X
    Categories: A & ECommunity & CultureVisual Arts

Once and Future Cosmic Aeroplane

You know that bit about not knowing history means that you’re doomed to repeat it? It somehow seems appropriate lately to offer a new generation a link to how Salt Lake City dealt with an off-the-rails American society in the olden days.

The Cosmic Aeroplane bookstore, born in June 1967, was a hive of counterculture, sedition, music, good times and a few books. You can read a little bit about it in an ancient Salt Lake magazine.

Mike Evans curates a blog that offers a very groovy window into those heady days and the close-knit tribe (including Ken Sanders, of course) that made Salt Lake an oasis of cool in a very strange land.

When Evans called for permission last week to post the SLMag article, I remembered an encounter I had with the Cosmic Aeroplane spirit in the mid-1980s when I was a reporter for the Deseret News (Yes, I actually worked for the DNews).

There had been a series of U.S. embassy bombings and a Utah legislator was outraged that Cosmic Aeroplane sold the Anarchist Cookbook (which included instructions for making bombs). I dropped by to confirm Cosmic had the book and asked the manager, the late Bruce Roberts, if he was going to remove it. (It was a classic “eek-a-mouse!” story). Roberts patiently explained the First Amendment to me. I took down a couple quotes and bought the book.

Sadly, I never asked the lawmaker why he was in the Cosmic Aeroplane in the first place.

Glen Warchol :
https://www.saltlakemagazine.com/future-cosmic-aeroplane/amp/
www.saltlakemagazine.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-39
79462
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:DKDOXRICCVMNUPJSCU2MTTU4ZVYYXVWP
<urn:uuid:c8904e5b-229f-4702-9fba-7f042d9e9851>
2018-09-18T18:21:35Z
52.54.128.0
text/html
sha1:6M76RGR5OGGDLWMEI4EZ2KVQDWXBSHWI
<urn:uuid:8686f031-90f2-44af-806f-fc170ef1e0a3>
https://www.saltlakemagazine.com/future-cosmic-aeroplane/amp/
response
<urn:uuid:8cd41894-8644-4371-96dd-83c0a9d1038b>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-39
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2018
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-111-168-72.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 0.11-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/