Peter Benjaminson:
CLASS OF 1963
Menlo-Atherton High SchoolClass of 1963
Atherton, CA
Princeton University - Woodrow Wilson SchoolClass of 1977
Princeton, NJ
Columbia University - JournalismClass of 1968
New york, NY
University of CaliforniaClass of 1967
Berkeley, CA
Peter's Story
Unbelievable! Unless my math is wrong, next year it will be 50 years since we graduated from Menlo-Atherton and nearly that from various other places. Who's running this show? Obviously not me, otherwise we wouldn't be so "mature."
Since I left M-A I've lived in Berkeley, Manhattan, Washington, D.C., Detroit, Atlanta, Miami and Binghamton, NY, and have been back in Manhattan since '88. I got married the first time in Detroit in '73. Thank God there were no kids, since we got divorced the same year. I got married again in '79 and remain married to the same woman. We have a daughter, a U.S. Foreign Service Officer, who recently gave birth to our first grandchild, Leo Alexander Naarden. Speaking of marriages, in May 2012 my wife Susan Harrigan and I attended John Brigham's third marriage ceremony, to his third wife, in Woodstock, NY. I'm pleased to report that the town has almost completely cleaned up the mess from the famous concert held there, and that John and his new bride are looking young and energetic. (John was also in our M-A class.)
Inspired by working on Bear Tracks with Roger Allen, Coreen Davis and others, I worked as a reporter for the Daily Californian at Berkeley, then for the (New York City) Chief-Leader, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Detroit Free Press. I also worked as a spokesman at different times for the New York City Department of Investigation and the New York City Correction Officers Benevolent Association. I also taught journalism courses for a total of 10 years at Binghamton, NYU and Columbia universities.
Semi-inspired by a lovely summer I spent as a "shelving associate" at the M-A library, I started trying to write books soon after taking my first newspaper job, and ended up writing six books that already have been published and another one that's coming out Nov. 1, 2012.
Since i...Expand for more
t's incredibly difficult to get publicity as an author, my desire for fame requires me to list those books here: "Investigative Reporting," a how-to written with Dave Anderson; "The Story of Motown," the first book ever published in the U.S. about the Motown Record Company (located, of course, in Detroit); "Death in the Afternoon," about the death of big-city afternoon newspapers in this country; "Publish Without Perishing," a guide to the publishing industry; "Secret Police: Inside the NYC Department of Investigation" and "The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard." "The Lost Supreme," which was favorably blurbed on the back cover of its paperback version by Greil Marcus, a truly famous writer who also graduated in our glass, did so well that I wrote a bio of another Motown star that will be released this fall, "Mary Wells: The Tumultuous Life of Motown's First Superstar."
For the several other authors in our class who might want to know, these books were published, in order, by Indiana U. Press and Iowa State U. Press; Grove Press, (run by the famous Barney Rosset); Andrews-McMeel; the National Education Association and National Writers Union; Barricade Books (run by the famous Lyle Stuart); and Chicago Review Press/Lawrence Hill Books. The Mary Wells book is a milestone because it's the first time I've ever been able to convince a publisher (Chicago Review Press) to publish two of my books.) I'm now working on a book about Farrah Fawcett-Majors, later known as Farrah Fawcett. Yes, that Farrah Fawcett.
Meanwhile, a couple of years ago my wife and I moved to Harlem, Manhattan's historically black neighborhood, and are having a great time in what to my amazement has become a quiet, friendly, relatively pollution free and integrated community, while remaining almost as lively as ever. More as this story develops.
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