CRA News September 2008

Selected articles from the newsletter of the Carmel Residents Association

We aren't sure whether Susie Carr was describing a fish she caught or discussing the elaborate fiesta decorations with husband Don and Dick Laney. Susie and Don, long-time chairs of the twilight barbecue, co- chaired the event this year with the Jane and Tony Diamond. Dick Laney barbecued the sausage hors d’oeuvres, while his wife Frankie prepared and served the delicious Mexican beans.

CRA May General Meeting:
Joe Livernois, executive editor of The Herald
Meet the editor and hear how
The Herald will cover the election

President's Message
Carmel -- everybody's cup of tea

by Roberta Miller

While walking through Mission Trails Nature Preserve one day, in the early morning fog, I pondered the joy and sentiment that Carmel-by-the-Sea injects into my thoughts and being. This hideaway, small and serene, so close to large sprawling cities, has managed to set itself apart through the wonders of mother nature and our forefathers' vision. As embers of light spread through the trees, I smiled, resolving to enjoy each day and count my lucky stars. Maybe, just maybe, enjoying sentiment is almost as good as enjoying a cup of tea. I have tried to put some of these thoughts into the words below.

"Carmel-by-the-sea, by the sea, by the wonderful sea."

• Retain a 6-foot double-sided grape-stake fence rather than the masonry wall. CRA board member and former Cultural Commission chairperson Carolyn Hardy wrote the council, "A character-defining element of a grape-stake fence is that you can see through the slats. I hope that this would still be possible with a double-sided fence that completely surrounds the theater property site. We want to carry on the tradition of peering through the fence!"
  
  
• Leave the current parking inside the fence and on the street rather than excavating the perimeter of the property, causing the removal of significant trees.
  
  
• Retain, but improve the existing concession stand, which was moved from Sunset Center at great expense, and add a ticket booth to it rather than erecting a new building.
  
  
• Build the enlarged stage as shown in the plan but eliminate an excavated room under the seating. Hardy wrote, "In working toward a compromise of addressing the needs of the actors with reducing the scale of the structure, I hope you will consider asking Mr. McCann to strive to preserve as many existing trees around the structure as possible and configure backstage in a way that does not appreciably expand the footprint while providing the needed appropriate bathrooms, dressing areas and scene docks."
  
  
• Maintain the existing seating footprint. In the proposed plan, the seating footprint was enlarged and more space was allocated per seat. Carolyn Hardy suggested that "such an expansion of use could create additional vehicular traffic at a time when the neighborhood is at a saturation point for parking cars."

OLD CARMEL
by Connie Wright

Jimmy Hopper -- one of the Carmel gang

Jimmy Hopper was born James Marie Hopper of an Irish Fenian father and a petite French mother in 1876 in Paris. Bringing Jimmy and his twin brother John with her, she came to Oakland to teach music. She enrolled the boys in the Prescott School, the toughest school in Oakland, and sent them off wearing French velvet suits of the highly adorned style of 1887. The effect can be easily imagined: a fight ensued which Jimmy won, beating the toughest kid. He fought every day after that to maintain his reputation.

At eighteen he entered the University of California at Berkeley and took up football. At 5'6" and 142 pounds, he soon became the dynamic quarterback. Fans rose and screamed when he entered the field. While at Berkeley, he played a large part in the first-time stealing of the Stanford ax, a symbol of Stanford's power and ferocity.

Jimmy graduated from Berkeley, took a law degree at Hastings, and was admitted to the bar in 1900, but never practiced law. Instead he took a job at the Wave, a small San Francisco newspaper, at $10 a week. In 1901 he married Mattie Leonard. The next year they set off for the Philippines, where they started new schools and taught. Jimmy now began writing tales of the Philippines, which were ultimately published in McClures Magazine, one of the vital U.S. magazines of the time. Jimmy joined the McClures staff in San Francisco, where he was a regular at Coppa's, the meeting place for San Francisco Bohemians. When George Sterling introduced Mary Austin, then a rising literary star, to the group with a view to having her permanently join them, Jimmy pronounced that she was not pretty enough and was too outspoken. She herself described Jimmy as having "the face of a Breton sailor, and hair of one of Fra Angelico's angels."

Jimmy was working on the San Francisco Call when the 1906 San Francisco earthquake occurred. His account of the event appeared in Harper's Weekly and made him enough money "to enable me to give all my time to story writing." The place to do so, his friend George Sterling told him, was Carmel. Here they moved in 1907, but Jimmy was soon called by McClures to write a series on San Francisco graft trials. Jimmy met Fred Bechdolt in San Francisco and got him to come to Carmel. With a retired burglar as a source of information, Jimmy and Fred wrote 9009 (the informant's prison number), an exposé of prison conditions, which came out in the Saturday Evening Post in 1908. It was one of the Post's great serials and contributed to prison reform. In 1914, as World War I was breaking out, the Hoppers purchased George Sterling's house on Torres and 12th Street. Jimmy became the correspondent for Collier's, a leading liberal magazine, in France. At the end of the war, he returned to Carmel. In 1935 Mattie died, and in 1938 he married Elayne Lawson of Monterey.

In those latter days of his life, Jimmy could be seen sitting in his car, smoking one of his small, brown, French cigars, while Elayne shopped. Robinson Jeffers remembered him as the man who used to stand and talk at his garden sea gate, who loved the cold ocean and used to swim from Carmel Point to Point Lobos. Hopper's Rock off the Carmel Beach is named for him. He died in August, 1956 of a heart condition.

Altogether, Hopper published some three hundred short stories in addition to his newspaper work. He appears to have been the sweetest, kindest and most sensitive of the Carmel bunch.

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