''From Out of Sherwood Forest'' was a Southern California tabloid

underground newspaper The terms underground press or clandestine press refer to periodicals and publications that are produced without official approval, illegally or against the wishes of a dominant (governmental, religious, or institutional) group. In specific rec ...

published biweekly in

Newport Beach Newport Beach is a coastal city in South Orange County, California. Newport Beach is known for swimming and sandy beaches. Newport Harbor once supported maritime industries however today, it is used mostly for recreation. Balboa Island, Newport ...

starting in November 1969. Based not far from the campus of the

University of California at Irvine The University of California, Irvine (UCI or UC Irvine) is a public land-grant research university in Irvine, California. One of the ten campuses of the University of California system, UCI offers 87 undergraduate degrees and 129 graduate and pr ...

, it was aimed mainly at students, teenagers and hippies, and was known for its inflammatory, take no prisoners rhetoric: "The American government was on trial for crimes against the world. We now find the government guilty and sentence it to death in the streets." In an article entitled "Outlaw Blues" and signed "Robbin' Hood" readers were encouraged to shoplift, making the argument, in an

oversimplification The fallacy of the single cause, also known as complex cause, causal oversimplification, causal reductionism, and reduction fallacy, is an informal fallacy of questionable cause that occurs when it is assumed that there is a single, simple cause of ...

Marxist theory Marxist philosophy or Marxist theory are works in philosophy that are strongly influenced by Karl Marx's materialist approach to theory, or works written by Marxists. Marxist philosophy may be broadly divided into Western Marxism, which drew fro ...

, that "profit is theft," hence all profit-making businesses were stealing from the public and it was not immoral for the people to steal back what was theirs. Produced by a collective, the main editor and publisher was Don Elder, a 23-year-old former member of SDS at UC Irvine, son of a Newport Beach city council member, self-described revolutionary and co-owner of the Bird in the Cage (later Bird in Search of a Cage) bookstore, which opened in March 1969 on

Balboa Boulevard Balboa Boulevard is a major north–south street in the city of Los Angeles, and it cuts through many communities and is one of the main thoroughfares in the San Fernando Valley. The southern end of Balboa Boulevard starts at Ventura Boulevard in t ...

, in a shopping strip near the surf in Newport Beach. Starting in November 1969 the paper was published by a "vaguely Marxist" collective out of the Bird in the Cage storefront. On Dec. 31, 1969, several weeks after the paper printed the article encouraging shoplifting, Don Elder was busted on 10 counts of conspiracy to solicit burglary and contributing to the delinquency of a minor, solely on the grounds that he was the editor of the paper and copies had allegedly fallen into the hands of minors. In July 1970 he was finally cleared of all charges. On Jan. 6, 1970, one week after the bust, the Bird in the Cage storefront was evicted from its Newport Beach location, ultimately relocating 10 miles north to Santa Ana."Underground Editor Pleads Not Guilty" by Scott Moore, ''Los Angeles Times'', Jan. 10, 1970, p. 14 (Orange County ed.)

References

Biweekly newspapers published in the United States Defunct newspapers published in California {{California-newspaper-stub

See also

References