R. Sheldon Newman, 87, Denton, a supervisor in the facilities department for 20 years and a local counterculture icon in the 1960s and 1970s, died May 18. He spent eight years in the U.S. Air Force and then hitchhiked around the country. While enrolled in the mid-’60s at UNT as a library sciences student, he was elected president of the campus chapter of Students for a Democratic Society and led protests against the Vietnam War. He worked as a day laborer in the automobile yards and founded “The Family,” a group of like-minded individuals around Fry Street, and his idea of The Church of Changes, a church of no rules or walls but a desire to help others. He established the Family Feed Store, an organic grains and vegetables co-op that allowed patrons to pay what they could afford, and Earthware, a secondhand clothing store. He returned to work at UNT in the 1980s and ’90s as a custodial supervisor. As a Fry Street regular, he was one of the subjects painted into the iconic mural at Jim’s Diner.
R. Sheldon Newman, 87, Denton, a supervisor in the facilities department for 20 years and a local counterculture icon in the 1960s and 1970s, died May 18. He spent eight years in the U.S. Air Force and then hitchhiked around the country. While enrolled in the mid-’60s at UNT as a library sciences student, he was elected president of the campus chapter of Students for a Democratic Society and led protests against the Vietnam War. He worked as a day laborer in the automobile yards and founded “The Family,” a group of like-minded individuals around Fry Street, and his idea of The Church of Changes, a church of no rules or walls but a desire to help others. He established the Family Feed Store, an organic grains and vegetables co-op that allowed patrons to pay what they could afford, and Earthware, a secondhand clothing store. He returned to work at UNT in the 1980s and ’90s as a custodial supervisor. As a Fry Street regular, he was one of the subjects painted into the iconic mural at Jim’s Diner.
