Winter of 1978, I enrolled in a Black and White, 35mm Photography 101 class at a community college in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in northern California. The locals kiddingly called it UBR–The University Behind Raley’s (local grocery chain). It consisted of old trailers and portables under a canopy of massive California Oaks. The campus cantilevered on a hillside overlooking the western edge of the Northern Hemisphere. I came from Colorado a year earlier to visit relatives and never left. A magical, bewitching, Shangri-La place of dreams. I had a robust love for California. I belonged with my de facto family of Freedom, Peace, and Love hippies…along the Western Sea. I had to find a way to make a life here.