Noel Young Interview

--(Interview begins)--

REMAK: This is an interview with Noel Young for the Special Mountain Drive Project. It is February 18, 1990. The interview is taking place at his home in Santa Barbara. And this is Roberta Remak. So can I start off by asking you where you were born and when and what your education was as a child? That sort of thing?

YOUNG: Yeah. Well, I was born in San Francisco in the early twenties, and my father died when I was about 13. And so my mother and sister and I moved down to Pasadena where she taught. And then and I was a journalism major and my ambition was to be a world correspondent. Do exactly what you're doing only with leaders of nations, so to speak. And but then I was pulled into the Air Corps, and I was in for three and a half years, and I was stationed over in the 00:01:00Philippines for nine months of that time and left. And but during that time, I had gotten married and my wife was pregnant and she had our first daughter while I was over there. And I didn't get home until, oh, six months after my daughter was born. And there we were living in a garage apartment in Pasadena and in back of her folk's house and an intolerable place. I never made friends with Southern California. Santa Barbara is as far south as I would ever want to be. And so I didn't want to go back to Stanford. I had a family to support, and my ambition was to be a writer. But to be a writer, it didn't matter where I live necessarily. I wanted to live in Robinson Jeffers country. I wanted to live in Steinbeck country. So we bought the most powerful car that $150 would 00:02:00buy, which was a 1929 LaSalle touring car and packed all our earthly belongings in it and headed up north and hoping to land in Monterey, where the ocean was, had some muscle to it and where the elements were more stronger. But we got as far as Santa Barbara and the car broke down it threw a rod. The engine was totally destroyed. And we looked around us. There were no stoplights in town, and this is in 1946, and it seemed a good place to stay. And so I had about six jobs in six weeks worked as a train caller, worked in a bookstore, worked in the library, and my wife was doing freelance illustration, doing book plates for people and things like that. And I wound up as an apprentice printer. I figured that had some relationship to books and writing and I became very 00:03:00fascinated with working with my hands and letterpress book shop, learning to set, I mean, print shop, learning to set type and hand feed presses and that kind of thing. And so during that time, an old friend, Dick Smith, whom I met in the service and his wife and child, moved out here and we bought an old barn in Montecito together, and we were going to be potters and we're going to start a little literary magazine. We had all sorts of idealistic and ill-founded dreams. And about that time, through my interest in writing and going to adult education writing class that was then given by Paul, fine old gentleman named Paul Ellerbe. I met Bobby Hyde who had just acquired that 50 acres or so up at Coyote and Mountain Drive.

REMAK: And what year was this?

YOUNG: This was in about must be around 1948 or '49, somewhere before 50. I know that. And Bobby had already portioned off some of his land. I mean, his daughter Suzy had married Bud Macy[1] and they had an acre on the high part of, see Mountain Drive had this equator running, right. Mountain Drive was the equator line and above it were one kind of folk and on the lower side were another. And they didn't necessarily co-mingle. They did sometimes, but they were two distinct, they were the upper Mountain Drivers and the lower, and the more restrained were on the upper side. And the more, well, more pagan were on the lower side. And Bobby was down there on the lower side himself, but he had built his house and his. And he had Oliver, his wife's son, it 00:05:00was building and Joel each were building houses and his son-in-law, Bud Macy, is building another one. And about that time, Bill Richardson came in and bought one of the highest up on the top, just about the top. And we were looking for land, too. And so Dick Smith[2] and I and our families went out looking and Bobby Hyde showed us around and he pulled some overalls over himself. And we got in the back of his old Army weapons carrier. And he drove us cross-country across these bumpy parcels of land. And Dick and I were all for it. We like the idea of getting a cement mixer up there and making our own block houses and getting telephone poles and railroad ties and putting something together with our hands. But our wives had babies and and my wife had become pregnant the 00:06:00second time, and it didn't. And she and we didn't have any running water. And Bobby said, that's no problem. We'll just run a hose from our neighbor, you know, half a mile away, just get a half a mile of hose and you will have water. But now my wife wanted a washing machine and she wanted a life was difficult enough with a couple of little kids without having to go through that. So we gave up the idea of joining Bobby in those early pioneer days and we bought a piece of land over on Harrold Avenue and the west side of town and bought another barn-like structure. And then we ended up building two houses there with our hands. But meanwhile, we had befriended Bobby and some of the people. Bill Neely moved in up there about that time and Frank Robinson[3] and some of those other leaders and early pioneer families up there. And we knew them all well. And so we were we considered ourselves just the westernmost outpost of Mountain Drive.

REMAK: Did they help you build your houses?

YOUNG: No, not, well. Bobby did. He came over and he loaned us, he hauled his cement mixer over once and loaned it to us when we were doing some foundation work. He didn't actually mix the concrete, but he helped us in some ways. And others, like Bud Macy, would come over sometimes and and help haul some heavy ties and that kind of thing. But for the most part, Dick and I handled it pretty well ourselves.

REMAK: How long did it take you?

YOUNG: Well. To move in, to make it habitable, it probably took about six months, but to make it. But then it was a constant building enlarging process once we were in. And by then we had two houses, he, his and and we 00:07:00would just help each other as the years went on. But it was an ongoing process after in being in for a couple of years and decided we wanted a fireplace. So we got and there had been a big flood in Santa Barbara and a bridge, a stone bridge had been washed out. And there's a wonderful, wonderful lintel sized cut stone wood that inspired a fireplace. So we hauled that must have weighed a quarter of a ton, but we got it somehow. And that was those were the early years. But meanwhile we were like we were like the fringe members of the Mountain Drive community, I guess. And we came to most of the ritualistic parties they had, which I'm sure others have talked about elsewhere. Bobby Burns Night and Twelfth Night and that kind of thing. And, and then we had our own 00:08:00relationships with people like Bill Neely, and he would come to our house and we'd go to his without including thinking of them as a community at that time, thinking them also as a collection of individuals. Then the Pot Wars were always fun on Sundays as a social event and a good place to do Christmas shopping, too.

REMAK: What was Bobby Hyde like when you first met him?

YOUNG: You know, a highly educated, well-read man from the Hudson River and a very gentle voice. He could be irritable, but for the most part, he was very tolerant and kindly. He was intolerant of intolerant people that might be said of him. And of course, when the weather was clement, he was lounged around his grounds nude. But he was never nude. He had a bear-like pelt of 00:09:00reddish hair growing on him from knee to shoulder and over his shoulders onto the back. So you never really saw him nude? He was like a bear.

REMAK: And I've never asked anyone else. Did he have a regional accent?

YOUNG: Very slight, I would say. Oh, the way someone in Connecticut or upstate New York might talk a little bit, but not very pronounced. It was it was an educated voice. And he'd been I don't know what college he went to, but I'm sure he went through a college education. And I think he didn't have that. He didn't have the brash New York or Bronx accent or Brooklyn, and he didn't have the Vermont or the New England accent either. No, he didn't really. I'm really not a little unclear about his early years.

REMAK: He apparently was born in Santa Barbara.

YOUNG: Oh, that's right. His father was an antique dealer here. That's true. So then...

REMAK: But that he did live in the East indeed. Probably at a in the age where he might have. I ask because I noticed that you say idea. Yeah. And my Boston mother used to say. Yes.

YOUNG: Oh she did? Well, I think that comes from my aunt who was born and raised in Oregon. And she came down and stayed with us when I was young. And I thought she was a lovely woman. And she said, idea and theater and wash and I think I emulated her. Those are about the three words I can think of that that I still hang on to.

REMAK: Oh, I interrupted you while you were talking about Bobby. Did you find him an energetic person?

YOUNG: You know, he was very laid back. He didn't have he didn't make fast motions. He just seemed to be very at ease, although he had ulcers. And then it turns out in later years and so on, maybe he repressed a lot, but he was always relaxed and easy and laid back and emotions were. But he had grand ideas and he accomplished so much over the years. And he ran a bulldozer and carved out a lake up in the mountains. You've probably heard about that. And he ran horizontal well digging equipment, but I never saw him seeming to be 00:12:00rushed. He kind of moved. And if anything, slow motion.

REMAK: You met him in connection with this writer's group?

YOUNG: Mm hmm.

REMAK: Was he there primarily as an author himself or as a sponsor of young talent?

YOUNG: No, he wasn't really sponsoring young talent. He wasn't that, I can't think of him as being necessarily a patron or a sponsor. In one sense of the word, he was very good to his friends and would give, and he loved to pontificate and give them the benefit of this knowledge about building and how to build something cheaply and well. And he had a good, sound knowledge of those things, but he came as a writer to these writers meetings. He was he 00:13:00had a couple of books published and over the years and he had been he was widely published as a short story writer. And he wrote good, good commercial human interest stories for places, you know, all American publications like Family Circle. And he'd write on a little with a lot of humor, a very delicate, droll sense of humor, about Hawaiian crabgrass growing in Southern California tract house, and just about Mr. Blandings Dream House. He was capable of that kind of writing. He had a very good touch, however.

REMAK: What was Floppy like?

YOUNG: Now there is the one that's hard working. She was seem to be white knuckling it all the way through her life. I mean, she had I mean, she raised her two sons or three plus Bobby's kids plus six more kids that they 00:14:00adopted in later years. Plus grandchildren. And she was always rushing about. And they were very gregarious. People were always dropping in on them. And Bobby was usually laid back playing putting Water Music his favorite Handel's Water Music on. And there she was in the kitchen trying to make a meal for twelve people. Six of them dropped in without advance warning. And Bobby would say, oh, stay for dinner or whatever, you know? And she looked kind of frazzled most of her, most of the time. She was the lovely woman. But. And she works so hard and she always seemed to be breathless and dashing from room to room.

REMAK: Bobby's approach to parceling off his land, did he select 00:15:00people because of certain common interests? And how did. Did you ever figure that one out?

YOUNG: Oh, well, sure. I mean, he liked creative people. He liked people that were natural, that enjoyed that wanted to do things with their own hands, that had a sense, a creative sense about them. One of them was an automobile mechanic, and he would buy $50 cars or he sold $50 cars and he would get old wrecks from the junkyard and put them in running order. And he sold cars.

REMAK: Who was that?

YOUNG: He died, oh, 20 years ago. But, Hawthorne. Ray Hawthorne.[4]

REMAK: Oh, yes.

YOUNG: And so he was creative in that sense. So you don't necessarily 00:16:00have to be a writer or a painter or a musician, but those are the people that predominantly came up there. But they shared, in addition to a creative nature, a sense of being on their own and anarchists, you might say. I don't know what if Bobby ever expressed any political creed, I think he avoided creeds as such. But basically he wanted to live a little bit outside of society. And but he was not a evangelist in the sense of some of these cult leaders you read about. He wasn't a Rajneesh or anyone like that by any means, but he had some things he believed in, certainly. And he and he had a certain attuneness with 00:17:00nature. When he carved his little lake up there, he said, "As soon as I filled it with water, lake things grew up around it. Cattails grew. I didn't plant them there." He said, "Everything is in the jet stream," and as soon as you create the right environment, these things will come and water skates, those insects that walk on water. They appeared out of nowhere because that was just a sagebrush chaparral environment. And he carved a lake and suddenly he had bulrushes and water skates and polliwogs and all of that said it's all there. And then he would wax on a little poetically about the jet stream and the seeds of everything are there.

REMAK: Was it a conviction or economic necessity that made him...?

YOUNG: I think it was conviction. He could have lived another life. He owned property. His father left him some property downtown. He could have 00:18:00lived comfortably downtown. No, it was his conviction. And he and he loved the idea of getting food for free, picking his own olives off his own olive trees or his fruit from fruit trees. He once chided me for putting in a bunch of pine trees and cypress at my house over on Harrold Avenue because they didn't bear anything edible. And he said, If you're going to plant a tree, why not, it'll still provide shade, why not make it an apricot or a peach or a cherimoya or something of the sort? And he said, So we have raised our own food. We do two things at once. And then the water from his swimming pool was recycled down into his orchard and he had avocados and he had a sense of everything recycling. And he was a little bit ahead of his time, you might say.

REMAK: Did you involve yourself in any of the building of houses up 00:19:00there? In the...

YOUNG: I helped a couple of times, but not to any serious extent. I had my own. My weekdays were filled downtown and then I had my own house projects going. But I think I came up and helped Bill Richardson a time or two for an afternoon. Or maybe Bud Macy I might have helped once put in some flooring or something, but not to any real extent.

REMAK: Did most of the people and you yourself down Harrold Avenue, did you design your own houses and...

YOUNG: Well, the first one was never even designed. It was just a goat shed and then yeah. And then we kind of Dick Smith and I would kind of make sketches on at lunch time on paper napkins and that would as to what shape and what size the next room would be when we knocked out a wall. But of course, in those days, the county had no zoning and no, what's the word, building 00:20:00codes. So we didn't have to worry about it. And so we just did what we wanted. And of course, that's not true of this house or the one preceding this up on the end of Tunnel Road.

REMAK: Are you original houses still there?

YOUNG: Yeah, it's over on the end of Harrold Avenue.

REMAK: So you built pretty well?

YOUNG: Yeah. And. Oh, yeah, yeah. We build them pretty well. Alright. And Dick's house is still occupied by his widow, Olive Smith, but she doesn't drive a car, and she rarely gets out. And friends take her shopping from time to time as she never I don't think she ever went up to a Mountain Drive party maybe once or twice in her life. So she wasn't really part of that. She just had her own little milieu on Harrold Avenue.

REMAK: Yeah. What was your impression of the life of women up in 00:21:00Mountain Drive?

YOUNG: Keep 'em barefoot and pregnant. They were. Well, the old timers say that now it's two or three generations later if a generation is 20 years long or something like that. But in those days they were just like Floppy was. They were getting the food ready. They were being the men were being patriarchal. And I would say a bit quite a bit chauvinistic. And the women were expected to raise the children and keep them out of the way when they were noisy and to provide food for the guests and to enjoy wine with them and to do the dishes and the laundry. And the men were expected to do the construction and bring home the bacon one way or another, like in the case of Bill Richardson, bringing home the bacon was coming in with a deer over his shoulder or a wild 00:22:00pig or a fish from the ocean.[5]

REMAK: Where did he find his deer and pigs?

YOUNG: Over in the valley. He had friends that owned the ranches and and they gave him rights to go in there and shoot the wild pig that were kind of tearing up the crops and making pests of themselves and deer during deer season. And then when he wasn't getting red meat, he was skin diving off the reefs here and spearing fish. And then he had a frozen locker. And so he always kept his family in meat.

REMAK: That sounds very pioneer-like.

YOUNG: Yeah, well, it was. It was, yeah.

REMAK: Did the women do more old fashioned, homely things like sew and and bake bread and can and...?

YOUNG: And it seems that almost all of them baked bread and good old 00:23:00rich wheat breads and multigrain breads and and they all seem to make their own a lot of their own clothes and clothes for their children and patching clothes, things of that sort. Yeah, they, I'm not saying they all did, but I'm sure most of them did and then some there was one I forgotten her name and she used to bake many loaves of bread for, for the Pot Wars and sell her bread there. And she made gorgeous bread. God.

REMAK: Can't remember who that was?

YOUNG: If it comes to me, I'll let you know. I haven't seen her for 20 years, but...

REMAK: Something that people have talked to us about was the village-like atmosphere up there where, well, people really move freely in and out of each other's houses and the children did as well. Is there any particular, 00:24:00any particular reason for that happening?

YOUNG: I think that was true on Lower Mountain Drive, but less so on Upper Mountain Drive. I think there they were all like neighbors, but they often would call ahead. What they had was a system of banners, or flags, a lot of them. And when they hoisted the banner up, that meant open house. Come. You didn't knock, just come on in. But if the flag was down, then they wanted to be left alone. And Jack Boegle[6] was on Upper Mountain Drive, but on that side of the road. But he was really more associated with across-the-road gang. And the Macys when they lived there were more formal and more and kept to themselves a bit more. And then there is Erich Katz, the musician, the medieval musician and music scholar and I... and then there's Merv 00:25:00Lane.[7] They weren't quite as open. They each had their own restrictions and disciplines and so on. It was more the lower mountain drive way of coasting through. And I think it was just a matter of thinking of themselves as one big happy family or one big, hardworking family or whatever. And Bill Neely, particularly because he by the end of his life, he had built a little collection of houses, adobes down there, one called La Ruwena, you've probably heard of that. And then he had children and he had people coming there to help him with his vineyard or help him with his pottery. And he gave lessons. And he was very gregarious. And so, so one or another of his dwellings down there was always occupied. And that was the gateway down to the 00:26:00bottom of the canyon where the where the big hot tub was and where they would have the Grape Stomp every year. And that was all on Neely's domain. So there was a lot of activity around there for the most part.

REMAK: I see, were more men there during the day than, let's say, in another neighborhood?

YOUNG: In another neighborhood?

REMAK: Yeah.

YOUNG: What do you mean?

REMAK: Were there more men around during the day in Mountain Drive, then in...

YOUNG: Oh, in town or in regular? I think so, because they were all busy working on their houses or else like a lot of them were potters and they had their own potting sheds and they had their own studios right there. Or those that were painting were painting. So yeah, I would say much more. The men were there all the time in a lot of the families, maybe most of them. And in some cases the women would went off to take town jobs to bring in a little money 00:27:00while the men were building the house or whatever.

REMAK: There were quite a number of talented people and there were a great many.

YOUNG: Yeah.

REMAK: Was that part of the attraction of the area that...?

YOUNG: Well, you know, the creative arts are fairly lonely by definition. And so when you've got a couple of poets or a poet and a painter or two together, they felt in company with each other. Whereas downtown they didn't want to sit talking to an insurance broker necessarily. But there were exceptions and Stan Hill was a good exception because on one hand he built he had a piece of a good sized piece of land there, and he built his own place. But at the 00:28:00same time, he was an optometrist and ran a normal optometry downtown and had to keep regular hours and so on.[8] He wasn't typical, but I don't know if he's. Yeah, he's still up there, I'm sure.

REMAK: Yeah. Yeah, indeed. You talked about the flags. I'm thinking of clubs, the Sunset Club and the, what was it, the Go Society and things like that?

YOUNG: Yeah.

REMAK: Did you belong to the Sunset Club? Did you join...?

YOUNG: I didn't. I mean, there was no it wasn't that formalized an institution, but it was it was kind of a time for the men. I don't think women were normally or usually welcome at the Sunset Club. The men would sit and drink wine for a couple of hours and sometimes during that hour or two, a lot of wine 00:29:00could go down the gullet and just have man-talk, as such. And I attended from time to time, and I knew I was always welcome there. I mean, Gill Johnston, Frank Robinson, Jack Boegle, were the main ones. And of course, Neely would come up from down below. Yeah.

REMAK: We interrupted you when you were talking about hot tubs.

YOUNG: Right.

REMAK: And I wanted to know if you and your family had ever been up to swim and Bobby Hyde's pool?

YOUNG: Oh, sure. Sure

REMAK: Yeah. Did your family have any any problem with nudity? They just took to it?

YOUNG: No, not after the first time. Then it just became quite natural. It in the context is right, it would be fine. I noticed a lot of people would when they were coming to a hot tub or or just a swimming hole for the 00:30:00first time, they would want to get in without anyone watching. But once they were in and splash around then then it just became quite a natural thing to do.

REMAK: How old were your children then?

YOUNG: Oh, this is all from five years old on up to, well, 12 or so. I think that was about the time span.

REMAK: People lived off the land more than the usual. Did you did you get involved yourself in any projects where you grew crops or anything like that...?

YOUNG: No, not I, because I wasn't actually living up there.

REMAK: Yeah.

YOUNG: Neely tried to put a vineyard up there, but the soil was too shallow. And so his grape crop, it grew very well for the first year or so. But when the roots wanted to go down further, they hit a dead pan, a hard pan, and 00:31:00substrata sandstone and clay. And so it wasn't a good place for that. I don't know anyone up there that oh, they all had vegetable gardens, I guess, and I know the Sandy Hill[9] did, and Gill Johnston did a lot of that. You know, he wrote that outdoor column.[10]

REMAK: Yeah.

YOUNG: It was very charming. I love that column of his. And he rotated his vegetable crops a lot, but I think he was probably the most he and the Hills did the most of any of that. I really am not aware of anything more than most people didn't do in the way of having a row of lettuce and peppers or something.

REMAK: Yeah, let's see. Let me go on to the relations of the Mountain Drive community with the outside, the rest of Santa Barbara. What did Mountain Drivers think of the rest of Santa Barbara?

YOUNG: For the most part, they felt it was old, the old conservative guard. And they felt, you know, they felt a little bit like Edward Abbey's environmental raiders that were in the Monkey Wrench Gang that were trying to blow up a Glen Canyon Dam to keep the Colorado River from flooding out all the fauna and flora of the land up there. I just want to see how that little fragile bird butterfly is about, anyway...

REMAK: Do you want to bring it inside?

YOUNG: No, no, I see what's blowing around. It's just a little 00:33:00raccoon pan that I feed the raccoons in. No, no, the bird, I think, is okay.

REMAK: It's taking a bit of a beating.

YOUNG: I'm going to put it down on the back. You want to shut your...

REMAK: Alright.

YOUNG: ...intelligently. The, they loved, some of them, like Dick Johnston[11] and Bill Neely, and particularly with the radio station and Stan Hill and his optometry business and so on. They love the idea of having a connection with downtown. Frank Robinson was the assistant Harbor Master for a number of years and having some of them posted down there in strategic places to be the, and to bring their ideas to bear upon the community. There was that amongst some of them and they but for the most part, I 00:34:00think they looked upon the community as the establishment and they were somewhat free livers outside the establishment. But on the other hand, they all, in one way or another, like the idea of as they got older, of having a little more secure, economically secure life. And what was his name? He was an attorney. And he came up there and. Uh. And lived amongst them. And then he became the attorney for any of them that had little grievances or there's something going on, they needed an attorney, they would call on him.[12] So there always it wasn't as though they had turned their backs completely on the establishment, but they did. They loved to make fun of the deep 00:35:00seated Republicanism of downtown. But Bobby Hyde had several Montecito Republican friends that had estates in Montecito. And he loved to have them come up and see his way of life. And they would come up and they'd come up in sports coats and ties and they were surrounded by the barefoot gang. And it was just a study in contrast to say nothing of Westmont College right next door to the, the Christian College. And they the students in the College were often the babysitters for Mountain Drivers. And there came a time when Frank Robinson and his wife[13] broke up and he married the babysitter[14] from Westmont College. And you probably heard about that. And that's probably documented. And that was, there 00:36:00they were, the Christians on one side of the swimming pool and the naked hedonists on the other side.

REMAK: How about the reverse? What did Santa Barbara think of Mountain Drive?

YOUNG: They got increasingly intolerant of them as the years went on. Well, first of all, the county building codes were brought in and of course, every official had to do his job and they had to come down. As the years went on, they came down harder and harder and the Mountain Drivers couldn't get away with their free building and they didn't have the license they used to have to do what they wanted to and the roads and the water meters, and they just aggravated and pestered the Mountain Drivers a lot more. And there were articles in the paper later on. I mean, not so many years ago, maybe ten years ago, as, you know, how the Mountain Drivers were living in unsanitary conditions 00:37:00and how they had defied the law and how they weren't paying their taxes. And I think certain elements came down on them pretty hard and made life kind of miserable for them.

REMAK: Well, I do know that when Bobby first got the idea of adopting the Rodriguez children, they were turned down, which apparently made Floppy, very angry. And she got together all of her big guns. And they did get the children. But there was, I think the suggestion that this was not a wholesome atmosphere in which to bring foster children.

YOUNG: And the up righteous people downtown heard these stories of orgies and nudity and debauchery and drinking and all these things. And naturally that made them leery of them.

REMAK: Do you think that the Mountain Drivers did actually have some effect on the cultural life of Santa Barbara?

YOUNG: I'm sure they did. I would like to think so at least. Gill Johnston, for example, worked for the News-Press, which was a public media, and I was kind of a go between in many issues over the years, either verbally, informally or whatever. And I think their Pot Wars where the whole town was invited up to Mountain Drive, and they had their wares spread out. And people love to come up to those Pot Wars and buy homemade vinegar or pottery, or whatever, caused a liaison between the two elements. So it wasn't all hostile or negative.

REMAK: I was going to. Ask you just really briefly about these political involvement. You mentioned this, that they were classifying the people down below in a negative fashion as Republicans. Were they all Democrats?

YOUNG: Or Buddhists or Zenists?

REMAK: Oh, I see. Were they active politically?

YOUNG: Those that were, a lot weren't. A lot were declines-to-staters or nihilists or something. I didn't really get involved in politics until I was in my fifties. During my thirties and forties, I said, oh, they're all a bunch of crooks, you know, I just blanket made blanket condemnations like that. But I think, but the Maurers, Nina and Eric 00:40:00Maurer,[15] were very active politically from the very, as Democrats. She was a delegate to this state, whatever caucus or whatever it's called. And Eric was, I think, head of the one of the local unions and wrote the union news sheet and for years. And and he was on that. He was a union leader. And this time I can't think of anybody other that...

REMAK: What union would that be?

YOUNG: Well, musicians' union.

REMAK: Oh, yeah.

YOUNG: That was it. And he ran that and was very active about that and he wrote the newsletter. But as far as just voting, I'm sure that those that did vote all voted Democratic.

REMAK: You've talked about their participation in the arts, the 00:41:00people who wrote and potted. Did that provide a connection with the downtown? Did they teach, or at organizations...?

YOUNG: A lot of them. Yeah, Neely taught pottery at adult education. Bill Richardson has taught creative writing for 20 years or more. He took over after Ken Miller, Ken Millar[16] died, and so he teaches in that program. Merv Lane is a faculty member at the City College in writing for poetry and literature, something in the English Department. And others have done that kind of thing, too.

REMAK: What do you remember about the Coyote Fire and Mountain Drive?

YOUNG: Ah, that was something. I was downtown and I saw the smoke and 00:42:00heard the sirens that afternoon. And then, then I heard on the radio that it was right there at Mountain Drive.[17] And I called Bill Richardson and he said, "Hell, no, it's already come and gone." It swept right past his place without burning it. And he said, "And the firemen are up here and they're just putting out the little grass fires that the blaze started." And he said, "Come on up and see for yourself." So at the end of the day, I drove up there and the fire had started down at the crossroad and just gone up and over the mountain. And so I said, "Well, looks like the worst is over." And there are a lot of firemen and a lot of individuals there putting out the embers of the grass fire, the chaparral fire. I don't know, in that first rush of flames that any structures were really damaged. They were endangered, but it 00:43:00really didn't work out that way. So I went home, which is over here on Tunnel Road, all these miles away. And suddenly, late in the evening, Bill called me and said, "My God has come back. It went over and then it came back and this time is coming back big. We need to evacuate somewhere. Where can we come over to your house and sleep tonight?" And so I said, "Of course," and he did. And his house was burned down that night while we were sitting in our house listening to the radio. And the fire had just become a giant. And it's funny how it just passed by everybody and sort of singed the chaparral. And then...

REMAK: You would've thought that it'd make a firebreak, wouldn't it?

YOUNG: Yeah, but it didn't eat it, burn up enough for that, you see. And then, you see, the wind changed.

REMAK: You were interrupted at the point where you were going to talk 00:44:00about what the result of the fire was, what happened? Did people move away?

YOUNG: Not many people moved away. But what did happen? They realigned themselves. There were probably a few families that did move away. And they, but what it did, it wiped the blackboard for them. It made them reevaluate their lives. It made them wonder if they like the way they built the house. It made them wonder if they like the woman they were living with for 20 years. It made them wonder if they like even being up there at all. And a rash of divorces occurred as a direct result, I would say, of the fire. It might have taken six months or so for all this to happen, but people realigned themselves. They took stock of their lives and, some rebuilt on the site of the old, and 00:45:00rose like phoenixes up from the ashes, somewhat rebuilt, entirely different kinds of houses. Most of them had a little more money than they did when they were younger. But that Mountain Drive is never the same after that. And another thing is that by now they were all 20 years older. Their children were anywhere from, they were either teenagers or just on the verge of being 20 years old or college age. And the children were taking over the vitality of the community. And the old timers that elected to stay on did so in a quieter way. And the kids came in to the community, brought their friends. Some of the kids even were starting to get marriage age, but they were bringing in a whole different, set of values.

REMAK: What about what about the old traditional celebrations? Did 00:46:00the kids take those over?

YOUNG: The kids took some of them over. And Bobby Burns Night, I think, continued, but they limped along, but in a different way. And we had a different kind of music. Instead of having the folk music and the recorders, we're now having rock. Loud rock. And I think there wasn't, there was a whole new cultural layer that came in. And there were the people, the men coming back from the Vietnam War that had their traumas. There were others that were were, we came from the alcoholic generation, perhaps a lot of them were coming from the new drug generations, which had another kind of attitude. And whereas we would maybe try a mushroom once in a while as a way of exploring the capacity of the human mind, so we intellectualized it, these kids were thrill seekers 00:47:00and they were having their drugs for just for as recreation and they didn't really care about mind expansion or anything of that sort. I'm generalizing; there are exceptions to all of this, of course.

REMAK: What about you yourself? Do you feel that your life is different because you knew Bobby and knew the people up at Mountain Drive and shared that experience with him?

YOUNG: Well, I think Bobby had a profound influence on all our lives, as long as you didn't abuse it. Abuse some of the things he taught. He was totally for freedom, totally for being a natural human being. And he had he taught a great deal about attuning yourself with agriculture, with building, with nature, and the jet stream above. He was somewhat mystical in those ways. 00:48:00But also, you couldn't take him too literally without getting yourself into some kind of trouble, but with moderation. And if you took him with a bit of a grain of salt from time to time, I think he did have not only on my life, but on most of the people up there. He had a strong influence, even those that maybe didn't like him as well as others did. I still think he had an influence and we wouldn't have been all brought together if it hadn't been for him.

REMAK: Do you think Bobby himself lived as he talked?

YOUNG: Pretty much so. He espoused what he did. He was a very complex man. And he had friends among different strata in society. He would bring over some fairly wealthy friends from Montecito from time to time, and they'd come over in their ties and jackets and mingle with the barefoot Mountain Drivers. 00:49:00And do they seem to get kind of a kick out of it. Bobby was that way, but you just had to watch Bobby and hold on to your own sense of proportion at all times.

REMAK: That's a nice summary. Thank you very much.