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Pied Piper - When Pie Throwing Became Political Protest · Outlaw's Digest

• On April 16, 1977, Phyllis Schlafly was having her pie and eating it too. She was holding court at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where the Women’s National Republican Club was holding a luncheon in her honor. Schlafly was the tradwife champion of the 1950s. In the photos you can see her in her typical style: trotting around looking like someone who would call the police on a child’s lemonade stand, with her hair brushed up into a dome over her head. A few broaches and a corsage were pinned to the high neck of her sweater, like the war medals on a fascist general. No doubt the fans surrounding her were imagining how they could also get hair just as shiny and round without delay. Outside, protestors had gathered. To anyone listening, and especially to the reporters in attendance, Schlafly was gloating just a little bit. I quote, “It’s sour grapes, because WE are winning and THEY are losing.” She had spent the decade fighting the Equal Rights Amendment. Remember that one? If you don’t, that’s because of all the hard work Schlafly put into killing it. I look upon the women’s liberation movement as essentially a negative view of life… The ERA, as it was called, was meant to make discrimination on the basis of sex unconstitutional across the United States. It would have, um, actually, given women the same rights as men under American law when it came to things like banking, housing, hiring. I know, crazy. Schlafly? She hated it. While it was working its way through the legislative process, Schlafly devoted her life to fighting it. Under the cover of, you know, being an affluent white woman, she led a successful campaign to sabotage women’s rights. The reason we’re against ERA is because we are pro family… She rallied conservatives around a painfully narrow vision of the traditional family. She became its figurehead. I think it’s a great privilege to be able to take care of your baby rather than be compelled to join the workforce … it’s the great gift that god has given to women and it’s not an example of oppression! By 1977, it was pretty clear that Schlafly was winning the public debate. Hence the celebratory luncheon at the Waldorf-Astoria. She was basically getting showered with praise by the republican women’s club. But, after the initial reception, just before the luncheon was about to begin, a man—with monstrous sideburns—stepped out from the assembled attendees. He approached Schlafly, holding something in his left hand. And he hit her with a little tradition of his own: a towering, double-crust American apple pie. He yelled, “that’s for the Equal Rights Amendment!” and dashed away. Schlafly was left blotting apple pie out of her eyes with an embroidered hanky. It was a paid hit by Schlafly’s enemies: a group of anarchists calling themselves the Emma Goldman Brigade, called the New York Times and claimed responsibility for the attack. They told the paper that to hit Schlafly, at the height of her power, they had hired only the best: Aron “The Pieman” Kay. America’s most prolific and successful pie-throwing activist. Welcome to Outlaw's Digest, the podcast telling stories from criminally delicious food history. I’m your host, KC Hysmith. I’m a maker and eater and scholar of food. I’ve got degrees in gastronomy and cultural studies, and in my writing I put those together into a delicious exploration of food history. Now, with Outlaw’s Digest, I’m looking into the forbidden pages of the recipe book—and bringing you the wildest crimes that food history has to offer. We’re talking malicious poisonings and organized fraud, but also incredible stories of smuggling, heists, and, like in today’s episode, times when food itself became the weapon. Any fan of true crime knows that stories of crime reveal deep parts of who we are: our hidden impulses, our secret lives, the silences and moral anxieties that reveal how our communities really function. Food gets that deep, too. So telling the stories of food and crime, together? I simply can’t resist. In today’s story, we follow the exploits of Aron “The Pieman” Kay, and how a uniquely American dish, our beloved pie, becomes a powerful political tool when it falls into the hands of radicals. This is Outlaw’s Digest episode 1: Pied Piper. The journey Aron Kay took into edible activism started on Capitol Hill in May, 1970. That’s when a presidential commission held public hearings in a crowded conference room. Aron was in that crowd. He was a twenty-year-old hippie who had made his way to DC from his California home. He was there with his friend, Thomas King Forçade, and a few others steeped in the counterculture youth movements of the day. They were members of the Youth International Party, or Yippies, and they had a clear message: less war, more marijuana, please and thank you. At the head of their group, Thomas Forçade was dressed like a priest: long black coat, black hat, white collar, and holding a large box in his lap. They had come to weigh in on a contentious topic: the definition of obscenity. The commission had worked on this issue for two years. This was their first hearing open to the public. They invited law enforcement, publishers, teachers, librarians and others to drop in and offer comments for the commission to consider. Forçade, he of the priestly attire, published indie newspapers for the youth counterculture—one of them was called, High Times. He had also started the Underground Press Syndicate to network indie papers across the country. So Forçade was at the hearing to give the commission a statement. Aron tagged along in his posse of other counter culture types, to support what Thomas was about to do. When it was Thomas’s turn, he took the mic and said that the commission was unconstitutional, illegitimate, and obscene. Yeah, he called the obscenity commission obscene. One of the commissioners, a sociology professor, asked Forçade to explain how what they were doing was so unconstitutional. Forçade said, “I have material in my box to explain that.” He stood up and walked forward, carrying a large box. When he got to the tables where the commission was sitting, he threw some papers off the top, and reached in. Under them, he had a cream pie. He whipped it out of the box, and slammed it into the sociologist’s face across the table. Cream splashed over his perfectly coiffed hair and down his tie. The tin pie plate settled into his lap. While a glob of cream was still dangling from the sociologist’s left earlobe, the Underground Press posse jumped into action. They scattered around the room and passed out fliers with the title PIE POWER! The pamphlet included a quote from the first filmmaker to record pie throwing as a comedy gag. It said: a pie in the face represents a fine, wish-fulfilling, universal idea, especially in the face of authority There were six capitol police guarding the hearing room, but none of them made a move to touch Forçade. He took his box, his documents, and even his pie plate, and marched out. His posse followed. Papers across the country picked up the event. And the headlines were journalistic gold. Things like: Bizarre Obscenity Hearing Climaxed with Pitched Pie Commission shows pie-smeared face to public — and Obscenity commission gets ‘creamed’ It was the first time that pie-throwing had been used as a form of political protest. Sure, it had been part of slapstick for decades, and the pie throwing had been a comedy gag in films going back to the 1920s. Aron was a fan of the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers. Slapstick was a language he knew well. On top of that, Aron’s childhood friends would later tell the press that he had spent his school years pushing back on kids who bullied him for being Jewish. They said he fought with a ferocity they didn’t see in anyone else. So, when Aron watched Forçade hit a government commissioner with a pie for real—I imagine that brought together his love of slapstick and his taste for smacking bullies in a whole new and delicious way. It pulled the comedy gag off the screen and made it real. It also told the bully getting pied: you’re a joke… and you deserve to be treated as such. So Aron left the obscenity hearing vibrating with possibility. He knew a lot of people who deserved a pie in the face. And now he was sure he could give it to them.  Aaron "Pie Man" Kay, as he was known. First came up, um, as part of this group called Agents of Pie-Kill that was founded in the aftermath of Forsade's pieing heard around the world. That’s Rossi Anastopoulu, producer for King Arthur Baking’s podcast, Things Bakers Know, and author of the book Sweet Land of Liberty: A History of America in Eleven Pies. When she was writing her book, Rossi learned some crazy things about the Agents of Pie-Kill.  Agents of Pie-Kill was, uh, it was a business where you could hire these agents to pie someone of your choice. Yep, in the classic American style, the pie throwers saw Forçade’s pie attack on the Obscenity commission, and they sensed a business opportunity. They put themselves on the market. Contract hits. If you wanted someone to take a pie to the kisser, the Agents of Pie-Kill were there to provide.  one example of an Agents of Pie-Kill target was a, a nun who was known as, quote, "the bitch" by her students. Oh so you can guess who paid for her to get pied. One feature about the Agents of Pie-Kill practically reads like a PR puff piece. It runs through the ins and outs of the business saying the agents will make pie attacks at offices, conventions, or even birthday parties, and they assure their clients of the very best quality pies. The flavor is up to the buyer. The attack is up to the pie-er. The fee is $40. That doesn’t sound like much, but by my calculations, $40 in the 1970s is close to three hundred dollars in today’s money. The Pie-Kill spokesman said they’d done 50 contract hits. That’s like fifteen thousand dollars. Guys, should I start doing contract pie hits? Maybe Aron had the same thought when he joined the Agents of Pie Kill. He got on the pie-hit payroll. In fact, Aron himself was the one who had pulled the hit on the nun. At one point, someone hired him to pie a wedding. In 2016 he told the writer Tom Hale that the requests came in from a lot of directions. The targets were landlords, bosses, spouses. The Pie-Kill spokesman bragged to the press in 1974 that somehow no one had yet tried to sue them after being hit with a pie. Kind of like a signal to anyone reading the paper that, yeah, this is all fun and games. And, for a while, he did things the Agents of Pie-Kill way. But Aron Kay didn’t just want to pie nuns for cash. He wanted to settle scores with the bigger bullies. He wanted pieing to mean something. So Aron decided to kick things up a notch. He kind of went rogue, um, and started doing his own pie throwing outside of just this group, and he started going after higher profile targets. So who did Aron set his sights on next? Well, maybe you’ve heard of the conservative talking head, William F. Buckley. He was a “public intellectual”—heh—for decades. He was a household name in the 70s, at least as the host of tv talk show Firing Line: Buckley: … hwhat are you going to say about the extent to hwhich the critical capacities of the leaders of the intellectual class show themselves to be deficient in this as in so many other instances… Yeah. There are at least two things you can hear there, right? First, his family had so much money that they sent him to school in England. Second… he’s just trying so so hard, guys. He was also the founding editor of the conservative National Review, and spent his time claiming to clean up conservative thought, but, Bill, we haven’t forgotten how much time you spent supporting segregationists and failing to become the Mayor of New York City. Well, can you guess how Aron had him pegged? Yeah, Buckley was Public Bully Number 1 across a whole range of issues in American life. So when Aron found out that Buckley was going to be giving a lecture at NYU in the spring of 1976, he laid some plans. He arrived in the audience ahead of the lecture, and as Buckley took the mic, Aron made his move. He dashed through the audience, and he whipped a pie forward! It was a fantastic shot. The pie clocked Buckley in the head. Now, in this case, calling it pie is generous. It was a pie tin filled with shaving cream. But in his later interviews, Aron Kay told the press it’s because a lemon meringue pie would have cost him almost a whole four dollars. And to be fair that’s like twenty-five bucks today, so, heard. Anyway, the hit made national news. Papers across the country were always looking for crazy stories from the counter culture and the conservative machine to drop into their culture sections and this did the trick. Aron Kay? He got some interviews. And, crucially, he did not get arrested. He hit William Buckley with a pie right in the face, and walked away scot free. To his Pie-Kill pals this was a badge of honor. By July, Kay was giving interviews to the press as the man who had pied William F. Buckley. That September, 1976—and may I remark that’s fifty years ago, so happy anniversary, Aron—he struck again. This time, he caught US Ambassador Pat Moynihan in the street, on the corner of Orchard and Delancey in New York City. And the news footage that caught it is kind of amazing. It starts with the ambassador having a friendly chat in a circle of people on the street corner. Moynihan is campaigning for US Senate. Someone he’s talking at is nodding along. It’s a pleasant little encounter. That’s when someone on the left side of the frame reaches into a bag, pulls out a pie, and lunges forward. His right arm, holding the pie, rises up over Moynihan’s head and then BAM slams the full circle of the pie onto the ambassador’s forehead. A brief halo of cream blasts into the air. The camera suddenly shakes, and zooms in on the ambassador, then after a second whips to the left. It catches a man wearing a bright red and white candy striped shirt running off into the crowd on the sidewalk, almost bouncing with adrenaline. He’s clearly trying to escape, but there’s almost a childish joy in the way he flaps his arms as he sprints to safety. You can see, in that moment, the absolute thrill of the pie attack. Aron would later say that he had carefully chosen a mocha cream pie for Ambassador Moynihan. He said he wanted to “change the senator’s complexion,” since Moynihan had led a government commission criticizing Black culture. It was his first pie tailored carefully to his target and many more would follow. some of the ones that he threw were so complicated. It's either like, yes, he had to be making them 'cause they were so specific, or like, you know… yeah, did he go home to mom and was like, "Mom, I'm gonna, I'm gonna get the mayor of New York tomorrow. Can you please help me make grandma's apple crumble for..." Or he had one that was like a Bavarian chocolate and blueberry cream cheese pie. Like how many people, how many bakeries are making that? I'm not sure. Okay, looking at statements from Aron’s mom, it’s very clear that she didn’t approve of pie throwing so I sincerely doubt that she was doing any baking for him. Plus, she lived way out in California, while Aron was in New York. But the apple crumb pie is true. Aron handpicked that one for, in his words, a crummy mayor of the big apple in 1977. This was the same year as the Schlafly hit. You’ll remember that attack was an apple pie, too. It was a direct response to campaigners against the Equal Rights Amendment who were saying that the Patriarchy was as American as apple pie. His other big target that year were Watergate burglars. At the end of 1976 and the beginning of 1977, Aron arrived at the courthouse where Nixon’s goons were facing trial for their break in at the Watergate hotel. Twice, he managed to bean a Nixon henchman with a cream pie. In his eyes, there was no guarantee that the courts would bring these men to justice. So, he decided, he would at least serve a little of the people’s justice along the way. For all these pie attacks, Aron basically walked in, splatted some miscreant in the face, and bounced away consequence free. But each time, he was upping the stakes a bit. And that Bavarian Chocolate and blueberry cream? Well, that’s the one that finally landed Aron… in a little bit of trouble. Alright, we’re going to get serious for a minute, because I need to tell you about William Colby. Colby was an American intelligence officer. After World War 2, he joined the CIA and he climbed the ranks. During the Vietnam War, he ran the CIA’s kidnapping, torture, and assassination program. After that, he came back to the US and became the director of the CIA. That’s who he was until 1976, when he handed off the reins of the CIA to daddy Bush, by which of course I mean George HW. A year later, he was doing the press circuit, writing books, founding a lobbying firm: you know, generally cashing in. Well… Aron Kay wanted to show Colby that he wasn’t beyond the reach of a little edible justice for his cold war crimes. Aron set the date: October 1977. It was almost a script by now, right? Colby takes the stage for a public event. Aron lies in wait. Just when the target is settled in—Aron springs forward. This time, he brought backup: another Yippie named Alice Torbush. Aron and Alice launch two pies at the CIA director. Aron hits him in the head with a Bavarian chocolate pie. The blueberry cream from Alice splashes his coat. The hit is successful, but this time… Aron isn’t able to just slip away through the crowd. Apparently an attack on a former director of the CIA is taken pretty seriously.  there was definitely a real risk of jail time, of being prosecuted. A lot of pamphlets around, you know, for pie throwers, cookbooks, media directed to people in these groups who are throwing pies. Oftentimes w- were not shy about, um, that fact. Their crime? Well, that’s an interesting one. How would you define a blast of crust and cream to the chops? For one pie thrower, Pat Small, the consequences were pretty severe.  he threw a pie in Miami in the early '70s, and he also ended up spending, uh, 90 days in jail for, you know, creating a public disturbance. Um and so, I think people were aware and these consequences existed from the start of the movement. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have 90 days of my life to casually throw away. In the case of the pies that hit William Colby, Aron Kay finally had some consequences catch up with him. They weren’t so bad at first. Sure, he was arrested. But the charge against him was just harassment. He paid a fine of one hundred and fifty dollars and walked away again. But then, and you can see this in the newspaper reports, things seemed to change. The next pieing… didn’t go so well. On his way to hit another one of Nixon’s Watergate goons, Aron was stopped. His pie was knocked to the ground, and some private security guys started laying into him before the police intervened… and arrested him. That was another charge of harassment, with some resisting arrest added for good measure. And he hadn’t even hit anyone with the pie! The next two stories I can find in the papers for 1978, they’re two more failed pieing attempts. It seemed like after hitting Colby, Aron couldn’t just anonymously slip into crowds to get close to his target. I mean, he’d hit the former director of the CIA. Do we really think he wasn’t being watched?? he claims that he had 120-page file on him at the FBI because of his antics. Um, and you know, he did have a lot of nicknames like the, the Pied Sniper of New York or the Chef of America's Pie-romaniacs. So again, a lot of myth-making and, and legend-building around this guy. I wonder if we can FOIA the, um, his file now that it's been a bit, uh... I'll, I'll, I'll have our team look into it. Yeah. I wanna know if it exists. Like, you I know, feel like it- he might've just been making that up. But what if he wasn't? Alright, friends, we filed the FOIA for Aron Kay’s FBI records. And guess what? Request DENIED. The government will not release the records to yours truly. I don’t think we’re done looking, though, so stay tuned. But whether or not Aron was getting his exploits recorded by the FBI—and honestly I think he probably was—he did have plenty of other people writing about him and his achievements. The man knew how to generate a headline. At the peak of his powers, through 1976 and 1977, Aron Kay was on a legendary run. You can search the papers month by month, and track his hits. Watergate crooks, corrupt mayors, conservative campaigners—they were all getting hit with custom pies tailored to their misdeeds, as Aron saw them. And when a reporter would catch him, he’d say so. In one interview, he was sure to make it clear, “I’m not just a crazy pie thrower. I have points of view that I want to lay on people.”  the goal of Aaron Kay's pieing and so many other pie activists was to, uh, to, to make a splash really, or I guess make a splat in the case of pie. Many people have talked about how if you write a letter to the editor, it doesn't get published. If you hold a protest, you know, there's so many protests, they're not gonna get covered. People aren't paying attention. Um, and so you have to resort to these, these stunts that are worthy of news- news coverage, worthy of attention to break through the noise. After each of Aron’s high profile hits made headlines, and even the front page of the New York Times, he realized just how effective a pie could be. He was showing these powerful figures that they weren’t going to get away, scot free, for their crimes.  I think especially with his tailoring of the pies specifically to many of these people, I think that's reflective of just, you know, we're pay- we're paying attention. You know, you have to, you, you have to answer to the people even for one moment, for the 20 seconds in which someone is humiliated and covered in whipped cream, bring them down a peg. Remember how Aron Kay was inspired by the pie to the face of the obscenity commission? Well, as Aaron turned the weapon of pieing on more and more of America’s most notorious bullies and blowhards, he in turn became an inspiration for other activists around the world I think  it really reflects a lot of the circumstances around the pies being thrown. You know, some- so many of the reasons that people were frustrated and angry and felt helpless were things like rapid globalization, worldwide economic trade agreements, things that were driving a lot of, um, uh, a widening economic disparity. And so that's not something that just existed in the United States. That's something that existed in many parts of the world. By the time I remember seeing a public pie-ing on the news, when Bill Gates got hit with a cream pie in 1998, the act of humiliating a powerful predator with a pie to the face had been passed from Aron Kay and the Yippies to many, many more new hands. Corrupt government officials and corporate robber barons around the world have been hit. Anti-gay activist Anita Bryant was pied soon after Schlafly in 1977. George Bush and John Ashcroft got crust-smacked in 2002. In 2011, Rupert Murdoch got pied with shaving cream at a Parliamentary hearing in London—cause he wasn’t good enough for real whipped cream. It's kind of the perfect video clip, right? Um, it, it's so visually distinct, and that's part of why it's so effective to bring attention to a lot of these issues and a lot of the people behind, um, these systems of power. Aron’s original instinct that slapstick could be used to whack bullies still holds. I don’t see it every week, but every once in a while there’s still a pieing that breaks through. We have seen, an uptick in food as protest, um, in reaction to some of the issues of today, and so it is interesting that pie has been less of an emphasis in that. I have a feeling that it won't ever fully disappear. I mean, we've talked about the long legacy of pieing dating back to the Three Stooges. I wouldn’t be surprised if it comes back. Now that I know Aron’s story, with every new time I see a pie or a milkshake hit some powerful ghoul in public, I think back over the long lineage— from the three Stooges, to Aron Kay, to other groups like the Biotic Baking Brigade in San Francisco, who did so many pie hits they came out with their own cookbook in 2004. It’s called Pie Any Means Necessary, and I highly recommend it. It’s a reminder that food—how we make it, grow it, share it, throw it—can and should be a part of how we resist bigotry, authoritarianism, and political corruption. To take us back to where we began: Phyllis Schlafly had a devastating impact on American life. Her work shut down the Equal Rights Amendment and shined the shoes of white patriarchy. In so many ways, we’re still trying to clear the aftertaste. I like to think… Aron Kay had his impact too. His approach may have been less legal, but… call him an outlaw, a legendary figure in American life. You might even say: as American as apple pie. Here’s a little more from my interview with Rossi Anastopoulo on pie and politics. I asked her to talk more about a favorite pie that she wrote about for her book, Sweet Land of Liberty: A History of America in Eleven Pies. Her answer took us to Muhammad Ali’s fights with Joe Frazier and a custardy, nutty pie that I’m super excited to make. So here’s Rossi on her favorite pie from her book, Sweet Land of Liberty… The one that really stands out to me is one of the first pies, one of the first topics that I ever wrote about professionally, which is the navy bean pie, um, which I think is such an incredible story. Um, it is the pie that the Nation of Islam made that was quintessential to their kind of political ideology. The reasoning, you know, the kind of ideology being creating a new Black identity free from any white influence or white identity. And so navy bean pie became a symbol of this movement, the navy bean being a pillar of Elijah Muhammad, the Nation of Islam leaders', um, kind of prescribed diet for members of the Nation of Islam. And so the navy bean pie, in many instances, replaced the sweet potato pie which did have ties to the era of enslavement and this legacy there. And so the navy bean pie became a symbol of this new Black identity and incredibly popular, um, in Black, uh, communities, particularly in the Nation of Islam. And Muhammad Ali, was incredibly fond of it. His personal chef, Lana Shabazz was famed for her navy bean pie and he blamed his loss to Joe Frazier on eating too many of her pies. He claimed that she kept serving them to him, and that's why he wasn't in great shape. And so it's an incred-incredible story that There's so many deeper levels of meaning behind it, and it's just delicious. It's just a really good pie, um, Can you describe it for us, for folks who haven't had it before? Is it, is it bean- is it savory? Is it beany? Or beany's not a word. Is it sweet? it is a sweet pie, yeah. It's, um, you know, not unlike a custard pie, like sweet potato pie, if you think about the starchiness of the sweet potatoes and what they offer to a filling like that. It's, it's not unlike that. So it's blended navy beans with sugar, eggs, usually some form of dairy. There's warming spices, something like cinnamon or nutmeg. Um, and so it's like this custardy, creamy, sweet, kind of nutty pie with a hint of spice to it, and it's, it's really delicious. Very comforting, very good for, like, fall and winter seasons. I think it's very, very cozy It sounds lovely, and for contemporary eaters, maybe, you know, you've got protein and fiber in there. It's a, and it's a pie. Exactly. Exactly. And so yeah, depending on where you live, if you're in a city, um, you know, like here in Los Angeles, there are parts of South Los Angeles where a lot of, um, bakeries will offer it or kind of old school bakeries in the community. And so, um, it's something that is also really fun to find who's making it and serving it near you That's super cool. Thank you. To hear the full interview with Rossi, join us on the Outlaw’s Digest Patreon! You’ll also get the aftershow, where I go behind the scenes with the production team for a second helping of the history behind political pie throwing, the Biotic Baking Brigade, and the FOIA process: an Outlaw’s Digestif, if you will. We reached out to Aron Kay for this episode, and he declined an interview. If that ever changes, we’ll be sure to share our conversation with supporters of the show. You’ll find that on Patreon at outlaw’s digest dot com. See you there! Outlaw’s Digest is a production of Good Egg Audio, an independent worker cooperative, and me, KC Hysmith. Thanks to Rossi Anastopoulo for talking with us about Aron Kay’s targeted recipes, how they inspired the Biotic Baking Brigade in San Francisco, and what makes pie a distinctly American dish in the first place. Read all about it, and a lot more, in Rossi’s book Sweet Land of Liberty: A History of America in Eleven Pies. This episode was written by Carl Nellis. Story editing and production support from Nicki Stein, Gemma Castelli-Foley, and me. Carl Nellis is managing producer of Outlaw’s Digest. Mixing and mastering by Nick Dooley. Original music by Rebecca Ryskalczyk. Show art by Andreea Dumuta. My personal thanks to my kids for not banging pots and pans while I recorded this, and to Maggie Cooper from Aevitas Creative. And thanks to all of you for listening.