Ron Pumphrey came to public attention seemingly from out of nowhere. Now in his seventies, this mystery man, who until this volume had a veritably unknown past, is still larger than life. Human Beans is a memoir that covers the early childhood years of this wily Newfoundland icon, a renowned (and some might say infamous) journalist, politician, publisher, and radio talk-show host. For the first time, he presents with tongue in cheek the tale of his humble beginnings in the 1930s, a meritorious memoir of his growing up in Harbour Grace and on Bell Island. Fantastic and guileless, this autobiographical writing is a colourful exposition of a boy and his family.

Careers adventurer Ron Pumphrey was born in Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, in 1931. He was, variously and sometimes conjunctively, surface-mines labourer, amateur boxer-wrestler, salesman, journalist, editor, radio talk-show host, television news writer and amateur performer, books editor and publisher, writer and performer of three long-playing recordings (LPs). He founded two bay newspapers and two capital city monthly magazines, was a city councillor, a commercial investigator, a minister, and perhaps the province’s first private public relations man (“PR With RP”). A lifelong student, he’s a certificate holder in beginners’ law, in coastal navigation, and in writing, and the motivational sciences. He has studied in day schools, night schools, nighttime universities at home, on the mainland, and in the United States. Noted as a hard-working, hard-playing individualist, Ron worked in Jamaica with the Kingston Daily Gleaner (where his sense of humour resulted in his getting a job when literally none was available), was for a short time a stringer for the New York Times, and, in Toronto, was a full-time employee variously with the Stock Exchange, Dun and Bradstreet, Flash Newsmagazine, and British United Press. His hobbies are educational pursuits, political and other news analyses, philosophy, and watching his weight come and go. His children (by his late wife, Nellie Dwyer of Bell Island) are Heather, Ron Jr., Helen “Nellie,” Steve, John, Shawn, and Ian, who live in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, the Yukon, and Denmark. He lives with his wife and companion of thirty-two years, writer-activist Marilyn Tephi Duffett, in a cottage built onto (not into) the slope of a high hill, in Quidi Vidi Village, hard by Ye Olde Inn which keeps his favourite brew on order. He spent the first dollar bill there, when “the tav” opened in 1977. It’s in a glass-fronted frame on a wall near the bar.

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