Beginnings Part 1

Everybody starts somewhere.  My start was after graduating from UNLV in 1983.  I bought a Canon AE-1 and a Raleigh bicycle and headed for Europe.  I had gone on domestic adventures before and my family were camper/hunter/backpacker sort of people.  I rode from Spain up into France, then London and around Scotland.  I went to Belgium, Netherlands and finally the Rhein River valley, Heidelberg and ended my journey in Munich.  Three and a half months, lots of contemplating life and a couple of lifelong friends.  The knowledge that a bicycle trip should be a loop, rather than a mixture of train, ferry and cycling.

I shot about 1000 photos on that trip and came away with a new hobby.  The AE-1 was the camera that built Canon into a contender.  It was possible to take pictures on fully automatic and get back 80% good images.  With a 35-70 zoom lens, that camera was a great tool for bringing the locations I went to back to the folks back home.  I wasn't a photographer yet, but I had a camera.

I met Chris Hoffman on the way through Germany.  Of the 20 or so people I shared initial correspondence with after meeting on that trip, Chris actually followed up on that initial meeting and we had more adventures together.  We shared a passion for travel, literature and art.  We each thought of ourselves as writers.  

My own artistic ambitions were internal.  My love of books was the product of my upbringing, I guess, but I was an average student who got a BA in English from "the basketball school" after 5 painful years of college.  My friends were all jocks and potsmokers and I'd guess we would be termed the original "slackers."  I played a year of T-ball as a kid and then stuck to football.  I wasn't big enough to play, but I played through High School until my Senior year, when my inner-slacker thought the whole game was sadistic and cruel.  At the end of my Senior year I played "big-league" baseball which was essentially Babe Ruth baseball for kids with no talent.  I'll explain the importance of that experience in future blogs.

Anyway, I get back to the US with no real skills and I'm working in Harrah's Reno as a change person.  I get a letter from Chris explaining that he'd like to experience the "West" (he's from Connecticut) and could he sleep on my floor for awhile.  Then he actually came out and lived there for a year.

My camera saw little action during this period.  It seemed that pot-smoking, sitting around eating pepperoni pizza and watching MTV were not condusive to taking good photographs.  So Chris comes out and immediately takes to slinging change at Harrah's.  I had since moved on to manager of a shoe department in a men's clothing store.  My slacker friends didn't understand Chris.  He actually studied in school and had a degree from Rutger's.  I however, saw that Chris' desire for an other-than-normal life was a direction that few people actually went.  We had shared the experience of travelling abroad, how could we go about living abroad?  

"Jobs In Japan" was a relatively thin book that we found on a weekend trip to Ferenghetti's bookstore in San Francisco.  I did take some cool pictures on that trip which I'll put up in the future.  As I recall, it listed the names of some English schools in Japan where you could work legally and the methods of getting hired, finding a place to live, etc.  This was in 1984 and before Japanese business methods became all the rage.  Most of the information  on Japan was hard to come by and it consisted of WWII, gheisha girls, kimono, chop sticks and sushi.

One of the schools we wrote to, sent us information and announced an interview in San Francisco.  My English degree, trumped Chris' superior grades and they offered me a part-time job.  We decided to go anyway and left in March of 1985.  I said goodbye to pot-smoking and MTV and hello to Japan.