Tuesday Voice: An introduction

Portrait painted by Jane B. Mudd

Glad to be here

By Bob Boldt

[Editor’s Note: We are delighted to welcome Contributing Editor Bob Boldt to our staff, and we thank him for introducing himself today and providing this week’s “Thor’s Day” column, two days from now. He has an entry in the sidebar.]

I was raised in a traditional Midwestern, nuclear family, strongly influenced by my mother’s love of books and my father’s iconoclastic creativity. Reaching majority during the Eisenhower years, I responded to their materialism and the booming post-war prosperity with a growing consciousness of its shallowness and a simultaneous sense of the inherent dissonance between appearance and reality.
    In the late fifties I pursued undergraduate studies and received a Bachelor’s degree in psychology at Wabash College [in Crawfordsville, Indiana]. In spite my love for the liberal arts educational tradition, early on I also arrived at the beginnings of a deep-seated, life-long aversion to academia. This led to studies at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, finally deciding on a career in filmmaking.
    For me, the advent of the social and political turbulence of the 60’s was a long-anticipated, watershed moment. As a news cameraman/journalist, I covered both the Chicago campaign of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention.



    Having lived through some of the most interesting events of contemporary history, having met many fascinating characters along the way, and after a long life of embracing some of the most exciting intellectual and aesthetic movements of the past half-century, I think I have become uniquely qualified to comment on our past, our present, and our future.
    I presently live in Jefferson City, Missouri, where I have pursued such diverse activities as community organizing, gardening, poetry, still photography, and video production. I am active in the Center for Buddhist Development, the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, the Reader’s Eye Film Series, Lincoln University, Jefferson City Writers, the Missouri River Regional Library, and The White Rose Collective.

Copyright © 2014 by Bob Boldt