FULL SYNOPSIS

If you were born in February, 1946, how can you be “famous long ago” in 1970? Raymond Mungo was and is because that’s the way he wants it.

Told with the gusto of one who had the good sense to drop out of kindergarten, Famous Long Ago really begins when Mungo and Marshall Bloom decided to start an underground press service because they had nothing else to do. But, first of all, Mungo had to make a quick trip to Czechoslovakia to meet the Vietcong. “What a story! Boy journalist sleeps with Vietcong.”

When he came back, the Liberation News Service was unhappily settled in our nation’s capital. In its third week, LNS saw its material on the siege of the Pentagon printed in whole or in part in more than 100 newspapers with a total readership in the vicinity of a million.

And a great many other things happened. People came and went; the news service changed; Mungo tore up his induction papers; and finally the news service split into two warring factions with plots and counterplots put into action regularly. Today Mungo and some of his friends live on a farm in Vermont where, in the words of Verandah Porche’s invocation to this book, they are “refugees in winter dress/ skating home on thin ice/ from the Apocalypse.” And Mungo’s concluding words are: “Though we’ll probably never meet, dear friends, I’m with you.”

 

—Excerpted from the back cover of Famous Long Ago: My Life and Hard Times with the Liberation News Service, by Raymond Mungo

 

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