Richie Goldstein

My life has been peppered with amazing events and blasted by traumatic ones.

I’ve been a farmer, a fisherman, a journalist and newspaper editor, a grant writer, and a Certified Nursing Assistant. I’ve sold women’s shoes and men’s wallets. I’ve hawked newspapers in traffic for 3 cents a paper, soda jerked malted milks for 90 cents an hour, and boxed cough syrup on an assembly line for a buck an hour - while the Mexican women down the line made 20 cents less than I. The beginning of political consciousness. Over forty years of teaching, I’ve worked with every age student, from third grade to second year college.

I’ve lived as a communist and as a capitalist. I’ve hitchhiked across Europe several times, been a paratrooper, raced dogs on the frozen tundra, been scarred by the murder of a beloved friend, and won a prestigious national prize. I’ve written and produced award-winning video documentaries.

I have not run for public office. I am unelectable.

I grew up in an extended family of ten living in a teensy one-bedroom apartment. All of my relatives were smokers and were semi or totally ruined by the close quarters experience. Being the youngest, I was spared most, but not all, of the angst associated with tenement living. My cousin became a kleptomaniac and I, too, was a petty thief as a pre-teen. Because you could buy switchblades at Sears in those days, I was my gang’s armorer. Happily for me, my accomplices drifted out of my life and I managed to avoid the law (mostly).

I haven’t a single memory of ever studying in high school, nor of ever being asked by anyone at home whether I had homework. Nonetheless, I managed to get into UCLA, where my utter lack of study skills consigned me to one of the lowest GPAs ever recorded (0.67) by an entering freshman. Thus, I was invited to leave after a single semester. And a good thing, too. Otherwise, I might have ended up a pharmacist.

Taking inspiration from a short film narrated by the incomparable Edward G. Robinson, I began traveling abroad at nineteen and worked and trekked my way into adulthood. Travel does that for young people. I returned several years later to the same university and, after acquiring a BA and an MA, quit a doctoral program, despite having a full ride scholarship. I chose, rather, the life of a seaside Bohemian, earning a living by selling sandwiches to doctors and lawyers. This idyll was interrupted when, through the carelessness of smokers in the next building, my home caught fire and I was left with the clothes on my back.

I survived and returned to university for two credentials in education. They took me to the Alaskan bush and to a life of intense romance and insane adventure. I married there and helped raise my daughter and son.

We now live in Anchorage, where I write, grow flowers, and teach and study Tai Chi.