Posts
Figure In 41/2-Year Obscenity Battle Wants It Ended
BY TRAVIS BAKER
“The Gratefull Society: Bombs, Bullets, Battleships and Bull----.”
If that alliteration doesn’t ring a bell with you, chances are you’ve come to Kitsap County within the last four years.
Four to five years ago, it was big news here when Edison “Pinky” Fisk, middle-aged anti-war activist, displayed the eight-word expression on a poster in a downtown Bremerton demonstration—and got himself arrested.
On Sept. 20, 1968, Bremerton police made the pinch and the matter began dragging through the courts. It’s still dragging.
The world has changed a lot since that day. The Vietnam War has ended for this country. Anti-war activism has largely disappeared, as have the weekly Friday anti-war vigils in front of the Army recruiting station at Sixth Street and Pacific Avenue at one of which Fisk displayed his sign and went to jail.
The recruiting station isn’t even there any more, having moved elsewhere.
Fisk has undergone a few changes, too. He swore off activism a couple of years ago, deciding the war was a symptom, not the basic problem, and there wasn’t anything he could do about the basic problem.
He sold his Tiger Lake waterfront home, split the money with his wife and then the two split in a divorce. Fisk spent some time growing organic vegetables at the Unitarian Fellowship in East Bremerton, one of his favorite haunts during his activist days, but he’s even fallen out with the Unitarians, and now grows his vegetables in Tracyton, where he lives in a trailer.
And it could very well be that the word “bull----“ , has even changed—in its degree of offensiveness to local residents in an increasingly X-rated world.
But the court case in which Fisk was convicted of disturbing the peace for displaying that word hasn’t changed much. The conviction still calls for the defendant to serve 30 days in jail and pay a $300 fine, just like it did on July 2, 1969, when Judge Oluf Johnsen upheld in his superior court Fisk’s November, 1968, conviction in a lower court.
But the entire matter has gotten stuck, and Fisk is trying to push it along.
He has a $300 appeal bond posted, and he’d like to get his money back, he said.
Fisk’s lawyer, Charles Talbot of Seattle, appealed the conviction, and the State Court of Appeals sent it back to the local level, saying there had been no findings of fact or conclusions of law filed on which they could base a decision.
Give us some, the court told Bremerton’s prosecutor, Gary Sexton, and the local court.
That was on May 13, 1971, and the matter has gone no further.
Talbot made a tentative approach to Sexton by letter on Nov. 3, 1971, about getting it settled, and sent Fisk a hand-written memo last April 14, saying he would do something about it in “about three weeks.”
Nothing was done, however, and Fisk now says he can’t even locate Talbot. He’s in an inactive status, the State Bar Association says, which means he can’t practice law, so apparently things have changed a bit for him too.
Sexton says nothing is holding up further action, and he’s waiting for Fisk or his lawyer to take some. Asked if he thinks the delay has weakened his chance of keeping the case alive should Fisk move for dismissal, Sexton said quite the opposite is true.
In the intervening years, Supreme Court decisions in the area of obscenity have grown more stringent, improving his chances, the assistant city attorney said.
Fisk says he doesn’t want to spend any more money on the thing if he doesn’t have to, so wants Sexton to take the next step. Fisk has called Judge Johnsen to ask him to help, but “he doesn’t want to talk to me about it, in case he has to hear the case again.”
Has he thought of hiring a new lawyer? He made a tentative effort, but he happened to choose a former associate of Sexton’s, who was prevented by bar ethics from entering the case.
Anyway, he says, “I don’t want to spend any more of my money to make the God-damn legal system work. I’ve learned you have to push the law to make it go, but I think this has been pushed far enough.”
So the case remains high-centered, and in the meantime, Fisk grows his organic vegetables, and puts in stints as a union electrician.
Ironically, many of his electrical jobs are with his old nemisis – the military. He’s recently done work in Puget Sound Naval Shipyard’s meteorology lab, and just last Friday was laid off a job in the new PSNS pump testing shop, when the work ran out.
Has his anti-war past kept him out of work at all?
Not much, Fisk says. He had some long dry spells for a while, and “A lot of my fellow workers think I’m a direct disciple of Mao Tse-tung, but we get along.”
.JPG)
