Gavin Hyde Interview

--(Interview begins)--

This is an oral history interview with Gavin Hyde. July the 10th 1986. At Phelps Hall, University of California, at Santa Barbara. I'm Helen C. Newbery.

NEWBERY: Mr. Hyde, where were you born?

HYDE: I was born in Santa Barbara.

NEWBERY: What were the names of your parents?

HYDE: Robert McKee Hyde and Florence Fenno Tuckerman, who later became Florence Hyde.

NEWBERY: The names of your brothers and sisters?

HYDE: I have quite a few, actually they are all half-brothers or half-sisters. My mother had two children by her husband, before marrying Robert Hyde. His 00:01:00name, her former husband was Loring Andrews, who was also a writer. And she had two children, Oliver Andrews and Joel Andrews, and then I was her third child after she married Robert Hyde. And then he had had two former wives. One who died in child birth and that child is named Susan Hyde.

NEWBERY: Did she have a married name?

HYDE: Susan Macy. She married Eliot Macy.[1] Then he married again, the name of his second wife was Lydia Tonetti and they had three children, Anne G, whom we all called Angy, and Joe and Francois. So those are all my brothers and sisters.

NEWBERY: Does Anne have a married name?

HYDE: Angy became Angy Bjorklund. She married Bjorklund, and Angy lives in Santa Barbara on the Old San Marcos Road.[2] Joe and Francois pretty much stayed in the east all their lives.

NEWBERY: I understand Joe is rather a renowned chef.

HYDE: That's right. Joe studied cooking in France, and then when he came back to New York he became a kind of caterer for big parties and things. He wrote a book called, "Love Time and Butter." He cooked a meal of mushrooms for the New York Mycological Society and things like that.

NEWBERY: And Francois?

HYDE: And Francois has been involved with, I think, some oil company, and he 00:03:00spent a lot of his time in some Far East country, I think Iran, I'm not sure exactly.

NEWBERY: Where were your early residences in Santa Barbara, where did you live as a child?

HYDE: Well, first I lived on Garden Street, 914 Garden Street, and then we went to Arbolado Road, 837 Arbolado Road, and then we went to Mountain Drive.

NEWBERY: What kind of work did your father do?

HYDE: He was a writer, but during the war both my mother and father went south, 00:04:00everyone was involved in the war, I'm talking about the Second World War, everyone was involved in the war effort. You couldn't think about anything else at the time, so even though my father was a very strong pacifist, to the extent that he wouldn't allow us to say bang-bang in the house as if we were playing cowboys and... Playing with guns was definitely something you could get spanked for. Even if it was a stick you were using to make believe it was a gun. But they both got jobs in the defense plants down there, in Douglas Aircraft in El Segundo.

NEWBERY: And then when you returned after the war to Santa Barbara, that's when Mountain Drive community developed?

HYDE: Right, right.

NEWBERY: How did it get started?

HYDE: How did Mountain Drive get started? Well, to sort of lead into that, I 00:05:00thought I'd read my father's words, from something that he wrote. He was preparing an autobiography when he died, but he didn't get much further than the move to Mountain Drive. So actually this is the last chapter of what he wrote, and before this interview I decided I would look in his autobiography to see what I could find, and sure enough, this will give a kind of idea of what he was like because, you hear it in his words. So I'll just read this. I hope it doesn't take too long.

NEWBERY: Time is of no consequence here.

HYDE: "It began to be obvious that the war was coming to an end, and that when the war ended the Douglas Company buildings would be empty, and greater Los Angeles a ghost town. The thing to do was to sell the house at Manhattan Beach as fast as possible. The Hydes ran an ad in the newspaper and sold the house to the first buyer who would pay $1,800 cash. It made them feel a little guilty to take the $1,800 for it because that gave them a profit of 300 percent over the cost. But then they had put a lot of work into it. Bobby came back to Arbolado Road, and worked on the Arbolado house while Floppy stayed in Los Angeles building airplanes for Lockheed. She came up weekends and terrified Bobby by giving rides to hitch-hikers, but there was nothing to do about it. You can't control a woman just because you are married to her! Some of the olive trees 00:07:00from the two thickly planted slopes at Maria Ignacio were moved into a line in front of the porch, and although the building was classified as a store room, Daddy moved ten truckloads of antiques at a dollar a load from the old place on Carrillo Street to the new building, and operated the new building as his business for the rest of his life." Now I'm going to interrupt the reading here for a second to explain, because that can be confusing to any person who listens to this. That is, that where he's talking about moving olive trees to a place in front of a house, he's talking about, a place down on Carrillo Street that belonged to my grandfather, Robert Wilson Hyde. My father had built a house behind that or was about to, I guess, and so since he had a source of many olive 00:08:00trees he moved some down there to make, to beautify that place, and my grandfather had to move out of the place where he was keeping his antiques, so he moved all his antiques into this place on Carrillo Street. That's what is being spoken of there. Now I'll go back to the reading. "There was still enough space in the back of the lot for a small house. So Bobby built one there out of 1 x 12 boards with battens over the cracks. And some of the first income Bobby and Floppy had in their married life was $25 a month rent from the house behind the shop. One day while he was working on the Arbolado house Bobby looked up into the handsome and faintly familiar face of David Gray. David was familiar by being the son of David Gray, Sr., who had been a friend of Daddy's. David was 00:09:00five or ten years younger than Bobby, which by the alchemy of time had only now suddenly made them contemporaries. David had bought an old water tower and was in the process of having it sawed into five sections, and moved over to David's ranch in the valley. Joe Hollister was drilling a horizontal well in the 40 or 50 acre Hollister ranch, and Bobby sat by the house watching them drilling. It was a fascinating idea Joe had. The idea of tapping the annual rain fall trapped in the mountains. Joe's first well was a success, and when David needed water on his ranch it immediately occurred to Bobby that perhaps a horizontal well there would be the answer. The whole family drove up to San Francisco in an old truck and bought a horizontal drill, 500 feet of drill pipe and a diamond bit. On the way down to Monterey and Carmel it seemed a good chance to look in on some 00:10:00friends at Partington Ridge. They started up the steep road at Partington Ridge, but the car was almost immediately in compound low, and no possibility of stopping at their friends. There was nothing to do but go on to the top and only hope the old truck would make it. That was how they happened to arrive at the top of Partington Ridge, and be turning the truck around in Henry Miller's yard. Floppy's son, Oliver knew Henry Miller. Henry was surrounded by his usual group of pilgrims and at that time had not acquired the halo of white hair, and the looks of a benign old angel which would be his later. It was with trepidation that the old truck was stressed into compound low, and started in motion down Partington Ridge. It made the highway, however and continued uneventfully to Santa Barbara. In a country where it may not rain for six months it's so exciting that maybe you can drill into a dusty mountain and water will gush out 00:11:00of the hole you drilled. All the water on the mountain is on its way to the ocean by the least obstructed way it can find. If the hole a man drills in the mountain becomes the shortest way for water to reach the ocean, water will continue to use that path as long as it continues to be the shortest way. When rocks were laid down as sand only to become sand stone in the bottom of the ocean, and finer aggregate which were to become straight up shale and clay, they neither helped nor hindered the path of water to the ocean, but once they were set up on edge by mountains within the earth itself then there were sand stones which were water bearing and clays which inhibited free flow. Bobby didn't have too successful a time drilling his first well at David Gray's. Nearly all the calamities which can happen to a horizontal driller happened to him. He lost circulation; a cave-in within the hole seized the whole string of drill pipe, as 00:12:00if in the jaws of a vice. And there was nothing to do but call San Francisco, and ask what horizontal drillers did when that happened. 'Then,' said the careful, experienced voice on the other end of the telephone, 'All you can do is wash in over the end of your drill pipe with a string of casing and another diamond bit until you get your first bit out again.' Joe Hollister was the only horizontal driller in the Santa Barbara area, and he was just drilling on Hollister land, so various people who needed horizontal wells called on Bobby to drill them. People who needed ancient olive trees, also, employed Bobby to transplant from his inexhaustible supply at Maria Ignacio. The road passed right beside the olive grove, and with a little old tractor, it was possible to cut around the bowl of the tree so that it could be pulled out of the hole by chains and ropes applied only to the bowl of the tree itself. The tree dug out by the 00:13:00bulldozer and pushed onto the truck by the bulldozer, trucked to its eventual site, and dropped directly into the hole, was an operation which could be carried out without damage to the bark. The tree could be worth 50 or 100 dollars or more depending on size and the elimination of other trees on the slope at Maria Ignacio made an improved situation for those which were left, and with fewer trees it was even possible to terrace the hillside. In between the serious work of drilling or moving an olive tree there were marvelous parties at the house on Arbolado Road. On account of the side of the small pool being slippery, once in, it was almost impossible to get out. And as many as sixteen people were known to have been swimming in that pool at the same time. The day came at Arbolado Road when neighbors were too close and city life almost, if not entirely, unbearable. That was when Bobby asked Jim Waggoner if he didn't have 00:14:00an acre for sale up on Mountain Drive. 'I haven't got one,' said Jim, 'I've got fifty.' 'That's too much,' said Bobby. 'Not if you can get it for the price of one,' said Jim, 'Is it?' And it was with just such ease, that Bobby found himself living on three enormous pieces of land and from time to time moving over slightly to make room for a friend." So that even gave us the name of the person that he talked to, which I of course did not know until I looked in this manuscript. And I do remember that the land was completely burned over at that time, so if you walked through it, it was like going through a waste land. Anyone who has been around this kind of brush land up here right after a fire, when 00:15:00you're walking in two feet of ashes, and there's just black trees, knows that there's a kind of a depressing experience, but luckily nature knows how to take care of those things and as soon as it gets wet, things just come back much stronger, it takes time. I say this, because, of course, the fact that Waggoner said, "Why turn away from fifty acres if you can get it for the price of one." The fact that that piece was burned made it look less valuable to any buyer at the time. It was also right on the edge of the city limits, and although Mountain Drive at the time, it did not seem like part of Montecito. Montecito is 00:16:00high dollar value real estate. In fact, it was part of Montecito. This is a fact that was not lost on my father. But of course, the principle reason that he wanted to go up there was just because he loved beautiful mountain land. But anyway it was burned over when he bought it. I remember that.

NEWBERY: You gave a very nice description of what it looked like. About how old were you when you went up with your father to see this?

HYDE: Well he bought it just as we were moving back from the Los Angeles environs, our house in Manhattan Beach. And that means I was twelve when we 00:17:00first went there.

NEWBERY: And that would be in the year around what, '45, '46?

HYDE: That was '42.

NEWBERY: 1942

HYDE: We built the house in Manhattan Beach in the same manner that we had always built any house that we ever lived in. The first experience I had with building a house was when we moved to Mountain Drive, and we moved into a cave there which my father had dug into the hillside, and he just, dug a square room into the hillside and then he covered that with boards for a ceiling, and he dug a hole from the ground up the ground above, which was the chimney of the fireplace where we did our cooking, and of course, that was during the '30s right after the stock market crash and so there were a lot of people unemployed 00:18:00at that time. And we actually had a maid while we were living in the cave, and the maid happened to be a highly trained maid with her own way of being a maid, which were not going to be changed just because she worked in a cave. So consequently she wore starched black uniform with a lace cap and her name was Anna. She was very formal, and I can remember her walking around with a tray and a sage bush in front of the cave as we got up in the morning bringing breakfast to us, which is very strange scene, and kind of hard to believe when you think about it. Sure enough, those where the conditions at the time.

NEWBERY: And so your father had owned his land prior to World War II?

HYDE: That's Arbolado Road I'm talking about. I'm just giving background because 00:19:00it's an illustration of the way my father approached building, anywhere it was you moved there first, then you figure out how to build the house. Either live under a tree, or in a cave, or in a tent, or whatever. And when we went to Manhattan Beach there was nothing on the land. Just because they went to work in a defense plant down there didn't mean that we had to go and rent a house. This is a philosophy anyone would have today. I have to go somewhere to get a job and then I have to rent a house. He didn't think that way. He looked for a piece of empty land and he moved there, and little by little the house would have to grow because that's where he lived, and by the time you left there, there was a house. And he was just always building. So we helped him build that house, and 00:20:00after having helped somewhat on the Arbolado house, we were very young then. But when we got to Manhattan Beach we could actually do things like mix cement, and put on roofing and things. We were beginning to be a little more useful as builders by that time.

NEWBERY: Then you lived in what kind of a structure on Mountain Drive when you started to build up there?

HYDE: Well at first, of course, we would go and camp there and I would go, I remember going with friends of my own age, when my parents weren't there even, and we would spend the night there. We'd get up in the morning and be making 00:21:00breakfast. There was a ranger who lived in a place nearby. He had the only house that was anywhere near up there at that time, and his name was Mr. Green. He had a white horse and he had been in the Spanish American War, so he still had his clothes and his sword, and he had a pith helmet. He was always dressed the same way. He was dressed in khaki and with his pith helmet, and he would ride over on his white horse, because as a matter of fact, he was bored being a ranger there. So if anybody appeared in the landscape, well he would come right over, and talk to them for a while. So, Mr. Green gathered us up and took us over to his house 00:22:00and got out all his little mementos from the war and told us about it. Somehow, he never ceased to be amazed at how many eggs we would eat in the morning. I can remember he was exclaiming, "How can you guys...?" Probably we'd go up there with a dozen eggs, and we cook all the eggs in one frying pan in the morning. He could never get over how we could, a couple of us would eat a dozen eggs. Mr. Green was a real fixture on Mountain Drive for a long time there.[3] As I say he was the only one, that was, his house was a quarter of a mile from the house site, from our house site on Mountain Drive. So those are the war years, and we would come up on the weekends, you couldn't buy gas, because gas was rationed. So someone found out 00:23:00that cleaning solvent, cleaning solvent would work in a Model A motor. So we would buy a few gallons of cleaning solvent, which wasn't rationed, and by mixing that with real gasoline we would nurse the car up here, and we would make a few adobe bricks on the site at Mountain Drive, and we'd leave those drying there, and go back. And so by the time we moved up here from the defense plant phase, there were a lot of adobe bricks on the site at Mountain Drive. Those were used to make the first room on Mountain Drive when we moved up there.

NEWBERY: How did your father, or what, caused him to decide to open up the land 00:24:00he had, to invite other people to come up there. Did he advertise it? Did he go to the government for a lot split permit?

HYDE: Well, he had always been a utopian. He talked about utopias a lot, and he realized full well that anyone who attempts to have a utopia runs into problems pretty fast, because, while you want people to join your utopia you don't want 'everyone' to join your utopia. You probably have some pretty strong ideas about who should, and who shouldn't, and then as soon as you begin to apply those ideas, the whole philosophy of utopianism starts to sound like exclusivism and it falls apart. But he said, that the land chooses the people. He said realtors 00:25:00think that people come, and they take them out, and they choose places to live. He said, "That's not true, it is just the opposite. The place chooses the people." And he said, "That's why I'm not afraid to put an ad in the paper downtown, that I'm selling acres for $50 down, and $50 a month," and it was $2,000 an acre and when people came up, if they weren't the right type of people the land would tell them to go away. And it did work to a certain extent, because people would come and some of them would just immediately express how 00:26:00terrible it was, "Oh, this is just covered with brush." And he just felt the brush was wonderful. So he wanted people to come, and of course it did also mean that there would be some kind of financial stability because, believe me they had no money to do what they were doing. It was just amazing that my mother and father managed, in the autobiography here it mentions that when they went south, my father had been trying to make it as a writer, and when they went south because of the war, when we went south, they had $2,000 in bills, and $2,000 today might make you a little nervous if you had that many bills, but in those days $2,000 in bills was a really heavy thing to be looking at. You just didn't 00:27:00know how you were going to handle it. So naturally they were paying for the land at the same time, they were selling the land, and, of course, luckily, as everyone knows the restrictions on building, although they existed to some extent, they were certainly nothing like what they are today. See, I built my first house on Mountain Drive, when I was 16, that was four years after we moved up there. And I remember the plan that I submitted downtown. It was drawn by my grandfather, on one piece of 8 x 11 1/2 paper. It had the measurements, it had 00:28:00the plan, ground plan, that was it. I don't remember what details really were on that one sheet of paper, but I remember that it was that simple, and my grandfather, Robert Wilson Hyde, had done architectural designing around Santa Barbara. I'm really not sure which buildings he was involved in but I know, I've heard over the years of certain buildings that he was involved in the planning of. And he had a very good esthetic sense, and a very good sense of proportion. He was a limner. A limner being a person who does colored illustrations on 00:29:00parchment, on texts, poetry and so forth. And so he was very interested in art, both of my grandparents on my father's side were, and my grandparents on my mother's side, too. My grandmother Lilia Tuckerman was a painter, and Robert Wilson Hyde was, and Susan McKee Hyde, were both very active in Lobero Theater and all sorts of cultural occupations in Santa Barbara. Anyway I've digressed an awful lot there. What were we talking about?

NEWBERY: We were talking about how your father screened the people for living in that area.

HYDE: Oh, right, it's just turned out it took a certain type of person to accept my father's suggestion that they could, where ever they were living, they could pick up their things and move them to an acre on Mountain Drive, today. Not put 00:30:00it off. Not build something there to move into, but bring it all up there, pay him $50 and start building a house and I know. I remember one the early families who appeared, his name was Glenn Reitz. It was a couple with children. When they came by and when my father suggested all this they said, "Well we just don't have anything. We don't have money, we don't have a job and we don't see how we can do this, but we couldn't resist coming to look at it anyway." So my father 00:31:00suggested that he would hire Glenn Reitz to build his house. Something new, so sure enough Glenn Reitz started building a house for his family and my father was paying him by the hour. Eventually it all worked out. They got jobs, and they paid him back and they ended up with a house which eventually they sold and moved away from there.

NEWBERY: What was the size of the house that your father built for the family to live in, your first house there?

HYDE: For a long time we lived in two adobe rooms, and that seemed to be the basic unit. You needed a kitchen and then a bedroom, living room with a 00:32:00fireplace, and that, we kind of extended that, and the other parts of that house, which are as they are today, were made of concrete slump bricks. This was an extension of the adobe my father suddenly decided, well with adobe you have to dig it up, and then you have to mix it up, and then you have to put it in the forms, and they have to be laid out on the ground on paper, so that they don't get stuck to the ground, and you have to wait while they dry, and then you have to mix a batch of mud, and put those adobe bricks on wall with the mortar. With the mud that you are using, and he thought, "Why are we doing all this when we 00:33:00can order cement, and sand, shovel it all into a mixer. It was cheap then, cement, and just concrete. Shovel in into a mixer, draw the outline of the house on the ground, and then just use a metal form, and just start going around the outline of the house with this metal form filling it up with concrete, just making the concrete set in well to the corners of the form and lifting the form off. In that one action you have made the brick, and you've put the brick on the wall. The brick is stuck there because it's wet when you put it on. So there's no mortar involved. In other words, he just decided why don't we get rid of all these steps, the waiting, the sticking together, and all this. So it turned out 00:34:00after that, that a lot of the houses were built that way, and I built my house when I was 16 out of slump bricks. The problem now days, of course, is that if you draw plans to do something like that you have to have so much reinforcing rod and so on and so forth, and that the building restrictions now involve things that go inside the walls, and so on, and so forth, so that slows up the process tremendously. We were very lucky because we were able to simply get the idea of making something, the way a bird makes a nest, and just logically proceed. It was our own problem that this did not fall on us in an earthquake, 00:35:00or whatever later, and it's certainly proved true that a human being is capable of building his own shelter, and is capable of not being hurt by that shelter in the future. Just as a person is able to go out on a walk and not fall into dangerous situations, but naturally as time goes on, and you get more population then of course, the problems occur. And as I said, our basic thing was two rooms, and you say well were was the bathroom? And naturally the bathroom came much later, and, of course, with the bathrooms, the plumbing, although problems. That's when the building restrictions start to weigh heavily.

NEWBERY: Well pioneers and people, our forefather's, took care of that as just a natural part of living, and weren't quite so concerned, but with more people on that, then you had to have more sanitation type things. I wonder if you remember some of the people, were they artists, or what did they do for a living? Were they potters or painters or writers or...?

HYDE: Well one of the earliest ones, Bill Delaney, he was a carpenter.[4] Another one was a teacher. Bill Richardson came along pretty fast, a writer. Bill did a 00:37:00lot of hunting, just to keep food on the table.[5] And Bill Richardson's wife had a job downtown in an office,[6] and that way, they were able to keep on making their payments. Merv Lane[7], he's a teacher. People got jobs downtown generally to try to keep some money flow going there.

NEWBERY: Then their artistic bends, or into music, or any of the arts, would be one of the things that they did as hobbies? Hoping to go into that kind of work to earn a living, or did they just as a recreational type thing?

HYDE: I don't think that anyone on Mountain Drive would have ever called music a hobby, although, I can see that in a sense it's a hobby, but I think the ones who were seriously interested in music, and there's still a lot of people up there who are, felt that it was a necessary way of expressing, they had to express themselves that way. They had a real thirst for expressing themselves that way.

NEWBERY: Was there any particular expression. Form that the expression took in the way of particular instruments or compositions?

HYDE: Well, of course, my brother Oliver was a sculpture, and he built two houses up there, and Joel built a house, Joel built two houses. Joel has always been a harpist. Still. Joel started playing the harp when he was seven on Arbolado Road, and he's still playing it at the age of 58, so he's quite a harpist.

NEWBERY: Was there any potter or pottery?

HYDE: There was potters.

NEWBERY: Do you remember the names of any of those?

HYDE: Ed Schertz[8], immediately comes to mind in pottery, and Bill Neely did a lot of pottery, and the presence of those people 00:40:00resulted in what was called the Pot Wars, which eventually brought a lot of people to Mountain Drive. The Pot Wars were kind of sales, which everyone would bring whatever they had. For the potters it was a real money-making thing. They could work all year, and they could sell a lot of pots in a day or so, but the other people would bring things to sell just to add life to the party, that's all.

NEWBERY: I was going to ask about what means of communication the members, the members of that community up there had. Did they publish a little newspaper or have community meetings?

HYDE: There was a Mountain Drive News[9], which was 00:41:00carried on for a long time by the children that my parents took in, of the Rodriquez family. My father wrote a book about that, and most of that experience with the Rodriquez family began, and continued there on Mountain Drive after I had left. I left in 1951, and I think it was about 1954 or so, that my parents saw an article in the paper that there were six Mexican children, who were on charity with the city because their parents had abandoned them in Santa Barbara. 00:42:00They were living with their grandfather, and the grandfather simply couldn't handle it, he was too old. So this is all recounted in the book, "Six More at Sixty[10]," which you may have seen and may know about.

NEWBERY: Your parents never adopted those children?

HYDE: No, no. they were not actually adopted, they were foster children, and as I say they wrote the newspaper, and carried it on for quite a few years there.

NEWBERY: Do you remember any of them, their first names?

HYDE: Well, the oldest, Ruthie. Then came Cecilio. Cecilio became a rock singer 00:43:00and lives in Hawaii, still very, very active in music. You know that's his life. Paul, Ruthie, and Becky[11], and Naomi. I think I've named six.

NEWBERY: It was just for the curiosity on my part about their names I'm sure they can be checked in the book. Do you remember any community meetings besides the get-togethers, or anything that the people up there had and celebrations or festivals or holiday celebrations of any kind?

HYDE: There were some people on Mountain Drive, they weren't specific people in general, although, Bill Neely had a lot of this sense of kind of starting traditions, starting rituals, giving these rituals names, and having them occur in a certain way every year. So, in fact, there were things that came up on Mountain Drive, and these rituals were not my father's invention, but he enjoyed them, and he just looked upon them as kind of an outgrowth of what had occurred. Which, by the time they began to be celebrated, the Hyde family had grown into 00:45:00thirty-five families living on that fifty acres. And there was Bastille Day, which celebrated the French overthrow of the aristocracy, and, oh, I don't know, May Day I think they did something. What were you going to say?

NEWBERY: I was going to ask about the Cinco de Mayo...

HYDE: There were people who were especially interested in Mexican culture, one being Frank Robinson, who is a local designer, and architect.[12] He built more than one house up there, and he designed a lot of houses, he's designed houses all over Santa Barbara, and 00:46:00he, I think, tended to have Fiesta parties. And there was a thing called the Wine Stomp every year. I think Bill Neely was the main force behind the Wine Stomp. And that involved a trip to get grapes, because no one grew enough grapes to make wine on Mountain Drive. So it involved a trip to pick the grapes, and then bringing them back in a truck, and putting them in a vat, and for some reason Bill Neely thought it was important that they actually be pressed by people stepping on them. So, of course, there was a lot of nudism, that was a 00:47:00regular tradition on Mountain Drive, nudism, and also taking hot baths, and so those two things tended to go together, when there were celebrations of one type or another, there was usually a hot bath going on at the same time, and one of the funnier occasions connected with that whole thing, was the visit a whole Hollywood crew to make a movie, which was a pretty bad movie, I think it was called Changes[13], and the star was Rock Hudson, and there was a lot of kind of joking, and there were a lot of anecdotes connected 00:48:00with that, because, of course, Hollywood wants to be nude but can't be, so Rock Hudson had, and I forget who the female star was, but they had to wear pink clothes, and of course that kind of hypocrisy making them look nude, but them not being nude was just everything that Mountain Drive was totally against, and yet they had accepted the idea that Hollywood was going to make a film of the Grape Stomp on Mountain Drive, so they had to go along with these things and naturally when you make a deal with Hollywood you don't know all the things that are going to come up in the process of actually getting the movie done. So things happened like the producer said, "Well we don't really need grapes, we 00:49:00can make grapes that aren't real grapes for a lot less, then we can get in a truck and go and pick them, so let's just dump all these artificial grapes in the vat. "Well, that was to Bill Neely, that was like the sacrilege of all time, and right there he was ready to break the contract. He said, "They're either going real grapes or there's no movie." So sure enough they did get their real grapes. In the end the payment was to be $5,000, and since a whole lot of people were involved, and it was completely amorphous group, what to do with this $5,000. So eventually, when it was paid, they put it into a bank account and it became a Mountain Drive fund from which people could borrow money, and pay it 00:50:00back without paying any interest. A couple of people were named as the executors of this fund, and that went on for many years, I don't know what the eventual disposition of that account was, but that was kind of a funny interlude in regard to the Grape Stomp.

NEWBERY: Did the residents when they had these festivals, wear particular costumes, or clothing of any kind, or just none?

HYDE: Costumes were strange clothing was always encouraged on Mountain Drive.

NEWBERY: Everyday strange clothing?

HYDE: Everyday, any time, strange clothing was encouraged.

NEWBERY: Can you describe any kind of, what would be considered strange?

HYDE: Oh, gosh. Offhand nothing much occurs to me except, that people, a lot of people got their clothes at places like the Salvation Army. They would deliberately pick out some old coat from a uniform or, you know, people wore boots with no reason to wear boots, or I suppose it was kind of, it was no 00:52:00different from other Bohemian groups who tended to wear clothing that looked odd, or seemed eccentric.

NEWBERY: Did they go into conventional clothing, that you would consider, when they went into Santa Barbara, or were they that much concerned?

HYDE: I suppose that it depended on what they were going to do in Santa Barbara. If they were going for a bank loan they probably put on their conventional clothes.

NEWBERY: Going back, as a young person up there, what would be an average day activity, just an ordinary day, the sort of things you might get up and have your breakfast and get involved in?

HYDE: Well, often it was construction and when someone, for instance Ed Schertz 00:53:00would be getting ready to build some more on his house. He liked to use adobes, and I can remember lots of times helping him make adobe bricks, and he'd get together a crew of people and we would all make it together. So there were those kinds of house raising groups, and sometimes it would be growing vegetables. A lot of people had gardens, and we would work in the garden. We tried to grow tomatoes below the house there. We picked our olives. We ground them and put them in a sack, hung the sack up and just let the oil drip out. People think, well, I couldn't make olive oil, and it's the simplest thing in the world. If 00:54:00you have a meat grinder you can grind up the olives off the trees on Olive Street, which are obviously going to waste, and put them in a cloth bag, put the mash in a cloth bag and olive oil will come out. With the olive oil you get a purple kind of emulsion, that doesn't taste good it's very bitter, of course, but if you let it stand it will separate out, and you can pour off the oil, and what you get is absolutely raw olive oil, which is very good, it's wonderful. It's not an efficient way to make olive oil but you can certainly do it.

NEWBERY: With no expense.

HYDE: At no expense, yeah, and sometimes we'd go and look for mushrooms, and my 00:55:00father loved to find things to eat that were just growing out there anyway. So sometimes, we'd go and collect cats tails, and baby cat tails are edible. If you picked the cat tail, usually the top of the cat tail is kind of a oblong brown thing, if you break it up all the little things float away in the air, but when that's young, when it's about three or four inches long and it's green, it's just like a tiny corn cob almost, and you can pick those at that age, of course, no one is interested in cat tails so there's no competition when you go and 00:56:00gather these things. You can boil them just like you would corn and then put a little melted butter on them and it's fine, it's food. It's a food that's absolutely ignored.

NEWBERY: I understand that at some time in the living up there on Mountain Drive, you had a swimming pool on the edge of the cliff there. Could you tell us something about that, how it was built or what was in the walls and cement?

HYDE: When we moved to Mountain Drive, my father, or shortly after, my father bought a new tractor, it wasn't a tractor with a blade, he didn't get a tractor with a blade until quite a while later, but we used that one tractor for pulling out brush, clearing land, and we used that tractor for making the swimming pool. 00:57:00Somewhere downtown in some junk yard he found a kind of a scraper, it had two handles, and it had a big kind of a dish in front of these handles, and then a place to hook up a chain on to it so that if this was hooked up to the back of the tractor, I could aim the thing into the ground and he could go forward and it would dig in. So when you got to the end of a run like that, after digging this thing full of dirt, then you just lift it up by its handles and you dump out the dirt, and you go back, and you could do this again, and I remember that's how we built that pool. We just scrapped it in these long runs with the tractor.

NEWBERY: Did you put a cement bottom in it or concrete?

HYDE: Yeah, yeah. And that whole thing of making swimming pools is really funny, people think that a swimming pool has to be made by people who make swimming pools. Actually all a swimming pool is a hole in the ground, that's got a couple of inches, or three or four, depending on how much money you have to put it on there, of concrete. Now, it's certainly true that of all the swimming pools that my father made, every one of them leaked. Because, by and by a crack would form in the bottom, because concrete dries, and it shrinks, and then it cracks, but either you can let the crack allow some water to go out, which may be a small or 00:59:00a large amount, but at that time it didn't seem to matter much, how much a swimming pool was losing, you just stick the hose, in and fill it up to the top again. Or you can patch the crack every once in a while, but naturally you hardly ever get around to patching the crack. And the another part of the typical Hyde swimming pool was a pipe, from a low spot, going out so that you could drain it out when the water got dirty, and that always drained onto fruit trees, so that the water got used when you drained it. That pool drained onto a bunch of avocado trees and lemons and oranges.

NEWBERY: So your father also had a fruit orchard there.

HYDE: Yes, he planted every avocado he would eat. He'd put the seed on the window sill, and after it would dry a little, he'd put in a glass with toothpicks, and hope that it sprouted, and then when it sprouted, he'd put it in a lug box and some dirt and see if he got. Of course, avocado trees, which are grown that way, from a seed, from avocados that you've eaten, don't tend to produce avocados like grafted ones, commercial grafted avocados. It's kind of like difference between a bantam hen, and a white leghorn. A white leghorn will lay 365 eggs a year, but if you get a bantam hen, that are close to the wild, you can't get that kind of egg production. Anyway, we had all these avocado trees that half of them were just beautiful, with no fruit. But then every once 01:01:00in a while one would come along that would put out quite a bit of fruit, and so we always had avocados.

NEWBERY: Were there any bottles for light in any of the walls?

HYDE: Yes, that pool, since it had to be built up on the lower edge, the upper edge of the pool was against the hill. So the hill formed one wall of it. But since it was on a slope, it had no lower edge, so we had to build that up, and they saved the wine bottles, and especially the prettier ones, and we made that whole outer wall with one large slump brick, and then a set of those bottles mortared in, and then another large slump brick, and a set of bottles, and just 01:02:00built that up same way we built up the houses, we built up the walls of the swimming pool, with a very large form that was about a foot or more thick and a couple of feet long. I mean we wanted something massive to hold that water in.

NEWBERY: It has a tremendous volume that pushes, push...

HYDE: Yeah, the weight of the water. But it never broke, it’s still holding.

NEWBERY: How were your evenings spent up on Mountain Drive after the light was 01:03:00gone, how did you spend your evenings?

HYDE: Well, my parents loved music and we had lots of records and my father would listen to the radio, and also played records.

NEWBERY: Did they have any favorite composers?

HYDE: I don't know, my father liked, he liked just about everything of the 01:04:00classical music. He liked Prokofiev a lot, and Bartok and he liked the moderns, and he liked Tchaikovsky and Brahms, and he liked opera, he had a lot of albums of Wagner and Verde. He just had a big collection of things to make music.

NEWBERY: Was your mother involved in any art work or handcraft work of any kind?

HYDE: She had done a lot of knitting. In fact, for a while she was knitting from Tweeds and Weeds. As a way of making money when we were living on Mountain Drive. They sent for a knitting machine which was a great big complicated thing that you stood at this machine and moved the handle back and forth, and each 01:05:00time you moved it back and forth it would knit all the way across a sweater. She knew a lot about knitting, but generally she didn't consider herself an artisan. She was always very self-effacing about those things. Everyone else wrote, for instance, the poetry, short stories, and so on, because my father was a writer we all kind of thought we would be writers. At one point I remember she was writing something, but she wouldn't show it to anybody, and as far as I know that manuscript got lost. She did work on it for a long time.

NEWBERY: It would be interesting if it were found and discovered somewhere. How did the 01:06:00community grow over the years? Did it change in any way, get more people or just remain about the same, with, obviously some of the earlier people sold and left, and would they be the same kind of people coming in, keeping the same life styles or...?

HYDE: Well, I think for quite a few years, probably until around 1960, the early 01:07:00'60s, people had pretty much the same lifestyle. Build your own house, have a garden, most of them drank wine, had parties, and had hot tubs, and many were into different ways of expressing themselves artistically. Writing music, playing music, doing pottery, painting, sculpture, and then I think that after 01:08:00the Korean War was when property values really started to rise, suddenly. And also a lot of people came looking for places to buy. And there were other factors, too, because I don't think anyone can ignore the kind of cultural effect that occurred in the '60s, with advent of drugs, the advent of a lot of people who were opting to drop out, as Timothy Leary said, and so there were people who were just hitchhiking around, and just kind of living where ever they 01:09:00happened to stop, anyway they could, and naturally a lot of them were attracted to Mountain Drive, and when they would drop in, Mountain Drive had a sense of being very tolerant, and it was certainly not intolerant of drugs, and it was always a kind of an experiment. "What will happen if we allow this to happen?" Was the philosophy, "let's see what will happen." And many people were just wonderful, some people were terrible, these transient people, and you 01:10:00wondered how to get rid of them soon after they arrived. But still the philosophy was, "let's tolerate it as long as we can." So then at the Pot Wars, for instance, you'd get a 1,000 to 2,000 people dropping in to buy pots, and it was a whole experience that suddenly a lot of the people that lived there didn't want to have, which is kind of being looked at as a phenomenon. A quaint Bohemian phenomenon. And so the people who were trying to make money from their pottery they wanted to have the Pot War, but on the other hand, to have people 01:11:00parked in people's drive ways all the way to Coyote Road, which was a quarter of a mile away, and have Mountain Drive turn into sort of a drunken brawl for the afternoon was not everybody's cup of tea. So there were conflicts, the more people the more conflicts arise, and of course there was the problem of the city looking up there and saying, "Now wait a minute, you can't have a house in a tree, where is that person going to the bathroom? We were going to know, or the tree house is going to be taken down." And they'd hang a tag on it, and the person would have to pay attention to the tag, otherwise he'd go to jail, or the person would move until the tag yellowed with age, and then move back in, and see how many years more it took the county to come back and say, "What are you 01:12:00doing here without a bathroom?" And those difficulties resulted in the coming to power, naturally if people with a lot of money who would simply come in and say, "Gosh that's a nice place, I'll buy it, I'll fix it up, I'll add rooms, I have unlimited money." They would do that, and they would either stay, or they would, after fixing it all up, and really making it into something that the county or anyone else would accept, they would sell it for twice as much, and they would go on. Naturally, when people begin to move in, that no one knows, then the 01:13:00ritual, periodical parties tend to be held, maybe, with a select few or three quarters of the people that are around, or maybe an open invitation. But still there's that problem that exists, who's going to come to this party? The old utopian problem, right, who's coming to this party? So things did change, and I wouldn't be a bit surprised if today there's still a Bastille Day party and maybe a Wine Stomp, I don't know.

NEWBERY: You don't live there anymore?

HYDE: No, I don't go up there very much.

NEWBERY: Then in summarizing, what things at the start of the development of 01:14:00that community made it unique, made it different from the rest of the community, from Santa Barbara or any other communities, what made it so special? I know it was the people there but there would be very distinctive things, are there any more that you can think of that would add to that uniqueness?

HYDE: Certainly the unique thing, the most unique thing, and I think that this is where the whole germ of my father's turning into kind of a pied piper to 01:15:00people, the germ of that is in the idea that land owners are not only rich people. That a person could come who had no money and be a land owner the first day, was a totally revolutionary idea, and it took my father to explain to that person, "you didn't own land yesterday, but I get along fine with you, and you like that spot over there. Wherever you're living now, what have you got? You're paying rent and so, okay, it doesn't rain on you there, in a little while it won't rain on you here, and you'll have your own piece of land and it's going to be an acre, which is a pretty big piece of property in Santa Barbara." Naturally that was just a really strong realization to most people, that that dream could 01:16:00be realized.

NEWBERY: Then there was a fairly strong relationship between Mountain Drive and the rest of Santa Barbara, or, were they more or less isolated? Saying, "Oh that bunch over there."

HYDE: I think there was always a strong, and good, relationship because I think that, while many people don't like to see open revolt against the law, there's another part of people that gets a lot of satisfaction out of seeing someone can 01:17:00simply go forward, and say, "I see logically how to put one brick on top of another, so I'm going to do it, and I'm not going to submit a plan saying how I'm going to do it," and things like my father, for instance, by the time we got the place at Painted Cave, building restrictions were very strong, and people were watching every place that was opened. The county would go around, and they would know what was going on, and so when my father went up there he was faced with the problem of having a piece of land, and he wanted to do something there, but he didn't know what he could do that wouldn't be limited by somebody and, so the first thing he did was, he started to catch water. He had a bulldozer by then, 01:18:00and so he just, along an area where the side of the hill was almost solid sandstone, he scooped out a hole, and just scooped it out until he had a lake there. This meant just a small amount of rainfall, falling on that hillside, which was sandstone, all of it would run off into the hole at the bottom, so consequently, the first rain, he had a lake. And then as soon as he got a lake he got a bunch of drums, sealed them, and painted them with rust-proof paint. A few coats of rust- proof paint so the water wouldn't get to it too fast, and he made a platform on top of the drums and then he built a house on that platform, so 01:19:00that he could go up there whenever he wanted to. There was another house in Santa Barbara. When the people downtown saw that there was a houseboat at the Painted Cave, they really couldn't come and say, "You have broken the law," because it didn't say anywhere, that you couldn't have a boat on a lake. Where do you find that? It did come to that. They said, "Somebody's living there," and these things would come out in the paper, and again some people I think got satisfaction noticing someone had a house that they hadn't had to ask for, hadn't asked permission for.

NEWBERY: How has the experience of growing up in that atmosphere affected the rest of your life and what you are doing now?

HYDE: Well, I like to build things. I still do from time to time and so I'm really glad I learned how to do that, and I like to work outdoors. I like nature a lot, and I definitely feel self-reliant. I don't feel that I'm reliant on my job, or the house that I live in, or anything like that. I certainly feel that 01:21:00at any moment and without any discomfort whatsoever, I could go into these hills, and live, and that's a nice feeling. There's a certain kind of security in that. Every once in a while I read about how they give instructions how you should prepare for a bad earthquake, and so on, you should lay some food away, and you should do this and that. I can see that on a grand scale, that would be a problem of water, food, and so on and so forth. But still I know in my heart that I could go into the hills, and I could go to places that no one would ever visit, regardless whether or not there was an earthquake. So it isn't 01:22:00as if I would be competing with someone else for that space, and I would be able to eat every day. I would be very, I might be terribly hungry in a certain sense, and I would get really thin but I would eat, and I would live all right, too. This happens to be a wonderful climate for not really going through hardship. If you're just out there with nothing, so that's a good feeling. And I think generally, as a metaphor, it's a good thing for a person to have been 01:23:00through the experience of being able to carry out a dream which is generally seen as impossible. Most people feel quite bound by the law. They see they have to go down certain avenues, and feel thwarted, and I think you can actually ignore a lot of those things without hurting your neighbor, and still accomplish something you wanted to accomplish.

NEWBERY: This has been most interesting, and I appreciate you taking your lunch time to talk to me about all of these wonderful experiences, and I thank you very much for this Mr. Hyde, and if at some time in the future you feel like 01:24:00there is more material that you would like to contribute to the archives of our museum, why, please get in touch with me, and I'll be glad to come and talk to you again. Thank you.

HYDE: Thank you.