Los Olivos pt. 3

I still marvel at coincidence as related to my life and especially my time at Williams College.  Remember "Los Olivos" the play handbill and how it related to a fancy boarding school in Los Olivos that a friend of mine attended when I first found Williams College?

Here's another one involving Ray Stark, the producer.  I was friends with his son Peter in Claremont when he was going to CMC and I was a senior trying to accelerate my departure from Claremont High School. My family had brushed elbows with the Starks early on in life (I'm not sure how, but I was invited to a fancy Beverly Hills birthday party and once rode on the merry-go-round in Beverly Hills while the adults waited by the brass ring pole, and later on during a shopping trip in Westwood as I was admiring some red queen anne pumps in a shoe store, we would encounter Peter who would follow us to a gypsy tea room.  Peter was eventually admitted to the Claremont Colleges, Ray would come to the Shakespeare Festival, where Peter had a part onstage.  I would talk with Ray and Peter in the dressing room as Peter applied his make-up and make crass jokes to impress his father.

Remember how everyone in the press of the time gave a vague geography to Ray's ranch, to afford him some semblance of privacy, saying his rancho was located "somewhere in Santa Ynez Valley" ... when he was at his Elba, exiled it would seem from the new "Hollywood"?   Everyone who knew, knew.  His place was in Los Olivos. 

A famous episode in the old Zorro television program was introduced by this plot summary outline: 

“A mystery develops when a teenage girl arrives in the pueblo and asks for

directions to a ranch no one has ever heard of.”

There's only a slight correlation here.  I'm just trying to make it exciting for you all to thrill or wonder more at the game of coinkydink and this recent business about more Los Olivos connections.  You know, I stopped at the edge of his long driveway one time, several decades ago, as I didn't want to intrude on his life, we were hippie-looking types in a '49 Chevy pickup truck typically in use to deliver organic produce, and I just waved hello to the house, and hoped he caught the friendly well-wishing vibe.

Dr. John W. Hopkins and his ability to draw talented people to him to continue on with Williams College in the genuine spirit of Cora Williams Institute for Creative Development, and his acceptance of strange coincidence that just blossomed all around him, was beginning to rub off on me a bit, in so far as I thought I could recognize the lines of connectivity by taking each person and event back and forth in a logical manner, and then viewing the assembly or result of their combination.  Shaky ground for a theorist or historian, skating on thin ice for a person in a human science like sociology (both history and sociology being discilplines which any trained in real science would dismiss as mere "pseudo science"), but for a creative individual, a heck of a lot of fun sometimes, and sometimes more than interesting if not actually fun.

I remember Peter Stark telling me, among other things, his parents named him Peter and his sister Wendy from the book by J.M. Berrie, Peter and Wendy.  Poor troubled Peter, he would sneer in disbelief because his life even in rich privileged Beverly Hills where the world could be his oyster was so unlike that of Neverland, and then because other times it weirdly was.   He was troublesome, lonely, confused, and a handful as a child, in psychotherapy as a child, and he told me his folks had talked about taking him in for electroshock treatments when he was a kid in the hopes it might help him in some way!  Poor, poor Peter, I thought at the time I heard that story from him.  He was difficult as a young man, too, even for me, and I tended to make a lot of allowances for people who were my friends. He had pushed and recommended that his dad make a "new movie" that the "new intellectuals" would want to see ("Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mom's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad"), but somehow he ended up acting in a version that another person put out, and the film was not well received.  Peter though raised in show business with all those connections and all the money to back nearly anything he did could likely never compete successfully with his dad, or feel he received his father's real approval for any of his artistic adventures.  I was very sad when I learned of his suicide in New York (where apparently he spent a lot of time at Fire Island).

So I just waved hello to Ray Stark's house, way down a long driveway behind a gate, and hoped he got the friendly well wishing vibe.

 

  

 

 

Ministry

Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa, 1929


John W Hopkins, Ministerial Class

The Cosmos Within

I was sorry to hear Dr Hopkins became embittered in his later years (1973-1975), as I remember him as a genial and well mannered person, but such a turnabout is almost inevitable when assaulted by the combined forces of government agencies and tax collectors.  I believe, but am not certain, he began running in to financial woe when the college lost accreditation, as that likely meant the property taxes were then recomputed at a much higher residential rate, which I am certain even then would have been horrific to consider. 

I can infer some of his anti-government attitude may have been shaped when he as a well educated young man (Phi Beta Kappa, Drake University) most likely read newspaper accounts of the day's current events, which undoubtedly included articles of dire news like we read daily today, these endless reports of devastating economic collapse that only threatens to grow worse.  Certainly the Great War.  The Dust Storms that could seem cataclysmic.

Then, that more historic economic downturn, The Great Depression and, for him, witnessing the endless foreclosures on thousands of farmers in Iowa, who lost family farms built up through generations of family labors likely did not go unnoticed.  Such Iowa foreclosures were viewed as the compounded result of an early government economic interference in elevating crop prices during the Great War (WW I) to feed the soldiers overseas.  That economic move encouraged expansion of property holdings to provide more production.  With the government then removing those price protections farmers who had borrowed on their land and crops to buy more land for growing more crops spiraled into foreclosure in a big broken shoelace kind of thing.  And the depression in Iowa started early, in the early 20s with a staggering number of bank failures in the state, all the direct result of farmers not being able to pay money to the banks on their loans and mortgages because they couldn't sell the crops .

The government gave and then the government took away ... and people suffered.  A similar thing happened in New Mexico, when the bean field farmers at the onset of WWI were awarded great and lucrative contracts which they gladly signed, but then somewhat mysteriously the bean fields were hit by a blight before the first acres could be harvested and they've not been able to grow beans a day since in the Albuquerque environs at least.  As a result, locals still look on the government as a curse and some claim they see the blight as a form of punishment or divine instruction.  But you've likely heard that story already. 

Dr Hopkins obviously benefited from and enjoyed some of the tax benefits of running an educational institution through the decades.  He perhaps even claimed more tax-deductible benefits as he early (1960) understood the importance of ordination (and I am trying to find where his "Dr" was awarded, as I suspect his was a doctor of divinity).

I understand he had mortgaged his father's farm (Rocklyn) in Iowa by the time I had encountered him again (1969), but I don't know whether specifically just to help keep the estate afloat, satisfy creditors and keep them at bay, or if he had (just guessing) been lured or enticed into some investment scheme.  That farm, which was the family farm for over a century, was simultaneously foreclosed upon when the estate went into the hands of bankers in California (Viking Mortgage, which then foreclosed on a sum of $70,000 on a near priceless property and sold the estate for a tidy profit to a handful of real estate investors who in turn sold to Larry Leon).

Jim Crow a Go Go

Because Dr. Hopkins was in steady financial difficulty, the once elegant estate had somewhat fallen asunder since the keys were handed to him by Cora Williams all those many years prior. A fact that Tofland noted, and the residents and visitors long after him noticed as well.  Others would visit the grounds and buildings and some of their impressions of the estate hearkened to the decay and rot consuming the architectural splendor of the ante bellum south and were quite remarkable.  Although it may be safe to assume that often the interiors of such mansions fallen from greatness would express more than a tinge of melancholy.  Such are the remains of some historical days.  The physical location, however, did much to help fuel the imaginations of the Mime Troupe members who were scripting the early ensemble works, most particularly The Minstrel Show.

(letter from George Starr, Professor of English, U.C. Berkeley, July 26, 2011:   "All in all the impression created by the Hopkins household in these years was a rather melancholy one, a sense of shabby-genteel decline and helplessness that would have seemed natural in a film or novel about the Deep South but rather out of place in bustling, thriving Berkeley.")

Universal Party

Dr. John Wohlman Hopkins (called John Jr) said he had his first visit from what has become commonly known as the space brothers in 1954 (see his article in the CalTech newspaper below), which was the very year his mother died.  He said he was sitting in the double basket chair (where he and his mom used to sit ) one night when the saucer descended down through the atrium. 

After that time, he met many of the great popular contactees by hosting conventions and meetings in the Bay Area plus traveling himself to farflung areas in California, Arizona, and I think Mexico.  He hosted Orfeo Angelucci at a convention at Williams College as well as Daniel Fry (founder of Understanding).  And Buck Nelson (John Jr had a little manila money envelope of black fur he showed me that was from Buck's dog after the dog went into outer space. Buck used to sell these as curios

Alien electric pianos and plasma televisions

Contactees and Music

Rare footage of Daniel Fry (who used to visit Williams College) and the benign comments of Mr. Menger concerning "aliens".  This is somewhat akin to some of the lectures we attended on the campus of Williams College. 

Not much has been written about Dr. John W. Hopkins, though. 

Willing, Willing, & Willing

I'm not sure which blog to post this on, I guess here as my geneaology and ancestral roots vaguely tangent into the Mime Troupe.  First, may I say the obvious:  everyone has a personal history, which combines into a larger family history if you are fortunate enough to be born into such a nuclear system and learn of family histories.  When you are friends with people, and grow close to them you learn something about their family history and they about yours because you share campfire stories.  Usually people who are concerned with geneaology are first driven by person curiosity, but most who continue in such delvings into the past usually seek to determine their own pedigrees, or others of a more cultural bent hope to learn more about history and people in history and their actions and places and so on.

I did not have a large supply of relatives on my father's side (though he was one of eleven children, remember kids died off early back then) so I heard a bit of my mother's geneaology from her.  She was raised by her blind grandmother in the South as the unwanted child of vaudevillians who performed on the circuit.  My mother's mother (born in 1880 or so) left home or ran away from home and joined the circus so to speak at the age of fourteen, and she became a dancer.  Though sometimes she would play in skits, too, show business being what it was (comedic skits, once she was a maid in costume).  She would turn down other job offers (for instance, a promoter on Boblo Island amusement park outside of Michigan when she first left home offered her a $5 or $7 to dive from a high platform into a small tank of water.  Another or so it was said tried to get her to dance on a platform atop a flag pole, and she considered that but declined.  Whenever I saw historic films of ladies doing the Charleston on the top of hot air balloon floating through the air, cinema shot by a crazy cameraman seated safely in a nearby biplane, I would think of my grandmother).   

My grandmother met my grandfather, Charles Willinghurst, a Southerner, on the vaudeville circuit (Great Lake States, into New York, a little into unspecified regions of the South, and once she said she played Iowa) and so my mom was born and soon shuffled off to an old wooden house in Kentucky to be brought up.  Charles Willinghurst was a vaudevillian performer as well, part Irish so he could do a step dance and a jig.  But his act, the act he was famous for (with a friend) was as a black faced minstrel, and they called themselves Willing & Willing.  They brought a third guy into the act and renamed the act "Willing, Willing, & Willing" but soon dropped him because of disagreements and went back to the twosome for performance.

I used to have an old clipping from a newspaper of the time, held folded in a book, a clipping which had nearly disintegrated by the time I even first saw it c. 1960, a large nearly full page article and photo, showing a photograph of Willing & Willing in blackface and standing next to an old wooden dray cart hauled by a mule.  A publicity shot and show announcement or review.  My mother, raised in the South, for many good reasons I felt, grew to hate her father and his act.  She even dropped the use of his name and assumed the last name of my grandmother's second husband, another Southerner, who she had met several times.

Because I was a curious child, I would ask my mother sometimes about her (painful) memories, especially the blackface act.  She said all they did was sing and dance and make jokes and white people would laugh at the antics of white people pretending to be shuffling comedic black people.  For a number of reasons (his alcoholism, punching her in the nose and breaking it to steal the three dollars she had in her hand earned from sewing a dress when she was 8 years old all so he could run to the tavern and get a much needed drink, the cruelty, the abandonment, being forced to live with someone she hated), my mother detested her father.  And she was embarrassed always that she had been raised in the South.

These were my roots, my own real painful personal history as well, but I am happy to say I shared this story with my theatrical friends, and they eventually came up with a pretty damn good spin on this story.

We were Willing, too.  Can you guess which play I am speaking of now?  That my friends who I knew from the desert college and now the friends at Williams College put together and put on?

(This is a picture of me as a kid on Catalina [August 1953].  My mother didn't even want to pose by the cart, as tourists would, let alone get into it as just the sight and the notion of the photographs brought back painful memories for her.  As to the publicity photo of her father, I like her would just keep it folded in a book until it was pulverized by time and turned to dust.).

This is a very important part of the secret and now obscured history of the early origins of the San Francisco Mime Troupe.  At least to me. (I'm the one wearing the hat)

I am obliged to mention that my mother's father and mother were indeed married when my mother was born.  My mother went through much anxiety when she was trying to get her birth certificate once and discovered the local Kentucky building holding those records had burned down.  She was afraid.  She had to get a baptismal certificate, to prove that she was who she said when asking for proof of birth to be provided elsewhere ... which she did eventually get, but the church records she looked into also showed marriage records.  So at least she was "legitimate", which was a bit of relief to her.  She was quite embarrassed to be the child of vaudevillians (actresses, dancers, musicians were regarded as the scum of proper society), and the child of divorced parents (as no one was divorced back then in 1917, those who did were regarded as loose moraled people), and the child of a blackface comedian to boot who was himself raised in the South, and then ashamed of being raised in the South herself.  Some of that personal history of hers rubbed off on me, how could it not?  It all was part of who I was and eventually became.  But enough about me.