Bill Raney

Bill Raney was born in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and spent his teen years in Port Angeles, Washington. It was there he got a ham radio license and began cruising the world on its airwaves. After two and a half years at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, he dropped out to become a beatnik in San Francisco's North Beach district during the late 1950s and 60s. It was there he met and married JoAnne Walker Raney, who owned and ran The Movie, a small art theatre in North Beach at the time.

In May of 1967, soon after Bill and JoAnne adopted Zerky (Eric Xerxes Raney), they left for the journey detailed in "Letters to Zerky, a Father's Legacy to a Lost Son and a Road Trip Around the World." Upon returning to California, thirteen months later, they moved down the coast to Santa Cruz, California, where Bill got a loan from a bank and started the Nickelodeon Theatre, which is still going strong today and has become a Santa Cruz institution.

One month after the Nickelodeon opened, JoAnne died in the night of an undiagnosed cerebral aneurism, and then about year after that Zerky was run over by a truck.

Today, Bill is re-married to Nancy Raney, who for many years helped him run the Nickelodeon. Together they took many periodic get-away trips to exotic places such as India, Africa, Papua New Guinea, South America and the Arctic. After selling the Nickelodeon in 1997, Bill and Nancy moved to Spain for six months, and then in 1997 bought an old 42-foot trawler on which they lived for the next eight years, cruising the Pacific Coast from Santa Cruz north to Alaska and back. It was towards the end of their peripatetic life on the boat that Bill ran into the letters he had written to Zerky on that trip of so many years ago, and also some old pictures and JoAnne's diary. Bill realized they could be a book to serve as a memorial.

Today Bill and Nancy live in a redwood forest outside Santa Cruz, California, with the deer, no antelope to play with them, but with Lucy and Hardy, their two remaining cats. Hardy's sister Laurel got eaten by a coyote!