What I didn’t tell you about me and Reed Erickson — the eccentric millionaire philanthropist

by ken winston caine

I promised, a couple years back, to share more of my experience with Reed Erickson, the eccentric philanthropist who financed the original hardback publication of A Course in Miracles.

He turned me on to the Course in 1982 after summoning me to his ashram in Ojai, Calif.

I, at the time, was the assistant publisher of the Ojai Valley News and the editor of the Sunday edition. The OVN then was an eclectic twice-weekly that won a ton of journalism awards under owner Fred Volz.

Erickson called me to his extremely large country-club-neighborhood home because he was convinced the Ojai Police were persecuting him.

It was true his name was showing up a lot in the newspaper’s version of the police blotter. He seemed to have a habit of hiring housekeepers and then evicting them unexpectedly at 3 or 4 a.m. before he got around to paying them.

The help, stiffed of their checks, felt obliged to report this to the police along with details about his temper tantrums and odd behaviors and frequent sniffing of white powder (which probably was not cocaine but some hallucinogenic exotic ethnobotanical. Turns out he had funded major scientific research into sacred herbs used by indigenous peoples worldwide.)

Don’t know exactly what he hoped to accomplish in meeting with me.

On the phone he had assured me he had some inside dirt on the Ojai Police. I knew virtually nothing about him except that he was said to be extraordinarily wealthy and quite strange and nobody I spoke with (including the Ojai Police) was really sure what was the source of his wealth or what he was all about.

I showed up as a reporter. He immediately took me on a tour of his three-story mansion that he called an “ashram.”

He was a reporter’s nightmare: completely evasive, deflecting any question I asked: about him, his work, his past, his life, what he meant by anything he said, anything of substance that I might be able to write about.

He was effeminate in carriage and manner of speaking — the syntax and pitch. His voice was high-sing-songy. At the time I assumed he was gay. Only many years later — and well after his death — did I learn that he was a pioneer in the transgender movement, having undergone one of the first surgical sex-change operations in the United States in the 1960s.

I would have been fascinated if he had told me about that and would have, without a doubt, done a story about it from his perspective as a pioneer. But he wasn’t talking about that. Or anything serious that I could write about.

As I mentioned in an earlier account, I declined his offer of some of what he called “magical white powder” that he kept in a beautiful polished wooden container and which he snorted in front of me. I declined only because he would not tell me what it was — not because I had any objection to interesting consciousness altering compounds. I just did not intentionally indulge blindly in much of anything.

He would only say when I pressed him to explain what it was, “It’s a wonderful, sacred substance. A magical white powder.”

He also admonished me to “lighten up.”

This was after he had showed me the huge hot tub on the third-story deck outside his master bedroom. Now we were standing inside, by the bed, and I’d declined his offer of otherwise unidentified “magical white powder.”

I was being rather no-nonsense reporter-straight with him, a bit impatient and slightly irritated, thinking he was wasting my time. After all, my small staff and I filled some 70 full-size newsprint pages a week with 100% locally written copy, plus on Sundays in addition to the newspaper, we put out a 16- to 24-page local arts and culture alternative-weekly-like tabloid. If there wasn’t something interesting that I could write about, and if he wasn’t going to be at least a little bit cooperative as an interviewee, then I needed to get back to my typewriter and telephone and staff.

It was shortly after he admonished me to lighten up that he switched the subject to one of the polished end-posts on his carved wooden bedframe. He asked if I noticed anything special about the wood.

The wood, he said, was a highly aromatic and rare rosewood that he had had imported from India and which was custom carved and polished for his bed. He pointed out how sunlight appeared to dance in the grain.

And he asked me, “Can you smell the scent of the wood?”

I didn’t smell anything unusual in the room. Ojai is quite verdant and always, year-round, the scent of something flowering hangs in the air.

“No-o-o-o-o-?” he said as though in bewilderment.

This, he said, is the most aromatic rosewood known to man and its scent is quite pleasing and is said to induce a great sense of peacefulness and to promote delightful dreams. Don’t you feel an essence of that in this room? he asked.

I felt uncomfortable, standing in the bedroom with this strange, long-haired chubby man with the girl-ish voice. I believe that at the time I was thinking, next he’s going to ask me if I like back rubs.

“You’ve GOT to smell this,” Erickson said. “Come here.” And he motioned me over to the foot of the bed and put his finger in a precise spot on one of the low-standing end posts. “I’ve noticed that the scent is especially strong right HERE,” he said. “This spot. Just smell right here.”

Jeeze, I thought. OK, I’ll humor him. And I leaned down to sniff the bedpost.

He grabbed my ass in both hands and started wiggling it up and down, laughing loudly, gleefully, in a high-pitched giggle, “hee hee hee hee hee hee.”

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I guess that’s how you get a journalist to lighten up.