Once Upon a Time in Santa Cruz

A rendering of Don McCaslin (center) and his band Warmth circa 1975. This glass mural appeared as a backdrop on the outdoor wall of the Cooper House, formerly the Santa Cruz County Court Building, located in the center of Pacific Garden Mall. Locals and visitors alike flocked to the scene, drawn by the swinging sound centered around the tall, slender hirsute man with mallets in his hands playing the vibraphone.  Those afternoons were parties of dancing bodies and grooving musicians who sat in with the master, a studied jazz musician and ex-basketball star at San Jose State. The local jazz scene had burgeoned under the direction of Lile Cruse of the Cabrillo College Music Department. McCaslin took it a step further with his so-called Sidewalk School of Jazz.

In the mid 1970s Santa Cruz was groovin.

Music. Theater. Art. Feminism. Rainbows. Sailboats. Waves. The town hummed with a joyful vibration.

The weekly tabloid's masthead said it all: Good Times. 

A new progressive City Council would declare its boundaries a Nuclear Free Zone. 

Visitors to the little burgh on the sunny side of Monterey Bay thought they had entered a time warp, backwards. The Sixties were alive and well. Long live the hippies! 

It wasn't always like this. Not before or after. Maybe it was only a minor blip on the geo-political-subcultural radar. Maybe the coming of a new University of California campus on the virgin hilltop above town had something to do with it. Maybe it was meant to be. 

I know for absolute certain that I was meant to be in Santa Cruz at that time. 

Rewind about two decades to the late '50s, during a period when Vern Hampton met regularly with a group of city boosters who wanted to bring year-round business to town.

Vern owned a gas station on Ocean Street, the main drag into town, where he pumped a lot of gas into the tanks of visitors who tooled gas-powered motor vehicles here to enjoy the sandy beaches and take the kids to the Boardwalk during the summer. Problem was, during wintertime, nobody came. It was hardly worth staying open. Vern needed year-round traffic to survive.

This group of business old boys were a sharp and hungry lot. They learned that a University of California Study Group had been formed to investigate potential sites for three new UC campuses, including one somewhere in the Central Coast region of the state. A local committee was formed to evaluate potential sites for such a campus in Santa Cruz County*.

They were led by their chairman Gordon "Scotchy" Sinclair, the irascible editor of the local daily newspaper the Santa Cruz Sentinel, the town's voice of conservatism. 

The committee recommended the Cowell Ranch, roughly 200,000 acres of pristine wooded and rolling hills above Santa Cruz. The city and county, both, vigorously supported the recommendation, with the additional assurance that "The City and County of Santa Cruz will provide roads, water supply, and sewerage to the campus," as stated in their submission to the Regents of California.

The City Council passed a resolution acknowledging its "responsibility... to assist in every possible way the solution of the many problems attendant upon the establishment of the University campus in this community." The Council voted 6-0 in favor, with one member absent. There was nary a sign or voice of protest during the entire campaign, which included a reconnaissance visit to town by Governor Edmund G. Brown. The silence signaled to the Regents that the their choice of Santa Cruz would go smoothly.

In the fall of 1965, the local business establishment's dream came true. The University of California at Santa Cruz welcomed its first students onto its new campus above town, land that had been the Cowell Ranch, named after Henry Cowell, the 19th Century industrialist who had profited from mining limestone and harvesting redwood timber found in the local hills and valleys. Cowell had purchased the land grant from Mexico, whose government was too far away to manage its northern reaches.

The S.H. Cowell Foundation, representing the city, stepped up with a nearly $1 million contribution to the Regents to seal the deal. The kickback enabled the university system to purchase the rambling, bucolic landscape of meadows and forests for $2 million. That would be $19 million in inflationary dollars today, an astonishingly good buy. 

The Santa Cruz campus was projected to see a student population of 27,000. 

"We didn't know what we were getting into," said Hampton a few years ago while lining up a putt on the seventh green of Spring Hills Golf Course in Corralitos, a sprawling rural community in south Santa Cruz County.

The city father's business decision to woo a University of California campus to town brought customers during the wintertime. Hampton's gas station could now be open year-round. The university also re-defined the community in a way they had never imagined.

The caveat, "be careful what you wish for" became an oft-heard lament for many who had grown up in what had been a sleepy little retirement town where the sidewalks rolled up when the sun went down. The city's promise to furnish roads, water and sewerage would lead to further issues. 

The new campus was based on the Cambridge model of cluster colleges that included no grades for students. It was revolutionary in a way that coincided with the new zeitgeist influenced by the cultural rebellion of the Sixties.

Everything changed

"The university changed everything," said Sonny Hankes, a roofer and native son of Santa Cruz. Sonny was my neighbor on Walk Circle. He talked about the days when salmon were so plentiful in the San Lorenzo River, "You could catch them with a pitch fork." Those days were long gone and the university was his scapegoat. The onslaught of students and professors and their liberal thinking rubbed against his very grain. It was no longer the same town of conservative values where he grew up. And it was all the university's fault.

I liked Sonny. A short man with a firm, compact body and leathery brown skin, he was recognized by local tradesmen as the best roofer in town. Many of them hung out at Sonny's house drinking coffee before work. Watching him scamper up and down a ladder or pound nails on a steeply-pitched Victorian roof was a remarkable sight.

He helped me re-roof my house -- how I got the house is another story -- and gave me a bro deal. He was a fine and generous neighbor, as long as you didn't infringe on his old-school conservative sensibilities, which turned out to be a problem during the planning of one of our famous, or infamous, block parties.

He and a few of his pals belonged to a local men's club, The Druids, who met in a clubhouse building on property near West Cliff Drive owned by the Oblate order of Catholic priests, a prime piece of real estate that has been in the hands of the Church since the establishment of California Mission Santa Cruz in 1859. The setting overlooks Monterey Bay as well as the most well-known surf break in Santa Cruz, Steamer Lane, named by the original surfers due to the steamships that cruised by to pick up the limestone and timber that made Henry Cowell a rich man.

Those Druid meetings involved an ample amount of drinking and high-spirited gambling that raised money for the men's club. "Our purpose is to deflower young maidens," one member jokingly told me.

Sonny liked to party and his newly completed two-story house that included a meticulously cared-for lawn and a couple of coco palm trees stood out like a resort on our modest, narrow block of small pie-shaped lots and dated cottages. Two smaller houses occupied his property on each side, one for his mother-in-law and the other a rental. 

Sonny's parties were rather confined compared to the event on Walk Circle that Fourth of July. It drew a wide assortment of Santa Cruz characters. A local rock group called the Waybacks set up on my front lawn, across the street from Sonny's house. 

Patti Free, the first female cable installer in town who could scramble up a telephone poll almost as quickly as Sonny could climb to the top of a house, was a major organizer of our party. Multi-talented with blazing curly reddish brown hair and a voice that could be heard several blocks away, Patti's true love was acting. She also made sure that her neighbors were hooked up to the cable.

We rarely missed a theatrical production that she was in, typically presented on the Art Theater stage, part of the Santa Cruz Art Center's low-slung building downtown that included India Joze restaurant, recognized for its inventive Middle Eastern/Asian cuisine, annual Squid Festival and peripatetic owner Joseph Schultz. Squid Row, the alley that runs behind the legendary building, still features eclectic doorways that lead to artistic creations and living quarters for at least one of Santa Cruz's longtime artists, Michael Leeds.

Patti made sure that Bruce Bratton, the town's major entertainment columnist published in Good Times, spread the word about our block party. Set loose, she was unstoppable. Not only did Bruce show up, but so did nearly anyone who read his column, which was everyone in town. There was Moo the mysterious flautist avec entourage, Wayback groupies, Jack the produce guy, John Murray of the Flower Exchange who lived on the next block, neighbors Little Ester and daughter Dominique and progressive political activist Big Ester Bradley and her sons Charles and the loquacious James, whom she referred to as her "Little Republican." 

Barbara Beverly, the attractive woman across the street, whom I had my eye on, although a different suitor seemed to show up at her door every week, was instrumental in helping to organize our block bash. Her roommate Paul Brown contributed his good looks and mischievous sense of humor to the proceedings. My brother-in-law Tony Lombardi showed up with his nonpareil comedy act to riff with Paul.

Mrs. Gray, a sweet 90-something-year-old lady came out of her tiny house to join the festivities, although her 60-something-year-old son, William Canterbury (aka Billy), often seen on his bicycle with his basket of produce and his butt-crack showing, did not attend. Word was he suffered emotional issues from the War.

Also in attendance was Crow, the resident Rastafarian who had grown up in the Circles, the only neighborhood to allow Black families after WWII. 

Patti made sure that we had a porta-potty stationed across from Redmen's Hall, a vacant faded green building with a Western-facade, where we held our Christmas-Holiday party the following year.

Neither Sue nor Ki, proprietors of the corner Santa Cruz Market, an historical landmark, where we all went when we needed a quart of milk or six-pack of beer, attended the party. Although I'm confident the little market did well that day. Nancy Cameron, who was raising two kids, Jenna and Wyatt, across the street from the market, was curious enough to pedal over on her bike.

Potluck food and drink flowed.

Molly and Vanessa joined the neighborhood pack of kids that included Teri, Sonny and his wife Betsy's daughter, and Frankie, Patti's son. They were continuously on the move.

At one point, Crow -- endowed with fetching charisma and a handsome white-toothed smile, his dangling dreads hanging from a green, yellow and red headband -- took the microphone and asked the assemblage to give it up for Kevin, who has "kindly allowed" the band to set up on his front lawn. I appreciated that.

He later told me his story about meeting Bob Marley backstage when he played at the Civic Auditorium downtown. "When I took his hand," he marveled, "I couldn't believe how small it was."

I had attended both Bob Marley concerts at the Civic, the last one in 1979. Marley never opened his eyes, as though he were channeling his lyrics and voice. He is considered the most influential voice of the Reggae genre, espousing "positive vibrations" and "one love."

Sonny played it cool at the party, carefully watching from his own perch, his soon-to-be two-story house and landscaping not yet completed. He still lived in the little house next door. Crow resided on the other side of the Circles where he had trimmed his own topiary hedges in his front yard creating a menagerie of copulating animals. 

The following year, when talk of our annual block party started, word came that Little Ester had invited Crow, who held his own annual party with a cast of characters, to merge with ours. Hearing this, Sonny went snake. 

While tensions rose within our small community of neighbors, Barbara and I walked over to Crow's house to discuss the issue. When told about what was going down, he replied:

"Okay, let's not combine parties." 

As simple as that the temperature dropped. I took it as a lesson in conflict resolution.

To be continued

* Source: UC Santa Cruz: 1960-1991, Campus Origin, and Early Program and Facility Development in the Sciences with Special Emphasis on Marine Sciences by William T. Doyle, copyright 2011.

The name Vern Hampton is fictitious based on a real person whose name I cannot recall. His story led to my investigating how the University of California chose Santa Cruz for their new campus.