Sometime about 1971 I moved out of Williams College to a place in Berkeley that wasn't situated at a tilt and alist, with big cracks in the cold concrete floor from hill slippage and settling, and with a bathroom and shower facility I wouldn't have to share with the ballet dancers, and which also had heat. The basement under the ballet studio could also be like a fun house, items would roll off the table like marbles, pans on the stove holding water to boil eggs had water an inch higher on one side, and the entire room was so skewed from settling that it was like an eerie optical illusion when people stood up inside. In fact, I had to set a leg of the kitchen table on a brick, and it was still tilted enough for items to roll off despite the grabbing effect of a red and white bistro table cloth I had placed on top of the mesa.
About this same time, Dr. Hip moved out to be nearer to all the celebrity life he took part in, as he was gone there most of the time anyway, it seemed. Farley Hall was summarily handed over by Dr John W Hopkins to a man of some mystery, an attorney or a lawyer of some kind, who no one on the estate that I know of actually met, but who they collectively didn't like or trust. Soon, the residents on the estate were alarmed and banded together to attempt to raise moneys needed to actually buy the estate for price on the note, perhaps a bit more, and of course (despite two of the residents coming from very well-heeled families with access to familial fortunes) likely because one of them didn't like the other and couldn't full heartedly engage, this plan ran aground. So quite soon, within a year or two, a few others moved from the estate and on to their own lives elsewhere (one studied mid-wifery in Appalachia and traveled and studied here and there in other fields, while the other with a newly awarded advanced degree was flirting with the idea of a gene bank although that would not be remunerative in any way so he became a real estate broker) with the exception of the highly physical couple (the exotic dancer and body builder) living in the old coach house, who I visited once in 1974. At that time, there was an xray photo of the man's foot held by tape in a window of the place. During that last visit, I felt the place was on the edge of a real abyss, and I could fairly accurately predict the final outcome of Williams College under the benign auspices of Dr. John W. Hopkins and the coming end of his tenure there.
When I stopped up to visit Dr. and old Mr. Hopkins in 1972 or so, to pay a friendly visit and to thank the Hopkins family for all their kindness and hospitality afforded to us all in the past, Dr Hopkins mentioned somewhat morosely and resigned finality that he was awaiting the arrival of "the people of color." These turned out to be the black couple brought in to help care for the needs of old Mr Hopkins in his final year on earth. Charles the handyman was still there then, too, as I inquired about his welfare.
During those years, hard pressed for money, Dr Hopkins would occasionally sell off antique furnishings from the place. The finer pieces were maintained in the Great House, while a few other items had been stored in the storeroom adjoining my basement flat. Once when Charles went in to retrieve a chair or lamp, he left the door temporarily unlocked for his return visit to retrieve more furniture. I went in and found an old brown flat metal suitcase with wooden ribs and leather handle, which was snapped shut with one lock (as the other was broken), and I opened that to find some old women's clothes, notably a thin and once elegant cable knit cardigan sweater that likely once belonged to Dr Hopkins's mother. I carefully refolded the garment and placed it nicely in the suitcase again, snapping it shut with the lock. Just as it had been when I found it.
The estate was no longer drawing people in to stay and create, as if the institute itself knew its time was coming soon. The woman who took my basement place started an essential oil business in San Francisco and soon (within a matter of months) moved out, and that room remained unoccupied I believe, merely a place that vandalous rich drunken teenagers of the neighborhood would trash and spray paint with rude grafitti. The woman who I'd known from the poopy desert college who had inherited Sandy Archer's old place in the early days of the Mime Troupe was off on extended travel and learning, and she deposited a friend in her old place, though she too left within a matter of months as I understand to start up a coffee house hundreds of miles away. I only remember seeing her once, long black braids and lace about the neck of her flowery dresses. Even Ed Leddy eventually left, despite Fantasy records absorbing the rights to the the first jazz album I ever bought, and he moved to Florida to be nearer the aunt who mailed him round cylinders of rum babas. And the peacock house guy as I mentioned was among the last to remain, but he moved in with a new girlfriend and began studying for a real estate career after an unsuccessful bid in a genetic or science consulting consortium he was part of. Though in mid-1974, the same couple still inhabited the old coach house. They probably had to move within a year, when the estate was taken over by a new owner of the physical grounds and buildings.
In the old days, there was a "W" on the roof of the Great House. Which could be seen from the window of a neighbor's house higher in the hills. Of course, the letter obviously signified W for Williams College, but I always liked to believe the W was for Cassiopeia, and perhaps that notation was a galactic directional signal of some kind for the space brothers to better make their way to the atrium for a visit with Dr. Hopkins.
Oh, yes, at the time of my residence at Williams College, I sent away $5 or $10 and became an ordained minister in the Universal Life Church, just in case.
I know what happened to old Mr. Hopkins and his son, Dr. John W. Hopkins. I wish I knew what became of Charles. I have a call in to an old friend to see if she might remember his last name.
Thursday, November 7, 2013
What Important People Do
Just to continue with this thought about Los Olivos, because the reader might not go to the trouble of looking up who any of these characters I mention are, and so remain ignorant really of how things are wound together in my personal history, I will point out that Ray Stark was once a powerful force in New York and Hollywood and continues to be an influence to this very day. I liked the fact he would take time from his busy schedule in Hollywood to come see his son Peter perform in the Shakespeare Festival, which was a small town hokey event for a prestigious intellectual bank like the Claremont colleges (the Shakespearean acrobats and clowns assembled to entertain the audiences on their way to the plays were drawn from the boys gym class at the local high school, and they'd installed a trampoline for their physical antics).
Ray Stark
My pal Peter Stark
What they do now
(I read through that long list, the only thing I can be directly and immediately connected with is Les Blank and his documentary about the Garlic Festival, because I developed a recipe for garlic ice cream, which I have boasted about several times in print. That the influence of this recipe spread farther afield I cannot deny. I never went to the Garlic Festival and I never went to the Nucleus Nuance, a hip restaurant now defunct on Melrose where the famous of the day gathered that used my recipe for a dessert. All that exists now is the recipe, and my name in a book or a newspaper article online).
I did like the fact when I heard of this back a decade or so ago that Ray and his wife Frances started a residential home for old actors, as that could have been my grandmother living in there had she lived to be 113 years old or so, presuming she'd had the money to pay for such rents (which she wouldn't have, just living off a deceased husband's meager social security stacked up after years on the assembly line in a Detroit auto factory), and her contributions to Theatre lofty enough to be mentioned and recognized on the rental application. Although my grandmother, when she was close to 75 years old, could still kick high, and reach the top of a door jam, which by all later reports she would still do on occasion when encouraged at a Thanksgiving family gathering. One time, she had a little too much wine and fell down flat on the floor, but just laughed and got up and tried it again and succeeded.
In thinking about it, when I knew Peter, I can't recall that he mentioned his mom to me, his Dad was the one typically who Peter, a young college man just trying to start out and gain a footing in life was the parent he was most concerned with, and I guess this was a reflection of Peter's personal issues of the time. I am the one making this psychological assessment based on our conversations that I recall from the time.
Though he was not completely self-absorbed. Peter and I would also mention and talk a bit about the settlements in Claremont for the retired missionaries ,,, we'd think about the future sometimes, in the shallow way that youth are known to do (his family would likely never have to worry, while life was a stretch for my grandmother after retiring from vaudeville, and how all things must pass, where either of us might be going and how we might end up.) Once in awhile, he genuinely sparkled. We went so see a movie at a Pomona drive-in, Saturday night at the movies like all the other young folks in the Valley, a film which though he knew someone attached to the film in some indefinable way neither of us liked, so we left and drove into the hills one evening and spread out a sleeping bag (which he carried he said because he was a member of the Sierra Club), and all we did was look at the stars in the clear sky, each in our own thoughts which we did not share with one another.
Ray by all reports really didn't like living the bucolic life in Santa Ynez, though he raised horses. His neighbor on Camino Cielo Road, a famous actor turned politician, owned 8 cows, by all reports, and took a huge cattleman's tax writeoff on his property. And they spray painted the grass green with fertilizing compounds when he went to visit a local state mental hospital before he reduced funding to throw everyone out on to the streets when the world at large was unprepared for them. You can't help seeing a conspiracy sometimes, myself included. When I was quite young, I was carried by adults on an outing of some kind, I visited this family home at the Redi Kilowatt house, but I don't recall too much of what went on there and I don't recall meeting anyone in particular, as I preferred to stay out in the garden.
Later, though, Lily Tomlin and I would talk once in a very great while about our mutual memories of relatives working in automotive factories. Noisy awful work, a hell of a way to make a living, is what we agreed upon. That shared commonality, a temporary geographic propinquity, and a mutual friend is about all we had in common at that time, aside from a skewed view of the world. You might see some of the things we talked about in her skits, though, so you'll have to be a detective and figure out what those might be, the spread of creative influence while tracing the intellectual history of the United States and all. I know what they are, but you can feel free to guess and if you guess correctly, you might say this is just too coincidental and so must be a fabrication or an embellishment or just a big fish story on my part. Whatever, history belongs to the victors, the biggest voice in media, and all those other platitudes you'd care to quote here.
None of this has too much to do with Williams College, except I was visiting and living there during this period and these people were in my recent memory then (except for the garlic, that came about a decade later, so I've fallen off a strict chronology here) and so they were part of my cosmos, as we used to say back then.
As for me, currently, I am consumed with bringing in references to Los Olivos so that you might better understand the nature of the people who Dr John W Hopkins allowed to live on the estate, although he did not know the facts nor the aura surrounding any of the famous people I knew in that past, nor even their names, he knew nothing of my personal history. But he allowed me to live there, and he was satisfied he was drawing people to him in some weird occult or metaphysical way to continue on in the genuine spirit of the Institute of Creative Development (overlaid with newer stricta and interpretations as developed by the leadership of the Understanding movement).
Ray Stark
My pal Peter Stark
What they do now
(I read through that long list, the only thing I can be directly and immediately connected with is Les Blank and his documentary about the Garlic Festival, because I developed a recipe for garlic ice cream, which I have boasted about several times in print. That the influence of this recipe spread farther afield I cannot deny. I never went to the Garlic Festival and I never went to the Nucleus Nuance, a hip restaurant now defunct on Melrose where the famous of the day gathered that used my recipe for a dessert. All that exists now is the recipe, and my name in a book or a newspaper article online).
I did like the fact when I heard of this back a decade or so ago that Ray and his wife Frances started a residential home for old actors, as that could have been my grandmother living in there had she lived to be 113 years old or so, presuming she'd had the money to pay for such rents (which she wouldn't have, just living off a deceased husband's meager social security stacked up after years on the assembly line in a Detroit auto factory), and her contributions to Theatre lofty enough to be mentioned and recognized on the rental application. Although my grandmother, when she was close to 75 years old, could still kick high, and reach the top of a door jam, which by all later reports she would still do on occasion when encouraged at a Thanksgiving family gathering. One time, she had a little too much wine and fell down flat on the floor, but just laughed and got up and tried it again and succeeded.
In thinking about it, when I knew Peter, I can't recall that he mentioned his mom to me, his Dad was the one typically who Peter, a young college man just trying to start out and gain a footing in life was the parent he was most concerned with, and I guess this was a reflection of Peter's personal issues of the time. I am the one making this psychological assessment based on our conversations that I recall from the time.
Though he was not completely self-absorbed. Peter and I would also mention and talk a bit about the settlements in Claremont for the retired missionaries ,,, we'd think about the future sometimes, in the shallow way that youth are known to do (his family would likely never have to worry, while life was a stretch for my grandmother after retiring from vaudeville, and how all things must pass, where either of us might be going and how we might end up.) Once in awhile, he genuinely sparkled. We went so see a movie at a Pomona drive-in, Saturday night at the movies like all the other young folks in the Valley, a film which though he knew someone attached to the film in some indefinable way neither of us liked, so we left and drove into the hills one evening and spread out a sleeping bag (which he carried he said because he was a member of the Sierra Club), and all we did was look at the stars in the clear sky, each in our own thoughts which we did not share with one another.
Ray by all reports really didn't like living the bucolic life in Santa Ynez, though he raised horses. His neighbor on Camino Cielo Road, a famous actor turned politician, owned 8 cows, by all reports, and took a huge cattleman's tax writeoff on his property. And they spray painted the grass green with fertilizing compounds when he went to visit a local state mental hospital before he reduced funding to throw everyone out on to the streets when the world at large was unprepared for them. You can't help seeing a conspiracy sometimes, myself included. When I was quite young, I was carried by adults on an outing of some kind, I visited this family home at the Redi Kilowatt house, but I don't recall too much of what went on there and I don't recall meeting anyone in particular, as I preferred to stay out in the garden.
Later, though, Lily Tomlin and I would talk once in a very great while about our mutual memories of relatives working in automotive factories. Noisy awful work, a hell of a way to make a living, is what we agreed upon. That shared commonality, a temporary geographic propinquity, and a mutual friend is about all we had in common at that time, aside from a skewed view of the world. You might see some of the things we talked about in her skits, though, so you'll have to be a detective and figure out what those might be, the spread of creative influence while tracing the intellectual history of the United States and all. I know what they are, but you can feel free to guess and if you guess correctly, you might say this is just too coincidental and so must be a fabrication or an embellishment or just a big fish story on my part. Whatever, history belongs to the victors, the biggest voice in media, and all those other platitudes you'd care to quote here.
None of this has too much to do with Williams College, except I was visiting and living there during this period and these people were in my recent memory then (except for the garlic, that came about a decade later, so I've fallen off a strict chronology here) and so they were part of my cosmos, as we used to say back then.
As for me, currently, I am consumed with bringing in references to Los Olivos so that you might better understand the nature of the people who Dr John W Hopkins allowed to live on the estate, although he did not know the facts nor the aura surrounding any of the famous people I knew in that past, nor even their names, he knew nothing of my personal history. But he allowed me to live there, and he was satisfied he was drawing people to him in some weird occult or metaphysical way to continue on in the genuine spirit of the Institute of Creative Development (overlaid with newer stricta and interpretations as developed by the leadership of the Understanding movement).
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
More Agricultural History
In San Francisco and around the Bay Area, the actors and writers I knew from Williams College would watch movies, too. Although these films were in no way the polished productions one might find being fabricated in Hollywood for screens in major theater chains, they were interesting. Here's one from 1965.
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
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:
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.
Monday, November 4, 2013
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).
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.")
(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.")