Half Moon Bay Memories & El Granada Observer

Guess who? Guess again.

I’ll give you a clue. Everybody knows him. He’s an accomplished musician and he writes for Half Moon Bay Memories & The El Granada Observer.

Give Up? Look closely– deeply into his eyes.

It’s Fayden Holmboe of Half Moon Bay, circa 1970s.
Do you want to read Fayden’s work? Click here

**** Photo courtesy Joni Keim, a Petaluma resident who lived in the lovely “Quinta Marta” house overlooking the sea in Montara in 1972. To learn more about Joni’s consulting business, click here

Before we could get out there to help Joe, we heard him yelling in his
singing voice, “HELP MEEEEE!!!!!! HEELLLP MEEEEEE!â€?

Magically, the lights came on in the neighbor’s back yard. John, a Jamaican man, who lived with his English wife, emerged from their house in a full length silk bathrobe that only he and David Niven could have worn and gotten away with.

As the lights came on what we saw out of our kitchen window was Joe “the Bartender� lying on his stomach, his belly stuck in the middle of a six- foot high piece of jungle gym equipment that the neighbor’s kids played on.

Joe was waving his arms and feet like he was flying and singing his “HELP MEEEE” song!!

(To get stuck in the jungle gym, Joe would have had to climb over a four-foot fence, roll over a two-foot wide hawk’s cage before he was captured by the complex piece of kid’s play equipment. In explanation, all I can say is, it was really dark out there!)

We all helped Joe out of the tangle of the jungle gym equipment, and listing to the right and left, he vanished into the night. You really didn’t want to stop an emotional drunk anyway and tell them what to do. It did occur to me, though, as Joe disappeared into the night that he was no longer wondering “What am I going to do.â€?

Four days later Joe called and asked if we had seen his car.
We had wondered whose car it was and were happy to tell him yes it
was here. So you see, there was a happy ending: Joe didn’t get the girl, but he did find his car!

We were going to move the 55- foot ferro hull down to Princeton so
Chuck and I had to remove the deck; we also removed the five steps leading into the backyard, and it was in this direction that Joe “the Bartender� was heading.

Parrrummmp. We heard him hit the ground, then silence for ten seconds until we heard another parrrummmp and an “owwww.� This was Joe who had stood up and walked face first into the hull of the boat. Yep, ten secons later the parrrrummmp and “owwwww,� he had bumped into th boat again.

It was pitch dark out there and we were laughing and at the same time trying to find a flashlight. This was not an easy task as the cans of beer were almost gone and so was the Wild Turkey.

We didn’t hear anymore “parrrummmps” so we figured he was sitting down somewhere, until we found him. We were mistaken.

…to be continued…

Back to Birch St. in Montara. One night “Dirty Ernie,�
“Fast Eddy� (a 300- hundred- pound Hispanic friend with a giant
mustache and a Panama hat on his head) and me were drinking Shilitz Malt liquor with wild Turkey whiskey shots poured in the top of the can
where there was room after the first couple of sips.

There was a knock at the front door but nobody ever waited for us to answer. They just strolled on in and on this late night it was none other
than Joe “the Bartender.� Drunk as a skunk was Joe, and distraught
as he could be over his girlfriend who had just broken up with him.

He kept saying, “What am I going to do?”, as he paced from
the dining room where we were trying to sit upright in our chairs
with our aforementioned drinks, into a bedroom through a bathroom,
into another bedroom, rejoining us in the dining room .

“What am I going to do?” he said.

This went on for five or six laps.Then he started heading out of the kitchen towards the back porch. This was a mistake, and we all knew it , and in a slurring voice I said, “Joe don’t!â€? but started laughing at what was going to happen if he kept going in that direction.

Dirty Ernie shook his head, and “Fast Eddie� lowered his hat over his eyes like he was getting ready to take a siesta but he was really getting ready for the inevitable, and what was going to happen.

…to be continued…

Joe “The Bartender’s” Flying Experience (2)
Original story by Fayden

This is about 1973 at a house on Birch Street in Montara where “Dirty” Ernie (we called him “Dirty” Ernie because he liked it), Chuck Portz, the “Turtles” old bass player, my first wife and I lived. In this house we played music until all hours of the night and drank like fishes.

We used coal for heat and totally polluted the neighborhood for a week while we used up the big bag of coal we bought in the pot belly stove. We went back to wood when we saw what it was doing to the air. No one ever complained, we assumed, because they all drank like fishes, too (at least. the closest neighbors seemed to).

“Dirty” Ernie was a short little Italian guy, deaf as a door nail, bald on top with a massive mustache. He’d walk into any social situation, yelling, “Hey, no laughing tonight,” and everybody knew it was Ernie and they would laugh and then return to whatever they were doing.

Chuck was a portly man who was building a large ferro craft boat about 55-feet long out in the backyard. He worked in a fiberglass factory that manufactured shower stalls and he was a commercial abalone diver. Chuck owned a black Labrador Retriever that lived in the fiberglass warehouse and he bragged that the dog could actually sit down on the toilet in the restroom to do his business.

Other locals, including Ernie, Don, Gary, Orville and myself were also commerical divers. Problem was we didn’t really like processing the abs, so we’d trade Dwayne, the butcher at a local market, for anything that didn’t taste like fish!

…to be continued..

Joe “The Bartender’s” Flying Experience (1)

Original Story by Fayden

Just after David Greenberg, Mike Mindel and Peter Rogers gave up managing the Spouter Inn that changed its name to the Shelter Inn (I was the music manager, by the way; I booked our acts) two new older, straight-looking guys came in to run things.

Joe and Doogie were their names. Doogie had red hair (kind of a disco cut) and good-sized mustache. Joe was a large man, stood about 5′9″. Joe had thinning hair and gained popularity singing songs like “The Temple Bar at Morys,” like “Crazy” Googinheim did on the Jackie Gleason Show towards the end of his t.v. show. Kind of an A Cappella college glee club voice, or like the buzzard talked on the Muppet Show.

These two were also the people who changed the name of “The Shelter Inn” to “The Miramar Beach Inn.”

Joe and Doogie started having electric bands playing there rather than what had up to this time been a folk or folk/rock genre, leaning aggressively to the acoustical. Admittedly, it was probably a good idea; it pumped everybody up and they bought more drinks. We had encouraged a more coffee house feeling where you could nurse a glass of wine without being pressured into getting bombed.

Ok. Enough about how Joe and Doogie ruined the best folk club on the coast where John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Jose Feliciano, Hot Tuna, me, etc., had played!

….to be continued…

(Photo: Fayden)

…How We Survived Economically During the 1960s in Princeton….Story By Fayden

There is a little bit of road that runs from the corner of Broadway
in Princeton towards the water. One little cottage surrounded by trees stands on the corner; there is a house on the water with a garage next to it and a large vacant lot.

The house on the water stands across the way from the Harbor House. Before the Harbor House, there was a large hull of a wrecked boat on the spot, maybe one piece forty feet in length that faced the water.

The cabin was water tight, and this is where we used to go to inhale those forbidden herbs and drink our brews that made our words slur while we watched storms blow right on over us and away.

The creek that runs behind all these little houses cuts it off from the store fronts of Princeton, so in some ways it was an island unto itself within the otherwise barbaric mentality of late sixties/early seventies “Princeton- by- the- Sea� (we never called it that though).

This little street was an “intellectual” hub of high living within the otherwise physically and mentally crazed overt nature of fishermen,boat builders, and abalone divers. Now, I have built boats, assisted fishermen fishing, and ran the compressors to the long lines of abalone divers, however I still claim to be one of the terminally unique intellectuals that dwelled on this tiny strip of land off Broadway.

Doc (we called him “Doc� because he used three syllable words a lot) lived in the corner house surrounded by old cypress trees, and worked for United Airlines as a mechanic of some sort. We considered him to be the most stable of all of us because he earned a straight wage every week from a large industry. He was also the only person to have a car without dents and half rusted. Doc was always inviting people in and we appreciated this because except for Doc, Manuel and Sally, we all lived in campers. Small little boxes with even smaller little windows that created large flaring tempers when one got cabin fever.

There was an old black man named Isaac who claimed to be a hundred years old, and he would come over and drink, and tell stories at Docs. Isaac was a local born and lived his life in Half Moon Bay. On hindsight I don’t know if Isaac was a hundred years old but he told really great stories, and it allowed us to sit still and honor him in this way.

He probably just enjoyed watching us get pie eyed and slowly list fifteen degrees as we listened.

Manuel and Sally lived at the other end of the street (across from the old boat, remember) Manuel made beautiful abalone jewelry. He was an older man than us, maybe in his fifties and he rarely wore much more than a pair of shorts. He kinda reminded me of Jacques Cousteau with a pony tail. Manuel would cut the abalone on a water wheel, wearing a scuba tank to breathe with, while doing it. I guess the dust almost killed him doing it without the tank once.

Sally just kind of ran around in the background keeping the house together or chasing her two- year- old daughter who was eternally naked. They were the first San Francisco street vendors I ever met; they’d make the jewelry, then go up to the city around Ghiradelli Square to sell it.

Mickey lived in the two-car garage next to the house that Manuel and
Sally lived in. About a year earlier he had left his wife and kids in Moss Beach. Perhaps Mickey was the most creative man I ever knew;
it seemed he would take on just about any challenge mechanically and
could make it work.

Or he’d already know how to build just about anything wood,or metal, and well, too! He taught me taught me the zen of building, that every project was simply a puzzle, and my job was to make the favorable parts that put it together. It was also mandatory in this “Mickey- zenâ€? to be happy while I/we did anything, or else it wasn’t worth doing.

Mick also was an advocate for beginning the “Royal American Marijuana
Air Force.� The RAMAF plan was to collect all the seeds we could and then
drop them everywhere from a small airplane we would use from the HMB
airport. It never became a reality but we sure loved to muse over
the concept!!

During storms, before the inner break water was built, some of the
boats would lose their moorings and blow up on the shore. The
unlucky ones hit the rocks, shattered and broke up to the point where they couldn’t be repaired, right in front of their unhappy owner’s eyes!

One of these unfortunate crafts came up on a little beach between
Hazel’s restaurant (now Barbaras Fishtrap) and the rocks to the north
of Hazel’s. The wrecked boat had been abandoned for a few months when Mickey discovered it had a solid stainless steel gas tank about
three- feet- tall, nine- feet- wide, and about a foot thick, running the
full amid ship of it. We decided to cut the tank free using some
handsaws and then we’d float it out at high tide. Of course to add
to the intrigue, this all had to be done in the dark as we were never
sure of the legality of anything we did.

And so we commenced, the saws sawed, the water rose, we pushed it out of the now really wrecked boat and it fell on its side into the water. We grabbed two paddles and rowed it over to the end of Johnson pier, hauled it up onto the back of my truck and were now the “new” proud owners of a big, shiny stainless steel gas tank!

And so we commenced, the saws sawed, the water rose, we pushed it out of the now really wrecked boat and it fell on its side into the water. We grabbed two paddles and rowed it over to the end of Johnson pier, hauled it up onto the back of my truck and were now the “new” proud owners of a big, shiny stainless steel gas tank!

We decided to chain it up to a telephone pole in front of Mickey’s
garage facing Broadway and painted on it “STAINLESS STEEL TANK
$150.00.�

A couple of months passed and we didn’t have any takers so we crossed out the $150.00 and painted in a new higher price: $250.00.

Another month went by and still nobody bought it so we crossed out the $250.00 written just below the $150.00 and put an even higher new price of $350.00. About two days later a man came by, looked it over, checked the tank carefully for problems and was successful in talking us down to $300.00. He never asked about the other two prices and we never explained them!

The same day we cut loose the stainless steel tank, we liberated another gas tank in another wrecked boat but this one was only 60 gallons and it wasn’t stainless steel. We couldn’t lift it up the cliff so we emptied the gas into the sand. Mickey didn’t want to pollute the water so once we got to the top of the cliff he dropped a lit match on the newly poured gas. Powwoummmm! The biggest little atomic bomb replica I ever have seen before or since came to life right before my eyes. This flame was followed by a mushroom cloud the height of the twelve- foot cliff and the Eucalyptus trees on top of it.

Needless to say we ran like hell and commenced to watch every Sheriff’s car on the Coastside rolling up and down the streets in Princeton looking for whatever the heck had just occurred.

Needless to say “just another day in paradise”!

My dear old friend Fayden (at left) poses with Joe’s owner/Chef Pablo who comes from a family of Mexican chefs. Chef Pablo’s broad experience–translating into a diverse menu–ranges from his years at Joe’s of Westlake and the Fior d’Italia restaurant in San Francisco.

Good value, good food

Check out these desserts!

Bill Middlejohn is one of the folks who played regularly at the Shelter/Spouter Inn [Miramar Beach Inn] and did live on the coast for a short time.

Bill had a really soothing voice, and a nice finger picking style, a sense of humor in some ways like Arlo Guthrie. I seem to remember he glued a plastic eyeball on the tuning head of his guitar, but maybe that was somebody else. A bunch of us jammed together, Bill being one of them.

There was a brilliant lead guitarist guy, Jimmy or Billy Dean from the Santa Cruz area (I think it was) that o.d.’d while we were all playing, and Middlejohn wrote him a memorial song. There was so much talent under this Shelter Inn roof around 1970 that I am absolutely amazed more people who played there never got acknowledged publicly.

On the other hand as a very wise somebody said once, “We were the only generation that started a revolution, won it, then lost interestand went off to drink beer and play frisbie”.

Look! Fayden’s Albums (now rare) Are Still Available
http://gemm.com/item/FAYDEN/PEACE–BALLADS/GML833931337/
PEACE BALLADS
FAYDEN

Fayden with friend Belinda.

Story by Fayden Holmboe

When I first moved to Half Moon Bay from the Hillsdale area in the late sixties, there were a few locals that certainly stood out and it was always interesting to visit with them.

Bruce Haig seemed old to me but he was probably only about fifty. He had a weathered face like a farmer who had worked the land for many decades. Bruce was an ageless thinker, and he had more cool solutions to expensive problems than anyone I’ve ever known.

I met Bruce about 1969 as he rode his bike up to the front yard of “Little Joeâ€? Cotruvos house on the corner of Santiago and Francisco in El Granada. Bruce always rode a bike when he was off work, wherever he went to on the coast. He might be the only person in history who could smoke a pipe continually while riding up hill. His pipe had a large stainless stem between the tobacco bowl and the mouthpiece. He put toilet paper in it and this acted as the filter, “economic and efficient”, he exclaimed, owning about eight of the same design.

Bruce’s home had a window facing west that was about four- feet- high, and six-feet- wide with a fine view of the harbor. He could see Snakehead Point (also known as Pillar Point) and to the south the fog horn on the breakwater.

About 1975 new neighbors built a two-story house on the lot immediately to the west of Bruce’s 4 x 6 foot window blocking his entire coastal panorama. There was nothing but a wall of stucco looking back at Bruce. Bleak at best and the only thing breaking up the monotony of the wall was a very small sliding glass window and that was way up on the second floor.

Bruce went over, pipe in mouth, introduced himself to the new neighbors and asked in his always low-key voice, would they mind if he “painted a mural on the blank wall of their home?” They said okay so Bruce drew what was missing from his ocean view on their stucco wall.

You could still see the “real view” from other windows in Bruce’s dining room. If you stood in the dining room you could compare the “real view” with the painted one on the stucco wall and then back again to the “real view”.

This same 4×6 window was broken in the top right corner, with about two feet missing from it. Most people would have replaced the window. Instead Bruce got out his salvaged pieces of stained glass, channeled lead, then made and installed a beautiful little stained glass sun with rays coming off it in this corner.

Bruce was the shop teacher at Hillcrest Reform School in San Mateo, and he had so many talents besides woodworking. A good sense of humor was one so the kids would obey him, I’m sure.

There were many dimensions to Bruce. He was an accomplished potter, had a kiln and a few potters’ wheels in the backyard. If he found a log in the woods or on the beach, he’d carve it; if he found some scrap metal he’d make a fancy wind vane out of it. But the result was never just average. Whatever Bruce Haig made was finished, thought out, and well done.

In the late sixties Bruce said he didn’t like the violence on t.v. so as his personal statement he took an old Phillips t.v., gutted it and covered the screen with fabric. That was the only channel you could watch!

If you met Bruce on the street you would never have dreamed he was as creative as he truly was, an inspiration to me for sure, and funny to boot!

Long live the Bruce Haigs of the world!!!

(Watercolor of Snakehead Point and the beach at El Granada by Galen Wolf).

Lang Bowen’s Driving Lesson Dilemma

Story by Fayden

Miramar Beach, circa 1920s

Langston Bowen (most of us called him “Lang” back then) passed away about a month ago; he lived out here for a long time, and the most memorable thing I remember about Lang was a driving lesson gone bad.

So to set the stage, Lang lived at the south end of the road the Miramar beach Inn sits on.This house is now known as the “Hastings House”. After the “outer” breakwater was installed, the currents changed and ripped the beach down dramatically, so instead of walking straight out of the front of one’s house onto the beach, you had to climb down a cliff wherever access was possible. It looks similar to how it is
today, the difference is they hadn’t put the rocks in yet to curb further erosion.

I think that happened in 1970.

Some of these new cliffs stood fifteen feet or more between the road and the sand.

As memory serves me, Lang had one of the first Toyota land cruisers, a large station wagon- sized- four wheel- drive. He volunteered to help this kid Steve learn how to drive. Teaching someone to drive
is a charitable act at best, while at the same time putting one’s life, health and material wealth into a unpredictable teenager’s hands.

Apparently Steve hit the gas a little too hard backing out of the driveway, drove himself, Lang and the landcruiser out of the driveway and across the road a little too quickly to brake. Slowly………
slowly the car tilted until it sat on its back window and bumper facing down into the sand, its windshield facing skyward. It looked kinda like the space shuttle at the launch ramp in Florida .

After all this happened, I came walking upon the scene described. I looked down over the front of the car (I was standing on the road) through the windshield at a very puzzled Lang and Steve gazing back upward at me. Lang, whenever puzzled and unnerved, had a smile with enough teeth to look like the front grill of a fancy Lincoln Continental. With this smile he welcomed me to the scene not seeming to be terribly upset although somewhat bewildered.

So I asked Lang what in hindsight was an absurd question! “Do you need any help”?

Wth his Lincoln Continental “full-teethed” grin dazzling me and the heavens beyond, he laughed and replied “Uh……..no……….no……NO……we’re fine”!

So believing him, I walked away and went on in life with whatever I was doing.

Now, remember there were no cell phones. I have no idea to this day how they got out of the car (but they did), I have no idea how the car made it back onto the road (but it did), and we laughed about it later.

Ahhhhhh, the end of the sixties, we all did inhale, and no none of uswere running for president.

In 1977 I had a small cabinet shop in El Granada, and built a lot of signs and things for Carolyn Wood, a graphic artist. Carolyn was doing the menus, and designing the big sign out on Hwy 1 for what was going to be called “the Distillery” but had been the Galway Bay Inn for years.

This guy Paul had purchased the restaurant and in talking with Carolyn, he found out I had knowledge of an old whiskey still’s location. The old postmaster of the El Granada Post office’s grandfather (as the story was told me) had buried the original still from this restaurant behind a barn somewhere in Half Moon Bay during prohibition. It was supposed to still be there.

Carolyn came by my shop, and introduced me to Paul. Paul let me know–with his southern California attitude showing– that he was going to get this original still buried behind the barn. It truly left me scratching my head wondering why he came by to meet me just to tell me this but whatever! He made it very clear he did not need mine!

In Burlingame was (as far as I know) the first mini storage place on the peninsula named “U Stor It” run by a friend of mine named Mark. This was a warehouse with lots of plywood cubicles and mesh wire composition built the entire area for two stories except for the office, and a driveway from the front to the back. Along this driveway people were allowed to sell things if they had a box there, and this is where the whiskey still sat. $85.00 said the piece of binder paper taped to it.

A couple of weeks later Carolyn Wood called me up and said Paul could not find the whiskey still buried and so was interested in mine. He came over to my shop and started going on (very wired dude) about how he had found a still for $800.00 but it wasn’t in very good shape. I agreed to show him the one I knew about and told him the location. As soon as he left I called Mark, and told him to put a price tag on it for $800.00. Mark did it one better, he brought it into the office, put a sheet under it on a table, wrote a full typed page of its history and placed it neatly to the side of this giant metal tea pot with a straw.

When Paul arrived with Carolyn (I wasn’t far behind in my car) he was elated going on about how much better this one was than the other for $800.00 and in so much better shape!

$800.00 was a whole lot of money to us back in 1977 so you will never know how gleeful we were when Paul said he wanted it!

He started dealing out the hundred dollar bills, put the still in the car, drove away happy while Mark and I deducted the $85.00 we owed the original owner and split the rest……….. I always feel I can afford to eat at the Moss Beach Distillery!

I guess Paul took the whiskey still with him when he moved away but this is truly how the Distillery got its still!