The name on the obituary page of the New York Times on Wednesday caught my eye. Richard Seaver had died the day before at his home in Manhattan.

To most his name will remain obscure at best. To some, myself included, it conjured old memories.

The year was 1961, and as a freshman at the University of Connecticut’s Hartford campus it was a time of effervescence for me.

It had been a busy year. A charismatic young Jack Kennedy had taken the oath of office that Jan. 20. Camelot was stirring.

JFK would soon be humiliated by the Bay of Pigs fiasco. But he would redeem himself by asserting a national goal of putting a man on the moon within the decade. The Project Mercury astronauts had been in training for more than a year, and a chimpanzee named Ham had been sent aloft to test one of the capsules that would take them into space.

Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi leader of the Holocaust, stood trial for most of the year after Israeli agents kidnapped him from his hiding place in Argentina. He would be found guilty and would go to the gallows the next year.

The construction of the Berlin Wall began that year, as did the first official involvement of the U.S. military in Vietnam.

Catch 22 by Joseph Heller became a bestseller, but it was another book that attracted my attention: Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller.

Seaver was then editor in chief at Grove Press, a publisher that specialized in controversial works at a time of legal turmoil when the Supreme Court under Earl Warren was extending the grasp of the First Amendment in a series of landmark cases. It was under Seaver’s leadership that Grove Press published Miller’s sex-themed novel. All h-e-double hockey sticks broke loose.

Although the work would seem tame by today’s standards, it was anything but mild-mannered by 1961 standards. It took no time at all for the district attorney for Hartford County to ban sales of Tropic of Cancer.

The district attorney was far from alone in his opinion. He was hopping on a bandwagon being driven by a man named Charles Keating, who was making a name for himself nationally as leader of the Citizens for Decent Literature. CDL issued no literature, decent or otherwise, but did its best to save the rest of us from being tainted by dangerous ideas.

Keating foamed against Tropic of Cancer.

One aspect of Keating’s concern for the well-being of others would come years later.

In the 1980s his American Continental Corp., of Phoenix, Ariz., a developer, acquired Lincoln Savings & Loan. Under the leadership of Keating, who worked to weaken federal regulation of financial markets [Remember the “Keating Five,” a handful of senators dealing with financial regulation who accepted big campaign donations from Keating and who included Sen. John McCain?], Lincoln Savings began making big bucks through risky investments. The federal government eventually wound up with a bill for more than $3 billion when it seized the bank. Does that sound familiar today?

After pleading the Fifth Amendment and refusing to testify before a U.S. House committee, Keating was convicted on fraud charges and was sentenced to prison. After serving more than four years he successfully appealed to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. He then struck a plea deal in which he admitted fraud and was sentenced to time already served.

But in 1961 all this lay in the future. As a writer for the campus newspaper I felt a strong attachment to the First Amendment, and I agreed with those of like mind that something had to be done. With all the idealism of youth we organized anti-censorship rallies and wrote breathless articles and letters to the editor that warned of doom at the hands of the bluenoses.

The publicity about the book-banning of course spurred sales of Tropic to a level that might otherwise never have been reached, a recurring phenomenon that censorious folk never seem to grasp.

But until the Hartford County district attorney’s prohibition was overturned in court, there were no outlets for the work in Connecticut’s capital city.

So I did a little snooping around campus. It wasn’t hard to discover that plenty of students — and faculty members — wanted to read the book. I began taking orders — I think the book was selling for around $5 back then — and hopped into my car.

The city of Middletown, home to Wesleyan University, lay only a short drive away, but, best of all, the city lay in another county, one lacking a district attorney whose idea of protecting the public was to shield people’s brains from contamination by unauthorized information.

Having found a bookstore, I walked up to the counter, where stood a middle-aged woman who looked like a schoolmarm in an old Western movie. Did the store carry Tropic of Cancer? I asked, somewhat shyly, given my youth and the lurid nature of the national debate over the book.

Why, yes, she replied, with a hint of a smile.

“I’ll take three dozen copies, please,” I said.

Her eyes widened, and the smile became a grin. “Having a party?” she asked.

I loaded the books into boxes and set off to deliver the contraband behind enemy lines.

Back at campus the forbidden fruit became all the rage. The books changed hands at a fevered pace for weeks, either bought or sold, or who knows.

I hadn’t thought of that episode for years, until I picked up Wednesday’s New York Times and studied a picture of the man who had fought so valiantly for freedom of speech. He also, I learned from the obituary, published D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover and William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. And of course he also published another work by Miller, Tropic of Capricorn, but by that time the battle had been won, and the pious book banners were in retreat, although it’s unlikely they will ever go away completely.

Seaver had been a Fulbright scholar who went to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. He was 82 when a heart attack struck him down.

I’ve always wondered whatever happened to all those copies of Tropic of Cancer. Maybe they died, too, worn out from avid over-reading, not a bad fate, under the circumstances.

tmorgan@projo.com