Mourners Remember Rubin for His Courage and Dedication : Funeral: More than 200 attend services for co-founder of Yippies. Friends praise him for his enthusiasm for anti-war causes and his business acumen.

More than 200 friends from a lifetime that ranged from the ragged anti-war street demonstrations of the 1960s to the penthouse luxury of network marketing in the 1990s turned out in Culver City on Thursday to honor the memory of Jerry Rubin.

If Rubin--as described by several of the mourners--was “always in a hurry,” those who gathered to pay their final respects at Hillside Memorial cemetery were not. Their eulogies, which offered contrasts in style, lasted for more than two hours.

People such as Eldridge Cleaver, Stu Albert and Sally Kirkland fondly recalled the raucous demonstrations of the wild Yippie years while fellow health drink distributors from Rubin’s subsequent incarnation as a businessman extolled his virtues as a capitalist.

After a former lover and his former wife talked at length about their relationships with him, his most recent girlfriend took the microphone to describe hers.

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There were tears, and there was laughter. And when the talking was done, the pallbearers--among them fellow Chicago Seven defendant Tom Hayden, now a Democratic state senator from Santa Monica--carried Jerry Rubin’s body from the chapel and laid him to rest on a grassy, sun-drenched slope.

Rubin, 56, died of cardiac arrest late Monday at UCLA Medical Center, two weeks after he was struck by a car while jaywalking in front of his luxury Brentwood home on Wilshire Boulevard.

Thursday’s funeral came 25 years after the Chicago Seven trial that riveted the nation.

Rubin--who several years earlier had co-founded the rebellious Youth International Party, better known as the Yippies--and four other anti-war protesters, among them Hayden, were convicted of crossing state lines with intent to foment the rioting that took place at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Although their convictions were overturned, the protesters’ wild activities came to symbolize the civil disobedience of the 1960s.

Ironically, because of the anniversary, several of Rubin’s associates from those years--Yippie co-founder Paul Krassner and fellow Chicago defendants David Dellinger and Bobby Seale--were busy with commemorative activities in New York and unable to attend Thursday’s services. But fellow Yippie Stu Albert--whose associations with Rubin reached back to the student demonstrations at UC Berkeley--was there.

Albert told how--after being summoned to testify before the now infamous House Un-American Activities Committee--an uncowed Rubin showed up in the uniform of a soldier in the American Revolution.

“They threw him out,” Albert said. “He was probably the first person ever to be dragged out of a HUAC hearing, begging to testify.”

“Jerry taught me to stand up for what I believe in,” said Kirkland, an actress who appeared in such films as “The Sting,” “Private Benjamin” and ‘Anna” after working with Rubin in the Yippie cause. “He was my lover, he was my friend, he was my teacher, he was my revolutionary mentor.”

Kirkland said that in honor of Rubin’s campaign to get a hog elected president, she rode a pig in the nude in one of her movie scenes.

Cleaver, a former Black Panther party leader who served a prison term for attempted murder before joining the Black Muslim movement, called Rubin a “symbol for youth.

“I appreciated him,” Cleaver said. “I loved him.”

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The years after the Chicago Seven trial did nothing to curb Rubin’s enthusiasm and energy, but they did alter his orientation. He changed from Yippie to yuppie, and by 1980, the man who had once protested capitalism by dumping dollar bills on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange had joined the brokerage firm of John Muir & Co.

“He realized that America was the greatest country on earth,” said his former wife, Mimi Fleischman, who attended the funeral with their daughter, Juliette, 7, and son, Adam, 5. “He realized that capitalism is the greatest system on earth. He helped many, many people make money and have good lives.”

“He changed costumes, he changed rhetoric, but he never changed his heart,” Albert said.

Eventually, Rubin became an independent salesman for a Dallas-based firm--Life Extension International. The firm distributes products such as ‘Wow!” “Focus” and “Be Your Best’--beverage powders that are marketed as nutritional supplements.

“He was a force, a leader,” said Ron Caskey, a distributor for the firm. “He had a lot of ideas. He brought in Jack LaLanne. Jerry was one of the top three money-earners in the company.”

“Jerry always wanted to get there quicker,” said actress Tiffany Statner, who said Rubin asked her to marry him shortly before his accident.

“He was the love of my life,” she said. “He turned out to be my hero.”