John Eder - Biography

Biography

Raised in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, at the age of fifteen, Eder left the home of his abusive and alcoholic adoptive family. After moving between friends and relatives and finally being homeless, he became a ward of the court and entered the Hope House facility for troubled boys in Port Jefferson, New York. At age eighteen Eder entered college in Buffalo, New York to study philosophy. Disenchanted with college and suffering from post-traumatic stress and depression as a result of a difficult childhood, Eder dropped out. He spent the next several years studying philosophy on his own and working at the Greyhound bus station in Buffalo. Inspired by Buddhist teachers and the writings of the Beat poet Jack Kerouac, Eder traveled around the country—backpacking, hitchhiking, riding freight trains, and working as a migrant farm laborer. He went from place to place volunteering and engaging in direct action around a wide range of social justice issues. He spent this period squatting amongst a network of travelers from New York City to Mexico. While living in Austin, Texas he was briefly a Hare Krishna. A girlfriend from this period of Eder's life recounts her relationship with him in a popular episode of This American Life entitled "Cringe".

In 1997 Eder took a cross-country bicycle trip that ended in Maine. He was briefly married to a woman whom he met while hitchhiking. He lived in a solar-powered shack in the Western Maine Mountains with no running water and later attended massage school in Portland. In 1998 he was practicing massage, caring for the mentally ill, painting houses and organizing against pesticide use when he became the co-chair of the Portland Green Party. In 2002 leaders of the Maine Green Independent Party asked him to run for an open seat in the Maine House of Representatives made vacant by term limits. He met his wife, former park ranger Suzanne Kahn, in Acadia National Park. Kahn and Eder live in Portland and she works at the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve.