Friday, October 26, 2012

Small Town Halloween


My mother traced my interest in the theatre to my first Halloween.  I was three years old and I went as a pumpkin.  From then on I wanted to live Halloween year round––loving the idea of ghosts and goblins and haunted houses.  This obsession lessened after I found theatre at age eight, so clearly the theatrics of Halloween was a precursor to the theatrics of the stage.  On my second Halloween I was a clown and on my third I was a “Dancing Donkey.”  This idea came from a pattern in the McCall's Magazine, which was later modified to allow me to be Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer in my kindergarten Christmas play.  After that point I picked my own costumes, which ranged from vampires to super heroes to characters like Peter Pan and Charlie Chaplin.  Usually my costume would have something to do with my current obsessions, but I always liked returning to spooks.  At age seven we took our first family trip to Disneyland where my favorite ride was the Haunted Mansion and I rode it twice.

Small town Halloweens are naturally wonderful, for there is a great community spirit for the holiday.  In Placerville, everyone would decorate for Halloween and there were plenty of lit jack-o-lanterns on the front porches.  We would band together with a group of kids, chaperoned by the fathers and hit the neighborhood for trick-or-treating while the mothers stayed home to answer the doors.  After a few hours of running from door to door my brother and I ended up at home in front of the TV laying out all of our loot, which seemed like treasure.  

Halloween had a kind of full October build up.  The season was prime Apple Hill time, when a series of out of town friends might visit so we could tour all the apple barns, or pick pumpkins.  Every few years some association or another would sponsor a haunted house.  I might have been five when we visited my first haunted house.  My brother was too scared to go in, so he waited outside with my dad and my mother and I went in together.  The event was staged in some old victorian house that was completely transformed.  Each room had a different haunted scene and there were plenty of spooks roaming the halls.  The scene I remember most vividly was a dining room where there was a head on a platter in the center of the table.  All of a sudden the eyes of the head opened and the table sprung up off the floor with the head screaming.  This was such a simple trick, but most unexpected.  I was scared in a delighted sort of way and it all made a great impression on me.  What I really wanted to do was to be a part of it.  This was theatre, though I didn’t know it yet.  Upon exiting the house there were barrels of golden delicious apples for our parting treat.

A later haunted house that I loved was staged in an old unused train station building.  The finale had Frankenstein’s monster coming to life and it came rushing towards me, flailing its arms about and nearly getting me in its clutches––or so I believed.   The exit included barrels of apples as usual.  That Halloween also had several parties, so I got to get dressed up in my costume for several occasions.  One of the parties was a great big neighborhood affair down the street, filled with games like bobbing for apples, Halloween themed food (I’ve tried to recreate the black widow shaped cake many times since) and a back yard ghost walk.

When I was fifteen I participated as an actor in my first haunted house, this time put on by the Parks and Recreation department.  It was held in the Town Hall building and wasn’t nearly as elaborate as some of the others of my childhood and no one ever really put on a good one again while I lived in Placerville.  My last trick-or-treat run was at age 13.  My parents felt that after you left junior high you should be cut off, but I didn’t want to cut out Halloweening all together.  So, after the Parks and Recreation haunted house I figured I could do one myself that was as good as that and for my junior and senior years in high school my brother, a few friends and I transformed our garage into a marvelous haunted house to serve the trick-or-treaters.  Now you didn’t just ring our doorbell and admire our carved pumpkin, but you had to go through our haunted house to get your treat.

The experience started with Kristin Sullivan in spooky garb, standing guard at the garage door.  She regulated the traffic if there started to be a line up.  Dressed somewhat as Lurch from the Adams Family, I would lead the guests around the house to a back door that lead down a hall to the garage.  The walls of the haunted house were created by floor to ceiling curtains of black plastic that formed a square trail, making four corners to turn.  This created mystery as you couldn’t see what was around the bend.  Kim Sullivan was in the central control area to work the various effects and manage the spooky sound recordings.  Our fright for the first leg was a ghost flying right at the guests and then turning off through a passage way to disappear.  This was handled by a wire form supporting the flowing white shrouds of the ghost, arms outstretched and a skull head.  My brother, dressed in black, simply ran down the corridor with the ghost over his head and all you saw in the blue light was the apparition flying right at you.  A good first scare!

Turning the corner, we had rubber bats flapping about, spiders crawling up the walls and a scene of a murder in progress that suddenly popped into view through a screen when it was lighted from the rear.  The next leg had the good old fashioned standby of reaching your hand into jars labeled bats eyes, spiders eggs, brains and other slimy things that were really made out of food sources.  This area was before a window, which was rigged with a dummy outside.  When I would direct the guests to look out the window, I would pull a string that rang a bell that signaled Kristin to release the dummy and it came slamming down against the window with a hideous dead face of horror.  This always made the guests jump out of their costumes and it was so easy to accomplish.

The last leg happened to have a wall of cupboards and we rigged them with monster dummies that seemed to be trying to get out of the cupboards.  Kim was within the central work area pulling the strings that made the effect work.  The finale was a small table with a box on it and “Thing” from the Adams Family popped out with treat in hand for each guest.  This made for a nice laugh and satisfying conclusion to our little haunted house.

My brother continued the haunted house tradition when I went off to college, but the neighborhood was seeing fewer and fewer kids on Halloween.  My parents haven’t had a Halloween door bell ring in the past decade and don’t even bother putting a pumpkin out anymore.  I’m told that the Halloween experience in Placerville is much more reserved now and that the kids stay in at private parties or trick-or-treat from shop to shop on Main Street.  That’s not a bad way to do it, but it doesn’t beat wandering through the woods of your own neighborhood in the dark with flashlights and approaching all those jack-o-lanterns on the porches, no sir!

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Giovanni Drive


Giovanni Drive is named after Giovanni Bisagno, a builder of houses throughout the hills of Placerville surrounding Mosquito Road.  Giovanni Drive is a short, steep street that branches off from Morrene Drive, which spans the hill where I grew up from one side to the other.  The street is about three minutes away from Highway 50 and the start of Main Street, so it’s not right in town and not that far away.  This rather high hill is littered with homes––many, many more now than when I was  growing up.  The area used to have a lot of woods in-between houses and it wasn’t so much filled with pine and oak trees as it was covered in manzanita.  Giovanni Drive itself only has four houses on it.  Across the street from the house where I grew up is a huge expanse of property that could be developed, but so far it has been left alone, so Giovanni seems unchanged.

Three of the four homes were built in the late 1960s.  Our house was the first one you came across on a trip down the hill and then there were two others across from each other at the end of the street.  Or, I should say at the end of the pavement, because the road seemed to keep going as a very steep dirt road that connected to Madrone Lane.  The original plan must have been to continue building homes all the way down, but it didn’t happen.  Eventually the dirt road grew over and the Madrone Lane entrance to Giovanni Drive was blocked off by a house built in a 1980s development boom and this helped to freeze Giovanni Drive.

That steep hill made for a lot of fun.  In the winter it was absolutely wonderful for snow sledding, though it was a pain to drive up to get out to the grocery store.  However, Placerville is about ten minutes below the usual snow line and so we only had a week or two of snow a year.  The rest of the year I had a go-cart race car that I would haul up to the top of the hill and race down––flying into the driveway.  My mother was always irritated by how I wore out my sneakers from using my feet as breaks.  Feet were the only way to regulate the speed and without feet one might speed out of control.  I did spin out once and it just so happens that my dad was there with the Super 8 movie camera to catch it.  As I come racing down from the top of the hill and zoom into the driveway I suddenly spin out, scraping my knee along the way.  Dad doesn’t stop filming, but catches me get off the car and steer it up the rest of the driveway, mouthing the words, “Ouch, ouch, ouch.”  The film cuts to a close up of my skinned knee, then the camera moves up to my concerned face when suddenly––I smile a big fake grin.  The sequence cuts right there.  It is a brilliant in-camera editing and story telling job.  You know my dad told me to smile at the camera, which makes it all the more hysterical because clearly I had just hurt myself and I wasn’t pleased.  I remember going up to the bathroom after that to have my knee cleaned up and bandaged.

I hauled that plastic race car up that hill to ride down until it simply fell apart.  Sometimes I would see Mr. Swansboro at the top of the hill, sitting on a chair backwards and looking out over the hills towards Swansboro Country––named for his family.  When he saw me appear at the top of Giovanni Drive, he would look down at me from his perch and whip his arm out and point towards my house in a silent, but effective gesture of “Get home!”  I’d race back down the hill as usual.  I would have liked to have reasoned with him, saying something like, “Mr. Swansboro, you don’t quite understand.  You see, I’m not trying to run away from home, I am simply going to ride my race car down Giovanni Drive and into my driveway.  In my circle, we call it having fun.”

Mrs. Swansboro was a good one for always having candy on hand and I regularly popped in to say hello in the hopes of a sweet handout.  My mother tells a story that I actually half remember: I might have been three years old, but I would take a little trail through our back yard, across Morrene Drive and up another little trail to the Swansboro lawn.  I would knock on the door and hope for a treat.  On this occasion, Mrs. Swansboro was horrified to see a little three year old boy in his pajamas at her door and promptly called my mother to report the incident.  I dashed back down the trail and into the house just as my mother had picked up the phone. When she was told that I was up at the Swansboro’s house she looked to her side and there I was innocently looking up at her.  This idea of just heading out into the neighborhood was something that expanded with time and in those days my brother Mark and I really weren’t too regulated about exploring the hills surrounding our neighborhood.  We were generally out of earshot a lot of the time.

I was often running late to catch the bus when I was in first grade and one morning my Mother made some sort of threat to me if I missed the bus.  I ran all the way to the bus stop and it was gone.  I decided that I would simply walk to school.  I knew the way well enough from riding the bus route every day.  Down at the bottom of the hill on Hocking Street––a little tract home development where all the tiny houses were exactly the same––a slightly older kid (he might have been in the third grade) befriended me and offered to show me the best way to the school.  We partially took the very narrow and dangerous Carson Road, with this helpful kid telling me all the way to watch out for cars.  He seemed to know his business and I felt safe in his hands.  I made it to school in time and all was well.  I guess I felt proud of myself, because I told my mother what I had done later on.  She was more astonished than angry and I wasn’t disciplined.  I never had the accidental occasion to walk to school again, though when I was a little older I sometimes rode my bike to school for the novelty of it.  Coming home from a bike trip lost its novelty when you hit Morrene Drive and had to push your bike up that big hill.  But, there was always that little thrill of coasting down Giovanni Drive at the end of the journey.

On my twelfth Birthday I received a ten speed bicycle and this became my main mode of transportation until I was able to drive.  I took that same bike to college and rode it to death––meaning that it fell apart during my junior year.  In Junior High School I became a bit of a biking fanatic and took rather long and grueling trips just for the challenge of it.  Coming back from these long trips reaching out to the county fairgrounds and even Cameron Park fifteen miles down the hill always had to end at the bottom of Morrene Drive.  You’d stare up at that steep hill, wishing that Mrs. Sullivan would come along with her van to give you a lift, but she rarely did, then up you’d climb to the top and after what seemed like a small eternity you’d get the relief of coasting down Giovanni.

When I was small, the bottom of Giovanni had a family called the Graffs.  The Graff daughters took turns baby-sitting my brother and me.  My father could stand out on our front deck and call down to the Graff house, “Who wants to baby-sit tonight?”  One of the girls would yell back that she was available and the deal was done.  By the time I was seven, the Graffs moved away and the Keatings moved in.  We were already friends with the Keatings, who had three boys––the middle boy, Steve, being my age exactly, so we lost the baby-sitters, but gained playmates.  Most of my friends in my very young years were always a drive away and there were few kids in my immediate neighborhood to play with.  My best friend was Jon Black, who moved when I was in first grade.  My other best friend was Derek Racina, who moved away when I was in second grade.  For all of my growing up, my brother and I devoted the majority of our time to Kim and Kristin Sullivan, who moved into the neighborhood about when I was five.  Kim was a grade younger than I and Kristin and Mark were in the same class and even went to preschool together.

There was a second group of kids that were a few years younger that emerged into my world as they got older, but the key players after the departure of Jon and Derek were the Sullivan girls and the Keating boys.  There was an empty lot, of sorts, next door to our house and one day Giovanni Bisagno came in with this crew and cut down the trees, cleared the area and built a new house.  My father had tried to buy the property at one point, but Mr. Bisagno was going to do better building and selling a house, so he did.  We gained two new friends our age when the Knochenhauer family moved in.  There were four kids: two older boys heading for high school and Jason and Heidi who were between the ages of me and Mark.  This band of kids helped fill out the long days on the hill where there wasn’t a lot to do, but sit out on a backwards chair and stare at the hills like Mr. Swansboro always did.  Kids could care less about pretty hills, so we just set out on the deer trails to try and find some sort of adventure and take care to not fall down a mine shaft.

Besides exploring the woods, my other way to pass the time was to put on a show.  My theatrical nature began with early Halloweens and continued on with the Placerville Children’s Theater, but these things didn’t fill up a year and so I created my own haunted houses, plays and puppet shows in our garage.  I was always creating something new out of not much and inviting the neighborhood kids to be the audience.  On the property above our house I carved out a little series of trails and dubbed it “Magicland.”  This was a kind of amusement park where we gave wheelbarrow rides and I kept the idea of a regular theme park going on weekends all through the sixth grade as long as the weather was good.  My parents still call that section of the property “Magicland.”

Across from the Keatings lived the Strouds.  Mrs. Stroud was my fourth grade teacher and they had a pool, which they opened up to the neighborhood in the summers.  We spent a lot of summer afternoons down at the Stroud’s pool.  This was a doughboy pool above ground with a deck built around it.  There was a nifty circular cave-like trail under the deck around the pool that was fun to crawl through.  My grandfather had given me a periscope one birthday and I snuck down to the Stroud’s to test it out.  Crawling under the deck I would poke the periscope up to see what the Strouds were doing, which was nothing except sunning themselves.  I thought for sure I was not detected, but my mother had received a call from Mrs. Stroud asking if the spies would please allow her family their privacy.

Summer time always meant the threat of forest fires and during the great drought of the 1970s, this threat seemed an even greater concern.  On several occasions, off in the distance, a billowing column of black smoke would rise into the air.  We’d listen to the news to find out if we needed to evacuate, but the fire never seemed to spread close enough to reach Placerville, though we could see and smell that smoke.  Only one time did my mother panic enough to start packing the car, though it seemed we were out of danger pretty quickly because we never drove out of the driveway before the danger was called off.  My father tells a story about a time when we had the family of his old high school friend Fred Towers visiting at the time of one of those threatening fires.  My mother and Rose Towers packed up four small children and took us down to the City Park while Fred and my father stayed back to defend the house from danger.  What they ended up doing was to turn the couch around to face our big picture window and kick back to watch the airplanes zoom over the hills fighting the fire.

Today the houses have received manicures to the yards, simple additions and subtractions here and there and fresh coats of paint.  The trees are taller and the road still needs to be repaved, but for all that it looks the same.  There are more wild animals traipsing through now: wild turkeys, lots of deer, coyotes and the very occasional bear.  Dogs are no longer wandering free, but are generally kept leashed or gated.  The bus stop at the crest of Morrene Drive is grown over and out of use, for there are no more children at the top of the hill.  Although the neighbors of Gionvanni Drive have changed over, many of the children’s parents, including my own, are still on that hill, but the streets are quiet on Halloween night.  No more do bunches of boys sled down Giovanni Drive on a snow day home from school, but other things are the same such as those same four houses, dogs barking at each other across the hills at twilight, the smell of fireplace smoke on crisp late fall evenings mixed with the pine and manzanita air.  And on those now rare occasions when I travel back home, there is always a reminder of the childhood years as I drive down Giovanni Drive and roll up the old driveway, just as I once did on my ten-speed or that plastic go-cart race car.

Saturday, October 13, 2012

Old Hangtown


HANGTOWN GALS ARE PLUMP AND ROSY
HAIR IN RINGLETS MIGHTY COZY;
PAINTED CHEEKS AND GASSY BONNETS;
TOUCH THEM AND THEY’LL STING LIKE HORNETS.
HANGTOWN GALS ARE LOVELY CREATURES, 
THINK THEY’LL MARRY MORMON PREACHERS;
HEADS THROWN BACK TO SHOW THEIR FEATURES
HA, HA, HA! HANGTOWN GALS!

THEY’RE DREADFUL SHY OF FORTY-NINERS,
TURN THEIR NOSES UP AT MINERS;
SHOCKED TO HEAR THEM SAY “GOL DURN IT!”
TRY TO BLUSH, BUT CANNOT COME IT.
HANGTOWN GALS ARE LOVELY CREATURES, 
THINK THEY’LL MARRY MORMON PREACHERS;
HEADS THROWN BACK TO SHOW THEIR FEATURES
HA, HA, HA! HANGTOWN GALS!

The above song, “Hangtown Gals,” was written by a creative fellow by the name of John A. Stone, who came out to California in 1850 to strike it rich, but made a name for himself by writing simple little songs about Gold Rush life.  He used a pseudonym, “Old Put,” when he published a book of his songs called Put’s Original California Songster.  This was first published in Sacramento by Gardiner and Kirk in 1854.  Further editions were published by D. E. Appleton and Company of San Francisco, with the most readily available 18th edition of 1868 going for $250 in antiquarian book shops today.  Apparently he knew something about Hangtown, for it inspired a song.

The town was only called Hangtown for about three years, though it has been known as Hangtown all along.  Before that the area was called “Dry Diggins,” because the miners had to cart the dry soil down to the running water to wash out the gold.  The name “Hangtown” took hold when in 1849, three men were tried for murder by a citizens’ jury and a majority decided hanging was in order.  The criminals were hanged from the giant white oak tree that is now the site of the former Hangman’s Tree Tavern.  You can’t miss it, marked by the dummy hanging from a rail of wood off the side of the Main Street building.  The stump of the original tree is still in the cellar.

The town was incorporated in 1854 as Placerville, named after the placer mining going on and at the time was the third largest city in California (Los Angeles was the fifteenth largest).  The name Hangtown didn’t suit the Temperance League or the Methodist Episcopal Church, though businesses to this day enjoy using the name Hangtown and so, in a way, the city has two names.  However, the history of Hangtown, being so short lived, is really the history of Placerville.  The Placerville one sees now on a stroll down Main Street is largely a twentieth century Placerville, though here and there evidence of Old Hangtown survives.

The mining industry went on until World War II, though this was organized as opposed to the original Gold Rush era of 1849 when men came from all over to dig up the hills and pan the rivers.  Back then, Placerville was a tent city.  Soon it grew to a meandering village of plank wood shacks and log cabins that in old photos look like a kid’s toothpick house school project.  Samuel A. Lane wrote in his diary of 1850 that Hangtown was a “great place for gambling and drinking” and that he also attended a temperance meeting on the evening he rode into town.  Gambling and drinking on the one hand and temperance meetings and the Methodist church on the other hand––aside from mining, that was the culture of Hangtown. 

A silver strike in Nevada kept steady traffic going through Placerville and so there were plenty of hotels.  Now we only think of the Cary House, but in the nineteenth century there were many more hotels such as the Placer Hotel at Main and Sacramento Street.  There was also the Ohio House at Main and Sacramento Street, with its flag pole out front of a bright white washed exterior and attractive verandah across the second story.  Inside was a popular bar that boasted the finest wine, brandy and cigar selections around.  There was also the Central House Hotel, the Western Hotel with its own popular bar and restaurant next to the City Hall, and Harry Tom’s on Coloma Street, which was previously known as the Klondike Hotel.  Jacob Zeisz figured he could make more gold brewing beer than mining and started the California Brewery in 1859.  In 1884 he made a trip to Bavaria and was never heard of again.  His wife, Dorothea, turned the brewery into a rooming house and restaurant to support her abandoned ten children.  

1855 was the year the twenty-eight year old John Thompson walked into the post office looking for a job.  The mail was piling up because the post office couldn’t get it over the summit during the snowy winter and John Thompson thought he could carry it over by hiking on foot.  The postmaster didn’t have the authority to give Thompson the contract because he needed the standing contracted carrier to sign over to Thompson, but the carrier had disappeared.  On the hope of the red tape getting worked out eventually, Thompson insisted he could get the mail delivered to Nevada and set out to do so without any pay.  He could snowshoe it to the summit in three days and ski down in two (some reports have him making it to the summit in two days and down in one).  As a native of Norway he understood skiing and so back and forth he went for thirteen years until the Southern Pacific rail road completed its Sierra Nevada route and could carry the mail more efficiently.  He traveled to Washington D. C. to try to make a case for compensation for his work as a postal carrier, but since he never had a contract the Federal Government said he didn’t have a claim and was turned away.  The citizens of his half residence of Genoa, Nevada rallied to his cause and bought him a small ranch and the town marks his importance with a statue today.  On the other end of his route in Placerville there is also a statue to honor “Snowshoe Thompson” at the corner of Main and Sacramento Streets.

The oldest building still standing on Main Street just touches the days of Old Hangtown, for it was built in 1852.  It was the Tallman Soda Factory established by John Fountain and is now the Historical Society museum.  In 1860, the still standing Confidence Engine Building was established.  I always knew it as the City Hall, but apparently it was a fire house originally and the name came from the fact that when the Mountaineer Engine Company bought a used fire engine it had the name Confidence painted on it.  Rather than paint over it they just changed the name of the fire company to match.

1856 was a devastating year of three major fires that burned down Main Street and so came the idea of the Bell Tower as a way to alarm the city.  This idea not only served as a solution, but gave the city an iconic central structure and thereafter the area became known as the plaza.  I never heard anyone call it that when I was growing up in the 1970s, but “The Plaza” makes it sound very fancy––much more fancy than it is.  By 1860, Main Street took on the configuration we know today, though most of those buildings are long gone and the street wasn’t paved until the automobile came along.  

A few other nineteenth century buildings that managed to stick around include the very impressive Masonic Building from 1893, which was built from 85,000 bricks hauled from Sacramento.  A famous street level resident of the Masonic was Don Goodrich's Sportsman’s Shop, which sold everything from sporting and hunting supplies to appliances and eventually car tires.  In 1849, the Round Tent Store was literally a round tent that sold mining supplies.  From 1929 and many years after, the square building called “Round Tent Store” that currently stands was a clothing store and now is a restaurant.  Combellack’s Clothing Store has been family run at 339 Main Street since 1888, and it’s amazing that through all the years with the other clothing stores like the Round Tent, Cash Mercantile and Florence's fading away, Combellack’s made it to the end of 2019––where else could a teen rent a tux for the prom?  Pearson’s Soda Works was a one story building in 1859 and it was in 1897 that the second story was added to give it the look we know today.  Bottling soda water was the original purpose, but in the 1970s it was an ice cream soda parlor.  Upstairs was a restaurant that I thought of as fine dining, though its reputation diminished and it went out of business by the 1980s.  For a time, the short lived Main Street Theatre Company produced dinner theater productions upstairs.  Now it is a nifty coffee house, cafe and pub called Cozmic Cafe.

The Mountain Democrat, being established in 1851 as The El Dorado News when it was located in Coloma, is a true original Hangtown era business.  In that same year the paper was moved to Hangtown and became The El Dorado Republican.  The paper was renamed as The Mountain Democrat in 1854 when Thomas Springer sold it to Dan W. Gelwicks and William A. January.  From 1879 it was first located on the south side of Main Street a few doors from the Cary House, but moved to the north side of the street next to the Placerville Hardware to take advantage of Hangtown Creek behind the building to operate a Pelton Water Wheel which powered the presses.  The newspaper was still at that location when I was in high school, but moved to a dead Safeway supermarket on Broadway to enable a much needed expansion in 1991.  During the nineteenth century there were a number of short lived Gold Rush era papers with names like The Empire County Argus, The Times and Transcript, The Placerville Appeal, and the Squatter Journal among others, but The Mountain Democrat outlived them all.

Direct from the days of Old Hangtown comes the strangely famous culinary delight called the “Hangtown Fry.”  The story goes that a miner who struck gold came booming into the El Dorado Hotel (formerly on the site of the Cary House) and wanted to buy the most expensive dish on the menu.  The cook explained that his most expensive ingredients were eggs, bacon and oysters, so the miner directed the cook to make him something out of those ingredients. The result was an omelet of bacon and breaded oysters.  This dish became a menu staple from that time on and when the Cary House replaced the El Dorado Hotel, the dish was kept on the menu.  For years it was the Blue Bell Cafe that famously served the omelet from the 1930s to the 1970s and it has been adopted by restaurants all over.  The 160 year old Tadisch Grill in San Francisco has been serving it all along.  For a time, New York’s 21 Club included it on their brunch menu and it can now be ordered in Brooklyn at the Stone Park Cafe, however they deep-fry their breaded oysters for a twist.  A Food.com recipe for the dish includes nutmeg and parsley into the mix.  Today the Gold Rush delight has appeared as an occasional special at the Old Town Grill and regularly at the Buttercup Pantry (although I understand they don’t use fresh oysters, which diminishes the dish quite a bit).  The original Blue Bell recipe was still being served at Chuck’s on Broadway until it closed in 2013.

305 Main Street, that building with the hanging dummy named George is California Historic Landmark No. 141.  The former bar within closed in 2008, for the building was considered unsafe along with the next door Herrick Building.  After much debate a team was  assembled to restore the site to its 1850s appearance.  The building identifying the all important spot of the great white oak where the criminals were hanged is pretty essential to a town that trades on its old west history.  Since 2017, the old Hangtown Tavern has become Hangman's Tree Ice-Cream Saloon with as much of the old place being preserved as possible––including the historic mural of the town across one wall behind the bar.  

I close with a song, again by J. A. Stone, but in collaboration with J. Brougham, that has a sorrow to it, for it describes the end of the Gold Rush era and in that sense it is about the end of Old Hangtown, which hadn’t really existed for years when the gold mining industry really came to a close.

“The Land We Adore”

THE GLEAM OF THE CAMPFIRES OF EMIGRANT TRAINS
IS SELDOM NOW SEEN ON THE FARAWAY PLAINS,
FROM HIS EYRIE THE EAGLE LOOKS DOWN IN DISDAIN,
AS THE STEAM WHISTLE SHRIEKS OUT ITS STARTING REFRAIN,
OUR CAMPFIRES NO LONGER ILLUME THE RAVINE,
THE PAN AND THE ROCKER ARE RARELY NOW SEEN,
FRIJOLES AND FLAPJACKS, OUR DIET OF YORE,
LIKE A VISION HAVE FLOWN TO RETURN NEVER MORE.
NOW FOND RECOLLECTIONS OF LONG AGO TIMES,
COME ECHOING BACK LIKE THE MUSIC OF CHIMES,
OUR THOUGHTS WANDER BACK TO THE LAND WE ADORE,
BEYOND THE SIERRAS, PACIFIC'S LOVED SHORE.

Hangtown Fry as sold at Stone Park Cafe in Brooklyn, NY.

Saturday, October 6, 2012

Making Movies


Although I started making movies with my father’s Super 8 silent movie camera when I was nine years old, I didn’t take care to become really good at it until I was in high school.  The films before high school were slapdash if they were live action, though I did somewhat better with animation.  In the library of Sierra School I had found a marvelous book called, Make Your Own Animated Movies, by Yvonne Andersen and it changed my life.  The book was geared for a kid my age and had lots of illustrations on how to make the magic happen as well as stills from animated films that other kids had made.  The method of animation was called “cut out” animation and rather than painting hundreds of plastic cells laid over painted backgrounds, you cut out the characters in parts and strung the joints together with thread so that you could manipulate them across the background in the same manner a three dimensional stop motion puppet would be animated.  This method was pretty easy to accomplish with good results.  As my artistic ability improved and I advanced in the area of storytelling, the films became quite entertaining, though limited.  My brother Mark caught on to the hobby early on and we both made films regularly.

Animated films were tedious to make, however, and so we began to focus on live action stories.  Of course we had to come up with stories we could cast with our friends, costume reasonably well and produce with a minimum of dialogue because we had to sync the sound with a tape recorder.  Also, after I turned sixteen and could drive, our ability to get around to the locations we needed opened up our options considerably.

Prior to holding a driver’s license, my best early efforts were remakes of real movies such as King Kong and Chaplin’s The Kid.  “King Kong? Charlie Chaplin?” you might say with raised eyebrows.  My imagination (or obsessions) knew no boundaries.  King Kong was a slick five minute version.  It was crude in some respects, but wholly entertaining.  I had made a tape recording from a television showing of the original film, cut it down to some key scenes and used it as the basis for my own soundtrack.  When we filmed the scenes my cast would be lip syncing the pre-recorded voices of Robert Armstrong and Fay Wray.  We lived in the woods, so our jungle environment looked pretty good.  Kong was animated on miniature sets just like in the original film and spliced into the live action.  The effect of Kong’s hand picking up and setting down Fay Wray was handled by a painted cardboard cut out of the hand in fist position, which I held in front of the camera as our actress scooted along pretending to be in his clutches or stepping down from a level to simulate being set down.  With the help of careful framing the effect on screen worked.

I was in a Hollywood memorabilia shop in San Francisco reading a book about the films of Charlie Chaplin that gave an easy to read synopsis of each film, which first sparked the idea of making something that resembled a silent era movie.  I had seen clips from The Kid on TV before, but never the entire film and so I paused to read the synopsis of that film.  I had previously dressed as Chaplin for Halloween, even though I had never seen one of his films past the occasional clip.  I loved him and I didn’t even know him yet.  But, based on reading that synopsis and having etched certain scenes I had seen somewhere along the way in my mind, I formulated a scenario of my own for a five minute black and white silent film version of The Kid.  Because I couldn’t drive yet, I scheduled my mother into driving the cast to the locations around downtown Placerville and then the rest was filmed in my garage studio and the house.  My version of the story included a pie fight with the Keystone Kops and a final shot of me as the tramp walking off into the sunset with “the kid” down the train tracks.  These things weren’t in Chaplin’s film, but I had seen another clip of him walking down the train tracks and also thought of the Keystone Kops as quintessential silent era stars that were as much a part of what made a silent film as the fact of not having sound.  The end result was a good coherent story with some funny bits and a very good likeness to an olde tyme silent film.  I still like it very much and it amazes me now that my 15 year old self would somehow make that little film with the very few resources I had available.

One of my brother’s films required a tracking shot following an actor running along a stretch of Main Street’s sidewalk.  We all awoke very early in the morning and hit Main Street by 6 AM.  This way, we would have very little traffic or pedestrians in our way as we traveled down the street in the car pointing the camera out the window and following the actor.  Then we parked and captured a myriad of other shots that would all be edited together to form a very fine chase sequence through the streets of Placerville.

I loved an old Suspense radio show episode called “The Hitchhiker.”  Orson Wells was the star and the story depicted a guy driving across the country who would keep seeing the same hitchhiker.  The hitchhiker would call out, “Helllloooo!  Going to California?” in this hollow ghostly voice that was very creepy.  The repeat sightings drives Orson crazy and when he calls his mother in the hopes of hearing a comforting voice, he is informed that she is prostrate with grief as her son died in a car accident on the Brooklyn Bridge––the place where he first saw the hitchhiker.  I fashioned a screenplay from this radio show, gathered a cast and set out to film it over a weekend.  The new thing with this film was a night shoot.  We faked a close up of me driving at night by filming me in place pretending to drive as my Dad lightly bounced on the car hood and my brother turned a spotlight by the window to simulate passing street lamps.  Friend Eli was at the camera.  Next, with my brother dressed as the hitchhiker, we drove down the road with Eli as camera man again and captured a shot of the headlights illuminating the hitchhiker as we drove by.  The edited shots made a nice sequence.

The rest of the film, shot during the day, took us to various points surrounding Placerville, including a 1940s era abandoned gas station outside in neighboring El Dorado City. This time, Eli played the gas station attendant with a few lines and my brother took on camera duties.  I was in the Orson Wells role because I physically had to drive the car and all of my cast members were pre-driver’s license.  

The film schedule was planned around a key scene involving a train that was supposed hit the car when it stalled on the tracks, thanks to the will of Death in the form of the hitchhiker.  We had a confirmation that the Michigan Cal Lumber train would come by a certain railroad crossing on Mosquito Road at a certain time and we arrived early to get several shots at that location as we were waiting for the train.  When the train came along I simply pointed the camera at it and then got a shot of the train signal lights blinking as well.  All edited together the sequence had me driving towards the tracks and stalling.  Then a shot of the train signal blinking.  Then I look up and see the hitchhiker before me.  Then a shot of the train engine coming towards me.  I try to get out of the car, but the door won’t open.  Another ominous shot of the hitchhiker.  Then we did a trick shot with Eli walking along the tracks towards me in the car as if he were the point of view of the train engine.  Shot in half time, the scene was speeded up and had the effect that the train smashed into me stuck in the car. The End.

There is no logic as to why the Orson Wells character is established as dying upon first sight of the hitchhiker, but then is actually killed on the railroad tracks later on, but that’s how the radio show went, so that’s what we did.  The final result was intriguing and visually interesting.  Our dubbed in voices never quite synced and I vowed to only make films sans dialogue from then on.  I couldn’t get a voice as spooky as the one from the radio show to do the hitchhiker, so I just clipped that old voice and used it.  We had to do the voices, music and all the effects at once the way Walt Disney put sound to Steamboat Willie in 1929.  It was impossible to get the timing down perfectly, but I would adjust in showings by either pausing the projector or pausing the soundtrack to make one or the other catch up.


Our dog Penny and our cat Oliver were the stars of two films we made.  My grandfather had bet me that I couldn’t train a cat like one would train a dog and I took up the challenge.  I used raisins as food treats and trained Oliver to sit, stay and come to me on command.  And he could do it along side Penny and know the difference between his name and Penny’s name when a command was given.  This made it possible for Mark and I to direct Oliver in a movie.  The first was about how the pets ran ramped around the house making a mess while the owner was away.  By the time the owner returned home the house was back to normal and the pets looked like perfect angels.  Penny and Oliver had a natural habit of rough housing with each other, so all we had to do was to put them together to instigate the fun.  Oliver fought back, so the battle scenes were lively.  A simple idea, but it was entertaining.



In the second pet film the owner left for the day again as in the first film, but this time a pair of cat-nappers showed up and drove off with Oliver in a bag.  Penny’s mission was to follow the cat-nappers down to Main Street and save Oliver and then get him back home before the owner showed up having no idea what his pets had been through that day.  So, there we were on Placerville’s Main Street in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, giving directions to a dog right in the middle of everything going on, calling “action” and rolling film.  No one paid much attention to us and we easily got our shots.  Penny mostly obeyed and we got most of her stuff in one take. 

When Mark was a freshman in high school he came up with one of his best ideas for a film.  It was another seemingly strange choice for a small town boy of the early 1980s for he wanted to make a 1940s style movie serial with a cliffhanger every chapter.  The serial was called Trigg Solo and Mark wrote, directed and starred in it.  I handled the driving, the camera and generally helped out in all departments.  We filmed it in black and white and gathered together enough fedora hats, blazers and cap guns to give the characters the look it needed.


Each of the four chapters ended with a cliffhanger and it was the tradition of the movie serials to repeat the cliffhanger, but show how the hero survived it in the next chapter.  We couldn’t afford to make copies of the film we shot to easily edit in a repeated scene, so we had to film the endings of three chapters twice.  The most harrowing was an actual scene on a cliff. The sequence started with friend Kim Sullivan, who owned a horse, dressed as a man with a mask (i.e. villain) and riding in on the horse just for a little realistic production value.  She hopped off the horse to continue her pursuit of Trigg Solo on foot.  Then we cut to a spectacular looking cliff and the two climbing up a trail along one side.  Then we showed Trigg trapped at the edge of the cliff and the bad guy launching into a fight––wrestling on the edge.  I got a good shot by climbing out on a tree branch so I could really show the sense of depth from the top of the cliff to the ground below and still see the fight in action.  Then we pushed over a dummy, which was filmed from the bottom of the cliff to show the complete treacherous fall.  The dummy broke apart when it hit the ground, but we put it back together and hauled it back up the hill to film the fall again for the next reel.  The second fall didn’t work as well as the dummy broke apart part way down, but with a little careful editing we made it work.  We only had so much film and couldn’t afford to film the scene a third time.  

Our method for keeping track of all the footage was to cut up the scenes and clip them along a string so they wouldn’t get scratched.  We’d put the scenes in order, then run them through the editing machine to splice them together.  Then came the thrill of the first showing, which was always the best for the feeling of great accomplishment.  We had the sound session before we showed it to our parents who were usually the first to see the final product outside of the kids helping us to complete the film.

In my younger years I set up a movie theater in the garage and held matinees for neighborhood kids, just the way the Little Rascals might have done it.  I also collected commercially sold Super 8 Disney cartoons and other films of a kind that used to be on the market before video took over the world.  What we were doing as a hobby was dying out fast and only a few years after I entered college it became very difficult to buy Super 8 film.  About the time Super 8 film became a special order item I had moved on to focus on the theater.  Had I become a film major in college I would have graduated into more advanced forms anyway.  High School era showings of the films were held on the last day of school in the Drama classroom or shown as a parlor trick when friends and relatives came over. 
  
After I left home for college and a life in the theatre, my brother continued to make a few films and in one particular semester when I was home again, we made our last and best film: The Ticks.  We didn’t have a complete story, so we just made a trailer for a supposed horror film involving giant killer ticks sucking the blood out of humans.  We just filmed all our funny ideas and strung them together with a 1950’s science fiction styled coming attractions treatment.  The oversized ticks were made of gray balloons and black pipe cleaner legs.  We rigged ways of having the victims pull a big tick off of their neck which caused a leak of blood squirting out, or the tick would spit blood back at the victim.  The whole thing was fast and funny and the most enjoyable film we ever made.  The Ticks was our farewell film and then my brother went off to college to study the theatre too.

Our production company was always “Jackson Films,” named in the first title card at the beginning of each film.  Our back lot was Placerville and environs.  No one else our age was doing anything as creative with their time.  As I recount our movie making years I realize how interested in classic film we must have been, for we were obviously influenced by a great deal of old Hollywood product of a kind most kids we grew up with had little knowledge.  In our own little way we were doing something amazing when you think of all the trouble other kids were getting into, or still others who were just dead from the boredom of small town life if they handn’t dedicated themselves to a sport at school.  We were making movies and delighting ourselves and our friends in the process.  

These days, with the ease of digital technology, affordable cameras and excellent computer editing programs a kid can do what we were doing one hundred times better technically speaking.  Writing, casting, staging, costuming, scoring and such is another story, but I wonder what we would have created had we had the ease of today’s technology?  For our time, the 1970s and ‘80s, we were doing quite a lot with a Super 8 camera and a reel to reel manual editing machine.  Moreover, as an added benefit that we hadn’t considered, we have a record of our teenage years on film that not everyone can claim.  Now what I see in those films is not only our quirky creativity, but our childhood home, our backyard that extended into the woods of the gold discovery hills, our dogs and cats and Main Street as it was then.