My love affair with Mendocino begins
I have held “Mendocino in My Heart” since my family first came to Mendocino in the early 1960s.
My Mother, Pat, grew up in the Pacific Northwest, attending, by her count, 19 new schools from grammar to high school. In 1941, her father was promoted to a position as Vice President with Crown Zellerbach Corp., and the family moved to San Francisco. While she was a student at Mills College in Oakland, her roommate Maggie and her boyfriend Jim introduced my Mom to Jim’s best friend from Tracy, Jack Nevin. They were married three months later!
My parents had a a very happy marriage, but Mother never really adapted to the extreme heat of the San Joaquin Valley. We kids (five of us) would come home from school to find our Mother sitting in front of the room air conditioner (usually over 100º outside).
Any one of five kids: “What’s wrong?”
Mother: “Do you know how hot it is?”
Kids: “But it’s only 105º today!”
I guess children raised in the heat are immune to the it. Unconcerned… unfazed…
My Mom started looking cooler places to spend a few weeks each summer. In the early 1960s, a family friend told us about Mendocino, and through a circuitous series of decisions and events, we ended up staying at the Mendocino Art Center in an unoccupied cottage meant for a visiting art teacher. Thank God we were small — we slept in sleeping bags all over the living room in the tiny one-bedroom rental. I know someone slept on the coffee table, but as the eldest and the only girl, it wasn’t me.
After growing up in hot, dry, old Tracy, Mendocino was like visiting another planet. It was foggy and cool, and seemed so mysterious and so different from our lives at home. Shops in town sold books and cards and exotic “Hippie” clothes, and posters that advertised concerts in San Francisco. It was a world apart. We could walk anywhere and everywhere in the village. We spent days exploring the streets in town, the charming houses that looked nothing like the tract homes in Tracy. I decided I wanted to live in Daisy MacCallum’s house, with its wild, unkempt garden and in need of a paint job. I was sure it was haunted, but it’s what my 12-year-old self wanted.
We combed the beaches, collecting pieces of driftwood we were sure smelled like the ocean. Fires on the beach, hot dogs marshmallows, bare feet in freezing cold ocean water… Playing “knock” rummy with our Father at Bill Zacha’s laundromat (now Ed O’Brien’s Compass Rose leather goods shop) while my Mother washed the clothes we’d worn at the beach the night before. It was a magical time — the beginning of my love affair with Mendocino…
