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[The Essay is presented newspaper style--read all of the first column, then go to the second, read
all of it, then to the third--if you want to read it in the manner in which is was composed.]
Bill came back from the Pacific a young man who had seen a world far beyond his native Garden Valley, Idaho. He would
never be the same. He found a hip new scene around the San Francisco Bay at places such as the Purple Onion, North Beach and
the Hungry Eye. Lenny Bruce had rolled into town from the other coast and those in the scene were trying out every shape and shade of post war freedom--intellectual,
sexual, political, racial and sociological--to put words to but a few of those shades.
The exploration of previously taboo words and subjects could not be stopped. During World War II many African
Americans had come to the Sausalito Boat Works to construct floating stock for the War. The return from the Pacific
of so many soliders, of every race and stripe of the whole of America, soldiers who assumed that their death was
imminent and then found themselves quite alive and in the city, and many other liberation factors were in play including
some freedom with government funding called the GI Bill.
The whole matter eventually culminated with aspects such as the Grateful Dead and the Summer of Love. In the U.S. Navy, on ship, the races had been segregated until Harry S Truman radically ordered desegregation.
Many of the young Americans, such as Bill, had never had interactions with those that been taught to view as "foreign" or
"different". All in all, it was an powerful positive cultural cocktail that exploded in the American Collective
Subconsciousness forever.
It was certainly no accident that San Francisco became the first "safe" city for homosexuals and a place where legend
had it that a former prostitute might well be elected, and, yet, even warmly welcomed, to the City Council.
Whatever you called it, it was a high voltage Osterizer for previously static cultural forms that were now
being distorted, rethought, reworked and, ultimately, emerging as whole-new-cloth. And this cultural revolution
was not an East Coast Affair. No, this was, perhaps, the most significant cultural development of the century;
and, it was a Pacific matter--not an Atlantic one. Probably no cultural devlopment since Mark Twain's "Huckleberry
Finn" had so emphasized Western Americana at the expense of the "Eastern Establishment".
It impacted everything and it was all new--even the emblemtic Levi 501s came in a new way (unshrunk) and had a new code
(your waist size was the size before they were shrunk, you had to experiment, observe and learn--as
if a child all over again) and they formed--and revealed--to your body in a new way--different from previous clothing.
These were not your father's fancy, to mimic a later car sales campaign. No matter how personal the imagos;
the very symbolic language was entirely fresh--all new--not just part new.
Bill enjoyed the GI bill in those days, as did many others in the scene, and attended classes at the University of California
at Berkley and Boise State College in Boise, Idaho. In Boise he fell in love, not with the 'girl next door' but with
his Spanish professor, the one Carmen Monsanto of Guatemala. In the Pacific he had seen a different energy of the people and
had encountered Latin influences in the Phillipines and elsewhere. All bets were off and he was was encouraged by the scene.
He attended classes at the San Francisco School of Art and painted on his Sausalito Houseboat.
| Bruce: Convicted in NY but Aquitted in the Bay. |
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| Pardon The Dead: Obscenity Conviction turned to first posthumous pardon in New York history. |
All around the Bay deep play was in action. The Smothers Brothers were headlining clubs with a three person act called "The Smothers Brothers plus God" [Tom Smothers, Dick Smothers and
Bobby Blackmore]. Bill would show his wares at street exhibitions getting caught up in scandal when the San
Francisco Chronicle featured a photograph of his paintings on street display under the communist sickle of a flying red Russian
flag. For Bill, is was all pretty innocent but he was getting on the wrong side of things.
After his marriage to his first wife, he lived in Guatemala and worked for the leading newspaper in Guatemala as a political
cartoonist. The editor would show him an image of a politician and ask him to draw the politician in caricature
with a gun in his mouth or would ask him to create an image of a general with a baby in his. Bill learned to
speak Spanish and he and Carmen brought forth three children. He was living far away from the roots of his Idaho home.
Handsome but somehow geekish Bill took great influence from the Latin manner of his new family and their Guatemalan roots.
Bill
saw not only poverty here, in Guatemala, but also the profound issues of justice, privilege and power in a two class
society.
[Continue Next Column]
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Even as San Francisco was beating with a new vibration in the mid to late 1950's, Bill was happy to be a part but eventually
got caught up in the negative political side of the Era. Duly baited by "anticommunist" Senator Joesph McCarthy and his "red scare", even grand intellectual institutions like the University of California Berkley were seeking "communist
fighting" loyalty oaths from each student--and Bill was no man for such matters.
Throughout his career painting, many influences of Latin color, form and sensibility can be traced to his time around
the Bay and in Guatemala. The first surviving paintings attributed to Bill, works on board, come out of this era. The works
are believed to date to approximately 1955. Two known works exist in private family collections. They are extremely rare and
while their sense of color is to the monochromatic they show early notions of mother, Madonna, and child.
| Brothers Smothers |
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| San Francisco Bay in the late fifties was a hot bed of social experimentation and change. |
The sixties were yet to come but the seeds of the revolution that culminated in the Summer of Love (1968) were well along
their sprouting way. These were the Beats and Bill was a player. At a party on Bill's houseboat along the Bay's Sausalito Piers, he met Judith
Johnson, the pretty fun loving gal from Winnetka, Illinois, fresh from her diversion through Durango, Colorado and Colorado
College.
| Quiche Woman |
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| From Bill's Mid Taos Period, circa 1989. The resolved tension here: pastel color meets bold line. |
They were off on their one week romance and their ensuing marriage in Reno just a day later; Judith, his second
wife. The two made a perfect pairing of so called 'opposites', a balance between his gravitas and her love of action,
happenings and fun. She had a good day job at Standard Oil of California courtesy her college degree and her strong
programming skills. He was painting the scene and full of nerve and verve. They were handsome, nay, pretty, and
they were on their way to a nearly fifty year marriage.
Bill didn't believe, however, in a government [let alone a church] that should be involved in such
matters as marriage and it must have surprised his new bride when they disembarked from their bus ride back to San
Francisco long enough for Bill to throw the newly inked marriage certificate from the canyon precipice into the
Truckee River bed with the epithet "that's what I think of the Government licensing Love".
Judith may well have gotten more than she bargained for, finding Bill's strong artistic drive to be sometimes all
consuming and occasionally unrelenting. Through it all she percervered and today she is director of RANE Gallery in Taos, NM.
There were many others in the art movements of the times. Some of them also begin their artistic pursuits
in California but ended up in New Mexico. Wilfred Lang was one such artist. A friend of both Bill and Judith,
Bill's second wife, he was, himself, an accomplished, if oftimes dark, painter. He lived his later years
in El Rito, New Mexico halfway between Bill's Taos and O'Keefe's Abiquiu.
Eventually, and with some moving back and forth from San Francisco, Latin America and Idaho, Bill left California. The
unconfirmed story is that he was under some political heat to get out of the state and that the California
highway patrol followed him, wife Judith and newborn Anson to the Nevada line.
Whatever the truth of the matter, Bill
was on to a time in Tucson, Arizona and eventually settled with wife Judith in Alamogordo, New Mexico where they
had two more children while Judy brought the bread in from her government job and Bill played art and building projects on
the New Mexico desert.
All the while trips to Mexico's Pacific San Blas and painting, sculpting and building were
the order of the day. It was a time of freedom and happiness with the gentle goings-on of life worn like a loose garment--a era which
has been well chronicled by Bill's eldest child, daughter Rosa, who aspires to present them publicly at a later time.
Mexico was so much a part of the fabric of his life in those times that his seventh child, Omar, was born during a year
long run on the Yucatan Peninsula--hurricaines, beach bugs, children from both marriages, second wife (Judith), new borns
and all. Some of the children might have missed a year of schooling, but no worry.
[continues next column]
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Bill would just tell the folks back at La Luz Elementray that the the children had all been in a private American school
and were ready for the next year, paying no heed for the missed grade, as if the year off meant nothing. The "nothing",
however, was the "private school" that Bill made up. It was far from a lie in Bill's sensibility. He figured the one
year education received by a trip to Merida or Progresso was as good as two in a regular school.
The only lessons were from Bill's private "School of the Caribbean" where he and wife Judith were teacher, principal,
and school board all as one. And however great the quality of the lessons, they were, nonetheless, shall we say,
quite informal and no written lesson plan has ever been discovered. But it was true, Bill's knowledge that
he was keen to pass to his children was indeed broad and deep from marine biology to how a lightbulb functioned-on and on--let
alone the Spanish language learning and the intercultural exposure.
In those Southern New Mexico years of the early 1960's, before Taos,
before Toronto, and before Socorro, Bill built a bohemian home
from rock, adobe, scrap, courage and not much else. La Luz, New Mexico, just beyond Alamogordo, was an ancient Spanish hamlet in the shadow of Trinity Site, the dubious desert home of the World's first nuclear blast. All of Bill and Judith's beat friends from the Bay
were interested in extending their explorations and the Rane house on the Southern New Mexico Desert became the perfect recuperative
halfway stopover during long road trips or arduous hitchhike excursions--a sort of free parking zone on a counterculture
underground railroad, a safe house for beats, and then hippies, wandering to the southern climes of the Western
Hemisphere to places such as Matzatlan, Zacatacas and the Yucatan.
The parties were fierce and even ribald. Bill had extraordinary charisma in those times that made him the unquestioned
leader of the pack--and Judith his undisputed chosen queen. They were beatnick royalty--if ever there could be such
a thing--complete with ambassadors to and from the various arts and letters, mad muses, moated castle, extended court, minstrels,
appointed jokers and beautiful, bright, fresh faced progeny.
It was constant high energy fun of the kind that ran only in that time. A certain legend has it that once a
last-minute-party got so out of hand that the revellers drenched a huge Lincoln automobile carcas, not unlike the one
JFK rode on his fateful Dallas date, with gasoline--then lit the fuse. When local Sheriff Terrel Hendren arrived,
on Bill's ten acre spread (known to hippies and beats alike from Galveston to San Francisco Bay simply as "The
Land"), to inquire about a reported fire, the Lincoln was beyond incendiary with flames leaping and lusting twenty
feet or so into the Southern New Mexico night sky with half--and fully--naked drunken free spirits dancing in a circle as
if pagans after the goat kill.
The Sheriff Hendren said to Bill, "We had a report of Fire Out here". Bill was nonplused and his steely
blue-eyed-reply was plainly "no Sheriff, no fire here". It was a charmed life, and all the Sheriff could muster
was a weak "well o'kay Bill but we have to check these reports out"--leaving without further incident or inquiry--and,
best of all, no government paperwork. Fortunately all the party goers were in one piece the next day no worse
for the fun.
The Southern New Mexico spell did break though. In those early Vietnam days, before Nixon's impersonal lottery
draft based on birthdate, the local draft board made those harsh and fateful conscription decisions sending some
to the front lines, some to the clerical administration of war, and leaving others at home. Well, with the
wild Rane reputation of the various happenings on The Land and with what?-other public
episodes such as when Bill sent the kids off to school with his fresh penned " Alamogordo High School Talking Blues",
a harmless little ditty roughly based on a Bob Dylan number--the word got out. Rane-boy kids could go ahead and pack--they were already on the short list for the local
draft board's very next quota fulfillment. Bill had another thought altogether. Liquidating immediately his
(and Judith's) ownership of The Land at basement price for an overnight cash sale, Bill
figured that it must be time for Canada; and, so, it was--a very rapid exit--"Next stage North".
| Bill in his Socorro New Mexico Studio--about 1974 |
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| Photograph by Jonas Rane, Copyright/Courtesy of Jonas Rane--All World Wide Rights Strictly Reserved, |
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