Fred E. Huntley, a member of the archconservative John Birch Society, ran for mayor of Berkeley in 1967 — and made a point of running against the developing scene on Telegraph Avenue, which his campaign materials labeled ‘the greatest freak show on Earth.”
“It makes me sick,” Huntley said in another campaign flier, “to see my hometown turned into a nationwide joke, to have our own newspaper have to refer to a section of our city as ‘an open sewer.’ But unfortunately it is true. What kind of a town to raise our children has Berkeley become under the leadership of our current mayor?” Berkeley, this flier suggested, had become “the creep capitol of the world,” a “magnet for perverts, dope addicts and degenerates.”
The incumbent Wallace Johnson, a moderate Republican, won the election with 22,254 votes. Jerry Rubin — the proud radical who was vilified in this flier from Huntley’s campaign — received 7,385 votes, or 21 percent. Huntley received a mere 2,160 votes.