Bill Anderson
1928-2004

By Sarah Creider

William Clark Anderson, poet, journalist, thinker, and conversationalist extraordinaire, who was poetry editor at the Bay Guardian in the 1960s, died April 24 at his home in Bedford, Penn. He was 75.

Anderson, known as Bill, was born in Pittsburgh and grew up in Auburn, N.Y., and Bedford, where he graduated from Bedford High School. His parents, William Clark Anderson and Sarah King Anderson, had met at the Mt. Pisgah AME Zion Church, where his father was a minister.

During the 1960s Anderson lived in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco and wrote for Pacific News Service and the Bay Guardian. A pioneer of a new style of journalism that combined stream-of-consciousness writing with traditional reporting, he was part of a circle of poets that included Denise Levertov and Jack Gilbert, and he studied with Sylvia Plath. His work is included in Hayden Carruth's seminal anthology of 20th-century American poets, The Voice That Is Great within Us. He also worked for the state employment department, developing one of the first job-training programs for low-income and inner-city youth.

In 1974 he moved back to his family home in Bedford to take care of his aging mother. He was active in the environmental movement in Bedford County and helped lead a successful fight against a hospital waste incinerator in nearby Manns Choice that resulted in changes to statewide environmental laws. With his partner, Peggy Reimann, Anderson home-schooled their daughter, developed educational materials for one-on-one teaching, and worked with migrant farm workers and their children throughout western Pennsylvania.

"Bill Anderson did remarkable work for us back in the late l960s, as our poetry editor and as a poet and journalist of unusual talent breaking new ground in both disciplines," Bay Guardian editor and publisher Bruce B. Brugmann said. "He was the only African American reporter to cover the first Huey Newton trial in 1968 on a daily basis and produced literary reportage that reads as well today as it did then. He was top of the line."

He is survived by Reimann as well as his brother, Harry Sheldon Anderson, nephews Eric Christopher Anderson, Alexander William Anderson, and Michael Francis Anderson, daughter Sarah Creider, and friends all over the world who will remember him as a reader, a writer, a mentor, and a never-ending source of fascinating and enlightening discussions.

A memorial for Bill Anderson will be held June 26, 2 p.m., Bay Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi, S.F. For more information, e-mail Sarah Creider.

Links to some of Bill Anderson's work in the Bay Guardian:

Senator Robert F. Kennedy assassinated (June 18, 1968)

Huey P. Newton's trial, p1, p2, p3, p4 (August 30, 1968)

"The February Rain is Falling" (March 27, 1969)

The International Industrialists' Conference, p1, p2 (December 16, 1969)