Gaye LeBaron: Hollywood and The River some of Sonoma County’s summertime memories

I was in Guerneville last week and, as I headed home, around noon, I drove out of the redwood shade and into the open just in time to see a lanky young man in baggy trunks take a flying leap off the Hacienda Bridge into the Russian River.

I knew at that moment that summer had indeed arrived.

And it wasn’t quite July.

June may be the solstice, but the Fourth of July, I maintain, is the true start of summertime in these parts.

Just as the winter holidays arrive with a truckload of memories, so does early July.

Where to begin? Being blown off Salmon Creek beach by the summer winds? Picnics at the high end of the lawn at Morton’s in Kenwood when there was only one pool and Ruth and Harold Morton and their family sold tickets, guarded lives, kept order and dispensed popsicles? Or the damp blue ribbons won at the annual “water carnivals” in Healdsburg or Monte Rio?

OR WE CAN START way back (a kind of lazy summer day version of the Old Older game) with a letter I received nearly 30 years ago from Robert Herbert, a retired naval architect - and the son of William Herbert who had the distinction of being Santa Rosa’s first architect.

In his note, perhaps prompted by one of the early Old Olders, Herbert wrote about the Santa Rosa summers of his youth - in the years between world wars.

“We spent much of our time in the streets, and they remain in my memory. The hot asphalt of College Avenue on a summer’s day, outer Mendocino on the way to school, Second Street by the tannery and the creek.

“On the Fourth of July the veterans of the Great War, with still a few from the Spanish American War, would parade up McDonald Avenue under the trees, stopping at Soldiers’ Park to hear speeches and taps played against the echo bugle in the cemetery.

“The dust hung in the warm, still air after they passed and we boys would march along behind, wondering what it was like to be in a war.”

Thanks to people like Herbert who write down their memories, we can be sure that there was once a park where the First Presbyterian Church now stands on Pacific Avenue. It is harder to imagine what it was like NOT to be in a war.

IT’S DEFINITELY SUMMER on The River, as witnessed by the Monday bridge jumper, and by the testimony of my minister/columnist friend Bob Jones, who has seen a lot of summers in Guerneville. Bob says he hasn’t seen it “so busy, so early,” in years.

You notice I’ve capitalized The River. I’m not the first to do so, of course, but it seems to me that there is a move afoot to abandon town-specific in favor of the regional.

If the three towns in the Sonoma Valley can leave their given names behind and become The Springs, then everything from Mirabel west can be The River. At least until the date sometime in the distant future when the citizens of Monte Rio or Boyes Hot Springs or Duncans Mills rise up to demand the return of their identity.

But I digress. There are many nostalgic memories of summers hiding in old letters and the memoirs of the departed if you know where to look. (And if you don’t, Katherine Rinehart at the Sonoma County Library’s history room can show you.)

It was the recent news stories about the triumphant return of the dam at Healdsburg Beach that sent me straight to good old Dr. Shipley.

DR. WILLIAM SHIPLEY, born in Healdsburg in 1872, was a physician who practiced in Santa Rosa well into his 90s. He was a founder of the original Sonoma County Historical Society and a longtime contributor to the Healdsburg Tribune. His collected columns take us back to the 1880s and 1890s for stories of summer days in Healdsburg when “the boys” (never the girls, in those petticoat years) “would to take themselves on foot to the old swimming hole just above the railroad bridge on Saturday afternoons.”

He writes about “stripping down” in the willows on the east bank, about building driftwood fires to roast potatoes in the coals, “hot dogs being too expensive at the time,” and of “rafts made from old railroad ties to make up for the lack of boats.”

Youthful memories are special.

Summer stories are special as well. Take, for example, the one we might title “The summer of Carol Burnett.”

YES, THAT CAROL BURNETT - the one of the Tarzan yell and the ear lobe tug and the wickedly funny TV show.

When she appeared at the Luther Burbank Center in 1997, she happily recalled the summer of 1953 when she “played Guerneville” as one of a troupe of UCLA students who set up in a little redwood log recreation hall in Armstrong Grove to perform for a couple of summers as the Stumptown Players. Prompted by a reminder from the audience of those early years, Burnett said she had just finished her freshman year as a drama student at UCLA, aiming at becoming, well, if not a tragedian at least a very serious actress.

“Some seniors had started this summer stock company,” she said, “and when they asked me to join I felt like I’d won an Oscar.”

It was a long way from Hollywood. Glen Twombly, who had returned to Sonoma County from a career as an audio-video engineer for CBS in New York, set the scene for me in 1985, remembering the makeshift staging.

“I was given $100 to purchase technical equipment. I made a switchboard we called the PJR 12. PJR stood for pickle jars and redwood. The electrodes were built of tin cans.”

The technicians doubled - and tripled - as actors. Twombly recalled playing a role in a melodrama that required him to laugh uproariously and tilt his chair back.

He positioned himself at the back of the stage and as he laughed, threw his arm back to hit the master switch for the blackout.

Burnett had a mini-reunion with Twombly in ’97 at her LBC appearance.

She, too, remembered the jerry-rigged lighting system in the old hall at Armstrong Grove. “The backstage had no lights,” she said. “None at all. If you had quick changes, you had to lay everything out, very carefully, in order, because you couldn’t see what you were putting on.”

One night, in a scene where she sang a torch song leaning against a lamppost, she made her usual change in the dark, she said, to the short shirt, black lace stockings and tam of a streetwalker, came on, leaned back and was well into her number when she looked down and saw the black seams of her stockings - running up the front of her legs.

“That’s when I knew I should go into comedy,’’ she said.

She also played a redwood tree that summer. With feeling.

The Stumptown Players successes were short-lived, but must have had an impact well beyond Sonoma County. Six years later, in another memorable summer, the fine actor Karl Malden - in Santa Rosa for the filming of “Pollyanna” - turned my interview with him around, asking me questions about the Stumptown Players and why there was no more “summer stock” in this area.

THERE ARE many other summer stories around films made here - including “Happy Land” in 1943, when as the story goes, a pretty little 4-year-old spectator named Natasha Gurdin, who lived on the corner of Humboldt Street and Lewis Road, was taken to the filming site downtown and urged by her ambitious mother to approach the director, Irving Pichel, and sing a song in Russian.

He was impressed by the child and gave her a small part, in which she was required to drop an ice cream cone on the sidewalk in front of a store in Healdsburg and burst into tears.

It was (drum roll) Natalie Wood’s first film.

Or the “Summer of Bette Davis,” in 1955 when the Oscar-winning veteran actress spent six glorious days at the old Santa Rosa Hotel for the filming of “Storm Center,” a not terribly successful film about a courageous librarian.

The local “star” of that film is Santa Rosa’s old stone Carnegie Library, which also appears in Hitchcock’s “Shadow of Doubt,” (another summer - 1942) and brings older residents to the verge of tears.

SO SUMMERS are for fun, for warm weather entertainments, for clear skies, warm afternoons, water sports and Hollywood invasions.

Summertime, wrote Ira Gershwin, “when the livin’ is easy.”

Enjoy your summertime. Not much else is easy these days.