From Downey to Disneyland

It was a dare, but the twelve-year-old boy was up to it.  His big brother aspired to be an actor and the Pasadena Playhouse of Pasadena, California was having auditions for a production of Eugene O’Niell’s, Ah, Wilderness!  This turn-of-the-century hometown play was filled with parts for young people and 16 year old Joe Kirk was hoping for one of the better teen roles—hopefully the central teen character, Richard.  The play was set to star Will Rogers, Jr. as the father, too!  Joe got a copy of the script and studied the part of Richard.  He noticed that the show also had a part for 10 to 12 year-old little brother.  So, Joe dragged his little brother along to the audition.  Fate was not in Joe’s favor, for the role of Richard was already cast.  The part was given to one of the most important working teen actors of the day, a former Disney contract player named Bobby Driscoll.

Driscoll’s credits were great; he had two junior Oscars and had played plum roles in Walt Disney’s Song of the South, So Dear To My Heart and Treasure Island.  He was also the voice of Peter Pan.  But, the more surprising outcome of the audition was that Joe’s little brother, Tommy Kirk, won the role of the little brother in Ah, Wilderness!  Joe went on to become a dentist, but Tommy went on to become….

“I remember meeting the director and his associate sitting at a table,” said Tommy, “They were friendly and asked a few questions.  Then we got a call and they said, ‘Come back to another meeting.’”  As it turned out, Tommy and his brother had come on the wrong day—they weren't reading for children.  Tommy walked up to the director and tugged at his pant leg, “When are you going to read for the part of Tommy?” asked the youngster.  “Who did you come with?” asked the director, “Show me.”  Tommy pointed to his brother Joe and his friends.  “You came here under your own steam, didn’t  you?”  Tommy replied that indeed he had come under his own steam with his brother.  The director was impressed and let Tommy audition.

“What can you do,” asked the director? 

“I do impressions,” returned the 12 year old boy.  So, Tommy proceeded to imitate an old Baptist minister.  He had done the impression once before at school and sent an audience into fits of hysteria.  The routine worked on the director too and after reading from the script, Tommy was asked to return for another interview.  He did and they told Tommy he had the part in Ah, Wilderness!  This time it was the day of the planned children’s audition.  A big line of kids and their stage mothers were outraged to hear that the part of Tommy was already cast and they were sent home.

Brother Joe took Tommy to rehearsals and performances and had a lot of fun being a part of the back stage scene.  Tommy found acting to be a lot of fun himself.  He never had stage fright and felt very natural on stage.  He was a big fan of Bobby Driscoll, having seen him on the big screen in Treasure Island.  Working with a movie star seemed very exciting to young Tommy and he became good friends with his on stage older brother, “Bobby was extremely nice.  I was thrilled.”

Ah, Wilderness! opened at the Pasadena Playhouse on August 19, 1954, just weeks before little Tommy Kirk was to enter the eighth grade at East Junior High School in Downey, California.  His mother, Lucy Virginia, a legal secretary and his father, Lewis Al Joe, a journeyman machinist, had settled there when Tommy was two, hoping for a better line of work than they had experienced in Louisville, Kentucky where Tommy was born.  Joe Kirk suffered from earaches and the family felt that a move to California would also be better for their oldest son’s health problems.  The Kirk family was working class, moving from Downey to Fresno to Berkley and back to Downey as war time work dictated.  The Kirks bought a home in Downey and then rented it out while they worked with Lucy’s Uncle in Fresno for a time.  Interfamily relations were never ideal in the Kirk family and soon they were back in Downey living in their home, which was formerly a bank building.  The house was filled with marble walkways and floors with windows of cut glass that created rainbows.  Downey in the 1940s and 1950s was a small town.  Near by the house was a river filled with trees and bamboo.  The area was surrounded by orange groves and the little town boasted two soda fountains.  Los Angeles seemed very far away to the young Kirk boys in those simple days.

Tommy’s father was Baptist and there was a history of Baptist ministers on his side of the family.  Tommy’s mother was Methodist, but the family never went to church together.  Joe Kirk went to Sunday school because his friends did, but his parents never oversaw a religious upbringing.  In fact, the Kirk boys had very little supervision.  Lucy worked hard and raised most of the money to take care of the family.  Al Joe’s money was his own and he did little to help out the family finances.  The father of the Kirk family was an alcoholic and as mean as a snake.  “My mother was Joan of Arc and my father was the beast that walked,” said Joe Kirk of his parents.  Joe looked at his parents as the angel and the devil and the Kirk boys took a lot of abuse over the years due to their father’s uneven temper.  The rules of the house continually changed—once the boys memorized one set of rules the father would change them.

Every now and then there would be a note telling the family that the father had left for Kentucky.  The family was never invited along and the Kirk boys never knew their grandparents on their father’s side of the family.  Al Joe Kirk felt he had to go back to Kentucky to feel good about himself again.  He was raised there and for some reason, he periodically found it important to go back.

Grandfather Kirk was a judge in Kentucky and had been in the U.S. Senate.  He died early of cancer and his death caused great financial hardship on the family.  Al Joe Kirk was the youngest of ten children and grew up spoiled and indulged.  All of the older siblings found a profession in life, but Al Joe got by on his good looks and charm.  He started in on marriage early at sixteen and throughout his life had five marriages.  Tommy Kirk’s family was part of the third marriage.  The Grandparents had a large home in Kentucky.  It was the kind of home where the Grandmother drew a line down the center of the house with one side being hers and the other side being his and the two didn’t communicate for the next twenty years.  The Kirks were still split from the Civil War and the issues of North and South permeated the family all the way into young Tommy’s childhood.

Tommy was a confident boy and artistic from the start.  His favorite subject at school was art and he was continually sketching.  Dinosaurs were some of Tommy’s most favorite subjects to draw and some of his artwork made it into episodes of the Matinee Theatre television show.  For a time, Tommy thought that he wanted to be a scientist and he busied himself with little experiments.  One such experiment was a product to help plants grow that he called “Anti-Grow.”  The solution was made from water and crushed marble from around the house.  Tommy went around sprinkling his “Anti-Grow” on all of the plants.  His brother Joe logically suggested that he might call it “Plant-a-Grow” instead since it was supposed to make things grow.

The boys often took the bus into Los Angeles on Saturdays to go to the movies.  They would spend the week collecting bottles and by Saturday they had enough to catch a matinee.  On a dollar the boys could ride the bus, see the movie, and even enjoy a bag of popcorn.  Tommy also enjoyed a game of tennis, but his carefree days of finding ways to entertain himself and fill time were coming to an end.

In the audience of Ah, Wilderness! was a representative of the powerful Gertz talent agency of Beverly Hills.  “An agent came backstage and introduced himself and gave me his card and said, ‘Would you have your folks call me?’”  Tommy gave the card to his parents after the show that night and they called the agency.  What the Gertz Agency saw in this young pre-teener was a real kid who could act honestly in a completely believable manner.  Without any training, this boy had a natural talent and a likable, down-home personality.  Tommy seemed corn-fed and truly American.  He was cute—not pretty, and he read lines as if he meant what he was saying.  The words seemed to flow as if he had thought them up himself.  Tommy even received exit applause at the end of one of his scenes every performance.  Tommy also played roles in two other Pasadena Playhouse productions, Barefoot in Athens and Portrait in Black before launching into the world of TV and film.

At the age of twelve, this self-proclaimed “theatrical novice” scored a job on the  Lux Radio Playhouse followed by his film debut in the Jerry Fairbanks short subject, Down Liberty Road in 1955.  This was also Angie Dickinson’s first movie and Marshall Thompson also starred.  The director started filming Tommy’s big scene with the back of his head to the camera.  Somehow, Tommy convinced the director to change camera angles so his face would be in the shot.

A number of television appearances followed including a guest star appearance on the very popular Gunsmoke TV series.  Once he got started, Tommy never stopped working.  In fact, by 1955 Tommy seemed to be all over the television.  His brother would drive him to interviews and he usually got the job.  After a while, the family hired a sitter to drive Tommy to his jobs. His photographic memory enabled him to be a great success in the live dramas presented on the Matinee Theatre.  Tommy was given leading roles with as many as three hundred lines and he ended up doing thirty-five episodes of Matinee Theatre, which ran from 1955 through 1958 on NBC at 3 PM.  There were also appearances on The Loretta Young Show, The Man Behind the Badge, TV Readers Digest, Big Town, Crossroads and another feature with Sterling Hayden called The Peacemaker from Warner Brothers.  Tommy was an instant success, but putting all of his early television and film work aside, 1955 also marked his most important audition.

Walt Disney was holding a big audition to find the right young man to play Joe Hardy opposite Mickey Mouse Club favorite, Tim Considine in a “Mouskeserial” based on The Hardy Boys books.  “A lot of kids tested for the series, including me, and I was fortunate to land the role,” said Tommy.  Fortunate indeed, for it lead to his long time association with the Walt Disney Company—the machine responsible for making Tommy one of the top teen actors in Hollywood.  Disney sent some pages of the script to Tommy’s agent after seeing him in Down Liberty Road and he memorized them for the audition.  There was a number of Joe Hardy hopefuls watching Tommy audition with Tim Considine and he felt as if he was pretty raw.  However, a few days later his agent called to say that he had won the role.  The money was the best he had been paid for a TV show and to Tommy it seemed like a fortune.  Tommy had a bank account now, and 20 percent was set aside in a trust.  The rest went to pay for the sitter and other expenses, including the family’s general living costs.  Tommy was now a very busy boy, for he had only finished four of his thirty Matinee Theatre episodes and now he was also a Mousketeer.

There were two editions of The Hardy Boys series: “Mystery of Applegate Treasure” and “Mystery of Ghost Farm.”  Both editions played between September 1955 and the fall of 1957.  Compared to his attractive co-star, Tim Considine, Tommy is instantly noticeable as the stand-out actor.  Tommy demonstrates, in this early part of his career, his gift for presenting a true and honest person on the screen.  There is a rather moving scene in “The Mystery of Applegate Treasure” when Tommy expresses his passionate desire to be a real detective like his father.  It is moving only because Tommy Kirk seems so desperate about it—being a detective is his dream and he wants it so badly that he can taste it.

The difference between Tommy Kirk and the other child actors in the series (some of the adults too) is that the stakes are high.  This approach is the sign of a great talent.  Since none of the other actors in the series seem to be committing to the world of the Hardy Boys quite like Tommy Kirk does, it can only be assumed that his good performance is not due to the director bringing it out of him.  Nearly all of the other kids in the series sound like they are just reciting lines.  Tim does better than most—and his handsome good looks made him very popular with audiences, but Tommy is actually turning in a performance of merit.  It is no wonder that he would be selected to play the pivotal teen role in Disney’s next live action film, Old Yeller.

Besides The Hardy Boys, Tommy was given a Mickey Mouse Club assignment that would influence the rest of his life.  As part of the Newsreel segment of the show, Tommy was assigned to cover both the Democratic and Republican conventions.  Tommy interviewed Senator Everett Dirkson on “Why I should be a Republican,” as well as interviewing Governor Frank Clement of Tennessee on “Why I should be a Democrat.”  He watched Adlai Stevenson, Eisenhower, Eleanor Roosevelt, Thomas Dewey and John Kennedy.  “But, I saw everybody who was anybody in politics in that era and it was fantastic.  I was at both conventions for their duration, and it was like a dream.  I’ll never forget it,” said Tommy.  The experience nurtured Tommy’s passion for a good debate and it taught him to follow the politics of his country very closely.  This aspect of his personality even came up in a 1964 press release for the film Pajama Party which stated that he, “never misses an opportunity to attend a political convention or a debate.”

There were other small assignments given to Tommy on The Mickey Mouse Club such as a voice-over on a show from Denmark called “Boys of the Western Sea.”  There was also a segment that Tommy and Annette Funicello would introduce about how kids lived in different parts of the world.  Tommy’s relationship with Annette Funicello was rather distant:  “We got along.  I was smart enough to realize that, if I’m gonna be under contract [at Disney] and she’s under contract here, it’s very important that we get along well.”  Even though he played her boyfriend in eight films, Tommy indicates that he had a work only relationship with Funicello: “…I always tried to behave nicely toward her, and she was nice to me.  Well, she’s nice toward everybody.”

Tommy made another TV appearance in 1957 in the second half of the fourth anniversary episode of Disneyland.  The Mousketeers honor Walt with a song and dance salute to the TV show on its third anniversary (“Going on four,” adds Kevin “Moochie” Corcoran).  Tommy Kirk is among them and says a few words of congratulations to Uncle Walt.  Although he was photographed for publicity in the regulatory mouse ears, Tommy was never a singing and dancing Mousketeer.  He sits behind Walt the whole time with Kevin Corcoran (also a serial player, but strangely dawning the Mousketeer wardrobe) watching the other kids put on the show.  The episode serves as an intriguing plug for a future project that would have featured Tommy and the other Mousketeers in a movie based on the “Oz” books to which Disney had acquired the rights.  Although some of the project’s songs are featured and fully staged with the Mousketeers performing as the Oz characters, the film was never made.

Walt Disney was looking around for a project to feature the popular Mousketeers, but most of them were let go when the TV series folded due to rising production costs.  A few remained to appear in other projects, most notably Annette Funicello and most significantly Tommy Kirk.  Disney offered Tommy a seven-year contract and he jumped at the chance.  Going to work at the same studio everyday would have taken a great burden off of his family having to run Tommy around to various auditions—his schedule was more or less set for the following seven years.

While on the Mickey Mouse Club, Tommy continued to attend public school.  He was teased more than praised by his peers for being a television star.  However, all of that ended with the seven year contract and Tommy went to school at the studio.  There was a Mrs. Penny who took Tommy to and from the studio every day.  She had two children, Victoria and Mark, with whom Tommy became friends.  Mrs. Penny was a conniving woman who started spreading around a lot of nasty stories regarding Tommy’s father.  She was hoping to have his parents declared unfit and take Tommy into her custody and profit by him.  None of this ever materialized, but Al Joe was smart enough to leave Tommy alone at home.  He knew that under the protection of Walt Disney he couldn’t lay a hand on Tommy—the studio wouldn’t have it.  The other boys in the family had a harder time with their father than Tommy did for they were not magically protected.  By this time there were four Kirk brothers in all, Andrew and John were the youngest.  Tommy could talk down to his father and get away with it while the other kids caught hell for it.  Andy (named Andrew Jackson Kirk, III. after his uncle and grandfather) was treated the worst by Al Joe.  The youngest, John, didn’t have it so bad at home as the father had mellowed by the time John reached his teens.  It was definitely not “Leave it to Beaverland” in the Kirk home, but on screen, Tommy’s growing up was the American dream come true.

In his first major motion picture, Old Yeller, young Tommy Kirk, still a Mousketeer serial player, displays the best use of his talents—arguably the best use of his talents during his entire career.  He truly gives an amazing performance and one wonders why the Academy did not recognize him with a junior Oscar.  He had already been nominated for an Emmy award for his work on Matinee Theatre.  The part of Travis Coats is a challenging one for it requires an acting talent that can run the gamut from high drama to comedy, not to mention some rigorous physical demands.  Tommy is drug by a mule across a field at top speeds, he is attacked by wild hogs and he is required to sit in a tree and rope the hogs—lifting them up to his level once he has caught them.  Tommy gives a confident and fearless performance filled with adventure and charm.  He develops, for the first time here, his truthful sibling relationship with Kevin Corcoran as the little brother—“...two promising newcomers…” as Variety put it.  Dorothy McGuire as the mother is perfect and although Fess Parker receives top billing he is barely in the picture.  “Fess Parker, at that time, was on the outs with Disney—I presume over money,” said Tommy.  Disney was notorious for paying lower salaries than any other studio for its top talent.  “This was simply his last contractual obligation and he only worked about three days on this film, but good, competent, professional that he is, he came in and did it.  I think he helps the movie a lot.”

Tommy Kirk’s performance is truly exemplary—not only because there is not a single dishonest moment in the film for him, but for a specific scene—the very climax of the film where Tommy is forced to shoot his suffering dog.  There is a close-up on his face as he points the rifle, anguishing over the thought of having to do it.  He is trying with all of his might to be brave, but for a second he drops his head into his arm and cannot find the courage to do it.  We cannot stand to see him in such pain—the situation is as miserably sad as can be.  Then, suddenly, Tommy lifts his head with determination and pulls the trigger.  Tommy delivered the scene to its fullest potential under Robert Stevenson’s guidance and it should be marked down as one of the most beautifully realized moments by a child actor in films.  Tommy credits director Robert Stevenson, and justly so, with the quality and sensitivity with which Old Yeller was made.  “I worshipped him,” declared Tommy, “I really loved him.  He’s the reason Old Yeller is so good.  He’s a very nice man, very gentle. I loved him like a father.”

Leonard Maltin said in his book, The Disney Films, that, “In many ways the outstanding performance of the film is that of Tommy Kirk, complete with Texas accent.”   Maltin also noted that Tommy “…carries off the full range of intense emotions with uncanny skill.  Knowing that he was capable of this makes it all the more sad to watch him in the bumbling comedy parts he played later on.”

Quality roles like Travis in Old Yeller do not come around for teenage actors very often.  Unfortunately, though he was handed some of the better teen roles of the 1960s, Tommy would never get the chance to show the full range of his talents again—not even in adulthood where he most definitely should have had the chance. “I’ve always been annoyed by that, but it’s water under the bridge,” said Tommy of his lack of dramatic parts.

Old Yeller and his second feature, The Shaggy Dog, established Tommy Kirk as a prominent young star.  Unfortunately, none of the films that followed would allow him the opportunity to display his excellence in the world of drama, but he was as able in the world of comedy and spent most of his time at Disney in screwball fantasies.  His appeal is classic, for he plays the underdog who gets ahead.  And he gets ahead on his own merits, by drumming up the courage and good character to make it through the toughest of odds.  “Tom in the movies was the way he was in life,” says his brother Joe, “He was that charming, that funny, and that serious.”

Those qualities Joe Kirk describes struck this writer, at the young age of twelve or thirteen, watching a release of Swiss Family Robinson on the big screen in Placerville’s Empire Theater and noticing Tommy Kirk for the first time.  Next I noticed him popping up on TV here and there as his old movies began to be shown from time to time.  So, although he was an icon of my parents generation, and perhaps remembered most fondly by those who grew up with the original Mickey Mouse Club, because of Disney’s tradition of continually promoting their old product, my generation got to see some of Tommy on the big screen too.  Today’s teens are seeing him on TV and DVD.  He is difficult to miss, although he is strangely unfamiliar when his name is mentioned.  From the small town of Downey to the wonderful world of Disney, Tommy Kirk had quite a trip.

Tommy Kirk in Old Yeller

Three Small Towns

Me in Cooperstown, NY.

In central state New York is a picturesque small town by the name of Cooperstown.  The hamlet sits along side the beautiful Otsego Lake and has retained its early 20th Century quaintness.  To say it was untouched by time would be a stretch, but it sure seems that way.  Some locals might complain that there is nothing to do––that the sidewalks are rolled up at night.  But, as I was in town for work to see a production of The Music Man at the Glimmerglass Opera, I was charmed by the park-like town that looked like it could have been the movie set for The Music Man.

The Main Street does not really function like it must have even thirty years ago, as the businesses have focused on a tourist trade.  The town is famous for its Baseball Hall of Fame ball park and museum.  To that end, the old movie theater has been gutted and houses a baseball memorabilia shop.  Once upon a time it was the Smalley’s Theatre.  Later is was renamed Cooperstown Theater, but everyone still called it Smalley’s.  The combination of emerging video stores and a new cineplex in nearby Oneonta killed it in 1987, though from the outside it still looks like a good old Main Street single screen theater with its operating marquee and 1940s cinema detailing.

The National Baseball Hall of Fame is a beautiful exhibit housed in one of the biggest buildings on Main Street, having opened in 1939 as a way to draw attention to the small town––a plan that worked.  However, there is more to the place than baseball and a cute Main Street.  The town also has the recreational asset of the Otesego lake.  Close to Main Street and right on the lake is the majestic Otesego Resort Hotel, built in 1909 in a colonial style that would sit well in Old Town Philadelphia.  The hotel has large and beautiful public interior spaces: lounge areas, libraries, restaurant and expansive lobby all with fireplaces.  The lakeside grounds include a large expansive deck full of seating, pool area and paths surrounded by green lawns and a view of a golf course all right on the lake.

Down the road along the lake is the great Glimmer Glass Opera, a modern theater building in the look of a large mill.  The spacious grounds have barns, pond and shaded picnic grounds.  The sides of the theater are screened and completely open to the fresh air.  For matinee shows, automated panels close off the open views to create a dark environment for the theatrical lighting to be effective, but on summer nights the walls are left open for a delightful cross breeze.  The summer opera season mixes classic opera titles with more rarely produced operas and a Broadway musical here and there.  The environment created for going to the opera is so special, so beautiful, so well produced that opera fan or not, the experience is a total delight and is alone a reason to make a trip to Cooperstown.

Another gorgeous building belongs to the Fenimore Art Museum, filled with Indian and other folk art exhibits celebrating New York history.  This museum rivals the best museums in America.  The building was formerly a kind of manor house owned by Stephen Carlton Clark, who was dedicated to the preservation of New York history and supported the New York Historical Society’s mission.  In 1944 he donated his mansion in Cooperstown for use as a museum for the Historical Society’s collection.  The impressive neo-Georgian structure was built in the 1930s on the site of James Fenimore Cooper's early 19th century farmhouse.  Connected to this organization is also a Farmer’s Museum, which is a kind of hands on living history museum about 19th Century farming.  This farm was also a Fenimore family property and later changed hands to the prominent Clark family.  The current stone structures date back to 1918 and are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.  In 1944 the facility was opened as a museum dedicated to the history of farming.

The serenity of the lake, rolling hills, post card perfect views and the variety of activities from golf to opera to art to water recreation, make Cooperstown unusually delightful.  It is a long drive on winding back roads off the highway, driving past one dead small town after another, before you come to the colorful and vibrant Cooperstown.  It seems like it is the middle of nowhere and in a way it is, for it is far enough away from the turbulence of modern society to really enable a fellow to release and relax.  One can take in the sweet air of nature and take refuge in the beauty of simplicity.

Main Street, Catskill, NY.

On my way to a wedding at the Apple Barn Farm in Germantown, NY, my friend Brett and I drove through a small town called Catskill.  This area is the famed “Catskills” where once upon a time the city folk got out of town in the summer to enjoy the mountain resorts that popped up during the early part of the 20th Century.  At these resorts some of the great American entertainers, writers, directors and choreographers learned their craft by creating entertainments for all the people vacationing in the Catskills during the summer.  What amazed me as we drove down the main street of Catskill was that the place was so well kept and the shops seemed to be filled with useful businesses of the kind that started to die out of most of America’s Main Streets in the 1970s.

The Main Street of Catskill is made up of Turn-of-the-Century buildings housing restaurants, hotels, hardware, furniture stores, cleaners, grocery, pharmacy, stationary, book shop, a pretty little church with a steeple and a functioning movie theater.  No, not repurposed, but actually functioning and showing first run movies.  The theatre has the mundane name of Community Theater, but the name couldn’t be more appropriate for it literally belongs to the community.  The theater was formerly called Nelida Theater, presenting vaudeville and local events until it burned down in 1977.  The community bought shares in a new theater built in 1920 and so it was named the Community Theatre––a 1200 seat combination vaudeville and movie theater.  In the 1970s the balcony was converted into a second screen and today the theater is beautifully maintained with all modern projection and sound equipment.  The 1860 chandelier from France still hangs over the staircase to the balcony.

Catskill was known as one of the great crossroad towns of New York because it is where everyone stopped, usually to enjoy the Bull and Head Tavern in the 1880s before traveling on to Albany or Montreal.  Because of this, the place had an unusual number of hotels for such a small town.  Through all these years, Catskill has maintained it’s early 20th Century charm.  With no suburb growth of big box stores to deplete the business, this particular Main Street has maintained its original usefulness to serve the needs of its residents.

Postcard perfect Hudson, NY.

Just a little further up the Hudson River is a bigger small town with an amazing number of streets adorned with historical buildings known simply as Hudson.  This is a place where they still have a parade for Flag Day and it is groomed in a way that would make Disneyland proud.  Here, the old movie houses have died and been repurposed, though new avenues of entertainment have emerged.  However, the majority of the town might as well be the set of Bedford Falls from It’s a Wonderful Life.  Every corner, every street, every building is post card perfect and there are dozens of useful businesses lining the streets.  Trains even pull into the local train station, just as they have since the 19th Century when the tracks were first laid down.  New York and the eastern region has retained its train culture, so unlike the rest of the U.S., it is still possible to take passenger trains into small towns, but how can you argue with the serene pleasure of comfortably traveling up the Hudson River by train––it’s woods and nature and river all the way and then you step off the train into The Music Man.  Everything changes for better or worse and you can’t say that these small towns of the Empire State haven’t changed, but they have retained a good portion of their original charm and it is possible, while still checking your email on your smart phone, to retreat to a simpler time where the shop keepers give you a friendly hello and take pride in participating in the vibrancy and traditions of their little towns.

Pollock Pines

Once it was decided that Pollock Pines needed to establish a post office, it was time to give the place a name and the winning idea that was drawn from the hat was that it should be named for an early pioneer family by the name of Pollock.   In 1936, H. R. Pollock was still prominent thanks to his lumber mill of 1900.  The name of the old Cedar Grove School, serving the children of the parents working the lumber business, was changed to Pollock Pines School and so when the first post office was built in 1936, Pollock Pines was the most logical name for this old Pony Express remount station.

There still isn’t much there today, but there is the El Dorado National Forrest that envelopes it and the many joys of Sly Park’s Jenkinson Lake, the infamous road stops of the Fifty Grand Steakhouse and the Sportsman’s Hall built upon that very famous Pony Express station, which is registered as California Landmark 704.  A plaque before the Sportsman’s Hall reads:

This was the site of Sportsman's Hall, also known as Twelve-Mile House, the hotel operated in the latter 1850s and 1860s by John and James Blair. A stopping place for stages and teams of the Comstock, it became a relay station of the Central Overland Pony Express. Here, at 7:40 A.M., April 4, 1860, pony rider William (Sam) Hamilton riding in from Placerville, handed the express mail to Warren Upson, who, two minutes later, sped on his way eastward.

The Blair brothers (there were four altogether), were diversified in business in El Dorado County and immediately set up the Blair Brothers Lumber Company in Pollock Pines and had their retail lumber yard in Placerville at the corner of Main Street and Broadway, which was run by the family until 1985.

Sportsman’s Hall continues on at 5622 Old Pony Express Trail and is best known for its breakfast, though it serves lunch and dinner as well.  However, the real establishment of Pony Express Trail is at 6401.  It is the great Fifty Grand Steakhouse, which in its current incarnation isn’t even as old as it seems, for it was rebuilt after a fire in 1983.  The original business really made up the basis of the only strip you could call “town.”  The spot sprang up in the early 1930s as a combination grocery store, gas pump, restaurant and then later that game changing post office.  There was a little saloon called Frenchie’s there, which by 1943 was under new management and the new name of the Fifty Grand, because it was on Highway 50 in a grand place to live.  In 1945 the management changed again and the place was serving Chinese American food.  There was a movie house in operation for a time in the aluminum building next door, so with movies, post office, grocery, gas and the Fifty Grand, there was nearly a proper Main Street U.S.A. developing.

Eventually the post office moved across the street to what is now the Pony Express Village business strip.  When a big super market came in, the old grocery store closed and was usurped by the Fifty Grand.  The expanded road stop served a good steak and potatoes dinner, ribs, roast chicken and a salad with good blue cheese dressing––still does.  The combination restaurant and bar became a well known spot on the way to and from Lake Tahoe and was known as a kind of legend when my family frequented the place in the 1970s.   Back then, there weren’t too many good places to go out for dinner in Placerville and so we often took visiting friends and family up to the Fifty Grand for a good night out.  My parents still enjoy going there today and the restaurant has managed to continue to serve a good meal at fair prices in a warm atmosphere.  Call it outdated or call it retro charm, but it is one of the few long time establishments of El Dorado County that has refused to disappear.

One important establishment that has disappeared was The Triangle––a kind of a sandwich counter meets dance hall opened by Arthur Berrill that served the social needs of the community in the 1930s when the folks working on the W.P.A. projects roamed the pines.  The Pine Lodge now sits on that site.

Near by Sly Park is full of boating, hiking and camping and as a kid I spent plenty of time on Jenkinson Lake doing all of those things.  The aspect that left the greatest impression on me was the winter week the 6th grade of Sierra School spent at the Sly Park Environmental Education Center––a camp with cabins to sleep 22 and a wonderful dining hall that served robust meals.  We spent days on hikes and learned about surviving in the wilderness.  We learned to eat worms and anyone who managed to swallow a worm got to make his own silk screened t-shirt that said “Worm Power” on it.  My favorite use of my new swallowing worms skill was to do it before a group of girls on the playground and watch them scream in horror.  There was also crafts and singing around camp fires and the first proper dance I ever attended at the end of the week.  Of course we were essentially going to school, but we were out from behind our desks and there were no math or spelling tests.  This was hands on learning and it was the kind of learning I did best, so it didn’t really feel like school at all, but a kind of vacation.

The kids from Pollock Pines end up down in Placerville going to El Dorado High School, so that Pony Express stop never grew into the kind of place that could really be considered a town.  Pollock Pines is sort of an extension of Placerville, like the other surrounding named areas such as Camino, Shingle Springs, Coloma and El Dorado.  However, that particular area of the forest marked by the American River to the north to Jenkinson Lake and the Mormon Emigrant Trail to the south, with the Fifty Grand and the Sportsman’s Hall right at the center of it all, maintains its reputation as a special spot on the map––special enough to be numbered Landmark 704.

The 50 Grand in the 1940s

Olde Coloma Theatre

Another stalwart organization of El Dorado County is the Olde Coloma Theatre located in Coloma, where gold was discovered in 1848.  That theatre company doesn’t date back to the Gold Rush days, but it takes on a 19th Century persona by presenting melodramas of the “boo-hiss” variety, even though most of the material is written by locals and very little historical accuracy is given to presenting the plays as folks might have seen them on the river show boats or the little playhouses of early California.  Who knows exactly what the style really was anymore?  What we can glean from movies about the era is a ballooned, cartoony presentation of simplistic plots about the heroin not being able to pay the villain his rent money.  She will be forced to marry the villain in order to survive, that is until her handsome young hero in the white hat comes along to save the day.  “Curses!  Foiled again!” says the villain as the curtain comes down.

In the mid-1990s, CSUS tried a summer theatre season of authentic melodramas staged at the Old Eagle Theatre in Old Sacramento.  Poor publicity, bad organization and less than adequate talent made this noble attempt a flop, though the productions were designed beautifully as all CSUS productions were in those days.  However, seeing those actual 19th Century melodramas make you realize how serious the stories were.  They couldn’t be played with a wink and a nudge––nothing was remotely tongue in cheek.  There were clear heroes and villains and olio songs performed between scenes, but the playwrights weren’t out to string together a bunch of puns and gags the way I originally came to know melodrama from Coloma.  No, the playwrights really did have something to say about their world.  That wasn’t Coloma’s concern.  For Coloma a melodrama had two titles, a villain in black with a maniacal laugh and a handlebar mustache he could twirl and a lot of hoary jokes strung together over an age old plot, usually set in old California.  In between scenes there were songs accompanied by an upright piano at the side of the apron and if all this lasted two hours with intermission you had yourself a show.

Many of these period-esque entertainments were a good time and made better by a trip afterwards to the nearby Sierra Nevada House for a chocolate soda.  After a while, the sameness of the productions began to wear you down and the company went through alternate periods of quality and baffoonery depending on who was helming the productions.  Some of the Theatre El Dorado people like Richard Harrison, Scott Sherrill and Mark Anderson would go down to put on a better than average production, bringing with them a cast of talents that wouldn’t usually participate in Coloma’s productions.  There could have been more of that collaboration, but it wasn’t always fostered.

I was in two productions that I would define as Theatre El Dorado plays Coloma.  The first was the annual 4th of July revue, Firecrackers, which was assigned to various directors through the years.  This particular year it was helmed by Scott Sherrill (with Jerry Moorman and Katie Miller) who had just finished his very successful production of Mame at Theatre El Dorado.  Although he held an open audition, which was how my brother and I were cast, the end result was that most of the cast of Mame made up the talent in Firecrackers ‘82.  The other show was The Bride of Frankenstein, which was hardly a melodrama, but there were villains you could boo and hiss.  Directed by Mark Anderson and Joan Prinz, that production broke the “nothing set after 1900” rule as it was a beach party take on the classic horror movie.  Again, there were open auditions, but a lot of the people working on that production had all just finished a production of Anything Goes at Theatre El Dorado together (see post “Bob Hope Summer”).

Firecrackers ‘82 had an interesting variety of acts.  I was fascinated by an elderly performer, Maggie Bridgham, who had become a kind of Coloma celebrity.  She was definitely form another era and was billed as “The Nightingale of Coloma.”  She was dressed in a kind of glamorous music hall finery, her fingers full of costume jewelry (“Like my rocks?” she used to say as she wiggled her fingers).  She sat quietly in a chair during the entire show and then rose when it was time for her turn before the footlights, leaving her cane behind.  She sang sentimental old songs, wiping invisible tears from her eyes, which caused the audience to “awwwh” on cue.  Maggie Bridgham was a pro and knew just how to work a crowd.  I was 13 years old, but I went around to the back of the house to watch her act every night and to study her.  There was something extraordinary about her as a performer, though of course this is all a distant memory and who knows what I would think about her performance now.  But back then, I recognized it as something elevated from the other acts.  She certainly commanded the audience in a way that other acts did not.

June Scott and Bette Schmidt had a cute “sister” act to the number “Dearie,” which was one of those good old summer days of yore type of numbers.  June Scott also did “Grandma’s Feather Bed” with her daughter Jan and grand children and then returned for a third turn with Bette Schmidt for “All of Me.”  There was a belly dancer who went by “Kahlila” and a wonderful classical guitarist, Chico Sebastian.  In-between all the musical numbers were comedy sketches of the burlesque variety and then there was my brother and me in our pantomime about the guy who poisoned his wife at the party and had to remove the corpse without anyone noticing.

The theater building itself has an interesting history.  The main auditorium is a log cabin built as part of an exhibit from the 1939 San Francisco World’s Fair.  In 1941 the building was moved to Mount Danaher to serve as a barracks for California forestry rangers.  Eventually the building was used as a warehouse and finally was to be raised, when June Scott campaigned in the late 1960s to have the building moved to Coloma with the idea that it could be turned into a theatre for her group of thespians putting on melodramas.  A lobby, bathrooms, stage and dressing room area were added to the cabin to form what became the Olde Coloma Theatre to house the “Coloma Crescent Players,” at 380 Monument Road. For years, June Scott was the life-force of the group and was even late into the 1980s.

In the middle of my college career I had decided to focus on directing and was looking for ways to get projects under my belt.  Since I was going to be back in Placerville the summer of 1988 I looked at Coloma as a possible venue for a directing project.  I was focussed on musicals and didn’t want to do a melodrama, but since The Bride of Frankenstein had been such a big hit, I figured I could get somewhere with a 1927 musical, Good News.  It was the kind of gag-filled, tuneful old musical that I could imagine working at Coloma.  I campaigned to June Scott, Vickie Moreno (another June Scott daughter) and board of directors to convince them that Good News would live up to its title.  However, Coloma wasn’t interested in crossing that rule about 1900––they wanted me, but they wanted me to do a melodrama.  I looked around for something, but with my limited time I couldn’t come up with a suitable replacement idea and so I picked up a book of turn-of-the-century songs and wrote a melodrama type of story around them.  After I finished the script in about two weeks, I sent it over to June Scott for a read and she approved it.  Nowhere else in the world would that script have been approved over Good News, but Just Plain Mary was going on the boards that summer.

At the time I believed in what I was doing and I was smart about how I wrote the thing so that I wouldn’t get in over my head.  Still, my youth made me ignorant of all the creative challenges that would soon be before me.  However, this was the point of doing the show: to have the experience of helming a production.  As a production company, the staff of Coloma didn’t really help me do anything, except that I had Vickie Moreno as a liaison and to handle publicity––something she was doing very well at that time.  In seasons just prior to 1988, the theatre was playing to very poor houses and in danger of dissolving.  Vickie came in and decided to make it her mission to rejuvenate the group and a big publicity campaign was were she threw her energies.  The board left me alone and naively assumed that I would deliver said production by opening night.  Lucky for them I had gained enough experience to know what I needed to do to make it all come together, but I still don’t know why they had such blind faith in me.  Coloma didn’t provide me with any staff.  I was expected to collect the people I needed to make the magic happen on my own.  I was hard up for a pianist, but finally found a Ponderosa High School senior named John Ferguson when I went to a band concert and saw him playing Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” on the piano.  I hired him for $300 to play all the rehearsals and the month long run of the show.  After that he was off to University of the Pacific.  That’s actually how I put together most of the cast––by going to all the area high school spring plays and concerts.  When we had a generally poor showing at the open auditions, I got out those programs and started tracking down people I imagined being able to do a good job and cast them over the phone.

The prior semester I was taking a few classes at Cosumness River College and met Pat Russell, who was going back to college in her 40s to become a social worker.  We had two general education music classes together and it turns out she was a big theatre fan.  I talked her into becoming the company manager for my production and she embraced the job wholeheartedly.  Because of the other production running before mine, Coloma could only offer us limited rehearsal time on the stage and they didn’t have another space for us.  What did other directors do I wondered?  They made due I was told.  Not for me; I needed a solid six weeks of rehearsal five nights a week with a piano.  Pat got on the phone and talked the Veterans Hall and the El Dorado City community hall into letting us use their spaces for free.  

I had worked in a scene shop for my entire first semester with the Western Stage Theatre Company in Salinas and so I felt adept enough to create the scenery I needed, which I did in a kind of illustration style using lots of color.  It definitely looked more like early Broadway musical comedy than 19th Century melodrama, but the most important thing was that it was all unified.  High School friend Jossette Childress coordinated the costumes and was able to pull together a complimentary design that worked well with my set just from the large selection of things Coloma had in storage.  John Ehlman, who had been working on lighting design with Theatre El Dorado, designed the lights and even ran the board.  Barbara Hilton, another high school chum, had grown up in choirs and not only served as vocal director, but understudied the show and had to go on once.  She was amazingly prepared and gave a good performance with John transposing the songs into her key by sight.

After we opened, I kept getting new ideas about how to improve the show and put in a few extra songs, so the show wasn’t really frozen until about half way through the run.  This was  a new show after all and no one was stopping me, so I just implemented whatever I felt I should to improve the production.  Everyone I ever knew came out to see the production and we received an enthusiastic review from the Mountain Democrat, so business was brisk at the box office.

I left Just Plain Mary and the Old Coloma Theatre forever after closing night.  I’ve never been back.  Somehow the group keeps going on.  Ed Mikula, who was seen back in ‘82 singing “Broadway Melody” in Firecrackers is still involved today and serves as president of the board.  From all reports the group continues to function more or less as they always have, though they have a year round program rather than just serving a summer audience of white water rafters and campers.  Coloma gave me my first full directing project and can claim me as one of its children.  That’s part of what a small town theatre group can do––get you started so you can fly the coupe.

The villain is captured in "Just Plain Mary" at the Olde Coloma Theatre, 1988

Super Bowl Sunday, or The Limbo of Main Street

The oak trees were naked, but the air was still and it wasn’t particularly cold.  Long before this day the brown leaves had fallen, though there was always one here and there that refused to let go.  Little did those stubborn leaves know that new buds would one day push them right off their branches, but for now they clung on––dead, but wanting to live just a little while longer.  Outside of a stray leaf and a few scattered pine needles, there wasn’t a lot to sweep off the patio.  As far as chores go for a young boy, sweeping the patio was pretty easy, but I hated it all the same.  Still, January sweeping was fast and I appreciated January for that.

Up stairs my parents had big plans to spend the afternoon watching the Super Bowl.  For some reason, this Super Bowl Sunday was not to be about having a group of people over for a party, nor did my parents have any plans of dragging us off to some other house for such a gathering.  This was to be a quiet, simple, run of the mill Sunday that happened to include the TV running all afternoon with nothing but football.  On other Sundays my brother and I would usually hunt down an old movie––we liked those.  There was a UHF channel out of Sacramento, down the hill about forty-five minutes, that showed an awful lot of old movies.  This was the closest thing to Turner Classic Movies in those days.  During this time they showed all the Abbott and Costello movies at a regular afternoon time on the weekends and we loved every single one of them.  I particularly liked the classic film comedians, but also the musicals.  I never got enough of the monster movies––King Kong, Ray Harryhausen and the Universal Horror family.  Those seemed to only come on late at night when I was supposed to be asleep, but I caught those “Creature Features” on the occasional sleep-over at a friend’s house.

If we weren’t watching old movies on TV on the weekend we might be down on Main Street at our little old single screen Empire Theater catching a matinee of the latest Disney release (or re-release as the case may be).  The Empire being the only form of regular entertainment in our small town, it changed films weekly and there was always a double feature.  The first film was usually a first run release and the other was something second run, odd, or classic.  If the film was a really big hit, such as Superman the Movie, then it was shown alone.  Although, we didn’t always get the hot new films right away and I remember it was a year before we finally had Star Wars.  Any time I was walking down Main Street I had to stop and stare at the posters of coming attractions.  I would have loved to have gone inside for every film every week, but not everything was for kids as my mother reminded me.

I had a few dollars in my pocket and so did my brother, so stuck with the prospect of nonstop football on a gray day, with no neighborhood kids around who could be pulled away from their own Super Bowl obligations, we decided to hop on the bikes and ride downtown just for the heck of it.  We’d buy a few ropes of licorice, wander around Main Street and ride back home.  We lived at the top of a hill, so the three mile trip to Main Street was down hill all the way and a lot of fun.  No one cared about helmets in those days and it is a wonder we survived the hill all those years.

Arriving down on Main Street that day it was a bit erie.  Not only was it overcast, but it was virtually a ghost town.  There were no cars moving up and down the streets, though there were some parked along the curb.  There were eight bars along Main and the Super Bowl could be heard from the doors of all of them, with occasional cheers whooping up from the small crowds within.  All of the shops were closed this day except the most important one––the Placerville News Stand.  This was a wonderful store full of useful and entertaining things.  There was a camera counter where I would buy Super 8 movie film and splicing tape.  There was an art section with a healthy supply of papers, pens and paints.  There was a small book section and craft supply area.  There were odd gifts and stuffed animals.  There was a well stocked magazine section.  All corners were stuffed with one little thing or another and all on top of warm and wonderful squeaky wooden floors.  Here we purchased our candy treat, looked the place over for anything new and then headed out for a little more exploring of the empty town.

Placerville’s Main Street in the 1970s resembled a lot of American Main Streets, which were all having troubles.  Many of the age old businesses of the street were seeing their last days and a few had been there since the 19th Century.  There had, in fact, been an Empire Theater of some sort since the Gold Rush when Placerville was known as Hangtown.  Even though the ladies of the town felt it would be better for commerce if the name “Hangtown” was dropped, the residents never really gave up on it, naming various streets and businesses “Hangtown” this or that.  There was also a stuffed dummy hanging from a noose off the side of a building marking the spot of the famous tree where the hangings took place and containing the Hangtown Saloon.  Placerville liked its Gold Rush history, but was barely taking advantage of it in reality.  Still, the street was filled with useful stores that served the needs of a small town as a Main Street was meant to do.  Placerville also liked its parades, which always jolted the street with life and with no suburb to steal away the business, Placerville’s Main Street could hang on.  Down in Sacramento’s downtown the old movie houses were being boarded up or demolished.  They were turned into parking lots, supermarkets and fast food restaurants.  The whole downtown was empty by five o’clock as workers fled to their suburban havens.

The tower de eiffel of Placerville is the Bell Tower, a symbol marking the town center and appearing on postcards––it is steadfast.  Down the street, the Cary House was renamed the Raffle’s Hotel, but it was being used as apartments and not a hotel.  The most interesting resident was a little man with a Charlie Chaplin mustache who walked a little white dog.  He was a town character, familiar to all and then he was gone.  The Raffles Hotel had once been the grand palace of the town––the finest place to stay in the Gold Country.  The building held a mystique for me and I longed to ride the old iron elevator and wander the halls––perhaps stay the night and find out if it had any ghosts.  Years later after all the residents had let go and blown away, the Raffles Hotel went back to being the Cary House and checking in guests again––it was steadfast too.

We peddled our bikes up an alley that lead to the mysterious “Reservoir Street” that wound around behind the length of the key portion of Main Street.  This street ran higher than Main and one mused about the strange second story back doors.  Some of them seemed to be apartments and I always wondered who might be living in those ramshackle places.  I never saw anyone come and go from those doors.  The most interesting of the doors was the back of the Empire.  These were large mettle doors suitable for Vaudeville companies of yesteryear to move their scenery into the theater.  It had been the 1930s when those doors were last used for that purpose, but I wondered about it and wished to have seen them opened and a traveling troupe to have moved in their painted drops and costumes.  There was a dumpster always sitting by those doors, flies buzzing around dead boxes of popcorn, and on this occasion I found a strip of 35 mm movie film.  This portion of film, spliced off of some unknown feature, pictured the warning that the film had been rated “PG.”  I pocketed the foot long film sample as a memento, which gave me some sort of vicarious delight that I was momentarily connected to Hollywood and real movies.

There persisted a story that the Empire had a ghost.  He was a drunken ghost and wandered up and down the steps from the boiler room to the stage.  The management claimed to have encountered him on several occasions.  Throughout my childhood I never once saw the ghost or talked to anyone who did––not even when, for a brief time, the theater went back to providing live stage entertainment and I was involved with a few productions.  No ghost was spotted on those stairs, but maybe he was spooked by all the new unusual human activity bursting forth upon the old stage, or maybe he finally let go of his branch.

Above Reservoir Street were other small houses, all looking rather worse for wear, with electrical wires strung from one to the next.  This seemed like a neighborhood out of touch with that moment in time.  Once it must have been thriving, new, pleasant. How nice must it have been to stroll around to Main Street to eat at the Blue Bell Cafe, to shop at the grocery store down the block, to know everyone in every shop.  Some of this was still possible.  The grocery store was not quite dead and the Blue Bell would manage to serve the old-timers for a little bit longer, but there was the smell of an era, just before my life began, that was slipping away quietly, but wanting to live just a little bit longer.  No more could the people of Reservoir Street sit on their porch and sneak a peek of the vaudevillians loading their scenery into the Empire Theater––like the circus coming to town.  The Circus didn’t even bother to come to town anymore, nor did the trains, though the tracks did get some use from the lumber company until a few years later.

Up Main Street we stopped at the rather new Round Table Pizza to play a game of Pin Ball.  Having exhausted our few quarters and dreading the walk back up the hill, I called my father to ask if he might pick us up.  Nope.  We were to come home in time for dinner on our own steam and so we started the journey back, which wasn’t fun at all compared to the brisk thrill of coasting into downtown Placerville.  About forty-five minutes later we were home––the football still going strong.  I stared at my film footage: “PG.”  I began planning a movie of my own in my mind that I might shoot with my father’s Super 8 camera.  What should it be?  A remake of Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid? A stop motion animated remake of A Star is Born? I’d have to save up the allowance money to buy the film, though maybe I’d spend it next Saturday at the Empire Theater.

Today Main Street has been repurposed as a gallery and antique mall catering to tourists on the way to visit Apple Hill or Lake Tahoe.  Although a few of the very old stores, such as Placerville Hardware and the good old Placerville News Stand are still there, others such as Florence's or Combellack’s clothing stores finally let go after surviving for generations.  The canker that gnaws is that the Empire has been gutted and turned into an antique store, though the marquee remains to memorialize the building from 1930 as having once been a theater––hanging on like the last brown leaf.  Glancing up and down the street it looks very much the same, though the character has somewhat changed.  The train tracks have been transformed into a walking and bike trail, the eight bars are gone, the Cary House functions as a proper hotel and there are better restaurants, though the Blue Bell is a distant memory.  Plenty of people are strolling up and down the sidewalks, stopping to read bronze plaques pointing out that in this or that spot something happened or something once existed.  The centerpiece, the Bell Tower, has never moved and although it disappeared for a while, the hanging dummy came back and still marks the spot of the fabled tree of capital punishment.

As the Super Bowl celebratory cheers went on and on––just a little bit longer––I looked out the window to the forest of oak trees and noticed the few brown hangers on refusing to blow away.