Mel Weisburd
Mel Weisburd was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. He moved to Los Angeles in 1942, served in the army, and graduated UCLA in English Literature. During the 50's, he worked for the Los Angeles County Air Pollution Control District in its pioneering efforts to fight smog as a ‘smog cop,’ where he authored the first law enforcement manuals in this field. In the evening he took courses with Thomas McGrath at Los Angeles State College. With Bert Meyers, Naomi Replansky, Gene Frumkin, Stanley Kiesel and Hank Coulette, he was a "Marsh Street Irregular" which frequently met at Tom’s home. With Gene Frumkin, Mel co-founded Coastlines Literary Magazine during the 50's and was its first editor-in-chief. He published poetry and articles in The California Quarterly (50's), California Quarterly (2003), The Transatlantic Review, Epos, Poetry-Los Angeles, Chicago Choice, Coastlines, Poet Lore (a verse play), Midwest, San Marcos Review, Blue Mesa Review and Café Solo. He was anthologized in Walter Lowenfel’s New Poets of Today and was the first literary writer to report on an experience with LSD. His article, Lysergic Acid and the Creative Experience was first published in Coastlines and subsequently anthologized in Best Articles and Stories in 1956. Leonard Wolf, in Voices from the Love Generation (Boston: New York, Little, Brown and Company, 1968) credited him for giving an account of that experience well before Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg. Much of his work in the 50's appears in The Poets of the Non-Existent City: L.A. During the McCarthy Years, edited by Estelle Gershgoren-Novak, UNM press, 2002. He is the author of A Life of Windows & Mirrors and The Gloria Poems. His works appears on a number of web sites, and he has read at Poet’s House in NYC and venues in Los Angeles and New Mexico. In the 70's and 80's, Mel was the founder and for 15 years president of Pacific Environmental Services, a successful environmental engineering company. He is now completing a memoir covering the formative period of the 50's in Los Angeles and several books of poetry.
