Question about Mae Brussel and pre-internet CT information exchange

[Matthew Poe]

I have a historically minded question for any of the forum members of better vintage, or deeper knowledge, than I.

When Mae Brussell was broadcasting in the 1970s and 80s was there any way to listen to her if you weren't in Northern California? Was one able to pick up her shows in LA?

Did people of like mind trade her tapes? Were transcripts passed around?

I know she once spoke at the Elgin Theater in the Lower East Side. Was that because Krassner promoted her? Was she a guest on WBAI?

I know Bob Fass interviewed Mark Lane during the HSCA years and he (Lane) and Brussel had some big feud after that. (When I interviewed Lane in 2010, still rankled, he called her and Sherman Skolnick "both completely nuts.")

Was Mae Brussell the only broadcaster with a wholly conspiracy based show or just the memorable one?

Was there a strictly CT guy/gal on WBAI or elsewhere? What about public access TV?

Lastly, did Long John Nebel interview any serious CT researchers or was it all UFOs, Maury Island and the like.

If anyone knows answers to any of the above I'd be much obliged. I've read John Kelin's masterful book on the 1st generation researchers so I am aware of the letter chain.

[Peter Lemkin]

I have a historically minded question for any of the forum members of better vintage, or deeper knowledge, than I.

When Mae Brussell was broadcasting in the 1970s and 80s was there any way to listen to her if you weren't in Northern California? Was one able to pick up her shows in LA?

Did people of like mind trade her tapes? Were transcripts passed around?

I know she once spoke at the Elgin Theater in the Lower East Side. Was that because Krassner promoted her? Was she a guest on WBAI?

I know Bob Fass interviewed Mark Lane during the HSCA years and he (Lane) and Brussel had some big feud after that. (When I interviewed Lane in 2010, still rankled, he called her and Sherman Skolnick "both completely nuts.")

Was Mae Brussell the only broadcaster with a wholly conspiracy based show or just the memorable one?

Was there a strictly CT guy/gal on WBAI or elsewhere? What about public access TV?

Lastly, did Long John Nebel interview any serious CT researchers or was it all UFOs, Maury Island and the like.

If anyone knows answers to any of the above I'd be much obliged. I've read John Kelin's masterful book on the 1st generation researchers so I am aware of the letter chain.

Good question. I'm not sure I can answer ever detail you ask just now...but some of them. Her show, as you point out was out of a small station in the Monterrey , CA area where she lived. There was no internet...and wouldn't be for a long time....BUT she sold cassette tapes of her show and they got around! A select few like Fass, Nebel and the like would rebroadcast the tapes. She also had a growing number of students of hers who (usually) interacted with her at her home for various periods of time...learning from her and how she investigated such things. One of these was John Judge, who died not very long ago. In my own case, I learned of Mae by hearing John Judge being interviewed on the telephone rather frequently on yet another radio show - broadcast in the San Francisco area, I believe, but was rebroadcast via tapes on WBAI and the four other Pacifica stations - at the whim of programmers. She never was, and still today, is not well know...nor are many of her 'Brussell sprouts' as they came to be called...but word of her and her work spread among the cognoscenti. Several of her 'sprouts' became very good researchers and speakers in their own right. So, by rebroadcasts sent by tapes, by occasional phone interview shows, by her Sprouts who lived all over the USA, by people with late night talk shows mentioning her work/ideas and telling how to get her articles [later Larry Flint published some of her better ones - which is what got him shot, IMHO] or tapes direct from her - she sent them out herself for a fee - and for free if someone claimed to have not the funds. Remember too that while Mae was not poor - the daughter of the founder of I. Magnin - a large Department Store, she was not rich either. Most of her funding in the later years before she was killed [I believe her death was not natural] came directly from John Lennon...and that was, I believe, one of several reason why he too was targeted for being killed. I believe if you search there is some information on Mae I posted here long ago...I'll see if I can find it. I know Nebel was really into the JFK assassination and my cousin would tell me what they were talking about when I met him...as I was not into staying up all night to hear such things in the New York Area at that time just after the assassination. Krassner also knew Mae and very much promoted her - as did a few progressive magazines of the time. I still have three copies of Flint's issue [about deep politics NOT sex - it was called The Rebel and there were only six issues if I remember, until he was shot and it ended] featuring Mae's classic piece: "The Nazi Connections To The JFK Assassination" (you can find it online and it still holds water well....if anything she only missed a few names...but those she names are good, as are the connections and reasons). If I think of more, I'll return with them.....

...it was very much an underground railroad of information or 'the drum'...it got around the country and even out of it to those who were in tune with such things.....by these means and word of mouth. By the time of her death there was one of her sprouts who had a regular show two Pacifica stations and he often rebroadcast her shows. His name was Dave Emory. I think John Judge probably did the most to let others know of Mae, and Emory and Judge came to be at odds after her death over who was to be in control of her library et al. It is a long and complex story and I wish Kelin would do a book on the second generation of researchers. While Mae started out on JFK and Dallas and never lost interest in that, she soon started expanding into other dark corners of things done by the same Secret Government or Deep Political actors and actions. When she died, the house nearest hers and with a direct view of who came and went from her hours burned down. No one in the area [a close knit suburban area] know who lived there or owned it]. Mae herself believed it was FBI or CIA agents who used the house to watch her and no one really lived there.

[Matthew Poe]

Thanks for the great reply Peter! Jonathan Vankin, in his first CT book, (generally sympathetic as were his ensuing encyclopedias) Conspiracies, Cover-Ups and Crimes, publishedin 1996 goes into the Sprouts a bit. The book portrays their feud and the nasty recriminations flying back and forth. Emory also despised the way Vankin portrayed him and wound up in a feud with the author.

I knew about Rebel and I've read the Nazi Connection piece although I must admit I've found its style difficult. But I'll read it again because the material is fascinating.

A piece of your post nearly knocked me off my chair. Lennon was a major donor of Brussell's! Not sure why it's so surprising given his largesse to other outre political causes, but it is.

[Peter Lemkin]

[TABLE="width: 750"]
[TR]
[TD="width: 20%"][/TD]
[TD="width: 80%"]Complacent Beverly Hills housewife Mae Brussell had quite an awakening in 1963 when President Kennedy was assassinated, and again when she read and cross-indexed the massive 26-volume Warren Commission Hearings. She saw that the international terrorist network that had made up the Axis powers during[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="colspan: 2"]World War Two had gone underground and continued their world-wide fascist campaign, overthrowing one country after another. America was not exempt.
Frustrated that this vitally important information was largely unknown to the American people, Mae went to her friend Henry Miller of Big Sur, California (with whom she would later brag to friends about an affair). He told her that people can do anything they want if they apply themselves; live anywhere, learn anything. And there is nothing worse than looking back and regretting not having done what was important to you. "Don't die before you're dead."
And with that advice Mae moved herself and the kids to Carmel, California and began the selfless, nonstop journey of political and history research that would soon rock the radio airwaves of Monterey and Santa Cruz counties from 1971 through 1988. Her listeners would never be the same.
While most of America slept:
[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
[TABLE="width: 750"]
[TR]
[TD="colspan: 2"]Mae saw that most anything Americana was being infiltrated, murdered, infected, poisoned, or deregulated. As Mae stated at the University of California in Santa Cruz: "What is happening to us is a classical case oftotally destroying us. And by the same people who've been at the top doing it since World War Two."

• On May 29, 1968 Mae confronted Rose Kennedy at the Monterey Peninsula Airport and handed her a note telling her Robert Kennedy would soon be assassinated. A week later he was shot to death at The Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
  

Mae's first published article in Paul Krassner's The Realist was actually financed by John Lennon (Krassner couldn't afford the $5,000 printing cost).

• Frank Zappa once gave her a computer for filing and cross-indexing her research (but she never used it).
  

Two weeks before Patty Hearst was kidnapped Mae told a Syracuse University audience that the SLA shooting of school superintendent Marcus Foster was the beginning of terror and psychological sabotage, in the same vein Germany had been subjected to in the 1930s.

• In August 1977 (broadcast #282) Mae discussed Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple move to Guyana. She speculated it might be a training camp for assassination teams this was more than a year before 913 members of the church were massacred.
  

Much of Mae's March 29, 1981 broadcast was spent discussing the power- struggle within the Reagan Administration and asked who will kill off their team members first. The following morning President Reagan was shot in Washington D.C.

• Her countless list of German and White Russian fascistfingerprints to President Kennedy's assassination reached its peak in May of 1988 when she discovered the name "Adolf H. Schicklgruber" handwritten in Marina Oswald's notebook of poetry in the Warren Commission exhibits.
  

There were times when death threats drove Mae off the air: once by Charles Manson family member Sandra Good in September 1975. Sometimes Mae resorted to recording her shows at home on her small cassette tape recorder and privately mailed out copies to her subscribers.
In 1983 Mae's show was picked up by listener-sponsored KAZU
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="width: 83%"]FM in nearby Pacific Grove. Five years later she was forced off the air, for the last time, from death threats but continued sending out her weekly tapes to subscribers until June 13, 1988 (tape #862).
Mae died of cancer on October 3rd of that year. She was 66.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

[David Guyatt]

She was way ahead of her time, and her research on the Nazi connections was outstanding - at least those parts I came across. I wonder why it never really made it's way in the JFK community as much as it should?

[Matthew Poe]

I did know that Lennon had helped out getting a few Realist issues to press, but not the direct connection to Mae. Good stuff, Peter.

The theory that Larry Flynt was shot because he wanted to publish politically dissident materials would seem to fit. After all, Flynt had "fuck you" money, an effective distribution system and he was his own man. But how does this square with the chronology that Flynt was shot in 1978 and Rebel mag wasn't unveiled until 1983.

That doesn't mean I think he was shot by a lone racist nut. This same shooter, Alan Greenblatt, was convicted of the 1980 shooting of Vernon Jordan as well.

[Peter Lemkin]

Thanks for the great reply Peter! Jonathan Vankin, in his first CT book, (generally sympathetic as were his ensuing encyclopedias) Conspiracies, Cover-Ups and Crimes, publishedin 1996 goes into the Sprouts a bit. The book portrays their feud and the nasty recriminations flying back and forth. Emory also despised the way Vankin portrayed him and wound up in a feud with the author.

I knew about Rebel and I've read the Nazi Connection piece although I must admit I've found its style difficult. But I'll read it again because the material is fascinating.

A piece of your post nearly knocked me off my chair. Lennon was a major donor of Brussell's! Not sure why it's so surprising given his largesse to other outre political causes, but it is.

Yes, John Lennon gave $5,000 first for helping Krassner to publish an issue with Mae's piece being most of it; afterwards I heard he gave her very large amounts of money and was basically her main secret source of funding...of course it would not have been secret to certain intelligence creeps. Flint may have also given her some money - he was rich from his horrible sex magazine, but The Rebel had zero sex in it at all..and was a VERY serious attempt to challenge the secret powers that be....and got Larry in a wheelchair paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life...but I'm sure they intended to kill him, but figured what was done was enough punishment...and he ceased publication of The Rebel [having gotten 'the hint'!].

Some of the 'Sprouts' maintained good lifelong working relationships. Others did not...but this is typical of the entire research community for a variety of reasons...and a few may have been provocateurs...others just eccentric and egoistic.

If you put Mae Brussell in our Forum search engine several threads will turn up...more will if you do it in google or other search engine and specify this Forum's url. I have several of her shows as mp3 files and one can buy them all on line now. She published several articles in various magazines. Live audience talks by Mae did happen - but were very rare. At the end of her life [the last years] she didn't go out much, and was getting death threats. As I said, the mysterious house that had cars with blackened windows drive in and out, usually at night, burned to the ground on the very day she died.....coincidence or conspiracy...I say most probably the latter. She was on to something very hot in her last months!..and she knew it - but Mae was on to hot stuff all along!!!. Last I heard, her archive is still in active contention as to who has control and what should be done with it...very sad...it is invaluable and has likely had some things removed by now. John Judge was a major in that battle, but with his sad death, I don't know who has taken over his efforts to see them put into an archive intact. I know one daughter doesn't want her letters to be part of the archive, but they are some of the best parts..she got letters from and to everyone..but that is another matter for another time. I think I posted on that here about three years back.

[David Guyatt]

Out of interest Pete, where do you rate Mae's Nazi sponsorship in regard to the JFK hit?

[Peter Lemkin]

I did know that Lennon had helped out getting a few Realist issues to press, but not the direct connection to Mae. Good stuff, Peter.

The theory that Larry Flynt was shot because he wanted to publish politically dissident materials would seem to fit. After all, Flynt had "fuck you" money, an effective distribution system and he was his own man. But how does this square with the chronology that Flynt was shot in 1978 and Rebel mag wasn't unveiled until 1983.

That doesn't mean I think he was shot by a lone racist nut. This same shooter, Alan Greenblatt, was convicted of the 1980 shooting of Vernon Jordan as well.

OK, my mistake...it was not The Rebel magazine that got L.F. shot, but his putting up $1 million in 1977 [a HUGE amount then!] to each and every person who had significant information leading to those involved in or substantially helping to solve the assassination of President John F. Kennedy .....and was seen posing in public photos with JFK researchers, such as Bob Groden and others.

Now, I remember why the confusion in my mind. When he started the VERY nicely produced The Rebel Magazine he was threatened with death in no uncertain terms...and pulled the plug on a GREAT venue for top notch information on the secrets, black ops, dirty tricks, false-flags, etc.... They didn't like what was in the magazine nor the fact that L.F. could easily publish it for decades at a loss.

[Peter Lemkin]