Gill Johnston Interview

--(Interview begins)--

GASSER: This tape records an interview with Gill Johnston at his home, 269 East Mountain Drive on July 20th, 1986. The interviewer is Teddy Gasser and it is done on behalf of the Santa Barbara Regional Oral History Clearinghouse. The interview records Gill's recollections about the Mountain Drive Community that existed here in the early 1950s and is still on-going although the scope of this interview ends at about 1969.

GASSER: So Gill you said you were born in Texas would you mind telling me a little bit about your childhood and your early years in Texas?

JOHNSTON: Well, of course I grew up during the Depression era. So there are really two parts to my early childhood before and after the market crashed. The earliest memories were the happiest ones. That seems the one we used to look 00:01:00back to over years that was when my father was working as an actor in stock companies, and he was a radio announcer and... Everything seemed to be pretty up and then it happened and things just seemed much grimmer after that. I remember, I was thinking about it the other day, they were trying to think of ways to even make a small living. My mother hit upon the idea of making neckties by hand and I remember going out with them in the little car my dad had. They would drive out somewhere and go up and down the street door to door knocking on the door 00:02:00selling neckties. Well...

GASSER: This was after the Depression?

JOHNSTON: During the Depression. The happiest news probably was 1935 or 1936, somewhere along in there, when Roosevelt started the Federal Theatre and Dad got on in the Texas Project. Things looked up from that point until 1937 when the project was closed for one reason or another, politics, I think. And Dad and another fellow came out here to in an old car crossing the desert sleeping out on the ground at night and uh I don't know what happened to the other fellow but Dad was going to crash into show business here in the movies. And that was sort 00:03:00of the... that was what was kind of in the background for the rest of his life. He got little bit parts here and there but mostly it was working on jobs that were make-do at keeping the family together.

GASSER: Did the rest of the family come out from Texas?

JOHNSTON: Yeah, my sister and my mother and I were camped, as was often the case at her mother's family place in Louisiana while dad was gone and he got a job hosing off with a steam hose, the doughnut machine at Van de Kamps at midnight, and he saved up and he lived with his sister, and he saved up money he sent for us finally. We had enough money to rent a place, put on a month's rent and to 00:04:00send momma the fare. So momma made up a big sack of shopping bags, actually of sandwiches which rapidly got very stale and we ate sandwiches all the way from Texas to California say that we each got a nickel, I think once or twice a day for either a milk or, in my case, of chocolate milk. Since I've never been able to drink milk.

GASSER: How many brothers and sisters did you have?

JOHNSTON: Well, I have one sister. Whom I'm not at all like, or who is not at all like me. She was a drum major and I was a grumpy English major. That sort of thing.

GASSER: So. Go ahead...

JOHNSTON: I was just automatically going to close the silence. I did a radio show once years ago and the... I had that sort of built in by the, built in me, You, you don't have those ungodly lapses, you ad lib no matter what.

GASSER: This is a KRCW?

JOHNSTON: Yes, yes, that was. The Dick Johnston's radio station in. Gosh, I don't know how long that. Early sixties until whenever it was sold. Probably the late 60s, early 70s.

GASSER: Back here, back to your earlier life, you were in the army or the Marines?

JOHNSTON: Marine Corps.

GASSER: You were the Marine Corps.

JOHNSTON: Yeah.

GASSER: Was that during the Korean...

JOHNSTON: Oh no, no. Look, World War Two. Hmm. I was afraid the war was going to end before I could get into it. Nineteen forty-three I graduated, I got a chance to graduate mid-year from high school. I did so and I went right down to the draft board and volunteered for induction. I'm not sure why I later regretted it very, very heartily because I've been very pleasant to have a few more few months of more being a civilian. This war did not end before I got in. Oh well, I got into the Marine Corps. Oh, so because having volunteered for induction, that was the only way, you couldn't just volunteer, you had to volunteer for induction. I had to go through the that process. There were members of all the 00:07:00armed branches of the armed forces working there at the induction center, which was the old PE Building in Los Angeles, that was the street car company. A long time ago. And, the fellow who asked at the end of the line, when you go through it, "Well son, what, which branch of the armed forces would you like to be in?" It was a grizzled old Marine sergeant and, I felt that I but I would annoy him, he might destroy me if I said anything other than the Marines, so I did. But that's how I got into the Marine Corps. He probably chewed me out because he said I was 10 pounds overweight. I think I've always been 10 pounds overweight. And I said, 00:08:00he asked me if I thought I could take it. I said, "Sir, I want to kill Japs." Boy, I had, I was programmed for all the right answers.

GASSER: And did you?

JOHNSTON: Not that I know of?

GASSER: What was your experience during the war?

JOHNSTON: I was a radio operator, which is as close to being a noncombatant as you can be, except maybe being a medical corpsman. So I got shot at, but I didn't shoot. We got put on the line several times. On Peleliu I was sent up to the lines when the first, the regiments of the 1st Marine Division got pretty well shot up and they needed a chance to regroup and get, absorb replacements before they went back on the lines again. They were throwing everyone, cooks and 00:09:00bakers and outfits like mine, which was First Armored and Third Armored Amphibian battalion. I had no combat experience, other than boot camp, which really isn't. And, I remember being up there at night and things were crawling across your face, and they was a tough young Italian from Connecticut, I think he played baseball and I couldn't throw anything straight. So we were supposed to throw hand grenades anytime we heard something suspicious, like some 10-foot tall Jap and the crawling towards us. So he would throw them, I didn't dare I was afraid they would come rolling back on me. Well, that and Okinawa when I went into the First Marine Division as a radio operator, were they, my combat 00:10:00experience. I had much more enjoyable experience going overseas in the first six months. Someone started a theatrical unit just for fun on board ship. And I would do a sort of song and dance and skits, nothing very profound, but the need for entertainment was so severe, I guess it's a good word, but they kept us together, and we went, let's see, the replacement battalion landed on New Caledonia, Nouméa. And we gave shows around there that they put us aboard an LST and we went up to Guadalcanal and were based there and gave shows up as far as Bella la Bella and Kaala-Gomen, which is about as far as we could go. We went 00:11:00as far as where there were still Japanese stragglers in the hills, and we got shot at a few times. Or maybe the fellows we were entertaining fired shots over our head to give us a thrill, I was never really sure which. Well, that was the Marine Corps.

GASSER: Have you met any of the people that you would know later in Santa Barbara during the time when you were in the Marine Corps?

JOHNSTON: No, I once saw the master sergeant of the 3rd Amphibious Battalion in a prisoner's detail outside the courthouse. I'd seen him on the street a few days before and he said, "hi." And I sort of recognized him. And it only sank in when I saw the second time and realized that my God, here was a, he was probably had been 00:12:00boozed up. But the only other one person I've seen since it's been on the screen and that was the guy named Robert Webber, who was active in a lot of the war movies. He was one of the fellows in the show that I was in.

GASSER: So how did you first come to Santa Barbara?

JOHNSTON: A girl that I had known in high school, we worked in Our Town I think, told me. She was going to the old campus here studying to be a teacher when I came back on leave, I guess that was it. At any rate she told me what a neat town Santa Barbara was and I happened to read, I think it was in the Readers 00:13:00Digest, a story about Pearl Chase and Thomas Storke cleaning up the town. And at the end of I went to Glendale Junior College after the war and I guess I put in pretty close to two years there. Anyway and uh I had to the junior year and at that point it seemed like a good idea to get away from home, but not too far away, being able to visit. And Santa Barbara seemed like and ideal place. So a whole bunch of us decided to do the same thing and we came up here cold not knowing what kind of a college it was. And it turned out to a really neat thing for me, I...

GASSER: What did you study at Glendale?

JOHNSTON: English lit. Simply because I enjoyed reading in English. And no other 00:14:00reason, very unworldly.

GASSER: So you came to Santa Barbara and started at the University here?

JOHNSTON: One of the first fellows that I saw... a number of us got living accommodations at the old Hoff Heights Army Hospital which had been taken over by the City or County. There was a veteran's village there and the barracks and a place where for so much a month, not very much, you could get two meals a day and a cot in a barracks and it was a good deal. One of the first people I saw there was when I walked into the place with my suit, smoked glasses and a Glendale cool--smoked glasses that was before Polaroids I think--was Frank 00:15:00Robinson. He had rather long hair and it looked like he was wearing a leather jacket. My experience with long hair was, only motorcyclists wore their hair long and had big wide belts and leather jackets and they were illiterate toughs. So I was not very favorably impressed by old Frank. Later on I discovered, well, we became best of friends. During the Korean thing when that came on, he had a 22-foot sloop that he had mahoganied, not body, whatever the word for it is, hull, and vee-bottom. Really a neat boat and we used to sail on that. Our idea was, by God, if things really got rough we weren't going into the service again 00:16:00we were going to Mongo Riva or someplace like that and live it up with the native wenches and just pluck bananas off trees and live the intellectual hoo-ha life. It didn't come out quite that way, but Mountain Drive was his approximation. Sometime had passed and we'd both at separate times started Master's degrees at UCLA and I didn't like it there at all. There were too many people and there was a great deal of pressure and I didn't give a damn. It had been a long haul, and I guess it was pretty much that way for him. He was Santa Barbara College's first philosophy major when they opened up the department and then went on to UCLA to major in it. He ultimately ended up here, too. He came 00:17:00back and stayed. I guess he was working up at the harbor got a job at the harbor as a, at the Harbor Master's offices as a person who works in the odd hours. And heard through one of Bobby Hyde's sons, whom we'd know in a few classes in college, we were invited to come up for a party of something of that sort, and discovered that land was available up here at the rather stiff price of $2,000 an acre, but it was a laissez faire community and you could build what you wanted. As Frank wrote me well, "You can't on Mongo Riva, there aren't free public libraries and you're only 10 or 15 minutes away from downtown and you've got all the other advantages. He tried to get me to come up. I couldn't at the time. My first wife said, "Well, you're not going to get me in a shack up in the mountains."

GASSER: Who? What was your wife's first name?

JOHNSTON: Marty. I met her through Frank's girlfriend when we were in college. His, actually first wife, Peggy. Peggy and Marty both worked at See's. Marty was known by one of the English majors as the second bon-bon from the left. She was really neat.

GASSER: And you were married?

JOHNSTON: Yeah, we eloped to Ventura because her mother, old hatchet face, was, well maybe she was wise but she would not admit that we were engaged or anything for quite a while and we felt threatened and I think Marty felt doubly threatened because I was in theater arts at UCLA and there were lots of pretty girls there and so she wrote me as said I think we ought to get married. It 00:19:00seemed to me we ought to, too, because I really missed her. So I got off from a production, we were doing, "He Who Gets Slapped." I played the heavy, the villain. And a fellow who teaches at UCSB now in theatre arts, Stanley -- I can't think of his last name -- played the part of the lead of the clown. I've not seen since he came up here.

TG; What year were you married?

JOHNSTON: I guess it was '50. My God, we were separated in '53 with two children.

GASSER: So how did you first then come to... you had met... the son of...

JOHNSTON: Oh, oh, I was vitally interested in building an adobe house. When I 00:20:00was in L.A. I thought about it. If only we could just find a piece of land off somewhere. My idea being that if you built a place that was really done properly and honestly it would be archaic, and when you got in there it would be the same. I didn't like the modern world very much. And sort of tended to live in the past, I suppose, and in my fantasies... So when I met Audrey, she and I came up here a few times to visit, and when I was teaching in '57 we came up and heard that there was place available would be available the following month, in 00:21:00July. I was thinking, oh Lord, I would love to rent that place; it was $50 a month. But of course, I was still going to a counselor over my first marriage and he persuaded me. Well, I persuaded myself really that that would be irresponsible, childish behavior since I'd finally gotten a teaching credential going to night school after the marriage with my first wife broke up and before. Actually, towards the end of the time I was still going to school when I met Audrey. Well at any rate, talking out loud to Audrey, well okay it would be 00:22:00pretty irresponsible. But she said, and it rather devastated me, too, "Well, I don't know, I'd like to live up in the mountains." And I said, "You would?" She said, "Sure." and I said, "Well, do you think we ought to do it?" She said, "Why not?" So I had just signed a contract for the third year of teaching and I had to go... we had a house and we unloaded the house for $800, paid off all our debts. I had to write a begging letter to get my contract revoked. And we loaded up everything and came up here. Lo and behold, the people who were moving out hadn't moved out yet. They hadn't been told that there was anyone coming. So they were just taking their time. So we got to know them. We helped them move out and then they helped us move in.

GASSER: Who was that?

JOHNSTON: Bob Guthrie, who has Bob's Diving Locker, now. They were good friends for a number of years. The last few years we haven't seen them, and then... it gets awkward going from "we" to "I." I've been alone two years now and...

GASSER: So you moved into your house...

JOHNSTON: Yeah, we were there for a year. I was under the illusion that I was a writer at the time, 'cause I'd written a bunch of -- oh -- short, short stories aimed at the men's market. Which tended to be pretty much tongue in cheek satires on it -- they weren't that good but it was such awful stuff that I 00:24:00couldn't help it.

GASSER: Were any of those published?

JOHNSTON: No. But I wrote a -- while I was involved with this one summer I had encountered a guy who I knew in high school while I was teaching at La Habra who chided me for not writing because I guess some people thought I had some promise. And he was doing sort of two things at once writing humorous little articles or stories and illustrating them himself, he worked at Disney's a lot so he was pretty good, he always had been a good cartoonist. And he got me to writing. He slanted me towards the men's magazines because he said that's where 00:25:00it's all happening now. That's where it's wide open because Playboy had just come on big and had pulled off, siphoned off all the, or so he said, established writers who had been writing for most of those periodicals. But my break, small as it was, came when he introduced me to the editor of a magazine called Teen. Teen was at that point switching its point of view from male to female and they needed a story about a girl. So I wrote about a girl I'd sort of known in one of my classes and fantasized about what she was like and so on. And it sold! So of course I sent a bunch of other stories to him; started writing them. That was 00:26:00just a day or so before we left for Santa Barbara when I sent it off. And the day that we moved in I sat at my typewriter and tried very hard to be stern with myself because I know very well what a goof-off I am. So I sat down and I did another story called the "Grease Monkey" and it sold. And everything else there was just this long period -- of course there was a long period before those were accepted. It was pretty exciting a 100 bucks a story. And then I got paranoid because I had lots of time to sit around and feel sorry for myself because the editor wasn't taking up everything I had. So I wrote him a nasty letter and he sent me back all my manuscripts saying, "Enclosed unacceptable" and that was the end of that. About that time Frank Robinson was aware that things were not going 00:27:00too well with us. We were living -- I was -- we were living on I think $20 a week we'd take out the bank and that supplied gas...

GASSER: So you were living on $20 a week?

JOHNSTON: Yeah.

GASSER: Were you still teaching?

JOHNSTON: Oh, no, no, no, this was up here. Presumably I was writing full time. Practically speaking, I'd go and sit at the typewriter and then after a decent or an indecent interval Audrey and her buddy would be in the other room talking I'd become interested in what they were saying; I might walk over to Bill Neely's and whom I thought terribly attractive. Bill was snapping me in to all the old Mountain Drive traditions, which I think he was inventing on the spot. And I became infatuated with the idea of -- I had a beard at the time which I'd grown that summer. I started the rage that's why Bill grew -- started his beard. 00:28:00At any rate he grew it after I did. I thought about berets and making wine and we had a pretty good time, but it sort of shot down my writing and ultimately Frank Robinson offered me some work on a rather menial, physical nature like sweeping out spec houses. He was into building. Since building a house up here he'd learned that he had to teach himself, because no one was going to tell him how to, so he started reading a lot. He's a pretty bright guy. Matter of fact, parenthetically, his experience was, Bobby Hyde kept telling him well when you're ready to pour you slab let me know and I'll tell you how to form it up. And so I guess he got all his plumbing in -- roughly read up on plumbing and got that in and then he went up to see Bobby Hyde how you form up the slab. And 00:29:00Bobby said well, you just take a couple of boards here and a couple of boards there and you pour in cement. Well, Frank knew well enough to know that was just a little bit too relaxed for him. So he started studying in earnest. He went from getting a contractor's license -- he did a little fibbing about that one about experience, but he backed it up with knowledge -- to getting a house designer's ticket until finally he's a full-fledged architect. He's a real self-made man. Terribly theatrical -- if you haven't seen him you've got something coming -- he's has all but an inverness cape. Frank Lloyd Wright and all that, but very bright to the point and very kind.

GASSER: So you started working for Frank?

JOHNSTON: Yeah, yeah, I swept out houses and did labor and learned how to use a shovel and even got to do a little hammering when things were -- when it was possible. I learned when you frame up two by fours there're normally set 16 inches on center; that was my great learning point that and learning how to drive a nail. Which is no mean feat especially if it's a Japanese nail they tend to bend rather easily. And we made adobe bricks and...

GASSER: Were these projects on Mountain Drive?

JOHNSTON: No. Well, actually most of them weren't. He did some rather large house in which he incorporated adobe bricks and so forth. There's one of them out on More Mesa where we got the wood for the first part of the house. John 00:31:00Lazell had the rights given him to pull down this old barn which T. M. Stroke's -- I think it was his maternal -- well I don't know one of his grandfather's Thomas More had erected in the 1800s on More Mesa which is why we call it More Mesa -- or More Mesa. It was old rough lumber, with furring on it and square nails. They put some pressure on John to finish the job he was just sort of 00:32:00piddling at it. So he was going to sell me some of the wood at a rather low figure. When they pressured him he said, "Oh, to hell with it you can have the wood." So Audrey and I had an old 1930s pick-up I'd bought from Stan Hill[1] for $12 or $14 which had a rack on it -- and we would -- and it also had a fuel pump problem and we were so poor we couldn't have the fuel pump fixed and if you had any less than 3 gallons in the gas tank it would not make it up the hill which was rather serious when you had a load of lumber on top. So sometimes we would have to back down very slowly and go around and try the run up Cold Springs. Well, we would go up there and strip out the lumber from the roof it had been collapsed the whole building had been collapsed so it was a matter of knocking off the shingles with a bar and then pulling nails 00:33:00out and you'd come first to the two by sixes, which is that material over there and then the four by sixes which is that material there although a lot of that stuff is known as car stakes along in there which you used to be able to buy of get for free. And that was how we got the lumber for the first part of the house. The building and the house itself was paid for largely by the death of a goat. Frank's oldest boy Robbie came down here one day -- I think there was going to be a party or something of that sort -- he always came around early and hung around -- and his dog Bowser followed him, Bowser was a big good humored but truculent dog. And Audrey had a goat that Ted Dethlefsen had given us that 00:34:00we'd finally after many tries gotten the buck to at the right moment and she was very, very, pregnant. Her tits were, her bag was swollen and we were saying, oh boy we're going to have milk finally. And she was tethered out there on the slopes on the dam and Robbie came through -- her name was Betsy but we used to call her Butsy for very good reason. She butted, and I guess she butted Bowser and Bowser took exception to it and attacked her. And there was another dog there too, so she got bites all over her essentially all over her chest and went into shock as goats and sheep and deer do. And she got screw worms in the bites 00:35:00and we had to take her the vet and they cleaned them out and she died. So, parsimonious old Frank finally owned up, "Well, I guess I owe you for that goat?" And I said, "Well yes, I guess you do." He said, "Well, I'll design your house for you." He'd been going to design it for a long time but I guess -- we were going to pay him, too, but there had never been any discussion of fees. But it boiled to one dead goat and I would do a little work for him. As a matter of fact I did a fair amount of work for him. The designing of the house; his interest in it originally had come by -- had happened when he came by when we were living up at the rental 209, and I guess it was before when we were 00:36:00thinking of moving here or getting a piece of land and Audrey and I were trying to figure out a floor plan for a house. There seemed to be more time then, no television then at least in our house. She was using graph paper and Frank came by and she was asking him about it. And he says, "Well, in the first place don't use graph paper because it restricts your imagination." So he took over. And that's essentially the goat thing.

GASSER: So how many people... did people come from all over the Drive to help you build your house? And when did you begin?

JOHNSTON: We moved down here a year to the day after we'd moved on to the Drive. July 1st 1958. And we still didn't have the plans -- well that was before the 00:37:00goat was killed -- we had no plans -- it was just that we -- probably she -- had decided we were going to move on to the land and I'd been persuaded okay reluctantly. And it was cheaper if we were going to buy the land to pay for the land and live on it rather than to live somewhere else and pay for it. So I bought a tarpaulin and salvaged some wood and Gene McGeorge gave or loaned us a wall tent which became the bedroom. and the tarpaulin which was 12' x 14' or 14' x 14' out there in back -- I have a few pictures of that -- was the sort of 00:38:00kitchen living room and there was a telephone in a box in the center of that and then there was a little tent that someone else that I think John Lazell gave us so that my daughter's baby bed was in. Everything was really neat until well for about 5 or 6 months until the rains came. Summer was marvelous. And then the bank came down from above during a January rain -- as a matter of fact it was on Twelfth Night. We came sloshing down, we had Laurie all wrapped up in plastic, foundation plastic and I was carrying her and we got to the tent and stepped inside and our feet ran into something and it was mud that had washed in about that thick all through the tent. So we went to live with John Lazell for a week. 00:39:00That persuaded me that thing to do was to get busy as quickly as possible on the house. I don't recall whether I'd started digging the foundation or not, because Frank did the foundation plans for us before he did the rest of the plans for the house. But they were plans for a two-story adobe, I think so the foundations were just immense.

GASSER: So from the mud slides you had lost pretty much everything and you began...?

JOHNSTON: I remember having to -- as soon as it dried out about a week we came back here -- having to dig everything out. And that meant that the foundations had to be dug out again. And nothing was ever quite as neat and true as it was before. We finally -- when the next rains were threatening -- I was persuaded to 00:40:00call in the Coleman Building and they sent down the trucks and we poured the footings and got them up fairly high so they wouldn't be destroyed again. Then you just score them the tops so that when you pour the next ones then he had steel in it then. Then the next ones they it sort of fits together all right, more or less.

GASSER: How long did the entire project take?

JOHNSTON: You mean the building of the house? Well it's still going on.

GASSER: Until you could move in.

JOHNSTON: Oh, It must have -- well let's see. When we got the slab poured 00:41:00John... We may have already poured the footing by the time that leak occurred. I'll be danged if I know, but I can't remember anymore. But I remember Lazell and I came over here and spent the night in the tent so that we could get up at the appropriate time after so many hours and finish -- polish the concrete slab. Well, it was some days after that that Audrey and I moved back into the tent and cleaned it up and... I guess, but it was -- the framing went pretty fast of the 00:42:00first part of the house and then the -- I guess a few months went by. But I remember the thing that finally got us out of the tent was -- I was working for a fencing company then -- I didn't know anything about building fences but I learned real hard -- I laid off because I'd heard there was a good storm coming in and we had put the roof up to -- just going over into the corridor there. That had been a long process. So I don't remember how many months went by. It 00:43:00all happened probably pretty fast because we were pretty well motivated but it seemed like a long time. But I remember getting the roll roofing and we had electricity down here -- had had for a while. And my daughter sat out on that bank up there -- I remember she was crying cause she was tired and hungry and it was dark and it was getting on towards midnight and we were still working on the roof -- rolling the paper out and cutting it and tarring it and nailing it down and, I remember being very annoyed with her wishing to god she'd shut up. We were stretched pretty thin. We finished. It was very, very late. And we moved -- 00:44:00we knew it was going to rain. It was imminently if it hadn't already started sprinkling -- and we moved the old queen size bed into to room which were opened just the roof on it and got the wood stove in there and dirty as pigs we all got into bed with my daughter in between us and we lay there. We were so tired we couldn't sleep and then we heard the rain coming. Oh that was lovely. It was the idea of being out on the -- I had sworn after two years in the Pacific during World War II that knowing mud pretty intimately that I would never, ever have anything to do with mud again. And there I was.

GASSER: Were there a lot of people that came down to help you build your house? 00:45:00Or did you help build any of the other houses?

JOHNSTON: Uh, the first part of the house I was sort of left alone. I had the feeling that it was sort of nineteenth century around here. Frank and a couple of fellows who worked for him came down one afternoon and surprised me and helped me work on the roof a little bit by putting on the first part here -- putting up rafters actually. It was very slow work for me because I had a handsaw and I did not know you could get handsaws sharpened in fact I thought it was just hard sawing. So that cutting the seats for the rafters and measuring them right was slow time-consuming and making sure that I had cut right because the wood tends to have a hump on it and it's not really true and you put the humped part on top and you have to figure it out and I was learning. And when 00:46:00I'm doing something like that I tend to work very slowly but I get very absorbed in it. Okay. We had a great deal of help with the second part of the house, the slab and the putting up of the rafters and indeed the roofing. By that time there was just a different feeling on the Drive altogether. It was phase two of phase three or phase four or something like that. And Audrey and I were pretty much established as new old timers. Yeah that was quite a time. There was a time here when I was doing the radio show and there was old sign out that I got from the Repertory Theatre when it closed down. It had been part of some set or 00:47:00another it was called the Buell Hotel which I had hanging out there. After Barbara Neely died, Bill's place, people didn't go around there because everyone felt sort of sad or maybe it was when she was ill, very ill -- she died of cancer in '63. And this became the center for a while until Audrey got really sick of people dropping around at all sorts of hours and sitting around until their glasses of wine were refurbished. She ordered me to take down the Buell sign and somehow the word got around. But, uh, that was an interesting thing about Mountain Drive. I used to call it the yogurt jar culture. The early years when we were here there weren't any wine glasses people were too sloppy and broke they and they were such large parties. And Adelle Davis was very popular 00:48:00and the Hydes had everyone around here interested in eating yogurt so. Yogurt then came in jars which made admirable wine glasses. I guess they were pint or half pint, and made -- must have been half pint -- made a fair glass of wine. That was the yogurt jar culture time.

GASSER: Well, they certainly came in handy then for the Wine Stomps and the wine festivities.

JOHNSTON: Oh yeah. Although often times there the jugs were simply past around. I guess, I don't remember a lot of things now. Now the Wine Stomps -- the grape stomps they weren't, we didn't stomp wine but somehow it comes out wine stomp -- grape stomp. And the picking of the grapes that was something I looked forward 00:49:00to all year round.

GASSER: Where did you go to pick them?

JOHNSTON: We went up to Mel Casteel's place for a long time. Bill Neely, I don't know how he met him but he did, and Mel had a number of acres up above Templeton. And very good and I think it was limestone soil as I recall it's very good for grapes. Fridays, after work we'd all drive up there and get to Mel's sometime in the night. You drive down the freeway for hours and hours and hours until you came to the Vineyard Street cutoff and you'd turn off the freeway and go over the bridge and then wind around there past the Mennonite church in the moonlight and there'd be deer out grazing among the fruit trees and ultimately 00:50:00you'd see a bonfire ahead and the was Mel's place. We'd all camp out kids would sleep in the car or maybe put them out in sleeping bags -- sleep in the vineyard. Guitars would be playing, people drinking and talking and sometimes Mel would have some poached deer there. In fact one night I remember he went out and actually shot a deer because he needed it then. It was illegal of course, but they did it. I could never eat the deer I have childish aversions and stick pretty much to beef which is not the healthiest meat I guess, but I would try eating other I'd chide myself for being childish but I'd be chewing on that 00:51:00sweet lean meat and I couldn't swallow it because I'd see the large eyes of a deer and I'd have to go around the side of the tree and toss the meat out to the dogs. So I always brought hamburger for myself.

GASSER: So after gathering the grapes you -- Did that usually take a weekend?

JOHNSTON: Well, we would pick on Saturday morning quite intensively and that was pretty -- well, that was fun but it was business like too. You did a lot of picking. Grenache was the one that Bill used to pick -- I believe that was it. Then we would everyone would have brought food, casseroles and so forth, and then we'd put 'em all together and have a great feast. Then afterwards in the 00:52:00latter part of the afternoon you'd drive home and the next morning the men would go unload the truck and clean out the vat. Well, I imagine that would have been done a day or two before because you had put a sprinkler hose in the vat and to seal it up because it would have been standing all year and would be dry and separated and the barrels would all be cleaned. There was time put in before that yeah, and... But the main job was to...

GASSER: ...have fun...

JOHNSTON: ...well, let's see now there are several things you had to do. Bill rigged up a screen for stemming the grapes, because we found out that it took too long to get a palatable wine if you left them on the stems. So we would rub 00:53:00them through into the vat. And then it was a matter of choosing the Wine Queen which was always terribly political -- mainly who hasn't been this year and who do we think deserves. It was kinda fun. In fact it was a helluva lota fun. Then there was the big dinner up at Bill's out on the porch. And then the procession, Frank Robinson wearing his wild cat skin over his shoulders. And he had a shirt that he always wore too it said the Montecito Lions Club on it. The sleeves were cut out -- he'd bought it at a rummage sale somewhere -- that was his shirt. People playing on recorders and dishpans being banged and so forth and dogs 00:54:00barking, and flags flying, a great procession and get down there. I guess that's where the queen was announced and the lass got to disrobe and got the -- we had crown of, we had many garlands --let me see is that what you call it -- of grape leaves which had been fashioned earlier. And this -- and the queen's, of course, was always gilded, sprayed with gilded paint as was the statue of Bacchus or whomever -- there was an old statue that Bobby Hyde had. Audrey did a statue that shows the later pictures of the Grape Stomps for the movie Seconds because the old one had been pretty well shot by then. She had a number of Mountain 00:55:00Drive men pose her. I remember Robert Venable, who was disappeared at sea and his boat was one he chose for his legs and it sort of had his face, too. There was something archaic about him. I don't know whether I have that picture or not. But it shows up in Seconds alongside Rock Hudson and Salome Jens.

GASSER: So have you seen the movie Seconds?

JOHNSTON: Yeah, yeah, we all went. As a matter of fact Frank Robinson and Bill Neely went to the opening at -- I think it was at the State Theatre -- they actually stood outside and signed autographs. And they were in a ten-minute segment. They showed up I don't think did in the final version except maybe just a blurred image. I was having second thoughts about taking off my clothes, and being photographed.

GASSER: Did they -- what was the occurrence of them coming? Did they come in stay a week? Or was it a very short period of time?

JOHNSTON: Well, they were only here it must have been overnight, I think. Then they came back -- John Frankenheimer was the director -- and he came back -- gee, that was in July and they had grapes that weren't even wine grapes. Actually some of our group went to the Central Valley and brought back a truck load of table grapes. So it was kinda phony. John Frankenheimer and his wife and a small crew came down to pick up a few shots during our regular Grape Stomp in which would probably have been in late September - early October. That was 00:57:00rather an agreeable time.

GASSER: There were a lot of other famous holidays on the Drive as well -- Twelfth Night.

JOHNSTON: Yeah, Twelfth Night, yeah I was the first Bean King.

GASSER: Congratulations.

JOHNSTON: I guess. It's degenerated I'm sure. But that was one hell of a time. We were still living in the rental and Foxy and Peter King -- Peter was an Englishman actually he was an Australian I think -- but he sounded terribly English -- who taught American History at the University here for a while. Foxy is quite a scholar and she did a lot of research on that and that was their party when they were living over -- on a place that's no longer there -- John 00:58:00Stack's old barn over in what's now Westmont -- among the oaks. It was a lovely place. It was an outdoor party and it was very mild. And the Bean King was essentially a the divine or the regal fool the sacrificial think it is -- it sounded an awful lot like to me oh I'm sure they did a lot of their research from the Golden Bough. But Twelfth Night -- the King was chosen by the person who got the bean in the cake which was passed out to all the men.

GASSER: Was that as political as choosing the Wine Queen?

JOHNSTON: Yes, and Foxy liked me and saw that I got the... I was delighted of 00:59:00course. I had always felt that I had certain regal possibilities. I had this colander for a crown with Christmas ornaments dangling from it and we proceeded to set all sorts of firsts that have been followed for example the naming of the court and Frank Robinson was wearing a long burgundy cloak which seemed to me somehow appropriate so I dubbed him forthwith the Duke of Burgundy -- it could have been Gurguldy. I remember the Bishop of Kuala Lumpur was there that night. Lots of things used to happen around Santa Barbara that didn't really require Beverley Jackson to report. I'm sorry I even said that. There were some 01:00:00interesting people there that night I remember -- and then I don't remember. I also set -- I may have laid the grounds for my own divorce here -- there was a surly Irishman there who was being deported who had a lovely English lass with him. After a few glasses of wine I decided, by God I was going pick her for my queen. So ever since there you never pick your own wife. It would have been highly politic had I'd done so, because I don't the lady that lady of mine was very happy about it.

GASSER: What were some of the other people of the court?

JOHNSTON: You know, I don't remember. Over the years they've added more, the Lord of Misrule, and this and that. I remember one thing there was the wassail 01:01:00bowl which I became addicted and each time I would drink there would be the cry, "The King drinks." At one point Frank Robinson yelled out, "God save the Queen!"

GASSER: And there were some other wonderful things -- Bastille Day.

JOHNSTON: Yeah, that was pretty much the Venable's party. Oh, no, no. It had been done before, that's right because Bobby Hyde said something about that, I think, in Six More at Sixty. The Venable's weren't on the Drive until later, they sort of adopted that as their party. It got to the point where their -- it 01:02:00was a costume affair finally -- you came either as a peasant, a sans Coulotte, or an aristocrat. As usual there was a lots of eating and drinking and champagne and so forth. And then there was Bobby Burns birthday which was the resident Scotsman's party. The 25th of January, I think, which is also Frank Robinson's birthday. That got pretty damn big for a while. We had the 7-Up Pipe Band there, when there was a 7-Up Bagpipe Band. And George Greyson, the resident Scotsman, who grew up in London -- sounds more like a Limey than a Scots. Was a chef by 01:03:00profession and he made the haggis and there was the address and everyone came as a Mc-what's-his-name. There was another good party and then -- Most of those Mountain Drive parties then couples went but they sort of left at the door. I've thought about this. You sort of pretended that you were single again and that it was sort of Saturday night forever at the parties. It was kinda good on the libido but not too easy on the marriages. There was a fair amount of hanky-panky I think. I kind of aspired to it myself but I was never any good at it. And I 01:04:00didn't really try very hard. And of course I believe that my wife never did and I'm sure she never did. We tended to come home with one another after flirting with other people at the parties. I think that's probably pretty usual really.

GASSER: Were there a lot of hard feelings toward some of the activities on the Drive? Many people did in-marry.

JOHNSTON: Yeah, there were some hard feelings. Mostly it never got beyond the flirting and kind of innocent sweetheart stage like the knight with his, the convention so to speak, you know, of the...

GASSER: ...chivalrous.

JOHNSTON: ...chivalrous, yeah and there wasn't really any problem there. I've 01:05:00been in love with Sandy Hill[2] for years and years and years and I enjoy her as a person and I've never stopped -- stepped over that boundary. And it's very enjoyable. She and Audrey were pretty good friends.

GASSER: There's also the Sunset Club?

JOHNSTON: Yep, yeah.

GASSER: Is that still in existence?

JOHNSTON: Yeah, quite so. That's met either on Saturday or Sunday nights for years and years and years. It started out Jack Boegle[3] lived just up above Frank Robinson. And Frank and a few other fellows used to go up to Jack's on Saturday or Sunday when the children were being fed, just to get the hell away from everyone and have their own male thing -- and occasionally 01:06:00the women would come, too. And it's lasted. Sometimes there have been long stretches when ole Frank's been the only one up there with Jack. I go intermittently since -- particularly since I stopped drinking it's not. Although I find it's ok now I can go and I don't drink anything I don't even have to take soda pop with me I can just sit there and we talk and it's fine. I sort of wonder why they're compulsively filling their glasses up, but I would be doing the same thing.

GASSER: Were you ever involved in the boat races or the regatta that took place?

JOHNSTON: Oh, the Regretta it was.

GASSER: The Regretta?

JOHNSTON: Yes, yes. I had a boat which I got second hand from someone which did 01:07:00not sail at all well. It was a Seashell which I called the Sea Slug for very good reasons. Sandy Hill and I raced it one year, and we didn't do very well at all. Either Frank Robinson or John David would always win. Frank enjoys winning. He's good. I think John wasn't bad either, he always had a boat. There's an 8mm of one of the Regretta's in '61 or '62 that was taken -- I was trying to think of the name of the fellow that did it. He was head of the Theater Arts department subsequently at UCLA and then went on to -- back to London -- he's a 01:08:00Scotsman. He's one of Peter King's friends who taught at the old campus here at the University -- for a while. Colin Young[4] took it. It's kind of good. Costumes of course we always had costumes for everything. And then there were pictures of Bill and Barbara and the kids and all the rest of us there.

GASSER: Do you remember when those began? The first ones began?

JOHNSTON: It seems safe to assume that they had been going on several years before that one and that was done before Barbara died and Barbara died in '63 so 01:09:00that was '62 or '61 so I would gather 1960 right about in there.

GASSER: What was your very favorite festival of all of the wonderful things that happened on Mountain Drive?

JOHNSTON: Probably the making of the wine. But we had our own party here -- everyone had his own party and ours was Cinco de Mayo. We had some doosers here. I remember the last one I... One of the fellows was a local -- he wasn't exactly a pusher but he'd also done that. Mike was here and he said, "Here take these it'll make you feel good." I don't know what it was hog tranquilizer or 01:10:00something but it smoothed me out pretty well. No it wasn't hog tranquilizer, it was something like -- Well I was going on, "Well, I hope you're having a lovely party and I'm just fine," and I was just focusing in on whatever was happening and people were all around here eating and -- Mike and someone else had brought some Tequila and there was Mike Shenanigan there -- Flannigan, we called him Shenanigan because he was always in trouble. He and... a Hispanic fellow whose name is the same as one of the roads around here -- he comes from an old family -- got into a hassle over by the garbage cans. Mike was on top of this other fellow and really slamming him and Peter Viegas, who used to be a butcher, and 01:11:00very gentlemanly and very big he came over and said, "Okay, you guys knock it off." And Flannigan didn't so he picked him up and he just beat the shit out of him. I missed all that I was just going on, "Well, I hope everyone is having a wonderful party." I think that was probably the last time I've ever taken anything. A long time ago. We went through that phase too -- the drug scene. Although it wasn't 'drug' it was a wonderful, a wonder thing. Of, gee, is it possible that time stretches out, that it has a different speed to it and so forth. I remember one fellow who was determined that he was going to "turn" Sunset Club on. This was when pot was really awful. He brought some around and 01:12:00we were all interested trying out but a little apprehensive. I think he'd fried the stuff trying to tenderize it. It was stems and where you'd suck and suck and suck on the pipe or the cigarette and your lungs would be burning and nothing would happen. Another fellow and I were walking home and I said, "God, it's taking us a hull-uv-a long time to get home." And somebody else reported, "I heard the clock striking after I got in bed and lord it went on and on." ...and then... We had -- I don't know did I tell you we had -- rather Audrey had, she, ol’ Thoroughly Modern Millie -- she got interested in Timothy Leary and Alberton. When Leary came through here she was handling helping with the publicity. And Leary 01:13:00came in his lawyer's Silver Cloud down there and parked over there where I've got all the stuff now -- there was just a dirt road that came down. We had people all through this house and everyone came straight because no one wanted to embarrass him in case there were people around. And it was just a lovely evening except that Frank Robinson[5] who was pretty much in his cuffs then and also his family had broken up and he was with Susan[6] whom he later married -- a young girl from Westmont as a matter of fact, but pretty aggressive. She'd heard about it and brought Frank over here. He never curses unless he's drinking and then he gets pretty foul-mouthed. Leary was -- there was a wood stove right over on that side over there, an old cooking stove that I'd bought from John Stack -- and Leary 01:14:00was wearing his very sharp looking Indian - oh looked like pajama pants and you know a -- he was talking away. We had a large table in there that night -- Weininger, the psychiatrist[7], was sitting there and a bunch of people around and we were just all talking and Frank was over there and he was saying, "Fuck you -- so and so." And Weininger leaned over and said, "Son, I'd be glad to give you free counselling if you'd like." That was the -- it was interesting because drugs were the first wedge in Mountain Drive, I think. Where people either would or wouldn't take it. I know I got bullied into, oh, reluctantly agreed to take LSD because my wife had. And I knew that I would have felt chicken if I hadn't, but I wasn't really interested in it. I know we 01:15:00used call her the "little shepherd of LSD" because she pretty sure that's what was going to save us all, to expand our consciousness. Then after that, then it was marvelous. I don't know that anything will ever be quite as, oh, like fairy land -- like yes, it's really true -- as that first time was. I did it any number of times afterwards until I finally became aware that I'd started structuring a weekend every four weeks or so and not much was happening.

GASSER: When you said it drove a wedge, what was that?

JOHNSTON: Before then we were all pretty much of one mind and everyone agreed upon everything. And that created a division and people didn't like it. There were those of us who were taking LSD and talking about it -- and, "Wow, man what a trip I had." And then there were those who, "Well, alive you don't catch me taking that stuff." And the second wedge was after the recalcitrant ones had finally come around and taken it -- I know of only maybe one person who didn't -- and then afterwards it was... "If the Maharishi is good enough for the Beatles, he's good enough for us." So we -- and we'd been reading a lot. You know, you talked about things that were happening and this thing of 'oneness' and the feeling of the universality of things, the Ground of Being, we'd been 01:16:00reading Alan Watts and all of these and passing books around until meditation was the next thing - idea. Well ok things were getting paranoid the stories about narcs and so forth -- if we can turn on naturally they can't touch us. We thought we'd get the same thing. And we started taking Walter Coke's meditation -- introduction to meditation -- Maharishi's meditation at the old Montecito -- I think it's the Library there now -- whatever it was before. And prior to that I think most of us had been -- well it was considered bad manners -- kind of gauche to believe in an afterlife or anything more. So that was a real wedge and it, for example, still exists between Frank and me. He -- I don't talk about it 01:17:00with him and he doesn't talk about it with me. We both understand how we feel... Dead silence.

GASSER: No, not dead silence, I was -- uhh, There were a lot of plays that went on, and I'd wanted to ask you because you had mentioned references to when you were in the war, and I know there were quite a number of performances.

JOHNSTON: Oh, oh, Bill Neely's productions yes. Yeah, yeah, I...,

GASSER: I know there -- you must have done the Pirates of Penzance?

JOHNSTON: There were the outside plays that people participated in. I know Frank, and John Stack and I think Bill Neely and Gene McGeorge worked in some of the Gilbert and Sullivan. Gilbert and Sullivan was in. Frank's old bit -- that goddamn alcoholic -- he'd work in these plays -- in these things and it was always great things, and in order to be able to keep himself up he's have a bottle of generally a bottle of pale dry sherry out in the bushes outside which he would replenish -- he'd fortify himself from time to time. Some of the fun things -- Bill -- Bill Neely was master of the rebels. He'd sit up at Yosemite in the summer and get his battery charged and think about things to revitalize 01:18:00the decadent Mountain Drive when he got back -- got us to doing things. That was the Germanic side of Bill Neely. He did one -- had various people working in; I didn't work in that -- the play from Midsummer's Night's Dream -- Something in Thisbe -- Pyramus and Thisbe, yeah. And it was really rather funny. He had these guys like Ray Hawthorne who couldn't read a line straight if his life depended upon it. He sort of says things in a monotone because he is -- was embarrassed. 01:19:00He was the old mechanic and -- Perfect for the part was Kirk Watkins, he was a mechanic and carpenter and whatever else around here. They played, "I am wall", and "I am this and that" and I don't know. At any rate it must have been a mid-summer's eve production or something of that sort because I remember it being done out on the lawn of the Neely place. Judith Anderson was present at one and she really got a kick out or it. She felt that it was sort of in the 01:20:00tradition that Shakespeare had in mind -- these 'rustics' bumbling around and doing the production.

GASSER: How had she come to come to Mountain Drive?

JOHNSTON: I think she was a friend of Michael and Laura Peake's. And that's the only way -- thing I know about that. Laura still lives here she shed Mike some time ago. She sort of doesn't have to work.

GASSER: Were you in any of the productions yourself as actor.

JOHNSTON: I think I did a small part once. My heart wasn't really in it at that point. The last, the great time Bill Neely and I and Tom Sheldon had when we 01:21:00were all working in Hamlet together. Tom Sheldon was Felonious, I was the evil King of course, and Bill Neely was the grave digger. It was the last production done by the old Santa Barbara Repertory Theatre. It was directed by Ruth Wathing whom I had known when I was in college. She used to take pictures of theatrical productions at college. There was one night that -- I suppose it must have been the last night or maybe close to it -- we left at a rather late hour, we got 01:22:00out, the play ended -- we all changed clothes and got into Bill Neely's old Chevrolet truck, it was a '41 Chevrolet ton and a half, to go up to Mel Casteel's place for the grape pick. So alright that had to be in late September of early October that that was done. And I remember we got up off the highway and the lights kept going off and on and we were driving in the moonlight there with no lights and... It was just neat getting into Mel's in the middle of the night and a few people were still singing songs and we sat around and drank wine 01:23:00for a little while and crawled into bed with our wives and got up in the morning and went out and picked grapes. It was -- I loved doing things like that, gee I miss it.

GASSER: Does that still occur on the Drive?

JOHNSTON: Ah, Bill's son, Chris and some of the younger bloods have their own thing and I don't know that there is any crossover in generation or not. I retreated from... an awfully lot of that when I became aware that suddenly we were passé. That meant so much to me that that really shook me up. I got rather 01:24:00childish about it. I just withdrew for a long time.

GASSER: How were you made to feel passé?

JOHNSTON: I think it was something Dana Smith had said our children were getting into the teenage and he said something about -- we were up at his place he'd built a place up on Gibraltar Road. We were all lying around nude and drinking wine, probably laced with LSD as was the custom then. The girls were walking around rather self-consciously exposing their recent addition of pubic hair and he said, "Well, we're just old has-beens now." And I sort of looked at him and thought well, I'll be damned if I'm as has-been. And it set up something in me. But that's...

GASSER: How do you see the Drive evolving? You've been here for a long time, where do you see that it's going to now in this third generation, or second generation?

JOHNSTON: Well it's under siege, by the county. I've tried to -- I haven't gotten too involved in that I -- except that heater over there which I've not yet put in which I'm required for me to get my house bought off -- we never bothered about getting our final inspections. And it didn't seem important at the time, I figured I'd paid for it and that was enough. And years later they are insisting on it now. What the kids -- well I - there's been a resurgence in spirit. I find in a way I don't care. I've done it. I don't want to be a self-conscious grubby Mountain Driver anymore or a downtowner either. I think -- 01:25:00be at peace -- I'm trying to find out -- I'm sort of -- speaking quite personally, I'm off -- I've been off balance the last few years since my wife and I parted. I guess you look for an identity and wonder who you are and it's only recently I've been sort of getting comfortable in being feeling fine being alone. Not feeling that I have to have woman in here in order for everything to 01:26:00be alright. Which I'm told once you accept it then you're going to get it. I had one lady in here as a roomer until recently who had to be removed by the sheriff after threatening, but that's something else.

GASSER: Yes. I know that we are probably both reaching a point of being tired; it's difficult to go on for a long period of time. I would like to thank you very much -- and if you'd want to make any comments about it I never got around to asking about KRCW and your Uncle Gill Show which...

JOHNSTON: That was fulfillment. That was as close to fulfillment as I ever came except with the column. When I got out of high school and college, you know 01:27:00there's a progression you go -- the society has things figured out for you and your always sort of given a chance to do something with what you've got. You get out in the world and it isn't necessarily so, -- and a large part of my life has been like being a fish out of water or the square peg in a round hole and I've had to adapt a great deal. And the radio show just being able to do it freely and to invent it as I went along was marvelous. I had pretty good -- you can't say readership -- listenership and I just enjoyed doing it and I blossomed under it. It was it hurt when the station folded because I felt I was leaning on it which made me very -- well I kind of pulled in my horns for a while. And then there came the chance to do the column or rather I invented the chance to do the 01:28:00column because I got desperate again. Working in classified advertising is about as dreary as you can get -- or so I thought at the time. It was then pretty neat and it's pretty neat now just to sit down and see what you can do. And have it accepted and have other people pleased by it. That's kind of neat. The show itself the radio station itself was outrageous, God. This was the time that Welch and the John Birch Society were trying to impeach Governor Warren who was -- well, Chief Justice Warren. T. M. Storke was snortin' and puffin' in fury 01:29:00because he considered Warren was a personal friend of his and he started attacking the John Birch Society in the newspaper. We were doing shows then and wine tastings and so forth and I think somebody was writing some material on that and I can't think of his name now but he lives up on the upper part of the Drive he wrote for the Union News he's pretty smart -- shame on me for not remembering his name. But he started doing some things some satires and we picked up on it and we evolved the Jack Ash Society. Our motto was "Make an ash of yourself". We had the ladies society called the Lemming Aides and a great deal, we did some shows, and we got some pop letters back from people. That was 01:30:00incidentally -- the Jack Ash Society -- was picked up by the national news services and commented upon and we were kind of pleased at that.

GASSER: What was your Uncle Gill Show?

JOHNSTON: Oh! well that was -- I think I told you that was the one -- the very first Uncle Gill Show, Dick Johnson had sort of shown me how to operate the turn table and so forth, he was there with me. I thought I would come up with sort of a strange sound effect, I had a record of his -- I'd gone through a number of them looking for stuff to play -- of sound effects. And I cued it up wrong. So the first sound in the Uncle Gill Show, the premiere performance, was a flushing 01:31:00toilet on the air. And that was kind of indicative of what went on. I used to do the news and forget to turn on the switch for voice and the air would be dead. People went along with it -- it was real -- it was kind of fun. I read poetry and I commented on things and described the sunrise that I'd viewed when I got up because I'd turn the station[8] on at, hopefully, at 7 o'clock in the morning. And I'd play classical music and just whatever and sometimes bits of -- oh, I think there was a period of time there when I did segments of Don Juan in Hell. So I picked up a fair college audience, including a young woman who was working on her masters. I encountered her downtown and she 01:32:00said, "Why," -- I was calling on the office where she was working for -- "Why, you're Uncle Gill!" I said mollified. I said, "Yes." I considered running away with her. I'd also turned 40, very traumatic. We were terribly innocent and -- or at least I was -- God, I remember -- Dana Smith's then-wife Judy Smith was my confidante we were pretty good friends. I was telling her -- I was really feeling rather sad, because this girl was leaving. It was the summer; she was going to work in some summer camp and I knew that it was all over and I thought my life had ended. So I confided in her and then Audrey happened to be talking to Judy and she said, "I don't know what's wrong with Gill, he's certainly been 01:33:00grumpy lately." So Judy told her. So here I come in and Audrey flies at me saying, hysterically, "Choose between us, choose between us!" I said, "My dear, I don't have to I've sent her away." Which was a lie; she was leaving. There were little funny things like that.

GASSER: Little bits of theatricality?

JOHNSTON: Audrey used to say that the great tragedy in my life was that, life was not like an Italian opera. She's rather -- an even -- Ohioan and tends to be rather quiet. We balanced one another rather well, as a matter of fact.

GASSER: Well, Gill, I had many, many, more questions...

JOHNSTON: Well, fire away.

GASSER: ...that perhaps would like to come back maybe and have you answer them at a future time.

JOHNSTON: Sure, if you like.

GASSER: I think you've done a very lovely job and want to thank you again.

JOHNSTON: You're welcome.

GASSER: We're back on the air with Gill, I just said that Gill had asked who had been recorded for the Oral History Project, and I said Mervin Lane. And he began to say yes, Mervin Lane was a good person and that...

JOHNSTON: He took me on my first LSD trip. He was my guide. We did the LSD thing by the book. There was a book out by Albert and what's his name -- the Irishman -- which was a translation -- I suppose free -- of the Tibetan Book of the Dead[9] and it was a pretty good guide on how to lose -- the big deal was to lose your 01:34:00ego and to just be there -- and you needed a supportive situation where you wouldn't be stressed and to have prepared yourself for it and to have a guide, somebody who would be with you. And if you got into trouble focus your attention elsewhere, and it was easy to do. And presumably somebody who had done it before and Merv was one of those people. I chose Mervin -- I think I was at the point of disillusionment at that time -- to some extent or another with Frank Robinson, my best friend. And Merv[10] was living with -- and may or may not have at that point married Peggy -- Frank's first wife. Theirs's was one of the casualties of the fire in '64[11] 01:35:00which was a real catalyst. At any rate I thought that -- I wanted to pay him a compliment, I think so I asked him to be my guide. I think I was trying to grow up and to change my viewpoint on things or open myself up to new things. Merv was a very good guide. He was -- he kept himself in the background, he didn't intrude. He was certainly aware of what was going on -- I say that because I'm not terribly aware of him other than when I looked at him -- I remember looking at him and thinking that, one, he looked like Robert Taylor and two, that he looked worried. And I say, "Well, it's ok Mervin, don't worry." He came down here and got me about 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning -- 5 o'clock it must have 01:36:00been because -- that's right -- Audrey set the alarm for 4 and popped the pill into my mouth and I sat here by myself and waited for about an hour waiting for things to take effect. Nothing was happening and I was sort of apprehensive and yet resigned -- okay, I'm going to do it. I was listening to the radio -- I think it was KFAC then which you could get at night -- the music station from Los Angeles. The music playing was Mendelsohn's violin concerto and I suddenly began to weep because I could follow the music and I knew what he was doing -- what the music was doing. And it was simply incredibly beautiful. And, "my God I'm getting high!" Because it was like walking through a barrier that and once 01:37:00you walked through it was all illusion and not knowing anyway. Merv came down. The thing was we would go up -- so it must have been on a Saturday morning -- we'd go up to -- and it was during the comet watch time when we were going up there and watching the comet early in the mornings this was Kawasaki or whatever it was[12] -- and it was also a good occasion to sit around and drink and just do something different we were very much doing lots of different things together, the group. I remember sitting there, and of course I was smoking madly, as usual; and Dick Johnston was there and he had a bottle of Bushmills Irish Whiskey which I drank like water and it didn't seem to bother me at all -- I was 01:38:00a superman that day. But after a while I started seeing spots out in the sky it was though holes were being punctured through. Then I noticed that the conversation seemed rather vicious to me -- people were speaking unkindly to one another -- they were saying things but they were putting a message on top of it. And I got so sensitive -- I was so aware that I finally asked Mervin to take me away. And I understand later on that this if rather usual. And we went up to his place and I sat outside and I watched the night and the gradual coming up of the sun and I don't know and one point of another it occurred to me -- this is the first time I'd connected Indian raga music with getting high but I'd thought I'd 01:39:00heard it before but boy I'd like to listen to that when I'm really capable of listening. I asked him to put one on and he went into do it and it took him for hours to do it, it seemed to me. And I walked in there and -- they say you don't hallucinate but I had to be -- unless I was seeing him on another dimension -- because he was a spider and the tape was all tangled up; he was trying to unreel it. And it was a very bemused looking Mervin, and I began to laugh delightedly. Then I asked him if Peggy could come out, and Peggy got up and came and sat by me. I remember she looked so good, and so sweet like the Coca-Cola girl and vulnerable, and I put my arms out like this and they became wings and I put them around her as an eagle will mantle to protect its kill, but in this case it was 01:40:00mantling to protect her, and it felt very good, and so she sat out with me for a little while. We took a walk after that and I ended high up somewhere around some rocks -- it must have been around Mervin's house. But I was seeing them as granite or whitish granite rocks and it was all a Grecian drama, and I looked at it and I realized that I was outside of it. And so I went and sat on one of the rocks -- or I stood on it and I said, "Let the play begin!" That was a good feeling. I walked well, I felt well, my body was perfect or so I thought. The saddest part was coming down. I actually was unhappy because at being just 01:41:00normal again, because everything was -- it was sort of like the difference between a car running on regular gas and a car running on super. That's a very poor example. It was the difference between being special and being ordinary or less than ordinary, between you being in the center of the world and you being off in the periphery somewhere and not being terribly much involved. It doesn't feel that way anyway, I might add.

GASSER: Having lost the power.

JOHNSTON: Yeah. I feel fine, now.

GASSER: Maybe I could ask you about some of the other people on Mountain Drive and you can tell me maybe what you basically remember of them or in small asides or anecdotes. We could start out with Will -- Bill Neely.

JOHNSTON: Will, Bill, Neely, yeah. Well one remembers an awful lot about Bill. Bill assigned parts for people to play. And I found I really wanted to ingratiate myself with him and I worked hard at doing it because he punished you when you stepped out of line. Up until I reached the point where I gained some strength and I'd start telling him to go to hell. Up to that point it could be very painful. But on the other hand he created marvelous illusions and he did 01:42:00some very good things too. He... he worked hard all the time at being bigger than life and sometimes he'd go into great, black, dark moods. He used to have a 'No' flag a big black flag that Barbara made for him. When he wanted to be completely alone, when he was sick of the world, don't come down when he doesn't want to give anyone a glass of wine, doesn't want to talk; up went the 'No' flag. When he was feeling good he had a Greek flag -- it looks like the American flag except that it's blue and white with the stripes on it -- he'd fly that. He had a number of -- I'll put it this way -- he was a womanizer. I think he and Ed Schertz[13] were having a contest to see who could sleep with the most women particularly at their classes. I was shocked by this but I was also attracted. It was not my forte though. He was a realist in many ways. I think he understood what made people -- what motivated people how to manoeuver them around, and he didn't hesitate in doing this. And on the other hand he was as he said, and other people said too, he was a different person in the mountains. That's where the 'Will' thing comes in. I think there was a genuine split there he may have been a little psychotic.

GASSER: Possible that was a good description.

JOHNSTON: Whatever he did, he did very well. He and Frank were sort of vied with one another, they were, oh, antagonists in a way. And yet they both wry affection for one another.

GASSER: What about Bobby Hyde and Floppy?

JOHNSTON: Well, they were a grand old lady and a grand old man. Bobby thought up things and Floppy did them. She followed through. I was very much in awe of him when we first came here.

GASSER: When did you first meet him?

JOHNSTON: Oh, I suppose visiting up here in '55 or '56. He was obviously having such a hell of a good time. And it took a little while to realize that indeed Floppy was backing him up. She was -- but it was her fault she was a willing 01:43:00slave. She was a slave to all the children. But she was an interesting -- elegant woman. She was one of the Tuckerman sisters from Carpinteria. I remember being told or she told me actually that -- I can't think of that fellow's name he's one of the New England or New York aristocratic types in government, who had been her beau when she was in an East coast college. Floppy had been mad for Bobby and as a young woman and her family was against it. They think he was sort of a ne'er-do-well. They broke it up. She ended up by marrying this fellow Andrews who took her to Hawaii, and he wrote a couple of books there, I think. 01:44:00He boozed an awful lot and I think he got syphilis there. She ultimately left him and came to live with Bobby. They had one child together. Poor Andrews wouldn't give her a divorce. She kind of set the tone; there was a gentle "lady-ness" about her that kind of put you on your best toes around her. I don't mean snobbish that she was really that way. You'd give a party and of course invite the Hyde's and Floppy might not be able to come but she would always 01:45:00bring down a dish. And she was always busy at something or another. Some do-good thing. Yeah she was in the tradition of the lady. Bobby was, there was the rascal in him. He was bright and -- Rachel's snoring -- I think the thing I liked about Bobby was that when we first came up here I had the feeling whatever I wanted to do was okay. We just sort of assumed that I was a certain sort of person -- gentle. I built on to the house that we rented from him and he 01:46:00supplied the lumber -- it was there in his yard. There was one section up there that was all brush and there were paths going through the brush leading to old refrigerators and stoves that the repair man would -- at that time you could call up the Electric Company and they would come fix your unit. And they would go over there and cannibalize the parts. It was years later Floppy had that all cleared out. There was a certain air of distinction about that place it looked like a great junkyard but it was different and it was okay. It put you sort of -- well -- God, knows you didn't want to be bourgeois and 'downtown' and insist upon everything being clean and so forth. And they had Ray Hawthorne who 01:47:00was living where the Peake's are and he repaired all their cars and sold them cars and they took it out in on his land note. And Ray's dream was -- he stuttered -- he said, "Aaaah one of th-th-these days I-I-I-I-I'm going to...," then he'd go into his pipe dream. But he was a pepper tree mechanic and he would work out in the open. And there were always tools scattered around and Ray would spend his time walking around kicking around in the grass looking for the tool where he put it down last. He kept things going. He always had cars around there that he was working on. They were real jewels; they were his rusty jewels. Yeah 01:48:00it was a different time.

GASSER: They said that Ray was able to lift up a car with one hand?

JOHNSTON: Yeah, he was strong. We used to call him Popeye. Well, he ultimately got a hernia and had to cool it, but he would get under there and he'd just get impatient and he'd just lift it up and somehow or another just hold the damn thing in place and hand start a few bolts and then tighten it up in that way. But there's a story I heard -- well two stories about Ray. He was sitting in a bar and a fellow started picking on him and Ray said, "Look I don't want any trouble, leave me alone." And the guy kept fooling around with him. Ray just whirled around on him -- I think he was probably still sitting down -- took the guys arm and broke it over his leg. And, you didn't fool around with Ray. He didn't have a bad temper but he just wouldn't be pushed too far. And then there 01:49:00was the time when he was out hunting with his son in two different cars and he was driving his jeep and they were looking for deer up around Cachuma and his son's car started boiling over so he motioned that he was going to pull off into Cachuma and get some water. And Hawthorne kept on going and right ahead of him he saw a deer running along and it had been shot, and it was limping. I guess he couldn't very well fire a gun around there or he didn't want to. So without thinking he just maneuvered the car around and with the light on it and got the deer, and he wrestled the deer and got it under the horns locked or he was trying to lock it under the fender of the jeep and the deer was working him over with his hooves -- it was still pretty much alive. And Hawthorne -- I don't know whether he was 01:50:00trying to reach for his knife and he couldn't because the knife was tied to a line on his belt -- but somehow or another he took a pretty good beating -- and then he finally reached up and got the gun and just held it like that and shot the deer. And this only took a few minutes. And then it was pretty heavy so he rolled it up against the incline of the road, backed the jeep up there, whipped it over, threw a tarp over it, and was driving down the road and only a few minutes had passed and his kid drove by, and he flipped back the tarp and there was the deer; and the kid's eyes were as big as saucers.

GASSER: Jack Boegle?

JOHNSTON: Jack came here. He was one of the first people here actually. I think I told you he -- either tennis or ping pong tournament in Santa Barbara and somehow or another he got a place to stay the night up at the Hyde's. And he was 01:51:00so intrigued by it, he just stayed on for days and he finally made up his mind that he was going to live here. So he quit his job -- he'd worked for years and years and years as an engineer with the telephone company, and moved down here from Berkeley, I think. He and Frank became pretty good buddies, Jack -- when I first started coming up here he was just building his place, it was and an adobe shell. He was living downtown with his mother; coming up and working odd hours and weekends on the place. And it was '54, '55 or someplace in there. It's a -- you haven't seen his place, have you?

GASSER: No, I haven't

JOHNSTON: You'd know that he's been an engineer, and he's used to niggling detail, because everything is just so. And it's a good little place for one man. When his mother died, he was then in his forties -- Jack's in his mid-seventies now -- he had gone to school before that, I guess after the war he went to the Sorbonne in France and studied. His idea was that he was going to take what 01:53:00money she had, and live off the interest and invest some of it. So he bought a piece of land from Dow Sturmen on Sabodo Tarde and Frank designed him -- a very narrow lot -- a little rental there -- it's a duplex. I worked on it along with John Stack making adobe bricks and a few other things. And Jack took off -- well he went to Europe and then he came back and then he went to the Orient. His idea was to follow the sun, and to very carefully plan out taking long trips the longest possible on tramp steamers where he would get good accommodations and 01:54:00free food; just to have a good time existing. And he met a Japanese woman in Japan who took up with him. She just, her GI lover had recently left. They hit it off pretty well and he ended up marrying her so he could bring her back to the States with him. It lasted a few years, but she was much younger than he and ultimately ran off with Ray Hawthorne's son. Then came back a year later feeling awfully bad about it and tried to make a go of it, but there was just too much difference between them. Jack had run out of steam and he was content that it be 01:55:00so after trying for a while. But they had a very amicable divorce. She had taken up with a Japanese-American fellow. She still comes and visits Jack, he's sort of the Uncle. Everything worked out nicely there.

GASSER: George Greyson?

JOHNSTON: George I haven't seen for quite some time. He, Cuthbert Chisolm, described him as a diamond -- one of nature's gentlemen. He is a gentle kind person. His wife, well it's just speculation -- Ducky we called her -- was not happy with one man and she constantly chased. Ultimately, they broke up. George[14] grew up in an orphanage -- and he's a nice 01:56:00guy. I really don't know too much, but John Stack knows quite a bit about him.

GASSER: Dick Johnston?

JOHNSTON: Dick[15]. Very bright. He had one bad arm that was crippled by polio, and he was operated on so he could use it as something to hold with and as a hook. It certainly has influenced his life. He could have been a very good doctor, he could have done anything he wanted to, but he makes a point of throwing things away -- which I sort of understand. He's very charming. Whether he knows it or not he uses people. I had a hell of a good time with him. If he likes you, he backs you up, he amplifies you and when he drops you, you feel it. It's as though you'd been deflated, and he's just that good. We were pretty good buddies for a while. He's back east now. He went to his brother's funeral and his brother's mistress took a fancy to him and went after him and finally brought Dick back with her which was good because he'd run 01:57:00through his last song and dance, I think, and he was out of it. He was out of money and out of people to charm, I think.

GASSER: Bill Richardson?

JOHNSTON: I'm leery of Bill. I've never know him very well. He's known for his temper and the fact that he's handy with his fists. He's stuck to writing for a long time, he teaches writing. I don't know whether I'm terribly taken with him as a writer or not, it doesn't really matter. He's just a different breed of cat than I am. I stand in awe and admiration of what he's done with his hunting. 01:58:00He's macho. I think of Hemmingway when I think of Bill Richardson.

GASSER: And the Coyote Fire. You had mentioned that it had changed a lot of things here.

JOHNSTON: Yeah. It just seemed that after the fire people who had been -- let's say, having their liaisons on the side, suddenly decided -- or it happened that there were break-ups and they went that way and people changed. Peggy[16] moved in with Merv. Frank and Susan got 01:59:00together. I don't know who else. That's what came to mind with me, oh, Dana and Judy Smith broke up and he took up with -- that may have been a year later I'm not sure. Time has a way of going like that.

GASSER: It makes it sound like the fire destroyed not just the homes but also instead of being a cohesive force it was divisive in some way.

JOHNSTON: It could be. It was a catalyst. Kirk Watkins had been thinking about this gal who was coming over to see him and after his place was burned down after the fire, he married her. Well it turned out she was a dipsomaniac and ultimately they were divorced. I think she died a few years later, drunk burned herself to death in bed, smoking cigarettes or something like that. It was quite an experience for me standing up -- I was scared to death, because I couldn't predict it, I couldn't control it, and I'd been burned badly during the war. And here was this woman saying, "Well, you're going to save our house, Dear!" And I was thinking what on earth are you talking about, I don't know anything about it. There was not water because everybody was on the same water line around 02:00:00here. It was like an octopus, everyone was hooked to the Hyde's 2-inch water line. And I'm sure they must have had monstrous water bills. But the whole water pressure was gone, you couldn't even get a hose turned on. We had filled one large tub of water right up there. And we put on heavy coats, in case the fire -- and we each had a towel which we had dampened. We stood up there. And all the children had been -- Sandy Hill was taking care of all the kids -- they lived down on Dawlish Place then, and just waited. And I saw Tom Arnold's place go up. He'd just put on a new shake roof. Why shake, I don't know. There was this 02:01:00monster, this primordial thing, this elemental power coming down upon us roaring like a dinosaur, and I couldn't think of anything to do. We'd cleared around here, and I'd done everything I could do. My own thought really was let's get the hell out of here! And I said so to Audrey. We walked across -- ran across the dam there and got up over at Westmont where it was clear and watched the fire just... while we were there Gus and Susie Mendez were sitting by us -- they were living in there were just two Dallas sets up at the head of the road, that 02:02:00wasn't there then. And Gus had a bottle of tequila and they had a little strong box with all their papers in it. I don't know if we had any papers to worry about. And we sat there and we drank a little bit. I was really thirsty, it was hot and the wind blowing, I think a soda pop would have tasted so good, Lord. We saw the fire come down. Well, first we heard the girls across the way over at Westmont College in the girl's dorm -- I guess they were still there. Why, I don't know! But they were yelling, "Jump, jump jump," and we could see over on Tom Arnold's place -- this was before it burned down -- it looked like he was up there with his dog, and the flames were just running right up the hillside right up to him -- it was like a chimney taking it right up there, and the house was 02:03:00invested. I heard later that he got out just by the skin of his teeth with his dog in the car and they just drove through the flames. And then the fire came all along here -- it just seemed to run through on both sides around the house -- and it looked like -- smoke couldn't see anything -- it looked like we could both see a rectangle of glowing embers and Audrey said, "Oh, there goes my house." I think it was at that moment the fear left me. I realized I could handle whatever was there. And I said, "You stay here," and I took off and of course she came right behind me, and there were some Westmont kids. And we came running up here and I got up on the roof -- we had the old ladder there -- and it was cool everything was okay. Glowing bags of gas ignited coming over from 02:04:00the fire above and from one of them dropped a smoldering piece of the new shake roof of his and that's the only thing that threatened the house. I don't think it would have -- I kicked it off, and that was that. Then we went through several days of just being here and not knowing what was going to happen and the fire coming back that night, this way, and burning. Not sleeping much. That was the high moment; the rest of it was just enduring and not knowing if it was going to come back on us again. For a long time it looked just like a moonscape 02:05:00around here all the trees dropped their leaves -- or it burned. The undergrowth was all burned out and you could hear sounds travel for miles. It was strange and it looked like a moonscape.

GASSER: What was it like the next winter?

JOHNSTON: We were concerned about flooding the forest people dropped grass seed. And it seemed to me that the rains were all right. There were some hard rains that came but it came gently at first. It may have been about that time that I put in the drainage along the side of the house -- to take care of any -- I don't know somewhere along in there.

GASSER: So Gill, more thoughts?

JOHNSTON: No, and my mouth is getting dry.

GASSER: It seems like a good time to pause the clock strikes.