High Heels Hallelujah

My high school choir, along with two other high schools, were to perform in a large church in downtown L.A. We sang Mendelson's "Hallelujah."  I had been begging my mother to let me buy some high heels and she finally agreed that I could for this performance.

So I bought some "high" heels and wore them with my long robe. When the school bus got to the church and we got off we had to wait in a long line in the sun for at least an hour.  That was long enough for my feet to start "killing" me.  I never knew that feet could hurt so much.

When we filed onto the platforms that were set up in the chancel it came to be my turn to stand in place just where the large priest's chair was, next to the bottom row and I sat in it.  Not sure that I should, there I remained . . . a miracle, and gratefully sang my soprano part.  Hallelujah!!!

Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C.

In June 1967 I took off for Europe with my new boyfriend Lee.  We drove in his Datsun sports car across country.  We got in an accident by going on an off-ramp too fast and rolled down an embankment in Kentucky and wound up staying there for two weeks.  With the repairs (broken axle) and hotel expenses,  there went our cash for Europe.

We drove as far as Washington, D.C. and settled in for a couple of years there.

At first we lived in Silver Springs, Maryland.  I worked for an insurance company as a receptionist and switchboard operator.

Back in the day before copy machines,  I would type forms with carbon paper in between each of several pages while pushing and pulling telephone cords into various holes on the switchboard.  Correcting typos was very challenging.

Next we moved to D.C. proper.  I got a job in the Dupont Circle Building working for Amnesty International.   The office was on the 10^th floor and there was an old elevator that you rode to go up.  It was operated by a man in a uniform who would always try to hug me if I was in the lift alone.  I would leave the elevator if I was the last one out so that he could not do that and take the stairs.

We collected information on prisoners of war and sent out fundraising mailings.  I remember being the hostess for foreign emissaries in the Watergate Hotel with the Potomac River running along outside.

Lee worked as a writer for National Geographic.  We went to a house that bred canaries one day and he bought me a white canary with black bangs.  I called him “Hipshot Percussion.”  D.C. had amazing restaurants of every ethnicity.  At the movies we saw “Bonnie and Clyde,”  “Mrs. Robinson” and “Rosemary’s Baby.”  We listened to “The Age of Aquarius.”

I had not been into politics too much really.  My brother had been drafted and sent to Vietnam which made that personal to me, but most other issues were far removed from my attention.  But living in Washington D.C. has its way of educating you on the issues.  The time I spent there had been quite turbulent.

There were anti-war protests going on all the time.  In October 1967  there was a March on the Pentagon with a rally at the Lincoln Memorial which numbered more than 100,000 marchers.

On April 4,^, 1968 Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis and all hell broke out in the city.  Everything was burning.  We went out a couple of days later to see all the charred remains of buildings. 

It reminded me of the Watts Riots.  A friend and I were in my 55 Chevy and we were lost downtown when the riot broke out.  I drove by a blackened hull of a bus and police officers were yelling at me to go this way not that.  Finally I found the freeway and headed back to safety in the San Fernando Valley suburb.

In May, thousands of poor people started a shanty town called Resurrection City in the National Mall in front of the Washington Monument.  It lasted for six weeks.

On June 5^th, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan moments after winning the California primary.

On November 15^th there was a march in Washington, D.C. for peace.  It was the largest antiwar rally in U.S. history.  The speakers at the Washington Monument were McCarthy, McGovern, Coretta King, Dick Gregory, and Leonard Bernstein.  The singers were Arlo Guthrie,  Pete Seeger,  Peter, Paul, & Mary, John Denver, Mitch Miller and the touring cast of Hair.

 

  

By 1970 I was back in the San Fernando Valley.  Lee had sent me ahead of him to procure an apartment while he gave notice to his job.  Sadly, he did not rejoin me.  Something I felt quite badly about for a long, long time.  So much for the chances a person can take with their heart.

San Francisco Weekend

My son and daughter-in-law showed me around San Francisco this weekend.  We went to an outside dance in a warehouse district, to the beach, to a park and to the bay.  I went over several huge bridges.

Mentryville

Mentryville

Mom’s dad, Grandpa Westcott was the manager of the oil depot in Newhall, California.  He lived on their property in a large canyon in the Santa Susana Mountains called Pico Canyon.  Pico Canyon is located just south of where Magic Mountain is located now, just north of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles County. 

Deep within Pico Canyon was a ghost town called Mentryville. Mentryville was an oil drilling town. It was started in the 1870s. The first oil strike in California occurred there in 1876. It is also the longest running well as it was not capped until 1990.  In 1966 Well No. 4 had the distinction of being the first site in Los Angeles County to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places.  The Mentryville ghost town is now open to the public as a historic park.

The town was named after the superintendent who was in charge of the oil field, Charles Alexander Mentry.  Mentry lived in the town until his death in 1900 and built the 13-room mansion (we called the Big House) that still stands there.  There have been several caretakers that have lived in the Big House over the years.  As children we played on the porch often and watched the quails peck around the bushes.

Mentry struck oil in 1876, at a depth of 370 feet.  The well immediately began producing 25 barrels a day.  It was called Well No. 4 as it was the fourth well Mentry drilled before he struck oil and it was drilled with great difficulty, as "the railroad had not then been completed, there was no road into the canyon, water was almost unattainable, and there were no adequate tools or machinery to be had." (The town had it’s own blacksmith.)  

“Mentry used his mechanical skills to create improvised tools, including a drill-stem he built out of old railroad car axles, which he purchased from the Southern Pacific and welded together.  When Mentry drilled the well to a depth of 560 feet in 1877, the oil spurted to the top of the 65-foot derrick, increasing the production to 150 barrels a day.  It became California’s first commercially successful well.

After Well No. 4 proved to be a success, Mentry constructed the first oil pipeline in California from Pico Canyon to the refinery in Newhall, later extending it 50 miles (80 km) to the ocean at Ventura, California. In 1895, a pamphlet issued by the State of California stated that the Pacific Coast Oil Company had 40 wells operating in Pico Canyon producing 500 barrels a day, and one well which had produced 1,500,000 barrels.

During the 1930s, most of Mentryville's residents left, many tearing down their houses board by board and nail by nail, and taking it all with them.  

In 1933, my grandparents and their five children (including my mom) lived in an old redwood cabin style house that was built without using any nails and was located just across the stream from the Big House.  My grandfather built a barn next to it.  They only had gas for lights, cooking and heating.  

My mother tells many stories of this time. . . being afraid during storms as the bridge would wash out, my aunt Peg waking up to a tarantula on her pillow, cooking a sparrow for her mother.  Getting stuck in quicksand, killing lots of rattlesnakes and grandma being the family doctor.

My brothers and I used to walk up the winding country road, being chased by aggressive ducks and passive cows, past the ghost-town’s one-room school house, and up to the remaining picnic grounds called Johnson Park.  There were huge barbeques and it looked like a good place to have a party.  There was also a huge oil tower with a plaque on it.  We were proud that this was the first place oil was discovered in California.

The Tatavian and Tonga Indians used to live in the canyon also and we found evidence of this once and awhile as well as lots of sea shells.  The sea shells indicated that the land had been under water at some previous time.

Mentryville and Pico Canyon have also become popular locations to shoot motion pictures.

There was a popular TV show called Lassie and the people in the Big House always took care of the series of retired "Lassies" from the show.

My Aunt Peggy tells me that Zane Grey wrote Riders of the Purple Sage while staying in the canyon.

The favorite part of the canyon for me was the wildflowers.

I later read about how much of the rusty drilling equipment that we played
around as children had been shipped to a museum that was located near where I had been living until recently, so I took a bunch of pictures (which I will post later when I find where I have archived them.)

Grandma and Grandpa Westcott

My Mom Pat Kelly

http://scvhistory.com/scvhistory/westcott-pat-index.htm

Mom's Webpage!

 

Mini Skirts and Music

I met Abe when I was working at a bank and his law firm was in the same building.  I had some interesting adventures with him.  He had just set up A&M Records with Herb Alpert and was also the attorney for Mick Jagger and the Mamas and the Papas.

I remember crying at the bank because I had just had my hair cut so short by the man who would next give the cut to Twiggy.  He practiced on me.  I wore mini-skirts and patent leather knee-high boots then.

There were a lot of meetings of industry people at his apartment in West Hollywood.  At one time I remember they were trying to decide on what single to release (back in the days of 45 rpm record releases) for the Fifth Dimension.  They had another song in mind but I kept insisting on “Up, Up and Away.”   Finally, I got my way.   The song was a big hit!

Occasionally we went to dinner in Benedict Canyon at Terry Melcher’s house (Doris Day’s Son).  One of the guys from Three Dog Night lived in the guest house in the back.  There were lots of wild cats around the property.

A year or so later I saw a picture of the house on the front page of the newspaper.  It was the house where the Charles Manson murders occurred!

Abe and I did a lot of promo work for the Monterey Pop Festival as the Mamas and the Papas were the main act.  They had an office in a house on Sunset Boulevard.  We would go there to pick up 45 rpm records of Scott McKenzie’s “If You’re Going to San Francisco.”  We passed out the records and flyers to a lot of people.

Just before the concert, Abe and I got into a verbose fight and broke up and so I didn’t go.  Too bad.  I enjoyed watching the Pennybaker film. 

Eventually I married the band leader from the Mamas and the Papas, but that’s another story.

Northern California

Northern California

Three of my four brothers moved up to Northern California, one taking my mother with him.  (My father and husband passed in 2008).  Then my only child and son got married and moved to San Francisco.  So recently I moved to Northern California after having spent most of my life in Southern California (with just a few temporary journeys elsewhere).

I am charmed by the oaks and pines of the foothills of Lake Tahoe, where I find myself re-planted.  This time has been spent reflecting on my old life and imagining what my new life will bring.  I find it is a time to reassess my old programming and my knee-jerk reactions to a more compassionate point of view.  Everything in my life has brought me to this point in time, and all for my higher good.

This week I have been making “money purses” and going through my photographs.  I like to do new things as often as possible so today I made a berry smoothie for the first time (with chia seeds).  I also have a couple of blogs that I like to update frequently.  

My room looks like a cross between a factory and a library.  The sliding glass door is open and I hear birds and the rooster crowing and lots of very fresh air is coming in.  Off in the distance I see the snow covered mountains of Lake Tahoe.

All feels peaceful and serene.

Melody Ranch

Melody Ranch

Dad’s Dad and Mom, Grandpa and Grandma Kelly lived on a western movie studio located in Placerita Canyon north of Los Angeles.   Monogram Studios was eventually bought by Gene Autry in 1952 and became the Melody Ranch (after a Gene Autry movie title).  

Grandpa (along with his white german shepherd) was the night watchman and lived in the main house.  I remember my uncles filling the air with smoke from packs of unfiltered Pall Malls, playing poker, and listening to the Son’s of the Pioneers on the radio in the main house.

I lived there when I was three and four years old.  We didn’t have television yet.  We were saving money up to buy a home which we eventually did buy in the San Fernando Valley which was where my father worked for the Southern California Gas Company.  We visited the ranch almost every week-end after that and I continued to vacation on the film ranch every summer until it burned down when I was 16.

During the 30’s and 40’s there were hundreds of movies and TV westerns shot on the movie lot including thirty-five John Wayne movies.  (My maternal grandfather, who lived on the other side of town, is supposed to have trained John Wayne in how to tame a horse.)

Melody ranch was twelve acres large with many streets that had 74 storefronts (fake-front buildings).  There were saloons, a huge adobe church, hotels, a jailhouse, a bank, a theater, a hardware store, and a gun shop. It also had a train and a train track that was not quite full size.  It was about half-size and was used in filming.  It is in a train museum now.  

Really, I did not have a clue that most children did not have their own train to run around in.  In fact I had the whole place to myself on the week-ends.  Nothing was locked and I wandered along the boardwalks while popping in and out of the stages.

I remember being given toys to be quiet in a back bedroom (which was also used for filming and was filled with antiques) while the living room was turned into a hotel lobby or a barroom.  Bad guys fought good guys like Gary Cooper in "High Noon" and Indians crawled all over the roof. 

Many actors worked on the lot.  Some of them were John Wayne, Preston Foster, The Cisco Kid, James Arness,  Bob Steele, Rex Rossi and Dennis Weaver of Gunsmoke.   Former President Ronald Reagan has worked there.  Also Anthony Quinn starred in “Man from Del Rio”. 

Television came along and The Lone Ranger, Wyatt Earp, Hopalong Cassidy, Wild Bill Hickock and Annie Oakley were also filmed there.  Yes, I met a lot of the actors.

One of my favorite memories is on the Fourth of July.  I would ride with my brother in a small covered wagon as "Miss Melody Ranch" in the small town parade.  Every January the men in town would start growing their beards and come the 4th there would be a contest to see who had the longest beard.  The next day all the beards would be shaved . . . until next January 1st.

After the parade we would go back to the movie ranch to a huge BBQ in which all the actors and families arrived decked out in their Nudies costumes.  There would be a Mariachi band and real BBQ.

I was resting on the swing couch in the back of the house when I saw smoke and saw that a pine tree was on fire and went to get help.  That year I was the big hero!

For many, many years as an adult, cowboy shows were on the television and I could see my trees and mountains that I climbed and ran down as a child.

There was a fire that destroyed much of the studio in 1962.  Elvis Presley was on location shooting “Kissin’ Cousin” and helped fight the fire.  No, I didn’t get to meet him.

Gene Autry suffered great loses from the fire.  Champion, Gene’s horse was kept on the property but what remained of his large collection of western memorabilia was sent to his new Gene Autry Museum.  He had an enormous collection of musical albums that did not survive the fire.

The movie ranch has been now been restored and I might like to visit it again someday!

This is my Dad, me and two of my brothers in the back yard of the main house at Melody Ranch.