The Rag Blog

Smith edited the influential Guardian (U.S.) in the ’60s-’80s; Bacon authored ‘In the Fields of the North’; Hill is a pioneer of the gay movement and Shelor heads Queer Rights ATX.

Rag Radio host Thorne Dreyer with Suzy Shelor of Queer Rights ATX in the KOOP studios, July 8, 2017. Photo by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.

Interviews by Thorne Dreyer | The Rag Blog | July 25, 2017

The following podcasts are from recent Rag Radio shows with host Thorne Dreyer. The syndicated Rag Radio program, produced in the studios of Austin’s cooperatively-run KOOP-FM, has an international audience and has become an influential platform for interviews with leading figures in politics, current events, literature, and cutting-edge culture.

♦ Jack A. Smith (1934-2017): Influential Left-Wing Journalist & Political Activist

Jack A. Smith died of complications of COPD in New Paltz, New York, on June 29, 2017. On Friday, July 21, we reprised our August 3, 2012 exclusive interview with Smith. Jack, our longtime friend and colleague, was one of the most important figures in progressive journalism in the 20th century. In his early life a radical pacifist who spent nine months in federal prison for refusing induction, Jack Smith edited The Guardian in the 1960s-1980s. The Guardian was the largest circulation independent left-wing paper in the United States. In his later years, Smith lived in the Hudson Valley, north of New York City, where he remained politically active, organizing demonstrations and publishing the monthly Hudson Valley Activist. Newsletter which had a circulation in the thousands.
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