Readers:
Satanic Reds will conduct a serious investigation of the claims of our Comrade, T. Casey Brennan. He swears that the following really happened to him.
About the following, he said: "I wrote CONJURELLA five years ago -- the American people had FIVE YEARS in which to read my statements and generate an investigation, instead of putting up goofy web-pages claiming it had something to do with my authorship of VAMPIRELLA."
T. Casey Brennan continued to explain, "Sept. 11, 2001 changed all that. Never, ever in our lifetimes will we see testimony linking the CIA to JFK or AIDS... never, ever in our lifetimes will I testify on a witness stand. It lives on NOW only as a vehicle for reinstating my comic book writing career. But it was true... it is."
Satanic Reds is wholly in favor of all public release of all records pertaining to the assassination of our beloved J. F. Kennedy because only a naive, gullible idiot still thinks Lee Harvey Oswald did it. Even the testimony of the only surviving Mafia Don, Bonanno, shows us that the official story is wholly bogus.
Not only have the Satanic Reds stumbled upon a dire and dastardly tale, but we will be investigating this! Updates will be posted here on this site.
There is a shocking truth to be exposed here. This is more shocking than the Roswell Incident, it is more shocking than the X files or the Z files. Yes indeed!
[Commissar also has recollections of being in The Grassy Knoll, even though Commissar knows she was in high school at the same time. Apparently Commissar remembers this wrongly! Perhaps Commissar dreamed it. However, Commissar KNEW that Oswald didn't do it. She was able to know that from seeing him on the TV and knowing he told the truth. Also, the I-Ching said Oswald did not do it.]
This terrible truth needs to be investigated. It is BAD ENOUGH that they stole Oswald's brain! We had thought that Oliver Stone had finally uncovered the truth, but even he, in his infinite clarity, had some missing facts.
Satanic Reds DEMANDS an investigation! Since none are capable of exposing the TRUTH about this, Satanic Reds will finally endeavor to do this.
Read these shocking revelations!
Castle Mirage - The Prelude: Conjurella
by T. Casey Brennan
This is the story of little mice. David Ferrie's mice. No, this is the story of Conjurella, and her daughter, Glinda; they were both there when I first met David Ferrie in Ohio, at the Old Covered Bridge; so were Mama and Daddy and Uncle Johnny. Everyone is dead now, except me, and, I think, Glinda, so there is no one to ask. But I think it must have been the summer of 1953. I started school in September of 1953 at Swamp School on Bricker Road in Emmett, Michigan; a one-room school on a gravel road which boasted my late mother as the CEO of its Board; it was sometime around then that the meeting at the Old Covered Bridge took place.
It looked something like a covered wagon, over a small stream through a narrow road cutting through fields and brush that stretched on forever. This was 1953. The only war we might have lost had been over for less than a decade. Oh-ess-ess was a whisper that lingered in the air; a song that was over, yet the melody haunted us. War measures meant many things to those caught in the web of that whisper, oh-ess-ess, so softly spoken, a love song, a lullaby, a death threat. I don't remember, but I think that whisper was in the air when we first met David Ferrie. Uncle Johnny helped arrange it; Uncle Johnny said he was a finder. Daddy and Uncle Johnny park the car right on the bridge, and get out "to take a walk" -- there is something on the car radio, or maybe Daddy and Uncle Johnny tell us, about "two escaped convicts" believed loose in that area. Mama and Conjurella get in the front seat. Glinda and I are in the back seat. Has MK-ULTRA begun yet? They must have given me some of the amnesiac hypnotic drug that Dr. E, the hypnotist whose work formed the basis for Mama's obsession with hypnosis as noted in Castle Mirage, would later fore on me in a more conventional setting. Glinda is my age, she is five. she sees the Perfect soldier, David Ferrie, standing guard. Everyone has told me: "Don't see that soldier," but Glinda says, "He sees that soldier."
David Ferrie uses his O.S.S. code name, Perfect Soldier. I don't remember how I know that. He assumes battle stances, brandishes his rifle, and threatens the children with rape. but it is Conjurella who is raped, by the "escaped convicts" who inevitably appear as David Ferrie looks on. Glinda and I are spared, and, I think, so is Mama. But I was too still in that back seat throughout the attack, too oblivious to what was happening - they had used something akin to Dr. E's "red lollipops", a favorite drug ploy of the MK-ULTRA hypnotist who would some day send the Perfect Soldier on a mission to kill John Kennedy.
I have the Brass Monkey, I think Uncle Johnny gave it to me. I don't know if it had anything to do with the OSS. It's not brass all the way through, and it says "Germany" on the bottom, not "Deutchlann" - Germany.
David Ferrie is hard to reemember.
I said I went to Swamp School, that was for my first and second grades. In the third grade, I started parochial school, Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Parish School, also in Emmett. That was in September of 1955. I attended Our Lady of Mt. Carmel for my third, fourth, fidth, and sixth grades. Daddy, who had always had intermittent violent fits, accusing my mother of an extra-marital affair (and me, of being the offspring of a local handyman from Texas, Frank Tilton) was on his best behavior through that period. He had been elected, or appointed, I forget which, to a position on the St. Clair County Board of Education, to match my mother's, on the Swamp Board. I am trying hard to be a Catholic religious sissy, worrying about mortal sin, telling the priest in confession about my Brigitte Bardot pin-ups, and studying prayerbooks. But in the summer of 1959, after my sixth-grade year, Daddy got in trouble. Getting out of it involved using his family "in hypnotic experiments".
That was how we met Dr. E. And how we all met David Ferrie again. Keep going north on M-19, and you will reach Yale, Michigan, a tiny town with its own tiny airport. David Ferrie, who is calling himself David Ferris by then, flew into the Yale airport in he pre-dawn hours to meet with my Dad, and follow behind us in a car, as we drove farther north, to Hopeville, to meet the hypnotist, Dr. E. There was no doubt about it; we were in custody.
My Dad is introduced, and he extends his hand to David Ferrie/Ferris and says "I attended the Ferris Institute in Big Rapids..." He stresses the word Ferris; he knows he is in trouble and he is looking for something that will give him an edge conversationally. but there is to be no conversation. A committee of MK-ULTRA agents roughly hustle him back to his car. Back in the car, he tells Mama: "We're cooked. This is the same guy Johnny took us to meet".
My memories of Doctor E are very sketchy, and they are not always easily rendered sequential. I know that at some point, through the use of amnesiacs so we would have no recollection of the more threatening encounters, he gained our trust, although it is important to remember that it was as difficult remembering just what had taken place previously with Dr. E then, as it is now.
I know that at one point, Daddy was in Dr. E's office, and Mama and I were in the waiting room, and Dr. E came out and said, "I want to see how fast you can eat a red lollipop," and handed us two red candies, which caused us both to pass out immediately; I only vaguely remember us being carried limply into his private office, and that, only after over three decades.
We went up north in August of 1959 on a trip, and I started back to school in September, at the old Swamp School again, and it was around then that I met Lee through Dr. E. Lee flew into the Yale airport with David Ferrie; I was always afraid of David Ferrie, but I was never afraid of Lee. He did not know about the threatening circumstances of our initial meetings with Dr. E and David Ferrie. He said that Dr. E was going to give him "almost god-like powers", and that he was doing "something important for the government". He said he was going on a trip, but he would be back to see me every so often. He spoke of great authority that he would have on his return, and his explanations of that coming authority vacillated between the governmental and the mystical.
I saw Lee only a very few times, and one of the memories of that era is an implant, because Dr. E. shoved me up against his screen, as I'll describe later, and said, "You're going to meet Lee Oswald again at swamp School, but this time it won't be real." the meeting that was real is sketchy. I don't remember how he got there, but I remember he was standing at the very edge of the road, telling me he was concerned bout how I was being kicked around, but he was going to do something about it. A lady who drove by and saw us, Kathy Malarkey, was later put into a mental institution, though I don't know if there's a connection.
I only saw Lee the first few days of September of 1959 when I entered the seventh grade. By the time I finished that school year, the U-2 incident had taken place, and Dr. E told us: "Don't worry about that one. We control both sides." On another occasion, someone associated with David Ferrie told me that MK-ULTRA, which was directly overseen by then C.I.A. Director Allen "You're a Good Man, Mr. Dulles" Dulles, was in the process of artificiaally creating a disease that would make the people who caught it hairless "just like David Ferrie".
I am trying to place all this timewise; I know that in the early days, I took home a comic book from Dr. E's waiting room; it was in issue of Robin Hood, under the brand Quality Comics, and several years old.
By this time, Mama and I were so disoriented by Dr. E's sessions, that we had forgotten the early, threatening encounters, and Mama encouraged me to leave a comic book in the office in return, which I did, a copy of Brave & Bold#28, an issue which introduced the Justice League, a team of DC Comics superhereos, I was later to have some marginal connection with DC Comics, and my stories appear in some late 1970s issues of the former DC title, House of Mystery.
I am also thinking that my parents may have taken other children from the neighborhood to see Dr. E, and I am wondering if there are any witnesses.
We do not see David Ferrie again with Dr. E, but there are disjointed memories of meeting with David Ferrie in my home, and in a neighbor's home, under so much drugging that I was only dimly, barely aware that my surroundings were real. it must have been later in his life, not around the Old Covered Bridge meeting, because in 1953, he still looked like a man, but by the time these meetings took place, he was just a fat, bald old blob. He looked something like my Catholic godfather, Paul, who was also fat and bald, so I asigned him the name "Bad Paul", which he liked, thouh he always did his best to be as threatening as possible during these meetings, though he never laid a hand on me.
I further remember them harassing me at a campground outside St. Ignace, around the time of the launching of Telstar, the first satellite to relay television signals, which you could then see orbiting like a shooting star. It was in August of 1962, before I started my tenth grade year, no longer at Swamp School, but now attending Peck High School in Peck, Michigan. Campers, including my parents and myself, liked to sit around a campfire, and watch Telstar. We loved Telstar; I even had the 45rpm it inspired. but on this particular occassion, we were discussing the U-2. A man at the campfire said, well, Powers was just a coward; he had a lethal injection to take if he was shot down, he should have taken it. But one by one, everyone, including my parents, leave the fire, and this one man remains, and he says, the C.I.A., that the U-2 was with, he works for them also. I say, hey, great. He looks guilty for a second, collects himself, and tells me the CIA has a use for me.
In October of 1962, we flew to New Orleans with David Ferrie and Air America, as I could help with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee very briefly. To understand the manner in which the Hopeville MK-ULTRA office - The Project, as I learned it was called- could be lethal with its participants one week, and a cooperative confidant and ally with them the next, it will be useful to understand, by way of a comparison, the effects of two drugs known to the general populace today; Rohypnel and Ritalin. Rohypnel produces unconsciousness and amnesia; Ritalin produces a very singular one-pointedness in users allowing them to concentrate on exactly what they are doing, and nothing else. It is possible for a person under the MK-ULTRA counter-parts of these drugs, combined with hypnosis and post-hypnotic suggestion, to, for instance, blithely pass out Fair Play For Cuba Committee literature in New Orleans, without ever even questioning how he got there, or believing that it should be questioned. also, there are processes of MK-ULTRA induced amnesia which make it virtually fool-proof. In the induced trance state, the victim is subjected to threats on his family members and himself. He is forced to witness real or contrived torture-killings of other human beings while in this state. Then, he is withdrawn from the scene of this abuse, given hypnotic commands in conjunction with drugs, told that the abusive treatment was all imaginary, and that he must not remember it; if he will not remember it, it will not be real.
I remember the Fair Play For Cuba Office in New Orleans, and I remember the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade office on the other side of the building. I remember asking someone, I don't remember who, but it wasn't Lee, "Are we for or against Communists?" And he said, "Both." and I laughed.
Anyway, Lee says the big Fair Play For Cuba campaign was in August, and I missed it, but we pass out a few pamphlets, and on the way back, we go into a store, it's just the two of us, on foot, and he buys me a candy bar, and he tells me to give them a pamphlet, tell them you're Lee Oswald, he says, and I do. And he laughs. Not far down the street, he stops by a tree. He wants to talk.
He says, "I'm doing dangerous work. If anything happens to me, I want you to take care of the family."
"Sure," I say.
But I really don't want any part of this. After we fly back, that night, Daddy pretends to have a fit. I say pretends, because now that I am an adult, and not under the influences of the substances forced upon me during the incidents, I see very well how his threatening, seemingly erratic behavior, contributed to the process of drug-and-hypnosis induced amnesia. My first example of it was, in the early days of visiting Dr. E, Daddy and I took separate pills, voluntarily this time, on the premise that they would help to "induce hypnosis", which, at that time, we thought we were studying. Driving back, Mama is crying, and I am lathargic and disoriented. I mention the pill I took, and Daddy flips out: "I took that pill, not you!" He stops the car and becomes more threatening. I say to Mama: "Daddy has gone crazy." Mama says: "This is a lot worse than Daddy going crazy."
The incident following the flight from New Orleans was a parallel; he began yelling "I want you to forget that trip! You're going to forget that trip!" And I did, again, for more than three decades.
I also forgot this:
At some point, Dr E asked if I would like to play the shooting gallery game that he had. I said that I would. He put me in front of a kind of television screen with a head brace on the seat in front of it. He says, "We don't have the gun that goes with it hooked up yet. But when you see the cowboy shoot the penny, you'll have good luck."
I look at the screen coming on, and he hits me with something, I think an injection in my neck, it hurts, and I slump. But the pictures form on the screen, and I can hear the words through head-sets.
Rirst there is a picture of a penny.
"SEE THE CENT WITH LINCOLN'S HEAD."
Then there is a picture of John Kennedy.
"THEN THINK OF THE SQUIRREL WITH JOHN F. KENNEDY'S HEAD."
(Girl's chuckle.)
Girl's voice: "IT'S NOT REALLY LINCOLN. IT'S JUST A CENT WITH LINCOLN'S HEAD."
Then there are moving pictures of a cowboy tossing a penny into the air.
"Pop!" he shoots it with a revolver, but instantly, the picture is of John Kennedy.
The voice says: "THINK OF THE CENT WITH LINCOLN'S HEAD, THEN SHOOT THE SQUIRREL WITH JOHN F. KENNEDY'S HEAD."
At another point, Dr. E shows me a whole film. It is sometime after I have seen something on real television, I think Disney, about the MacGregor family of Scotland, which I liked, about all the oppression they endured, and how, in the end, everybody stood up for them, and they are back on top. Dr. E. tells me he has something similar about the Fitzgerald family. I watch it, and I only remember the ending. It's set in the late middle ages or something, the Fitzgerald family is put through all sorts of problems, but in the end, there's a big crowd scene, and the speaker, a Fitzgerald himself, has just won some major victory, and he has everyone in the crowd with Fitzgerald blood yell "hooray for the Fitzgeralds!" The voices start up, and in seconds, you see that they are all over the place in the crowd. And that's the end.
Dr. E says to Daddy: "Well, I scared him with it. He'll be scared as hell of that story some day."
On the morning of November 22, 1963, I am awakened by Daddy unexpectedly in the pre-dawn hours. He says we are going to see Dr. E, then we are going on a trip. I think he means vacation, so I say fine.
We reach the tiny Yale airport, deserted in the pre-dawn hours, in no time. Daddy and I proceed to David Ferries plane, where Dr. E is waiting. Dr. E produces a hypodermic needle. His face is grim and he is wearing a parka in the pre-dawn cold.
Now I am scared, and try to get away. I yell "I don't want a shot!" and try to run. I know now that I m about to be kidnapped. I am fifteen years old now, but a pale, sickly fifteen, and I am in no shape to fight these men for my freedom. I struggle, but Dr. E injects me anyway, and I fall. The last thing I se before falling is the parka-clad face of Dr. E.
When I awaken, in the storage room of the sixth floor of the Texas Book depository building in Dallas, it is broad daylight. They have obviously brought me in crated up, or rolled up, in something. Anyway, I get dumped out, and David Ferrie kicks me in the ribs, and turns to my Dad.
"There's the assassin," David Ferrie says.
Daddy and David Ferrie make me stand agaisnt some cartons of books, and not look around. I am groggy. Sometimes when I would go up north to the Upper Peninsula with Mama and Daddy, they liked to explore abandoned buildings, places where I didn't always feel they had a right to be. I can't remember the injection now, and I amtrying to place just what is going on, whether it is one of these unauthorized romps Daddy liked to take through old buildings.
"Are we supposed to be here?" I asked, groggily.
David Ferrie laughs.
"Don't worry about that," he says, "If anybody bothers you for being here, you send them right to me!"
Daddy and David Ferrie are laughing now, and I'm beginning to think everything is all right. At some point, someone has told me that I am in Dallas, where Lee is now, and I ask to see him before we leave.
"Did you want to talk to him about comic books or something?" David Ferrie asks.
I say yes, that I wanted to tell him about the new Justice League comic just out, and that lee liked the Justice League, talked about how great it was that DC comics had brought back their old comic book series, the Justice society, from the 1940s.
"Well, he's downstairs pushing a broom. He's down on the second floor pushing a broom."
At some point, the lights went out. I don't know if I was injected or dosed somehow again, or whether post-hypnotic suggestion alone did the trick. Anyway, a hood was placed over my head, and then part of it pulled away and the gunsight pressed against my left eye.
Daddy gives the hypnotic command: "WHEN I YELL NOW, PULL THE TRIGGER."
Remembering this over three decades later, I can hear David Ferrie saying "I don't want him to see the gun!!" as he pulls the hood over my face.
David Ferrie says to Daddy: "Can he keep that right eye closed? If he can't, I'll kill him."
Now that funny screen of Dr. E's, at first it said "SHOOT THE SQUIRREL WITH JOHN F. KENNEDY'S HEAD". But just at the last, when they made me watch it, it said "SHOOT THE SQUIRREL WITH JOHN F. KENNEDY'S HEAD. THEN SHOOT THE COWBOY BESIDE HIM. YOU DON'T LIKE COWBOYS ANYMORE. YOU DON'T LIKE THIS COWBOY (Picture of Governor Connaly in a Cowboy hat). SHOOT THE SQUIRREL WITH JOHN F. KENNEDY'S HEAD. THEN SHOOT THE COWBOY BESIDE HIM."
Then they lift me up, in front of the open window.
I hear the voices: "Can he get up by himself?" "Lift him up!" "Don't let him open that eye!"
Slowly, I am lifted up, groggy and disoriented. I hear Daddy's crying voice say: "Please don't open that right eye, please don't open that eye, oh god, please don't open that eye."
David ferrie says "Can you see John Kennedy on the little screen?" My heart leaps as I see John Kennedy in the convertible six floors below, but only through the "little screen", i.e. the gunsight; I secretly like John Kennedy, though Daddy hates him, and I am glad to see him on "the little screen". But it all happens so quickly, seeing John Kennedy and then Daddy yells:
"NOW!"
My finger automatically contracts on what I now know was the trigger. I have never seen the Zapruder film, except in little glimpses. In my recollection of the incident, this is what took place: My shot hits the President in the chest. To my amazement, he writhes sideways as the bullet hits. David Ferrie takes the rifle instantly, and fires two more shots as I collapse.
As he does, Daddy shouts: "Don't shoot Jacky, Ferrie! Don't shoot Jackie, or I'll kill ya right now!"
David ferrie says: "Shut up, Bill!" - then, as three more shots ring out from elsewhere on the street - "Back-up! Good men! They could have left me hanging, but they didn't!"
I look out the window now, but David Ferrie gives the hypnotic command: "Don't look at the man we just shot!"
Either Daddy or David Ferrie says: "It's the end of the world. There's nothing but chaos out there now. Nothing."
I am groggy and disoriented, and am trying to take these words in a Catholic religious sense. I am looking around for signs of a Biblical Judgement Day, even though I cannot look toward the convertible at all, even if I wanted to, that was how great their power over me.
The next thing I remember is a man with glasses and a business suit, thirtysomething, short hair and professional-looking, entering. By now, we are all away from the window.
I call him Ultra Subaltern.
Ultra Subaltern says, matter-of-factly: "Everything go all right?"
David Ferrie says, "Well, Bill lost his head for a minute, but he's all right now." Daddy had no right to fly in David Ferrie's face like that over Jackie, they're thinking. Daddy nods nervously.
"You'll pay for that though, Bill," David Ferrie says.
Ultra Subaltern goes to the window.
Daddy says "You're going to the window?!" Ultra Subaltern says: "I was told to assess the situation. One of the ways to assess is by looking. Everyone is looking out windows now."
Ultra Subaltern leaves.
The next thing I remember is David Ferrie yelling "There's the signal!" Immediately, we were hustled into the hallway, with him carrying a suitcase. We walk rapidly down to the second floor. I do not yet know that the President has been shot, in spite of the fact that I've just witnessed it, and participated in it. My head is coming together a little now, and I say groggily that I'd like to see Lee now that we're in Dallas."
"You'll see him," says David Ferrie, then: "Casey, you never believe me on these things, but they don't even remember you. We slipped them something. You'll see."
We see Lee in the halls of the second floor, sweeping. I say, "Hi, Lee!" but he doesn't even look toward me. Immedi_tely, David ferrie starts yelling at him: "I've got some friends here and I'm telling you we're through with you, you dumb sonofabitch, you goddamned fairy, yeah you goddamned fairy..."
I don't remember it all, but in the end, David Ferrie pushes Lee in the chest hard. I am embarrassed by this hostility toward a man I intended to meet as a friend. Lee is stoical, tight-lipped, and condescending, like he's just barely putting up with this abuse.
During this, people run by, and a woman yells, "Something's going on out there!"
Lee starts to walk away, and David Ferrie says, "Where are you going?"
Lee says: "I'm going downstairs for a Coke." The altercation with David Ferrie has prevented Lee from learning that the President has been shot.
As Lee walks away, I step forward apologetically, and say. "Er...uh...Lee, the new Justice League comic came out..."
He looks at me blankly, and keeps walking. I feel my face redden. What could I have done wrong?
I don't remember the trip back, but the next thing I know, I was in a chair in front of a desk with Dr. E in it. Dr. E says, "we're taking you to school. Walk as fast as you can, and the faster you walk, the faster you'll forget this. you'll be late, so walk up to a girl, and tell her you went squirrel hunting, this morning, and as soon as you do, you'll forget all this, and the whole trip never happened."
Next I was hurrying down the halls of Peck High School.
But this was the story of little mice, David Ferrie's mice, that he used in his experiments while he made the disease that would make everyone who got it bald like him. No, this was the story of Conjurella, who divorced Uncle Johnny, and though she wrote for a while, I never saw Glinda again. No, this was the story of Castle Mirage, and my mother's obsession with hypnosis as demonstrated in this book, and how that obsession might have come about, in an alternate world, in a paralell time. Not what truly happened, for that, no one knows, nor will, ever. Not truth, but Gothic Fiction; Alice: Life, what is it but a dream?
And now: ---------
UNAUTHORIZED CONJURELLA: Housemates With Naomi Schechter, Ph.d, Activist-Psychologist With "Psychologists for Social Responsibility" by T. Casey Brennan
Copyright 2000 by T. Casey Brennan (permission)
Within, there lurked the memory.
But this was 1970. This was T. Casey Brennan at age 22, on a bus bound for Ann Arbor, fledgling comic book writer for the Warren Publishing Company titles, CREEPY, EERIE, and VAMPIRELLA, hell-bent on making his presence known to Ann Arbor's now infamous campus left.
This was 1970: it would be a Tetragrammatonic 26 years before I would write the legend of CONJURELLA, posted on the Internet initially by Anathema Research of Austin, Texas in 1996, then picked up repeatedly and posted and reposted, with and without authorization, by a wide variety of Netizens, intent on linking it to their own respective interests and causes. Twenty-six years before CONJURELLA would link our family to the JFK assassination as our alleged cousin, Howard Leslie Brennan, with his testimony before the Warren Commission, never could.
This was 1970: I hated the Vietnam war, hated the draft, loved the peace movement, loved the peace demonstrators and the love-ins, loved the beads and the beards and the flower children. But I feared the psychedelic drugs, and I feared the Communists; maybe, just maybe, I even feared the "Communist conspiracy" I had been told so much about, since boyhood. This was 1970: it had been a scant three years since I had resigned, after a little over a year, from the Port Huron, Michigan chapter of the John Birch Society (I had a membership card; was it Chapter 308? - I don't remember anymore), headed by locaal right-wing dentist, E. James Shay. I had joined in late 1965, at the invitation of Thaddeus B. Vance, who, like my late father, sat on the St. Clair County Board of Education. My parents were William James Brennan and paperback book author Alice Brennan, both Michigan school board officials and tax opponents. My late mother had begun this process when, in the early 1950s, she took the position of Secretary (and CEO) of the Swamp School District, Kenockee Township School District #4, one of the last K-8, kindergarten through eighth grade, school districts in the state. Soon, my late father had a similar position of authority on the St. Clair County Board of Education, and the two of them set off hand in hand to keep property taxes down, and the one-room little red schoolhouses open for as long as the voters would put up with it. Inevitably, they attracted the attention of the 1950s ultra-right in that regard, and soon we were all deluged with pamphlets from prolific McCarthyites coast to coast.
I had begun school in kindergarten at Swamp School in September of 1953, at age 5. But, I suppose, partly because I could already read and write, and partly because my mother was her boss, my teacher, Miss Nolan, advanced me at once to the first grade, still at the age of 5. Hence, I entered high school at the tender age of 13. The Swamp School was a one-room building on a gravel road, technically in Emmett, Michigan. Traditionally, our high-school students, after graduating from the eighth grade, attended school in neighboring Yale, Michigan. But by the time 1961 had rolled around, and I had graduated grade school, the Yale high school district was demanding that we annex before they would take our high school students. For that, the Swamp School would be closed, taxes would go sky high, and our children would henceforth attend grade school in Yale. My parents would have none of it, and clearly, they were in a political position to make deals. So, deals they made. It was arranged that a local farm couple, Jim and Mary O'Neill, would drive the handful of high-school students that the Swamp School produced each year, north on M-19, through Yale, to Peck High School in Sanilac County, later to become infamous as the home of convicted Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh.
Before long, the 13 year old high schooler version of T. Casey Brennan was developing his own independent personality and interests, sort of, and those interests included comic book collecting, and disseminating right-wing propaganda for the host of ultraconservative groups which had expressed support for my parents positions as property tax foes.
So my pile of special things included pamphlets from the John Birch Society (as headed by Robert Welch), the Cinema Educational Guild (by Myron Fagan, who claimed credit for providing the Dies Committee with the names of Hollywood Communists, though popular history would later, inaccurately, assign this role to Senator Joe McCarthy, who only investigated alleged Communists in government, not Hollywood), the Conservative Society of America (from Kent and Phoebe Courtney), the Christian Crusade (from Billy James Hargis, smeared in the 1980s as a homosexual lover to some of his followers, though inexplicably, I am told he has no recollection that these charges were ever made against him), the 20th Century Reformation Hour (from Carl McIntyre, who, much to my chagrin, became an establishment-sanctioned spokesman for the pro-Vietnam hawks during the Nixon Administration), and the Christian Anticommunism Crusade (from Dr. Fred G. Schwartz, whose New Orleans office shared a building with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee)...with early prototypes of comic book fanzines such as ALTER-EGO, THE COMIC READER, THE KOMIX, and THE ROCKET'S BLAST-COMICOLLECTOR.
Still, I had resisted actual membership in these right-wing groups until my graduation from Peck High School in 1965. Then, in the fall of that year, at the invitation of St. Clair County Board of Education member Thaddeus B. Vance, I attended an introductory meeting of the Birchers at something called The Round Building, on Pine Grove Avenue, in Port Huron, Michigan. A man named Robert Lowry, who held the office of Coordinator with the John Birch Society, briefed us on our responsibilities as Birchers-to-be. I joined, and stayed until 1967. And it was with this background, I proceeded, at the invitation of Larry B., of 30 Hayden Hall, East Quad Residential College, to meet with him, his cronies, and the now semi-famous Naomi Schechter, Ph.d, now, in the year 2000, with the activist group, PSYCHOLOGISTS FOR SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY. In thirty years, I would set down the plans for an unauthorized article on Naomi. But not yet. This was 1970.
I had met Larry B. in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, shortly after my twenty-second birthday, at a campground, with my parents. Actually, my dad had met him first. My dad had attended school at the University of Michigan in the 1920s, but never graduated. Though he had no sympathy for the campus left, he had, I suppose, a sense of nostalgia about Ann Arbor, as most ex-Ann Arborites do.
Larry B. had introduced himself to my dad as an Ann Arborite, and that, to my dad, had been sufficient to offset the stigma of the campus activism which Larry advocated. Larry told stories of Baba Ram Das, the White Panther Party, the Students for a Democratic Society, and one of his teachers, Naomi Schechter, closely associated, he said, with the campus left, and then working on her Ph.d thesis. And he invited me to come to Ann Arbor, to stay in East Quad.
So this was 1970: this was T. Casey Brennan, now on a bus bound for Ann Arbor, intent on imposing his invited, but unwanted, presence on Ann Arbor's campus left.
The day before I left, I had watched the movie WOODSTOCK, at Port Huron's Family Theater on Military Street. I was prepared. These campus left guys were great, I decided.
I had taken the bus from Port Huron to Detroit, and changed buses in Detroit for Ann Arbor. I have a beard now, anathema in my ancestral home of Avoca, Michigan, and I am glad to be in Detroit, where I won't be hassled for having it. From the bus, I flash the peace sign to a black cab driver. He returns it. I'm part of the movement, man.
Larry B. has advised me to disembark at the Michigan Union, a scheduled stop of the Greyhound on which I ride. Had I seen the Greyhound Station on Huron Street first, with it's standard clientele of drunks and beggars, I may have received a different impression of Ann Arbor. I was later to work at the Huron Street Greyhound station, from November 1973 till March 1974, when I moved here, as had been my intent, even then. The Greyhound Station had been managed, in those days, by Red Simpson. He had two sons, John and George. George, they said, had disappeared for about a year, and returned, with a sex change operation, as "Gail" Simpson. The bus drivers had been mortified, always referring to Gail as "He...she...it" in the course of a conversation.
But this is 1970: I am not to see the Greyhound station yet, nor will I actually move to Ann Arbor for another three years. Just before the Michigan Union bus stop, I see Larry B. walking on the street. I wave to him, but he does not see me. So I proceed, on his direction, through Ann Arbor's tumultuous diag of 1970, bound for East Quad. The "Tent City" protest, in which protesters pitched pup tents on the diag, is in full swing. Soon, police will sweep it away, on the advice that a hepatitis carrier has spread disease throughout the community.
I arrive at 30 Hayden Hall, East Quadrangle Residential College, but Larry is not there. Soon he arrives, beaming. He is, he says, delighted that I have accepted his invitation.
His letters have told me much about the now semi-famous Naomi Schechter. A Jewish girl whose parents, he said, were both registered Communists; an activist, a psychology teacher, highly intelligent, but with severe acne. Some years later, she will undergo facial surgery to correct the problem.
He had made it clear in his letters that she wanted to meet me. I had envisioned a romance. Boys will be boys. I had envisioned myself, T. Casey Brennan, fledgling comic book writer for CREEPY and EERIE, with my own Joan Baez, whose parents were both registered Communists, leading the campus leftists to victory over the supporters of the Vietnam war, and my very recent, former friends, the John Birch Society. But that was not to be. Some time between August of 1970, when Larry B. had invited me to East Quad at the Upper Peninsula campground, and October 1970, when I actually made the journey, Larry had relayed the bad news: Naomi had taken on a live-in lover at her home on Ellsworth Road in Ypsilanti, where I was to stay, briefly, intermittently, with my stays at 30 Hayden Hall, East Quad. Larry described him as "a silk-screener named Joe". Joe had an Italian surname; I don't remember it. He was, as I recall, one of the early directors of Ozone House, a still existing Ann Arbor group which supplies teen-age runaways with food, clothing, and anti-drug pamphlets. Joe alleged that his uncle had been murdered by the Mafia. Larry alleged that Joe was one of the biggest drug dealers in Washtenaw County, but, he said, just marijuana and hashish.
Despite all that, Larry B., and his room-mate, Dave, determined that my stay at East Quad should include my first experience with that staple diet of campus demonstrators, marijuana.
So, that night at East Quad, I smoked marijuana for the first time.
I smoke some that night, and the following morning, then wander around the campus area of South University, determined that I have now incurred permanent brain damage from it. In addition to my comic scripts for CREEPY and EERIE, I have also written some short stories for a magazine called LISTEN, edited by Francis A. Soper and Twyla Schlotthauer. My checks say Narcotics Education, Inc., but it is really a vehicle of the Seventh Day Adventist Church in Washington, D.C. They are anti-drug, anti-cigarettes, anti-meat-eating, anti-everything. Later, in the mid-1970s, when I am living at Xanadu Co-op on 1811 Washtenaw, marijuana salesmen will call them and tell them that I have been "caught" smoking marijuana (which they have sold me), as part of an on-going attempt by the campus left to sabotage my career. Undaunted, I write a pro-vegetarian story called "I Love Meat", a satire more derived from my VAMPIRELLA stories than anything else (see Warren Publishing's VAMPIRELLA magazines #s 5, 17-21, and 109, and Harris Comics VAMPIRELLA OF DRAKULON #1-3, reprinted in 1996, and the trade paperback, VAMPIRELLA: TRANSCENDING TIME & SPACE, co-authored with Steve Englehart). It's about a literal meat-vampire, a meat-addict: Soper rejects it, but it ends up published in 1977 issues of VEGETARIAN TIMES and a short-lived HIGH TIMES imitator called FLASH (no relation to the DC comic of the same name), in the latter case, accompanied by an illustration from legendary underground comic artist, Robert Williams. A quote from the story, beginning "Poor animals..." has now been picked up by vegetarian activists on the Internet world-wide...astute Net-searchers will find it posted widely on the Net and Usenet, listing me with the greatest philosophers of history. What's more, Soper later forgave me for being "caught" by the Xanadu marijuana peddlers, and published my publicity stunt essays about being an award winning comic book writer wanting to take smoking out of comic books in his early 1980s companion to LISTEN, a newsletter called SMOKE SIGNALS: the result being that the articles were entered into CONGRESSIONAL RECORD - SENATE, Sept. 28, 1982, Vol. 128, No. 131, page S12435, and commented upon in the U.N. World Health Organization magazine from Geneva, WORLD HEALTH, October 1983, page 30, and January-February 1986, page 9, issues; and THAT culminating in a Proclamation, dated December 22, 1989, carrying the Great Seal of the State of Arkansas, and the signatures of then-Governor Bill Clinton and his Secretary of State, designating January 1990 as T. CASEY BRENNAN MONTH in the State of Arkansas. All because of my association with Francis A. Soper, whom I then believed.
So I sit with a girl I just met, by a campus building in Ann Arbor, the second day of my trip, and tell her she must never smoke marijuana. It causes permanent brain damage, I tell her. Amusedly, she agrees, and promises. I go on to say, I may contact LISTEN magazine, and see if they can arrange some kind of speaking tour. Or, maybe, I'm thinking, the John Birchers, but I don't tell her that.
That part is secret, must be, cannot be told in my quest to woo the campus left of Ann Arbor.
Soon, we meet Naomi and Joe. I am to stay there for a few days, as per our agreement. The house is on Ellsworth Road, Ypsilanti.
Joe produces two forms of hashish, Pakistani and Nepalese, he says. Naomi says they are afraid to smoke the Nepalese hashish: "It's too intense," she says. Later, Joe takes me to his silk screen shop, which he owns. I think it's called The Silk Screen Shop. He tells me that the form of printing called silk-screening produces, not just t-shirts with cartoons on them, but also the illustrations that graced 1970-style pin-ball machines.
Naomi is then working on her Ph.d. thesis. She gives me a battery of tests, for practice, she says, including the standard Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory test, as well as something she has invented, using the Rider deck of Tarot cards, as designed by Arthur Edward Waite, much preferred by hippies of that era. Interestingly, in a classic anachronism, the early 1970s television program KUNG FU, starring David Carradine as a pseudo-Chinese Shaolin priest, used the Rider deck in an episode set in the 1860s, wielded by his guest-star father, one-time Dracula portrayer, John Carradine, in spite of the fact that the Rider deck was not produced until the 1920s.
I ask Naomi about the police, "the pligs, myan", as we called them then.
"They don't come out here unless we call them," she says.
I take Naomi's tests, then smoke the Nepalese hash that she has recommended against. I have a dream about a world covered with green foliage, with men with green helmets walking about in it, then go outside, thinking I am going to throw up. Joe comes out, offering sympathy, but in a moment, I am okay.
I take a ride with Naomi in her jalopy. As we pull out of driveways, I watch, repeatedly, for oncoming traffic. Naomi spots me doing this, and curses me.
"I thought men were supposed to help girls drive!" I say.
"Well," Naomi says, "You've been improperly trained."
I meet Naomi's friends.
One is a man named Tom. He says he owns a health food something-or-other on Liberty Street. He has fluffy curly hair, but no mustache or beard. Joe has a mustache.
One day, we wake up and Tom is annoyed by buzzing flies sticking to the fly paper in Naomi's living room. He applies his lit cigarette lighter.
"Better that they die that way, than slowly," Tom says.
Another is a traveller from England, a man with his long hair in a bun, like the old ladies I had known in my boyhood in Avoca, Michigan.
He tries to be friendly, but I see him as one of those members of the Communist conspiracy the John Birchers have told me about. He tells me of his efforts to organize the cockneys in England, but, he says, he is thwarted. He says they admire the upper-class English accent.
Naomi takes me aside later and says: "We don't know what he does. He may kill people."
Another is a pretty girl who brings a box of slides, which she presents to me and Joe. She says, "There is a picture of me in there..."
She giggles.
"Well," she says, "I don't know..." Then she giggles some more.
She leaves. Joe and I light joints, and set to work, examining the box of a thousand slides, one by one, looking for the implied nude picture of the girl who has just left. One by one, we examine each boring vacation slide, shake our heads, and move on. It just isn't there. We have been tricked.
I meet Larry B.'s friends.
Larry takes me to the Halfway Inn, in East Quad. He points out a student with a picture of a clenched fist on the back of his denim jacket.
Larry B. says, "Casey, you see that guy? He was arrested at a demonstration for throwing a rock at a cop. And he didn't do it!"
Larry also points out an East Quad drug dealer called Strike.
"Strike's a prick," says Larry B., "Strike works directly under Joe."
Later, Strike, a student with longish hair, a beard, and a furtive look, tells me in a hallway: "Everybody here is out to get me."
And, through Strike, I have had my first glimpse of the apolitical vendettas of Ann Arbor's campus left, so intent on victimizing their own.
Later, Naomi tells me she may not complete her Ph.d thesis. I embark on a campaign of persuasion, conceiving various approaches for talking her into it. It will be, she says, if she finishes it, a treatise on the Tarot cards and psychology. Following repeated phone calls along this line, I finally conceive of this:
"Maybe girls shouldn't have Ph.d's," I say.
"That does it," she says, "I'm going to do it."
And she did. And now she is a semi-famous activist with Psychologists for Social Responsibility, following in the footsteps of her registered Communist parents; her friend Larry B. (and his hero, Baba Ram Das); her friend Tom, who sold health food and burned flies with his lighter; her friend with his hair in bun who may have killed people; and her boyfriend Joe, who ran a silk-screen shop and Ozone House, and whose uncle was killed by the Mafia.
This was the memory that lurked within:
Before Naomi, Joe, and Larry B. giving me marijuana and hashish in 1970, there had been J.H. Earnshaw giving me LSD in the late 1950s. We had met him through David Ferrie, who died during the Garrison investigation. Menacingly, Earnshaw had claimed association with the CIA's illegal MK-ULTRA experimentation program, begun in 1953, and investigated by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, before a Senate Committee, in 1977. My dad's interests had included not merely school taxes and right-wing politics, but also hypnosis, which was Earnshaw's specialty. Earnshaw, an Osteopathic physician in Port Hope, Michigan, reportedly died in 1984, though he continued to be listed in the American Osteopathic Association Yearbook long after that. On November 22, 1963, Earnshaw and David Ferrie kidnapped me from the Yale, Michigan airport, with the assistance of my late father, and forced me to initiate the firing from the Texas School Book Depository Building in Dallas. That was what I wrote about in "Conjurella". Lee was innocent. I was not.
And this was the last memory of Naomi, not the LAST memory, but the memory that lingered, the way the memory of my single shot in Dallas, before I collapsed, before David Ferrie assumed command of the weapon and resumed firing, could not.
Naomi shows me a crystal by her window, that creates flickering lights and colors. It hangs by the couch on which I sleep; I do not sleep with her, the presence of Joe has seen to that. But in the morning on that day, whatever day it was, Naomi comes to awaken me.
She stands over me in the flickering light of the crystal, as the effect of the Nepalese hash lingers on in my unaccustomed brain.
I watch as she tosses her head, leans from side to side, and strikes poses in the window light of morning.
In my fear of Nepalese hashish and Communist conspirators, in my apprehension of the vendetta against Strike, and the man with his hair in a bun, and Joe whose uncle was killed by the Mafia, and her Communist parents, I have almost forgotten how pretty she is. But now, her long curly hair glistens in the morning light, in the light of the crystal, and she fans it out like a veil, as she weaves and tosses.
"NAOMI!" I say, with awe. And I need say no more. She knows.
"That will last a long time," she says.
And it did.
END
(2 minutes of clearing the throat) Satanic Reds takes very seriously all allegations of this sort, even if these accounts appear in comic books, because, as the NKVD would say - all things are suspect.
(100 minutes of thunderous applause).
These 3 sites are by, respectively, Kenneth Rahn, Richard Vizzutti, and Rob Sterling, all known, respected JFK researchers.
http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/Conspiracy_theories/Brennan--Conjurella/Brennan.html
http://www.angelfire.com/me/carcano
http://www.konformist.com/mkkafe/tcasey/tcasey.htm
The avalard & inri sites on the list below are both JFK oriented -- BUT the people who put them up are essentially comic book/monster movie people who have taken to my JFK statements.