Gaye LeBaron: Johnson’s Beach sale evokes bygone era on Russian River

We are three weeks into spring. Easter has come and gone in a strange mix of green and gray, bluster and beauty. Summer, supposedly, is on the way.

There’s no denying that weather has gone weird on us. We may need to call up memories to get into our summer mode.

We can start with the news that Clare Harris and his family have sold Johnson’s Beach. After 48 years of Russian River summers. For the Harris clan, who owned Rio Nido in its 1920s-to-’50s glory years, it’s actually more like 87 summers. That’s a ton of memories.

Sifting through my river files, finding notes from old columns and letters written in response, I can paint a vivid picture of Rio Nido and Johnson’s and every beach and dance floor from Palomar on Fitch Mountain to Monte Rio.

These were sunburned summers, scented with a strange mixture of baby oil and iodine which presumably promoted tanning (and prevented absolutely nothing), squealing girls in tipping canoes, hitchhikers with swim trunks in their back pockets, beaches pictured on the postcards sold at the five-and-dime on Guerneville’s main street.

The names of the bandleaders who played at The Grove or Mirabel Park or, most often, Rio Nido, on warm summer nights roll off the tongues of people who can’t remember what they had for breakfast. There is a list of people who met their husbands or wives on those beaches or dance floors (or that handsome Navy ensign that shipped out and never came back).

For so many, the river is a memory. For Clare Harris, it is his life story.

Clare was born in Guerneville, 95 years ago come September, at the west end of town, “on a prune ranch behind the old Cutting School.”

Except for the early 1940s, when he helped the Navy win the war in the Pacific, Clare has spent his lifetime watching the seasons change with the times.

He was 8 years old when his father, Harry Harris, bought Rio Nido from an Englishman named W.H. Smith, who had owned it since 1913, when summer patrons came by train, brought their trunks and stayed two months or more.

There is a fair amount of railroad history in these river memories. Today’s River Road was the Northwestern Pacific Railroad until the 1930s, connecting to the main north-south line at Fulton, ending in Guerneville.

When the Harris family arrived in ’28, the average resort stay had shortened, but at Rio Nido, “The Friday night trains,” as Clare recalls, “were still loaded with people.”

Those who came by car traveled a narrow road beside the tracks from Guerneville that stopped at Rio Nido. The car route to the River went by way of Forestville and Pocket Canyon.

Rio Nido, 1.8 miles east of Guerneville, was the crown jewel of the river resorts, a town in its own right. The 10 acres the Harrises bought was at the mouth of a long, steep, wooded canyon that had some 700 summer homes clinging to its sides. They ran the hotel, 130 rental cottages, the outdoor dance floor (a roof added later), soda fountain and a beach across the river, accessed via a tunnel under the train tracks and a wooden footbridge. They leased out the grocery store, the bar, restaurant, bowling alley and shooting gallery.

(Historical footnote No. 1: The shooting gallery and bingo game was run by an entrepreneur named Harold Smith who went on to Nevada when that state legalized gambling and opened a place called Harold’s Club in downtown Reno.)

Traffic from Guerneville was by Captain Biddie’s ferry from Guerneville - a small boat owned and operated by Bid Green. “Ten cents one way, fifteen cents round trip,” Clare remembers. Later, the voyage was accompanied by the strains of “Cruising’ Down the River.” Both ways.

By the ’30s, with Prohibition behind and the Jazz Age in full swing, the Harrises jumped on the Big Band bandwagon.

There had been music at the River since the 20th century teens. There were dance halls at every train stop.

(Historical footnote No. 2: The first “Big Band” in the nation is credited by music historians to a San Franciscan named Art Hickman who organized musicians in 1913 to entertain at the San Francisco Seals’ baseball training camp in - wait for it! - Boyes Hot Springs. Hickman went on to the Ziegfeld Follies and greater glory.)

By 1935, when 15-year-old Clare was running the beach at Rio Nido, there was a “house band” in residence (“$30 a week and they stayed in the Band House and ate in the hotel dining room,” he remembers.)

Harry Harris signed on with Music Corporation of America, a booking agent for the increasing number of bands that were “on tour,” playing on the boardwalk at Santa Cruz, Alameda’s Neptune Beach, traveling up the coast to Portland and beyond.

Clare’s older brother and partner, the late Herb Harris, recited them for me 20 years ago or more. Call it The Bands of Rio Nido.

Harry James tops the list. He was there four nights (but to Clare’s lasting disappointment he did not bring his wife, Betty Grable, along), Woody Herman, Ozzie Nelson, Phil Harris, Buddy Rogers, Ted FioRito, Kay Kayser, Harry Owens and his Royal Hawaiians.

Seven nights a week. Herb remembered the ticket as 75 cents on weekends, 50 cents on weeknights. $1.25 for the week. Clare thinks it was a dollar a night and $1.25 weekly.

The last Big Band to play before the Harris brothers sold Rio Nido in 1953 was Tex Benecke’s Glenn Miller Band in the summer of 1952.

Up the tracks, at Mirabel, Bob Trowbridge and his manager, Fred Plante, were picking up bookings from Sweet’s Ballroom in SF, bringing the likes of Lionel Hampton, Carman Cavallero, Hoagy Carmichael and Stan Kenton.

Not until the Green Music Center offered us the stars, so to speak, have we seen such a flood of musical riches.

At the end of World War II, when Herb and Clare returned - Clare from the Navy, Herb the Army - their father retired and handed Rio Nido over to them.

They ran it with gusto until the early ’50s when air travel took vacationers to Hawaii and Mexico, when TV dampened the excitement of seeing a famous bandleader “in person,” when the gambling casinos of Reno, Tahoe and, oh yeah, Las Vegas became the new weekend resorts.

Since they sold it, the businesses have changed hands several times. Two of them - Rio Nido Lodge, now a bed-and-breakfast with 11 rooms owned by Brett and Yulia Gibbs, and Rio Nido Road House owned by Brad Metzger - are alive and well, survivors of the floods and mudslides of several grim winters.

With the sale in 1953, according to Clare, the Harris brothers “retired.” Actually both of them stayed around, worked at various resorts - Clare for Angelo Boles at Guernewood Park, until 1967, when they became partners again and the property was Johnson’s Beach.

Johnson’s, in the heart of Guerneville, had been open to the public since 1918 and stayed in the same family until Gertie Johnson sold it in 1947. The Harris brothers bought it from Milton Rounds. They got in on the last years of the Pageant of Fire Mountain, the traditional season-ender at the Labor Day weekend - one last lure to fill the rooms and the dance floors.

An elaborate staging of a hokum legend about an Indian maiden and etc., the pageant involved music and drama and lots of flares and fireworks.

Special events still crowd Johnson’s for the annual Russian River Jazz Festival as well as the swim portion of the Vineman Triathlon.

The grand opening of the season on Memorial Day weekend this year will have greater significance than usual - bands will play, keys will be passed. New owners Nick Moore and Dan Poirier have been vacationing in the area for years. They may not have the store of history that Clare enjoys, but Moore, 47, told a reporter at the sale announcement that he had been “going to Johnson’s and renting kayaks pretty much my whole life.”

Thus a new chapter begins in river history. Not that Clare Harris is going anywhere.

He and his wife, Carla, will still be on the beach this summer, renting umbrellas and inner tubes, scooping ice cream and grilling burgers. And, as in so many seasons past, there may still be, on occasion, that familiar voice on the bullhorn. “You in canoe number three. Get your life jacket on!”

We need those memories in long, dry summers - or long wet summers if the weather gods give us a sardonic smile.

Memories lend texture to our lives.