I doubt it will be news to anyone reading this blog at this point, but my former employer Bill Bradford passed away two and a half weeks ago after battling cancer for several months. It still doesn’t seem entirely real to me. When I moved back to Portland in April, I planned to approach Bill with the prospect of me driving up to Port Townsend once a month to spend three or four days, to help out with the final stages of Liberty production. My freelance schedule allows for much more mobility than a consistent day job would, and I miss several things about the Liberty experience — Bill & Kathy, the creaky office, the town, the entire crazy production schedule (I can’t think of anyone other than Bill who could’ve convinced me to work, say, 18 hours on a Saturday).

I never got around to contacting Bill with this idea, and I really didn’t have an urge to hurry; although I knew Bill was sick, I was certain he’d fight it off and stick around for another few decades. I assumed I’d be seeing him fairly often in the coming years, if not right away. An intern saddled Bill with the nickname “Graybeard” (although never to Bill’s face), and it’s the name that keeps coming to mind as I read remembrances and obituaries written by others who knew Bill. “Graybeard” is sometimes used to mean something as simple as “old codger” — but it also has kind of an iconic ring to it. Oddly fitting, perhaps, for such an iconoclast?

I left Liberty in May, 1999, after only eight months as an assistant editor. I left on good terms with Bill, but this was not the majority experience among Liberty staffers at the time; we were all there during Liberty’s switch from bimonthly to monthly publication, and the stress of the tentative new production schedule only exacerbated existing conflicts between personalities and ways of working. This was the kind of environment in which talk of a hostile takeover of one of the magazine’s sister projects was meant only partly in jest. I think that within a year of Liberty’s switch to monthly publication, everyone on the staff had left, save Bill’s wife Kathy — even those who had been there for years.

When I told Bill I’d be leaving to take a higher-paying job, no hard feelings, I wondered if my abrupt departure after such a short stay would end up as a burnt bridge. But Bill took me out to dinner and told me he’d be putting me on the masthead as a contributing editor. A couple of years later, when I almost jumped ship from my new job to pursue yet another offer, Bill also proved to be a glowing work and character reference. I wish I had repaid his faith in me with a lot more writing for Liberty than I’ve contributed over the past few years — but I’m far from prolific, as anyone who’s checked this blog in recent weeks might guess. At the very least, I’m glad I finished my redesign of Liberty’s web site well before Bill passed away. It was sorely needed, so maybe it helped pay Bill back in a small way; although I found it hard to live on Liberty’s shoestring salary, I still feel like I’m in Bill’s debt. Whatever drawbacks my time at Liberty may have had, they were few, and, in retrospect, pretty insignificant.

I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this later. In the meantime, be sure to read the memorials written by people who knew Bill far better and longer than I. I particularly enjoyed Tim Virkkala’s (he also wrote a preface to his memorial), Jesse Walker’s, and Brian Doherty’s. I chuckled at Claire Wolfe’s; I was the guy who answered the door the time she stopped by Liberty’s offices. If you want to read them all, Tom Knapp has been collecting a complete list of links.