Houston's Space City! "unquestionably one of the strongest underground papers in America." In Leamer's words, the paper "had a special importance in Houston since the city is a sprawled-out, Texas version of Los Angeles. The paper holds the radical community together."Space City! (originally called Space City News) was founded June 5, 1969, by Dreyer and Victoria Smith – who had worked together at LNS in New York – in coordination with former Rag staffers Dennis Fitzgerald and Judy Gitlin Fitzgerald, and community organizers Cam Duncan and Sue Mithun Duncan. The staff was run as a collective, with all editorial and production responsibilities being shared, and in the beginning the three couples also lived together in a communal home, sharing meals and chores.Space City! quickly moved to the fore of the second generation of underground papers—developing a reputation for its advocacy journalism, power structure research, and arts coverage – and it served as a center for the bustling Texas boomtown's peace and hipster communities while spinning off a host of other countercultural institutions. In a 1976 book about modern Texas folklore, Hermes Nye wrote that "the dark-haired bespectacled, lovely Victoria Smith and her compadre, dashing mustachioed Thorne Dreyer... helped lay the cornerstone of Houston's Space City!... a well written, sprightly sheet... [that] also had an eye for vivid, telling graphics and poetry of a high level." Historian Leamer wrote about Space City!: "There is a solid intelligence to the reviews and cultural articles... It is a radical journalism grounded in fact... resolved and balanced in content and full of common purpose..." John Siemssen, writing in Houston's Other, quoted former Space City! staffer Bobby Eakin: "Thorne [Dreyer] was the glue that held the paper together..." Eakin added, "When it was tense and they were ready to tear into each other, Thorne would hop on a chair and recite a [humorous] monologue." Unlike The Rag, Space City! met with violent opposition from some elements in the community, facing the wrath of right wing vigilantes openly identified with a local Ku Klux Klan group. As Victoria Smith wrote in Ken Wachsberger's Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press, "we endured break-ins, thefts, tire-slashings, potshots (including a steel arrow fired from a crossbow through the front door), and threats, both to staff members and advertisers." Raj Mankad wrote at OffCite that the Klan's violent actions against Space City! were part of a larger picture