Jerry Kamstra

Jerry Kamstra (January 2, 1935 – November 26, 2019) was an American novelist, poet, artist and community organizer. Kamstra is best known for his novels Weed: Adventures Of A Dope Smuggler and The Frisco Kid. Kamstra was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts NEA Writers Grant in 1978 for his novel General Popo: A Novel of Mexico. He was a prominent artist denizen and “Beatnik” of San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as chronicled in The Frisco Kid, his novel of the Beat Generation. 

The novel has become a cult classic which literary critic and Kerouac biographer Gerald Nicosia claims is “a Beat masterpiece on par with On The Road.” Early Life: Jerry Kamstra was born January 2, 1935 in Riverside, California. Kamstra’s father, Richard “Dutch” Kamstra was a Dutch immigrant who made his living as a hard-rock miner, spending 50 years working underground. Dutch learned to speak English by reading The Katzenjammer Kids comic strip, arriving on a three-masted sailing ship in San Francisco in 1928 from Holland. 

Dutch became a member of the IWW (International Workers of the World) as a longshoreman. Dutch moved to southern California, and among his first jobs down there was milking cows for author Edgar Rice Burroughs in Tarzana, California. Kamstra’s mother, Lexie Kamstra, was the daughter of a fruit tramp, Nettie Cody, a distant relative of Buffalo Bill Cody. Jerry had three siblings – two brothers Richard Kamstra and Robert Kamstra; and one sister Bessie Kamstra.

By the time he was 14 years-old, Jerry Kamstra had broken his arm four times and had read most books in the Colton Public Library. From an even younger age, Kamstra was an avid sportsman which later culminated into a position of captain of the third best high school basketball team in California. He was also a diver specializing in the 3-meter board, becoming champion of the Inland Empire and, while a member of the United States Air Force, he tried out for the 1956 Olympics.

Kamstra worked with his father as a miner shortly after graduating from Colton Union High School in 1953. He received a full fellowship to ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles where he moved in the fall of 1953. Kamstra was studying to be a cartoonist, but after two semesters in art school, he quit to join the U.S. Air Force in 1955 to see the world. He was stationed in Guam. In 1957 he was busted and sent to the military stockade for a month for disobeying an order to march in a military parade, whereas he instead went skin diving in the deep waters of Guam.

Jerry Kamstra was given an honorable discharge from the Air Force in late 1957 under family hardship conditions after 2 ½ years of military service. His father was injured in a mining accident. Since Kamstra’s mother was already disabled in a wheelchair, he went home to help his family until his father recovered from his accident.

After leaving the U.S. Air Force and assisting his family, Kamstra took his first trip to Mexico and was turned on to the country. He met a girl named Anno on Isla Mujeres, where they made love in a Mayan temple amidst 6-foot iguanas staring at them.

At the tail end of 1957, Kamstra moved to San Francisco and “discovered a community existing on the edge of the city unlike any other in America. Reckless, creative, frenetic, insane, it was too insane for a lot of people, for not many survived,” said Kamstra. “I did, however, and in surviving came of age in the cheap pads and artists’ lofts in North Beach. In the process I lost my innocence and my youth, but gained an indelible memory of a bunch of crazy people who lived, fought, struggled, loved and even died together with a sense of élan and community that I had never experienced before nor have found since.”

Jerry Kamstra was married twice and is father to four children: Ameliana Kamstra, Duke Kamstra,Tcherek Kamstra and Miakje Kamstra. He has four grandchildren: Kaitlyn Thompson , Madison Kamstra, Mio Kamstra-Brown, and Tyler Kamstra,