You've come a long way, Bobby
by Joe Flaherty

Not since the ghastly revelation that Bella Abzug employs a housekeeper has the women's movement suffered such a dark day as September 20, the date of the King-Riggs match. The contumely heaped on Riggs by women for his unprecedented contribution to their movement smacks of the ingratitude the Irish people leveled at Parnell for taking a sexual breather between battles. But then accolades are never the spiritual sustenance of saints and revolutionaries.

The Press Desk
by Alexander Cockburn

THERE HAVE BEEN HEADLINES in the papers and cover stories in Time and Newsweek but one of the central facts about Chile, so far as the world's newspaper-reading population is concerned, is that one week after the coup no one knows what is going on there.

Phone Phreak Convention
by Ron Rosenbaum

One year ago the phone company had the phone phreaks on the run.

On May 8, 1972, a team of FBI and phone company security men arrested John Draper, alias "Captain Crunch," the most notorious phone phreak of all. The Captain's cherished computerized "Blue Box on wheels" was silenced.

And Joe Engressia, the original blind phone phreak genius who learned to make free calls by whistling into the mouthpiece -- Joe had been busted and forced to abandon the underground phone phreak central office he had set up in his Memphis rooming house.

From pitch to bitch
by David Tipmore

As soon as Geraldo Rivera cakewalked across the Leroy Street playground diamond last Monday night, you knew the charity softball game between the Sixth Precinct cops and the Mattachine Society gays had turned into the Press Putsch of the Year. Forget about warming up gay-straight relations in the Village or that $2 donation for retarded children you shelled out. Who really cared about the softball game, when all you could see from the bleachers were a chorus of tv cameras and a reporter with a copy of (More) hanging out of her purse?

Getting the thrust of Kung Fu
by William Paul

"ENTER THE DRAGON" is the first classy Kung Fu movie specially designed for Western audiences, and that's not to be confused with first-class. What it does mean is that the casting of the three leads has an ecumenical flavor: one Oriental (Bruce Lee), one Caucasian (John Saxon), one Negro (Jim Kelly), and all of them musclebound male. And that it's filmed directly in English rather than dubbed, which gives you a slightly queasy feeling about lots of American dollars having been siphoned off into needy Hong Kong banks on this more than cheapjack production.

Letter from Camp Washington Square
by Clark Whelton

Dear Mom and Dad,

Well, here it is time for my weekly letter and right off I want to thank you both again for sending me to summer camp in Washington Square this year instead of packing me off to old Camp Chigamawog in the Adirondacks. You were absolutely right about me having no trouble spending eight weeks in the park. I can sleep all night on the park benches or among the playground equipment and nobody says a thing. The cops are really beautiful. They just walk by and leave us alone.

Son of Son of God?
by Cynthia Grenier

EN BOQEQ, Israel -- We're 1286 feet below sea level. Total night, with a paring of a new moon and a sprinkle of fiercely bright stars. Suddenly day happens as if brought up by a master brightener. The sky is light blue and cloudless. The mountainous coast of Jordan stands pale violet across the wide motionless mirror surface of the Dead Sea. The first buses with cast and crew have already left.

It's a half-hour drive south, beside the Dead Sea, to the location -- past cliffs, their surfaces beveled by millennia of wind and rain, then off on an exceedingly bumpy dirt road into the vastness of the white-beige Negev. The car brakes behind a hillock. Utter silence. Then blaring forth, a disembodied full orchestra and chorus: "Christ you know I love you Did you see I waved?" It's "Jesus Christ Superstar" in action.

Covering up the cover-up?
by Lucian K. Truscott IV

In the days immediately following the break-in of Democratic National Party Headquarters at the Watergate in June 1972, Richard M. Nixon met repeatedly with the one man to whom he would turn time and time again as the scandal surrounding what he would call "this very bizarre occurrence" unfolded. And yet it is only now, more than a year after the burglary and bugging attempt, that the complicity of this most secretive individual in the events surrounding Watergate being exposed.

Press Clips
by John Leo

[Somehow I overlooked this: in May, 1973, the Voice began its "Press Clips" column, and its first writer was John Leo. So this isn't the first of that venerable column, but it's a very early one. -- Tony O.]

SCREAMING HEADLINE on the July 16 Daily News: "Liddy May Talk, McCord Hints," which would indeed have been a good story, if true. Inside the paper, however, we got a non-story, hyped by the reporter and hyped again by the desk on a dreary news day. All McCord told the News was that since Liddy was seeing his family, and people who see their family often wish to do so again, perhaps he might consider squealing. Ten demerits for all involved.

Deep Threat
by Lucian K. Truscott IV

Penthouse magazine, in the person of editor Bob Guccione, is out to challenge the recent Supreme Court decision on obscenity. "We are making ourselves a target," said Guccione last week at a press conference. "There will be a lot of sheriffs waiting out there in the hinterlands to show me who's the boss."

Does that mean, Guccione was asked, that the magazine plans to continue publishing full frontal nudity?