Last week, my grandson Ethan, aged eleven, and I went to Santa Cruz on the north end of the Monterey Bay for a few days. From the beach, where I stood watching him as he swam into the waves, I saw the pale blue uneven line on the southern end, which is Monterey.

I rode the Hurricane and Logger’s Revenge on the Santa Cruz Boardwalk with him. I also rented a little car from the hotel that went forty miles an hour and we drove through cold thick fog up to the University past startled deer and two or three complaisantly beautiful students. The car was open, it was too small for drivers in other cars to see even though it was canary yellow, it didn’t have a steering wheel but a thing like a motorcycle steering mechanism, and Ethan frequently put his long strong young fingers over my hands and tried to take control of the steering and screamed in my ear, “Faster Grandma! Faster!” I think Ethan may not be a contemplative child but he may be contemplative at a rate of speed so I am incapable of seeing it, as people are incapable of hearing sounds that dogs hear.

On the drive back to return him to his parents and little brother, Ethan and I stopped in Aptos at the Rummonds Building. Jim Rummonds bought the building when I was working for him in the mid 1980s. He wasn’t in his office when Ethan and I stopped by but his wife Sue and assistant Chansonette were there, and we lied to each other and said we had not changed. Actually, Sue hadn’t changed and she didn’t lie about anything.

Back in the 1980s, a group of investors sued the Rummonds’ firm clients, Dean Witter Reynolds, and the brother of one of our clients, David Nevis. A Monterey County Superior Court judge led us through a three-year long court trial before dismissing the action. One plaintiff died of old age and one defendant died by flying into a mountain during those three years. The wealthier defendants videotaped the depositions that preceded the trial and the trial itself.

We took some of the depositions in Dallas – for a related case – and some in Vermont, and some in Kinross, Michigan, some place I’d never heard about before the DWR case. When we were in Michigan, we took a ferry to Grand Island and rode bicycles with David Black and David Gomes and Jeff Cole and I pretended we were old WASPs and rocked on chairs in front of the Grand Hotel. I was in Jeff Tidus’s firm’s floor in a West Los Angeles building when I saw JFK, Jr.’s silhouette talking on the phone in his office but declined the opportunity to meet him because what would I say.

Lawyers, plaintiffs, defendants, secretaries, the judge, bailiffs and clerks all watched ourselves age on the tapes. The plaintiffs’ attorney David Hollingsworth eventually submitted a 280 page Tenth Amended Consolidated and Supplemental Complaint that weighed seven pounds, and to which were attached sections of California law on fire hydrants. He told the local journalists – who apparently believed him – that not only were our clients guilty but so were we.

Last January, Jeff Tidus stepped from his house in Rolling Hills to get his laptop from his car, and someone shot him in the head. I checked Attorney Search on the California State Bar website. All of the other defense and the plaintiff attorneys in the DWR case are alive and are still licensed to practice law. Two of those attorneys were admitted in 1965 and 1966. It looks like you have to shoot lawyers to stop us from practicing law.

I spent a lot of time in Monterey during those years, and part of it I spent in the Hollingsworth waiting room looking down at a bank on Alvarado and the bank parking lot behind it.

One day, I realized that the bank stood where Fanny Osbourne’s house had stood, and that her son Lloyd had chased cows over the ground the parking lot occupied when he was a little boy.

Fanny van der Grift married Lloyd Osbourne when she was seventeen. Lloyd served in the Civil War and then went to the Nevada silver mines. His wife and little girl Isobel took a ship through the Isthmus of Panama to San Francisco, and then they took wagons and a stagecoach through the mountains. Not many women lived in Lander County. Fanny learned how to roll her own cigarettes and shot a pistol. Lloyd went to Coeur d’Ilene and sent word to Fanny that a bear had eaten him, probably because he was engaged in one of his many amorous adventures with prostitutes, and then they had another child, and Fanny left him because of the prostitutes, and then they re-united in Oakland. She left him again and went to Paris with her children to study art, and in an artists’ colony outside of Paris 1876, she met Robert Louis Stevenson, who was ten years younger than she was but looked as if he was going to expire at any moment. She then re-united with Lloyd Osbourne, who must have had what the Turks call “devil’s fur” to keep Fanny returning, and sent Stevenson a telegram calling things off between them. In 1879, broke, RLS followed her back to the United States.

He lived in a flea-ridden rooming house in Monterey (This building is now called “The Robert Louis Stevenson house”), hoping Fanny would divorce Lloyd. He nearly died of a high fever when he went camping alone in the Santa Lucia Mountains.

In his “Simoneau’s At Monterey,” RLS described his landlord in the boarding house:

“All this time I have said nothing of papa Simoneau himself; always in his waistcoat and shirt sleeves, upright as a boy, with a rough, trooper-like smartness, vaunting his dishes if they were good, himself the first to condemn them if they were unsuccessful; now red hot in a discussion now playing his flute with antique graces, now shamelessly hurrying off the other boarders that he might sit down to chess with me: a man who had been most things from a man in business to a navy, and kept his spirit and his kind heart through all.”

He and young Sam Osbourne went walking in Pt. Lobos during the time he was very ill. Together, they drew a map of a treasure island, and RLS composed the story when walking with the boy along the beach.

Fanny and Stevenson married in May 1880 (Divorce was still a scandal, even in California, even in San Francisco, in those days, so she did not even mention that she had been divorced.) and honeymooned in an old miner’s cottage outside of Calistoga. The bridegroom was skeletal. He was always very ill, since he was a small boy. He spent a lot of time in bed and a lot of time with a fever, and he had little else to occupy him but to write.

RLS, Fanny and Fanny’s children lived in Europe for a time – John Singer Sargent painted a wonderful oil of RLS pacing in front of seascapes and an open door, with Fanny hiding in a white shimmering mantilla to one side — and then they moved back to the United States. In 1881, a friend arranged for Treasure Island to be published in a juvenile magazine, Young Folks.

Stevenson’s most enduring works are Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped (1886), Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and The Black Arrow (1888).

I loved them all growing up but when I was a child — and sick for a long time, living down the hill from where I live now, on West Silver Lake Drive — I loved most A Child’s Garden of Verse (1885).

“The land on counterpane

“I watched my leaden soldiers go,
With different uniforms and drills,
Among the bed clothes, through the hills;

“And sometimes sent my ships in fleets
All up and down among the sheets; or
Brought my trees and houses out,
And planted cities all about.”

After his death, Virginia Wolfe condemned Stevenson’s writing as genre horror and juvenilia, and not literature. Jekyll and Hyde initiated generations of horror but followed Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Both books illuminate the dual nature of modern science – one side of it beneficial, and the other capable of destroying us all.

His writing style is not Victorian. It is transparent. Although he arrived in California not too long after you could get to it by train, Stevenson comes across as a modern Californian.

If his – and later his and Lloyd’s – writing is aimed at children, then all right, but I still read it.

In the elevator on the way to meet the others for lunch at a restaurant surrounded by glass that was on top of a Monterey hotel, I told Tidus, “Hollingsworth’s office overlooks the house where Fanny Osbourne used to live.” I was very excited by my discovery.

A man standing behind us in the elevator said, “Lady, who the fuck cares?”

“Who the fuck cares! Who the fuck cares!” I screamed at him. “Haven’t you read Treasure Island?”

“No,” he said pushing past us and then said something about getting the fuck away from the crazy lady. I hate it when people say that.

“What about the first Disney live-action film Treasure Island?” I demanded he tell me. The man’s feet scrambled frantically on the polished and mechanically buffed floor as he ran down the hall.

“Well,” I said, outraged, as we sat down with the other lawyers. “We met a man in the elevator who has not read Treasure Island.”

“Imagine,” Dave Black said. “But then, many people haven’t heard of Houyhnhnms.”

“Houyhnhnms are the rulers and the deformed creatures — ‘Yahoos’ — are human beings in their base form,” I said. David Black nodded over his menu.

You could see all of Monterey from the restaurant windows, all the way down to Point Lobos where Robert walked with a ten-year old boy whose mother he loved and made up stories for him.

Stevenson managed to live until he was forty-four. Fanny lived until 1914. She died in Santa Barbara, California. Her daughter Isobel brought her ashes to Samoa where they were interred next to Stevenson’s on top of Mount Vaea. Lloyd, the little boy who chased cows behind his mother’s rented house in Monterey, died in California in 1947, at the age of 79.

http://www.robert-louis-stevenson.org/ is the RLS website, but, of course, you can Google Fanny Osbourne and Lloyd Osbourne and Robert Louis Stevenson and find information on many websites.

James D. Hart, editor, From Scotland to Silverado, (Cambridge, 1966)

Anne Roller Issler, Our Mountain Hermitage ( Standford University Press, 1950)

Mickey Friedman, “The Silverado Sojourn of Robert Louis Stevenson, San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle, May 11, 1980).

The Abbey Road EMI Studio in London, no doubt the most famous recording studio in the world, has been in the news a lot recently, so I thought I would wait for a few weeks to pass so I could tell my memories of the place without the contamination of trendiness.

I spent some time at London’s legendary Abbey Road Studios in the early ‘70s because my uncle, violinist Yehudi Menuhin, also known in England as Lord Yehudi Menuhin, was recording there. I’m sure he had been making recordings there probably since the ‘30s. I think Yehudi by far had the biggest catalog in the EMI catalog, and many of them had been recorded there.

This time Yehudi was recording Bach with the Menuhin Players, his own chamber orchestra, composed of some of the best of of London’s musicians, including the late George Malcolm, the preeminent harpsichordist.

I’m sure for more of its history, mostly classical music had been recorded at EMI’s Abbey Road Studio. Classical musicians have a different attitude toward recording than popular music. I remember once when an engineer started telling my mom to do this and that as she was recording the Chopin Preludes, she said, “No, I make the music. You record it as well as you can. Period.”

The Menuhin Players were well rehearsed. They were all friends of Yehudi he had known for years, and knew exactly what he wanted. They hardly needed him to conduct.

Whereas in the early ‘70s rock recordings took days and weeks to finish and depended on sophiticated multi-track recording equipment, at that time classical musicians didn’t take much more time to record than it took to play the music. The only time at this particular session a section of music had to be re-recorded was when George Malcolm’s harpsichord had to be returned half way through a movement.

Yehudi ushered Nigey Lennon (then my wife) and myself into the inner sanctum of the studio and with great pride walked into the room known as the Caruso Room.

It was the artist room.

Yehudi felt honored to be using the same artist room that the great Caruso had used. As I remember, there was some sort of sculpture of the great singer in the room.

Nigey later got into a long conversation with Yehudi about philosophical things, since she had studied sitar with Ravi Shankar, the great Indian musician with whom Yehudi made a series of famed East Meets West recordings. But at the moment she seemed intrigued not so much by the Caruso room but by the studio’s equipment. Nigey came out of the pop music tradition where recording is a complicated and highly technical profession, literally a part of the music making.
She was impressed by the fact that this was where the Beatles recorded most of their albums, including the famed Abbey Road album.

What struck Nigey (a musician who later played guitar on a tour with Frank Zappa) was how primitive the equipment was in the famed studio.

She stared at the simple Ampex two-track tape recorder which ran at only seven and a half inches per second being used to record the session—a tape recorder used by home recordists in the United States. The microphones were top of the line, but not the tape recorder.

She talked to the engineers, who admitted that their equipment, unlike that of say, Deutsche Grammophon studios in Germany, was relatively unsophisticated. But they said that with a certain noblesse oblige because, they dryly observed, it had been sufficient for recording a lot of the world’s greatest music.

Back in Caruso’s room, Yehudi was peeling an exotic fruit for us. The group included my mom, Nigey, myself and Princess Irene. He was showing us a Kiwi—once known as a Chinese Gooseberry—then primarily from New Zealand. Now Kiwis are common everywhere, and are grown many places other than New Zealand, from California to Italy.

We had been joined by Princess Irene, formerly of the Greek monarchy, who had just moved to London because her brother Constantin had been deposed in Greece.
I had little sympathy for Constantin. He walked into the studio along with Irene, and he struck  me as an arrogant asshole. I didn’t wish him ill, but the notion of a king had always struck me as a pretty ridiculous one. But then I am an American, born in the country that had the world’s first revolution that overthrew a monarch.

As much as I didn’t like Constantin—I didn’t like the way he walked, the arrogance he seemed surrounded by—I liked Irene.

She was related to the British royalty, and she spends considerable time with Yehudi in London. I felt some resentment towards her because, unlike my uncle, I have no patience with the basic assumptions behind royalty. Yehudi thinks royalty can add something to a society. I could just as well live without it.

My mother Yaltah, a pianist by trade, might have predisposed me to Irene, even though it was my mom who first made me appreciate Mark Twain, not only America’s greatest writer, but a strong opponent of monarchy.

Unlike her arrogant brother, I quickly felt that there was something sad and discarded about Irene, that there wasn’t an iota of bad intention in her, despite the fact that one couldn’t say the same thing about her mother, the former Queen Fredericka.

While Yehudi was out of the room, Irene asked me what the book I was writing about  Yehudi and my family was about. I explained that “The Menuhins” was the story of a Russian Jewish family descended from a long line of Hassidic holy men.

She told me she had learned of the Hassidic tradition through the writing of Martin Buber. That immediately commended her to me, for back in my room was a Buber work I was reading with great fascination.We naturally began talking of Yehudi, and his relationship to that tradition, and she confirmed my thoughts when she said, “Yehudi’s whole personality became clear to me and I understood who he was when I read Buber.” She had been struck by the uncanny similarity between the Hassidic wise men and the gurus of India. When she discovered that Yehudi was descended from generations of wise men, it was a revelation to her.

Sometimes Yehudi dismissed his Hassidic lineage in the many discussions we had for the book,  but he also confided to me on other occasions that when he recognized his long line of ancestors he began to understand himself, even though he has said he is not a person concerned with family trees. It is obvious even to Yehudi that much of his identity has come from his ancestors, despite the ambivalence with which he relates to that identity.

At the end of the recording session, Yehudi took Princess Irene in his Mercedes Benz limousine and asked if we wanted a ride.

I shot Nigey a look.

“No, we’ll take the tube.”

I wanted to walk out the Abbey Road Studio on Abbey Road and walk to the St. John’s Woods station to get home.

*
Lionel Rolfe is the author of “The Menuhins: A Family History,” “The Uncommon Friendship of Yaltah Menuhin and Willa Cather,” “Literary L.A.,” “Fat Man on the Left” and other volumes, available through this website.

Our photographer couldn’t find any pretty dancing women, but he did manage to find someone very pretty. Her name is Rose, by the way.

First Movement

Movements 2 and 3:

My older daughter Feride and granddaughter Emma and I arrived at the Sierra Club’s Clair Tappaan Lodge, which is on the old Lincoln Highway – the first coast-to-coast automobile route in the country (1912-1913) – a little west of Donner Lake, at about midnight on July 3rd, after an incident that revealed to me that Feride had indeed inherited my parallel parking gene. (The parking event occurred when a total stranger opened my daughter’s car door and yelled, “I can’t stand it!” and made her get out so he could park the car for her. The first time someone did this to her, she thought she was being carjacked. Now she just tips them, which can be unnerving when the intervener turns out to be a surgeon.)

We took the I-80, which was backed up most of the way, although the backup didn’t affect us because it took her so long to pack. My daughter packs very well. She packs everything. The Volvo whimpered as the last suitcase went into the trunk.

Thirty years earlier, Feride learned how to drive on the I-80. We hadn’t intended that she would learn how to drive on the I-80. She had her learner’s permit, so I pulled off the highway into the parking lot of a coffee shop (It’s no longer there.) Neither of us knew the parking lot exited into the Interstate. Burned into my retinas is the image of my teenager clutching the steering wheel of my rental car with unnaturally white hands as big rigs surrounded us and escorted us towards the portal of eternity. Burned into her retinas is the image of me with my mouth opened like the fellow in Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream.” I promised God I’d give up Marxism if my daughter survived. Fortunately, I hadn’t promised God I’d give up drinking.

In the 1930s, Sierra Club volunteers built the lodge because it was on the Lincoln Highway and also because passenger trains stopped at the station in Truckee. Before Interstate 80 bypassed the lodge in 1956, it must have taken a very long time to drive along the twisting Lincoln Highway from the Bay area, about as long as it took us on 80 the Friday of this Fourth of July weekend.

The three of us schlepped suitcases and sleeping bags up the dirt incline from the highway to our room, which took us fifteen minutes to find. It was to take me three days to figure out where everything was in the lodge, including a very creepy basement that should have been a location for a horror movie and through which we passed by mistake that first night.

We didn’t hear automobile traffic, but, at night, we heard freight cars pass. Amtrak’s California Zephyr – a passenger train –passes at about three in the afternoon.

During the first night, the train’s rhythmic clicking soothed us, and we needed soothing because our room was the approximate size of a San Quentin cell and we had to unroll sleeping bags on primitive bunk beds, something that my granddaughter (who reminded us several times that her father only takes her to first class hotels where maids place miniature shampoo-conditioner bottles within fans folded from wash cloths), had not agreed to, and she also had not agree to swim in a lake with water snakes in it or to hike in some forest with nothing to see but trees, all of which look like each other. I spent some hours watching freight cars moving across the opposite under a net of brilliant stars.

The next day, Feride rented a jet ski, which I initially assumed was a joke name meaning “Polish jet,” perhaps a joke suggesting a jet that did not work well or that arrived at preposterous conclusions assumed from baseless argument, but which is actually the brand name of a personal watercraft trademarked by Kawasaki Heavy Industries, at a tiny marina on Donner Lake and Emma sat behind her, and young girls took turns riding behind Emma. I rented a kayak and paddled around the lake. One of the men in our party from Clair Tappaan said, “Just think back to when you were young,” when I got into the kayak, and this is not a good thing to say to me but Feride said later that I had hit the man in the head with one of my paddles when I was getting into the kayak.

At six o’clock, we climbed rocks above the Lincoln Highway and sat on them until it got dark so that we could look down at Donner Lake during the pyrotechnics displayed from one end of the lake. We learned that, even at that elevation, there are small slender flies that feed on the blood of mammals and that there is no place to pee when you are on rocks above the Lincoln Highway.

We imagined that by Monday many people would have returned to the Bay Area or Nevada or wherever they came from but this turned out not to be the case. We saw stationary cars on I-80, and the line stretched for miles. Feride’s Global Positioning System Minerva (named after the goddess of wisdom) insisted we take I-80 but we didn’t. Instead, we headed down the west side of Lake Tahoe towards the El Dorado Forest. Minerva advised us many times that she was recalculating the route and to make a U-turn. She grew increasingly annoyed with us and picked up the tempo, reminding us incessantly that she was recalculating the route. Utterly frustrated with us, Minerva stopped telling us what to do by the time we reached South Lake Tahoe City.

Once again, the trees did not impress Emma as we passed through the El Dorado Forest. I told her that Ronald Reagan had felt the same way about redwoods and famously said, “When you’ve seen one redwood you’ve seen them all,” yet another thing we said that did not impress my granddaughter. A splendid number of things do not impress her. Emma sat in the backseat and played the one movie she downloaded before we left Clair Tappaan. Her ear buds were in the trunk so we heard all of the film “Glee” seven or eight times. It sounded like a musical. I hate musicals.

“See that river down there?” I asked. She saw the river, white in the afternoon sun and moving between steep banks. “That’s where we go white water rafting tomorrow. That’s the South Fork of the American River.”

We stayed at Coloma Country Inn, which is next to a pond and located in the Marshall Gold State Discovery Park in the Sierra foothills. A swing hung from the limb of a tree. Two docile dogs guarded the lawn and kept ducks off of it.

The next day, we passed some of the machinery and buildings that had been part of Sutter’s enterprise in the state park before we got into a raft and went down the South Fork.

In 1841, Swiss national John Sutter became a Mexican citizen. The King of Spain granted Sutter 48,000 acres, and he created one of the first ranchos in the Central Valley. Californio ranches were humongous. He built an adobe fort on the Sacramento River, and this area eventually became the city of Sacramento.

Then Sutter did something that seemed practical and intelligent: he expanded into the Sierra foothills into the small valley the Nisenan Indians called Cullemah in order to cut down timber and to mill it for the his buildings.

Sutter’s decision to build a sawmill to mill his own wood led to the
Indians’ enslavement and death, the contamination of large sections of the natural environment, the immigration of many American men, women and children into California, the creation of the State of California, the collapse of Sutter’s empire, the rebel states’ loss in the American Civil War, and the beginning of just about everything you and I know as modern California: iPhones, Google, telegraphs, public schools, the pony express, highways, the railroad, property weighted voting by Water Storage Districts, Jack London, the Los Angeles Times, court houses, suburbia, trolleys, the City and County of San Francisco, Chinese restaurants, and everything else.

Imagine what California might have been like if Sutter had been able to keep the gold find a secret.

Most of us would not be living in California. Those of us who lived here would be citizens of Mexico and speak Spanish. The United States might end in the west at the top of the Sierras. Without California gold, the Union Army might not have prevailed, and our country might have remained a confederacy of equally powerful states, some of which depended on slave labor. The enormous ranchos in Alta California, dependent on peonage, would have survived much longer. Mexico would have had control of what was to be the bread-basket of the world: the Central Valley. The Southern Pacific would not have reached Los Angeles. Mexico would have owned our oil fields when oil became important. Industrial revolution era residents might have learned from the Indians rather than exterminating them.

Sutter partnered with James Marshall to build the sawmill in Coloma, and Marshall discovered gold in the South Fork in 1848. All hell broke loose after that. A New York newspaper had already used the term “Manifest Destiny” by 1845, when it called for the annexation of Texas. The United States invaded California and also annexed the Mexican state of Tejas because of its manifest destiny.

When lawyers use the word “manifest,” or when they say, “it is clear,” or that it “is evident,” they have no evidence for their argument. Congress had no evidence that the destiny of the United States included moving out to California. Therefore, that destiny was manifest. As my mother and every other Californian except probably John Muir used to say, “You can’t stop Progress.” Thomas Starr King, the orator with the big voice whose five feet long body rests in a tiny sarcophagus near the magnificent Unitarian Church on Geary in San Francisco (California Registered Landmark 691), urged union in mystical terms, as inevitable. King’s speeches roused the public to send California gold to help the federal government win the war against the rebel states.

After we rafted part of the South Fork of the American River, Feride’s valiant 1997 Volvo drove us along Highway 49 to Placerville, through hot pleasant woodlands, and then to Amador, where Feride fell asleep in a parking lot and Emma and I learned how to cross a street to get sodas in a town without stop signs or crosswalks.

Writers arrived in California along with the money-grubbers, gunfighters and lynching mobs, although the best of the writers were to return to the east after roughing it for a time in the Sierra Mountains, on California’s rugged coast, and some time on San Francisco’s hills.

Bret Harte had arrived in Gold Country in 1855, at the end of the Gold Rush, when he was nineteen years old. He found the foothills “hard, ugly, unwashed, vulgar and lawless.” His The Luck of Roaring Camp, one of the seminal mining stories first published about eighteen years after the Gold Rush ended, portrays miners as so ignorant they barely speak English, and is set in the Sierra Foothills. The Outcasts of Poker Flat, and the Idyll of Red Gulch, both also set in Gold Country, sketches similarly formulaic myths of the pioneering miners, but these are myths that shape our consciousness of how things used to be.

“Dame Shirley,” (Louise Amelia Knapp Smith) wrote a series of letters to her sister, later published in the literary magazine Pioneer (1854), about her years in Sierra mining camps on the Feather River. These letters, lucidly written in prose that reads as well as anything written today, without any of the cluttering pretense of much Victorian writing, provide a clearer insight into life in Gold Country. Dame Shirley’s letters may have been Harte’s inspiration for his sentimental stories.

In 1864, Samuel Clemens met Harte in San Francisco when Sam was working as a lokulitem (The fellow who checked police and fire stories as local items) for the Morning Call. Bret worked in the same building at 416 Commercial Street at the U.S. Mint Annex.

Harte and Clemens both wrote for The Golden Era. They got along most of the time, and they shared sort of thing of some sort for the young poet Ina Coolbrith, who had moved up to San Francisco from Los Angeles after her drunken ex-husband tried to shoot her and shot her stepfather instead.

It appears that people in 1860s California generally brained each other, stabbed each other, yelled at each other, cursed each other, and, most especially, they shot each other. Sometimes they sued each other. Twain attacked San Francisco’s notoriously corrupt police department in the Enterprise, and the police chief sued Twain and the Enterprise.

A little after that, Sam’s companion in night raids on San Francisco’s low spots, Steve Gillis, got in a barroom brawl, and it looked like he might be charged with murder after bringing a cut glass ash tray down on the head of the bartender. Sam posted bond. Steve Gillis fled to Nevada. Sam decided to take a vacation.

When he reached Murphy’s in the foothills, Twain signed into the hotel guest register as J.P Morgan, Lord Byron, a bandit named “Black Bart,” and a group of people known as “The Belgian Tourists, ” inasmuch as everything with the word Belgian in it is humorous.

Clemens said he couldn’t have been colder if he swallowed an iceberg the months he stayed in the one room cabin on Jackass Hill, according to Nigey Lennon in The Sage Brush Bohemian Mark Twain in California (1993,Paragon House) (Boryanabooks is going to republish Sage Brush Bohemian.) By then, Jackass Hill was comprised of derelict shacks left over from the Goldrush and a number of people who called each other, “Bitch.”

He spent a lot of time in the Angel Saloon, which was on the first floor of a hotel that had started out as a tent during the Gold Rush years.
In a boring monotone, the Angel Saloon bartender Ben Coon told Twain the entirely unoriginal story of a man who had a frog who jumped well. He (The man, not the frog) wanted to race this frog. He gave another man a frog. The other man put buckshot in the first frog and this second frog consequently won the race. Twain wrote up this tale in “The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” Obviously, this story would and did take New York City by storm, mostly, I contend, because New Yorkers enjoy thinking of us as idiots.

Back in the twenty-first century, the three of us stopped at the Best Western that stands just outside Angel’s Camp. A big CVS anchors a shopping mall that very likely killed any chance for real business in the little town. There is nothing any normal person from the Bay Area would want to eat in that shopping mall, but there are likely descendants of people who grew up eating raccoons and boiled squirrels who might appreciate the relatively more tasty Mexican, Chinese and burnt pizza and ribs provided at mall restaurants. There is a real restaurant in Angel’s Camp but it’s closed Mondays and Tuesdays, and there is a real movie theater.

The hotel where Mark Twain heard the jumping frog story is still there, and there are an awful lot of frog tchotchkes in store windows in Angel’s Camp but there isn’t really anything anyone, local or tourist, might covet in any of the stores. Jackass Hill has to be around there somewhere because there’s a photograph on Internet in color showing a fence around the one room Sam Gillis cabin.

The next day, we went to the Moaning Caverns off Highway 4, and men put helmets and restraining devices on Feride and Emma and drove them up to a platform and sent them zipping down a metal line. I did not do this stupid thing. After that, Emma persuaded me to buy a bag of dirt with fools gold and crystals in it.

It was incredibly hot and clear and a million miles from the Van Nuys train station where I got a ride in a cab driven by a newly arrived Armenian immigrant through ugly streets and smog to the Bob Hope Airport, which has a big banner with Bob Hope’s face on it hanging from its tallest structure, where I began my part of the journey to Gold Country.

I thought of something as we headed back to the Bay Area: Jack London’s sister gave him the money to outfit himself for the Yukon gold rush, and the stories London heard in a miner’s cabin were his real gold, as the stories Brett Hart heard and read and the story Mark Twain heard were the true gold they found in the mountains.

References:

Most important is to read Nigey Lennon’s, The Sage Brush Bohemian, referenced above. It’s delicious.

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6516/, retrieved July 11, 2010. “Dame Shirley” Describes Life At A California Mining Camp in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1851.

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moajrnl&idno=ahj1472.1-01.001 (retrieved July 11, 2010)

The Luck of Roaring Camp, The Outcasts of Poker Flat & The Idyl of Red Gulch
Francis Bret Harte, The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction, Vol. X, Part 4.
Selected by Charles William Eliot
Copyright © 2001 Bartleby.com, Inc.

http://www.sierranevadavirtualmuseum.com/docs/specialex/biographies/harteb.html
Gary Noy
Director, Center for Sierra Nevada Studies
Sierra College
5000 Rocklin Road, LRC 442
Rocklin, CA 95677
916-781-7184

sierracenter@sierracollege.edu
gnoy@sierracollege.edu

Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915 (Oxford University Press, 1973)

http://www.jstor.org/pss/27746285 (retrieved July 11, 2010), “Mark Twain in the Overland Monthly (1868-1870), by Daniel Wells, in American Literary Realism (1870-1910), vol. 20, number 2, winter 1988, published by University of Illinois Press.

http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/projects/price/frog.html, retrieved July 11, 2010. The text of “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” by Mark Twain, edited by Angel Price 11/96.

By LIONEL ROLFE

Beginning in October, I will join with Lee Boek and Eric Vollmer of Public Works Improvisational Theater in presenting a series of salons and theatrical productions relating to the bombing of the Los Angeles Times and the almost successful candidacy of Job Harriman in becoming the socialist mayor of Los Angeles. He had already beaten the incumbent in a primary. Along with Nigey Lennon and Paul Greenstein, I penned the book “Bread And Hyacinths: The Rise and Fall of Utopian Los Angeles” which documents the story. That book is now available for your iPhone, iPad, iPod, Kindle or computer from Amazon’s Kindle bookstore. The book was optioned by Oscar-winning director and screenwriter Paul Haggis.

The bombing of the Los Angeles Times building in 1910 whose centennial is in October is much more than a testament to an antiquarian piece of class warfare. It was a transitional period that ended a relatively radical period when Americans were increasingly electing socialist mayors and even a congressman or two, yet the bombing undercut the power of the American labor movement for decades.

Now Hollywood is preparing a film about this period in Los Angeles history, based on Howard Blum’s “American Lightning,” an historical pastiche and costume drama of figures like General Harrison Gray Otis, Harry Chandler, Clarence Darrow, Private Detective William J. Burns and the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building.

Blum makes Burns the hero of his piece because along with Pinkerton he specialized in fighting for management’s side in the great struggles accompanying the rise of modern cities like Los Angeles with sky-piercing buildings of steel early in the 20th century.

In Blum’s entire book, Job Harriman’s name only comes up on three pages. Blum speaks well of Harriman, but in his version you would hardly realize he was co-counsel for the McNamara brothers. On the other hand, Blum manages to weave Burns and Darrow throughout his manuscript with that of D.W. Griffith, the pioneer film maker.

It’s a cute way of making his story more “Hollywood,” but the inclusion of Griffith’s name seems forced at best—whereas Harriman, who truly was central to the events of 1910, is brushed off with nary a real mention. Yet Harriman was the main attorney for the McNamara brothers until Darrow came in.

The McNamara’s were the trade unionists accused of blowing up General Otis’ building and killing more than 20 people. Job Harriman was a truer and better character by which to tell the times than Burns ever was. Harriman’s dreams were not empty symbolism. They came out of the struggles of his times. Harriman was born in the year of Abraham Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address, which came at a time when the country was being torn asunder by the threat of secession from those who believed in black slavery. In that First Address, Lincoln assured Southerners he had “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the United States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” But his words did not prevent the Civl War.

Harriman looked somewhat like Lincoln, although he wasn’t nearly so tall. Lincoln was his mentor. It can be argued that the other great influences in Harriman’s life was religion and tuberculosis. Aldous Huxley who contemplated Harriman and then wrote an essay about him because he lived for a while on the land that had been  occupied by Harriman’s Llano Colony in the Mojave Desert described Harriman as “somewhere between a Revivalist and a Shakespearean Thespian.” But Harriman was never an intentional thespian. Trained in a seminary as a minister and preacher, he then threw in his lot with socialism and the law. He was a successful lawyer, and a formidable political candidate and later a utopian leader. His character was forged by adversity and it was not just symbolism. He took Lincoln’s words from the Inaugural Speech to heart. In that speech, Lincoln referred to “the better angels of our nature.”

You might say those angels were the demons that drove Harriman. They formed the vision, the dream, which drove the man when he first went to San Francisco in the 1890s. He opened a law office, lived in the Altruria cooperative colony, and later ran for Governor on the socialist ticket. Then as the new century rolled around, he ran for vice president on the socialist party ticket with Eugene Debs. And by 1911, he was making his bid to become mayor of Los Angeles. Those better angels of our nature caused him to do battle with General Otis, who built the Times building like a medieval fortress. Otis also built his house and called it “The Bivouac” and in case the point was missed, mounted a cannon on the side of his car.  Whereas Harriman represented liberation from the repression of the past, General Otis was a man who crushed other people’s aspirations if they contradicted his own. Harriman believed in the concepts of the Law and Justice. He was a first rate debater, and opponents said that once Harriman laid out the logic of his argument, he was almost unbeatable in the eyes of the juries.

Harriman was the man Blum should have made his hero, rather than Burns, who was villainous. He might have been persistent in his villainy, but his motivations weresimple–and venal. He lusted for money and power. He was heavily invested, emotionally and financially, in helping Otis triumph over labor. There was no nobility in the man’s story. Yet that is the story Blum is pushing. Blum may have hardly known Harriman, but he talked a great deal about Clarence Darrow, perhaps the greatest defense lawyer this country ever saw. When Darrow was brought in, Harriman turned over most of the legal duties to Darrow, who never had great sympathy with socialism or Harriman’s candidacy. Blum goes with the big names–Burns, Darrow and so forth, and makes Burns a latter-day Sherlock Holmes. To Blum, the McNamaras were guilty. He does not entertain any of the powerful evidence linking Otis himself to the bombing of his own building, or Otis and Burn’s role in agent provocateuring designed to bring the labor movement down, even if it cost Otis his building and more than 20 of his workers there.

The fact that Otis was conspicuously out of the building when the explosion occurred, or that he had raised his insurance on the building just days before the explosion, are not mentioned. But Blum does manage to drag in the filmmaker D.W. Griffth and was of the major characters of the drama, even if there is almost no basis for doing so. Born into a heavily religious Christian fundamentalist sect concerned with getting out the truth of The Word of the Bible, Harriman was a product of a fierce  midwestern frontier tradition. Suffering from weak lungs from the beginning, he became a bookish lad ill suited to hard labor who also read a lot. The tradition was an ideal one for developing utopianism–a utopianism that initially was Christian, and then moved into the camp of social justice and socialism.

He went to seminary, became an ordained minister, but moved to San Francisco where he became increasingly attracted to utopian socialism. He was not alone in this. Utopian socialism, sometimes known as Christian socialism, was part of the warp and woof of the times. Gaylord Wilshire, the man who founded Los Angeles’ grandest boulevard, was a Utopian socialist, inspired in great part by Edward Bellamy. After throwing off the cloak of religion, Harriman proclaimed:

“It is in doubt and not in faith that the salvation of the world is to be found. Faith is a delusion and a snare: a pitfall, a prison. It intimidates the intellect. With fear of eternal damnation religion crushes intellectual activity; with hero worship it destroys individuality; with hopes for the beyond it prevents the growth of ideals for the present. It makes of us a race of intellectual cowards; it changes but little if any our daily conduct toward each other. But doubt sets us free.”

Another factor in Harriman’s life was the fact that he was always fighting for his next breath. Many people in those days suffered from such lung troubles. Los Angeles was a mecca for many such people. One of them was Harriman. No doubt part of the reason he left San Francisco were his problems with drawing a reasonable breath.

At one point he went inland to Indio, south and east of Los Angeles, because his cough had suddenly got worse. For a while, the dry air seemed to help. But when things didn’t go so well, he and his wife pushed deeper into Colorado. For months, they wandered the desert in a horse-drawn wagon, looking for that place that had the right combination of sun and air so he could breathe more easily. All of this no doubt deeply influenced his personality, his choices and decisions.

I was joined in my hunt for Job Harriman’s “Rosebud” by my good friends Lee Boek and Eric Vollmer of Public Works Improvisational Theater. We speculated that perhaps people had stronger and more unshakeable convictions in those days because they came to their beliefs out of so much adversity. The tenacity with which Harriman pursued his dream of utopian socialism suggested this. When you’re always fighting for your next breath, life is a constant struggle. For the most part, where public health has been successfully instituted, tuberculosis has departed from the scene. So there was no wavering in the face of truth as he perceived it. Harriman was a compelling character, a sometimes volatile character, who could swing rapidly from judicious to vehement and even vituperativeness. People thought of him as “witty, but mostly found him gracious, accommodating and highly encouraging to those with whom he worked. He quickly grew to be in great demand at socialist gatherings, first in San Francisco, and then in Los Angeles, where the weather better suited him.

Thus we plan on marking this coming 100th anniversary of the bombing of the Times building by doing salons on the subject, based in part on “Bread and Hyacinths: The Rise and Fall of Utopian Los Angeles,” which will be made available digitally for the event. And Boek and Vollmer plan to use Public Works Improvisational Theater as a vehicle to talk about those times as well. Given the considerable effort that can be expected to portray things in a way that vindicates General Otis–Blum’s account strongly suggests this–we felt that it was appropriate to respond. Perhaps many of those who were inspired by Lincoln were self educated because they were voracious readers. Harriman valued Lincoln in part because of the man’s honesty. In his progression from Christian minister to evangelical socialist, he could hold massive audiences spellbound for hours. In his personal life, he developed the patience and persistence of Job, in part because that was his name. He often thought about his name.

His parents were Christian, and discussed giving their son such an unusual name. The mark of Job was upon him. Job Harriman’s grandfather had also been named Job. As a lawyer, Harriman had a way of being incredibly eloquent and also sometimes slipping into those colloquialisms and even vulgarities that revealed his back woods rearing.  But that was perhaps not inappropriate for a man who voiced the concerns and beliefs of the common working man. For them, he had a way of making every thing they believed common sense. He could hold the rapt attention of 10,000 people assembled in downtown Los Angeles for hours. Hundreds of people from those audiences eventually followed him to Llano, the utopian colony he found on the Mojave Desert. He probably was a more eloquent speaker than Lincoln, although the content of Lincoln’s greatest speech is sometimes unrivaled literature.

More than that, Harriman was not just molded in the Lincoln tradition, he was his own kind of archetype. In part it was his name, for he was not only called Job, he lived the life of a Job.

There certainly were a number of euphonious moments in Harriman’s life stemming from the curse of his name, and the trials and tribulations he suffered from it. We do not know for sure this is the case, but perhaps Harriman knew the story of Job from the illustrations and narration of William Blake’s “Job,” since it probably would have had more resonance to his times than the original biblical version. On the other hand, Harriman’s trials and tribulations were on a par with Job of the Tenach.

*

There had to have been many epiphanies in the narrative of Harriman living among the web of characters he was centrally involved with—Gen. Otis, Clarence Darrow, Lincoln Steffens, Detective Burns and Eugene Debs. No doubt the moment he lost the mayor’s race, unexpectedly, was such a moment. The exact moment when he moved from mayoral candidate to leader of an experiment in utopian living can only be surmised, but offers a fertile area of investigation. The last germain question to resolve is what was Harriman’s character really? Did he know, for instance, that the McNamara brothers were “guilty?” In his personal and political life, Harriman had consistently stood against those who advocated “direct action” or violence. The socialist movement was split between those who advocated direct action and those who advocated peaceful change. Harriman was most definitely in the latter camp.

Harriman argued that “whenever the masses of mankind abandon all hope of peaceful resolution of our social problems, we will have been presented with all the  elements that cause civil wars and open warfare will then commence.” Darrow said that Harriman had nothing to do with the decision to plead the McNamara’s guilty, but he also insisted that Harriman must have known on some level the brothers were guilty. Darrow also knew that the decision to plead the McNamaras guilty would end Harriman’s campaign, which otherwise was on the verge of success in just a few more days.

Darrow’s friend Lincoln Steffens, and J.W. Scripps, the left-wing newspaper publisher, argued that of course the McNamara planted bombs. They were, after all, trade unionists, not socialists. The bosses used violence, and they used violence. It wasn’t an academic argument. It was just fact. Steffens assumed “that organized labor has committed the dynamiting and other crimes charged against it” and for him the only interesting question was why? Although Harriman argued eloquently for non-violence, he was the attorney for Ricardo Flores Magon,who was living in Los Angeles in exile from the corrupt and brutal American-supported Porfirio Diaz dictatorship. Magon was like the trade unionists in the midst of battle. As a revolutionary, he clearly was dedicated to “direct action.” Magon did not trust most Gringo progressives. But he and Harriman seemed to respect each other and established a certain bond. By 1910, Magon was back in Mexico,where he was acknowledged as a leaders of the Mexican revolution. Ultimately, though, Magon died in a U.S. federal pen–Leavenworth–and only when he died was his body returned to his native Mexico.

So how naive was Harriman about those he represented? A friend and colleague, Le Compte Davis, proclaimed that “Not all the angels in heaven or all the devils in hell could ever convince me that job Harriman knew anything about the conniving and dynamiting.” Others argued that Harriman made a mistake trying to integrate trade unionists and socialists–the trade unionists are just thugs, they said. In the years after Llano was established in the Mojave, there would be lots of grinding moments. The thousand or so people who followed him into the desert tended to be strong-willed types–vegetarians, free lovers, socialists, mystics, actors and musicians. They did not prove to be effective legislators. Democracy with the “lid off” didn’t always work so well in day to day things.

So they asked Harriman to assume the title of dictator, which he reluctantly did. The commune itself lasted a surprising amount of time. It moved to Louisiana, where it survived until the bottom of the Great Depression—a period of nearly two decades. His connections with the key players of Los Angeles at the beginning of the century are rich and even ripe for our dissection of the man. His life as a potent force in Los Angeles municipal government rivaled that of him as a utopian. Progressive politics and utopianism were part of the woof and warp of the times. He also was a considerable man who historically played a role in shaping the alliance of the socialists and organized labor early in the last century. Surely, the disappointments of Job when he lost his campaign to be the city’s first socialist mayor must have been life-changing. He decided socialism could never win elections, because elections were rigged. So he would create a new city on the desert where socialists would live. It many ways, it was quite successful.

He also took on a mistress, leaving behind his wife Theo who had been to hell and back with him. A man’s nature can also be told by his relationship with the women in his life. His wife of so many eventful years burned her husband’s love letters written to the woman who accompanied him to Louisiana while she stayed behind. He met his mistress at Llano, and that was not uncommon. Many of those couples who came to Llano ended up divorcing their spouses and making new marriages–many of which lasted for years. Llano was most certainly a utopian colony with its bohemian charms. Even if it was not exactly a great financial success, it seemed to have a rich cultural and social life. No doubt, the relations of men and women there produced much emotional turmoil as well. It had a rich cultural and social life. There were plays and magazines that were published there that had impact far beyond its own borders. Bella Lewitzky, the great dancer, was born at Llano, and credited the colony for inspiring her.

During the two decades the colony survived, there were euphoric moments and times rife with conflicts and problems. And in the end, Harriman returned to his wife in Los Angeles a near invalid, who cared for him until he dies. She burns his love letters. If a man’s character can best be told by his lovers, even more can it be told by his enemies. Harriman clearly had one. His name was General Otis. To Otis, it was the struggle between the followers of the Red Flag, and the forces of Law and Order. Of course in the end, Otis and the law and order he represented, won. General Otis used the techniques of using crooked detectives and muscle and the power of the press to twist and lie, which he did. He perfected his techniques against another utopian socialist who came along a couple of decades later, who also nearly became governor during the Great Depression, Upton Sinclair. General Otis won. Yet 100 years later, the same story is still very much with us.

At the end of the life, perhaps Harriman had some doubts. Had his been a life spent in vain? He is known at the end of his life to have commented that building socialism was difficult in part because of the greed of those who joined up as well as opposition from outside. It’s only in retrospect that question can be answered. Harriman couldn’t have known that the movement he began with his campaign for mayor and his utopian colony led to Upton Sinclair’s nearly successful candidacy for governor two decades later in the middle of the Great Depression. The campaigns for unemployment insurance, for social security, for the eight hour day, these were very much the product of Harriman.

The crusade Harriman began should no longer remain unsung. Especially in light of the tributes that some want to pay the likes of General Otis and William Burns.

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Rolfe’s books are available from this website.

First Movement

Movements 2 and 3:

www.boryanabooks.com is run by Yaltah’s son, Lionel Rolfe, an author and journalist. Check our catalog for his book, “The Uncommon Friendship of Yaltah Menuhin and Willa Cather,” available at Amazon’s Kindlestore for iPads, iPhones, Kindles and desktop computers.

His first book, “The Menuhins: A Family Odyssey,” is also available digitally. Rolfe has written seven books, including those devoted to politics, literature and politics.