William J. Craddock

Inspired by his father, an English literature and drama major, and his influential high school English teacher, William J. Craddock (“Billy,” “Buzz, “Wild Bill,” or just Bill, depending on who knew him when and under what circumstances) began writing a column for his high school newspaper about his classmates’ “rides,” hot rods, and scooters, but mostly motorcycles, a passion and hobby of Craddock’s. By graduation, he had already been hired by his small town’s local newspaper to write a weekly column titled “The Vicious Circle,” about virtually anything he was interested in about the “changing times” of the late 1960s.

Bill entered college on the harbinger of the radical ʼ60s, a time of unrest and change for youth of that era. Vietnam loomed and draft induction physicals came regularly. One was told to stay in college, if you were a young man wanting to live, or move to Canada. With his Harley as his only mode of transportation between classes and his apartment, Bill began riding with and became a member of a motorcycle group, the Night Riders Motorcycle Club, considered a 1% outlaw club, while attending San Jose State College, majoring in English, journalism, and a bit of drama and fencing on the side. He began a novel about the Hells 14

Angels and outlaw bikers in general, but feeling it held no commercial value, set it aside, reduced the manuscript, and sold a few random chapters as “The One-Percenters” to Adam magazine under the pen name “William James.”

With the Psychedelic Revolution taking hold in every improbable way during that era, Craddock, still in college, edited and published an underground newspaper, “The Mobius Strip,” writing many of the articles himself to meet the deadline. Writing long into every night until sunrise, and skipping classes, he eventually dropped out of college, married his high school sweetheart, Carole Anne Bronzich, and finished his first draft of Be Not Content with the desire to publish before his 21st birthday. The novel, sometimes considered “historical fiction,” was picked up by Doubleday & Company. A first-person account of an 18-year-old’s experience and inside look, “a chronicle of the times,” Craddock considered it to be his definitive saga of the drug culture, but also a careful personal analysis of the almost religious experience a small group of people were living through at the time.

Craddock was offered a contract for Be Not Content in 1969. It was published a year later in 1970, a few years past his 21st birthday, but it still put him among the youngest authors in the country at the time.

Shortly after the book’s success and with positive feedback from various writers and reviewers, Craddock submitted a sequel titled Backtrack to Doubleday. After a long period languishing in editorial review, Doubleday rejected the work as “too long” and hard to sell, amongst other criticisms.

Depressed and sorrowful over the rejection and his impending divorce, Craddock fulfilled his contractual agreement in 1971 by submitting his third novel, Twilight Candelabra, a “horror story of today.” An esoteric work, even Craddock considered it a book of his own personal grief and lapse of rational thinking, and he was slightly surprised when 15

Doubleday decided to publish it. He moved into a remote cabin in the Santa Cruz Mountains, worked on a satirical novel, wrote short stories for motorcycle magazines and a newspaper column for the Santa Cruz weekly, Good Times.

Craddock happily remarried to Teresa Thorne, moved back briefly to his home town of Los Gatos and continued to type fiction on his trusty old Underwood upright typewriter and poetry on scraps of papers, crumpled cigarette packs and envelopes, and pages of letters to family and friends. He cleaned tack, groomed and spoiled his sister Diane’s horses while immersed in thought for the modern Western he wanted to write, and managed a vintage motorcycle shop.

Be Not Content remains Craddock’s “tour de force,” an opus to a period of time many will recognize, some would rather forget, others will deny even happened. Most everything Craddock ever wrote, he said, was true.