The Magnet #64: FATE, FONIK RIETEENG, and VONU
True stories of the strange, the unusual, the unknown
A magazine salesman visited our Los Gatos, California house when I was in 6th grade. My dad told the salesman he subscribed to Scientific American and didn’t want any other magazines. But the salesman was persistent, he wouldn’t take no for an answer, and my dad was too polite to shut the door in his face. My dad finally agreed to purchase a subscription.
“What is the least expensive subscription?” my dad asked.
“That would be Fate,” said the man. “It’s $10 for a year.”
My dad wrote him a check and the man left.
“What’s Fate?” I asked my dad.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just wanted to get rid of him.”
A month later a copy of Fate arrived. It was digest size and printed on cheap pulp stock. It had a bunch of ads for occult sects and secret societies, like the Rosicrucians, Astara, Eckankar, and Cosolargy. It advertised ESP workshops, witchcraft courses, lessons on “instant evolution,” and biofeedback devices to “control your mind and body.” I was fascinated. The back pages had hundreds of classified ads for numerological handwriting analysis, psychic readings by mail, secrets to winning sweepstakes and picking racehorses, homemade insecticide recipes, flying saucer photos, and “70 Priceless Secrets!!” (for $9.95).
The articles were equally intriguing: Air Force Telepathy Test. In Brazil It Rains Beans. Mystery Airships of the 1800s. UFOs in the Florida Swamp. The Jealous Tenant Cursed Our Home. Baffling Bird Deaths. UFO Damages Iowa Soybeans.
A regular section called “True Mystic Experiences” ran reader-submitted accounts of unexplainable experiences. They were like Reddit stories from 50 years ago.
Fate became my favorite magazine. I thanked my dad for getting it. “Don’t tell anyone I subscribed to it,” he said.
As fate would have it, we continued to receive issues of Fate in the mail for a few years after the subscription expired. I saved every copy, but I don’t know what happened to them. Someone probably threw them out when I went away to college. Fortunately, the Internet Archive has many scanned copies.
This week, while I was looking at the classified ads in the June 1973 issue of Fate, I came across one for something called FONIK RIETEENG, which at first glance appeared to be in a language other than English:
It said:
FONIK RIETEENG Impelz kurekt speleeng. Gied wun dolur — ue kood luvit — Joesif Bednash, 1515 Pusifik Av., Venus, 90291 Kalif.
I realized it was in some kind of phonetic English. Translated into standard English, I think it says:
PHONIC WRITING impels correct spelling. Gied(?) one dollar—you could love it.—Joseph Bednash, 1515 Pacific Ave. Venice, 90291, Calif.
I looked up 1515 Pacific Avenue in Venice, California on Google Maps. Today it’s a hostel called Planet Venice. (Too bad it’s not called Planet Venus!)
I also searched Google for “1515 Pusifik.” The only hits were for the June 1973 issue of Fate and for a PDF scan of a November 1972 zine called Vonulink published by “Mike Freeman” of Cave Junction, Oregon. The text is hard to read:
Here’s what I think it translates to:
Constitution, because Frisco brought tits out in the open, then LA brought asses along with tits, a few years later. So somehow, social nudism ought to be a way of life wherever people desire it so. I work for my room and have been wanting to get phonics ukr(?) across for the past two years. Joesif Bednash, 1515 Pusifik Av. 306, Venus, Kalif. 90291.
The entry follows with a comment from a Vonulink staffer:
To joesif bednash, rayo, paul doerr and other proponents of reformed spelling. I will write phonetically (what I write for vonulink at least) if you will all agree on one phonetic system (and if it’s a system I can type easy). How about it? Lan
I became more interested in Vonu than Bednash’s idiosyncratic spelling style. After poking around online, I found Monograph Bookwerks’ auction catalog that was selling issues of Vonu Life in 2014 and which had a definition of vonuism.
The catalog copy said:
VONU LIFE #1-9 / VONU LIFE ’73 / PACSCRIPT #1
Grants Pass/Cave Junction OR & Berkeley CA
1971-1973. Newsletters. 8.5 x 11” (21.6 x 28 cm), varies 8-32 pages, staple bound. Very good, some toning and light soiling to pages and covers. SOLDVonu Life was a bimonthly hippie/libertarian newsletter that fostered communication “among nomads, troglodytes and other invulnerables” later changed to “and other freedom-achievers” and finally to be a “handbook and directory for freedom and survival achievers.” Attributed to Mike Freeman, a pseudonym for Tom Marshall, “vonu” was an invented word and philosophy of live and let live while avoiding institutional and governmental coercion. Vonu Life ’73 is an 80,000-word booklet summarizing the information and teaching of vonu, including articles on hand-built shelter, wild plants, super hobos, secret radio networks, troglodyte community and more. Sometime after 1973, Marshall disappeared into the forests of Western Oregon and was never heard from again. A rare and obscure set of documents from the back-to-nature/libertarian movement of the 1970s.
An introduction to a Vonu paperback defines Vonu as
a contraction of Voluntary and Not vUlnerable. “Vonu” is somewhat like “freedom” or “security.” But those words mean many different things to different people. Rather than argue about what those words ought to mean, I speak of “vonu.”
Vonu founder Mike Freeman/Tom Marshall also went by the pseudonym Rayo. In 2019 the publisher of the Vonu podcast interviewed Jim Stumm, who edited Freeman/Marshall/Rayo’s book (under the pen name Jon Fisher) Vonu: The Search for Personal Freedom. At the time of the interview, Stumm described himself as a 75-year-old retired janitor. Stumm remembered Rayo as:
…serious, calm, friendly, but not effusive, introverted, and a logical thinker. He was somewhat suspicious of someone like me who he was meeting for the first time. For more, see LOTM page 12.
Rayo was nothing like a Woodstock hippie. He was older, about 40, and his hair was not long. I saw no hint that he had any interest in rock music or protest songs. Rather than a hippie, Rayo was more like the Star Trek character, Data.
For a second opinion, I’ll quote Ben Best who visited Rayo at his house in LA in 1967 and again at his camp in the Oregon woods in 1972. He wrote about his impressions in an article in LIBERTY MAGAZINE, vol. 1, no. 1, Aug. 1987. Ben says:
“I first met Tom in LA in 1967. He was a tall, slender, bespectacled electrical engineer, a nerd, inhibited and at a loss for ‘small talk’…He was much more at ease exchanging information or making plans for action…
“In the spring of 1972, I visited Tom again, attending his Vonu Week program in Oregon…
“Tom was an acutely fear-filled individual who lived in constant expectation of nuclear war, economic collapse, social chaos, and a totalitarian state. He was also an intensely conscientious and trustworthy person. By his own admission, he had little interest in – or understanding of – humor.
“I’m sure there was some relation between Tom’s political paranoia and his inhibitions in social situations…He seemed to find the ‘status symbols’ of ‘that society’ intolerable and was unable to relate to most people very fruitfully…Tom’s intense rationality and integrity are what inspired those who knew him.”
Vonuism reminds me of a combination of Ayn Rand individualism, the Loompanics catalog, The Whole Earth Catalog, and the Sovereign Citizen Movement. I’m not going to pass judgment on vonuism because I’ve only touched the surface of it. I do wonder what happened to Rayo/Freeman/Marshall. If he’s still alive, he’d be in his 90s. I hope he succeeded in his dream of disappearing from society.
And so ends this breadcrumb trail of a story from FATE to VONU. I hope you enjoyed it! Thanks for reading and your support!
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The Magnet: my favourite rabbit hole 🙏🙏🙏
Mark, this one is brilliant. Thanks man.