Tuesday, March 18, 2002, the day before the war at Border's Cafe with Bob Hall



BOB: ** into the Catalyst and I saw you sitting over at a table with your, what 

looked like love beads and a tie-dye shirt or something and I walked over and I 

said, "Hmm. You must be a student at UCSC." And you said to me, "No, I'm a 

professor of mathematics." And I did a double-take, like I did with my sister-in-

law, Linda Berman, at that time, who attracted my attention and I met her before 

Charlie did, I think, my brother. And we got into a conversation which had to do 

with Taro or something wild, and come to find out later that Linda was a candidate 

for a Ph.D. at Princeton University, the first woman to get a musicology...and 

when she met my brother it just changed the chemistry of our whole family. My mom 

played the piano also and so there was a tie there and everybody appreciated the 

idea of having a Ph.D. and the Hall family was quite excited.



Ralph: Let's go back a little bit before that and just think about where you were 

when the Hip Pocket Bookstore opened up, and that was some earlier I think.



Yeah, it was about the time Santa Cruz was enjoying, or suffering, the fallout 

from the Haight Ashbury in San Francisco, when a lot of the communes and 

collectives were forming here in Santa Cruz, people getting away from the hard 

drugs that had entered the picture up there. Sometime in that general period Santa 

Cruz became a hotbed for hippies. Not the Beat generation, but real hardcore 

flower children and love *



R: Who were the first hippies that you actually met, people that you knew?



You! [laughs]



R: No, before that.



You know, I don't know. I didn't think of them as hippies then. I just thought of 

them as flower children.



Peter: What can you tell us about the barn?



Oh, the old barn out in Scotts Valley? That was a fabulous place! I went out there 

only a few times, but the doctor who did the gold tooth for Ken Kesey--Doctor 

Smith--he was doing the slides for psychedelic light shows, and the guy that was 

operating the machine went to get a drink or something and left me in charge of 

doing the light show and I was going, "Wow! I can do it!" and I didn't know Dr. 

Smith that well but he was quite a character I guess. Did you know him? You must 

have.



P: Yeah, I actually had a tooth extracted by him.



Did you know him?



R: I did, yes.



I never got really acquainted with him, but I had fun that night. Everybody was 

high and everybody was having a wonderful time. 



P: Well how would you say this stuff in the 60s started here in Santa Cruz? How 

did it all begin?



Like I said, I kind of think of it in connection with the fallout of the Haight 

Ashbury. And I was going up there weekends and spending lots of time at the Kool-

aid things that were going on in Golden Gate Park and just walking up and down the 

street, you know, a boy from small-town Santa Cruz, watching the crowds mill up 

and down Haight from the park to Ashbury Street, and, you know, wondering to 

myself, "What's going on here?" Going up into the coffee houses with a little 

place up above where people were smoking dope and finding a crash pad overnight so 

I could stay for a couple of days up in San Francisco leaving my family here in 

Santa Cruz to wonder where I was I suppose.



R: So the hip scene in Haight Ashbury was well established before anything got 

started in Santa Cruz.



To my recollection, yeah. 



R: And at that time you had a family with two little children and--



Four. I decided to quit the real estate business and drop out in front of God and 

everybody here in Santa Cruz and it was a great wonderment to my friends that I 

had a ponytail and bell-bottom jeans and did the whole nine yards as it were.



R: So was this movement a factor in your dropping out from the real estate 

business?



No. That came later when my kids started picking up bad habits at junior high 

school already, finding packets of this mysterious substance called marijuana in 

their travels around the campus. 



P: Did they just find them here and there?



Well that was the excuse I heard from my daughter Robin. I went into her room that 

she shared with Holly one day and I saw this baggie on the bed and I said, "That 

smells like..." and I said to my daughter Robin, my middle daughter, "Why don't 

you roll one up and we'll see if it's any good." Their mother would have had a fit 

had she known. But I had smoked it and already done some psychedelics up with John 

Lingerman up on empire Grade, so I was, you know, I knew the kids would get into 

it sooner or later anyhow, those "hippie hall kids" the teachers used to call 

them. 



P: I would think that anybody with any curiosity would be interested.



R: So how did this lead to your quitting the real estate business?



I got tired after twelve--no, I was married twelve years. I was in the real estate 

business about ten years and I--there was just too much family politics, both my 

mom and my wife, and my dad. My mom wasn't in the business but she * and I was 

like the knot in a rope in a tug of war between my mom and my wife, you know, I 

was being pulled apart.



R: So it had nothing to do with your discovering marijuana, psychedelics and so 

on. It was just an internal matter of the family?



P: But it freed you up to observe this whole scene, right?



Yeah, it keyed me up and I got so bold I used to do LSD by going up the river to 

the Garden of Eden or up to the, you know, up the river, because I thought it 

required more of a contemplative frame of mind, and so I--but I got so bold that I 

would drop a tab of LSD and come downtown and sit at the old Cooper House and 

listen to the music. And a few people would come up to me and sit down maybe and 

say, look at me and get a contact high and say, well, you know, it's no big deal. 

Here we are on Pacific Avenue listening to Don McCaslin and his Warmth Band and I 

got rather blase about the whole thing. 



R: Tell about the scene at the Lingerman Place--John Lingerman's Place, what was 

going on there.



Oh, John of the Mountain. He was a real interesting character. I forget how I met 

him. Maybe through a real estate friend of mine, he had an office on Mission 

Street where I had lived for a while after I left my family. They were friends, 

and I guess he came to visit her one day and she introduced me to him. Can't 

remember her name. And next thing I knew I was traveling up--where did he live up 

there? Pine Flat Road? You know, not on the main Empire Grade Road but off of it. 

Smith Grade. And found myself in this little cave covered with a tarp that he and 

his girlfriend had established their place out of. Very strange. You know, they 

just--he had bulldozers because he was a well digger, and caved this place out of 

the sandstone and invited other people--other people, you know, Zoo and Tosh and 

Charlie Nothing and Dude and others to join him while his family lived at the 

bottom of the hill, his wife and two boys, who were partners in his business. So 

it was quite a scene. 



I was sitting in the cave with him--I call it a cave--and we were talking about 

this and that and the other thing and he turned to his girlfriend. She was a 

teacher in Santa Cruz and she dropped out along with him. And Lingerman said, "I 

think Bob is ready." And of course my antennae went up, tweak tweak tweak. And I 

said, "Yeah, this is a good place, you know, a beautiful place with a view and 

interest. And so he gave me a tab and I stood by my car for a while, because I 

thought, "This is not working," you know, "I've got to get back to town, get 

myself straightened out." And then I got behind the eyeball thing and said, "Oh, I 

guess I better hang around a while. I can't drive down the hill." And in the 

meantime, he and his wife said, "Well, you know, we've got to go shopping today, 

and why don't you just wander around. There are people here and there you can talk 

to if you want to, or just hang out here." So I did. It was a very interesting 

day. And since that time I tell people to my own amazement that I never had a bad 

trip.



R: Yeah, me too.



Really? I mean I've had incidences that I've been able to manage of paranoia 

within the process, but I could always bring myself down, even when driving a car, 

bring myself down to, "Hey, Bob, slow down. Your four tires are not supposed to be 

off the ground. Ground yourself and get home!"



P: Did it give you a sense of excitement or anything like that here in Santa Cruz 

when the Hip Pocket Bookstore opened?



Oh well we were all excited about that. I belonged to the ACLU and the first board 

of directors, we met at Dr. [Hobert] -- the guy in the wheelchair



R: Yeah, Doug Hobert



And I remember one time we passed around nude photographs that had been in the Hip 

Pocket Bookstore and caused some alarm among the local evangelical gang, and that 

was--we all found them interesting and nothing exceptional. I mean they were very 

artistic pictures, nothing pornographic about them at all. So then Ron Boise came 

through town, I guess he lived here for a while, and was doing these--



P: My brother was the guy who sold his work stuff in San Francisco and got busted.



Oh, I remember your brother. So anyway, the upshot of the statue was that 

everybody, you know, after the story in the paper about this horrible pornographic 

adventure in--what was it, steel? 



R: Copper



It must have been about 15 feet tall, a big piece.



P: Up on top of the bookstore.



R: Above the entrance.



Right above the entrance to the bookstore. And, you know, first thing anybody 

would do would be to walk around and--



P: This is a couple, is that right?



Yes, a naked couple--and find out what it was that the Scotts Valley Evangelical 

people--what offended them was nothing, you know? You couldn't see anything. Here 

were these two large sculptures of a man and a woman sort of clinging to each 

other but in no suggestive--I don't remember any suggestion there.



R: Holding hands or something.



Yeah, very innocent thing. That's the story about that. And I used to just wander 

through the Hip Pocket Bookstore.



P: What happened as a result? This was brought up in court?



No, no, no. Never. They just presented them to our board of directors of the ACLU 

and we passed them around and that was the end of that. We went on to something 

else. It wasn't the subject of the meeting at all. But that statue, you know, 

later on, going to Oakland on the mud flats of the Oakland Estuary, I saw one of 

his other statues that had been put up there, but I didn't realize how many of 

them he had made. Do you know?



P: No. The ones my brother was busted for were actually real small. They were Kama 

Sutra things.



Oh, well I never saw any of those. 



R: There are still some of them at the Bhopal Gallery...I saw them there just 

recently.



I don't remember ever meeting Ron Boise. I know he was around town, but I never 

had a chance to talk to him. I would have loved to.



R: What about the Odyssey Records and what was going on in there?



Odyssey Records?



R: The record store, it was next to the Hip Pocket Bookstore...Rich Bullock and 

there was Lou Fein had a booth in there where he delivered astrological readings 

between the books.



Oh, Lou Fein. He did a reading for me once in his special deck and I bought one of 

his decks. He was a marvelous guy. Lou Fein. He must have been a good friend of 

yours and my sister-in-law, because I think she was kind of into that. Huh. Lou 

was a fine astrologer, maybe one of the best I ever met.



R: Still is, I think. I've seen him recently. He hangs out in Boulder Creek, you 

know, it's far from here.



You know, I don't know what happened to the deck I bought. It's lost somewhere in 

storage. He designed it himself, did he? I believe he did, or had something to do 

with itt.



P: I spent a winter one time in the end of Long Island with a guy, we would -- 

there was a lot of hash I remember and I was doing some speed or something. 

Anyway, he would draw these cards. Well anyway, he did this tarot deck in about a 

week. *** Maybe sometime I'll find it. I leave things various places.



R: So Bob, were there any other Santa Cruz native people who were involved in this 

scene like you were?



People going native, maybe, up at the Happy Dell Camp up in Ben Lomond--what was 

the name of the old camp? Right on the river where people lived at the old resort. 

The owner gave them the resort to live in. Paradise, that's right, it was. Not 

Paradise Park, the Masonic Park, but it was--and they went bathing nude in the San 

Lorenzo and apparently neighbors complained, and Locatelli was on the Board of 

Supervisors at that time, supervisor of San Lorenzo District, and they forced the 

owners to close down Camp Paradise. Was that the name?



P: I don't think that's quite right, but it's close.



I only spent a very short time there. I just went in and out, and then it became 

apparent that these kids were doing dope and swimming naked in the river, my God. 

Didn't we all swim naked in the San Lorenzo River when we were kids here in Santa 

Cruz? Well shoot me another question.



R: I'm out of questions. Peter?



And I'm out of answers.



R: No, you're not out of answers, we're just out of questions. We're at sea here.



P: Aside from the Hip Pocket Bookstore, what other sorts of things were--



I was fascinated browsing the shelves. Sometimes we would just take books from 

there into the Catalyst and read them. They must have lost a lot of books during 

that period. Peter Demma and Ron Bevert were in the Tom Wolfe story of the Koolaid 

Acid Test, characters not with their own names, but I knew all the people in that 

book by their real names here in Santa Cruz--many of them, not all of them. And 

so, where were we? 



P: Yeah, well see they came down once, or something like that, to the bar, didn't 

they? Didn't they do a performance?



R: They came down to my house once. Parked the bus outside my house on California 

Street. The Pranksters.



The Pranksters, yeah. I saw them come through Pacific Avenue, right down the main 

street of Pacific Avenue going south, when they were fleeing the law and trying to 

get to the Mexican border, and by God with that psychedelic painted bus, onward, 

they were in and out of Santa Cruz like that. I just happened to be downtown at 

the time and saw this crazy bus. I don't even think I had read the book by that 

time but I was aware of the Merry Pranksters. And then they were gone. And they 

made it all the way to the border in that bus with the loudspeaker on the front 

playing loud music. I mean I don't know how they did it. Do you have any idea how 

they made it to the border without--



P: *** what about music-wise in the 60s. What was going on here?



Well, of course my kids grew up with the Beatles and I wasn't terribly fascinated 

with them. I am devoted now. I would love to have met John and Yoko and -- but my 

kids were not old enough at that point to go to concerts or anything, but I -- and 

I loved the fact that down at the Poet and Patriot the bartender plays the Beatles 

songs all the time down there, and I'm just picking up on some of the words, you 

know, to those songs. About ordinary people, like Lovely Rita Meter Maid. Common 

people. Father Mahaney and Mother McCrary or whoever. You know. They had a common 

touch that only later began to appeal to me. I thought, well, you know, these are 

songs for the kids. I was into classical music. I loved Debussey and all the great 

jazz musicians, the two brothers, uh--you know who I mean, the classical jazz 

brothers, one did the music and one did the words. What were their names? Yeah, 

Gershwin.



P: Yeah, Ira, George.



R: So what about Max Hartstein? Did you ever go to his garage for perfect music?



Oh yes. Der Max. Yes. I loved Max. I used to visit his place up in Ben Lomond and 

hang out there sometimes. He had a musical group too, didn't he?



R: Yeah. The 25th Century Ensemble. It still is far out in the future.



Well he was living in the present and the future somehow, managing the two very 

well. Wasn't he a teacher, a music teacher or something at one time? 



R: Maybe, yeah, well the first I knew of him he was a professional jazz bass 

player in a club in San Francisco, one of those jazz clubs in North Beach. And he 

moved down here from there. 



Charlie Nothing also, up at John Lingerman's place. And they played a few times on 

their musical instruments made of branches of trees and manzanita and strange 

instruments that they created, and I heard them a couple times in a little cellar 

bar down at (Keg?) in Capitola, playing there. But Charlie Nothing was also a fine 

jazz musician out of New York who came to Santa Cruz to drop out I guess. And they 

played wonderful music and when I was up at the ranch, you know, getting high on 

acid, I would hear this flute up on top of the hill. And  would go up there and 

this was a real cave, you know, going laterally into the [hill] and I went to the 

end where there was a little light and a fire and this guy was frying something in 

a skillet. And I said, "What's cooking?" And he said, "Smoke." He was drying out 

some marijuana leaves. And that was Charlie Nothing, and I don't know his real 

name, but he was a fabulous character. And then, you know, he would, they'd make 

hand-made flutes and if things got boring in their cave they'd come out and 

there'd be this one voice, a flute voice, up on top of the hill playing down to 

another flute or instrument playing in one of the other spots where they were 

located. You know, they all had their own places but they were separate, one on 

top of the mountain and somebody down here close to the **. One, Morley was his 

name, a very fine artist, and I sat in his bus. He had a converted bus for his 

house. And we were sitting in there. He was in the driver's seat and I was sitting 

there, and he brought out one of his pictures. I wish I'd bought



[end of side A]



My two daughters, Robin and Holly, worked for him behind the counter and Eddie was 

kind of the manager. And I don't think Alan Paddy had a bar. I think it was 

Randall Kane that opened the bar up and that made a big different in the 

clientele. But they were still very open to people coming down and playing open 

mic style every Thursday I think it was that they set aside for anybody who wanted 

to sign up, literally. And so, you know, the old Catalyst evolved when they moved 

to Pacific Avenue and established their Taj Mahal down the street here, and it was 

fascinating, because my two daughters wanted to work as--they told Black Eddie 

that they wanted to be busboys. They didn't want to do counter work anymore. And 

Eddie said, "Well, okay if you're loose," whatever that meant. They had a real 

scene in there, with some of the looser barmaids, not including my kids of course. 

And then he fired them all. He'd hired so many people expecting the thing to take 

off like a burst of light and it didn't. It didn't catch on right away, its new 

place you know.  But he'd over-hired people and then he started firing them. So my 

two daughters eventually sired Randall because they formed a little local union, 

you know, it had nothing to do with the big union, but Randall couldn't stand 

that, so they took him to FEPC, Fair Employment Practices, State Administrative, 

and they won. Randall said, "This cannot stand," and took them to Federal Court 

where Randall Kane lost again. Because at the Federal level it becomes something 

else again, you know. He had to hire a Federal lawyer and probably spent a million 

dollars busting this handful of people who worked for him. Can you imagine? 



R: No. I didn't know this story at all.



And some of us patrons got out in front and picketed. Especially me with my two 

kids working there, wanting to support the staff who were all decent, nice people. 

And it didn't take more than a year. I used to go back in the Catalyst, even after 

that, and one day the bouncer came up to me. He says, "You can't stay here." And 

an off-duty bartender had just brought me a beer, and I said, "Well you've got to 

explain this to me. I'm not going to take your word for it." And he went over and 

consulted with Randall, who was kind of lurking, you know, with his funny eye, 

like Quasimoto over in the corner, and the guy came back and he said, put his hand 

on my glass as if to take it away from me. I should have just dropped it. But I 

didn't want to embarrass my good friend, Roger Applebee, wonderful friend, who was 

a bartender. And I left and I didn't go back from a long time. So I call him 

Citizen Kane. I really liked him at first, I thought he was this great liberal, 

until he got into union busting. This great liberal who had supported the first 

Peace & Freedom candidate, actually a democrat from Monterey County where he 

lived, that ran against Bert Calcott, our six-term Republican Congressman before 

Leon. Did you know Leon Panetta switched parties to run against Berg Calcott? He 

was working for the Nixon Administration in one of the Federal departments and 

opposed Nixon's Southern policies, and lo and behold, yeah, Panetta switched 

parties to run against Bert Calcott, who was a terrible hawk from Vietnam, you 

know. He used to brag about "my son the bombardier." 



P: Was there much in the way of protests about the Vietnam war here in the 60s?



Oh my, yes.



R: I'm going to have to go now.



Hey, you guys, we'll have to do this again sometime.



R: Yeah, definitely.