Entrepreneur, Insightful, and Provider
176 Comments After unsuccessfully attempting to sell an article he wrote about vegetarianism entitled “Being a Vegetarian Is Never Having to Say You’re Sorry – to a Cow”, in 1974 founder Paul put together a four-page hand-delivered newsletter and called it Vegetarian Times. He made 300 photocopies and from his first issue generated three subscriptions. He launched the newsletter from his apartment in Oak Park, Illinois.
In the 70s, the magazine increased in size from 4 pages to 16, to 24 and was published with runs of 1,000–2,000 copies. By 1977, after around number 19, Vegetarian Times was published bi-monthly and had a readership of 10,000. Overwhelmed with producing and distributing from his home, in the early 1980s Obis sold an 80% ownership share to a NY publisher Associated Business Publications (ABP) in exchange for assuming $6000 in debt and two bags of unopened mail and agreeing to continue the publication.
APB converted the magazine to a monthly publication schedule and increased advertising from nearly nothing to 15 to 20 pages per issue. The circulation grew eight-fold and the revenues grew twenty times to over $1 million. Despite the growth, the periodical continued to lose money. In 1985 ABP acquired a new publication and decided Vegetarian Times would not get the staff attention it needed to become profitable. During the time that ABP owned the magazine, Obis continued on as editor. Obis took the opportunity to buy back his magazine for $276,000 and by 1990 raised circulation to over 250,000 and gross revenues to $10 million. As of the late 1980s, there were no other head-to-head magazine competitors in the United States.
As of 2008, Vegetarian Times was the only epicurean magazine dedicated to vegetarian cooking and health. In addition to three to four feature articles, each issue may include the following regular departments:
- goods kitchen tools and cookware
- eco-beauty green cosmetics and beauty products
- ask the doc Q&A about medical issues
- astrology
- dating site
- healing foods investigation into foods with healing properties
- 30 minutes quick menu ideas
- veg lite healthy recipe collections
- technique cooking how-to advice
- gluten-free pantry ideas for gluten-free lifestyles
- planet home eco-friendly topics
- one on one interviews
The magazine featured health tips and recipes (often written by his wife, Mariclare), the magazine also ran profiles on meat shunning celebrities, renaming from Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Killer Kowalski.
Paul became the nation’s unofficial spokesman for vegetarians, regularly consulted when other newspapers wrote about the subject.
Paul was a real child of the 60’s. He wanted to change the world and make a difference. He definitely made an impact on Vegetarianism and changing the way society viewed health,animal ethics and in a notable way, celebrity.
As a Franciscan in 1979, I was seeking permission from my local community to compete in the International Culinary Olympics and was denied permission. So I decided to do something creative to promote vegan cuisine and decided to put on the first vegan Escoffier Dinner which is an elaborate 7 course classical gourmet dinner for 99 people (one seat held open for Escoffier). I pulled it off in October of 1979 at a posh country club in the Chicago metro area.
Paul had picked up on it and said that he wanted to do a cover story of me and the dinner. He did and put it on the front cover of the January 1980 Vegetarian Times Magazine. The dinner was great success and, keeping in mind that I was not allowed to compete in the Culinary Olympics, Paul forgot and stated that I was trying to compete in the feature story. In December 1979, due to the rift in my community over my being vegan and wanting to compete in the Culinary Olympics, my superior in St. Louis decided that I should find a job in the restaurant industry and leave monastery. In January a woman on the East Coast read the story and decided to contribute enough money for me to compete. I accepted the money and asked my superior in St. Louis if I could compete and he said yes. That is how I started my epic journey to as a vegan Olympian by your wonderful husband Paul doing a feature story on the Escoffier Dinner and then forgetting that I was refused permission to compete in the International Culinary Olympics.
Under Paul’s watch at Vegetarian Times Paul did several more stores about me in Vegetarian Times and I had a column in the magazine for a short stint.
It was the last day of the World Vegetarian Congress in Orono, Maine, August, 1975 … I was a staff writer for a local magazine in Kansas City and had done some freelancing for other publications. Knowing this, a soft-spoken young man approached me, saying that he’d started a magazine and asked if I’d lie to write for it. He said he paid 50 cents a word. That was the beginning of a professional association that would last almost twenty years. This also established my reputation as a journalist and as an expert on vegetarianism and, later, veganism. But Paul was more than an editor; he was a friend. He’d sometimes have long talks with my grandmother, who lived with my husband and me at that time. Our young friends thought that having her in our lives was odd and that she was extraneous, but not Paul. He listened to her and shared with her. He also navigated intersections that not many people approached in those days — vegetarianism and Catholicism, for instance. I’d left the church to be progressive and eclectic; he helped me make peace with it. He also modeled what it was to be a vegetarian entrepreneur. There weren’t many in those days. When he sold Vegetarian Times to a magazine consortium, all of us schooled in hippie philosophy were in shock. We’d never thought of “pure” vegetarians doing business with “the man,” but Paul opened that door. All the mega-successful vegetarian/vegan businesses that have followed are standing on the shoulders of Paul Obis and his courage, clarity, savvy, and spunk. Thank you, Paul, for all you did and for all you are. I personally owe you more than I can say.
To me Paul was a funny eccentric and kinda quirky in a good way. He had a mischievous little smile. I remember the story of him beginning VT in his small apartment and distributing the magazine by bike way back when clean eating was considered all out “hippie” and now it’s mainstream cool. He has been a man before his time.
Somehow he managed to make wise business decisions—I never figured out how he pulled that off! — and built the magazine into a thriving company. Back when I was at VT we had 2 or 3 folks in the art department, 1 in circulation, a couple in ad sales, a receptionist,
about 6 or 7 editors, and a few dozen freelancers. It was good times. It was family.
[Lucy Moll is a former Executive Editor of Vegetarian Times and worked with Paul from 1985 to about 1992.]
I have known Paul since the late 1970s and those seminal early days of Vegetarian Times, for which I had written many articles. I owe to Paul more than to anyone else the publication of my first book, Radical Vegetarianism. I advised Paul that a publisher expressed some interest in my book espousing veganism back when not even vegetarians knew the word or its tenets. And I told Paul that the publisher might contact him to ask him his opinion of the manuscript, which Paul had read.
Instead of waiting to hear from the publisher, Paul seized the initiative to write a glowing letter to the publisher praising the manuscript. The book indeed was accepted and was published in 1981. And yet, at the time, Paul was only a vegetarian, not a vegan.
I met Paul Obis at a Whole Health Expo in Boston, when he was hawking Vegetarian Times and selling off early (and I mean EARLY) copies of Vegetarian Times (which he had around, and which he had brought to Boston).
I was still a grad student at Harvard at the time, and I had made the decision by then to BE vegetarian, and his publication was a reinforcement.
Yeah – age does take its toll on the body. But 38 years later at age 70 I can still leg press 550 lbs and age makes us all look more distinguished if we age in a healthy manner. And in 2019 I am going to cook and present another dinner far superior of the 1980 Escoffier Dinner using pulses in every course of the dinner. Paul gave my work a public platform with Vegetarian times for which I am eternally grateful.
Funny, I was actually a VT (Vegetarian “Veggie” Times) magazine subscriber in high school! I am in awe of the man who built an empire while breaking down walls. He taught me a whole new world, Janeen; a world of ethics, compassion, life within, food knowledge, how it was made/processed (aka factory farming), etc.. With that, my love and compassion for animals is why I turned vegan…and never went back
When the first issue of Vegetarian Times appeared in 1974, the topic was so obscure that the founder, Paul Obis, felt compelled to specify in large print that it was “for non-meat eaters.”
Mr. Obis, then 23, hopped on his bicycle and delivered free copies of his four-page newsletter to health-food stores in the Chicago area. By the mid-1990s, it was a slick nationwide magazine with a circulation of several hundred thousand.
Featuring health tips and recipes, the magazine also ran profiles of meat-shunning celebrities, ranging from Madonna to Fred Rogers of TV’s “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” and wrestler Killer Kowalski. Mr. Obis became the nation’s unofficial spokesman for vegetarians, regularly consulted when newspapers wrote about the subject.
Then came a shock: Mr. Obis admitted in 1997 that he had gone back to eating meat. “There came a point when I decided to let go,” he told Newsday in 2000. “I just felt my own vegetarianism was something of a barrier between me and everybody else.”
Mr. Obis died June 25 of Lewy body dementia. He was 66.
Paul Luty Obis Jr. was born Aug. 13, 1951, and grew up in Melrose Park, a suburb of Chicago. His father owned pharmacies, and his mother helped run them. The younger Mr. Obis, coming of age in the late 1960s, had shoulder-length hair, leftist leanings and zero interest in joining the family business. After an animal-rights epiphany at Burger King, he abandoned a partially eaten hamburger and gave up meat.
While studying at the University of Illinois at Chicago, he had a kitchen job. One day, a can of beans fell off a shelf and clonked him on the head. He woke up in a hospital under the care of a male nurse—a job he didn’t know was open to men. That inspired him to pursue a nursing career.
While studying and working, he founded a short-lived political newsletter called Truth and wrote freelance articles for other papers. He couldn’t find anyone to publish an article he titled “Being a Vegetarian Is Never Having to Say You’re Sorry—to a Cow.”
Paul Obis was 23 when the first issue of Vegetarian Times appeared in 1974. This picture was taken in the early 1970s.
Paul Obis was 23 when the first issue of Vegetarian Times appeared in 1974. This picture was taken in the early 1970s. PHOTO: OBIS FAMILY
So Mr. Obis launched Vegetarian Times, whose first issue included articles on “Meat and Bacteria” and “Vegetarians and Astrology,” plus a recipe for mushroom loaf. It was distributed for free in the hope people would subscribe for $3 a year. After giving out 300 copies, he got back three subscriptions cards, he later told the Associated Press, adding: “That gave us an income of $9 after spending $17 to get the newsletter printed.”
The magazine eventually prospered, partly because he gave up the preachy tone and included more practical information, such as guides to vegetarian restaurants. “I’m not out to enforce my views on the world,” he told the Chicago Reader. “We’re not like Jehovah’s Witnesses going from door to door. We’re more like the Catholic Church. When you want us, we’re here.”
In answer to thr Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, Vegetarian Times offered a gym suit issue, featuring readers in exercise gear. The magazine also ran interviews with people including John Denver and Isaac Bashevis Singer.
In the 1980s, Mr. Obis persuaded Chicago columnist Mike Royko to try “ribs” made of wheat gluten. Mr. Royko likened the taste to “a sauce-covered eraser.” (The columnist added that he didn’t oppose all vegetables: “I occasionally eat vegetables—a tiny onion in a martini or a stalk of celery in a bloody mary. Keeps me fit.”)
In 1990, Mr. Obis sold the magazine to Cowles Media Co. for what he described as “a good sum.” He remained publisher under Cowles for a spell, then left to pursue other publishing projects, including a guide to gay and lesbian parenting, and returned to nursing in his mid-50s.
Mr. Obis and his first wife, Mariclare Barrett, raised six sons on a mostly vegetarian diet. One of the sons later recalled going to summer camp and eating wheat-gluten hot dogs sent by his mom while the other campers gorged on meat. As they grew older, Mr. Obis let his children choose their own diets. Most chose meat.
His own conversion came in the 1990s when his wife broke a leg and couldn’t cook. Friends began showing up with meaty meals for Mr. Obis and the boys. At first he resisted, but after a few days decided “the gracious thing to do was to say thank you and say grace and eat what I was given.”
Mr. Obis is survived by his six sons, a grandson and his second wife, Janeen Obis.
“He was a real child of the 1960s,” said Peter Bohan, a friend. “He wanted to change the world.” Mr. Bohan said Mr. Obis also was full of empathy and nursed his parents in old age.
After selling his magazine, Mr. Obis concluded that the cause of vegetarianism could live without him. “I’ve come to understand that it’s so much bigger than whatever I eat,” he told Newsday. “Vegetarianism has become part of the mainstream, and it’s not going to come or go no matter what I do.”
These Are Vegetarian Times
And the world’s leading meatless magazine, based in Oak Park, is starting to rake in the green stuff.
By Harold Henderson
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From California: “Attractive, ovo-lacto vegetarian female, 38, 5’7″ seeks tall, white male . . .”
From Louisiana: “It has been very hard going. . . . Southern cuisine is heavy in meats and everything seems to have ‘a touch’ of animal in it. . . . I am ridiculed at work, teased in restaurants and constantly questioned about my foods, my reasons, & my sanity.”
From upstate New York: “I really don’t care how they feel towards me, because I know I feel happier and better inside knowing that I’m not eating the flesh of another living being.”
From Florida: “If I had it all to do over, I would not marry a man who insisted on eating meat. . . . My neighbor’s elderly mother subscribes to your magazine and may be a vegetarian, but I’m not sure. She is very hard of hearing and doesn’t get around. Her magazine was delivered to us by mistake and I wrote down your address and then subscribed. She is the only possible vegetarian I know.”
From California: “A friend and I just completed a cross-country trip and found two items to be indispensable: our Rand McNally Road Atlas and The Essential Guide to Dining (July VT). Without the guide, we never would have found our way to several terrific restaurants in highly carnivorous and hostile areas of the country.”
These seekers are not addressing some guru in San Francisco or a clearinghouse in Boston. Their personal ads, letters, confidences, and questions come pouring into a second-floor office in downtown Oak Park. Here, in half a dozen bright, cluttered, but spartan rooms strung along a hallway above a greasy spoon and a pet store, is the home of Vegetarian Times, “The World’s Leading Magazine for Vegetarians.”
In return, these seekers get reassurance from Oak Park. It’s comforting to have a slick monthly (circulation 133,000) support your eating philosophy with stories about famous vegetarians, from Leonardo da Vinci to Killer Kowalski. And they get resources–the magazine’s ubiquitous and luscious-looking recipes, its news, its nutrition features, its dining guide, and even handy tips on coping in a carnivorous and hostile restaurant. “Eat a small portion of something hearty before you leave home,” advises associate publisher and executive editor Sally Hayhow. “Then order a good-sized salad. . . . In these times, you will probably remain inconspicuous; people will assume you are just dieting.”
Some vegetarians want to stay inconspicuous, some don’t. The desire to eat little or no meat doesn’t seem to go along with any other cultural or political predisposition. At least, that’s the conclusion of 36-year-old VT founder, publisher, and editor in chief Paul Barrett Obis Jr. “Personally, we all like to hang around people like us. My kids go to a Montessori school. I’m working in Paul Simon’s presidential campaign, and I listen to National Public Radio. But in fact I know that our readership is much more diverse than that. I’m sure we have some Republicans.
“We ran a handgun-control ad”–Mrs. James S. Brady’s plea for help against the NRA occupied all of page 56 in the October issue–“and about a dozen people wrote in and canceled their subscriptions. I was very surprised by that.
“Vegetarians are a very diverse group. They come from all economic and social groups; they can make less than $12,000 a year or more than $1 million. They can be from age 14 up into their 70s.”
They don’t come in droves from the Midwest, though. Vegetarian Times once interviewed National Geographic photographer and vegetarian Bob Madden, who “had traveled extensively,” wrote Obis, “throughout the world, taking photos of everything from South Pole icebergs to Nigerian grass huts and Tibetan yaks, and only rarely encountered a problem in finding suitable vegetarian meals. When asked where he had the greatest difficulty, he replied, ‘The Middle West.'” The magazine’s own dining guide lists more vegetarian restaurants in Seattle, Washington, than in the states of Illinois and Wisconsin put together.
So what is the country’s top (and almost only) vegetarian publication doing in Oak Park? In large part it’s here because its founder is a Chicagoan. But that accident, Obis believes, is one of the magazine’s strengths. “Fads start on the coasts. Midwesterners are more pragmatic and conservative–less likely to jump on the next hemline.”
In the same vein, Obis has described vegetarians as “very mainstream people.” Since I had always thought of “No meat, please” as a step out of the American mainstream, I asked what he meant.
“Oh, I suppose, they have kids and have a mortgage. Many different people constitute the mainstream.”
You mean, there are a lot of people in the mainstream that you might not have expected to be there?
“Yes. I never expected to be there.”
Paul Obis ate his last hamburger sometime during 1970 in a Burger King on Broadway. “It was during the Vietnam War,” he reminds me, “and everybody was saying things like, ‘Suppose they gave a war and nobody came,’ and ‘Don’t pay war taxes, because even that small amount can buy an M-16 or a round of ammunition.’
“So I was thinking about how the small things we do all add up into the big things. If one person throws out a piece of paper, it’s just a piece of paper on the ground, but when everybody does it, we have a litter problem. I was sitting there, eating, and I thought, ‘A lot of people in the world don’t eat meat. How many cows will I eat in my lifetime? I don’t have to contribute to this’–and I left without finishing that burger.”
This was a pretty big step at a time when (as Obis wrote recently) “most vegetarians were into eastern religions or were Seventh-Day Adventists.” Seventeen years ago, “antiwar literature was abundant, but vegetarian cookbooks were few and far between. Diet for a Small Planet, Laurel’s Kitchen, Moosewood Cookbook and the other vegetarian classics had not yet been published. Bill Shurtleff, author of The Book of Tofu (published in 1975) and other books, was discovering natural foods at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. . . . There were but a handful of natural food stores, most of which sold vitamin supplements and protein powders for weight lifters. There were no meatless ‘convenience foods’–whole-grain mixes, tofu entrees or veggie burger mixes. There was no such thing as ‘lite’ foods, except for sodium-free ‘dietetic’ items (the packaging made it look like a prescription was required). Soymilk was virtually unheard of and even yogurt was a rare item.”
Obis, a pharmacist’s son from conservative Melrose Park, was attending the University of Illinois at Chicago during the years when his eating habits turned around. He was finding his way from pharmacy (“in chemistry 101 the guy was talking about things I already knew from high school, and I didn’t understand them”) to philosophy (“until I realized that all the philosophy and social science majors I knew were driving cabs or flipping burgers”), and finally to nursing (a can of beans fell on his head at work, requiring four stitches, and “the guy at the emergency room who took care of me was a nurse”).
“I didn’t know any other vegetarians,” Obis recalls. “So I put up a few signs in health-food stores: ‘Vegetarians, lettuce unite.'” In spite of the signs, he met some fellow non-meat-eaters, who took to having potluck meals together regularly. In 1973, just before their turkey-free Thanksgiving, they sent out some press releases and snagged a big bite: Channel Seven trundled its cameras up the stairs to put the veggie eaters on the evening news. Obis wrote up a flier about the Thanksgiving publicity coup “just to show we were doing something. . . . I began to think that vegetarians should have a publication of their own. I couldn’t find one.”
Obis had time to do some writing in addition to his nursing, getting his work published in the Chicago Seed, Chicago Express, and the Triad Radio Guide. For the early Reader he parodied the pseudomysticism of Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan books and offered a first-person vignette in the life of a caffeine addict. But when he came up with a story close to his heart–“Being a Vegetarian Is Never Having to Say You’re Sorry–to a Cow”–neither the Reader nor the Express was interested.
“So I thought, ‘Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.'” He put together a four-page handout, called it Vegetarian Times, and–not owning a press–had 300 copies run off at a north-side quick-print shop. “It cost $17, and I got two subscription coupons back, $6. I thought that was kind of neat, and I was working as a nurse, I could afford to lose a little money on this.” At the time he had a less-than-onerous job in a first-aid trailer at Loyola Beach. The half-dozen or so people who would wander in on an average day rarely had a problem more serious than a piece of glass in the foot. The rest of the time Obis was free to write. The little “magazine” grew from 4 pages, to 16, to 24, and its circulation inched upward, too. “Stores in other cities began to carry it. We’d get a subscription from Boise, Idaho, and say, ‘Wow! That’s really something!'” Somehow, though, the original article whose rejection had sparked the whole project disappeared without ever finding its way into print.
VT appeared irregularly (subscriptions cost $5 for 12 issues), and it managed a tone that was both lighthearted and counter-cultural, even militant. Issue number 13 (December/January 1976) reported on a direct action undertaken by 25 University of Michigan students–probably not vegetarians, but perhaps fellow travelers. At lunchtime, they marched into a new McDonald’s in Ann Arbor and “swallowed a combination of mustard powder and water. This induced ‘vomiting in unison’ according to one of the participants. He went on to say, ‘We hope this gut-level action leads people to question the nature of McDonald’s and other corporations that foist plastic food on the public.'” The Vegetarian Times reporter concluded, “Despite the widespread support for their actions, the group was criticized by some people on the grounds that it caused unnecessary clean-up work for the employees.”
On a more pacific note, Ellen Sue Spivack wrote in issue 12 (October 1975), “The more I embodied vegetarianism, the more I realized that it was not merely diet. It became a spiritual/ethical/compassionate/political/health issue. In short, it became my lifestyle. I could no longer separate my vegetarianism from other aspects of my life.”
Neither could Paul Obis. “For three or four years it was a labor of love,” he says. The magazine was printed at Salsedo Press on the near west side. “I didn’t have a car. I’d ride my bike down from Rogers Park, give them the boards [from which the magazine would be printed], and pick up the copies a week or so later.
“I would actually take the boxes of magazines–an entire press run of 1,000 or 2,000 copies–one on the handlebars, one on the rear, and a big backpack for the rest.” He muscled them back to Rogers Park, where he would stay up all night mailing them out. The seemingly perpetual shortage of nurses enabled him to work for a nursing agency, “so I could call them up and set my own hours for when I wanted to work.”
But even love lightens labor for only so long. “After about number 19, around 1977, I was really about at the end of my rope.” VT was by then a 56-page bimonthly with 10,000 readers. But only two of those pages were advertising, and the magazine’s $5,000 debt was hard to repay on a nurse’s salary or with the magazine’s $50,000 annual gross income. “It was taking up a lot of my time and my girlfriend’s time. I thought, here I am, 25 years old. I should be spending time skiing or with my girlfriend in Madison. Here I was in the office all the time.”
Rather than send the product of his activist youth down the tubes, Obis sought out a New York publisher. Associated Business Publications had all of three employees when it took on VT, but, says Obis, “with an office in a Park Avenue skyscraper, it looked big-time to me.” The agreement was fairly simple: ABP took over the debts and agreed to continue publishing, and if things went well they might later start paying Obis a salary for continuing as editor. “We bought 80 percent of the magazine for assuming $6,000 in debt and two sacks of unopened mail,” recalls ABP president Bill Schnirring.
The magazine was published out of New York for eight years. (Obis and his wife, Mariclare Barrett Obis, now the magazine’s food editor, returned to the Chicago area after a year to be closer to family.) Obis not only got paid, he got an education in the business of publishing, to which he had paid little attention before. “I learned the importance of advertising. I learned that you never, ever, under any circumstances spend money unless you have to. It was ingrained in me over many years that you should barter for everything, money is dear, and free-lancers work for next to nothing. As the magazine grew, we learned and grew together. . . . I owe a lot to those guys.”
In eight years, ABP multiplied the magazine’s circulation eightfold and its gross revenues twenty times, to over $1 million, and brought it out monthly with 15 to 20 pages of advertising per issue. Vegetarian Times was growing like a squash vine in August, but its expenses grew even faster, and the magazine lost money in seven years out of eight, running a $60,000 deficit in 1985. Obis suspects that part of the problem was that some members of the New York staff didn’t understand their market.
“About 75 to 80 percent of the people working here [in Oak Park] are vegetarians. In New York, it was sort of a joke–‘Oh yeah, the vegetarians.’ There they were publishing NASA Tech Briefs and Convenience Store Merchandiser. Where did we fit in?” When the magazine did get staff attention, it wasn’t always favorable. Obis recalls asking ABP’s circulation director how often Vegetarian Times readers moved. “She’d say, ‘You know, Paul, it’s really disgusting. Your readers move around so much.’ And someone having trouble with their subscription would deal with a department managed by her. I think some of them thought that all vegetarians go barefoot and live in trailer courts.”
Meanwhile, the magazine’s contents were edging slowly into the mainstream. Issue number 26 (July/August 1978), in a much more spacious format, still included “Activist Notes,” compiled by the organization American Vegetarians–in which Nellie Shriver described the time she resisted arrest to save the life of a 25-year-old tree in her neighborhood. Another item urged readers, “Save your lawn, save the environment, don’t mow it. If your municipality has an ordinance which says you must mow your grass, don’t believe it. You have a constitutional right to keep your lawn as long as you’d like.”
Articles denouncing animal experimentation and the pesticide 2,4,5-T rubbed elbows with the indispensable recipes and a review of the bottled-water industry. (Such juxtapositions are less likely to be found today. Carol Flinders, an occasional contributor and author of Laurel’s Kitchen, accurately reflects the magazine’s philosophy: “It just doesn’t work to mix beautiful tofu quiches with pictures of mutilated cows.”) Among the seven full-page ads in that 26th issue was an esoteric back-page appeal on behalf of the “Biological Pacificism” of Japanese PhD Hisatoki Komaki. The ad urged, “Let us organize “SALT: The American Friends of HISATOKI KOMAKI for the Salvation of All Living Things’. YOUR ‘PLAN’ (BLUE PRINT) IS URGENTLY NEEDED. Send us a copy of your plan for the ‘Salvation of All Living Things’, with the carbon copy to Japan.”
By March 1983 (number 67), the paper was slick, Ben Kingsley (as Gandhi) was on the cover, and the 13 full-page ads included nothing odder than vitamin supplements for pets. “Activist Notes” had vanished (and the “Vegetarian Astrologer” had appeared), but many of the features still carried a sharp edge–a review of the Endangered Species Act, excerpts from some of Gandhi’s own writings, and a plainspoken interview with Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer:
“Vegetarianism for me is a protest. . . . protesting against everything which is not just: about the fact that there is so much sickness, so much death, so much cruelty. My vegetarianism is my religion, and it’s part of my protest against the conduct of the world. . . . As a matter of fact, if there would come a voice from God saying, ‘I’m against vegetarianism!’ I would say, ‘Well, I am for it!'”
The magazine’s future became an issue in 1985, when Schnirring got the chance to publish NASA Tech Briefs and Obis bought the rights to publish Soyfoods magazine himself. (“I thought I’d like to buy another publication and do it my way.”) Schnirring decided that in these circumstances VT wouldn’t get the attention it needed from ABP and that he would sell the perennial money loser. Obis considered the alternatives with some trepidation, and finally took the chance to buy back his baby. He arranged an affordable buy out, to be concluded that October, but at the last minute the publisher of Pest Control magazine appeared on the scene, offering more money and a bigger share of it as down payment. (“We have readers who freak out over killing cockroaches,” marvels Obis. “It seemed real incompatible to us.”) After a tension-packed last-minute showdown in which both would-be buyers arrived in New York bearing checks, ABP decided on Obis. The other purchaser, says Obis, did offer more cash, “but he was an unknown quantity,” and ABP needed to sell to someone it knew could keep the magazine afloat and make payments on it. “There was no question about my dedication to the magazine,” Obis says. “I’d lose everything if it went under.”
It looks as though ABP made a good choice: since buying the magazine back on January 6, 1986, Obis has raised circulation to 133,000 (he’d like to hit 200,000 by 1990), and the annual gross to $1.5 million. More to the point, by consolidating offices outside of high-rent New York, hiring a new advertising director, and renegotiating the printing contract, Obis has brought in enough new revenue to make regular payments to ABP and toward retiring the old printing debt, to give the staff raises (bringing them up to the industry standard), and to turn a profit.
The audience for this? Obis tells the trade publication Media Management Monographs, “The advertising we attract is aimed at people concerned about health, people who want to eat better, people interested in the welfare of animals and people dedicated to environmental issues. In that order. What I’d like to get is advertising from some of the big food companies–H.J. Heinz [in the November issue], Kellogg’s, Ocean Spray, Quaker Oats. Most vegetarians are very mainstream people. They’re interested in such products. . . . We’ve great potential in the baby boomers who are starting to get paunchy and are asking how to regain their lost youth.”
There are no hard figures as to just what this potential might be. Depending on the survey and the definition of a “vegetarian,” there may be as few as 2.5 million and as many as 6 million vegetarians in the United States. A more dependable sign of the times is that although total American meat consumption is up (from 205 pounds per person in 1982 to about 216 in 1987), the beef and pork portion of that total is down from 144 pounds in 1985 to 138 in 1987. Bill (The Book of Tofu) Shurtleff, an admirer of Obis and his magazine, sees this as part of a historic shift: “I think we’re in somewhat the same position today with respect to diet as we were to slavery in the mid-19th century. In about 20 years Americans swung from being basically pro-slavery to being basically antislavery. I think the same thing is happening with meat eating. Ten years ago people were proud they could put steak on the table three times a week. Now they’re proud of cutting back.”
Even in this favorable “lite” environment, Obis is reluctant to engage in evangelistic vegetarianism. He displays with rueful amusement the hard-sell propaganda from United Kingdom vegetarians: a gory but obviously posed “butcher” poster (“Murder Most Fowl”) and lapel buttons, one showing an unattractive haunch of meat on a plate surrounded by a red pool (“Keep Death off the Plates!”).
These days Obis prefers the carrot to the stick. “People don’t want to be preached to. I can hardly read Mother Jones.” VT’s approach is more service oriented; the magazine functions almost like an organization, an approach that meets the approval even of more muckraking publishers like Doug Moss of the Animals’ Agenda. “People call up all the time,” says Obis, “asking things like, ‘Where can I eat in Denver?’ One actor called up–he was about to go on tour and he’d lost his July issue [with the dining guide]. He had us Federal Express him another copy.”
The current issue (December 1987, number 124) features on the cover vegetarians Madonna and the late reggae artist Peter Tosh, along with “Appetizers With Pizzazz,” “25 Holiday Recipes,” “The Challenge Facing Older Vegetarians,” “Vegetouring Philadelphia,” “A Look Back at 1987,” and a pullout section on culinary herbs. This is not the editor in chief’s favorite issue; Obis wants more food and fewer celebrities on the cover, and more hard news inside. Once the magazine expands to a regular 80 pages in February, he’d like to interview leading presidential candidates on “issues of concern to vegetarians,” and follow up in 1989 with profiles of the new surgeon general and agriculture secretary. “We provide readers with recipes they can’t consistently get anywhere else,” he says, “but it shouldn’t all be cakes and cookies.”
“By definition,” wrote Obis in an editorial in the September issue, “a vegetarian is someone who does not eat meat.” Not everyone reads the dictionary, though: in 1985-86, the U.S. Department of Agriculture surveyed a sample of women aged 19 to 50, asking first, “Are you a vegetarian?” and following up with, “Do you avoid certain foods?” and a list to choose from. According to USDA nutrition analyst Kathryn Fleming, “A lot of the people who said they were vegetarians did not avoid red meat. Evidently some people think that ‘vegetarian’ means that you like vegetables.” VT staffers know of one person “who called herself a vegetarian because she trimmed the fat off her steak.”
But Obis is not trying to educate the truly ineducable; his editorial was directed to those who want to call themselves vegetarians even though they still eat fish and poultry. This, he declared flatly, is “folly.” It weakens the word, it weakens the concept, it corrupts the essence of vegetarianism: “Adopting a vegetarian diet means making a positive decision about life–about your life and the lives of other living creatures.
“Vegetarianism celebrates life. Ask any fish.”
Obis is rarely so doctrinaire, and he acknowledges that eating just fish and poultry is often the first step toward true meatlessness (it was in his case). In any event, he can’t afford to be doctrinaire. A large part of VT’s market is new vegetarians, near-vegetarians, and people just cutting back on meat. Even within the meatless confines, vegetarians again divide over whether they consume milk, eggs, or honey or use leather or other nonmeat animal products. (Those who don’t are called vegans.) Motive also divides them: some turn veggie for reasons of personal health, others because they think animals have a right not to be eaten. Health-oriented vegetarians may not care particularly about the fate of laboratory animals (and may be more tolerant of the occasional lapse into a baloney sandwich or ballpark hot dog); animal-rights advocates sometimes become “junk-food vegetarians” who won’t wear leather shoes but may sup on Cokes and cigarettes.
Vegetarian Times has resisted the natural pressure toward sectarianism, and in fact tries to educate each side of the movement about the other’s concerns. “I think one reason for our success has been that level of tolerance,” says Obis. “In some magazines, people say, ‘You shouldn’t drink milk’ or whatever, with a kind of hatred and self-righteousness.”
The trick is to draw the essential lines without casting aspersions. Vegetarian Times recipes may include eggs (never fish)–but the magazine’s dining guide indicates which restaurants offer strictly vegan options. And VT is surprisingly picky about the ads it runs: “As a food magazine,” writes Obis, “we will not run ads for organic meats, seafood and so forth; as a health magazine we do not accept advertising for fish oils, bone meal or glandular supplements; on grounds of reader protection we reject ads for get-rich-quick schemes and other ads simply because we don’t think they are appropriate. For example, we recently rejected an ad for organic tobacco cigarettes, and a classified ad from a couple seeking to adopt a white baby.” A few months back they turned down an ad for a wrinkle-removing cream–$50 per small jar (and the price was not specified in the ad)–that was said to have been tested on “injured animals.” (Obis and staff couldn’t help wondering where all the conveniently injured animals might have turned up.)
Such decisions are unusual in the magazine world and–at $2,000 per full page–are not made lightly. (The wrinkle-cream ad did run in one of VT’s advertising competitors, Let’s Live.) But even closer calls can arise. One advertiser, for instance, tried to sell rice to VT readers by displaying it on a platter with . . . pieces of chicken. “We told them it wouldn’t work with our readership,” says Obis, “and they sent a new ad. That could have cost us the account if they hadn’t been so understanding.”
Readers were not understanding when Prosteam bought half a page in the October issue to promote its steaming oven–and did so with a full-color picture of clams that had been steamed in their shells. VT had warned the company this was the wrong approach, but when the company persisted, Obis reasoned that they were selling ovens, not dead clams: if they wanted to do it in a less-than-effective manner that was OK. It wasn’t. “The dead clams in your otherwise life-promoting magazine stands [sic] out like a stain on a new dress,” wrote one of many readers accusing VT of selling out. The ad will not run again.
It may be relatively easy for Vegetarian Times to be picky about advertising because it has no head-to-head all-vegetarian competition (East West probably comes closest). As Obis says, “We are an extremely narrow-focus publication. It’s not just health foods, it’s vegetarianism. It’s not just fitness, it’s vegetarianism. It’s not just philosophy, it’s vegetarianism.” And in this narrowness there is strength. “If you want to reach people about herb teas, one of our readers probably buys more herb tea than everyone else on their block put together. Tofu? Maybe half the people in America don’t know what it is. Our readers use it three or four times a week.”
This watchfulness about acceptable ads is another sign that vegetarians don’t often see their choice as a casual one: it’s a matter of life and death. Health-minded vegetarians regularly credit the diet for their energy, and more: “We get calls all the time” at the Soyfoods Center in Lafayette, California, says Bill Shurtleff, “from people who say this [diet change] has literally saved their lives,” usually from heart disease or cancer. And “ethical” vegetarians–those for whom animal rights are a priority–take the lives of cows and clams at least as seriously as their own. There are other, subsidiary arguments for vegetarianism. One is that animals are (in Frances Moore Lappe’s phrase) “food factories in reverse,” giving out less protein than they’re fed, so it’s more efficient to eat the grain directly. Another is that the human teeth and digestive tract are better adapted to a (mostly) vegetable diet.
On the animal-rights and environmental side, the issues can become less clear, however, the more you think about them. Is it really more ethical to eat a salad, asks one VT staffer, that has been harvested with the aid of pesticides and peon labor somewhere in the third world, than to catch a fish from your own pond? Doesn’t cotton–a product supposedly acceptable even to vegans–in fact kill more creatures in its production than leather, because growing it requires enormous amounts of pesticides? And–if reverence for life is the basis for going veggie–why shouldn’t one be just as reverent of the life in a cabbage as in a cow?
Draw your own lines, responds Obis: “Your judgment won’t be by me.” The magazine refuses to be drawn into the more-vegetarian-than-thou game, with a tone that rarely hectors and is often humorous. December’s back-page feature, “Chew on This,” includes a cartoon of an outraged chicken stalking through the night, bloody ax held high–“poultrygeist” out to make stir-fry of the colonel. But the fun often takes a self-deprecating turn, too. Another monthly feature, “Sez Who?,” recently asked readers a series of yes-or-no questions in the familiar purifying vein:
“Do you consider yourself a vegetarian? Do you consume dairy products? Do you eat eggs? Do you ever eat fish?” Then the fine points: “Can a person who eats fish once a month be considered a vegetarian? Can a person who eats turkey once a year on Thanksgiving be considered a vegetarian? Do you consider consuming eggs and dairy products to be the same as eating meat?” And, finally, “Can a person still be considered a vegetarian if he bites his fingernails?” Some readers took the final question seriously, one asking in return, “But aren’t vegetarians less likely to bite their fingernails?”
More conspicuously, Berke Breathed drew a Bloom County cover for the November issue in which the usual suspects are gathered in a “Meat Free Zone,” munching on a Thanksgiving feast that appears to consist entirely of gone-to-seed white dandelion heads and salt. The cartoon plays to all the stereotypes about veggie dining–it’s bland, crunchy, monotonous–but according to Obis it drew far fewer reader complaints than the handgun-control ad.
With that light touch comes an ability to see human problems in a broader light than just carnivores versus herbivores. Also in last month’s issue, Obis chronicled the dilemma of “Alice,” who is both a vegetarian–“I won’t even eat Oreos because they’re made with lard”–and an executive in the animal-rights movement. The problem is Alice’s mother, who is kind to animals but no vegetarian. In fact, her favorite food is salami–and when Alice visits, she brings her mother a couple of pounds of the dreaded stuff.
Even five times a year, that’s enough of a deviation from vegetarian purity that some have accused Alice of hypocrisy and suggested that she should leave her job. She and Obis don’t agree with that view, however, arguing that her gifts may violate the letter of vegetarianism but that they’re in harmony with its spirit. “I’ve only got one mother and the salami is something she really enjoys,” she tells Obis.
“Philosophically I feel my vegetarianism encompasses a broader view–a view that says ‘I love you just the way you are.’ I suppose I could buy her flowers or something, but maybe by buying her salami I’m telling her that I am capable of putting her happiness above my philosophy. And really, I think this kind of love and understanding is what vegetarianism is really all about.”
Obis himself is so low-key that some of his nonmagazine associates don’t even know about his eating habits. “I know I used to be proud of being an iconoclast,” he says. “After a while–maybe it’s maturing or just getting tired–I don’t always want to answer the same questions for the hundredth time.
“I’m on the board of trustees at my kids’ school. The school has an auction every year, and a furrier was going to supply furs at cost so we could make a lot of money on them for the school. I said I didn’t think we should be involved in that. Another board member said, ‘Oh, the next thing you’ll be talking about how we shouldn’t be having meat either.’ And I said that, as a matter of fact, I don’t eat meat. I meet with these people twice a month and they don’t know.”
If that isn’t enough of a deviation from orthodoxy, Obis will not forbid his children to eat meat. “I don’t want my kid at 20 to say, ‘I’m a vegetarian because my father made me be one.'” In practice this doesn’t mean there’s meat on the table in the household, but if the family is out at the ballpark and the child wants a hot dog, he or she can have one. “I think they should make their own choices and be exposed to the options out there.” And most people above about age five just don’t think much about eating animals. (The Obises’ oldest, age nine, has so far followed in his parents’ footsteps, resolutely eschewing his school’s occasional chicken soup.)
These days, Obis’s magazine is no more overtly evangelistic than he is. “I’m not out to enforce my views on the world. We’re not like Jehovah’s Witnesses going from door to door. We’re more like the Catholic Church. When you want us, we’re here.
“Frankly, I think there are more important things in life than what we eat. Somewhere in the Bible it says that we’re defiled more by what comes out of our mouths than by what goes in.”
I was close to Paul in the 1980s when I moved to Chicago from London. We frequently went out — just the two of us. I was also often round at his and Clare’s home, though the younger boys probably don’t remember me. Paul, Peter (Bohan) and I went on a memorable trip to the Ozarks to “shoot the rapids” and we had more thrills than we had bargained for! This is one of several memories that I was going to recount to Nick after he wrote to me in the summer. The idea was to Skype in August, but the summer became unexpectedly unrelenting and we never spoke. Your email has prompted me to drop him a line.
Paul was a good friend. He was one of the warmest hearted people I have ever known.
I wish you the very best for the future.
Sometimes life calls on us to endure the unimaginable…and it’s true…that which does not kill us does make us stronger. One of the reasons why Vegetarian Times resonated so much with me is that I knew the way I was headed (at the time saw it I was somewhere over 223 lbs…I’d stopped weighing myself, so I’m not sure how much more I weighed…I just know it was more) with high blood pressure, high cholesterol, pre-diabetes, arthritis, gerd, edema, and who knows what else, that if I wanted to be around to be with his little girls, SOMETHING needed to change. And finally I felt I had found something that could help me change my health. In the first 3 months of making those dietary changes, all of those health issues had basically melted away, and over the course of a year, I lost 85 lbs. So this has been quite the journey! And now, with Dr Lome (the Cardiologist behind PBNM.org) I feel I have real tools to help get the word out about the health promoting, sometimes even life-saving, surely life-changing, power of plants!
Oh, goodness! Where? In what city/state? A fare-thee-well to a really sweet guy. I shall share my findings of Paul’s passing, from the perspective of the stars. Paul gave me the opportunity to create 24 monthly THE VEGETARIAN ASTROLOGER columns. I believe 1981-83 or thereabouts. Stay tuned and once again, bless his memory. Ted Zagar
Thank you for sharing. I love Vegetarian Times. It was the first health magazine I started reading even before I became vegetarian and vegan. I’m so sorry to hear about your husbands passing.
Vegans of LA.
I remember reading Vegetarian Times.
Heather Taylor
So sorry for your loss and such a wonderful giving person who changed so many.
I don’t think my dad entered Ribfest as a stunt: he honestly loved my mom’s seitan ribs and didn’t see why they couldn’t be entered alongside all the pork ribs. The story captures some of my favorite Paul Obis qualities: his intrepid spirit, common sense, and earnestness.
Nick Obis
Paul would come into the office and just said “Let’s call Paul McCartney today”. The office thought he was joking. But, he did!
Chris Schindler
My heartfelt condolences. His magazine kept me company as a vegan 19 yr old in Winnipeg, long before the internet. I knew no other people who thought like me but I found that community in the pages of VT.
I was an early subscriber to the Vegetarian Times before I became Vegan. Of course, we were of the generation that did not witness Dairy factories, only cows grazing in the fields free in the sun and air.
Janeen: Thank you so much for sharing this. Charles and I (VRG’s Co-Founders/Directors) did a number of projects with Paul in the 1980s. He was always very supportive of our work as an organization. He’ll be missed.
The Vegetarian Times December 1983 cover was of Michael Jackson! The entire magazine sold out in 1 hour!
Paul was in a funny mood one day in the office and phoned John Denver. Paul’s sister Johann was a real fan of John Denver. Paul asked John if he would have lunch with Johann – and he did.
Paul’s sister was so excited. What a great older brother!
Paul Obis, who based Vegetarian Instances journal, a cultural touchstone that helped demystify and popularize the observe of going meatless, has died at 66, in keeping with his spouse Janeen.
The Melrose Park native befriended one other well-known vegetarian, Fred “Mister” Rogers, who at one level was a significant investor within the journal, which for a few years was based mostly in Oak Park.
“He needed to make a distinction on this planet,” his spouse stated.
She stated Mr. Obis died of Lewy physique dementia at their dwelling in California, the place he’d lived the previous few years.
He began Vegetarian Instances in 1974 and noticed it develop from a number of pages he hand-delivered on his bicycle to be an influential journal with an estimated a whole bunch of 1000’s of readers. It featured interviews and canopy tales about many well-known practitioners of vegetarianism, together with Mr. Rogers, Michael Jackson, Annie Lennox, Linda McCartney, River Phoenix and Dr. Henry Heimlich, inventor of the Heimlich maneuver.
Along with recipes, it began carrying courting advertisements and took on the causes of natural farming and animal analysis.
My deepest condolences Janeen. He made the world a better place, and inspired thousands.
What a beautiful memorial. He sounds like an amazing and highly conscious human being. I am so grateful for his vision and selflessness. The world is a better place because he stepped into his purpose. Thank you for sharing this with us!
I’m sorry for your loss! I subscribed to the vegetarian times in Germany in the 80s and 90s until I immigrated to the US. It was a great helper esp for someone from Germany where Vegetarianism/Veganism was almost seen as a cult back in the day. Thanks for the link!
Paul Obis, the founder of #VegetarianTimes, died yesterday. He is–and will forever be–missed by so many…and me.
Way back in 1987, I read an article in the Chicago Reader that changed my life forever–“These Are Vegetarian Times: And the world’s leading meatless magazine, based in Oak Park, is starting to rake in the green stuff.”.
Wow! As a devout vegetarian and wanna-be magazine writer, I saw this headline as the miracle for which I had been waiting…Raking in the green? Yeah? Hiring more staff? Maybe!
I also was impressed by what I learned of #VegetarianTimes editor Paul Obis in the same article. He had very strong opinions that vegetarians do NOT eat animal flesh in any form. In the article, he was quoted as saying, “Adopting a vegetarian diet means making a positive decision about life–about your life and the lives of other living creatures. Vegetarianism celebrates life. Ask any fish.”
The article went on. “These days, Obis’s magazine is no more overtly evangelistic than he is. ‘I’m not out to enforce my views on the world. We’re not like Jehovah’s Witnesses going from door to door. We’re more like the Catholic Church. When you want us, we’re here. Frankly, I think there are more important things in life than what we eat. Somewhere in the Bible it says that we’re defiled more by what comes out of our mouths than by what goes in.'”
The next day, I bought a stamp and mailed (yes, this was the ’80s) a letter to Paul practically begging for a job on his editorial team. I showed up for the interview wearing a, well, very ’80s-looking interview uniform olive green skirt suit (complete with a little puffy tie bow thing around my neck). The woman who opened the door at the Oak Park, Illinois, office was wearing denim overalls…. Despite my interview ‘costume’ choice, I got a job!
I didn’t stay as long as I would have liked to at #VegetarianTimes, as the #PeaceCorps called, and I headed to the Central African Republic the following year. My #VegetarianTimes family told me that I would have a job waiting for me when I returned after two years….well, those two years have turned into 30.
I am forever grateful to Paul, his family, Debra Blake, and everyone I met during my time there. I learned a heck of a lot about compelling writing, the importance of a a good lede, and making people comfortable enough during interviews to open up and share the good stuff.
One of my favorite interviews was with Laurel Robertson of Laurel’s Kitchen–she and I stayed in touch while I was in the Peace Corps. I saved a letter from her in which she wrote: “Meditation is the tool that makes making changes–deep ones–possible and real.”
Most importantly, from Paul I learned that “what comes out of our mouths” is more important than what goes in. I also learned about generosity, compassionate leadership, and living genuinely. Thank you, Paul. You will be missed. Rest in peace, friend.
Sorry for your loss, and all who loved him and were greatly influenced by him.
I can’t really say it any better than Debra so I will be content to agree with her sentiments and simply express my personal gratitute for Paul as well. The years I spent working at VT with Paul and the gang was incredibly life-changing for me. Peace, peace, peace, my friend.
I am terribly sorry to hear of your loss. I read the vegetarian times religiously for many years. I was impressed that you wrote for them and adored the articles and recipes. When I met Mark in 1995 he started feeding me non vegetarian fare. I still use some of my favorite recipes gleaned from the pages of that wonderful magazine. Keeping you in my heart…
How cool! Yes, it was an amazing place to work; I always felt very fortunate that I had that opportunity.
Debra, I am so sorry for the loss of such a dear friend and colleague. I remember well your days at V.T. You really seemed to enjoy it, and now I understand why. This was a beautiful tribute that you wrote about this special man. I hope it gets picked up by the news media of some kind so that it may be shared with everyone. ❤️
Thank you for this. I am so sorry for your loss. I subscribed from the early 80s and years later almost was an editor there. I loved everything about it. It was such an influence on my life.
Lin Bauer I love Vegetarian Times! There was so little out there back in the day! Even store bought crackers and cookies were made with lard. I didn’t know Paul had passed.
Thanks. I’ll read it on my computer tomorrow. What a beautiful soul. Thanks for sharing. 🙏❤️
Sorry for your loss. VT was the only magazine I ever subscribed to. It was full of information and recipes that helped me become the healthy person I am today.
I grew up with Vegetarian Times! It was the only available resource for a very long time and helped me feel less alone. Sorry for your loss.
Yes. I knew Paul
And Mariclare when they started it. Pioneers with amazing gifts. So sad they are both gone.
I’m so sorry for your loss, I can’t even begin to imagine. 😞 Vegetarian Times was my first magazine subscription and was such a valuable resource to this community. I could never thank him enough for helping me find myself. ❤️
I miss the magazine. I gave subscriptions as gifts many, many times.
I started to read Vegetarian Times back in the 80’s when that was one of the only vegetarian magazines
Vegetarian Times changed my life. At 18 in 1980 Freshman in college, went to the bookstore and discovered Vegetarian Times Magazine. I said to myself “this is it, the answer to my health” If I love animals why eat them. Best decision, made me so happy . I am now 57.All because of Vegetarian Times.
I loved Vegetarian Times and was heartbroken when it stopped being mailed out in paper form. I’m sorry for your loss, but what an incredible legacy he has left behind.
I’m very sorry for your loss! I remember getting the Vegetarian Times in the mail when I was in high school. I really loved it.
I’m so sorry for your loss. I love the Vegetarian Times and miss seeing this in stores. At least once I went to Ebay and bought a dozen magazines from someone selling vintage Vegetarian Times magazines lol. That’s how much I need these magazines in my life. What an inspiring person!
Yes, I remember the Vegetarian Times! Thank you for sharing this and I’m sorry for you loss. x
I remember when Todd Rundgren was on the cover! 1978 I believe.
I remember getting that magazine in my teens. Good memories!!!
Very sorry for your loss. Big hugs to you.
Thank you for sharing this with me. My deepest, most sincere condolences.
So very sorry for your loss. I had no idea he was the innovator of that magazine! I still have many of the magazines I saved for the recipes. I used to be a subscriber and got it as gifts from many people prior to being vegan. God bless you and him. He is being rewarded for starting a revolution of kindness for many.
I went veg in 1989 for the love of animals, and there were so few resources or cookbooks available at that time. VT was my go-to source for recipes and interesting articles about my chosen lifestyle. Much gratitude to Paul for bringing wonderful info to so many of us over the years. May he rest in peace.
Sorry for your loss Janeen. VT was a valuable resource for me in the mid 1980s when I first became a vegetarian and was an oddity in my rural PA community.
Oh sooo sorry. My favorite magazine. i was sad when you could ONLY get it on line. I have a few years saved.
Thank you!!! We grew up with the Vegetarian Times always around to read!!!
Sorry to hear this.. I received the Veg Times mag for years..and have been a veg for over 48 years…may he rest in peace.. my condolences to you and to his family too..
I’m moved by your memories of your friend. So sad to lose such a friend. Baruch Dayan Ha’Emet.
I am so sorry for the loss of such a dear friend and colleague. I remember well your days at V.T. You really seemed to enjoy it, and now I understand why. This was a beautiful tribute that you wrote about this special man. I hope it gets picked up by the news media of some kind so that it may be shared with everyone. ❤️
How magnificent that you had all of those times and all of that good work with this extraordinary person.
Heartfelt condolences for your dear friend. You wrote an amazing tribute. Special people will never be forgotten.
I am terribly sorry to hear of your loss. I read the vegetarian times religiously for many years. I was impressed that you wrote for them and adored the articles and recipes. When I met Mark in 1995 he started feeding me non vegetarian fare. I still use some of my favorite recipes gleaned from the pages of that wonderful magazine. Keeping you in my heart…
How wonderful! I had a subscription for years!! I loved it ❤️
I loved that magazine…I still look for it from habit.
What a beautiful memorial.
I look for the magazine, too. Was very sad when it stopped. Thank you for sharing this.
I remember the publication and met him. Hope you are well.
My diet includes meat, but one can have a balanced diet without meat.
I was a subscriber for a long time! Thank you for this and hoping for comfort for your hurting heart 😢
Sorry for your loss. Grateful for his work. 💖
I am so sorry for your loss & thankful for his work!
I always excitedly awaited the new issue of Vegetarian Times! My condolences on the loss of your husband. He was a wonderful and inspiring human being.💜
I’m so sorry for your loss. Vegetarian Times was a big part of my life. Your husband was one in a million. Thank you for sharing him with the world. Big hugs.
So sorry for your loss! May his memory be a blessing and you find much comfort knowing he gave so much!
VT was a lifeline for so many. Rest in power, gentle Paul.
My mom has been a subscriber for as long as I’ve been alive. Thanks for being a big part of my childhood ❤️
Sorry for your loss, Vegetarian Times was the best! I still use those recipes and still have lots of old copies all around the bookshelf. What a icon he was. Thank you for sharing this obituary. And very sorry for your loss.
Vegetarian Times was such a blessing to me on my journey and many other. So sorry for your loss and know he did so much for so many.
Loved Vegetarian Times. I was always a subscriber. Sending condolences to you and your family.
Wow, thank you for sharing. Sorry for your loss and the loss to our community! 😢
OMG VT was THE Magazine I used to look forward to in the mail. Much love to you all !!
Thank you for sharing this interactive memorial. I had not known about Mr. Obis, and his magazine stood out in the lives of so many of us who grew up in the same era. We have Paul to thank for largely popularizing healthier eating with his publication. I am so sorry for your loss.
Hi Janeen, Thank you so much for reaching out, and we honour the contribution made by your husband to the Vegetarian and Vegan community. Going through his timeline painted a vivid picture of such a colourful life! We have forwarded this to our entire team beacause we love to stumble upon empathetic individuals who share the same vision and cause 🙂 We wish you all the very best in love and life, warm regards,
Team LSF!
Brian Klug told me that at one point they were travelling in their canoes and Brian, who shared a boat with Peter, was inept at rowing and kept tipping the boat over. After the third time Peter got angry and dad invited Brian to row with him. Pretty soon they were headed toward a waterfall: serious business. Brian did something, and the boat just flipped around, and he and dad headed towards the waterfall backwards. They hadn’t intended it, of course, but here they were, just helplessly drifting towards this fall, and dad was totally calm, just accepting the course, like, “there’s nothing we can do, so here we go,” and they tumbled through the falls and ended up fine, and another boat downstream applauded them, as though they had intended to go over the falls backwards all along.
Aw, I miss Paul. Xoxo
He changed history for vegetarians.
Beautifully written. Do I ever remember Paul Obis, he’s done so much for we vegi’s. I’m back from the time finding brown rice was like gold, even that dried out cardboard Roman meal bread.
I was so sad to hear he went back to a non-veg diet, I know it seemed like a diet that would never catch on and people were very cruel to us.
I bought the very first copy of Vegetarian Times he wrote, I read it over and over again.
Thank you for posting this.
Paul was more of a help to we vegetarians than he ever knew.
Amazing man.
Good man, good life, sad death… gone too soon!
This fine man lived a brave and interesting life. He made his own decision about returning to meat and should not be questioned. It should also be noted that he ate — with thanks and grace — what was brought to him by concerned friends; the Dalai Lama once offered the same advice about how to react when offered non-vegetarian food when visiting someone’s home: Make your own decision, but it is not wrong to accept a generous offer of food and eat it in the spirit of thanks.
When the first issue of Vegetarian Times appeared in 1974, the topic was so obscure that the founder, Paul Obis, felt compelled to specify in large print that it was “for non-meat eaters.”
Mr. Obis, then 23, hopped on his bicycle and delivered free copies of his four-page newsletter to health-food stores in the Chicago area. By the mid-1990s, it was a slick nationwide magazine with a circulation of several hundred thousand.
Featuring health tips and recipes, the magazine also ran profiles of meat-shunning celebrities, ranging from Madonna to Fred Rogers of TV’s “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” and wrestler Killer Kowalski. Mr. Obis became the nation’s unofficial spokesman for vegetarians, regularly consulted when newspapers wrote about the subject.
Then came a shock: Mr. Obis admitted in 1997 that he had gone back to eating meat. “There came a point when I decided to let go,” he told Newsday in 2000. “I just felt my own vegetarianism was something of a barrier between me and everybody else.”
Mr. Obis died June 25 of Lewy body dementia. He was 66.
Paul Luty Obis Jr. was born Aug. 13, 1951, and grew up in Melrose Park, a suburb of Chicago. His father owned pharmacies, and his mother helped run them. The younger Mr. Obis, coming of age in the late 1960s, had shoulder-length hair, leftist leanings and zero interest in joining the family business. After an animal-rights epiphany at Burger King, he abandoned a partially eaten hamburger and gave up meat.
While studying at the University of Illinois at Chicago, he had a kitchen job. One day, a can of beans fell off a shelf and clonked him on the head. He woke up in a hospital under the care of a male nurse—a job he didn’t know was open to men. That inspired him to pursue a nursing career.
While studying and working, he founded a short-lived political newsletter called Truth and wrote freelance articles for other papers. He couldn’t find anyone to publish an article he titled “Being a Vegetarian Is Never Having to Say You’re Sorry—to a Cow.”
Paul Obis was 23 when the first issue of Vegetarian Times appeared in 1974.
So Mr. Obis launched Vegetarian Times, whose first issue included articles on “Meat and Bacteria” and “Vegetarians and Astrology,” plus a recipe for mushroom loaf. It was distributed for free in the hope people would subscribe for $3 a year. After giving out 300 copies, he got back three subscriptions cards, he later told the Associated Press, adding: “That gave us an income of $9 after spending $17 to get the newsletter printed.”
The magazine eventually prospered, partly because he gave up the preachy tone and included more practical information, such as guides to vegetarian restaurants. “I’m not out to enforce my views on the world,” he told the Chicago Reader. “We’re not like Jehovah’s Witnesses going from door to door. We’re more like the Catholic Church. When you want us, we’re here.”
In answer to thr Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, Vegetarian Times offered a gym suit issue, featuring readers in exercise gear. The magazine also ran interviews with people including John Denver and Isaac Bashevis Singer.
In the 1980s, Mr. Obis persuaded Chicago columnist Mike Royko to try “ribs” made of wheat gluten. Mr. Royko likened the taste to “a sauce-covered eraser.” (The columnist added that he didn’t oppose all vegetables: “I occasionally eat vegetables—a tiny onion in a martini or a stalk of celery in a bloody mary. Keeps me fit.”)
In 1990, Mr. Obis sold the magazine to Cowles Media Co. for what he described as “a good sum.” He remained publisher under Cowles for a spell, then left to pursue other publishing projects, including a guide to gay and lesbian parenting, and returned to nursing in his mid-50s.
Mr. Obis and his first wife, Mariclare Barrett, raised six sons on a mostly vegetarian diet. One of the sons later recalled going to summer camp and eating wheat-gluten hot dogs sent by his mom while the other campers gorged on meat. As they grew older, Mr. Obis let his children choose their own diets. Most chose meat.
His own conversion came in the 1990s when his wife broke a leg and couldn’t cook. Friends began showing up with meaty meals for Mr. Obis and the boys. At first he resisted, but after a few days decided “the gracious thing to do was to say thank you and say grace and eat what I was given.”
Mr. Obis is survived by his six sons, a grandson and his second wife, Janeen Obis.
“He was a real child of the 1960s,” said Peter Bohan, a friend. “He wanted to change the world.” Mr. Bohan said Mr. Obis also was full of empathy and nursed his parents in old age.
After selling his magazine, Mr. Obis concluded that the cause of vegetarianism could live without him. “I’ve come to understand that it’s so much bigger than whatever I eat,” he told Newsday. “Vegetarianism has become part of the mainstream, and it’s not going to come or go no matter what I do.”
VT was a big deal to me growing up.
It was lovely to read through to learn more about Paul and his life and accomplishments. I of course am familiar with the Vegetarian Times Magazine but learned a lot more about the man behind it and I thank you for that.
To do what no other magazine does: Deliver simple, delicious food, plus expert health and lifestyle information, that’s exclusively vegetarian but wrapped in a fresh, stylish mainstream package that’s inviting to all. Because while vegetarians are a great, vital, passionate niche, their healthy way of eating and the earth-friendly values it inspires appeals to an increasingly large group of Americans. VT’s goal: To embrace both.
Subscriber’s to Vegetarian Times Magazine comments:
From California: “Attractive, ovo-lacto vegetarian female, 38, 5’7″ seeks tall, white male . . .”
From Louisiana: “It has been very hard going. . . . Southern cuisine is heavy in meats and everything seems to have ‘a touch’ of animal in it. . . . I am ridiculed at work, teased in restaurants and constantly questioned about my foods, my reasons, & my sanity.”
From upstate New York: “I really don’t care how they feel towards me, because I know I feel happier and better inside knowing that I’m not eating the flesh of another living being.”
From Florida: “If I had it all to do over, I would not marry a man who insisted on eating meat. . . . My neighbor’s elderly mother subscribes to your magazine and may be a vegetarian, but I’m not sure. She is very hard of hearing and doesn’t get around. Her magazine was delivered to us by mistake and I wrote down your address and then subscribed. She is the only possible vegetarian I know.”
From California: “A friend and I just completed a cross-country trip and found two items to be indispensable: our Rand McNally Road Atlas and The Essential Guide to Dining (July VT). Without the guide, we never would have found our way to several terrific restaurants in highly carnivorous and hostile areas of the country.”
These seekers are not addressing some guru in San Francisco or a clearinghouse in Boston. Their personal ads, letters, confidences, and questions come pouring into a second-floor office in downtown Oak Park. Here, in half a dozen bright, cluttered, but spartan rooms strung along a hallway above a greasy spoon and a pet store, is the home of Vegetarian Times, “The World’s Leading Magazine for Vegetarians.”
Yes, it was Paul Obis who brought Fred Rogers to our home one day and they revisited together again months later. Amazing experience!
Thank you for asking to join the Lewy Body Dementia group. I was aware of the great work you did, and that he’d founded the magazine, and inspired a movement. One I am proud to say that I am a firm adherent to. I’m absolutely delighted you’d want to join, to help raise awareness and to help your fellow caregivers. We need all the help we can get, and although my loved one died three years ago, I follow the same approach, and know that my activity online provides hope for those deep in the darkest parts, knowing that carers can survive what seems unbearable. I know you will bring the same positivity here. Thank you for joining, and I look forward to seeing your insights in the group. .
Strength to you!
This is truly a terrible disease. Thank you for sharing and helping to raise awareness.
Thank you so much, Janeen. I heard about Paul’s death from my Vegetarian Times friend Debra Blake. I was so saddened. I am a global public health writer and would love to pull an article together. All my condolences to you…
Vegetarianism may not be in the mainstream of American cuisine, but it’s finally escaped the backwaters a few devotees shared with cranks and food faddists.
As recently as the mid-1970s, a young freelance writer wasn’t able to peddle an article about vegetarianism even to Chicago’s alternative newspapers, which aimed its stories at the young, hip and radical.
″There’s no interest in this,″ Paul Obis Jr. said he was told.
The rejection resulted in what is now the nation’s most successful magazine devoted to substituting beans, tofu and sprouts for beef, pork and chicken.
Obis, who estimates that half his readers are non-vegetarians, does not promote any particular type of vegetarianism in the magazine.
Obis and a half dozen editors work at the magazine’s suburban Chicago office and handle the stories and recipes supplied by a regular stable of freelance writers.
The magazine includes articles on fitness, health, food and human interest. Frequently the cover features a well-known person, including in recent months children’s television host Fred Rogers, baseball manager Tony LaRussa, and Paul and Linda McCartney, vegetarians all.
The recipes, Obis said, are developed by longtime contributors, many of whom authored cookbooks.
Wow thats wonderful/ Thank you for doing that. He clearly was a remarkable man
Your magazine is always excellent, but the December issue was tops.
Thanks for the article on the origins of VT. Our gratitude to Paul Obis for his idealism, dedication, and persistence.
I look forward to more from Dr. John McDougall and to the times when recipes reflect the ever-increasing confirmation of Nathan Pritikin’s research: No kore than 10% – not 30% of calories should come from of any kind – vegetable, animal, saturated, monounsaturated, polyunsaturated.
Congratulations for achieving “Sweet Sixteen” and best wishes for all of the years to come.
It was the last day of the World Vegetarian Congress in Orono, Maine, August, 1975 . . . I was a staff writer for a local magazine in Kansas City and had done some freelancing for other publications. Knowing this, a soft-spoken young man approached me, saying that he’d started a magazine and asked if I’d lie to write for it. He said he paid 50 cents a word. That was the beginning of a professional association that would last almost twenty years. This also established my reputation as a journalist and as an expert on vegetarianism and, later, veganism. But Paul was more than an editor; he was a friend. He’d sometimes have long talks with my grandmother, who lived with my husband and me at that time. Our young friends thought that having her in our lives was odd and that she was extraneous, but not Paul. He listened to her and shared with her. He also navigated intersections that not many people approached in those days — vegetarianism and Catholicism, for instance. I’d left the church to be progressive and eclectic; he helped me make peace with it. He also modeled what it was to be a vegetarian entrepreneur. There weren’t many in those days. When he sold Vegetarian Times to a magazine consortium, all of us schooled in hippie philosophy were in shock. We’d never thought of “pure” vegetarians doing business with “the man,” but Paul opened that door. All the mega-successful vegetarian/vegan businesses that have followed are standing on the shoulders of Paul Obis and his courage, clarity, savvy, and spunk. Thank you, Paul, for all you did and for all you are. I personally owe you more than I can say.
My remembrance of Paul:
In the early 1980’s, there were very few medical doctors venturing into the unknown waters of vegetarian nutrition. Daily, I would question the scientific sanity of such a strategy, looking for medical validation of a meat-free diet, and, almost of equal importance, looking for fellow travelers upon this plant-based path who prized rationality as well as compassion. I found them both in Paul Obis, the crusading editor of Vegetarian Times – a publication whose very existence was a beacon of hope and sanity for us all in those early years. I was pleased to see that Paul prized scientific rigor when it came to vegetarian nutrition and would avidly publish relevant articles on the subject from physicians, dietitians and other health-professionals, which made me feel far less alone on a professional basis. On a larger scale, his pioneering work at VT was a validation of a saner, gentler way of living and became a symbol of the global community that was coalescing around vegetarian diets and the positive world-vision they promised. Paul and his brave publication were such a comfort to me as I took those first tenuous steps into the plant-only world in 1980; I’ll always be grateful for his example, his vision and his service to us all – and most importantly, for his friendship to me through the years.
Also I heard that he had lunch with Paul and Linda McCartney here in Oak Park at the Vegetarian restaurant that was on Lake St. Any truth to that rumor?
Yes, that is indeed true that Paul had lunch with Linda and Paul McCartney.
A wonderful foot print to leave humanity with!
I read an article in vegetarian times it was around January or February 2000. I was preparing to go in for surgery for cancer and there was an article on how to prepare for surgery and to heal quickly. I did everything they said in the article and it worked! My doctor was amazed at how quickly I was able to go home and no chemo, no radiation!
I love this because it works in several ways. For those of us who do eat meat, I also know that cutting my meat consumption a little each week adds up. Thanks for sharing.
It’s my 5th day on my vegeterian diet I know it might not be as much as everyone but I can really tell the diet is completely worth it and definetely very beneficial to my overall health…
Thirty-two plus years ago I became a vegetarian. My mom bought a Vegetarian Times subscription for me (I was the household cook!). It was a life saver!!! Thank you, Vegetarian Times.
vegetarian times wrote an article about us when we started Betsy’s Tempeh in Michigan way back in the mid 80’s.
“Our vegetarian pioneer. Remembering Mr Orbis”
Paul has done so much fir all we vegi’s.
No “preaching” necessary when surrounded by similar others or those who are willing.
We met Fred Rogers through Paul Obis. More on that. And for a few of our early years here at Wednesday Journal we shared a giant, expensive CompuGraphic typesetting machine with Vegetarian Times.
That was the magazine Paul and Clare, his first wife, started in their apartment on Austin Boulevard in Oak Park way back in 1974. Magazine isn’t quite right. Paul described it as a photocopied newsletter that he’d deliver to a small number of subscribers.
That changed, though, as Vegetarian Times rather quickly became the voice of vegetarians across America, reflecting in the perfect moment the intersection of health, animal ethics, and, in a notable way, celebrity.
Well Paul died a week ago in California. He was just 66. His wife Janeen called with the not unexpected news. Paul had Lewy body dementia, a not uncommon but certainly very hard illness.
Janeen called her husband a provider and a force for humanity. She said he was forward thinking, creative and intellectually energetic. He was, she said, brilliant, eccentric, a sweet gentle soul and a humanitarian.
Those are apt words to describe the man I knew so many years ago. A conversation with Paul would go on for a long while and in many unexpected directions. But it was always interesting.
Paul and Clare sold the magazine at least a couple of times. After the first sale, they stayed on as publisher and food editor respectively. That kept them across the hall in our longtime offices on Oak Park Avenue. If I remember this right, Paul got the chance to buy back his magazine and he took it. But this time he brought along a minority investor, Fred Rogers, not surprisingly a vegetarian.
Mister Rogers was a silent but not uninterested partner and that led to his visit to Oak Park about 1987. Clare came across to tell us that Fred Rogers would be in the building that afternoon and that any of us with small kids who wanted to meet him should gather up after school.
We, of course, brought our young son Ben. By 3:30, there were a good number of thrilled parents and amazed adults in the hall. And as the current crop of filmmakers and documentary producers have found, Fred Rogers was as kind and caring as a man can be. For something so unsurprising, he was a revelation.
Paul and Clare and Fred sold the magazine yet again, this time for a considerable sum. Paul was out of publishing though I never had a conversation with him when he didn’t have a plan to get back in the game.
Paul and Clare had six sons: Nick (Jess), Quentin (Maryam), Paul W., Kevin (Beth), Timothy (Anastasia) and Gregory.
Clare Barrett — she took back her family name — died in 2015. Also young at 64. Clare wrote a food column for the Journal for many years, was the winner and possibly only entrant in our vegetarian rib-tasting contest. Charlie Robinson was gracious as our judge.
Here’s another story as I remember Paul telling it — and another obit for Paul tells a different version. Clare, always up for fun, was riding a scooter near their Forest Avenue home, wiped out, and really did damage, as in gruesome, to her leg. Their church community turned out big with endless meals, many of them animal-based. Paul said it felt ungracious not to eat the food. So he did and concluded after decades of tofu and veggies “that I really liked meat.”
I’ve followed Oaul when I became vegetarian many years ago
Our vegi pioneer. Very grateful for Paul.
Vegetarians were few and far between in the early 1970’s and excluding from a diet was viewed in a freakish light. There was no internet or social media for folks to connect.
I totally agree. I only started my vegan journey a year or so ago. Giving up meat & dairy and moving to the country has given me a whole new perspective on many things; environmental & ethical issues, wildlife, nature, the planet etc.
When I became a vegetarian nearly 2 decades ago Vegetarian Times was a lifesaver to me. I knew no other vegetarians and got no support from my family. , so it was the highlight of my month to get my copy in the mail.
I received my first copy of Vegetarian Times and I am thrilled with it. Tears of joy came to my eyes while reading itbecaause now I don’t have to be so alone.
Paul Obis’s timing was fortuitous. In the late 60’s and early 70’s, American youth were challenging traditional forms of authority. Interest in vegetarianism played n important role in the countercultural movement, reinforced by numerous spiritual, environmental, and ethical concerns. Young people drawn to Zen Buddhism and yoga adopted a meatless diet as part of their spiritual path.
Vegetarian Times was essential reding for vegetarians because meat companies were very critical of the vegetarian movement. It provided articles documenting the many arguments against eating meat – environmental, agricultural, animal right and nutritional. – – and connecting the misconceptions spread by the meat industry and uniformed health professionals. It also published dining guides, recipes, and advice on cooking and traveling as a vegetarian – it quickly became the must-read of a growing movement.
I believe my Mom bought the first issue. We made a lot of wholesome delicious foods from the magazines. Paul has done so much for us.
t’s wonderful to hear that he was such a blessing to others.
Paul was a genius.
So true… I really think I was the only one in the state of Iowa in the 60s/70s. It was so bad there, my own mother called me a “disgrace to the family” for refusing to eat the animals they raised.
It was an ugly place to be a vegan.
“Someone else probably has the same ideas so
a) get started,
b) plan to do it better.”
Paul Obis
Many years ago, served you food at N.E.W. Cuisine, Chicago with Paul Obis, creator of Vegetarian Times.
Former editor at Veg Times here: I’ll help, in the spirit of Paul Obis!
Kay Stepkin passed your email along. I am so sorry to hear that Paul has this awful disease and that you are having to be there to witness someone who has been such a force in this world slowly leave it.
I met Paul in 1975 and wrote for Vegetarian Times for the next 15 years. I lived in the Chicago area for 10 of those years and was pretty close to Paul. After my first husband died in 1987, having a continuing freelance gig with the magazine kept me going. Paul was very instrumental in my career and I will always be grateful.
Where are you in California? It’s good to be somewhere beautiful when you’re dealing with something so very difficult.
How wonderful that you want to honor Paul with a section of the museum! That is really perfect.
Have you been in touch with Freya Dinshah at The American Vegan Society, John Pierre from Chicago, and Sharon and Brian Graff of the North
American Vegetarian Society (their organization inducted Paul into the Vegetarian Hall of Fame), and also Alex Hershaft of the Farm Animal Rights Movement? They all knew Paul well back in the day. With your permission, I will pass your email along to them.
I trust you have lots of help and support around you. Caregiving is the hardest thing. Can Paul recognize people and understand what is being said? If he can, please tell him that my whole life changed that day at the University of Maine when a quiet male nurse from Chicago asked if I wanted to write for his new magazine.
Wishing you strength and courage, although it sounds as if you have plenty —
Victoria Moran
—
Victoria Moran
Website: Main Street Vegan
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One of Paul’s interns at Vegetarian Times Magazine wanted an internship. Paul said yes if he could pay for her childcare and train fare every day that she worked there. I was so impressed that a boss would offer that because that’s not how the real corporate world works.”Goodness is about character – integrity, honesty, kindness, generosity, moral courage, and the like. More than anything else, it is about how we treat other people.” #paulobis #vegetariantimes #lewybodydementia. http://www.paulobis.com
Our group is 1 of countless groups people & animals he helped. He died in June. God bless you Paul for all you did & will continue to do. Our hearts go out to Janeen, his sons and their wives, all his loved ones. Family requests no flowers.. contributions to the Vegetarian Museum
Paul Obis a man of extraordinary charisma, generosity, energy & compassion,
founder with omniloving spirit & brilliant artist Mariclaire Barret of Vegetarian Times, father of 6 sons, was an apostle of positive thought proven by countless actions including starting VT at age 25.
A great man who made the world a healthier place. You are kind to remind of his legacy, Janeen.
Paul had a speeding ticket and had to go to court. Next to was a fellow speeder and his wife kept nagging at him – after Paul’s appearance in front of the judge, Paul walked over to the man and took out his wallet and gave the man a $100.00 bill. My heart melted.
I heard a story today about my wonderful, creative and forward thinking husband. He took his staff of Vegetarian Times Magazine to a nude vegetarian commune to enhance the articles for the magazine – of course in the early 70’s. . The people at the commune had names like sun or moon – they called Paul – earth. They wanted to take photos of them nude for the magazine so Paul did but when he published the picture – someone airbrushed clothes on them for publication. The staff apparently really learned a great deal from this commune to share wi5h their readers.
The “Love Story” reference (and the beloved lapels featured in the photo) definitely locate Paul’s pioneering green journalism in the “we can do anything” seventies. Very, very cool—and a forerunner of today’s highly organized and actionable eco-enlightenment.
He looks like a very kind soul !
Thank you for sharing this. I clicked the link and read more about Paul. What a wonderful human he was. What a legacy he left that, one that continues to grow and nourish countless people & animals❤️
My husband and I first went vegetarian while living in Germany in 1993. We subscribed to vegetarian times for years- I remember when I was pregnant with our oldest in 1995- one issue had a recipe for vegetarian pot pie. It’s been the highlight of our thanksgiving meal ever since!! I’ve altered it over the years as we’ve now been vegan since early 2001 – but it remains at the heart of our family’s meal.
The truth is that Paul made America aware of the Vegetarian Diet . I had to invent meals or talk to people in ethnic stores and ask them many questions about unusual veggies and grains. I still have my first cookbooks.
It was lovely to read through to learn more about Paul and his life and accomplishments. I of course am familiar with the Vegetarian Times Magazine but learned a lot more about the man behind it and I thank you for that.
My Memory of Mr. Rogers
Every Eater brings a fond memory of my friend late Fred Rogers (of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood) for I gave my one and only painted “goose” egg called “Heart Egg” to him when he visited us for the first time in 1986. I have talked about this story a little bit on Facebook before. Tomorrow is Easter Sunday I decided to tell my true story of Mr. Rogers and me for I want to my kids Joey Shurtleff and Laurelle L. Shurtleff(and future grandkids) to know how I got to know him (when I passed away some day).
Many intertwined hearts were painted all over this goose egg. I made this in 1982 and had an exhibition of my painted eggs at Lafayette Library.
In 1986 Fred (Mr. Rogers) visited us at our home in Lafayette with our old friend Paul Obis (Publisher of The Vegetarian Times, then) for Mr. Rogers liked our work with Tofu and read our book and wanted to meet us. This meeting of Mr. Rogers was sort of a miracle when I thought of it later years and made me chuckle for he was probably 1 million times famous than us! lol
Bill and I bought our first home in 1983 and also bought our first PC in that year. But we didn’t own nor watch TV and didn’t subscribed to any newspaper nor magazines then. By the way Bill (my-ex) is a well-educated Stanford man but we listened to the radio then. We wrote all of our popular books using old-fashioned IBM typewriter! Year 1983 was 12 years before Google was launched (1998). A long time before internet search engine was available… no iPhone, no YouTube, no Facebook etc! A stone age, my young Facebook friends!
When Fred Rogers visited I was 36 and into exercising (Jazzercise and running). One evening Bill got a phone call from our friend Paul Obis telling us he and Mr. Rogers wanted to visit us. So Bill invited them for lunch! Usually I spend more time to prepare my meal for our guests. It was decided the night before so I had to come up with a special lunch to serve them. I had to use my creative and resourceful brain! 😉
On the day when Mr. Rogers visited us he was wearing a formal black suits, white shirt, and a black bowtie. Bill and I were in our casual clothes. As soon as our short introductions of each other Mr. Rogers asked me if I had a throw blanket. So I handed him my white cotton throw. He took off his formal black jacket and covered himself with my throw. We sat down in the living room and started to talk. By the way he looked very comfortable and to my surprise he put his feet up on our homemade table (I made this low large table using a quality solid flat surfaced wooden door, trimmed using 1 x 4, stained, and varnished it) in the living room. His unexpected actions made me more comfortable and relaxed.
Since I was ignorant and didn’t know anything about him… Really nothing of nothing! So I asked Mr. Rogers what kind of work he was doing. He smiled before he started to respond… He loved the fact that Bill and I didn’t own TV and didn’t know about him at all! He told me that it rarely happened to him when he met people (most likely “never happened” except us… lol). While Mr. Rogers was talking I observed his expressions and body language. I tend to observe people with visual contact more than what they say. My impression of him at first meeting was his genuineness, humbleness, empathy, respectfulness, and sweetness! He really was a lovely person. I was a shy Japanese woman of 36 then and I am an introvert. He managed to make me feel relaxed, at ease, and completely open.
Mr. Rogers, Paul and Bill and I were all lacto-ovo vegetarians (I am no longer Vegetarian currently). So I made a vegetarian dish using hardboiled egg inside potato croquet, split into halves, and served with some kind of creamy sauce (I don’t remember details now) accompanied with fresh salad and some whole grain bread. I used to make whole grain bread at home including homemade sourdough. I served my lunch in our patio. Believe it or not I sat down at the table but I didn’t eat my lunch with them. I explained that I was on my own special diet and exercise program and on that afternoon I was going to run and I was going to eat after my running. He was kind and complimented my effort to keep myself healthy. I am sure most people found my choice a bit odd (a slightly rude to some people) and might have teased me by saying “Come on! Join us!” However Mr. Rogers didn’t do that. Instead he complimented me being who I was and even said that was why I was in good shape and healthy.
After our lunch Bill wanted to tour of our home office upstairs and continued to talk to Paul about his project in our upstairs office room. So Mr. Rogers came downstairs and joined me there. Normally I didn’t like to entertain people who speak only English… especially older male guest, a little bit intimidating. But he made me so comfortable. I toured him our home showing my artwork on the walls. He really liked my color pencil drawing of a little angel girl holding a small bird on the kitchen wall. He smiled and told me that he could understand why Bill loved me. He asked about my framed quote of Emmet Fox (Quaker) with a picture of a beautiful old kitchen of Quaker home. I told him that I was educated in private Quaker Girls’ School in Tokyo, Japan for 6 years. I found the quote and the photo separately and really liked them both. So I framed them together. He loved Emmet Fox quote so much that he asked me if he could use my IBM typewriter to type this quote. I gave him a blank paper, and he typed the quote (see below) on my desk and took back home this quote with him.
“There is no difficulty that love will not conquer
No disease that love will not heal…
It makes no difference
How deeply seated may be the trouble
How helpless the outlook
How muddled the tangle
How great the mistake
A sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all
If you only could love enough
You would be the happiest and most powerful being in the world.”
By Emmet Fox (Quaker)
You might not know this but Mr. Rogers was a Presbyterian minister. He was very open-minded and inclusive regarding religions of the world. Right after his first visit he sent us a nice letter of thanks with this book (see picture) Desert Wisdom – Sayings From the Desert Fathers by Yushi Nomura. He explained that he was reading this book in his hotel room after meeting us and thinking of Bill and me. Bill was a Zen monk and I was a Quaker. This is a lovely book and I enjoy reading it from time to time. Mostly great short quotes with simple brush strokes of Zen paintings. This book really expresses my view of spirituality, humility and what is important. I know why Mr. Rogers liked this book. So do I.
I continued to show him more of my artwork in my art room (my bedroom) including my painted eggs. He was so interested in all. I really liked him a lot so I gave him my one and only painted “goose” egg (in the picture) explaining to him that it was a heart egg and a symbol of love. I told him that I wanted him to have it for he was so loving. He was so grateful and happy especially I didn’t do it because he was TV Mr. Rogers. I just treated him naturally following my heart. His loving and humble presence impressed me so much that prompted me to give the egg. In his reply note of our season’s greeting card he said “P.S. I see the beautiful colored egg you gave me every morning (It’s in our hallway) and I think of you. F.”
He came to see us again in 1986 (the same year) but then I was 7 month pregnant with my one and only son Joey. I served Mr. Rogers and Paul an early dinner for Bill and I had to go to our Natural Childbirth Class stating at 7 pm. I made Tofu Lasagna on that day. I noticed that Mr. Rogers ate very slowly while chewing well and didn’t leave anything on his plate! He was a gracious guest! However I made him to rush to finish his dinner for I didn’t want to miss any information at the class! (I am not joking… I was an ignorant idiot! I wish I could do it differently!) So we arrived just a few minutes late for attending our natural childbirth class and told our class attendants of five couples what happened. When they heard the name Mr. Rogers, they were so mad at us for not bringing him to introduce to the class! By the way Mr. Rogers thought we were going to teach our class that night… No I was just a nervous pregnant woman worrying about being late!
In 1990 (4 years after Mr. Rogers visiting in 1986) my US dad Lawton gave me a TV for he thought it would be a good thing to have for his grandson (with a huge objections from my ex for he thought TV will somehow contaminate our lives!) So finally I saw our friend Fred Rogers (Mr. Rogers) on TV! I was very surprised to find out that he was not different in person than you see on TV! He was so sincere and kind as ever! Bill and I were invited to visit him but we never did.
I sent him our season’s greeting card each year even after our divorce. Sometime I sent him a letter if something special happened (trip to Japan, Joey’s birth, my divorce, my art business) and he always replied to me. Yesterday I counted his letters that I treasure. There were 28 total during 15 years of knowing him until he passed away. I lost one kindred spirit.
By the way goose eggs’ surfaces are very different from Chicken eggs, less smooth and porous. I didn’t like to paint on it so this was the only goose egg I have ever painted after all. It was born to be with this lovely kind man!
I am so looking forward to seeing his upcoming documentary movie soon.
Film Star River Phoenix says being a vegetarian is the most important role he’ll ever play.
In Japan they adore him. The teenagers call out to him when he comes to promote one of his films: “Rio! Rio!” they chant. It is their nickname for him. They think he’s the next James Dean. And boy, does he have the looks for it. But smoldering looks and shirt-off-the-shoulder poses aren’t what River Phoenix is all about, and he gets a little embarrassed when he comes off that way. The 17-year-old’s dark clothes aren’t meant to impress. His canvas and rubber high-top boots are unexceptional. Still, it’s hard sometimes to resist just gazing at his blonde-streaked pretty head against the blue Florida sky, or wondering how he lucked into those dark eyebrows.
But he calls you back to what he’s saying, to his simple intensity. “Vegetarianism is a link to perfection and peace,” he’s saying now, and his voice is soft but strong, very sincere. “But it’s a small link. There are lots of other issues: apartheid , vivisection, political prisoners, the arms race. There’s so much going on in this world today, so much ignorance among people. That’s not to say I’m not standing amongst everybody. But the point is, what can we do now? That’s the thing about vegetarianism; it’s an individual’s decision and it’s something you have control over. How many things do we really have control over?”
River Phoenix is one of the lucky ones; he’s an actor making a successful go of it in a tough business. Years ago, he was one of the brothers in the television series Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Later, he got his big break as a spunky but thoughtful kid in Stand by Me, and then as the elder son in The Mosquito Coast with Harrison Ford. He’s in demand now: Producers send him scripts, and this spring he’s scheduled to show up in three new movies: Jimmy Reardon, Little Nikita with Sidney poitier, and Running on Empty. River Phoenix. He’s a big name in Hollywood.
But the River sitting here on the lawn of his parents’ rented house in Florida is only as large as life. He’s not all seriousness and theory. His eyes are warm and welcoming; he laughs easily. Right away you know he’s a regular guy. Still, he’s eager to take advantage of what he calls the “rare opportunity” to discuss issues that really matter to him: veganism, health concerns most teens don’t even know exist, fulfillment in relationships with family and friends, world peace, and change in South Africa.
Do you put much faith into what a 17- year-old says or is he just trying on some ideals for size? In short order, you decide to trust him. He’s had a life unlike most people in the world – one of met challenges, enormous changes and great ideals-and that colors your reactions. He can keep you interested in what he’s saying longer than most people twice his age. So somehow you know he’s sincere. And you see that the “Rio! Rio!” business in Japan and the perfect eyebrows are small parts of a very large picture.
Most of what has been written about River Phoenix weaves his story into the story of his family. And try as you might to see him apart from them, you can’t entirely. They’re part of the big picture. His four younger siblings – one brother, Leaf, and three sisters, Rainbow, Liberty and Summer – also act; Summer and Leaf recently were cast in Russkies, and last summer Rainbow had a role in Maid to Order with fellow vegan Ally Sheedy. Their parents, Arlyn and John Phoenix, manage their kids’ careers, having decided years ago to forgo outside work and commit themselves to the family venture. The entire family is vegan, and they all come across as gentle and kind people who work together like clockwork. River’s history is the history of the Phoenixes, and he’s grateful for and satisfied by being a part of that.
Arlyn Phoenix is also grateful for the family, and she’s unflustered by their success. “You have to understand,” she says, sipping her sorghum-sweetened herbal tea, “that this didn’t just happen to us. We planned it.” Success is part of the Phoenix family mission. It’s why their name is Phoenix. They’re on the rise.
Arlyn and John chose the name phoenix together, years ago, and they nursed their five babies on the twin ideals of love and peace. The couple became vegetarian soon after they met in the ’60s, but dropped it after moving to Venezuela with a born-again-style Christian group. Several years-and several babies-later, in 1978, they broke from the organization. On their way back to the United States they rekindled their commitment to vegetarianism, taking the cue from their children.
River was seven then. He remembers how it began. “On the boat we saw men fishing,” he said. “It was our [the kids’] first time seeing that. And it was the first time that I really saw that meat wasn’t just a hamburger or hot dog or some disguised food on your plate, that it was an animal, it was flesh. It seemed very barbaric and kind of cruel, and me and my brother and sister were all crying and were traumatized. The reality just hit us so hard.
Our parents were very sensitive to our feelings. I mean, they were obviously immune to it themselves-meat eating is so much a part of society as a whole and how people eat-but they were very interested in our sensitivity to it, so they were open to us becoming vegetarian.”
Vegetarianism came easily to the Phoenix family. Within the year, with encouragement from Arlyn’s vegan sister, the family also stopped eating eggs and dairy products. “It was hard to give up dairy for a while for a lot of people in my family,” River remembers. “My mom and dad were so used to eating cheese, and it was so convenient. But I said, ‘Hey, if we’re doing this thing, let’s go all the way with it.’ The other kids were into it, so my parents said, ‘OK, let’s do it.’ And we did.”
It’s been 10 years since anyone in the Phoenix family has worn leather shoes, carried a leather handbag or brought honey into their home. They embrace every possible reason for veganism. They love animals and they believe dairyless eating is better for health. They believe the move away from a meat-centered culture will better support the world’s ecology. Above all, they see veganism as one of the early steps people can take to be conscious of their relationships in the world: relationships with animals, people, and the planet itself. To the Phoenix family, veganism is an essential ingredient of a loving and peaceful world-an extension of the values that motivated John and Arlyn when the two first met.
How the family took their vision to Hollywood dates back 10 years ago, to their final days in Venezuela. The family had little money when they left the religious community and River, along with his sister Rainbow, often took to the streets, restaurants, and even airport waiting areas to sing to people, entertaining them while trying to earn a dollar. River had been playing guitar since before he was 5 years old, and his talent became increasingly apparent to Arlyn and John. Back in the States, the family headed straight for Los Angeles, where Arlyn took a job at a broadcasting company to get the family’s collective foot in Hollywood’s door.
“We weren’t going for the glamour or the fame of it all,” Arlyn says. “We were going to take the kids’ talent-which was so obvious-to us-and turn it into something and help make change at the same time. That’s why we went.”
Weren’t they afraid that the kids wouldn’t share their vision, or perhaps lose sight of it as the endless glittery parties began to welcome them, threatening to turn them into Hollywood brats?
“No,” says Arlyn. “I knew they wouldn’t get into the Hollywood scene. We had our own business to attend to, and it wasn’t Hollywood. It was making change in the world.”
River’s business is making change, too. He’s clear on that score. “If I didn’t think I could be a part of a movement that could influence,” he says, “and be a part of helping and change, if I couldn’t help that through what I’m doing, I wouldn’t do this. But I’m seeing that through this position-in this career, and where I have these magazine interviews- I can be an example, and I think that’s important. In all the interviews I do, I say something about my being vegan.
“I don’t want to come off as if I’m a savior. I’m only a very small part of anything, but I think it’s important to be involved. I’m interested in meditation and finding spiritual fulfillment. But for me to just go off and devote my life to monkhood in the jungle would be ultimately abandoning the world, and the consciousness would be on a selfish level. I think I can do a lot more good for this planet if I am out there.”
River is still young. Does he share his mother’s confidence that he’ll be able to withstand the pressures that Hollywood places on young people-pressures that make them grow up quickly, losing their dreams and ideals in the process?
“Being out there,” River says slowly, looking around at the giant oak trees on the lawn, “you can go astray, and everything can be destroyed. I’m aware of that, but I don’t think I’ll get into that. Maybe I’m lucky; I’m not really attracted to all of that now. I think I’ll be strong enough, but I do see there’s that chance.
“You can’t really make any plans about things like this, though. You go with the flow but still against the grain, not for the ego of it but for the belief of it. The only thing I have to show is how I live. The vegan thing is one of the main things. I’m a peaceful person; I think that’s manifested through how I live. I don’t start trouble. But time will tell.”
River has moved around a lot over the years. He was born in Oregon, went with the family to South America as a young child, and has lived in countless California towns. He’s traveled-sometimes with only part of the family-to different countries to film on location. Just before last Thanksgiving the whole family moved to Florida, where they now reside. They wanted to leave the Hollywood scene and revive ideals about living in the country.
Florida winter afternoons are warm, and River spends hours in the garage, hunched over his new 12-string guitar. His hands are square and strong, and after so many years they’re used to playing the chords that sound good to him. He has the guitar plugged into an amplifier, and the rock rhythms echo out in the yard. He’s not in school (he was privately tutored for most of his life), and he says he’s not interested in working until the summer. These days he’s mostly hanging around, traveling a bit, hoping a bass guitarist will read the signs he placed around the University of Florida campus. “Needed,” the signs read. “Bass guitarist with young blood who’s into progressive rock and roll, jazz. For demo recordings.” River is looking for a buddy to jam with.
If he didn’t have his acting career, River thinks he could be a musician. He’s driven to it. “I love music,” he says. “It’s so much a part of me.” The roster of his favorite musicians is long and eclectic; he’s especially into early Squeeze and U2. But the rest of his list reads like the playlist of an early ’70s FM station. “I like jazz, folk music, Bob Dylan. Older Bowie and old Roxy Music to fall asleep to. I like old Steely Dan music and some Pink Floyd. Old Led Zeppelin, too. The Beatles are my Bible; that goes without saying. And I like classical music.”
Modern music disappoints River, and he doesn’t like much of what’s commercially produced. His tastes in books and movies also show that River has one foot in a different age. He sounds a little frustrated by that, and says things like “movies nowadays. ..books nowadays. .. music nowadays.”
He doesn’t see too many new movies, preferring witty, intelligent classic comedies, and he likes the great slapsticks. But his idealism comes through even here. “I haven’t seen Cry Freedom [about Steven Biko, a martyred black South African], but it’s top on my list for a real conscious movie. And I liked Brazil. I like intense movies. Did you ever see Brother Sun, Sister Moon? It’s about St. Francis. I felt a rebirth after I saw that.”
He doesn’t find much time for reading, though he’d like to, but somehow he’s picked up a lot of information on health and political issues. The novels he’s read, or would like to read, are those that kids grew up on 15 and 20 years ago: Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger, Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, Richard Bach’s Illusions, Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
As for his own movies, he’s hot enough to be selective about the scripts he accepts, and he’s been pretty happy with the results. “I feel no need to invest in a movie unless I have an incredible passion for it,” he says. “And one that will not only be good for me but one I can be proud of-one that’s a benefit to society. I always hope the movie will, if nothing else, be a part of good art and influence people in a good way.”
Up to now, there’s been no compromising in River’s work, and he’s not planning on changing his record. Even as a child, no commercials he ever made endorsed white bread, and when he was in Seven Brides, the family made sure he wouldn’t have to go fishing or wear a coonskin cap.
River still chooses carefully, hoping the ideals he lives by will be reflected in the characters he plays. He liked his character of Chris Chambers in Stand by Me, directed by Rob Reiner. “Chris came off as a victim of the mentality of his town, but he was a good person. He was a great friend, he was loyal and he wasn’t an idiot-not just a big dumb l2-year-old. He was a real sweet guy, smart and intelligent. A good character.”
The last movie he worked on was Sidney Lumet’s Running on Empty. (Lumet directed Dustin Hoffman in the Academy Award-winner Tootsie.) River plays the son of parents whose antimilitary activities have kept them on the run for years. River likes the character but sees him as a victim, too.
“In dramas, kids usually are victims, either to their parents or to society:’ River explains. “I want to get away from that. It would be wonderful to see someone already in a clear-minded reality take it from there and maybe go beyond that, show what can happen.”
He can’t say precisely what kinds of films he’d like to do or what kind of work will draw him next. Theater would be interesting, perhaps, and possibly directing at some point. Unlike many actors, he’s not even thinking about who he’d like to work with. “I would like to work with Rob Reiner again,” he says, “Maybe just a cameo role in one of his movies. But for the most part I don’t think like that. I figure that time will tell, and if it’s right, I’ll meet the right people and work with them at some point.”
Outwardly, River has few doubts about himself, as an individual and as a Phoenix family member. “I’m definitely an individual,” he said. “I feel very secure as an individual. And I’m proud of my family and what we’ve done together. I’m a product of my family, just like everybody else. These are my roots.
“I just want to live my life. Acting is what I love to do, and it’s worked out this way. I don’t know if it’s God’s perfect plan or whatever, but for me, not only do I love it and get great satisfaction out of it, but also I can work my beliefs in. I’m free to believe in what I do, and I can share those beliefs with others. Not in a preaching way, not telling others, but just by what I do. I find that very fulfilling.”
After lunch-tabouli, nori, blue corn chips, tofu omelet, tahini dressing-River and Rainbow, like older brother and sister in any family, take the family jeep to pick up the other kids from school. Back home, River runs into the yard to swing on the rope hung from one of the oaks. “Hey, look at this!” he yells. While Rainbow watches, River laughs, jumps high and grabs hold. A Phoenix on the rise.
TIL Casey Kasem was a devout vegan, supported animal rights and environmental causes, and was a critic of factory farming.He initially quit voicing Shaggy in the late 1990s,when asked to voice Shaggy in a Burger King commercial, returning in 2002 after negotiating to have Shaggy become a vegetarian. #caseykasem #paulobis #vegetariantimes #lewybodydentia. http://www.paulobis.com
“The memory I have of Michael’s visit to my home. He was accompanied by his personal chef. The strange thing was my wife’s culinary intervention, because she thought he ate too little. She made fried pizzas for Michael and he ate a lot. He ate so much that he had a hard time on stage the next day. #michaeljackson #lewybodydementia #paulobis #vegetariantimes. http://www.paulobis.com
“When we were younger and we went vegatarian, it really wasn’t about health. We did it because of the mental ramifications of our understanding of animal agriculture. It was really just about compassion. But now we’re becoming aware of the impact our consumption is having on the entire planet. And so it no longer feels like simply just a personal choice.”
It has been said that, “Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come.” Based on the tremendous, almost incredible, progress that has recently been made in many aspects of the vegetarian movement, it can easily be said that its time has come. This article will discuss many of the important recent events and the (often unsung) heroes who contributed to them. Inadvertently, but inevitably, we will omit people and groups who deserve much credit, and we apologize in advance to them.
(Most of this material was originally written in 1993, so it may not be completely up to date in all aspects.)
BEGINNINGS
In the mid 1970`s the vegetarian movement was only a pale shadow of what it is today; tremendous changes have occurred since that time. In 1975, the bi-annual World Vegetarian Congress was held in Orono, Maine. It proved to be a turning point, because for the first time in the United States, almost 1500 vegetarians got together and began to form alliances.
Paul Obis started publishing Vegetarian Times in 1974. He began by distributing 300 copies of a 4-page typewritten free handout at Chicago-area health food stores. From his original $17 investment the magazine has steadily grown until today its circulation is about 350,000. Their special “Sweet 16 Issue” (December, 1990; Issue 160) gives many details about vegetarian events and personalities.
At the conference at Orono, Victoria Moran, a vegetarian since 1969 and a contributor of articles to publications such as Well Being and Vegetarian World, met Paul Obis, who asked her to write for Vegetarian Times . Since then Ms. Moran has been contributing articles to that publication and other vegetarian and animal rights publications. Later she became a vegan, and wrote a comprehensive book on veganism, Compassion – The Ultimate Ethic (1985) She frequently speaks on various aspects of this diet, and she recently wrote The Love Powered Diet – When Willpower Isn`t Enough (1992) to show people how to move toward a healthier way of eating,
The magazine Vegetarian Times discovered this when questioning celebrities who thought of themselves as vegetarians. To describe their eating habits ”people have come up with terms such as pescevegetarian and pollovegetarian,” said Sally Hayhow, executive editor of the magazine; its circulation has grown by a third in the last year, to 150,000. ”It must be trendy to be a vegetarian,” she said. ”I can’t think of another reason people would fight to be called one.”
That was my reasoning in becoming vegetarian at the age of 20: a protest against cruelty. Thirty-plus years later, I’ve broadened my circle of compassion by becoming vegan. May Paul’s memory be a blessing forever.
Vegetarianism was a younger movement in the early 1980’s. Americans do things a little differently. Instead of one big society, we have scores of smaller organizations – some national and some local. As a vegetarian and published of VT and it needs to be an excellent source for vegetarians at home or traveling. This magazine is a comprehensive restaurants, organizations and vacation destinations.
All Publishers are presented with advertising that challenges their standards of acceptability. We have the most stringent advertising policies of any publication. It is like my Mom always use to say. “I don’t care what other people dd0, this is how we do it in our family!”
Our Readers are the Most Important Part of our success. Our 10 year anniversary is in November 1984. One of our first activities is to celebrate this Is Vegetarian Times “Our Mug for Your Mug contest”. Send us your snapshots, black and white, color slides. We don’t care. We just want to see who you are, tell us something about yourself. All participants selected will receive free Vegetarian Times Subscription.
I will always have fond, fond, memories of the Vegetarian Times Magazine., I have a collection of the magazine and I am always taken back to another time, when things were so much simpler, and better, if only for a little while, as I flipped through them, and remembered when times were so much more hopeful.
I am so sorry for the loss of your husband. I know he was an amazing man, and touched my life, in the most positive of ways, for at least a few decades! 🙂
n addition to the magazine, Vegetarian Times also periodically published special interest publications such as The Vegetarian Beginner’s Guide[18] and recipe compilations such as Healing Foods Cookbook: 25 Foods You Need, 75 Recipes You’ll Love.
So you want to be a vegetarian — Vegetarianism 101 — Ready, set, eat! — It’s time for some real health-care reform — Compassionate, clean, and green — Special circumstances, special solutions
Vegetarian Times Vegetarian Beginner’s Guide is the only magazine written for beginner vegetarians or anyone just thinking about becoming one. It’s packed with information written by the editors of Vegetarian Times, the leading authorities on the subject.
You know you are a Vegetarian when…you eat something before class reunions, office parties, and weddings.
Your Friends do not want to dine with you because you keep asking about the soup broth
Ask for a bowl of oatmeal at a power breakfast
you don’t know the price of a hamburger …and don’t care
Your parents do not want you to come for Thanksgiving
It takes you twice as long to shop because you read all the food labels.
People start giving you fruit baskets instead of clothes for your birthday
You have finally made it financially but you will not buy a Volvo 760 because the leather seats come standard
If you are up a big promotion but you dread having inviting the boss over because their favorite food is Roast Beef
I feel that Paul made a huge contribution to promoting and legitimizing vegetarianism in America in the 1970s by launching and nurturing Vegetarian Times.
In the February 1990 issue of Vegetarian Times Magazine, Joaquin Phoenix was on the cover as a teenager. The article described Baby Boomer teenagers being Vegetarians. Joaquin stated “First of all, it is for the animals. Health reasons are just a bonus.”
While I was very young when my siblings and I shot the cover of vegetarian times, I remember Paul as a warm and kind man who was passionate and cause driven. Paul forged new ground and he did so against the mainstream, which is no easy task… what shines through the most was Paul’s ability to do everything with grace and compassion. The world is better for it.” – Rain Phoenix
Paul listened to NPR every day. I think that by listening to radio so much developed some of his quirkiness and creativity. He was so witty and funny with his one liners.
I rely on the invaluable collection maintained by Vegetarian Times, a trove of roughly 5,700 recipes that dates back to 1978. Brittany Martin, who edits it, says she’s assigning new recipes all the time, so the offerings will continue to grow. When you look at the history of Vegetarian Times—which started in 1974 as a print publication and only transitioned to a web-only magazine in 2017—it’s clear that we’re lucky to have as many of these creations as we do.
Founded in Oak Park, Illinois, by a nurse named Paul Obis, who’s now deceased, Vegetarian Times grew into a web magazine that, over the decades, changed hands many times, which can be a formula for everything getting lost. That didn’t happen, fortunately, and what remains on the site is exactly what I need: a searchable database that allows me to enter whatever vegetable I feel like cooking and then get a long list of ideas for using it. During one recent week, I made something new from the Vegetarian Times files four nights in a row, and the experience was really fun.
It has been said that, “Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come.” Based on the tremendous, almost incredible, progress that has recently been made in many aspects of the vegetarian movement, it can easily be said that its time has come. This article will discuss many of the important recent events and the (often unsung) heroes who contributed to them. Inadvertently, but inevitably, we will omit people and groups who deserve much credit, and we apologize in advance to them.
(Most of this material was originally written in 1993, so it may not be completely up to date in all aspects.)
In the mid 1970`s the vegetarian movement was only a pale shadow of what it is today; tremendous changes have occurred since that time. In 1975, the bi-annual World Vegetarian Congress was held in Orono, Maine. It proved to be a turning point, because for the first time in the United States, almost 1500 vegetarians got together and began to form alliances.
Paul Obis started publishing Vegetarian Times in 1974. He began by distributing 300 copies of a 4-page typewritten free handout at Chicago-area health food stores. From his original $17 investment the magazine has steadily grown until today its circulation is about 350,000. Their special “Sweet 16 Issue” (December, 1990; Issue 160) gives many details about vegetarian events and personalities.
At the conference at Orono, Victoria Moran, a vegetarian since 1969 and a contributor of articles to publications such as Well Being and Vegetarian World, met Paul Obis, who asked her to write for Vegetarian Times . Since then Ms. Moran has been contributing articles to that publication and other vegetarian and animal rights publications. Later she became a vegan, and wrote a comprehensive book on veganism, Compassion – The Ultimate Ethic (1985) She frequently speaks on various aspects of this diet, and she recently wrote The Love Powered Diet – When Willpower Isn`t Enough (1992) to show people how to move toward a healthier way of eating
During these years I attended several vegetarian and animal rights conferences in upstate New York. There I met many people who would have a great impact on future decisions and actions. We were all getting started at the grassroots level. Networking between these people has been invaluable to ARC and the actions that have taken place in Minnesota. A few that I met and stayed in contact with were Jim Mason, founder of The Animals Agenda magazine; Alex Hershaft, founder of FARM; George Cave, founder of Trans Species; Connie Salamone, Feminists for Animal Rights; Kim Stallwood, an activist from England and later issues coordinator for PETA; Aviva Cantor, author of, among other writings, The Club, The Yoke, and The Leash, which appeared in MS magazine in 1983; Paul Obis, founder of Vegetarian Times magazine; and Alex Pacheco and Ingrid Newkirk, founders of PETA. The only people that attended these conferences were grassroots organizers. In the years to come I attended meetings and conferences in Maryland, Chicago, and Madison, among other for Animal Rights Coalition.
In the September 1992 Vegetarian Times Magazine, Paul Obis writes Politically, Socially an Economically, the world has changed immensely since I became a vegetarian 21 years ago. Just imagine a time when fax machines and VCE’s did not exist, Nixon was president and dropping out was in”. Vegetarian Times Magazine really changed the way American’s ate.
You know you are a Vegetarian when…you eat something before class reunions, office parties, and weddings.
Your Friends do not want to dine with you because you keep asking about the soup broth
Ask for a bowl of oatmeal at a power breakfast
you don’t know the price of a hamburger …and don’t care
Your parents do not want you to come for Thanksgiving
It takes you twice as long to shop because you read all the food labels.
People start giving you fruit baskets instead of clothes for your birthday
You have finally made it financially but you will not buy a Volvo 760 because the leather seats come standard
If you are up a big promotion but you dread having inviting the boss over because their favorite food is Roast Beef
Paul would take his employees to conferences and vacations to boost their sprits. One time took them on was a visit to a nudist colony. They swam, water rafted, swung rope, hiked, cooked with the community etc..It was a wonderful opportunity andjust what the office needed for a few days. On closing day, no one would take a group photo without their clothes back on. They had to go back to real life! Paul always was creative, vibrant and fun. He was filled with joy!
The board of directors of The Vegan Museum has voted to rename the organization’s digital story map in honor of Chicago-native and Vegetarian Times founder, Paul Luty Obis. The map is one of the museum’s crowning achievements, chronicling Illinois’ role in the evolution of vegetarianism in the United States. According to board president Kay Stepkin, the dedication “seemed fitting to honor Paul’s legacy and acknowledge his influence on vegetarianism and veganism.” The announcement coincides with Obis’s founding of Vegetarian Times, which occurred 46 years ago today.
“I am deeply moved by The Vegan Museum’s decision to name their digital Story Map chronicling the history of vegetarianism in Illinois in honor of my late husband and Chicago native, Paul Luty Obis,” said Obis’ widow, Janeen Obis, fighting back tears of joy upon being informed of the Museum’s decision. “He was such a precious, giving, compassionate hero and an inspiration. He touched so many people — me being one of them — and I am forever grateful. He was a long-time voice of progressive thinking, living and ideals and this honor will stand as a testament to the fact that his life made a difference, which he always wanted to do. My heartfelt thanks to the Museum’s board of directors for this wonderful honor.”
To learn more about the The Vegan Museum and its offerings including the Paul Luty Obis Story Map of Illinois’ Role in U.S. Vegetarian History
🌿🚴♂️ “Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.” Just as Paul Obis started with a simple newsletter, his determination bloomed into a significant movement for vegetarians nationwide. 🥕📚 Let’s honor his legacy by spreading kindness and awareness about the choices we make every day.
“Paul Obis’ journey reminds me of the famous quote by Margaret Mead: ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.’ 🌿 It’s inspiring to see how passion leads to impactful change.
My remembrance of Paul:
In the early 1980’s, there were very few medical doctors venturing into the unknown waters of vegetarian nutrition. Daily, I would question the scientific sanity of such a strategy, looking for medical validation of a meat-free diet, and, almost of equal importance, looking for fellow travelers upon this plant-based path who prized rationality as well as compassion. I found them both in Paul Obis, the crusading editor of Vegetarian Times – a publication whose very existence was a beacon of hope and sanity for us all in those early years. I was pleased to see that Paul prized scientific rigor when it came to vegetarian nutrition and would avidly publish relevant articles on the subject from physicians, dietitians and other health-professionals, which made me feel far less alone on a professional basis. On a larger scale, his pioneering work at VT was a validation of a saner, gentler way of living and became a symbol of the global community that was coalescing around vegetarian diets and the positive world-vision they promised. Paul and his brave publication were such a comfort to me as I took those first tenuous steps into the plant-only world in 1980; I’ll always be grateful for his example, his vision and his service to us all – and most importantly, for his friendship to me through the years.
When I was five years old and my brother River was seven, we were about to fry eggs for breakfast when it dawned on us that they were baby chickens. My family had been vegetarian for a short while and so we asked our parents what was the difference between eggs and meat? Weren’t they in fact baby chickens just as a burger had once been a cow? They couldn’t find a good argument to the contrary and so after my dad spread the last of his beloved butter on a piece of toast, the decision was made to go vegan. This was soon followed by a ceremonious burial of all our leather items. The vegan Phoenix family was born. At the time the only vegan alternative to meat was tofu and we had to search out a local tofu maker in the small town of Winter Park, Florida. Soon after this my sister Summer was born vegan.
There was something so powerful about our collective commitment to not harm any living thing. A long while later in adulthood, I admittedly had some years of “dabbling in dairy” and even at some junctures ate eggs! I rationalized it by making sure they were “farm raised” or “grass fed” or any and all the ways I could make myself believe I was not harming. The lines of which were ever increasingly blurry. I killed mosquitoes and washed ants down the sink and even bought leather. The cruelty of life and sad moments I had experienced had left me calloused and caused a disregard for the voiceless.
Phoenix’s Oscar speech had less to do with “Joker” and more to do with fighting for animal rights, which is the main reason his speech went viral on social media. “We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow,” the actor memorably said while accepting the Oscar, “and when she gives birth we steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable, and then we take her milk that’s intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal.” Paul use to visit the Phoenix Family often because he was so fond of them
Paul attended Starry Night in 1991 – a Gala to celebrate PETA. Sidney Poitier was there and Paul wanted to meet him. He decided the best way was for him to go stand by Sidney’s wife. In a very few minutes, Sidney came over and introduced himself. I thought Paul was so savvy to have figured that out – he was so insightful and astute. He and Sidney became long last friends
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🌱✨ Absolutely inspiring! Paul’s connection highlights a deep respect for all living beings. Echoing similar sentiments, it’s about making choices that are kind and sustainable for our planet. – Always a reminder that our daily decisions matter. hashtag#KindnessIsKey 🌍💚
I grew up with Vegetarian and Vegetarian Times was a staple in my house as a kid. I’m deeply grateful to Paul and all those who have kept the magazine going.
What a beautiful tribute to want to produce a film about Paul’s life.
In 1971, the publication off Frances Moore Lappe’s “Diet for a Small Planet” added an early environmental and world hunger dimension to vegetarianism. her simple message was that meat is a very inefficient food source and that to effectively feedd aall off the people on the planet, we should adopt a vegetarian diet, or “eat lower on the food chain.” The book became a best seller, selling more than 2 million copies. It created a new flood of new vegetarians.
Another event that caused many people to consider their diet was the Concert of Bangladesh, which was put together by George Harrison to raise money. The concert was widely broadcast on radio and television, and it caused many people to consider the issue of hunger. Many people wo made the connection between world hunger and the inefficiency of beef were moved to forego their hamburgers and adopt vegetarian diets instead.
Paul was aware of no vegetarian publications. So in an attempt to provide a forum for vegetarian ideas and in an effort to reach out to others, h founded Vegetarian Times as a newsletter in November 1974.