"The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act."

–Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968)

I've been married for 40 years. I was born in San Diego 76 years ago and grew up in San Francisco, North Oakland, and Berkeley. For the last 37 years I've lived in a small town in Connecticut, where we raised a daughter, a son and various cats.

In mid-2008, our first grandchild, Freya, was born to our son and his wife, who live in Berkeley, California, and our second granddaughter, Astrid, was born to them on March 27, 2011, when Freya, the big sister, was three years old.

Several years ago, I was given an Olympus C-60 camera and since then have been happily snapping photos of interesting things. I joined Flickr 18 April 2008 and bought a Pro account two months later.

If you’ve gotten this far, here’s a short biography, focusing on some of the interesting times in my long and varied life:

I spent the 60's living in San Francisco, Berkeley and London in the midst of the (r)evolution of Rock. I was at the "Free Speech Movement" incident in Berkeley's Sproul Plaza and the "Electric Kool Aid Acid Test" at the Longshoremen's Hall, among many other landmark events of the 60's. The Acid Test show included a new group I'd never heard of called the Grateful Dead. I thought they were pretty good.

One day, on my 31st birthday, my first wife and I decided to travel from San Francisco to London by going west. It took us about a year to go around the world, almost entirely by surface transportation, including a good deal of hitchhiking. (Scroll down to see a world map showing the countries I've visited.)

Then in July of '68, newly divorced, I moved to London and lived there for a couple of years, simply because that was something I'd always wanted to do.

And, if you're wondering, I was *not* at Woodstock. I was still living in London, and instead went to the free Stones' concert in Hyde Park, which was held on the 6th of August, 1969. In a remarkable coincidence of dates, the Woodstock festival opened nine days later.

Returning to the US and real life, I worked at this and that, married again and moved to Connecticut, where we raised our two children in a 300-year-old house.

At the end of 2006, I retired from a career in Technical Document Production as a: writer, editor, document designer, and publisher, of documentation for nuclear radiation analysis systems. And here I am.

The Old Traveller

Lord, I Was Born a Ramblin' Man

This map shows most of the countries I've visited and another, a little farther down, shows which states in the US I've seen in my travels.

And in the US, these states:

Visited 33 states (66%)

Create your own visited map of The United States.