Chris Neely Interview

--(Interview begins)--

GASSER: This is an interview with Chris Neely on the 5th of February, 1992 at his home on Mountain Drive. Done, on behalf of the Santa Barbara Oral History Clearinghouse Mountain Drive Project. My name is Teddy Gasser. So, Chris, thanks a lot for having me be able finally to to get here. I see you have your photo album in front of you.

NEELY: Right.

GASSER: To spawn some memory. What occurs to me is I look over your biographical form right away is that you were born in Yosemite National Park. And this struck me where you actually could you give me your date of birth and tell me a little bit about about...

NEELY: Well, I was born there. Every summer, my father was worked for the National Park Service, Forest Ranger there. And, actually a Ranger-Naturalist, which is different than a forest ranger. And so one summer when he was working there, with my mother, I was born in August of 1951, August 23rd. And 00:01:00he was stationed at the time at Tuolumne Meadows, in the high country. I was born down in Yosemite Valley. Interesting note is that the very first white child to be born in Yosemite Valley was also born on August 23rd, the same day that I was born, although many years earlier. At the time my father knew and here's a photo that we were looking at the last remaining Yosemite Indian, his name was Chris Lemey. And, I was named Chris, perhaps after him, I'm not sure. And I was taken when I was two days old, taken up to Sentinel Dome, a sacred Indian spot in Yosemite. Pointed to the four directions after which, coming back down, I developed a case of pneumonia. So that's my shaky beginnings there in Yosemite. Also, I have several brothers that were also born in 00:02:00Yosemite during the summer.

GASSER: Oh, really?

NEELY: Several years later.

GASSER: Which of, which of those were...?

NEELY: Dana Neely was born. My father was climbing Mount Dana at the time when he was born. So he was named Dana.

GASSER: And they were all born in the valley?

NEELY: Right.

GASSER: So only Dana was...

NEELY: And Severin. The rest here in Santa Barbara.

GASSER: The naturalist life that you're that your father led, how could you describe how that's influenced you?

NEELY: Well, he, was in, or had coined the word ecology part before it was ever done. And we grew up in Yosemite with the sense of the relationship of the natural world to human beings being different than just exploitation. He was always a naturalist. Even here in town. When he was not working as a naturalist, he approached life from that point of view. The natural world was 00:03:00extremely important to him. And became so to all of us. And I think it's carried through. And in many of his work that we are living with, such as living in an adobe house, a dirt house, as opposed to one that was made out of materials that cause far more havoc upon the Earth.

GASSER: How did it come that the family came or moved to Santa Barbara? Where you living permanently in Yosemite or...?

NEELY: No, No. We lived in Santa Barbara. My mother grew up here, was born and raised in Santa Barbara.[1] My father was born in Los Angeles, but attended the university here.[2] And so was living here when he met my parents, my mother. And so they were living at the time, I was born on Victoria Street downtown. And when I was I believe, one years old, they purchased this property on Mountain Drive. I think my tea is ready.

GASSER: Okay, I'll pause this for a second and... Okay, Chris, tell 00:04:00me about if you know the story behind the meeting. Could you tell me the story behind your father's meeting of Bobby Hyde and you're moving up to the land?

NEELY: I don't really know the exact meeting exactly when they met or how they met. I know that my father's circle of friends at the time...

GASSER: Which included?

NEELY: I'm not even sure all their names. There were people from the university. He was just more involved with what we would call at that time a more bohemian or beatnik crowd. And he when he was living there in Victoria Street, he started making wine, had always been interested in wine since he had traveled throughout Europe and so on. And he was also interested in new thinking, different thinking than the normal times that in the early fifties there. So I believe 00:05:00around 1951 he met Bobby Hyde and through a large mutual friendship of other people. And Bobby Hyde was interested in his wine-making. And my father had talked Bobby into allowing him to build a wine cellar down in the canyon, down below us here. So that was the first project. My father bought two acres of land from Bobby for $2,000, $200 down. And the first thing he built was this wine cellar in the creek bed down. And started, when that was finished, started work on a single structure that we called Cafe Mazatlan. Single room house...

GASSER: Which is where?

NEELY: Which is right below our main house here, and...

GASSER: Is that the one that. That Jeff is in?

NEELY: No, no, no. That was built later. The house down below is not 00:06:00being occupied now. It was built of adobe also. While we were living in, or building that, we were living in what became the chicken coop. It was just an outdoor palm frond shack. And my mother cooked on a charcoal stove. And hiked all the way to the top of the driveway. Two acres away for water and brought it down. And so we built the first house there. And all this while it was sort of the beginnings of this Mountain Drive community. My father talked Bobby Hyde and a few other people to go up to Kinevan Ranch in San Marcos Pass to pick grapes, they picked mission grapes up there. Made wine. To fill their wine cellar. And I think about this time also, as I recall, in fact, I remember meeting Robbie Robinson, who was four. So I was three. That's when my father first 00:07:00met Frank Robinson,[3] who had just also bought land. Another as we've in this picture here, my father clearing his property. The house up above in the top of the hill was just being built. And that's Jack Boegle's house.[4]

GASSER: The hill behind him is Jack Boegle's house?

NEELY: Right.

GASSER: I'm looking at a picture of Bill Neely on this wonderful bulldozer. Was that Bobby Hyde's bulldozer?

NEELY: Right, Daisy.

GASSER: Daisy the bulldozer. And with his beret, very cavalier.

NEELY: That's where he was. All the area above our house at the time. He had planted in vineyards which have not survived because of the clay soil. But that was his dream, was to have our own vineyards here for his wine-making.

GASSER: And when you say Mission grapes and were they of wild grapes?

NEELY: No, it's just an earlier, some of the grapes that were used in the Mission days, just an earlier grape. And then, since the European 00:08:00influence brought in zinfandel and cabernet and other grapes later. Those were the first wines we made. And then later, when the Mountain Drive community expanded, there were more people around who got a larger group together and was able to, we went to Ojai for several years to pick grapes, and I'm not sure what types there.

GASSER: So you do have very what are some memories that you have of Bobby Hyde?

NEELY: Bobby Hyde mostly he was a very eclectic, very, he was friendly to us children, though he was not very outspoken. Very quiet. Always a very reserved character. He played Go, the Japanese game of Go, and was very interested in Zen Buddhism. And a very quiet, inward person. And never really like to attend any of the Mountain Drive get-togethers. He was rarely involved with the Mountain Drive scene or group. Just occasionally we'd see him there. At a Wine 00:09:00Stomp he would show up in his camouflage jumpsuit and play recorder for a little bit and then quietly sneak away. So he wasn't really a central figure other than he had originally owned the property and had around him a group of people that took on a community sense. His wife, Floppy was much more outgoing and with the six children that they had adopted, which, she was obviously involved with them quite a bit as well as Bobby. He was writing at the time, so he'd tend to be more secluded. The kids were wonderful. I really enjoyed Naomi Rodriguez was my age and one of my closest friends.

GASSER: Where is she now?

NEELY: I don't know where she's moved. She's no longer in Santa Barbara, and I've lost touch with her. But I remember mostly playing. If I did hang out up at the Hyde's house, it was playing with the kids there.

GASSER: They had a wonderful swimming pool, I understand.

NEELY: And they had a swimming pool that they would occasionally fill in the summer, although it always leaked. And so we used it more for just running around and playing in when it was empty. And also, I think it was Paul Rodriguez had the idea of filling up this large cattle trough they had with hoses that we ran across the roof of the house to heat it up. And although it's been said, that was the first hot tub, it wasn't. The first hot tub was done with the old wine vat that my father used to make wine in. Using. He had an old tank of diesel fuel that he would drip down onto a stove pipe that was warmed underneath by this little wooden fire with a vacuum cleaner blowing air to heat the hot flames through coils of water. It took us about 5 hours to fill the tub, and those were the first hot tubs.

GASSER: How old were you at that time?

NEELY: Probably around seven or eight. Something like that when we 00:11:00first started. And so we would have we would have hot tub parties with large groups of people. So that's where it sort of spread around, although there's been hot tubs in Japan and so on for years before so...

GASSER: You don't know where he drew his inspiration from?

NEELY: Well, yes, probably There was one of the things I liked about early days of Mountain Drive is that we always had community outings. We would go, he would say, "Let's all go up to Las Cruces Hot Springs, and about 20 people would pile in cars and go up to Las Cruces Hot Springs and soak in hot tubs up there. Or drive over to Mono Hot Springs. So I think the inspiration came from just a group of people.

GASSER: So did you ever use the hot springs at Hot Springs Road?

NEELY: Oh, yes. Yeah. Years ago John Stack[5] was a caretaker up there and he was a Mountain Drive character here and so we used to go up there when it was still the building still existed before the 00:12:00Coyote Fire. And soak in the cement tubs that they had there. We had great Halloween parties.

GASSER: I don't think I've heard of the Halloween parties at the hot springs.

NEELY: Yeah, they were great. Wonderful.

GASSER: As a child, did, I know nudity was the norm for Mountain Drive and even for Bobby and Floppy Hyde, I presume? How did that strike you as a as a child?

NEELY: Didn't ever think much of it. You know, especially during the summertime and it was hot a lot, most of us kids would ride around without clothes and, I remember Robbie Robinson's story about how he was running down to my house one morning and got halfway down and realized he forgot to get dressed. So it was it was sort of a normal part of life and never really struck me as being that unusual. It wasn't until, I think, junior high, I moved out that I realized that we had a different point of view than the rest of the community.

GASSER: Could you describe how that, when you first became conscious of that and how that made you feel and how you adjusted to that?

NEELY: Well, I was kind of proud of the idea that I grew up differently than everybody else. That was I felt a little bit special because of it and tried to maintain that sense of that I had a different upbringing and I didn't try to find out what was normal. Because I wasn't that intrigued by it. I felt that the unusual upbringing that I had added something to my life and I was always pleased and content with that.

GASSER: Did that attract people to you, and if so, could you describe those people?

NEELY: Well, some of my close friends were intrigued with the more, at that time, became the hippie lifestyle or whatever. And that it was. I don't think it was an attraction other than just a mutual way of looking at things.

GASSER: And who were those? Were those downtowners?

NEELY: I had friends from Mountain Drive up here. I still have friends that I grew up with up here. And also when I went to school, I had school friends that would live in town. So, from all over.

GASSER: Back to the description of your early days. What do you remember from the building of the adobe? Were you, you said you were perhaps three or four.

NEELY: Well, we started building when I was probably about two, and I don't remember much of that. I do have memories of being here when it first was being built. The lower house. Now, this main house was built when I was probably started being built when I was around five, four or five and then continued working on the adobe and so on until I was about seven or eight. It took many years to finish the house and I remember the dirt floors here for a while where there were tiles on, and it was a lot of the picture of Mountain 00:15:00Drive has always been one of a lot of party and gaiety and so on. But it was incredible work because they were pioneers. They had to clear the land, which my father did there with old Daisy, the bulldozer. And after clearing the land, making the adobe bricks, which is really a lot of work. I remember him with the old cement mixer mixing up the mud and pouring it into frames, drying the bricks and stacking them. And then we were paid a penny a brick to help move them and help him stack them. And my mother worked constantly on this, even when my father was gone to Yosemite. Later, she would stay here and work in the house.

GASSER: And what were her functions? What did she do?

NEELY: Well, she did most of the building of this house. A lot of it. She built all the cabinetry, carved all our cabinets. You can see they're all carved. She did all the tiles, laid the floor. She did most of the a lot of the work and a lot of the carpentry, a lot of the structure work on the house, tiled the roof and so. Uh, she graveled the driveway. She was the one that really 00:16:00did a large part of it. Although my father was a, You know, when he was here, worked right along with her.

GASSER: And your own functioning besides stacking bricks, did you have other functions in helping?

NEELY: Trying to stay out of trouble. I remember times my father gave me a large box and told me to go fill it full of weed seeds up there just to get me out of the way for a while. But I would help just like, say, doing the tiles on the roof. My job was to move a stack of tiles over to where they were laying them. Or doing the bricks on the wall here, they had to mix up the mud for the mortar between the bricks, and I got to tromp with my little feet in the wheelbarrow and mix up their mud. There's always something to do.

GASSER: Well, could you describe. Was that an exciting time for you or...?

NEELY: It was mostly just a lot of work, as I recall. And I remember seeing how hard they worked, too. And I think that's part of their sense of 00:17:00celebration that Mountain Drive developed was because everybody had worked so hard that they also wanted to celebrate the fact that they had hand-built everything. Which took so much sweat that they felt this release through celebration. My father was always quite an outgoing, very outgoing and celebration was meant everything to him. He constantly had, one day it would be a Greek party. He decided that we're all Greek, and he put on Greek music and invite friends over and we'd be Greek for a day. And then I never would know one day he'd say, "Let's go to Baja." We'd pack up and go down to Baja for a week or two. And he'd find whoever wanted to go, perhaps two or three other families would join us, just on the spur of the moment. So there was always something going on.

GASSER: And your, and your mother. What were what? What was her? Could you paint a typical day for me? For for perhaps your mother?

NEELY: Well, she eventually had six children, so she was constantly working with kids, always had children around her, tugging at her. But she was the one that ran the household. All the cooking and taking care of the children, although myself, being the oldest, found that I was also doing a lot of the child care taking. Did a lot of work with the kids. That she and that my father and my mother both were doing organic gardening far beyond before it was ever really a big thing. I recall one time there was an article or even a picture of my mother rototilling out in the garden that was in an organic gardening magazine.

GASSER: But how large a garden was it?

NEELY: It's about a quarter of an acre. And that garden had constantly been worked on. They were always working on it. Then my father was always 00:19:00interested in building this or some little project around here. He built his vinegar room where he made wine vinegar. He and Frank Robinson did that. There's a picture of them ramming earth. It was a different technique than adobe. They would build forms about two feet wide and fill it with earth and dampen it with a little water and ram it, pack it down. And that's called rammed earth, which isn't, I think, as strong as adobe. It doesn't really hold up as well. After 30 years later, I've noticed that...

GASSER: It doesn't have straw or anything else...

NEELY: ...to bind it. But we do have clay types out here, so it does hold up. But so he would experiment with that. He made his vinegar room, doing that and then additions to the house and so on. So there was always some project going on that's keeping him busy as well as his pottery. My father at that time taught pottery at Adult Education, ceramics. And also had a studio that he 00:20:00built here and was doing pottery here.

GASSER: Could you describe how he got involved in that?

NEELY: I'm not sure how his beginnings, I think were at the university and he was going to school out there. He started ceramics. And his interest in it was from before I was born I know that he had shows, ceramic shows. And. I know that one of his interest was to describe Santa Barbara as an artist town. On the back of all his plates. He would stamp Santa Barbara on it instead of his name, just trying to bring the attention to people that Santa Barbara had a community of artists. Although I'm not sure who else would who joined in on it. I know Ed Schertz, he taught how to make pottery years ago and there were other people in the neighborhood that did different arts.

GASSER: Do you do you have any recollection of people coming also to help build the house or going other work parties? Could you describe some of these?

NEELY: I remember always someone being around helping out here and there. It wasn't. I don't remember major work parties so much as now someone would be here to help do this or help you do that. I don't remember any whole community gathering together to help build one house, but I think people would just stop by and give a hand here and there. It was more the, the community gathered more at celebration time rather than the work time.

GASSER: There were no roof raising parties or...?

NEELY: Well, perhaps there were at certain parts of the house being done. They probably would get together to celebrate it and to help out with something. But I think more of it was just individual effort by each neighbor helping each neighbor. But not all concerted at one time.

GASSER: Could you describe a little bit about, you mentioned the 00:22:00stamped earth...

NEELY: The rammed earth?

GASSER: Rammed earth method. What are some of the things that happen to an adobe? What kind of upkeep do you have to do 30 years down...?

NEELY: This house, this is the way my father built it is fairly solid. The adobe part is. Parts of it are not where he didn't do the foundation as he should have.

GASSER: Which means what did he do?

NEELY: The footing, when he first started out, the footings that he made weren't deep enough, weren't strong enough to hold the weight of the walls. So some of the walls have sank a little bit. The rammed earth sections, he did two additions to this house using rammed earth. And they although the walls are thicker, they tend to weep, or moisture from the outside will just seep right through the walls. And so we've had to plaster those with a concrete 00:23:00mix to stop that. Then inside the walls here on the adobe, we've had to paint with a thick cement paint mixture just to keep the dirt from flaking off. Living in a dirt house can be a little dirty, but other than that, it's held up quite well.

GASSER: And as far as earthquake...?

NEELY: Well, we've been through some major earthquakes here in the past 30 years. The rock that this house is built on, this solid sandstone structure here, doesn't move like anywhere else. It's a very solid place. And some of the major earthquakes that we had a few years ago. Nothing even rattled on this house. The upper house up above, we could see it shake and things shake there, but...

GASSER: That's La Ruwena?

NEELY: Right. La Ruwena. But this house is held up fine. It's also the way it's structurally built with a concrete there's a concrete header up 00:24:00around the top of the adobe and wood beams going up to support the roof and so on. So if the walls were to crumble, the roof would still stand.

GASSER: So it's basically there's some wood inner structure. Could you describe what a typical summer day for a young boy was on Mountain Drive if you're, who your friends were?

NEELY: Yeah we had a group of, I would say four or five young boys that we would run around. Then sometimes Naomi, the girl and Robbie's sister, Maia Robinson, and my brothers, and there'd be Robbie and His sister Maia. We would normally ramble all over the neighborhood. You know, we didn't really go and play at one's house or anything that we would, we had little trails all around that we'd run through and play with our dogs, running through the trails. It 00:25:00was always outside play. We rarely, in fact the house, as you can see, is quite dark. It's as my father said, you know, during the day you have to be outside. And so he built a house that's coming in at night. And so we played outside most of the time, ran around we'd build tree houses, tree forts, that we could play in. Underground forts. Mostly just I remember running the whole neighborhood was ours. And only towards the evening my mother would come out and blow this conch shell. You see up there. Gather all the kids in. And usually wherever we ended up. Whoever's house we were closest to, we'd go to, and that's where we would have dinner. I frequently would end up at Robinson's house and perhaps them here. You know, it's just where we were. Where we happened to be. So there was a wonderful sense of more communal life amongst us kids.

GASSER: And what would that do for a mother? I mean, who was 00:26:00preparing a meal or not? Could you describe what your mother?

NEELY: I don't know. I never thought about that. Yeah, well, with so many children in each family, you know. It was. I think it was pretty well distributed. You know, wherever if I happen to be up there, I'm sure one of the Robinson kids would be down here or whatever. But we were pretty well distributed. And I'm sure that our parents I know my mother and Peggy Robinson[6] would sit and talk for hours on the telephone or with each other and visit each other. So they always knew what we're really up to whether we knew it or not.

GASSER: Were there. You mentioned before that there were a lot of celebration. I mean, the sense of celebration was important. Were there special activities as a child that were just basically for the children? Could you describe 00:27:00some of those basically just for children activities?

NEELY: Not that I know of. You know, I can't really think of anything that they did just for the kids. We felt like the most of the stuff they did was just for us, but was because we partook in all of it. Say it the wine, the grape stomps, the winemaking. We were the first ones that were allowed in the vat to start crushing. Which was always great. It's a wonderful feeling to be the first one stepping on those all those new grapes. And we'd love going on all the constant outings, constant camping trips. Every Easter time we'd go to Santa Media of the, near, on the other side of the mountains over here, and there's Girl Scout camp there that we would camp and get, do skiing as a group.

GASSER: Skiing?

NEELY: Yeah, cross-country type skiing. Or if there wasn't snow, we would have Easter egg hunts here for the kids. Over where we called the Easter 00:28:00Field over at Coyote Road and Mountain Drive.

GASSER: Whose property is that now?

NEELY: I think that's Kit Tremaine's now. But we just always enjoyed going with the adult activities and only those kids would band together and do our own, have our own fun at it. He really made our own part of the celebration.

GASSER: You didn't. You were allowed at all the adult parties.

NEELY: We were allowed. My father used to have down at our wine cellar used to have a Cinco de Mayo party. And so we were allowed our end of the table. Their tables were set on the ground. Long low tables with banana leaves. And so we were...

GASSER: Oh, describe some more. Oh, paint that picture for...

NEELY: Cinco de Mayo is great. It would be it would move to different people's houses. But I remember the first one was down here at our wine cellar, and he had long table set on just grape boxes. So they were about two feet 00:29:00high. And instead of tablecloths, he just had banana leaves laid down and everybody brought food and laid it out. And they always were able to dance and sing with this the smallest amount of music. It was wonderful. You know, perhaps just a concertina, or a couple of recorders, and we'd get everybody going. And then that I remember, also was held down at Gill Johnson's[7] house quite a few years for the Cinco de Mayo. We also, my father used to, celebrate with us as a family, the Twelfth Night, Epiphany, and as an old Renaissance custom. And he and I think it was John Stack, perhaps. Were some of the founders of what has become the traditional Mountain Drive Twelfth Night celebration. And the first one was held here, as I recall. There was one also held at John Stack's red barn over by Westmont College. And that was a great celebration. They would also 00:30:00have low tables set along the floor. Everybody would sit on the floor. Dressed in their Renaissance costumes. The role of children during that celebration was to be the servers. We had to serve all the food to the to all the court. And all the people lined up there. hat was always fun.

GASSER: When the king drinks...

NEELY: ...everyone drank and we had to pour all their wine for them. Right. That was. But my father felt it was, also it was felt more deeply about some of these celebrations and meanings behind them meant a lot to him. The Twelfth Night. From the old European custom of trying to bring spring back. And so what they do is they would elect a king that would be sacrificed and through that sacrifice, bring, spring. And so it started out where they just would build a huge bonfire outside and the king would have to jump over the fire three times in a ritual sacrifice. Then he'd lift the queen up to the roof beams for her to 00:31:00bless the house for the year. So there was there was ritual as well as celebration in these.

GASSER: Rather than just ribald party?

NEELY: Right. Right. Yeah.

GASSER: So, are these traditions still alive on Mountain Drive?

NEELY: Somewhat. You know, we continue to make wine here as we had years past, although we're no longer stomping it. I use the equipment that my father had. In fact, the equipment my father bought was originally from Santa Cruz Island, and there was a winery out there starting around 1880s to 1890s. And he bought all the equipment, the press and the crusher and so on. And so we use that equipment still. I have been in contact with Marla Daily, though, who is rebuilding the winery out there, and we're going to be donating all the equipment and help rebuild the winery out there.

GASSER: Oh, really? Yeah. And what are you going to do then, for your wine?

NEELY: Well, we're going to have them replace it with new equipment, comparable equipment. But I'd love to see that old equipment back where it 00:32:00originally came from on the island.

GASSER: So they're going they're actually going to do that. I know a little bit about the project. I thought they were going to have to tear down all those buildings there now.

NEELY: No, they're going to...

GASSER: ...be preserved.

NEELY: Right. Some of them they've are working on the old winery now. And. Although the permitting process and so on is tough, going through the Nature Conservancy, who wants all the eucalyptus removed and all the grapevines and anything else removed. So they have some conflict but apparently they're close, we'll see.

GASSER: So when does this transfer take place, do you know?

NEELY: Well, I've donated some things already. And they are working out there now. I was to go last weekend but couldn't make it. So we'll see what happens. And then soon as we're able to find replaceable equipment, the rest of it transferred over.

GASSER: So how much wine do you make a year?

NEELY: Well, I work with in fact, Robbie Robinson is one of my partners. And several other people here in town. And we this year we picked one ton 00:33:00of grapes.

GASSER: And where did you pick them?

NEELY: We picked them over at Richard Sanford's winery. Sanford and Benedict winery in Santa Ynez. And so we made about 120 gallons of wine and that split amongst five people.

GASSER: A hundred and twenty, how many bottles is that? How many barrels is that?

NEELY: It's two barrels. It's two barrels. And I think it's like 80 cases. I think we end up with ten cases each, something like that. Enough to last a year.

GASSER: So. Does this age? Do you keep this to...? Tell me the process. Describe the process.

NEELY: Well, originally, when my father made the wine, he would, we'd pick the grapes... Maybe we should start with that story because that's...

GASSER: Yes, please.

NEELY: Originally, when my father would make the wine with the whole community involved, we would go to the grape pick. And when it first started, it was either at Kinevan Ranch or Ojai. But finally he found an old farmer up near Paso Robles named Mel Castillo. And it was the most beautiful grape 00:34:00vineyard. Just in a gorgeous area. But we would have the whole community would drive up there Friday night and, or Friday evening and camp out on Mel's huge front lawn, and they would have a big bonfire. And us kids would play in this huge tree behind the bonfire, just running around the tree. It was just a wonderful experience. The next morning and there would be music of course and singing and everything late into the night. Next morning we'd all get up and pick, usually picked, I think it was a ton to two tons of, I think it was a ton of grapes that are usually picked. I'm not sure what the types. I think Grenache or maybe some Zinfandel. And we picked the grapes. We'd be done picking by noon, and Mel Castillo would have gone out and shot a deer and barbecued it on his huge roasting barbecue. We'd all, the whole, usually about 30 people, or 30 adults. Kids running around. And so we'd sit down to a huge feast. And 00:35:00which is wonderful, and lots of singing and music. It was great. I loved the grape picks. Those are fun. And drive back down Saturday night. And Sunday morning was the Grape Stomp and the first thing in the morning the men of the neighborhood, Frank Robinson, usually being the master of ceremonies. And my father and maybe about ten or so other men of the community would gather down at the wine cellar and clean out all the cellar and all the vats and everything. And if they made white wine they would do that. They would crush that first and put that the white wine would be pressed and put into a barrel. nd then the red grapes were put in a large round vat we had. It was about six or eight feet across and then the area was raked smooth and my father would use his four fingers and make little hoof marks of a goat. And the statue of 00:36:00Bacchus that we had down there was spray painted gold and decked out with his grapes and the wreath. And the men would sit in a circle and decide upon the Wine Queen. And there's usually had to be a young virtuous virgin of the community. I don't think they ever found that out anyway. And so then when that was done, they all gathered up here at the house and we would have another huge feast. And then there would be a ceremonial parade led by Frank Robinson with this leopard skin draped over his shoulder and his tambourine. And everybody would dance to music down to the tub down there and stomp all the grapes. The Queen was the first one on in the tub, and we all toasted to the Queen. And then the children were allowed in, and then everybody else jumped in. By that time, everybody was pretty well drunk. And my father used to just run around yelling not to spill one drop out of the vat. And then the long, slow 00:37:00trudge back up the hill.

GASSER: How could you tell when all the wine was pressed enough?

NEELY: Well, usually everybody had just about had enough, were covered with grapes. It got very well pressed, very well pressed. Just all the stomping, it was usually done way before everybody's ready to quit. So but now what we do...

GASSER: How did people clean up? What was the...?

NEELY: Everybody just got hosed off. Yeah, but I remember having grapes skins in my hair for weeks afterwards. That's how I met my wife was at a grape stomp. When I first met her picking grapes and making wine.

GASSER: How did she come to, to come to the Drive?

NEELY: She was a friend of a neighbor and just happened to go on the Grape Stomp. There she was.

GASSER: Describe a little bit about that particular Grape Stomp and your love affair with your or your attraction to this woman, who was the 00:38:00neighbor and everything?

NEELY: Yeah, that's funny. Well, I guess she had met a neighbor of mine, Scott Sheldon, who is still a neighbor and a friend. And so he invited her on to this Grape Stomp, and we were driving up to it and she happened to be sitting next to me. And we'd started talking and I talked to her all throughout the Grape Stomp, and so on, and just became good friends with her at that point. It was funny that year, the women, as they were preparing the meal up here decided to all get together and elect a Wine King, which had never been done before. And I was completely surprised to find out it was me. That was interesting. So I got to...

GASSER: Were you a young, virtuous boy?

NEELY: Well...

GASSER: How old were you at that time?

NEELY: Seventeen at the time. Seventeen or eighteen. So. But, and then there was, that's when I first met her. Then I accidentally ran across her 00:39:00again at a later time. We ended up spending quite a bit of time together.

GASSER: And now, lo, these many years later and 20 years later, you have two children.

NEELY: Right. But now, the way we make wine, we pick grapes. There's usually five of us involved in this. So it's no longer the big community outing that once was with the whole celebration of it. In fact, the vineyard where we pick don't like us to pick the grapes because they're worried about their vines being pruned correctly and so on. So they pick the grapes, we go and pick them up. Bring them here and carry them down. The cellar that was down below, the original cellar, we no longer use. It's no longer on our property. So it's, and it's also starting to collapse. So we moved all the equipment up to the old vinegar room next to Cafe Mazatlán down below here. And...

GASSER: Who are the five people that you're...?

NEELY: There's Chris Coleman, whose father is well known here in town. Coleman family, Spellman. Robbie Robinson. Jerry Friedman, who is an author. 00:40:00Juan Ortega. And Norm Grant. And we have another fellow, Phil Dickman involved. Just old friends. So Rob and I are the only Mountain drivers really involved with it. Although a lot of Mountain Drivers stop by to help out now and then. Just to see, taste the wine, make sure it's okay.

GASSER: So how much do you pay for your grapes? For you...?

NEELY: I don't remember what we paid this year. It's considerably more than I think the $200 that my dad used to pay. Now, I think it's or, now, I think per ton, it's around $1,000 a ton. Something like that.

GASSER: And so that that. Have you ever averaged that out or is it do you do it even for this?

NEELY: It came out to about a dollar a bottle. So yeah, it was worth doing. We're making Cabernet and Merlot, and they're both excellent wines. And really good grapes. In the process we do now, too, after we crush, we 00:41:00ferment it for longer than my father ever used to.

GASSER: How long is that? How long did he and how long...?

NEELY: He used to do it for about five days. When he let it sit in that tub that it had all been pressed. And then he, from there, pressed it, put it into the press and press the juice out from the skins. We let it sit for longer, about 10 to 15 days. But it really get the color of the skins and so on. And then we press it and we put it into oak barrels. And let it age for about two years.

GASSER: And then do you bottle?

NEELY: And then we bottle it. And then it sits in the bottle for about two years.

GASSER: So right now you're drinking wine from 1988 or...?

NEELY: Yeah, 1986, although we didn't make wine in 1987, 88 or 89. We were just all too busy at the time. So there's a gap here with no wine for a while. That's all right. We'll live, we've made some this year, though, that's 00:42:00excellent. Or hope to be. We'll find out.

GASSER: So go on and describe. So you don't do a huge party like you did before, but you have some festivities or...?

NEELY: Well, yeah, we go down and put a little wreath on Bacchus, you know, and pour a little wine over his head and just ask him to not to bless the wine, but bless the celebrations that the wine will bring. To make sure that part of what used to be the spirit of what used to be the winemaking here is still there's still some facet of celebration about it. Although I must say, the wine certainly is better than it ever was.

GASSER: So is Bacchus is still down below with the wine cellar. Right. Do you know who made that statue?

NEELY: That was made by Audrey Johnston. There was an earlier one that I'm not sure how my father got, but this is a replacement. And this one is starting to fall apart, too. So we have to do some patching to it. But then there's also sculptures down there that were made by Oliver Andrews years ago. 00:43:00Some weird 1950s concrete things stuck around the hillside. But we don't there's not really that much celebration involved in our wine-making now. We do have wine tasting parties where we get together, taste wine. But it's not, it's not the community type celebration it was. I think the only real community thing that I still see observed is the Twelfth Night party, which is continues on. And our Easter is up at Robbie Robinson's. And the whole community gets together for that, too.

GASSER: And who is left in that community now? Who are, who are from what I remember. Yes. Well, who's today?

NEELY: Well there's a whole wonderful group on West Mountain Drive. There's Jeff Johnson and his wife, Ginger. And quite a few people in that neighborhood. There's also Robbie Robinson and his family. And his family is 00:44:00married. So there's quite a few families there involved. And our family here. With that generation, that's about it. Then there's the old Frank Robinson. There's George Greyson.[8]

GASSER: Do these people still come? Do the older generation still come to Twelfth Night and the Easter?

NEELY: Not the Twelfth Night so much. Now that's more of the younger, or my generation. I guess it's younger. But...

GASSER: It is if you're them.

NEELY: Right. But we still see them, and we just had a Robert Burns party at Frank Robinson's and it was Frank's birthday as well. So we got to see some of the older generation there. It was nice to see Stan and Sandy Hill[9][10] and George Greyson was there. Frank, of course. So they're still there.

GASSER: So the basically the only two or so traditions that you 00:45:00partake in are the Easter and Twelfth Night?

NEELY: Yeah, as far as the traditional Mountain Drive celebrations that I remember, that's, But what we do, there are other things that the community has done like Jeff Johnson over there has had gypsy parties or the same spirit of what Mountain Drive has, celebrations at the drop of a hat kind of thing. So it does continue to some degree.

GASSER: So the West, West...

NEELY: West Mountain Drive, sort of taken over...

GASSER: Yeah, taken over that taken, taken over, the whole tradition.

NEELY: Yeah. Another tradition that we used to always have are the Pot Wars up there. And those were my father used to sell his pottery. Well, he sold it at the Renaissance Fair, but before then he sold it at, mostly just to people that would come by. And then he would take his old truck, Rupita, up to the mailbox up there and lay out his pottery. And at that time, we were also 00:46:00making soap. Gush Soap.

GASSER: What soap?

NEELY: Gush.

GASSER: Gush? G-U-S-H?

NEELY: Right. Gush Soap. And I was making scoops out of cords. This sort of family industry. We just were all making things.

GASSER: Everybody made something?

NEELY: And so we'd go up there and set it out. And then Ed Schertz decided, well, he'll sell his pottery, too. And so we started the Pot Wars,[11] you know. And then that moved down to Bobby Hyde's big driveway or parking lot area there. And they became bigger and bigger. And they attracted quite a crowd for a while. It was a lot of fun.

GASSER: What years was that? When did it start, do you know?

NEELY: Probably early sixties, something like that. I know the Renaissance Faire started around '63. And that was about the year after the Pot Wars were going. So, around the early sixties.

GASSER: Can you describe? Did Mountain Drive have an influence, or could you describe the influence it had on the Renaissance Faire?

NEELY: Well, Ron and Phyllis Patterson were old friends of my father, 00:47:00and he knew them, I'm not sure from where. They worked for radio station KPFK. And Phyllis Patterson had a children's puppet theater that she would try to produce every year. Plays for children and events.

GASSER: Okay. Second side. Go on. I'm sorry.

NEELY: Okay. Well, as I said, Mom, Phyllis Patterson knew my parents, and they wanted to do this benefit for radio station KPFK. And so they suggested a Renaissance theme based on their experiences at our Twelfth Night. And they also enjoyed the Pot Wars and thought, well, it'd be great to have this marketplace and a Renaissance theater or a stage. Where they could have Peggy Robinson sing.[12] And they had a recorder ensemble from up here. And my father was always theatrical and loved acting, got to play Robin Hood. And so they dragged this all, asked us all to come down, and quite a few of the Mountain Drive crew came down. Ed Schertz[13] 00:48:00was there, my father. I think there was about ten or fifteen people that started doing it from the very first one. And then of course, that fair took off from there to be quite successful. But I think you can say a lot of its origins came from this area.

GASSER: From this beginning. There were costumes galore. And I wanted to hit on some of this theatrical things. Who did the costumes? Do you remember? Can you describe how they got made or...?

NEELY: Yeah. Well, one thing my father was, as I said, very theatrical. He would sing in operas at the Lobero Theater. And did quite a few of the operas there. And would tend to walk home with his costumes he had in different productions. My mother played the flute in the Santa Barbara Symphony when they did the shows there. She was in Madame Butterfly and a few others. And so they had 00:49:00some connections there. But the costumes, as I recall, were just handmade. And some people here, I don't remember anything where they came from.

GASSER: What were your, what were your, some of your costumes for you?

NEELY: Well, I remember for the first Renaissance Faire, all six of us children had these matching tunics that we just could not stand. We're so embarrassed to wear these things and this funny hats with feathers in them. In my father's Robin Hood outfit, I always remember liking that one. And. But. And then the I think with the Wine Stomps and so on, someone could say they were costumes, but they were more just what we always wore, you know. Mexican peasant shirts and so on. It wasn't really a costume event. And then we had the Bobby Burns party, the Scottish Influence. And so anything plaid we could find, we'd put on. And that usually was held up at the Castle up the very top of the hill up 00:50:00here. And that was always fun. They had pipers. Bagpipes playing, and George Greyson would cook the haggis.

GASSER: How did that taste?

NEELY: I refused to ever taste it. His son Malcolm told me what was in it. I said, forget it. Never eat that one. I think another celebration we had was Bastille Day, the French, and that we would celebrate up at Jack Boegle's house. And he had a carbide cannon. Just a noise-making cannon that would shoot off. And that was always fun. I wonder what other, I can't think of any other celebrations...

GASSER: Were you part of the rabble? Or were you at the Bastille Day?

NEELY: Oh, I just remember being infatuated with the cannon and just wanted to help shoot that off.

GASSER: How was Jack with children. How was that?

NEELY: Well, all the adults in this area were I think most of what, unless they had a family like Frank Robinson or Bobby Hyde with his family. 00:51:00They were, we would just play with the family. Jack Boegle didn't have a family, so we'd go to visit him and he would actually interact more with us than us visiting his kid. He had a wonderful little house there that we were always intrigued because it was like a little hobbit house. And so we loved going to visit him.

GASSER: Describe his house for me.

NEELY: Well, it's adobe house, but it was all in a small scale. He was never a very tall person, and so everything was just smaller in scale. Built into the hillside with little steps winding up to a little cute little bedroom and the little kitchen off to one side. Everything was small, which I always liked. And it was also on the top of the hill, which had a view of the whole neighborhood. That's where Sunset Club was held. Men would gather in the evening and supposedly watch the sunset and they would just sit around and drink wine.

GASSER: I understand that women were not allowed. Were children allowed?

NEELY: Well, I went to, I remember going to some Sunset Clubs. And I think the women had their own get-togethers, too. They had their Sip and Bitches they called them. They'd sit around. Yeah, but I don't, I only went to a couple of Sunset Club meetings. That's where the children were named, too, supposedly.

GASSER: Oh, really?

NEELY: To find out what the name for the latest child would be.

GASSER: Those must have been some interesting names.

NEELY: Well, yeah, I guess so.

GASSER: The one, especially the ones where they didn't get named, only supposed names. Was there any kind of coming of age ceremony? Like I would think that Sunset Club might have been it?

NEELY: Yeah. Not that I can think of. Nothing. Not for any individual person. I don't remember any ceremony like that.

GASSER: No particular initiation from whenever you stop serving Twelfth Night or when you got to...

NEELY: No, I don't recall any change other than us refusing to do it. 00:53:00Okay. I don't remember any special change there.

GASSER: Back to the music. I know there was a lot of music on Mountain Drive. Right. And I know your father played a concertina, and now I've learned your mother plays, played the flute. And could you describe a little more about this?

NEELY: In my family, my father played the violin and the cello, concertina, and the piano, and the guitar and recorders. And he tried to teach us all, in fact, as he was also spoke, I think, five different languages. And so he wanted each of us to learn a language. And so every morning we'd sit around and he'd ask us questions in each of our language. And then, I think mine was Spanish. And then in the evenings, we all had a family orchestra where he would try and 00:54:00teach us all to play different instruments. So we played together. And that was more classically oriented and we would play music for our Christmas pageant. We'd do the Christmas play. And so we'd do the music for that. But at a party or a celebration. It didn't take much. There usually would be a couple of recorders, a tambourine, and my father's concertina, which tended to drown out everything. And that would be the party. And it didn't really take much music to get everybody dancing and singing. I remember constant singing. Everybody was always singing get together. I remember also the fun on the outings, I mean, the Mountain drive would go on incredible. They'd go on wine tasting tours of Napa Valley. To Polk Valley or John Stack lived for a while and... Going, my father knew the winemakers of some of these wonderful wineries. And so they would put us up for the night with 20 people sleeping out on their lawn and 00:55:00playing music and singing. And because of that, every winery that I'd gone to years later, "Oh, Neely, that's right. That reminds me." So it's an indelible memory of a group of gypsies like this moving into these places. So the musical aspect was always, there was always music.

GASSER: I've also heard that there was a lot of bongo drumming, that there was communication through bongo drumming. Could you describe?

NEELY: That was much later, more in the seventies. There was a conga, a lot of people got into playing conga drums and there's a large group of people down on Banana Road and I'm not sure who all they were, that were always having conga drum sessions. They were great, just pounding late into the night. And we'd occasionally, they'd come up here down at the wine cellar, we'd have a hot tub and everybody bring their drums and pound away. And in fact Westmont College next door here, being a Baptist college, that it is, thought that there must be voodoo drums going on. And one time we heard some students were 00:56:00commenting or asking about going, "What's going on, voodoo drums, you guys out there burning babies or what?" You know, and in fact, so we started a rock'n'roll group, we called them the Burners.

GASSER: Who was in that?

NEELY: Those other people, not from Mountain Drive.

GASSER: But this is the, you spoke earlier before we started recording about your having a recording studio. Describe a little bit about that.

NEELY: We started, that was done in early eighties, I think, because I think it was for a birthday party that I had here and some friends brought their electric guitars and some conga drums and everything would just start banging around and it sounds pretty good. Then. We thought it did. And so we took over Mazatlán, the building down there and started jamming in there for a while, and it started getting good. And one friend out in Goleta who was a very talented musician, had a small shack we turned into soundproofed recording studio. With a 00:57:0016-track recorder and the whole thing.

GASSER: Who was that person?

NEELY: Jay O'Rourke. So we had our band for about three years and did a couple of concerts in town and played. It was fun.

GASSER: Did you do any recordings or...?

NEELY: We just had some tapes and he, Jay has them all, and now he's moved up to Washington. So I don't know what happened...

GASSER: Who else was in the band?

NEELY: A fellow name Kenny Berlazo. And my brother, Severin, who is a drummer, and myself.

GASSER: So the music in some way stuck from those early sessions with your father.

NEELY: That was more, he was classically oriented. And I still enjoy classical music because of that. Luckily, and I still love opera, and that's every night at dinner you'd sit down, and would sing just a couple of phrases from an opera. We'd have to guess which one it was from. Our bedtime story at night would be he'd read the scores in the libretto from an opera, so we'd have to 00:58:00listen to that. So I grew up with opera here.

GASSER: Which was your favorite?

NEELY: I always liked Rigoletto. So dramatic and beautiful, but other houses and other families would have a different sense of music, too. It being in the fifties or sixties, jazz also was like the hip music to listen to. And so there was jazz influences and things like that. But I like the simpler community getting together, just banging some tambourines and so on.

GASSER: You know there was also Erich Katz.[14] Do you know, can you describe?

NEELY: Yeah, the recorders. I never, I met him, but I just recall him as being a much older person, I didn't get to know him well. I did take up recorder when I was young and still play occasionally. And I had his book, you know, to learn how to play recorder.

GASSER: And what instruments do you play?

NEELY: Well, in the rock'n'roll I played the keyboards. And then I 00:59:00played guitar and flute and recorders. But none of them very well.

GASSER: Well enough to have a have a good time however it sounds.

NEELY: Yeah.

GASSER: Are any of these traditions, these traditions that you just spoke of. Do you, how is that influence the raising of your own children?

NEELY: Well, I'd wanted to steep my children in the same things that I was brought up with, but I found that's didn't work. They can't stand opera. In fact, they'll ask me to turn it down whenever I'm listening to it. But they do, both my children learned to play the piano and they play classically-oriented piano music. But they'll listen to rock'n'roll music on the radio. Although they have somewhat good taste. They don't listen to Metallica all day. Although my son just got a Metallica tape. And I don't know about that one. But they do like music. I mean, it is part of their life and part of our life here.

GASSER: There was, there was so many interesting people here on Mountain Drive. I mean, I don't know if you interacted with Mervin Lane[15] or I could imagine that there would have been a lot of discussions, philosophical discussions and different... Could you describe some of those?

NEELY: I was always intrigued mostly by Bobby Hyde. Because of his interest in things more esoteric. At least he would be willing to speak more about it. Perhaps not directly to him, but I would hear him talk to other people about Buddhism and so on. My father was always deeply interested in any type of philosophical thought. He read the Bible to us every day or every Sunday. Only with his own storytelling ability. And I don't remember Merv Lane very much. He was, I never really got to know him well at all until later years. So 01:01:00I don't remember much about him. Although there are always wonderful, interesting people coming through our house. I remember being sung to bed by Joan Baez and people of that generation. And by poets and so on, would stop by and poetry readings here and so on. So I do remember it. That whole generation of creativity coming through our house. And we constantly had house guests, a lot from San Francisco area.

GASSER: Do you remember other people at all?

NEELY: I don't remember their names. I just remember poets, a lot of bearded poets coming by and I do remember Joan Baez because she came by twice and sang just to me and my brother sang us, in our bedroom to sing a song, which was wonderful. I enjoyed that.

GASSER: What a wonderful. What years were those?

NEELY: Well, I must have been about six or seven. So, middle fifties.

GASSER: It was almost before, before her fame, great fame and...

NEELY: Yeah. And later when I heard about her. But I don't remember the names because I was only five or six. And I just remember the constant activity of, there always being someone interesting in the house. My father loved interesting people. And they'd always be discussing things, you know.

GASSER: Did that affect your high school or your grade school. Did that did you take any of that with you to...?

NEELY: Not, you know when I was in high school, in junior high in high school, it was more when the hippie thing started. And so I consider myself a hippie and glad to have roots that were sort of mutual to that. But I didn't, I felt like I never, A lot of what people would call hippies back then had to change from being a middle class American person to revolt from it or to, and I 01:03:00didn't feel like I had to revolt from anything. I was just being what I'd always been. So that's how it affected me. I think just that element of having to do something different than your parents was one thing that I never had to go through.

GASSER: So there was a kind of sense of respect all through your teenage years for your, for your parents?

NEELY: Yeah. Oh, from me to my parents. Yes. My mother died when I was 11. So my father remarried soon afterwards. And I had respect for his way of life and so on. Although personally we had a falling out in that, after my mother died, I had to move out of the house. He couldn't take care of all six kids at once. He just felt there's too much for him. And so I went to live with my grandmother down over in Mission Canyon.

GASSER: What is your grandmother's...?

NEELY: Irma Cooke, and wonderful lady.[16] I was very happy to move there because my father was going through such drama with the death of my mother. And I was glad to be away from that. So I lived with her until my teenage years, until high school. And then I came back here at the end of high school. And moved back in. Not with the family, but down into Mazatlán. So there was a period of time where I wasn't part of the family or part of Mountain Drive. And that's a lot of the time where the conga drummings and the later the next generation sort of moved in and where a lot of ["men drove," marriages?] actually broke up. And after the death of my mother, my father was so traumatized for years that, he was always the focal point of a lot of the community activities, and he backed off from that. And so the community activities sort of dwindled after that. It wasn't done so much after that point.

GASSER: I had heard also that he had a black flag that he would fly.

NEELY: Oh. Ever since. Yeah, ever since we were kids. Everybody had flagpoles and would fly flags. And occasionally, I don't remember very often, but he had a big flag that said, "NO" on it, which meant don't come visit today. And it's not a good day to visit. And then other days, he would put up a flag saying...

GASSER: What color was that flag?

NEELY: Well, yeah, all different, he would fly the Russian flag. The one time he flew the flag, the hammer and sickle, the red flag, Russian, Westmont called up and complained and send a sheriff over here. I remember my dad, as he did with everybody that came to visit, managed to drag the sheriff down to the wine cellar and had him tasting wine. That was great. But he just fly flags of different nationalities. On our Greek days, when we decided that we're all Greek, he'd fly the Greek flag and put on Greek music. And he'd fly the Albanian flag.

GASSER: Did other people fly also flags?

NEELY: Yeah. Frank Robinson had a flagpole. I remember he usually flew the flag of Spain up there. And there were up at Jack Boegle's there was a flag. A lot of houses had them. They added a sense of gaiety around here.

GASSER: So they were real flags and not banners.

NEELY: Well, there was a, I remember when I was young, there was, yeah, sometimes they were just streamers or banners or whatever, but mostly flags of different countries. Although there was a contest when I was a kid to invent a flag for Mountain Drive. I remember drawing hundreds of designs and none of them made it. I don't remember what it ended up looking like or if it ever got made. But that was...

GASSER: Were you involved in the Grapevine production?

NEELY: Well, the earlier, the earliest Grapevines were done by the Rodriguez kids after the Hyde kids. And I helped a little bit. I remember just wanting to be one of their secret reporters or anything. And so but I didn't write any articles . Just being there when they were doing it. They were always 01:06:00active doing something. They started that little newspaper for the kids in the neighborhood more than anything else. And they passed it around. They also put on plays occasionally. And so on. My father put on plays up there, too, In their swimming pool.

GASSER: In the Hyde swimming pool?

NEELY: Yeah. He put on some plays. The Lysistrata plays. He had several people involved in that.

GASSER: Were you involved in those plays?

NEELY: No. That was all adults.

GASSER: Was that also during the period of time that you were not on Mountain Drive?

NEELY: No, that was when I was here. But that was more, he did, was it Midsummer Night's...? You know, Shakespearean...

GASSER: Midsummer Night's Dream. What is the...? I know, I know the one. Yes.

NEELY: I can't remember what he did, but anyway, he did those productions here. I've never seen them. But he didn't have kids in them at all. We're just part of the audience.

GASSER: I can. I had also thought that they had done plays here in 01:07:00your, right below La Ruwena. Was that...?

NEELY: Oh, perhaps. I don't remember that. There might have been something in the field below there.

GASSER: Right in the lawn? But mostly they were in Bobby Hyde's swimming pool...

NEELY: Well, the ones that I remember originally. Yeah, but there might have been productions, but he was always trying to get a production of some sort going.

GASSER: Well, they did Pirates of Penzance, or I can remember...

NEELY: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, they did that, too.

GASSER: I don't know if they did that here or down, down in the downtown area.

NEELY: Well, my father was in that in the Lobero. I think I have a picture of him in that too, somewhere here. Yeah. There was a lot of operas that he did down there, but they did some up here, parts of it.

GASSER: I had the wonderful... very close to the end of your father's life, I guess. He, Gill Johnston, came and Frank Robinson, and they were 01:08:00singing little, little snippets together of Pirates of Penzance.

NEELY: Right. Yeah, yeah. They still do that. There's the old picture of the crew.

GASSER: Oh, my goodness. What a wonderful, and this is at the Lobero. What a wonderful photograph. Oh, delightful.

NEELY: And this photo here is one of our regatta that we would have every New Year's day.

GASSER: At the beach.

NEELY: At the harbor, there. Yeah, there would be, oh, I guess it made four or five boats. My father had a little eight-foot, little dinghy, a little sailboat that he'd sail in. And Frank Robinson had a boat called the Brown Banana, as I recall, and a few other boats. There's Gene Sturmer, I remember he used to come down to it. But as everything else, instead of just a race, it turned into more of a celebration. And usually the person that turned in, came in last, would win a prize or something, as I recall. Then everybody would, after the 01:09:00race was over, would pack up and go to Mom's Italian Village because on her birthday she would offer great discounts for dinners.

GASSER: So it was always coincided with Mom's birthday?

NEELY: Right. And then I remember going to Arnoldi's Cafe was another outing that the families we'd go to occasionally and there would be in the back room the whole little row of these baskets of all the latest babies would be sitting in the baskets along the row.

GASSER: These are the Arnoldi's...?

NEELY: No, sorry, the Mountain Drive babies.

GASSER: Oh, the all the Mountain Drive babies. I see. Did you, could you describe how you became a goldsmith?

NEELY: And. Well, that was later. Let's see. 1971, I believe. Around then. I went up to an area of the foothills of the Sierras called Fine Gold, 01:10:00where our family had bought some property up there. And there was next to that a ranch that was run by a wonderful lady named Susie Hickman. And she had kids from all over, a lot of underprivileged kids from the cities and so on. And she had tried to run a, she called the Fine Gold Institute. It was an art institute, basically. So I went there to help teach ceramics that I had learned from my father and do ceramics. So I went there to teach ceramics. And while doing that, I met some people that were doing...

GASSER: You were how old at this time?

NEELY: I started when I was around 17, 16, 17. And so I was teaching the ceramics and I met someone that was doing jewelry work there. And just watch, I was just fascinated by it. So I continued doing that.

GASSER: Do you remember who that was?

NEELY: No. There were several people that I was just watching them work, and I'm not sure what their names were, who they were. But I remember being interested with it. And I also had picked up some, a friend that had got into 01:11:00soapstone carving, just carving soapstone.

GASSER: Who was that?

NEELY: His name was Charlie Thompson, and he was a geologist or studying to be a geologist. So he went out and collected soapstone and we'd go on expeditions to Death Valley or somewhere, and then we'd carve it into, I was making little jewelry, little pendants out of it and so on. In turquoise and then tried my hand at doing working with a little silver and just kept going, just taught myself. I met a person named Jonathan Winter who was just like a mad scientist, a wonderful character. And he was a silversmith. Who taught me more than anything about how to work with silver. And in fact we went out to Death Valley and mined silver from the silver mines and came back and refined it and just learned it from the ground up. So I've been working with that since 1972. I've been working with silver and gold and so on. 20 years now.

GASSER: Who would you consider your your main influence or...

NEELY: Well, no one person really. You know, when I started out doing the jewelry I was still helping my father at the time do the Renaissance Faires. And so I saw jewelry there that was being sold and I thought that I could do better than what I was seeing there. And so I had developed, you know, not really a Navajo style, but I was doing stone set and a bezel and silver and so on. And realized that I had to make something of my own. So I started changing it. Working on my own designs. And I had some influences, like from the Egyptian style, their sense of geometrics was, I was liked. And the Mayan Indians that also use geometric but in a more natural form. So I was influenced by those in development and style and still being involved with Renaissance Faire. I naturally started selling my work there and they wanted a more Renaissance or antique look to it. So that influenced my work as well. So and I'm 01:13:00still to this day doing the Renaissance Faires. Some of my work there.

GASSER: This catches you at a good time because you're between, you also do the Yes Store.

NEELY: The Yes Store.

GASSER: Do you, are there other craft fairs that you partake in?

NEELY: Those three. There are two Renaissance Faires a year, and the Yes Store, and then in between I do custom work. And it's unfortunate because most of the jewelry that I make now is sold in Los Angeles or San Francisco and only at Christmas time here in Santa Barbara at the Yes Store. So I wish I could sell more here locally. But I do a lot of custom work here and it's, that's good.

GASSER: Have you gotten more custom work in the last, in the last years, or...

NEELY: Oh, yeah.

GASSER: I know several people that have your work there. In fact, Ava, who works on this project, is all, "Okay, now hit him up."

NEELY: I got hit up at Christmas. I'm having to work right now.

GASSER: Oh, I bet, too. So was that a sell out at the Yes Store?

NEELY: Oh, yeah, it always is for me. And here's a picture of our first Cinco de Mayo Party. See the boards on the ground. The banana leaves and, see, they're dancing. And I think all the music that there is one or two people playing a recorder. That's probably, oh, there was a snare drum.

GASSER: Music of the soul.

NEELY: That's all it took. It was just amazing. It's always something going on.

GASSER: I also heard about as far as the craft thing that Bobby Hyde had worked stone with children. Can you tell about that?

NEELY: Well, he was, he loved collecting and tumbling stones. What he was primarily interesting in making is his little Go stones for the game of Go. And so he would look for white and black jade and so on. He was into collecting jade. And so he had a little diamond saw up there. And he cut slabs 01:15:00of jade and tumbled it or polish it and so on. But I don't know how much he did much with kids. I remember going up there and asking for a stone. And he would cut it in half and show it to me and gave me half of it. But, that's the only interest I knew that I saw him do, was mostly for his little Go beads.

GASSER: So he didn't. You didn't go on any kind of expeditions with him to look for it.

NEELY: No, he took his family looking for jade. To beaches and so on. But I don't remember going with him doing that.

GASSER: Were there, as far as your travels as well, I know you've mentioned several times, you know, the back country and how spontaneously you would, the family would go would get up and travel and go. Did you, did you also do any kind of like projects in the back country or do any kind of improve, well, improvements is the wrong word, but any kind of...

NEELY: Yeah, none that I know. The only thing I'm aware of is after the Coyote Fire, when it did burn through, in the backcountry there as well, the Forest Service gave my father several huge crates of young seedlings of trees, and so he went and planted trees all over the backcountry. But that wasn't a Mountain Drive project. No, mostly we just went to the hot springs as a community. It was more than just to go out and camp for a while to go camping at Mono Hot Springs and... Or our trips up north, traveling to the wine country and so on. It wasn't, it was more just a journey rather than doing any work at all, and going down to Baja California, too. It was done just to enjoy the country there.

GASSER: He went down oftentimes for tiles, did he not?

NEELY: He went down several times to get tiles in Tecate.

GASSER: And where did he get them from, and how did he, what did he 01:17:00use them for?

NEELY: Well, our floor tiles here were from Tecate.

GASSER: Nice tiles. Beautifully worn.

NEELY: Yeah, many years of kids riding tricycles through here and so on. But he got the tiles, and you can tell they're handmade because they're not the commercially pressed tile using... he got them in Tecate, but I never went with him when he did that. Our roof tiles he bought from an old movie set. And I don't know where, but I don't know what movie or where it was. But I just remember hearing.

GASSER: I had also heard that the back country, the Mono, the little Caliente over at Mono was, the Mountain Drivers had something to do with the original sort of damming up of that, or...

NEELY: It was always been dammed up, and torn down, and dammed up. Every time we go there, someone had torn it down and we'd fix it up.

GASSER: I see. But there were no kind of improvement projects...

NEELY: There might have been, I think later on in the seventies. I think there was a time when it was with Mario and gang went out there and tried to really improve that one and it didn't last long. And here's a photo of us as kids and you see that we all have barefoot. That was one thing I remember is that we never wore shoes. I used to hate having to go to school. And this is all our Sunday best special photos. Still no shoes. That's one aspect of being on Mountain Drive here as I recall. Running everywhere but never wearing shoes, which I love doing.

GASSER: Healthy, healthy feet.

NEELY: Right.

GASSER: Were there not rattlesnakes?

NEELY: I saw one throughout my whole life here. I've only seen, at least on this property and that was just right outside here, outside my door. In fact, I was really young. I remember walking outside and, "Hey, mom, there's a 01:19:00snake. But don't worry, it's a good one." Just trying to make her show how brave I was. She went out and looked. It was a rattlesnake.

GASSER: Good thing you didn't pick it up?

NEELY: Right?

GASSER: What about the Coyote Fire? What do you remember from...?

NEELY: Well, that was right when I, that was the year that my mother died. In fact, she died right, right around that same time. And I just moved out. She had died, I think, about a month previous to the fire. And so I had just moved out to my grandmother's house and when it started and was burning, my father stayed at, the family evacuated down to where I was with my grandmother, and my father stayed here. And in fact, when the fire department came out, they refused to drive down any of our long driveways because their trucks would get stuck or potentially stuck. So he stayed here. The end beams of all our houses were burned. All, every tree here was burned. But the house survived being 01:20:00the tile roof and adobe house it was. And he stayed. He chain sawed down all the trees and tried to keep the beams from burning. And he also saved the house up above, too. Not only La Ruwena, but the other one.

GASSER: I see.

NEELY: Working on chainsaw and trying to put it out. So, but after the fire here, it was completely blackened. And I mean none of these trees, all the oak trees, everything, just, not burnt down, but burnt, all of these were burned out. There was just a, looked like a disaster area. It's just amazing. Now, 20 years later, or 25 or whatever it is, it's overgrown and ready for another one. Yeah.

GASSER: It must have matched the mood of your family at that time.

NEELY: Yeah, it did somewhat. You know, at least I didn't feel as depressed or as at a loss as my father did because he had the six kids to worry about, so on. And I was living with my grandmother and I was very comfortable. I 01:21:00really enjoyed that opportunity. So...

GASSER: Were, but the other, your other five children were with your father?

NEELY: No, I had two other brothers lived with me at my grandmother's.

GASSER: And they were?

NEELY: Severin and Dana occasionally, and then Benjy occasionally. It would change, but I was the one that was there all the time.

GASSER: So Benjy died after your mother died?

NEELY: Right. He died up there, Fine Gold. And I guess that might have been around 1971, and that's when I was around 17, he was around 13.

GASSER: And could you describe a little bit about that, if it's not too painful?

NEELY: No. He was a rambunctious 13-year-old, quite rambunctious. And a real charmer, a real ladies man. He's, wonderful character. No, it's not his picture. But I was working there at Fine Gold. He was going out with two of 01:22:00his friends to go rock climbing, and they climbed up a fairly steep rock and he fell quite a distance and hit his head and landed in water, but apparently was killed instantly. My father was in Europe at the time and my stepmother was here in Santa Barbara. So I was supposedly responsible for him. They didn't like the fact that I didn't take that good care of him. My father didn't come home from Europe. My stepmother, Susan, came up to Fine Gold. And so we scattered his ashes there at Fine Gold during that time period. And then my stepmother came back to Santa Barbara, and I stayed up there and continued to learn how to make jewelry. Yeah, it was it was sad. I didn't get that close to him because I was living at my grandmother's and he wasn't one of the ones staying there. So I didn't see his change into teenager-hood until I was up there at Fine Gold with him. And I was amazed at how rowdy he was. And I was going, "Boy, 01:23:00this kid's going to get in trouble." You know, and yeah, it's too bad that affair.

GASSER: Here are some other family things that have happened. I know there's a story with a cow that changed a lot of things.

NEELY: Yeah, that was, also I was the only one not in the car at the time, but in our VW bus, everybody was on their way up to Yosemite for the summer. I think that's what the trip was. And the whole family was in the car and some workmen were doing work along the side of the road and had left the fence down. And a cow had wandered onto the freeway at night there. And so my father hit the cow straight on with the VW bus. Which is... So it crushed the front of the bus and his knee was broken, my stepmother's neck was broken and my little sister lost a toe. Her little toe and other injuries to her. And that was the major injuries. So they all ended up in hospital for a while. Not being able to..., 01:24:00My father's thing with his knee, was not being able to lead hikes as a ranger, which is what he did for a living in the summer, as a naturalist, was leading these hikes. So that changed his summer career for quite some time. In fact, I think that's when he retired from the Forest Service. Or National Park Service. And, also doing the potteries here the kick wheel, I think it affected his knee also. He never liked those electric wheels. But they had a lawsuit involved and he won the lawsuit eventually and was able to retire on what he had won from that lawsuit.

GASSER: Although we did later go back to working with the Park Service or...?

NEELY: He did work with the Sierra Club, led tours for them. Did some work with the Park Service. Actually more through a concessionaire out there doing the 7-day hikes up in high country. But I think after that point, he 01:25:00wasn't doing his regular ranger job at Tuolumne Meadows that he had always had.

GASSER: Were you also not here during the filming of the movie, Seconds?

NEELY: I was here during that.

GASSER: Could you describe a little about that?

NEELY: Well, I wasn't living here, but I came for that. I came for most of the celebrations that were going on. That was right after that fire. And in fact, they had to cut branches and hang them in the trees to make it look green. And it was I thought everything was somewhat, it was, it was put on, it was forced. So the grapes weren't wine grapes, they were table grapes and, but it was fun. You know, it's just like having two Wine Stomps in one year. We just celebrated it again. And it wasn't, luckily, there wasn't a lot of like, 01:26:00"Everybody hold it. We got to reshoot the scene," or anything like that. It was just they filmed it and we just did it. And there wasn't, although they came back and did second shots of a lot of things and so on. There's one scene in there of me standing right by this little redwood tree that as tall as I am. And now the redwood tree is about 30 feet tall there. And. I remember meeting Rock Hudson. And some of the other people involved, but not being that impressed by it all at that age or that time. I later saw the movie, in fact, that I forgot that they had found it here, or that I remember they filmed it here, but I forgot what movie it was. And so I didn't even think about it. And I took a girlfriend out to a movie and that section was in there and I was just flabbergasted. There we are and she's..., and it was interesting. To 01:27:00go to a movie and suddenly see yourself and your whole crew there.

GASSER: Especially in the buff. I would imagine.

NEELY: Some of them, yeah, I think they're fairly discreet about the way they filmed it. I mean, eventually, I mean...

GASSER: They cut out the other...

NEELY: I think they cut out a lot of stuff, but... Yeah, that was interesting.

GASSER: Yeah. I have a lot of questions that I really want to ask you, too, about your, how you deal with the onslaught of new neighbors and what Mountain Drive is for you now. Yeah. And how that how that's changing for you here.

NEELY: Well, I live here with my family, my family, my wife and my two children. We've moved into this house in 1977. After living up above in La Ruwena for a while. And at that time there were still the families that I'd grown 01:28:00up with. Maia Robinson, who was my age, had a son, my daughter's age. And so we still continue like the third generation growing up here. They built themselves a new house to live in. Robbie Robinson had built himself a house and he now has children and so on. So we felt there was, the new buildings that were going on, was still community somewhat. But the changes that were that are more recent are the escalating value of property is prompted more speculative even. Some people have sold their property for enormous sums thinking, Gill Johnston sold his to retire and... So it has changed. It's, the thing that saddened me is that some. Some people have moved out just because of the value of the, the money value rather than the value of community.

GASSER: Who would those people be?

NEELY: Well. Just some of the old timers, like the Gill Johnston had 01:29:00to, he moved out. Dolores Fabian lived up here and sold her house to retire. I'm not sure who else was sold out and left, really. The Hydes, of course never really rebuilt after the fire. So their property is sold now. And there's a lot of new building going on. The problem that we had was, after my father died when I inherited the place then the zoning department came by to check out the zoning in this place. And my father, of course, back in then never applied for permits, you know. And so she gave me 30 days to tear down all the houses here, which I told her I couldn't do. I didn't want to tear it all down. It was too historical, it meant too much to me. It was so handmade and she was adamant about it. She really wanted to see them torn down or removed and 01:30:00wouldn't back down. So I had to go a sort of a circuitous route around her and was able to get a lot split, which means I had to divide this parcel into two parcels in order to have two buildings legally, and then apply for building permits for them, which is hard to do with adobe structures. So the process is taking us about seven years in order to keep these houses. One of the results of that is that I've had to sell that upper parcel in order to afford to do that.[17]

GASSER: La Ruwena parcel.

NEELY: Yeah, we sold that in order to pay the bills involved in trying to keep this house. So it cost us everything we had to make it legal. My brother, Jeff, who's in a wheelchair, quadriplegic, was living illegally in the house next door here. But it's the only way where we can take care of him and where 01:31:00he could afford not to pay rent so he could get a job. He had a full time job working on computers. And he was actually voted Client of the Year by the State of California. Given the award by the governor and so on. But it's only possible because he didn't have to pay for a full time attendant and he didn't have to pay for rent. Otherwise, he shouldn't even bother working. And so they tried to kick him out and legally he's not allowed to live there. He's not there technically, he would be put in a rest home and be paid for by the State. And so dramas like that have upset me. The fact that the county has decided that Mountain Drive no longer is exempt from the rules of the rest of the county, which as it should be, and it's understandable. However, it cost us too much having to comply with what everybody else is complying with this. It was too hard to do. I mean, it is too hard to be forced to sell. So when I 01:32:00see new development going on I just see what's happening is that people are becoming more rigid in their application of existing laws. But they're saying for the public good. Well, not always the case. In our case, it definitely wasn't for the public good. The programs that my brother is able to apply for other handicapped people, which if he's not able to do that, that's not for the public good. Things like that.

GASSER: So they've proved they've proved a stonewall in...

NEELY: Well, in this house fortunately had a permit originally. So it didn't need to be brought to code. The upper house does not have one. And so they're going to have to tear that down or rebuild it. So they're not approving, they're not saying, well, this is, if it doesn't have a permit, they're saying they have to be brought up to current code.

GASSER: I see. And what's happening with your brother's dwelling?

NEELY: They want that back up to code. The last I talked to them was last February, they said, "Have you done it yet?" I said, "Well, no, I don't really want to tear anything down," or they wanted it torn down. I said, "Well, I don't want to tear it down. There's historical value to this area." It's there's a lot to it that might need to be looked at. I just told him I wasn't willing to do it to comply. And they said, "Okay, well, we'll get back to you." And that was a year ago, and I haven't heard from them since. So I haven't...

GASSER: You haven't asked.

NEELY: Although I had to Al McCurdy, who is the Head of Resource Management showed up the other day, knocked on my door...

GASSER: This is the second tape with a tape of Chris Neely on Mountain Drive on the 5th of February, 1992. My name is Teddy Gasser, and we will 01:34:00continue. We're looking at some pictures right now. And Chris was mentioning the article that just appeared in the Santa Barbara Magazine.[18] And we were having a little, little talk about, about the fact that Bill Neely was not mentioned very often in that article. And what a great oversight that has been and some of the other minor discrepancies.

NEELY: Well, it wasn't I'm not, personally I don't feel upset that he wasn't mentioned. I think he would be, because he always liked to be mentioned. But the article I felt was somewhat inaccurate in that it was just taken from different points of view. Than what I saw as growing up. The Wine Stomps were definitely here. And he did start them, and as you can see, he started it before he even moved here.

GASSER: He was on, that was on Victoria Street, this picture?

NEELY: Mm hmm. And then the bulldozing mentioned in there, by Bobby 01:35:00Hyde bulldozing everybody's house pads and so on. I remember Bobby bulldozing a road, but most of the work was done on this property, my father, as you can see, did all the grading and work and so on.

GASSER: Did he do any grading work on anyone else's, your father?

NEELY: I'm not sure if he did or not. There wasn't much land up here in the hillside to really work with. I mean, it was very limited what could be done. I know he did work here on it.

GASSER: Was it your, your father was a very dynamic and somewhat, some would say difficult man. Was it difficult growing up or describe some of the...

NEELY: Well, yeah, he was very much like a Leo personality, real outgoing, very dynamic. He did listen to us children and he was, I would consider him a good father, you know. This community-wise. He was such a leader, 01:36:00such a strong leader that it made it hard to, for him to be involved in any other capacity, which would constantly getting him, I'm sure, in trouble. But I think his dynamic character is also what formed a lot of this community. Someone that wanted to have a group of people doing this or a group of people doing that is the way he was. He didn't want to do something just by himself all the time. He did, but he didn't always want to. And so I think that dynamic that he had sort of helped pull a group together to do things, such as wine-making, which the Grape Stomps and so on, were a focal point, that he definitely organized and arranged and did all the arrangement and pulled it out. I think that a lot of the other ceremonies, too, that were his inspiration. Now, the thing 01:37:00was when people wanted to look at something differently than he did, he would definitely be loud about it. But we were sort of grew up more in his shadow than trying to follow along this footsteps. Most of my family, my kids, I mean my brothers and so on, were all much quieter than he ever was. And don't really share the same outgoing sense of, or need of community. We've been more involved in just family life.

GASSER: It seems that he was a great catalyst for things that occurred here on Mountain Drive, perhaps more so than Bobby Hyde in...

NEELY: Well, I think Bobby Hyde was able to make a lot of things happen here because of his position of owning the property, for one thing, and being the, sort of the central, the original central point. Having a group of friends around him made him a very important personality, a very important 01:38:00part of this property. Of all the neighborhood. But as far as I think the celebrations in the what Mountain Drive became famous for, or least well known, notorious for, whatever, that was more of my, I think, more of my father's influence. I would, I would say more of it, of my father's than Bobby's, in many things.

GASSER: And what about Frank Robinson? Was there was there ever any...?

NEELY: He was always, well, they were originally very close, the Pagan brothers.

GASSER: Is that what they were known?

NEELY: Well, the winery was known as Pagan Brothers Winery and Frank was always a wonderful master of ceremonies. He was very good at ceremony and being a master of the ceremonies. And my dad and Frank were always at odds, 01:39:00constantly at odds, saying, "Oh no, you gotta do it like this, or you gotta do it like..." You could always hear them arguing about how to do it. But it was always done with a sense of humor. It wasn't 'til the later years that they did go in somewhat different directions. My father being somewhat involved in the Sierra Club and the Sierras, and the natural realm with the constant camping trips was something that Frank wasn't involved with. So there were two different ways of living there, too. The summertime was, when we were, he was off in Yosemite. Frank would be here. There were two different lives, lifestyles.

GASSER: What do you think your father would like to be remembered for?

NEELY: Well, he was primarily interested in, as I said, the ecology. He was very, keenly interested in that, deeply involved with that. And 01:40:00wanted that to be part of his legacy was that there was a higher awareness of living, on everybody's part. Living on this planet. I think his efforts for that have been through teaching geology, teaching ecology at the university and also through Sierra Club. And the National Park Service. I think he also would like to be remembered for his sense of art that he had his artistic ability, although he never really he had such a casual style of art that it wasn't one that he considered a, he'd like it considered usable. Peasant art is what he liked. And his writing. He was always writing. And he had sent off manuscripts and some things were published, in what I'm not sure what they were, where they were published, but, and especially in his last year he wrote constantly. He was always writing. So I think his sense of creativity in writing and his 01:41:00ecological sense were real important to him.

GASSER: Do you have, I know that he kept a journal even when he was a young man.

NEELY: Yeah, he has a whole crate of journals that right now are at his friend, Alex, over on Banana Road.[19] In fact I've been meaning to pick those up and need to go through them. And I did go through them at one point and read some of this like the year I was born, which was fascinating. Learned a lot of the history of the beginnings here that I would normally have forgotten.

GASSER: What do you intend to do with those journals?

NEELY: Well, just to keep them, you know, just to remember, to look through them now and then. He had willed them to his friend Alex, for her to edit them and come up with some sort of story, which with his strong ego thinking, his life story would be a wonderful book. I don't think they will ever happen. So I think it'd be nice to keep them. Also, I need to look into the name of the family where he bought the Santa Cruz Winery equipment. They need to find 01:42:00that out, things like that. There's information in there that I'd like to look into. So I need to get those back.

GASSER: He was also, as you mentioned before, a wonderful storyteller. Do you have a favorite story that he would tell?

NEELY: He would tell every Thanksgiving or, every family, important family gathering, he would tell stories of different characters, Pizgah Pete, an old desert rat.

GASSER: Piz... what was that?

NEELY: Pizgah Pete.

GASSER: Pizgah?

NEELY: Yeah.

GASSER: How do you spell that?

NEELY: I think it's P-I-Z-G-A-H, or something...

GASSER: Okay.

NEELY: An old desert rat who always managed to get in trouble and out of trouble. Stories of, or what was it, Uncle Fred? Uncle. Uncle somebody, rather, who would come up with crazy inventions like revolving goldfish bowl, for tired goldfish, things like that. But he wrote a book of fables for us. We 01:43:00have this book. Far, far flung fables. They're interesting.

GASSER: Do you read those to your children or...?

NEELY: I did years ago. I have to find that book again. I'd like to go through it. I bet you they'd be interesting again.

GASSER: I can remember a story of a Paiute grandmother.

NEELY: Oh, right. Yeah, But, you know, with his sense of character, we would change every day from Albania, we're all Albanian that time. That's where our heritage was. And then we turn into Irish. We're all Irish. On St. Patrick's Day he would paint his Jeepster, he had a green Jeepster. He'd go up there and paint the middle green line down the middle of Mountain Drive. That was great.

GASSER: What characteristics do you think were necessary to survive on Mountain Drive?

NEELY: Back in the...?

GASSER: Back then? And.

NEELY: Well. Survival. I mean, everybody was pioneering, they're building and so it took a lot of work. They had to have a certain stamina. That was a strong characteristic. And the sense of humor, a sense of fun it's important, too, although I think everything was tolerated, that was one thing that was so much, so much was tolerated here. People of all different characters. Were, no one was omitted from anything because of the way they were. Other than, unless they didn't want to partake in any event.

GASSER: Were there ever people that didn't, weren't successful in living here on...?

NEELY: Well, there are perhaps people here that didn't fit in, that didn't partake of the whole sense of community. In that, but in some way, they always did. Like there was Tom Arnold[20] across the way here who really didn't involve himself much in what was going on, other than he was a good photographer and would take pictures of our old Grape Stomp, 01:45:00some of those. And he raised bees, and so we'd all get our honey from him. But he didn't go to any of the outings or the other parties. And I think there were other people, there must have been, didn't really involve themselves much in the community.

GASSER: So what did it take to have that sense of community to be...? What was that, that made some people be able to...?

NEELY: Yeah, it's hard to say. I think it's just a different way of looking at life than was prevalent in the fifties, you know, not the normal, it's what they were called, more of that beatnik or Bohemian style. Which is more creativity. And a sense for letting oneself celebrate things, even pagan rituals. You know those, something that it took to be part of it. You know, certainly if a whole group went up to the hot springs and took off all their clothes and jumped in, some people would feel uncomfortable doing that and didn't. I think 01:46:00it took that sort of, that ease of just doing something like that.

GASSER: I know there was a lot of drinking on Mountain Drive, what in that there was a price. Could you describe a little bit what you think the price might be for...?

NEELY: Oh, yeah. Well, my father's life for one thing. Yeah, his involvement in wine started out with an art of wine, winemaking and wine drinking, going to wineries and tasting fine wines. And I have a photo somewhere here with he and Jack Boegle drinking a Château Lafite. And so they always had this interest on a higher scale, which I think developed through years and can easily develop, now that we know, back then, I think there was innocence about it. But now we know so much more about alcoholism. That just that amount of constant drinking will lead you to a pretty strong addiction. And in his case, it certainly did. He was, had battled alcoholism and never really won the battle . In 01:47:00which, you know, towards the end of his life, he was drinking quite a bit, more just on his own. You know, it just hole-up and drink. And he also was addicted to codeine because of his knee, pain pills. And so he just had a hard time climbing out of that hole. And was never able to. There is, I still have met a few friends here that were involved back then with a lot of the drinking that was going on. Saw where it could lead and no longer drink or in moderation or take it in moderation. My younger brother, Dana, who had stayed here most of the time through all the drama of my mother's death and so on, stayed here through a lot of that. He ended up with quite a drinking problem. And still, I think, has one. And he ended up homeless for a while. So I've seen the effects of it myself. Making wine and making ten cases in one year. Fortunately, I 01:48:00live in a family situation here where it isn't possible for me to. I mean I have to be a sober person to get along with family needs. I been able to follow my father's footsteps.

GASSER: You've made a different choice.

NEELY: Yeah. I'm not following where I saw him go, hopefully.

GASSER: But there was a lot of drinking in other ways and in effects and also drugs on the community. Could you describe what that was?

NEELY: After I moved out. Later, in the, I guess in the seventies or late sixties, too, I know there was a lot of marijuana being grown and smoked and... That was prevalent and I never saw, and also, I remember one year my father sat down with my stepmother, myself, my brother Dana. And that's when I was about 16, 15, I think I was 15 or 16. And he had just met this fellow named 01:49:00Timothy Leary,[21] who stopped by and gave us all these little liquid vials of LSD. He said, before anybody knew that it was a, the drug that it was. This was more experimental and it was presented more from the psychology viewpoint back then. So we all took LSD then. And then it became more of a fad or a thing. And he didn't like it so much. And he wasn't, my father never really liked the drug element, I think because he was getting more involved in his alcohol. He wanted to deny that and at the same time deny a lot of the drugs. So there was, I think, a lot of pot smoking, especially like those conga sessions that would happen. You just trance out and play the drums and smoke the pot. And I was somewhat involved when we had a rock and roll and played drums here and so on. But as I said, once you're family-orientated. It's hard to do that.

GASSER: So but, but it did take a toll on the community itself with relationships, and...

NEELY: It may have. I don't know how it affected relationships so much. I really don't know where it led. I don't see that much of it anymore, so... and I still see a lot of the same people. So I don't, I think it all became a matter of personal working things out. I don't see how or if at that time the use of all the drugs changed, I mean, it did alter the sense of community that we had to change it. Changed the tone.

GASSER: How did it change that?

NEELY: I don't know. I mean, it just was different. A lot of the sense of celebration that my father had originally, with a deeper meaning to everything, the deeper meaning of Twelfth Night and the pagan rituals with the Wine Stomp and so on. It became much more surface later with other drugs. People would celebrate just to have fun. Twelfth Night was a good chance to yell, 01:51:00"The king drinks," and everybody drank instead of really, instead of like singing, everybody used to sing, then they got more time to listen to stuff. So it just, I think, made it a little shallow.

GASSER: Spring got lost in the ritual of Twelfth Night.

NEELY: Yeah, right. So there was a change there.

GASSER: But as a young... how does it affect? I guess there are two questions here. One is, at such a young age, to be in a family situation, to be given LSD to take. How did that affect your life? How was that?

NEELY: It's no different than growing up in a different way than everybody else, you know? It was just part of that, too. Growing up in a different way than the normal way. I, didn't affect me any differently. I learned off the bat that I didn't like that. That was one thing I didn't really like to do. I didn't like to ever get high, like some of the people around here enjoyed. I 01:52:00guess it depends on the personality is more, because I can see in my own family that we all grew up the same. I have one brother that, like I said, just ended up in complete alcohol and drugs, he liked drugs. So I think it's just personality. You see a difference.

GASSER: How has all of that milieu of growing up affected your own raising of your own children?

NEELY: Well, I've always be grateful that I grew up here in this house. Because I was able to grow in a house that I knew that there was work involved in it, that it took the labor one's hands to live. And so raising my children here and raising my family here, I think the house shows that to them. It shows them that it took work to live here. It takes work to live here. It's not, "Yeah, just go buy a place and live here." And I think they're getting the idea that 01:53:00you have to work to live. And, not necessarily go out and get a job here, but just the fact that it does, it takes effort to. And the other thing is that I learned living here and growing up here is a sense of tolerance and raising children. My children, when my kids were young, I caught one of them writing on the wall in crayon. And then most parents would just go, "No," you know, yell at them or whatever. I was always going to say something, but I couldn't because right next to it was my name I'd written when I was a kid. And so I just really learned a lot of tolerance. My wife would wonder, "How do you keep the kids out of these cupboards, how did your mom do it?" And we go, "That's the best place to play in, right here." So, you know, I had a different viewpoint raising children in the house I grew up. Which is always been a special, very special thing. I think they benefit from it. I hope they do. We'll find out.

GASSER: Have you ever wanted to move away from Mountain Drive?

NEELY: Well, at the time of my mother's death, I was glad to, I didn't necessarily want to, but when I did, I was glad I did. I've never wanted to move away from Mountain Drive, you know. I've been faced with maybe having to, you know, especially with our recent problems with the county and being forced to sell and so on. In fact, we're still faced with that. We never know if we'll have to sell this place or not. So it is uncertain. I don't want to. Although I've been places and I've lived other places, so I would love to live some...

GASSER: For example?

NEELY: Well, I've enjoyed being up in Washington area, Washington State. I spent some time up there. Really enjoy that. Beautiful area. And the Sierra foothills I've always enjoyed. Although lately I've taken up scuba diving. So I don't think I'll be far from the ocean.

GASSER: Yes, you mentioned that. It's a whole world. You do scuba dive here, off the coast?

NEELY: Yeah, Channel Islands. Any chance I get. The other aspect of 01:55:00growing up that I recall that was so important was the time that we would spend up in the Sierras. I climbed every mountain in Yosemite. And explored almost every inch of that area of the Sierras and the east side of the Sierras. So I've developed a very deep love for our natural world up there. Through that family, basically living out there in the summers. I remember at times crying because I couldn't go back up to the mountains. I had to go to school. Just so, there was a very important element of that part of my life my father brought to us.

GASSER: You could say that Mountain Drive was a fairly chauvinistic 01:56:00society, fairly chauvinistic place to, the fifties, the women cooked and served and were right along. Has that affected your own relationship with your wife? How do you divide activities?

NEELY: Well, two different things. First of all, and see by these photos, my mother and father worked side by side on the roofs, my mother tiling our roof. Here she is doing the tiles, and there I am helping hand her the tiles.

GASSER: But you were a little tyke.

NEELY: Actually, I think that's my younger brother. But they worked side by side here. But back then of course, the women did the cooking and the housework and raised the children, where the father went out and earned the money. And that's what my father was, the breadwinner. He went out and taught pottery during the winter months and taught his other courses and so on. But as it 01:57:00affected my life now, it's interesting, since I work here at home and my wife teaches school. I do all the shopping, cleaning and cooking. So I don't think it's, I don't feel very chauvinistic. I'm the housewife here. I do all the laundry. Yeah. So. The house is reasonably clean.

GASSER: It wonderful, it's spotless. I wish you, I wish I could keep mine.

NEELY: But I am allowed my, my workshop's my playroom. I get to keep that as messy as I want.

GASSER: But did you did you have any sense of that being a chauvinistic society?

NEELY: Not that much. I mean, I remember the women being involved in most of the activities, but usually in a different way. So it must have been somewhat chauvinistic. I remember the, like at the Grape Stomp, the men would be down choosing the Wine Queen while the women were up here preparing the meal. A lot of what my father brought was, he went to college in Europe at 01:58:00University of Oslo and traveled throughout Europe. And he had a very much, you he learned five languages and spent years in Europe. And would go back constantly the next year. And so, again, it's sort of a European traditional sense of values that when it came to family life and community sense, too, which a lot of the Mountain Drive community was based on his idea a European community, how they would do things. And I think that carried forward to the aspect of women is that more European women had their own communities. My mother was certainly close friends with the women around here. But they also worked side by side on what needed to be done.

GASSER: What do you think your mother would like to be remembered for?

NEELY: Well, raising the six children, I think, was, she was always proud of us children. And then, this house that she worked so hard on, she did 01:59:00most of the work on it. So I think those two things were her pride. She really was always working. And always just so, so proud about that fact that she'd done most of the house work, the building of the house. So I think that the children and this house. I don't know what else, she was an artist who played music, but I don't think that was a priority for her.

GASSER: Give me a little bit more. Can you give me a little bit more of a description of your mother?

NEELY: Well. As I recall, here, which is from the viewpoint of an 11-year-old, was someone who was extremely patient, especially having six kids around. And always doing something. And I never saw her really relaxing or seeing her... Always working on some project. And even at night, I remember going 02:00:00with her to adult education, where she would do like a woodcarving cabinets. Or do something, and then during the day she'd always be working on some part of the house, doing some building. I would accompany her, and, she'd always have to interrupt it to take care of one of the kids, do something. So I just remember her always, always working, always energetic and always sympathetic, never, I think, having to live with my father, who was a much more fiery, outgoing person. She had a sense of. Much quieter sense. She didn't fight back. She wasn't trying to, she just sort of let it all. Most of it let him just go be as wild as he wants. She used to stay here and take care of the kids and work on the house. And she was also ingenious in an industrious way, in that 02:01:00we weren't very rich at all. She grew the garden, grew most of our food, and made do with so little. She did all the sewing and accomplished a lot of it with very little not to work with.

GASSER: I can hear a great deal of respect in your voice for and admiration for all she did.

NEELY: Yes. She reminds me a lot of my wife, actually. Same energy and wanting to be sympathetic with everything and still accomplish everything. Which is two different, hard things to do. And she's very good at that. Here's a picture of Frank Robinson and my dad doing that rammed earth we talked about.

GASSER: I see.

NEELY: They just tamp it down.

GASSER: Oh, yes.

GASSER: Whose method of, who invented that method, do you know?

NEELY: No, I don't. There was, in fact, these photos might be found. 02:02:00There's an article in Sunset magazine that they did about this. They came up here and photographed my father.

GASSER: Oh, really?

NEELY: It had been done in India and other drier climate places as a form of building.

GASSER: I think I've, I know there are a million other questions that I really that are embedded in these, in these sheets of questions that I have here, that I haven't asked. But I guess maybe just sort of to.

NEELY: The Scragg Family...

GASSER: Oh, yeah. Oh, I'm glad you saw that.

NEELY: Yeah. My father's, made vinegar, usually out of wine that didn't work. And it was excellent vinegar. He used a recipe of garlic and herbs and so on. And it was always very good vinegar. And he called it Wild Will Scragg's vinegar. And just as a name he came up with. And it was also, I think 02:03:00it came from he and, there was a whole group of, Gene McGeorge who played violin, and Kajsa Ohman played guitar and sang, the whole group they called themselves the Scragg Family.[22]

GASSER: I see.

NEELY: And so they would play music together, sort of a jug-band style music. My father played this little stand up tub bass and played the jugs and so on. And so I think the Scragg Family came from that and he called himself Wild Will Scragg, made with vinegar.

GASSER: So the Scragg Family wasn't really the Neely family then, it was the name for a group.

NEELY: Yeah, right.

GASSER: I see.

NEELY: Right, yeah.

GASSER: And did they entertain, I guess they were, they were there...

NEELY: I remember they entertained quite a few events here. But they weren't there, it wasn't a little later, you know that. It wasn't in the early Mountain Drive days. They were a little later, but and they played more around town and my dad would join them occasionally. But that's where that Scragg 02:04:00Family came from, that little bit.

GASSER: I know, too, that he was involved in the radio station. There was a radio station here. Dick Johnston had a radio station.[23]

NEELY: Yeah.

GASSER: Do you, could you tell me a little bit about...

NEELY: The only thing I remember him saying about that; I remember him going to Dick Johnston's house to record a program, and I don't even know what they're talking about. I remember them saying something about the only radio station with the microphones covered with a burlap bag. So at least that's what it sounded like. And they, my father would just work on interviews with Dick, you know, just humor, real humorous pieces. Later, when the Grapevine, Dick Johnston resurrected the Grapevine, a newspaper. When Dick Johnston resurrected that he and my father would write articles on the same vein of their radio show. And he did, a little advice to the lovelorn and so on. So some interesting, crazy things. But I don't know much more about that radio station.

GASSER: You, as children didn't get involved?

NEELY: No.

GASSER: Take you down. What do you think has happened to the community?

NEELY: Well, it's changed. You know, as any community will. I like to, I feel a real, it's interesting. I like the way it's changed in many respects. I'm really pleased to see Robbie with this new house up there, and beautiful new house. And raising his family and so on. I'm sad to see some of the changes, like the big monster house we're seeing going up there at Mario's old place. It's just unfortunate that, that type of change is taking place. The sense of community, I think has shifted over to West Mountain Drive, and I really enjoy 02:06:00seeing it there. I'm glad it's still alive to some degree. I think raising my family here, I have that same sense that when I grew up as a family here, having that feeling of a house of earth and I really earth connected. And that feeling I'm glad, hasn't changed. But the whole element of really pioneering and working together, which was the early Mountain Drive, they were really pioneering it. That's gone and necessarily had to be done because everybody's done building. There's no more, no more to do. Like you can't do it any, the county won't let you do it anymore. So that part of it is sad, that it's no longer that way, but I'm glad it's part of my memory. I'm glad they're still. And when Robbie and I go down to Bacchus every year and pour wine over his head and, you know it comes alive a bit, so it's still there. The life of it's still there. It's just sort of tucked away somewhere.

GASSER: It's nice that you can remember that and continue to remember that. Well, I think... Is there anything else that you'd like to add?

NEELY: No, that covers about, you know, most of my memories of growing up here are. So I think we've gone through most of it.

GASSER: What would you like to be remembered for?

NEELY: Gosh, I don't know. You know, I've tried to be somewhat community-involved in the Santa Barbara community with the world of arts. I've been a manager of the Yes Store for about 15 years or so. And so the artistic community means a lot to me, and I've tried to work with that quite a bit. As well as through my own expression of art. You know, jewelry lasts probably longer than I ever will, so I hope it'll be a full memorial out there on everybody's fingers and so on. And also my family that I've raised 02:08:00here, it just means an awful lot to me that's watching my children become young adults and seeing the qualities they have. I hope to be remembered as their parents, I hope they. That's all I can think of off the top of my head.

GASSER: What other, what other things in the community have you, have you, have you been doing...?

NEELY: Well, like I mentioned, working with the Santa Cruz Foundation. I'd love to do more of that. I've worked, I took a docent training at the Sea Center to learn how to work with kids. The marine environment fascinates me, being a diver. So I was taking groups of kids out snorkeling and just working, getting them excited about what they see, not just going out saying this is that and this is that. But taking them out and, "Wow, look at this!" And seeing their involvement with the marine environment blossom with that. So that type of activity where I can work with the kids and work with them. The sense 02:09:00of nature that we have with it needs to be brought into kids' lives.

GASSER: It sounds like that's some of the legacy of your father.

NEELY: Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. He used to take us out on hikes and instead of saying, "Okay, this plant is..." that or that he'd just go, "Oh, look at that!" You know, "What? What? What is it?" You know you just get your enthusiasm going from that. And I'd like to continue, continue on that.

GASSER: I know you, you chose to, I think, use the Waldorf system of education for your children.

NEELY: That's more from our underlying philosophy of life that my wife and I have studied and tried to live on this viewpoint of life. That it's a spiritual viewpoint, but it's also practical. It's just how to, the main idea's that you look at everything from more than one point of view, rather than saying this is how something is done. And the Waldorf education is an offshoot of that, and they raise a child as, looking at the child from all points of view 02:10:00not just of, "Here's how you do math, here's how to do that." My wife is a Waldorf teacher. She teaches second grade this year. So we're quite involved with that school. We're one of the founding families of the school. And I've seen kids go through the system and succeed. You know, it's, it's a wonderful system.

GASSER: And you're seeing that kind of blossoming in your own children.

NEELY: Right. My kids went there, my son went there from kindergarten through fourth grade, and my daughter from first grade through fifth, I believe.

GASSER: And why did your son not go, go further?

NEELY: There was many things involved with him having to move out of his class to Cold Spring school here, where I went. Just kind of nice, but not for many, you know, dismay on the part of the Waldorf School on our part. We thought the classes he needed to do some differently. But it's, yeah, the 02:11:00school's system is wonderful. Hopefully continuing on, my wife's job depends on it.

GASSER: I hope so. Thank you very much, Chris. I really appreciate the time. And if I have more questions, I hope you will be open to come back.

NEELY: And yeah, if I think of anything. The main things I remember; the art and music and nature. Those are the three important elements we have here, still here.

GASSER: They sound like they are. They are well-preserved with you. Thank you very much. Here, here we are again. I, I was just as I was just getting up, I said something about still wanting to interview Cuthbert Chisholm. And Chris started in. And I have to ask you, could you tell me a little bit about Cuthbert?

NEELY: Wonderful character. I just remember him coming by occasionally and sitting down and drinking wine with my father. And then decide that he's going to make dinner and he would make a soup every time. It would be a 02:12:00soup that would take everything he could find and throw in there and work it. And we would be amazed watching him with a sharp knife, worrying about him. And every time the soup turned out amazingly good. We didn't know what he did or how he did it, but it was just always a miracle. And then the other quality I remember about Cuthbert was it any time we saw him driving on the road we'd run to the side of the road and the bushes if we could, because his little VW bus would be veering off the road. He just could not drive. The other wonderful character, too, that we had here was old Ray Hawthorne,[24] who could fix any vehicle if it was built before 1960. No matter what was wrong, he could go anywhere and fix it. And I remember getting stranded up at Las Cruces Hot Springs and old Ray Hawthorne would drive up there and fix the car. He was able to fix anything.

GASSER: And "The Wall," I think as he was known in the plays.

NEELY: Right, always "The Wall." Right.

GASSER: Yeah, I guess he had other other terms like, Popeye, as well. 02:13:00I've heard people speak of him as for I guess for his strength and being able to lift a car up.

NEELY: Yeah, yeah. I just remember as a child and going over and him letting us collect all the nuts and bolts we wanted. Which was always fun. And then looking at his hands, which were so wrinkled, he had the most wrinkled hands I ever remember seeing. That was...

GASSER: ...full of grease.

NEELY: Yeah. Right.

GASSER: What did you do with the nuts and bolts?

NEELY: Just played with them.

GASSER: Are there any other characters that you remember? What about Bill Richardson?

NEELY: I never got to meet him much at all. He never really liked kids around that I know of. Maybe we were just always afraid of his dogs.

GASSER: Oh.

NEELY: I don't know. The other aspect of growing up here that I didn't mention was the fun we had with Westmont. And that's where Robbie and I and all the kids here, this dormitory across the canyon was built. My father called it Westmonster Abbey, and it was just as hideous square cinder block 02:14:00building that my uncle designed, unfortunately. And when it was being built, first starting to be built, they plowed over one of the third largest fields of bunch grass in the world. And so my father was terribly upset by it. And he goes, "We've got to stop him." And of course, back then there wasn't the building control that there were. So as kids, we used to go and sneak and play around the building when no workers was there, pull out all the wiring and just, I'm sure we delayed their building by about two years. I have let all the tires out of the earthmovers, you know, things like that.

GASSER: Sabotage.

NEELY: Right. But Westmont was also was our playground. We had the, there's trails all over that place. We used to enjoy walking up from school every day, taking about two or three hours just roaming Westmont. So that was another aspect of living here as kids, is playing in this.

GASSER: I know the, you mentioned the Kit Tremaine property, when she came, though, that was, the Easter egg hunts were there...?

NEELY: Right.

GASSER: And that stopped though, or did you continue even after she... Has she ever been incorporated in the community?

NEELY: No, no, not really. Because the first thing was done is put a big chain link fence up there. The Easter Egg Field was there originally called the Easter Field, and then it just moved right across the street to where there's a house now and was there for some years. And then the house was built there. And so we gave up on that area and we moved it to Robbie's house up on Mountain Drive, except on rainy days when it's here on my front porch.

GASSER: Oh, is it? Different. I want you to know, however, that Kit Tremaine has, is responsible for giving us some funding for doing this project.

NEELY: Yeah. And she has involved the community in that, some of the people from West Mountain Drive and some friends have been able to work for her or help her out there. She's, I'm not saying that she ever shut out the community. She's definitely a part of our community. A very vital part of our entire community here.

GASSER: Yes. And I know she's ill now.

NEELY: Right.

GASSER: Yeah. Let me see. I know there are so many other things.

NEELY: I know it.

GASSER: One keeps thinking of other, is...

NEELY: Let's see, the other family that we got involved with, was the McGeorges. Gene McGeorge, who I think lives in Montana or somewhere now. He lived over on Banana Road, but he had the only swimming pool around, or the one that was a big swimming pool that we used to walk over and go swimming on hot summer days. And that was always another child thing we did. Hang out at the pool. There was a pool up at the Castle up above, but... there were so many families moved in and out of that Castle that we weren't always familiar with who was there, so...

GASSER: You weren't always welcome.

NEELY: No.

GASSER: And you weren't always welcome nude.

NEELY: We weren't welcome the way that we... welcoming to just walk in and do what we wanted to do. So, yeah, there was a difference. But finally up at the Castle was the Johnson family. Verne Johnson. Which is, became a sort 02:17:00of a key family for quite a time here. Vernon and Anne Johnson,[25][26] in there, I think they had twelve children and they're great. And Jeff Johnson over here on Mountain Drive and his sister, Christy, she's building a house. They're both building houses. That generation is still living here.

GASSER: An interesting family, as you said.

NEELY: Wonderful, yeah.

GASSER: I think also with the spirit of Mountain Drive in there.

NEELY: Yeah.

GASSER: I guess they went to met Kruschev or something or waved at him at him.

NEELY: They had traveled throughout Russia and took a bus, drove a bus in Russia and so on. But I remember when Khrushchev came here to Santa Barbara,[27] and in fact, Bobby Hyde took me down to see him with Naomi. And Bobby held me Naomi up on his shoulders and she waved to him, and Khrushchev came over and shook Naomi's hand. And there's a picture of it in the newspaper. And, all over the country. It was kind of neat. But I can't think of any other characters or incidents, but I'll let you know.

GASSER: Okay. Thank you very much.