Writer co-founded alternative paper

Stories like the banana high spread through the culture via the Underground Press Syndicate, a network formed by Bowart, Kunkin and others with a serious purpose, to "warn the civilized world of its impending collapse," according to a manifesto written by its founders. The syndicate, which eventually included 600 papers in the United States and abroad, "was the way the news about the opposition to the Vietnam War was circulated and also about '60s culture, music and so forth," Kunkin said

According to one widely told story, Bowart came up with the name of the syndicate when an interviewer asked him what it was called. At that moment he saw a United Parcel Service truck go by, which prompted him to tell the interviewer that the organization was called UPS.

Bowart left the East Village Other in 1968 but remained involved in publishing. In Arizona, he started Omen Press, which published materials about Eastern mysticism and metaphysics. He later lived in Aspen, Colo., where he wrote for the Aspen Daily News, and in Washington state, where he published the Port Townsend Daily News.

During the 1980s, he was editor of Palm Springs Life magazine, which he once characterized as "a Sears catalog for the congenitally rich."

Bowart was not born to wealth but married well. His second wife was Peggy Hitchcock, an heiress to the Mellon banking fortune. When they divorced in 1981, he successfully sued her for alimony, winning $2,000 a month for 15 months. He married four times in all. He is survived by four children, Wythe Bowart, Sophia Bowart and Nuria Detarre, all of San Francisco, and Wolfe Bowart of Perth, Australia; two grandchildren; and three sisters.

In later years, he was a frequent guest speaker at forums on mind control and founded the Freedom of Thought Foundation to educate the public about it.

"In the '60s he was saying you can be who you want to be, think what you want to think," Wolfe Bowart said last week. "He was really about . . . freedom of the mind, the last frontier."

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elaine.woo@latimes.com