In the evening he took courses with Thomas McGrath at Los Angeles State College. With Bert Meyers, Naomi Replansky, Gene Frumkin, Stanley Kiesel and Hank Coulette, he was a "Marsh Street Irregular," students who frequently met at Tom's home.
With Gene Frumkin, Mel co-founded Coastlines Literary Magazine during the 50's and was its first editor-in-chief. He published poetry and articles in The California Quarterly (50's), California Quarterly (2003), The Transatlantic Review, Epos, Poetry-Los Angeles, Chicago Choice, Poet Lore, Midwest, San Marcos Review, Blue Mesa Review, Grasslimb, Lummox and others. His poems were anthologized in Walter Lowenfel's New Poets of Today.
His article "Lysergic Acid and the Creative Experience" was chosen for Best Articles and Stories in 1956. Leonard Wolf in Voices from the Love Generation (Little, Brown and Company, 1968) later credited him with giving an account of that kind of experience well before Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg.
Much of his work in the 50's appears in Poets of the Non-Existent City: L.A. During the McCarthy Years, edited by Estelle Gershgoren-Novak, (UNM 2002) and in Mel's A Life of Windows & Mirrors: Selected Poems, 1948 -2005.
In the 70's and 80's, Mel was the founder and president of Pacific Environmental Services, an environmental engineering company. He has completed a memoir covering these periods entitled The Smog Inspector and a psycho-neurological novel in progress called Reverse Pathways.
*Two major EPA- documents he authored may be found in the U.S. Library of Congress, control numbers 62061847 and 73602958.
A Life in Windows & Mirrors: Selected Poems, 1948 - 2005