In Remembrance: The Man David Lance Goines

By Moristotle

Today we pause to remember the man whose last name I use for the name of my fictional character Goines. David Lance Goines died on February 19 in Berkeley, California, the city where I was born about two and a half years before Goines was born in Grants Pass, Oregon (May 29, 1945).
    “Goines” was familiar to me from the posters of his that my wife and I have long had hanging on our walls, and “Goines” was irresistible for the easy puns it gives way to.
    Goines’ mother was an artist and calligrapher, and he became a graphic artisan and printmaker. His March 6 obituary in the New York Times (“David Lance Goines, Who Shaped the Counterculture Aesthetic, Dies at 77”) notes that his “signage for [the artisanal French restaurant] Chez Panisse…became emblematic of its visual identity and earthy, bohemian ethos. He said the woman was…an embodiment of romance drawn from his imagination.” That last bit fits comfortably with my fictional character.

    “Goines” may have little else in common with David Lance Goines, however.

It was an earlier antiwar protest, the Free Speech Movement, which erupted on the Berkeley campus in 1964, that set him on his path. He was a classics major swept up in the politics of the time, and when he and others were threatened with expulsion for handing out political leaflets on campus, it galvanized more than a thousand students to take over Sproul Hall, where the administration offices were.
    The sit-in there made national news when nearly 800 students, Mr. Goines among them, were arrested.
    He was proud to say he was arrested 14 times in the ’60s. He was thrilled, too, to have been thrown out of school, which he hated, and by the art of printing, which he learned as an apprentice at the Berkeley Free Press, a small publishing house and haven for radicals dedicated to producing material for all sorts of political groups.

Copyright © 2023 by Moristotle