About Me — Josh Hammond
In the 2009 movie, Crazy Heart, Jeff Bridges says, “I used to be somebody and now I am somebody else.” That pretty much sums it up for me in one sentence.
Photo of author, Josh Hammond, on one of the original old streets in Philadelphia, my boulevard of unbroken dreams, where I lived some years ago and still do in my mind.
As always, the devil is in the details. I was born in Cochabamba, high up in the Andes Mountains of Bolivia donde el candor pasa. But I grew up in the small village of Concepción, one of seven villages established in the remote Eastern lowlands of Bolivia by Jesuit missionaries in the 16th Century. My father chose this place because it was as far away from the real world as he could get on the disquieting eve of WW2. His “calling,” the inaudible kind that fundamentalists get all the time, was to contact, clothe, and convert a “savage” native Indian tribe associated with the those featured in the dramatic movie Mission, starring Robert Di Nero and Jeremey Irons. I grew up in the Amazon and came of age in America.
By no means was my growing up routine. At the age of six my father used me as bait in his gambit to contact the Ayoré Indians, a tribe related to the one in the movie. I was dressed down to my tighty-whities to look naked like they were.
I survived this encounter or more accurately suppressed the experience. I could not understand the willingness of a father to sacrifice his son, until I recalled the Bible story of God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. So that’s where he got the idea! There would be an encore several years later. The circumstances were less life-threatening that time around, but still bewildering.
One day my life imploded: My older brother was gone, missing, sent off to look for America for his education at the age of twelve. No formal goodbyes. No explanations. Just cursory answers to a brother’s befuddlements. A year later, unsuspectedly, I was shipped off, too. An oversized suit had been ordered for the occasion. I asked something, but my father said, “You’ll grow into it.” He determined where I would go. The rest would be up to me.
I was put on a PanAm DC-3, with a tag bearing my name and destination — Philadelphia, USA, via Santa Cruz and La Paz, Bolivia; Lima, Peru; and Miami. I made the trip alone, with an occasional two-finger salute from the captain. He told me when we were flying over the Equator. I looked out my window but couldn’t see it. I did get a Neptune certificate.
My father chose mission over family.
In effect, I became an orphan, hobbling from church family to Christian boarding school, to college courtesy a National Defense Education loan at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In a cover photo of the St. Petersburg Times, a map showed the arc and reach of where the Russian missiles would do great damage cutting right through my dorm at the University of South Florida, a new university in Tampa at the time.
Upon graduation, I packed my bags and stuff into my 1957 Plymouth Fury with yellow rocket fins, pocketed my last $100, brought my Shell Oil credit card that could be used for more than gas, and moved to Washington, DC, to look for America and change the world. I’d be a different kind of missionary.
I’ve been lucky to be the right guy in the right place at the right time. I quickly understood that only the lead dog gets a change of scenery. I learned the art of starting with the end in mind. I learned that process is a product, so how I did things was as important as what I did.
In Washington, DC, I was Director of Communications for the White House Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention, the center of President Nixon’s War on Drugs. And I was senior Legislative Assistant for US Senator Harrison A. Williams, Jr. and I staffed the Senator’s role on the Senate Committee on Health, Education and Welfare. Other distinguished members of the committee included Senator Robert Kennedy and Senator Claiborne Pell, of the Pell Grant fame.
In California, I created the National Public Advertising Center based in San Francisco, where I created the “Say No” to drugs strategy popularized by Nancy Reagan, although she got it mostly wrong. I created and produced the first public advertising campaign on Wellness for Governor Jerry Brown, known as the “Old Fashioned Medicine Show” with a community-based program called, “Friends Can Be Good Medicine.” It was done in conjunction with the Annenberg School of Communications at USC.
In New York, I was the founding president of the American Quality Foundation, the nation’s first think-thank on strategic quality management, chaired by Robert Stempel, the CEO of General Motors. AQF was best known for its comprehensive study, with the accounting and management consulting firm of Ernst & Young, that identified comparative best business practices for four industries in Japan, Germany, United States and Canada. My book, The Stuff Americans Are Made Of (Macmillan, 1996), was the basis for a national Disney University Professional Development Program.
While much of my life unfolded before the broad adoption of the internet, and before the popularity of social media, I’m surprised that much of the record is there in some form or another. My life was interrupted by two blood cancers that gave me a 30 percent chance to live five more years. That was 15 years ago, thanks to good doctors and my dearest wife, the “Chief Medical Officer” in the family. I’m one of the lucky ones.
My first internet venture was WhiskyMoods, an online coffee-table-like magazine, launched in 2013 with Ralph Steadman, the defining illustrator for Hunter Thompson’s Gonzo Journalism, and George Dambier, a celebrated French fashion photographer in the mid-20th Century. I write about both artists’ work on Medium. Steadman here. Dambier here.
I took my work seriously, never myself. For fun, I was the general manager of the Oakland City Ballet, doing a better version of Aaron Copeland’s “Billy the Kid” than the ABT in New York. I was co-producer of a major drug abuse treatment documentary with a little help from The Beatles. I got a screen credit for minding the store at Pacificon Productions, a film production company in San Francisco, while my partners made a feature movie, Street Music. For a Sierra Club fundraiser, I walked 100 kilometers (60 miles) in one day, 18 hours, from the Lincoln Memorial to Harper’s Fairy, West Virginia, along the C&O canal. For my last Sunday School lesson, I produced a posthumous trial for Judas — I thought he was framed. There was a redemptive quality about the experience, something a shrink called “salvation on my terms.”
Biographically in chronological order,
If I were a book, I’d be Robinson Crusoe If I were an actor, I’d be Jack Nicholson in The Passenger If I were a song, I’d be The Boxer If I were a poem, I’d be Lord Alfred Tennyson’s Ulysses If I were a city, I’d be Paris
But I am who I am, with a satisfied mind.
Thanks for checking in — I feel at home here, with one big extended family of pilgrims on the road.
