Woke up Monday to some very sad news: my friend Robert (Richard*) Hansen died of a pulmonary embolism last weekend.
I don't really even know where to start with this.... Robert and I were very close for years - we got to be buddies when we worked together at a company called State Net back in the mid-nineties. We bonded over a shared love of history (he was a HUGE WWII nut), art, books and a commitment to progressive, pro-union politics. On the surface we really couldn't have appeared more different - I was a skinny punk rock car guy and he a was a big, bearded poetry fan; but we really hit it off. We hung out a lot, and got coffee together on our break at work nearly every day... we had a laugh when we realized that the folks running the LGBTQ-friendly coffee shop we usually went to had assumed we were a couple.
State Net's core business was legislative tracking, but they also published a magazine called California Journal. CJ offered in-depth nonpartisan policy analysis in a monthly magazine format, often with illustrations. I'd just left my full-time commercial art gig at Tower Records, so I submitted some samples, and got to do a few illustrations while I worked there. I was going for a real Kathe Kollwitz 'salt of the earth' feel on the drawings, and Robert loved them. He got me doing illustrations for a lefty newspaper he volunteered for called Because People Matter, and for another State Net publication (published via fax!) called State Net Capitols Report.
Robert was not a car guy, but he was intrigued when I bought the Crosley and started driving it to work. The idea of someone intentionally driving a tiny, somewhat ridiculous 50 year old car every day appealed to his sense of absurdity, like I was making a daily tilt at my own private windmill. I should mention that Robert was a BIG guy - probably 6'5, maybe 350 pounds, so for him, a Crosley must have seemed even smaller than it would to an average-sized person.
Like many of my pals back then, Robert was fascinated that I was preparing to drive the Crosley on a 700 mile trip to Morro Bay for the annual Crosley Meet. They knew I was working on the car constantly, knew that it had no top or side windows, and that it had a gas tank out of boat just sitting in the back of the car. Most of my buddies just thought the trip was crazy and a bad idea - Robert thought it was crazy and a good idea. You can see why we were such fast friends.
It was at my job at State Net where I first encountered the internet - I'd hardly ever even seen a computer before that. At State Net, I got my first email account, which I used to email other people at State Net, who were the only people whose email addresses I knew. At that point, half of my friends in Sacramento worked at State Net, so this was actually pretty cool.
After I made the trip to Morro Bay (and back) in one piece, I wrote an article about it for the Crosley Club newsletter. Since I now had access to email, I also sent the story to a few of my car buddies I thought would be interested - and to Robert.
He LOVED the story, and asked if he could make a website about it. At the time (2000), this seemed like absolute wizardry to me. I could send email and go on internet bulletin boards, and look at Ebay, but the idea of making a website from scratch was inconceivable. Robert said he could do it - and for free! He borrowed some of my photos from the trip, scanned them on the State Net photo scanner, and got to work.
So, The Crosley Report was born.
At the time there wasn't a whole lot of Crosley stuff on the net - The Crosley Automobile Club had a website (a really good one) and there were a few random things out there, but they were so limited that the CAC site actually had a page of links called "Other Crosley-Related Links You Will Love." I was in heaven when they added The Crosley Report to the "Other Links" page. I had hit the big time!
That was Robert Hansen in a nutshell - he'd get excited about someone's project, would offer to help however he thought he could, and take it get to a whole other level. Take that story with me, and multiply it by dozens, maybe hundreds, of other people, and that was Robert's whole life.
Robert and his then-wife Rachel owned a small bookstore called The Book Collector that served as a hub of the poetry community in Sacramento. The place was tiny, but they'd draw big crowds for book signings, poetry readings and they even did some art shows, the weirder the better. I did an art performance there called "Nothing is as Worthless as a Rock Star" where I set up outside the store and shined people's shoes after giving them a dollar billed stamped with the show's title. Robert loved it.
Robert's job at State Net was as a junior designer - he did the design jobs the senior designers didn't want, like laying out business cards for new employees, etc. That meant he was the point person for the new cards when they came in, and he noticed that the printer would add blank card stock to take up empty space in the boxes. This stock was often really nice colored or patterned paper and he started thinking about ways to use it instead of just throwing it away.
He hit on the idea of using the colored stock as a cover for tiny booklets - folding it in half and stapling regular paper inside to make half-a-business-card-sized books of poetry that he liked. He started making these in his spare time at work, and then would just leave them around town for people to find. He called them Poems-For-All.
At the time I remember him telling me that the production process was his equivalent of a zen garden: he started with a big stack of paper and a paper cutter, then meticulously folded each tiny page, creasing with a bone tool and finally assembling each book, one staple in the center.
Of course, as a designer, he couldn't just keep making books with blank covers, and he soon started designing individual covers for each new batch of books. And, before long, he was publishing new material - poets loved the concept and asked him to include their poems in his series.
I was doing a regular comic strip in college at around this time, a send up of Little Orphan Annie called Anton, and he asked if he could use some of my strips - he ran at least five of them as PFAs. And then he also set up a comprehensive Anton website, where he published each day's strip online.
When I eventually took over as editor of the West Coast Crosley Club newsletter, the Tin Block Times, I asked Robert if he could help with the design. He was enthusiastic to do the layout, and thought he could prevail on one of his friends in the printing business to do our covers in full color at the same cost we'd been paying for black and white. When that was approved, the first order of business was a new color logo - I handed him a copy of Rod and Custom and said "something like that."
I found a digital version of one of his issues here (sadly all those color interior photos printed black and white.)
The new-look TBT was well received, and Robert loved being involved. He even came to the Annual West Coast Meet in 2005 and had a ball. For a while he fixated on the idea of getting a Crosley wagon or truck as a promo vehicle for The Book Collector, and I think he might have actually ended up getting one if it hadn't been for his size.
Poems-For-All took on a life of its own, with people around the world sending submissions or asking for copies of books, and Robert himself really became the go-to guy for the whole Sacramento poetry scene (a surprisingly robust community at that time.) Liv met Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth once some years ago, and when he found out she was from Sacramento, asked if she knew Robert and Poems-For-All.
Our local public radio station made a nice video about the project, which captures Robert (then going by 'Richard') really well:
As lovable a guy as Robert was, he didn't always handle pressure well, and one day he just stopped going to State Net. He didn't quit, he didn't call in sick - he just never went back. From then on he just worked at the bookstore, did design projects and made Poems-For-All.
He kept designing the TBT for a few years, until some family health issues forced him to quit. He was sad to let go of the project, but he was traveling constantly to take care of his Mom who lived in the UK, and couldn't commit to anything other than that. He was out of the country for long periods and at that point I was working 80 hour weeks running a magazine and we started to lose touch.
About ten years ago he got up one day, told his wife he was leaving and moved to San Diego. No notice, no goodbyes to anyone else, just out. Most of us who knew him well were hurt, but also, in some ways, not surprised. At one point Robert was one of my closest friends, and I loved him dearly, but I knew that he sometimes did things in a way that didn't make sense to anyone but him. This was just what he had to do, and that's what he did.
We kept in touch a bit via Facebook, as one does, but he really had another life. The only thing that was unchanged was his devotion to Poems-For-All. I'm not sure now many different PFAs he actually published, but probably close to a thousand, which is an astonishing achievement.
When his wife Karen posted that he had died (of a pulmonary embolism), I was flooded with memories I haven't thought about in years: Robert winning a marshmallow peep-eating contest with 69 peeps (I ate 32); Robert boisterously singing along at local Star Trek-themed punk band No Kill I's shows; the two of us, dejected at a 2004 election night party, watching a drunk screaming with fury in the middle of the street; looking in awe at his complete run of Upton Sinclair's 1934 EPIC newspaper; the two of us sneaking out of work to hear artist Steven Kaltenbach give a lecture at Sac State... so many memories.
It's always hard to know when something is about to change your life, but meeting Robert Hansen changed mine in ways I could never imagine.
Thank you, buddy.
*During his time in Sacramento, when I knew him best, Hansen went by "Richard," - he preferred going by "Robert" later in life, so I have used that name here.
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