User:Melvynstiriss

Melvyn Stiriss, a former UPI wire service reporter/editor, is an author, publisher, oral historian, lecturer, video and audiobook producer, author of Voluntary Peasants, memoirs of The Farm commune in Summertown, Tennessee. Stiriss writes from a remarkably broad range of work experience as a reporter, editor, announcer; Madison Avenue publicist, community builder, communard, farmer, carpenter, ditch digger, road builder, mason, mechanic, miller, baker, vegan chef, oil rig roustabout, detective, movie carpenter, set dresser, prop maker and extra in a dozen movies, also as a theater stage hand, rock-and-roll roadie, and a humanitarian aid worker who built schools, clinics and houses in remote Mayan villages and a clinic for Mother Teresa in Guatemala.

Melvyn, a “Space Age Baby,” was born the same day the first V2 Rocket was launched, inaugurating the Space Age, October 3, 1942. Melvyn grew up in a blue-collar, Russian-Jewish family in Edgewater, New Jersey, in view of New York City and the Hudson River, his playgrounds. The author attended the University of Richmond in a segregated South, was an announcer on the air when John F. Kennedy was assassinated; worked as a newspaper and UPI wire service reporter in NY and Chicago; a stint as a Madison Avenue “Mad Man,” ran into the 60s, marijuana, LSD and Zen, went to Woodstock and followed the powerful energy of the time to the great, San Francisco spiritual smorgasbord of 1969. Here, Melvyn found a “psychedelic Zen guru,” Stephen Gaskin, went down the rabbit hole in search of enlightenment and co-founded the biggest American commune, The Farm in Summertown, Tn.

Melvyn now lives in rural upstate New York, enjoying a new career as author, publisher, speaker, and movie maker. Influenced by Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac, John Steinbeck, Charles Dickens and Maxine Hong Kingston. Melvyn is a visionary, twenty-first century, renaissance man, generalist, storyteller.