Rich Nadler

I'm still kind of processing this. My ex wife called me at work this morning saying, 'I don't want to freak you out, but how old is Rich Nadler?'



Late fifties, I guessed. Turned out there was a Rich Nadler in the obits, a brief notice. Age 60. Interment in St. Louis Tuesday, service today at the Torah Learning Center.



With each detail, any doubt I could have entertained drained away. It's not a totally unique name, but there was only one Ultra-Right-Wing-Vegetarian-Jew from St. Louis living in the Kansas City area, and he was my friend and mentor.



How I met Rich: I was listening to this new guy on the radio. A conservative talk-show guy* who did funny stuff like 'caller abortions' (when a liberal caller was particularly unentertaining, a vacuum sound would commence and the host would apologize that the call had been un-viable). The show was new, so the ad time was cheap enough a local tabloid could swing a trade-out with the station, and I heard the following ad (more or less):

Without the Federal Government, our roads and bridges would crumble, armed gangs would maraud the streets and our children would wallow in ignorance. In other words, things would be exactly the same except we'd get to keep all this money we're paying in taxes and wouldn't have to put up with a bunch of stupid regulations.

Naturally, I called the number. The phone was answered by a woman who promised to have someone call me. Nobody did.



I heard the exact same ad the next day and called again. This time the phone was answered by a guy who laughed easily and spoke in paragraphs. I had a newsletter, he had a newspaper. He said he'd send me one 'gratis,' (I didn't know at the time it was a free publication anyway) and I said I'd reciprocate.



I sent him a copy of Midwest Rock Lobster, my newsletter. I never got a K.C. Jones in return but I did get a phone call from Rich a few days later saying he wanted me to write for him.



First impression of Rich: the man smoked a corn cob pipe, which he tamped with a calloused thumb. He was the biggest character I'd ever met (and probably still holds the title).



He paid me the going rate for K.C. Jones articles at the time: they paid nothing, but it was nothing per word. I'm not exaggerating, Rich never, ever paid for editorial content.



A few months after I'd started contributing movie reviews and whatnot, he called me with a 'career opportunity.' This was, it turns out, my entry into a career. Not as a writer, what I thought I was supposed to be, but as a graphic designer. I wore a lot of hats, actually, including distribution routes, phone solicitations for the Missouri Taxpayer's Watchdog Association, and I don't know what-all.



I worked for Nadler Publishing about five years of the seven it was in operation, and might still be working for Rich except two weeks after Em was born Rich called a meeting to tell both of the remaining employees (the company had fallen on hard times) that 'We're tits up.'



I've stayed in touch with Rich in the 13 years since, but not as much as I wish I had. A friend of mine mentioned being a big admirer of Rich when he was a regular on Ruckus! and I said, 'If you want to meet him, I have the juice to make that happen.' We had lunch with Rich a few weeks later.





I'll let the 'ultra-right-wing' part stand as read since I've got all these K.C. Jones covers I photographed this evening for you to get an idea of his ideology. Rich was a small-'L' libertarian/Republican. I know he's not exactly a household name, but trust me, Grover Norquist, Ed Meese, Ramesh Ponnuru (who used to write for the Jones), etc., knew and respected him. He was a constant researcher and scholar, the most educated high school dropout I'm pretty sure there ever was.



He was, yes, a vegetarian. Out of extreme hostility to plants, not any sympathy for animals, he was fond of saying. No ideology behind it, he simply found meat inedible. Except for the shellfish his religion forbade.



He got more serious about his religion as the years went by. When I started working at Nadler Publishing, he'd observe the fasts and whatnot, but by the end of Nadler Publishing he was strict about the Sabbath and had finally found a rabbi who was orthodox enough for his tastes. At the service today, I learned that he had become quite adept at reading the Torah (I take it this is a chanted-in-Hebrew deal in the worship service, and harder than you'd think), and that he walked 4+ miles each way to this service because it was the Sabbath, so no cars.



He would tell me of the fasts, that it doesn't help and in fact makes it worse, but 'I routinely eat a large pizza before and after the fast.'



If there was a constant thread to all of Rich's endeavors it was his contrarian nature. Summed up by a friend of mine, seeing Rich's panning of the movie Titanic, 'That contrary motherfucker!' I'm certain Rich would have taken it as a compliment.



The K.C. Jones covers I've shot for this post, Rich didn't draw them, he was the art director. Most were done by Scott Freeman, at the time one of Hallmark's stable. Rich would give him the idea and let Scott run with it.

Rich also recruited the cartoonist Elvis Lackey, who contributed the Zeitgeist which caused so much controversy the cartoonist had to go into hiding in Florida.






K.C. Jones was the only free tabloid to ever champion market forces, even though it was market forces that put it out of business. If only there'd been something like Blogger back then, Rich could have published his intensely researched, dense, 10,000 word articles at a cost of zero in a searchable forum available to the whole world. By the time he could have done that, he'd figured out other, more effective ways, to deliver his research. He also got into producing television commercials, political ones guaranteed to boil the blood of liberals everywhere.



I remember the little house in St. Louis Rich's family had. He had lived in it for a few years after Pavlov's Dog (the band he was in under the stage name Sigfried Carver) broke up. This house was a tiny affair by the old Blues arena. There were easily 10,000 books in the house, all of which Rich had read I'm pretty sure. His reading taste was encyclopedic, catholic and fearless. He would read, and could discuss, anything.





The Missouri Taxpayer's Watchdog Association was one of his hobbies: every year, he'd read every law voted on by the Missouri General Assembly. If it had any implications for taxpayers either in the form of increased taxation, increased government spending, or regulation, he decided if it was good or bad for the taxpayers from a cost/benefit standpoint. Then he compiled a rating chart for every legislator based on how they voted. Few legislators even got C grades in the Watchdog guide.



I remember during a press conference for a group opposing a local tax-hike ballot initiative, a reporter asked Rich how come he was always against any tax increases. 'If you believe that people are already overtaxed,' he said, 'Then what is the benefit of supporting some tax increases in the interest of being fair-minded?'



Another line I remember him coining, 'Those who love liberty always seem to underestimate the degree to which some people hate it.'



Oh, the Pavlov's Dog thing: I meant to call Rich the other day when I learned of a CD reissue of Pampered Menial, the album he played on. Rich used to get a call every year or so from someone saying, 'We're getting the band back together.' 'Not with me, you're not,' was his answer every time.



He had moved on. He wasn't even interested in being party to lawsuits over various elements of the contract where, apparently, both the band's manager (an ex-con) and the record label had played fast and loose with rights and money. He had taken a lot of drugs, played the violin in a rock band that toured around in a used bread truck, opened for Meat Loaf and whatnot, but that was his misspent youth. He didn't want to revisit it any more than he wanted to go back to being a Communist like he was back then.



I remember, too, his delight with Missouri's 'sunshine law.' A friend of his had been elected to the General Assembly, a fellow traveler, and asked for a suggestion on how the law should read. The idea being, to make it impossible for government entities to do closed-door smoke-filled-room deals that the press couldn't report on. So Rich submitted his suggestion after researching other states' laws of a similar nature. His 'suggestion' was, verbatim, introduced, voted on and made law.



Oh, and on the subject of these K.C. Jones covers, of which I'm providing only a taste, I think we set a record for the most times Emmanuel Cleaver could be caricatured in a skirt. Or a robe in the case of the cover mocking him as Jesus casting the money-changers out of the temple. I think it was that one, or a subsequent one, where I asked Scott, 'Is it a conscious decision that Cleaver can't be depicted in pants?' Scott pointed out, Cleaver was in pants in the first cover Scott did, actually, one I can't find at the moment (I hope it's not a casualty of water damage), with a Siamese Twin Cleaver, the coat and tie wearing politician pushing off from the 60s radical with the Afro and the Free Angela Davis poster.



There was also the ArchRival, which was K.C. Jones St. Louis. Rich envisioned an empire of local free tabloids roughly combining the Pitch and Riverfront Times business models with the content of National Review.



Last time I talked to Rich was a few days after the election. I asked him what he was up to, and he said the usual, researching, writing. 'Illegal immigration and the cheap labor it provides is good for the American economy and I can prove it,' he said.



I'll bet he could, too. He ended the call, and this would have been probably 9:00 p.m. or so, with 'I have to get back to work.' I gave him a hard time, said that he wasn't working, he was doing whatever he wanted to do, like always. But yeah, the only thing he really wanted to do was work.







It's impossible, really, to encapsulate Rich Nadler in a blog post. Impossibly long as this post is, it's only about the first 20% of a Rich Nadler cover story. It would be hard, actually, in a mutli-volume biography by Robert Cairo. The time in Pavlov's Dog would be Volume I, I guess.





I won't say he was like a father to me because if he was I probably couldn't have listened to him. But he was an influence of that magnitude in a lot of ways. Rich helped me develop my work ethic, my critical thinking, and generally helped me pull my head out of my ass. Five years working for him was better than college: I didn't make a lot of money but I learned a ton with no student loans.



It seems impossible Rich is gone. 60 used to sound old to me, but that would put Rich only a year or two older than I am now when he offered me that career opportunity. I guess I always figured if the Grim Reaper came for him, Rich would simply prove Mr. Death to be wrong on policy, write a paper about it and live a few more years.


*Yeah, I'm talking about Rush Limbaugh. He was entertaining for a few months back in 1990.