Sorry Jim. But it just wafted back to life. Probably just smoldering in past threads stinking the place up anyway.
Whatever happened to Will Heath? Is he still around? I think I would like to meet the guy.
First of all
WILL WAS NOT BANNED HE BANNED HIMSELF He put himself out there and did a lot of things some people on this site, and a couple of others, hated him for because; according to them, he had not done the sweat equity to get him to his point of respect. He had a direct dialog with most of the major players in bonsai today evidenced by the web site he was instrumental in founding and elevating to a high status that people still talk about today: The Art of Bonsai.
One individual who had a really great vendetta toward Will because, in many ways Will, did not suffer frauds lightly and Will considered this individual as a fraud. This person was a student of Boon and boasted it almost daily when he was not reminding everyone that he was a member of Mensa, making the argument in an ad hoc sort of way that being a student of Boon and a member of Mensa automatically gave him Boon's credibility. The Problem is that this individual, with all of his Boon intensives, could not post any work of his own; just pictures of Boon's trees Boon let him work on. One a personal level he had only one little JBP that he had been working on for ten years and it was not really much of a bonsai.
Well this individual spent some of his own money and went out and did a background search on Will and discovered that twenty-five years ago he was arrested for a "sex offense" Lets examine this incident. Will in his youth owned a business that did parties with clowns, jump houses, and the like. His business also did more adult endeavors with stripers for bachelor parties and the like. This is where it turned south. His business carried catalogs which included photos of the girls that worked for his business as stripers and two of them had been hired with professionally made ID's proving they were eighteen years old and intact they we sixteen.
This happened in another state and Will was not personally involved in hiring the two girls but, because he owned the business he was responsible in the eyes of the law. Here is the funny thing about the law: It is legal to have consensual sex with a sixteen year old but you cannot take pictures of a sixteen year old. Therefore his business was lost and he was convicted of a sex crime.
This individual, who by now was jumping up and down with glee, proceeded to post this mess all over the Internet until someone pointed out to him that what he was doing was a ten year felony.
After this, all of the people who did not like Will declared war on him without knowing the details of what happened or even caring much about anything other than lynching him and getting rid of him. A year ago I had a disagreement with a member on this site about the number of trees in a display and you would have thought I had accused his mother of illicit and forbidden sex on a street corner. I had trouble understanding his anger until he made the statement that his anger was not because of my questioning the number of trees in a planting but because I was a friend of Will Heath. Any thing any one could bring up or imagine was fair game. So Will decided just to preserve a degree of harmony he banned himself off of this site he was not asked to leave.
As to my involvement with Will? We were and are friends and as far as I know he is still doing bonsai though all of this has created some bumps in the road, I still think of him as a friend and spend time with him when possible.