Fitzgerald was a founder of The Rag in Austin and Houston’s Space City!

Dennis Fitzgerald, Space City! days. Image from
Jessica Kent / Facebook.

By Alice Embree | The Rag Blog | December 17, 2018

Dennis Fitgerald passed away on December 9, 2018, in British Columbia, Canada, where he had lived for several decades. Dennis graced ‘60s Texas activism with a wry wit and a talent for journalism. When the Rag reunion of 2005 came together, his written memoir stood out for its sweet tone of humility:

I was privileged to be in the delivery room at the birth of The Rag. ‘Breathe, breathe, breathe!’ It was a long, hard labor. But what a beautiful child she was. For just over a year, I changed my share of dirty diapers and delighted in watching her first tentative steps. And then we both had other places to go.

The Rag was where my friends and I tried to figure out who we were. We were hardly more than kids, taking our own first steps into the “real” world, and trying to make sense of the fact that there was so much there that affronted our ideals. Things were a lot meaner and shallower than they were supposed to be. That wasn’t anything we were prepared to conform to, nor, given our idealistic bent, anything that we could in good conscience ignore.

We were a group that found each other and clicked because we shared a common, albeit kind of fuzzy, notion about what was right and what was wrong and what was really important. But we didn’t have a home for all that; we fit with each other, but we didn’t seem to fit anywhere else. The Rag was our owner-built home, a place of safety and purpose, where we could define who we were and get on with the job of saving the world from itself.

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