(AUDIO) Richard Evans is Holding Up

Richard Evans, still a dreamer

Last week Humboldt was featured prominently in a lengthy article by GQ Magazine—for something other than weed, if you can believe it! The piece, “The Last Glimpses of California’s Vanishing Hippie Utopias,” takes the reader on a tour of some of the aging and forgotten communes manifested by the generation of idealists associated with what we know nowadays as the back to the land movement. 

These days Richard Evans, one of the article’s subjects, makes his home in the booming metropolis of Eureka, but back in the early ‘70s he and his cohorts fled the Bay Area for a more idyllic, communal country existence on a property in far-flung Southern Humboldt. On this week’s episode of Humboldt Holding Up — LoCO’s always-idealistic podcast — Evans shares with us his recollections of his back-to-the-lander days. Topics include:

  • A discussion of what individuals who found themselves swept up in the back to the land movement were seeking
  • Evans’ involvement in the March on Washington and gay liberation activism in the ‘60s
  • his trek up to Humboldt in search of land and subsequent country livin’ out in Ettersburg and Alderpoint
  • His time as an adventurous stained glass artist
  • The difficulties of being a gay black man in rural SoHum
  • His work as part of the team that converted an abandoned school into Eureka’s Jefferson Community Center

ABOVE: A young Evans sits next to a window he installed at Tommy and Karen Hessler’s Humboldt home. He was bummed that GQ didn’t include a picture of the other side of the window, so we’ve included that below


Evans was part of the team that crafted this stained glass entryway that once welcomed visitors to a State of California building in San Francisco

Click the audio player above to listen to Evans’ chat with the Outpost’s Stephanie McGeary and Andrew Goff or click on over to Apple Podcasts. And if you’d like to one-way meet even more Humboldt people from the comfort of your headphones, take a scroll through past Humboldt Holding Up guests below.

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