Ashleigh’s Brilliant Summer

“If I can survive death, I can probably survive anything.” – Ashleigh Brilliant
[9 December, 1933 –24 September, 2025], Pot-Shot^® # 805

A footloose former teacher with the unlikely name Ashleigh Brilliant grabs his portable microphone, bullhorn, and milk crate and bounds down the stairs. The date is May 21, 1967 – yeah, “The Summer of Love.” Brilliant has recently moved into an apartment on Shrader Street in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, practically across the street from Golden Gate Park and the sloping meadow that has become the counterculture’s SF rallying point. “Hippie Hill” is a faux-Socratic gathering spot where extemporaneous speakers, musicians, gurus, and riffing philosophers ply their truth-telling before a meadow-sprawled crowd of tie-dyed seekers. 

The whole world seems in a state of corner-turning flux and Haight-Ashbury is the counterculture’s west coast Mecca, drawing to its tumbledown neighborhoods a wave of anti-establishment pilgrims in their tens of thousands, and from all over the country and world. Brilliant is one of them, though in his diaries he does not see himself in the new revolutionary context. 

“This district is an amazing contrast to what I have of late been accustomed to. It is full of young weirdly-garbed people currently known as ‘hippies,’” he writes.

The decade’s newly enflamed youth are loudly agitating for an overthrow of the established order, and counsel solemnly against trusting anyone over the age of 30. Ashleigh Brilliant, seen here awkwardly hustling across Stanyan St. with his milk crate and dangling bullhorn, has just turned 33. His brushfire hair and Abbie Hoffman beard belie his recent career as an educator, though his tweed jacket handily straddles the sartorial line between the academy and the soapbox. Ashley Brilliant crosses under the Alvord Lake Bridge, laboriously climbs the hill, and mounts his overturned milk crate. So begins the amused public disturbance that will characterize Brilliant’s next 58 years.

The Poet at Rest

Ashleigh Brilliant – armchair Laureate, MJ columnist, soft-spoken iconoclast, late-blooming hippie and short-form rhapsodist – has left the room he inhabited for 91 years, and with such aplomb. He took his leave of us on the morning of September 24, Rosh Hashanah, in the company of people who loved him. I’d recently sat with an enthusiastic Ashleigh for two interviews and was writing his profile when, on my return from a short family trip, a colleague stunned me with the news that he had passed the day before. My last memory of Ashleigh is looking back at him from the door of his house. He is sunk into his timeworn recliner and waving me off as I leave. 

Brilliant may be best known for three things: [1] his epigrammatic Pot-Shots^® empire built on thousands of wittily expressed, deliriously all-purpose aphorisms available for decades as printed postcards, and as a syndicated feature in some 30 American newspapers; [2] his successful 1997 campaign to etch into the granite of civic law his contempt for gas-powered leaf blowers (Santa Barbara Municipal Code 9.16.021); and [3] Brilliant’s bicycling omnipresence in every corner of his adoptive hometown of Santa Barbara, through whose sun-drenched neighborhoods he could be seen stoically pedaling in his shorts, dark knee socks, black shoes, cardigan, and the occasional pith helmet; Haile Selassie on a Schwinn. You couldn’t miss him.

As for leaving behind a written corpus that explains his life perspective, Brilliant’s expressive whole is surely the sum of 10,000 parts. His published canon of grinning maxims called Pot-Shots^® continue to be taken up by the wider world every day. 

Born in 1933 London, England to Victor and Amelia Brilliant (as has been noted in countless articles, Brilliant is not a nom de plume but Ashleigh’s family name), Ashleigh’s fairly typical childhood took a turn in 1939 when the steamroller that would become WWII forced him , his mother Amelia, and his younger sister Myrna to leave the UK for his mother’s hometown of Toronto. The three would immigrate to the U.S. in 1941and make a home in Washington, D.C., where they would be joined by Victor after a separation of several years.

The Family Brilliant returned to England in ‘47. Ashleigh would travel to the U.S. with a pal in the summer of ‘51 and hitchhike across the country, the American boomtown energy a striking contrast to the monochrome postwar austerity of the UK even these six years after the war’s conclusion. 

Having earned a degree in History from the University of London’s University College (UCL), Brilliant returned to the States in 1956 as an emigrant to his new home. He settled first in L.A., taking a masters at Claremont Graduate School in ‘57, then earning a PhD in History and Geography from UC Berkeley. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1969. 

Brilliant’s forays into teaching were not fruitful. Prior to his Berkeley PhD he engaged in a “mercifully brief career teaching English at Hollywood High School in Los Angeles.” Following Berkeley he taught at Central Oregon College (’64-‘65) and was ultimately fired from that post for playing a recording of Allen Ginsburg’s controversial beat poem “Howl” for a group of students. He’d been warned. 

His final formal teaching gigs were at the behest of Chapman’s University of the Seven Seas (today called Semester at Sea). At Chapman University’s bidding Brilliant taught History and Geography aboard the refitted cruise ship, liberally referred to by the school as a “floating university.” Dr. Brilliant and his respective student cohorts (and a bemused ship’s crew, we can imagine) sailed twice around the world, each session lasting 3½ months. It was on that second session he met his future wife Dorothy (1932 – 2018), a fellow teacher.

By 1967 he and Dorothy had made their way to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, arguable object of Scott McKenzie’s popular and instructive tune that year; “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).” In the hothouse atmosphere of that place and time, Ashleigh the restless Creative would stumble artfully into the remainder of his life. Holding court on Hippie Hill (“I was a big pacifist, so I liked to spread ideas about peace,” Brilliant told me of his bullhorn-amped speaking engagements there), Ashleigh Brilliant was morphing, and began to self-identify as “a public thinker.” When, with his Dorothy’s dedicated assistance, he launched Pot-Shots^® in Haight-Ashbury that year (he originally referred to his epigrams as “Unpoemed Titles”) – Ashleigh Brilliant had found his footing, and a way to express his granular life credo. He and Dorothy moved to Santa Barbara in ‘73 to be close to her parents. They’d married twice: once in Tijuana and once in SF. “The San Francisco wedding was in a big Jewish temple. My parents were more Jewish than I was, so Dorothy actually converted so we could marry. I should tell you, as a matter of interest,” he continued with a rueful grin, “we also got several divorces.” When Dorothy passed in 2018, they’d been married 51 years.

Ashleigh’s warmly cantankerous, wholly loving, and deeply curious journey through life would not be mistaken for anyone else’s. Predeceased by his mother and father and his younger sister, Myrna – the livewire that was Ashleigh Brilliant is gone. 

Back to the present tense, and the closing moments of Ashley’s spoken remembrance and our final conversation. 

Thin Line Between Love and Haight

Early 1967, and Ashleigh Brilliant has recently disembarked, for the very last time, the SS Ryndam – the floating university on which he’d circumnavigated the world twice as shipboard professor for Chapman College’s “University of the Seven Seas” program. Walking down the Ryndam’s gangplank on February 4, he is more than ready to wash his hands of both pedagogy and words like “pedagogy.” Brilliant begins his next phase in earnest, and absent the distracting nuisance of a plan. 

“I had been a college teacher, but I wanted to be a writer,” he says broadly. “Back in the 1960s, anything could happen, you know.”

“I know,” I answer. 

“It was really one of the best parts of my life.” He falls silent and gestures at a framed photo on a shelf, which I retrieve for him. He looks at the group in the picture for a long moment. “These are San Francisco friends,” he says disconsolately. “I haven’t looked carefully at that photo for a long time.” 

Once Brilliant becomes a regular speaker on Hippie Hill, a certain momentum kicks in. A wildly collectible LP called Ashleigh Brilliant in the Haight Ashbury is still in circulation, and good luck finding it. In fairly short order, and in Haight-Ashbury of all places – arguably the perfect petri dish in which to germinate an Ashleigh Brilliant in 1967 – the man becomes a known fixture in the area; a tweedy stand-up philosopher and gadfly.

On July 20, Brilliant’s sardonic Haight-Ashbury Songbook is published, he appears on several local radio programs as guest, and his photo is featured on the Society Page of the S.F. Examiner. Locally beloved SF columnist Herb Caen (who famously coined the Sputnik-adjacent term ‘Beatnik’ to dismiss Kerouac and his gang) declares himself an Ashleigh fan. Feeling expansive then, Brilliant has an additive brainstorm. He’d been painting for some time, and in an unusual turn would add the title of the work to the canvas, too. 

“When people bought my paintings, they seemed strangely interested in the titles that I had put at the bottom. That finally led into my doing postcards,” he says. [Diary entry, August 19, 1967: I should be putting my time into new creative projects, particularly into publishing my unpoemed titles, which it now appears may soon come out in postcard form].

“When I found out I was doing epigrams, I didn’t even know what the term meant,” he confesses now. With Dorothy’s tireless assistance he rolled the new Ashleigh out. “I didn’t realize that was going to be such a big thing. I put them in a few stores along Haight Street and people liked them and bought them – and I thought, ‘I don’t have to go back to teaching!’ I finally stopped a few years ago. I think 10,000 is enough.” 

Many of Brilliant’s Pot-Shots^® have entered the fridge magnet/boxer briefs realm, most famously, perhaps: I May Not Be Totally Perfect, But Parts of Me Are Excellent. 

If there is one story that perfectly sums up the indefinable Ashleigh Brilliant, it may be this one. When he and Dorothy attempt to more fully sample the counterculture and hesitantly attend a Haight Ashbury Love-In one evening, the charcuterie is bland and they find the surfeit of bare flesh off-putting. At the zenith of the grabby goings on, a stark-naked Ashleigh is standing in the middle of the living room, lamenting the backup sandwiches in the car outside and his inability to retrieve them. Haight-Ashbury, man. 

The afternoon wanes and Mr. Brilliant is tiring. “I did a lot of bicycle riding,” he says. “Sadly, my last bicycle is on the porch there.” Much of Ashleigh’s story is behind him. The fact seems to provide a partly-cloudy subtext to our conversation. His speaking manner – like the man himself – is dolorous but seasoned with bursts of laughter. 

I mention all the years I would see him tooling around town on his bike. He smiles broadly and stirs in his recliner.

“Oh!” he says with sudden delight. “You remember seeing me on my bicycle?”  

Editor’s Note: Ashleigh was the clock our staff set each week to… Around 1 pm on Thursdays, his column would always come in. Every week, it was the first piece we edited and placed for the next issue. A lighthearted but thoughtful way to start the week’s cycle. When he passed, there was a cache of finished articles for us to run. The first one being called “Freedom.” He will be missed and we hope his newfound freedom and lasting legacy will continue to inspire countless other Brilliant Thoughts in whimsical minds… ZR