Some Rebels From the ‘60s Reunite and Renew Their Old School Ties

To students attending Chadwick School in 1963, counterculture meant smoking a cigarette or sneaking off the private school’s Palos Verdes Peninsula campus.

Or launching an alternative newspaper called The Sardine, which was banned after it criticized the administration of Chadwick--then a boarding school--for not letting students wear white Levis.

The paper’s editor was Jann Wenner, a senior who later would launch another alternative publication, Rolling Stone.

“The Sardine was on the cusp of the ‘60s,” said Wenner, 47, now head of a publishing empire estimated to be worth at least $150 million. “I suppose you could trace some of the beginnings of the times to that. It was sort of the prototypical underground newspaper, and the administration didn’t like it.”

Wenner returned to Chadwick for his 30th reunion last weekend along with 23 other classmates--about half their graduating class. Most of the alumni--many now lawyers, doctors and artists--hadn’t seen each other since they got their diplomas. But they had no trouble remembering Wenner and others who challenged authority.

Those challenges were tame by today’s standards, but a big deal in those days.

“We were kind of a rebellious class,” Wenner said. “I got called before the school disciplinary committee and was personally blamed for the loss of school spirit in senior year because I was influencing the senior boys dorm, and that influenced the rest of the class, and the rest of the class influenced the school. Then I would fight them on the subject.”

The Sardine offered such news as who got asked to the school dance, or who won the school elections. The paper’s name was a play on the nautical monikers given the yearbook (The Dolphin) and sports teams (The Mariners).

“They didn’t think it was funny when we poked fun at school institutions,” Wenner said.

The paper was officially banned after three issues, but not before it reported on the victory of the Progressive Party, the first student slate of candidates ever to run in campus elections at Chadwick. One of those on the three-candidate slate was Wenner.

“We promoted challenging of the Old Guard; we wanted change, and this staid student body bought it,” said Ed Lennard, a Progressive Party supporter and now a prescription drug benefit manager in Washington. “It was clearly conservative versus New-Age liberalism.”

That was big news for a school in which “a lot of” students, Wenner said, had parents who were members of the John Birch Society.

The Progressive Party’s platform: coffee privileges for seniors and a bulletin board for students. Both were granted.

Wenner’s feisty attitude was reflected in the notes next to his yearbook photo: “fiery young intellectual or damp young vegetable” and “greatness knows itself.”

But then, Wenner was also editor of the yearbook.

“It’s surprising how much people stuck to the path that they were already on,” Lennard said. “They look just the same. A little older, but just the same. The personalities are just the same.”

During a campus tour for last weekend’s reunion, a guide proudly pointed to a chalk outline of a body on a campus walkway. The figure was drawn by student members of Amnesty International.

“We would have been expelled if we did that!” Wenner shouted.

Not that Wenner’s class was all that politically aware. Many classmates recalled a climate of innocence that only dissipated after John F. Kennedy’s assassination and the war in Vietnam.

“I remember that the fact that you couldn’t take a date to a dance who was not a student was much more significant than the Cuban Missile Crisis,” said Sheila Prell Sonenshine, an associate justice on the state Court of Appeal. “Or it was how close students could dance to a Johnny Mathis song.”

Wenner and Lennard ditched part of last weekend’s campus tour for a visit to their senior-year dorm (now faculty housing), which he and about half a dozen other boarders treated like a frat house.

“This is where we had our counterintelligence operation,” said Wenner, opening up a vent to a below-ground room where he would sneak cigarettes.

After graduating from Chadwick, Wenner and several other classmates went to UC-Berkeley. But he dropped out when he started Rolling Stone, which became a leading voice of 1960s culture.

And Rolling Stone still reflects Wenner’s Chadwick experience. To this day, it features a column called Random Notes and the motto “All the News that Fits.” Both came from The Sardine.