Thomas King Forcade

 

Thomas King Forçade (ne Gary Goodson), the founder of High Times, was manager of the Underground Press Syndicate before founding High Times in 1974. It was during his tenure at UPS that Forçade, who despite the photograph was not a minister, came up with the idea of a counter-culture daily newspaper in New York City in the event of a newspaper strike.

Here he offers a brief description of the idea:

“Coordinated through UPS, we hope to put out a daily, utilizing the staffs of different NY underground papers on successive days — EVO on Monday, Rat on Tuesday, Corpus on Wednesday, Win on Thursday NY High School Free Press on Friday, Black Panther on Saturday, and everybody on Sunday, with Gothic Blimp Comics as the comic section. It’s a difficult project, requiring our entire loft, many phones, much organizing, much toleration, much persistence, much willingness to cooperate. It will require three 4-unit web presses, many rent-a-trucks for distribution, an aggressive advertising department, and a lot of money. But it can be done — we’ve already checked out the presses and the trucks, and have people to handle advertising and distribution. SUPERDAILY!"

I could find no evidence of a New York newspaper strike in 1970, so Forçade was not able to pull off this ambitious dream. By many accounts, Forçade was an energetic and mercurial man, a radical activist who enjoyed few things more than taking the fight to "the man." But he also suffered from mental illness and attempted suicide once. He eventually did take his life in 1978, after the death of his best friend, shooting himself in the head in his Greenwich Village apartment. He was 33.