Maverick Origins: What’s in a Name?

Although the slide toward autocracy has been my recent focus, I’m also revising and releasing selections from Witness to the Fall, a collection of relevant previously published work — autobiographical reminiscences, as well as essays published in recent years. The introduction is below, followed by links to several chapters.

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I’ve been publicly sharing research and my views on local, national and global issues for more than half a century. At first in a high school paper and university magazine, then professionally in newspapers, magazines and online. My earliest regular column, for a Vermont daily, appeared in 1969 in the midst of the Vietnam war and cultural revolution of that era. I called it “Polarities in Our Time.”

About nine years later, when an “alternative” weekly was launched in Burlington, I tried again in a column called “Immediate Release.” It leaned more toward reportage — enterprise journalism and interviews — but continued to reflect subjects of personal interest, regardless of whether they were attracting public attention at the time. When I became editor of that paper, I dropped the column but wrote editorials weekly.

In 1983, after leaving the Vermont Vanguard Press, I syndicated a column that appeared in several newspapers — until taking a break, and an extended journey across the country and through Mexico. It was time to reflect and rethink my assumptions. 

More than a decade passed until I wrote an ongoing column again. The opportunity emerged when I returned to Vermont after several years in New Mexico and California, plus travels and life in Denmark and Germany. This time it was for another weekly. I called the reports “Maverick Chronicles.”

The name was chosen for several reasons. In 1985, I’d launched Maverick Bookstore and Gallery, which became a lively oasis in Burlington’s Old North End for several years during the Sanders era. The name felt appropriate, philosophically and also because the Lloyds, my son’s family on Robin Lloyd’s side, were actually related to the Maverick clan in Texas. 

Samuel Maverick was a pioneer with a big personality and the origin of the modern usage of the word. The official story is that he won a ranch in a card game and afterward declined to brand his steers. Unbranded steers became known around San Antonio as mavericks.

The TV show Maverick was pure fiction, but Brett Maverick was a cheeky anti-hero and personal favorite in my youth. There was also a real and large, real Maverick clan. Lola Maverick married Robin’s grandfather, who became famous briefly as a so-called “Communist millionaire.” Lola helped organize the Ford Peace Ship before World War I and co-founded the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Some of their children were activists as well, including Robin’s dad Bill. I would eventually become editor of Toward Freedom, the publication he founded in 1952.

 

So, when I thought about launching an independent business, as well as continuing my journalism and peace work, using Maverick to help define it felt apt. On the first anniversary of the bookstore, a group of modern Texas Mavericks sent a ceramic calf as a gift.  Since running the bookstore, which later relocated downtown and eventually merged with the local peace center’s book business, I have used it as a handle and publishing imprint. In 1997, “Maverick Chronicles” began a two year run as a weekly column in The Vermont Times, a weekly successor to The Vermont Vanguard Press. 

In the decades since then, I’ve written hundreds of essays for a variety of outlets, online and in print. You can find many of them on websites like the Center for Global Research, Toward Freedom, Truthout, VTDigger, ZNetwork, Muckrack and UPI. Books are available from Amazon. Now, along with the current series of posts released on Substack, I’m reviving Maverick Chronicles as a kicker and framework one more time.

A Writer’s Life

Even back in grade school, I felt the urge to communicate. Art and music came easily enough, but writing was irresistible. It felt like a compulsion. Over time, through economic and social necessity, I added the roles of editor and manager to the mix, and at times agent of change. Taking shape gradually, my goal was responsible advocacy, informed by a search for truth and a commitment to social justice and right livelihood. Those efforts, beliefs, commitments, and aspirations led to memorable encounters, journeys and insights I try to share — before I forget.

As Bill Maher once said, “With age comes wisdom, but only if you can remember it.”

I started writing stories at about 10, mostly short plays and satirical skits, performed in classes at holidays or special events. Next, as editor of The Lance, the student paper at Holy Cross High School, I took an early shot at opinion writing. Before graduating, reviews were appearing in a Long Island daily. At Syracuse University there was some newswriting and a supplement for the Daily Orange, plus essays and satire for Vintage, the campus magazine I designed and edited. 

In Bennington, still 21, it was a stretch to manage the daily newspaper’s darkroom and write everything from accidents to features on a deadline. But ultimately the Bennington Banner was a priceless training opportunity, time to get past any writer’s block.

After that on-the-job training, also an invaluable introduction to Vermont life, I was hired by Bennington College, where I mostly wrote press releases and covered promotional events, but also edited a quarterly, and experienced professional alienation for the first time. Luckily, the job didn’t last long and was followed by a mentally healthy shift into counseling and public service. Before long, however, the management at Champlain Work and Training Programs figured out that I could also write grants, which led to consulting work with school systems. Eventually, I wrote a federal grant for myself, which led to a campus office and graduate degree at the University of Vermont.

By 1975, I was teaching journalism and planning skills at the fledgling Burlington College, and running a local used bookstore called The Frayed Page with other members of a collective. The store was an organizing center for the growing anti-nuclear movement and spun off a magazine, culminating in a people’s history of the state. That eventually grew into Restless Spirits & Popular Movements: A Vermont History. I also freelanced for news services, magazines and community papers until a group of UVM grads launched two alternative weeklies in one year. The second presented a golden opportunity to use much of what I had learned about journalism and Vermont so far.

During my years with the Vanguard Press, I produced more than 50 cover stories and hundreds of news stories and features. For the first time since college I could experiment with New Journalism and test boundaries, trying anything the publishers allowed, writing first drafts of stories that would stay with me, developing and evolving for years. I also exposed public and private misdeeds, and interviewed everyone from prisoners and protesters to presidential wannabes.

Beyond that, I was part of a movement that transformed Burlington, produced a new Vermont political party, and launched the career of Bernie Sanders. That story was retold in two books, The People’s Republic and Managing Chaos. For decades my work has included an eclectic mixture of freelance assignments and investigations, trips, trials and profiles, syndicated columns, study guides, documentary scripts, candidate speeches, ad campaigns, position papers, conference addresses, radio broadcasts, legislative testimony, quarterly and annual reports, and grants for just causes from immigrant rights to nuclear sanity and environmental justice. Persuasive communication was part of almost every job.

Eventually, there were also 15 books, which rarely paid that well. My favorite is Spirits of Desire, a paranormal mystery set in the 1870s. In contrast, ghost writing was lucrative, though sometimes frustrating. After spending months looking deeply into a subject, despite being Buddhist it was tough to stay unattached when someone else took the credit.

Since February I’ve been thinking and writing about the slide toward an American-style autocracy. Going forward, some essays will continue to look at current events, but there will also be selections from Witness to the Fall, a collection of previously published work for periodicals and websites. I’ll share autobiographical reminiscences from the 1970s and 1980s, and articles developed and published during the last 15 years.

New essays on current events will be posted as the struggle to preserve democracy and human rights continues.

Witness to the Fall — Chapters

Unstuck in Time: When “The Plan” Blew Up

Bennington, Vonnegut and a Campus Breakdown

Consciousness & Conscience: Finding Right Livelihood

Lessons of Buddhism, Bernie and Public Service

The Rise of the Electronic Messiah, Part One

The Rise of the Electronic Messiah, Part Two

Democratic Distemper: Carter and the Trilateral Commission

Coming Up: Conspiracies and Reagan Myths

I hope you’ll subscribe (It’s currently free!) and stay in touch. 

https://mavmedia.substack.com/

Back in the Day: Outsider in a Strange Land

If it was a film, my childhood might look like the opening of The Godfather, that idyllic scene when the Italian extended family celebrates a marriage. The facade is soon shattered, but even a young outsider could feel safe for a while. It was like a colorful garden party just before a storm.

By Greg Guma

At six I was just another skinny, olive-skinned kid in the Big Apple, one of eight million stories in a sprawling mega-city, outgoing, carefree and basically secure — for a while. Then grandpa Bruno had a heart attack and died unexpectedly, and Harriet, whom mom called my “governess” and was responsible for my daily life, decided to retire — just as my baby sister was on the way. 

It was confusing. The world I had taken for granted was changing fast and I didn't understand.

A year later, I became seriously ill. It was mysterious, maybe a heart murmur, rheumatic fever or some other inflammation, never precisely diagnosed. Our family doctor nevertheless prescribed daily doses of penicillin for the next ten years. Home visits may have been overrated. 

Whatever the actual problem, getting sick changed my life. Mostly alone for months in my room, drawing and reading, discovering how to nurture myself in isolation, I became more introverted. The experience reinforced a sense of difference, but also helped me to develop inner strength in the face of loss, pain and alienation. I emerged with confidence, less needy, more self-sufficient, but also more separate from other kids.

Feeling like an outsider, my “philosophy” became the naive assertion that whatever most people did or liked couldn’t be much good. If all the kids drank Coke and chewed gum, I was damned if I was going to follow along. I declined to join the "in crowd," even though they seemed willing to accept me. Instead, I gravitated to other outsiders, weird kids with special gifts and unusual ideas. 

Deep into psycho-dramas filled with heroic deeds and supernatural feats, I spent much of my time on the planet of unlimited possibilities, a benign "twilight zone" in which a child could fly and anything was possible. I dreamed of Arabian nights and journeys on the high seas, sailing into the sunset, convinced that I could accomplish amazing things, even remake myself as I wished to be.

But harsh realities couldn’t be avoided forever, and as I approached 13 they closed in with a vengeance. Yet the outsider feeling stuck, along with visions and vivid dreams set down in cartoon recollections, fantasies of travel to other worlds, and the sense of their power to transform others and myself.

Bill, Olga, Andrea and Gregory Guma in the mid-1950s.

On a gray, threatening morning in September 1960 I took the bus for my first day with the Brothers of the Holy Cross. Along the route, up tree-lined Bayside Avenue, I passed the junior high where I'd spent the past two years, learning how to question everything and put my fantasies on paper in short stories, illustrations, and school plays. Friends were returning for their third and last year at one of the city's best public schools. But, as my parents ominously put it, I was off to spend four years “with my own kind.”

       The upperclassmen had been in this thing, Catholic education, for years already. Even most of the freshmen knew each other from previous incarceration at parochial elementary schools around the county. They shared a common understanding of the experience. I had no idea what it was about.

But that first day I learned several lessons about how it would be. In English class, the teacher quickly announced that this year, "You're going to learn how to read, or you're going to learn how to bleed." It wasn't just a figure of speech. He split his time between parsing sentences and coaching sports, and used the same techniques to handle both assignments. 

If you couldn't handle a question, the penalty was public humiliation. If you spoke out of turn or didn't pay attention, he’d sit on your desk and punch you in the forehead. He called that The Thumper.

In history class, the Irish orator behind the desk taught mainly by delivering monotone readings from an out-of-date textbook. About halfway through the first class I got confused about a point and raised my hand. He stared as if I'd questioned whether the Pope is Catholic. 

"What's that?" he asked, nodding at my up-raised palm.

"My hand," I said, "I have a question."

He smiled and patiently explained. "No, you don't ask questions here. I ask the questions, and sometimes I call on you."

There was also Latin, math, physical education, plus the daily dose of religion. Mercifully, by early afternoon the gray sky opened up full blast and poured down enough rain to flood the streets and knock out the electricity. I considered it an "act of God," a reprieve from the repression and tedium ahead.

Herding us into the auditorium, the brothers announced that we would be transported home as soon as they figured out how to do it. Something about wind and blocked roadways. But the longer we waited, the more difficult the kids became. These teenagers, so disciplined in class, suddenly sensed their power as a mob. I imagined them overrunning their keepers and declaring a pointless rebellion. On the other hand, I thought the Irish and Italians cliques were just as likely to declare war on each other. But this was projection, and I also wondered whether I was the only one hoping for a massive bolt of lightning to torch the place.

When they finally let us leave it was well after 3 p.m. The storm had scuttled classes but kept us late. It was almost dark when I reached home – exhausted, angry, and acquainted with "my own kind." That night I prayed, a bit skeptically, that I'd never have to see them again.

Party time in the basement with Eddie Hodges, Jack DeMasi and our GBS crew.
Our friendship began with alphabetical class seating: G came right before H.  
He’d played Huckleberry Finn on film and was about to be a pop star. 

Even before high school I was a bit offbeat for a New Yorker. No team spirit, not much urban bluster. Fun for me was role playing, exploring ideas and making art. I largely ignored what was popular and gravitated toward the unusual. But the sense of being different was mild before the alienation I experienced in Catholic high school. 

The norm was absolute obedience and orthodox piety. Gone were the public junior high art classes and supportive teachers who had nurtured my creativity. The attractive closet socialist who opened my eyes to politics and encouraged my urge to write was replaced by an English teacher who thought sensitivity was an illness.

If it was a film, my early childhood would be like the opening moments of The Godfather, that idyllic scene when the Italian extended family celebrates a marriage. Children frolic and parents dote, comfortable in their insulated world. But in my family the facade is eventually shattered by divorce, nervous breakdowns, drug addiction, and premature deaths. 

Still, even an outsider could feel safe for a while. It was like a colorful garden party just before a storm.

High school was a very different scenario. Now I felt like a prisoner, struggling to stay sane and undamaged inside a monastery or fortress. A righteous alcatraz. In movie terms, I imagined myself as the Birdman of Bayside, an inmate clinging to hope and looking for escape from a brutal world. 

After a few months, I discovered a doorway to relative safety. The school’s points of pride were the accomplishments of its athletic teams and forensic society. I wasn’t sporty but knew how to handle myself with an audience. I’d been doing it since my first TV appearance, followed by dance and piano lessons. Forensics included several forms of public speaking, from dramatic interpretation to debate. My plan was to develop some performance abilities through Catholic competition. But even that took a while.

Dramatic presentations were a privilege; the dues included serving the school as a form of cannon fodder in extemporaneous speaking contests. It worked like this: boys from various schools would gather in a library around a fishbowl filled with slips of paper. Each slip listed a topic, most of them about current political events. Each of us would draw three slips, then choose one as the subject for a five minute presentation. We had about 30 minutes to prepare and then deliver an articulate analysis with only an index card as reference. Scores were based on organization, diction, posture, quality of the arguments, and remaining within the time limit. Beyond winning, the school’s goal was to find out who could handle the pressure.

I never enjoyed the experience, but did have a knack for it. Apparently, I knew how to quickly organize my thoughts and present them effectively. In time I became a strong competitor and the Brothers of the Holy Cross took note. I graduated to the debate team, Unlike “extemp,” this involved extensive preparation on a limited number of topics chosen at the beginning of each school year. Teams would collect information and construct arguments over a period of months.

My usual position was second negative, the last to speak in the first half of a debate. After the affirmatives presented and defended their “resolve,” I would review everything and try to demolish their case. Practice taught me how to undermine almost any argument. Eventually, it became part of my world view. Rip down, tear and destroy, as I put it with a smile. 

“But what do you put in its place?” Asked a friend. “That’s not my problem,” I replied. Short-sighted but it was meant to be ironic.

Debate also challenged the idea that there was something called truth. In some debates, that was reinforced by the practice of switching sides from one round to another. The negatives would take the affirmative role, defending the position they had just derided. For me, an underlying message was that winning the argument was more important than intellectual honesty. It took years to overcome the cynicism that debate performance implicitly encouraged.

By age 16 I was a dangerous opponent who could sense the weak spot in most arguments, a skill that would later undermine some relationships. It was a struggle to overcome this impulse, to actively listen and empathize rather than rushing to make my own point. In time I developed a distrust of pure logic and appreciation of heartfelt emotion.

As a prisoner in Holy Cross, however, my ability was used as a weapon, at times to protect my soul. They had my body but my mind was still my own, and I decided to use it to expose the hypocrisy of my captors. In a sense, Catholic high school encouraged a subversive streak. It may have been dormant already, but institutional repression brought it to the surface.

If my keepers provided the tools, I would wreak havoc in their world of blind faith and paper-thin reason.

With Dad and my sister Andrea in 1963

In the summer of 1962 I met my first “serious” girlfriend on a beach in what was then called rural Huntington on Long Island. There was Leta speeding across the water in a motorboat, long hair flying in the wind. Her parents relaxing at their summer house with mine. I was wandering, upset that I’d been forced to accompany them on the trip from Queens.

When she finally came ashore I was immediately impressed by her defiance. She showed little respect for her parents’ rules or conventional behavior. I jumped aboard for a ride and we had a lively conversation about the pleasure of doing what you wanted. That evening, as our folks talked politics, we strolled along the beach until it became obvious where this was heading.

Plopping down behind a dune we gazed at the stars. Leta smiled and waited. I wasn’t sure what to do. I’d been on a few dates, but had little sexual experience. Desperate to make something happen, I eventually resorted to a joke.

“Kiss me, you fool.”

“No,” she replied. “You kiss me.”

I leaned over and took her in my arms, beginning a long embrace that slowly moved us down into the shelter of the dunes. It was a passion I had never experienced before. The night sky, the warm air, the sound of the surf, everything felt romantic. One kiss led to more and time seemed to stop.

It was a moment I never forgot. For years I struggled to recreate the feeling. Long after we broke up, we reunited one evening and returned to the same beach. By then I had more experience and hoped to mix that with my memory. But we had both changed. We kissed again, but it was impossible to improve on the original.

At 14, I thought I’d found the secret of life. By the end of the encounter we were completely infatuated. Without removing one item of clothing, we’d tasted real desire.

We only saw each other one more time over the summer months, a brief covert rendezvous arranged by a friend. But we wrote letters almost every day. And when summer ended, we continued a secret romance that took my mind away from debate and added a new word to my vocabulary — hedonism. I wasn’t clear about the definition but it seems to fit my mood. School days flew by, mere prologue to stolen moments under the wooden bridge near the bay. Concealed in our secret sanctuary, we would talk about a shared future between lingering kisses.

Our lives revolved around any form of contact. Forbidden by our parents to “go steady,” Leta urged us on. In the middle of the night we would creep into empty rooms and whisper over the phone. Sleep seemed unnecessary. In order to actually see each other, we enlisted friends as co-conspirators in elaborate schemes. 

“You want your life to be like a novel,” my friend Jack teased. 

“Or at least a good dust jacket blurb,” I replied.

My gang, my compadres — the guys I trusted in high school, the ones who watched my back and kept me in line — were Jack, Paul, John and Jim. In our hearts sometimes we were the Jets, a teenage posse strutting down Bell Boulevard in Bayside, rapping out lines from the opening song in West Side Story. We were also members of our own fraternity, Gamma Beta Sigma, otherwise known as GBS or Guinea Ballbusters Society, complete with initiations and an oath.

Not that we were tough. Our crib was a basement rec room, and Mrs. George Bernard Shaw — another GBS — was our mascot. An inside literary joke. Other than that, we were just normal, relatively innocent boys who went to confession on Saturday night (before going out to party), early Baby Boomers, and mostly Italian. 

Just before Christmas in 1963 our solidarity was tested in what became known as the necklace affair. By then I had been meeting secretly with Leta and talking with her late at night for months. One night we were finally discovered. The kitchen lights flashed on as I huddled on the floor, deep in conversation. My father burst in and grabbed the phone. Mon was right behind him, holding a necklace she had found in my room. The inscription read, “For my love.” 

“Who’s on the phone?” Dad demanded as I hung up.

“Paul,” I lied.

“And what’s this?” Mom followed, brandishing the evidence. She’d been through my drawers!

“I’m holding it for him.” It was all I could muster. They immediately called his house.

Awakened by his parents, Paul backed me up the best he could while half asleep. Our parents knew it was baloney, but there was no way to break us. We’d all seen The Great Escape, one of our favorite movies, and understood what it meant to be part of a team. Solidarity 101.

Later I learned that mom had been tailing me for weeks.

Unable to keep us apart, our parents reluctantly consented to our relationship. We could bring our romance out into the open — as long as it didn’t get “out of hand,” whatever that meant. But the infatuation couldn’t bear the light of day. We continued to date for months but the thrill was gone. By junior prom it was over. We attended together, but agreed that we’d reached the end. We said goodbye in rented clothes.

Graduation Day at Holy Cross in 1964; I’m the one looking back.

In my senior year, the student musical was The King and I. Desperate to play a role, a public, creative alternative to making obscure arguments in front of a few judges, I auditioned and won a supporting role as the king’s son. It included a song, some dialogue and death in Act Three. I was ecstatic. 

However, the debate team coach and the advisor for the school newspaper I edited, felt I was overextending myself and met at home with my parents. I had won the part in the play, but they wanted to veto that. Swayed by their warnings, mom and dad agreed. The struggle between my artistic urges and the plans of others had reached a new stage. My future was apparently being managed by a committee and I wasn’t on it. My performance in debates and as editor overruled what I wanted to do.

My response was gradual but defiant. I began to act out in classes, taunting teachers to punish me with weekend detention. Or a slap on the face. My response to that was to spur my classmates into childish rebellion. I openly mocked Catholicism's obscure canon laws and sought ways to puncture the system’s brittle facade. “If you can’t eat solid food before communion,” I would ask, “does a milk shake count?” I figured that my irreverence and transgressions would be overlooked whenever there were debates to be won. And I was often right. They could threaten, but hesitated to enforce. 

Afterward I would point out the unfairness to those who weren’t so lucky.

Around the same time I began planning my escape. From Catholics, my family, New York. A total break. They would try to hold me back, but I concealed my intentions until it was time to make the move. I would find a college far away and begin a personal reinvention.

Editors and staff of The Lance, 1964

— From Strange Enough to be True: Life / Stories

More Family History: The Basilicata Branch

Two Italian Stories: Bruno and Lorenzo