Acknowledgments

This book has been a long and, at times, difficult journey, beginning in the late seventies, when I began to collect clippings with the hope of writing a Phil Ochs biography, and ending nearly twenty years after Ochs' death, when I was finally able to finish the task.

However, for as much as I wanted to write this book, it never would have happened had it not been for a strange conversation that I had with two very dear friends.

I will always remember it vividly.

It was early in 1992, and I was sitting in the All-State Cafe on New York's Upper West Side with Carol Edwards and Amelie Littell, two people who had worked closely with me on my Allen Ginsberg biography. I had brought along photographs for the Ginsberg book to show them, and, as the hours stretched on and I had far too many cigarettes and glasses of beer, I began to bemoan the state of publishing. There were so many books crying out to be written, I complained, sounding every bit the misunderstood author. I started rattling off examples, some of which were actually discussed for more than a sentence or two.

"The book that I really want to write," I informed them, "is a biography of Phil Ochs. Unfortunately, it's the kind of book that will never get published."

Both women reacted instantly. They knew someone who would want the book, they said. Carol grabbed my manila envelope of Ginsberg pictures and jotted down the name of a publisher and editor. I knew nothing about either, but I promised I'd call. I did, and that's where this book landed.

All this, of course, is a lengthy but very necessary way of thanking two people who are very important to me. Amelie and Carol: Thanks for this and much more. I love you both.

I am extremely grateful to the members of the Ochs family for their cooperation and encouragement. It couldn't have been easy for them to backtrack over some of the painful memories, or to deal with my persistent demands for more time and information. Each family member honors Phil's memory in his or her individual way, and all saw that this came through, clearly and immediately, whenever we talked or met.

Sonny Ochs, Phil's sister, sat through countless interviews and telephone conversations, going over point by point, detail by detail. with unflinching honesty and patience. In addition, she helped me line up interviews, blessed me with photos, and even let me use her guest house as a base of operations when I was conducting interviews in upstate New York.

Michael Ochs, Phil's brother and archivist extraordinaire, also sat for numerous interviews and helped me connect with other sources, as well as providing me with valuable photographs. Michael's considerable knowledge of the music business proved to be invaluable, as were his many tapes of Phil's interviews, concerts, and previously unreleased songs.

Meegan Ochs, Phil's daughter, generously permitted me the use of her father's journals and notebooks, as well as many of the previously unpublished photographs included in this book. One of my fondest memories in the writing of this book will always be the day I spent at her home, going through Phil's scrapbooks and clippings collections, seeing some of his possessions (such as his trademark cap and gold lamé suit), and hearing Meegan's thoughts about her father.

Alice Ochs, Phil's former wife, was generous with her time, even though she was initially reluctant to go back over the years that she was hoping to keep behind her. A religious woman who has come to peace with herself and her life, Alice overcame her reluctance and was obliging in providing me with valuable information.

Thank you, all. I hope that you will find this book worth your time and efforts, as I hope that your disagreements with me-and there are bound to be some-are minor.

In piecing together Phil's life, I traveled all over the country and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews. Some of the interviews were actually cathartic in nature, allowing people to express emotions that had been bottled up for nearly two decades. There was a lot of laughing and crying and, in some cases, vocal asides to Phil as if he were actually sitting in the room with us, listening in on the conversations. Never, in all my experiences as a journalist and biographer, have I seen so many people react with such passion when discussing a person's life. This, I take it, is the ultimate measure of Phil's own passion, and the effect it had on others.

My gratitude, then, to: Stew Albert, Peter Asher, Guy Carawan, Len Chandler, Ramsey Clark, Ron Cobb, Lola Cohen, Paul Colby, Sis Cunningham, Henry Diltz, Peggy Duncan, Josh Dunson, Deni Frand, Erik Frandsen, Ian Freebairn-Smith, Allen Ginsberg, Jim Glover, Bernie Grundman, Arlo Guthrie, Sam Hood, Lee Housekeeper, David Ifshin, Erik Jacobsen, Danny Kalb, Paul Krassner, Jack Landron, Harold Leventhal, Jay Levin, Robin Love, Larry Marks, Lincoln Mayorga, Jack Newfield, Robin Ochs, Odetta, Van Dyke Parks, Tom Paxton, Carol Realini, Jerry Rubin, Pete Seeger, Patrick Sky, Larry Sloman, Steven Soles, Studs Terkel, Dave Van Ronk, Mayer Vishner, Cora Weiss, Doug Weston, Andy Wickham, and Jerry Yester.

Special thanks to poet/musician Ed Sanders, whose award-winning liner notes to Chords of Fame initially prodded me into exploring Phil's life, and who generously supplied me with clippings and notes he might have used for a biography of his own. Ed's love for Phil lives in his generosity and free spirit.

Thank you, Sammy Walker, for the interview, tapes, and the photograph. When Phil took you under his wing, he saw not only a talent at work, but a kindred spirit who would protect him during difficult times and in the decades following his death.

Arthur Gorson: Beneath your soft-spoken voice lies a toughness that has allowed your survival in a very trying business. I honor your modesty and gentility, which somehow seem to keep you on the level.

When traveling. I was put up (and put up with) by a number of people, many of whom are listed elsewhere in these acknowledgments. I would like to thank Allan Gumbinger, Mike Lovely, and Chris Tunney for their help in California, and Mark Gumbinger for helping to arrange it. My good friends Peter Spielmann and Judy Hansen provided me with a place to stay in New York.

A tip of the hat to other important people, who helped me in large and small ways: Dona Chernoff, Ken Bowser, Dawn Eden, Al and Diane Schumacher, Ken and Karen Ade, Jim Sieger, Glen Puterbaugh, and Simma Holt. Thanks to agents Kim Witherspoon and Maria Massie for all their patience and understanding, and to the staff at Hyperion, for helping see this book into print.

Last, but certainly most important, my love and gratitude to my wife, Susan, and to my children, Adam, Emily (the big Phil Ochs fan in the family), and Jack Henry, for enduring the usual hardships associated with the writing of a biography. You are the people who make all this worthwhile.

Michael Schumacher

March 13, 1996

Prologue

During the Civil War, a company of singers and entertainers known as the Hutchinson Family moved from Union camp to Union camp. entertaining the troops.

The group had started out as a quartet nearly two decades earlier, and over the ensuing years had expanded to include other family members, their offspring, and various hangers-on. Highly regarded for their musical excellence, the group was even better known for its commitment to the abolition of slavery, as well as to other human rights issues considered radical at the time, including equal rights for women. Much of this material managed to make its way into their performances. To the Hutchinsons, the message was as important as the music.

This approach drew harsh response from some critics, who felt that the Hutchinsons would better serve their audiences by concentrating on music and leaving the editorializing to others. Wrote a reviewer for the Philadelphia Courier in 1846: "It is really time that someone should tell these people, in a spirit of friendly candor, that they are not apostles and martyrs, entrusted with a 'mission' to reform the world, but only a company of common song-singers, whose performances sound very pleasant to the great mass of people ignorant of real music."

Such criticism had no effect whatsoever on the Hutchinsons, who openly acknowledged the controversial nature of their performances, and who made no effort to tone down the political content of their material. If anything, they used the controversy to help sell tickets to their shows.

The group continued to play their topical songs when they per-formed for the Union troops, enraging soldiers and officers alike with songs that protested warfare in general or, more specifically, President Lincoln for not being a more effective leader in the fight against slavery. After one particularly powerful appearance, the Hutchinsons were summoned before a Union general, who informed them that they could no longer play in front of his troops. The decision was upheld by General George McClellan, who opposed the abolition of slavery to begin with.

The flap was eventually brought to the attention of Lincoln himself. The president was given copies of the songs deemed too incendiary to be sung before the troops. Lincoln read through the material and issued his own proclamation on the Hutchinsons' music.

"It is just the character of song," he declared, "that I desire the soldiers to hear."

Prologue

They came together to honor a life.

Five thousand people-friends, family members, fellow musicians, fans, hangers-on, the media, and the curious-all filing into Madison Square Garden's Felt Forum for what promised to be at least some type of closure to a life that had been so promising yet which had ended so abruptly. Although the event was taking place only a few weeks after the young man's death, there was more of a festive air to the occasion than a sense of mourning. This was a grand reunion.

Phil Ochs, the folksinger, activist, and, sadly, reason for the gathering, would have loved it, had it occurred under different circumstances. He had always been a catalyst-much more so than a leader-and he loved nothing more than the knowledge that his passion and energy had driven others to action.

And here were the people in his life, greeting each other like longlost friends-which, in fact, they were. The Movement had sunk several years earlier, its rudder crippled in the bloody streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, its structure sustaining irreparable damage from the cynicism of the Nixon years. wherein government officials grasped frantically for justification for the murder of four students at Kent State, a CIA-backed overthrow of the government in Chile, and the comic nightmare of Watergate. The Movement had listed heavily for several years-an awkward, unsalvageable vessel-and then it had disappeared unceremoniously beneath the waters of apathy, its few survivors manning lifeboats. but seeing no rescue ships on the horizon.

The sight had broken Phil Ochs' heart, and from such despair came the loss of his sense of purpose and creativity, his voice, and, perhaps worst of all, the combination of romanticism and determination that had pushed him forward even when things seemed bleak and out of control. Unlike the others, he had been incapable of adapting and moving on.

He had been only thirty-five when he took his life.

People hugged and kissed, exchanged pleasantries, caught up on the recent events in each other's lives; some spoke quietly about what, if anything, could have been done to save Phil's life. Abbie Hoffman, still on the lam from police, had somehow managed to slip unnoticed into the hall and sat quietly, sporting the world's worst disguise, hoping to be recognized by everyone except the Law. Allen Ginsberg. wearing Phil's ludicrously tacky gold lamé suit, sat backstage and went over the speakers' carefully prepared texts, tightening grammar and phraseology, making certain that the historic occasion would not be marred by improper prose. Melanie, the folksinger who had made a good first name for herself at Woodstock, tried to amuse her two-year-old daughter with a pet ferret. People wondered aloud, more often than was appropriate, about the whereabouts of Bob Dylan, Phil's friend and Greenwich Village contemporary, and Joan Baez, who had taken home her fair share of loot from her cover of Phil's "There But for Fortune." Jim Glover, Phil's old Ohio State roommate, hooked up with his former wife, Jean Ray, for one final performance as Jim and Jean.

The scene brought back memories of Phil's greatest moment as an organizer, achieved less than two years earlier in this very same hall. Angered over the overthrow of Chile and the murders of President Salvador Allende and folksinger-poet Victor Jara, Phil had put together his ultimate protest, an evening of song and rhetoric condemning the United States' involvement in the coup. The evening's music, bogged down by heavy backstage drinking, had been barely passable, and the speeches, like so many political speeches, tended to be a bit winded, but the fact that Phil had been able to pull it off had been a miracle in itself. Ironically, the success of the event had also hastened his downfall, since he could come up with no way to follow it, either on a personal, creative level or in another large-scale show.

Unfortunately, as his friend Jerry Rubin insisted, it had taken his death to bring everyone together one last time.

For most of his life, Phil Ochs had succeeded through sheer willpower-that, and a forceful personality that could, in turns, be charming or infuriating.

Critics never could understand his success. If you applied the strictest musical standards to his talents, his guitar playing was marginal, and his voice, although pleasing enough-especially in comparison to the fashionably rough-hewn sounds of his contemporaries-sounded far from professionally trained. Yet he had recorded seven albums and performed before SRO audiences at some of the country's finest venues, including Carnegie Hall.

The songs had carried him through. The sincerity of his lyrics, along with the passion of their delivery, more than compensated for Phil's musical shortcomings, and for a while, when topical songs were the rage of the folk scene, Phil Ochs had ranked at the top of the list. He was a classic troubadour, singing the news of the day and applying an editorial spin that urged his audience to get off their hands and move. He hated pretension and hypocrisy, and no political party or philosophy was exempt from his commentary. He could ridicule liberals for paying lip service to their causes as easily as he could rail against the conservatives for dragging their feet when society demanded change.

Politically, he had been anything but a weekend warrior. He had gone to the Kentucky coal mines in support of the underpaid and overworked laborers; he'd risked his personal safety when he had traveled to the Deep South during the voter registration drives. He had spoken out early against the war in Vietnam, and as the conflict dragged on, he had organized or attended countless rallies, sacrificing paying gigs in exchange for gratis appearances at demonstrations. He had been present at the official birthing of the Youth International Party, and he had sung "I Ain't Marching Anymore," his best-known protest anthem, in Chicago's Lincoln Park during the Democratic National Convention.

To no one's surprise, Phil's hard-nosed politics, coupled with his popularity as a performer, caught the FBI's attention, and throughout a career that spanned nearly a quarter-century, the Bureau kept close tabs on Phil's whereabouts, thickening his file with regular updates on his activities, informing other government agencies of the threat that he posed to the common good, and tapping his phone. For those more inclined to live in the real world, Phil was a menace only to the paranoid. In fact, a good portion of his charm, especially in his younger days, could be attributed to his tendency to listen as much as he spoke, to laugh as often as he erupted in anger. He tempered his reality with the political instincts and humor that his adversaries lacked.

One by one, the speakers at the memorial took the podium and sang Phil's praises. Ramsey Clark, the former attorney general who had known him and defended him in his dark final days, spoke of Phil's commitment to political and social causes, calling him "a driven man" and wondering aloud about what inspired him to live the difficult life of the activist. Stew Albert, one of the founders of the Yippies, spoke directly to Phil, noting "the world's a little more hypocritical without you"-a sentiment underscored when William Kunstler read Phil's poignant and often very funny testimony from the Chicago Conspiracy Trial. Sonny Ochs and Michael Ochs, Phil's sister and brother, offered biographical sketches tracing his footsteps from his boyhood in Ohio to his rise to the top as a topical singer-songwriter. Emotions ran high, and the music-from Dave Van Ronk's moving rendition of the standard "He Was a Friend of Mine" to Jim and Jean's haunting interpretation of Phil's "Crucifixion"-upped the ante. The evening honoring Phil's life and music was inevitably shaded by a touch of sadness. No one had been afforded the chance to say goodbye, and as a result, people were making their final declarations.

Phil's final year or so had been so horrific, so lacking in grace and dignity that people could only wonder what on earth had happened. What had reduced him to a pathetic street creature wandering around New York, occasionally barefoot and covered in his own filth. often threatening the people he came across? Was it mental illness. alcoholism, a combination of both? It was common knowledge that he was manic depressive and a heavy drinker, but others had suffered similar conditions and walked away alive. Why had he self-destructed?

Perhaps he took his life because, as one of the country's most enthusiastic movie buffs, and as one who often viewed his own life as if it were taking place onscreen, he had the misguided romantic notion that suicide was the only noble ending to a script he had been given to work with. Perhaps he took his life because he had wandered into a darkened corridor from which there was no exit or return to light. Perhaps...

Reasons were unimportant.

Phil Ochs ceased to exist, first in his own mind, and then in reality. In the end, there were too many blank calendar pages in his datebook, in the past and in the future.

"So many people have tried to analyze the reasons behind his death," his sister wrote in the memorial concert's program notes. "There's nothing to analyze. He literally could not bear living anymore so he chose to go to sleep. At least he left us a legacy-all the meaningful songs he managed to create while he was with us."

The best of his songs were played at the memorial, but, appropriately enough, it was Phil who managed to steal the show when, with the stage darkened, he was heard singing "Changes," one of his most beautiful ballads, over the hall's sound system. During those few minutes, when his softly lilting voice filled the arena, people were reminded of what was lost and what would be missed.

After the memorial, people partied at The Bitter End in Greenwich Village. The get-together lasted until the evening's darkness had passed and the sun was beginning to hit the New York streets again. People got pleasantly drunk, and stories of better days were freely traded.

Phil would have loved that, too.

Book One: I'm Going to Say It Now

There But For Fortune: The Life of Phil Ochs
There But For Fortune: The Life of Phil Ochs
Author	Michael Schumacher
First published	1996
Type	Book

"Ah, but in such an ugly time, the true protest is beauty."

-Phil Ochs

Chapter One-Boy in Ohio

GERTRUDE OCHS yearned for her native Scotland and the privileged life of her youth, yet for some horrible reason, as if she were being punished by a batallion of angry gods, she had been sentenced to endure her second pregnancy in Columbus, New Mexico.

As far as she was concerned, Columbus was the penultimate stop in the American move westward toward oblivion, the kind of hicktown you'd read about or see in the movies. No one seemed to be doing anything. Townfolk clutching sweaty bottles of Coca-Cola would gather at the general store for the main event of the day-the arrival of the mail truck. On one occasion, when she returned home from a trip to town, Gertrude found a rattlesnake coiled on her front porch; fortunately, her screams brought along a neighbor, who shot the snake as casually as he might have shooed a fly from an apple pie cooling on a windowsill.

Gertrude blamed her husband for her predicament. Two years earlier, Jack Ochs, with his medical degree and his flowery talk of life in America, had sweet-talked her into leaving her homeland. How could she have known what lay ahead? Two of her closest friends in Scotland, Heddy and Dinah, had married American doctors and were living the good life in the States. How could she have suspected that it would be any different for her?

But Jack was nothing if not different. Not only had he struggled to establish a practice in this godforsaken country, but he also had suffered the horrible misfortune of being drafted into the army and shipped off to a CCC camp in New Mexico. Gertrude and their daughter, Sonia, born three years earlier in Scotland, had traveled with Jack to their new home in the Southwest.

In Gertrude's mind, one thing was absolutely certain: she would not be bearing her second child in Columbus. It was bad enough that she had been dragged to the outer reaches of civilization, but she would not hear of having a baby in anything but a proper medical facility, which, in this case, meant traveling to a larger city. The only nearby candidate to meet the expectant mother's qualifications was El Paso, Texas, so in December 1940, with her baby's delivery date rapidly approaching. Gertrude packed a suitcase with books, candy bars, and a single nightgown, and left for the city. She would be on her own, staying in a hotel, until the baby arrived. Her first son, Philip David, was born on December 19, 1940.

Jacob "Jack" Ochs, despite his wife's feelings to the contrary, was actually a product of the American Dream realized, at least to a modest extent. Both of his parents' families had immigrated to the United States in the late-nineteenth century, both coming from the same town, Mlawa, in Russ-Poland. Both families settled in New York City, where some of the Old World traditions could be maintained while the new immigrants settled into a different way of life.

It wasn't easy. Fanny Busky Ochs, Jacob's mother, would never forget the hardship of her early years in America. The entire family-Fanny, her parents, and her four sisters and two brothers-were crowded into a two-room railroad flat on Manhattan's Lower East Side, living on next to nothing and sleeping wherever they could find the space. While Fanny's father tried to eke out a living as the proprietor of a small grocery store, Fanny's mother tried to hold things together at home, taking care of her children while making hats or sewing clothes to supplement the family income. Fanny would recall that her wardrobe consisted of two dresses, one that was worn when the other was being washed, and on her one and only day of school in America, she was ridiculed by her classmates when she turned up without shoes. ("I suppose I looked like something that came from a tree," she reflected. "so they had a good laugh.") She never returned to school, and would never learn to read or write in English.

Instead of attending classes, Fanny went to work, doing whatever she could to earn extra money for the family. For a while, she baked bagels and sold them on the street; she also helped her mother sew hats. The day-to-day trials made her tough and self-sufficient. Although she was barely five feet tall as an adult, she could make it instantly clear, with no room for discussion or argument, that she was not a person to be lightly regarded.

Her future husband, Joe Ochs, was a strong contrast. At nearly six-foot-four, he towered over Fanny, yet he was very quiet and gentle-the kind of individual not given to fighting or raising his voice. This nature of his proved to be beneficial after he and Fanny were married in 1898. Fanny, the dominant force around the house, would order Joe around in even the tiniest of matters, with very little protest from her husband. Joe might come downstairs in the morning, announce that he intended to make scrambled eggs for breakfast, only to hear his wife insist that he soft-boil them; the next morning, Joe would start the water to boil eggs, only to have Fanny chide him for not scrambling them. Joe would simply shrug and take out the skillet.

Jacob Ochs, born in 1910, was the youngest of his parents' four children. At age four, he moved with his family to Arverne (Rockaway Beach), where the Ochs family enjoyed its first home-a brand-new frame house for which Joe Ochs paid the princely sum of four thousand dollars. Joe was justifiably proud of this turn of events: he had no education, very little job training, and had been raised in poverty, yet he had worked himself into the position where he could afford a reasonably good life for his family. He had invested the money he'd earned from his store in Manhattan into a small grocery store and bungalow-building business on Rockaway Beach, and he was holding his own in the business when he moved his family in 1914.

Jack inherited his father's easygoing personality, which definitely set him apart from his two older brothers, David and Sam, who were as hard-nosed as their mother. Unfortunately, Jack had not been handed his father's ambition, and there was very little discussion of his making a career in the bungalow business. Instead, he and his sister Eva would be the first family members to attend and finish college, and with their degrees, both would be afforded opportunities to work as professionals. To someone like Jack, a dreamer if ever there was one, the education was a mixed blessing. He would not have to work with his hands like his father and brothers, but he was also being saddled with the responsibility that accompanied the investment in his degree. He figured, fairly early on, that he would do best as a doctor.

After attending pre-med school at the University of Virginia, Jack was disappointed to learn that he couldn't get into any American medical schools; the quotas for Jewish students had been reached. Undaunted, Jack decided to attend medical school overseas. The University of Edinburgh in Scotland was friendly to Americans wanting to earn medical degrees. Jack's decision to go to school there proved to be fortuitous, at least in terms of his meeting his future wife. Harry Phin, Jack's closest friend at the university, had an older sister that he wanted Jack to meet.

For as long as she could remember, Gertrude Phin had been accustomed to the finer things. Her father, George, owned two highly successful tobacco shops in Edinburgh, and he had parlayed his earnings into the kind of life that would see that his wife and five children would never want for a thing. The family lived in a ten-room stone mansion, complete with live-in maid's quarters and a parlor that was never used. Four huge bedrooms, each with its own fireplace, occupied the top floor.

Despite such material wealth, life at the Phin household was less than ideal. George was a cold, domineering presence, rigid in the rules that he set and not given to displays of affection toward his wife and children. Little power plays were the order of the day. When, for instance, it was time for the children to receive their weekly allowances, George would make them stand around and wait until he was finished with a meal or otherwise inclined to dispense the money. Proper behavior was expected at all times.

When Gertrude met Jack Ochs, she was less than impressed. The American, by her estimation, might have been pleasant enough. and there was no doubting that he was a natural-born storyteller. but he lacked the social graces to which she was accustomed. Jack. however, was not to be easily discouraged. He liked his friend's older sister and was determined to win her over. It didn't hurt, either, that Gertrude's parents found Jack agreeable and considered him a good match for their daughter.

Jack regaled the family with tales of New York and America, using his charm to embellish his stories about how his parents owned a string of bungalows by the sea, and how he was going to make a big success of himself as a doctor with his own practice. Gertrude eventually subscribed to Jack's stories, and the two began to plot out the details for their marriage and eventual move to the dream life in the United States that Jack so eagerly described.

They were married on June 24, 1936, and Sonia was born in April 1937. The newly wed mother soon determined that raising a child was not something that came naturally to her. Children could be time-consuming and demanding, and Gertrude, who could barely take care of herself and couldn't cook even the most basic of meals, resented the imposition of having to look after her daughter by herself while her husband was doing his internship in York, England.

In time, the young family boarded a ship for America, Jack with his medical degree, Gertrude with the hope that her life would square itself away in the new land. Neither could have predicted the many turns that would dictate the direction their lives would take.

Gertrude was angry and bitterly disappointed when she realized that her life in America was going to be dramatically different from the one she had envisioned. When Jack had spoken of his parents' owning bungalows, Gertrude had pictured exquisite cottages by the sea-the kind she had seen in Scotland-not modest frame units that looked like all the other houses around it and that seemed to be located in the middle of nowhere. When Jack earned his medical degree, Gertrude had anticipated instant success and wealth, not a protracted struggle to establish a practice in post-Depression America. Feeling trapped and betrayed, Gertrude took out her frustration on her husband, berating him as a failure and criticizing his every move around the house.

Upon moving to the States, the Ochs family moved into an apartment in Manhattan, near Seventh Avenue and Fourteenth Street, and Jack found work in one of Manhattan's medical facilities. Then Jack received his call from Uncle Sam. Fierce battles were being fought in both Europe and the Far East, and while American politicians debated over the wisdom of entering the century's second world war, the country's armed forces were gearing up, preparing for what seemed to be inevitable. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor less than two weeks before Philip's first birthday, the family knew that Jack would be in the army for some time to come.

By the time Jack was shipped overseas, the family had grown accustomed to a rather nomadic existence. After a stay in Columbus, New Mexico, Jack had been transferred first to San Antonio, and then to Austin. To Gertrude, who had been raised in rock-solid stability, the moving around represented just another reason to question her marriage to this strange American doctor. For Sonia, there was the challenge of meeting new sets of playmates and learning new terrain. On her first day of kindergarten, she got lost walking home from school and had to be rescued, frightened and sobbing on the street curb, by the ice cream man. Although not gravely affected by the changing locales, Philip had other changes to deal with during this period: a younger brother, Michael, was added to the family in 1943.

Before departing for the war in Europe, Jack moved his family back to New York. Gertrude would need help in raising the children, he decided, and he could think of no better place than with his parents. Little did he know that Gertrude would find life with his mother to be the ultimate confinement, or that his and Gertrude's early years together, trying as they were, would prove to be the least difficult years of his marriage.

Jack was sent to England, where he was to await further assignment.

So far, his time in the service had been, at the very best, a mixed bag. During his years of training. Jack had done little to endear himself to his superior officers. He was a bit too moody and rebellious for his own good, and though these traits were not of the sort to get him drummed out of the army, they did cost him the opportunity to gain a decent officer's commission. In addition, when he did finally find himself up for promotion, Jack shrugged off the opportunity, refusing to fill out the paperwork necessary to assure his move up.

There was a reason for Jack's erratic behavior, though it wouldn't be determined until much later, after he had been hospitalized, given a battery of treatments (including shock treatments), and finally diagnosed as being manic depressive. In the army, he was seen as being eccentric-and not always unpleasantly so. In England, he was nicknamed "Charlie"-short for "Goodtime Charlie"-because of his buoyant personality. His paycheck would arrive, and Jack would spend it as if a time limit had been imposed on the contents of his wallet. Nights out with the boys, fine liquor and food, new clothingJack would enjoy life to the hilt, only to have to scrimp for the rest of the month to make ends meet until the next paycheck. Then it came time to repeat the procedure...

His darker side emerged when he was called upon to apply his medical skills to the fodder of war. Working on soldiers injured in the Battle of the Bulge proved to be a hellish task, and seeing the day-to-day carnage had a profound effect on the good-natured doctor. In no time, he was as shell-shocked as the young men on the battlefront, his depression leaving him hard-pressed to concentrate on his duties. In time, the army realized that he had become another war casualty and, in November 1945, a deeply troubled Jack Ochs was issued an honorable medical discharge and shipped back to the States. He had been in the service for nearly five years.

Jack's absence had been rough on his wife, if for no other reason than because Gertrude found life with her in-laws-and particularly Fanny-to be more unbearable than life with her husband. As a guest of Jack's parents, Gertrude had no choice but to accept the ways of the household, which was not always easy. Fanny could be both demanding and critical, and contending with her, as well as trying to raise three children without the physical presence of their father, was difficult for Gertrude. At one point, all three children came down with the chicken pox, one after the other, which was immediately followed by individual cases of the measles. Gertrude was all but imprisoned in the house, looking after her children's needs, unable to escape the constant hectoring of her mother-in-law.

After Jack's return, the family moved to a house in Far Rockaway. The Ochses celebrated Christmas 1945 amidst packed boxes of belongings, a small Christmas tree perched atop the kitchen table, and the presents piled underneath. It wasn't much, but at least they were all together again, living in their own house and looking to the future.

The reunion was short-lived. Jack needed psychiatric treatment, and he had barely unpacked when he was off to a hospital on Long Island. It would be his home for nearly two years.

The long-term effects of his father's absence on Philip, coupled with the many changes of homes that he would go through during his childhood, can never be accurately determined, but there is no doubting that Philip was markedly different from his older sister and younger brother. Sonia and Michael were cheerful and gregarious, both capable of easily making new friends and adapting to the changes of scenery. Philip, on the other hand, was naturally shy and tended to be withdrawn even among his own family. Making new friends was exceedingly difficult and, as a boy, Philip would never have more than one friend at a time. In school, he was quiet and inattentive, more inclined to wander the landscapes of his own imagination than to pay attention to anything a teacher might have to say.

In February 1947, with Jack still gone, Gertrude decided to take her children for an extended stay with her family in Scotland. Traveling by boat in the middle of winter made for a long trip. Philip. Sonia, and Michael filled some of their hours by playing on the ship's deck, which had been glazed by frozen sea spray, their footing made delightfully precarious by the combination of icy floorboards and the pitching ship. The games were brought to an abrupt halt one day when Philip lost his balance and slid across the deck toward the edge of the ship. At the last second, he latched onto a volleyball net that had been left at the side of the deck. As an adult, Phil Ochs would use the imagery of the sea in a number of his songs. but his initial introduction to it as a six-year-old was anything but romantic.

He would also hold a chauvinistic attitude toward Scotland in his later years, though there is very little evidence to indicate that his six months in the country were especially memorable. Every morning, he and Sonia took a bus to the Liberton School, a tiny schoolhouse located just outside of Edinburgh. Philip would carry his books in an old music case his mother had used as a child, and it was not uncommon for him to leave his books behind, either at school or on the bus, his absent-mindedness driving his mother to near distraction.

"He was a dreamer, with a capital D," his sister remarked many years later, noting that this characteristic remained consistent through adulthood. As a child, Philip would lose his school books; as an adult, it would be his wallet. When he began to wear glasses, Philip would lose or break them with a regularity that proved to be humiliating to his mother.

"My mother had bought him glasses at Sears," Sonny recalled, "and they had some kind of policy in which you were insured if the glasses were lost or broken. It got to the point where my mother was downright embarrassed to walk in because they had replaced or repaired so many pairs of glasses. She felt guilty and wanted to pay. but they wouldn't let her."

Teachers could be equally exasperated with Philip's spaciness. He generally earned good grades, but his instructors were hard-pressed to understand why: he never seemed to be paying attention to anything going on in class.

One particular teacher-a Miss Jocelyn-eventually exploded in frustration. She had taught Sonia a few years earlier and deemed her to be a model student, which only meant that Sonia had fallen in step with her teacher's strict, traditionalist approach to learning. Philip, on the other hand, was different; he didn't listen or participate in class. Miss Jocelyn complained about this to Sonia, and to prove her point, she summoned Philip's sister to her classroom one day.

"I cannot stand it anymore," she said, obviously at wit's end. "I cannot teach your brother."

Sitting in the back of the room, Philip stared out the window, oblivious to Sonia's presence in the classroom.

"I'll show you what the problem is," Miss Jocelyn continued. "Philip," she called out.

The youngster did not respond.

"Philip!" she called out in a louder, more insistent tone. Philip continued to stare off into space.

"PHILIP OCHS!" she shouted at the top of her lungs.

"Huh?"

Miss Jocelyn turned to Sonia. "I want you to go home and tell your mother that I cannot stand it anymore," she said. "He's this way all the time." Sonia dutifully reported the incident to her mother, but they both realized that there was no changing the boy. He was incorrigible.

For a dreamer like Philip Ochs, the ultimate parallel universe was a darkened movie theater and a Western double feature. In the world of cinema, life was as uncluttered and black-and-white as the giant heroic images projected onto the screen. In the real world, life could be complicated and sometimes painful, even for the good guys; in the movie theater, justice always prevailed.

Philip's interest in movies began innocently enough: whenever she needed a babysitter, or just wanted some time to herself, his mother would send him and Michael to one of Far Rockaway's three movie theaters. The boys watched movie after movie, never tiring of the action pictures, taking in as many as nine movies a week. Philip loved The Count of Monte Cristo, King Kong, and any movie featuring John Wayne. To Philip, John Wayne-and, to only a slightly lesser extent, Audie Murphy-symbolized everything that America stood for.

Movies quickly became the most important activity in Philip's life. Anything connected to the movies drew his instant attention, from the films themselves to his sister's movie magazines and posters. Whenever he went to the movie theater. Philip brought along his Kodak Brownie camera and took pictures of the theater's marquee; he even attempted to shoot photographs of the movies as they played on the big screen. He collected scores of movie-star postcards that he could purchase for a penny in vending machines.

The obsession would last a lifetime. As an adult, he would attend thousands of movies, quite often as many as three or four a day. Friends marveled at his ability to remember not only titles, release dates, plots, directors, and stars, but seemingly every minor detail connected with every film he saw. Not surprisingly, he often saw dramatic events in his life as if they were scenes in a movie and he was the film's protagonist. Movies gave him his first exposure to the idea of celebrity, and even in his youthful years, he knew that this was a status he wanted to attain.

After his release from the hospital, Jack Ochs tried to start a private medical practice in Far Rockaway. He put together a small office and, anticipating extra work if someone happened to step on a piece of glass or other sharp object, he hung a shingle near the beach. Patients, however, were hard to come by.

Life was even tougher at home. Gertrude continued to badger him relentlessly, criticizing his inability as a doctor, husband, and father. At this point, Jack and Gertrude's marriage was totally loveless. Neither showed the slightest affection for the other, and the two slept in separate beds, prompting their children to joke as adults that their parents were either blessed with three immaculate conceptions or had actually had sex a grand total of three times over the course of their marriage. The only thing keeping the two together was Gertrude's uncompromising belief that divorce was simply out of the question.

On a typical day, Jack would come home from work, eat dinner, and immediately retire to his room, where he would either read in bed or go to sleep. Contact with his children was held to a minimum. Every so often, he might take Sonny to a track meet or baseball game, but this kind of bonding was nonexistent between him and the boys, who never showed any interest in sports. As a rule, Jack preferred to keep to himself.

"My father was almost like a phantom." Sonny explained, remembering her father as more of a fixture than a living being around the house. "He was there, but he wasn't there." Significantly, when Sonny and Michael, as adults, were asked what the two of them might have inherited from their father, both offered identical responses: "Nothing."

Jack eventually gave up the hope of practicing medicine in Far Rockaway, and after inquiring about employment opportunities in area hospitals and clinics, he found a job working in a TB clinic in Otisville, a tiny community in upstate New York. Rather than relocate his family, Jack packed his bags and moved alone. Given his state of mind and his problems with his wife, the decision must have felt like an escape.

If Gertrude Ochs made one lasting impression upon their children, it was the emphasis she placed on confronting the truth. Throughout their lives, Sonny, Phil, and Michael would be candid to the point of being unsettling, no matter how difficult it was to face up to the truth. On occasion, Phil's honesty could make him look naive, as if he didn't realize that being forthright could cause him trouble.

However, there was one occasion when he could not bring himself to own up to the truth.

He had just turned nine. The family was going shopping in Jamaica, Queens, and Philip, not wanting to go along, asked if he could stay home. His parents agreed. To amuse himself during their absence, Philip repaired to his mother's clothing closet, which also housed the cardboard box with all the children's toys. The closet was dark, so Philip, unable to find what he was looking for, struck a match to shed a little light on his search. The flame caught the bottom of a piece of Gertrude's clothing, and before he knew what was happening, Philip had a fire going in the closet. He ran to the kitchen, filled a pot with water, and tried to dowse the fire. When this failed to extinguish the flames, Philip tried to think of someone who could help him. He had been expressly forbidden to talk to strangers, and the only people he knew in the area were his former next-door neighbors, who were now living a block away, on Rose Street. Philip ran up the alleyway to their house, let himself in, and reported the fire to the family's teenage daughter. The daughter immediately called the Fire Department, and firefighters were still at the scene when the Ochs family returned from their shopping trip. When questioned about the fire, Philip denied having anything to do with it, claiming he had no idea how it had started-a story he would stand by for years to come.

The fire turned out to be one of very few eventful moments in an otherwise passive childhood. Like his father, Philip preferred to spend his time alone in his room, and on those occasions when he was around Sonny or Michael, a squabble always seemed to take place. Philip would tease or pick on Michael, who was physically incapable of defending himself in a fight, and he thought nothing of taking advantage of his younger brother in other ways. Philip especially enjoyed trading toys with Michael because he knew he could always bargain to his advantage. Sonny, who resented the interest that Philip charged whenever he loaned her money, would jump to Michael's aid, and before long the three would be going at it, infuriating Gertrude with their incessant fighting and teasing.

If he was around, Jack bore the brunt of Gertrude's frustration.

"Take these goddamn kids out of here so I can have some peace and quiet," she'd order her husband, virtually on a weekly basis. Jack would then gather the kids in the family car and take them for long drives in the countryside, giving Gertrude time to cool off. On other occasions, Jack would take them out on his own, using the time for rare moments with his children.

Over the years, the evening meals became a study of how dysfunctional the family really was. Gertrude loved to read, and she insisted on bringing a book to the dinner table with her. That, however, was only the beginning. She also demanded silence while she read, so the typical Ochs family dinner would find four people-or five, if Jack was present-sitting at the table and reading books or comic books, the entire meal taken in silence, unless, of course, the kids were fighting among themselves, which was not at all uncommon.

In June 1951, the Ochs family moved from Far Rockaway to Perrysburg, a tiny rural town in upstate New York. Jack had moved on to another job in another TB clinic, and this time he took his family with him. Phil spent a year attending a three-room schoolhouse before he was shipped off to nearby Gowanda, where a larger, central school was located. It was here that he began his musical training.

Gertrude believed that her children would benefit from music lessons, and she urged them to select an instrument to study. Sonny picked the piano, which she learned to play efficiently: Michael chose the saxophone, and Philip decided to go with the clarinet.

"He was incredibly gifted," Michael said of his brother. "I took the saxophone and was good at it, but then he picked it up and topped me in a week. He was so much better that I quit right away. He was a natural."

At first Philip was less than enthusiastic about taking any instrument, but in no time he was attacking his musical studies with a passion that bordered the fanatical. Every day after school, he would head straight to his room and practice for hours, running through his scales over and over, the family dog positioned at his feet and howling along with him. Before long, the endless repetitions unnerved the entire family.

"It was absolute torture," Sonny insisted, noting that such behavior was in keeping with her brother's obsessive nature. In fact, as Sonny recalled, the persistent practicing led to a humorous episode a year or so later, when Philip decided to supplement his musical knowledge by learning to play the drums. The family lived in a four-unit apartment complex at the time, and when Gertrude casually mentioned to her downstairs neighbor-who happened to be married to the assistant director of the hospital where Jack worked-that Philip was thinking of taking up the drums, she received a firm, unenthusiastic response.

"Over my dead body," the woman told Gertrude. "If he's going to learn drums, he's going out in the woods. He's not doing it in that apartment. A person can take only so much."

Nothing ever came of Philip's interest in drums; mastering the clarinet kept him busy enough. He was a standout on the instrument-so much so that he quickly surpassed other students who had been studying it for years. His technical skills went unquestioned, but even more important, he showed a remarkable gift for interpretation. Each year, Philip would go to Fredonia State Teacher's College, where he would have his musical skills professionally analyzed, and every year he would earn A's for his individual performances. "You have exceptional musical feeling and the ability to transfer it on your instrument is abundant," commented one judge, who encouraged Philip to continue his studies.

In just over three years' time, Philip's progress on the clarinet was so remarkable that his teacher, Mr. Navarro, was genuinely upset when the Perrysburg TB hospital closed down and Jack was forced to look for work in another city. Students like Philip didn't come along often, and Navarro wanted to see him through the school term. It would be in her son's best interests, the instructor told Gertrude, if Philip remained behind and finished his course of study. Philip could stay with him. Gertrude, of course, disagreed.

It was December 1954, and the family was off to another part of the country-to Columbus, Ohio, and still another TB hospital.

By then, Sonny was no longer living at home. Gertrude had received a modest inheritance when her mother died, and in an effort to provide more poise and polish for a daughter she considered to be too tomboyish, Gertrude sent Sonny to a finishing school in Switzerland. Sonny loved living in rural New York, and she never forgave her parents, first, for sending her to Switzerland against her wishes, and. second, for moving while she was away.

Meanwhile, in Ohio, life followed its familiar pattern for the Ochs clan. Jack took a job at the local TB hospital, the family found an apartment on the hospital grounds and ate the same food served to the patients, and the boys were enrolled in a small country school.

As an adult, Phil Ochs would retain fond memories of his time in Columbus. The city, fairly small in those days, was especially uninhabited on the outskirts of town, where the Ochs family lived, and life was an uncluttered slice from Rockwellian Americana. Philip loved to take his bicycle on long rides down Alum Creek Drive, a rural stretch of road that seemed to accentuate the area's natural beauty. Many of his classmates were country kids who didn't report to school until after the October harvest, and who left school for spring planting.

As one might expect, Gertrude found the scene totally unacceptable. Their apartment, placed in the midst of a hospital complex, an old-age home, and a cemetery, was a far cry from serenity. Jack was again going through a manic phase, manifested by his fighting with the hospital's head nurse; from past experiences, Gertrude could tell that he was not long for his job. As for the boys... well, there had to be something better than a country-bumpkin school offering little more than nineteenth-century educational standards.

Gertrude was especially appalled when Philip came home with a friend who appeared to embody everything she disliked about the area. With his unkempt hair and sloppy clothes, Dave Sweazy was anything but the kind of boy Gertrude would have preferred her son to be hanging around with. It didn't matter that this was Philip's first close friend; Sweazy seemed so uncultured to Gertrude that the best she could muster for him was pity.

Philip ignored his mother's objections to his new friend. After years of staying off on his own, having occasional, but never especially close friends, Philip had come across someone he could talk to for hours on end-a buddy who shared his enthusiasm for going to the movies or for just hanging out. Philip enjoyed having Sweazy over at the house as a dinner guest, or for long conversations in his room. Significantly, he took a number of photographs of Sweazy, and on one occasion posed with him in a dimestore photo booth; the pictures were then added to Philip's scrapbook of movie marquees and film stars-an honor bestowed upon no other friend to that point.

Sweazy made an important contribution to bringing Philip out of his shell. After moving to Columbus, Philip had continued his train-ing on the clarinet, studying at the Capital University Conservatory of Music and achieving the unheard-of status of principal soloist in the college orchestra by his sixteenth birthday. Despite his talent and membership in the orchestra, Philip was never really a part of the group. At school, he continued to stay away from the crowd, distinguishing himself in neither academics nor athletics. If anything, his occasional playground fights established him as a moody figure. With Sweazy, Philip could be himself and be accepted for it.

Unfortunately, the friendship was short-lived. Gertrude had every intention of extracting her sons from the small school they attended, and she told Philip and Michael that they would be transferring to the Columbus Academy the following school year. When Philip balked at the notion, Gertrude countered with the suggestion that he come up with an alternative. Phil mulled it over, and after seeing an advertisement in the New York Times Magazine, he announced that he wanted to attend the Staunton Military Academy in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley.

As far as Gertrude was concerned, Philip wouldn't be leaving soon enough, especially after his latest bit of mischief with Dave Sweazy. The two had been to another Western playing at the movie theater, and afterward, inspired by the onscreen gunplay, Philip decided to check out his own quick-draw capability with a Sweazy family pistol. The gun went off, and Philip was fortunate to escape with only a flesh wound in his leg.

Philip, Gertrude concluded, might be better off elsewhere.

In retrospect, it seems ironic that Phil Ochs, who made "I Ain't Marching Anymore" his signature song, could have enjoyed military school as much as he did. However, he was anything but a rebel when he departed for Staunton, Virginia, in the fall of 1956. If anything, he needed to find a compromise to his conflicting needs of both fitting in and setting himself apart from his classmates.

As he later admitted, he was nothing more than a confused teenager.

"I had no idea what I was going to be," he said. "I was just an American nebbish, being formed by societal forces, completely captivated by movies, the whole James Dean, Marlon Brando trip."

In some respects, military school was an ideal environment for Philip. All students were subject to the same rigid rules and schedules; everyone marched to the same beat, awoke to the same bell, and could commiserate with each other when academic life became too structured or oppressive. Since he was extremely shy around girls to begin with, Philip found that he could walk more freely in the all-boys school, where guys could be guys without the added distractions of the opposite sex. It was easier to fit in when one was literally living with one's classmates. Guys spoke in a shorthand, hung out together, pulled pranks and stunts, formed their own society. In Staunton, Philip shortened his name to "Phil"-indicative, perhaps, of his new, freer spirit.

Phil found small ways to distinguish himself. Although he had always been awkward and uncoordinated in athletics, he discovered that he enjoyed lifting weights and could hold his own in the weight room; classmates nicknamed him "Mr. Universe." He was also a member of Staunton's marching band, but this proved to be a disappointment. Wearing a uniform and marching in formation offered absolutely no opportunity for creativity, and as the months passed by, Phil considered dropping clarinet entirely.

His attention was now directed to another type of music-the kind being broadcast by a nearby country radio station. Phil loved the voices of Faron Young, Ernest Tubb, Webb Pierce, and Lefty Frizzell, who offered emotional impact in their deceptively simple phrasing. The same could be said about Johnny Cash or Hank Williams, who appeared to have arisen straight from the masses. Then there was Elvis Presley, who filtered every sound that was truly American through a voice that came from an uncharted place and served it to a public thirsty for something new. In Phil's eyes, Presley truly was the King.

For Phil, the music was more than just a casual pleasure; it quickly became another obsession. He listened to it nonstop on his radio. He hummed or sang along. When he returned to Ohio for summer vacation, he bought records at the local record shop and argued about his musical discoveries with Michael, who was also interested in music, though he preferred rhythm and blues to the country-flavored music that Phil liked. Phil entertained the notion of being a singer himself someday.

The family, by now all too familiar with Phil's obsessive nature, humored him, although Gertrude was bothered when Phil talked about giving up the clarinet, for which he had proven talent, and becoming a star, which seemed so far removed from the real world. At one time, Gertrude had listened to a young man's visions of grandeur; now, two decades and numerous problems with her husband later, she knew reality well enough to map its course.

Phil had no idea how he would attain the stardom that he talked about, but he was sensible enough to acknowledge that he would do well to continue his education after his graduation from high school. Ohio State, the local Columbus campus, was a logical choice.

Besides his passion for music, Phil had cultivated a strong interest in writing during his two years at Staunton. When the academy sponsored a short-story writing contest for its students, Phil entered "White Milk to Red Wine," a brief yet very effective vignette that took the contest's ten-dollar second prize:

I had never been so worried in all my life. When I got out of bed that morning a cold sweat came over me. I knew I had to fight him sooner or later, and today was it. He had bullied me so often, and now I had finally reached my breaking point. If a person is stronger than others, he doesn't have the right to pick on people smaller and weaker than him.

He insulted me in front of my friends. I had to make a stand. In a moment of anger, I challenged him to a fight the next day after lunch. When he accepted, he threw back his head and laughed cruelly.

I went to school the following day feeling like David when he went to meet Goliath. Unfortunately, I had no slingshot to cover me. My morning classes seemed to pass too quickly and the lunch I ate had no taste. When I walked towards the meeting place, I knew how a condemned man feels as he walks the last mile. All of a sudden a hand gripped my shoulder. I spun around and there he stood. The only difference was that the triumphant look was gone from his face. He stammered nervously and said that he didn't mean to pick on me, and that he didn't want to fight.

With a sigh of relief I agreed, and we walked back to the school to spend another routine kindergarten afternoon.

The story, with its dramatic presentation and O. Henry-like surprise ending, gave some indication of the artist and person Phil Ochs would become in the future. Phil would always see a much larger picture framed in everyday events, and in "White Milk to Red Wine," he viewed his confrontation with the schoolyard bully as symbolic of the struggle between smaller, weaker people and their tormentors. Further, in citing the David-and-Goliath Bible tale, he acknowledged that his story was hardly new. Nevertheless, in making a passing reference to the epic struggle, he added impact to the ironic, humorous ending.

As an adult, Phil would integrate similar elements of drama and irony in his songs. The idea of showing courage in the face of tough opposition would become a personal credo motivating his political activism and topical protest music.

Of main importance, for the time being, was the recognition that the story brought Phil. After being raised in a household where he had to struggle to be noticed, he had moved away and discovered that he could be honored for what he had to say. For an aspiring star, this was a small but considerable start.

Phil had never been comfortable with his physical appearance. He had a long nose, weak eyes, and ears that stuck out too far; his lack of athleticism had left him with a soft yet gangly frame. He realized, as a result of his mother's constantly carrying on about other people's physical appearance, and especially in comparison to his collection of movie-star pictures, that he was, at utter best, plain in his appearance, and he believed that he had to do better if he could ever hope to stand out in the public eye.

His weight-lifting regimen at Staunton had put him on the right track. Contact lenses helped, as did a brand-new, brushed-back, and longer hairstyle. Despite these improvements, Phil was dissatisfied. Something had to be done about his nose.

Shortly after his graduation from Staunton, Phil told his mother that he wanted corrective surgery. He wanted to start college with a new look, and he wanted to give himself at least a decent chance to succeed in whatever he would eventually be doing. Gertrude was not inclined to go along with such foolish vanity, and it took some convincing on Phil's-and, eventually, Sonny's-part to change her mind, but the surgery was finally done. The procedure might have been unnecessary, but there was no doubting that the new Phil Ochs looked better than the old one. After a childhood spent in the background, he was ready to step forward and make his mark.

There But For Fortune: The Life of Phil Ochs (Michael Schumacher)

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