Asking for help is often difficult, and can be doubly so when the person you’re asking is an idol of yours — someone you’d claim “has done for religion what the Beatles did for music.” Such was the case for Sun founder and editor Sy Safransky when he considered reaching out to spiritual leader Ram Dass. At the tail end of the 1970s the number of Sun subscribers hovered somewhere south of a thousand, and the magazine was in dire financial straits. Assistant editor Elizabeth Rose Campbell suggested Sy write to Ram Dass for assistance. When he couldn’t bring himself to do it, she wrote the letter herself.
