Craig Sandoe Vetter
June 3, 1942 - April 10, 2017
“If the journey is the reward, I feel overpaid”
There was a recent death in Chicago that is of interest to a number of people here in the Bay Area. Craig Vetter passed away quietly in bed in the early morning of Monday, April 10th. For Craig to pass quietly in his sleep will no doubt astound many of his friends for Craig was a constant motion machine and not only an erudite and quick witted man but a risk taker par extraordinaire.
Craig made his mark on the world of letters as a writer first for the Bellarmine College Prep paper (See the photo above where he is on assignment interviewing Willie Mays), and the USF Foghorn and Gaviota, and he went on from there to Sunset magazine and eventually as the first Staff Writer for Playboy magazine. At Playboy he often did the Playboy Interview, most notably the one with his friend Gonzo Journalist Hunter Thompson for the November 1974 edition of Playboy. If you threw that months magazine out you can still catch the interview and great photos of a young Dr. Thompson in Al Satterwhites book, “The Cozumel Diary” with Craig’s interview reprinted as well as a foreword by Craig.
When Hunter died Craig penned a unique eulogy to his warped friend in a Playboy article and on line book entitled “Surviving Hunter S Thompson: Remembering a 35 year Friendship”.
Craig was a bit of an enigma wrapped up in a riddle. Born Peter Simmons in June of 1942, Craig never knew his father Robert Simmons. His Dad was a Naval Officer on the Destroyer USS Longshaw which went aground off of Okinawa in March of 1945, and was subsequently sunk with heavy loss of life – including his Dad.
The telling of that event is in Craig’s manuscript “All my Love, Samples Later: My Mother, My Father and our Family that Almost Was. A Story of Life and War”. Craig and his younger sister Pam Vetter Bouton were adopted by Roger Vetter who married his Mom, Winifred Sandoe in Palo Alto in 1948. They dropped the name Peter as well as Simmons because they thought answering to Peter Vetter would leave him open to taunting at school.
These years were not exactly wrapped in warmth and happiness at home, and to add insult to injury Craig fell into the arms of the Catholic intellectual Mafia, the Jesuits. First at Bellarmine College Prep, Class of 1959, and then the University of San Francisco, class of 1966. Along the way he married Sharon Wann, had a daughter Rebecca, and a son Peter.
Craig was a marrying man, and after Sharon he was in and out of marriage and relationships, but he finally settled down about 25 years ago when he married Barbara Biederman and he bonded with her son Eric and daughter Rebecca.
Ever the iconoclast (albeit a well-educated and talented one) he embraced the counter culture and antiwar ethic of San Francisco in the ‘60’s while performing in plays and musicals and the USF Pipes acapella group – much to the delight of the local girls schools ladies. True to form he led revolts on USF student government and wrote for the school paper during strikes of the SF dailies. At one point he and some co-conspirators tried to abolish Student Government by a student plebiscite. At the 12th hour the Jesuits agreed to the election, but with one change – add a third choice, “Make significant changes”. The vacillating students went for it instead of yeah or nay on the future of student government. This earned the Jesuits his eternal animosity.
After USF he started down the writers road always making his biting criticisms palatable by his taste for humor and sarcasm, all couched in a very readable style. He tried his hand at speech writing for Senator Cranston at one time, but couldn’t get enough vitriol into what he wanted to say and so headed off to the magazines to write short essays on the characters and issues of the day. At Playboy he earned his adventure credentials by doing a series of dares – wing walking on a bi plane, climbing an ice fall and the like until he came to trying an Acapulco Cliff dive which frankly made him view his own mortality in a different light. His on line book “Adrenaline Soup, Six Tales on the Ragged Edge” recaps these hair raising exploits He backed off from that but joined the legion of 60’s and 70’s risk takers and wrote about first ascents of steep walls in Yosemite, epic treks, Everest ascents, slack wire dare devils, and for a Playboy article, a study of Bat Wing Flying, entitled “Icarus 2010, The Man Who Can Fly” about Dean Potter who found out he really couldn’t fly when he died in a bat wing descent in Yosemite in May 2015. Craig knew all of these unique personalities and admired their courage and tried to put them in a shining light. He covered their exploits in Outside (where for one year he was an editor), Esquire, National Geographic Adventure, Sports Illustrated, and others.
To get a feel for rough manual labor he worked in Wyoming with an oil drill crew on a rig, and turned that into a book “Striking it Rich”. After a bad fall off the top of the rig he earned the nickname “birdman.”
Meanwhile, Craig’s health was being compromised by Diabetes and Parkinsons and all the ailments of old age. He had the writers diet of cigarettes, coffee and scotch to keep the creative juices flowing. He never cared much for money but found that being sick needed a certain amount of regular income. He taught non fiction writing at Northwestern for a while. In the last two years of his life he wrote a nonfiction novella about a New Zealand saga entitled “Murder in the Rough and Tumble”. When he died in April the book was being polished and sent out to publishers – look for it in the fall. The New Zealand connection was a quest for more information about his mother’s family, the Sandoe’s of Ashburton, New Zealand.
The relationships Craig had with the women in his life, his friends and his family will be his legacy. His friends in Chicago, the Bay Area, Aspen, and Southern California are all grateful he came into their lives, and will toast his long journey and wish him smooth sailing – most especially his wife Barbara Biederman with whom he had a very serene, loving relationship that gave him great comfort..
If you want to tweak Craig one more time, and get a splenetic outpouring from him in the heavens, have a Catholic Mass said for him by a Jesuit – the entertainment value of that will be priceless. Contact Barbara at biederman.barbara@gmail.com about the memorial wake for Craig on June 3rd at a Chicago watering hole. Toast a life well lived on what would have been his 75th birthday.