Draft:Richard Raymond (publisher)

• Comment: this will need re-writing in a dry neutral tone. Theroadislong (talk) 17:13, 2 November 2024 (UTC)

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Richard Raymond (30 November 1923 — 16 September 2015) was a social and economic instigator who mentored, supported, or organized many projects, personally subsidizing the early stage of some. According to New York Times staffer John Markoff, Raymond's Portola Institute "was Silicon Valley’s first true incubator." Usually called Dick Raymond, he was a key figure in Northern California environmental and cultural developments, partly in his role as publisher (e.g., of the Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly), also in his support of small-business entrepreneurialism (e.g., the Briarpatch Network). He was a co-organizer of the POINT Foundation, formed to fund and assist organization of regional projects related to environment, community, and various types of innovation.

Early life and education

Raymond was born in Newark, Ohio in 1923. His father worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Growing up, he moved with his parents through a lot of the Midwest. He graduated from Miami University, served in the U.S. Navy Air Corp during WWII, and afterwards earned an MBA at Harvard.

Career

A transplant to the San Francisco Bay Area, in the 1960s Dick Raymond gained experience operating some start-up companies, including co-founding Rayturn Machine which developed the Irrigage soil-testing instrument Subsequently, he was employed in urban planning in the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), in Menlo Park, California. Raymond's specialties included land use, recreational economics, and community development. At SRI, one of his clients was the Century 21 Exposition (the Seattle World’s Fair of 1962). According to writer John Markoff, Raymond convinced organizers to plan buildings that would remain on the site as part of the city's heritage.

In the early '60s, Raymond and his family lived in the Portola Valley, west of the Stanford University campus. During his stretch with SRI, he worked as a consultant to the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. At Stanford, he met the aspiring photographer and journalist Stewart Brand and, with his connections, was able to offer Brand a photography job on the reservation.

Raymond had myriad personal interests; he was particularly enthused about emerging possibilities in “alternative education.” Given this keen interest, and finding SRI's structure too rigid, he left the organization. In 1966, using his own funds, he founded the Portola Institute to explore and support education projects. Among Raymond's interests, by 1967 he'd begun to think that computers could become a valuable ingredient in education, though personal-computing equipment was at that time known to few people. The technology gradually became more available and familiar, leading to some of the later projects he sponsored, e.g., the Homebrew Computer Club and The WELL (or Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link).

Many years later, University of Nevada history professor Andrew Kirk wrote: “The Portola Institute was one of the best examples of how creative communities were coalescing around a loose set of shared social and cultural goals in an effort to create new means for achieving personal and community success.”

Raymond and the Portola Institute readily attracted idea people. For some of these, the development of innovative modes of education was a focal enthusiasm. It was a commodious sphere that could accommodate a notion Stewart Brand had been toying with, something he thought of as an “access catalog.” Brand's intent was to help creative people locate useful information and tools to facilitate translation of their ideas into reality. Raymond provided mentoring and connected Brand with other local advisors. With Brand investing some of his own money, supplemented by backing from Portola, a trial issue of the Whole Earth Catalog was produced in 1968. PBS's "American Masters" series recognized the 1968 birth of the WEC as a milestone in the history of environmentalism.

The Portola Institute published issues of WEC's until the POINT Foundation took over the role in 1980). Subsequent issues gained widespread circulation. A 452-page issue titled The Last Whole Earth Catalog was published in 1971 and was added to the Benson Ford Research Center's collection of stories of American innovation; in 1972 that edition received a National Book Award. That edition's title belies the fact that occasional later editions, such as The Next Whole Earth Catalog (1980), continued to be published; the final edition appeared in 1998.

Michael Phillips, a friend of Raymond's and a Bank of California vice-president, worked with him. In appreciation, Phillips wrote: "Dick Raymond is the father of the Briarpatch concept which emerged in early 1973." The resulting Briarpatch Network opened a Bay Area office the next year. The network functioned as a consulting and mutual-support organization providing free or low-cost services to small-scale entrepreneurs. Phillips, the organizer of Mastercard several years previously, was a co-founder of the Network and served as its financial consultant. Andy Alpine—who held a B.A. in economics, an M.A. in international affairs, a doctorate in law, and had been an assistant with the United Nations Secretariat—was attracted to the venture and served as coordinator. According to Phillips and co-author Greta Alexander, "The outwardly visible characteristic of the people who run Briarpatch businesses is that most are under 45 years old, [and] there is a high proportion of women owners." Eventually, the Network's records listed over a thousand people who had been members.

With the Whole Earth Catalog's financial success, Dick Raymond and Stewart Brand were in a position to found the POINT Foundation, purposed with providing grants for promising ventures. They invited a motley covey of board members of distinctly varied viewpoints but united by concern for the natural environment. Among other projects, POINT gave birth to the CoEvolution Quarterly in 1974. In 1985, POINT launched The WELL, an early online discussion community, and that same year the Quarterly was revamped as the Whole Earth Review.The new publication carried on CQ’s content of cultural, science, and environmental journalism while expanding much further into the realm of personal computing (hardware and software), maintaining the WEC’s custom of users’ own experience with specific products.

Dick Raymond had relocated to Portland, Oregon and become involved in solar-energy development. His activity in this undertaking foundered with the 1980s turnabout, when disappearing federal-grant funding decelerated activity in the renewable-energy field. Afterwards, Raymond pursued projects related to unmanned flight and cold fusion.

Death

Dick Raymond died at age 91, on September 16, 2015 at Lake Oswego, Oregon.