CRA News April 2002

Selected articles from the newsletter of the Carmel Residents Association

CRA Meeting -- Retired Police Chief Don Fuselier's alter ego -- Isaiah Turner!

President's Message

by Monte Miller

As I get older, I find it fascinating to read obituaries. I learn where the deceased went to school, their professions and highlights about their lives and families. Often I am sorry not to have met the person or to have known him or her better. For example, I have read several obituaries about local people who were Air Force fighter pilots in the same planes that I flew. What a disappointment that I didn't get a chance to meet them and share our common experiences. Some attended the same college I did, or lived in the same cities where I have lived. Again I wished for the opportunity to have chatted about our commonality.

These reflections were precipitated by hearing third hand that one of our members--still very much alive--was a former pilot for Howard Hughes. I knew him, but not anything about his background. More on that later. I then remembered about reading an article in the February Carmel Foundation newsletter about a Jazz Appreciation class taught by Don Newmark. Don and his wife are both active members of CRA. However, I didn't know about his expertise in jazz. I started attending the class and was impressed by Don's knowledge and abilities. CRA member Bobby Jungnick is also in the jazz class. Don's wife, Laura, is a published poet, and her father was a well-known barnstorming pilot. I have read a draft of a book on his fascinating exploits during the early days of flying. You can read more about the Newmarks in Howard Skidmore's profile.

At our general meeting after Sept. 11, I asked all the military (active and retired) to stand and be recognized. There were so many I couldn't focus on everyone. Clayton Anderson, a well known member, was in the Army's famed 10th Mountain Division during WW II. Milt Williams was a Navy pilot. Al McDaniel was not only Howard Hughes' pilot, as mentioned above, but a test pilot. Dick Laney served on an aircraft carrier. And when Jim Wright made Navy captain he was the youngest officer ever to attain that rank. It will be interesting to discover in what branch the others served and in which war.

To mention a few of our many interesting members, there are artists, such as Frankie Laney, Belinda Vidor and Ali Miner. Writers, Jim Holliday and Robert and Angie Irvine. A TV star, Barbara Burnett. A TV producer, David Whorf. Academics, Connie Wright and Ingrid Wekerle. Journalists, Ed Bayley and Zaza Skidmore. An airline pilot, Marshall Hydorn. Business leaders, Larry Rodocker and Ed Botsford. And accounting executives like Larry Southern, who can explain off-balance-sheet accounting practices. (Is Enron listening?)

We also have a multitude of grandparents of totally-superior, good-looking grandchildren. (I have 12, can you top that?) We have graduates of UCLA, Berkeley, Stanford, Yale, Cal Tech, Annapolis, MIT, U. of Oregon, Harvard and many other great universities as well as people who have lived in or visited places all over the world.

So what is the point of this discussion? We all are missing fascinating facts about our many members. The solution? We need to start getting brief bios and interesting anecdotes from all 500 of you members. Just jot down some notes about yourself and mail to me at Box 13, Carmel CA, 93921. This information can be used to initiate newsletter articles (with your permission, of course), or we might even find some interesting program material. Who knows, you may be the next Howard Skidmore and tell us about "famous people who knew me."

Greg D'Ambrosio's talk cheered
by standing-room only audience

Saturday, April 27
10 a.m. - noon

* Volunteers meet at foot of Ocean Avenue
* Please bring gloves
* Coffee and pastries served courtesy of Caffe Cardinale and Carmel Bakery

CRA PROFILE
by Howard Skidmore

Historical preservation, poetry and jazz, the Newmark mix!

Don and Laura Newmark, CRA members, have a special relationship to the natural beauty and historical places of coastal California. Don has used his professional skills to protect and preserve those valued resources, and Laura has rhapsodized about the natural beauty in poems that fill a book.

Worthy as these commitments are, do not think that the Newmarks can be easily put in pigeonholes. Don's time now is devoted to teaching the history and appreciation of jazz. And Laura's poetic inspirations are firmly buttressed by a past career in the specialized field of librarian in academic research.

Both are native Californians. The first 18 years of Don's life were spent in Beverly Hills. Two days after graduation from high school he enlisted in the Navy--World War II was underway. Two years then followed of being close to the sea but not on it, shore duty in San Diego.

Post-war, Don went to the University of Colorado and then earned a degree in city and regional planning at the University of California at Berkeley. A career in urban planning followed in various Bay Area entities, ending up at San Mateo County. That area's proximity to San Francisco and the early history of the region meant it had sites and structures of historical importance, of particular interest to Don.

Laura was born in Santa Monica. Her father, who had been a barnstorming pilot, became a career Air Force officer after World War II. The family moved frequently, and a treat for Laura was four years spent in Naples, Italy.

After graduation from the University of California at Berkeley (a different time from Don) Laura earned a master's degree in library science at the University of Illinois. A year at the University of California at Los Angeles followed. She was then ready for a post at the American Institutes for Research in Palo Alto, where she stayed six years. Laura and Don met on a Sierra Club hike in Big Basin State Park in 1971 and they were married the next year. Their home was first in Menlo Park and then in Portola Valley, where the foothills setting moved Laura to write poetry.

After Don retired in 1980, he became chairman of the San Mateo County Historical Resources Advisory Board. Its role was to give expert advice to the county's Board of Supervisors.

Public controversy erupted on many of the issues tackled by the board, reminiscent of our own area's Flanders Mansion and Fort Ord flare-ups. In the adaptive reuse of an old schoolhouse, the planned presence and parking of participants aroused the opposition of nearby residents. The upshot was that dance classes were okay but weddings were not.

The threatened demolition of a 1920's complex of buildings in which early tuberculosis research had taken place engaged Don's advisory board. A dispute similar to that at Fort Ord pitted conflicting aims. The artists wanted studios, the Park District wanted buildings removed to create parkland. The case went to court, says Don, and parkland won.

Satisfying to Don was the outcome of a campaign to save a country general store in what became the posh community of Woodside. The store was restored to its appearance at the turn of the century, stocked appropriately, and operated by the county as a museum. Don's path from historic preservation to jazz appreciation was filled by an interlude of video film production. Subjects included architecture, jazz and the history of the Camino Real, which started as a Spanish country trail and today is a busy boulevard through the communities of the South Bay.

Drawing on a longtime interest in jazz and a collection of records and CDs, Don has taught appreciation, with musical accompaniment, at venues ranging from the San Francisco Center for Learning in Retirement to, after he and Laura moved to this area, the Carmel Foundation and the Park Lane in Monterey.

In 1993 the Newmarks visited Carmel, and thought they would like to live there someday. Laura was particularly moved by poet Robinson Jeffers' Tor House and Hawk Tower. In 1994 they moved to a rental in Monterey, and two years later occupied their hillside home in Hatton Fields. The sweeping view, filtered by trees, centers on Palo Corona Ranch of the Stuyvesant Fish family, also known as the Gateway to the Big Sur.

Don put in two years on the Monterey Commission for Historic Preservation, the protection of the ancient adobes a concern. Laura says she was very fortunate to be welcomed to the late Bob Campbell's informal authors' coffee group at the Pine Inn. Bob, educated as a graphic artist before he became a writer, did the design of Laura's 1999 book, A Watercolor Wash of Fog, Poetic Sketches of Carmel, Asilomar and the Monterey Coast.

How do Laura and Don feel about living in paradise? Maybe the joy that pervades this brief poem speaks for both of them--

Poem reprinted from Tor House Newsletter

For years, Rocco Cardinale of Caffe Cardinale and his father, Gaspar, before him, have generously donated coffee for the CRA's Beach Cleanup, as well as for other civic events sponsored by the association. Several years ago, Beach Cleanup Chair Clayton Anderson approached Gaspar Cardinale, telling him he really should be charging full fare for the coffee they supply. Gaspar's reply was, "Since running a business doesn't allow time for us to help you clean the beach, this is our way of contributing to the effort."

To show its appreciation, the Carmel Residents Association board decided to not only present a Certificate of Appreciation to Rocco but to give him a gift certificate for dinner at Caffe Napoli or Little Napoli ... which, incidentally, are owned by another benefactor of the Beach Cleanup, Richard Pepe.

A letter sent to Richard Pepe, owner of Carmel Bakery, which provides pastries for the Beach Cleanup

OLD CARMEL
by Connie Wright

Hugh W. Comstock: "Builder of Dreams

Hugh Comstock was born on a farm in Evanston, Illinois, in 1893, the youngest of seven children.

The family moved to Santa Rosa in 1907. He was educated at home by private tutors. In 1924 Hugh came to Carmel to visit his sister Catherine and her husband, George Seideneck, both artists and members of the struggling Carmel Art Association. Catherine and Hugh's mother, Nellie Comstock, was a generous donor to the association. While in Carmel, Hugh met Mayotta Browne, who successfully made and sold rag and felt dolls, called "Otsy-Totsys." Hugh and Mayotta married that year. Buyers from large cities came to place orders for the dolls, which soon filled their house to overflowing. She asked Hugh to build her a cottage to use as a showroom. Hugh was neither a builder nor an architect, but he loved to draw and tinker. He designed and built with Mayotta a whimsical little cottage, Gretel, on Torres near 6th, inspired by the watercolor illustrations of the British children's book illustrator Arthur Rackham. They mixed pine needles with the plaster and toweled it over burlap to give a textured appearance. Hansel followed in 1925 and the Tuck Box, Dolores south of Ocean, in 1926. The Carmel Pine Cone called Hugh "a builder of dreams" that year. With some happy exceptions, most of Carmel domestic architecture of the period consisted of large, boxy board and batten houses without any pretension to style, and commercial stores had false Western fronts. All this changed with Hugh's intriguing little creations, and people clamored for him to build them cottages or stores. The little cottages seemed to grow from the ground they rested on. Hugh purposefully did not use a carpenter's level, so the lines were untrue and the chimneys crooked.

In the late 1920's, Hugh yielded to the wishes of those who wanted larger, more traditional homes for year-round living, but he remained firm in his concern for the environment and his love of natural native materials. He used chalk rock from Carmel Valley, natural wood, hand-carved timbers, terra cotta tile, redwood shakes and hand-forged fixtures. The interior walls of some of the houses were rough lumber and the workmen first painted them and then removed part of the paint to accentuate the knots and grain of the wood.

Hugh's own studio, built in 1927, corner of Santa Fe and 6th, was inspired by an English country house. The exterior walls are stuccoed and trimmed with wood, irregularly carved, at cornices, windows and doors. The roof is steeply pitched with irregularly-cut shakes. The narrow, tall chalk-rock chimney has a Gothic pot. The interior of the office is handsome and comfortable. The steep ceiling gives the room a feeling of both spaciousness and intimacy, which is typical of Comstock houses. Even in large 20' by 40' rooms, there is a feeling of coziness and comfort.

Due to the Depression and a desire for cheap building materials, Hugh became interested in adobe and studied Monterey's historic adobe buildings. The material itself was supremely economical--simply dig a hole. The problem was that if the roof of the building leaked, the adobe melted. Hugh learned that stabilized, waterproof bricks had been made by adding emulsified asphalt to the clay. He was, however, unable to obtain any, so he and his associates devised a formula and made bricks at their plant in Carmel Valley. His first adobe house was completed in 1936. He called these bricks "Bitudobe" and his invention led to the development of the Post-Adobe system, in which heavy grooved bearing beams are placed at intervals in a single layer of stabilized adobe and locked together with waterproof mortar. This system eliminates all leaks. Rather than patenting the process by which he would have made a great deal of money, he made his trade secrets public. In 1948 he published at his own expense Post Adobe, in which he described this method of construction, including the formula for "Bitudobe," complete floor plans for homes and photographs. This generous act was typical of the man.

His generosity was not limited to sharing his building expertise. He served as chairman of the board of the Carmel Sanitary District for over ten years and as president of the Carmel Unified School District. In this latter capacity he served as a consultant to the architects who built Carmel High School, which used the Post-Adobe system. His interest in the environment led to efforts to preserve the forest ambiance of Carmel by outlawing sidewalks, house numbers and mail delivery. In 1946 he became a member of the newly-formed Planning Commission whose job was to deal with a building boom which appeared to threaten the uniqueness of Carmel.

Comstock's contributions to domestic architecture have been described in House Beautiful, Good Housekeeping, Sunset Magazine, House and Garden and other national periodicals.

He died suddenly in Santa Barbara in 1950 after what appeared initially to be successful surgery. His friends and associates remembered him as "a sweet guy," "a straight shooter" and "an inexpressibly fine human spirit."

Our Favorite Places

Time for Spring Cleaning

Bob Kohn writes, "Now that Spring has sprung, we're wondering how we can see out of our winter-dirty windows to watch our garden burst into leaf. We've decided to give this job to our local window washers--Monterey Bay Window Cleaning Company. CRA members Greg and Dorothy Cole are residents of our village and have owned and operated their commercial/residential business for years. Call them for estimates. You'll like the great job they will do for you and you'll be surprised at how much spring beauty lies outside your sparkling clean windows.

Remember that your City Council is on T.V.

City Council meetings are taped and re-broadcast
Sundays, 8 a.m. - 12 noon on
KMST Channel 26