Biography

(Also known as 'Life of Larry')

Larry Cafiero was born on Thanksgiving Day (Nov. 28) 1957 at Otis Air Force Base, Massachusetts (now Otis Air National Guard Station).

Cafiero was raised with two brothers and two sisters in suburban Miami. He attended Catholic grade school and Catholic high school; in the latter, at Monsignor Edward Pace High School in Opa Locka, Fla., he had television commentator Bill O'Reilly as a 10th grade history teacher.

A third-generation man of letters -- Cafiero's father was a newspaper editor, and his grandfather was a mailman -- Cafiero attended Miami-Dade Community College and Florida International University, but withdrew from college to work in the newsroom at The Miami Herald. After seven years at the Herald in which he worked his way up the journalistic career ladder, Cafiero freelanced stories to national publications and served as editor for various weekly newspapers in Dade and Broward counties. In 1984, newspapers edited by Cafiero won multiple Florida Press Club awards for layout and content.

In 1987, Cafiero moved to San Francisco. He served as the Pacific Rim correspondent for Southeast Travel Professional, a now-defunct travel trade publication, while freelancing and working in the overseas tariff industry. In the latter, he served as a tariff analyst for various cargo carriers and for agencies such as the Pacific Coast Tariff Bureau and the Transpacific Westbound Rate Agreement conference.

Cafiero spent a year at NBC in Burbank as assistant script editor for the Saturday morning comedy "Saved By The Bell" during the show's final season. Not finding another television and/or entertainment job in Los Angeles once the "Saved By The Bell" assignment ended, he returned to San Francisco in 1992.

Cafiero returned to San Francisco to study Zen Buddhism and became a resident at the San Francisco Zen Center. His Zen studies piqued an interest in Japanese culture, and he spent from March 1996 to October 2000 in Japan. While in Japan, Cafiero served as a writer and editor for the English-language lifestyle magazine The Nippon View (now J-Select), as well as a legal document specialist in Tokyo office of the San Francisco based law firm Morrison & Foerster. He also served as an English teacher for the Japanese telecommunications company Telecomet. He returned to San Francisco in October 2000 (but not before casting an overseas vote for Nader in the 2000 presidential election), and his family joined him in January 2001.

Cafiero involvement in the Green Party started in 1995, when switched his registration from Peace & Freedom to Green. At that time, though, his "activism" in the party extended only to voting for Green candidates. He did not become active in the Green Party until 2002, at which time he became involved on a state level and on a local level with the Green Party of Santa Cruz County, as well as serving on the state's media standing committee (and serving briefly as press secretary until the end of 2003). He currently serves as the liaison to the Secretary of State's office for the Green Party of California, as co-editor of Green Focus (the state party's quarterly newspaper), and as alternate co-coordinator of the Media Standing Committee. He was elected to the county council for the Green Party of Santa Cruz County in 2004 and was elected for a second term in 2006.