About HOME AT THE EDGE by Ronald Schulz
HOME AT THE EDGE takes you from jail to the madhouse, an on-the-road and in-the-streets memoir of free-loving, acid-dropping radical youth in 1969, that still resonates today. We last saw 17-year-old Ron lying handcuffed over the hood of a car in “Chicago Rage.” We pick up with him entering Chicago’s Cook County Jail, where he and his radical companions are kept segregated from the other prisoners to prevent them from–god forbid–being a bad influence on murders and rapists. He is bailed out only to be admitted to a mental hospital where he bonds with other disaffected youth, fellow ‘freaks’ grappling with their identity and struggling against the status quo. The attempted and successful suicides of his companions and would-be lovers haunt him. He must confront his inner and outer demons and, as he turns 18, the looming military draft, which threatens to toss his whole generation into an immoral war.
His would-be love affairs are thwarted by a shadowy administration. Only Sue, desiring to get pregnant and have a child to avoid being sent to a convent can share a hurried wild love before she is locked away. While his options are bleak, he must not lose faith and rebuild his life on the outside.
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Born in Chicago, Ronald Schulz grew up in the semi-rural suburb of Wood Dale. At fifteen he ran away to New Orleans, where he lived on Skid Row until betrayed by a priest. As a disaffected seventeen-year-old high school dropout in 1969, Ronald took a massive dose of LSD while hitchhiking alone into the wide-open Western American scene in search of the counterculture. He later became involved in radical movements in New York and Chicago, including the SDS Days of Rage, where he was arrested and subjected to several months in a mental hospital. He made the most of it, joining the White Panthers and later a rural Wisconsin commune, which remained his home throughout the 1970s. In 1975 he hitchhiked across North Africa and the Middle East, spent time on a kibbutz, and worked at a copper mine in Israel’s Negev desert. Then on to India and Nepal, where he spent nine months studying Buddhism under Lama Yeshe. His life has been full of adventure, travel, and different jobs, including teaching English classes in Tokyo, construction work in Los Angeles, and mining in South Dakota and Colorado. Ronald has a BA in political science from the University of Washington, as well as certificates in memoir writing and teaching English as a second language. He has been to every continent and now lives in Seattle, writing a series of honest memoirs: Chicago Rage, Home at the Edge, and Spirit Quest 1969. Soon to be published are Party at the End of the Rainbow, about the Chicago White Panthers, and Teenage Runaway about running away to New Orleans at 15. They are coming out soon, with more to follow. Stay tuned!