THE AUTHOR ON BADGER PRESS

Retiring from academia in 1991 I still had things undone. Since none would attract a large audience, it seemed wise to form my own publishing imprint. In heraldry "gray" is another name for badger; since my first Gray ancestor in America had been a Scotch prisoner from the 1650 Battle of Dunbar and sold as a slave, the trademark was registered as "an emblem of a badger enchained rampant holding up a lamp".

The first project was a six-volume study of some 300 colonial families. Titled Penobscot Pioneers, this actually made money. Not so successful was Mean Streets and Dark Deeds which held Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as exemplars of the genre. The shoals upon which this literary project made shipwreck were probably a combination of the dandification and gender-bending of the Western mindset.

The next project was the application of ethological theory to the serial killer/mass murderer/school assassin deviants. I placed the blame for these deviants, and the horrors they commit, on an interruption of the imprinting process in early childhood. But nobody likes to believe that so much evil can come from the innocent carelessness of parents. Next from Badger Press was a collection of poetry, letters and academic memos, with most copies given away to friends and acquaintances. This was followed by a lengthy manuscript melding ethology and psychoanalysis, titled Jabberwocky Darwin, Jabberwocky Freud. Soon after this, I decided to prepare for publication this extension of my directory of Eskimo artists.

THE AUTHOR ON HIMSELF:

My parents divorced soon after I was born, so I grew up wherever my mother had a job as a housekeeper. Leaving school after the eighth grade, I worked as a farm helper, woodsman, ditch-digger and ship-yard laborer until joining the army which sent me to Texas for infantry training. I was at the top of the platoon on mortar and machine-gun, and firing the MI Garand with iron sights, able to put a run of five shots into the space of a man’s chest at 500 yards. so it must have made sense to somebody that on arrival in Europe early in 1945 I was switched to the combat engineers where I managed to survive my seven weeks on the front line by mine-sweeping, blowing up pillboxes, and building bridges over troubled waters, and getting shot at. The army did have a good program of providing books and I read a lot.

Out of the military, there were mediocre jobs, terminated by two years as an animal care-taker at the genetics lab in Bar Harbor where, finding myself seemingly as intelligent as the resident scientists, I took and passed all the exams needed to enter the University of Chicago at the graduate level. There, I earned my living as money verifier clerk for Brinks, Inc. and as a ghostwriter and apparatus-builder for a professor.

Seven years later, I became a psychology professor in Montana. an invitation in 1968 to be a visiting professor in Winnipeg for two years led to a lasting interest in Eskimo art.

Now closing out my eighth decade on Planet Earth, I look back to see what I enjoyed in life. Family and friends, of course, especially the acquaintance of some lovely ladies, one of whom I married. Swimming, roller-skating, motorcycle and horseback riding, painting, driving sports cars and shooting, especially pistols. While age has worn away at most of these activities, sports cars and pistol shooting remain, as do good mysteries, folk art and beauty in its many forms.