Biography
Writer, photographer, educator: Gordon F. Sander is a man of many talents — some of which he has actually managed to put to constructive use.
As a child, his grandparents, the art dealers Flory and Myrtil Frank, thinking that he had the talent to become a painter, enrolled him in the preschool at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In the event, the powers that be apparently didn’t feel he could cut it — and so, after his first one-man show at age five, he was, as they say, out of there.
Sander’s first post-MoMA passion was geology. As a child, he spent many hours at the playground behind his parents’ apartment building in Jamaica Estates, collecting various rocks and minerals (as well as other things, best unmentioned), which he would bring back to show his classmates at Public School 131, where his favorite activity was Show and Tell.
Graduating 13th out of 1,100 in his high school class, Sander entered Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he studied architecture before finally focusing on history and literature — as much as one could focus on anything during the strange, turbulent, exciting period known as the late 1960s (currently the subject of his first novel).
One of the highlights of his undergraduate years was his work as a photographer for the United States National Park Service at the Lake Mead National Recreation Area in Boulder City, Nevada during the summer following his sophomore year, an experience that truly broadened both his artistic and intellectual horizons. Some of the striking photographs he took of the lunar Nevada landscape are still on display at Park Service Headquarters (as well as indelibly etched onto his mind).
Back at college, Sander chose to explore the life and times of Emile Coue, the founder of Self-Conscious Autosuggestion, the emblematic positive thinking craze of the 1920s, for his history honors thesis, establishing a pattern of focusing on untold stories and unsung heroes that would continue for the rest of his career.
Deciding to steer free of academia, Sander became a freelance journalist following graduation, specializing in higher education. Quickly acquiring a reputation, it wasn’t long before he had become one of the top (and only) independent education writers in the country, contributing both to general interest newspapers like The New York Times, as well as specialized ones like Change, The Magazine of Higher Education.
By 1976, he established himself as a foreign correspondent with his profile of the Netherlands for The New York Times Magazine. A quarter of a century later, it is still one of the aptest profiles of Holland by an English language journalist.
After a strange — though not uncreative — period during his late 20s and early 30s, during which he variously dreamed up an adult education course (“Hanging Out: A Nighthawk’s Guide to New Yorkâ€), dabbled in the antiques business, and tryed his hand at academic public relations, Sander returned to the muse (as it were) in 1987, when he secured a contract to write his first book, “Serling: The Rise and Twilight of Television’s Last Angry Man” about his unsung and overlooked video-cum-literary hero, Rod Serling. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in biography, curator of The Museum of Television and Radio Ron Simon called “Serling” one of the 10 best books ever written about television.
Following its publication (which was a little bumpier than expected), Sander returned to journalism, especially his foreign correspondence, which he used to explore the Baltic region. One of the better-known English language journalists in the region, his articles and essays about this overlooked corner of the world have appeared in dozens of publications.
If Sander has been eager to “show and tell†American and English readers about the Baltic and Low Countries, he has also enjoyed the converse: in 1998, he mounted “My America,†a one-man show of his photographs of America, at Taidehalle, the municipal museum of Helsinki. He has also lectured in Finland for the United States Information Agency.
In 1997, Sander moved to London, where he became one of the few Americans writing regularly for the British press, with articles appearing in the Financial Times, Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, among others.
Deciding to explore his own past, in 2001 he wrote and narrated “The Frank Family,” an original radio documentary about his mother’s family’s experiences during World War II, which became basis for his book “The Frank Family That Survived.”
Now at an age when most of his peers are worried about mortgages and retirement, Sander remains at heart very much the third grader, rummaging around the world’s backyard for stories and images to show and tell the world. And that may well be his greatest accomplishment of all.