Arthur Glick Kunkin was founder and editor of the Los Angeles Free Press, the first and largest underground newspaper of its kind, from 1964 through 1972.

Kunkin was interactive before it was a thing. “Every reader is a reporter” was his policy. He printed a press pass in the paper so anyone could print it out and be an L.A. Free Press reporter.

Kunkin was born on March 28, 1928, in the Bronx to Irving and Bea Kunkin. He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1945.

He was an organizer for the Socialist Workers Party and acquired some journalism experience working on The Militant, the party’s newspaper, as well as other leftist publications. In the 1950s, after service in the Army, he worked as a machinist for General Motors and Ford, where he found a discontent not often thought of in counterculture terms.

The L.A. Free Press started out as a weekly produced from the family dining-room table. By 1967, it had a circulation of 17,000. By 1968, it had topped 85,000 with 40 full-time editorial and clerical employees. Advertising revenues were $5,000 a week.

Kunkin has been credited for helping to build opposition to the Vietnam War by publicizing the times and places of anti-war protests. The L.A. Free Press was heralded for its coverage of the 1965 Watts Riots.

During its time, the paper was groundbreaking and influential. “I felt that there was a new consciousness, a new culture that wasn’t being expressed and that was being suppressed,” he said.

Kunkin viewed the paper’s role not so much as promoting a left-wing or any other agenda, but as reflecting the underserved communities in which it circulated.

“When the community is doing nothing but rock ’n’ roll concerts, that is what The Free Press will be doing,” he once said. “And if the community is out in the streets, that’s where The Free Press will be.”

Kunkin revived the paper four times before the version he created with longime friend Steven Finger went out of print in 2007.

Kunkin became a journalism instructor at CSU Northridge, and his former student, Sylvan Tauber, praised his lectures on Facebook for his “world-wide perspective on news reporting and the business of information dissemination.”

Kunkin moved to Joshua Tree in 1999. He lectured at the Institute of Mentalphysics and lived on its property. Visitors said his home was covered from floor to ceiling with books, many about alchemy.

 

 

*Hall of Fame inductees are selected annually by a committee appointed by the California Press Foundation. They recognize career achievements of weekly and daily publishers in California who were important and influential in their era, as judged by their peers in the association. The write-ups are a historical and journalistic snapshot in time and not official biographies.*