Dick Meister

I'm a long-time freelance writer living high on a hill in my native San Francisco with my wife Gerry and the raccoons, skunks, possums, scrub jays, sparrows and other fellow creatures that regularly visit our garden. Oops! Excuse me for a minute. There's a jay rapping on my study window, demanding a peanut, and feed him I must.

Anyway, back to me. I spent most of my youth playing baseball, in northern California, Oregon and western Canada, and most of my adult life as a journalist in this country and abroad. I've been a reporter for United Press, The Associated Press and PBS-TV Station KQED in San Francisco, a reporter-photographer for the San Jose Mercury-News, labor editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, city editor of the Oakland Tribune and a commentator on Pacifica Radio in Berkeley, Los Angeles and Houston and on KQED-FM. I co-authored a history of farm labor, "A Long Time Coming," published by Macmillan in 1977.

My freelance columns and articles have appeared, over the past 50 years, in more than 150 publications and broadcast and online outlets ranging from the New York Times Magazine and Christian Science Monitor to the weekly San Francisco Bay Guardian and Anderson Valley Advertiser. I cover labor, politics, international affairs, the media, sports, historical events, foreign and domestic travel, films and other matters.

I hold an AA degree in journalism from City College of San Francisco, where I was editor of the weekly student newspaper, BA and MA degrees in communication & journalism from Stanford University, where I was editor of the student daily newspaper, and have taught journalism at San Francisco State University.

These days, I spend most of my time writing (and of course watching baseball games). I keep hoping to put together a book on labor history and another on baseball, but never seem to find the time because of my tight self-imposed schedule for regularly churning out columns and radio commentaries. OurEcho is a favorite outlet of mine because of the feedback I get from fellow writers, a rare but extremely welcome occurrence for me, and because of the opportunity it gives me to read stories about places and things I'm unfamiliar with.

Story ID:	2074
Written by:	OurEcho Admin (bio, link, contact, other stories)
Story type:	In The Spotlight
Location:	San Francisco CA USA
Year:	2007
Person:	Dick Meister