Behind the Sun: A Family affair, part I
http://www.pacificsun.com/news/show_story.php?id=1026
The golden age of the Chosen Family and the curse of Olompali
by Jason Walsh
August 11, 2009
From the Sun vaults August 6-12, 1969
Some will come and some will go and we shall surely pass...We are but
a moment of sunlight, fading in the grass --the Youngbloods, "Get Together"
As future Marin resident Jesse Colin Young crooned these prescient
words in this hippie anthem of love and brotherhood that hit number 5
in 1969, the sunlight of utopian idealism was fading for good upon
the grasses at Novato's Rancho Olompali.
From November of 1967 to August of 1969, the northern face of Mt.
Burdell was tenanted by a self-sustaining band of outsiders known
throughout the Bay Area as the Chosen Family--Marin's archetypal
entry into the legend and lore of the '60s hippie commune.
The Family, according to the Sun, "was to create a lifestyle based on love."
The antecedents of the Family first arose in late '67 when southern
Marin businessman and fortunate son Donald McCoy Jr. took a few
hundred thousand from his inheritance to lease the mansion,
buildings, dormitory and pool at Rancho Olompali--together with a
couple dozen other one-time establishment beneficiaries. Now
transformed by the Haight-Ashbury allure, McCoy "grew a beard, turned
on and dropped out."
The Family's commune at Olompali quickly became a scene de
celebre--its numbers at one point counted into the hundreds and
included former nun Mary Norbert, San Francisco nightclub entertainer
Sandy Barton and Garnet Brennan, the beloved Nicasio school teacher
whose career had been bogarted by her school district after she
publicly admitted to smoking marijuana. Janis Joplin and members of
the Jefferson Airplane visited the ranch; the Grateful Dead shot an
album cover there.
"The whole group ranged in age from late teens to late forties and
there were always at least a dozen children around," wrote Sun editor
and publisher Steve McNamara after spending the better part of a week
with the Chosen Family for his story, "Lively Life of Rancho Olompali."
McNamara described the early days of the commune as "a golden age of
the Chosen Family"--with open nudity, shared food and the free flow
of money (what there was of it) rendering North Marin its closest
encounter with the counterculture's promise of ecstasy through
emancipation, an Elysian Fields of freedom. But "ranch residents
fiercely defended their right to do their own thing," cautioned
McNamara. "This sometimes included their right to ignore needs of the
group as a whole."
When McNamara signed off on his first of two stories about the
commune in that week's issue, "the days of the Chosen Family at
Rancho Olompali [were numbered." A pair of narcotics raids, near
bankruptcy and a disastrous fire had thrashed residents from their
utopian dream--and that was before the tragic drownings that would
stream the illusion of "a lifestyle based on love" at Olompali into
full-blown nightmare.
"Olompali's recorded history begins in 1776 when Spanish explorers
visited an Olompali Indian village," noted McNamara in his intro
recounting the cursed history of the land. After the vanquishing of
the natives, the area was granted to Christianized Olompali Camilo
Ynito, who a decade later was fleeced of the vast 9,000 acres by
Nicasio land baron James Black, all for a measly fifty-two hundred smackers.
"It was widely believed that Ynito had buried his treasure somewhere
on the ranch," wrote McNamara. And years later, "a woman tried to woo
the secret out of old Ynito--but failed. And, so the story goes,
enraged by her failure, she put an arrow through his heart."
A hundred years later, the Chosen Family tried to woo its own brand
of treasure out of Olompali.
"When the gates next to the Williams Worm Farm north of Novato
finally close on the Family," concluded McNamara, "it will end still
another remarkable chapter in the history of the ranch."
--
Next week: A Family affair, part II: Paradise Lost [see below]
--------
Behind the Sun: A Family Affair II: Paradise Lost
http://www.pacificsun.com/news/show_story.php?id=1038&e=y
Tragedy at Olompali, and the end of the 1960s
by Jason Walsh
August 17, 2009
From the Sun vaults, August 13-19, 1969
'Love is but the song we sing, and fear's the way we die--you can
make the mountains ring, or make the angels cry'--the Youngbloods,
'Get Together'
--
Few mountains have sounded sadder chimes than Mt. Burdell; scant have
shed more angel tears than Rancho Olompali.
Olompali's story didn't end with the tragedy of the Chosen Family,
nor did it start with the anguish of James Black. But that is where
our tale of innocence lost begins.
It was 1863 when wealthy dental-powder inventor Galen Burdell married
the striking daughter of Nicasio land baron James Black, a shrewd
illiterate who'd struck it rich in the gold mines of the Sierra Nevada.
Black and his beloved wife Maria bequeathed to the newlyweds nearly
9,000 acres of Rancho Olompali, but their vast estate was no
fortification from tragedy. When Maria mysteriously died while under
the dental anesthetic of her son-in-law, the elder Black cursed the
Burdell name and struck his daughter from his will.
Driven to drink in an attempt to numb his widower sorrows, Black fell
from horseback in an intemperate stupor in 1869, suffering a 2-inch
wound at the base of his skull. He died wallowing in the dirt,
convulsing breathlessly as if poisoned by a fatal cocktail of
strychnine and grief.
"The leaves of the great book of life closed [on James Black,"
declared the Marin press of the day, "and another of California's
oldest pioneers has passed from time to eternity."
One hundred years later, 40 years ago this week in fact, the final
pioneers of Olompali passed from time to eternity; stricken with
tragedy of their own, the Chosen Family had been selected out.
The Chosen Family's hippie commune experiment had lasted a little
over 18 months in the deteriorating buildings and fertile grounds of
Rancho Olompali. Their dream of a "lifestyle based on love"
incinerated alongside the faulty wiring of the Burdell mansion in a
February fire that mirrored the burned-through family funds of the
commune's pecuniary patron Donald McCoy Jr.
After a pair of narcotics raids forced McCoy and commune kingpin
Robert McKendrick to flee the estate--the former to Marin General's
rehabilitation ward, the latter from the law--it seemed the
self-sustaining community could sustain itself no more.
"The relationships between adults was often abrasive," wrote Sun
editor and publisher Steve McNamara after spending the better part of
a week at the commune for his story, "Swan Song for the Chosen
Family." "The pressure and diverse aims had taken their toll;
disparaging remarks punctuated nearly every conversation." While the
adults bickered over the morality of selling crops for profit and
whether nonfunctional nudity was acceptable, the maturation of the
dozen children living on the ranch, wrote McNamara, was the commune's
one undeniable success.
"Children were treated with the maturity they had earned," described
the editor. "This might mean that a 13-year-old was treated as an
adult on some matters and as a child on others. It worked beautifully."
But despite their "total absence of whining and bickering," children
are not adults, added McNamara, though they may have acted as the
commune's only responsible members.
"So it was cruelly ironic that what spelled the doom of the commune
was the death of two children," continued the Sun's story. "Audrey
Keller, 4, and Nika Carter, 2, were pedaling a trike along the edge
of the unfenced pool. The woman who was supposed to be watching them
had her back turned."
What happened next is still debated to this day. A woman screamed.
Two "strange objects" were floating in the pool. Mouth-to-mouth
resuscitation was applied. The many derelict cars and trucks on the
property all failed to start. The rescuers despaired and gave up
their efforts--the press claimed for as long as five minutes--before
CPR recommenced. A mad 400-yard dash to the nearest neighbor with a
truck finally got the girls passage to the hospital, where they died
shortly after arriving.
The death of the girls spelled the end for the Chosen Family. County
officials scoured the facilities, finding a slew of building-code
violations, and the Rancho Olompali landlords ordered the Family off
the land entirely within 30 days.
"By midnight," wrote McNamara on the Family's final day on Olompali,
"with light of the full moon glancing off the ruins of the white
stucco mansion, the spirit of the place had gone. The spirit had been
at time joyous, at times tragic, and almost always confused. But the
Chosen Family had been a definite presence, something worthy of the
rich history of Rancho Olompali."
Today the lands at Olompali are preserved under the auspices of the
California State Park system; an annual festival each May attracts
out-of-towners, local history buffs and former members of the Chosen
Family--now responsible citizens in their own right; some are
grandparents, some great-grandparents.
We recently asked McNamara about his final week with the Family at
Olompali; he said three elements stand out from the fog of distant
memory--"the same three that ran through the whole amazing era."
"Some people held a soaring belief that the dramatic lifestyle
changes that had arrived, particularly in San Francisco and the Bay
Area, would alter and energize the world forever, and for the
better." But, McNamara writes, others thought the philosophizing was
"mostly bulls--t" and the real deal was to "get stoned, get laid and
listen to some great music."
Finally, says McNamara, there was the decade's "grubby underbelly."
"Where middle-aged pot dealers ran their schemes and small children,
unattended by their wigged-out parents, fell into swimming pools and drowned.
"It was," he says, "all intertwined."
.
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