Dallas Notes

Initially founded by Doug Baker[1] at Southern Methodist University in March 1967, under the title NOTES from the Underground, the first issues were run off after hours on a copy machine at Texas Instruments.

[2][3] With a blend of New Left political activism, hippie/drug counterculture, and underground comix and graphics, the paper developed a growing citywide and regional readership, and starting with Vol.

Thorne Dreyer wrote at The Rag Blog that Notes editor Burns "was incessantly harassed by the Dallas authorities, who charged him with obscenity, beat him mercilessly, tore up his offices, and confiscated his equipment."

The obscenity case against the paper "went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court where Justice William O. Douglas commented on the cops' ransacking of the Dallas Notes offices: 'It would be difficult to find in our books a more lawless search-and-destroy raid.

"[7] In his book, Unamerican Activities: The Campaign Against the Underground Press, Geoffrey Rips wrote that the "persistent persecution of Burns stemmed in part from [his] 1967 investigative report in Dallas Notes about Texas Congressman Joe Pool's arrest for drunken driving, after his car hit a carload of soldiers at a red light."