Bill would joke that he was a lesbian who likes women and Geri was gay and liked men. Everyone would laugh but not quite understand. It was one of those Bill things. With his long hair and beard you would not mistake him as a corporate type but before he died in 2013 he was the web master for Lawyers Coop, Thomson Reuters, and then West Publishing. The company produced all those law books you see lining lawyers’ shelves in old tv shows. Today it’s LexisNexis.
Bill owned Asymmetrical Press and they printed the Hi-Techs first 45 cover for Archive Records. He was at Scorgie’s listening to Personal Effects the night his wife, Geri, gave birth to their first son, Sam. We knew him for a long time. Peggi and I used to do a yearly slideshow for Hampshire Instruments when they were marketing an X-ray lithography process for making computer chips. We took our Canvas files to Bill when he and Geri were running Publisher’s Workshop in an upstairs office at Writers & Books. This was before PowerPoint and Canvas was the only program that would allow you to output files to 35 mm slides. The files took so long to image that we slept there while they ran. Bill was always way ahead of the curve.
Bill was a Whole Earth kind of early adaptor. A first with personal computers and excited by the egalitarian promise of the web. He helped us learn the early versions of Dreamweaver. We spent a good part of every day on the phone with him. And when a problem couldn’t be solved Bill plugged away, did the research and came back with a solution. When West wanted to transfer Bill to the midwest he quit and started Virgin Wood Type with Geri.p
When we were doing some construction on our house Bill stopped by and picked up a piece of re-bar with concrete attached to it and he stuck in the ground out back. We left it there but the winters took a toll. The concrete crumbled and the re-bar was all that remained. This weekend Peggi and I rebuilt the sculpture using leftover concrete from a pool project mixed with the mortar we skim-coated our concrete block house with before painting it this summer. We used three concrete blocks as the forms and lined it with an old sheet of rubylith (Peggi’s idea). I cracked the blocks open in the morning and the sculpture emerged. We stuck it back in the ground where Bill originally put it.
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