Remembering the Invention of JLV
When Charles Beardsley first purchased the old Pagani Winery in 1969 or thereabouts, it had been vacant and neglected for more than a decade. By that time it was little more than a crumbling collection of old farm buildings that had been left behind on a country backroad, a mile or so from the highway. Armed with grant money provided by Lady Bird Johnson’s interest in restoring the American Heritage, he invented Jack London Village as it is known today.
Charles cut a colorful figure, controversial and commanding. With his partner Robert Fritschi he repaired the buildings and cleaned up the property, pulling jettisoned winemaking equipment out of the creek to set up along the pathways with signs to indicate their history. He was a veritable raconteur, and would give creekside lectures on art, philosophy, and what life was like here in (for him) the not too distant past. He imagined into being a community of artists and musicians, where galleries, shops and studios were established, flourished, and in time were replaced by others.
A few figures have stepped out of those days to stop by my cabin and introduce themselves. Yvonne Giambrone-Martin showed me where her first jewelry shop “Lord of the Rings” had been, on the south side of the mill’s first floow in 1972. There was no deck there at the time she said, just a narrow walkway; she shared the floor with either “Spoon River” or “The Waterwheel” —restaurants that had occupied the mill in those days before Juanita.
You can’t talk about those days without eventually coming around to the grand and legendary muumuu-clad proprietess of “Juanita's Galley”. Juanita lived in broad strokes that fascinated and dismayed many people; it was her habit for example to sneak up on unsuspecting customers and “earmuff” them by throwing her immense breasts about their heads in a suffocating hug from behind.
Juanita’s food was honest and simple, and her prime rib cheap and good, but the health department did have occasional problems with the menagerie of animals that wandered among the tables: the monkey and the enormous pig in particular.
While Yvonne was talking with me Elliot Kallen stuck his head in the door, and they immediately recognized one another, even after three decades. Elliot had been part of Synergy, a musical cooperative that had built the recording studio where Opalesce is today.
Yvonne and Elliot quickly burst into rapid check-ins about mutual friends and shared memories that they each took turns embroidering, reminding one another of who else had been at JLV, and what else had happened. She remembered Van Morrison, and he talked about Norton Buffalo and Metallica. I, meanwhile, began dreaming about someday hosting a reunion here, with maybe an open mike.
A few days later I stopped in at Larry Brookins’ studio, “Lost Art Stained Glass“, out on the highway. Larry quickly recognized me from a visit a year or so ago, and resumed telling the stories he remembered, including the drives Beardsley would take through the Village in his vintage Rolls Royce. Fritschi would be driving in appropriate attire and Beardsley would be sitting in the back seat in his finest grey suit, with his hands clasped together over the gold knob of his gentleman’s walking stick, tipping his hat to the passers-by.
Larry had built the cabin I use as an office beneath the old bin in 1969, as a showroom for his work, and had kept his workshop in the basement of the mill. He moved into the general store after a while, which had stood where the decks are now arranged along the creek.
Tobi Smith’s jams and jellies shop, where she sold what she made of windfall fruit garnered about the valley (“Aunt Nelly’s Kitchen... Saints Preserve Us!”), had been in the general store just before Larry, living in the basement just about where the lower deck was built after the fire.
I finally just found the article that had appeared in the Index-Tribune January 6, 1977, headlined “Fire hits London Village store”. It heralded the sad end of the general store and one-time stagecoach stop that had been companion to the mill since the 19th Century. A few years ago I ran across the fellow who had helped build the decks afterwards, as a much younger handyman; now his work as a fine photographer is becomiong very well-known in Marin. It seems time marches on, carrying us all with it; those of us who remember have a sense of where, and why.
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This article originally appeared in The Jack London Villager December 2006.