For those of you getting this for the first time:

Over the years, the list has grown — I’ve added anyone I thought might be interested — and there are now about 6,500 people getting these infrequent emails.

If you’re not signed up on the list to receive (that is, if you are reading this on Instagram or my blog), you can sign up for email delivery of the Gimme Shelter newsletter here.

I like getting back to emails. Completely different from social media. These come in to you; you don’t have to open anything up. Old school, in a way.

When I send these out, some older people say “I got your blog,” They’re not going to my real blog, and I can reach them this way.

Like a lot of technical advances, we all rush in, and then step back and figure out what’s missing with the new technology. And then try to figure out how to incorporate some of the old stuff (that’s missing) in the mix. Like recording music — the limitations of digital recording vs. vinyl or tape.

It’s a chance for me to tell people what’s going on in my world, in a direct and more personal way than Instagram or my blog.

Sorry for the length of this. (The last one of these was over a year ago.) As I’ve said many times before, paraphrasing Blasé Pascal (1647): “I’d have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have enough time.”

A Sad Year

I’m not big on broadcasting my personal life, but events of the past year have had such an impact on what I’m doing — now and in the future — that I thought I’d explain a bit here. I’m writing this for people who follow me in one way or another, so you’ll know where I’ll be “…coming from.”

In 2023, I lost my wife Lesley, my brother, and my two best friends, so I’m heading into new territory.

I’m coping — it’s a gradual process and I’m OK, but — without going into details — things are definitely different in my life.

Coincidentally with all this, I had decided I was weary of running a publishing business and was looking for someone to buy Shelter Publications — and this has just happened:

AdventureKEEN Takes Over Shelter Publications

Richard Hunt and Molly Merkle of AdventureKEEN in the Shelter studio.
Photo by Elise Cannon

As of January 1st, 2024, AdventureKEEN is taking over the operation of Shelter Publications, which I have been running for 53 years. Another big change in my life.

They will keep everything functioning and I’ll be able to step away from the (ever-increasing) business and technical details of running a publishing company, and go into a new phase of communicating. AdventureKEEN will be the publisher, and distribution will still be by my beloved Publishers Group West book lovers.

AdventureKEEN is a great fit for Shelter. Some of their other publishers are Wilderness Press, Adventure Publications, and Nature Study Guides. Hiking, canoeing, cooking, gardening, backpacking, animals, tracking — all stuff I’m into: adventure. I feel very sympatico with everyone at AdventureKEEN.

And a big tip of the Hatlo hat to PGW’s Kevin Votel for shepherding this deal along.

• AdventureKEEN Acquires Shelter Publications – Publishers’ Weekly
• PDF of Point Reyes Light article on Lloyd and the sale

A New Way to Communicate

When I finally disentangle myself from all the responsibilities of running a business and being an employer, I plan to start posting on Substack, doing better Instagram posts, and making videos for my YouTube channel — reporting on tools, how to do stuff, the beaches, the hills, skateboarding, cool people, and all the amazing things going on in cities.

I’m excited to be shifting gears. Like when I switched from insurance broker to carpenter in 1965. Or when I gave up after building domes for five years and discovered real building in the ’70s. A fresh outlook on work and life.

For some reason, disengaging myself from the business of running a company made me think of the ropes of entanglement in this drawing (by J.J. Grandville) in Gulliver’s Travels (1756). Cutting the ropes and bounding into a new phase of life.

On Substack, I can write, and as well post images larger than Instagram’s 3 by 4 inches. (I want my photos on a bigger screen.) Substack is for writers, and is kind of a combination email and blog. And that I can er, ahem, hopefully get paid for (by subscriptions).

I’ve been a communicator since the age of 3. “Hey Mom, look at this butterfly.” I’m a reporter at heart — have been since my high school journalism class, and then running a newspaper for two years on an Air Force Base in Germany (1958–60). I shoot photos constantly and everywhere.

I find the world — in spite of all the darkness nowadays — fascinating. People doing great (and often unnoticed and unheralded) things, plus homes, tools, vehicles, art, signs, etc. that I’ll record. I want to take you along with me — riding shotgun — seeing what I see.

In the ’80s, I loved journalist Charles Kuralt’s TV program “On the Road,” his 12‑year motorhome adventures traveling the back roads of America and filming people and places. I’m gonna get out in the world and report on what I run across.

I’ll be going into full journalistic mode, not just the intermittent reporting I’ve been doing in recent years.

Thanks to Christopher Ryan, writer extraordinaire (Sex at Dawn, Civilized to Death), prolific podcaster, and more recently Substacker (chrisryan.substack.com) for turning me onto Substack.

I figure to be rolling in these new modes by March–April, 2024. And I’ll try to do these newsletters at least every few months.

I figure I’ve got a year or so to see if this is gonna work.

The Real Baja

I’m heading to Baja Sur in my 2003 Tacoma 4×4 (5-speed, 2.4 L, 4‑cylinder engine), with tent on top and foldable tarp for beach camping. Taking my old ten-foot Doug Haut Surftek three-fin surfboard and I’m gonna try to start getting back up on the board. Once I’m up, I’m OK. Looking forward to warm water. Also taking boogie board and fins. I’m gonna ride waves one way or another. Plus work on my crawl stroke, and some diving.

This will be my first road trip to Baja in 20 years. Los Cabos (the southern tip of Baja) has grown exponentially, but I plan to — as in the past — get outside the very narrow regions of heavy tourism — into the real Baja. Camping on remote beaches and in water-filled arroyos, visiting old mission sites, hot springs, remote ranchos.

For about a dozen years, I went to Baja whenever I got the chance, hanging out with my Mexican friends, and I came to love the people and the tropical desert of the Los Cabos area.

I’ll be posting on Instagram as I travel. (I left on January 30.)

• If you use Instagram, ride along with me: instagram.com/lloyd.kahn
• If you don’t use Instagram or you want to see much larger photos — (yes!), go to my blog: Hey, you’re here!

Read More …

This is an uncorrected chapter of a book I’m working on provisionally titled Live From California: The ’60s — Before, During, and After — 1935-1973.

It’s sort of an autobiography of my first 38 years, which includes my observations on the ’60s. Having grown up in San Francisco, going to Lowell, which was the edge of the Haight-Ashbury district, having dropped out of the straight world in 1965, I have a different take on what went on in these few years, before everything — at least in the Haight district — fell apart.

Lowell, class of 1952. There were about 250 of us.
Note the eight or so of us facing each other — not the camera — in the second row down from the top. (Click or hover over the image for a zoomed detail.)

Lowell was at the Corner of Hayes and Masonic streets, just across a narrow strip of park from the Haight-Ashbury district, until 1962, when it moved out to the Lake Merced area.

Lowell was the one high school in San Francisco you could attend, regardless of what district you lived in. It was one of the best high schools in the country and many graduates went on to Stanford or Cal (UC Berkeley).

(Interestingly, Lowell was the subject of a New Yorker article titled What Happens When an Elite Public School Becomes Open to All in March, 2022. There was no test required to get into Lowell in my day, but in intervening years, demand to attend was so great that testing was required and this became a controversial issue ​— ​too much to cover here.)

I had skipped 5th grade,* so was a year younger than my classmates. I didn’t know many kids there when I started; most of them were from different parts of the city. For the first two years I hung out with a few kids, and had a steady girlfriend, Cora Mae Bolles.

*Mrs. Wasp, my fifth grade teacher told me I should study to be a lawyer, I guess because I argued so much.

Teachers

My two favorite teachers were Mrs. Cooper, who encouraged me to write, and Jack Patterson, the journalism teacher. Years later, at a reunion, three of us discovered we were in our present occupations (English teacher, staff the San Francisco Examiner, and publisher) ​— ​largely due to “Captain Jack.”

Patterson had been a captain in the Marines and had a Silver Star from World War II. He was small and wiry, bald, and had piercing blue eyes that twinkled with humor and mischief. It turned out he was gay, although he never came on to us.

He was a great teacher. I remember to this day how he described the “five w’s and one h” of journalism that, he said, should be in the first paragraph of every news story: who, what, where, when, why, and how.

And how a journalist’s duty was to report objectively (as far as that was possible). Opinion was for the editorial page. How relevant that is in these days of “fake news.”

He got fired eventually. At the time, he owed money to a bunch of friends and since he’d lost his job, he decided to rob a bank in Texas. He entered the bank with a tear gas gun and a .22 pistol. The tear gas gun didn’t fire, so he fired the .22 in the air three times. He was apprehended before he could get away, and because of the gunshots, was imprisoned for armed robbery.

One of Patterson’s former students had been Pierre Salinger; Pierre had been the editor of The Lowell, the school newspaper. Pierre went on to become President Jack Kennedy’s press secretary.

From jail, Patterson got in touch with Pierre, who got Kennedy to issue a pardon and he got out of jail. The athletic director at Stanford gave Patterson a job on the campus. I’m so sorry I never went to thank him in person for his guidance.

Sports

Football

I’d played football in my neighborhood in earlier years, but for some reason didn’t go out for high school football until my last year.

I wasn’t successful. For one thing, all the other guys had two or three more years of high school experience than I did. For another, the football coach was also the swimming coach, and he didn’t want me playing football.

I wanted to play halfback ​— ​I knew I could run and catch passes from neighborhood games ​— ​but the coach made me play defensive halfback. The first time at practice, our 220 lb. fullback George Schwarz broke through the line and was charging towards me. I weighed 150, and decided then and there I wasn’t going to put my head down and tackle him. Law of physics, or self-preservation. I didn’t get to play too much that season.

In later years, I was glad I wasn’t the football star I aspired to be, as I saw all my football friends suffering years later from the contact aspect of the sport ​— ​something that wasn’t noticeable in younger years.

The 1952 Lowell football team, which ended up with four wins and five losses. The highlight of the season was an upset of favored Washington, 6–0, on a second quarter pass from quarterback Pete Kistler to wide receiver Gary Friedman.

But a couple of good things came out of football:

1. Each night after practice at the polo fields in Golden Gate Park, we had to run around the ¾-mile track in full gear. I did it faster than anyone else, and it led me into going out for cross-country and then running the half-mile on the track team.
2. On the bus to and from practice I started sitting next to Gary Friedman, a star wide receiver. Gary liked me, even if I wasn’t playing football at his level. He “adopted” me, in a sense.**Looking back, I can see that at various times in my life, people have “adopted” me. It happened again at Stanford, and a number of times in the publishing business ​— ​people who for some reason liked what I was doing and helped me move along through life.

Swimming

I was on the swimming team — ​diving during 10th grade, the 100-yard butterfly my last two years. I was on what they called the 130s, a team for lighter weight, smaller guys and I got first place in each event. But it wasn’t the same as varsity swimming.

Track

Bob McGrouther and I were the school half milers. Bob was 6′4″, and the track coach said I took 3 steps to every 2 of Bob’s. Bob was consistently faster than me. My best times were 2:06 in the half mile, and 4:53 in the mile. Good, not great. (Bob ran the half mile in 2:03 and a sophomore, Pete Ryder, ran the mile in 4:45.)

(These were years when you didn’t have to concentrate on one sport, as nowadays.)

My three best friends, the guys I hung out with, went to parties with, had adventures with turned out to be Gary, John Brazier, and Ron Chapman.
Read More …

My Dad bought this print for $1 from the photographer (name unknown) during the depression, about 1930. it’s printed on textured paper, hence the pattern.

It shows the Golden Gate before the bridge. Note Fort Point on the left.

21 years ago, I got to go up to the top of the southern tower of the Golden Gate Bridge. Three of us spent about 45 minutes up there, on a warm September night. It was one of the greatest thrills of my life, and also the first time I used a digital camera (a small Fujifilm model).

When I get some more time (if ever!), I’ll post the story, along with the photos.

And also, the story of my friend Jeff starting on the roadway of the north tower at dusk, going up along the cable (with carabiners attached to the handrail cables), climbing to the top of the northern tower, back down to the roadway, up to the top of the southern tower, and making it to the toll gate by dawn the next morning. Not for persons of the faint hearted persuasion.

Here’s what I wrote about it originally (the format is weird because this was when I was using Blogspot, and it’s not compatible with WordPress (or something like that):

blog.shelterpub.com/shelter/_lloyd/bridge_top.html