Bayard Taylor

Hi. My name’s Bayard Taylor, no relation to the famous 19th century translator of Faust and travel writer (1825-1878) of the same name.

The name Bayard means “reddish brown hair and powerful.” I inherited it from my father’s father’s middle name.

My roots go back to Madison, Wisconsin, where both my parents grew up. My mom was third-generation Norwegian; my dad English-Scottish mutt. After dad fought across Europe in World War II they married and migrated west.

I was born in Pomona and raised in several Southern California towns, which means I qualify both as a true California Native and for all the fruits-and-nuts jokes the rest of the country enjoys telling about Californians.

I don’t surf. Sorry.

I studied psychology and philosophy in college, which were not terribly relevant skills for my first job: chasing cows out of the corn and mending fences on my uncle’s dairy farm just outside of Brooklyn, Wisconsin.

This turned into a lengthy sojourn in Midwest (“back east” as we say in California). There I survived fifteen winters, the kind that try their best to kill you. Builds character, Midwesterners say.

Since then I’ve slung pipe in onshore and offshore California oildfields, evangelized and discipled college and graduate students, trained as a seminarian, traveled to strange lands and far-away places (Poland, India, Saudi Arabia, Albania), remodeled houses, ghost-written books, husbanded one wife and fathered two children.

Thanks to family vacations, Boy Scouts, the Sierra Club, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Ansel Adams and backpacking in the Sierras, sunsets at the beach, the hush of the desert and the vast expanse of the plains and oceans, I have come to respect all of Nature as a great Burning Bush pointing us toward our Creator.