War and memory

When I was coming up in Flint at the end of the 1950s and beginning of the '60s, I used to hang out at the legendary Sweetie's Barbershop in the city's north end. There my close pal Charles Leonard Boatwright Jr. — better known as Junebug — would be doing hair in the style then known as "fried, dyed and laid to the side."

I used to sit nodding out in a chair in the back, digging Gene Ammons 45s on the jukebox and listening to the cats talk, paying special attention when they would refer to some of the many, many things that were then well beyond my personal knowledge or experience.

What would really make my ears perk up was when someone's name would come up and one cat would say, "Oh, man, I been knowing him for 40 years." This was inconceivable to me: I was just 20 myself, and this figure represented twice my lifetime. It seemed impossibly far off, but now 50 years have passed and I say it all the time, especially this year, when I find myself celebrating the 40th anniversary of my release from prison and cringing at the 40th birthday of the War on Drugs. 

A story I read recently in the Drug War Chronicle took me back over those same 40 years to a law enforcement atrocity in Michigan that's been all but forgotten in the dreadful annals of the War on Drugs: the felony prosecution of a guy named Richard Songer for holding the Goose Lake rock festival on his property outside of Jackson in the summer of 1970. Police and prosecutors claimed the venue was meant to be a place where drugs could be sold and distributed.

Mark Deming commemorated the Goose Lake festival with a story in the Metro Times ("Goose Lake memories," July 2, 2008) that explained: "The Goose Lake festival was the brainchild of Richard Songer, a Southfield native who'd made a fortune in construction, building many of Michigan's highways, ramps and bridges. He purchased 350 acres near Goose Lake, just outside Jackson, and in 1970, Songer, then 35 years old, decided to transform the property into a park. He told the press: 'It's a dream of mine to put together some place for the young people to go.' 

"With that in mind, Songer planned to ... stage a series of concerts, starting with a three-day rock festival to take place Aug. 7-9." But the typically widespread ingestion of proscribed substances by festivalgoers triggered a police response that set off a veritable law enforcement conflagration culminating in Songer's prosecution as a narcotics felon.

Songer was indicted in October 1970 by the Jackson County Citizens Grand Jury and charged with aiding and abetting the sale of heroin and marijuana, and having heroin and marijuana under his control without a license. He was found not guilty by a jury in December 1971 after undergoing a brutal felony prosecution that, under 1971 statutes, would have resulted in a mandatory minimum 20-year sentence upon conviction.

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