A Note on my Writing Lifted by Other Websites

I sometimes stumble upon bits of my blog posts on other websites, with no credit. If I can find a link, I will write to the offender, and usually they'll make a link back to my site, etc. But there are some websites where there is no way to reach out to the plagiarist.

One Hollywood-type, a reality TV producer's assistant, Tinsley, lifted my massive post on Chilean miners, and posted the entire piece on her Tumblr blog (all gone now), apparently, because she was "very liberal," she was also very liberal with my post.

Many of my enraged friends bombarded Tinsley's site, and she took it down. I called it my Tinsleygate. I wouldn't have cared if she had at least asked me, published a portion of it with quotes, then made an obvious link back to my blog. But she didn't do that. She was getting all the traffic and kudus as if she had written it. Thing is, I was still revising it (I revise a lot), when she snagged one iteration of it...

Tinsley later apologised, see her letter at the bottom of my Chilean Miners post. She back-pedalled a bit, to say the least. Rather than just use bits of my piece, or give me credit, she took it down. I guess we took her down when she realized the legal implications between the concept of "fair use," and copyright infringement.

Borrowing a few lines is considered to be fair use (for educational purposes only) under the copyright act.

Someone also lifted my Black Bart story, but a few emails later, it was resolved nicely...a Dutch fellow interested in old firearms, used my story to illustrate his antique gun collection. Turns out he just really, really liked my story.

black bart - Dutch Gunswww.dutchguns.com/black%20bart.htm‎ Het origineel is te vinden op http://mohurley.blogspot.com/2009/09/black-bart. html. This article is not mine, but found on the internet. It is written by Maureen ...

1. Another nefarious sort lifted my entire interview and photo of Jim Dodge, then posted it on his own blog, zoran rosko vacuum player with no link or mention. Grrr. I guess the word vacuum explains it all. I was able to leave a comment:

   Maureen Hurley7/29/11, 5:19 AM If you're going to lift my entire blog post and repost it here, please at least use my name and offer a back link to it. BTW, you're also breaking copyright.
   Maureen Hurley   http://mohurley.blogspot.com/2009/09/jim-dodge.html

At the time, I thought there was no legal recourse for me. I've never resorted to legal means, but in each case, no one was actually making money off my pieces. To be fair, Zoran Rosco did remove my photo, and credited my work to a literary blog I belonged to, RedRoom, as the author. But not to me.

However, if you find your work appearing on other sites, do check out this helpful post from the National Writers' Union, Are Websites Stealing Your Work? There are some great links at the bottom of the post. (And see my links at the bottom of the page.)

An architectural magazine in Australia followed proper blog etiquette when they ran one of my blog pieces, but they contacted me first and asked permission. (Can't find the link.)

A couple of blokes delving into brewing a heady quaff, did source me (not sure why!) for my bit on St. Patrick & Annals of the Four Masters. Cheers! I'll drink to that. Moor: Dining and Dwelling Part 4

This particular link is more of a tribute, than a theft, but it's done right. A synopsis, and a link back to me.  The Hall of Heorot:  Literrata: Olaf the Peacock's Irish Mother Which, in turn, was a reblog from Ireland's Eye on Myth, from Nov. 30, 2013. And also in Fuck Yeah Vikings and Celts! (But I couldn't find the post. OK, so I'm a little late to the party.... three years later. I't not like I have a huge following,  "This domain listed #3 054 178 number in the world.")

Maybe I should Google myself more often than once every five years. I also found this BOOK! entry on my Tiki Junction piece. It looks like a bibliography.

The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice - Google Books Result
https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1439177406Vanessa M. Gezari - ‎2014 - History
See also Price, “Barney West Famous for Tricky Tikis,” and “Tiki Junction, Sausalito,” http://mohurley.blogspot.com/2007/03/tiki-junction-sausalito.html, accessed ...

1. cassidyslangscam paid somewhat of a sideways backhanded tribute to me as well, in that he quotes bits of my blog, but didn't like Danny Cassidy (or my blog) all that much. "So, while there are things I dislike about the blog, she is displaying an admirable amount of integrity here and drawing a clear line between the man and his crazy theories. Unfortunately, this kind of integrity is rare."
2. And yes, my photos are stolen as well; But most people do attribute them to me. Until I began to Google my name, I never even knew about this one from Bird & Beckett, a great indie bookstore in SSF, and I've read there... and I do love that photo of HD Moe, RIP.

1. "A footnote: The photo of H. D. Moe above is from Maureen Hurley’s blog (is she perhaps the photographer as well?) athttp://mohurley.blogspot.com/2009/09/black-bart-rides-again.html. There, you’ll find a wonderful account with stunning images from the Black Bart Poetry Festival held at the On Broadway Theatre in North Beach in 1983, with Dave Moe in attendance, among a cast of luminaries that will make you regret ever missing a promising gathering of bards. The post begins with the well-told tale of Black Bart, himself, “California’s first and most notorious stagecoach robber poet” and quotes a commentator who noted that “whatever Black Bart lacked as a rhymer, he sure made up for as a robber.” If you think poetry is a crime, you’re not alone! But crime pays, just like poetry, no? Bring a dollar or two for the poets!" 

I'm less happy about the outright theft of a Brownie Mary photo on a YouTube book review,, but my blog was given credit: The Long MANGLED MESSY MALIGNED Life of MARIJUANA. And it doesn't have a huge following (218 views in one year... So I'll wait and see,)

1. I know I've pissed a few people off with my post calling Arby's dancing chimps ad racist and offensive, and also my Viking Redhead post ruffled a few feathers....many divergent threads there. But enough of this obsession, I'm onto page 5 of Google results and am cross-eyed and growing weary...a lot of spammy, bogus sites replete with the red herring siren call of seeing my handle mohurley.blogspot in print, merely as bizarre spam filler.
   
   Of course this search process only works if my name's attached to my work. There's probably a lot more of my work out there with no credit at all. Not much I can do about that. Except use unique search lines for each post, and at 1500-plus posts, I don't see that happening any time soon.
   
   That's how I stumbled upon my stolen Jim Dodge post, a unique line handle led me to a post where the writing seemed strangely familiar. Which led to that moment of epiphany: hey wait! I wrote that! The irony is, If I wait too much longer I won't remember that I wrote it anyway.
   
   Ultimately, leaving my post up on the vacuum cleaner's blog site benefits my friend, writer Jim Dodge, so I did not invoke legal aid on that blatant post theft. I took screenshots of it, 11 of them, just in case....
   
   So it boils down to this, if you write, you have a few options, leave your writing under lock and key, mouldering in a drawer, while submitting some of it in small sequential batches in the hopes that someone will eventually use it in a print journal, or you can electronically publish your work, whether with self-publishing in a blog, or with electronic magazines. (And that still won't stop people from lifting your work.)
   
   

   Writing is a compulsion, I have to write, I don't seem to have much control over what I write, so write, I must. That's how I learn, how I comprehend the world around me.  I never set out to write about a given subject. It's an organic process, with no tangible beginning, middle, or end.

   
   

   I guess the question begs, who do you write for, yourself, or for others, in the hopes that someone will read your work, and perhaps be moved by it? I do know that by publishing my writing here, such as it is, it forces me to rewrite and to work much harder at my sullied craft, than if it was strictly a private affair. It ups my game considerably. Ah, exposure, exposure, exposure is everything. I'm not sure theft is the most obvious form of flattery.
   
   

   
   

Tiki Totems

It begins as one tiny memory, and suddenly I am remembering sheaves of information. In the early 1960s, Barney West was carving a totem with a chainsaw, me sitting in the white convertible watching him work as my mom met up with some friends at one of the Sausalito houseboats. The day was harsh and Barney, dressed in shorts, and little else, was swarthy, sweat rolling off his back. She must've told him to keep an eye on me because he was cranky. He bristled. Wouldn't even talk to me. So, I sat there in the car, silent, and watched monsters unfold from the trunks of redwood trees. They glared menacingly from the shadows. Followed me home in sleep.

On teaching Poetry to Kids

This has been one horrendous countdown week, finishing up my poetry residency. Funding wasn't what it should have been this year and we only had 5 sessions total (including layout and art) to get a decent poem ready for our annual poetry book. That's 4 writing dates. Normally I have 6-7 sessions per grade.

In addition, the 5th grade had low writing skills. Low skills across the board, I'd say. Take ESL RSP, or At Risk populations, and a whopping 60% fit the profile. By comparison, the 3rd graders (their profile is just under 50%) are writing the socks off them.

It took me a full day to read some 70 students' work, comment on it, in some cases, wrestle a poem from their prose, and type up the best examples for the poetry book. (Their own published work becomes the model for more writing.) Normally, I type 8-12 model poems up each time, but if a class has weak writing skills, then the final day becomes a crunch day to squeeze everybody in—even if it's only a line or two—as I need to have a poem typed for each student in order to do a final editing session with them.

This year I have several new students from Cloverdale and places north. So I get to see first hand how much my returning students have retained over the years, as these incoming kids are entirely new to poetry. I asked them to do a prewrite and to tell me what they thought poetry was, what they thought about it, and if they liked it.

Generally speaking, boys will say they don't like poetry, and one 4th grader wrote he thought it was a waste of time. Let the Games begin. By Day 4 I had him fully invested in the power of the written word, he came up to me yesterday and saying poetry was neat and he really liked it. Pretty much ditto for the rest of the new students.

It's a long road to metaphor, let alone simile, and figurative language doesn't come easy to the students who've never been given the opportunity to do creative writing. Sure, there are great attempts at storywriting, something they've been rewarded for in the past, but it falls short of poetry by its excess of filler language.

Sure, students have learned about adverbs and adjectives, but not about strong verbs and nouns. Or junk food words that take up space but tell us nothing. So they litter their ideas with flabby prose and sometimes by the time we scrub away all the flotsam and detritus of language, there's a skeleton so scrawny, it won't sustain the bones of a poem.

How to teach fresh imagery remains central to my workshops. Some of these kids are so literal (as in factual reportage) they don't even get clichés or puns, let alone, figurative language. God forbid that I should ask them to use comparisons: simile and metaphor. They've never had to use their imaginations, and it's like a rusty tool left out in the rain.

We are a nation of passive consumers, whether it's via TV, Wii, video games or films. I should be thankful that my students are reading books. At least they're reading. But writing is a whole other ball game.

I tell my students to reread what they've written and to cross out all words they don't need. Put their poems on a diet. Toss out 10-20 words. Now look for weak verbs and nouns. Build strong images, use comparisons. We freewrite, we write the day's poetry lesson, and next class we edit the typed poems.

At residency's end, each student has a typed poem, edited and workshopped, ready for the book. It's a lot of extra work on my part to read poems, comment on them, type up 7-10 of the strongest poems each week, but by residency's end, I've got most of the poems ready for the poetry book.

Most students love poetry, one 3rd grader said she wished every day was Poetry Day. And of that 5th grade, I definitely was in a battle zone with one extremely recalcitrant and onerous student. Though he can write well when he chooses to, and I've eked good work from him last year (he was new), he's decided that everything in school is for shyte—especially poetry. So it's become a battle of wills. When he's out of line, I write his name up on the board, ask the teacher to deal with his behavior, and move on. Don't let it spoil my flow.

One rotten apple. The problem is in role model. I need to keep all the other boys engaged, and I did, but it was tougher than it should be. Sometimes the chemistry of the class is such, that you tend to overlook the good stuff. The girls who write their hearts out. The boys, invested in language, who write of dragons and dungeons and the dark side. Not my favorite but at least they're writing sci-fi.

I wish I could get the boys to make fabulous sports poems. Things from their lives. We talk skateboards and baseball and golf; they love to shout the terms, but bottom line, they can't seem to render it into poetry—even on opening day of baseball. They need to ride the coattails of fiction to allow them to enter into the poetic realm.

And that's my job as a writer, to offer them my coattails so that they can apprentice with me, and write fabulously every time. And ride the coattails of their own experience into poetry, not just parrot back something they read somewhere in a book or saw on TV.

All this to say, I'm now days behind on my own poem a day as it was so challenging to get the kids to write, there was no time left for me in class to write, and when I got home, and finished with their poems, I was too tired to write. I did write and drive one morning, but that's risky and Monday was far too stormy to risk multitasking at 70 MPH barreling up Highway 101 in the rain. Besides, I'm not fond of transcribing random driving notes, a fine idea in theory, but poems rarely come that way...

I've also two papers due for tonight's class, and haven't even begun my taxes, and it's nearly Good Friday. April is indeed a cruel month. But hey, at least I've written a blog of sorts.

The new principal and I met to sign the CPITS contract, and discovered we had friends in common. Alas, another obituary is in order: Darrell DeVore, the music man (AKA The Flute Man or Mr. Sound Magic), but it will have to wait.

Darrell and I worked as artists in residence at a school in Petaluma one fine spring. We spent a lot of time by the side of the road talking of all things verging. I remember potluck parties in the country, with impromptu music jams, listening to Richard Waters on his Waterfone and Darrell on his myriad flutes or hand drums.

Whaever happened to his son, Trane DeVore? (Bobbie Louise Hawkins' grandson). Trane (as in Coltrane) used to read at my poetry series, and I ran into him at UC Berkeley in the late 1990s or the early 200-ots. Heard rumor that he was getting a Ph.D or something... hope it didn't ruin his poetry. Ph.Ds will do that. Just like grad school, only ten times worse. I should know, that MA & MFA cost me poetically, and I'm no longer as prolific as I once was. All that intellectualizing is not necessarily a good thing for poetry's authentic voice.

Trane, who looked like a tall young WB Yeats, or my late cousin Ricky Reilly, used to work with my cousin Sinead who was a barrista at the Petaluma Coffee Company, way back when. I think they went to Casa Grande together. I knew Trane separately from his father. Different worlds colliding.

I'm just putting this stuff into the universe to see what happens... when you writing something down, it tends to develop a life of its own and attracts connections.

The Irish had an idea that grammar was related to glamour (an Irish word), and that writing itself was a kind of magic. As in Poetry with Merlin, as one 3rd grader wrote on her folder.

POETIC ASIDES: Yesterday's email brought a query from someone who stumbled across my blog, he was interested in my early Sausalito days, specifically Tiki Junction. He was asking about Barney West, the tiki carver. I barely remembered watching him carve the tikis at Gate 5 when I was a kid, I had no idea he was a cultural icon for tiki carvers. Now I'm racking my brain, trying to remember more, as there is a dearth of information on him or Tiki Junction.

What I do remember, is that people used to steal the tikis, so Barney shackled them all up like a chain gang. it was pretty funny. But did I have the hind/foresight to take photos of them when I was in my early 20s? I was not yet a writer... A little vault excavation is in order.

I must've known something about Barney as I do remember making a tiki pilgrimage to Trader Vic's in the City and to Tam High in the mid- 1970s. (The maitre d let us wander in and look at the tikis one afternoon, without making us order or pay for drinks.)

During my College of Marin daze, we also went on a Benny Bufano pilgrimage as well. And there's the Unknown Museum. I did take lots of photos of Dickens Bascom, Larry Fuente and David Best's crazy work. Some of it in Mill Valley, the Sausalito Art Center, etc., I just need to find and scan them. There was a Lady Godiva sequence, a woman posing on a bejewelled and beaded life size fiberglass horse on the San Geronimo Golf Course. More fodder there to uncover.

Times like these, I wish my friend Micaela had been around, or my brother was a little older so we could reminisce. But with nearly five years age different between us, growing up, we were universes apart. He was into his go-carts and mini motorcycles whereas I was into art with a capital "A."

Meanwhile those two Adult Ed pedagogy papers await my undivided, if narcoleptic, attention, and memory will just have to take its place in the cobwebbed corners of time a little while longer.

Tiki Junction, Sausalito

When my mother, actress and costume designer, Kellé Reilly (aka Maureen Hurley) was working at the Gate Playhouse theatre, I was often left behind with friends to be babysat on one of the houseboats at Tiki Junction, Gate Five or Gate Six. My favorite babysitters were the Smothers Brothers and Sterling Hayden lived in a railroad car by Tiki Junction. I loved it when my mom parked the big white Ford convertible right in front of the tikis at Tiki Junction because then I could stand up on the red car seat and see them eyeball to eyeball.

My mother knew Barney West, the woodcarver who learned his trade in the South Pacific. He once told us he had to padlock the tikis together like a San Quentin chain gang because people were always trying to steal them. These tikis were huge, stealing them must've taken some planning. Not something you could pop in the trunk on a whim without blowing out your rear tires and busting an axle.

Barney West salvaged a lot of his wood after the big storms. Winter of '64 was record flood year (we measured rain by the foot in '63 too), and when it retreated, (following on the cusp of the big Alaska quake and tsunami) left a lot of debris and salvaged boatwrecks behind.

Years later, there were still huge beached logs and big burls shipwrecked and marooned in the oddest places up and down the coast. (I remember the Good Friday quake, I was home, sick, leaning back on the couch the wall, with a fever, and the wall suddenly slapped the back of my head like a cricket bat. Marin was hit hard, the tsunami, though small inside the Gate, stacked the bay water up. Many boats, snapped from their moorings, were turned into kindling).

At the junction, there was always a tiki boneyard in reserve. We'd climb the logs and burls like they were Mt. Everest. Sometimes they'd be floating in the bay, seasoning, I guess.

I remember watching Barney work, shirtless, his sun-baked skin glistening like mahogany, sometimes he worked with chainsaw and axe, or with mallet and chisel.

Barney was not one for smalltalk, or for small kids pestering him, but I was fascinated, watching the progress from blank wood to terrifying tiki. Sometimes painted, sometimes not. What remains in memory, a flotsam carpet of woodchips, the sonorous chainsaw idle and whine, the resinous odor of carved wood left me with a lifelong urge to visit the mo'ai of Easter Island.

OTHER SAUSALITO BLOGGY BITS

You rarely got what you wanted at Juanita’s Galley, but you got a lot of it 

Gate Five

Tiki Totems

ALAN WATTS

Take Five, Dave!

Guys and Dolls

Gate 5, Gate Playhouse, Sausalito

Gate Playhouse Theatre, ca. 1961. (Photo courtesy of Richard Knablin)

During the 1950s and early 1960s, my mother Maureen (Kellé Hurley) Reilly was an actress and costume/ set designer/painter for the Gate Community Playhouse Theater Company, on Bridgeway, catty-corner from the No Name Bar, in downtown Sausalito.

After a show closed, I used to love playing dress-up with the discarded costumes and remnants mouldering in my grandmother's basement. Yards of purple netting from Guys & Dolls at the Music Circus, loud silk print dresses, Victorian capes and witches' rags.

Sometimes I went to the theater or work with my mother when she was staying with us out in Forest Knolls. She never lived with us for long. She'd drive over White's Hill in her big white convertible with the top down and the known world spun past my forehead in the form of cerulean blue sky, green oak canyons and golden hills. I must've been about six or seven.

My mother supported her ephemeral art by working as a waitress in nearly every coffee shop in Sausalito. So I got to know them all from the inside out. The Kettle, The Valhalla, Juanita's.

Juanita was unforgettable with her menagerie (a rooster perched on her shoulder, a spider monkey and an orphan fawn named Cissy) following her around the parking lot as she served customers on Sunday mornings at Gate 5.

I don't remember the infamous Trident (until I was older) because it was on the other side of town by the bronze seal (though for a time, my mother did move into the big shingle house overlooking the water near Sally Stanford's infamous Valhalla). I do remember meeting The Kingston Trio. Perhaps that's why Tommy Smothers and others were hanging out at Gate 5. (It may have technically been Gate 6, but it was always called Gate 5.)

There was the time when my mother was working for Sally Stanford at the Valhalla and who should walk in but Perry Como! Richard Knablin happened to be hanging out at the bar that night, and said (my mother) Kellé looked great standing there in her Valhalla costume, fishnet stockings, tall heels, a merry widow and not much else, as Perry Como walked in and sit at one of her tables. She had the classic tall willowy showgirl figure for it.

Perry left a nice tip. There might have even been an autographed napkin involved as well. I've a vague memory of something like that....

My mother, Kellé Reilly (later it was Kellé Green—her stage name as there was already an actress, Maureen Hurley in SAG), Richard Knablin, Skip Rognlien and Vee Rae, Christmas, 1960. (Photo by Chris Gracida, courtesy of Richard Knablin.)

When a show was running at the Gate, sometimes I went to the theater (I saw Guys and Dolls, Pipedream, The Fantastics, Anything Goes, Annie Get Your Gun, On the Town, Of Thee I Sing, and a children's matinee, Hansel & Gretel—my mom played the evil witch. It was in November of 1960?, because The Gate Players had a tradition of bringing all the birthday kids onstage after the show for a big birthday cake and ice cream party. But it quickly became ice scream.

We were all gathered round the cake singing Happy Birthday to blow the candles out when my mom came out from the wings still in costume and makeup to give me a hug. I knew it was my mom, but the other kids didn't, they saw the witch had come to eat them, so when she hugged me, pandemonium broke out as they all ran off the stage—screaming.

I was the only one left standing so I blew out the candles by myself. I was also the last kid left standing, mortified, glued to the spot, but I had the whole cake to myself as none of the kids would come back on stage even after my mom took her makeup off. I shrugged my shoulders as if to say, it's their loss and went on with the serious business of eating cake.

Les Abbott and the Marquee. Vee Rae photos 1961

Courtesy of Vee Rae photos 1961

But more often than not, I was left on one of the houseboats at Tiki Junction or at Gate Five or Gate Six.

Before the show, I was deposited at Dick and Tommy Smothers' houseboat where there were folks sitting around on chairs and pillows in the living room singing and playing banjos and guitars. With all that adult attention, I was pretty precocious and I'd dance around in circles to the music. In hindsight, it was probably The Kingston Trio and entourage down from The Trident.

My babysitters were the funny men: There was big black Sam the actor, with a fabulous physique who looked like a bald muscleman genie from Aladdin. I asked him if he was Samson but where was his hair, did Delila cut it all off, and was he still strong? He roared with laughter and tossed me up into the air. I'd never seen a black man before wearing a single gold earring so I knew he was exotic and not of this world.

In those days, I was preparing for my first communion, I was busy equating everyone with Biblical characters—trying to reconcile imperfect metaphor with reality. The nuns at the Lagunitas church, St. Cecelia's, told us me that whenever it rained, it was God's tears because we were so bad in church. I said He was peeing on us and let me tell you, I got into deep doo-doo for that remark. I was never was asked again to be Queen of the May, never again to crown the statue of the Virgin Mary.

Unlike his dour brother, Dick, who didn't seem to like kids, Tommy Smothers was kind and funny, if not funny looking with his ears sticking out like teapot handles. I liked Tommy the best. He was a real kid magnet. Whenever I'd spot him, I'd launch myself at him and he'd sing me around the room by the arms and then throw me through his legs and toss me back up into the air until I nearly hit the ceiling and I screamed with laughter. (And I probably immediately fell asleep exhausted).

In the '60s and 70s, I was shocked to later see Tommy's name on billboard at the Purple Onion, or on TV —The Smothers Brothers Show. A few years ago, when I ran into Pat Paulson's daughter and we exchanged stories, she said Pat was living in Sausalito too, but I don't remember him. Weird to think I might have played with her as a child.

Gate Playhouse. Vee Rae photos 1961

I remember seeing Sterling Hayden in a movie—The Ten Commandments—I was in Switzerland as an "exchange" student in 1973—I'd seen very few movies in my lifetime and almost no TV when I was young, so I tended to remember everything in minute details. I asked my mom why he seemed so familiar and she said because I knew him from the Sausalito days. Another veil lifted. I have only one image of Sterling, taller than forever, tossing me up into the air by the elephant fountain. I thought he was a Viking God.

During the '50s and '60s, McCarthyism drove many Hollywood folks north to the Bay Area. In the '80s I remember seeing converted chicken ranch barns in Sebastopol and Cotati made from Hollywood backdrops and movie props. Whatever happened to the Gate Playhouse director, Skip Rognlien, from New York, or to beautiful Greek Athena Martin the actress living in the Alta Mira above the Village Fair, who looked like Jackie O?

Back of the Gate Playhouse. Vee Rae photos 1961

Back of the Gate Playhouse opened abruptly into the bay,
a tiny ledge & nothing more than air. Vee Rae photo 1961

I ran into my mom's sidekick, Sally Lacey, who lived near Sally Stanford's Valhalla, they'd all meet for coffee and sit on the deck with the whiskey-voiced chain smoking Madame, Sally Stanford, and later mayor of Sausalito holding court. I ran into a toothless Sally Lacy—in the looney bin at Napa State Hospital where I was teaching poetry to the inmates. Sally Lacey remembered me, but that was about it. Time had not been kind to her. Was Sally one of Madame Sally's girls from 1144 Pine Street in the City? Or another colorful character from Sausalito's past? Vee Rae said Sally was Marilyn Monroe's stand-in in Hollywood.

And I haven't even mentioned Pat Wall, Piro and Alice, Peter Wolfe and Jean Varda....but that was my second Sausalito incarnation, when I was ten and learned to pilfer at the Trade Fair. Fodder for another blog.

The Ark, 1967

Sally Stanford died in 1982. I heard that Juanita died in a fire, when someone torched her restaurant in Boyes Hot Springs. But rumors of her death are greatly exaggerated. She's alive, and well, living in Sonoma County, (She died in 2011) Sterling died in 1986 in Sausalito.

They cleaned up the waterfront, blew up the ferryboats and a bit of the past along with it. Tommy opened a Volvo car dealership in Santa Rosa, and Pat opened a winery in the Valley of the Moon. My mom died in 1994, Lloyd, in 1998. With them, the rich stories of Sausalito in the 1950s, are irrevocably lost.

The 7 Seas

© 2007 Maureen Hurley