Clinton Callahan

The lady behind the California Polytechnic State University (San Luis Obispo) registration desk in 1975 asks, "And what would you like to learn, young man?" Clinton has no hesitation in declaring, "I want to learn magic. I want to learn healing, transformation, authentic adulthood initiations, paraphysics, metaphysics..." "Hold on right there," she says. "We have physics!" "Uh, I'll study physics then." Five years later he has to admit he is not learning what he wants to learn and one Thursday night invites others with the same frustration to begin a weekly meeting to teach each other what they want to learn. Seventy-five people show up that first evening, but soon distill down to fifteen regulars. The weekly meetings culminate in a three month experiment in synergetic education and temporary community in the fall of 1975 with five participants (Kat Felkner, Ed Clark, Alan Friedman, Phyllis Goldman, and Clinton Callahan) camping together on a beach at the very bottom of Baja California between San José del Cabo and Cabo San Lucas. The experiment is so fruitful that soon afterwards Clinton joins the SafeSpace Project to establish an experimental educational community on Roatan island off the Caribbean coast of Honduras with fifty people, only this time, since the context of the gameworld was not agreed upon beforehand, the group falls apart the first evening they meet around the campfire and all are arrested, eventually sent back home to America. Not to be stopped, Clinton joins another SafeSpace project to build a sixty foot catamaran in Phoenix, Arizona (the middle of the desert...) to sail around the world as a floating university and an example of peace and sanity. Indeed the ship gets built but the group soon destabilizes due to a lack of clarity about exactly how to create peace and sanity. Clinton meets his first wife Brenda Krieger and they get married December 1980, taking a two and a half year edu-vacation-honeymoon around the world, sailing from Hawaii to Fiji on the trimaran Moondog, continuing throughout Southeast Asia including Australia, Thailand, Bali, Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Philippines (where Gustav J. Stipek, Clinton's maternal grandfather is buried in the US Military Cemetary, killed in WWII in the Martial Islands), Japan, India, Nepal, finally returning through Europe during which time they discovered they were pregnant with the first of their two daughters (Amethyst Star Callahan and Aurora Star Callahan). The girls were home-birthed in Santa Rosa, California, and home-schooled their whole lives. Clinton moved with his family to Arizona in 1990, then to France in 1995, delivered the first Expand The Box training in 1998 in Hamburg, Germany, was divorced 2004, moved to Germany in 2005.