Franklin D. Roosevelt had one in the 1930s.
John F. Kennedy had one in the 1960s.
Pete Wagner had (or more accurately, was had by) two, one in the 1970s and another in the 1980s, and is working on three.
The East Side Brain Trust was a group of friends in Milwaukee, where I spent the first 19 years of my childhood (going on over 50 now). They called themselves a "marijuana cooperative" but I was a teetotaler and was always trying to recruit them to get involved in guerrilla theater and pranks, with limited success.
The 1985 Brain Trust was formed in 1981. If that is a bit confusing, here's the story, in brief: I had been working as a political activist largely on my own since 1970 when I organized an
environmental group (ECO) in high school. My main method was what was then called myth-making or "media manipulation." (Later called "guerrilla communication" by my friend, Abbie Hoffman.) In 1981, I worked with the Minnesota Public Interest Research Group to put together a series of political consciousness-raising lecture/shows at Coffman Memorial Union at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. At the same time, I was hawking my first book, BUY THIS BOOK, at the Union bookstore and at Dinkytown News, a newsstand just off campus. Between the shows and the book-selling appearances, I met several students who liked the message of the book about combining fun with activism, and we organized the 1981 Brain Trust.
The main co-organizers were Dian Wall, Tom Pettersen, Jim Hobson, Scott Adams and Aaron Helfman. We confronted "The Destroyers," right wing rabid evangelists Jed Smock, Max Lynch and Cindy Lassiter, Rev. Jerry Falwell, the Peters Brothers and others with good-humored guerrilla theater to express our disagreement with their views.
The name "1985 Brain Trust" came out of the view that "Most people think the world will end by 1984--either Orwellian totalitarianism or a global thermonuclear war. We're optimists. We think the world will last much longer. At least until 1985."
