William Rodarmor
Here are two things in my life I’m especially proud of: winning The New
Yorker cartoon caption contest in 2014 with my girlfriend Toby Golick,
and sailing solo from Tahiti to Hawaii in 1971 without her. And earning an
M.J. degree from the UC Berkeley journalism school, of course.
I was born in New York and attended the Lycée Français there and Collège
Beau Soleil in Switzerland, becoming bilingual at an early age. (I later
added German and Spanish, plus Russian and Italian.) I enrolled at
Dartmouth College in 1960, but dropped out to serve in the Army from
1961 to 1964. I returned to Dartmouth to earn my B.A. in 1966, then a
J.D. degree from Columbia Law School in 1969. After a long hiatus, I
earned my master’s from UC Berkeley in 1984.
I’ll admit that I haven’t been the most career-oriented guy around. When I
quit practicing law in San Francisco in 1970, I sailed to Tahiti. There, I
met a well-known French singlehanded sailor named Bernard Moitessier
and translated his round-the-world saga, The Long Way. It became the very
first of my forty-odd French book translations.
I spent the 1970s rafting rivers and climbing mountains, writing freelance
and working odd jobs: I set up trade show exhibits, was a National Park
Service ranger in Alaska in 1973-75, joined a mountaineering expedition
to Chile in 1974, and led a series of wilderness trips for Mountain Travel.
I have written about everything from computers to plastic surgery, but
especially law. And after years as a freelancer, I embraced the structured
environment of the J-School in 1982. I learned broadcast work from Bill
Drummond, and long form writing from Bernard Taper and David
Littlejohn. I also wrote my best-known piece of journalism there, an
investigative expose of sexual abuse by guru Muktananda, published in
the Winter 1983 edition of CoEvolution Quarterly. After graduation in
1984, I went to work at PC World magazine, then returned to campus as
the managing editor of California Monthly.
Less professionally, I also practiced long-form romance. Toby Golick was
my classmate and girlfriend in law school, but we drifted apart after I
moved to California after graduation. I married fiction writer Thaisa
Frank, and we had son, Casey (a Cal grad and blockchain expert), before
divorcing in 2002. But Toby and I had stayed in touch during all those
years. At one point, she was a widow and I was divorced, and we
rekindled our romance. I now commute to New York to visit her, see old
journalism friends, and continue translating French books.