Lee knew joy in the running when he was a high school football halfback, and when he ran the 100-yard dash, the 220, and the 880 relay in track. He knew joy in the music when he played piano and put together a high school jazz quintet.
Listening: Dave Brubeck, Erroll Garner, Sonny Stitt, Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Lee Morgan, Art Blakey, Chico Hamilton.
When the time came, his well-meaning parents sent him away to the University of Colorado, where tradition-oriented instructors propounding orthodox institutionalized ways of life tried to shape his thinking into perceptual modes unsuited for his inquisitive, creative spirit. He found himself brooding, drinking too much, trying to write. Confused, dissatisfied, he struggled inwardly with himself, outwardly with his studies.
On his own, encouraged by a friend, reading: Dostoyevsky, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, T.E. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Melville, D.H. Lawrence, Thoreau, Colin Wilson, Styron, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg. Listening: Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Horace Silver; Beethoven, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky.
In his sophomore year he left CU, moved to California, re-entered school, got married, and graduated from San Francisco State College. Reading: Goethe, Thomas Mann, Schiller, Shakespeare. While still a student, he picked up a second-hand guitar and began strumming and singing folk songs. His brief attendance in graduate school at UC Berkeley did nothing to expand his mind or his talents. Although making straight A's, he dropped out, disgusted with the narrowness of the curriculum.
Reading: Nikos Kazantzakis, Henri Bergson, Tolstoy, Nietzsche. Listening: Bill Evans, Miles Davis, Jimmy Smith, Beethoven.
