Peter Kyne: Coastside Author (5) Conclusion
With the creation of his Cappy Ricks character in 1916–the founder of the Blue Star Navigation and the Ricks Lumber and Logging Companies– Moss Beach author Peter Kyne was on his way to becoming a household name.
[The house Peter Kyne grew up in--near Highway 1, at the southern end of MB may still be standing. I've misplaced my photo of the two-story yellow house--but I'll find it for you.]
The Cappy Ricks character became so popular that Kyne’s editors asked the author to travel the world and describe what he saw from Cappy Ricks’ point of view. And it must have seemed a much bigger world than the internet-driven one we are accustomed to today. From any point of view, small town Peter Kyne was a very lucky writer.
To use a sports metaphor, he was in “the zone” and batting in one home run novel after the other. Things got more exciting as Kyne’s book, “The Three Godfathers”– a story about several outlaws who promise a dying woman they will save her baby–was made into a 1948 film directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne and Ward Bond.
The 1919 & 1938 filmed versions of Kyne’s book called the “Valley of the Giants” was about saving the old groves of redwoods in Northern California–a timely plot as there had been a powerful movement emanating from leaders and students at Stanford University to preserve the elegant redwoods of San Mateo County through the founding in the 1920s of Memorial Park in La Honda.
As Peter Kyne became famous, he visited the Coastside more and more rarely. A Half Moon Bay nephew, Gerald Kyne, remembered his Uncle Peter visiting Moss Beach, arriving in a chauffeur-driven automobile. By then he had long lived elsewhere–but those early years on the Coastside had left their mark.
Peter Kyne died in 1957.