I was born in Ballard, a Seattle Scandinavian immigrant district, delivered in Ballard hospital by an uncle who was a family primary care physician. My sister Jackie was born four years later in the same hospital delivered by our same uncle. All in all a pretty good way to start this living business.

The family moved north of Seattle to Woodway Park south of the town of Edmonds when I was five. Lots of trees, not so many people. When I was twelve the family moved to Yonkers, New York, where there were lots of people and not so many trees. We lived comfortably, as my father managed the New York City office of an architectural firm known for designing regional shopping centers, some of which you've probably visited. The firm itself is best known for its design of the Seattle Space Needle. I returned to Seattle when I turned eighteen to attend the University of Washington.

I founded Seagull when I was a sophomore, an off campus humor magazine with press runs that reached twelve thousand copies toward the end and was hawked by students around the campus and distributed on local newsstands. I don't recommend starting a magazine as a sophomore, not for the experience - it was great - but for the stress and the debt. This led to writing the “Uncle Robert” humor column for the University Daily for two years. In a sense this online journal is an extension of that old weekly column which, after all these years, is probably a little strange.

I entered the army in the summer of 1967 where my Fort Benning Infantry officer class was told we'd be spending the last year of our two year commitment in Vietnam. The balance of that first year after Benning was spent in a Ft. Lewis training company south of Seattle. Anyone remember an American spy ship named The Pueblo? The North Koreans captured it? Caused a stink? This happened just as I was due to be rotated to Vietnam and caused me to be diverted to Camp Casey, Korea, where I served as G-4 Plans and Operations Officer on the Seventh Division General Staff sitting in an office with a documents clerk (who did all the work) far from any fighting. I owe those guys on the Pueblo.

A friend picked me up in his Volkswagen bus when I returned from Korea with the idea it was 1969, the world had gone psychedelic and we'd better head to San Miguel de Allende (north of Mexico City) to finish our respective novels, drop acid and drink. Which we did. We'd heard that Neil Cassady, former beat sidekick of Jack Kerouac (Cassady had been his model for Dean Moriarty in On The Road) and member in good standing of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, the designated driver of the Pranksters“s psychedelic bus, had died of exposure passed out on railroad tracks near San Miguel de Allende after a night of heavy duty drugs and drinking. We felt it appropriate to pay homage to this hallowed ground for our own writing purposes. Had we not read Tom Wolf's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test? Were we not setting out freed from the bonds of school, military service and gainful employment? Did my instigator and travelling companion Mr. Baumgart not own a fabled Volkswagen Bus and did we not have the wherewithall to spend whatever number of months in Mexico that may be required to do things we had, then, only read about?

Then again I'd wanted to see what Gilbert Shelton and Jack Jackson (Jaxon) were up to in San Francisco. Gilbert had been the editor of The Texas Ranger, generally acknowledged the best college humor magazine of its time and creator of the Wonder Wart Hog series of comic strips, many of which I ran in Seagull. I hadn't met Gilbert, but I'd corresponded with Jackson and gave him a call when we hit San Francisco on our way to Mexico. Jackson suggested we drop by The Family Dog headquarters (where he was the art director) and say hello, which we did, both of us learning that he, Gilbert, Dave Moriaty and Fred Todd had formed The Rip Off Press earlier that year by pooling $400 and buying a printing press to publish underground comix and “rip off” better royalties for their artists.

Returning from Mexico to Seattle Mr. Baumgart dropped me off at a condemned building, part of a redevelopment project near San Francisco City Hall, at that time home of the Rip Off Press, and I became a resident of San Francisco.

The Seventies.

...more to come.