Cliff Barney - Mind, Body, Health, and Politics

This morning (9 am Pacific) I continue the Psychedelic Elders series with the latest confessor, my dear friend Cliff Barney (92 years old).

Cliff is a former journalist who has written for major U. S. dailies, including the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Hearst-run San Francisco Examiner, and covered the semiconductor and computer revolutions in Silicon Valley as a bureau manager for McGraw-Hill’s Electronics magazine. He studied and taught at the San Francisco Gestalt Institute, and holds an M.S. in counseling from California State College, Hayward.

He was born in New Bedford in 1929 and grew up in Rhode Island, the only child of a father who was the first of his family to leave the farm in 250 years in Swansea, Mass., and a mother whose family emigrated from Scotland in the late 19th century. Though neither of his parents got past the fifth grade in school, they nonetheless managed to send him to Dartmouth College, from which he graduated with an A.B. in 1951.

He has written about the press, aging, and Latin American politics in a blog, Cliff’s Notes, and about contemporary Mayan culture at carolinamccall.com, the website he runs with his artist wife.