I grew
up next to the ocean in Bermuda, moved with my family to Virginia, and
attended schools there and in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Massachusetts. I
was drafted in 1968 and spent sixteen months in Vietnam during the war.
I worked as a volunteer in the Paleontology lab at
the La Brea Tar Pits museum for 25 years. I participated in researching
wild orangutans during three Earthwatch projects in Indonesian Borneo,
and then was a tour guide at the Los Angeles Zoo for five years. I
have traveled to and done extensive photography in such places as Chile
and Argentina, Belize, Costa Rica, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa,
the Big Island of Hawaii, most of Western Europe, and the North Pole, which
I visited on the Russian nuclear icebreaker Yamal in 1994. I
have been studying the native vegetation of southern California for about
twenty-five years, and have also botanized in Virginia, Death Valley, the White Mountains and the eastern
Sierras. I have taken many classes, dozens of field trips with botanists
from the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden, the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden,
the Joshua Tree Institute, the Jepson Herbarium, CNPS, and UC Riverside, and
some hundreds of field trips on my own all over southern California. I
am a long-time fan of science fiction, Firesign Theater, travel writing,
Russian history, Bob and Ray, bluegrass music, W.C. Fields, mystery novels and all things
Irish. I am married to a retired TV comedy writer and I have a daughter who is a graduate of Vassar College
in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. We have two basset hounds, Mamie and Pearl, and a shelter mutt named Charles. I also have an incredibly cute granddaughter named Poppy who is 3 years old and a new grandson named Mack. |
