Self Interview

Self-Interview with Mick Winter 2007 - Updated 2008 What do you want out of life? The same as all beauty contest winners want. World peace. Spiritual enlightenment. The end of human suffering. Saving the planet. A ten-hour work week. Ha-ha. But seriously... That was serious. Where'd you come from? I grew up down the San Francisco Peninsula in what was then considered part of East Palo Alto but is now part of Menlo Park. Went to high school at Menlo-Atherton. Left for college and never returned. And your family? My father was from Ireland, went to school at Berkeley, and worked for Del Monte foods as a plant geneticist. He's the one who developed the “stringless” green bean—long before they were doing genetic modification. My mother was from Montana where she'd been a teacher after graduating from Oberlin. After my father died—when I was ten—she became a librarian. My younger sister Patty is a writer in the Silicon Valley industry. Where'd you go to college? University of California, Santa Barbara. They threw me out after a couple of years for lack of academic dedication. I came back five years later and redeemed my reputation. Where were you for those five years? I spent six months wandering around Europe. I came back to sell the VW that I'd previously stored in New York before taking the passenger liner (ah, those were the days) to Europe. I intended to return to Europe to live but Kennedy exempted married men from the draft and I was single and 21 years old. A prime target. I joined the Army for four years rather than two, figuring that if I went in for a longer period I could do something more interesting than carry a rifle. Did you? Yep. I spent six months studying German at the Army's language school in Monterey, then another six months in intelligence school in Baltimore. After that, I was an intelligence agent in Germany and Vietnam, each for a year. You didn't need to carry a rifle? Well, actually it wasn't a bad precaution in Vietnam so I went around pretty well armed, but weapons weren't my main function. They were more of a useful accessory. They went well with the camouflage uniform. What were you doing overseas? In Germany we were running agents into Eastern Europe; everything west of the Urals was our turf. I was kind of a junior spook, doing support for the much more experienced guys. In Vietnam, once I was out in the countryside, I was attached to a Special Forces team, advised an undercover Vietnamese Army unit, conducted liaison with a number of different outfits, and hung out with the local CIA guys. Since we couldn't win the war on the outside, we played Risk and drank good Scotch all night. Then you got out? I spent five or six months at Ft. Bragg in North California first. If I'd known what Bragg was like, I'd have stayed in Vietnam longer. You didn't care for Ft. Bragg? Let's just say it didn't seem to represent the best of the South. What then? I went back to UCSB, got a degree in German, and married and divorced (I screwed up) my college sweetheart (we'd accidentally reconnected at a showing of The Seven Samurai when I was at language school in Monterey), worked at a newspaper in Marin for awhile and headed north for a new home. I didn't see any place I particularly cared for till I got to Vancouver, B.C. I loved it. I stayed there for 10 years. What did you do in Canada? Advertising copywriting, creating and writing print ads, radio, TV, outdoor, brochures and all that stuff for everything from yogurt to airlines. I also did screenplay writing. I worked for a year and a half in the Canadian Rockies writing scripts for full-length wildlife movies. I lived on a compound with more than 100 animals and shared a trailer with a grizzly bear named Willie. Willie didn't snore much, but he did pace back and forth all night. I went back to Vancouver, got involved in the human potential movement—various group therapies, lots of crying and shouting and other fun—and ended up in a spiritual school called Arica after taking a 40-day training with them. I spent a few years teaching meditation and the other Arica material. I've been connected with Arica ever since though it's been a long time since I've actually taught Arica programs. And you came back to California? I'd met a lady from Los Gatos, fell immediately in love and left Vancouver to be with her. Unfortunately, she called the night before and said “Forget it”—her (ex)boyfriend was unhappy. I was all packed and it was time for a change, so I moved to California anyhow. To Napa? No, to Marin. I eventually met my future wife Kathryn in the city. I was running the Arica office in San Francisco and we fell in love over the phone. Falling in love sounds like a frequent pastime of yours. I've been fortunate enough to have encountered some remarkable women. What happened after you and Kathryn met? We ended up leaving the city and moving to Napa. Why Napa? We had a number of friends from Arica up here. Also, we lived in a small one-room hovel in Pacific Heights (I don't think Pacific Heights has hovels anymore) and one night got in the car to drive to a restaurant. We spent half an hour looking for a parking place, gave up and went home to eat. We then spent half an hour trying to find a place near home to park. That was it. Within a week we'd moved to Napa. When was that? 1980. We've lived in the valley ever since. A year in Napa, eight years in Yountville and the rest back in Napa. We moved back to Napa for the bright lights and excitement. What have you been doing in the valley? I started out doing winery advertising and public relations. Did some ghostwriting. Worked at Queen of the Valley Hospital in their customer relations department. Poured wine and led tours at Beaulieu Vineyard. Designed software interfaces and wrote user manuals for the tech industry. Worked in the computer department at The Doctors Company. Was a staff writer for Wine Business Monthly. For some years now, I've been focusing on my own websites and books. We'll get to that but first, you've been doing things with the Internet for a while, right? I've been on the Internet since the public was able to do so. In 1985, I logged onto The WELL (Whole Earth Lectronic Link) the first day it was online. It was started by Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog gang and quickly became the pioneering online community. I wrote the first manual for The WELL. Everything was volunteer then. At the time I was also working for MicroPro in Marin. They had the world's most popular word processor. Few people these days have ever even heard of WordStar. Such is longevity in technology. I also worked for a while for Adam Osborne's Paperback Software. Another company with a great product that didn't last. In the late 1980s I tried to convince the Napa Valley Vintners Association and the Napa Chamber of Commerce that they should start promoting themselves, and communicating within the community, via the Internet and something I called “NapaNet”. Since few people had ever even heard of the Internet, my attempts weren't met with rousing success. I tried again in the early 1990s and was fortunate to hook up with Terry Faherty, a teacher in the Napa Valley Unified School District. She and her tech team liked the idea and Terry and I ended up spearheading NapaNet. Others quickly joined in, including the NVUSD administration, Barbara Nemko at the County Office of Education, and The Doctors' Company. Upvalley school districts and local businesses also got involved and we soon had a non-profit whose mission was to connect every school in the valley to the Internet. That non-profit ended up morphing into the for-profit company that NapaNet is today. But it helped all the kids get online. 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