Funky Sam Ridge
Sam
Funky Sam Ridge is a former law student, disk jockey, TV cowboy (Death Valley Days as Piute Pete in 1959 and Sugarfoot as Hank Durfee in 1959 ), Movie Actor (Gold as Verbal Talkingham in 1972) and administrative assistant to Assemblyman John Burton.
An excerpt from the Saturday Evening Post article 1968
"Sam Ridge of Funky Features has put 20,000 miles on his car in the past few months, crisscrossing the country to bring the real poster product to places where only plastic art was known before.
To the Mole Hole in Chicago, the Infinite Poster and the Intergalactic Trading Post and Underground Uplift Unlimited in New York, the Kazoo in Los Angeles, George’s Folly and Truc in Boston, Head Shop South in Coconut Grove, Florida, the Emporium in Miami Beach, to shops in college towns and semi-college towns all over the Midwest. . . .
In walks Funky Sam with boots, beard, and candy-striped pants, saying, “I’m the only man over 30 the kids can trust. Now I don’t sell W.C. Fields Personality Posters — for that you have to go to Martin Geisler in New York — and I don’t sell plastic hippie stuff either — I’m a-selling of that good old rock baroque, I’m selling pretties and meanings, it’s the psychedelic cultural revolution. We bill on the tenth of the month. I’m here to work for the common evil, brothers. Oh yea, if you want political posters, there’s Dick Kasak in New York, too. You’ll note our Zodiac line — well, we’re not greed heads. We turned down huge orders from J.C. Penney’s and Woolworth’s. They wanted to cover certain parts of anatomies, tame our artists. Nyet. This is Obscenity Junction where we bend your minds. Here’s our folding display. …”
In the blush of The Summer of Love in San Francisco, and through the turmoil of the Vietnam anti-war protests, the Funky 3 collaborated with a group of virtually unknown artists, that later went on to produce some iconic works that are sought after by collectors and displayed in permanent art exhibitions around the world.