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BN: So how did you then get involved with Gidra? You know, a lot of people you mentioned, of course, were also involved.

JF: Right. I don't know. You know, when I think about what I did there, I just remember burnishing Letraset letters onto white paper that had a very light blue line down for alignment purposes and just lining up each letter one at a time and pressing them down, burnishing them with this polished wood little chopstick shaped thing, and then making sure that was all correct and typesetting for hours on end with one of the early IBM Selectrics, which would justify what you typed, it would justify the right-hand side of the column -- for the camera's purposes over here -- so that each line would look even. I thought that was a minor miracle and you could pop out just a little ball that contained all the fonts, and then depending on what font you wanted, if you wanted to change it to italic for a particular word, you'd have to physically lift this little ball out and replace it with your italic ball and then continue for that word and then do the same to get back to normal font. But yeah, I was a real fast typist, a trait that my mother passed on to me. So it must be genetic. [Laughs] And I still type pretty quickly, thank goodness. So yeah, that, and the photography, it kind of took advantage of some of the interests that I had personally, along with the fact that again, we all felt as though we were building something that could change people's minds. And the whole movement for me, at least, was about change, personally.

When Gidra stopped publishing and we had a little staff gathering, I think it was at Bruce and Evelyn's house, there was a slideshow that they started showing of, over the years, the different staff members. And inevitably, in the dark, one comes up with me, of my face. I'm looking kind of, almost like that. [Laughs] And then there's silence for a beat or two, and then Alan Ota says, "Now what's Jeff worried about?" [Laughs] And that was mean. Because I kind of took things very seriously, and the movement for me was an effort to change people from the inside out. So for me, personally, like I would read Todd Gitlin's article about the "Maoist man." So here are some of the attributes that the "Maoist man" or woman possesses, and then he would come up with these examples. And, of course, he'd use the Vietnamese people and their struggle against the United States and the imperialist army and stuff like that. And those were our heroes, and then we kind of wanted to demonstrate that same kind of fighting spirit by changing ourselves inside out. So for the newspaper, the newspaper was kind of a physical extension of that desire for us to change people by our example.

So I can't even remember any of the articles I wrote, but I remember Mike Murase. He had these "Murase-isms" and he would just think of them on the fly. Like during a staff meeting I'll be just kicking around on the sofa that was falling apart inside the Gidra office, and we would all circle around. Inevitably Mike would come up with these phrases, but I remember one that was just stuck in me for the longest time. He said that the purpose of the paper in what we do and in our writing was "in style reflect them," "them" being the readers. So, "in style reflect them," and, "in content, change them." So I thought yeah, that sums it up pretty much for me. And so I remember deliberately, when I would put articles together, trying to write it in a way that didn't turn off people, and that was, it sounded friendly and not "holier than thou," and I wasn't trying to force anything down people's throat or sound condescending or anything like that. Not that other people did, but I think sometimes that was a mistake in some of the leadership, that they would put people down for not being, or having street values, whatever that is. Because they happened to live in the Baldwin Hills like my parents did. Laying it on, something that was beyond people's control, that they couldn't do anything about, and consequently they would be turned off by that because they felt like, damn, I'll never be a part of that. So I thought that was a mistake. Anyway, minor.

BN: Yeah, I will ask you about some specific articles. I think what you just said, it does come through, that your articles do come across that way, like not didactic, and you're often writing about everyday topics. You wrote an article about fixing toilets and kung fu films.

JF: Oh, I remember that one. [Laughs]

BN: I'm going to ask you about that one. In my first reading of Gidra years ago, that was one of the ones that stuck in my head, is like, "Oh, that's interesting."

JF: And then you went straight to the bathroom to fix that leak.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.