It all started in the late 1960’s when the anti-Vietnam war movement was growing. The core of Fresno’s antiwar movement was centered at a cluster of houses in a fig orchard a little South of Herndon on First Street. Weekly potlucks were held, draft consulting was available and demonstrations planned. For a more in-depth look at that time, see the book “A Hard Rain is Going to Fall” by Joel Eis.
In June of 1969 Joan Baez performed a benefit concert for the Fresno Draft Resistance with the goal of raising enough money to purchase a printing press. She was joined by her husband David Harris, a national draft resistance leader, who was from Fresno.
That press, a Multi 1250, was purchased and put in the home of Dale Klemm and Gail Erwin where antiwar flyers were printed. Eventually, as a precaution against bomb threats, the press was moved into storage.
After the time spent at The Resistance House, it spent some time in the garage of Vic and Marcia McLane.
I first encountered The Resistance Printing Press in the early 1970’s. I was working in Larry Sheehy’s radical Shanti bookstore on Van Ness Ave when Lang Russell asked me to help print an antiwar flyer announcing a rally in Fresno featuring Jane Fonda.
Lang already had the press working and he showed me how to feed more paper, turn it on and off and other functions of the machine. We ended up printing thousands of flyers for the event. That is how my career as a printer began.
The name of the print shop in the back of Shanti was the Green Tree Press. Recently, I talked with Lang about the press but his memory was not very clear. He can’t remember where that Multi 1250 came from but did confirm that it ended up at Millbrook School establishing a print shop to train students to print. It was used as part of the school’s vocational training project. In the mid 1970’s, Millbrook School asked me to be a teacher and I worked there for several year
Millbrook Press was run as a workers’ collective. We had posters of Mao on the wall and we considered ourselves a part of an alternative economic model. Were we revolutionaries? We thought so at the time, but it would be a stretch to make that claim now.
The printing press remained there for several years, even after the school ended the vocational training project. It was then used as a commercial printing press for several years. In the late 1970’s the commercial print shop closed.
The press was given to Inside/Out, a newsletter published by the Fresno-based Jailhouse Civil Rights Organization. The press was used for printing prisoner rights pamphlets and commercial jobs.
Our idea was that commercial print jobs would reduce the cost of prisoner rights information helping Inside/Out financially.
When the group lost state funding, the print shop was even more important for our survival. The director at the time, Dave Davis, asked me to use the machine to print money. He said I would be safe because he would stand by the door with a shotgun and not let anyone enter. I declined the offer.
Shortly after that incident I left the publication and got a printing job at Hume Printing, a union shop. Within a week I got a call from the police asking what I knew about a counterfeit operation at my former employer. I claimed no knowledge of printing counterfeit money. The next day the story was in The Fresno Bee that a box of counterfeit money had been found at Inside/Out.
I went to their next meeting and said I wanted the Multi 1250. I was called a traitor for leaving and that if I pursued the issue they would break my legs. I decided to wait and see what would happen.
Davis died of a drug overdose and I managed to get possession of The Resistance Press. I was part of a local solidarity group in the 1980’s called The Latin American Support Committee. We raised money to send the press to El Salvador.
Our association to CISPES gave us a connection with a student group at the university in San Salvador (AGUES). They wanted the press to print flyers in support of the FMLN. When I visited the student print shop I was able to see the press was in good hands.
