Mervin Lane Interview

--(Interview begins)--

CLEEK: Mervin, how did you happen to come to Santa Barbara?

LANE: I'm originally from New York City and I married a dancer who I met at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and we felt that the city was an impossible place to build a life. I didn't have a job that I was interested in so we decided to come west.

CLEEK: Were you originally from New York?

LANE: Yes, and we left New York and we stopped along the way to see if any city interested us. We knew we would have to go to a city because my wife is a dancer and wanted to either teach, she had a teaching credential from California, but she thought she would like to teach it, or to participate in some kind of dance activities in a city, so we stopped in Minneapolis and when we got to Casper, 00:01:00Wyoming, I had never been that far west before and I said, June, this is impossible, I can't stand these wide open spaces and I'm getting the opposite of claustrophobic which I don't know what that is but the space was pressing in on my brain so I said let's turn around and go back. She said, "...wait 'til we get to California and go through the Donner Pass and maybe it will change your mind." So we did that. We went into Donner Pass into Berkeley and I was enamored by the vegetation, the flora and so on and we stayed in Berkeley and I applied for a job as a hose man with the fire department and just before I took the jump test off the building into a net, my wife at that time, received a contract from the Santa Barbara city schools to teach dance at the high school, which she came down and did.

CLEEK: What was her name?

LANE: Her name at that time was June Ann Lane, her name now is June 00:02:00Christensen[1] and she has been very active in the arts in Santa Barbara -- she still lives here -- and she began teaching here and I got a job at the railroad in which I worked for six years and during that time I built this house.

CLEEK: How did you meet Bobby Hyde?

LANE: Well, that's the way I got to build my house is Bobby. We looked for a rental. We found a rental in the foothills that was his rental and was rather peculiar because nothing worked and yet the rent was very low. We met him and a number of the other neighbors because every Saturday he had a party and he got to like us. We especially liked people who were somewhat opposed to the 00:03:00established way of doing things and could do things on their own and use their own mind in hands and brains. He encouraged us to think about buying a piece of property up here because it was very, very inexpensive. He only required that you pay fifty dollars down and fifty dollars a month, or as much as you could afford, which is the way I bought this acre. So after I was here for about eight months, I bought what you are sitting on, which is an acre parcel and it's been very manageable because when he did the surveying then I had it surveyed years later and it didn't conform as much to his surveying lines as it should have. None the less it was substantially the same so he encouraged me to build and he was very helpful to all the people in the area. He lent out his equipment and he 00:04:00helped you if you didn't know what you were doing.

CLEEK: He had a bulldozer...

LANE: He had tools, he was a well digger by trade and he also was a writer and he would try his hand at anything. He was very, very innovative and original.

CLEEK: Did he put in the entire water system?

LANE: No, no he didn't find any water there. He went up the Santa Maria Ignacia and made a dam up there to float around in a houseboat, in the mountains. The people in the area objected to this because they felt he was using their water 00:05:00and damming it up and so on.

CLEEK: He put in a whole water system. When you came here was there electricity? So you all had to do everything?

LANE: The first thing I did was to put in the water supply. I had to pump up water from the mountain dry because they were above the water table and had to put in my own gas line and I didn't have electricity for a year or two years.

CLEEK: Did you use Cold Springs water?

LANE: We're on the Montecito line and I don't know where they get their water from, but I think it's Montecito.

CLEEK: Bobby had written a book in 1926 telling about this professor who wanted 00:06:00to live by his own principles and do his own thing and I think he was probably forecasting his own life. That's when he was married to his second wife and lived back in New York.

LANE: Tonetti is now Mrs. Henre Dural who lives here in town and teaches at the University. She is his granddaughter and she is aware of his presence here and when she came out she spent time in the area but she married a professor at the University and I know her very well. She might throw some light on the early years of Bobby's life back East. In fact, a friend rented one of those funny 00:07:00houses he built with all the rock work he did that was very much from New York. She lived there a friend of mine who had absolutely nothing what so ever to do with Bobby.

CLEEK: I think it's being preserved, don't you?

LANE: The house is still there and Jerry hired a cook. One of Bobby's sons became an internationally famous cook and he lived in that area for a long time after Bobby left it.

CLEEK: So evidently he was building houses when he wrote that book then. Already getting his economic, what do you call it, by doing odd jobs and so forth.

LANE: His philosophy, you know, was carried out it seems to me whatever he was 00:08:00believing about being self-sufficient and living economically he imparted not only to the people in the area but to his sons. Gavin Hyde who you may be interviewing or have already interviewed -- once told me, you know, all you need is a garden and a few goats and chickens. And I've seen Gavin operate in Merville, Canada, which is a place that Bobby bought. He bought a bay near Campbell River which is a town North of Victoria on the Vancouver Island side and he bought a bay, and it is very, very, primitive. You have to get there by boat, the only thing that we had was a motor boat and there was nothing else there. And he built, Bobby built, a little shack and Gavin helped him and so on. And when Bobby passed away the land came into Gavin's possession and he built 00:09:00out of stone and drift wood and, you know. It was very, very primitive but very, very pure. And Indians used to still come down when I was up there I saw the Indians coming to pick to get fresh water from where the ocean met the natural stream and to pick clams. So he was kind of a in a hundred years earlier he would have been a pioneer. I mean as far as looking for a new place, a new horizon. His attitudes were very open but he disliked very few things, and mostly screaming children he disliked. He couldn't stand them.

CLEEK: He had quite a few -- including the...

LANE: Including every child that ever screamed or yelled. He just felt that they shouldn't do that, and he would use some eschatological language to shut them 00:10:00up, or tell their mother and so on. It was a little embarrassing and it was not in keeping with how he felt about them. The story that the anecdote that ties in with Bobby and my own city life was the one where he invited us to go olive picking on a Saturday, and we met down there -- all the families in the area -- to gather olives and to make olive oil that was the idea. He had a press there, he had an olive press -- it was actually used for wine making also -- but he converted it seasonally. And he told us where there was the biggest supply of olives, and we all went there and spread out and families went there with their children and so on. I went there with my wife and we worked as hard as we could. 00:11:00Then we brought back two big bags of olives. We were the first one's back and then all the other families came with truckloads of olives. Their pick-up trucks were filled to the brim with olives. And we had these two little Safeway paper bags. And Bobby greeted us back and gave us wine and what not, he didn't say anything about the paper bags and then everyone started lining up to pour the olives in the press. He said, "Oh, Mervin I see you have these two bags, what's in them?" We said, "These are all of the olives we'd picked." He said, "Well, what exactly did you do? I mean there's such a discrepancy between the amount of olives that everyone else picked and your own." I don't either. I can't understand how they got so many. He said, "Well, what did you do?" I said, "Well 00:12:00I climbed up in tree and I started picking them." He laughed and said, "Well, Mervin the next time you go out you take a long stick and what you do, you flog the tree, and you put a ground cloth underneath the tree, and you flog the tree's branches, and the olives drop and then you drive them away, and that's what you do." So that was a standing joke amongst the people in the area that proved that I was a city slicker that I knew nothing about getting food in the country.

CLEEK: So, he did that once a year?

LANE: Well, he did it occasionally. He varied his routine. When there was a stand of persimmons that someone had mentioned to him which was just left rotting; he would go over there. And he would gather a few people who were available, and would pick the rotten persimmons. And he made candy with the 00:13:00rotten persimmons. The best candy I ever had. He would let the persimmons dry like olives on a roof, and then cut them up and make candy out of them.

CLEEK: Floppy...

LANE: Well, Floppy was there always involved in these things in preparing what brought back. He'd find someone to give him a whole truck load of oranges and then he'd share this. He'd share this with other people, I mean, he wasn't hoggish about it, he liked to share the things. But he was always pushing the idea of innovation and doing things for yourself and not depending upon anyone and when he had trouble with the city department -- the county bureau -- in terms of some land division or whatnot, he went down and fought them all the time. Single handedly. None of us were -- well, we were too involved in building our own house. But he did a lot to protect the area so that it wasn't overrun 00:14:00the way it's being overrun now, as you can see if you come up Coyote Road there's a tract house on the lower end of it and there are two houses that are completely out of keeping with the area's...

CLEEK: Now is that part of Bobby's land the other...

LANE: Well, all of Bobby's, he had about sixty or seventy acres here and he bought it in the late 1940s and began to sell it. He built some rentals very, very, you know, economical and cement block rentals, which were hot in the summer and terrible to live in really. Got water and the essentials to these rentals. And then, when one burned down, he built another rental. And when people started buying land, he felt well he'd sell the property that he bought and he did. And he sold almost all of it and...

CLEEK: Now can I get back to...

LANE: Sure.

CLEEK: I went to check deeds and the court house according to the Courthouse you bought the land from Oliver Andrews.

LANE: Right, well what he did was to sell you a piece. It was a piece like this. He couldn't sell it to me outright because it wasn't permitted at that time. You have to... So the last person that bought from him was the person that the forthcoming buyer would buy from. So it was just going around in a circle. But everyone gave him the money, you see. Oliver Andrews was legally the person that I bought it from, his son,[2] but Bobby got the money. Just to make it legal. It was silly, you know, you should be able to...

CLEEK: But Andrews lived next to you. Where was that?

LANE: [Begins talking]

CLEEK: Is his house still there?

LANE: Yeah, you can see from my driveway.

CLEEK: Now he was a sculptor?

LANE: He was a sculptor.[3][4]

CLEEK: So, did you know him quite well.

LANE: Yes I did. Yeah.

CLEEK: Now, he lived here until about the middle 1950s before he moved to Santa Monica?

LANE: Well, no until the middle 1960s. Late 1950s early 1960s he moved to Santa Monica.

CLEEK: Now, he had his first show at the Museum [mumbled] were you there at that time?

LANE: Yeah, uh-hum.

CLEEK: He was just a young...

LANE: Well, he was a young sculptor but he had a lot of experience and a lot of aptitude and so on. That hood over the fireplace he made for me.

PC: Yeah was his studio down there?

LANE: Yes.

CLEEK: You probably saw him working.

LANE: Oh yeah, he did sculpture right outside the house.

CLEEK: He must have worked in different types of materials.

LANE: Mostly metal and mostly welding. He and Bobby got along fine because they both new about welding. And Bobby...

CLEEK: Do you think he learned originally from Bobby?

LANE: No, I think Bobby learned from him. No, I think Bobby learned how to weld from him, but it's a moot point. But anyway [?out of he built his house] and 00:17:00almost immediately began doing sculpture outside of it.

CLEEK: Did he use casting, or a lot of the welding?

LANE: Mostly welding. He'd hammer pieces and weld them together, and made -- there is a piece, I think, in that castle on the corner unless Tommy took it away but there is...

CLEEK: You mean...

LANE: No, right here. On the point here, what we call The Castle which was the house that Tommy White built.

CLEEK: Oh, oh, you mention in your book.

LANE: There might...

CLEEK: Now is that the White that is related to Tonetti?

LANE: Well, I think...

CLEEK: Tonetti was his mother?

LANE: Yes, I think so.

CLEEK: Alex White.

LANE: Alex White, yes, Rob White, Alex White and the Whites are all related and 00:18:00Tommy White built that house way above mine on the top most part of the little mountain here. He built and adobe and cement house when he was 17.

CLEEK: And then when did he build The Castle?[5]

LANE: When I was here in about 1957.

CLEEK: Was he in his twenties then?

LANE: Yes, yes. He'd just come back from the Navy. Gavin had come back from the Navy also. They had both been in the Navy and came back here. Gavin came back to raise his family, which he had married a Spanish woman when he was in the Service and stationed in Spain. And Tommy was not married he was in the Navy and he came back and chose to live here.

CLEEK: And does it look like a castle?

LANE: Oh yes it does. It's built with huge pier timbers which were taken by Tommy, myself, and a couple of other people, from the Ellwood pier, which was 00:19:00being demolished.

CLEEK: So it is historical.

LANE: Well, the wood is, the wood is very old it's from the Ellwood pier. And I had a lot to do with it because I helped Tommy collect the materials and also all the stone work -- that's rounded granite in there -- I gave to Tommy because I worked for the railroad for six years and I alerted him to the fact that when they were making these big dumps by the Rincon to build up the highway. Something you might call fortunate.

CLEEK: You mean the stones...

LANE: Yeah, [talking over each other] they came down from Oregon in these flat cars and when they dumped them they came back to Santa Barbara to be re... - the flat cars to be sent back to their home whether it was Northern Pacific or the Atlantic, Topeka and the Santa Fe or whatever it was. But there was a lot of 00:20:00concrete on those flat cars little small pieces of it, you know which they didn't bother with because they were interested in big boulders. So I used to sweep this stuff off and I told Tommy to come down with a truck and pick it up. He picked up what must of been a huge pile of rock which he used for building inside the house. I was going to use this timber myself because it was very inexpensive, I could have built this house with that timber. But in unloading it I was knocked off by the crane that was unloading it and the [?] you know what a [?] it has a point on the end of it and you use it, loggers use it to roll logs, it has a hook on the end of it [a] and a standing spike and I had to let go of it [? can't understand] then I fell the [?] hit me in the back. It was just 00:21:00about an inch from my spine. It was a very, very, narrow escape but it soured me, you know. I figured, well I'll build my house with some other material. And I did.

CLEEK: In the book, Going to Town,[6] you mentioned how Bobby Hyde dumped some big rocks in front of your driveway. You had to do something.

LANE: Yes, well, you came in on the driveway, okay.

CLEEK: So they were dumped right there?

LANE: That was just a hill and he made this cut with this little tiny bulldozer with a six foot blade, that's not a very big blade. He made this little cut and he unearthed in the process of getting rid of all the brush and what he unearthed [was] three or four huge stones. Well instead of throwing them down to the bottom of the canyon he tried to save them. And then when I saw that the stones were obstructing the very driveway that he was making for us to come down 00:22:00and build my house, I asked him to get rid of them. I said I can't use these I'm going to make it out of adobe and wood. He said, "Mervin, I don't think that's a good idea, I think you should cut these up and make stones." So that's all that work there. (pointing to the wall)

CLEEK: How long did it take?

LANE: Well, this wall here took me six months, and that's because I didn't know anything and the wall upstairs which is bigger took three months and now I'm doing an extension of this wall which is -- that's why I called because I want to get to that wall today sometime -- which will take less time because of my further knowledge of technology. You use feathers and you use wedges and you can construct anything.

CLEEK: Feathers, what did you say, feathers?

LANE: Feathers. Feathers is the terminology for two little pieces of metal that fit in a hole and then you drive the wedge between them. And you can split the 00:23:00rock by just touching them with a hammer...

CLEEK: Did the Indians use these?

LANE: No, no, they didn't have these. But these principles I learned gradually and I learned about the carborundum blade which can cut into sandstone very easily. I was using primitive methods to split the slab. So I was so angry when I found out that technology would do it quicker that I stopped using any materials whatsoever I just took the rock up I could lift and if it sat without rocking I'd just cement it in place.

CLEEK: Did Arthur help you with your...

LANE: No, no, the only help that I got here was lifting the walls of the studio which all the neighbors in the area helped. We built the walls of the studio on the sub-flooring here and then we raised them. That was the most economical way to do it. I'll take you upstairs and let you see it, it's a neat room.

CLEEK: How long did it take you to raise it? Did you have equipment?

LANE: Well, you lift the walls that have been built on floor up and they are not very heavy and I mean, if you have twenty people they are not heavy you just raise them up, and you put them in place. You use various two by fours to steady it and so on. And then you hammer the baseboard onto the two by six or whatever you are doing. So we raised these walls and put them in place with my neighbors. And Frank Robinson,[7] who is the former husband of the wife that I am married to now, designed the trusses upstairs and...

CLEEK: Oh, and he's an architect?

LANE: He's an architect, definitely. And he lives right below here, too. And I helped him. And you know it was a kind of cooperative community in terms of construction. That's about as far as it went, the cooperation, because everyone had their own lives to lead so they were interested in pursuing that too. People 00:25:00were interested in building. I myself was not interested in building. Only I was -- I built the house which took me six years to do both of these units, only because -- for practical reasons. It was very, very, inexpensive. I don't think I spent more than ten thousand dollars for this whole thing which includes the land that I bought which was two thousand dollars, so it was very, very, inexpensive. The walls that you see here the adobe walls here cost me thirty-five dollars.

CLEEK: Now did you make your own adobe bricks?

LANE: Yeah, I made my own bricks...

CLEEK: Wonderful.

LANE: Everything is done by hand, including the floor here.

CLEEK: Did you have forms?

LANE: Yeah, I had forms. I cast on the wall, I used the cast on the wall method not the baking the sun baked method which other people used. I used forms and cast them as I went. Then I would pull the forms out and go on up. And at the end of the day the sun was hot enough so that the first course was dry so I could put something else on the next course the next day. So these walls here, theses adobe walls took me a summer to make.

CLEEK: Now, did you use the earth that you dug up here?

LANE: That, Bobby bulldozed.

CLEEK: So this good earth, then for clay bricks?

LANE: The Historical Society is made from the earth that was excavated.[8]

LANE: Right, the Chumash were using this to build mud hut, too, and from here to Gaviota, about twelve hundred feet above sea level, is a good adobe soil, and we just happened to be in that kind of elevation. All the dirt that Bobby pushed to make and all the stone was used in the house. He didn't think... he didn't see why you can't use your native materials. And his philosophy ties over in quite a number of the living fields here. And if you ask the residents he was also inspiring the younger people because he told them how to do it themselves.

CLEEK: [?] ...artists and writers or would you say...

LANE: No, the people that lived in the area were innovative and daring in some 00:27:00kind of way. They were also people who were completely content to live without all the amenities, the social amenities, and the domestic amenities. They didn't mind going to bed when the light went down, okay. So I...

CLEEK: Oh, so how long was it before you had electricity?

LANE: Well I started building in 1952 and wasn't about until about the middle of 1953 that I got a pole. And then it was about the end of 1953 that I had it all hooked up. But it wasn't -- I mean the pole was hooked up to the main -- but I didn't have electricity for two years here because it took me about two years to get this, you know, everything hooked up and ready and the [? form] made and so on. But we lived while we were building in a little trailer that I constructed 00:28:00in the back. And we had our children in that trailer. And then the two children that..., the first child was born in this little hut. And the second child was born while this area was still under construction. So the second child was born in 1956 and we came in 1952, so it took about four years before there was a structure here to move into. And there was a grand piano, Tommy White's grand piano. He was leaving for Europe, and he the Santa Barbara moving company bring this grand -- concert grand -- and it used to sit right there.

CLEEK: And did you have a piano player?

LANE: Yes.

CLEEK: A musician in many...

LANE: Well, I was trained as a musician in New York and played all the percussion instruments. I was trained as a timpanist then when I met Erich I got interested in Renaissance music so I took up all the instruments of that period 00:29:00including all the recorders and the [? Unclear gamba...] and I sang also. So the Renaissance and Baroque music were what did, and we did this for years up here. And we liked...

CLEEK: Now, Erich Katz[9] taught at City College?

LANE: No.

CLEEK: I mean Adult Ed, didn't he?

LANE: Yeah, he taught at Adult Ed and...

CLEEK: I think I took a course when I first came.

LANE: He was a musicologist and a composer and had a tremendous wealth of understanding of the Renaissance and he was also a composer in his own right and he had several of compositions played here in Santa Barbara. Not only by his own group but by other people, too.

CLEEK: And he lived here?

LANE: He lived...

CLEEK: And he had something to do with bringing him here?

LANE: Yes, I was familiar with Erich in New York, and I sang in his a cappella group at the New York College of Music. New York College of Music was a small music school but it was very, very, well known by people who were in the field. 00:30:00And I used to go there and sing every week with him. And then I got to know his people and the reason why I got to meet him was because one of his singers married a trumpet player from Texas. She went -- I went to school with her at Black Mountain and so she said why don't you come on over and we'll play and I'll introduce you to Erich and we'll play some recorder and we can see how it goes, and then you can join us on Wednesday night at the New York College of Music. So I got to know Erich and I went to all his concerts and I got very enthusiastic extremely enthusiastic about Renaissance music. Because I had never heard of Johannes [?], Anton [bach] I had never heard of Jacques [? Dupres]. These people -- you know there are people walking around that have never heard of them either. There are people walking around that have never even heard of Mahatma Gandhi, so it's no surprise to me that you have to introduce every 00:31:00generation to the wealth of the past. I heard this music it was so pure that I was determined the literature as much as I possibly could. So when we came out here I had to give that up. Coming out here with my first wife I had to give that up, but Erich was looking for a place to go, he'd had a heart attack in New York. It was too much stress for him there and he had written the Peace Corp in Santa Barbara Street before he ever visited here. He looked up maps and thought about places. He looked at climate conditions, he looked at the longitude, latitude of places and he decided that Santa Barbara might be a very nice place to go. And so he wrote me and said send me all the literature on Santa Barbara that you can, including geological data, climatic conditions, and I did that. And I got that from the Chamber of Commerce and so on. And then he came out and 00:32:00visited -- he loved it here, it was terrific and just what he wanted. And he contracted out a little studio here, and came out...

CLEEK: But did he live here on...

LANE: Right on the hill.

CLEEK: But he didn't build his own house?

LANE: No, but he designed it, and he Frank Robinson, who is the former husband of my present wife, designed it. It was completely... it was really an interesting house completely. It was done with the minimum amount of money, I mean he [?], you don't make money if you're a teacher. You just do not do that. So he had very little money, and so it was done with the minimum amount -- with the cheapest materials possible. But he commandeered that, he was very fussy about the way he wanted to have that studio. And he built a little house where 00:33:00he could sleep with his companion, Winifred.[10]. And that's the way it happened. It's nice to inaugurate without first [?]...

CLEEK: Now, you mentioned that this record that you made was done outside here at East Mountain Drive.

LANE: No, this was done in the studio.

CLEEK: Oh, oh...

LANE: It was taped here. We had people in adult education and people like Bernie [?Clayee?] who were electronic engineers and who were also interested in music. So Bernie Clayee recorded this on a tape which was at that time not particularly good but as a matter of fact we recorded it up here in the studio, my studio.

CLEEK: Oh your studio...

LANE: Yeah, right up here [?] up here. You know, it's okay; you can have a large concert you can go to a mission and record a concert. [?] and Jameson and the 00:34:00Harvard [?] a cappella group sound just absolutely magnificent [?] Erich liked the studio because it was big and it had a kind of a resonance and it's all wood up there, as you'll see it has a nice space fifteen hundred square feet. So we recorded up there and then they made a record from the tape. The record company was made up but the record was cut by friends of John Lazell, you see Lazell Records. He was an innovative person in the area too. He used to climb up on the electric poles and plug in and shave that way. He didn't have any house to live in. I mean he did things -- he was the first solar collector in the area. In the late 1950s he was collecting solar energy...

CLEEK: Now, he lived here?

LANE: John Lazell, yeah. He made big instruments, he was music... he was involved with Erich. He liked Erich a lot, and Erich liked him because he was...

CLEEK: Now was he the one that lived in the tree house?

LANE: No, too many people have lived in the tree house, that was Stanford Hayes, who lived in [? sex] house tree house downtown. And that was Stanford Hayes but he wasn't connected with the area at all, I mean as far as living here... The artists who...

CLEEK: So, so was solar heating...?

LANE: Well, John Lazell introduced that.

CLEEK: So did other people.

LANE: Well, not at that time, but eight years ago the house across the way, my son's house, was built with solar energy and uses solar energy. It was built 00:36:00entirely with sun power, and there are about ten or twelve people in the area now that get their energy through solar collectors. They don't just heat their water their whole house is run this way. Bonny Friedman who's my nearest neighbor has a solar collector for some of her appliances, but her whole house doesn't run on it.

CLEEK: Now she's got to be one of the old [timers] here.

LANE: Yes, yes, she is.

CLEEK: There were still names of people that started up here in the 1950s that are the old timers, and you're one of them.

LANE: I'm one of them and so is Bonny Friedman. Her husband, was a potter, Jay Friedman, used to make pots and used to make ceramics and was an artist and had studied it. Now Bill Richardson was a writer, and I'm a writer and a musician, but, and Bobby was a writer, and they have been people in the area that have 00:37:00gone into creative things but I don't think that that's any more unusual than if you went through an apartment house downtown and interviewed the people you'd find they were artists and craftsmen amongst the people in an apartment house. It's just natural for the human being to be creative in some kind of way. I'm sure you will agree with that, I mean where...

CLEEK: But I think arts are here though.

LANE: Well, it was more conducive to doing what you wanted to do in terms of not being hounded by, the way they are hounding us now about whether we conform or not to certain kinds of downtown codes which don't apply to the area ecologically speaking. But they are much more uptight now, everyone is much more conservative, people do not -- I could not rebuild this house. I mean if this house burns down I'd probably have to move downtown to rent, because they won't 00:38:00give me a building permit. The adobe alone -- they don't permit you to build adobe unless you reinforce it, use post and beam and put all kinds of stuff in the mixer, prohibitive. The reason why this area was good was that a person could build a structure, that was strong and you could get a use permit without so much fuss. And this house is perfectly legal as far as my own -- and most of the houses of the old timers are perfectly legal 'cause we conformed to the codes that were then operative, which were not very many. No one would consider this an establishment, a regal place, from the stand point of the county codes that are now existing. This is -- I built this in 1953 you can't keep building your house every year, right just to conform to someone's idea. Anyway that was 00:39:00conducive -- when you have a little bit of freedom then you do more of what you feel instinctually and have the natural to you. And so that kind of encouragement, I think, might have brought about more writing, more music and so on. We did have music in the area, we did have lots of ceramics, Bill Neely, Ed Shertz, Jay Friedman, are just a few off the top of my head that were devoted to crafts and...

CLEEK: Now did they use the soil right here?

LANE: Yes, they did. And they also used other soil, too. Bill Neely used the dirt from the area. But it's not completely conducive to all kinds of pottery. Ed Shertz does porcelain he's a very fine...

CLEEK: It's different clay entirely.

LANE: He uses different clay entirely. But he lives in the area and teaches at 00:40:00Adult Education. Bobby made it conducive to doing the kind of work and the kind of avocation that you really wanted to do. In other words, if you don't have to spend eight hundred dollars a month for rent and don't have to use that time to make the money in order to make the space that you need to do your work which -- that's a long process. I mean, one has to work, so to speak, to earn a living which is sort of ridiculous to earn the right to live, but Bobby was kind of good in the most economical and positive way possible, and I think that his point is well taken. It's not an accepted mode of behavior nowadays, but neither were the Indians accepted as a mode of behavior. Gavin is right, all you need is 00:41:00a goat, some chickens and a garden plot, and not to be hounded by people who think you should conform, and have running water and electricity, and so on and so that you don't contaminate the area and so on. The people in the area were more ecologically minded then people downtown at that time. They never harmed the area at all. We know that we don't belong here for one thing, because of the ceanothus which is..., you know, this is an area that is supposed to burn naturally. Naturally, the Indians burned it off every ten or twenty years, it burns. That's why the fire in this area is also in the foothills because that's the way it's supposed be. Of course, when you have arsons that makes it more difficult. I'm terrified living up here, to tell you the truth. Absolute terrified. There are only two or three months out of the year that I have a little peace and that's when it first begins raining, first begins because, if it rains inordinately long, then the water comes in the house in some kind of way.

CLEEK: To change the subject, another artist that you know quite well is Arthur Secunda,[11] and suspect from reading your little book that you might have met him in France.

LANE: Yes I met him in France Ken Nolan, the artist, introduced me to him and Arthur.

CLEEK: Now where did you know Kenneth Nolan from?

LANE: From Black Mountain College, that's the way Black Mountain College comes into play here. But I met Arthur in Paris and became friends with him and then collaborated with Arthur on various kinds of projects. First of all...

CLEEK: Now did he come here? How did he come here?

LANE: I got him to come here.

CLEEK: So there are several people that you introduced here?

LANE: Yeah, I was instrumental in encouraging various people namely -- Arthur Secunda wrote me from England and said I need a job in America; can you get me a job in America? I said Arthur, you must be out of your mind America is a big place. He said don't be funny you know what I mean, I mean where you're living. 00:43:00So I wrote him a letter and I lied to him and I said I got you a job as an art teacher at the two schools in Ojai and he came on the basis of that. He left England and came with his new wife. I didn't get him a job at all and anyway...

CLEEK: Did he live up here?

LANE: No, he lived in Toro Canyon. And he, I got him a job as a milkman finally just...

CLEEK: Oh, you told that story about him as being a milkman.

LANE: Right, right, I got him a job as a milkman, because I worked with the railroad at the time and I had a lot of connections with the Teamsters Union and so on. So I got him a job with the Golden State Company, at that time it was called Golden State, not Foremost, and they still had bottles. He ruined his back by that job, but it gave him a start. Then he got a job as a curator for the Museum, and then he taught adult education art classes. He's the only person 00:44:00that I know that got the old Montecito ladies with the blue hair and glasses on their knees, got them on their knees, in adult education classes dripping paint and giggling and laughing and having a marvelous time. He was terrific with the older people.

CLEEK: So what was he doing, watercolor?

LANE: Well, he was doing all kinds of things. He...

CLEEK: Drip painting maybe, I guess, it was the drip painting period.

LANE: Doing drip painting and they were all on their hands and knees. Anyway he was -- he played with Erich's group too. And his wife played, and I played a number of concerts with his wife, and members of this [talked over].

CLEEK: Now is that the late 1950s when he came?

LANE: Yes, late 1950s about 1958, 1959 or 1960s. He and I collaborated. He's now a very famous painter, I figure he's a millionaire right now.

CLEEK: How did you collaborate?

LANE: Well, we wrote books together.

CLEEK: Yes, they're at the Art Museum about four of them.

LANE: Well, there are seven of them. We did that just as a funny thing. We never sold these books. He used them to entrepreneur his own work. He got some votes when the time Carter was running for President when we wrote our first book called, "The President." Did you see that one?

CLEEK: Yes, I Xeroxed the cover of it.

LANE: Yeah, well you should have taken a look on the inside. It shows Arthur eating grapefruit.

CLEEK: I looked inside also...

LANE: The text is taken from the Encyclopedia Britannica the duties of the President. I just copied them completely verbatim from the Encyclopedia Britannica and changed one word at the end which made it a little bit funny. The last word is changed...

CLEEK: Now, I wonder, was it little Dadaist? Or is it Zen Buhddist? What was the influence?

LANE: Of what?

CLEEK: Of these books. They are funny, but it's a certain kind of humor.

LANE: Oh, it's just social spoofing, off the wall, to be as crazy as you can.

CLEEK: I see. Wouldn't you say it was a little Dadaist?

LANE: No, absolutely not. I'm not a Dadaist. I mean, he would send me these pictures, which were very, very commonplace pictures. Someone, having a party in a house, with everyone sitting around with a bored expression. And he'd say, "Can you make a story out of this?" And I would do it. So, the creative continuity of the book, I consider the book more seventy percent my creation then...thinks that their own creation is seventy percent of the situation. But the idea was a collaboration. We never talked about it. The books, though they were crazy, were seriously reviewed by art magazines, and so on. It was just marvelous to be able to do it. The reason I kept on doing it, without any money, 00:47:00is because it would get done very quickly. He would send me a bunch of pictures, say "Can you make a story out of this?" I'd look at them, put them in different order, what not, and make a story out of them, and send them back to him, and he would say, "This is great," and he would get them published right away. And within two months they would be out from the press. So he liked the quickness without any kind of fussing around, this idea of getting something done, of making something accessible, making something useful, giving someone else pleasure without straining. I think, those are Mountain Drive characteristics and Arthur appreciated that and he appreciated that but he appreciated -- he was international he spoke six languages. He would have fit up here perfectly. He just came a little later and he wasn't interested in building any house. He was interested in painting and did that all the time that he was in Santa Barbara.

CLEEK: So did he live here then?

LANE: He lived in Santa Barbara for about...

CLEEK: No, no I meant on East Mountain Drive.

LANE: No, he didn't but he came and played with our group. And he was the worst recorder player that I've ever heard, but he was so funny that Erich loved him. He used to bring Erich little gifts. He used to get a toy saxophone, stuff it with cement, paint it gold -- you couldn't play it at all, he saw to that -- and presented it to Erich for his birthday or some anniversary. And Erich just loved him for that. Erich loved peculiar things. As a matter of fact, we had an instrument that Erich made out of old New York telephone bells. He took the bells out of the telephone, put them on a stick.

CLEEK: Oh, I think you mention it in your book!

LANE: Yeah, yeah. He called them "tibits." Someone asked him what are those instruments? He said, "Oh those." [They said,] "They sound Tibetian?" [He said,] "Yeah, those are called tibits." Being of German background he'd make new words up.

CLEEK: Getting back to Arthur Secunda, I thought you wrote a very nice catalog 00:49:00of his torn paper works.

LANE: Yes well, he asked me to do that.

CLEEK: So you could almost be an art critic?

LANE: I've written reviews of shows, Ray Sells shows. Ray Sells is a sculptor who I...

CLEEK: Is he local?

LANE: No, he's not. He's no longer living either.

CLEEK: Where was he from?

LANE: I met him in Santa Barbara. My brothers came out here to work, to see what California was like.

CLEEK: Oh your brother was here.

LANE: My brothers, my twin brothers.

CLEEK: One was an artist, right?

LANE: One is an artist, and one is a mime, a pantomimist. They are both involved in the creative arts. And Ray Sells was here in Santa Barbara playing bass at the Spigot, you know, bass fiddle at the Spigot before there was any electronic 00:50:00stuff. And I met him. And he became my best friend. And he became a sculptor, from a framemaker he got to be a sculptor.

CLEEK: What sort of work did he do?

LANE: He worked with plywood, only with plywood. He made sculptures out of plywood. They are very, very incredibly beautiful works.

CLEEK: Does he still work here?

LANE: No, no, he's no longer living, he died at the age of fifty-two of cancer of the lymph system...

CLEEK: Did he show here?

LANE: He showed in San Francisco mainly and he's had pieces at the expo in Japan.

CLEEK: He didn't show locally?

LANE: No, because he wasn't doing sculpture at the time he was living in Santa Barbara. But in any case, all these people interconnect because it's a small world and if you seem to be a pivotal pointer, people communicate. I communicate 00:51:00a great deal with people by letter. I keep up that correspondence. For instance, with all my sister's children I've always communicated with them. So they have a feeling that I'm in touch with things, which I'm not. [I'm not] any more in touch with things than anyone else is, but I give that illusion. So people would ask me and I would convey -- I'd give the news. I consider myself a little bit of an historian, that is to say, the book that you refer to, Going to Town, is historical really. It gives anecdotes about things that have happened in the past that have been memorable. For instance, the part about City games is not completely an anecdote, but kind of a chronicle of the games we used to play in the City. I don't know how many people have written about City games, but I'm sure a lot of people...

CLEEK: I'm sure it has historic interest.

LANE: Sure normally people...

CLEEK: Because children don't play those anymore.

LANE: Right, So it is of historic interest.

CLEEK: And it was very nostalgic, I think.

LANE: Well, yeah, the idea is that people don't know about the games kids have to make up in New York just to keep their sanity. There wasn't any earth, there's just cement, so you have to do something to make your life bearable. It was very unbearable, actually although the children who are born in the City never think that, they think it's the most marvelous thing in the world. I was just completely dumbfounded at the fact that one could walk around on actual dirt. I mean when I came here, Mountain Drive was a dirt road. I thought it was amazing, just amazing that people lived off a dirt road. Although I'd seen dirt roads in pictures...

CLEEK: And that was in the fifties? I didn't come until the late sixties.

LANE: Well, the idea is that, I was so citified that I didn't realize that I lived on an island until I was fourteen.

CLEEK: In New York?

LANE: Yeah, when the junior high school class went around Manhattan Island on a day trip -- took all the school on a day trip -- I didn't realize that I lived on an island until I was fourteen years old. That shows you how inured you are if you are born in the city. You just don't realize these things. But coming out here I was very, very dubious, especially about Santa Barbara which was for me -- when I got the feeling of the area here -- it was like See's Candy. I mean, I compared Santa Barbara to See's Candy. The people payed lip service to the arts, but they didn't do anything about it. I tried to get a choral group started and everyone was enthusiastic, but no one would show up or they would show up late for the rehearsals. I was very discouraged. For instance, I had to call you up to tell you to come here. It was nine o'clock and when you say nine o'clock, you mean it. That's a city trait. [PC: I see] Johnny-on-the-spot. If you say you're 00:54:00going to dump a pot of garbage on someone's head, you'd better do it. You should stand behind your word. Anyway, things were so casual out here that I couldn't relate for a long time. I couldn't talk to anyone about it as no one talked about their problems. They talked about golf, surfing, swimming and their latest date, but not about any internal psychological stuff, and that was my background. Problems were my background.

CLEEK: Do you have camaraderie with your neighbors?

LANE: That was by chance only because we had a common project. We had the opportunity to build houses inexpensively, and to buy property fairly inexpensively without interest.

CLEEK: Later on didn't you gather for yearly events? Would you like to tell 00:55:00about that?

LANE: Well, I'm not very good at that. I didn't participate in all of them although I knew they were going on. We made wine annually and that was under the aegis of Bill Neely, who liked to be the one to run that show. There was Bobby's olive picking and persimmon collecting and apple collecting and orange hauling and so on.

CLEEK: What did he do with all the oranges?

LANE: He distributed them and he kept some of them. He believed that you should eat about ten oranges a day if they were available. I saw him eat oranges continually. We had a Bobby Burn's night because there was a Scotsman in the 00:56:00area. Frank Robinson knew someone who played the pipes and so they piped in the haggis which is the pouch of an animal. I guess the pancreas or something stuffed with all kinds of weird material. It's indescribable. That was Bobby Burn's night. Then there was Twelfth Night.

CLEEK: What was the Twelfth Night?

LANE: The Twelfth Night is after Christmas when we would burn the tree in the fireplace. In Bobby's house there was a big fireplace that you could get two trees in it.

CLEEK: Did you use his Castle?

LANE: Yes, we used his Castle for those festivities because he had a 00:57:00tremendously large fireplace and also a large space, and he welcomed that. We used that place a lot until he sold it and then we couldn't use it anymore because there were renters in it. The renters don't use the place the way it should be used, anyway they're not very festive. You can't expect the same traditions to go on and on. We observed the anniversaries of these common place ceremonies.

CLEEK: Now did you do these in costumes?

LANE: We did have a lot of costume parties. New Years was one of them and then 00:58:00we used to make up costume parties up. We used to say this is a party but you come this way or come -- There was Bastille Day, too which we just finished celebrating. You can see the difference because in the old days Bastille Day was [when] the plebeians raided the aristocracy, and at a certain point in the party everyone who was on the plebeians side, the artisans and the working class -- [and on the other side] the ones who still felt they were aristocratic. So there would be a free for all and that was Bastille Day. Then there was a Bean King chosen every year and a Bean Queen. The Bean King would chose the queen and there would always be a young couple chosen. They would reign for a whole year. 00:59:00We had various things like that happening and I think most of these were just [a time] to get together. You know, it was just nice to have a bright occasion and people took advantage of that. Bobby had parties every weekend without fail. There was always a party down there on the weekend, always. In order to compete with him we had to make up reasons for getting together. Lots of children were born in the area. What's interesting is that the children of the people who originally moved up here, at least some of them, have not moved away, the way you would expect. Your daughters and sons want to get the hell away from you because they can't stand it, they love you but they can't stand it they want to be on their own. Some of our children went to Europe or they went back East, but 01:00:00they came back here and built their own houses. I have a daughter and a son who built a house within a quarter mile of this threshold.

CLEEK: Did they build it themselves?

LANE: They built it themselves.

CLEEK: What about Bill Neely's son?

LANE: He's done some building. Bill Neely's son, I guess he added on to what Bill built but he's living where Bill lived. Bill is no longer living, of course.

CLEEK: Are there other second generation children here?

LANE: Bill Richardson had two children and they're in the area also. They still live at home when they're here. Gavin Richardson is a gardener. All of the children keep coming back here but many of them try to do things on their own, I 01:01:00guess they were influenced. If your parents are doing things and they're enjoying it, then the children notice this. If you tell the children what to do. If you say, here, I'm going to give you piano lessons, they fight it. They have to see that you are so interested and that you are so absorbed, then they get interested in that. I learned that fairly early and I never pushed my children in the direction of what I thought would be good for them, because I knew they would never take it. They were interested in what I was involved with. And so I was reading books on Zen Buddhism, my daughter is more scholarly.

CLEEK: You are a Zen Buddhist, aren't you?

LANE: No, I'm not a Zen Buddhist. But I studied [interrupted and talked over] I did calligraphy.

CLEEK: You did calligraphy?

LANE: I studied calligraphy only because I wanted a way of entering the East.

CLEEK: There are examples around your room that were given by your teacher?

LANE: Yes, by my teacher, and also executed by myself. These two were executed 01:02:00by me. This one was done by my teacher. Jerry Freeman gave me the photographic paper to mat it. [tape is turned off, no explanation] These calligraphies here are done by my teacher, but I studied it for two and a half years only because I wanted to get a feeling of the East. If you're interested in studying a culture, you have to get into an activity. If you're interested in Japanese culture you should either take up the tea ceremony, flower arranging, koto, or samurai.

CLEEK: Have you done any of that, as well?

LANE: I teach Tai Chi Chuan here in town.

CLEEK: At Adult Ed?

LANE: I used to teach it at the City College including yoga, but the State cut it out for lack of funds or something. It's a Chinese art form very close to 01:03:00calligraphy in spirit. As a matter of fact it's so close to it that I could see the analogies between body movements and what you do when you have a sumi brush in your hand. So I've always been interested in the arts and my brothers...

CLEEK: You really have to learn to attack in calligraphy?

LANE: No, you don't do that. It's a whole art form by itself. You have to have a teacher in order to do it. I studied with Hoto Kobashi in San Francisco for a couple of years, but at the end of that time I wasn't strong enough to go it on my own and he went back to Japan so that was the end of that. But prior to studying with him I studied with Jo Jetsu Ono here and the Priest at the Zen Buddhist Temple here in town before him, I forget what his name was. My friend 01:04:00Ray Foster said, "Why don't you come and take some calligraphy down here, it's very interesting." So I started here in Santa Barbara to do that, and then when I got a little bit better and knew what I was doing I had a friend Ruth Asawa Lanier in San Francisco, who is a sculptor and artist and very, very, big in the city PTA. She is a great artist, a great, great artist she does wire sculpture. She is ill. But she had this teacher and she said, "When you come up I'll take you over and you can take a couple of lessons from him." He's in the book, too. He was a remarkable man, just remarkable. He was a master calligrapher. He was going to write the book, Zen and the Art of Calligraphy, 01:05:00which was an idea he thought he might do. He may even have done it. But he passed away. He was the Abbot at one of the large Southern Zen Monasteries in Japan on one of those islands, the biggest one in the country.

CLEEK: Now, getting back to East Mountain Drive, when the Coyote Fire[12] occurred, you were very lucky in saving your house.

LANE: Well, we had to leave the area it was so hot.

CLEEK: Bobby Hyde's home burned?

LANE: Yes, there were a lot of houses that burned. Bill Richardson's house burned. Doug Grant's, who wasn't living here at the time, his house burned. It got within five feet of our house. It was just a change of wind that saved the 01:06:00house. That's why I shake in my boots to live up here because it is so dry.

CLEEK: I was interested in the Grapevine, [13] you had an issue relating to the Coyote Fire. But it should have been called the [Bovine?] Fire because it started in the lands up above.

LANE: Well, I don't think it did. But everyone has different ideas about that.

CLEEK: But you helped with the reseeding?

LANE: Well, after I saw my house burn down I went the following morning into the area which was blocked off, but the Fire Department and the Police Department have to sleep, too. So I got into the area because I got up very early -- I 01:07:00couldn't sleep anyway. When I was up here there were a few people putting out spot fires and we spent all day putting out fires. The people that were up here saved the houses that remained, because there was fire all over the place. So we put out fires around my house, and went down below and put out fires around there, you know. We did what we could, and it was devastating. I was very fortunate, but I thought, from the Knapp Drive area, right across the way, I thought I saw my house burn down and I said, "Boy, that's a relief." I didn't mean it was a relief that my house burned down but that it was a relief that I wouldn't have to think about it anymore. I told that story to John Cage, who's the musician in New York -- he came out with Merce Cunningham's 01:08:00company[14] and he... I called my mother up one day, years later and she said, "Oh, Mervin, John Cage was just talking about you on the radio and he told that story about how you thought your house had burned down and you said, 'That's a relief!' He told that anecdote." I said, "that's amazing," because I just called my mother while she was listening to this program, and I don't call my mother except on Sundays and this was a Thursday and a peculiar time of day. So my mother was very pleased about that synchronous event, she thought there was something interesting about how I called at the time that John was on the radio.

CLEEK: Merce Cunningham is coming this year?

LANE: Next April.

CLEEK: [You knew him] from Black Mountain School?

LANE: Yes, from Black Mountain College. He stayed here with his company at one time. He's very, very famous now. He wasn't famous then. And that's the way things happen. You just keep at doing the thing that you want, and all of a sudden if you keep at it long enough and if you have enough of a vision, you become famous. But of course it's always ironical. Paul Goodman, the writer, said if you really want to become known after you have already written your novels, poems, and plays you have to pass the word around -- you go to Mexico and stay away for a couple of years and you somehow pass the word around that you are no longer living. Then you become immediately famous. Then, you go back after that, after you receive all the notoriety. It's usually after you're gone 01:10:00that people begin talking about you, begin paying attention to what you say. But that wasn't the case with Bobby, people payed attention to what he said while he was doing it.

CLEEK: His most famous book was about adopting children?

LANE: Yes, Six More at Sixty.[15] One of those children became a rock star, Cecilio,[16] or Juno, became a rock star he still is playing music in Hawaii. He was on Columbia Records for three or four records, but he couldn't stand the graft and the corruption in the industry. They wanted seventy percent, eighty percent of what he made, just terrible there is so much corruption in the country.

CLEEK: So does he still do it?

LANE: He still does it but he has his own company, and so on.

CLEEK: But he's not so much in the limelight?

LANE: No, he's not so much in the limelight, of course. But he didn't care about 01:11:00that, he just wanted to make music. Anyway, it was so beautiful because before Floppy died he came back and I overheard a conversation with him and he said, "Mom, I just want to tell you something although I'm famous and have made all this money, I'm still the same Juno [Cecilio] that you knew when you first adopted me. I'm still the same." He was so sweet. Floppy of course was proud of him, but not any more so than she was proud of any of her other children. Bobby was very, very innovative that way, too. he read about this family of six people who were abandoned by their parents. Can you imagine that? That is the worst trauma that a child can experience is abandonment and he just took them over. And of course some of them turned out to be thankful. The oldest daughter was not thankful and left to go to Mexico as soon as she could. The other children 01:12:00were too young to do that but some of them were resentful. Of course, children when you do something for them they sometimes are resentful and sometimes thankful, you can never count on anything. But Juno [Cecilio] was very, very warm and when they grew up, they were very thankful for what Bobby and Floppy did.

CLEEK: How did Floppy interact with the community?

LANE: She was absolutely the most essential. I mean, Bobby did all these things but she was kind of -- if he did something that was a little too far out she would enter the picture and say, "Bobby, I don't think that's proper," or "I don't think that's right." She came from a very, very proper New England family.

CLEEK: Was it difficult [for her] to fit in?

LANE: No, no, she had a quirky side. She liked Bobby's originality and that was 01:13:00important to her and she put up with his antics. She was an indefatigable worker she was always doing something, always. I never saw her laying back relaxing except when talking with someone. I had more admiration for Floppy than I did for Bobby because she was always in the background, and she was always doing these things that Bobby was always talking about. She was the one that was cutting up the stuff that he brought back, she was the one fixing the table, she put out the work.

CLEEK: You mean the feeding?

LANE: All the feeding and all the domestic chores. She was doing all that stuff. He brought back the food, or the material but she had to do the work. And she did it and she never complained about it not for a single minute. She gave good advice to her own sons, and so on. They were devoted to her. She had a marvelous 01:14:00relationship with Lou Grant,[16] who was the one that called me about the Carpinteria Historical program, and so on.

CLEEK: That was her sister?

LANE: Yes, her sister. Her sister is a remarkable woman herself who could give you a lot of insight into the early years here, I think. Although Lou wasn't a part of it she came up and visited. Campbell Grant, of course, who is a very famous man now because of his work with the Chumash and the two or three books he has written about the Indians here. But any way Floppy was an am...

CLEEK: Now, He's an artist?

LANE: Yes, he's an artist too. Yes, he's a painter.

CLEEK: Is Tuckerman the mother or a sister?

LANE: I don't know, that's the Bothin connection. The Bothin connection is up on Bothin Tea House there is a plaque with three or four lines of poetry by Francis [Frederick] Goddard Tuckerman who was a transcendentalist poet. A very, very, 01:15:00fine poet that no one knows about except N. Scott Momaday who was the Kiowa Indian who was on my master's orals board. Kiowa Indian, N. Scott Momaday, he wrote The Way to Rainy Mountain, and The House Made at Dawn. [He] got the Pulitzer Prize. He did his research, as a graduate student, on Francis [Frederick] Goddard Tuckerman's poetry, who is related to Floppy, a grandfather or great grandfather or something like that. She didn't know anything about Tuckerman. She knew she was related to him, but she didn't know anything about his poetry. Scott Momaday put out this very this complete edition of Tuckerman's work, which I've read. I've read part of his poetry; Tuckerman's an incredibly gifted poet. [PC tries to ask a question and talks over ML who is saying something about the time of ? and time of Emerson] And that poetry was on Bothin's property, and I discovered that. Well, I said Bothin probably knew 01:16:00Tuckerman. So I told Momaday, who was my teacher.

CLEEK: But he was in San Francisco?

LANE: Well, Bothin was down here at that time but she was living at the El Encanto Hotel, and was senile so she couldn't give any information to him. Although he visited her to get more information about Tuckerman, because she was directly related to Tuckerman at least in terms of her social acquaintance. I mean she had a [? crock ?] of his poetry so she must have known something about him. But Momaday went up to the El Encanto and she couldn't articulate anything, she was a little bit too old.

CLEEK: Now what about your own writing?

LANE: Well, I've been doing it ever since I was fourteen.

CLEEK: Do you write short stories?

LANE: I write poetry mostly. I've got a lot of unpublished collections out because I'm mainly a teacher, you know, and in order to get known you have to do a lot of hustling, and I only use the mails. Although I went back to New York 01:17:00last year to try to get my brother's book, which I wrote a text to my brother's cartoon -- He did some beautiful little illustrations a series of drawings called Hunting Bird and His Friends. It was a kind of children's book. It's not published, but I tried to go back there and get it published. It was such a terrific, terrific book. Anyway, my own work is mainly poetry. I have a story coming out in Connexions this December. It's a story about our new Savior, born in December 25, 1985, in New York City by caesarean section to a couple, but in this case the man gives birth to the child. There is in the popular culture 01:18:00right now the idea of male pregnancy which has been in Omni magazine and a couple of French newspapers and an English newspaper which I didn't know about, but after I'd written this story I began to hear all kinds of things about male pregnancy, because a woman went to term without having the child in the uterus. I think she aborted or something happened but it went fully to term so the child was getting nourishment from not the uterus but the intestine. So they figured well it's possible for a man to have an in vitro implantation and to have a child. Anyway, this individual in New York is visited by Gabriel, the same one except he says you can call me Gabby. And gives an annunciation, she is going to 01:19:00be the daughter of god, she's given a name, Miranda, which means miracle. He goes through nine months of getting bigger and bigger with the daughter of God. It parallels St. Luke. There are characters in it that parallel Zechariah and Elizabeth. There are parallels of the Slaughter of the Innocence, by the news media this time. And there are parallels with the Flight Into Egypt, which in this case, is a flight to Montreal by the couple who are trying to escape this so they can raise this remarkable daughter who turns out to be black, born to a white couple. We see that color comes from an eye contact that he has with a sales lady in Orbachs. She transfers her melanin, her skin color to the fetus. It's a pretty far out story. You should read it in December, it will be in Connexions.

CLEEK: Now, speaking about your poetry, have you been in any of the poetry 01:20:00reviews ?

LANE: Oh yeah, I've had about sixty-five poems published, not very many, but poems published in all kinds of magazines all over the place.

CLEEK: But you've never done a book?

LANE: The book has not been published, but I've published a long poem, myself, called the Houston Passage which I had published just like I published this Going to Town by myself. I'll show it to you.

CLEEK: Is it done locally?

LANE: Yeah, It's done by Elmer Pickard printed it. All the publishing I've done has been self-done, so far. You know, you hope to eventually get a collection published. As a matter of fact, this summer I had planned to collect the poetry now which I've never done before. I mean, take all my various little small collections and works and put them together in a larger form and send them out. I have a spur for that because San Jose University has started a press for 01:21:00this kind of thing, and they have elicited submissions, now for this new press. Anyway, that's what I'm going to be doing. I love to write, poetry is the thing that I've done all the time. I've written scenarios and a play, but mainly it's that genre. The poetry is my...

CLEEK: There are local women who have had their plays performed, locally -- The Woman of the Well. It's about a family, oh I've forgotten...

LANE: Yeah, there are quite a few local artists...

CLEEK: That one gal got an award.

LANE: Yeah, well. Well, one of my colleagues that wrote that book about the 01:22:00Waitress, which Noel Young published...,

CLEEK: Oh yeah, yes, now Noel Young reviewed your story. Did he live here?

LANE: Well, he was very, very, familiar with the area and came to all of the parties that Bobby Hyde gave. He has been here longer than I -- been in Santa Barbara longer than I was. So that he has a familiarity with all the characters up here. He's still friends with Bill Richardson and he knows all the people in the area here. I tried to get him to publish my work, but he thinks I'm too much like T.S. Elliot. I'm not at all like T.S. Elliot. He doesn't even know about T.S. Elliot if he says that. He's a funny man. He did remarkable printing for the Black Sparrow Press when the Black Sparrow Press was in Los Angeles. He's a remarkable printer. His son is doing that work now. He is more commercial now 01:23:00and not interested in doing fine artistic work. He wants to make some money and not worry about it so much and that's what he's doing. Hence you have the Waitress, hence you have his architectural books, he's trying to do things for himself and you can't blame him for that. But he's a remarkably fine printer, and my respect for him is as a printer, not as a writer, although he has aspirations in that area, too. He's a good writer, not fiction, but non-fiction. Why don't I just show you the upstairs, Mrs. Cleek. What can I call you, what is your first name.

CLEEK: Pat. Well, thank you very much. [phone rings in the background and tape is turned off]

LANE: [tape resumes] You wanted to find out about my teaching.

CLEEK: At City College.

LANE: Well, after I got finished working for the railroad for which I worked six 01:24:00years in town here, I went to the Devereux Foundation. They were looking for an instructor for emotionally disturbed, but people who were capable of learning and I went out there and they hired me. I stayed out there a year and I got fascinated with the idea of rehabilitating some of the emotionally damaged people there. [I] directed plays and did music and did free creative piano improvisations with a boy by the name of Harry Schnell.

CLEEK: You tell about it in your Going to Town.

LANE: Yes, right. That is what turned me on to teaching because I saw that one could help another human being in a definite way, and that was such a great thing for me to have done. I know that people help other people out, but when you make a difference in a person's life, a marked difference where he turns 01:25:00open to everything where he has been closed to everything before. Then that makes you feel good...

CLEEK: [can't understand] I thought you were very innovative, by the way, in your poetry.

LANE: The piano used as a medium of expressing one's own problems is out of the whole idea of therapy. But I was definitely interested in pursuing that because the psychologists were getting things from me that they couldn't get from Harry. Anyway all of that business out there and the Deveraux School gave me a motivation to go back to school so that I could be in a position to spend most of my time helping people during the eight or ten hours -- you know, that's what 01:26:00I wanted to do. Because if it were possible to help people then I wanted to have more options. I just didn't want to work in a private foundation. So I decided to go back and get a degree. And I went back to New York to see what would be involved in becoming a therapist and Art Carney who was the head of the intern program for the psychiatrists in uptown Manhattan said it would take ten years before I would be working. I was thirty-one or thirty-two at the time and I figured well I'll be working when I'm forty-two, you know, that's too long. So my age was against me. I also would probably have had trouble getting into graduate school because they don't want the older people. If they are going to put that much effort into training you they want to get at least twenty years out of you in terms of the profession, right. So I decided I wouldn't become a 01:27:00doctor although I tried to see what I could do in that area. He said well, you can do this and it will take this long and if you get a doctoral degree it will take you eight years, but you might as well get an M.D. because you'll then be able to have more options. I saw that it was impossible in terms -- I had two children at the time and I knew there would be difficulties. So I chose my second enthusiasm which was literature and went back to school and I got a degree...

CLEEK: In New York?

LANE: No here at UCSB. I'd already been to Black Mountain and the University of Leiden in Holland and they didn't accept any of those units or credits. So I had to, at the age of thirty-one or thirty-two, go through the whole business all over again which was incredibly difficult for me psychologically because sitting in an English One class when your ten or twelve years older than everyone else -- 01:28:00there was no re-entry program -- it was just a ridiculous waste of time. But I managed to hold on, barely, in terms of my sanity and graduated there magna cum laude which meant money to me. It meant that I could get grants, and I got grants, Ford Foundation Grants and so on, to do the laundry here, okay. My wife was working as a school teacher, as a dancer but when I was going to school I wasn't making any money. So I got a master's degree finally and then I applied to two schools, one in Ventura and one up here. And I got a job here and I've been here for twenty-two years teaching literature, and philosophy, and yoga, and Tai Chi Chaun; all these things happened, not all together but in a row so to speak. And I love teaching because I'm very enthusiastic about helping people.

CLEEK: Yeah, I noticed your English philosophy course with...

LANE: Yes, I taught that last spring. I did work in Ezra Pound. I had a sabbatical the year before and did work in The Cantos of Ezra Pound, and I tried to make The Cantos available to the students. Not many people teach The Cantos because they have been so difficult to crack that we have to wait until there have been two or three men who have devoted their ten or fifteen years elucidating just the normal nomenclature in The Cantos so that we can define what he's referring to. So I did work with a companion guide that had come out 01:30:00just during my sabbatical year and then put this course together to teach these three great American poets who are the most important ones, that I think exist. I don't think there are any more important poets who were born here in this country although Pound sort of exiled himself and Elliot was...

CLEEK: Now, did you know that Schneidau at the University taught on Pound and he's recently moved to the University of Arizona?

LANE: Yes, he wrote a book called The Image and the Real which I use a lot in terms of, you know, he was a very interesting man. I'm sure he taught some of The Cantos in his classes. Anyway, this was a project of mine for my sabbatical and I finished it last spring and I taught this course. And there were about eleven people in the course and it's been accepted by the University of California as a transferable humanities course. It was terrific for me because 01:31:00I'd never done it before. You know, when you're teaching at a junior college you get an occasional chance to do something innovative. Unfortunately you have to teach all these basics, and you don't have very much opportunity to do innovative work.

CLEEK: The junior college here has a good reputation, and I'm sure it's courses like this that have...

LANE: Maybe. I think it's more the faculty that teaches the basics are very good. But you don't have very much opportunity to do creative teaching, I'd say, unless..., you know, I mean I think of new ways to get people to write better. I'm going to teach this Going to Town it's going to be a text for English One, 01:32:00I've written a subject guide for it now, so people will be able to write about a crazy experience of their own, okay. But you get ideas on how to make people write better.

CLEEK: What about this right-brain, left-brain theory? Do you believe in that?

LANE: It's not a question of belief; it's a question of whether anything makes sense to you, whether something is intelligible. The idea of affective learning and getting people involved in a creative way was the way I was raised. I went to a school that was affective -- was more right-brained school than left-brained, okay. I mean it was teaching dance and the creative arts and what not, as a modality to get people interested in life, okay. And that was Black Mountain and so I was raised on that basis. I'm very analytical myself, but I think I have a fairly good balance between the contemplative and active life. I mean I do this 01:33:00work and I married a dancer, and I'm a musician, and also I teach literature, so there is a balance between idea and affective techniques that -- you know, you try to make your life balanced between contemplative and active, and it's an ideal. You can see why the Greeks thought about it as an ideal and I think Bobby was a good example -- Bobby Hyde and this whole area about building one's house -- the craft, the idea of using one's own hands... [tape ends]