In 1967, Vietnam, the Beatles, and interracial marriages graced the covers of Time magazine. The Velvet Underground released their first album. So did Jimi Hendrix. Psychedelia bloomed. That was also the year of the long hot summer when many cities, including Milwaukee, experienced rioting and civil unrest.
Now people around the world can revisit the era, viewed through the lens of one Milwaukee underground newspaper, the Kaleidoscope, which was recently digitized and placed online through the UWM Libraries: collections.lib.uwm.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/kal.
A complete run of Kaleidoscope – 1967-1971 – was donated to Special Collections in 2014 by one of its original participants, Gordon Simons.
Editor John Kois, radio DJ Bob Reitman, and designer and rock musician John Sahli founded Kaleidoscope in October 1967. The writers provided the spark and a borrowed $250 became the tinder. The first issue was published to instant notoriety – and excellent sales – with 3,500 copies sold out in two days. Articles were written at the whim of the staff and ranged across a multitude of topics, giving an alternative liberal voice to national politics, civil rights, gender and sexuality, city crime and police action, as well as the more standard fare of art, music, and literature.
The writing was unrepentant, explicit, and readers couldn’t get enough – unless they loathed it, of course. Censorship dogged the newspaper from its birth until after its end in 1971, going as far as the United States Supreme Court over obscenity charges (where the Court ruled in favor of Kaleidoscope and the First Amendment, much to the chagrin of the publication’s challengers). By the time the newspaper folded it had published 105 biweekly issues.
Kaleidoscope offers a wealth of information about life and culture in Milwaukee during the late 1960s and early 1970s that is already being used regularly by researchers in Special Collections.
“We are excited to be able to put this material online and to see the research that comes from making it widely available,” says Max Yela, head of the Special Collections Department.
Digitization of the Kaleidoscope was supported by the Polly and Stanley Stone fund, which is overseen by the Chipstone Foundation.
