He ran Rubin's 1967 campaign for Berkeley mayor, which emphasized social justice, ending the Vietnam War and legalizing marijuana. That same year, Rubin appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee dressed as a Revolutionary War soldier and set the mold for the brand of guerrilla political theater that would become the Yippies' chief tactic.
In 1967 Albert went to the New York Stock Exchange with Rubin, Hoffman and others to make a point about greed. From the visitors gallery they threw 500 $1 bills at stockbrokers. Trading stopped as everyone on the floor grabbed the money.
Other antics were just as zany, such as when Albert joined Rubin and Hoffman at the massive antiwar march on the Pentagon later that year, where they made headlines with an announcement that they would "exorcise" the military complex of evil spirits and levitate it.
Albert often served as a peacemaker between Hoffman and Rubin, Krassner said in an interview Wednesday. His mediation skills were crucial in what became one of the Yippies' most famous pranks: running the pig for president.
"There was a lot of competition between Jerry and Abbie. Abbie had gotten the pig," Krassner recalled. "Jerry complained that it was not big enough or ugly enough. To appease Jerry, Stew went with him and got a bigger and uglier pig." They called it Pigasus.
"Our big contribution was our theatrical approach," Albert told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2004. "We tried to be inventive and creative in developing tactics, and we had the belief that if we did we could change the world."
Years later, he said that the imagination of the Yippies eventually became their downfall. "After a while, our imperative tended to be developing stunts rather than counter-institutions," such as the Free University in Berkeley that he helped found in 1965, he told Salon.com in 2000.
Albert, an early supporter of the Black Panthers, often served as its liaison with the Yippies. In one of the '60s' stranger episodes, he helped smooth the way for Timothy Leary, the acid-dropping counterculture guru who escaped from a California prison on drug possession charges in 1970, to find haven in Algeria with Eldridge Cleaver, the Panther leader who was himself a fugitive.
Leary and his wife, Rosemary, were at first received as guests but later became prisoners under "revolutionary arrest" at Cleaver's villa. Albert served as go-between for a tense period during Leary's Algerian confinement; Cleaver eventually released Leary, who returned to prison in California.
"He was on the front lines of the counterculture," Krassner said of Albert.
Todd Gitlin, the 1960s historian who teaches at Columbia University and knew Albert in Berkeley, recalled Wednesday that Albert later became a private detective.
He helped Gitlin and others obtain government files kept on them through the Freedom of Information Act.
"This was an example of his sense of humor," Gitlin said. "It seemed marvelous that he had gone from yippie impresario to private eye."
After moving to Portland, he remained politically active in groups that battled racism and promoted Arab-Jewish dialogue. He ran an online site called the Yippie Reading Room and continued to blog until shortly before he died.
He is survived by his wife, Judy Gumbo Albert, and their daughter, Jessica.
