''Dana was born in the same hospital in Ravenna, Ohio, where the dying students were later taken from Kent State. He counts among his formative experiences shaking hands with Jack Kennedy when he campaigned in East Lansing in 1960, and hitch-hiking in August '63, at 16, to Washington, D.C., in order to be near the foot of the Lincoln Memorial for the "I have a dream" speech. Two months later he organized his first demonstration of 2,000 people, in Lansing, when the Klan blew up four little Black girls in a church on Birmingham Sunday. The next year he did a brief stint in a state mental hospital because of his mercurial temper. Because he told shrinks he thought he was destined for something important, they said he was crazy. But that kept him from being drafted in January '65, a month with the highest proportion of casualties in Viet Nam. He also became a lifelong critic of thorazine and prolyxin. He escaped, got a job in New York, saved his money, and legalized his status in late 1965.''

''Inspired by a VOICE article on the Dutch Provos, he started the New York Provos with two friends, and called a smoke-in for Tompkins Square Park. The smoke-ins got bigger and bigger, and after a judge ruled a roll-your-own cigarette seen from a distance wasn't grounds for arrest, the Feds moved in an informer who wheedled Dana's personal acid stash out of him. When he was busted in late August 1967, 3,000 people marched from a Fugs concert, across Fourteenth Street, to the federal holding pen on West Street. It was Dana's first fifteen minutes of fame. In October () the Provos gave out four pounds of pot at the "Levitation of the Pentagon." Then in December, the Provo Free Store on First Street was raided, and Dana was charged with a pot sale he didn't do. Convinced he couldn't get fair treatment, he fled to Mexico, then Canada, where he had to watch Chicago '68 on television.〔