By DAN CHIASSON
This piece is excerpted from the book Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician by Dan Chiasson, a guest at Amherst College’s eleventh annual literary festival. Register and see the full list of for LitFest 2026 events here.
Sanders was elected Mayor of Burlington by a margin of 11 votes in March of 1981. Thereafter, all hell broke loose.
The Burlington Flea Press
(Spring and Summer, 1981)
Burlington’s first public Xerox machines were located in the basement of Capitol Stationers on Church Street. Upstairs, schoolchildren roamed the aisles for markers, sparkle and glue. Downstairs, at the copiers, metalheads ran off posters for their bands and teenagers occasionally xeroxed their bare asses. The upstairs was wholesome and bright; the downstairs, stygian and edgy. In those days there was something faintly illicit about a copy center and the motives of those who frequented such establishments.
So Capitol Stationers, a block and a half from City Hall, was a perfect place to produce The Burlington Flea Press, an anonymous slander sheet aimed at the city’s new mayor. In fact Peter Freyne, the city reporter for The Vanguard Press, often swung through the shop on his way to the bars in the hopes of discovering a scoop. “You never knew what might get left on the glass,” Freyne, an intrepid and tireless curator of scuttlebutt, told his editors. Freyne thought he saw the traces of a Capitol Stationers job in the material presentation of The Flea Press. The copy shop workers, who loved gossiping with Freyne, told him of a jowly figure in trenchcoat and tweed cap who had that afternoon hastily collated and stapled fifty copies of a “confidential document,” then vanished into the bright midday Church Street crowd, a bundle tucked under his arm. Ah, but this mysterious figure had left an original in the bowels of the big machine! It was a mock-up of page two of The Burlington Flea Press, the scurrilous broadsheet making the rounds in City Hall.
The public learned of the turmoil convulsing City Hall that spring and summer in the pages of The Burlington Free Press. But inside City Hall, everyone got their news from The Flea Press, delivered on Thursdays with a different postmark every week and sealed in a plain manilla envelope, “the way porn is delivered,” as Greg Guma put it. Sanders received a personal copy, addressed to “B.S. Sanders, Temporary Mayor,” or “Burn A. Sunder, Days Numbered.” The Flea Press went well beyond the bounds of responsible satire, identifying Richard Sartelle as “Pritchard Sauresmail,” an “overweight elephant in search of peanuts,” and mocking his disability: “we can’t imagine that a husky, healthy, ambulatory man could possibly be disabled.” A female aide was depicted as “an overweight Venus clad in a flimsy white dress accompanied by six goatish young winos from our Marxist proletariat.” Linda Niedweske, called “Glenda Needswitz,” was mocked as a spoiled “nutritionist” who couldn’t type.
Her portrait was done in verse; whoever was behind The Flea Press knew the basics of prosody, and managed to convey his odious ideas in halfway decent ballad stanzas:
The mayor’s typewriter is covered with dust But sturdy and staunch
it stands
Though our middle-class Board thinks typing’s a must It soils nutritional hands.
When a Sanders character appeared in Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury, a nationally-syndicated strip, The Flea Press added its own comic strip, Goonsbury, complete with anti-semitic caricatures of the Mayor. Two local attorneys opined that the targets of the Flea Press had “grounds for lawsuits against the perpetrator,” as The Vanguard Press reported.
The author or authors of The Flea Press were not just having fun; they intended to destroy Bernie and his allies. I’d heard about the paper for years, but never laid eyes on a copy until Greg Guma–one of its targets, mocked as “Gregg Goona of the Rumpguard Press”–pointed me to a stash. The publication is, in fact, insane. Its author intends to discourage, intimidate, and frighten. As The Flea Press became more libelous and seditious, more demented, Bernie’s adversaries in City Hall began to flaunt their enjoyment of the paper. Allan Gear of Ward Four distributed it at Aldermen’s meetings. Its reactionary argot–Bernie’s ”cadre,” his “comrades”–began to seep into mainstream press reports. The paper betrayed “an insider perspective,” as Guma put it: “many people assumed that a city employee was involved.”
The shadowy patron who’d left his mock-up behind on the glass was one Vincent Narramore, a math professor at Saint Michael’s College, former chair of the Burlington Democratic Party, political commentator and pollster, and one of Gordon Paquette’s closest friends. Narramore, in fact, had been on the radio the night of Bernie’s victory, spreading disinformation to benefit Paquette about low turnouts in Bernie-friendly wards; it was when he delivered this analysis that Jim Rader, listening on the road to the ferry, wrote the evening off. Narramore had proffered misinformation for years with his patented Vermont Political Poll, which was considered the gold-standard until Free Press reporters looked at its actual performance and found it to rank near the bottom of all similar polls nationwide.
Narramore therefore had reason to despise the Free Press and Sanders both. And though he denied being the Flea Press’s author, Narramore had left an additional clue inside its pages. Those demeaning, sexist satirical ballads were clearly the work of an experienced writer of doggerel; it happened that Narramore was an amateur versifier, who wrote and published children’s songs on the side–including a tune performed on the air by Captain Kangaroo. This 15 minutes of fame was Narramore’s great pride–his secret, transforming vanity. When confronted by Peter Freyne, Narramore brought up Gordon Paquette’s lawsuit against Guma and The Vanguard Press, threatening his own legal action against the paper. Narramore was busted; Freyne’s star was on the rise.
Dan Chiasson ’93 is the author of five books of poetry, including Bicentennial (2014) and The Math Campers (2020), and a book of literary criticism. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, Chiasson is the Lorraine C. Wang Professor of English and chair of the English department at Wellesley College.
