Bio Notes for Brian Kervin

For all you North Bay folks, Neil O"Neill and Maureen Hurley will be on the air live reading poetry (and music) on The Learnin' Kirven Show April 6th, from 4-6 pm at KWMR West Marin Community Radio  at 90.5 FM Point Reyes Station, and 89.9 FM Bolinas kwmr.org (live stream). Maureen will be reading poems of place, growing up in West Marin, highlights of our upcoming CPITS' 50-year anniversary, West Marin kids to read their poems. Neil will talk about coming to Marin in the 1970s, Ross Valley Players, his 30-year gig with Bread & Roses, and play some music.

I began to write Brian some bio notes and it got out of hand. Bloggy material, it is.

Summer Camp

As a kid growing up in West Marin in the 1950s & 60s, I lived in a place where we never went to camp but kids from all over the US came to camp where we lived.

It was an uneasy mix as the Forest Farm summer campers were from the land of faraway (mostly the eastern seaboard—NY) and they had no notion they were guests in our land—they weren't nice to the natives. Nor was Old Man Gregg.

Camp counselors and campers hailed from the far reaches of the known world and descended upon Forest Farm Summer Camp each June, founded in 1944 by the Greggs. They may as well have been Martians.

The official story goes that the Greggs welcomed everyone—they built their own pool when a Chinese counselor was told she couldn't swim at the Woodacre Improvement Club. But we local kids were never invited to swim at the Woodacre Improvement Club or in the Gregg pool. Ever. No matter how much we drooled. Funny how that goes.

Somebody At Forest Farm Summer Camp must've had a sense of humor: SAN RAFAEL. Calif. (AP) —A sign posted recently on the office door at the Forest Farms Camp by owner Harold Gregg reads, please keep door closed so bird won't eat our cat." The bird is a turkey vulture. (Miami Herald/Lewiston Evening Journal/The Evening Independent, etc., July 26, 27, 1965). 

 I actually do vaguely remember the sign. Only I didn't get the joke at the time.

The FBI was interested in the Greggs for suspicious activities, but then anyone who moved to Marin and Sonoma from Hollywood or New York was under investigation during the paranoid era of McCarthyism—including my best friend Stephanie's mother, Johanna Stone, a former Russian translator for the UN.

Mrs. Gregg was OK—she was a former teacher who was originally from Petaluma, so she was nicer to the local kids than her husband, Harold. I believe cookies may have been involved.

Harold Gregg, a New Englander, dressed in plaid shirts, thin and dour as they come, taunted Jack Gilbert when his daughter Linda brought him home. The apocryphal story goes: Old Man Gregg said Jack wasn't a real man, but a sissy poet.

Jack got his macho out and shimmied up a Doug fir to fell it with a chainsaw. Something went horribly wrong—the tree split in the middle and Jack came plunging to earth like a sad soft Icarus.

Linda Gregg ran off to Greece to care for Jack Gilbert whose wings were forever clipped. He was sentenced to the wheelchair—and she became a famous poet. Most people know Forest Farm Camp as Serenity Acres—the rehab place where Jerry Garcia died. But that was long after Harold died.

Forest Farm Camp was a commune before that. One of my high school classmate ran away from home and lived there in the 1970s when Claire and Jim Felson owned it from 1966 to 1976. She later told us wild stories of musicians who lived there and even wilder parties. Chalk it up to the times we lived in.

Mrs. Barbano—who also ran Barbano's Lagunitas summer camp on Arroyo Road, just down the hill from the Greggs, opened up her pool for swimming lessons—that's where I learned to swim at the ripe old age of ten. Old Man Barbano's daughter was killed in a car accident in Mexico. He wasn't right in the head after that.

Old Man Barbano gave up the summer camp business and rented the dorms out to musicians including Big Brother and the Holding Company. Yes, Janis Joplin. When the grief got to be too much for him, he shot himself in the head. We were walking home from high school when they brought the gurney out. It was the first time I saw a dead man. But not the last.

There were other camps in the San Geronimo Valley but I don't know their names. Perhaps someone else will remember the stories of the summer camps. The transient folk. Certainly people came in droves from the Bay Area to Camp Taylor ever since the turn of the 19th century. Some families camped out all summer long along the banks of Papermill Creek and Devil's Gulch. Research fodder for another blogeen.

Too Bright to See

Poet Linda Gregg grew up down the hill from me, on the next ridge over, Tamal Road, which was on top of a hill above my great-aunt Ellen Budjick's cottage in Forest Knolls.

We used to sneak through the Gregg’s Forest Farm Summer Camp on our donkeys because that was the only shortcut to get to Tamal Road from the Barbano's Lagunitas Summer Camp. We'd ride a wide loop back up into the hills where Forest Farm Camp winter-pastured their horses and then we'd traverse the final ridges homeward in darkness.

Forest Farms Camp is the same place where Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead died. But by that point, the summer camp had transformed into a rehab place with a different name: Serenity Knolls Chemical Dependency Center.

Jerry Garcia was personally responsible for record sales of Ben & Jerry's ice cream at the Forest Knolls store. But heroin didn't kill Jerry. Despite his daily walk down the hill to the store, his heart just gave out. I'm sure the ice cream didn't help the diabetes any either. The Godfather of acid rock was dead at 53.

Seems Forest Farm Camp was always a troubled place. Janis Joplin lived on Arroyo Road at Barbano's Lagunitas Summer Camp with Big Brother and the Holding Company—but that's another story to tell....

In the 40s and 50s and into the early 60s (before the economic crash happened), Forest Farm Summer Camp was a pretty radical co-ed summer camp for inner city kids who were pretty much like Martians to us.

We thought it was a weird, if interesting concept for kids to go to Forest Farm Summer Camp. So did the FBI. (In those days, most summer camps were not co-ed, nor were they such a strange admixture of kids from all walks of life—sort of a mini-United Nations).

Anyway, varying shades of McCarthyism colored a rosy hue over our little valley so the FBI was interested in several families.

We locals were definitely not welcome at Forest Farm Camp at any time which upped the ante during the summer months when we'd sneak through camp on our slow-dreaming donkeys and have staredowns with the camp kids from New York—it was as if we were in a bad spaghetti western with a thin plot. They were big, bad and ugly.

But Brenda Fullick who leased her Icelandic pony, Helgar from the Greggs after summer camp was over, liked to sneak in a visit to see Helgar who hated the city slickers on his back. He was a one-girl pony. And Brenda was his girl. Whenever he saw her, he'd buck off his rider and come over to wicker a hello.

We had a strange notion that we were invisible on our long-eared mounts, lost in the resulting meleé, because everybody else was on horseback too. The Gregg girls never finked on us or told us to leave. Only Old Man Gregg would chase us off like vermin.

I remember Old Man Gregg, I thought he was the most dour man alive. He'd just as soon bite your head off rather than give you the time of day.

Ironic in that they'd taken refuge in Forest Knolls, far from the claws of McCarthyism, like many Valley folk. Then they too shunned everyone.

Mrs. Gregg was kinder, she was a local, who grew up in Petaluma, but the Anglo Saxon Presbyterians kept themselves separate from us Catholics. The Troubles of Northern Ireland were so deeply ingrained, the distance lent itself to generations. You were marked at the church door.

When Jack and Claire Felson took over Forest Farms Camp from 1966-1976, it became a kinder, gentler, more inclusive place that invited participation from Valley folks. But by that time I was long gone, chasing the wind over some distant horizon.