When the Elite Burned Down

And now for a little historical fiction––

The month of March, 1929, had spring springing upon us and I found myself with one of those typical, nothing to do Saturdays that tend to present themselves in Placerville.  The small strip of lawn was cut before my little bungalow on Locust Street and there was nothing else more pressing to do but to put my feet up and read a book or listen to the radio.  However, the sun was out and the day was pretty, so I figured I’d walk down to Main Street and poke around––perhaps have a sandwich at the Blue Bell.  I had a half idea of buying a new suit at Combellack’s––the excuse being that I was going to attend the American Legion Club show at the Elite Theater coming up in April and it would be a perfect event for trying out a new suit.  So, down my little hill that emptied out on to Main Street I strolled.  Combellack’s was at the other end of Main Street, so I took my time, looking in the windows of the shops along the way.

After creaking through Hangtown Hardware to see if anything was new and say hello to a clerk, George, who went to the football games with me sometimes, I spied the Miller’s Barber Shop across the street and decided that I should get a haircut since I wasn’t quite ready for lunch yet.  I lucked out and got a seat right off the bat.  Miller was in a happy mood, as the whole Main Street seemed to be since spring had blossomed early.  “Oh, we might have some more rain before it’s all over I imagine,” said Miller, in his lazy way.  “It’s a little windy, but nice,” I returned.  We talked about how the time the El Dorado High football team beat Grass Valley 18 to zero and how he was planning on going to Ray Marr’s Baseball Club game on Sunday.  He also had the news on the Legion show; Roger Brown had been in for a hair cut and told Miller all about it.  Les Butts had written some comedy sketches and Miller thought that Butts usually did a good job, relating one that he remembered as particularly funny from the last show.  There was to be a playlet called “Other People’s Husbands,” that Miller didn’t know anything about.  “Sounds like the Women will get a kick out of that one,” I supposed.  There would also be a radio broadcast novelty with musical numbers.  I asked Miller if he had seen the movie running at the Elite that week.  He shrugged and said that he thought the Elite should go over to soundies like the theaters in Sacramento and described a sound comedy with songs he had seen at the Orpheum along with a bill of vaudeville.

All cleaned up and fresh, I walked by the Elite Theater and looked at the movie posters and considered the show times.  Maybe I’d see the movie in the evening if I could rustle up a friend, but I would probably keep to my plan of going stag to the Shakespeare Club dance.  Then I wondered if I should premier the new suit at the dance rather than wait for the Legion show.  Rather than make a decision, I wandered across the street, past the Bell Tower to the Placerville News Company.  They had some new records and I thought about getting one, but put it back.  Instead I picked up a copy of the Sacramento Union to read at the lunch counter over at the Blue Bell.  Just as I came out of the store there was hustle and bustle across at the Elite.  Black smoke was coming out of the second story windows!

The volunteer fire department was screaming down the street, horns were honking as cars swerved to get out of the way.  Everyone came out of their shops to see what was going on.  Apparently the Graystone Hotel next door was on fire too.  Amazingly, the wind carried sparks and cinders over Main Street and the awnings of the Placerville News Company caught fire.  I quickly moved up the street towards the hardware store to keep out of the way.  The fire eating the awnings was extinguished and the News was saved, but the Elite Theater was badly burned, even though the fire had been brought under control in an hour.  The hotel suffered damages, but was standing.  Poor W. E. Miller––to think I had been sitting in his barber chair just moments before the fire broke out.  His business was lost.  Also lost was the next door shoe shop and the cabinet shop.  A few days later The Mountain Democrat reported that the damages had reached about $25,000.  Of course, the Legion show was canceled.  I had forgotten all about buying my new suit and just went home.

That night at the Shakespeare Club’s dance, all anyone could talk about was the fire and all felt the great loss of the Elite Theater.  Yes we had the baseball club and the High School football games and annual operetta for entertainment, but the Elite had really served as Placerville’s center attraction.  The place had formerly been known as Sigwart’s Opera House, having served up entertainments for residents since the 1880s.  As the Elite it had gone over to movies, but still was used for vaudeville, touring plays and local benefit shows.  It was thought that perhaps the Legion show could move to the high school auditorium, but the whole thing fell apart.  

The first people I noticed across the Federated Church hall, where the Shakespeare Club dance was held, were Tom and Mary Swansborough.  I might have stopped into the Candy Kitchen to see “Aunt Mary” Swansborough (as everyone calls her) earlier if the fire hadn’t happened.  Tom and Mary talked all about their upcoming 50th Wedding Anniversary party that was going to be held at the church.  Aunt Mary said that within a year the Shakespeare Club expected to have their own building with a proper hall for dances and other events.  I half joked that the club ought to think about building a movie theater while they were at it.  

Soon, in walked June Bell and Rose Brown, apparently without escorts.  June and Rose work as operators for the phone company and June had a lot to say about the craziness going on while on duty during the fire.  Every phone line was busy and June and Rose were working so hard to control the lines that they didn’t even notice the roof of their own building caught fire.  Apparently the fire fighters killed the blaze and the building was saved, but phone lines went down, knocking out service in the south west part of town, though a line was kept open down to Sacramento by way of Auburn.  I never think of how the phone works––it’s amazing to hear June talk about it with such knowledge and detail.  I asked her to dance and we trotted the floor a bit before the band took a break.

June and I walked over to get drinks and we stat down to talk next to Rose.  Rose had been talking to Larry Anderson, who works at the Placerville Lumber company and he was coming back with refreshments.  June gave Rose some ribbing about having a crush on Larry, which Rose then turned around onto us.  I hadn’t known June very long and hadn’t been so taken with her as to have asked her to the dance as a date, but she was pretty good company now.  Rose asked about how things were going with my teaching English at the high school and I told her I thought we had a pretty good senior class––we should have 47 graduate.  I realized that June never asks me about myself, but only talks about her work and interests.  She’s not a bad dancer though.

Over the next few months there was lots of talk as to what should be done about a movie theater.  One idea was to use the old high school building now that students have all been moved into the new school on Canal Street.  For a while the Lion’s Club sponsored occasional benefit movie showings in our new high school auditorium.  These were infrequent, but were a lot of fun with the Glee Club, 12 men strong, singing a pre-show program and the school band playing along with the film.  There was a big turn out for Douglas Fairbanks in The Mark of Zorro.  Because of a misleading headline in the paper, some patrons thought that Douglas Fairbanks was making a personal appearance and were a little disgruntled, but the Glee Club did a wonderful job at winning over the crowd––Professor Talbert really has a knack for training the boys to sound very professional.  These shows were meant to raise money for the new high school band uniforms, but they served as the town’s only entertainment outside of the games.  There was also that annual Senior Class Play, which was the very amusing Nothing But the Truth.  This was all about a fellow who made a bet with his friends that he would tell the absolute truth no matter what and it turned out that he had a pretty hard time of it.  June Bell volunteered to help with “front of house” duties, I think to find a reason to see me more often as I was acting as house manager for the play.  June was starting to insinuate her way into my life.

Although the Main Street fire did a lot of damage, two very good things came of the fire.  One was that the burning of the buildings on the south side of Main Street allowed for the city to widen the street right where it had an irritating bottle neck.  The bottle neck was also dangerous, as proven by the difficulty of the authorities getting through with all the other cars and pedestrians in the way when the fire broke out.  A new theater was built a short way up the street and it was decided that the old historical theater name, “Empire,” would be adopted as the name of the new theater, which would be equipped for sound.  When you think about it, the building of the new Empire Theater went very fast considering the grand opening was only eighteen months after the burning of the Elite.  I was so excited that I made sure to have a ticket for the big event, which was priced at fifty cents.  I bought two, but debated as to whom I might ask to go with me.  Although I hadn’t seen her recently, I called up June Bell to ask her and it turned out she already had a date.  I felt dumb for sulking about it, but then asked my pal George if he wanted the ticket and he was delighted.

In all the months since the fire I never did buy a new suit––somehow it didn’t seem important, but now I had an event and I was actually overdue for that suit.  So, after school one Friday that September I parked the car just a few doors down from Combellack’s and popped in to see what they had.  I found a dandy blue suit in a light wool that the clerk, whose name was Eddie, called “summer weight,” but I didn’t care.  September was still warm enough and I liked how the suit fit me without needing any tailoring.  I also bought a new tie with a thin red stripe to it, suspenders and two white shirts.  When I mentioned that I was going to the opening of the Empire, Eddie said he would see me there.

The manager, Mr. Frank Atkins, came out on stage of the warm and cozy 600 seat theater and gave a short welcome speech and introduced to the audience, Mrs. Donahue, who had been in the audience of the opening night show of the original Empire Theater in 1856.   She stood up to wave and everyone applauded.  Imagine the history that lady has seen in all those years!  Mr. Atkins said that the Empire would change films three times a week.  This was a more robust schedule than we had with the Elite.  In addition to movies the theater would be available for occasional live performances, vaudeville and local benefit shows––the annual Legion show would soon return.  Then the curtain opened and we had the great fun of seeing the brand new MGM musical, Good News, which had only just been premiered in Los Angeles.  The sound was good and the movie a rousing time with the audience laughing and applauding all through it as if it were a live show.  On the way out, George and I ran into June on the arm of Eddie, the clerk from Combellack’s!  We all said empty things to each other and then went our separate ways––me giving George a ride home.

The next week I went to all three movies: Ramon Novaro was in Call of the Flesh and the most interesting thing about it was hearing his voice after only having seen him in silents in the past.  I invited June to go with me to a silly thing called Man Trouble, but the dinner we had at the Raffle’s Hotel beforehand was better.  Walking up Main Street towards the Court House, where my car was parked, I took hold of June’s hand and she leaned her head against my shoulder.  The week ended with a Hal Roach western starring Gilbert Roland, Men of the North, which I attended alone, but ended up sitting next to Larry and Rose, who were now engaged.

I didn’t keep up with a three a week movie going schedule––who had the time?  But, I went to the Empire nearly once a week for years thereafter.  Obviously inspired by the opening week showing of Good News at the Empire, the High School put on the Broadway stage version of Good News the following April and it had a lot more songs than the film.  The band also looked very handsome in their new uniforms.  Several of the boys had formed their own small dance band and I suggested to some of the Shakespeare Club ladies that they use the boys for their next dance.  Roger Brown was standing near by and piped up that he might be able to use the boys in the next Legion show at the Empire.  “You’re a regular Hollywood style agent,” said June.  

The Daughters of the Golden West gave the Swansborough's an honorary dinner––it seems they are the most famous and beloved couple of Placerville.  I read the story in the paper to June and she smiled and said, “Maybe they’ll be throwing us an honorary dinner in 50 years.”  Ah ha!  That was a hint if ever I heard one, but the idea sounded pretty good to me too, so I smiled back and said, “You never know.”  The next day I went down to Miller’s Jewelry on Main Street and bought an engagement ring.

InterArts

For only two summers, those of 1985 and 1986, the El Dorado County School District had a summer school program for the arts called InterArts.  This program was brilliant because it brought together students interested in the arts from all the high schools into one program.  The first year, one hundred teens appeared together in the musical Sing Out Sweet Land on the stage of the Discovery Playhouse at the fairgrounds during the county fair.  This was the culminating experience of a six week program where students studied in “majors” and were introduced to secondary subjects during the early part of the morning and then rehearsed the show in the later part.  By one o’clock the day was over.  Somehow in this condensed amount of time we participants were split up into acting, dance, voice, band, art and technical theater classes, had rehearsal for the show and somehow it was all pulled together for opening night.  But, the best thing about this program was the integration of students from the three high schools.  Under no other circumstances would I have become such good friends with kids from the other high schools.

El Dorado High School’s strength was Drama and so those students dominated the acting class and a second session had to be added to accommodate the demand for the class.  Ponderosa High School’s strength was music and had the only men’s choir in the county, so the choir room was filled with boys from Ponderosa.  The El Dorado choir never had more than three or four boys tagging along, so Sue Beyaz of El Dorado, who took on the task of voice coach for the program, finally had a full chorus of boys during InterArts.  Georgette Barton was an English teacher who was versed in dance and very involved in local community theater and was put in charge of the dance class.  For all the boys that this program attracted, none of them took the dance class and it was all girls as expected.  What was remarkable was that there really was a dance class, for this was not something that was available during the school year.  If a kid took any form of dance they went to one of two private studios in the area.  The arts programs available at the smaller Oak Ridge High were limited and so those kids were sprinkled throughout the various disciplines and were in hog heaven to be studying and performing in proper facilities for a change.

The first summer of 1985, when I was leaving my junior year, the musical we produced was picked because it could be easily rehearsed in components and had a structure that naturally expanded to accommodate one hundred kids.  Sing Out Sweet Land wasn’t a great musical and it certainly isn’t well known, but it served InterArts very well.  The show had played Broadway in 1944 as a patriotic salute to American history through music––a typical war time idea to boost moral.  The show starred Alfred Drake and Burl Ives and was about a character named Barnaby who traveled through time beginning in Puritan days and hit key periods in scenes that each contained a popular song up through 1944.  For our production we cut off at the 1920s and jumped to our own created scenes for the 1960s and 1980s to bring the show up to date.  This idea was completely unauthorized of course, but it was a good idea and helped the show to be more relevant.  The original production ran thirteen weeks and basically disappeared, so it was a small miracle that anyone at all was producing it in 1985.

When the program started the students were in cliques according to their schools and without saying so explicitly, director Jim Orr pushed through the idea that individual school spirit had no place in the theater, we were to become our own unified company.  The audition process helped to level the students as they observed unfamiliar kids stepping forward to sing their audition songs, read scenes and go through choreography.  Talents emerged and the most serious hard working students flocked together and became a new clique made up of members of all schools.  Other cliques naturally formed based on areas of interest and they too were mixed up with kids from all schools and this aspect was broadening.  

Thanks to InterArts I had a great new group of friends from Ponderosa and Oak Ridge that lasted through my senior year and into the next InterArts summer.  We met up for movies and parties during the school year––we went to see each other’s school productions and concerts.  There was a great kind of arts camaraderie between schools and when I think back to that time I think of a number of peers from all schools as my best friends.

The second summer of 1986, when I was a graduated senior, I served as Director’s Assistant and participated in the choir and acting classes, but had little to do during rehearsals, except to watch.  My best pals from the first year were back along with half a new crowd of students.  This time the production was held at the Empire Theater on Main Street, which had turned into a live venue due to the new Placerville Cinema 4 taking over the movie business.  The Empire had an ample stage, though it had poor wing space and organizing the crowd of kids was a challenge, but it was nice to be in a real theater building with an act curtain.  The production was the musical Carnival, a Broadway hit of 1961 based on the Leslie Caron film, Lili, about an orphan teenage girl’s adventures with a French circus.  To make the show rehearsable, director Jim Orr cut the show way down and in a typical move for him, interpolated the song “Hi Lili, Hi Lo” from the film.  Jim liked to do that kind of thing––moving scenes around, writing new lines, adding songs from a film version.  I didn’t even know that the show had been cut or the song added because we received a typed manuscript that was the final version we performed.  A few years later when I happened to do the show in college I realized how altered our InterArts version had been.  Today in my capacity as licensing agent for Music Theatre International in New York, I know these kinds of cuts and changes to be against the Federal Copyright law and completely unethical, but in a six week summer program with one hundred kids, I guess you do what you have to do.

Jim Orr was a mysterious and interesting man.  He was the uncle of my friend Thea who grew up in Pollock Pines with her very American parents, though her uncle spoke in a British accent.  He had spent a lot of time in England and went back from time to time, retaining the influence of the locals I suspect.  During my life in high school, Jim Orr maintained the image of the professional theatre artist and was the man anyone interested in theatre was most excited to work with.  When he directed a show at Theatre El Dorado, the local community theatre, it always seemed to be above average and he commanded the very best from everyone who worked with him.  When working with kids, he was better than anyone else teaching theater at guiding an actor towards an honest and believable performance.  I can hear him now saying, “Don’t try to be, just be.”  Jim didn’t have a permanent job, but earned his daily bread as a substitute teacher who was very much in demand for English, Humanities and Drama classes.  He was entertaining in those classes, but also commanded attention and always taught us something––he wasn’t just a baby sitter.  

Jim Orr had my Humanities class in stitches when we were to all take turns reciting the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence.  Some mush-mouthed kid got up and recited, “That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the People to alter or to abolish it...” and Jim Orr interrupted in an extra thick British accent and mocked, “A ball of shit?”  After that every kid who stood up to recite the Preamble sounded like they were saying “a ball of shit” instead of “abolish it” and sent the class into gales of laughter.  Even when a kid tried extra hard to enunciate it was hilarious.  We had a good time with this, but we also learned the Preamble and we had a good lesson about delivering a speech with diction.

During my final senior semester I had made a good group of new friends doing a production of How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and these friends were all involved in Carnival as well, so my bond with these peers became very strong very quickly.  This made me feel heartsick when at the end of the summer I was to go off to college and leave them so soon.   It was difficult to break with friendships that had come to mean so much, even over such a short period of time.  Such are the transitions of life and as fate would have it, I have lost touch with several people who meant the world to me at the time, though I have retained contact with some.  Paul Tomei, who took over as El Dorado’s Drama teacher, played the lead in Carnival and we have maintained a close friendship through the years despite a separation of 3000 miles––in fact I was back in Placerville last December to attend his wedding.

Side story on Paul: he and I, along with friends Thea and Shelli, went down to the Sacramento Music Circus that summer of 1986 to see Rex Smith in a production of Oklahoma!  One of my favorite things to do after a Music Circus production was to go next door to the Clarion Hotel for dessert and we did.  In the lounge the cast was hanging out and in those days there was always a pianist.  The cast took turns getting up to sing and so we had an impromptu after hours cabaret show.  We all encouraged Paul to get up and sing––he had only recently discovered the power of his own resonant baritone voice.  With a little timidity, he asked the pianist if he knew “Old Man River.”  The pianist did and started to play an introduction.  A few bars in the pianist stopped, “You’ll kill yourself if we start the song there.”  The pianist took the song down a few steps and sixteen year old Paul, hitting those rolling lower notes, really did a beautiful job with the song.  The cast of Oklahoma! applauded and we were thrilled.

InterArts had been a test program for a possible arts magnet school.  After the summer of 1986 there was no more InterArts.  I was lucky, for I was the right age to participate in one of the greatest and most successful education experiments my home town community ever launched and it is too bad that the program couldn’t continue at least as a summer school program even if it never evolved beyond that.  The bringing together of the various schools with the common goal of working together to produce a musical was a huge advantage in our education. Not just because we were interested in the arts and this offered us another outlet, but because the very nature of that particular program taught us all so much about the idea of sharing our talents and getting to know our greater community outside of the bubble of our individual high schools.

In the previous February of that year I found a tap class.  I had wanted to learn to tap dance ever since I saw my first Gene Kelly movie when I was small and I picked it up quickly.  I wanted to really do something with my new skill outside of the dance studio and an opportunity presented itself directly following Carnival.  Berta Stead, a prominent arts enthusiast who was very involved in local theatre and music, spearheaded the idea of using the Empire Theater as a live arts facility.  She was busy working behind the scenes to keep programs going in the theater, but decided to step forward in a solo show called “Berta’s Here” as a way of introducing herself to the public.  She engaged a band and put together a cabaret program of standards to sing.  I can’t remember how it came about, but Berta needed an opening act and so I quickly formed “Tapping Away,” a tap dance group made up of myself and three friends.  I picked out the music and choreographed four numbers on my accumulated six months of tap lessons.  We rented tuxedoes and turned out a pretty good act––at least everyone gave us a lot of praise.  The funny thing was that the other boy dancer of the group, Steve, had the unfortunate occurrence of his taps falling off his shoes before the performance.  There was no fixing them, so during his duet when the audience would hear some solo tapping from him, I made all the tapping sounds behind the curtain while Steve danced it out front.  At one point, one of Steve’s dance moves kicked the curtain open for a moment, revealing me there tapping away behind the scenes.

“Berta’s Here” was my last hurrah and my one chance of performing on the Empire stage before it became an antique mall and then I went off to college.  Jim Orr gave me a worn book of Shakespeare monologues as a parting gift that I still have today.  Inside it was inscribed, “You have proven that what I share with young people has validity and blessings.  Growth and good fortune go with you.”  I treasure that book as my one physical connection to a man who came in and out of my life in various ways, but who was rather influential and very wise.  The book has also been very useful.  In the late 1990s when I was teaching teens in an arts program I used the book to pull out Shakespeare monologues for my students.  The binding is broken, the pages are stained and browning and I sometimes pull it off the shelf just to read the speech from Henry V., “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!”  I very much feel that we all had the spirit of that speech as one hundred teens burst upon the small town stages of Placerville for two summers and sang and danced our hearts out in a spirit of unusual communal unity.

Sam's Town

Cameron Park, California, located on Highway 50 about thirty minutes above Sacramento on the way to Lake Tahoe, has no true downtown, no Main Street, but from 1968 to 2001 it had a road side stop that put that particular highway exit on the map.  Sam Gordon was known as the Sacramento Hof Brau King, having established a chain of twelve “Sam’s Hof Brau” restaurants in the Sacramento area.  Sam was a great collector of early American memorabilia and wanted a showcase for it all, so after selling his hof brau chain to Denny’s restaurants, he bought the original old Red Coach Inn, just off the Highway in Cameron Park, expanded the building a bit and obviously taking a cue from Disneyland, built a fanciful 1890s Western town center and called it Sam’s Town.

Driving up from the Bay Area you would see a series of signs featuring the company mascot, “Sam,” with his handlebar mustache, holding a foaming beer and counting down the time left before arriving at Sam’s Town.  The place was clearly seen from the highway, all lit up at night with hundreds of light bulbs.  The place looked like a strip of an old time Main Street from another era.  It was brightly painted and inviting and like Disneyland’s Main Street, it was a little bit better than a real Main Street of the 1890s ever was.  With nothing more than miles of pastures and trees between Fair Oaks and Placerville, Sam’s Town stood out as quite a sight and was a fantastic hook to lure drivers off the highway for a look.

Once parked, patrons could see the cage used in the original “Planet of the Apes” film by the entrance.  Once through the door, there was a panorama of frontier mining scenes painted by George Mathis, the artist who had painted Ronald Reagan’s portrait hanging in the State Capital.  From there, a series of large open rooms separated by portals contained a myriad of little wonders.  There was a candy shop, with barrels of salt water taffy and many other colorful treats.  There was a museum, which I can barely remember and probably rarely looked at the many times I was there, but it contained the bulk of Sam Gordon’s treasures.  I do remember very well the authentic Wells Fargo stage coach and horse drawn fire engine.  There were wax figures, including one of Abraham Lincoln, baseball memorabilia and antique bicycles.

The rooms were named things like Diamond Jim Room, Honky Tonk Room and there was a fine dining room (some would drop the word “fine”) called the Lillian Russell Room.  There was a great Arcade with an historical span of Arcade amusements. I loved the hand cranked movie machines that gave me my first look at Charlie Chaplin and always got my fortune told by the automated fortune tellers trapped in glass boxes, reading cards and then spitting out a card with my fortune outlined.  What a useless spending of a quarter!  And yet, I loved watching that dressed up dummy’s finger gliding over the cards and then taking away that fortune.  Air hockey was a favorite as well as the more modern electronic games that came in later on, but by the time Pac Man was all the rage, I was in Sam’s Town infrequently.  During my grammar school days it seemed like I was in there all the time.  The place was a wonderful spot for birthday parties and for taking our Bay Area family friends visiting with kids.

You didn’t have to eat dinner in the Lillian Russell Room, for there was an easy fast food counter and you could sit in a bar area, decorated with over 100 antique guns and often with live entertainment on weekends, and have a hamburger.  Patrons sitting at the bar for those famous foaming beers were served peanuts and encouraged to drop the shells on the floor, so there was this effect of sawdust all over the place.  My parents and the other adults of our party would hang out at the tables visiting while we kids ran around the arcade, museum and candy store with a pocket full of quarters having a grand time.  By the time I was in high school that experience was pretty much over and I am surprised the place made it to the new millennium.  So many themed road side stops, which were littered over the roads of California, have disappeared.  Sam’s Town was actually a hold out.  I think my family felt that as kids we had outgrown Sam’s Town and that there were better places to eat after all.  However, if you had a gaggle of ten year old boys for a birthday party, you could let them loose in Sam’s Town and all had a wonderful time.

A commercial development next to Sam’s Town tried to expand on the idea of the Old West Town and only half successfully created a few mini blocks of Western streets to house shops and eateries.  The shopping area was surrounded by a small train to give the place atmosphere, but the buildings looked prefabricated and cheap.  For a long time it was mostly empty, though businesses have filled in over the years and this shopping area has survived where as Sam’s Town has been leveled.  In the place of Sam’s Town is a new modern shopping area, still named for the old road stop, called Sam’s Town Marketplace.  Of course it has nothing to do with the old Sam’s Town and has none of the magical allure of Sam’s Town, but that kind of place, much like the old Nut Tree in Vacaville down the road, were part of an era that is long gone.  Somehow, down in Sacramento at the corner of Watt and El Camino, the original Sam’s survives.  The cartoon Sam is still holding his mug of beer and smiling and bright lights still spell out the mantra: “Families Welcome.”  

Little Theatre

When I was eight years old my mother received a list of children’s activities available through the Parks and Recreation Department and asked what I would like to do.  I signed up for soccer, tumbling and Children’s Theater.  I didn’t take to the tumbling class, though I wish I had because it would have helped me during my days as a performer in musicals.  I kind of liked soccer, but the Children’s Theater class was my new found love, so when my mother said I had to choose between one or the other because she wasn’t going to pay for both, theatre won out.

We met on Wednesday nights for an hour with a delightful teacher by the name of Katherine Hoffman who basically taught us theater games.  The focus was all improvisation and every week Katherine had a new several exercises for us.  This proved to be great training, though we never worked with a text, practiced memorizing lines or rehearsed a proper play.  That first semester we created a long rehearsed improvised play based on a scenario that Katherine created called “Saved by the Rain.”  I played a football coach and there was a first grade boy who had a big scene on a telephone and there was some trouble with an upcoming game because a girl had broken her leg and somehow a rain storm saved the situation and I yelled out the key line in triumph, “Saved by the rain!”  I can’t remember anything else about the plot, but we rehearsed it by Katherine coaching us through the scenario and feeding us the lines.  We improvised around this outline and learned to hit the key points and more or less give the play without ever having read a script.  I had played Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer in a kindergarten Christmas show and Santa in a second grade Christmas show, but “Saved By the Rain” was my first play on a stage under lights directed by someone who knew what they were doing in the theatre.  I was hooked.  

The class was held in the Music building of El Dorado High School in a classroom that had been converted into a little theater with a stage at one end and rows of tin cans painted black to serve as the stage lighting.  On the outside of the building was a light up sign that said “Little Theater” and so we called the class by that name rather than its true name, “Children’s Theatre.”  The second semester was more exciting as there was a bigger group of kids and my brother had joined as well.  Katherine decided we would concentrate on a more ambitious production to be staged at the Discovery Playhouse at the fair grounds––a converted metal structure that looked like a small airplane hanger and was generally used by the neighboring American River College (now Cosumnes River College) and what became the home of the local community theater, Theatre El Dorado.  This was a big stage with a proper act curtain and lighting equipment.  We worked extra hard by meeting on Saturdays as well as our usual Wednesdays, sold ads for the program to raise a little extra cash for the production costs and finally opened in “The Point.”

One Saturday we devoted our time to painting a backdrop.  The cloth was laid out on the floor of the log cabin Boy Scout Hall located in the city park.  We all pitched in painting the landscape of a small town.  We didn’t work from a rendering, but just applied our imagination and painted cold right on the backdrop under Katherine’s direction.  I was responsible for adding the church, which I did as an old fashioned one room white church with a steeple and bell just like one I saw often on the road to Coloma.  When the drop was hung and under the lights it looked like kids had done it, but it also had a kind of artistic beauty to it and looked good as a setting for our story.

I kept involved with the group until I was twelve, which was the cut off age.  Every semester there was some new final play, always a rehearsed improvisation, though I don’t remember any of them after “The Point,” except for the semester we focussed on pantomime.  Our final production was made up of a collection of pantomime skits and one was “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas” with me as the Grinch.  In the audience of this presentation was Richard Harrison, the theater professor from American River College who was going to put on a big pantomime production featuring Bernard Bang––a noteworthy mime of the Marcel Marceau school.  Marcel Marceau was enjoying a kind of vogue at the time along with the team of Shields and Yarnell, so I suppose this production, titled “Pantomime ‘79,” was part of the general trend of the period.  Mr. Harrison picked out four kids, including me, to be in his production.  We would repeat one of our own skits and be worked into the rest of the show, including another version of “The Point.”

Bernard Bang had several solo spots where he performed ingenious routines including a wonderful bit as a doctor performing an operation, which I performed myself for my fifth grade class.  I was enamored with the art of mime and would have told you at the time that I firmly wanted to go to Paris and study with Marcel Marceau, though I suspect I was convinced by others that being a mime was a limited career choice even though Shields and Yarnell seemed to be all over the TV.  Friend Kim and I recreated the Shields and Yarnell robot sketch for friends at a New Years Day party and my father caught part of it with his movie camera.  Looking at it now, it is kind of amazing how many details from the real sketch I retained when you consider these were the days before home video recording and Youtube.

My last year with Little Theater was minus Katherine Hoffman, who for some inexcusable reason moved away from Placerville and left us with a new teacher, the wife of Richard Harrison.  She knew something about theater, yes, but she treated us like children, which was something Katherine never did.  I didn’t realize this until Mrs. Harrison gave us exercises asking us to pretend to be butterflies and ladybugs.  Ugh!  We were all more advanced than that.  We had skills and shows under our belts.  This was a group of little actors that had been working together as a company for several years at that point and although there were always new kids coming and going, the core members were veterans.  Mrs. Harrison followed Katherine’s rehearsed improv method for a final production and I suppose she realized we were ready for something more potent, for in the second semester she decided we would do a royalty play of “Hansel and Gretle” from Samuel French.  This was something we weren’t prepared for and Mrs. Harrison’s mistake was in assuming two things: that we understood the discipline of memorizing lines and that we could accomplish the play with only meeting once a week on Wednesdays for an hour.  When our final days were approaching and we weren’t nearly ready, the whole thing was canceled and there was no last play.  This was disappointing, but also a relief, for I was not prepared to go on in the play and neither was anyone else.

The next year I entered Edwin Markham Intermediate School and there was a proper drama class under the direction of George Sabato and so I had a daily dose of theater, which for the next two years was great fun.  The Placerville Children’s Theater kept on for another year, but died out after that.  I have no idea what happened, but I suspect that Mrs. Harrison just didn’t have the drive to continue and perhaps with the core group of kids all grown and gone the attendance didn’t warrant keeping it going.  However, I had been with the group from age eight to twelve and it fed my creative inclinations.  I also feel that the strong emphasis on improvisation was instrumental in my development as an actor and my early confidence, both on stage and off.  I never heard from Katherine Hoffman after she moved, but I always think of her as one of my most influential teachers.

Gold Bug Mine

The hills of Placerville and environs are filled with Gold Rush trails, mine shafts, ditches, structures and former gold mines, leaving evidence of the Gold Rush era that upon sight brings those days into a visible reality that you can’t gain from history books or disintegrating wild west photos of ghostly blank faced miners.  My childhood neighborhood was situated above what is now known as Gold Bug Park.  Only shortly before my life began, the area defined by Big Canyon Creek that passed several historic Gold Rush spots was taken over by the Bureau of Land Management to establish the area as public property in 1965 and the first version of Gold Bug Park came into being.  A long flat grassy area along the creek included several foot bridges, picnic tables, a teeter totter, merry-go-round and a refurbished for public use Gold Bug Mine.  The mine had been dug into the hard rock back in 1888 when the ease of pulling gold right out of the creek came to an end.  The mine changed owners over the years, but remained in operation until World War II when the President ordered that mining be terminated as a “non essential industry,” so the men could go to war.

In the 1970s, when I was growing up, the upkeep of the park was in slow decline.  Once established, only a minimum of effort was devoted to it, but the park toys and the joy of running in and out of a real live gold mine was enough fun to make long summer days a little less boring.  We could walk down our street to hook up with Big Canyon Creek Road and down to our not so secret trail that lead straight down the side of a steep mountain to the park below.  One could drive there from Placerville’s Main Street, but that would have taken longer.  Our connecting secret trail gave us easy access to this most interesting historical area.  There were enhanced hiking trails about the area and another mine up the hill from the Gold Bug Mine, which was always boarded off, but it was interesting to look at none the less.  Across the street entrance to the park was a dilapidated stamp mill, which could have used a serious restoration to make it a really wonderful tourist site, but it just sat there continuing to deteriorate.  I’m sure we were in constant danger as we crawled all over the old shack.

We hiked all over the area and knew every trail––including the trails made by deer rather than men.  We were warned by the parents against getting too close to mine shafts and we found several. It is a wonder we never had an accident around these unprotected sites.  The city didn’t expect that a gang of kids from above the park would be roaming the area in search of adventure and so didn’t bother to close off these places, but we survived.  We were also warned about hippies lurking about and so we stayed clear of anyone seen around the park with long hair and a motorcycle.  Now it seems very humors to think we were wary of the “hippies,” which were only a group distinguished by a fashion style that somehow signified trouble.  We had no idea why the hippies were worse than other strangers we might meet, but apparently they were of particular concern.  I don’t think we came across more than two hippies through all the years we played in this park so the worry was unfounded.

An amazing thing by today’s standards was that we played in this park for hours without any connection to our parents––even with the possible hippie threat lurking about.  We were not within earshot, we had no phone access, there was never a park ranger or any authority near by to ask for help if we fell down a mine shaft or got molested by a hippie and yet our parents were fine with us going to Gold Bug Park.  My mother would give me her watch and say, “Be back by five.”  The park added a coolness factor for visiting friends,  not only friends from out of town who never saw a gold mine before, but to kids from other areas of Placerville who didn’t have the easy access secret trail available to them.  We definitely felt lucky to have this park as our extended back yard.  The only other park in town was the City Park, which didn’t have a lot going on unless it was summer and you were there to visit the City Pool.

I had no idea that in 1980 a committee was formed to renovate the park and make it into a true historical destination handled in the way that Coloma State Park had been managed because there was no immediate evidence of change.  This group, “Hangtown’s Gold Bug Park Development Committee, Inc.,” was formed to do something about the neglected park and run it with the respect that the historical site deserved.  If you’re going to be a town that trades on your Gold Rush history, then you’ve got to have a respectable Gold Rush park that is a joy to visit––it’s got to be worth getting off Highway 50 on the way to Lake Tahoe for more than gas and the McDonald’s drive-through.  Nothing much happened to better the park in 1980, but by 1985 the area was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and things started to look up––most likely because the funding began to accumulate.  Now the park is cleaned up, there is a museum on sight as well as a tourist friendly gift shop.  The shack that housed the stamp mill is torn down and replaced by a new building that houses the stamp mill machinery as a proper museum exhibit that is of greater value to the public.  Other improvements are in the works, so this marvelous historical asset to the center of the California Gold Rush is finally finding its post gold giving potential.

That 352 foot Gold Bug Mine that you can actually walk into all the way to the back, is still the coolest site in Placerville.  Today there are no hippies lurking about and sadly, no kids at the top of the hill to climb down and explore the area.  My old neighborhood still has many of the same folks living there, but they are grandparents now and the kids have long moved out.  My parents haven’t had a trick-or-treater on Halloween in more than ten years.  Although, now some official might stop a new generation of kids from having too much fun in the park, but back in the 1970s when absolutely no one was looking, the kids of the hill ruled the Gold Bug Park.  My time with the park was long before today’s media saturation took over the attention of the children and besides a rerun of Batman on TV, the Gold Bug Park gave us a great deal of fun and adventure.

Bob Hope Summer

Small towns can get very excited when a celebrity visits, but when the celebrity is legendary there almost isn’t anything to match it.  The celebrity was Bob Hope and he was coming to Placerville to do a benefit show in support of Marshall Hospital.  The tickets were a whopping $100 to $500 each and for 1984 that was outlandish.  Although there was a pretty good crowd in attendance at the main exhibit hall of the fairgrounds (there wasn’t a proper theater in town that could handle Bob Hope), there had been worry that the show wasn’t selling as well as the promoters had hoped.  News was going around that plenty of tickets were still available in the days leading to the performance.

That summer I was busy doing a variety of things.  During the day I was baby-sitting an energetic kid named David.  His father was a great friend of my parents and having been recently divorced, needed someone to take care of his son during the summer days when school was out.  David’s father picked me up in the mornings and took me home around five.  During the day we somehow found enough to do to while away the hours.  A neighbor let us use their pool and I was able to entertain David with magic shows and showings of my Super 8 movies.  In the evenings I went to rehearsals for a crazy show under the miss-titled Bride of Frankenstein.  The lackluster script by Tim Kelly, a playwright who made a pile out of writing stage adaptations of every well known public domain piece of literature in existence, was greatly enhanced with gags, puns and interpolated ‘60s pop music by directors Mark Anderson and Joan Prinz, who dropped a beach party movie theme on top of the whole thing.  It more properly should have been titled, Frankenstein a Go Go.  This was surely a copyright infringement and I am dubious as to whether or not the play was even licensed to begin with, but the final production was undoubtedly an improvement on the source.  The show was out in Coloma at the Olde Coloma Theatre and so I spent the summer getting in my driver’s training hours on the winding Highway 49, thirty minutes one way and then back the other.  I also squeezed in a week of working as a mime with my brother at the county fair, so the summer was packed.

Bride of Frankenstein was not the usual fare for Coloma.  The theater specialized in melodramas, most of which were written by the board members of the organization and were cartoon versions of the genre rather than actual material from the heyday of melodrama.  As long as you could boo and hiss the villain, the audience made up of area locals as well as visiting white water rafters and campers, was happy.  Our show was raucous enough to allow for audience participation, but it was no melodrama.  Our show was a beach party slash Universal horror movie musical mash up.  I played Dracula and now I can’t imagine how the character was integrated into the story, though the “Bride” fell in love with Dracula instead of the monster.  I ended up singing “My Girl” with reworked lyrics as “My Ghoul.”  

The director loved to ask people to guess how old I was after the show.  At fifteen I was six feet tall and in my Dracula make up and tuxedo I looked like I might be in my young twenties.  When I came out after the show all cleaned up, people would still guess I was twenty-two.  Then the director would laugh and announce that I was only fifteen and shock everyone.  This was his ritual every night and I have to say that I kind of liked being thought of as older, or maybe I loved the idea that I had so transformed on stage that I had fooled everyone, but then I got back into the car with my learner’s permit and continued to rack up my driving hours.

There were eighteen performances of “Bride,” which may have been the longest run of any show I was ever in.  About the fifteenth performance I found myself running on autopilot.  I walked on stage aware of my surroundings and then my mind began to wander.  Towards the end of this particular scene my mind brought me back into the play and I suddenly realized I was unaware of the previous ten minutes, yet I was still following the correct blocking and saying the lines in my Bela Lugosi accent.  It was like I put in a tape of the show and pressed play and the performance just came out of me as usual. No one seemed to notice that anything had gone wrong, but it was a little bit disconcerting to have not been aware of ten minutes of the play while I was on stage in the middle of it.  I won’t say that it never happened again in other productions, but it never happened again in that play.  Where it happened to me after that was in  musicals where I was completely choreographed and it was easy to have the show in your bones and to run on autopilot.  This basically means you’re getting bored in the show and it is a kind of a discipline to find ways of making each performance fresh so you don’t check out.

I remember that we were all talking about Bob Hope during one of our performances of “Bride” and the stage manager quipped, “We’re sold out, too bad Bob Hope isn’t.”  Although the word going around was that ticket sales hadn’t been as strong as the promoters had hoped, 1250 were in the audience to see the comedian.  Hope appeared with vocalist Patricia Price, a former Miss Alabama who toured with Hope often.  For music there was the twenty piece Bill Rase Orchestra of Fair Oaks––the “go to” Sacramento area event orchestra.  The Mountain Democrat dubbed Hope the biggest name to hit Placerville since Horace Greeley, the famed editor of the New York Tribune, rode in on the stagecoach from Nevada in 1859 with Hank Monk, the folk hero driver famous for his speed breaking trips.

Earlier in the day of the show, Mark Bailey had driven up to Placerville to possibly buy a new car.  During the previous two weeks he had lost his job, his girlfriend and had two cars break down.  An unexpected lift to his depression came when he spied a quarter on the ground and picked it up.  Upon inspecting the coin he saw before him an advertisement for “The Bob Hope Show.”  Being in Placerville he couldn’t imagine that the actual Bob Hope could possibly be involved, but Bailey decided to investigate.  Finding the main hall at the fairgrounds, Bailey walked into a side door to find Bill Rase and his orchestra tuning up.  Workers were running around, putting the finishing touches on the warehouse-like hall to transform it into something more fitting for a show biz star.  Just then, from across the hall, the doors opened and in walked Bob Hope.  Bailey was amazed and having already nabbed a program, walked up to the old gentleman and asked for his autograph, which was given.  Bailey continued to hang around and no one bothered to notice him. He latched on to a TV crew and offered his services as a camera pack carrier and saw the show that night for free.

When Bob Hope walked on stage, played on to “Thanks for the Memory,” the audience stood and cheered.  He joked that he couldn’t top his entrance and that he should probably get off the stage while he was ahead.  Outside, the Christian Action Council had organized 150 protesters who didn’t like Hope’s pro-choice politics, but they couldn’t put a damper on the event for the audience barely noticed the protesters were there.  When the audience calmed down to finally let Hope get his first words out he joked, “I haven’t played a garage like this since...” and the audience started in laughing before he could bother to get out the name of the last garage he had played.  “So this is the Placerville Cultural Arts Center,” said Hope looking around the hall, “Looks like something from Shingle Springs.”  At the end of the show, in good old small town fashion, Hope was presented with a cake baked by Louise Nelson just for the occasion.  It is debatable whether or not I would have been able to see Bob Hope due to the steep ticket price, even if I wasn’t busy in my own show, but I felt that I was missing something special.

  

Trevor Parsons saw Bob Hope.  He was given a $500 ticket to go as a way of giving the boy something special to lift his spirits, for he had been diagnosed with Leukemia in 1980 and died in 1984, only a few months after having his picture taken with Bob Hope for the news paper.  Trevor was a sports kid who loved baseball and competition swimming, but by the time he entered El Dorado High School he was unable to participate, though he did play the trumpet in the marching band at football game half time shows and marched down Main Street for the annual Homecoming parade.  Although his battle with Leukemia was very public and he had great support, including meetings with celebrities like Mr. T., Bob Hope and Lou Scripa, the world record holder for sit-ups donating his pledges to Trevor on TV, the boy passed away only days after his fourteenth birthday.  

The Bob Hope summer was fruitful, what with steady baby-sitting money coming in, the county fair mime gig, playing Dracula at the Olde Coloma Theatre and getting all my driving hours in.  Summer always ends with my Birthday and that year I turned sixteen, so I could finally take that diver’s test.  My family celebrated my Birthday in San Francisco seeing a musical revue of Jerry Herman songs, Jerry’s Girls.  The show starred Carol Channing and the original Annie, Andrea McArdle.  That show also introduced me to Leslie Uggams, who blew me away and I have seen her in many things since.  Bride of Frankenstein ran through September and in October the Olde Coloma Theatre had its annual “Outhouse” awards and I received a little outhouse statuette as “Best Newcomer.”  Only in small town America do you get awarded with a statue of a toilet and still consider it an honor.

My Grandfather kept a book in the end table bookshelf next to his TV chair called Words to Live By.  This book had wonderful quotes by notables like Robert Louis Stevenson, Thoreau, William Blake and Helen Keller.  Bob Hope wasn’t one of the contributors, but inside the cover my Grandfather had taped a newspaper clipping quoting Hope.  It started with a question which was very similar to the one asked by Mountain Democrat reporter Lee Wessman to Hope about his amazing youth and vigor at the age of eighty-one, which made him seem that he hadn’t aged a day in twenty years.  Hope replied to Wessman, “If you can get a laugh and a little love every day, you look better.”  The quote in the browning clipping taped into my Grandfather’s book answered, “Always have something to look forward to––a project, an event, a plan to help someone, a hobby.  But keep moving.”  My Grandfather never showed me that quote or that book.  I found it after he died and have always had it with me.  My Bob Hope summer happened to exemplify his credo and I didn’t even know it.