Dick Johnston Interview

--(Interview begins)--

GASSER: Here we go. This is a tape with Dick Johnston on the 8th of April 1992 at his home in Goleta. My name is Teddy Gasser, and it's taped about Mountain Drive for the Oral History, Santa Barbara Oral History Clearinghouse and Dick, if you want to say a few things, let's see if we're getting anything taped here.

JOHNSTON: Well, I'm here sitting here ready to disgorge all of the knowledge I have about Mountain Drive.

GASSER: Ok. Let's see if we got any of that. Ok. It looks like we're ready to roll. All right. It's, uh, taken. Um gee, I see that it's the 8th of April and you were born on March 8th and happy belated month belated birthday to you. You were. You were born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and I was wondering if you could give me just sort of a brief picture of your family and childhood.

JOHNSTON: Well, my, both of my family, both my parents were scientists and my father was a heart specialist, an M.D., and my mother was a 00:01:00biochemist with a Ph.D. And they worked through most of my early childhood, and my brother and I were taken care of by various maids that were hired. And uh, which is all right. They were nice people. I don't remember a great deal of it. And that's the early childhood. And then I went to school in Ann Arbor until I finally gave up on getting a degree at the university and moved to California in 1957 to Santa Barbara. Nineteen fifty-seven.

GASSER: Could you when you moved here, could you describe what Santa Barbara was like?

JOHNSTON: Well, there was one traffic light in Santa Barbara at the corner of State and De La Guerra, maybe State and Carrillo. I think it was State and De La Guerra, when it got over 90 degrees, the Chamber of Commerce gave away free orange juice on the streets. And that's that's gives you a picture, 00:02:00you know, now the Chamber of Commerce tries to and tries to get developers to build more vacant property. Santa Barbara has changed a great deal. Santa Barbara was a wonderful, sort of quiet, laid back, sleepy little village when I moved here. And you can buy it, you could buy a house for ten thousand dollars or less. Um, nobody. No. There were no Hollywood stars living here. Well, maybe one or two, but no Hollywood stars. No. Nobody knew about Santa Barbara. Montecito has probably changed less than than any other part of Santa Barbara, but it too has changed and been developed. Now, Santa Barbara, I thought I've thought of moving away from Santa Barbara, if I could find a place 00:03:00with as good a climate, and with people I knew, because it no longer is the glorious place it was.

GASSER: How did you find it? How did you discover in 1957 this wonderful little jewel?

JOHNSTON: Well, I had friends in Ventura and I was staying. I had a woman friend who was staying with these people in Ventura, and I was looking for a job in radio broadcasting. And I got a job in Santa Barbara. I got a job at Harry Butcher's Station KIST[1], and moved to Santa Barbara.

GASSER: Could you describe your first encounter with Mountain Drive, was it at that time?

JOHNSTON: No. My first encounter with Mountain Drive, I think I've tried to think about I. There were rumors and stories about Mountain Drive, but one heard almost immediately about these crazy people that lived up on the mountain and built their houses out of mud. Well, I think my the first time I ever 00:04:00met anyone from Mountain Drive, I was in a, in a, a play that was in a Repertory Theater, which no longer exists. It was over on Arlington Avenue, near the just off State Street, up near the Fox Arlington Theatre, there was an old house that had been converted into a theater. And there was a Shakespeare play. And I think it was Hamlet. I'm not sure, but there were several people from Mountain Drive in that play, among them Bill Neely. I'm sure he was in it and Tom Sheldon was in it. And maybe Frank Robinson, but I'm not sure about that. But I know that Bill Neely and Tom Sheldon were in it. That was where I first met Bill Neely, although I wasn't, you know, I didn't really remember that until that I'd met him at that time until much later because I wasn't particularly impressed. I mean, they were seemingly rather normal people. And my I wasn't in that play. I was in another play that was being put on. Subsequent to Hamlet, so 00:05:00so that my encounters with them were very, very brief, very glancing encounters. And we'd walk through the green room and pass, you know, that kind of thing. So I really didn't. But that was my first meeting with anyone from Mountain Drive. And I didn't, I didn't really become acquainted with it seriously until after I had my radio station[2], which was in, uh, I became the owner of the station on the first of January 1963 and almost immediately I met Gill Johnston.[3] And sitting around having coffee in the, uh, courtyard in El Paseo. And then I met Frank Robinson, [4] who had an office there. And gradually, Gill Johnston invited me up to his house for dinner. Actually, I knew him for a while. I think it was in the summertime.

GASSER: What was Gill doing at that time?

JOHNSTON: He was working as a classified advertising salesman for the 00:06:00News-Press, and I also gave him a I also gave him a job as a morning, doing a morning program on my radio station and which he did very well and came very, he became very popular, became the most popular feature that I had on my radio station, calling himself Uncle Gill, the Uncle Gill program.

GASSER: So he invited you up to Mountain Drive.

JOHNSTON: He invited me up to his house for dinner and I met his wife and then we went up to Sunset Club. And then after Sunset Club, we went up to the old hot springs for a hot bath, which is, you know, all of this was rather new to me at the time. And I just, you know, and I got to by then, I'd gotten to know Frank Robinson a little bit and knew Gill pretty well, and met a whole bunch of other people. That first time I went up there and I sort of started going to Sunset Club after that and hanging around in the first of November, right 00:07:00around the first of November, in 1963, I moved up there. I didn't move on to actually on a Mountain Drive, but I moved on to a house in Coyote Road, which is considered part of the community. And I stayed there for almost 20 years. Not quite. I left for the last time in '82. So it was 19 years.

GASSER: So could you give me a physical description of the Mountain Drive area at that time?

JOHNSTON: Well, what do you mean by physical description?

GASSER: How it looked, how the what kind of houses or what your impression did they still seem just like normal folk? How were they normal folk at all?

JOHNSTON: I mean, nobody who was a normal folk moved up there was living there, and a lot of ways they were normal folk. They were just more normal than other people.

GASSER: More natural, perhaps.

JOHNSTON: More natural.

GASSER: But the land itself, how did how did the homes of it all strike you?

JOHNSTON: You know, there was a lot of adobe. A lot of the lot of the houses were built either wholly or partially out of adobe and and um, which you know, bricks they made, made themselves. And the houses generally were quite impressive, I thought. Some more than others, Frank Robinson's House is extremely impressive Jack Boegle's house. Because the setting was extremely impressive, which is where Sunset Club is held. It was sort of a dry, fire prone area with a lot of a lot of chaparral around, hotter than downtown Santa Barbara, by a few degrees. A little less fog in downtown Santa Barbara? Quite a lot less fog in downtown Santa Barbara.

GASSER: Were there any was there any building going on at the time when you 00:09:00first moved in '63 or had a...

JOHNSTON: Well, it was always building going on at one time, but most of it was additions and improvements. Most of the houses were there. You know, Bobby Hyde's House was there and Bill Neely's and Frank Robinson's and Gill Johnston's, although Gill was enlarging his house the first couple of years I was around up there, major a major addition was being put on Gill's house. Ed Schertz[5] was just beginning to start to build a house. His oval house up there, which is right above Gill Johnston's. But when I first went up there, he had he hadn't started because I can remember I was present when the slab was poured for, helped with that. We had Ed Schertz's slab was poured and Stan Hill was not yet ready to build his house, when I first went up there.

GASSER: Do you remember any work parties you said you helped Ed with 00:10:00his foundation, were there work parties?

JOHNSTON: Oh, there always, always work parties, you know, for instance, everybody helped with with major, you know, major construction projects. Everybody, everybody helped out and there were, you know, pouring a slab was one of the more major operations and usually garnered the most people at any one time. But anytime anybody needed any help, it was a simple matter to get it.

GASSER: How did they how do they do that?

JOHNSTON: By telephone? You know, these modern conveniences in an oxcart culture is, really nice.

GASSER: Okay, well, let's get back to describing what were your first or describe your first impressions of Bobby Hyde?

JOHNSTON: Bobby Hyde had just about given up living there by the time I got up there, and I met Bobby, I knew Bobby Hyde pretty well. But it's happened over a long period of time and I wasn't very impressed with Bobby when 00:11:00I first met him. But, you know, I got to know him and became quite impressed with what he'd accomplished, which is considerable.

GASSER: Why was he unimpressive?

JOHNSTON: I don't know he didn't talk much. A man with white hair. I didn't know anything about him. You know, his name had come up in conversations, and...

GASSER: In what context?

JOHNSTON: Oh, you know, Bobby Hyde did this and Bobby Hyde did that. Bobby Hyde, you all the time that they were going to make olive oil. I suppose you got that story many times over. Went down all the olive trees to ripen up on Olive Street, which is lined with olive trees, as you well know. And nobody did anything. You picked them. So we went down to Olive Street. Well, I 00:12:00wasn't part of it. I didn't. This was before my time, actually. But Olive Street was plucked clean by Mountain Drivers in one great communal gathering. You know there were pickup trucks full of olives. And Bobby Hyde had decided he was going to make olive oil. So he had he had this horizontal well drilling machine and the and he connected. This is not my personal experience. I'm relating things you were told to me, but it's one of the Bobby Hyde famous Bobby Hyde stories that I heard. And he had one of these meat grinders the kind with the screw and the and that were the stuff extrudes out at the end of big handle on it and taking the handle off. And he took this thing up to his or the power take off in his horizontal well drilling machine, which is a great long, you know, it was probably 10 feet long and a great rattly structure with a the old Ford engine on it, you know, four cylinder engine that developed quite a bit of 00:13:00power. Anyway, they got this thing rattling along and chugging. This grinder was spinning away and somebody took a handful of olives and stuck them in and it stalled it. So they found out that they could keep it going if they put olives in one at a time.

GASSER: Whoa.

JOHNSTON: So days, days and days, because you have to in order to get any olive oil, you have to crush the seeds. That's the whole you have to crush. The seeds were to get it squeezed, squeezed enough to get the oil out. I don't know how much. I never heard the end of the story. I just heard that it was a vast, useless undertaking, sort of typical Mountain Drive project. That was one of the famous stories about Bobby Hyde. That circulated, you know, I met him and I used I used to have some long, long conversations with Bobby Hyde in the late sixties. Say sixty -six, sixty-seven, I think he died when, sixty-nine 00:14:00he died?

GASSER: Some place I think in there, I'm not sure here is...

JOHNSTON: A couple of years before he died I got to know him pretty well and and he used to come over to my house and sit around and we we talk a lot. He was a remarkable man. And you know, at that time, I thought that he was the originator of Mountain Drive, and it wasn't until sometime later I learned that he wasn't.

GASSER: How did you learn that and how do you mean that?

JOHNSTON: Well, the cons, the basic concept of sort of a community where everybody owns the plot of land and builds their own house and was first started by a man his wife named Tonetti, in Snedens Landing. It's right across the Hudson River from it's across the Hudson River from New York. And I haven't I don't know if it's New Jersey. I think it's in New Jersey might be in New York. We should put it further up the Hudson. But the man Tonetti was a sculptor. Very good sculptor, and he didn't turn out an awful lot, there's a 00:15:00lot of this sculpture in the Library of Congress. And there's one piece in the garden at 1088 East Mountain Drive. At least it was a few years ago. But he was a he was a recognized sort of a sculptor's sculptor, really. But he had a remarkable wife. I can't remember his name. I can't remember her name, who I think was a dancer, but I'm not sure of that.

GASSER: Were they related in some way to, to the Hydes?

JOHNSTON: And they had some daughters. They had three or four daughters. And one of their daughters, I think her name was Mary, was Bobby Hyde's first wife. And they had set up this community at Snedens Landing, and that's how Bobby Hyde got the idea for the Mountain Drive thing long before he did it because it was set up back there by the Tonettis. And there's a book called, "The 00:16:00Tonettis of Snedens Landing," and it's very hard to find, but there is a book which explains all this. You know, it's the story of the Tonettis. But Bobby Hyde is mentioned in there and he lived back there. He built a house back there and it was part of the community back in Snedens Landing. And it's, uh, you know, it's worth some research, I think, you know, as the background of where the idea originally came from, for Mountain Drive.

GASSER: Mm hmm. It's a that's a wonderful piece of information. I had no idea that...

JOHNSTON: I'll tell you if you talk to Bendy White, he might be able to give you a copy of that book. It was Alex, Alex White, one of the other daughters who gave me the book to read in the early 80s or late 70s. And so I've seen the book, and I was told at the time it's extremely rare. And I gave it back to her, and she has subsequently died. She died in the last few months. And the Bendy White, there are several Whites, Rod White, Bendy White. They're all 00:17:00her sons. They might be able to put you on in this book, and it's really worthwhile, including it. Or you might be able to find it from a rare book dealer. I don't know when it was published.

GASSER: Or what kind of conver...

JOHNSTON: Go ahead.

GASSER: I was just wondering what kind of conversations that you'd had with Bobby, if you could relate any of those, any important ones that you remember.

JOHNSTON: Oh, we talked about building houses. I remember one of the first times I ever really talked with him was right after the Coyote Fire. I went up there and he was trying to put some roof, roof beams across his burned out adobe walls that were left standing after his house and burned down. And I kind of helped him for a while, and I was just sort of wondering I was looking for somebody else, I guess, or just wandering around, which is a lot of common pastime on Mountain Drive. People wander around and see what's happening. And, 00:18:00you know, I helped him for, you know, two or three hours and we got talking. So that was the first time I really ever talked with him. I'd been acquainted with him, but had never talked to him very much. And I guess at that time, we talked about how to build houses and how to how to, houses should be built to survive a fire. And, you know, a lot of different, you know, mostly mechanical things. And later on, I remember one story he told me, which I had heard I had heard other places, but, he had a case of Château d'Yquem, which is one of the greatest of all French wines, in my opinion, the greatest of all. He had a case of it and he had it holding up a corner of his bed and his kids got into it and drank it. And he was enraged because their comment was it was too sweet. Stuff now sells for it, I guess, well, the last price I saw for a decent year of that was 00:19:00about one hundred and seventy five dollars. At the time it sold for between eight and ten dollars a bottle, which was a lot of money in those days. But it's so it's so precious now that I can't drink it anymore. I used to, but I don't know, I can't really remember. He used to come over me. We talk about, you know, the world situation and politics and everything, everything under the sun. It was nice talks, but I can't remember in detail, except that I can recall it was a very pleasant. Uh, talking with him.

GASSER: His philosophical stance, I mean, uh, can you give me an idea what his...

JOHNSTON: ...well, live and let live, generally. He was very uncritical of anyone and anything, although I mean, not particularly of the government, but 00:20:00 of the people around him. I mean, he was he didn't criticize things that could obviously be criticized. I could. But, it's hard to it's hard for me to know his philosophical stance, because we didn't talk about that kind of thing, we talk more about hard things, you know? I can't really tell you much about his philosophical stance, although I'm sure there are a lot of people that knew him far better than I did. George Greyson, I think knew him probably as well as anybody. I think George Greyson[6] has a lot of tapes of Bobby Hyde, conversations he had with Bobby Hyde.

GASSER: In his. Could you describe Floppy Hyde for me?

JOHNSTON: Well, Floppy Hyde was the business person in the family. 00:21:00They had a house to rent. It was Floppy Hyde that rented the house and you paid your rent to Floppy Hyde. And if you needed a note or something transferred, I bought a house up there one time and she had a second mortgage and she did all the business. And partly it was because her sons own property up there. Her sons from a previous marriage, and partly because Bobby didn't like to deal with that kind of thing very much. Bobby's idea of doing business was that if she said it was OK, it was OK, and you know, he sometimes had to write something down because the law required it, and lawyers required it. But he'd rather not have ever written anything down as far as any kind of business deal. I 00:22:00mean, he sold, he sold the property up there. I'm sure, even though you've got this a thousand times, sold the property up there originally for fifty dollars down and fifty dollars a month for an acre, and his handshake sealed it, you know, and everybody was on a land contract eventually. But you know, the paperwork, paperwork came along later, and I assume Gill Johnson, I think, told me that told me that, he had his house half built before he ever signed the contract. Which is one of those things that... It's..., I didn't know Bobby nearly as well as a lot of people.

GASSER: But you did enjoy you didn't enjoy the long conversations...

JOHNSTON: But I enjoyed. You know, sometimes it wasn't a 00:23:00conversation. Sometimes I had this wonderful house on Coyote Road that was me and that's I didn't see too much about me after I moved up into the regular community, but I had a hot tub and sometimes people would come over for a hot tub, and sometimes he got there early quite often and set out in back, there would be this steaming hot tub and and uh, sometime he didn't talk, he just sat there looking at the night, you know, and he was one of the people that realized you don't always have to be making noise when you're in company with another person.

GASSER: So you eventually bought land on Mountain Drive?

JOHNSTON: Well, I and a woman to whom I was married, bought land and and bought a house at 215 East Mountain Drive, which is down the little road from Mountain Drive, down the road, we call it Pikes. They call it, uh, I don't 00:24:00know what they call it. Somebody joshingly called it Peake's Pike after he bulldozed it into a civilized road, that nobody wanted.

GASSER: This is, uh, uh, Laura. Laura Peake, or Michael Peake?

JOHNSTON: Yeah. Don't get me started on that.

GASSER: Oh, give me just a little hint. Give me just a little hint. You can keep the libel out of it.

JOHNSTON: He shot my cat.

GASSER: Oh my god.

JOHNSTON: That's to begin with. Uh huh.. You also diddled me out of that house, by forcing Floppy Hyde to start foreclosure proceedings, because he had her strung up with some kind of something she needed in order to do something to get some land that she could sell. And he strung her up with, you know, 00:25:00he says you have to for, because he wanted his friend, Tim Crawford, to move into that house.

GASSER: This is the house that you were...

JOHNSTON: This was the house that I bought. I was in difficulties because my wife and I were divorcing, but I had just figured out how to arrange to get the, you know, to pay her off. But I couldn't do it because I was foreclosed upon. And I didn't learn until several years later, that was Michael Peake that was behind that. So I have no kind feelings toward Michael Peake. And neither do most people. I think that there you'll hear the similar stories from a lot of people.

GASSER: Did that taint also your feeling about Floppy?

JOHNSTON: No, no, she's the one that told me about it, actually several years after it happened. No, actually, I always liked Floppy, and I was a little upset with her at the time, but well, it was very upsetting at the time. 00:26:00But I subsequently had some dealings with her, and she said, I think you ought to know what was behind that situation that happened.

GASSER: So what year did that? Did that happen?

JOHNSTON: Seventy and seventy-one. I got into that house in sixty-seven and moved out in the fall of seventy-one.

GASSER: Did you did you build anything? Did you make any additions to the that?

JOHNSTON: Oh yeah, I built things on everyplace I lived. I put a, I can remember one time I was building a storage shed out and back of the house on Coyote Road. And it required a slab to be poured, and Ed Schertz and I are looking at it and we figured, well, it says we don't have to call in very many people because this is, you know, it was only 8 by 10 foot slab or something like that very small, that we can probably do it ourselves, so I got a cement mixer. In 00:27:00fact, I traded the cement mixer from Robert Venable from for an old kiln I had, no wait a minute, no, that's wrong. I traded the kiln, I got the kiln for the cement mixer. I'd gotten the cement mixer from some other trade. I forget where I got it, but I had this little cement mixer. So Ed Schertz and I just, you know, mixed up a bunch of cement and poured the slab. Did it in the morning. And then I built the, I built the, little shed on this land. And then I put a tile patio in on the other house, which was quite a good sized patio that was required pouring a big slab, and that was one of the major what required a major summoning of the forces up there. And I can't remember who all was there, but they were, you know, just about everybody was there helped pour that 00:28:00slab and put the tiles in.

GASSER: Which house was this? This is the one at 215 East Mountain Drive.

JOHNSTON: Oh, okay,

JOHNSTON: I built this big covered thing out and back to to be sort of a social center when I was having a hot tub.

GASSER: So there were two houses, 215, where you built a patio? And which other one?

JOHNSTON: 999 Coyote Road.

GASSER: The shed was at 999 Coyote.

JOHNSTON: Yeah, And there are little things I built here and there did a lot of help. I helped Bill Neely a lot with various construction projects, and he was building La Ruwena I did all the wiring. And then...

GASSER: You've had a long relationship with Bill Neely. Could you describe, give me a description of Bill and...

JOHNSTON: Oh, Bill Neely. He was, he was the by far to me, and he were the most important figure on Mountain Drive. I mean, Mountain Drive would not have been Mountain Drive without Bill Neely. And I think it's really a shame 00:29:00that in the current stories that appear about Mountain Drive, Bill Neely is not mentioned. And you know, it's uh...

GASSER: What do you attribute that to?

JOHNSTON: I attribute that that to the old rivalry between Frank Robinson and Bill Neely, and that Frank Robinson is the one that's usually consulted nowadays, and he neglects to mention Bill Neely. In fact, he there was a story recently in the Santa Barbara Magazine about Mountain Drive. And it relates a story about how Frank Robinson went up to Mountain Drive by himself and met Bill Richardson. Well, that's not how it happened. I mean, I wasn't there, of course, but for years I heard the story how Bill Neely and Frank Robinson both went up to Mountain Drive and looked around because they had met Bobby Hyde downtown. They were living right near where Bobby Hyde had a house on 00:30:00Salsipuedes Street.

GASSER: They, who...

JOHNSTON: Bill Neely and Frank Robinson.

GASSER: I see, they were together.

JOHNSTON: They were living in the same apartment building. I believe they're going to the college up on when the local branch of the University of California was up on the Riviera. They were they were going to school and they met up there at the college. And the way I always heard the story, you know, may not be correct, the way I always heard the story was that they had gone, they had met Bobby Hyde and Bobby Hyde said, well, I've got this thing going up in the mountains there. And if you want to go up and take a look, I'll sell you some land cheap and build a house. So they went up there and they went up together and with Bobby, and they each found where they wanted to build their houses. And Bill Neely bought two acres and Frank Robinson bought one and immediately started building their houses, which I think Bill Neely started in 00:31:00late 52, or in 52, and he finished his first place in 53. And Frank Robinson started right around the same time. But it's impossible for me to sit around and describe Bill Neely, I've written a novel which is almost entirely about Bill Neely. And while it's purported to be fiction, most of it isn't. Bill Neely is probably in my entire life the most interesting and complex person I've ever known. And he was about half good and about half evil. But he was he was the heart and soul of Mountain Drive and a Mountain Drive would not have been what it was without Bill Neely at all. But when I first really met Bill Neely, I had met him at the Repertory Theatre with, you know, it hadn't 00:32:00registered. When I had my radio station, I had gotten to know Gill Johnston over a period of from the first of January to the mid-summer when I was when I first went up there. But at that time, Bill Neely was in Yosemite as a ranger. And, there were a lot of things going on and Bill Neely's wife, Barbara, whom I only met once, briefly, was dying of stomach cancer. And Bill Neely was this constant subject of conversation at Sunset Club. Every time, Sunset Club got together, Bill Neely was talked about and and you know, I really began to wonder what or who is this Bill Neely? You know, I mean, I hadn't met. He was away while I was really getting acquainted with Mountain Drive, he was away. And it was 00:33:00sometime after he got back, his wife died very soon after he got back.

GASSER: She was alone and I'm not. She was...

JOHNSTON: She was, you know, essentially she was alone, but there were an awful lot of people looking after her, Mountain Drive people. And I'm not too well acquainted with that particular situation, as I say, I only met her once, and that was very brief.

GASSER: So anyway, she died soon after Bill Neely had come back?

JOHNSTON: She died soon after, I would say she died in late September, early October of 1963 and Bill Neely was not visible for a short time after that. But after we were, we're doing a series of programs on my radio station where we get a bunch of people in and sit around and talk about things. It 00:34:00was absolutely, completely free form, to do it for an hour a day. If we didn't have anybody to talk about or nothing to talk about. We didn't do it, but usually we did it. You know, it was around noon. And I can remember, I don't know when it was. I think it was in November of 63. But then what, Gill Johnston with this man who I hadn't met. Very clean cut looking man, no beard, no mustache, wearing a sort of a brown twill shirt like something a park ranger would wear and very highly polished brown boots and maybe Levis. I'm not sure about what pants he had on. And we were sitting around and I can remember we're talking about the John Birch Society. Donald Jones, who is sort of a Mountain Driver, and Tom Sheldon were there and you've heard this tape. And, 00:35:00Gill Johnston came in, I'm not think Frank Robinson. Yeah, Frank Robinson was probably there. A woman named Garland Harrison. And I was there, and Bill Neely came in and took over. He just came in and took over. I was astonished, you know. And he spoke very well, very clear, clean, well, modulated voice. I mean, I was really impressed. And he started talking about the Jack Ash Society. And it was to me it was just immensely funny, I mean, I didn't say much in that I was sitting there and didn't say much the whole program. That was my first real meeting with Bill Neely, which is actually happened to be recorded on tape. And I got to know him very, very soon, very quickly after that. I had no 00:36:00notice. I'm trying to place the time he wanted to do a program on the station. You know, there's all kinds of Mountain Drivers, are a very competitive place. If somebody had done something, somebody else had the top them.

GASSER: Let's let this plane go over, I don't know if we're picking that up, but I'm having a hard time understanding. Okay.

JOHNSTON: Well, my Mountain Drive was a was an extremely competitive place. For instance, Gill Johnston was doing a morning program on my station. Well, that meant that Bill Neely had to do a program on my station. So he he decided he wanted to do something called the Gaelic Hour. And I had moved into that house on Coyote Road in November of, early November of 1963, probably about the same time as that Jack Ash Society program. I really can't get the time, 00:37:00so but anyway, I know that he and I were tape recording the first Gaelic Hour on November 22, 1963, and we tuned in the radio, and we finished it and we tuned in the, I turned on the station and here was Tom Sheldon, who was working for me on giving a newscast. And I thought that's weird, we don't have any newscasts on at this time of morning and what it was, he was talking about the fact the president had been shot, Kennedy had been shot. And so Bill Neely and I climbed in the car real fast and whizzed down to the radio station, we heard on the radio at the corner of Milpas and Canon Perdido, right by the Arden Dairy where the old cow, brown cow used to be, we heard that Kennedy was dead. I walked into the station and it was jammed full of people who'd come up there to, 00:38:00to get the news. And Bill Neely and I hauled the teletype machine out into the middle, it was in a little closet, and hauled it out in the middle of the floor so everybody could look at it. But I can pin it down because of the fact we were doing the first Gaelic Hour on the day that Kennedy was shot.

GASSER: Did that go through or did you postpone that?

JOHNSTON: No, we postponed it because we didn't do anything and we carried network stuff and played music that whole weekend. And the Gaelic Hour did not go on that weekend. But it went on after that, was on and taped it every week for, I don't know, two or three years. As long as I had the station.

GASSER: The Jack Ash Society went on for more than just one program, too.

JOHNSTON: Yeah, there were several programs done on the Jack Ash Society. I always thought the first one was the best one because, you know, that was where I really saw this imaginative man. Bill Neely at work. And we did, we taped every Friday. We taped two programs up at my house on Coyote Road. We taped a Gaelic Hour, which we did first, and then we taped the famous Wine Tasting program. Which was done in cooperation with the El Paseo Wine Cellar, and Pierre Lafond, who furnished us with wines in exchange for, you know, advertising you got. And that was on for a couple of years, and done every week, you know, we had some people really knew a lot about wine on that program. Stan Hill[7] and Gene McGeorge and Jack Boegle[8] and Bill Neely were the, you know, the basics people who really know a lot about wine and, gave their gave 00:40:00their opinions on whatever it was we were tasting. And we had a fight one time. Gill Johnston was sort of the police officer, somebody came in one time we were tasting, tasting wines and, you know, it was all very, very quiet and subdued and gentlemanly type of thing. And, somebody came in and made some noise. Gill Johnston took offense, and went and slugged him, it was this horrible, horrible thumping and crashing. That was the only time I ever edited that tape that time.

GASSER: So that never made the air, right?

JOHNSTON: That part of it never made the rest of it. You know, I cut that part of it out because after a while, it all simmered down. And it was 00:41:00very funny because here were these people, Jack Boegle and Gene McGeorge and Bill Neely and Stan Hill sitting around this table, little picnic table I had there, talking about wine, and here was this thumping and crashing going out of the background and, you know, bang, crash, and, "Well, it has a pretty good nose, I think." They tried to carry on, you know? Finally, they couldn't, you know, just got to be too raucous. Very, very funny scene. Mountain Drive was a very funny place. I don't think I've ever laughed so much as I did. It was pretty early years of Mountain Drive.

GASSER: Could you tell me a little bit more about how your how you got your radio station, how you left KIST.

JOHNSTON: Well, I left KIST, I was there for about a year and I worked for KDB[9] after that was a copywriter, and then I 00:42:00met a woman and moved to San Francisco for a while. And I heard that the fellow named Cameron Warren was about sell his FM station in Santa Barbara, and I'd actually seen it once because I'd applied for a job there one time. So I wrote him a letter and asked him what he was asking for it and what kind of terms he wanted, all this kind of thing. So he wrote back he wanted $50,000 for it, and he'd take 10 percent down, and no, not 10 percent, he wanted, $15,000 down. Of course, this is, you know, this station is now worth millions. Anyway, anyway. I wrangled this got got a hold of the of the money he wanted for a down payment, bought the radio station. And, it was a sort of halfway classical 00:43:00music station when he was running, he was he was running it from noon until ten o'clock at night, playing mostly classical music. But he had a whole series of little dinky programs in the afternoon where he played different things. I'm not quite sure why he did that, but anyway, I put it on at 7:00 in the morning and ran until midnight and played classical music all day long. And the only break was that noontime program where we had an hour of discussion. We did, you know, newscasts at certain times of the day and on Saturdays played a lot of different music. Everybody who wanted to do a program could do their program on Saturday. So I think we were the first radio station in Santa Barbara that played The Beatles. Because that was, you know, that kind of music, that kind of music wasn't played on the radio in those days. Not much, anyway. Rock 'n' Roll was, 00:44:00 you know, considered pretty, pretty awful. And so anyway, and then Peter Feldmann did a program on Saturday and playing bluegrass, you know, all kinds of stuff on Saturdays broke the pattern.

GASSER: Well, Peter Feldmann is also an interesting, interesting person. We'll have to get back to him. Go on.

JOHNSTON: Um, well, that brings up the Scragg Family, which I won't...

GASSER: Go ahead and tell me about the radio station. We'll come back to the music and the Scragg Family and some of that.

JOHNSTON: And then Sundays, was the Gaelic hour was broadcast on Sunday night, and we did a couple of operas on Sunday and the Gaelic Hour, which is Bill Neely's. I wish, I don't have a tape of the Gaelic Hour, and am sorely sad about that.

GASSER: Do you have how many of the tapes do you still have? I know I have the Jack Ash ones.

JOHNSTON: I have all the tapes that you have. I mean, I don't, but I don't have any more. I mean, I sent you all the tapes, and I found out a couple of weeks ago that somebody, well, the mother of a woman to whom I was briefly married while I had the radio station. Her mother had tape recorded my whole Christmas Day programming on the station, she says, "I play it every year." So what is it? I mean, that was 1963, 64, around in there. So she's still playing that stuff. It's almost 30 years later.

GASSER: That's incredible. Who is this? Who is this?

JOHNSTON: The mother of Mother of Maggie Norton. And well, you know, I don't know if you knew about this, but there was a notice in the paper two or three weeks ago of a Richard W. Johnston who had died up in Paseo Robles. And there were there was a certain panic that buzzed around. Stan Hill called 00:46:00me up and says, "Are you alive?" I said, "I don't think so. I think so." He said, "Gill Johnson is in a panic. You better calling out." So I called up Gill and Paseo Robles and said the reports of my death have been somewhat exaggerated. Anyway, Mrs. Norton called me up later that afternoon to find out if I was all right. I guess she'd gotten the number from Gill. And that was, I haven't talked to her for twenty-five years. And uh, I finally told her I ought to die more often because, fascinating, you know, all these people I haven't talked to for a long time. I do talk to Gill now and then.

GASSER: Okay, to the music and to the Skagg family and Peter Feldmann and um, tell me who the Skaggs family were...

JOHNSTON: Scragg, Scragg, S-C-R-A-G-G, Scragg. It all started when 00:47:00Gene McGeorge, who had a house over on Banana Road, referred to John Lazell as being his place over there as being the "Scragg family." And I don't know where they where he got the name. But it sort of, as things did on Mountain Drive, it sort of got blown up and eventually everybody had a "Scragg" name. Bill Neely was William Scragg. He put out actually a commercial product of wine vinegar, "William Scragg's original and aromatic wine," in fact I printed labels for him, I still have one somewhere. Gill Johnston was Oral Scragg. I can't remember what Frank Robinson was, but everybody had a, had a, I was Electron Scragg. Gill's wife was, Trellis Mae Scragg, and their son was, was, Maynard, 00:48:00Maynard Scragg. Well, anyway, when Gene McGeorge and Kajsa, his wife, and Peter Feldmann, and I think that was the main group, formed a bluegrass group, they called it the Scragg Family. And Ruby Scragg was Kajsa's name, and Gene McGeorge was, uh, sometimes people use their first names, but I can't remember what Gene McGeorge's Scragg name was, nor can I remember what Peter Feldmann, but they all had, they all had Scragg names. And they would appear on my radio station once in a while and and uh, Peter Feldmann did a did a bluegrass program on there for a while on Saturdays and Saturday afternoon. Anybody could do 00:49:00anything they wanted as long as it wasn't illegal.

GASSER: Wasn't Bill Neely a Scragg, played with the Scraggs as well?

JOHNSTON: He did occasionally, but he wasn't really, uh. It was more the Scragg Family did classical music once in a while. I mean, he and Kajsa did a rendition of Vivaldi concerto one time, which was not half, not half bad. I think that Christmas party. Bill Neely had some musical talent, but not a lot. He could play a lot of different things and he played the concertina, probably as well as anything. Did also play the cello a little bit and guitar, maybe. But he was not facile enough really to be a part of this Scragg Family group, which 00:50:00was pretty good. They they started getting some commercial engagements. Bill Neely had a little talent in an immense number of directions. He's probably the best writer on Mountain Drive. Certainly the most fascinating conversationalist on Mountain Drive, and probably the most imaginative person on Mountain Drive. These are these good qualities. I won't go into the bad qualities, 'cause everybody does.

GASSER: Tell, tell, tell me if you actually everybody's been very careful to, uh, to avoid all the bad qualities.

JOHNSTON: Well, I'll give you a very short paragraph, and I won't talk about it anymore. And that's only from my, uh, knowledge. I knew he was convicted of child molestation in 1975 or 1976, and was put on probation. That's 00:51:00probably the worst thing about Bill Neely. He was also what would now be called a womanizer, to a rather extreme extent. And quite frankly, I can think I would say that he did was really wrong was to mess around with the little six year old girl, in a way that he shouldn't have, in a hot tub. And as far as the womanizing goes, that's more of a subjective, field. I suppose that I suppose that you've gotten a lot of people talking about what a male 00:52:00chauvinist place Mountain Drive was, I mean, nowadays. I mean I wouldn't tolerate it nowadays, but I didn't know anything about it. I didn't know anything about male chauvinism when I when I first moved up there. I wrote a novel which had a first novel I ever wrote was about a bunch of people, sort of like Mountain Drivers, who got together and blew up an oil platform out in the Santa Barbara Channel. And I gave it to some people to read. I'll never forget, Christine Walden gave it back to me. She says, "Well, it's kind of fun, but it's horribly male chauvinist." And I said, "What?" I didn't know what she was talking about. But her comment, probably as much as any comment anyone has made to me, have made me do a lot of thinking, or made me at the time, do a lot of thinking. I finally, you know, I finally sort of figured out what she 00:53:00was talking about. So, but it's really difficult with people my age who have been brought up in a certain way, even with a mother who was an equivalent of my father as far as work goes. You know, it's really hard to understand what these people were talking. I mean, I do now, but at the time, I didn't know what these people were talking about. I don't know. I mean, I don't know how common that is, but it took me a lot of thinking to figure it out.

GASSER: So was it a male chauvinist society and in, how do you see it now?

JOHNSTON: Mountain Drive is a tremendously male chauvinist society. It was a hideously male chauvinist society. It was awful from that standpoint. I mean, I can view it that way now. At the time, I thought it was just good, clean, fun.

GASSER: What made it male chauvinist?

JOHNSTON: For instance, you know, they, every time, every year at the Wine Stomp, they, uh, we, elected a Wine Queen. All in good spirit of 00:54:00good, clean, fun and wine making and all that. One of the last few times I was at a Wine Stomp, which I guess the last time I was in the Wine Stomp was 1972 or 73 or 74. And anyway, the women you see, were relegated to the Bill Neely's House, while the men went down and did things like stemming the grapes and getting everything ready for the Wine Stomp. And in a secret ceremony, elected the Wine Queen. And the ceremony was never supposed to be talked about. I mean, what went into electing the Wine Queen was never discussed. And the 00:55:00Wine Queen was announced after the, then there was a luncheon which the women prepared, the women were relegated to the house up there. And their job was to prepare this luxurious luncheon. The vintage luncheon before, were you ever at a Wine Stomp?

GASSER: No, I was never at a Wine Stomp.

JOHNSTON: Which, you know, everybody partook of this marvelous feast, and it was usually very, very good.

GASSER: So how was the Wine Queen elected?

JOHNSTON: The Wine Queen was elected in a way any other person is elected, I mean, there was nothing that special about it. What happened was that actually we got everything ready. We had all the grapes stemmed and the vat all full of grapes and everything cleaned up and Bacchus, there was a gold statue, a gilded statue of Bacchus. There were two Bacchus statues, actually. But Bacchus had been repainted with gold paint and all this was done and everything raked up and the place made to look nice. Everybody sit around on grape lug 00:56:00boxes in a circle. And Frank Robinson or Bill Neely would conduct this thing, I think more often than not, it was Frank Robinson conducting. And he'd say, you know, he'd say, "Nominations for the post of Wine Queen are now open." And there were usually four or five. Well, the subjects had been discussed for a long time before this about who would make a good Wine Queen that year, among the men.

GASSER: In what were the criteria for what would make a good Wine Queen?

JOHNSTON: Pulchritude. Nothing else. Oh, and you know, there were a few other little side issues like the woman. It was not customary to elect a woman Wine Queen who had not gone along to pick grapes. I think that was about the only other criterion. There was a, there was early on, there was this scam 00:57:00that the Wine Queen should be a virgin. And the only way they could be sure of it was to nominate a four year old. So there was one time that the Wine Queen in the 50s was Maia Robinson, who was at the time, four years old. That was... Anyway, so anyway, after four or five women were nominated, the nominations were closed. Each of the persons, each person who had nominated the Wine Queen was expected to stand up and give a speech promoting the Wine Queen. I remember Ed Schertz one time nominated Queen Elizabeth. That was rather funny. And they ruled, they eliminated her because she wouldn't be there. And Ed Schertz said, "Well, how do you know she won't be here?" Anyway, so, you 00:58:00know, then there was this extensive vote. It was a very complicated voting system, where I think at the first, on the first vote, everybody could vote for two people. It was drawn out to make it as long and complicated as possible. So there were two or three votes on it. And finally, it got narrowed down to two people, two women. And the final, the final, the final vote was between the two women. And nobody threw out the whole luncheon. Nobody revealed who the Wine Queen was. The men thinking that the women are dying to find out who is elected Wine Queen, whereas they were all dreading it.

GASSER: Do you know that for a fact, really they all dreading it?

JOHNSTON: Well, no, I wouldn't say that they were all dreading it, but they were not in great suspense over this. The men believed that they were, however, thinking it was such a great honor to be the Wine Queen.

GASSER: Were you at the famous filming of Seconds at that Grape Stomp?

JOHNSTON: Oh yes. It was actually the same procedure, Leslie Hill was elected Wine Queen. And since there'd been no picking the only criterion was pulchritude. We just got together in the late afternoon and went through that same old routine and we'd always gone through. Yeah, I was there, it was quite a... Most of them, almost all of the pictures that we're in that 01:00:00Santa Barbara Magazine article were pictures that Paramount took during that filming. None of those pictures were of a real Wine Stomp.

GASSER: Those were Bill Neely's or...?

JOHNSTON: Frank Robinson. They used a picture that I took of Bobby Hyde without a photo credit, and I got really upset. So I called him up, said, ask them where they got the pictures because I was, I was thinking, maybe Michael Peake had given them the pictures, in which case I was visualizing lawsuits and things like that. But it was Frank Robinson who had given them the pictures that they had used in that thing, including the picture I took of Bobby Hyde, which is one of the best pictures ever taken of Bobby Hyde. They were reproduced it quite badly, but...

GASSER: Do you still have those photos?

JOHNSTON: Oh yeah, well, I'm not sure. I have an awful lot of photographs of Mountain Drive. I have an awful lot of photographs of Mountain Drive. I've got a, I should look into this, downtown, with a bunch of stuff, I think I've got a whole lot of negatives from various Wine Stomps, which I never really 01:01:00printed up. I took a lot of pictures at Wine Stomps, but I didn't make very many prints. There a few around.

GASSER: Well, Bill Neely must have been quite instrumental in some ways, also in regards to the filming of Seconds. Do you know how all that came about?

JOHNSTON: Oh yeah, I was there at the very first meeting. I was one of those that decided it was going to be alright to do this, because you see, Mountain Drive was a very xenophobic society as well as male chauvinist. For a long time, you know, it was just sort of an unwritten law. And I mean, law, you didn't talk about Mountain Drive anywhere. It was a good thing. We had a good thing going and we don't want anybody to know about this,

GASSER: But everyone didn't know about it.

JOHNSTON: But everybody, well, sort of knew about it, but not really. I mean, I found the place to be a lot different than what I imagined it to be. I imagined it to be really raunchy and really, you know, a bunch of seedy people 01:02:00running around half naked or naked, you know, building their own houses, sort of, you know, but it wasn't that at all. It's a very erudite and very smart people. Sometimes running around naked, but not as much as the stories, the downtown stories had it. They did build their own houses, but you know, most of the houses were legal.

GASSER: They seem to have families, too.

JOHNSTON: Yeah, there was a lot of family. The women were pretty well subjugated. But, the women made some attempts. You know, when they realized that when the feminist movement began to simmer, for instance, the women started a meeting, an organization, I forget that they had a name for it, I 01:03:00don't think there's sort of an anti-Sunset Club group. Women were allowed at Sunset Club once a year. Otherwise, no women were allowed at Sunset.

GASSER: When was that? When was that once a year?

JOHNSTON: I think it was in the, I think it was around the time of the Chinese New Year, if I remember correctly. But I'm not, I can't be sure, but I can remember that there was an annual meeting of Sunset Club at which women were allowed. You know, if anybody had a real tight girlfriend they'd bring them anyway. I mean, you know, I mean, there were women at Sunset Club now and then.

GASSER: I'd always thought it was Moonrise. I think there was another...

JOHNSTON: The Moonrise Club. Yeah, but the men call it, Sip and Stitch. I was trying to think of the Moonrise Club and I couldn't think of it, but I was remembering the Sip and Stitch. But I didn't want to come out with that until I remembered, yeah MRC, the Moonrise Club. And that was the official 01:04:00name that the women called it. But the men call it Sip and Stitch.

GASSER: Clever retort. And so the first meetings then in regard to the films?

JOHNSTON: Oh well, Bill Neely called me up one day and asked me to come over and says that this guy from, there's this guy named Louis, Edward Lewis, from Paramount, who wants to film a Wine Stomp. And he says, "I'm asking you and Frank Robinson's to come over and we're going to talk about this, and meet with this guy." So I went over there to Bill Neely's, and sat on the porch and drank wine, and Edward Lewis arrived, who was the producer of the film. And he came, I think, by himself that first time. And he said that what had happened was that they had gotten a screenplay from a guy, the guy who had been hired to write the screenplay from the book Seconds by Ely, James. His name, his last 01:05:00name is Ely. I can't remember his first name, maybe William Ely or James Ely? He'd written a screenplay, and they thought it needed something, it needed some beefing up. So this guy who lived over on Banana Road, who was the screenplay writer, I don't know his name, had heard about the Wine Stomp. And so without really knowing much about it, he added a Wine Stomp scene. Well, they liked this. And so the, and they also found out from this guy that this really happened. And they had come up to, you know, if we would put on a Wine Stomp for them. But I don't even think he knew, when it, he didn't know anything about grapes or wine, he didn't know it was required it to be at a certain time of the year when the grapes were ripe. He just didn't really know much about it. So we, you know, we said, well, you can't do a Wine Stomp because there aren't any grapes at this time of year. And he says, supposing we get you the grapes?

GASSER: That's Hollywood for you.

JOHNSTON: Right. And there was an awful lot of discussion about it, whether we wanted to do this, whether we wanted the publicity, whether you know, they offered this $5,000 you know, which went into the general Mountain Drive fund, all kinds of other things, you know. All the grapes, you know, we get to keep the wine and all this and that. You know, they'd build us, they get us some more more wine vats, and they do all this stuff, you know? Finally, we talked about it for quite a while. You know, and people got more and more people got dragged into it into the discussion. Finally, it was decided, well, okay. Besides, it looked like it might be a real interesting party. Which I think was the thing that finally decided everybody to do it. And it was a horrendously big undertaking, gigantic. Bill Neely came down from Yosemite, I forget 01:07:00it was done in July, around the 20th of July. In 1966, I think, 65 or 66.

GASSER: The land had recovered, though, from the Coyote Fire, by that time.

JOHNSTON: The land had recovered somewhat from the Coyote Fire. Still, I remember still, see they didn't get all the stuff they wanted, so they came back to the real Wine Stomp later on to shoot some more stuff. Just a few people with some really fancy cameras. And so I remember John Frankenheimer sitting up on the bank above the Wine Stomp with his wife. But on the ground, almost being, you know, not much growing. And on a hillside that normally would be covered thickly with chaparral and is now, I'm sure. Anyway, you know, they came up, they arrived on the day before the event was to be filmed and with 01:08:00these huge semi-trucks that were parked up in the top there and, set up lights and built this canopy around and put together, they brought up a couple of vats, one of which they put together to use in the film and the other they gave to Bill Neely. I think it finally rotted before it ever got put together. It was a big vat and we stood around and watched all this happening. Boy, it was something. Big lights, all these big lights up on the hill side. And then they started it with the dinner and they put, oh, they put on this fantastic piece and they hired George Greyson to do this food. And I don't know how many thousands he charged, but he put out this incredible feast, you know, with whole pigs and stuff. You know, he'd roasted in holes in the ground here somewhere and just this incredible mass of food. And there were a lot of extra 01:09:00people invited because you needed a lot of people. So everybody invited, you know, it was a rather carefully arranged type of thing. I mean, you know, weren't supposed to be any of the authorities.

GASSER: Any of the authorities in what way?

JOHNSTON: You know, police, and people frown on this kind of activity.

GASSER: They must have had some clearance though, wouldn't they, from the city for all the film production units?

JOHNSTON: Nothing. No. They just came in and did it before the days of environmental reviews. You know, I'm sure that never could be done now up there because somebody would, you know, squawk about fire danger or, you know, something. I mean, it wasn't no harm was done.

GASSER: So there was this, there was this huge meal and carefully selected guests...

JOHNSTON: Down at Gill Johnston's parking lot at his house, which is considered to be the best spot because it was level and it was large and could 01:10:00set up a lot of tables and there was room for camera people for being around and that was done during daylight. That was done. I think it started around 4:00, 5:00 in the afternoon, still quite a bit of daylight left. And I was there with the woman I was with at that time.

GASSER: Who was that?

JOHNSTON: Brigitte. Brigitte Feeser, to put it in English, she was German. She is, well, she became the research, after she and I split up, she became the research director of the Santa Barbara Research Center. Made a lot of money, made a lot of inventions. A lot of smart shells to hit people in Vietnam and a lot of things which I didn't approve of. Of course, it's none of my 01:11:00business, but she married Gene Forssell subsequently. Anyway. There was a picture somewhere that Bill Botwright took, and he was the only reporter allowed in. And he was allowed in because we all knew him. I think I brought him up to Mountain Drive. I think I was instrumental. Botwright finally became a Mountain Driver. He was working for the News-Press and he got he got his, whole outlook on life, got so changed, he quit his job. But he was there and wrote a story on it for the News-Press. But what happened was, as this thing was going on. Of course it got dark and all the lights came on. People could see the lights, this big glow up in the mountains; they could see it from downtown. People wondered what was going on and they started driving up there. And the, you 01:12:00know and the with some foresight, Paramount had got a lot of rent a cops and they, you know, they had Mountain Drive blocked off, except for residents, you know? But sightseers were not, couldn't get close to it, couldn't get close at all. There was some discussion the next day about what had gone on up in the mountains. It was quite an event. And in the European version of the movie Seconds, the Wine Stomp scene lasts about twenty-two minutes. And shows full nudity, you know, and all that. And in the American version that lasts, I think, five or six minutes and doesn't not show any real nudity.

GASSER: I recently saw the film on television, and they had cut those scenes completely.

JOHNSTON: I have a version of it on videotape.

GASSER: Oh, do you?

JOHNSTON: I have the American version I videotape with the Wine Stomp sequence in it. I happened to tape it. I happened to see it was going to be 01:13:00on. I taped it when I was living in Philadelphia.

GASSER: I was very surprised because I expected, "Oh good, I finally get to see the movie Seconds," and I watched the whole thing and where it should have been, there was nothing there. They needed something to spice it up. But years later, they could cut it off...

JOHNSTON: And cut it out so they could put more commercials in.

GASSER: Right, exactly.

JOHNSTON: No, no artistic consideration.

GASSER: Or maybe it's called artistic un-license, or something? Um, I guess there were a lot of other community kind of events, too. Plays, etcetera, that you've mentioned several times, the connection there with, having met people in plays who seemed like that was another great highlight on Mountain Drive, were the different, Pyramus and Thisbe, and play production...

JOHNSTON: You know, Bill Neely, for a number of years, wanted to do a play for the Summer Solstice party. And usually it was Pyramus and Thisbe. But 01:14:00a couple of, twice he did a version of Lysistrata. And I don't know, I can't remember who wrote it. You know, the version. Aristophanes wrote it originally, but there was a rewritten version that appeared in Eros Magazine. I don't know if you've ever heard of Eros Magazine, but it was a very strange magazine that put out four issues and a sort of a hardcover, large hardcover format, sometime in the sixties. And one of those was a rewritten version of Lysistrata, which is just marvelous. Really wonderfully bawdy than a lot of modern idiom and really, really a neat version. So we just lifted that and did that version of it. And it was marvel... the first time we did it. I was just, it was just absolutely wonderful. I have a tape. I think I may have sent you the tape of it. 01:15:00It's not a very good tape, but you can get some kind of an idea of it. And Bunny Bernhardt played Lysistrata. She of course is a marvelous actress and, well, the whole cast was just absolutely fab... The first time it was on, Stanley Glenn from the university drama department was there. It just blew him away. He thought he'd never seen anything like it. He just thought it was the most marvelous thing. He couldn't stop raving about it. It was, it was great.

GASSER: I heard that Dame Judith Anderson had been at...

JOHNSTON: She was there, she was there at a Pyramus and Thisbe one time, and I think the last time it was done. Maybe around 19... maybe a little before that, 16 years... I was doing that, I was playing the part of King Theseus 01:16:00in Pyramus and Thisbe. About five minutes before it was due to start, I was introduced to Dame Judith Anderson, and I thought, "Oh boy." Here I am having to do Shakespeare in front of Dame Judith Anderson. Yeah, well, you know, she didn't stay around afterward. She left, you know, and I thought, "Well, I don't blame her." But I just happen to run into her at this radio station, which I was working at the time, a few days after, it was less than a week after. And I asked her what she thought of it. She said it was, "Mah-velous."

GASSER: So how did the plays get staged, what uh...

JOHNSTON: Well, Bill Neely did it, I mean, Bill Neely was the instigator and not only of that, but of other theatrical productions. There was a 01:17:00Christmas play, sort of, Christmas program, which he did.

GASSER: Wasn't that for children?

JOHNSTON: The children did it, but Bill Neely, Bill Neely was the, quote, director.

GASSER: Mm hmm. Tell me a little bit about that.

JOHNSTON: And what, well it was sort of the Christmas story acted out by the kids and, his son Jeff, who was at the time this was done in a very small, three or four years old, blew the blew, the trumpet blast that was always sort of the high point of it, the squawk. But all the children acted out the Christmas story and somebody narrated it. I forget who. I think I did it once. I think Bill usually did it. But the children, you know, acted out the annual Christmas program on Mountain Drive. And then, there was Christmas caroling where the men all got together, no women, went, well there was a woman once, but 01:18:00generally it was another men, all men scene where a few days before Christmas, usually on a weekend, the men would go around Mountain Drive singing Christmas carols, and the idea was that they'd get invited in for a glass of wine. And by the end of the evening, everybody was pretty well smashed. But anyway, the Christmas program was I, uh, I'm not terribly familiar with the Christmas, but I'm very familiar with the plays, which Bill Neely directed as a rule, pretty competently. And there were certain traditions of the Pyramus and Thisbe, where, a fellow named Ray Hawthorne played the Wall. And he had no, no acting talent at all, and didn't know really what was going on, but he had this sort 01:19:00of bedsheet which had some bricks painted on it and a big hole in it. He gave his lines, it was... Are you, you've heard the tape? I think I have a tape of that, too, which I gave you. That was the one, the tape is the one at which Dame Judith Anderson was present. That was the time. I think that was the last time we did Pyramus and Thisbe. I'm pretty sure of that. I think that was in nineteen sixty, we might have done it after that, late sixties, maybe 1969, 1968.

GASSER: And how is the, how were the cast, how was the cast picked out? Was it from the same from year to year?

JOHNSTON: Yeah, it was. It was just generally the same. I mean, Puck 01:20:00was played by Lorna Greyson usually. And George Greyson was almost always in it. And Tim Arsette was in it. He was in it the year that I taped it. He played, oh, wait a minute. They reversed the roles. They had a man playing, they had a man playing Thisbe and a woman playing Pyramus.

GASSER: Just to make it more confusing.

JOHNSTON: Wasn't Bill Neely, he didn't like the idea, but everybody overruled, Bill Neely could be overruled occasionally, sometimes by a walkout.

GASSER: How did he respond to that?

JOHNSTON: He gave in eventually. He capitulated. There was a constant rivalry between Bill Neely and Frank Robinson. To top each other, I guess you'd say.

GASSER: Can you detail that a little more?

JOHNSTON: Well, no. It's hard because I really, I really knew it was going on and could see it from time to time. And in just the, they would try to out costume each other and, uh, outdo each other. But Bill Neely was such an imaginative talent that nobody could outdo him. And Frank Robinson, of course, wanted to be the leader. And I remember one time him sort of confidently telling me that Bill Neely thinks he runs Mountain Drive, but he really doesn't. I do. I was very early, very early when I was there. I'll never forget that. But they the two of them really were the people that ran Mountain Drive as much 01:22:00 as it, as much as it ever had to be run.

GASSER: Perhaps they needed the spark, each others spark.

JOHNSTON: I think, I think there was some of that.

GASSER: Wasn't there also a huge controversy about the Wine Cellar in some way?

JOHNSTON: Well, yeah, who, who owned the Wine Cellar? Well, Bill Neely and Frank Robinson had built it together, and Bill Neely says, "Well, it's on my land, therefore, it's my Wine Cellar." Well, the fact of the matter was it was on Bobby Hyde's land. It was on neither. It wasn't on either one of their property. Bill Neely. I think Bill Neely and Frank Robinson's land adjoined each other for a brief, a brief stretch.

GASSER: You were also learned potting. Bill Neely was a great potter, and, so and I know that you also potted with him for a while. Could you tell what he was like as a teacher?

JOHNSTON: Very good. Very good teacher. Yes, I took his pottery class just as sort of out of curiosity and see what it was like. And I got very 01:23:00interested in it and did a lot of, in fact I had a whole pottery setup on the back of my house on Coyote Road. Which I moved up to the other place, but I never did much pottery up there. You know, I made a lot of pottery and I sold pottery at the Pot Wars and did pretty well at it.

GASSER: Describe to me the Pot Wars and how that came about.

JOHNSTON: Well, I'm not really sure how it came about. I have it in my novel. I have a scene, this is one of the parts that's one of the few parts is fictional is Bill Neely, and, well, I better not tell you the fictional part. I'll just say I don't know how it came about, but it came about because Ed Schertz and Bill Neely were both potters. Schertz, taught by Neely. And they decided that they'd have what they call a "Pot War," which in which they try to outdo each other in selling pottery. Every now and then, it happened more than 01:24:00once, every now and then, one or the other, I think Ed Schertz thought of it first, would say that if "any pot that isn't sold by six o'clock will be smashed." This is in my book, but this is also actually happened, that several times, that one or the other smashed all the pottery they had left. That they hadn't sold. But then it got to be. At first, it was just the two of them selling pottery, but then gradually other people began to sell refreshments and other items out there at the time of the Pot War.

GASSER: Did you sell?

JOHNSTON: Yeah, I sold quite a lot of pot. I mean, I made nine hundred dollars once at a Pot War.

GASSER: Whoa.

JOHNSTON: Which was not nearly what Bill and Ed Schertz made. But I was amazed, you know, these tiny little cups and stuff I mean. I did pretty well.

GASSER: You must have had a large backlog.

JOHNSTON: That bowl that's back in the corner there is, I think, the last thing I made. Yeah. And I think it's the only, it's too heavy in the bottom. But I like the shape of it real well.

GASSER: I like the glaze, too.

JOHNSTON: Yeah, I like the glaze. But that, I think is the last thing I made. The last pot I made. And I don't, it's one of the very few I have. Maybe the only thing I have.

GASSER: I love this wonderful lip, that wonderful sort of square lip, with a beautiful blue...

JOHNSTON: Yeah, I made nice pottery.

GASSER: Yeah, you did. Was it difficult adjusting doing it with one hand, wheel throwing?

JOHNSTON: Well, I don't know whether it was difficult or not, it was the way I had to do it. But I couldn't do big stuff. I did mostly small things.

GASSER: How did, uh, how did uh, uh, Neely teach you?

JOHNSTON: Well, he didn't. I had to figure it out for myself. I mean, he taught. He taught some basic principles, like you have to get the clay centered. And you know, before you can, then you stick your thumb in it, and you know, 01:26:00he taught, he would give me the methods of doing it. But I had to sort of figure it out for myself. How I did it.

GASSER: You certainly did it beautiful. Which I've also heard. I've also heard from, I've forgotten the teacher's, not from Ed, but I think from someone else that was speaking about your pots and, how lovely they were. And you don't pot anymore.

JOHNSTON: Naa. I haven't done any of that since...

GASSER: The computer...

JOHNSTON: I haven't done any pottery. I did a little bit of pottery with Mary Burton. I made some stuff for her. Threw a few things. But I figured that after I'd done a little of it, it was going to take me so long to get back into it, you know, and do it really well, that I wouldn't bother. I could still do it, you know, I mean, I could still make a center of the clay and make a pot, but to do the really nice stuff that I used to do, I wasn't, you know, it'd been fifteen years, twenty years since I've done it.

GASSER: Could you talk a little bit about any kind of activities that 01:27:00the Mountain Driver, Mountain Drive community was that, you know, of that was involved in the larger community, any kind of political or arts or...?

JOHNSTON: Well, not much. There was, Mountain Drive entered a float in the Fiesta parade one time. You may have heard of that, it was a Wine Stomp float. It received some attention, but not the kind we wanted.

GASSER: What kind of attention?

JOHNSTON: This was done at, right at the time, I was think it was sixty, in the summer of sixty-three, right at the time I was getting involved with Mountain Drive and I wasn't involved with it. I was going to Sunset Club, I think, at the time and heard a lot about it. But I wasn't. I wasn't involved in it. I was not involved in fooling around with the float or making it or anything. I just sort of, and I watched it go by. And I, I really didn't know anybody at the time. I knew a few people, but I didn't know the people who were on the 01:28:00float. I subsequently got to know them. But it was right when I was first becoming acquainted with Mountain Drive. I'm trying to think of anything else. Mountain Drive was pretty much its own, its own thing and did not interact much with the community. I think that, see the... My radio station was a very interesting. That was the first time Mountain Drive ever became public, but Mountain Drive wasn't mentioned. It was a bunch of people who were doing strange things on a radio station, but it had no nobody. You know, there are people that knew that these people were Mountain Drive people, but not too many. And Mountain Drive was not talked about much, if any. Somebody might say, "Well, we live up in the mountains," you know, something like, but, you know, Mountain Drive was not talked about.

GASSER: They didn't. They didn't refer to themselves. How did they refer to themselves?

JOHNSTON: They referred to themselves as Mountain Drivers, but not on my radio station.

GASSER: I see.

JOHNSTON: Now, that was, you know, during the still during the period of extreme xenophobia. Yeah, and it was talked about, that we don't want we don't want the flatlanders coming up here and gettin' in the way.

GASSER: But a lot of people did come up and go up to visit to Mountain Drive.

JOHNSTON: Well, I would not say a lot. But you know, there were people who were downtown people, who lived downtown, who were considered Mountain, to be Mountain Drivers.

GASSER: For example,

JOHNSTON: For example, the Martins. Tom Martin and his wife, Jan. I don't think they ever lived there. Well, maybe they did. Bill Botwright is, was one person I can think of who became a Mountain Driver even though he never 01:30:00lived there. He was a reporter, a very good writer in this place. In fact he was their star reporter, until he got this whiff of something different, which ruined him. As a commercial human.

GASSER: It seems like a lot of people in some ways got, quote unquote, ruined. Maybe that's only a wrong impression. Do you? How do you feel about that? How do you see that?

JOHNSTON: Oh, I don't think they ruined at all. I think they came to their senses. It's like Bill Clinton who never inhaled marijuana. Well, I'd think a lot more of him if he hadn't still did, you know. I think there ought to be asked how much they drink. I don't think they have ever used marijuana. It's completely the wrong, the wrong approach.

GASSER: I guess I consider the price that that some I mean, Bill 01:31:00Neely paid the price of heavy drinking. And, you know, several other people pay the price from, uh, from those years of, living, sort of living, not, living fully.

JOHNSTON: Yeah, well Bill Neely was an alcoholic, which I didn't recognize. I didn't know it for a long time. And one of the reasons I didn't know it was that he functioned very well all the time. But he ruined his liver. Yeah, and I think Bill Neely was probably the heaviest drinker on Mountain Drive, although Ray Hawthorne did a lot of drinking. And also died. And, I did, I did it quite a bit of drinking, but not for very long. I found I didn't like being drunk and I didn't like having hangovers. So I, you know, I drank wine, but not very much.

GASSER: How would you describe the other drug habits of Mountain Drive or...?

JOHNSTON: Well, marijuana was big on Mountain Drive for quite a long time among certain people, even Bill Neely, who condemned it, condemned it as being an extremely sinful thing. Once he got on to it. He had it in his pipe all the time. And he didn't, he was so blasé... I don't know if that's the right word. He didn't give a damn whether it was illegal or not. I mean, if he wanted to smoke marijuana, he'd stick it in his pipe and smoke it, whether he was downtown or anywhere else. And he got so he really liked it, really liked it. And I really like it. I mean, if I had it I'd smoke it, you know, and I 01:33:00don't have it usually. It's, to me it's much better than alcohol as a mild intoxication. Well, it was maybe about the time that drugs came in. And I think that since alcohol really hurt Mountain Drive as a maybe did... Mountain Drive at its peak when it was fully functional and going full pulver, was a very alcohol-ridden place. I mean, there was a lot of wine drinking going on on Mountain Drive during those, during its great years. I think it was other things that destroyed Mountain Drive, not drugs.

GASSER: Well, what were those things?

JOHNSTON: Well, I think it was the fact that commercial, it became "fashionable" in quotes, like Greenwich Village. It became, it became known about 01:34:00and which is the thing that everybody had always feared. It became, you know, about the time that a certain Mountain Driver and his wife appeared in Vogue magazine, that was about time it began to collapse.

GASSER: Who was that?

JOHNSTON: Michael Peake and his wife.

GASSER: Oh, I see.

JOHNSTON: Right? Shot photograph right outside their house on Mountain Drive. And, you know, it became fashionable and the property values started skyrocketing. And when that happened, the right people, and I'm talking about the people that originally formed Mountain Drive and made it great, they couldn't afford to live there anymore. So, you know, it disappeared. In essence, it's gone. There are still a few of the old people living there, but 01:35:00the, you know, the great, the great spirit has gone.

GASSER: The sense of community seems, although I don't know. How would you describe that sense of community? Do you have anything still to do with...?

JOHNSTON: I don't see anyone up there anymore. I have visited Frank Robinson. But, you know, it's just not, it's just not going, it's just not happening. It's not going up there anymore.

GASSER: Although some festivities that still occur?

JOHNSTON: They still have a Twelfth Night party as I understand it. But the old Mountain Drivers aren't invited to the Twelfth Night party, which I suppose is all right. I probably wouldn't go anyway. Because I don't think I'd know anyone. And I think that, you know, there was a certain spirit that maybe held on until Bill Neely died. But I wasn't there. I was living in the east from 01:36:001982 until 87. I lived in Philadelphia, so I don't I wasn't aware of what was going on on Mountain Drive. I heard about Bill Neely's death, but not until two or three months after it happened, which is a horrible shock.

GASSER: I can imagine. How?

JOHNSTON: That really, that hit me really very hard. Because he was a very good friend of mine. Probably as close to friends as I had up there, you know, I, and I was one of the few people that never had a big fight with Bill Neely. I had some disagreements with Bill Neely and I just wouldn't see him for a while and they would blow over. But I never had any big fights. Everybody up there had major fights with Bill Neely.

GASSER: Do you know the causes or circumstances around any of them?

JOHNSTON: Oh, women. Women. What the character of the Wine Stomp was supposed to be. Who was in charge of this, or who was in charge of that. Insult, imagined insults. I mean, it was a bunch of very, very sensitive people up there who could get set off, you know? You were dancing with my wife too much, you know, that kind of thing. But Bill Neely would go through periods, too, where he became angered at the entire community. And would sort of shut himself off from all activities. Not for long and it always was carefully timed so it didn't interfere with the Wine Stomp. But he was responsible for the Wine Stomp 01:38:00and the Summer Solstice party. Which were the two of the major, major festivities. The Wine Stomp, of course, he would never allow that to be called a party. He was very adamant that it was a serious winemaking, not a party. "This is not a party!" Which of course it was.

GASSER: What do you consider some of the unifying factors on Mountain Drive?

JOHNSTON: Well, I think the parties were a big unifying factor, I think the fact that, you know, things like the Wine Stomp, the communal activities, the fact that everybody helped everybody else out when they were building something and required assistance. I mean, it was not hard to get help. It was not hard at all to get help. I mean, you just dropped the word that there's going to 01:39:00be some project going on sometime and everybody would show up. It was very easy to get a lot of help. That was a very unifying factor. I think another unifying factor was that we're here and they're down there. You know, I mean, it was everybody was up here looking down at the rest of the world. I think just the location of it up in the mountains there, a thousand feet above sea level, had a great deal to do with the fact that was a unified place. "And we don't want them to know about us." That was very, very big when I first went up there. And I gather it had been, but it kind of deteriorated. And I think maybe it was the cause of the downfall of it, to some extent.

GASSER: Is that they wanted to remain so far...

JOHNSTON: They didn't want anybody to know about it. The xenophobia 01:40:00went, when it kind of dispersed, may have been the reason it fell apart. Well, there were other things, I mean, it just could just kind of entropy. I mean, it just kind of ran down. You know, Bill Neely got charged with child molestation.

GASSER: That must have been a shock for the community, too.

JOHNSTON: Well, you know, a lot of people didn't know about it. I think everybody knows about now. But at the time it happened, not very many people knew about it. I didn't know about it. I was told about it by somebody who did not live on Mountain Drive.

GASSER: That seems a hard thing to keep secret in a small community.

JOHNSTON: Well, there were a lot of secrets up there. It was a tight-knit community and a lot of ways, but in a lot of ways it wasn't a tight-knit community. A lot of times, when I was first up there, it was much 01:41:00tighter than it was when, you know, 10 years, 12 years, 14 years later when there was this child molestation. And, I knew the, I knew the the young woman involved. The young girl involved. Because she was a very close friend of my daughter's. And my daughter could have been the one molested by Bill Neely. Except I do think that Bill Neely knew that if he did that, I'd kill him. I mean, I don't, I don't think, you know, I think he just stayed away from her and nothing ever happened with her. But however, she was in the same situation. It could have happened with her.

GASSER: Did you ever talk to Neely about it?

JOHNSTON: Never. Never.

GASSER: He never knew you knew?

JOHNSTON: Never knew I knew.

JOHNSTON: I didn't associate with him an awful lot. About the most association I ever had with him after that was at those Wednesday night dinners where I first met you, where you were up there. That was, that was my major association with him. My daughter was there...

GASSER: Jessica. I remember her.

JOHNSTON: Jessica. That's her now.

GASSER: Wonderful. It has been a long time.

JOHNSTON: She will be twenty-one years old in a few days. She living in Canada with her mother, in Ottawa. She's a Canadian citizen. Also an American citizen.

GASSER: I guess she will have to choose sometime.

JOHNSTON: No, you don't have to anymore.

GASSER: Oh, really?

JOHNSTON: No, you can be both now.

GASSER: Did she spend a long time on Mountain Drive?

JOHNSTON: Well, she grew up sort of on Mountain Drive. She has very strong memories of Mountain Drive. You know, later on. She was around Mountain Drive until she was 10, 11 years old. She remembers a good bit about it.

GASSER: Describe what it was like for a child on Mountain Drive. When she was young.

JOHNSTON: Well, I don't know. I mean, I have kind of wondered about the Mountain Drive children. Very few of them have gone to college. Which to me, it was very surprising. Because almost all of the parents were, had either gone to college or were college graduates. There were some advanced degrees up there. And it surprises me a lot that such a small percentage of the children that were raised on Mountain Drive have gone to college. I can't be exact. I don't 01:44:00know. I mean, I have that feeling and I can't really. In some ways, they may have gone late. But when most of them became of college age when I was up there, they did not go to college. And I find that, I find that surprising.

GASSER: Do you have a suspected reason or reasons?

JOHNSTON: No, I don't. I haven't thought about an awful lot. I've done a little thinking about it. Not recently. I don't know. I don't know why it is. They went to Cold Springs School, where most of them went to grade school. It's considered one of the best elementary schools in the state. I mean, to me, it's a, it's very surprising.

GASSER: Maybe it's a disdain for all things that were downtown.

JOHNSTON: Maybe a disdain for convention. I don't know.

GASSER: Convention, right.

JOHNSTON: I don't know. It's hard to say. But I find it, I find it very surprising. I think that few, one or two of Frank Robinson's six 01:45:00children went to college. None of Bill Neely's children, I know went to college. He had six children, one of them died, Benjy died.

GASSER: Yes, the Neely family had a number of tragedies, it seems.

JOHNSTON: Yeah.

GASSER: What do you think people needed to survive on the land there, or to become part of the community?

JOHNSTON: Well, I think everybody was different. I think everybody had something to offer, what the group wanted. It may have been just this ability to socialize, or talent, or wanting to be part of it. I, uh, I got I got 01:46:00involved there because of my radio station. I'm not sure I would have otherwise. I might never have gotten to know anyone there, if it hadn't been for my radio station. But I loved it, I mean, I thought it was the most astonishing, situation I'd ever been in. I couldn't believe it.

GASSER: What astounded you most?

JOHNSTON: I mean, I don't know just everything. I mean, the people, I mean, I particularly liked Bill Neely. I mean, I really admired Bill Neely. I don't admire him now quite as much as I did then. But I can also think back and... See, one of the problems I had with this Mountain Drive novel, if it's going to really be a novel, I got to carry Bill Neely up until the time he dies. And I haven't done that. I quit about the point where he, you know, started having problems. And so what it is, is it presents Bill Neely as a 01:47:00complicated person with good and bad about him. But none of the real bad. Hints of it, maybe. But not the real bad.

GASSER: I get the sense some...

JOHNSTON: And I don't know whether I mean, well, I do know, I ought to go on and finish it. I shouldn't stop where I did. If it's going to be a real novel I should go on. And it's about Bill Neely.

GASSER: I guess my sense of in hearing you talk is it is almost a tragic, maybe I'm reading my own feelings into it, but was sort of a tragic hero. You know, I mean, that is his fate is sealed somehow, in his very character.

JOHNSTON: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. That's true. It's very true.

GASSER: And it must be difficult that ending, endings can be difficult.

JOHNSTON: Yeah, well, you know, I should, I should get it together and finish it

GASSER: Oh here, I'm reminding you of these things to be done.

JOHNSTON: Well, I started rewriting it from the beginning. Oh, a couple of months ago and I rewrote the first chapter. And it wasn't, it wasn't long novel. It was only about fifty thousand words. It wasn't very long though. But it ought to be. And I really, I really, and most of it's true. Most of it's absolutely true. Most of it's all based on things that really happened, which of course, any good story is. But I really ought to go on and finish it.

GASSER: Does it, it doesn't have, does it have a name yet?

JOHNSTON: Well, it's just called Mountain Drive.

GASSER: So far.

JOHNSTON: Mountain Drive: A Novel of Sentiment.

GASSER: Could you describe a little bit, some of the other characters? I don't know very much about Bill Richardson. Do you?

JOHNSTON: Naw, I don't know much about Bill Richardson, either. He was pretty much out of the, out of the mainstream. He'd appear at the Bobby Burns party and do a Sword Dance every year, and that's the only time I saw him. I knew him enough to speak to him and say hello. But I didn't know him well, but he was one of the people that was first up there. One of the very early ones. Mervyn Lane's another one, I know him a little better. Marty Birdsell I knew pretty well.

GASSER: Yeah, describe Merv Lane for me a little bit.

JOHNSTON: Well, Merv Lane[10] is a good writer, a very good writer. Teaches at the City College. I don't know him well, I don't know him well. By the time I got up there, he was again sort of out of the 01:50:00mainstream, although not as much as Bill Richardson. Mervin Lane would show up often at Mountain Drive parties, whereas Bill Richardson seldom would.

GASSER: What did you think that all...

JOHNSTON: Certain people had there, certain specialized niche. Like Jack Boegle was the owner and operator of Sunset Club, it always took place in this house and I guess it still does. I think he's dead. I think I heard the Jack Boegle died. I don't know, somebody told me this. And, and quite a while ago, and I don't know whether he is or not. He wasn't well, he had Parkinson's disease quite badly. The last time I was, I went. I've been to Sunset Club once since I got back from the East. And I found it so depressing I didn't want to go back.

GASSER: What was depressing?

JOHNSTON: I don't know, decrepit old man sitting around complaining.

GASSER: I don't imagine it still occurs since he's went off to live 01:51:00with Su Chan.

JOHNSTON: Did Jack go off to live with Su Chan?

GASSER: Yes. Several years ago, three, two, three years ago.

JOHNSTON: I didn't know.

GASSER: I can't remember some place, in, I don't know if the Central Valley or the...

JOHNSTON: I didn't know he'd left. Somebody told me he died and this was a while back and I never, I never followed up on it. I thought it was probably true, you know, but it happened so long before I was told, you know, there wasn't anything to do about it.

GASSER: A year ago, or a year or two years ago, he was not dead. As of a year ago he was not dead because I had him, I sent him a letter and got a response. I had failed to have him do a release form and he sent me back the release form.

JOHNSTON: Well, he sold his house or gave his house to a couple of guys, and one of the conditions was that Sunset Club was supposed to go on.

GASSER: Oh, really?

JOHNSTON: Now whether or not it is going on, I, Frank Robinson, and I 01:52:00should see Frank Robinson. He was a friend, a good friend.

GASSER: You know, Cuthbert Chisholm.

JOHNSTON: Sure. Is he still around?

GASSER: He was as of the time I wanted to interview him, but he I don't know if he's going...

JOHNSTON: Now he's one that never lived there, but who was a Mountain Driver. Peter King was a Mountain Driver who never lived there. He lived briefly, I think, in the area. I think he rented John Stack's place when John Stack had a house in the middle of the Westmont campus. But Peter King is the one that started the Twelfth Night.

GASSER: What's his wife's name again?

JOHNSTON: Fox

GASSER: Foxy.

JOHNSTON: How many people have you interviewed?

GASSER: Uh, gee, I'll give you a list later.

JOHNSTON: Well, I don't need a list. Just a number.

GASSER: Probably about 20. Maybe more than that now running on to 30, perhaps.

JOHNSTON: Oh, that's great, so, yeah. Did you ever interview Bill Neely or did the project start?

GASSER: It started after his death. You know, I must say that that...

JOHNSTON: Do you know Alexandra Cole?

GASSER: Alexandra Cole...

JOHNSTON: Has a house over on Banana Road?

GASSER: Um, the name Alexandra comes familiar. I didn't associate it with Cole.

JOHNSTON: Alex, Alex Cole, Bill Neely's girlfriend. Woman friend for many years.

GASSER: Oh yes, that's why. Alex Cole. That's right.

JOHNSTON: She has his diaries.

GASSER: Does she?

JOHNSTON: So you might look into that. I've been thinking about looking into it, but I haven't thought of, figured out how to approach her, exactly.

GASSER: You know, are you sure that she? I talked to Chris. I think Chris may have them back again, Chris Neely.

JOHNSTON: Chris Neely? Because I was up there in eighty-seven. The last time I've been up there at Neely's place. And I was talking to Jeff, and Jeff told me that she had the diaries.

GASSER: I've talked to Chris. I can't remember. Maybe he was speaking 01:54:00of something else, but I think that he may have the diaries back. I can check, I think he references it on the tape that I just did, so I can I can check. I did get to read some of his diaries during his World War II, some of the beginning kind of things. He was a good writer.

JOHNSTON: Oh yeah.

GASSER: And his imagination was wonderful. I remember his...

JOHNSTON: Vast talent.

GASSER: His Piute grandmother and all of his, uh, different, uh, sort of fairy stories for entertainment and penguins and his prodigious talent for foreign languages to be able to speak, and... So I think my connection with Bill Neely, although it was very, it was really very minimal. I was also attracted to the to the strong, I don't know, imaginative talent that he had. And also 01:55:00his very his ability to be outdoors. I really enjoyed the nature part of him and the, his being able to identify all the flora and fauna as when drove along and sing bawdy songs at the same time.

JOHNSTON: Yeah, he had this remarkable talent for, going on a camping trip with Bill Neely over in the back wilderness, backcountry here, was just a fabulous experience. Just wonderful. I did it a few times. Not very many, you know, four or five times.

GASSER: I did not know him well, but I did appreciate that. And I think because of because of his life is also the interest of this project, as I see it, too, and also always a little bit astounded that he's mentioned as seldom as he is, although by some people, yes, and by other people not.

JOHNSTON: Well, I think it's still that traditional rivalry because people talk to Frank Robinson about Mountain Drive, and I think there's a little 01:56:00of that old rivalry there. And he doesn't mention Bill Neely.

GASSER: It's a shame he can't be, can't be present to get in and get interviewed here.

JOHNSTON: Yeah, because he'd certainly have a lot to say.

GASSER: He was never at a loss for words.

JOHNSTON: Never. Never.

GASSER: Could you talk a little bit about your time as editor of the Grapevine?[11]

JOHNSTON: Well, I was sort of editor by default. Nobody was doing it, and I really, there were a bunch of people around, Michael Fagan, this was, well, I did it off and on for a number of years. Linda Bachy, to whom I was married and bought the house at 215. She wanted to do it. And so I, she and I did it for a while, and then we quit doing it, and I re-did it again when I was living up at Joel's house. And, but there were there were a group of people around. I 01:57:00 forget exactly who, but Michael Fagan and a bunch of people that really wanted to put it out. And so we sort of got together every week and put it out for a while. We did it weekly for a while. You have all those, don't you?

GASSER: I have smatterings of them, and I'm because I don't know... I've seen several different copies. I have Gill Johnson's still, and I had Marty Birdsell,[12] who had a fairly completed set of them, but I don't know that I've ever seen all of them.

JOHNSTON: I don't have them all, you know, I have most of the ones that we did.

GASSER: Yours may be missing, a lot of yours. Maybe I can take those and have those photocopied at some time.

JOHNSTON: Yeah, I don't think I can dig them out right at the moment.

GASSER: No, not at the moment.

JOHNSTON: All that stuff is in those boxes, but I'm not sure where.

GASSER: Not at the moment. But if you have them that as we as I get closer to looking again to make sure the archives are full and complete or as 01:58:00complete as can be.

JOHNSTON: Well, there's a ranger, Gill Johnston wrote me a story about one of the, wrote me a letter, and mentioned that there's a ranger that Bill used to work with up in Yosemite that's doing a book about him.

GASSER: Oh, really?

JOHNSTON: But this, of course, will be a book about him as a ranger, I guess. Because, most of it, there were some visits by his ranger friends to Mountain Drive, but very few.

GASSER: You remember any of those?

JOHNSTON: The visits? Well, there was a fellow named Sharpsmith that used to come down. I don't know that he's the one that's writing the book or not. He used to come down once or twice a year just for a day or so, to visit. But most of these people, I mean, it's astonishing to me that somebody who knew him principally as a ranger, would write a book about him. It shows the vastness of the man's talent. I mean that he could impress somebody in a field 01:59:00where we hardly know him, you know? I mean, he impressed this other whole group of people enough so that one of them thinks, you know, it's worth writing a book about him. I think that's a very impressive thing.

GASSER: Well, he is mentioned in the back of one of the, I saw by happenstance in a book that I picked up in Yosemite on a guidebook of the different trails and hikes. He's referenced as some of his work on the Indian, I don't know, edible Indian plants or some the edible or diet, Indian diet, research or plant research. What kind of plants the Indians used. I haven't looked at this book for a long time, but I was, his unpublished work. So obviously this person knew of some work that Bill Neely did that I didn't even know he'd done in 02:00:00that area. As far as, I guess, plant uses, Indian plant uses or something, I think was the reference is what I'm getting at. But, so he is referenced. I wonder where all those papers have disappeared to and...

JOHNSTON: I don't know. If they were published they're in the library somewhere.

GASSER: No, they were unpublished.

JOHNSTON: Well, maybe they are with his diaries. But I don't know. Maybe Alex Cole or Chris or Jeff.

GASSER: What would you like to be remembered for?

JOHNSTON: Vis a vis, Mountain Drive?

GASSER: Mountain Drive? Yeah.

JOHNSTON: I don't know, I guess being there. I came in at about the peak of it. I mean, I wish I'd been there earlier. But I missed a lot of good 02:01:00stuff. But I also was present for a lot of good stuff. Well, I don't know, maybe if I write a good novel about it, I'd like to be remembered for that, but I don't know that I'll ever write a good novel about it. It's a very hard thing to do. It's hard to pin down Bill Neely, because he was such a talent. And he was so evil, in a lot of ways. I don't know. I can't tell you what I'd like to be remembered for. I guess just being there. Somebody asked me when I had a heart attack a year and a half ago, I was in the hospital for a week and there was this very interesting nurse and she asked me what was the most interesting thing that ever happened to me in my life. And I, without hesitation, 02:02:00I said, living on Mountain Drive for 20 years. Which she didn't know anything about. She didn't know what I was talking about.

GASSER: A rare exception here in Santa Barbara, I find most people know Mountain Drive in, some in some context. That's something to hang on to, you feel very. They usually feel very strongly about it either, uh, they always have some seem to know, know something about it or an amazing number of people. I'm sure that that's changed, too. Santa Barbara's gotten quite large. But is there anything I've forgotten to ask you that you would like to add?

JOHNSTON: Well, probably, but I can't think of it now. I'm kind of talked out at the moment, I think.

GASSER: I think that, uh, I really want to thank you and...

JOHNSTON: Well, I'm really glad to do it. I have very fond memories of Mountain Drive.

GASSER: And if I get through and listen to this, there might be some 02:03:00follow-up questions that I could go, "Oh darn, why didn't I ask him that?"

JOHNSTON: Well, come back.

GASSER: Okay, great. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much, Dick.