For the following eight years he worked as a dishwasher, school bus driver, construction worker, waiter, underground molybdenum miner, and small town newspaper reporter in Colorado, Idaho, and Arizona.
Newsham married his first wife, Beverly, in 1980 and spent six months traveling around the world visiting Hong Kong, Thailand, India, USSR, and Greece in 1982.
In summer 2001 he received Philippine rice farmer Tony Tocdaan, whom he had met in 1988, as a guest in his San Francisco home.
This attracted significant press attention, and Newsham was able to send Tocdaan enough money to build a guest house to accommodate some of the many people who wished to visit him.
But in October 2006, Newsham veered away from the book project and threw himself into the movement to impeach US President George Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney.
Many Americans, including Newsham, passionately believed that the Bush administration should be held accountable for its misconduct in office, and considered Pelosi's "off the table" declaration to be an enormous—even unconstitutional—blunder.
[citation needed] Early on the clear, calm morning of January 6, 2007—just two days after Pelosi was sworn in as Speaker of the US House of Representatives—Newsham and a crew of volunteers outlined the message "IMPEACH!"
Photos and video from these events were used by Reuters, the Associated Press, the Christian Science Monitor, the San Francisco Chronicle, and in newspapers, magazines, and websites around the globe.