He Published Himself

Lorenzo Milam 1933-2020

Forty years ago, The Sun magazine was not the polished publication it is today.  It was printed on what I believe is called stock, rather than the slick paper the magazine currently uses.  It didn’t have a vast staff—often the Editor was it—and didn’t pay its writers much, if at all.  Each issue didn’t begin with a mammoth interview on an important subject (my favorite feature of the current publication).  Its main feature was sometimes an interview with or an article about the spiritual teacher Ram Dass, letters from a woman named Peg Staley who was dying of cancer (“Those articles in the Sun by Peg Staley are tearing me up,” my sister told me.  Thirty years later she died of cancer herself), or an excerpt from a book with the engaging title The Cripple Liberation Front Marching Band Blues, the memoir of a man who was stricken with polio in his early twenties, and whose sister died of the illness.  (I would have said The Sun featured at least ten excerpts from that book.  It seemed to be in the magazine every time you turned around.  I was astonished to look in the archives and see it had only appeared four times.)

The Sun is a better magazine today.  Even I would say it’s better, and more important.  But there was something about the rough-hewn funky magazine from those days that seemed more authentic, even as it floundered around a bit.  I’m not saying it should have stayed like that.  But I had an affection for it that I’ve never had for another publication.

At its heart was the guy who wrote The Cripple Liberation Front, Lorenzo Milam, who was always identified as “the Johnny Appleseed of listener-sponsored radio.”  The New York Times also focused on his radio work in a recent obituary that startled me by its length.  Milam first and foremost loved radio and wanted it to be commercial free, a decision which The Sun eventually made too.  Apparently—in place of ads—he sometimes allowed up to ten minutes of silence.

I don’t have a particular interest in community radio, but always liked Milam as a writer.  He, like the magazine, was rough around the edges, but he had a wild verbal gift and said whatever he wanted, especially about being crippled (the word he insisted on).  The magazine reported in those days with some outrage that The Cripple Liberation Front had been turned down by fifteen publishers, but that didn’t seem surprising to me, or all that many rejections, to be honest.[1]  Milam’s brutal honesty could be hard to take.

A man of some means (I was never sure how much in the way of means, or where they came from) Milam published the book himself.  That initiated—I think—Mho and Mho Works, the publishing house he founded and that published, as far as I know, very little other than the works of Lorenzo Milam (though it did produce two anthologies of writing from The Sun).

Milam later began two magazines, which in my mind merged into one, The Fessenden Review, and RALPH (the Review of Arts, Letters, Philosophy and the Humanities).  These publications solicited work from writers, featured reviews and articles on a variety of subjects, had a number of articles under various bylines, but I suspected they were all   written—whether they were signed Carlos Amantea or Laura Lark—by the man himself.  They all had that wild streak, were entirely off the cuff, chatting away about whatever he was reading or doing.  It was in his own magazines, I thought, that Milam really came into his own.  It was as if he had created the first website.

He later published two more books: Cripzen: A Manual for Survival and The Blob That Ate Oaxaca, a series of travel tales.  I read both, though I honestly don’t have much memory of them now.  In writing about being disabled, he was utterly honest and unapologetic, talked about how terrible it could be and how to grit your teeth and get through it.  His quotations from an interview, quoted by the Times, are typical.

“‘All disabled people know fear,’” Mr. Milam told New Mobility, a magazine for wheelchair users, in 2000. ‘We know that we’re very vulnerable. We know we’re going to get more and more disabled and we’re going to get more and more dependent and we’re probably going to get more and more scared.’

“‘How do we handle being an old, scared geezer?’”

He seems to have decided at some point that Mexico—with its informal atmosphere and a variety of young men to help him—was the best place for an old scared geezer.  I felt the same way at a certain period of my life, sometimes thought I might retire there, especially to Oaxaca, which became the favorite city for both me and my wife.  (We didn’t notice that a blob had eaten it.)  But other things got in our way—care for elderly parents, then for a disabled brother—and we’ve wound up staying in this country.  We were also disturbed by the violent crime in Mexico, though Milam apparently was not.  He moved there permanently after a series of strokes in 2017, and died in the little village of Puerto Escondito[2] in July.

I have to say that the man was an inspiration to me.  He didn’t like what radio had become so he founded his own stations, couldn’t find a publisher for his book so he published it himself, wanted to write whatever he felt like so he founded a magazine to publish his own work.  He loved Mexico so he mostly lived there, finally moved there.  And if you’d told that man in those dark days of 1952 when he was stricken with polio and his sister died of it that he would live another 68 years and do all he did as a radio guru and writer and publisher and finally die in a beautiful spot beside the Pacific Ocean, I think he would have said, I’ll take it.

[1] He should have sent it to fifteen more, then fifteen more, though it was rather a different process in those days; you typically only had one copy of a manuscript, and the ethic was that you sent it to one place at a time.  They could ponder it for months.

[2] At least it was a little village when I went there, on one of my first trips to Mexico, in the early nineties.  We were traveling all over Mexico and stopped there for a weekend of R&R.  The moment when I stepped out of the plane and onto the tarmac I remember as the hottest I’ve ever been in my life.  It was so hot that all we could do at the hotel was sit by the pool under and umbrella or go swimming in the pool, or the ocean.  The first time I road a wave in the ocean it slammed me into the sand on my shoulder and scraped me all up, so I confined myself to the pool after that.  But I sat under that umbrella reading Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose.  It was the most memorable two days of the trip.