Mary Lynn Soini Interview

--(Interview begins)--[1]

REMAK: About Mountain Drive, when did you first hear about it?

SOINI: I guess I was probably seventeen.[2] I went with my friend Maria who was in that photograph. We were dancers in the high school, and our teacher, June Lane, was living on Mountain Drive with her husband, and after one of our bigger productions she had a cast party at her house. My parents drove us up to the party and dropped us off and came up and got us afterward. We thought it was great. We thought this house they lived in was just super.

REMAK: Did they have a big dance floor?

SOINI: Yes. I think it was fairly new. They were having everybody in because 00:01:00they had finally got this huge thing built. But it was really quite wonderful. We'd been downtown all our lives. We had never seen anything like that. That was my very first exposure.

REMAK: Did you think you would like to come and live there?

SOINI: Not at the time, because of course Maria and I had plans to go and take New York by storm upon graduating from high school, this didn't happen obviously. You would have all heard about it. (laughter) It was when I was about nineteen and needing a place to live, and I was living on some land of Bobby Hyde's over on the San Marcos Pass area. I had met his daughter, Angy, and a bunch of people over there who I thought were pretty wonderful. And someone over in that area said, "Oh, there's somebody who needs a babysitter over on Mountain Drive." So I moved into this tiny little house adjacent to a larger house and 00:02:00took care of some children and cleaned and cooked and had my eyes opened real wide by all of this independent living going on around me. It was quite wonderful.

REMAK: Who were those people that you worked for?

SOINI: Stu Carlisle. I don't know where he is now. I know he has some friends in the Painted Cave area. Ted Adams and people like that still try to keep up with Stu. He was trying to become a metal sculptor and different things. His house eventually burned down in one of the fires. There's not a trace of it left. I think someone else finally bought that land and made another house. It was right above Merv Lane's.[3] Straight up. Between Marty's and that other one over there.

REMAK: What were your first impressions of living on Mountain Drive?

SOINI: During the time I was at Stuart's, there was some kind of a little party. 00:03:00I was thinking about this just the other night, thinking of you coming to talk about Mountain Drive. I hadn't met very many people because he had three small children and I was kept fairly busy. He and his wife were working at the time. And suddenly all these people were coming up in the evening bringing food. The plan was just to sit around in the evening and build a campfire down on the ground. I thought everybody was extraordinary and exotic and colorful and beautiful.

REMAK: Were many of them artists themselves?

SOINI: Bill Neely, I would say, was an artist with his clay. He was also managing to carve out an existence with it by selling his wares and by teaching.

REMAK: What was so exotic about it?

SOINI: Just the way everyone was dressed. Frank Robinson, who's an architect, had a big, gold--not a big gold but a very lovely subtle gold earring on. I'd 00:04:00never seen a man with an earring on and that was twenty-five years ago. And I thought maybe he was a pirate or something, or had the ocean in his past. As it turned out I learned later that he had lived on a boat for a while in the harbor, he and his wife.[4]

REMAK: The costumes, now that's sort of interesting, the way people were dressed...

SOINI: Yeah, I don't think they considered themselves in costume that much, but, for instance there was this kind of very simple hand-woven jacket from Mexico that all of the men had on over their shirts. I've forgotten what they're called now. Not a huarango, maybe a huarango. You've probably seen them. They've got a little bit of fringe at the bottom, which is the warp hanging down. It's just a simple woven textile of a slip. The sides are sewn up, and there's usually some striping of colored wool and natural wool. Just that sort of thing. Probably some of the men had boots on. Frank always wore boots and tucked his trousers 00:05:00into his boots, which added to the seaman look about him for me. And the women were all in skirts most of the time instead of trousers. All of the women I had been around were getting into trousers all the time. And everyone had a nice earthy quality that they were consciously going after. It was sort of like a little alternate counter-culture group, but I don't think anybody had really articulated any of those things yet at that time.

REMAK: Bobby Hyde selected the people that he sold land to, didn't he, from the basis of his particular way of living.

SOINI: More or less. I know two or three, maybe even four of the men had been in college at the same time when the campus was on the Riviera. I think Frank 00:06:00Robinson and Bill Neely and Gill Johnston went to school together.[5] They were even in some shows together. I think I found an old yearbook once, and Gill was very much into theater and Frank was a bit and Bill was a bit. I'm not sure about this, but I think Bill Richardson might have been in school at the same time, but not necessarily a very close chum of those three. But I think those three guys spent enough time together so that when they found the women they married they kind of all still kept in touch and decided they wanted to do things a little differently and build their own houses. And I think what Bobby supplied was an opportunity for people who didn't have tons of money to do that. At that time Mountain Drive was far enough off the beaten path so that building inspectors and a few other bureaucratic people weren't around all the time. So people could kind of do 00:07:00their own thing, another phrase that was popular much later.

REMAK: Were you involved in building a house?

SOINI: Not at first. But then Ed Schertz and I were living together and we became involved in building a house. We bought an acre of land from Gill Johnston, who had bought three, I think, acres from Bobby, and he subdivided for us. At the time the land couldn't go any smaller than an acre. Excuse me.

REMAK: As long as we were interrupted, let me go back to my outline of questions and one of the things we're interested in is people's impressions of Bobby Hyde, and the origins, what you might know about the origins of the community, if you could tell me the first time you met him for example.

SOINI: I don't remember when the very first time I met him was, but after 00:08:00meeting him a couple of times it was as though I had always known him. He was that easy for me to be around. I think he had a wonderful ability to really go into something he was enthusiastic about, and although I didn't know him this well, I've heard people say that another wonderful thing about him was that he was able to go from project to project with almost a relentless kind of energy. He just kept going and going and going. And he did to a certain extent hand-pick people. He was fond of saying things like, when I began to have a relationship with Ed Schertz, he would say things like, "Oh, I approved that." He was kind of a patriarch, his position there. I think when I moved to Mountain Drive it was 00:09:00really coming into its prime. I don't know how many years people had been there already--four, five. Not ages and ages. All the children were very young and still coming, and houses weren't quite complete. People were still living in incomplete houses and still working on their houses as much as they could and growing gardens. Things were still on the build. I lived there for five or six years in various locations, the final one on this land that Ed bought. After I moved I still stayed in touch with a number of people, but not as closely. Then things really did change in the late sixties. There was a lot of reshuffling.

REMAK: I think you said something to the effect that the lifestyle wasn't defined in words exactly, but there was certainly the feeling that...

SOINI: ...that it was a little bit different. Yes, everyone talked about how they weren't downtown. If you kind of got off the path it would be like, "Oh, you're getting a little downtown on us." There were these little subtle nudges and peer-pressure things to have an alike group of people. I got the feeling a lot of times that everyone was just tickled to be away from the beaten path and doing something a little different. Enough of the men had the kinds of jobs that they didn't have to be away all the time, so that there was more of a, probably a more natural village flow of life, which is exactly what everyone wanted at the time. There was a lot of just going around visiting in a very casual way. People didn't necessarily always phone ahead and say, "Are you going to be in? 00:11:00We'd like to drop in." It was just dropping in. I remember after I lived at Stu Carlisle's house I moved down to Jack Boegle's house. Have you been to his house?

REMAK: No I haven't.

SOINI: It's really wonderful. It was a lot smaller then. It's been added onto now. And I wasn't doing certain things properly, but I had no idea. For instance, there used to be a very regular visitor. At the time I was quite busy putting my life together after I'd had a very bad early marriage, and I was trying to go to school. I was going to City College and working in a restaurant and having my consciousness very much blown up (laughter) by my experience of living on Mountain Drive. Just the daily life that was so exciting. One person who used to come and visit quite regularly--I thought he was very pleasant. He came and came and came and visited. Finally one day he said, "Don't you know that when I get here you're supposed to pour me a glass of wine?" (laughter) And 00:12:00ever after, whenever I saw this person come to the house, I said, "Oops, I've got to get some wine glasses and the wine bottle out." A lot of wine was being consumed. But compared to our whole cultural direction in the decade or so that followed, it seems like a very naive little offshoot there on Mountain Drive.

REMAK: I read somewhere about each of the houses having a flag--a Mountain Drive flag--and then in the center of it was a medallion that each person picked out individually. Was that at the time you were there?

SOINI: People were very much into flags. I don't remember every single household having their own flag. Flags were used kind of the way they're used on boats. Everyone had a "No" flag. If you flew your "No" flag you did not expect anyone 00:13:00to come calling. And being on a steep hillside the way the situation is there, it was easy to get to a vantage point and see flags before you got to somebody's house. People were quite good about the "No" flag, and unless there was a pressing issue, they would usually stay away.

REMAK: Was it a standard flag?

SOINI: I think it was white with a black spot or something like that. (laughter) Probably a plain flag of the Maritime Code. Then there were other flags for holidays. Everyone seemed to have a flag collection, so during Christmas certain flags were flown. Flags for holidays, I do remember that we had a lot of flags. I don't remember all of the insignias.

REMAK: Holidays seemed to have been celebrated very delightfully...

SOINI: Uh, uh. You might say harkening back to the Middle Ages. They had a lot of holidays in the Middle Ages. Why can't we still have a lot of holidays? So 00:14:00there were all the traditional holidays that we have--except that some holidays were put down as being too commercial to be recognized. I think Father's Day and Mother's Day were probably some of those. And the commercial end of almost everything was kind of put in the background, which sort of fit the economy, too, because there was a certain tightness with the dollar that was in existence. But then we did have special holidays. One was Bastille Day, July 14th. That was celebrated with a big party. And Cinco de Mayo was celebrated. All the independence days from all over from every culture possible. And then there was Twelfth Night, the Epiphany, that was very much celebrated. That was a very big structured party. A whole Court of Fools was chosen and a Bean King was chosen. It was really taken right from the Middle Ages or whatever king it was 00:15:00who was rebelled against and first had that party formed against him. There was a cake made, and one piece had a bean in it. All the men were to eat the cake, and the one who got the bean was the king. He had to choose the queen, and the queen could be neither a sweetheart, lover, or wife. So this unattached-to-him woman would be queen would be queen for the evening and they would reign for the evening--and for the whole year if they wanted to. (laughter) They could take over any party they wanted to take over. There was a lot of, "The King drinks," "The Queen drinks." And everyone kept drinking. There was Bobby Burns Night, which was part of our effort to recognize the lesser-liked poets. (laughter) I remember there was a lot of reading of McGonagall. He's another pretty awful poet. And there was also a Christmas pageant. This was usually at Frank 00:16:00Robinson's house, because his living room was perfect for it. He had a large living room, and there was a large double step going down to a large hearth. The hearth was probably half the size of this dining room. And all the children would have the parts; the Virgin, the Baby Jesus, and all. As the children got bigger it was always a big debate, who would be the Baby Jesus. That was really wonderful. That was just great. Everyone would gather and everyone would be very quiet and let the children do their performing. There would be a great party after. That was wonderful. It was an idyll. It was really a conscious effort to really eke the goodness, all the joy possible. There were probably other parties I can't think of offhand.

REMAK: Of course there were the two big occasions, the Wine Stomp and the Pottery War.[6]

SOINI: Yes, the Pottery Wars. I don't know just when those started, but there got to be two or three a year, and those were big occasions. Those were very much fun. We didn't have very many of them before the tax man came and said, "Wait a minute. We've got to get some sales tax out of all this." (laughter) Then they did kind of peter out after that, because it was not anything we wanted to register, put on the map and have people really come to.

REMAK: They were advertised though in the local paper. I think I've seen an ad in "Things Happening this Weekend," the Pottery War.

SOINI: Great. I wasn't aware of that.

REMAK: You did get people up there though?

SOINI: Oh, yes, tons. I mean after we'd had one or two it was really a crush.

REMAK: Did they come to buy or come to...

SOINI: They came to look around, and party. And they did buy. They bought lots. I used to bake bread for that event. I would stay up for 36 hours and make 100 or 120 loaves of fresh bread and sell it all.

REMAK: What kind of bread?

SOINI: Oh, I had different kinds. I always used real good flour and I made fruit breads and plain breads and onion breads and poppy seed breads and all these different breads.

REMAK: Did you have a regular stove and regular kitchen in the contemporary sense?

SOINI: I had all the parts--except for hot running water. I had cold running water. And I had a stove and a frig and a sink. Actually my neighbor, Audrey Johnston, had let me use her oven. She lived down the hill from me, and when I was baking it was put six in Audrey's oven and run up and check the ones in my oven. (laughter) It was quite mad but quite a lot of fun, too.

REMAK: Did you do a lot of your own preserving and that sort of thing?

SOINI: Yes, as much as possible. Well, as much as was possible without getting stressed out about it.

REMAK: Did you try to live off the land as a goal?

SOINI: No, not really. In ways. I mean everyone had gardens, and there were lots and lots of fruit trees and avocado trees around. There was that. But the living off the land thing came in a little later. It became part of a national movement, this back-to-the-land kind of thing. A lot of people on Mountain Drive were pretty practiced at a lot of that stuff, and became popular. No. I worked. First I was a student, and then I taught at Devereux, and came home on the 00:20:00weekends and made adobe bricks and fed hordes of people, and went back to work on Monday.

REMAK: Could you describe some of the people you knew up there? For instance, you mentioned June Lane.

SOINI: Well, she was the dance teacher at Santa Barbara High School, and my friend and I were just about as far into dance as we could be at that time. June was wonderful because she was so innovative, and she really caused us all to work hard--the ones she realized were serious students.

REMAK: Was it mostly modern dance that she taught?

SOINI: Yes, but she gave us a few basic positions of ballet and this and that. Her energy was so wonderful, and the things she got out of us all were so wonderful.[7] She had a course, she finally did the history of dance, and we went and looked at all these different aspects of dance. I remember one thing we did was..., we had to do something from Greek theater. She divided this huge dance class into four or five groups, and we had to choreograph something and then have most of the people in the group be a chorus. The old Dance Room at the high school was wonderful because there was a balcony that looked down, and I remember the group that Maria and I were in we did something where we had our dancers down here and our chorus up there, and we did the thing back and forth. The class sat around on the benches and watched. I still do see June occasionally, and [when] I saw her, oh, four or five years 00:22:00ago, we were talking about those days and those dancing classes, and she said that it was never the same. She said that after the class of sixty she never got a group again that was so willing to work so hard and who were so curious about all these different aspects. I don't know if that meant, that by then the girls coming up had already been exposed to so much in their lives that they weren't as interested, or what. I guess I was like a farm pig. Every day was new and fresh and... (laughter) That's what farmers say about pigs, that every day is all brand new.

REMAK: What about her husband? He was a musician and a writer, right?

SOINI: He was a musician, a writer, he worked at the railroad, and he attended school. He had a degree from Black Mountain College in the East, and it was not 00:23:00accredited so he couldn't teach here. So he began going to the university and taking classes, and by the time I was in the university I used to carpool with him for, I think two or three semesters. I would hike up the road and meet him and we would go out to school together. He would make me read my French. He was very academic, very studious. He has a great sense of humor, I think, and sometimes it takes a long time to get to that point with Merv. But he's one of my favorite people. He used to come occasionally to the dance classes. June and Merv's son owns this restaurant called E.J.'s in town where Joe's used to be. Nathan Lane owns that. I remember when Nathan was about two, Merv came to the dance classes one day, and my friend Maria and I were just spellbound by this beautiful little boy who was so cooperative and so willing to sit and watch. His 00:24:00wonderful eyes. I didn't really know them at home. When I was in high school I wasn't really a free agent. So I never knew them at home together as a couple. I guess I was in and out of their house a little bit when Merv and I were riding to work together.

REMAK: What about the Neelys? I remember he being a potter. Did he teach?

SOINI: He taught at Adult Ed, forever. For years he was fully ensconced in the Adult Ed schedule in those days and I think he probably did it within a year of his death. He was a real mainstay down there. And in summers he was a forest ranger up in Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite. He would take the family up in the summer and they would camp out and live out all summer.

REMAK: Did you ever go out there?

SOINI: I never got to go to the high mountains for a week or two or whatever, and have great times in the mountains. And I never got away, managed to leave myself, my responsibilities behind, and get up there. And he was very colorful, and his wife Barbara, his first wife, was very wonderful. She died at quite a young age of cancer. That was one of my first big crushing blows of reality--was this young mother of six dying, and there wasn't anything any of us could do. She did, indeed, get sicker and sicker and die. That was a great sadness for everybody, a great loss for the children. She was wonderful. She was always sewing and painting the house and growing the garden. Her youngest was only three when she got really sick.[8] And I always thought 00:26:00her children were an exceptionally beautiful crew. I was very impressed by all the young children when I first moved there because they spent so much time outside. They were always climbing around that mountainside. They were all so vigorous and sturdy and muscular. It was just great.

REMAK: Were they well behaved on the whole?

SOINI: When they were within earshot, you know. The kind of traveled in little packs in the brush and had all their little forts and their favorite canyons and this and that. But I would generally say they were very well behaved.

REMAK: Were their parents particularly concerned with giving them a broad education? Were they encouraged a lot to explore the out of doors and learn about rocks and trees and...

SOINI: I think nature education was pretty much emphasized. I remember hearing, after I got myself up there, after I'd lived there for about a year and a half, 00:27:00or two years. I remember people started talking about how, "Oh yeah, we weren't going to send any of kids to public school. We're going to educate them at home." But then when they really looked at it as a project there wasn't anybody who wanted to take it on. (laughter) And there was Cold Springs School, one of the best public schools in the country, right down the road. In fact, at the time, it was right down the trail. There was a trail through the whole Mountain Drive community, through Westmont, and all through that neighborhood. Kids could walk to school without ever crossing a road. It was wonderful. It was this magic little trail. It was great. Not a lot of those kids went on to school beyond high school. I always kind of wondered why. All their parents were college-educated people, which maybe was one of the reasons, maybe it's the flip-flop thing. I don't know. Some of them have become successful at their chosen fields.

REMAK: Were they also encouraged to study music and painting and dance?

SOINI: I don't know about music, but painting, but I would say dance and music and outdoors and those things were right into their regime. I know one of the moms, Peggy--she was Peggy Robinson then, she was a very active Girl Scout mother for years, and the girls went all through scouting. She had three girls and two boys.[9][10]

REMAK: Who was Peggy Robinson's husband?

SOINI: That was Frank. He was an architect, in fact he still is. He does some 00:29:00beautiful things. He was very hail-fellow-well-met. I knew him for years and years and years before I realized that as a young man he'd suffered a stroke, and that's why he had a certain speech slur... that I just assumed was a very modest speech impediment. He couldn't really go actively at carpentry any more, but he certainly oversaw the whole construction of a house he had designed. And when his houses were up to a certain point, I think when all the roof beams or rafters were in place, he would always have a rooftree party. Word would spread, and everybody who wanted could go up and look at the building. The owners would be there and more wine would be drunk in honor of it.

REMAK: These houses were not just in Mountain Drive?

SOINI: No, they were all over the place.

REMAK: Was his reputation for adobe houses particularly?

SOINI: Adobe houses and site-suitable houses. He would never design a house 00:30:00until he had spent quite a bit of time on the site. From the most basic thing like the path of the sun to the vegetation and the grade. He was in favor of the minimum of bulldozing to make a spot for it. I think he just came back from Texas, somebody flew him out to Texas to do a house. He worked for a while in Mexico--somewhere near Allende, I think, designing and building houses. With his second wife.[11] They went down there for a while.

REMAK: I was going to ask you more about your Canada experience. Was that part of a group of people from Mountain Drive?

SOINI: That was kind of spinoff. (laughter) I had been going up to Canada for summers for three or four years before I moved up there. The place I went was some land that Bobby Hyde owned way up on Quadra Island in Village Bay. This was not necessarily remote, but there was no one else around. You had to walk over a hill to get out or boat out. I think when Bobby bought it there was one old ramshackle cabin that he fixed up, and then his son, Gavin Hyde, made another cabin. His daughter, Angie, and her husband, bought some land on an island about a 30-minute boat ride away over in Whaletown on Cortes Island. So we'd all end up there in the summers. The fellow I was with at that point, he and I would go 00:32:00up for three or four months sometimes. So we really had a long space. When people came and needed their cabins we'd move out and camp out. And visit with them and enjoy seeing people. I did a whole lot of just nature observation and swimming and boating, and we built rafts, and we fished, and dug for plants. It was like the idyll carried a few more steps. That is where I really did try to subsist more closely off the land, and use very little money.[12]

REMAK: Was it stimulating for a creative person to live in Mountain Drive? Where the community of ideas and people to bounce ideas off of one another.

SOINI: I think so. There were lots of lively discussions. That was one of the great things, in fact, about, well, say, winter evenings. We always felt that it 00:33:00was winter when winter came up there because there was no central heating. There was the great activity of walking from house to house along trails instead of getting in your car and driving. And sitting around wood-burning stoves and fireplaces, and there was lots of nice conversation, easy times, and very cozy times. Current events and ideas, things that everyone would air their opinion on that. Some of the older children would stay up and would listen. So there was that element. People who didn't want to be so involved in the community didn't have to be. There were several people whom one rarely saw by comparison. Bill Richardson, the writer, would be one. He didn't want to live anywhere else, but he did not seek to interact on a daily basis. He knew that I was interested in 00:34:00writing, and if we ever ran into each other at, say, the mailboxes, another great nerve center of communication, (laughter) he would always ask me if I was spending enough time with my journal and this and that. So even though he wasn't there all the time he was still after the basic thing we all thought we were after.

REMAK: Tell me a little something about Ed Schertz, as a potter primarily.

SOINI: He was just becoming a potter when I met him. He had been a Probation Officer downtown and decided it was not for him to report in every morning and have all that, whatever was attached to that job for him. He had his studio at home. He was really just beginning, and I think he developed quite nicely. I don't know how great of a potter he is, or was, or how much he even does it now. 00:35:00I'm not real happy with some of the things I've heard about him.

REMAK: Well, I saw his name on the current Adult Ed schedule.

SOINI: Oh, good. I'm very happy. I thought that maybe he wasn't going to be able to do that for a while. He's been teaching down there for probably ten or twelve years. He was a very educational experience for me. (laughter) He was quite a bit older than I was. We're not really in touch now, but we always enjoy seeing each other. I've sometimes have run into him down at the gallery,[13] and Elizabeth had a show of his. Before I had my job at the university I did a lot of holiday work for her the first Christmas we were back from New York. He came in a few times, and it was nice to see him. I remember when he came to pick up his work after his show was over I told him which piece was my favorite, and he said, "Well, why don't you take 00:36:00it?" I thought that was very sweet.

REMAK: What sort of things did he do in clay when he first came to Mountain Drive?

SOINI: Utilitarian things. He didn't make the same style of clay as Bill Neely at all. Bill made these wonderful majolica pieces; he was really reviving a whole European art form. Ed was more contemporary. He was more into the brown glazes and the earth colors--California pottery.

REMAK: Did he study with Bill Neely?

SOINI: I think he did. He finally went to Japan and studied there some years after my association with him. I was really thrilled that he had stepped out that much, because when I was living on Mountain Drive I know he used to hate to go as far away as Solvang. (laughter)

REMAK: Were you there during the Coyote Fire?

SOINI: Yes. We had to evacuate, but we didn't lose anything. We just lost a couple of trees and a couple of lumber piles--supplies for the house we were building. We had this little Quonset hut we had erected as our temporary house. It seemed to be temporary for quite some time. But we didn't lose any of our animals at all, or really anything. I was almost wishing we would because I thought it might spur us on. But when we had to evacuate we took a lot of our stuff with us; we had a truck. We threw everything that we had in there and then spent a few days at my mom's. She lived out on La Cumbre Road at the time.[14]

REMAK: Was it difficult for people to get back after the fire?

SOINI: Yes. I know there was one family--another family that didn't interact much--Tom Arnold and his wife. They lived kind of on a promontory beyond Bobby Hyde's house. I don't know if anything has ever been rebuilt there. The whole thing burned to the ground, and I don't think she got out with a lipstick tube. I don't think she ever went back. She could not bear to go back. They had lived in many places in the world and he had been a photographer. He lost every negative of his whole photographic career. They were retired, and they gardened extensively. In fact, when they went away on trips I would water their gardens for them, and I would just go and spend four or five hours watering. They had so many beautiful, beautiful plantings. The Garden Club used to tour their place. They were on the "in" schedule. And that all was destroyed. I think they were the most completely devastated 00:39:00because of the point they were in their lives. Most people lost parts of their houses. Like Frank Robinson lost the canyon side of his house, was real destroyed. But he put it back together nicer than it was. It took him about six or eight months.

REMAK: Did people help?

SOINI: Yes, a lot. There would be community work-days at this place or that place. There was a lot of cleaning up to do even on places that didn't lose houses, because of all the ash--an incredible amount of ash. I remember the ground stayed hot for so long. Our driveway was skirted by these big royal blue eucalyptus trees, and a lot of those limbs burned and fell to the ground. The ash was 18 inches deep. We were all running around in rain boots for a long time. I remember how hot it felt. I was cleaning up one day, and suddenly it was so hot on my feet, and I thought, "My God, it's still hot under here." And it 00:40:00was. I put my hand down there and it was still hot. It wasn't burning because there wasn't anything else to burn. But that was a pretty devastating experience for everybody--the shock of it. The first night of it we were all watching the fire...

REMAK: From where?

SOINI: From all of our houses.

REMAK: You hadn't evacuated?

SOINI: No. We didn't evacuate until two or three days into the fire. I remember the fire going south on the mountains, and everyone thought they were just about to get it under control and the Santana winds came from the other direction and blew it all back. We couldn't believe it. It was something that was so much bigger than anybody could do anything about, and there it came. It was started by a cigarette. And then to have it all go back to Painted Cave and everything else.

REMAK: A trivial question: I have the impression that the hot tub was invented 00:41:00on Mountain Drive. Is that true?

SOINI: (laughter) You know, I was wondering about that, too, because I was thinking of the hot springs and how we used to--if it was a nice full-moon night and no one had anything to do, we'd go up and sit in the hot tub and talk and drink wine and get real clean and warm in the water. And I don't remember anyone else around doing that yet. And then people started building their own hot tubs. And then Noel Young came out with that hot tub book, "Leon Elder," came out with that hot tub book, and kind of cemented the whole thing.[15] It was really a tradition by then. We always said anything that happened two years in a row was a tradition, if it looked like it was going to keep going. I guess there was a lot of hot tubbing. Then, the Grape Stomp was pretty radical. I think what they strove for was to get all 00:42:00those barriers out of the way. "We know each other. We might as well know what we look like with nothing on." Pretty radical. So okay, we went for that. (laughter) I remember in an earlier grade I heard something that after I had been on Mountain Drive for about two or three years--I thought, "This is it." Because there was this rumor downtown that there was a nudist camp up in the mountains. It wasn't a nudist camp by any stretch, but after I'd been there for a while--I was probably sitting in a hot tub one night--and thought, "Oh. I must be in the nudist camp." (laughter)

REMAK: Did living up in Mountain Drive change your life?

SOINI: Oh, I think so. I think it had a very positive and very expanding impact for myself. But I was probably like a squeezed out sponge when I got there, just waiting for anything new and different. My food awareness was affected. People were trying to eat well. Several of the women were very knowledgeable about nutrition, which is very handy if you don't have a lot of money to know what your kids are eating is a good step. The yen to celebrate was made a very lasting impression on me. My husband is Jewish, and we celebrate his holidays and mine with equal vigor and enthusiasm. I think my thinking was probably 00:44:00affected. "Question authority," is another little thing I never heard until years later, but that was the kind of, you know, you don't just follow blindly along and get sucked into something. You think about it for a minute and see if you really want to be involved, if you have to be involved, if it would be better for everybody if you were involved. And certainly, expressing oneself through the way one dressed was part of what was going on there. One of my college friends, who also lived on at least the edge if not closer to Mountain Drive with me for years and years, she articulated that one day. She said, "We are expressing ourselves each morning when we put our clothes on." (laughter) Yes, we are. Of course in those days we were getting a lot of our clothes either 00:45:00from our sewing machines or the rummage sales or the thrift stores, and that was really not quite de rigueur, but we acted as though it was. You didn't go out and get something new. (laughter)

REMAK: What sort of an impact did Mountain Drive have on Santa Barbara, do you think?

SOINI: Oh, golly. I think Santa Barbara--I think probably the people who knew about Mountain Drive enjoyed what they got--enjoyed the rumors. We used to talk about Sunday tourists driving through and stuff like that. There were probably a lot of people who thought it was really horrible. I don't know. I've never spoken with anyone about it who said, "Oh yeah, oh you lived on Mountain Drive, that terrible place." No one's ever done that. Everyone's always gone, "Oh yeah, you are? What was it like living on Mountain Drive." And it was very exciting 00:46:00and fun and a new way of approaching things for me, definitely. I came from a very structured, very conservative lifestyle. My parents weren't necessarily conservative politically, but they were first generation Americans so they were not going too far from where they had come from.

REMAK: That's great. Are there any questions you wished I had asked you?

SOINI: I want access to all this material after. I want to hear what everyone else has said.

REMAK: We'll do our best.

SOINI: What's your time line on it, Roberta?

REMAK: Well, why don't I turn the machine off and then I'll be able to... Thanks a lot.

SOINI: You're welcome.