The Radio Station Was “Bombed Off The Air Twice By The Klan”; Founder Of Underground Press Gives His Account

Thorne Dreyer, a political activist and progressive journalist most of his life, was a pioneer of the ‘60s-70s underground press. He was a founding editor of The Rag in Austin and Space City! in Houston, two of the most influential of the era’s underground newspapers. Dreyer is a director of the New Journalism Project, is editor of The Rag Blog, and has hosted Rag Radio on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin for the last 13 years. He is the author of Making Waves: The Rag Radio Interviews, published in 2022 by the Briscoe Center for American History and distributed by the University of Texas Press, and an editor of Celebrating The Rag: Austin’s Iconic Underground. Newspaper (2016), and Exploring Space City!: Houston’s Historic Underground Newspaper (2021).

In Austin, Dreyer joined the Students for a Democratic Society where he was active in civil rights and the movement against the War in Vietnam. Dreyer grew up in Houston where his mother was a prominent artist and his father was a writer and editor at the Houston Chronicle. Their Dreyer Galleries was the center of a large community of artists, intellectuals, and political activists, and was often under fire from the Ku Klux Klan because of the family’s support for human rights. He worked as a political consultant in Houston, as a correspondent for Texas Monthly, managed KPFT, the Pacifica radio station, ran a public relations business, and worked as an actor and music producer. He currently lives in Austin with his dog Picasso.

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