Max Scherr (March 12, 1916 – October 31, 1981) was an American underground newspaper editor and publisher known for his iconoclastic 1960s weekly, the Berkeley Barb.
[5] In 1958, Scherr purchased a local hangout popular with students and beatniks called the Steppenwolf at 2136 San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley, which became a stop on the West Coast folk music circuit.
The smudgy first issue of 8 tabloid pages was crudely printed in a small edition of 2000 copies, and the paper was launched on a run which lasted almost 15 years.
By the fall of 1965 antiwar protest led by the Vietnam Day Committee and Jerry Rubin dominated campus activism in Berkeley, and the Barb soon emerged as the unofficial mouthpiece of the VDC.
The battle over People's Park which began in 1969 with an article by Stew Albert in the Barb was in some respects the paper's high-water mark in arousing its readers to militant activism in the streets, but the bitter aftermath, in which several protestors were shot and the city was occupied by the National Guard, left many in Berkeley with little appetite for further confrontation.
[6] This led to conflict with the paper's staff of 40, which was earning at most the legal minimum wage, and the staff rebelled, forming the Red Mountain Tribe collective and issuing a special interim edition called Barb on Strike without Scherr, who managed to put out a bare-bones 8-page issue of the paper on schedule without assistance.
In 1978, with sales down to 20,000 copies (from a peak of over 100,000), in an effort to attract mainstream advertisers, the paper's lucrative sex ads were spun off into a separate publication, the Spectator.
[8] Shortly before his death he told fellow underground newspaper editor Abe Peck: "We were a lot of well-meaning fools.