Walter Bowart, 68; cofounded underground Manhattan newspaper
LOS ANGELES - Walter Bowart, who channeled the cultural chaos of the 1960s into print as the cofounder of one of the era's first underground newspapers, died Dec. 18 of colon cancer in Inchelium, Wash. He was 68.
Mr. Bowart helped launch the biweekly East Village Other in Greenwich Village in 1965, a convulsive year when the Beatles, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War were rocking American society. Mr. Bowart and a small band of colleagues used the paper to push the boundaries of convention with stories about sex, drugs, music, and pressing social issues, presented in an experimental format that changed from issue to issue.
It reported on the exploits of many figures who became icons of the psychedelic era, including Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, and Allen Ginsberg.
"It was a radical alternative to the Village Voice; it was very irreverent," said Paul Krassner, the satirist and cofounder of the Yippies who ran his own counterculture journal, the Realist, from an office near Mr. Bowart's on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
Mr. Bowart later published books and other materials about metaphysics. He also became fascinated by the Central Intelligence Agency's experiments with mind control and offered a conspiratorial view of government attempts to manipulate human behavior in the book "Operation Mind Control," published by Dell in 1978 with an introduction by "Manchurian Candidate" author Richard Condon.
Born in Omaha, Neb., Mr. Bowart attended the University of Oklahoma on a journalism scholarship but also was interested in painting. He brought an artist's sensibility to the East Village Other, which was launched by a small group of artists and writers that included Allan Katzman, Sherry Needham, and John Wilcock.
"Walter should be remembered because he was such a pioneer in this early revolution in publishing," said Wilcock, adding that Mr. Bowart was among the first underground publishers to use offset printing as "a way to break the limitations of a linear paper."
Unlike other underground papers that stuck to traditional newspaper design, the Other had stories swirling around pictures and graphics printed in dizzying colors.
"It was gritty but imaginative," said Northwestern University professor Abe Peck, who lived in the East Village during the paper's heyday and later wrote a history of the alternative press. He remembered in particular a cover that consisted of a picture of a man in a Sergeant Pepper uniform with a collage of images floating above his head that depicted his thoughts. He was burning his draft card under a headline that declared, "Girls Say Yes to Men Who Say No."
The Other, which had a circulation of about 65,000 at its peak, also fostered a new breed of cartoonists, including Vaughn Bode and Spain Rodriguez.
Mr. Bowart left the East Village Other in 1968. In Arizona, he started Omen Press, which published materials about Eastern mysticism. He later lived in Aspen, Colo., where he wrote for The Aspen Daily News. During the 1980s he was editor of Palm Springs Life magazine, which he characterized as "a Sears catalog for the congenitally rich." 