Biographical Sketch
Growing up in Berkeley California during the fifties and sixties was a singular experience that it hard to imagine having parallels. Those of us in that place and time had remarkable influences and opportunities not seen in the larger culture.
The reputation is for the activities of noisy political reactionaries and social visionaries, arriving mostly from elsewhere. The presence of a large world class university tended to dominate our lives. Both of my parents were highly creative, literate and intelligent individuals. Both had their own neurosis, with colorful, pleasant and toxic manifestations.
And while it was a remarkable time and place, it was not without many of the same frustrations and problems that happen everywhere. Most especially difficult was the transition through adolescence. My experience with other boys I recall with little nostalgia as I had no interest in sports, cars or discussing female anatomy.
What I do recall is being bullied and harrassed for not fitting in with the dominant culture. The experience set me on a course of having a profound appreciation of outsiders and eccentrics, and as a result I have always questioned the status quo.
This sense of isolation was aggravated by the absence of my father who pressured by my mother to leave had moved to New York when I was nine. This was just prior to my mother taking me and my sister for an extended visit to Cairo Egypt where we lived from the October 1957 until March of the
following year.
Coming home from this experience changed me for ever in terms of how I saw and understood my world.
The combination of my fathers absence, my own adolecent turbulence and an increasingly tense relationship with my mother resulted in my attending a school called Shimber Beris that was located for a time in a primitive village at the foot of the Baja Calilfornia penninsula in Mexico. I was with them almost a year. This experience was utterly unusual.
Some years after high school I attended The San Francisco Art Institute where my father had taught when I was a child. From there I went on to graduate school at Yalet. I then embarked upon marriage and the raising of children.
This phase was violently redefined for me by the death of John Hubley, my chosen teacher, the death of my stepfather and the births of four children, the third requiring heart surgery soon after birth. Feeling overwhelmed by these events I drove a taxi to pay the rent and feed the familyt.
I drove a cab in San Francisco for ten years.