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Extracted Text (OCR)
“How could Columbus discover America,” he was asking the
audience, “when the Indians were already here”
In his dressing room between shows, Gregory took out his wallet
and showed me a tattered copy of his favorite poem, “If,” by Rudyard
Kipling. | laughed and he looked offended, until | explained that | was
laughing because it was also my favorite poem, and “the unforgiving
minute” was my favorite poetic phrase.
Gregory visited me on the lower east side of New York. The entire
side of one building on that block featured a fading advertisement for a
cleanser personified by the Gold Dust Twins, a pair of little Negro boys. It
had originally been painted right on the bricks.
When he saw it, he said, “They ought to take that whole wall and
preserve it in a museum somewhere.”
kok #
On a work-vacation in the Florida Keys with Abbie and Anita
Hoffman in December in 1967. | followed a neighborhood crow down the
road, then continued walking to town by myself to use the telephone. First
| called Gregory, since it was his city Chicago that we were planning to
invade the presidential convention in the 1968 summer. He told me that
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