My Story – Who I Am and Why I Do What I Do

TL;DR
A small town boy moves to the big city, follows his dream career (doesn’t work out), gets married (doesn’t work out either), falls in love with a quirky and free-spirited slam poet, and together they become radical vegan activists and live happily ever after.


The Longer Story
I have two passions. One is for art and design, particularly graphic design, and this has been my career and co-motivator for more than 45 years. My other great passion is to somehow to do something that makes some kind of real positive change in the world.

The first passion hit me when I was very little and I would lose myself in drawing, coloring and building things. My family and teachers all encouraged me along the way, which helped me to stick with it.

The second passion first started to stir in early 1968 when my sixth grade teacher, Mrs Robbins, made me sit in the Principal’s office rather than meet a returning Vietnam vet because I had stated that I wanted to ask him if he thought we should really be waging war in that country. She saw this as total act of insubordination and hatred of the American Way and she made me stay after school while she ranted at me for an hour about my rebellious attitude. After that awful experience, I decided that I wanted to grow up to be a hippie and a campus protester who designed album covers and underground comic books and lived somewhere far away from my tiny Minnesota farming village.

My college career began just as the both the Vietnam War and the Nixon presidency ended in humiliation, and the counterculture was giving way to the “me” generation. So my activist ideas were sublimated while I concentrated my efforts on honing my art and design skills.

For the next 14 years or so after graduation, I worked my way up the ladder as a graphic designer and then an advertising art director, switching jobs often, moving to bigger and more prestigious ad agencies, from Des Moines to Minneapolis and ultimately Chicago, where I finally ended up at Leo Burnett, which at the time was one of the most famous and coveted ad agencies in the world.

Meanwhile I married a fiery advertising copywriter who dressed me in designer suits, and we lived in a fancy Printers Row loft and vacationed in Europe and the Caribbean.

During this time, the activist side of me was more or less dormant. Well, almost. One night, early in my career, I was laid up in bed with bronchitis when a documentary called The Animals Film started playing on PBS and since I was too sick to get up and change the channel, I was stuck watching it and the images of animals being raised for food shocked me so much that I immediately became a vegetarian, and I have shunned eating meat ever since. My vegetarianism, along with my shoulder-length hair and my artsy career made me feel like I was somehow more sensitive and pure than the craven, success-crazed yuppies who surrounded me.

But the higher I rose in the ranks, the more disillusioned I became with what I was doing. My inner activist was starting to see that the messages I and thousands of my colleagues were churning out were all just carefully crafted propaganda designed to turn citizens into greedy consumers, and our messages convinced them to buy more and more useless and often destructive things. Once I got that thought in my head, I realized that my advertising career had become untenable.

Around that time, my marriage, which had been deteriorating for years, finally collapsed when my wife left me and moved to LA. For the next year or so, I planned for a new life, even though I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I started studying and practicing drawing in earnest and I built  a portfolio of my  illustrations.

In March of 1993, my old life completely dissolved in just a few days. On a Friday, I received a certified letter that my divorce was finalized and on the following Monday I was laid off from Leo Burnett. I felt like two giant weights had been lifted from my shoulders.

Six weeks later, I went out to see a Burnett buddy of mine who was competing in the semifinals of Illinois Poetry Slam championship. When I arrived at the venerable Green Mill nightclub, my eyes (and the eyes of everyone else in the packed house) were drawn to this buoyant and charismatic poet strutting across the stage with a sheaf of papers in one hand and the other hand gesturing wildly as she humorously and metaphorically eviscerated all the men in the audience, many of whom appeared to be failing to realize that they were the targets of her satirical barbs. Her performance blew me away and left me almost dizzy while I set out to find my friend.

I found him laughing in a booth with a half dozen others, including the poet I had just watched. He gestured to an empty chair next to her. “Marla, this is my friend John.” I reached out to shake her hand, but instead of taking it, she kicked off her platform sandals and lifted her feet onto my lap. In a sultry Marlena Dietrich-ish voice, she purred, “Rub my feet.”

Marla and I spent the summer in a crazy bliss, going out to clubs and events most nights, while I spent my days drawing storyboards and illustrations and working as a freelance art director for a buddy’s ad agency. I also started working for a progressive magazine called Conscious Choice where I drew about 30 covers and dozens of interior illustrations.

On a freakishly summery day in late October, Marla and her friend Deb suggested that we hang out in Wicker Park where I would shoot video of them interviewing random passersby. Next thing I knew, Marla and I had created and shot 15 episodes of a bizarre sitcom/talk show/reality show mashup with a full cast and crew that we called The Simply Marla Show. We cablecasted it on Chicago’s public access channel.

In the midst of this, we became vegan together and in addition to our TV show, we had joined an animal rights group and were soon participating in and organizing all kinds of protests, marches and other events. After about a year of this, we rebranded ourselves as vegan activists which wasn’t even really a thing at that time.

In 1996, on behalf of Conscious Choice, I designed and wrote an ad that was instrumental in shutting down a dangerous public incinerator. Next thing I knew I was working full-time in an iconoclastic anti-advertising agency I helped create called Sustain where I designed and built ads and programs that, over the next nine years, helped rewrite the national organic standards, stopped the building of dams on the Mississippi River, helped clean up the Great Lakes, instituted a recycling program in the US Capitol building and influenced dozens of projects on local, state and national levels.

At the same time, Marla and I built one of the internet’s very first vegan websites, Vegan Street, which has grown exponentially in the 25+ years since. We also formed a Chicago chapter of EarthSave International, where we hosted dozens of vegan events from monthly potluck dinners to book signings, lectures and dine-outs, as well as five daylong conferences called The Conference for Conscious Living that hosted some of the leading animal rights and vegan activists of the time and each drew hundreds of people. We even helped put together a cargo van with a giant TV screen mounted on the side where activists played slaughterhouse videos on local street corners.

Also, between Vegan Street  EarthSave Chicago and Sustain, we developed a host of experiential events, many of which involved elaborate puppetry and other street theater. We took on lots of subjects from animal rights to environmental, social justice and anti-war causes, to name a few. In separate events, we were each arrested and spent nights in jail – Marla twice, including a felony arrest that led to her being forbidden from carrying a firearm in the state of Wisconsin and a celebrity arrest, where she was jailed with rockstar Bonnie Raitt and the famous treesitter Julia Butterfly Hill.

In 2002, we welcomed our son Justice into the world, who attended his first multi-day animal rights conference at the tender age of 3 weeks, and came very close to being arrested himself along with his mom and dad when he was 9 months old on the night that the Bush/Cheney bombs began raining down on Baghdad.

Sustain eventually fell victim to the cruel machinations and midnight dealings of the Bush administration and a cultural shift in attitudes about radical activism. Shortly after that, Marla and I felt a desire to move on from EarthSave Chicago to other things and we called the parent organization to inform them that we wished to dissolve the chapter. Our group had about $7,000 sitting in an escrow with our parent group, and we were told that we had to find a good use for it or we would lose it altogether.

We decided to blow it all on a big vegan festival with lots of food booths, a big exhibit hall, live music, speakers and lots of other fun things. Marla came up with the name Chicago VeganMania, and we spent the next year and a half trying to sell the concept to everyone we knew. The first event went shockingly well and we decided to turn it into an annual outing.

We approached the idea of Chicago VeganMania in the same way as we approached Vegan Street, The Simply Marla Show and virtually every other project we built or attempted, which is to say with only the vaguest clue of what we were doing. Our whole lives together have been spent coming up with big ideas and then flying by the seat of our pants and making it all up as we went along. Despite this, Chicago VeganMania held on and flourished for ten years drawing thousands of visitors and selling tens of thousands of dollars of vegan food and goods each outing.

During this time, Marla’s mom began suffering the effects of memory loss and a weakening of her body, and we moved her into our house and carted her off to all of our Chicago VeganMania core group meetings and everywhere else we went for the next nearly three years. She was diagnosed with Lewy Body Dementia, which attacked her mind and body simultaneously and ultimately took her life.

Shortly after she died, we revived Vegan Street, which had been largely dormant for several years and we began exploring the new world of social media by creating and regularly posting Vegan Street memes, recipes, essays and vegan living tips. Soon after, we launched Vegan Street Media and used it to develop design, writing, marketing and branding for vegan companies.

About the time that Chicago VeganMania was reaching the end of its lifespan, I began suffering from a series of strange maladies including a loss of balance, breathlessness, night sweats and unexplainable but serious aches and pains. When it got serious enough to warrant a trip to the emergency room, we discovered that I had a pretty advanced case of ALL, which stands for Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia or cancer of the white blood cells.

During the next two years, I was hospitalized ten separate times and I had lots of chemotherapy, full body radiation and a stem-cell transplant that required killing nearly my entire bloodstream. For months, I was quite a mess and nearly catatonic at times. But even then I kept producing our memes and other Vegan Street and Vegan Street Media projects, working alongside Marla, even as she was patiently nursing me back to health.

Now Vegan Street is 25 years old and thriving, we’ve recently launched a neighborhood food pantry called The Little Free Plant Powered Pantry and we’re currently launching an online vegan community platform called Root Riot which, like pretty much everything we’ve ever worked on, is taking us completely out of our comfort zones and forcing us to build the road we want to travel on.

And we wouldn’t have it any other way.