Dana Smith Interview

--(Interview begins)--

GASSER: This is an interview with Dana Smith on the 26th of January 1991, recorded for the Santa Barbara Regional Oral History Clearinghouse. My name is Teddy Gasser, and we're going to discuss Mountain Drive in the building of homes in the early years here on Mountain Drive. So, Dana, if I could find out from you what your first. First of all, let's back up. Let me do a little bit of background information about where you were born and a little bit about your family, your early family life, so that I can...

SMITH: Well, I was born in San Francisco in 1922, February 17th, and then lived a year in a lumber camp where my father was setting chokers behind the Cat. And then we moved down to Pasadena and he went into the real estate business. And I was raised in South Pasadena, went to school there, went to college 00:01:00in Pomona College, Law School at USC. That's a thumbnail sketch.

GASSER: That that's very well done. And when did you first come to Santa Barbara? When did you move to Santa Barbara?

SMITH: Well, moved to Santa Barbara in 1959. I tired of fighting the smog down in Fullerton where I ended up and wasn't doing very well in private practice of the law. So I hooked on with the district attorney up here in Santa Barbara and did civil work, basically Planning Commission, Building. So on. That sort of thing. No criminal.

GASSER: And when did you how did you first describe how you first encountered Mountain Drive and this community.

SMITH: Well, I can't tell you about the real early days of Mountain Drive because I wasn't here then, because it started about 40 years ago when Bobby Hyde subdivided this area. And Bobby Hyde was the grand old father of Mountain Drive, and he had some adoptives, well they weren't adopted, they 00:02:00were foster children, a Mexican family, girls, and they went to the Cold Springs School with my two daughters and they got to be friendly and stayed and visited. And I met Bobby Hyde when I was working, trying to put together a Go board, and I'd forgotten where the heavy dots were to begin the Go game. And Bobby told me because he knew all about that sort of thing, anything like that, he knew. And so of course I finished the Go board, got a bunch of shoe buttons for the men and played my one of my twin sons. And I taught him the game and he beat me, so I never played him again. Anyhow, I got interested in Bobby's place because my wife then came up to pick up the girls and found this community where 00:03:00people built their own homes and did a lot of things for themselves that at that time were done by contractors and specialists. And I got gradually interested in this type of life. For one thing, the people...

GASSER: Was this your first wife that...

SMITH: Yeah, uh huh, my first wife, we're divorced now. Became interested in a place like this where if you went to a party, there were some subjects other than dirty jokes and football talk spoken. And if I quoted poetry, somebody up here would know the next few lines. Interesting and interest in all kinds of different lifestyles from what the accepted average type was, middle class. So I visited people, came up, went to parties where we drank a great deal 00:04:00of good old York Mountain Wine,[1] which is probably the world's worst.

GASSER: The cheapest.

SMITH: That reminds me of something I saw in Ensenada one time, where on the door of an abandoned shack, there's a sign, as drawn words saying, Red Mountain Wine, the breakfast of losers. York was just as bad. And that's one of my earliest memories of drinking too much of that horrible red wine.

GASSER: Did you have one particular person, was it Bobby Hyde that you knew best or were there other people that that drew you in?

SMITH: Actually, it was Frank Robinson.[2] Then a building designer, now an architect. This was when Montecito was in one of its periodic attempts to become a city, and Frank was going to run as a city councilman. And I met him then found out he was a building designer 00:05:00and I needed some things done to the house I was staying at in East Valley. So I got to know him and we became friends.

GASSER: And subsequently got to know other people. Describe Bobby Hyde for me.

SMITH: Well, during all the years that I knew him, more than 20 years, he never changed his appearance. Once you look the same age the whole time, a little dried up, shriveled character with all kinds of interests in all sorts of things. He was a mycologist for a while. That is mushroom.

GASSER: We have to break, our photographer is here.

SMITH: Beautiful steel. And with friends. We got some of the beams in place.

TOMAS: I love that fireplace.

SMITH: The doors I made from what I got from a friend who was about to go up the river for 10 to 20 or something.

GASSER: Doors are just absolutely magnificent. With the oak. All of the latches.

SMITH: They all work of course.

TOMAS: Could I take a look outside? For sure. Possibly a suitable location? You need electricity, is that right?

GASSER: Well, yeah. I mean, this is basically a good place. And that's the mic. Yeah. So, yeah, this is all Alejandro Tomas, our photographer. And I'm going to turn off again. We're now going to go ahead and record while the photographer is taking his pictures. And Dana, go ahead. And you were starting to say...

SMITH: Well, the whole anchor, really the founder and the first person to conceive of this type of community was Bobby and went along with some of his principles, which were as little regulation as possible. He hated authority, hated people who were officious officials, but maybe he didn't. Even though I worked for the county and was in the County Counsel's office, he used 00:07:00to refer to me as a spy in the enemy camp. Maybe that's why he didn't that. Now, as far as the Wine Stomps go...

GASSER: Go ahead a little bit more...

SMITH: They were sort of institutional here, and everybody tried to make their own wine with varying degrees of success. I never tried because I saw some of the bad mistakes made. I didn't want to try it.

TOMAS: You bring that? I'm sorry. Closer to you. This is the table. Here we go. Okay, fine.

SMITH: I always put it back there because my wife says I knock them off of the table. And they were. I forget just when in the year was the major Wine Stomp and a Wine Queen was named and everybody got together, celebrated, had a good time, went home, blasted, and that's about what they were. There were 00:08:00a number of ceremonies that we had that oh, some of them were taken out of Renaissance periods, like Twelfth Night after Christmas and then the Bobby Burns Day, which is actually Frank Robinson's birthday, too. Those were fine because George Greyson[3] would prepare an enormous haggis. Haggis is very good. You don't want to ask what's in it? You just eat it.

GASSER: What is in it?

SMITH: I'm not really sure. I never asked.

GASSER: So following your own advice.

SMITH: Some of it, it's a lot of innards and George gives a fine address from I think it's probably quoting Bobby Burns to the haggis and then slashes it open and the steam rises and everybody eats, you know, and then they dance. And then we used to have the Seven-Up Bagpipe Band then, too, and those guys were great. But it's all broken up now. It's gone.

GASSER: No more haggis.

SMITH: No. And then we had Gill Johnston's place, Cinco de Mayo was a great thing to have deer, venison all cooked in an outdoor pit. And here again, we had good old York Mountain Wine until our teeth turned black in the morning. And besides that. There was something at Bill Neely's place that I've forgotten, that it was taken from Greek plays...

GASSER: Pyramus and Thisbe...

SMITH: Pyramus and Thisbe and then the other one, they alternate each year.

GASSER: Pyramus and Thisbe. What is the other one? Gill, what is the other one? It was Pyramus and Thisbe and...

SMITH: Gill Johnston, I mean, at Neely's place.

GASSER: Sure. You know, I can I can watch I can watch his I can watch 00:10:00his face. I mean, it's in half shadow and...

TOMAS: I meant if you can turn the chair the other way. So you could stick your legs out. That would be more comfortable. Well.

SMITH: That's very thoughtful of us...

GASSER: Here. Yeah. Comfortable? Yeah.

TOMAS: Now, come in closer. It's close as you can get to his chair. Okay. There we go. That's much better.

GASSER: Oh, dear.

SMITH: Oh, and there was also the French Revolution, June 14th.

GASSER: Bastille Day.

SMITH: Bastille Day. Yeah, that was held down at the Castle, generally, and so was Twelfth Night and Bobby Burns. And that Castle is something else. There are places where you don't want to sit because if you look up at the beam that's bending like that.

JOHNSTON: Frank Robinson used to shake his head.

SMITH: He wouldn't go under certain places because he didn't trust them, and yet it survived earthquakes and so on. It's still there, and it...

GASSER: This was the first building attempt of one of Bobby's sons?

SMITH: No, this was Tom White built it. He was a descendant of Stewart Edward White, the author, who wrote so much about California, and Mountain Men.

GASSER: Is he still in town?

SMITH: Tom White? No. He's living in France, I believe, and has been for many years.

GASSER: Do you ever see him on your travels?

SMITH: No, I've never even met him.

SMITH: When I came up here, he was long gone. But I do know two of his relatives, Bendy White, Harwood, who was on the Planning Commission for a while, and Rod White, Rod's Marine. They're also related. There's a lot of us, a lot of them, a lot of Whites, now.

GASSER: Okay, as far as Floppy. Go back to your descriptions. I'd like to get some more description of the Hydes and...

SMITH: Bobby was a little dried up old character that looked the same for all the all 20 years that I knew him with interests in almost everything he knew, for example, which mushrooms you could eat and which you couldn't because he experimented with them if he got sick, that went off the list. Fortunately, he knew the deadly ones. He didn't try them. And we got interested in that. And I believe I mentioned his interest in Go game, helping me build the board.

GASSER: How did that come about? That was well.

SMITH: That's because my two daughters and his two foster kids, I forget their names now. They were a Mexican family. They were all orphans and were in the foster, in the juvenile hall when Bobby saw them and asked Floppy if she'd like to take them in as foster kids. And I guess when she recovered, she said, "Yes," 00:13:00because they did. And all except Martha. It worked out pretty well. I knew them all, and particularly with the girls that were friends of the daughters and Floppy, Florence, was that type of person. She put up with some of the damnedest things from Bobby.

GASSER: She was always ready and I understand she was always very gracious, very gracious...

SMITH: Very, very. And came from a good family all close. By good, I mean, I don't mean rich, I mean good in the sense that they got along well together, and good people.

TOMAS: Sir, could you scoot your chair a little forward?

SMITH: Sure.

TOMAS: A little bit more. And you could stay, you're fine right there.

SMITH: Now. If I do that, I got to do that.

GASSER: Oh, dear. This is getting to be so, so disjointed, this interview. 00:14:00Anyway, describe your first encounter with Floppy. Do you remember your first?

SMITH: I don't remember. I don't remember. She was more, she was always somewhat in the background. Bobby was around at least. He was the flamboyant character. She was not, she was this ever-ready, always helpful, person.

GASSER: So you became more enamored of Mountain Drive the more you came to the parties.

SMITH: The lifestyle was interesting. The parties were good. I have studied a lot of history and some of it harkened back to things I knew about and it just was so different from the typical middle, middle class life and the values. Because you're sort of the impoverished intellectuals, you might say, that sometimes gather on big cities, on the outskirts, where the rent is cheaper, or 00:15:00we can build our own homes. There's a place up in the Bay Area called Volcano, and a book was written about that it's much like us, where we did things ourselves, build our own homes, so on. Made a lot of our own food, grew it. And tried to make wine.

GASSER: So whenever you first. Was this the house that was existing? Wasn't the house that was here?

SMITH: No. The house was here. Belonged to Casey. And it was burned in the Coyote Fire.[4] It's the one big fire that they always show first. So spectacular. The house was all wood. And I remember when she was, her husband left her, and she had five kids and she and friends and neighbors built the house. And one time she was up on the roof and it blew off with her on 00:16:00it. Fortunately, she wasn't killed, but it was mostly wood and it just went up tremendously. So when I came, I bought it from her for $10,500.

GASSER: That was after the fire?

SMITH: After the fire. Junk and debris all over it. I made five dump truck loads and, borrowed Michael Peake's dump truck and took all the trash to the dump and cleared off the slab and the Building Department said I could use the same slab. So I did. But as you can see, this house is built to be fireproof.

GASSER: Yes.

SMITH: Tile roof, that's the main thing. But also the heavy beams and the brick. There's not much of anything here that'll burn because I don't like fires. When I was a teenager, I worked in a lumber camp on a fire crew for a summer. And I got to hate fire, wildfires that is. And we've had them up here. In fact, I had a small one when I was cutting up an old car body, and I accidentally set 00:17:00something on fire and burned up a couple of trees. Fortunately, the Fire Chief was a good friend of mine, I'd known him when I was in the County Counsel's office. So he didn't charge me for the cost. He could have, you know.

GASSER: Yes, that's true. So, I was disjointed and distracted, I guess the living in amongst that fire. So you rebuilt and... no, I knew what I wanted to ask you. I wanted you to point out again some of your wonderful special designs as far as this house in concerned. You have a lot of...

SMITH: Basically, the house was designed by Frank Robinson when I was between marriages for me to build, an owner builder place and, So the basic design was his for somebody who was just a lawyer and didn't have any construction experience to be able to build. And of course, that was true of most of us. We all, Gill Johnston[5] here, and all the others built their homes based on Frank's design so that they could do it. The electrical is very simple. The plumbing is well, plumbing is impossible. But yeah, the day I finished the plumbing and turned the water on every damn joint leaked. I had spent four days going back and resoldering all the joints on the copper. My plastic joints were fine and put the plastic pipe outside and copper in. So I learned a lot of things.

GASSER: Were there very many people that came to help you from Mountain Drive?

SMITH: Oh, sure. Sure. I just ask a friend, three or four help me get that beam up there and help me dig out various things and but mostly and my kids helped and Leanne's kids all helped.

GASSER: Was Bobby on the scene at that time?

SMITH: He was there, but he wasn't doing any building at that time. He'd gotten past his building years, but he'd come up and take a look.

GASSER: Tell you how to do it better.

SMITH: No, no. This house was built twice. Of course, I had to rip a lot of things out because they were done wrong and come back to them. But one thing I did do right when I'd finished with the brickwork and we poured the bond beam, it was only an eighth of an inch difference between this part of the house up to the plate, that the roof beam sit on, and the back part. So that was pretty good. But I learned from let's see, it was Alvarez taught me how to lay bricks and my wife, too, how to lay bricks, but I'd go down to work at work on the 00:19:00weekends laying bricks and you have to soak them in water. And those are rough bricks, Mexican bricks, and they're twice the size of a common brick. And I go to work with Band-Aids over all of my fingers. Bob Curry in the office used to laugh at me until I got him up here to help me lay bricks one time. And then he went to work with Band-Aids on his fingers. I used to have blood running down, there's blood on some of these bricks, believe it or not.

GASSER: Is there any reason that you use brick instead of adobe?

SMITH: Yes, adobe you want to make from soil on the site. And this adobe here is very poor. I had to take all of it that was left away because you could take a screwdriver and just break it through it and break it up. It is too sandy. You need more clay than this adobe has here, and it's spotty, too. We went over this with a chemical set to see what exactly what kind of soil we had and, no. So I 00:20:00went down to a man that Stan Hill[6] knew, Primo Garcia-Solis in Tecate, who has brickyards and trucks and so on and made deals with him. He told me an amusing story. Before I came down to him was when Richard Nixon was building his house in San Clemente and they got the bricks and tiles from Primo and the agent for the contractor came down and he didn't know much about Mexico or Primo, and he saw these beautiful clay pots. Magnificent. I used to have some, but they all decayed because he didn't fire-harden them and Primo used to give them to me. Every once in a while he'd say, Well, cinco dollars, you know, five dollars. And so the agent for the Nixon 00:21:00place said, "How much you want for these pots?" And he said, "Oh, I don't know, what do you think they're worth?" And then he says, "Well, there's $100 enough?" Primo nearly fell over dead, never sold them for more than five bucks a piece. And he said, "Well, yeah, that's, that's, that's fine, fine. How many do you want?" The guy says, "Oh, we want about 40, I guess." So he went into town that night and celebrated. With His friend the mayor.

GASSER: Wonderful story.

SMITH: Well, it was fun going down there. The last time I went down to get these Santa Rita tiles and some of the floor tiles, his son had run over his foot with a forklift. And so he had a great big cast on his shoe, on his foot, rather, stumping around. And he was the only one in the family who spoke English and he didn't speak very much English. But what he did was good.

GASSER: Did you? I know Bill Neely used to go down as well. Did you ever go down with him or was it ever joint...?

SMITH: I don't know that Bill ever went to Tecate. I went down with Frank a couple of times, Frank Robinson, and but mostly it was just my wife and me. He went down three or four times. I'm not sure about Bill. I know Stan went down there, of course. Stan Hill.

GASSER: So who are some of the other people as far as building your house?

SMITH: Well, of course, Stan. And I guess I mentioned that when he got that mausoleum of his built, he looked around and looked at me and says, "I wonder if I could get this converted into a specialty restaurant." But he and Sandy[7] lived there in that house is awfully hardy. It's beautifully done. He's done magnificent work on it. It's a different idea of mine than mine. Mine is more Mexican, His is more Spanish. And besides that, of 00:22:00course, there's Gill who built his home and had a wonderful fireplace in it, and I helped him a little bit now and then, and so did other people, because that's the way we were. We helped each other work. Any time I needed help, I just holler for it. And I know with Gill, I used to repair some of the tools that would get broken and then other houses, other homes that people have built. Well, of course, the Castle we mentioned that Tom White built and Bill Richardson[8] built a house up there. Bill is a little bit like Bobby Hyde. He swore he'd never work for a living. And he doesn't. He hunts and fishes, skin dives. He was a Marine Raider in the war. Went on the raid to Makin Island with Roosevelt's kid. And he teaches boxing and ballet. He's quite a character.

GASSER: True Mountain Drive character.

SMITH: Yeah. I taught him how to use machine tools, so, because he wanted to make things out of teeth of the boar he hunts with his dogs and also out of the bone, he make combs and so on. So I showed him how to do that and taught him how to use a chainsaw, too.

GASSER: How did you get interested in in doing metalwork?

SMITH: Oh, as a hobby. Just something to do. I knew a man and a real character named Stuart Carlisle, and I admired the work he did. He did metal sculpture, so I made a deal with him to teach me how to use an oxyacetylene torch. And he did. And I've been doing it ever since. Not much now.

GASSER: When was that? When did you start?

SMITH: Oh, Lord, that was about '64 or '65, something like that, or even earlier. I didn't know much then. And then I took an adult education course to polish up my welding, and I learned a lot of safety things that Stuart hadn't 00:23:00bothered to teach me. I was just lucky I hadn't blown things up because there's a lot of pressure in that oxygen tank. If it gets loose, it'll fly.

GASSER: Yes. Like a bullet.

SMITH: Like a missile.

GASSER: Yes. Yes. We certainly are seeing what they can do these things.

SMITH: He had a house, what they call the A-frame. It was actually an A-frame. And he was a little bit sloppy about building it. He could open some of the cupboards and you were looking right out of the cliffs. And another thing he did, he put one corner of the house on just a flat rock, no foundation at all. And so one rainy night, we were all up there dancing on the second floor, and it slipped off. Everything went down about a foot or so. Scared the devil out of us.

GASSER: Oh, dear. No one was hurt?

SMITH: No, nobody got hurt, as far as I know.

GASSER: Was that a particular festivity?

SMITH: Yeah. No, that was just a dance. It wasn't one of the regular ones. It 00:24:00was a, we had a lot of impromptu ones, too. And whenever somebody would get a couple of barrels of good old York, we enjoyed that. And let me think of other houses up here. That house burned, though. It burned clear down.

GASSER: Which house was this?

SMITH: The A-frame of Stuart Carlisle's. He lost it to a guy he owed money to, who lived up here, too.

GASSER: He lost it?

SMITH: Yeah. It was just foreclosed. He'd hocked it. Then there was a house down there. It's 330, I think it was built. I did a lot of work on that one because it was falling apart. I had to do a lot of metal work. Down there, I think and... I don't know who built this was Louise Casey's place. And I'm trying to think it was too... Oh, there's the Maurer's down there.

GASSER: Eric and Nina Maurer?

SMITH: Yeah, Eric is dead.[9] And Nina still lives there with her son and the daughter was there, left and then this house below where the mutton runcie lives. Colina. At one time that was sort of called the hen house. I think it was about eleven good looking girls living in it.

GASSER: Oh, dear. That was trouble.

SMITH: Well, it was a scene of a lot of good parties, as I recall. Oh, and we used to do Christmas caroling, too. That was a custom we had, but that's fallen by the wayside. We're getting too old and creaky to get around anymore. And Helen Connolly, I think Gary probably helped build that place. He knows how to build. And you've probably seen his house.

GASSER: Yes, yes.

SMITH: Yeah. He's had a lot of trouble with that. I don't know if he's still living there. If he is, it isn't it isn't by virtue of the County, they did their best to shut him down and I made him a complaint and so on. But it didn't 00:25:00work out because he basically there isn't enough water. That's the real problem. The house they could accept, I think if somebody really went to bat on it and then the Mountain Drivers sort of spread out toward West Mountain Drive. We began here, East, then worked west.

GASSER: It seems. Yes. It seems like some of the children or some of the...

SMITH: The children and some of the younger ones moved out that way. People like Ed Schertz[10] for one and...