The presiding judge’s name, Elton C. Lawless, gives the clipping an unintended comic irony: the Diggers, arrested for disordering public space, were released under the authority of Judge Lawless.

This San Francisco Chronicle clipping, which appeared above the fold on the front page, records the dismissal of public nuisance charges against five Diggers arrested during the Intersection Game, staged at Haight and Ashbury on Halloween. The event has acquired a certain founding mystique as the first Digger street theater action, apart from the Panhandle free feeds that had begun a month earlier. The photograph names the released participants—Robert Morticello (the sculptor whose nine-foot tall puppets were part of the street theater), Emmett Grogan, Pierre Minault, Peter Berg, and Brooks Bucher—celebrating outside court. In one compact newspaper item, the clipping captures the early Digger fusion of theater, public space, police confrontation, and media visibility. Emmett Grogan later gave this Chronicle photograph its own afterlife in Ringolevio. He wrote that the gesture he was making in the photograph was not the peace sign but a backwards V-sign, understood by the English and Irish as “Up Your Ass,” equivalent to the American raised middle finger. According to Grogan, after the photograph appeared on the front page, people in the Haight began greeting him with the forward-facing V-sign and saying “Peace, brother,” converting his intended obscene gesture into part of the local folklore surrounding the counterculture peace sign. (Ringolevio, p. 253)