34.7 years of Argonaut history — a personal view
The 35th anniversary that The Argonaut celebrates this week brings to mind nearly half-a-lifetime of memories, rendered all the more poignant by the tragic premature death in May this year of the newspaper’s founder, editor and publisher, my dear friend David Asper Johnson. I met Dave nearly 35 years ago. I was the founder in 1968 of an avant-garde literary magazine called Beyond Baroque, which by early 1972 was also a cultural center located on what was then West Washington (now Abbot Kinney) Boulevard in Venice, and had just become the nonprofit Beyond Baroque Foundation, now in the Old Venice City Hall. To support myself I ran a small printing business, and when I saw an early issue of the twice-monthly Argonaut, I wanted to place an ad in it for that business. Only a post office box was listed as an address for The Argonaut, so I telephoned. Eventually I spoke with the newspaper’s publisher himself, and he insisted he would come to pick up my ad. It soon became obvious that The Argonaut was published out of Dave Johnson’s residence in Playa del Rey, and that his public office was his tiny but sporty yellow Volkswagen Karmann-Ghia. As we sat in his car office talking, one editor to another, he offered me a job proofreading The Argonaut every two weeks and I jumped at the chance to...
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