Richard Harrington Raymond (November 30, 1923 – September 16, 2015), entrepreneur, publisher, and organizer, was a key figure in Northern California environmental and cultural developments. Some of his projects had a role in the Santa Clara Valley becoming a premier high-tech industrial district nicknamed the "Silicon Valley." After his employment as an economist and land-use planner in the Stanford Research Institute in the early to mid-1960s, Raymond supported numerous ventures through the Portola Institute, a non-profit organization that he founded and presided over. The Institute supported developments in digital tech and personal-computer applications, explored potentials of computers in educational contexts, and published the Whole Earth Catalog. Raymond later co-founded the POINT Foundation to financially support the organization of environment- and community-related projects. The Foundation's many undertakings included sending Bay Area environmentalists to the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, in Stockholm, as well as supporting the founding of the Trust for Public Land. POINT also published the CoEvolution Quarterly which, a decade later, was expanded in scope as the Whole Earth Review. The Briarpatch Network — a mentoring and mutual-aid system to support small-scale entrepreneurs — was a brainchild of Raymond's, launched in collaboration with a few of his friends. In the 1980s and later, he worked in planning in the Pacific Northwest and leadership training in California’s corporate world.
Early life and education Raymond was born in Newark, Ohio, in 1923. His father worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. While growing up, he moved with his parents through the Midwest. He graduated from Miami University and served in the U.S. Navy Air Corps during World War Two. Following the war, he earned an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Early career Generally known as Dick Raymond, while living in the Portland, Oregon area he gained experience in some start-up companies, which included his co-founding of Rayturn Machine, developer of the IrriGage irrigation-water testing device." Moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s, he worked in urban planning at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), in Menlo Park, California where his specialties included land use, recreational economics, and community development. At SRI, collaborating with strategic planner William S. Royce, one of Raymond's clients was the Century 21 Exposition (the 1962 Seattle World's Fair); Raymond convinced the organizers to plan buildings that would remain on the site as part of the city's heritage. While employed at SRI, among the colleagues he became close friends with was chemist Roger S. Stringham, who decades later became deeply involved with independent experimentation in 'low energy nuclear research' or LENR. During his years with SRI, Raymond worked as a consultant to the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. At Stanford, he met Stewart Brand a man in his mid twenties who was, at that time, an aspiring photographer and journalist. In 1963, Raymond was able to offer Brand a photography job on the reservation. Raymond's professional life began a venturesome new chapter when he committed to launching a non-profit company; it's beginning, under the name Portola Institute, coincided with his departure from SRI in 1966. But overlapping with the ensuing shift, he led research into recreational-economic opportunities, under the authorship and publishing umbrella Richard Raymond Associates; the results surfaced as book-length reports, concentrating on the San Mateo County coastside (published 1967) and the Monterey Area (published 1969).
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