Mary McCaslin's Roundup

June 17,  2004

VISITING WITH OLD FRIENDS

One of the benefits of traveling as a professional musician is playing unique and historic places around the country. In May I drove to southern California to do a performance at the Folk Music Center in Claremont. Started by Charles and Dorothy Chase in 1958, the Folk Music Center has survived not only as a music store, but also as a small concert venue and a museum of musical instruments from around the world. The Chase's grandson is popular singer - musician Ben Harper, who grew up hearing musicians such as Claremont resident David Lindley and a host of other pickers and singers. He purchased the Center from his grandparents so they could retire.Ellen and Joel Harper, Ben's mother and brother, have been running the business. Sadly, Charles Chase passed away on May 21.

Another benefit of traveling is having the chance to see old friends and to catch up on each others' lives. While in southern California I stayed with former long time Santa Cruz resident Lee Quarnstrom and his wife Chris. They moved from Santa Cruz a couple of years ago to the town of La Habra, a suburb of L.A. and now live in a large home in a quiet residential area a few blocks up the hill from Whittier Blvd. Chris is teaching school and Lee is retired. He often takes drives around the area to explore the many ethnic neighborhoods, finding small restaurants with first rate food. He has also found a few independent bookstores, none of which are close to home. He stays off of the freeways, only driving on the surface streets, which he says have less traffic congestion than Santa Cruz. He said the thing he misses the most about Santa Cruz, other than friends and family, is the Bookshop Santa Cruz.

The Quarnstrom household also includes their two dogs, Hux and Emma. Hux is an 11 year old Catahoula Leopard Hound, who lived in Santa Cruz with Lee. Catahoulas are the state dog of Louisiana. Emma is Pembroke Corgie, who is 5 months old. She has shaken Hux's quiet golden years to the core, but he patiently tolerates her antics. It is through a mutual love of dogs that Lee and I met over a decade ago. In the early 1990s I read one of his San Jose Mercury News columns about his long deceased Corgies, Reuben and Fedora. This was in the pre-email days, so I wrote him a note complimenting him on the piece and telling him about my years of Basset hound "ownership". To my surprise Lee telephoned me and our friendship began.While visiting, I asked him about his career in journalism, his wild old days with the Merry Pranksters and his life in the Santa Cruz area.

He started out at age19 in Chicago as a reporter for the City News Bureau, and then wrote for the Evergreen Park (Illinois) Dispatch, whose publisher was Seymour Hersh. Later he moved west to Seattle to write for the Associated Press and then on to the San Francisco Bay area to write for the San Mateo Times.

In 1965 he interviewed Ken Kesey and reviewed his book, Sometimes A Great Notion, for the Times. He was so taken with Kesey and the book that he decided to leave his job and join the Merry Pranksters at Kesey's place in La Honda. As Lee put it, he "signed on" as a Merry Prankster. When asked what exactly was entailed by signing on, he said, " nothing really". He just moved in with Kesey and those who were living in La Honda at that time. They consumed lots of psychedelics and he rode on the Bus, which was originally called "Further". The story goes that an artisitc Prankster altered the original sign on the front by painting over the "e" and replacing it with a "u" - changing the name of the Bus to "Furthur".

Eventually, the scene moved down to "The Spread", a piece of property with a ramshackle shack in the Rodeo Gulch area outside of Soquel. Lee lived there for several months before moving to Zayante with the woman who became his second wife. Her given name was Judith, but her "nom de prank" was Space Daisy.

Those were the days of the Hip Pocket bookstore, which was located approximately where the Bookshop Santa Cruz stands today. In his book, A Long Strange Trip (The Inside History of the Grateful Dead), Dennis McNally credits Lee Quarnstrom as the Hip Pocket's co-founder. Peter Demma and Ron ("Hassler") Bevirt started the store. Lee was a part time employee, who by his own admission, kept a rather erratic work schedule. He would come in, sometimes only sweeping the floor and the front sidewalk before leaving for the day. He said it was not uncommon to see the coroner's vehicle parked on Pacific and the body of an elderly St. George Hotel resident who had died during the night being wheeled out.

He credits confusion about the history of that time period to the fact that so many people were taking psychedelics. "Each of us believes we are the only one who has the complete true memory of what actually took place, but I know that none of us has the slightest idea of what happened."

Lee and Space Daisy bought a house under the redwoods up past the Atomic Vaults and the Club Zayante, which then was nothing more than a country bar. In those days the San Lorenzo Valley was mostly populated by people who kept to themselves and who held a conservative outlook on life. Almost no one in the Santa Cruz mountains had long hair. Lee said he was regularly asked by clever locals if he was a boy or a girl because he wore shoulder length hair. To further set himself apart from his already wary neighbors, Lee kept 7 monkees in an enclosure in front of their house.

Back then the mountains had many cabins which sat empty except for the summer months and others that were unused all year round, seemingly forgotten by whoever owned them. Those funky abodes were ripe for squatters. Across Zayante Creek, which ran behind their property, stood an empty cabin with a large stone fireplace. Lee said that a group of people who would now be called hippies moved into the cabin one fall. All through the cold months he watched in amazement as they systematically dismantled the place, starting at the opposite end from the fireplace. They burned the wood to keep warm and by spring there was very little of the cabin other than the fireplace left standing.

After living for 2 years in the damp and sunless redwood forest, he and Space Daisy split up and Lee moved to Las Lomas. In 1968 he got a job as a mail carrier for the Santa Cruz eastside post office and delivered the mail to the Live Oak area until hiring on as a reporter for the Watsonville Register Pajaronian in 1969. In 1978 Paul Krassner asked him to move to L.A. to be the articles editor of Krassner's political satire magazine, the Realist.. From there Lee went on to a stint as executive editor for Larry Flynt's Hustler magazine after Flynt was shot. His final gig in L.A. was as story editor for a short lived, and in Lee's words, "truly terrible" television show called That's My Line - an offshoot of the What's My Line? idea. He moved back to Santa Cruz and wrote for Jay Shore's new publication, the Good Times. In 1982 he was hired by the Mercury News, which he wrote for until retiring in 2001.

I used to run into Lee walking around downtown Santa Cruz, wearing one of his trademark Hawaiian shirts. Visiting with him a few weeks ago gave me the chance to tell him how much he is missed in this community.

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