so dangerous that everyone assumed the byline Phineas Israeli was a pseudonym.

Light, who runs the photography program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, told the story of coming out from Long Island with his parents to see “Hair” in San Francisco.

“It introduced me to political passion,” said Tow, who was almost moved to tears when she was recognized by Jane Scherr, partner of the late Barb founder Max Scherr.

Another attendee who was moved to tears was attorney Leo Laurence, who came from San Diego for the event and was the only person there in coat and tie.

Laurence sat quietly at a table, but the people who remembered him sat down to hear how the Barb ran his reports on the gay movement before it was even called “gay.”

“I would write an article one week, and the next week we’d have a meeting with 100 people because of that article,” said Laurence, who wrote under the byline Gary Patterson so that he could keep his day job at KGO.

Eventually those articles led to the Committee for Homosexual Freedom, which was organized three months before Stonewall, the Greenwich Village uprising in 1969.

Gumbo introduced Seale, who raised two fists above his head like Muhammad Ali and got a standing ovation.

Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.