Tom Lodge

Tom Lodge (born 1936) is an English author and radio broadcaster.

Early life

Lodge was a figure in British radio of the 1960s. He was a disc jockey on Radio Caroline. Caroline and other pirates forced the government to deregulate radio, hitherto a monopoly of the BBC. He was the son of the writer Oliver W F Lodge and his wife Diana, and a grandson of the physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, was born Thomas Odoard Marshall Lodge on April 16, 1936, in Tanleather Cottage, Forest Green, Surrey, England. When World War II broke out, his family left England and he was brought up in Maryland and Virginia. At the end of the war he returned with his family to England and lived near Painswick, Gloucestershire. He was educated at Bedales School, England, where he developed his interest in music. He took lessons on the violin and the clarinet and taught himself the guitar and mouth organ, and played the stand up Bass in a four piece skiffle band, called the "Top Flat Ramblers".

When Lodge was eighteen years old he traveled to Hay River, Northwest Territories and worked by commercial fishing on the Great Slave Lake. While fishing with a colleague, he was blown out into open waters on an ice floe. His friend died, but he was saved by some trappers. He described his adventures in his first book, "Beyond the Great Slave Lake" (published by Cassells 1957 and E.P. Dutton) 1958.

In 1956 he returned to England. He married Jeanine Arpourettes in 1957. They returned to Hay River, Canada, where he ran a fishing business.

Broadcasting

In the late 50's Lodge moved to Yellowknife, where he worked in a goldmine until he joined the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as an announcer on CFYK. On 27 May 1958, a son, Tom Lodge Jr. was born. Tom Jr. is currently (2011) a presenter on Radio Caroline. In 1960 he became the CBC manager for a new radio station CBXH in Fort Smith, N.W.T., until he returned to England as a CBC correspondent. In 1964 Lodge joined England's first offshore pirate radio station Radio Caroline, as disc jockey and programme director. His book "The Ship that Rocked the World" describes his time there. After the outlawing of the pirate radio ships in 1967 by the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act, he worked as a disc jockey for the BBC on the newly created BBC Radio 1.

In 1968 Lodge became a disc jockey on CHLO, St Thomas, Ontario, Canada, which is now CKDK-FM. In 1970 he founded a creative program at Fanshawe College London, Ontario, Canada, called "Creative Electronics", which after two years he made into Music Industry Arts, a training program for recording engineers and record producers, and is still operating at Fanshawe College.

Umi

In 1975, in California, Lodge began practicing Zen. In January 1998 his Master changed his name to Umi and he began guiding people in Zen. He has an ashram, "Stillpoint Zen Community", near Santa Cruz, California.

Bibliography

• Beyond the Great Slave Lake, (Cassells, 1958)
• Beyond the Great Slave Lake, (E.P. Dutton, 1959)
• Success Without Goals, (Lloyds Mayfair Group, 1992)
• Circles,Tom Lodge Becoming Umi (Lloyds Mayfair Group, 1993)
• Footprints in the Snow, (Umi Foundation, 2000)
• The River and the Raven, (Umi Foundation, 2002)
• Enlightenment Guaranteed, (Umi Foundation, 2002)
• The Radio Caroline Story, (Umi Foundation, 2002)
• The Ship That Rocked The World, How Radio Caroline Defied the Establishment, Launched the British Invasion and Made the Planet Safe for Rock and Roll, (Bartleby Press 2010)
• God is a Dancer, (Umi Foundation, 2007)
• The Diamond Sutra with Umi, (Church of Consciousness, 2008)