About the Author
Gary M. Koeppel
Gary M. Koeppel grew up in a small Oregon town in the Willamette Valley and, as a boy, spent his summers visiting his great aunt and uncle, a Coast Guard Captain and Keeper of the Heceta Head lighthouse on the Oregon Coast. At night his aunt would peel apples in her rocking chair before the fireplace as she told spellbinding stories about their adventures while tending lighthouses on the Pacific Ocean along the Northwest coast. It is from her he credits his imagination.
Koeppel’s parents, whose grandparents emigrated from Switzerland, endured and survived the Great Depression. At age 14 Koeppel’s father, Carl, the eldest of a large family, was asked by his father to leave home because he could not feed him. He moved to Chicago where he lived in the YMCA and, for money, he sang and tap-danced on bar tops in beer halls during lunch hours for pennies in tips. At 16 he joined thousands of hobos who worked for food as he traveled the rails across America until he arrived in Oregon, his ‘God’s country’.
Koeppel’s mother, Barbara, had a scholarship to become a teacher but, when her father abandoned her mother and six brothers and sisters, she sacrificed her career to work as a grocery store clerk and to care for her younger siblings. Her brother was a dental technician who trained Carl whom she later married and became his dental assistant and a later a porcelain ceramicist.
While studying pre-dentistry in college, Koeppel needed a required liberal arts course and signed up for a creative writing class taught by Bernard Malamud, a renown Jewish American author, whose influence on him was soon realized.
Koeppel was accepted into the dental school but dentistry did not suit him, so he quickly left and returned to undergraduate school for a degree in English literature. With a letter of recommendation from his writing mentor, Malamud, he received a graduate fellowship to the prestigious Writer’s Workshop in Iowa City where Koeppel was deeply influenced by existentialism and read everything written by and about Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, Herman Hesse and Franz Kafka. In 1962 he wrote his first novel, Harehound.
But instead of publishing the book and becoming a writer, Koeppel was fearful that he had nothing to write about, so for the next seven years he taught writing and European literature as an English professor at universities in Iowa, Puerto Rico and Oregon. At Portland State University he developed a new method of teaching writing, which he called ‘Experiential Composition’ that involved assigning experiences to students they had to undertake and then write about them in the first person to him as the audience.
In 1967 at Portland State University Koeppel also produced the first university-accredited program on the subject, LSD and the Psychedelic Movement featuring guest appearances by Timothy Leary, Alan Watts, Allen Ginsburg, Ken Kesey, The Merry Pranksters, and Doctor Samuel Irwin, a psycho-pharmacologist from the University of Oregon Medical School. Koeppel served as the university president’s counselor to the freshman class on drug use and abuse.
In 1968 Gestalt psychiatrist Fritz Perles of Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, learned of Koeppel’s innovative teaching methods and invited him to teach writing to Esalen seminarians. However, due to the paranoia and psychosis caused by the drug culture of the 1960’s, Koeppel left Esalen and moved to Malibu where—at first as a hobby, then professionally—he developed a new kind of sand candle, became an American craftsman and wrote a book for Chilton, Sculptured Sandcast Candles.
As “K the Kandler” he carved candles in malls throughout California, then at Universal Studios and Disneyland. As his candles became successful, he returned to Big Sur and bought the Coast Gallery in 1971, but two years later the gallery was inundated by a 100-year storm that was exacerbated by a 100-year storm. To recover he designed and rebuilt the gallery by recycling large, municipal redwood water tanks into an in-the-round complex that has become a historic architectural landmark on the Big Sur Coast. In 1978, to stop an attempt to federalize Big Sur as a National Park, he founded and published the Big Sur Gazette newspaper. As in David and Goliath, the Big Sur citizenry won the battle for Big Sur, and he learned the ancient lesson that the pen is more powerful than the sword.
From 1975 through 1981 Koeppel founded the Big Sur Volunteer Fire Brigade, the Big Sur Chamber of Commerce, the Coordinating Committee for Big Sur Area Planning and the Citizens Advisory Committee to the Local Coastal Plan.
During the next 30 years Koeppel and his wife, Emma, opened art galleries in Maui, Pebble Beach and Carmel while producing 30 Global Art Expos in Japan, Israel, Germany, Hawaii, New York and California. He became Henry Miller’s art dealer during the last 10 years of his life and continues to be his posthumous art publisher and licensing agent. He has written a book and several essays about the paintings of Henry Miller.
By 2012 Koeppel had divested himself of his art galleries and art expos, and returned to writing— exactly 50 years after writing his first novel, Harehound. He had just finished rewriting an incomplete manuscript written by Lillian Bos Ross titled The Road, which is the third book of the recently published Big Sur Trilogy.
His latest book is about Edgar Haber, an American entrepreneur who created a golfing oasis and a five-star hotel on a dairy farm, titled The Legend of Quail Lodge.
His next book is an investigative expose about the mortgage derivatives fiasco created by bankers-turned-brokers, an illegal and monstrous money racket that has destroyed multitudes American dreams and home ownership, bankrupted America’s mortgage market and burdened homeowners with untold financial miseries for decades to come. The working title of this investigative bombshell is How to Beat the Bank and Keep your Home.