Max Scherr

Max Scherr (March 12, 1916 – October 31, 1981) was an American underground newspaper editor and publisher known for his iconoclastic 1960s weekly, the Berkeley Barb.

Max Scherr was born in Baltimore, Maryland on March 12, 1916 in a Jewish household. His parents, Harry Scherr, a tailor, and Minnie, were Yiddish-speaking Russian immigrants who arrived in America in 1898. His early life is obscure. From 1935 to 1938 he attended law school at the University of Maryland, earning his law degree in June, 1938. For the next three years he practiced law in Baltimore, including serving as legal counsel to Local 175 of the CIO-affiliated Transport Workers Union in a 1941 Baltimore taxi drivers strike. During World War II he served in the Navy. After demobilization he attended the University of California, Berkeley, earning a master's degree in sociology in 1949.

On a trip to Mexico in the 1940s he met and married Juana Estela Salgado, a medical student. Together they had a daughter, Raquel Lorraine Scherr, born in 1947 and two sons, Sergio and David Scherr. Returning to the United States, they lived in Albany, California and Berkeley, where Max Scherr worked for a publisher of legal textbooks, hanging out after work at a coffee shop called Il Piccolo Espresso where he kibbitzed with local bohemians and radicals. By the end of the 1950s "The Pic" had become an important meeting place for SLATE, the progressive student party at UC Berkeley. In 1958, Scherr purchased a bar, a local hangout popular with students and beatniks called the Steppenwolf at 2136 San Pablo Ave. in Berkeley, which became a stop on the West Coast folk music circuit. Scherr ran the Steppenwolf for seven years, selling it in 1965 for $10,000, which he used to launch the Barb.

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