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Although I lost all my savings, there was one blessing in disguise. At the racetrack, I bought a handicap newsletter, The Armstrong Daily , which included a clever column by Marvin Kitman.
    I invited him to write for The Realist , and he became our consumer advocate with “An Independent Research Laboratory.” His first report, “I tried the Rapid-Shave Sandpaper Test,” called the bluff of a particular advertising campaign when he described his personal attempt to shave sandpaper with shaving cream. He also wrote sardonic pieces such as “How I Fortified My Family Fallout Shelter,” on the morality of arming yourself against neighbors who didn’t have a fallout shelter.
    Meanwhile, I was becoming bad company. Campus bookstores were banning The Realist , and students whose parents had burned their issues often
wrote in for replacement copies. But I was publishing material that was bound to offend. For example, Madalyn Murray was a militant atheist who had challenged the constitutionality of compulsory Bible reading in public schools, and she concluded her first article, “I feel that Jesus Christ is at most a myth—and if he wasn’t, the least he was, was a bastard—and that the Virgin Mary obviously played around as much as I did, and certainly I feel she would be capable of orgasm.”

    I seemed to be following a pattern of participatory journalism.
    In 1962, when abortion was still illegal, I published an anonymous interview with Dr. Robert Spencer, a humane abortionist who was known as “The Saint.” Patients came to his office in Ashland, Pennsylvania, from around the country. He had been performing abortions for 40 years, started out charging $5, and never charged more than $100. Ashland was a small town, and Dr. Spencer’s work was not merely tolerated; the community depended on it—the hotel, the restaurant, the dress shop—all thrived on the extra business that came from his out-of-town patients. He built facilities at his clinic for Negro patients who weren’t allowed to obtain overnight lodgings elsewhere in Ashland.
    After the interview was published, I began to get phone calls from scared female voices, from teenagers to matrons. They were all in desperate search of a safe abortionist. Even a nurse couldn’t find one. It was preposterous that they should have to seek out the editor of a satirical magazine, but their quest so far had been futile, and they simply didn’t know where to turn. With Dr. Spencer’s permission, I referred them to him. I had never intended to become an underground abortion referral service, but it wasn’t going to stop just because in the next issue of The Realist there would be an interview with someone else.
    A few years later, state police raided Dr. Spencer’s clinic and arrested him. He remained out of jail only by the grace of political pressure from those he’d helped. He was finally forced to retire from his practice, but I continued mine, referring callers to other physicians he had recommended. Eventually, I was subpoenaed by district attorneys in two cities to appear before grand juries investigating criminal charges against abortionists. On both occasions, I refused to testify, and each time the D.A. tried to frighten me into cooperating with the threat of arrest.

    Bronx D.A. (now Judge) Burton Roberts told me that his staff had found an abortionist’s financial records, which showed all the money that I had received, but he would grant me immunity from prosecution if I cooperated with the grand jury. He extended his hand as a gesture of trust. “That’s not true,” I said, refusing to shake hands. If I had ever accepted any money, I’d have no way of knowing that he was bluffing.
    At this point, attorney Gerald Lefcourt filed a suit on my behalf, challenging the constitutionality of the abortion law. He pointed out that the D.A. had no power to investigate the