A School Time-Line
I have in my sweaty little digits a rather aged piece of parchment; a yellowed typewriter sheet with very dated typing, done by an IBM Selectric with a sans-serif type-ball, sometime in 1975, and lost for all the intervening years until this very morning as is, when my hand landed on it, stuffed in amongst a pile of long-forgotten papers…. The paper has just dates and a few words of notation on the side. I’ll elaborate that with commentary. I have photos of all these events, and they’re free to see on ihddb.com…
JUN 1964 — BACK FROM THE WAR — There never was ASA in Vietnam. I was a PFC Clerk-Typist Trainee 006, stationed permanently at Fort Devens, Mass. Ignore the sripes I wore at Fort Ord where I was a weapons instructor.
You’ll note my MOS designation: “006”. That’s only one number away from the infamous James Bond, “007”!!!
Double O Six meant “Licensed To Seriously Annoy”. I returned to a civilian job as a Remote Reader, which I quickly abandoned in favor of author — I landed a job as a writer at a fabulous .25 a word!
AUG 1964 — LACC — I entered LACC with my Vet’s Bill Education Allowance. I ended up at Otis Art Institute, and the story is fully told in “My Otis Experience”, so I’m not going to take up a couple hundred pages here to tell it again.
JUN 1965 — KNX RADIO — I took a job at KNX Radio, a CBS affiliate, and ended up writing continuity for Bob Crane and Arthur Godfrey. It was on a wild and crazy day that I was called for by the station manager, to be the official photographer for Columbia Studios at Columbia Square, which had been dedicated back in 1938.
KNX Radio, a 50K AM “banger” at 1070 KH, was famous for airing the 1938 Halloween broadcast of Orson Wells’ notorious production of “War of the Worlds” that caused nationwide panic in the streets.
It was due to my job as mail-clerk in that place that I met and worked for Jack Benny, Bing Crosby Productions, George Burns, Edgar Bergen and others who helped me in my Hollywood career in the sixties.
JAN 1966 — EDGECLIFFE HOUSE — In January 1966 I made my first script sale, and right after that, got involved in animation production, mostly a lot of cheapo commercials, but there were a few bright spots in those productions with Forry Ackerman — sheer fun and merriment!
MAY 1968 — Compleat Enchanter FANTASY FAIRE, Los Feliz Blvd., Glendale; a converted antique shop on five stunningly landscaped acres right in the center of town — which I then converted slightly, into an antiquarian bookseller’s, specializing in First Editions and Incunabula (books printed prior to moveable type). At this time, the group meetings typically numbered about 30-35, varying only slightly, from meeting to meeting, depending on personal schedules. We met in the afternoons at 3PM and on Fridays we met at 7:30 PM.
We gathered in a circle on the champagne-pink 100% virgin New Zealand wool carpet I’d had laid down in the main room. There were still many signs of the antique shop all around, notably the fine hardwood trim and top-panels. It was a rich-looking space, and attracted a very well-to-do clientele. My best books in stock at that time included a subscriber’s First Edition copy of T.E. Lawrence’s 7 Pillars of Wisdom, Jonathan Cape, London, and a First Folio Shakespeare. I still offer antiquarian books today, from time to time, as opportunity allows. I don’t have much time to catalog and list, these days.
The books were displayed in shadow-boxes inset into the walls, reached from an access hall on the other side of the back wall, if you follow my drift. Naturally, I’d gone to the trouble to make certain that the lights used did not affect the books or bindings in any way, going so far as to create a UV block on my front windows, the kind you generally see in the front of antique stores, the small divided sort of English style kind of windows. In the end, I painted them black, to block any light at all from destroying the books.
There were two important Medieval manuscripts in my stock at that time, both having come from my friend and bookselling tutor, Jake Zeitlin. One of them was an unpublished manuscript by Charles Stanfield Jones, along with a hand-written commentary by Aleister Crowley, the other was an alchemical manuscript dating around 1710-1712, which had some important Solomonic Keys and numerical tables. I sold the former, and kept the latter.
Two of our group members, Barry & Larry, were surfer kids, twins, and they always arrived — I’m not kidding — barefoot, having somehow managed to hitch-hike all the way from Seal Beach to Glendale, and somehow, from this uptight thoroughly tense town, these obvious hippie surfer dudes managed to get a ride back to Seal Beach. They came to meetings for about a year, and I was always astounded to see them walk in the door, just for the adversity they’d overcome getting to the meeting!
Ed Boast, a jovial and good-natured friend, whose RPG handle was “Arch-Druid Killane”, managed to cool out the Glendale police unit that crashed through our front door one mid-afternoon when 30 or so of us were seated on the floor in a circle in the middle of the room with a candle burning in the center of the room.
Flashlights played upon the faces of those in attendance. The fact that it was broad daylight and that the windows and doors were wide open due to the extreme heat of the Los Angeles midday sun into which mad dogs and Englishmen dared not tread, made no difference.
Everything was resolve to the satisfaction of the police when Ed explained that this was a Nazi Party Bund meeting. They went away smiling.
There was no reason for them to disbelieve this; my next door neighbor was a character name of George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, although I was unaware of it at the time.
The place got sold out from under us, and — probably because it was literally next door to Forest Lawn Glendale Cemetery, it got bought by a nursing home developer, and within months was bull-dozered and steam-rollered and behold! Yet another ten-block long by ten-block wide retirement & nursing home! They don’t call them nursing homes any more.
They now call them something that doesn’t sound so bad; I used to know what they’re called these days, but my memory isn’t what it used to be … but then again, it never was. Assisted Living, maybe???
AUG 1968 — Compleat Enchanter FANTASY FAIRE II, was on Sunset & Silverlake, Hollywood California. An enormous 125′ long, 35′ wide, 22′ high former furniture shop with antiquarian books, candles, incenses, meditation pillows, dhotis, sari, zafu and other New Age items, and a large Darshan Hall.
I divided the shop up into booths and opened it up to my art student friends as a cooperative art gallery. It might have been one of the first. Everyone contributed $10 a month to the rent. Our business phone was a semi-private coin-operated wall phone. Evidently the phone company didn’t trust us to come up with the dime at the end of the month.
SEPT 1968 — FAM Earthquake “Happening” featuring Ron Matthies, whose in-game handle was “Arch-Druid Tyrhon”, with the help of 60 or so Otis students — A staged art-happening event which generated over 1 million words-in-print, coverage through UI, UPI, Reuters, CBS, NBC, ABC news and all media outlets throughout the world. It was then that we rented Suite 1313 at the famous California Fed Bldg. on Wilshire Boulevard — it had the only heliport in town — and we rented the entire suite for only $1,000 a month, giving us 16 offices, coffee break room, a giant reception area, and most importantly, an enormous and impressive hardwood-lined conference room, which we dearly needed for our press conferences. This is all described elsewhere, but suffice it to say that we had Huntley-Brinkley and Walter Cronkite “stringers” as well as local media and wire services up there on four memorable and well-published and publically recorded occasions, all related to art statements, related to my experience at Otis Art Institute, which is covered well in my photo book, My Otis Experience. The book is still in print.
Any full suite in the Cal-Fed Building would have run upwards of $30,000 a month — it was an entire floor full of giant offices and a fabulously decorated reception area, but nobody wanted to rent the 13th floor, except us…we thought it was fabulous, and wrote the check and signed the lease without a moment’s hesitation. Well, as my Dad Horace used to say, “It’s unlucky to be superstitious.” — we had great luck there, as a matter of fact!
It was at the Cal-Fed space that I connected with a real Hollywood character, a guy named “Saint Mike”. He never revealed his actual name, just as “Hobbit Pan” and “Pony” didn’t, and in fact a lot of our folks being street-folks and all, had “street-names”. Many were hookers, pimps, god knows what, but they came to classes and wanted meditation retreats, and I didn’t turn them away — Saint Mike was not a street guy, but he had a past that he wasn’t willing to reveal, and I frankly wasn’t interested. Everybody has a past, and everyone has something to hide except John Lennon and his monkey.
The Amazing, Brilliant & Mysterious “Saint Mike” circa 1968 — photo by E.J. Gold.
Mike claimed to be a very high-level refugee from a well-known religious group. I didn’t believe him — it was Hollywood, and I worked in the entertainment industry, where bullshit is the Name of the Game — and I didn’t much care about his past or his disgruntle about some organization I had no interest in whatever. Like I said, everybody has a past.
It’s only recently that I was reminded that he was, indeed, a high-ranking member of the organization — I had forgotten entirely that he’d even mentioned it — and learned only a few days ago that he had actually been telling the truth, but I assure you that he was in this respect a Hollywood Anomaly.
And as I said, I don’t care about a person’s past, only their present and possible future.
We had no organization at this time, just a meeting place, keep in mind — Cosmo Street, which the group rented for $60 a month; Vic rented the downstairs shop for $10 a month.
Mike wasn’t interested in joining anything, but he came and lectured at Cosmo Street several times a week, and he was brilliant on any subject.
After a breakup with his girlfriend Joanne, he stayed as house-guest with Mata and myself for a few months, during which he wrote a number of songs, helped run the shop, wrote some beautiful stories, told some very strange and unusual stories about his life on the sea, then one day, met a girl and they left for parts unknown.
Saint Mike vanished. I saw him only once since then, sometime around 1980 — in Northern California, where he worked as a photographer. Brilliant and original, he had all the qualities needed to make a fantastic speaker, and he and Billy Whitefoot did bring in a crowd!
OCT 1968 — Compleat Enchanter Hollywood Boulevard — A very tiny shop, but right on Hollywood Boulevard, with about 1,000 passers-by an hour! Only catch, no place for Darshan, so we rented Fiesta Hall at Plummer Park for our Movements Demonstrations and Sacred Talks, as advertised in the Free Press — that was the only outlet available at the time for such event announcements, unless you paid for a display ad in the Times or Herald-Examiner, which ran about $160 a column-inch per placement, which meant one-time cost if you paid for a month in advance, otherwise $320 for a one-time placement. Today, you post on facebook for free. The only catch is, so does everyone else.
JUN 1969 — FAM Saints’ Protest March — A staged “happening” art-event, what would today be called Theatrical Blogging, perhaps. The Pope had dropped 40 saints from the official calendar, and we showed up at the unemployment office the following day and registered as miracle-working saints looking for jobs. Naturally, we got coverage, CBS, NBC and ABC were there, and we did some 50 hours on television, hundreds more on radio, and generated something on the order of 1,000,000 words in print, including photo articles about the event in Time and Newsweek, plus a published dialogue with the Pope — well, actually with “the Vatican”, whatever that means.
SEP 1969 — MMM — Magical Mystery Museum, a copycat name after the success of the Beatles’ album, “Magical Mystery Tour”, opened with a bang, on the second floor of a famous Hollywood & Wilcox landmark building right next to the Mayfair Riding Academy & Tack Shop — and we closed down just a few weeks later with a flutter and a gasp. Lesson learned?
Nobody goes upstairs to see anything. They never did, and they never will. Just at this moment, however, good fortune smiled, and our band got booked on tour until May 26, 1969, when we returned to Norton Street from a long, dusty and very tiring musical gigging road show. Our last gig on that tour was the last for the band. We gave it up when disco started to rear its ugly head, ‘way back in ’69…there were already worm-signs in the sand.
JUN 1971 — RED HOUSE — Thanks to Chris Javor, the Cosmo Street Group, Group 1 it’s called today, was able to relocate to Red House, a 100 year old hunting lodge built by author Jack London. Red House easily accommodated 70 people. We needed all that room just for ourselves, and needed even more on weekend retreats! The staff of 50 or so manned the three bookstores, coffee shop, thrift shops (only 2 of them at first, one in the heart of Crestline, meaning between the other four shops, and the other located at Dart Canyon, one of our newer properties). There was a small chapel open 24 hours a day on Crestline Drive, a large meeting hall on the main corner, and “Shradda”, a large living space for students above the thrift shop.
DEC 1971 — NEW HOUSE was purchased, and at a weekend retreat, Jeff Green donated his famous Hollywood bookshop, and the group voted to close the shop there and move the books up to Crestline. I advised against it, saying it would be better to select the books from scratch and sell the shop intact, but was voted down. I only get one vote, true democracy. So we were stuck with 70,000 assorted books, mostly fiction, non-fiction and other. We rented the local bowling alley; the owner wanted the bowling things taken out, so we undertook the task, with a corresponding reduction in rent.
The next day we opened the bookstore, with all the books installed on shelves, not a trace of the former tenant’s bowling alley, and the required dump-runs and disposition of equipment all handled well by the group, under the leadership of Group One admins. The Legend of the Bowling Alley Conversion lives today, spoken with silent awe at hootnannies everywhere. Laugh if you will, but it classifies as at the very least a minor miracle of cooperation and selfless tasking.
JAN 1972 — EMERSON HOUSE was purchased, and at the same time, we brought in a builder to make the important additions to the house on the lower hillside, where the huge porch had been. We weren’t able to use the porch, due to the excessive number of Red Smog Alerts, at 5,100 feet of altitute! It got so bad that eventually we left, in 1975, but at the time, we needed more room to house the weekenders and retreat folks, so we bought this huge three-story “country inn” and ran it as a bed-and-breakfast, with our wonderful staff to cook the meals, all taken at NEW HOUSE, which was only three lots away from Emerson House.
Epitaph for an Ego was composed by myself and Brad Newsom at Red House, and performed at my friend Bob Levinson’s “Fidelity Studios”, where I had done the “Hey, Culligan Man” commercials with Bob years before.
FEB 1972 — SLEEPING SUFI — This was a weekend event at Red House. There’s lots of information about it, and a recording, “Enterview” was made at this time. The recording says it all, and includes a group effort, “Spiritual Olympics” which was recorded in the Sleeping Sufi chamber by the staff and friends from UCLA and USC study groups.
MAY 1972 — HOLLYWOOD ROOSEVELT HOTEL — When we were told by UCLA students that nobody was running the Cosmo Street groups anymore, I asked for volunteers to do this chore — we currently had five groups a week. Nobody raised a hand.
So Lana and I got in the car and drove down the hill.
Mata was now in charge of Red House and the Crestline operation, and I’d gone back to Hollywood to get the groups started again. Strange phenomenon: nobody wanted to run the L.A. groups when I lived and worked in Crestline and Blue Jay, but suddenly when I returned to L.A. to do workshops and lectures on “the circuit”, meaning the local colleges and universities where we had Off-Campus Group activities, everyone suddenly showed up in L.A.! Go figure.
JAN 1972 — I had some friends who imported copper and brass items from Turkey, Iran and thereabouts, mostly huge, elaborately hammered copper and brass “samovar” and the occasional “hookah”, none of which were in working condition; they were antiques and far more valuable with the patina left on, and unrepaired. Anyone can tell you that an antique loses value if it’s repaired, even expertly so.
Ken Paulson built the beautiful redwood Persian-style doorway, and Toni, Mary and Claudia helped run the shop. Claudia did belly-dancing in the common mall, and we got a lot of customers in the shop as a result. She was a terrific dancer, and she and Al Rose were the very first to demonstrate my movements to groups.
JUL 1972 — On the weekend of July 4th, 1972, we took up residence and work at the Cherokee Office on Hollywood Boulevard, where we ran “Toad Records” and I recorded some old friends, Acid-Queen “Natasha”, and MoTown refugee Ruby Stoner, on my tandem 4-tracks with the state-of-the-art Langevin Mix Board. The Stoner tracks have since vanished, but the Natasha album, “Unicorn” managed to survive. I haven’t released it, pending locating her again for her permissions and, yes, I know the options, but I’m still hoping she’ll get in contact.
It was in July that we gave up the office and went on a motorbiking expedition across California. Returning to L.A. to connect with Joe and Rue Barron, our group leaders at that time — and also managers of a very famous rock group — we were contacted by Ray Walker and Sarah Warsher, who had been sent by Fritz Perls to find me and ask me to come to help him direct Cowichan in British Columbia. There were so many politics in that environment that it’s now impossible to sort out the facts.
I did end up directing the Cowichan Centre for Gestalt Learning in Duncan, B.C. and Vancouver; there were a lot of famous Gestalt and Primal people there, it’s true, but it wasn’t anything to do with me. I was there, fulfilling a promise to Fritz.
JAN 1973 — TRIUMPHANT RETURN — The Institute was technically bankrupt — The Crestline group had somehow failed to pay the mortgage for quite some time, and the electric, phone and gas services had already been turned off long ago. We were in British Columbia that year, and had known nothing of these troubles.
On our return, we bailed the Institute out, paid off the balance dues and put Peggy Smith in charge of finances; things ran beautifully, and it was once again time to expand our services and horizons. Thanks to many generous donations on a single Sunday, we opened the Kung-Fu Restaurant in Blue Jay, just a few miles from Crestline, in a very highly populated upwardly-mobile resort community on the way to Big Bear, a major ski resort.
We did well, under the directorship of Ellen Tisdale and with the enormous untiring help of Paco Ramirez.
MAR 1973 — RCA LIVE — It was at this time that we went to RCA to record the group, which had been practicing music for a month, to see if a rock group could really form overnight. These were, of course, all non-musicians who merely thought it might be fun.
One grueling month later, they were ready to record, in my opinion. My friend Al Schmidt and his legendary engineering brother Richie Schmidt, did the production at RCA studios in Studio B, a large and sumptuously equipped professional major-label studio.
Richie did the mastering, which has since been re-done by the equally legendary Oz Fritz. The album is called “Live at RCA” and we were lucky enough to have several uncredited musicans in the session with the noobies, including Jerry Jumonville, Jerry Garcia and a few others. We couldn’t credit them — it was a non-union session.
Of course, it sounds raucous and raw, because they had no experience in a studio, and it wasn’t intended for release. Nowadays, you can record yourself and hear how you sound, but then, you couldn’t. You had to go to a studio, and since I worked at RCA as a producer, I had access to the space, and RCA made us happy, a lot happier than my friend Harry Nilsson. His RCA experience was not so pleasant, but he tells the story better — I’ll post a video of our discussion on youtube at some point when I have a bit of time to hunt it down.
MAY 1973 — BLUEBELL — Now begins one of the weirdest periods of School History; the Bluebell Saga. I’ll tell it briefly: The group rented an enormous 7 bedroom house on Bluebell Avenue, Encino — the Beverly Hills of San Fernando Valley, if such a thing is possible.
The family who rented it said it would be okay to put in a garden in the back; they’d intended to do that someday, and thought it might be fun. It wasn’t. Grueling heat and lack of humidity makes growing anything other than citrus and artichokes almost impossible without serious impingement upon the local water system and, you’ll recall, there was a drought in California.
We raised stuff anyhow, somehow getting enough water to the garden at the expense of the putting-green short-cropped bluegrass lawn out front.
When I saw the facility, it presented an opportunity to try something I’d been wanting to try for some time…isolation training, apart from the Lilly Floatation Tanks that we’d been using in our floatation centre in Crestline.
What this entailed was sort of a monastic retreat building — seven bedrooms did just fine, connected only by a multiple-channel television security system through which they could communicate with each other and the staff.
It was very well run — there are many photos of Lin Larsen teaching the basics and the huge group posing for photos. Nobody actually lived there — Lana and I were installed in a small apartment in Burbank, nearby, and folks lived in various spots around the area.
The Shakti Centre was close, also — it was on the corner of Ventura and Laurel Canyon. You couldn’t get a better location, and the place was jammed every day, with people taking Shakti! Movements Training and T’ai Ch’i from our high-level instructors; we’re now teaching the same things online at the Virtual Ashram.
JUN 1973 — CAMP MOZUMDAR — Mata and I posed for photos on this memorable day at Camp Mozumdar, which we were allowed to use for group retreats and such; Ange Abels and Ken Paulson made videos of Lin Larsen and the group in general there, and some of that footage survives today. We made several video films at that time, and they can be ordered. They are quite vintage, made with a professional news-gathering camera and recorder of the period. The image is jittery from time to time, and there are many glitches, but it is interesting footage.
AUG 1973 — NEW HOUSE — New House was fully purchased at this time, and we redecorated by painting the raw wood as the interior of a space-ship. At the time, it really seemed like a good idea. We restored it the next month. Note to Self: Don’t Ever Do That Again. New House was enormous, and we had many group meetings there. On one memorable weekend, we hosted 315 people there with groups from Beshara and SAT — naturally, Reshad and Claudio were there!!!
OCT 1973 — BURBANK — Lana and I hosted a group from the Shakti Centre, and we organized a number of activities, including the first Bunraku performance. It was decided to find a retreat center in Los Angeles.
AUG 1974 — ALEXANDRIA HOUSE — Finally, we concluded negotiations on Alexandria House, in the Wilshire District, a very beautiful area, right near Reshad’s new centre, by “sheer coincidence”, only two short blocks away! We helped Reshad organize a number of Jamiyats, held at our old haunts, Fiesta Hall at Plummer Park in West L.A..
It was at this time that I did “double-bills”, appearances with a number of friends, notably Reshad Feild, Claudio Naranjo, Tarthang Tulku Rinpoche, Chogyam Trungpa, Venerable Thich Thien-An and many others. This starts my public phase, and I spend several hundred hours on radio and television, with Barbara Birdfeather, Julie Russo, and my special wondrous friend, Amanda Foulger, who tolerated my 10 minute radio mime routine on KPFK. There’s never been another broadcaster like her.
Amanda Foulger, KPFK circa 1974, photo by EJ Gold.
MAY 1975 — SALE OF RED HOUSE — We moved to our present location; Red House was sold in a bidding war between three buyers, Kung-Fu was sold and became Kathy’s Country Kitchen, a vastly more successful enterprise as a grease-joint than as a health-food restaurant, although we had done very well there. But nothing beats hot, rancid bacon-fat.
Well, that concludes the content of the “lost letter”. Hope you enjoyed the little romp through history.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby