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Tag: Civic Association
Posted on September 15, 2019 April 6, 2020
Police mull action to 'clean up' park
The following article first appeared in the Sunday, June 4, 1967 edition of the "Ojai Valley News" on the front page. It is reprinted here with their permission
Hippie set
Ojai police, nettled by a series of provocative acts attributed to members of the Hippie set, were mulling retaliatory action Friday.
Chief James D. Alcorn said his "phone has been ringing off the hook," with calls from citizens who are plainly disturbed by what they claim are impudent reflections on recent narcotics violations.
Most recent incident was the posting of a sign near the arches fronting Civic Park, proclaiming "Things go better with Pot." Pot is a slang word for marijuana.
Alcorn said private citizens have also complained about the posting of a routed redwood sign with the capital letters, O-V-D-A, which reportedly stand for "Ojai Valley Drug Addicts."
He said some of the Hippies hold the sign on their laps as they sit on the wall fronting the park.
Civic Park is a private park, administered by Ojai Civic Association. Alcorn said trustees of the association have been exploring ways of combating the situation, but thus far have failed to find any answers.
In recent discussion of the problem by the Ojai City Council, City Attorney Duane Lyders warned the council that restrictive actions would raise questions of free speech and assembly – thorny issues of civil rights.
As a private park, however, authorities have indicated there might be ways of cleaning up the situation.
The Hippie set has used the front area of the park as a rallying point for some time,, according to Alcorn, but the situation apparently worsened earlier this year when Hippies from coastal cities staged the first of two "Love-ins."
The first event came off without incident. Barefoot youths with flowers behind their ears strummed on guitars, ate picnic lunches and proclaimed "Love" to all who would listen. It was similar to events conducted quietly in Los Angeles, San Francisco and most recently in an eastern city.
The second "Love-in", however, had slightly different overtones. Police arrested two visitors on charges of possessing marijuana. One was a girl from Glendale, the other a boy from Los Angeles.
Observers, however, noted that some of the visitors were not so young and some were estimated to be only juveniles who supported the bizarre costumes and deportment of Hippies years older.
Alcorn said the situation was a delicate one. "We have to be careful how we handle this thing," he warned, "publicity is what most of these people want."
He said the most his officers could do at present was to see that no laws are broken.
Ojai was 'torn apart and rebuilt'
This article first appeared in the August 26, 1970 edition of the Ojai Valley News. It is reprinted here with their permission. The author is Ed Wenig.
(Editor's note: this is the second in a series of articles by historian Ed Wenig on Civic Center Park and the man responsible for its gift "to the people of the Ojai Valley" — Edward Libbey).
On September 1, 1916, THE OJAI printed an editorial from the Ventura Free Press, written by Editor D. J. Reese, who had attended the Men's League Banquet in March at the Foothills Hotel:
"Some morning, not far distant, the village of Nordhoff is going to wake up and find itself famous. The work being done in that section just now would make the man who has known Nordhoff of old rub his eyes in astonishment if he was brought into the place suddenly. Great things are in store no doubt. The town has been torn apart and several sections have been removed hither and yon. There has been a general clearing up of everything, and everybody has an expectant look as though wondering what will happen next. The main street has been piled full of terra cotta brick, and no one seems to know what is doing. Old landmarks like the Clark stables and the Ojai Inn have vanished as before a Kansas cyclone. Only the beautiful oaks, and here and there a substantial house like the bank or the clubhouse or the Nordhoff fountain and splendid Ojai atmosphere seem to be left. Something is surely doing. Ask what it is and the Nordhoffite will throw up his hands and mention the name of Libbey. You hear about Libbey every time you ask a question. Everywhere you go you note that somebody is working hard at something or other in digging ditches or burying water pipe or clearing underbrush or building massive and magnificent cobble walls. Why, it is to be another Montecito, you are told . . . "The people there are to be congratulated that they have a Libbey who has taken an interest in their affairs. It is to be hoped they will give him free rein."
Vast Land Holdings
At an Ojai Valley Men's League banquet at the Foothills Hotel J. J. Burke, speaking of improvements, told of a well of Mr. Libbey's which "will pump at least 65 inches, and if Mr. Libbey's plans materialize he will spend $20,000 in getting the water to his ranch. . . . The old Ojai Inn and all but one of the Berry Villa buildings have been torn down or moved away, making room for more extensive improvements in the future. Through the generosity of Mr. Libbey, Signal Street was cut through and graded to the railroad."
In the spring of 1916 Libbey was reported to be visiting his friend, H. T. Sinclair and discussing with Mr. Thacher, Colonel Wilson and W. W. Bristol "sundry matters of importance to the community."
On June 9, 1916 it was announced that E. D. Libbey had bought 200 more acres to add to his previous 300-acre property. "Among the early improvements will be the laying of a water main from his well on the Gally tract to his large holdings. And that is not all, as the entire square upon which once stood the Ojai Inn, is to be improved in a manner that augurs well for the future of Nordhoff, which is good news to the entire community. Mr. H. T. Sinclair has been taken into Mr. Libbey's confidence and will be the directing head during his absence. Let us be glad, as well as thankful for so generous a promoter as E. D. Libbey."
On June 16, 1916, we are told that Mr. Libbey has bought the last parcel of privately owned land in what is now the Civic Park. In the local paper, "The plans Mr. Libbey is making to benefit both the town and the Valley has met with the highest approbation of the committee and the cooperation of the League in every way is assured."
It was reported on June 30 that the Berry Villa, "an historical step-sister of the Ojai Inn, now a demolished antiquity," had been torn down and the lumber hauled away.
By July 14, fifty men in one crew were working on the Libbey pay roll. Tom Clark destroyed his barn north of his livery stable and constructed a rock wall for a modern garage. This wall can still be seen as part of the Village Drug Store.
Early in November, Architect Requa, of the San Diego architectural firm of Mead and Requa, went to Toledo and got full approval of the plans for the renovation of the main street of Nordhoff. The local newspaper reported, "The post office tower, penetrating the lower heavens 65 feet is to be a reality. There are many features that we shall be delighted to prattle about when fully assured that the architect has removed the censorship."
In March, 1917, representatives of the Men's League met with Mr. Libbey. A corporation was formed under the name of THE OJAI CIVIC ASSOCIATION. The incorporators were E. D. Libbey, S. D. Thacher, J. J. Burke, Harrison Wilson, H. T. Sinclair, A. A. Garland, and H. R. Cole. Said the editor of the paper: "The initial purpose of the corporation is to assume title to the valuable property acquired by gift from Mr. Libbey . . . This beautiful park and the tennis courts, covering more than seven acres, is to become the property of the people of Nordhoff and the Ojai Valley.
Concurrent with the changes in the appearance of the town of Nordhoff came a popular move to change the name of the village to Ojai. A petition was circulated under the auspices of Supervisor Tom Clark requesting the name change, and received so many signatures that it was five feet long by the time H. D. Morse, manager of the Foothills Hotel, sent it to Washington D. C. In March, 1917, Senator James D. Phelan sent the following telegram: "You may announce the change of name from Nordhoff to Ojai."
Posted on October 15, 2012 April 14, 2017
The Meaning of Ojai Day
The Meaning of Ojai Day, by Mark Lewis
Reprinted from The Ojai Quarterly
Downtown Ojai in 1920s. Courtesy Ojai Valley Museum
Ojai Day celebrates the 1917 transformation of Ojai from a dusty, ramshackle collection of old West shops into unified design of public architecture and parks, with converging perspectives of arches and towers. What inspired Edward Libbey to transform Ojai into an architectural jewel? Mark Lewis interviewed Craig Walker, who revived the Ojai Day celebration in 1991, for this in-depth look at the origins of Ojai Day. Craig traces the impetus to the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, an epochal event that launched the City Beautiful Movement, made Libbey a vast fortune and introduced him to Mission Revival architecture.
The original plan was to call it Libbey Day, to honor the man who had transformed the dusty, dowdy, backwater burg of Nordhoff into the model Mission Revival village of Ojai. But Edward Drummond Libbey was having none of it. He was proud of his role as Ojai's guardian angel, but he preferred to celebrate the town itself on the occasion of its rechristening, rather than focus on his role in the process. As usual, Libbey got his way. And so, on April 7, 1917, some 2,000 people crammed themselves into the town's brand-new Civic Park to celebrate Ojai Day.
"We are celebrating here today the fulfillment of a conception," Libbey told the crowd. On every side stood examples of his handiwork: The Arcade, the Pergola and the Post Office Tower, all immaculately sheathed in sparkling white stucco or plaster.
"There has been too little attention paid to things aesthetic in our communities and in our homes," Libbey said. "The time has come when we should encourage in ourselves thoughts of things beautiful, and the higher ideals which art encourages and promotes must awaken in the people the fostering of the love of that which is beautiful and inspiring. We must today decry with contempt and aversion all that is cheap, vulgar and degrading."
That night the new buildings were illuminated with white light, rendering them incandescent. The effect must have reminded some onlookers of similar illuminations they had witnessed at the Panama-California Exposition, a world's fair of sorts that had just closed on January 1, after a successful two-year run in San Diego's Balboa Park.
Looking back at these events across a distance of 95 years, it seems clear that Libbey's Ojai project was heavily influenced by the San Diego fair. The Panama-California Exposition had popularized the new Spanish Colonial Revival style, a baroque offshoot of the Mission style and Ojai's Post Office Tower would have looked right at home in Balboa Park. But one local history maven, Craig Walker, traces Libbey's original inspiration further back, to an earlier world's fair: Chicago's legendary World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, better known as the White City.
White City at 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Photo: Chicago History Museum Collection
The Chicago fair had an enormous impact, and still lingers in the national memory. It is the subject of Erik Larson's hugely popular nonfiction book The Devil in the White City, first published in 2004 and still going strong on the paperback bestseller lists almost a decade later. The book focuses on a serial killer, Dr. H.H. Holmes, the eponymous "Devil" of Larson's title, who preyed upon fairgoers. But for most people who visited the White City, it looked more like heaven than hell.
It was there, on the shore of Lake Michigan, that Edward Libbey witnessed a testing of the hypothesis he would propagate in Ojai two decades later: that beautiful buildings inspire people to become better citizens. To judge by Chicago's less-than-sterling reputation over the years as a bastion of civic virtue, the original experiment was rather a bust. Ojai would turn out to be a different story.
MAKE NO LITTLE PLANS
The World's Columbian Exposition originally was scheduled to open in 1892, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus discovering the New World. But its organizers got carried away. Led by the architect Daniel Burnham, they turned the fair into an epic celebration of modern America and its apparently limitless potential. "Make no little plans," Burnham famously said; "They have no magic to stir men's blood, and probably themselves will not be realized."
Big plans take time to develop. As a result, the fair did not open until May 1893. But it was worth the wait. Burnham & Co. had built an entire model city in Jackson Park. This was in effect a Hollywood set, made up of temporary buildings molded out of a kind of stucco and painted white to look like marble. Nevertheless, the effect was stunning especially at night, when they were bathed in electric light. Collectively they comprised the White City, and people looked upon them in wonder.
Some 27 million people visited the fair that year, the equivalent of a third of the country's population. Among them was the future author L. Frank Baum, for whom the White City would serve as the model for the Emerald City in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Another onlooker was Elias Disney, a carpenter who had helped to build the White City; his son Walt would one day build his own White City in Anaheim and call it Disneyland. Even the notoriously cynical historian Henry Adams was impressed with what Burnham had wrought.
"Chicago in 1893 asked for the first time the question whether the American people knew where they were driving," Adams later wrote. The answer was still unclear, but at least the question was framed intelligently. The White City, Adams wrote, "was the first expression of American thought as a unity; one must start there."
All sorts of people beat a path to Chicago in 1893, including the theosophist Annie Besant, who was on her way from Britain to India. She stopped off in Chicago long enough to attend the fair's Parliament of Religions, during which Swami Vivekananda introduced America (and the West in general) to Vedanta and yoga. Such epochal goings-on were routine at the Chicago World's Fair, which also introduced America to the Ferris Wheel, Cracker Jack candy and Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer. But its most far-reaching legacy was the City Beautiful Movement, which the White City embodied.
"The industrial cities of the 1870s and '80s had little planning "they evolved as crowded, ugly, haphazard affairs," Craig Walker said. Burnham built the White City to show that there was a better way. "The belief was that cities built as a unified, planned development, with beautiful public buildings and parks, would inspire civic pride and moral virtues that would bring social reform," Walker said. "The exposition was the blueprint for modern America; it had a major influence on art, architecture, city planning, business and industry."
Ah yes, business and industry. The exposition was not entirely about art and moral uplift. Commerce also was highlighted, and many manufacturers built exhibits to showcase their wares. Among them was a certain glass manufacturer from Toledo, who saw the fair as his chance to hit the big time.
Edward Drummond Libbey was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts in 1854. He followed his father into the glass business and by 1892 was the head of Libbey Glass. The firm had moved in 1888 from New England to Ohio, where it struggled for a few years before finding its footing. Now Libbey saw the World's Columbian Exposition as opportunity to establish his firm as the premier national brand for high-quality cut glass tableware. But his board of directors balked at investing big bucks to build a first-class exhibit. So Libbey borrowed the money himself and built it anyway. It was a full-scale glass factory situated on the Midway Plaisance, west of the fairgrounds proper. Libbey's gamble paid off: The Libbey Glass pavilion was a huge success with fairgoers.
Libbey spent a lot of the time at the fair, living above the store, so to speak, in an apartment built into the pavilion's second floor. The building was located half a mile east of the Ferris Wheel and just short walk west from Stony Island Avenue. On the other side of the avenue lay the shimmering White City.
Most of the fair's buildings showcased the neo-classical Beaux Arts style, which America's leading architects had studied in Paris. Among the more notable exceptions was the California Building, which stood less than a quarter of a mile away from the Libbey Glass exhibit. Paris had never seen its like. Nor had Chicago, for that matter. The California Building introduced America, and Edward Libbey, to a new architectural style called Mission Revival.
ENTER RAMONA
California had not always celebrated its Mission Era heritage. After the gold rush petered out, the state's boosters needed to give people from back East a different reason to migrate west, and California's Spanish and Mexican heritage did not seem like a selling point for white Protestant Americans. On the contrary, the state's boosters feared that all those Spanish-style churches and forts made California seem too foreign and too Catholic. "From the 1840s to the early 1880s, the American immigrants did everything they could to eradicate the state's Old World Spanish architecture," Craig Walker said. "The missions and presidios were abandoned and destroyed."
Casting about for a viable marketing angle, California's railroad barons brought in the travel writer Charles Nordhoff to publicize the state's natural beauty and healthy climate. Nordhoff hit the mark with his book California for Health, Pleasure and Residence (1872), an enormous success that induced thousands of Americans to move west. Some of them ended up in the sparsely Ojai Valley, where a real estate promoter named Royce Surdam was promoting a new town site. The settlers decided to name this town Nordhoff, to honor the man whose book had lured so many of them to California.
Nordhoff's founders took no cues from the few remaining adobe structures they encountered in the vicinity. Their new town was built out of wood, and looked like it had been plucked from Kansas or Iowa and replanted in the Ojai Valley. But not every visitor from the East was averse to adobe. When the author Helen Hunt Jackson passed through Ventura County in 1882, she ignored Nordhoff but made a point of lingering in Rancho Camulo, a Spanish-style ranch near the present-day town of Piru. Rancho Camulo served Jackson as a model setting for Ramona (1884), her melodramatic novel about a young Indian woman who lives on a California ranch during the early years of statehood.
Ramona changed everything. A runaway bestseller, it sparked a national fascination with California's Mission Era. The state's boosters reversed course and embraced the old missions as iconic symbols of a romantic (and mostly spurious) past. "They just rode this Ramona thing," Walker said. In the end, Jackson's book lured even more people to California than Charles Nordhoff's had.
Meanwhile, California architects concocted the Mission Revival style to create new buildings that harked back to the period in which Ramona was set. Naturally, when it came time to design a California exhibit building for the World's Columbian Exposition, state officials chose a Mission Revival motif. The California Building was hardly the first example of this new style, but it was the first one to win nationwide acclaim. It made a big splash at the fair.
"It really was the building that got America's attention," Walker said.
Did it get Edward Libbey's attention? He could hardly have missed it, given its close proximity to the Libbey Glass pavilion. Was he impressed? There is no way of knowing. All one can say with confidence is that Ojai's future benefactor first encountered the Mission Revival style in Chicago in 1893.
The World's Columbian Exposition also put Libbey on the path to extraordinary wealth, due to the success of his glass-making exhibit. "His whole glass empire just took off," Walker said. "It propelled him to the top of America's glass manufacturers, and he became one of the wealthiest businessmen in the country."
And, crucially, the fair exposed Libbey to the full effect of the City Beautiful Movement. Before long he began applying its precepts to Toledo, where in 1901 he co-founded the Toledo Museum of Art. But Toledo turned out to be too big a city for one man to beautify. Libbey continued to support the museum, but he spent more and more of his time in Southern California. In 1908 he discovered Nordhoff, and built himself a winter home high up on Foothill Road. He loved the valley's climate and mountain scenery, but was less impressed by its tacky architecture. Eventually, it occurred to him that Nordhoff, too, could benefit from the Libbey touch.
The town of Nordhoff before Mr. Libbey's improvements.
THE VILLAGE BEAUTIFUL MOVEMENT
Nordhoff's ramshackle business district did not amount to much: a forgettable stretch of uninspired wooden storefronts, indistinguishable from a thousand other hick towns languishing in the boondocks. In short, Nordhoff was homely. Libbey had a remedy. He had internalized the great lesson of Chicago, which was that art and human progress were inextricably linked. And among the arts, architecture was especially effective at creating a physical context for uplift. What had been true of Athens and Rome could become true of Nordhoff: Beautiful buildings would inspire civic virtue among the inhabitants, and make the town a better place in every sense. In April 1914, Libbey called a meeting of Nordoff's leading citizens to offer a suggestion: They should essentially scrap the town they had, and build a new one.
"Make no little plans!" That was Daniel Burnham's advice to the city planners of America, and it was Edward Libbey's advice to the burghers of Nordhoff. His wildly ambitious proposal evidently stirred the blood of every man at that meeting, for they voted unanimously to embrace it. Why would they not, given that Libbey and his rich friends would provide most of the funds? And so the great experiment began.
There were still a few details to fill in. First and foremost, who would be Libbey's architect, and what style would he employ? The choice ultimately fell upon Richard Requa of San Diego, whose firm, Mead and Requa, did some work for the Panama-California Exposition of 1915. Libbey evidently visited the San Diego fair, was impressed by its Spanish Colonial Revival motif, and hired Requa to create something similar in Nordhoff.
But the sequence of events suggests that Libbey already had settled on the Mission style for Nordhoff, well before he ever set foot in Balboa Park. After all, he had been familiar with the style at least since 1893, when he first clapped eyes on the California Building at the Chicago World's Fair. And he no doubt had admired the Thacher School's administration building, a Mission-style structure built in 1911. Significantly, the first major new building erected in Nordhoff in the immediate aftermath of that April 1914 meeting was a Mission-style movie theater, the Isis. (It's still there, almost a century later, only now it's called the Ojai Playhouse.) Given the town's enthusiastic embrace of Libbey's plan, it seems most unlikely that someone would have built a major new building in the downtown district without first vetting the design with the man from Toledo.
Libbey did have other architectural choices. The most impressive-looking building in downtown Nordhoff in 1914 was the Ojai State Bank, a stately brick pile in the neoclassical mode, complete with Doric columns. Theoretically, Libbey could have put up a neoclassical village to match the bank. But that would have looked bizarre, given the region's historical context. The closest points of reference were Ventura and Santa Barbara, each of which dated back to the Mission Era and boasted an authentic mission building. Mission Revival was the obvious choice for Nordhoff. It seems likely that Libbey had made that decision even before he called that meeting.
Libbey of course was no architect. He left the design details to Requa, who used a mixture of Mission style (e.g., the Arcade) and Spanish Colonial Revival style (the Post Office Tower) to bring Libbey's vision to life. Meanwhile, in March 1917, the town completed its Ramona makeover by changing its name to Ojai. Now it had a Spanish-sounding name to complement its new look. (The name, like the architecture, is not actually Spanish; it's derived from the name of one of the Chumash Indian villages that once dotted the valley.) Thus it was Ojai Day, rather than Nordhoff Day, that the town celebrated a few weeks later on April 7.
At the opening ceremony, Libbey handed the deed to Civic Park to Sherman Day Thacher, who accepted it on behalf of the newly formed Ojai Civic Association. A reporter for The Ojai newspaper recorded Libbey's speech, an earnest paean to the power of art:
"Art is but visualized idealism, and is expressed in all surroundings and conditions of society," he told the crowd. "From the earliest age to the present time, art has been to the races of men one of the greatest incentives toward progress, refinement and the aesthetic missionary to the peoples of the world."
Did the townspeople take Libbey seriously, with all his high-falutin' rhetoric about Greece and Rome and beauty and virtue? Relatively few people in the crowd knew him well. He was only a part-time resident, after all. But clearly he was sincere, and most of his listeners were grateful that he had taken Ojai under his wing. Heads nodded in agreement as he launched into his peroration:
"Thus we are today celebrating, in the expression of this little example of Spanish architecture in Ojai Park, a culmination of an idea and the response to that spark of idealism which demands from us a resolution to cultivate, encourage and promote those things which go to make the beautiful in life, and bring to all happiness and pleasure."
The crowd gave Libbey a huge ovation. And then the party began.
"Last Saturday a new epoch in the social and industrial life of the rejuvenated and resuscitated ancient Nordhoff, under a new title and new conditions, was ushered in and welcomed with joyous acclaim and much felicitation," The Ojai reported in its next issue. "It was the most memorable day in the history of the Valley. New life, new ambitions and greater accomplishments will date from April 7, 1917."
THE LIBBEY LEGACY
Ojai Day was not celebrated in 1918, due to America's participation in World War I. But it returned in 1919 and became an annual event, as Libbey's influence provided the town with more new buildings to celebrate: The St. Thomas Aquinas Chapel (now the Ojai Valley Museum) in 1918, the El Roblar Hotel (now the Oaks at Ojai) in 1920, the Ojai Valley School in 1923, the original Ojai Valley Inn clubhouse in 1924. Then Libbey died in 1925. The town continued to celebrate Ojai Day until at least 1928, but at some point after that, the tradition was abandoned.
The buildings, of course, remained. But as the decades passed, some of them fell into disrepair. The original Pergola was demolished in 1971, the same year Civic Park was renamed Libbey Park. "And we almost lost the Arcade in 1989," Walker said.
Walker is a retired Nordhoff High School history teacher and an expert on the valley's architectural history. (He inherited some of that expertise from his late father, the noted architect and longtime Ojai resident Rodney Walker.) He was a member of the citizens group that saved the Arcade, by raising funds to refurbish it and bring it up to code. In the wake of that effort, Walker led a move to bring back Ojai Day. The event was revived in 1991, and now is celebrated each year on the third Saturday of October.
Craig Walker. Photo: Raijmakers Photography
Walker also was among the people who brought back the Pergola in 1999. As a member of the Ojai Valley Museum board, he continues to lend his expertise to the museum's projects. It was while researching a talk about Ojai architecture that Walker learned that Libbey had been an exhibitor at the World's Columbian Exposition, where he would have been exposed to both the Mission Revival style and the City Beautiful Movement. Walker already was familiar with Libbey's Ojai Day speech from 1917, but now he viewed those words in a new light.
"The words just echoed the real heart of what the City Beautiful Movement was all about," Walker said. "On that day in 1917, the architectural and social ideals of the World's Columbian Exposition were expressed in a beautiful new civic center that was created by a man who owed his own success in large part to that same Chicago exposition."
Did Libbey achieve his dream for Ojai? Certainly his influence on the look of the town has been enormous. Walker points to all the beautiful Mission- or Spanish-style buildings that other people erected in the valley after Libbey worked his magic downtown. These include the Krotona Institute of Theosophy, Villanova Preparatory School, the Ojai Presbyterian Church, the Ojai Unified School District headquarters (formerly Ojai Elementary), the Chaparral Auditorium, and many, many others.
But an Ojai building need not be Mission style or Spanish style to reflect Libbey's legacy; it need only be beautiful. Nor is his influence limited to architecture. Today the town is known as a mecca for artists, and Libbey, in a sense, was their prophet. He called for the community to pay more attention "to things aesthetic," and his call has been heeded.
"It all goes to show, first of all, that one man can make a difference," Walker said. "Libbey's ideas must have infected the people of Ojai."
In one way, Libbey outdid Daniel Burnham. The glorious White City burned down in 1894; only one of its buildings remains standing in Jackson Park. But Libbey's buildings still stand along Ojai Avenue, and still perform their intended function. Burnham's lost masterpiece was a blueprint for future cities that were never built, except, perhaps, by L. Frank Baum and Walt Disney. But the Emerald City is imaginary, and Disneyland is a theme park. Ojai is a real town, where people live. If today Ojai prides itself on its beauty and on its highly developed sense of civic virtue, then much of the credit must go to Edward Drummond Libbey, who set out to build a better town, and succeeded.
"I think it helped people realize that they live in someplace special," Walker said. "This was Libbey's stated intention "to inspire people to these higher ideals of civic involvement. One could say that his intention has been borne out."
(Originally published in the Ojai Quarterly's Fall 2012 issue. Republished with permission.)
Posted on July 20, 2011 December 3, 2014
Summer Bummer: Ojai in the Turbulent 60s
Summer Bummer by Mark Lewis
Ojai's Long, Strange Trip Through the Turbulent Sixties
The Age of Aquarius lingers on in Libbey Park, where Ojai's flower children convene on Sunday afternoons to bang a drum or twirl a hula hoop. Counterculture types also can be spotted occasionally at the Pergola of a Friday evening, joining in the Peace Vigil to protest the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The enduring hippie presence is a long-established Ojai tradition. But there was a time when they did not seem so benign.
For many Ojai residents – those of a certain age, who grew up here – the sight of tie-dyed peaceniks cavorting under the Pergola is a scene straight out of 1967, when anyone driving through downtown was sure to spot hippies lounging on the south side of Ojai Avenue. Some will smile at that memory, but others will cringe, because the Summer of Love was no love feast in these parts. There was yelling and rock-throwing and fist-fighting, culminating in three midsummer nights of violence which old-timers still refer to as "the Ojai riots." Then the Pergola itself was bombed, and eventually demolished.
It seems extraordinary that these events could have occurred in peaceful little Ojai, which sees itself – and rightly so — as a refuge from the ills of urban life. But 44 years ago, when the 1960s suddenly erupted into "the Sixties," Ojai seemed on the verge of losing its cherished Shangri-La status. Baffled and bewildered by all the changes, many people focused their fury on the hippies in the park, who seemed to represent a terrifying alien invasion.
Over time, passions cooled, and Ojai's safe-haven status was preserved – with considerable help from the hippies, as it turned out. The Pergola eventually was rebuilt, and now seems as though it has always been there. The events of 1967 faded into legend, then into obscurity. To many newcomers, Ojai seems firmly rooted in a much more distant past, with its iconic Mission Revival architecture and its century-old orange groves. But a case can be made that the Ojai of today is really a child of the Sixties. Its birth was unusually traumatic, and the quickening began on a festive day in the fall of 1966, when a certain longtime resident returned to town after many years away.
The Secret Doctrine
Jiddu Krishnamurti first came to Ojai in 1922 as a messiah-in-training for Annie Besant and the Theosophical Society. He eventually rejected their World Teacher role and resigned from the society, but he continued to make his home on McAndrew Road, and to give occasional public talks at the Oak Grove in Meiners Oaks. Among his East End neighbors in the late 1950s was a young girl named Susan Diets, who would grow up to be Suza Francina.
Suza Francina & Manuel Saenz
"I often saw K standing at the bridge on McAndrew, soaking up the beauty of the valley," Francina recalls.
For Judy Evans, who grew up in the Upper Valley during the '50s, the K connection was more fundamental. "We actually moved to Ojai because of Krishnamurti," says Evans, who describes her parents as "vegetarians and nonconformists."
That description could be applied to a number of people lured to Ojai by the sage's presence, including the potter Beatrice Wood and the restaurateur Alan Hooker, who started the Ranch House. Nor was Krishnamurti the only draw. There were also the Krotona Institute of Theosophy and the Happy Valley School (now known as the Besant Hill School). Ojai was home to some notable eccentrics, such as the woman in Meiners Oaks who went barefoot and lived in a tree. Most of the valley's bohemians were less flamboyant; they had jobs and mortgages and looked pretty much like their neighbors. But when "the Sixties" kicked into gear, they (and their teenage children) were ready to embrace it.
As for Krishnamurti, he almost missed the Sixties altogether, at least as they unfolded in Ojai. He had avoided the town since 1960, due to a strained relationship with his business manager, D. Rajagopal. But in the fall of 1966 he returned to make peace with Rajagopal, and to give a series of talks at the Oak Grove. Alas, the hoped-for reconciliation did not pan out; the sage soon departed, and did not return until well into the 1970s. But his three-week visit in 1966 would have a lasting impact.
Despite his long absence, these talks drew enormous crowds. More than 2,000 people came to the first one, on October 29, to hear Krishnamurti call for "a revolution in the psyche, in the mind itself."
Ojai's homegrown intelligentsia turned out in force, along with curious teenagers like Suza Francina, who was delighted to find herself in such enlightened company. Francina, the product of a strict, Pentecostal upbringing, found herself drawn to the free spirits she encountered in the Grove. The term "hippie" had only recently been coined, but it applied to many of Krishnamurti's listeners. Even in that crowd, they stood out.
"Everything about them had a different vibe," Francina says.
Many of them had come up from Los Angeles: Laurel Canyon cowboys and Hollywood hipsters eager to latch onto the new thing, Indian gurus being all the rage. To be sure, Krishnamurti's links to Hollywood went back many decades, and he had been prominently associated with the late Aldous Huxley, whom the counterculture would embrace as a prophet. But K's 1966 visit seems to have re-forged the Ojai connection for a new generation of Angelenos, especially those who had stopped getting haircuts. Ojai would soon be a regular stop on the hippie caravan route from L.A. to San Francisco.
"Maybe they would have found Ojai anyway," Francina says, "but they found it sooner through the K talks."
The talks, which continued through November 13, were extensively covered by the Ojai Valley News. Writer John Nimick attended every session and explicated Krishnamurti's philosophy in long, detailed articles, which no doubt were well read in the valley's bohemian precincts. But most OVN subscribers skipped over Nimick's articles and turned to the sports pages, where bigger news was brewing.
Catch a Wave
November 19 was Homecoming Day at Nordhoff High School. The gym had been decorated for a big dance featuring the Decades, a highly regarded rock band from Ventura. But first the Rangers would host Bishop Diego for a game that would determine the Tri-Valley League championship. Nordhoff was a basketball powerhouse in those days, but the football team had never made it to the playoffs. An enormous crowd showed up at the field on Maricopa Highway that Saturday afternoon, hoping to see the Rangers make history.
Before the kickoff, Homecoming Queen Jill Bryan received her crown — and a kiss — from team co-captain Steve Olsen. Playing center on offense and linebacker on defense, Olsen racked up six tackles and seven assists that day. But Nordhoff still trailed by a point in the final minutes of play, and Bishop Diego was running out the clock. Then the ball popped loose, and Olsen pounced on it. Jan Colenbrander, an exchange student from Holland, kicked a 35-yard field goal, and Nordhoff held on to win the game, 16-14.
The town went temporarily insane with joy. The victors were honored with a triumphal procession through downtown Ojai, escorted by smiling police officers. Then it was on to the dance, and a celebration that would linger in many memories for years to come. Theosophists by the thousand might beat a path to Ojai to sit at Krishnamurti's feet, but this was still at heart an All-American small town out in the boondocks, where most people cared more about football than about expanding their consciousness.
"It was a time when athletes still dominated the scene," Olsen recalls. The retired Chaparral High School principal looks back fondly on his own high school days, when Ojai resembled the setting for George Lucas's classic film American Graffiti.
Just as in Lucas's film, Ojai teenagers spent their weekend nights cruising the strip, which ran along Ojai Avenue from the Shell station (where Cluff Park is today) to the Hitching Post drive-in at Bald Street. (The Hitching Post, famous for its corn burritos with Happy Jack's special sauce, was on the site currently occupied by Sea Fresh.) Olsen and a friend once cruised the strip nonstop for 24 hours in a '55 Chevy: "It was just something we decided to do, and did it."
More American Graffiti parallels: Ojai's Top-40 radio playlist was curated by Wolfman Jack, broadcasting from a pirate station south of the border. And just as in the film, Ojai teens were devoted to drag racing. Since the 1950s, successive generations had been racing their cars in the East End, beyond the jurisdiction of city police.
"We'd drag on Gorham Road," recalls Susana Arce, Nordhoff '60 (she was Susie Callender back then). Carne Road also was popular, and sometimes Grand Avenue. Everyone fell into one of two categories, Ford or Chevy. "I had a '52 Ford," Arce says. "I was a Ford person."
Manuel Saenz was a Chevy person. More specifically, a '57 Chevy person. He and his friends were known as "the car guys." They were a few years older than the high-school crowd. Saenz was 22 in 1966 — old enough to buy beer, which car guys consumed in prodigious quantities.
"In the 1960s, Ojai was the party town of the county," Saenz says. For car guys, it was heaven: "There were eight gas stations back then, and there were eight bars that were open."
In that more innocent era, drunk drivers were treated more gently than today. If a teen-ager drank too much, the cops were apt to give him a lecture and drive him home. "It was like Mayberry," recalls Dan Cole, Nordhoff '64, who played drums in Ojai's hometown rock 'n' roll band, the Raiders.
Or maybe it was more like Petticoat Junction, since Southern Pacific Railroad trains still chugged into town occasionally to pick up loads of fruit from the packing house on Bryant Street. When kids heard the whistle of an approaching train, they ran down to the tracks to place pennies on the rails.
"Ojai wasn't a very active place," says Dr. Ray Huckins, who served as mayor from 1967 to 1970. "And that was fine as far as I was concerned. Nobody got very excited."
"It certainly was a sleepy town," agrees former city attorney and City Council member Jack Fay. "But I wouldn't call it a hick town."
Indeed not. Ojai offered highbrow cultural amenities rarely available in small-town America. The Happy Valley School staged modern dance programs featuring solemn-looking young women in black leotards, striking esoteric poses derived from Martha Graham. An eccentric impresario named Wayne Glasgow took over the Ojai Theatre in 1966, changed its name to the Glasgow Playhouse, and offered a steady diet of artsy foreign films: Godard, Truffaut, Pasolini. The Art Center that fall was mounting a production of William Inge's steamy Picnic, to be followed by a heavy dose of Eugene O'Neill. The Ojai Music Festival was planning to bring in the avant-garde composer Pierre Boulez as its next music director, and have him conduct Stockhausen's "Zeitmasse."
Perusing this exotic bill of fare in the Ojai Valley News, many valley residents simply scratched their heads. But there was something in the paper for every taste. Under editor-publisher Fred Volz, the OVN ran rave reviews of New Wave films like Last Year at Marienbad, but also gave plenty of ink to church socials, and to the bowling league results from Topa Lanes.
"Ojai was culturally schizophrenic at the time," says Richard Laubly, Nordhoff '69. "As far as I know, only long-hairs from Happy Valley School went to Godard films, amongst the teenagers, anyway. For the rest of us, it was definitely James Bond double features at the Los Robles Theatre. On the other hand, I remember various teenagers I knew showing up at Krishnamurti talks, and we would be a little surprised to see each other there."
One person Laubly didn't see there was Steve Olsen, who was a jock and a surfer but not a budding Theosophist. Olsen's focus was on football — at least until the Rangers lost their playoff game. After that, he was free to resume his regular weekend beach safaris to Mondos or Rincon, where an Ojai boy could catch a wave and be sitting on top of the world.
Distant Trumpets
At least one dark cloud was visible on the horizon as 1966 drew to a close. Young men who didn't go to college were subject to the draft, which meant they might be shipped off to Vietnam.
"The war had kicked in, and I was opposed to it, right from the very beginning," recalls Howard Landon, who was then a Nordhoff history teacher. "And I was one of the few in town who was. A lot of people thought I was a Communist."
Ojai's political spectrum ran the gamut from radical leftists to the John Birch Society. But the liberals — a mostly college-educated cohort of teachers and artists and Theosophy enthusiasts — were far outnumbered by conservatives such as Dr. Huckins, who had actively supported Barry Goldwater's presidential run in 1964 and Ronald Reagan's California gubernatorial bid in the fall of 1966. Reagan's victory on Nov. 8 cheered his many Ojai supporters — but some were appalled in mid-December when local anti-war activists announced plans to hold a regular Peace Vigil on Sunday afternoons in front of the Bank of America building. (This was not the current Bank of America building; it stood just east of the park, on the site currently occupied by Leslie Clark's Nomad gallery and the Los Caporales restaurant.)
Meanwhile, there were disturbing reports in the OVN that marijuana and even LSD were making inroads in Ojai.
"Drugs were something that we had just not been aware of," says Michael Cromer, whose family owned (and still owns) Bodee's on the Maricopa Highway. Cromer graduated from Nordhoff in 1963, when marijuana and LSD were largely unknown in the valley. Just three years later, they suddenly seemed to be everywhere. "We thought that was something on another planet," he says.
The dopers hung out in Civic Center Park (it would not be renamed Libbey Park until 1971), and they were increasingly brazen. In those days, there was no open plaza behind the Pergola, there was no big playground, and the park was more heavily wooded. The Pergola was better known as the Wall, a name derived from the three-foot-high masonry structures that filled the spaces between the pillars. When viewed from the street side, they looked like a wall that stretched along the entire length of the Pergola. For decades, Ojai teens had sat on that wall to watch the world go by. Now, this previously benign edifice was beginning to look more like an ominous fortress, which protected the shady characters in the park from police scrutiny.
Not that Ojai was opposed to walls. A lot of people would have liked to build one around the entire valley to keep it safe from outside influences. From the traditionalists' point of view, Ojai remained a place apart, an island of beauty and sanity and tranquility in a world gone mad. They were determined to keep it that way. But it seemed to be a losing battle. All over Southern California, small towns like Ojai were submitting helplessly to the L.A. juggernaut and trading their orange groves in for housing developments. By the year 2000, the Ojai Valley's population was projected to rise to 80,000, as more and more people fled the city to find refuge in this rustic paradise. In the process, the newcomers inevitably would transform Ojai into the very thing they were trying to escape.
While Ojai officials cast about for ways to stave off this looming disaster, many younger residents were dreaming of escaping from Ojai itself. They yearned to bust loose and see what the outside world had to offer. They were particularly curious about San Francisco, where strange and wonderful things were said to be happening. Suza Francina was in a hurry to find out for herself. Graduating from Nordhoff a semester early, she left home in December and boarded a northbound Greyhound bus. Soon she was living in a rented room on the third floor of a house in Haight-Ashbury. It was a room with a view, and she sat there at her window watching a brave new world being born.
The Summer of Love
On Jan. 14, 1967, thousands of hippies thronged San Francisco's Golden Gate Park to celebrate the first Human Be-In. It inspired similar events in New York, Los Angeles — and Ojai, where a tribe of local hippies already had staked out Civic Center Park as their headquarters. The closest thing they had to a leader was Ben Barraza, whom the Ventura County Star-Free Press later would dub "the King of the Hippies."
"I was one of the first ones to go up to San Francisco," he says. "I went up to the Monterey Pop Festival too."
At 30, Barraza was older than the average hippie. An Ojai native, he had been a football star at Nordhoff in the mid-Fifties. By 1967 he was married to Judy Evans and they had two young children. But when the counterculture blossomed, Ben grew his hair long and embraced a new role.
"He went from captain of the football team in high school to King of the Hippies," Evans says.
Ojai's first love-in, in March, was a peaceful event. "Barefoot youths with flowers behind their ears strummed on guitars, ate picnic lunches and proclaimed 'love' to all who would listen," the OVN reported.
A few hippies from Los Angeles came up to join in the fun. "People who went said it drew a crowd of several hundred and was a peace family trip," reported the Los Angeles Free Press, an alternative newspaper that kept close tabs on counterculture happenings.
The Ojai Valley Tennis Club was less enthusiastic about the hippie presence. In late April, during the club's annual tennis tournament, the Los Angeles Times reported that "a group of gate-crashing hippies — not exactly the kind of people you'd expect to see in Ojai — upset the tournament committee by making too much noise during a match between USC's Stan Smith and UCLA's Roy Barth."
In response, some of the hippies formed the Ojai Valley Dopers Association, or O.V.D.A., to tweak the Tennis Club officials.
"The O.V.D.A. was originally a joke on the O.V.T.C., tennis folks who gave some of us a hard time about cluttering up 'their' park with our loathsome longhaired hippie selves," recalls Tony Neuron. "At one point my brother Michael and I played doubles with a couple of other O.V.D.A. members on 'their' courts, barefoot with old junk rackets, largely just to piss them off. They saw us as criminal lowlifes — we saw them as stuck-up snobs."
When the tournament ended, the tennis folks left the park to the hippies. The second love-in, in May, was bigger than the first. The crowd was swelled by local high-school students such as Richard Laubly who came to check out the scene. There were also more out-of-towners, two of whom were arrested for marijuana possession.
"The love-ins were a kick — lots of hippies but also several very straight-looking undercover cops trying to blend in," Laubly says. "But I think after the first love-in more and more people started coming into town, either just to hang out or for the following love-ins. Ojai being more or less on the route from L.A. to S.F. might have also played a part."
The hippies were impossible to ignore. There they were lounging on the Wall, right across the street from the Arcade, which in 1967 was not yet the tourist Mecca it is today. Back then the shops catered more to local residents, who went downtown nearly every day for one reason or another.
"That's where people congregated, that's where they shopped, that's where they did everything," Vince France says.
France is an Ojai native who graduated from Villanova Prep in 1961. By 1967 he was a sergeant on the police force, which suddenly found itself dealing with a serious drug problem. And it was not confined to the hippies in the park. There was, for example, the 14-year-old boy tripping on LSD who took off his clothes in Bart's Books one evening. "I love everybody," he announced.
Less amusing were the youths who became seriously ill after overdosing on jimson weed, a natural hallucinogen that grows wild in the hills.
"We had five kids who damn near died," France says. "It was crazy, it was absolutely crazy."
Nordhoff teachers had to deal with students who would show up in class while under the influence. "We went through a real drug thing here," Howard Landon says. "I would have kids in class who would act a little strange."
Ojai was Mayberry no more. The straight people in town — i.e., the vast majority — looked on aghast as longhaired, unwashed vagrants in psychedelic regalia took over the park and painted "LSD" and other drug-culture slogans on the Pergola. The community demanded action, and the police complied. But in the new political context of 1967, many young people felt persecuted by any vigorous attempt to enforce the drug laws. They felt that the cops "were a little heavy-handed, and so they started to retaliate," Steve Olsen recalls. "And because of that, there was some anarchy."
"The Hippie set," as the OVN called it, consisted of several overlapping groups. There were the authentic flower children, who were obeying Timothy Leary's injunction to turn on, tune in and drop out; there were young activists who were more politically minded, and more focused on protesting the war; there were dopers, who just liked to get high; there were drug dealers, who were there for business reasons; and there were high school kids who were just there to soak up the vibe. Collectively they were the long-hairs, whereas the anti-hippie set – the car guys, the farm boys, the rednecks, the straight kids – can be labeled the short-hairs, at least for the purposes of this article.
Tension between the two groups further escalated when the O.V.D.A. began using the Pergola as a billboard.
"Ojai police, nettled by a series of provocative acts attributed to members of the Hippie set, were mulling retaliatory action Friday," the Ojai Valley News reported on June 4. "Chief James D. Alcorn said his phone 'has been ringing off the hook,' with calls from citizens who are plainly disturbed by what they claim are impudent reflections on recent narcotics violations. The most recent incident was the posting of a sign near the arches fronting Civic Park, proclaiming 'Things go better with pot.'"
There was a truce for the Fourth of July, which featured Ojai's usual parade. It was unusually well attended that year. The theme was "Our America," and the hippies joined in the spirit of the occasion. "I borrowed a truck," Barraza says, "and we made a float completely out of flowers."
But the third love-in, in mid-July, was a disaster. Undercover narcotics officers tried to bust a dealer for selling hashish, and quickly found themselves surrounded by angry young men who did not like narks. A passing short-hair saw what was going on and ran to the officers' aid, yelling, "All right, which one of these hippies do you want me to clobber?" When the dust cleared, five people were in police custody and hundreds were bummed out.
By now, the battle lines were clearly drawn. "It became where you had the rednecks and the car guys versus the hippies," Olsen says.
Car guys like Manuel Saenz, who had a job in a machine shop, resented the hippies for thumbing their noses at people who worked for a living. When Saenz and his friends would encounter any long-hairs, the tension was palpable. "Everybody was flipping each other off," Saenz says.
The short-hairs often congregated in the Elbow Room, a bar in the Arcade near Rains Department Store. (Nowadays the location is occupied by the Primavera Gallery.) The Elbow Room had pool tables and a card room and a good view of the Pergola's west arch, which constituted the hippies' main redoubt. From their vantage point under the Arcade, the short-hairs seethed as they watched the long-hairs made teasing remarks to passersby, including women who had to pass the Pergola on their way to the Post Office.
"A lot of young fellows like myself, we just thought that they were being disrespectful," Mike Cromer says. "It kind of got to a boiling point."
It was summer now, so all the teenagers were out of school and hanging out downtown. Some lined up with the car guys, some with the hippies. Others just milled about, not taking sides but eager to see what would happen.
Up in San Francisco, the Summer of Love was in full swing. In other cities, fear and loathing were more predominant. All through the long, hot summer of 1967, ghettos erupted in violence. First Newark went up in the flames; then on July 23 the riots spread to Detroit, where they continued for five or six nights, and 43 people were killed. In Ojai that week, people stared at their television sets in disbelief. Could anything like that happen here? Ojai was too small to have a real inner-city ghetto, but it did have a park full of hippies, and clearly there was trouble brewing.
Looming over everything else was Vietnam. On July 23, the OVN reported the death of Army Sgt. David Allen Stephens, Nordhoff '64, the first Ojai man to be killed in the war. Married only eight months, Stephens left behind a widow who was pregnant with a daughter who would never know her father. Ojai mourned his death, and brooded over its meaning.
Some of the short-hairs were ex-servicemen. They bitterly resented the hippies for opposing the war, and therefore dishonoring the sacrifices made by men like Allen Stephens. "They thought we were being unpatriotic," Barraza says.
The animosity was further fueled by a whiff of class conflict. The car guys and farm boys tended toward blue-collar occupations, which left them subject to the draft. Whereas many Ojai teenagers who lined up with the hippies were the sons of college graduates and were college-bound themselves, and therefore (at the time) exempt from the draft.
The situation was combustible; it would not require much of a spark to set it off. On July 28, a short-hair got into it with a long-hair, and events began to spiral out of control.
Up Against the Wall
A hot summer evening, well lubricated in the usual way. Young men looking for trouble, and finding it. Push comes to shove, punches are thrown, the police move in to break it up, someone takes a swing at a cop and lands in jail. Just another Friday night fight in a small town with too many bars and not enough to do. But this one lit a fuse.
Mike Cromer remembers it all clearly, 44 years later. He and a friend had just returned from Santa Barbara and were cruising down Ojai Avenue past the Wall.
"Some of these hippie characters yelled at my buddy, and he was kind of an aggressive character," Cromer says. The friend jumped out to have a little chat with the long-hairs. Cromer quickly found a place to park his car and returned to the scene to find a fistfight in progress. The cops broke it up and hauled the participants down to the police station, which back then was located at the east end of the Arcade. Other young men gathered in front of the station, in support of one side or the other. A second fight broke out, and one youth was arrested for assaulting Chief Alcorn and Sergeant Gene Meadows.
"And that was the beginning," Cromer says.
There was no more serious violence that night, but both sides were now girding their loins for battle. The tension continued to build throughout the weekend. The downtown area overflowed with spectators, most of who were eager to see the long-hairs get their comeuppance. Saenz recalls that many older people in the crowd were urging the short-hairs on: "The adults were yelling, 'Get the hippies! Get the hippies!'"
In Ben Barraza's telling, it was car guy Rick Watson who finally threw down the gauntlet. On Sunday afternoon, Watson and some friends decided that enough was enough. They marched up to the Wall and told the hippies to abandon their fortress by 5 p.m., or face the consequences. The long-hairs who received this ultimatum ran to tell Barraza, who immediately began mobilizing his troops and gathering weapons.
"We had a big stash behind the Wall — pipes and clubs," Barraza says. "We were ready."
Somewhat to his surprise, these supposedly peaceful flower children were ready to rumble. "They were ready to put their lives on the line and fight for that Wall," he says.
(Note: Some longtime Ojai residents might recall a young man named Marc Lewis who lined up with the long-hairs during the period in question. He is no relation to the author of this article.)
For three nights — from Sunday, July 30, through Tuesday, August 1 — Ojai teetered on the brink of civil war. The short-hairs knew most of the long-hairs; they had all grown up together, gone to school together, played football together. Now they were at each other's throats.
"Every night something would happen downtown," Alan Rains says. "A window would be broken or a car would be vandalized."
Each night after dinner, Rains and Charles Barkman would go down to the Rains store and stand guard on the roof.
"The Wall was just about directly across from our front door," Rains says. "There were lots of people across the street raising Cain."
The two armies faced each other across Ojai Avenue, the long-hairs under the Pergola, the short-hairs under the Arcade. Rocks were thrown, and handfuls of BBs, and the occasional cherry bomb or firecracker. Grass fires were set in nearby lots. Scores of onlookers — men, women and children — stood on the sidelines or mixed with the combatants, egging them on. The tiny Ojai Police Department, vastly outnumbered, did its best to keep things under control.
"It was just unbelievable," says Cromer, who was in the thick of it.
There was no general melee, but there were frequent fistfights and brawls. Whenever punches were thrown, the police would quickly move in to stop the fight. Sometimes they had to arrest a combatant who failed to simmer down. On Monday night, short-hair Jerry Puckett got rambunctious and ended up in the grip of four or five officers, who proceeded to frog-march him off to jail. Some long-hairs mistakenly thought that the cops were ganging up on a hippie, so Puckett's arrest "triggered a storm of rock-throwing," the OVN reported.
A news photo of Puckett being subdued by Ojai's finest went out on the wire, and apparently ran in other county newspapers. Their coverage of the disturbances inspired short-hairs from Santa Paula and Ventura to drive to Ojai to get in a lick at a hippie. On each successive night, the crowds were bigger and the mood was uglier.
"It got worse and worse as it went on," France says. "It was scary times for awhile there."
With tensions rising to dangerous levels, the police decided they needed to take action to head off a disaster. They called in reinforcements from the Ventura County Sheriff's Office and the California Highway Patrol. Then they waited.
By sundown on Tuesday evening, at least 500 people were milling around in the downtown area, waiting for the show to begin. Just after 9 p.m., a brawl broke out near the Post Office, and the police made their move. They barricaded Ojai Avenue at Signal and Montgomery streets and rolled down the avenue in force with their lights flashing. Wearing helmets and carrying nightsticks, they waded into the crowds and ordered everyone to disperse.
But that was not the end of it. Someone was lurking in the shadows behind the Arcade, carrying a six-pack of Molotov cocktails. He tossed one toward the back of the police station, but it exploded harmlessly on the pavement.
The bomb-thrower, apparently, was Roger Stine, a 22-year-old doper who lined up with the long-hairs. Not that Ben Barraza had approved Stine's commando mission. Most of the hippies were peaceful people, Barraza says: They were just out to defend themselves from the rednecks. But Stine and his cohort were something else entirely.
"These kids were on the fringes," he says. "They were violent kids with violent thoughts, and they saw their chance to do something."
Stine concocted his cocktails in empty soda bottles, mixing alcohol and liquid soap to create a napalm effect. "I think he was going to burn down the Arcade," France says.
He never got the chance. Rains and Barkman, patrolling the Arcade roof, spotted Stine on an exposed deck on the second floor of Tobey's Super Market, in the building that now houses Rainbow Bridge.
"He was heading to the top of the roof to heave this cocktail," Rains says. "He had one in his hand."
Rains and Barkman rushed to intercept the intruder. Stine ended up in the hands of the police, who charged him with felony possession of a Molotov cocktail. (Stine could not be interviewed for this story; he died in 2000, at the age of 54.)
Police had cleared the Arcade area, but disturbances continued for several more hours on the fringes of downtown, where short-hairs and long-hairs traded punches in parking lots and on street corners. It was well after midnight before the two opposing armies finally disbanded for the night. The following morning, Fred Volz in the OVN relayed Chief Alcorn's warning to everyone in town to stay home that night, and to enforce the curfew on their teenagers. That warning, plus the massive police presence, seems to have persuaded most people that things had gone far enough.
"And that was the end of it," France says.
But not quite, because now the out-of-town news media descended. "200 Youths Clash in Ojai; Molotov Cocktails Found," blared the Oxnard Press-Courier. A TV news crew from Santa Barbara set up shop on Ojai Avenue and interviewed Alcorn and Barraza. That night, Ojai residents sat in front of their TV sets and saw their own peaceful little town described as the scene of a riot. Newark, Detroit … and Ojai?
Of course, Ojai's so-called riots were not remotely comparable to Detroit's. No one was killed here, or even seriously injured; there was no looting, no buildings set afire, no cars overturned. There were many arrests, but only Stine faced a really serious charge.
"There were some scuffles and pushing around," Barraza says. "There weren't that many scuffles, actually. Nothing really happened."
Perhaps not, but the possibility was there. "The turmoil was very chaotic and threatening," Rains says. "It was squelched before it turned into something major."
Pictures at a Revolution
Suza Francina was still in San Francisco while Ojai went through its days of rage. But she returned to her hometown later in August and ended up staying at Ben and Judy Barraza's place near downtown. She was not their only guest.
"I had a little commune going in my house on Willow Street," Barraza says.
Other hippie hot spots included the Art Center, Orchid Town, Ojala, Camp Comfort, the Happy Valley School (then located in Meiners Oaks), and much of the East End. Also popular were the dumpsters behind the Bayless Market, where hungry flower children could scavenge for food. But the Barraza house was their main headquarters.
"That was the hippie hub," Francina says. Fortunately, she had moved on to new digs by October 29, when a county narcotics task force raided the house on Willow Street, arresting the Barrazas and eight other people.
"The narks thought that we were selling acid," Barraza says. And in fact, as he now concedes, at least one person staying in the house was indeed selling LSD. Acid trips were central to the hippie experience in 1967, and many Ojai flower children indulged – including, on occasion, Suza Francina.
"The hope was, of course, that psychedelic drugs would change human consciousness," she says. "LSD has been totally marginalized and misunderstood by the mainstream press. Kids should not be taking it. But even though I probably will not take any more drugs ever again this lifetime, it has given me a deep appreciation for cultures that use psychedelic substances in sacramental or religious contexts. I had a spiritual awakening on LSD that has stayed with me my whole life."
The charges against Barraza and his housemates apparently didn't stick, and the hippies declined to be chased out of town. They were reinforced by new arrivals, who had heard good things about this little town in the Ventura County backcountry.
"Ojai had a reputation for drawing these people," France says.
Between the Krishnamurti talks, the love-ins and the riots, Ojai was well known in counterculture circles. Filmmaker Edgar Beatty, who was shooting a documentary about the hippie movement, included a scene shot in Ojai of a group of local flower children, including Judy Evans Barraza, discussing various cosmic matters in a sheltered glade in Dennison Park. (The word "groovy" was frequently employed.) His film, which premiered in New York in December 1967, was titled The Hippie Revolt.
Beatty was not the only filmmaker drawn to Ojai by its counterculture ambiance. One weekend in late November, Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider checked into the Ojai Valley Inn to work on the script for Head, a surrealistic send-up of all things psychedelic. Rafelson was to direct, Schneider was to produce, and they had brought along an up-and-coming screenwriter named Jack Nicholson to collaborate with Rafelson on the script.
The choice of Ojai as the setting for their brainstorming session evidently was not a coincidence. Twelve months earlier, Nicholson had been a face in the crowd at the Oak Grove, dragged there for the K talks by his theosophically inclined wife. At the time, Nicholson's acting career was going nowhere, so he was shifting his focus to screenwriting with an emphasis on counterculture themes. Clearly he considered Ojai a source of good material. His script for Head would recycle the sage's pronouncements and put them in the mouth of the Swami, a guru-like character clearly inspired by Krishnamurti.
Head was supposed to make movie stars of the Monkees, who were also guests at the Inn that weekend. The three filmmakers and the four Monkees spent several days getting high and dictating their ideas into a tape recorder. The film that emerged from this process would be a resounding flop, thus proving the O.V.D.A. wrong: Things did not always go better with pot.
(Nicholson, Rafelson and Schneider, sans the Monkees, would have much better luck with their next effort: Easy Rider.)
Ojai's cosmic reputation also lured the novelist Thomas Pynchon to town – or so one might reasonably conclude after reading his 2009 novel Inherent Vice. Pynchon is said to have lived in Manhattan Beach during the late 1960s while writing Gravity's Rainbow. As it happens, the protagonist of Inherent Vice is an ex-hippie-turned-private-investigator named Doc Sportello, who lives in a town very much like Manhattan Beach. At one point Doc drives up to Ojai to investigate a mysterious sanitarium, and he talks his way in by name-checking Ojai's favorite sage:
"I believe," said Doc earnestly, "that just as chakras can be identified on the human body, so does the body of Earth have these special places, concentrations of spiritual energy, grace if you will, and that Ojai, for the presence of Mr. J. Krishnamurti alone, certainly qualifies as one of the more blessed of planetary chakras, which regrettably cannot be said for San Francisco or its immediate vicinity."
The Inherent Vice plot also features a bank called "the Arbolada Savings and Loan," which makes loans to "ranchers, local contractors, maybe some Rosicrucians and Theosophists now and then." Clearly, Pynchon knew Ojai fairly well. Nor was he the only counter-culturally inclined Angeleno to undertake that 90-minute pilgrimage via the Ventura Freeway. With the hippie movement now in full flower, and the caravan route from L.A. to San Francisco heavily traveled, many long-haired strangers passed through Ojai in those days. And some decided to stick around.
Most were more likely to crash at Camp Comfort than to check into the Ojai Valley Inn. All in all, they were not the sort of tourists that Ojai was eager to welcome. But they came anyway. To many people in town, it seemed as though their peaceful community was being overrun by bizarre-looking aliens, who were infecting the local teenagers with their deeply weird ways.
Counter Revolution
Susie Arce returned to her hometown in the fall of '67 to teach English at Nordhoff. She found a community that felt itself besieged by the forces of chaos.
"The whole world changed in the Sixties," she says. Small towns like Ojai "were unprepared for this huge shift. Things just erupted. And nobody knew what to do. It was a shock, I guess."
The riots had settled nothing. Hippies still hung out in the park and lounged on the Wall, which they generously shared with their fellow travelers, the anti-war protesters. Many older people in town suspected a sinister collusion between the local long-hairs and those campus radicals one read about in the newspapers. It all smacked of an anti-American conspiracy. "They really worried a lot about Communists," Arce says.
Civic Center Park remained the focal point, and a source of deep concern. Both park and Pergola were owned by the Ojai Civic Association, which had received them as a gift from the philanthropist Edward Drummond Libbey half a century earlier, in 1917. The association trustees were unhappy about the hippies but were unable to evict them without closing the park to everyone else.
The Pergola's west arch, near the Post Office, posed a particular problem. It was 50 years old and beginning to fall apart, like the rest of the Pergola (and the Arcade as well). The hippies (or their doper friends) seemed to delight in vandalizing it, and in scrawling provocative slogans on its sides. Then someone decided to blow a hole in it. The deed was done on December 30 at 3:30 a.m., using what the OVN described as "a handmade bomb."
The newspaper said the bomb was made up of shotgun shells filled with black powder. But Tony Neuron drew a different conclusion.
"I actually was on the scene, right by the Post Office, the morning after the 'explosion,' " recalls Neuron, who these days is a librarian in Roanoke, Va. "I ran into Major [John] Dron, who was standing by the first arch holding an empty 12-gauge shotgun shell. It did not look like it had been 'filled with black powder.' It was undamaged, and looked like just what you would expect to be ejected from a shotgun after firing. The terra cotta building block that the original Pergola was built of was extremely brittle, and the damage I saw was consistent with a shotgun firing into it."
Whether the vandal used a bomb or a shotgun, the damage to the arch was relatively minor. No one was arrested, but outraged city officials blamed the hippies.
"Last night's act is a felonious one and is a definite threat to the health and welfare of the community, and stronger action will have to be taken," Mayor Huckins said.
Garfield Jenks, president of the Civic Association, complained that the park had been hijacked by hippies. Major Dron, an association trustee, was even more vociferous:
"This outrage is but the culmination of a long series of insensate and vicious efforts to destroy and deface the park," Dron said. In response, the association must "enforce rigorous measures to prevent the park from being turned into a disgraceful shambles of broken furniture, scarred trees and a headquarters for dope addicts."
The park was closed. But then it re-opened, and the hippies drifted back in. The summer of 1968 was less troublesome than the one before, but the basic conflicts remained unresolved. The cells of the old Ojai jail behind the park tell the tale: Their walls are covered with peace symbols and drug-related graffiti dating from the late 1960s.
Some of the messages are defiant – "LSD is here to stay" – but others are poignant. One night, by the light of the moon, a young prisoner named Kerry Donat O'Connor cast a spell on the two officers who had arrested him. He scrawled a notice to that effect on the wall of Cell 3. Then he added these lines:
I started at the top
Now I'm falling to the end.
Undestined to be destined
For my life will never end.
Kerry is my name
And faith my only nation;
Time and space my dwelling place
And death my destination.
And all the while, Ojai boys kept dying in Vietnam.
Howard Landon was hit especially hard by the death of his former student George Skakel, Nordhoff '64. "George Skakel was a brilliant young man," Landon says. Skakel, a cousin of Ethel Skakel Kennedy, also was known for his sense of humor and venturesome spirit. After graduation, he bummed around the world for a while, then enrolled at UC Santa Cruz. Then he was drafted into the Army. "He was against the war," Landon says, but Skakel chose not to dodge the draft, "more or less to please his father." He was killed in action in Quang Tri Province in March 1968.
Raymond Bunch had lined up next to Steve Olsen on the offensive line the day the Rangers beat Bishop Diego. After graduating in June 1967, Bunch went straight into the Marines. He was killed in action at Khe Sanh on July 5, 1968.
In Ojai, opposition to the war was gradually increasing. But most people still viewed the Peace Vigil protesters as unpatriotic or worse, and feelings ran high. "I got my mailbox blown up once," Landon says.
Richard Laubly, another Landon student, caused a major ruckus by resigning from the Parks and Recreation Commission to start a Ventura College chapter of the anti-war Students for a Democratic Society. His SDS chapter never really got off the ground, but he caught considerable flak just for making the effort.
"When I resigned from the Parks and Recreation Commission to join SDS, it stirred up a lot of that conservative sentiment," says Laubly, now an education trainer based in Paris. "My father, who taught at Ojai Elementary, was threatened with losing his job, for example."
Despite all the hostility, Ojai's anti-war protesters continued to march through the Pergola with their placards, and the long-hairs and dopers continued to line the Wall with their freak flags flying. The structure seemed to symbolize hippie defiance.
"It was decided that it would be wise to eliminate that symbol and show them who's boss," Steve Olsen says, relating the story as he has heard it. "So a group of local citizens decided to take it into their own hands, and placed dynamite and blew it up."
On October 28, 1968, a little before 4 a.m., someone dropped an explosive device into the hole created by the first blast 10 months earlier. This time, the vandals did a more thorough job: The explosion fractured the Pergola's west arch. The City Council immediately condemned it and had it partially demolished, for safety reasons. Fingers pointed to the usual suspects.
"They tried to blame it on us," Barraza said. "We didn't have anything to do with it."
Indeed they did not. No one ever was arrested in connection with the blast, but Ojai is after all a small town. Before long, everyone thought they knew the main bomber's identity. And he was no hippie.
"I heard it was Pete Rowe who did it with half a stick of dynamite, and that Gar Jenks [of the Civic Association] put him up to it," Barraza says.
Vince France, who later served as Ojai's police chief, says he doubts that Jenks had anything to do with it. Concerning Rowe, France chooses his words carefully. "My theory would be Pete," he says. "But it's only a theory."
Mike Cromer says his lips are sealed.
"I don't have a theory, I know exactly what happened, and I'm going to take it to the grave," he says, with a chuckle. "I wasn't involved, but I had close friends who were."
Peter Rowe died in 2008 at the age of 70. Many stories are told about this colorful character, but his biggest claim to fame was his supposed role in the Pergola bombing.
"He was a cowboy-type guy, and he was very tough," Manuel Saenz recalls.
There's no doubt that the bombers were short-hairs who wanted to strike a blow at the hippies. But Barraza thinks there was a wider conspiracy at work. His theory — and it's a popular one in Ojai — is that the bombers were given a green light by the powers that be, who wanted an excuse to demolish the entire Pergola. That would deprive the hippies of their fortress, and make it easier for the police to see what was going on in the park.
Another possible motive for getting rid of the Pergola was that city planners wanted to open up the park with a plaza and a fountain as part of Ojai's ambitious downtown redevelopment effort. The Pergola was old and in the way.
Jack Fay recalls no collusion between the city establishment and whoever bombed the arch. The Pergola was falling apart due to its age, he says, and the bomb accelerated the process.
"The damage to the structure had made it a danger to the public," he says. "So the city proposed removing it and not replacing it."
But a vigorous new protest movement sprang up, with the aim of preserving or replacing the Pergola as part of Edward Libbey's original vision for Ojai. For two and a half years the battle raged, while the new plaza was constructed, and the mutilated Pergola continued to deteriorate. Finally, on March 2, 1971, the Civic Association conveyed ownership of the venerable structure to the city, which quickly made its move. The bulldozers rolled during the early morning hours of March 4, when the protesters were still asleep.
"The city struck at dawn, and had the job done before anybody got wind of it," Fay recalls with a chuckle.
After 54 years on Ojai Avenue, Edward Libbey's Pergola was no more.
"It was like a commando thing," France says. "People woke up and it was gone."
But at least one unidentified hippie noticed what was happening and moved to retaliate. That same morning, he took a sledgehammer to a newly constructed brick wall near the Ojai Library, a block west of the Pergola. After doing considerable damage, he spray-painted a defiant message on the vandalized structure: "A Wall for a Wall!"
The Pergola's demise foreshadowed the end of an era. By 1973, the U.S. had withdrawn its forces from Vietnam, and the counterculture was on the wane. There were still hippies around, but they were increasingly difficult to distinguish from the car guys.
"The hippies won in the long run," Saenz says, "because two years later everyone had long hair."
So, fast-forward to 1997. Civic Center Park is now Libbey Park and downtown Ojai is a jewel, thanks to the city's redevelopment efforts. But local history maven David Mason knows something is missing: The Pergola.
Mason's restoration campaign had been stymied for years by several longtime City Council members. They remembered all too well the events of 1967 through 1971, when the Pergola was a perpetual battleground and an impediment to the police.
"I had to wait until the last one retired from the Council," Mason says.
Then he went to work, with help from David Bury, Joan Kemper and others. On July 4, 1999, the brand-new Pergola was dedicated. It was a faithful replica of the original in every important respect, except one: the Wall was missing. The spaces between the pillars were left unobstructed. "The police preferred not having a wall there, so we took that out," Mason says.
The former short-hairs, now middle-aged and longer-haired, did not object to the Pergola's restoration. "I think it was the correct thing to do, absolutely," says Mike Cromer, who these days presides over his sprawling Rancho Grande guest ranch in Rose Valley, while his daughter Michele Cromer-Bentivolio runs Bodee's.
As it happens, the City Council that dedicated the new Pergola included two members of Nordhoff's Class of 1967: ex-jock Steve Olsen and ex-hippie Suza Francina.
Rebuilding the Pergola "brought a feeling of wholeness and harmony back to that part of our downtown core," Francina says. "I think for those of us living in Ojai in the 1960s this was a conciliatory moment that brought closure and harmony to the community."
(Further evidence of closure: The bronze plaque bolted to the new Pergola's west arch lists the many "community donors" that contributed to the project. Buried in the middle of this long list is a cryptic, Pynchonesque reference to "the O.V.D.A." Apparently this was a conciliatory moment for the Ojai Valley Dopers Association, too.)
Both Francina and Olsen served terms as mayor while they were on the Council. They have not always seen eye to eye politically, but both agree that Ojai has put the trauma of '67 behind it. Many contentious issues still divide the town, and the debate often gets heated. But it seldom gets physical.
"As time went on, everyone reconciled," Olsen says. "I don't see any negative. I see that we have healed from any of those issues 100 percent."
For Susie Arce, the 44 years that have passed since the Summer of Love also measure her career at Nordhoff, where she is retiring this June as assistant principal. She too sees Ojai as a different place today.
"People have learned to work together in many ways," Arce says. "The hostility is gone, I think."
Vince France, now retired from the force and living in Porterville, makes a similar point. "I think everybody mellowed," he says. "I know I have."
Meanwhile, the hippies are back in the park, and nobody seems to mind. Of course there are far fewer than in 1967, and they're better behaved. They no longer seem like the heralds of change; more like artifacts from a lost past. Some of the older ones may share Doc Sportello's predicament in Inherent Vice, "caught in a low-level bummer he couldn't find a way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into the darkness … how a certain hand might reach terribly out of the darkness and reclaim the time, easy as taking a joint from a doper and stubbing it out for good."
Ben Barraza, now 74 and living in Phoenix with his daughter, has known some hard times since the Summer of Love. But he still looks back fondly on his reign as the King of the Hippies.
"I loved those times," he says. "It was exciting."
Judy Evans also lives in Phoenix but is divorced from Ben, and she is not at all nostalgic about the Sixties.
"The aftermath was that people who were hippies ended up becoming drug addicts," she says. "There weren't any real good outcomes that I can see. I don't see that anything was accomplished."
But the hippie movement did accomplish something in Ojai. It helped save the town from the creeping urbanization that seemed so unstoppable in 1967. The political coalition that stopped the freeways and stymied the developers and thwarted the mining companies has many components, but it rests at bottom upon an alliance between well-to-do retirees and green-minded activists. The latter might not be hippies per se, but they tend to draw inspiration — and some of their tactics — from the Sixties counterculture. Over the years, they have applied that activism to the essentially conservative project of keeping Ojai pretty much the way it is. And the town's old-school conservatives, such as ex-Mayor Huckins, seem reasonably pleased with the results.
Huckins, long retired from politics and from his medical practice, now says that all that talk about riots and bombings was greatly exaggerated. "We always had a fair number of hippies," he says. "The majority were local. They never caused any trouble. They were mostly good kids."
Ojai of course has changed quite a bit since 1967, and not always for the better. But, remarkably, it remains a small town surrounded by ranches and orange groves, offering a serene haven to its fortunate residents — including those latter-day hippies who still cavort in the park.
"It's a quiet little town," Huckins says. "It was, it still is, and as far as I'm concerned it always will be."
From the Ojai Quarterly magazine, Summer 2011.
Posted on May 31, 2011 June 1, 2011
Sharp & Savvy: Sherman Day Thacher
Sharp & Savvy: Sherman Day Thacher (1861 – 1931)
Sherman D. Thacher
It was in 1888 that Sherman Thacher took up a homestead claim of 160 acres in the Ojai Valley. At first he thought he might teach as a side line which would furnish him some means of livelihood.
The idea of a school was gradually developed and the first pupil came to the "Casa de Piedra" ranch in 1889, and while being educated by Mr. Thacher, he was given the opportunity to develop a wholesome outdoor life.
Mr. Thacher's original plan was not to remain in the valley, but to stay only temporarily, then journey on to destinations unknown. As fate would have it, the beauty and charm of the valley grew on him. He soon noticed that the outdoor life agreed with him and he saw success ahead which spurred him on.
His teaching began with the one pupil from the east and eventually, more came. Sundays, holidays and off school hours were devoted to improving his property. He even built a house with his brother's help.
His brother, William, was also involved in civic activities and was responsible for founding the famous tennis tournaments held annually in Ojai.
With the addition of more pupils the ranch soon developed into a full time school. More suitable buildings were added year after year.
Mr. Thacher was certainly well qualified to run a school, he had graduated from the Yale University in 1883, in 1884 entered the law department of Yale University, graduating in 1886. He practiced law in Kansas City, Missouri, and in 1887 came to the town of Nordhoff in the Ojai Valley.
In 1896, he married Eliza Seely Blake, a native of San Francisco who was a graduate of the University of California in 1895. They would become the parents of six children.
Mr. Thacher served as headmaster of the school until his retirement in June, 1931. He had been associated with the scholarly and cultured life from his early childhood.
He was a kind and generous man and a valley leader. Along with his school he had been; president of the board of trustees of Nordhoff High School from 1908 until 1922, trustee of the San Antonio school district from 1898 until 1912. He was a member of the Ojai Valley Men's League from 1910 until 1920, director of the Ojai Civic Association, and a member of the Ojai Valley Presbyterian Church since 1887. Mr. Thacher worked closely with his friend Edward D. Libbey, to change the entire face of the downtown of Ojai.
He was the paternal great-grandson of Roger Sherman who was born in 1721 and best recognized as one of the founding fathers who helped draft and sign the Declaration of Independence and laid the foundation for our current-day Treasury Department.
Many men prominent in business and the professions, not only in California but
throughout the world, acknowledge their debt to the Thacher School for a wholesome education that has been an opening to the resources of a broad and fundamental life.
Before his death in 1931, his devotion to the valley that he loved was without thought of personal gain, he created a school of high scholastic standing, a lasting monument so recognized by educators of renown to be one of the finest schools to ever serve the students that arrive yearly from all parts of the world.
JUNE 30 - SEPTEMBER 11, 2011


Hi friends! Greece is living a national tragedy these days. The wild fires in Attica burned houses, families and forest. I don't know who is to blame. I just pray for a quick recovery.
Inspired by the colors of the Greek summer, I have a couple of cards to share with you.
Clean and simple design this time. Started by masking the central area with masking tape, then white heat embossed with the MFT Mesh background stamp which Ι then colored with my Zig Clean Color Rear Brush markers.
The cute turtle is from the Simon Says Stamp Under The Sea Animals, colored with Zigs and cut with the coordinating dies.
I used a stitched rectangle die to cut my frame and foam squares to adhere the turtle in place.
The sentiment is also from the same Under The Sea Animals.
For the second card I did a lot of die cutting and coloring. First I dry embossed the Simon Says Stamp Pebbles die on a piece of Neenah Solar White card stock which I then colored with copics in shades of blue. I continued by applying a layer of clear crackle paste over it and let it aside to dry.
I die cut the pebbles from another piece of white card stock and a bunch of blooms using the Simon Says Stamp Hydrangea die. To color the flowers I used Simon Says Stamp Doll Pink and Magnolia inks.
I stamped the sentiment from the Simon Says Stamp Vacation Time stamp set in Soft Navy ink and attached the flowers with glue dots. I also added some dots with a white gel pen to the centers of the flowers.
Thank you for stopping by and I'll see you soon!
Oh my goodness – I LOVE both of these cards. The firsst one with the turtle is so wonderful. I love the embossed grid and the shades of blue you chose with watercolor. That little sea turtle is adonable. A great card of encouragement. I am in love with the sea glass look of the second one – what a great job you did with that pebble die cut and the crackle paste. Those pink blooms look amazing with the pebble colors too. FANTASTIC!!! Thank you for sharing your turtle card at ATCAS. I am so glad that I got to see card #2 as well. I'm buing that die TODAY!


text:
Q: How come /bin/rm -rf /backups/hourly.5/ takes forever on a backup server? They're simply hardlinks so the files shouldn't actually even be deleted.
What options do I have? It even seems to take quite some load. I don't see how deleting 30.000 hard-links should take more than a minute, let alone a full hour.
I use rsnapshot,  centos and an ext3 file system.

A: It may be that the dir_index feature is not enabled for the filesystem. Using debugfs will allow you to verify if enabled and set it if not.

A: In order to delete all those files it must traverse the directory tree, and go down into the whole lot, deleting each files & directory one by one. This can take a while.
Sometimes the choice of filesystem can matter. Some filesystems can take a long time to delete lots of little files, some are good at this.

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text:
Bull's penis removed after complaints that it was putting diners off their food
Marie Le ConteMonday 30 Mar 2015 9:19 am
The bull's anatomy has been chopped (Picture: Fox13)
The normally quiet town of Hurricane, in Utah, made the news last week thanks to a city-wide battle centred around gigantic bull genitalia.
On March 14, Barista's Restaurant owner Stephen Ward decided to install a bull statue in front of his establishment.
The artwork, however, has a rather special feature: a comically large penis in the shape of a cone.
Hurricane residents immediately opposed the installation, citing the fact that the restaurant is directly opposite a school, with one local woman telling St George News that the statue looked 'terrible', and is 'R-rated to [her], especially with young school kids seeing it and talking about it.'
Ward initially refused to remove the statue, and claimed that the attacks were against him and not the statue, telling St George News: 'If I put Pinocchio up there, its nose would be too big. It's me. It's me. It's not the bull. It's not the restaurant. They don't like me.'
However, the town woke up on Friday to some surprising news: the Barista's owner had finally agreed to remove the bull's oversized penis.
Ward denies that his decision was influenced by the uproar, telling city officials: 'I am not removing the penis for you or because of your complaints. I don't like you. I'm doing it for me. I just decided it would look better without the weenie. And oh my God! It's beautiful."
He added that the genitalia's cone shape played a role in its removal, as it didn't look right, though he '[doesn't] know what a weenie on a bull is supposed to look like'.
Prizewinning photo gives powerful insight into living with autism
Need to pop to the Loovre? There's a toilet with an art gallery inside at Glastonbury

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