I really can’t remember now, but It was sometime between 1987 and 1991. I was at a street festival in Minneapolis, Minnesota called Cedarfest. This was one of my favorite of the summer festivals in “The Cities”. It wasn’t really very big, but Cedar avenue was blocked off where it ran by part of the U of M campus and so the festival was in part, the domain of many of my post-modern hippie college friends and all manner of what I thought to be smart, arty, hip… you know, cool.

Walking through the thick, bustling festival crowd, I was preoccupied (something about someone I was to meet at the KQRS stage) and so I didn’t hear when what I could only describe as an old hippie, said something to me and thrust a pamphlet in my hands. I just smiled at the old guy, put the thing in my pocket and went about my business of having a good time.

I didn’t read the pamphlet until I got home. It was written by a man who called himself Ernest Mann and the publication was called The Little Free Press. Reading the pamphlet, I saw that it was just one of a series, published by Mr. Mann to spread his idea for a money-less society. I was entertained, and impressed with the depth to which this idea seemed to be worked out. There was a phone number on the last page so I decided to give old Ernest a call.

On the phone, Ernest Mann (his real name was Lawrence “Larry” F. Johnson) told me that he’d started The Little Free Press in the late sixties. He said that before that he’d been a stock broker on wall street and was making lots and lots of money, but as he made more and more, he came to see that he wasn’t really doing anything worthwhile. So he decided never to make any more money, live off his assets and work on a system by which money could be eliminated from our society. I remember talking to Ernest for about three hours. He was a delight to converse with and obviously quite intelligent. The man had a playful energy that was infectious. Looking back, I wish I’d arranged to meet him but… I didn’t.

The idea (the way Ernest presented it) struck me as beautifully simple and I entertained myself and my friends with it for quite some time. But at that time in my life, I was way too distracted by money myself, to do much more than that.

Over a decade later, living and working as an EFL teacher in Japan, I was talking about money with a class of higher level students and one of them asked me if I ever dream of making a lot of money some day. I said, “You know, I have a dream that one day society will do away with money”.

They were all ears.

P.S.

This is a re-write of a piece I wrote sometime while I was living in Japan (1995-2001). Upon preparing this, I Googled Ernest Mann and found several stories about him at the Morrison County Historical Society website.

where I also found the pictures used here. In one of the stories, it mentions that in 1996, Ernest was beaten to death by his grandson with a pipe wrench.

Aloha Ernest.