LONG BEACH LAUNCHED JONATHAN LIVINGSTON SEAGULL AUTHOR RICHARD BACH
- LB908
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
By Clayton Trutor
The advice that most new writers receive is “write about what you know.” Long Beach’s Richard Bach did just that, turning his experiences in aviation into some of the most popular books ever written.
His best-known work, Jonathan Livingston Seagull (JLS), has sold more than 44 million copies and was the bestselling book of the 1970s.
JLS is the story of a bird that believed there was more to life than eating. He loved flying for the sake of flying and became the author of his own life. Bach’s metaphors of flight as freedom and desire for something more than the commonplace resonated with readers during the 1970s, the starting point for the modern self-help movement.
Bach was born in Illinois in 1936, and his family settled in Long Beach in 1944. Richard is the youngest of Roland and Ruth Shaw Bach’s three boys.
His father was the Long Beach chapter manager of the American Red Cross. His mother was the first woman elected to the Long Beach City Council. The Ruth Bach Public Library on North Bellflower Boulevard honors her legacy. The family lived near the intersection of Heather Road and Harvey Way in Lakewood Village.
Like his gull protagonist, Richard’s hobbies focused on the sea and the sky. He swam at Newport Beach. He belonged to a telescope club, made model airplanes, and did everything he could to be around real planes.
His mother’s campaign manager Paul Marcus got him hooked on aviation. Marcus owned a two-seat Globe Swift and allowed Richard to take the controls on his first flight at age 13. Richard spent much of his free time thereafter at area airfields, washing airplanes in exchange for flight instruction.
Writing became another passion during his time at Wilson High School. Bach came under the tutelage of John Gartner, his creative writing teacher. Gartner encouraged Bach to pursue his passions for writing and aviation. While in high school, Bach wrote a story about the city’s Excelsior Telescope Club, which he later sold to Southland Magazine, a local interest publication. From the beginning, most of Bach’s published work focused on flight.
He graduated from Wilson in 1954 and attended Long Beach State briefly before dropping out and joining the Air Force. Bach spent four years in uniform, learning to fly T-33s and F-86Fs before mustering out. While in the service, he married Bette Franks, whom he had met at Wilson High. Bette grew up in the Rose Park neighborhood.
Richard, Bette, and their growing family returned to Long Beach in 1958. They lived paycheck-to-paycheck, moving frequently as Richard bounced from job to job, working as a mail carrier, laborer in the Naval Shipyard, and magazine editor among the freelance writing gigs he could find. He wrote three moderately successful nonfiction books on aviation during the 1960s.
The couple ended up having six children. They divorced in 1970, shortly before the publication of JLS.
Not long after returning to Long Beach, Richard got his initial inspiration for JLS, writing down some early ideas in 1958 and setting them aside for eight years before finishing the manuscript. Bach befriended Ray Bradbury and joined a weekly writer’s workshop that the best-selling author held at his Los Angeles home. Bradbury was among the first people to see the JLS manuscript.
Finally, Bach found a home for JLS with Macmillan in 1970. JLS sold more than two million copies by Christmas 1972, making it the best-selling hardcover book in forty years. It sold another 10 million paperbacks in 1973. Bach’s follow-up, Illusions: the Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977), sold another 10 million copies.
Bach left Long Beach permanently during the 1990s and has resided in the Pacific Northwest for the last 25 years.
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