Emmett Grogan (born Eugene Leo Grogan, November 28, 1942 – April 6, 1978) was a founder of the Diggers, a radical community-action group of Improvisational actors in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. The Diggers took their name from the English Diggers (1649–1650), a radical movement opposed to feudalism, the Church of England and the British Crown. Biography Grogan's distrust of the mainstream media made it difficult for reporters to acquire more than a few details of his life. He was born on November 28, 1942, as Eugene Leo Grogan into an Irish-American family in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. According to his publisher, New York Review Books, "Grogan grew up on New York City’s mean streets, getting hooked on heroin before he was in his teens, kicking the habit and winning a scholarship to a swanky Manhattan private school, pursuing a highly profitable sideline as a Park Avenue burglar, then skipping town to enjoy the dolce vita in Italy." After high school, he attended Duke University for one year before moving to San Francisco. The San Francisco Diggers were a legendary group that evolved out of two radical traditions that thrived in the Bay Area in the mid-1960s: the bohemian/underground art/theater scene, and the New Left/civil rights/peace movement. The Diggers combined street theatre, direct action, and art happenings in their social agenda of creating a Free City. Their most famous activities revolved around distributing free food ("Free because it's yours!") every day in Golden Gate Park, and distributing "surplus energy" at a series of Free Stores (where everything in stock was without a price tag). The Diggers coined various slogans that became part of the counterculture and even the larger society, such as, "Do your own thing," and "Today is the first day of the rest of your life." Grogan's 1972 autobiography Ringolevio, a Life Played for Keeps, is regarded by some as the best and only authentic book written about the underground culture of the 1960s. In the book, Grogan refers to himself by the alias Kenny Wisdom. Peter Coyote, in the 1990 introduction to Ringolevio states that Grogan's choice of that alias is "no accident" but without elaborating. Grogan was also the author of Final Score, a crime novel published in 1976. Criticism of counterculture Grogan shunned media attention and became increasingly suspicious of those who sought publicity. In Ringolevio, Grogan discussed the 1967