The art of yours truly on display, including a few from the Main Stem Project. Please come to the opening if you can!
Here are some posts from the past that I thought were worth looking at again. New content in September, I promise.
Since starting in July 2014, the Springs Museum has launched 145 posts!
and a few digressions
Farrell’s Resort existed on land near the corner of Siesta Way and Sonoma Highway, between the years 1945 and 1958. A county court photograph from that year shows the resorts sign on the highway. An Index Tribune story in 1959 about a barn fire on the property mentioned “the pioneer Ferrell’s Resort property,” which implies, to me, it didn’t exist in 1959, as the barn was being burned by the fire department for training.
This photo is an exhibit from a lawsuit involving a traffic accident in 1958, courtesy of the Sonoma County Library. Difficult to see, at left, below the Richfield sign, half obscured by a power pole (!) is a sign advertising Farrell’s Resort. Thomson Ave (not East Thomson!) is at left. Across the highway is Baker’s Drive-In, current site of the Fruit Basket.
The property behind the Arroyo Vet building continued as a trailer park until 2020 when affordable developer Milestone Housing (https://milestonehousing.com/projects/) bought the land. In 2022 they started construction on a 92 unit apartment complex intended for senior households that have incomes in the 30 to 60 per cent of area median income. In May of 2023 construction is ongoing. See photos below.
In 1977, on part of the Farrell’s site facing the highway, Stan Goldsmith built a commercial building to house his Mark’s Sporting Goods. Goldsmith owned the whole property and told the Index Tribune that “…future plans at the 1.5 acre site include similar buildings housing quality small shops and possibly a patio restaurant.”
Goldsmith had founded a successful chain of sporting goods stores, located throughout California, which he sold before moving to Boyes Hot Springs. According to some of his ad copy, “In 1954 Stan Goldsmith revolutionized the retail sporting goods business by building the largest sport store in northern California (10,000 sq ft.) and becoming the first to combine active sportswear with sports equipment…Stan Goldsmith founded the Marin Skin Divers Club, the Northwoods Bowmen’s Club and designed the first nylon covered sleeping bag. Stan’s and the first air compressor to fill dive tanks in Northern California.” Index Tribune advertisement, 1979.
Mark’s Sporting Goods in Boyes Hot Springs, named after Stan’s son, opened in 1977. It was the second Mark’s. the first one was in Grass Valley, in an identical building.
Tragically, Stan was killed in the crash of his private plane in 1982. His widow sold and the store continued operating until 1990, when Doug McKesson bought the building, but not the entire parcel, to house his Goodtime Bicycle Company. McKesson sold to Dr. Rhonda Stallings and Rich Lee in 2000. A major remodel was necessary to convert the space. The new Arroyo veterinary Hospital opened in 2001.
1990s
2023
Appropriate, whimsical rafter-tails were added during the conversion to an animal hospital.
Digression the First: The original Arroyo Vet Hospital was started by Dr. Hansen 1979, in a building on Sonoma Highway at Arroyo Rd, which was probably built in the 1920s, and had housed various businesses including Becker’s Real Estate Agency. Dr. Rhonda Stallings took over from Dr. Hansen in 1997, the same year your correspondent moved into a house just a block up Arroyo Road. Imagine our sense of security knowing we could WALK our sick cat to the vet’s office. And thank you to Rhonda for saving Ralph’s life.
1950s
Digression the Second: The photo below shows a streetlight proposed for the Redevelopment sidewalk project. This was offered by landscape architect Ron Wellander and installed in 1997. The design was not used. It stands today, in 2023, lonely, unlit.
The first hearings for the sidewalk project were held in 1984. The initial pilot project was completed in 2002. The entire project, two miles of sidewalks and streetlights, was finished (except for one very irritating and dangerous gap) in 2016. Thirty. two. years.
I can’t resist sharing this text from a Coldwell Banker website. The addresses represent the apartment site.
Please stay tuned to the Springs Museum. We aim to bring you all the best in local lore!
Thanks to Rich Lee and Doug McKesson for their memories
Index Tribune courtesy of the Sonoma Valley Historical Society
Zan postcard courtesy of Stanford University Library, Special Collections
According to Mrs. Mary Farrell’s obituary in the Index Tribune in January of 1956, her resort was “part of the former Appleton ranch.” Before Appleton, a certain ”Mrs. Loud came to California in 1864…Her husband was Alfred C. Loud, who settled on what was afterward the Appleton ranch.” Index Tribune of Jan 14,1922 obit of Mrs. Loud.
In the 1975 obituary for Appleton’s daughter, the renowned Carrie Burlingame, Horatio Appleton established his ranch “in the Springs area in 1865.” He was “a pioneer vineyardist and a descendant of the Greenleaf and Adams families of New England.” He was instrumental in identifying the Phylloxera louse that decimated American vineyards in the 19th century.
Appleton appears as a property owner on the Reynolds and Proctor maps of 1877 (65 acres) and 1889 (160 acres). (See below). According to the Index Tribune, in 1888: “Several new town sites have been laid out and surveyed in this valley the past few months…Verano is …another new town site which has lately been laid off on the Appleton and Burns places…” (see Boyes abstract map). Parts of the town of Verano (not El Verano), were later owned by Nathan Cantor and Selig Rosenthal. Some of this became the Acacia Grove mobile home park with a carve-out for the Grange in 1934. Read more about Rosenthal, et al, here.
in 1877 Horatio Appleton published a plat of a cemetery on part of his land. (see below)
Thanks to the Sonoma Valley Historical Society, for everything, really, and to the Rumsey Map Collection.
Art is in the name of this Museum, and after all these years of existence, here is the first post about a specific artist. Sadly, it is occasioned by his passing.
Patrick McMurtry. 1947-2021
Gael del Mar (a perfectly beautiful name), was Patrick’s life-mate.I knew Gael first. We met at the Red Barn Store at Oak Hill Farm. Somehow we started talking about Frank Zappa (she must have had his music on the sound system.) “You like Zappa? she asked. “I have someone you should meet.” And so she introduced me to Patrick. Nearly every time we would see each other, we would talk Zappa and Beefheart. He was also interested in Sonny Barger, the Hell’s Angels front man. He loaned me a book Barger wrote, which led me to watch a lot of motorcycle exploitation movies, which are really great fun. Patrick had many great stories about the days of the Hells Angels and other rowdies in Sonoma Valley, which is where the Sonny Barger thing came from.
I walk around the neighborhood a lot and would often walk down Orchard Street hoping to see the garage door of Patrick’s studio open. It wasn’t a big garage, and it was packed with art, but he had a space carved out to work in. Then he and Gael moved over to 4th Avenue, which was even closer to our house. Again, I’d walk by and frequently encounter Patrick in front of their place. Long conversations would ensue. His last studio was out at the Art Farm on Grove Street. I visited him there in 2019, hung out talking, and bought a small painting (below).
In 2009 Jonah Raskin published “Field Days,” subtitled “A Year of Farming, Eating, and Drinking Wine in California.” The author spent that year hanging out at Oak Hill Farm, just up the road from Boyes Hot Springs. Patrick figures prominently in the book.
Jonah writes:
“Patrick McMurtry was not the first person I met at Oak Hill. Nor was he the oldest person living on the property. But he had lived there longer than anyone else-longer even than Anne Teller-and so I will let Patrick be the first Oak Hill resident to speak in this book. Anne dubbed him “the historian of Oak Hill,” and rightly so. Equipped with a good memory Patrick also appreciated facts and the sweep of events. Like most good historian, he had a knack for telling stories vividly. To go by his enthusiasm, body language, and facial expressions, he might have been talking about events as momentous and the American revolution of the civil War..” {I can certainly vouch for Patrick’s ability to tell stories vividly!}
“Of course, Patrick’s ancestors had come from Europe, and they belonged to that generation of early pioneers who put their stamp on California. They farmed, raised chickens, and cattle, grew grapes, and cut down trees, milled them, and sold the lumber”
“’My father worked for Shell Oil, and my mother worked at the high school,’ Patrick said. ‘They became party animals and alcoholics, but a great-aunt who had a farm in Paradise, California, continued the family tradition, and learned about agriculture from her.’”
“Born in 1947, Patrick watched the rural world vanish. In the 1950s, he witnessed the strange transformations of the American society of the post-World War II period, which forever changed the ways people worked and played, ate, drank, entertained, and existed.”
“Patrick graduated from high school and college and went the way of many a young man of his generation. He lived in a commune, grew marijuana, and protested against the war in Viet nam. ‘Those were trippy times’ he said. ‘There was Elvis, the Beatles, the hippies, and Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book, which I actually went out and bought.’ Patrick laughed as though it was yesterday and he could still smell the pot and feel the passion of that time. The 1960s had arrived with a roar and changed the cultural landscape of the Valley of the Moon. ‘It was wild,’ Patrick said. ‘The Hells Angels congregated here; and up on Sonoma Mountain, Alex Horn a follow of the Armenian-born mystic G.I. Gurdjieff, had a farm. Hippies moved up there; Horn took their money and put them to work, which is pretty funny.’”
From the June 20, 1984 Index Tribune article by Rhonda Parks:
In his studio hidden deep in the woods, Patrick McMurtry creates paintings inspired by a vivid imagination, like what a person alone is apt to see hiding in shadowed cubbys deep in the brush.
Peeking from his paintings are nocturnal trolls modeled after the folks he sees walking out of bars at night in Boyes Hot Springs. Patrick does a lot of walking and sometimes sees things like that.
He’s a bit mischievous, with a playful nature expressed as much in the “real world” as in his fantasy-inspired artworks.
The artist says…that his paintings reflect what it is like “going in a strange land for a while.”
While he’s painting, you might say that’s where his is-immersed in a strange land. But while some of his paintings are haunted with elusive characters, other depict life in a whimsical cartoon world. (These works ought to be accompanied by some of avant-garde singer Frank Zappa’s tunes, the artist says.)
In April 1981, Patrick showed at Composite Gallery.
When he retired from the Sonoma Developmental Center he got a pick up truck. The bumper sticker he put on the back seemed to perfectly express Patrick’s outlook.
In the photos below you see some of Patrick’s phantasmagorical works, which are truly unique.
These two videos about Patrick are available on Youtube:
Patrick McMurtry was a highly original artist, a great friend, and a valued member of the Springs community. We miss him a lot.
Index Tribune courtesy of the Sonoma Valley Historical Society
Passages from Field Days used by permission of author
On October 17, 1989, I was sitting in my studio in the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco, listening to the start of the World Series game taking place about a mile away at Candlestick Park. What came to be known as the Loma Prieta earthquake struck around 5pm. I ran outside, just what you are NOT supposed to do, to see and feel the ground jumping up and down like I was on a trampoline. As the concrete building next door developed an alarming crack, I heard someone say “como Ciudad Mexico.” I rushed home to Potrero Hill to find the only damage at our place was three broken wine glasses. Fortunately we had more glasses and a supply of wine.
In December of that year, I was working for a contractor in San Francisco. He got the job of putting a damaged building at 280 Shipley Street, in the South of Market neighborhood, on a new foundation. Shipley runs from 3rd St. to 6th St. between Harrison and Folsom. Built in 1906, it was a two story place with four flats in it.
It was a dark and dreary fall and winter in the City. Everything seemed beaten down by the disaster. I had paid a brief visit to Tijuana the year before and I was struck by the polluted air and grime of the Avenida de la Revolution (I’m sure it’s very different now). Mission Street had that feeling to me in December of 1989. Yet I was full of energy and optimism. I had just finished my MFA at San Francisco State and I was beyond excited about making sculpture and having a brilliant career.
At first, the contractor, Dan, put me in the fallen building to erect some bracing to protect against further damage from after shocks. It was freaky being inside it. Everything leaned like the buildings at Confusion Hill, the venerable tourist trap in far northern California.
https://www.confusionhill.com/pictures
That part of SOMA is built on bay fill, and the streets were bulk-headed and raised (like Pioneer Square in Seattle was in the 1880s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground) after the 1906 quake. Because of that, they all had basements, which used to be at street level, and half submerged doors and windows.
I was poking around down there and found some artifacts belonging to a Leslie M.
Some facts about Leslie M.
On Sunday, February 4, 1989, at 12:27AM, Leslie M. was booked for an alleged crime committed at 507 Cole, San Francisco. He was 18 years old at the time. Charges are listed as N/W 11377 H&S, and 11357b H&S.
He was working at a welding shop in SOMA in 1989.
In 1987 his Grandma wrote him from Wyoming expressing her confidence in his abilities.
Sometime between 1985 and 1987, he was arrested in Casper Wy. as part of a meth operation.
Inside the covers of a small address book he wrote the following:
“Party hardy Rock-n-Roll
Drink a fifth and smoke a bowl
Take a toke and make it last
Hope to hell it kicks your ass.
’88 Rules”
and
“what the fuck you doing reading my book asshole.”
and
“Fuck off bitch”
and
“Heavy Metal Rules AC & DC”
After initial bracing, the building was raised using hydraulic jacks and put on cribbing.
The building was raised and the cribbing placed by a house mover who lived in a compound out by Candlestick Point with a lot of dogs. His face was crisscrossed with scars from the explosion of one of his hydraulic lines, he told us. I only met him once, and that was probably enough.
Peter, the other carpenter, and I and some laborers worked digging out the basement by hand and with a jack hammer. The underside of the building was about ten feet over our heads. Freaky, when aftershocks hit. The design was to put a full height basement under it.
The ground was mostly sand, but when you got down a ways we hit jumbled brick that was dumped there after the ’06 quake. We found a lot of ceramic shards, pieces of glass, and other objects.
We eventually dug down to the little creek that still flowed under that part of SOMA. (Apparently part of Hayes Creek, which flows into Mission Creek.)
As we dug, we filled five gallon buckets with sand and debris, carried them to the front wall, boosted them up to the sidewalk level, and then into a dumpster. Eventually, through some of the hardest physical labor I’ve ever done, we got it excavated and filled with crushed rock, compacted, and concrete forms set. I used a builder’s level (for the first time) to level the forms.
Shipley really is an alley, and the back doors of buildings open on to it. Some of these buildings were full of women working at sewing machines. Clouds of industrial fragrance billowed out.
Every day at lunch time I would walk down Shipley to 5th and go to Harvey’s Café. Harvey’s was a famous hangout for bike messengers. Harvey Woo would loan them money or give them credit so they could eat when without funds. He had a big board behind his counter where he kept slips of paper with each person’s account.
Leslie Guttman, SF Chronicle, September 10, 1989: (Quake: October 17)
“It is Friday night. And, like the rest of San Francisco’s workers, the bike messengers head to their hangout, a grimy South of Market alley off Fifth Street, where their paychecks are cashed by their guardian angel and their dreams of the future have a brilliance that only a Friday night can bring. At least a couple hundred of the city’s approximately 400 bike messengers swarm, like bees to a hive, to Shipley alley, a narrow corridor between Folsom and Harrison streets, to let off steam after a week of dodging double- parked trucks, cars barreling through yellow lights and jay-walking office workers, their faces buried in their watches. Here, next to the alley, lives the man they call the Patron Saint of the Bike Messengers. Harvey Woo is the 49-year-old owner of Harvey’s Place, a little grocery store/lunch counter. In an era of bland chain superstores, Harvey’s is a relic: a first-names-only, family-run joint. As they say in the alley, “If you’re about to starve, you go to Harv.”
A dispatch from 2008 via Yelp:
The condos and other new buildings have proliferated on Shipley and all over the City, particularly South of Market, but a few of us remember Harvey’s.
Michael Acker, april 2021
Note: An earlier version of this was password protected because I wanted to address my family directly. This version should make more sense to the general reader.
Years ago my father, Marty, gave me a copy of a photograph of the Acker/Samuel(Weissbuch) family, assembled in Manchester, UK around 1900. I don’t know if he knew more about the photo, but he never gave me any details. The family had migrated from Rumania not long before. The group is photographed in front of and hemmed in by, brick walls, in tiers, with a gaggle of kids sitting in the front row. I have been going through folders of family photos lately, (partly so the younger members of my family won’t have to do it some day). I came across a copy of the photograph.
Now, in this family was a boy who would become a well-known writer, a Zionist thinker, and something of a radio personality in the U.S. His name was Maurice Samuel (my father’s first cousin. He was a hero to Marty in his youth, and I remember hearing him talk with poet Mark Van Doren on national radio. This conversation, the subject of which was the Old Testament, went on weekly in the summer for twenty years! They were also on TV.)
In 1963 Maurice published a memoir entitled Little Did I Know, the first sentence of which reads
“Among the people who rise out of my past to claim first mention in this book, my uncle Berel is the most persistent.”
Berel Acker was my great-grandfather.
I have had Maurice’s book (my father’s copy) by my reading chair for months and I dip into it now and then. I started reading, on page 72, a few days ago, this: “My mother’s family came to Manchester in full force, part of it moving on, as I have told, to America. I have a group photograph taken in 1902, in the squalid backyard of 5 Norfolk Street, on the occasion of my aunt Chaya’s wedding, which was celebrated in our upstairs front room. Uncle Berel is in it, billycock set jauntily on his head, a cigarette dangling from his lips. I am there with my twin sister Dora, in the front row, seated on the ground, and into my face only a Wordsworth could have read trailing clouds of glory…”
An amazing coincidence that I found the photo I read about in Maurice’s book just a few days later, giving me a lot more detail and a certain flavor.
Marty wrote on the back of the small copy I found that the little boy at the extreme left is his father, my grandfather Isaac.
In 1995 Marty and I visited the English relatives. In cousin Harry Rothman’s living room was a large version of the photo.
Maurice’s depiction of Berel agrees with everything I was told by my father. Berel was the man of the world, the “cool grandfather.” Marty’s other grandfather, who was named Katz, was so religious that he established his own synagogue and became its rabbi. Kids of Marty’s generation would say “when the Katz away, the mice will play.”
It’s gratifying to have little bits of family history come together like this.
We found our friend Dick Dawley out in front of his house on Vallejo St., building a fence. Dick is 85 years old and he’s lived in Boyes Hot Springs for forty nine years. Many people know Dick from the twentyeight years he worked at Parson’s Hardware.
Dick’s fence, which he built from redwood 1x12s milled from logs salvaged from the 2017 fires.
I used to have this recurring dream. I would find myself in a little corner store, in some unidentified city, maybe San Francisco. The place would have been lost in time. Inside was a glass case and inside the case was a marvelous collection of old fireworks with fantastic labels, for sale.
The dream came true, in a way, when, in the late 1980s, we stumbled across a strange little shop on Judah Street. We walked in, for what reason I don’t remember, and there we found Rudy Cipolla. The shop did have a glass case with musty, interesting old things in it. Among those was a box of caps for a toy gun, a firework of a sort, which I bought. The label said “72 Big Shots.”
The proprietor of the shop introduced himself as Rudy Cipolla, and in a few minutes our acquaintance had progressed to the point that he started to tell us that his name meant “Onion” in Italian, and that he was related to John Cipollina, the lead guitarist for the Quick Silver Messenger Service, a famous 60s band. He also told us he played the mandolin and that he was a composer. Then he gave us an autographed cassette tape of a piece he’d written entitled “La Civetta” (The Flirt, in Italian.)
We wandered out and into a gray fall day in the Inner Sunset district, never to see Rudy again, but I never forgot the literally dream-like encounter.
Later, I learned that the shop was called the Book Nook, and that Rudy Cipolla was revered by local musicians, mandolin players especially. David Grisman counted him as an influence and friend, and indeed, he was a very prolific composer.
Rudy died in 2000 at the age of 99.
Photographs courtesy of Owen Hartford
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