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Kent Minault

Oral History of the Early Digger Movement Through Performance Art

Kent is one of the participants in the Diggers from the earliest moments of this indigenous movement. He stands out as the humble incarnation of those 17th-century revolutionaries whose name the latter-day visionaries assumed. In Emmett Grogan's memoir of the San Francisco Diggers, Kent appears on the stage of Digger-Do at every important stop along the way: as one of the puppeteers arrested at the Intersection Game; as one of the leaping defendants captured by a Chronicle photographer on the steps of the courthouse after their charges were dropped; as one of the instigators of the march on the local police station to free the Hells Angels bikers at the Death of Money Parade; as one of the planners of (and performers at) the Invisible Circus; as one of the organizers of the Cole Street free store, Trip Without A Ticket; and innumerable other such involvements. But Emmett's highest praise for Kent is that he, along with a few others, in those early days of 1966, "had maintained the daily supply of Free Food for the Panhandle." Kent was one of a small group who undertook to keep Free Food going after the initial impulse.

Here is Kent's remembrance of those early moments. This video was produced in 2013, and covers the first six months of the San Francisco Digger story. Kent is at prime performance, using all the skillful means of his acting repertoire to tell us his story.

The Road of Excess Leads to the Palace of Wisdom

An oral history performance by Kent Minault

 

[Click photos for larger view.]

 
 
The Digger Archives is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Cite As: The Digger Archives (www.diggers.org) / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 / All other uses must receive permission. Contact: curator at diggers dot org.