Draft:Richard Raymond (publisher)

Richard "Dick" Raymond was a social and economic visionary who mentored and organized many projects from the early 1960s on. He was key figure in Northern California cultural developments, environmentalism, and publishing, examples being the Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly (Raymond published the former, and facilitated the latter). He was later an organizer of the POINT Foundation, formed to fund and co-organize varied regional projects related to environment, community, and various forms of innovation.

Early life and education

Born in Newark, Ohio in 1923, Raymond's 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 Raymond gained experience operating some start-up companies. 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). He convinced organizers to plan buildings that would remain on the site as part of the city's heritage.

In the early '60s, Raymond lived with his family 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 happened to meet the aspiring photographer and journalist Stewart Brand, and with his connections was able to offer Brand a photography job on the reservation.

As a creative individual, Raymond had myriad personal interests; he was particularly enthused about emerging possibilities in “alternative education.” Given this passion, 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 might be a valuable componnent in education, although the personal-computing device was as yet known to extremely few people. As the technology gradually became more available and familiar, it led into some of the later projects he sponsored, such as Template:The WELL (or Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link).

Looking back from later years, 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 prospect of developing alternative forms of education was a specific appeal. It was a direction that intrigued Stewart Brand, for one, and it was a key ingredient in a notion Brand had been toying with, something he thought of as a “whole earth 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 with Brand investing his own money, supplemented with some from Portola, a trial issue of the Whole Earth Catalog was produced in 1968. Portola Institute served as the WEC's publisher in early years. Successive issues enjoyed far-reaching success; by 1972 an edition had received a National Book Award.

Another of Dick Raymond's projects was the Briarpatch Network, conceived in 1973 and opening a Bay Area office the next year. The network functioned as a consulting and mutual-aid organization among start-ups and other businesses. Various professionals offered services, for free or at low cost, to small-scale entrepreneurs.

Following the Whole Earth Catalog's financial success, Raymond worked with Stewart Brand to found the POINT Foundation, purposed with providing grants for promising ventures. Among other projects, POINT gave birth to CoEvolution Quarterly in 1974, and in 1985 Template:The WELL, an early online discussion community.

After relocating to Portland, Oregon, Raymond became involved in solar-energy development, until federal-grant funding for that field dried up in the 1980s. Afterwards, he pursued projects related to unmanned flight and cold fusion.