Researching the Phoenix

We want to learn more about John Bellairs’s contributions to the Phoenix, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based weekly newspaper. It’s a long shot, we know, being almost 40 years after the fact, but that hasn’t stopped us before - and we've found answers before, too.

Here is what we know:

• We have a copy of Bellairs’s article “Graffiti” appearing in the debut issue on Oct. 9, 1969.
• He was only associated with the paper for a few weeks; therefore, we believe his remaining articles would be found in the Oct. 16 and 23 issues.
• We have confirmed he had no column in the Oct. 30 edition.  It is tempting, however, to determine if there is anything on Nov. 6 (though we doubt it).
• We don't know if "Graffiti" was the name of the first article or the intended name of the column, with Bellairs the initial author.

After this, it's a bit murky. 

Alan Lewis, who ran a website chronicling Boston-area music and entertainment history, said that to learn anything at all about the paper is difficult.

"It was officially known just as The Phoenix, but many call it the Cambridge Phoenix due to where it was published -- to distinguish it from the later Boston Phoenix. Like the city it was published in, it represented more of a hippie/folky point of view. However, well-informed people continue to refer to it as the Boston Phoenix, scholars who get the paper's name right still identify it as having been published in Boston, not Cambridge, and then when searching on the Internet to find anything about it, more often than not it will end up being about an English dance troupe or some such thing." [1] 

Cambridge's Phoenix would end its run in 1972, selling out to and merging with rival Boston After Dark, which in turn would evolve into today's well-known Boston Phoenix.

Bellairs was long disassociated with the newspaper at this point: he had stuck around only for three issues. Reason? Money. Priscilla says John stopped writing because "they stopped paying the $75 he'd been promised." [2]

We’ve contacted the usual archival sources in the Boston and Cambridge area (libraries and colleges), as well as other universities specializing in alternative newspapers from the 1960s (yes, such collections exist), to no avail. Some collections do not feature the Phoenix.  Those that do usually have only issues from 1970 forward.

The connection between this version of the Phoenix and the modern, better-known Boston Phoenix hasn’t helped much, either.

References

• [1] Alan Lewis (New England Music Scrapbook)
• [2] Correspondence with Priscilla Bellairs.