Buffalo Books: Memoir takes reader back to 1967

By P.A. Kane

J. Tim Raymond is a Western New York painter, writer, actor, traveler — a fascinating guy with a fascinating story. Born in the midwest into military family, his young life was marked by movement from Navy bases and ports all over the country.

By his teens, with his aviator dad attached to NATO in Brussels, Raymond was afforded the opportunity to hitchhike all over Europe. By 1967, at the age of 21, he was back in the states with his prized aluminum canteen that featured a porcelain top, ready for more adventure. He writes about that adventure in his page-turning memoir, Slack Action — My Year of Marginal Mishaps, 1967, which is available at local independent bookstores. We talked to him about his memoir and some of his other pursuits.

PAK — I really like the title of your book, Slack Action, which is set in 1967. Although slack action is a railroading term, it resonated with me because, during my reluctant transition to adult life, along with friends, I found plenty of action and adventure while slacking off. With the endless attachment to screens and the internet, is this sort of adventure closed to young people today? If so, where might be their places of slack action be?

TR — As siloed and compartmentalized as this generation appears to be, there is still in their various enthusiasms, the opportunity to road trip, even just as an exercise, to get away from the privileged privations of the internet. Until recently, the national parks for one. I know my youngest grew up on simulated excursions like Minecraft, but I also have met kids at The Pink (aka—The Pink Flamingo, The Old Pink) planning late at night train hopping to Pittsburgh and Cleveland and Toronto.

PAK — Your dad makes a brief appearance in the story called The Commune. You describe him in somewhat severe terms—six feet four inches, in a drip-dry suit and tie, with arms folded across his chest. Where did you grow up, and what was your family life as buttoned up as your father appeared to be?

TR — We were a navy family hosted all over the country — Navy bases and Navy ports and parts of the free world, in England and Belgium, with NATO — anywhere there was a base or an airfield. We lived the ’50s life of Cold War families in the military bound by the professional limits of the officer corps.

We’re a tight family unit at home — public school, Episcopal Church, Boy Scouts. It was matriarchal and hierarchical, and our structure was chores and much volunteer work in the community. Mom and Dad, when he was home and not deployed somewhere, three kids and maybe a dog. Mom volunteered at the American Red Cross for over 50 years, but dad was like a ghost who walks. He would take over when he got home. We’d have this kind of reconstituted family, and then he would be deployed for a couple of months on the distant early warning system. He flew the radar pickets, and then he’d be back, and he’d start that all over again, try to catch up on the kids, get back being a dad, but he was mostly distant.

So that was where he got the name The Ghost Who Walks, which is from the comic strip the Phantom.

PAK—In the book, you tell a rather harrowing story of hitchhiking from Santa Barbara to Fort Worth. Hitchhiking — or thumbing — involves standing on the side of the road with your thumb out, hoping someone going by would pick you up and give you a ride — a free Uber. I did some hitching through the ’70s and early ’80s, but this once-viable mode of transportation for young people is now virtually non-existent. Was hitching a big part of how you got around back in the day?

TR — In 1964 Dad was stationed in London, so the whole family was moved there. And the world of solo travel opened up to me with trains and buses and biking all over Britain. And with time, I gained experience. On summer break I traveled across France and to Paris and then down to the south. I hitched from Cannes to Marseille to Barcelona and all through Spain and then back up to Paris. And then I took a train from Paris to Munich to start school in 1965 with the Armed Forces junior college. So, by 1967 I figured I could hitch pretty well in the States.

PAK — In the pages of Kerouac, riding the freight trains was romanticized. Your trip from Fort Worth to Kansas City on a milk train was anything but romantic. You found plenty of misery from getting dragged by a flatbed car, being struck with a pipe by a man who thought you burned down his shed, and battling mosquitoes. Before you hit the road, did you have these romanticized visions of life on the road?

TR — I was part of a farm family that left and rarely returned, but my Missouri, Midwestern reserve, stoic, close to the vest, mentality stayed with me. And I’m not particularly a romantic person. I’m not given to much sentiment, though the memoir may belie that — I press on generally sober and reflective. I don’t give over anything to what I have read that romanticizes anything, and I think part of that was becoming a Vietnam veteran and seeing that side of life, which I’m writing about now these days.

PAK — As I was reading about how you accepted being best man in an inebriated state for two friends’ weddings on the same day, I was far enough into the book to think — Oh no, this is not going to end well. It didn’t turn out to be the debacle I expected. However, there was a stark difference between the two weddings. One was traditional, and the other was more of a hippie affair. During this period, you seemed to be caught between a conventional and a counterculture lifestyle, with both your family and friends. Were you conflicted about where you belonged? How did you manage it? 

TR — I was conflicted. I was always conflicted because I had friends in all these different ranks of adolescents. I had people in the Honor Society and I was on different sport teams — so I knew jocks, and I knew guys whose dads ran gas stations.

I also had years of vacillating between making artwork and writing stories. That took shape once I was divorced and returned from years of social work, serving as a facilitator to special needs populations.  

My earlier years, straddling identities of adolescent post war ethos — choosing to be either a square or a beatnik, I never really fit those rubrics exactly. On the other hand, I attended prep school from 1960-61, with another malcontent — Sylvester Stallone.

I was also married to a woman who rode horses, rode horses to hounds in the Maryland Outback and was exposed to old money prep society.

Growing up in the world of career naval officer, as my father was an aviator until 1964, taught me to stay focused moving through school and friends and relationships. My sense of the world developed by frequently being somewhere else, while my friends and family stayed fixed. I enjoyed being solitary and reading and writing and drawing, I was not a sports fan or a practicing athlete, but I did go out for track and football and lacrosse, learning, thus how to get along with the jocks. And that helped a lot in the army where I was a squad leader for a while. I had to work with some South Philly guys, black guys and Italian guys, a real mix. Even when I got to San Francisco, in 1967, I didn’t feel like I was going to sit on the curb and beg for money. Nor was I going to put anybody down either. I just moved through it.

PAK — After the weddings, you returned to your family in Brussels, where your dad was a NATO officer. He suggested that, rather than being drafted into the army, you enlist, which would shorten your time and provide benefits such as lifetime healthcare and tuition assistance. What did you do in the army, and where were you stationed?

TR — Well, following his very trenchant advice, I did enlist, not knowing what my MOS (military occupational specialty) would be. After basic training at Fort Dix, I got orders for Fort Bliss in El Paso Texas. I was posted to language school as an interpreter, translator — a signal intelligence specialist in the army attached, as it were, to the NSA, the CIA, etc.

I was stationed in Vietnam after two years training in Texas. The first year was language school, and the second year was security school. Security school was only two months, but my security clearance didn’t come for eight months. So I was permanent party at an Army Detachment at an Air Force base in San Angelo, Texas, as a non-commissioned officer.

After eight months, my security clearance came, and I went off to Vietnam. I was posted to Phu Bai, which was way up on the coast, above Da Nang and just short of the demilitarized zone. I was only there seven months because I got over there so late. My enlistment was up before the year was out and I was discharged in 1970. But for about seven months, I did interpreter translating on message traffic.

PAK — In addition to writing about your year of mayhem in 1967, you’ve also written about the Western New York art scene, you’re an actor and an exhibiting member of the Buffalo Society of Artists. You seem to have your hand in many different things. Is there one thing you like doing better than the other, or is it the mix of things that you like?

TR — I’ve lived in Western New York for over 30 years, first having moved up from Austin, Texas, where I taught at University of Texas, Austin to Buffalo. I married, had a baby, and was teaching in the SUNY system. Then I was a material activity specialist, until I retired in 2010.

I’ve come to acting and socially critical productions in Buffalo’s alternative theater, and I got back into my art studio work once I was divorced from my third wife.

To the present day I keep a studio, and I also have an office where I write. I look for opportunities to act and just try to keep all those things in balance, along with my wife’s interests. We share a car, so we have to really plan things out strategically so that each of us is able to get our jollies in whatever way we can. We’re both over 70, so you know, we’re freer about the time that we spend outside of each other, as well as our commitment to each other. That doesn’t mean we’re, as far as I know, cheating on each other. I mean, there’s not much left after you’re 70 to cheat about.

PAK—How would you describe yourself as a visual artist? Where can readers view your art, and do you have any upcoming shows?

TR— Well, I don’t have any upcoming shows. I do show work on Instagram and Facebook. I have some following there.

My art is pretty much a private investigation of just the process of painting that over 40 years or so, I’ve managed to sort out what I really want to see in front of me. I’ll say I’m a pretty literate visual artist. From many years teaching at university level I’m now a bit pedantic and tiresome to listen to really. Yet, much of my work has taken shape around issues of the day and filtered through semi-abstract landscapes and intuition-inspired compositions based on the working process of painting.

So I’m not currently exhibiting, but I am looking for an opportunity that doesn’t require a lot of waiting until I can get on the list. All the galleries now have lists and lots of people are ahead of me.

In the ’80s, when I was in New York, I was able to latch onto a blue-chip gallery on 57th Street, and for about three years, I did pretty well that way. Those were the years where corporations were taking risks on painters and saying — “Yeah, let’s get this guy and see what he’s like in two, three, five years. You know, we’ll just put him in storage and see what happens.”

You can view my art at TimRaymondStudio.com