Reed Stevens

Call me a rolling stone—I'm an East Coaster the wind blew to Santa Fe and again to northern California. But I have deep Philadelphia roots. My father was born there and his parents and my long-gone aunt, the painter Edith Stevens, are buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery.

Roots? I put them down for ten wonderful years at 2104 Brandywine Street in Spring Garden. Little did I know when I drove out of the city in 1988 that a Santa Fe stockbroker would tell me, in 1997, that she was the next to last owner of that exact same Brandywine house!

So, you can't really take the gal outta Philly, where I got a good boost to my freelance career and confidence ranting about anything and everything in the old Welcomat. NOT true it was a birdcage liner! Dan was a steady hand at the tiller even back then.

I learned to broadcast as a volunteer at the Radio Information Center for the Blind in Philadelphia and from there went to WHYY News to sound off as a local commentator. You gotta love those microphones.

Hunting for a bigger whack at glory, I wrote and produced a quirky one-hour radio drama on a Pennsylvania Humanities grant. Hired a good scriptwriter and paid the cast Equity wages, too. Because of that Equity credit, my star went on to the understudy role in Amadeus on Broadway, no less.

(Do I know where he is now? Well, the thing about rolling stones is you lose your marbles.)

Then, thanks to the strong Philadelphia culture, National Public Radio Theater bought that play, The Story of Crazy Nora, and aired it nationally. With my mellifluous voice introducing it, no less. What a hoot that was. Crazy Nora was a real, live 19th-Century street character whose portrait hangs in the Pennsylvania Historical Society. Thanks to Charlie Blockson, the well-known black bibliophile who gave his extraordinary collection to Temple University, for that lead.

Having established my fame and glory in the Northeast, I followed my cowboy heart west where I saved a wonderful old adobe on the Santa Fe River and published my first book, Treasure of Taos (1993), out of print but available second-hand at amazon.com.

“How do you make a small fortune in Santa Fe?†people ask.

“Start with a big one.â€

Alas, true. After the house and the horses, the cowboys and Indians, which I describe in my second book, Santa Fe Dreamhouse (2009), money got very tight, so I sold real estate. That's in the book, too.

Partner (now lassoed into being Husband) Jim Tirjan, Lehigh ‘63, grabbed a job opportunity in Silicon Valley. It took me a good year to stop pronouncing it “silicone†valley, although some of the women out here in California..

Yeah, I am very East Coast. Now I flog Dreamhouse and rant for Dan in BSR. Rant even more on my blog: reedstevens.blogspot.com. If you just have to have more Reed on your screen, take a look at that.

Who knows, maybe I'll figure out how to make some groovy vids on my new Mac. Boy, that scares the hell out me now, as I compose on Windows.

This old rolling stone has probably settled down now in Campbell, California. But that's not so far from Philadelphia these days, is it?

I'd love to hear from you!