The Art Festival and the Voodoo Do

By Larry Clinton, President
While schlepping garbage at the Art Festival on Labor Day weekend, I got to wondering about how this whole thing got started.  At the Historical Society’s Research Room, I found some old publications from 1959, which gave me an idea of how far the Festival has come.
In August of that year, a periodical called Marin This Month reported that Sausalito’s fifth Outdoor Art Festival was scheduled for the weekend of August 8 and 9.
Two hundred artists were slated to participate.  “Democratically,” stated the article, the festival would include “hobby painters, many of whom display their efforts for the first time. Prices of paintings range from $5 to $500.”
According to Marin This Month, in 1959 the festival was non-juried, “on the theory that juries tend to uniformity in taste and reflect too specifically the judges. For this show each artist may display whatever among his work he wishes; the general public decides the merits in each particular rapport between artist and purchaser.”
Entertainment included folk and jazz singers, poets, dancers and performances by the Sausalito Little Theatre summer program and Les Abbott’s Gate Theatre Players.
The publication noted that the previous year’s festival “broke all records for such shows in Marin County -- over 25,000 people thronged Sausalito, to the delight of artists and merchants alike.”
Admission in those days was free.
Meanwhile, down on the waterfront, another outdoor event was offering alternative entertainment,
“Rakishly named the Voodoo Do,” according to Marin This Month.
Entrepreneurs of the Voodoo Do were members of the Sausalito Preservation Association, “a group recently formed to protect the rights of waterfront residents. (‘If legal battles fail, maybe witchcraft will prevail,’ murmured one waterfronter.)
The Do was held at Gate 3 opposite the Nevada Street bus stop and featured an open air dance ("Come dance a Zom-balino").  Other entertainment included folk singers and dancers,  jazz bands and something called “boo-bam combos,” which evidently didn’t need any explanation back in the day. Night club comedienne Phyllis Diller, who was appearing at the Purple Onion in San Francisco, also appeared.   Booths sold such arcane items as “wax images, demon cosmetology, charms to ward off civic Babbittry and fetishes for young and old.”
Since the Voodoo Do was a fund raising affair, admission was charged: $1 for adults, 25 cents for children.
My, how times have changed.


Phyllis Diller during her Purple Onion days.
Photo from Google Images

Maritime Day: Erasing That Yellow Line Down Bridgeway

An interview with Annette Rose

By Steefenie Wicks

This year’s Maritime Day event at Galilee Harbor seemed a fitting place to interview Annette Rose, the first person to head the Maritime Day event committee back in 1981.   Annette, a member of the Galilee Harbor Community Association for over 30 years, was the first waterfront candidate to run for the Sausalito City Council and win,  back in 1988.  Since then she has spent over 16 years of her life in elected office.  The last Maritime Day she organized was held in 1984 and at that time she was responsible for bringing the WWII Liberty Ship the ‘Jeremiah O’ Brien’ to Sausalito and having it docked at the Bay Model for public boarding and tours.

I began the interview with the question, why Maritime Day?

Annette explained that in the beginning Maritime Day was only for members of the Sausalito waterfront.  It was presented at the Bay Model as a two-day event and took place in May.  It was the first event of its kind in Sausalito and produced the first working waterfront directory that listed the names of waterfront businesses.   The event used the talents of all who would come and volunteer.  There was music, food, nautical films, lectures about the waterfront and authors who had written books about seafaring tales.  The San Francisco Maritime Museum sent over its crew to perform sea chanteys during the event and there were demonstrations of how to mend fishing nets and build a mast.

The event was the brainchild of Chris Hardman and a group called Art Zone.    Annette Rose, Chris Hardman, Phil Frank, Chris Tellis, Steward Brand, Mary Crowley, Joe Trois and Jack Van der Muelin were the members of this elite group who shared one common interest  … protecting the Sausalito working waterfront and its way of life.  They wanted to counter the negative destruction of Bob’s Boat Yard, with a positive move and the idea of Maritime Day was born.

Annette goes on to say that, although the first Maritime Day was for waterfront residents it was well attended by the residents from the hill.   It was only then that the importance of this event became apparent to everyone.   Maritime day was erasing that yellow line of separation that many felt was dividing the City between “them” and “us.”

“One story I will always remember took place after the first event,” she continued. “One of the moms from Gate 3 came to me with this story about the Sausalito PTA.  It seems that at the PTA meetings all of the parents voluntarily segregated themselves, meaning that the hill moms all sat together, as did the moms from Marin City and the moms from the waterfront.  But after the Maritime Day event, the next PTA meeting turned into one group.  As the moms all decided they wanted to sit together because the ‘them’ and ‘us’ had been erased.  Everyone wanted to know more about the waterfront and shared their personal experiences from the event that had impressed them.   But the big thing was how people could cross that yellow line down Bridgeway and realize that neither side harbored the monsters that each had envisioned.”

Annette’s last Maritime Day was in 1984 and I was there.  It was because of this memory that in 2005, as 30 year member of the Galilee Harbor Community Association, I was able to persuade the community to resurrect the event and for the past 7 years as chief organizer, I was able to bring the event back and help re-establish it as a annual waterfront happening.  This year I stepped down as organizer and with that I asked the first organizer, if she feels that the Maritime Day event is still as important as it was back in its early years?

“When you re- started Maritime Day again in 2005, this was a great gift to the community and once again showed how wonderful the people on the waterfront can be.  Members of Galilee Harbor have become great stewards of the public trust, because waterfront residents take care of the marshes, the sea birds, the sea lions, the star fish and the California rays that come around the boats when they hear music, this is part of your life everyday here in the Harbor and Maritime day opens up this waterfront experience and this waterfront neighborhood and helps people understand so much more about your existence.” She smiles as she continues, “ the bare bones of today’s event is the great music (much of it provided by talented residents), the wonderful fish and chips,  the nautical  flea market, the children’s area and the fabulous ships from the San Francisco Maritime Museum.  All of it enables people to have a birds eye view of what it’s like to live on the water, to be part of a waterfront community. People at Galilee Harbor have always been really good hosts  to the public and that’s so important. “

In closing she added, “You and I have been part of something that has become a historical and annual event, we put in the work and the time, now we get to sit back and see the fruits of our labor or the wakes from our bows.”

In recognition of Sausalito’s rich maritime heritage, the Historical Society is launching a self-guided walking tour along the Sausalito waterfront, entitled Sausalito Sets Sail.  At the same time, a new exhibit of sailing art and artifacts will open at the Historical Society’s Exhibit Room on the top floor of City Hall.  Launch date is Sept. 4.  More details will follow.

Annette Rose in 1988.

Photo by  Steefenie Wicks

Anais Nin and Jean Varda

By Larry Clinton
Before settling in Sausalito, legendary artist, boatsman and partier Jean Varda visited
Big Sur and decided to move there, making friends with Henry Miller and Anais Nin.
Anais would write about Varda frequently, including a slightly fictionalized profile of him in her novel “Collages.”
In her diaries, Nin wrote: “Varda is the only artist I know leading a free life today. He has reduced his needs. He only needs to teach once a week. The rest of the time visitors buy a collage now and then. He has no jealousy, envy, or competitiveness…
“Varda made his fantasy come true. His life is the one I admire. When I left San Francisco he had already acquired a ferryboat [the Vallejo] from which the motors and wheels had been extracted, leaving a pool-like center to look into. He was beginning to make windows for the deck. With time the ferryboat grew in beauty. It is moored in Sausalito, and attached to it is a sailboat. Everything is made by his own hands, with little or no money. He makes a little income by teaching at an art school. But he does not need much. He wears jeans, takes showers army bucket style. If money is low he does not hesitate to serve only fried potatoes and wine. He cooks in an enormous frying pan from the flea market, with enormous wooden spoons from Mexico. He is a poet, sublime ragpicker who turns everything into an object of beauty.”
In “A Woman Speaks,” Nin noted, “I learned from him this creating out of nothing. I learned from Varda, who made collages out of bits of cloth...Varda also went to the junkyard, and from discarded boats made himself a beautiful Greek sailboat. This is the power to create out of nothing we need to restore ourselves...being able to create something out of clay, out of glass, out of bits of material, out of junkyards, out of anything is the proof of the creativity of man and the magic of art.”
Later she recalled a visit from Varda in the ’60s.: “He came with three young women dancers, the three Graces I called them. He looks ruddy and strong, although he had a stroke. He tells me this stroke delivered him of the fear of death. ‘I saw wonderful colors, like an LSD vision. It was beautiful. I had no sense of parting from the world, just dissolving in colors’.”
Varda died in 1971.  In her diary, Nin recalled that he was well known for his “outrageous parties, with topless dancers and many lovely young girls.” Varda developed a reputation as a dirty old man, but Anais defended him, “The comment on Varda was absurd. Women have always courted men and there is nothing offensive about Varda’s courting of women.”

These quotes were found on the Web at www.vallejo.to/artists/varda_anais.htm.
    

Jean Varda near the end of his life.    Photo courtesy of Sausalito Historical Society

Ross Sommers: His Own Man

By Steefenie Wicks

During my interview with Ross Sommers I asked him, “ What’s it like to have your father considered, the ‘King of the Sausalito Waterfront?’ As the son do you find that hard to live up to?”    Ross laughed and said, “No, I don’t even come close to that, my dad was all about the sea and me, I’m about more than that.  I like to hunt, and have since I was 10 years old.  I have two brothers and two sons and I’m the only one that really took to the water.  But once I opened up my own shop, I got to work.  I think that’s what it’s all about, your own personal accomplishments.  And I have been lucky because I have been allowed to live my dream and that’s what I’m doing.”

Ross Sommers, the son of ship builder Harold Sommers, is the new face at the Spaulding Wooden Boat Center.  He is the new Yard Manager and his job is very close to what he does in his own Yard at Gate 3, the Richardson Bay Boat Works.

His talents are much like his dad’s; he believes if you aren’t ‘hands on’, then things can get nasty.  He goes on to say, ”With today’s pricing in boat yards you want to have a ‘hands on’ guy so that you can stay alert.”

Ross and his two younger brothers grew up in Oakland, his parents were divorced when he was 10, and at 12 he started to go sailing with Dad.  He began to come to Sausalito on the weekends and go sailing with his father aboard the ‘FREDA’, a vessel that he would later call home. He remembers sailing the ‘FREDA’ but says the best was the first sails aboard the ‘WANDERBIRD’ …  those were special times.

From the time he began sailing up until he was almost 30 he did a variety of jobs that had to do with either shipbuilding or delivery of yachts.   For 5 years he sailed with Bob Sloan aboard the vessel, ‘SPIKE AFRICA’ where he continued to perfect his sailing skills.  But it was the rebuilding of the ‘WANDERBIRD’ that served to teach him to become a skilled marine worker.   “I consider myself a jack-of all- trades kind of guy, but mostly I do boat repair and have been doing so for the last 40 years on the Sausalito, waterfront.”

He goes on to say,” I was an ‘indentured servant’ on board the ‘WANDERBIRD’ and that’s how I learned boat building and boat repair.   My father would come by and see me sitting and say, ‘ while you are resting here’s a piece of sand paper -- that area needs some work’.   But there was a lot of community involvement with the ‘WANDERBIRD’, with guys like John Linderman Sr., he did a lot of the spar work and Ray Speck and his group from Gate 3 would come and over and pull the plywood off the deck.  You got to see ’hands on’ procedures by talented craftsmen, which is today a dying art.”

Other people would come by and volunteer their time working on some project that needed to be done on the ‘WANDERBIRD’.  During this time Ross lived on board the vessel in a small house-like structure that sat on the deck at the stern.   He says this was a time when people were not so rushed and they wanted to be part of a project that was considered special to the entire waterfront community.

‘There was the time my Dad received funds from I’m not sure who, but we ordered 3 units of Port Orford Cedar (from Oregon) in the rough.  A lot of people don’t know this but myself and a friend of mind rebuilt all of the bulwarks, the deck, the frames, the beams and the planks from the water line up. It took three and one half years, working everyday for 5 days a week while resting with a piece of sand paper in my hands.”

I asked Ross  whether he has seen any big changes since he has been working on the waterfront, and he pointed out that there are so many more restrictions than there used to be.  He explained that before you could do a few things that were easy for you like not having to lock up all the time.  For 15 years he   never locked up anything in his yard, but now he finds that something is stolen from the yard at least once or twice a year.  It gets a little depressing when you start to see that kind of change in a place that has always been considered ‘safe’.

Getting back to his new job at the Spaulding Wooden Boat Center, he says that he really likes the place because it’s like going to work in a big barn and he likes that feeling.   Having built his own home in San Anselmo, which has a barn, he feels at home at Spaulding.  He believes that the work that has been done on the ‘FREDA’ makes her a better-built vessel than when he sailed and lived on her.  Going to work each day seeing this classic that he learned to sail on, what he sees now is not only part of his past but the future of all of the new sailors who will walk her decks and pull her into the wind.   This is exciting.

Spaulding Center is hosting an Open House on Saturday, July 13 from 11 AM -3 PM.

Included are free guided boat rides with a Sausalito Historical Society Docent on board.  For information go to www.spauldingcenter.org or call (415) 332-3179.

Ross Sommers

Portrait by Steefenie Wicks

How the Gates Saved Independence Day

by Larry Clinton

The following article is from a Historical Society newsletter of 2008:

Back in 1994, Sausalito Historical Society member Dorothy Gibson conducted an oral history interview with Bob Kalloch and Laurabell Hawbecker, who moved to the northern waterfront (known as the Gates) in the late sixties. 

During this discussion, Bob mentioned that Laurabell had been responsible for reintroducing the Fourth of July parade to Sausalito, following a long absence.  And now, their interviewer, Dorothy, is the Grand Marshall of the 2013 parade. In the following excerpts, Bob and Laurabell recall how the parade was revitalized:

Dorothy: I understand that [Sausalito] hadn’t had a Fourth of July Parade for about 20 years.

Bob: I don’t think they’d had one since the thirties. . . or the twenties.  There were two things that came together.  One was that for several years in the Gates we’d had our own Fourth of July celebration, as well as Easter and Summer Solstice celebrations. . . A lot of people put energy into these things, but Laurabell was the focal point, I think it’s safe to say.  And this particular year they were really getting up a big Fourth of July celebration for just the Gates – from Gate 3 up to Gate 5.  Here’s a poster that was made for the… celebration in 1975, and it says there will be a dawn parade and then the main parade at 10:00, and it’s to go from Gate 3 to Schoonmaker Beach [for] a potluck picnic…

Laurabell had been working with Chris Hardman and his troupe’s drill team and drum corps.  They were getting their costumes, and it was coming along fine. But, in the meantime, Queva Lutz, who was the owner of the Tides Bookstore and head of the Chamber of Commerce that year, approached the City and said that they would like to have a Fourth of July parade. There was a little bit more of a response from the City to the Chamber of Commerce than the waterfront people were able to get… So Queva Lutz called up Laurabell and said, “I understand you’ve organized a parade for the waterfront.  Can we have your parade?” They talked about it and thought it would be a great idea for the waterfront and the City to get together, because there was very little communication between the waterfront and the City at that time…

Laurabell: I’d …  gone around to every unit that was to be in the parade and I had drilled them all – the band and our marching corps – I drilled them for weeks before the parade. And then I went to the police station to get the okay and everything for the parade and they said they would block the streets off, and there would be a fire engine “to lead your parade.” 

And I said, “No, I’m going to lead this parade, and I’m going to be out in front with my baton . . . because we’re representing the waterfront to Sausalito.”  The policeman looked at me and said, “Well, fire engines always  lead a parade,” and I said, “But not this one.” So he said, “All right, the fire engine will follow at the end of the parade. . .”

I said I wanted the parade to stop at Dunphy Park and I want all my different units that want to [perform] to do it in Dunphy Park right after the parade.  And they still are doing that, and after the parade the City and waterfront celebrate life together in Dunphy Park.

Dorothy: So after that first year, then the City took over and did it their way. But it’s continued to have all these elements.

Laurabell: Oh, yes, the waterfront gets in it quite a bit…

The entire oral history, which covers many areas of Bob and Laurabell’s fascinating life together, is available for review at the Society’s Research room at Sausalito City Hall.

Cornell Ross and Pam Bousquet chauffeured parade F(l)ounder Laurabell Hawbecker in the 2002 parade. Photo: Larry Clinton