CHAMBRAY, COUNTRY, COMMUNES and COCKETTES: 1968 to 1970

   

 CHAMBRAY, COUNTRY, COMMUNES and COCKETTES: 1968 to 1970
 
            Mike Hansen started Chambray when he moved to Berkeley from Chicago.  He was a singer-songwriter guitarist in Chicago, and brought some of his compositions with him. 
            The first member of what would become his commune was Tim Metzger.   Tim came to Berkeley to be a psychology major, but after graduating in 1969 in cinematography, he was inspired by the anti-War demonstrations to become a photographer/cinematographer.  Tim and Mike Hansen stayed close during the Chambray era. Tim was the band photographer - he took all the Chambray photos in this chapter – as well as being the band’s roadie, busing all the band’s gear to gigs in is VW bus.  Since then Tim has had a nice career as cinematographer/ videographer for major networks, from CBS to Fox, Discovery and History channels and many more. 
           Mike arrived in Berkeley in 1968, soon hooked up with Tim.  They started working together as farm workers Tim gives a great description of how things began in his farewell letter to Mike (for Mike’s memorial service), so with Tim's permission I will take a few quotes from there during this chapter (in italics):    
 

 
           "Remember the very beginning… you pulling into Berkeley with all the campus unrest, Peoples Park, the Vietnam War, and the Oakland Induction center, those old black and white photos I took of the tear gassed students and all those Oakland police… us watching the National Guard busily pepper fogging the campus streets and with us ducking into somebody’s apartment trying get some fresh air…

                          
 
                   "As you know those days made me want to become a photojournalist and a documentary cameraman. You encouraged me to do that… Thank you." 
                 "Back then I remember wondering…along with my friends… who was this this guy … well… we all found out pretty quick … you were Michael Hansen a singer-songwriter off the streets of Chicago. You had a very accurate eye… filled with a keen sense of perception …of what was really going on… and you had the talent to pour all of this into your songs …and you shared this with anyone who would listen. You were an avid reader and you had this Fearless and creative mind, which could … go anywhere …you just seemed to know something about everything.
               You took us in …and we took you in …and we never looked back …until now."
            Michael Hansen had started a commune on University Avenue, located just enough South to be in that  impoverished area of the East Bay where Berkeley and Oakland meet that novelist Michael Chabon in his novel Telegraph Avenue labelled "Brokeland",. 
            Mike had just moved from Chicago to Berkeley.  A handsome, square-built man, he looked almost exactly like David Crosby, moustache and all (which was no hindrance in those days when Crosby Stills and Nash were on the top of the charts).  
            Steve Barbose, the drummer, met Mike through mutual friends, and followed TIm in moving into Mike's University Avenue house commune. Steve was soon followed  by Pat Wendschlag, soprano singer and  friend of Steve’s from college, and last Philip Bouwswma on bass.   Philip Bouwsma the bassist came from a wealthier family who lived in a nice house up in the Berkeley hills.  Philip and I were both intellectuals and readers, and so Philip became my closest friend in the Chambray group.
             Most communes back then had a commune leader, someone who gave direction to the group and counseled commune members.  Sometimes that was all the leader did, but sometimes the commune leader became a little dictator.
            Much more common was a leader who just gave ideas and direction to the group – for example, Scrumbly leading the Cockettes into new costumes, new shows and new venues.   Mike was much more in the mellow mode of leadership, but he had occasional authoritarian flashes, one of which came out in Chambray’s music and doomed it.  Mike insisted on playing a super-loud, not really in-tune rhythm guitar, which often drowned out his own fine compositions. I kept begging Mike to take guitar lessons, or at least lower the volume so it matched that of the other instruments, or even add a rhythm guitarist to the band, who could chord while Mike sang and soloed, but Mike wouldn’t change a thing.  So Chambray had great songs, great vocals, a strong rhythm section, good Booker T. style organ – all too often overwhelmed by a roaring out of tune guitar, which killed any chance at a record deal. 
            The other side of Mike’s leadership was how he took in people with pretty trashed psyches  ‘the walking wounded’, he called us.   I say ‘us’ because I was still just half-way recovered from my Asperger’s syndrome, and I have to credit Mike and his friends for seeing what personal problems were bothering someone and then showing them how to solve them.   Mike's songs were more full-fledged compositions than those of most rock bands of that time.   True, it was common for a song to have an identifying hook or link - but Mike's songs usually had several, and they were always on a theme or telling a story, none of that random jumping from one unrelated idea to another so typical of so many rock songs.    
            The vocal harmonies were also unique:  Mike had a deep baritone, and it was often coupled with Pat Wendschlag's high soprano, making a strong and unique two octave vocal line, often supplemented with an additional harmony from bassist Philip Bouwsma. 
            The rest of the Chambray sound came from the powerfully linked bass and drum parts, which is what brought listeners out on the dance floor.  Steve Barbose the drummer was a solidly built clean shaven young man.  He and Debbie, soon to be his wife, were both devotees of Meher Baba's method of meditation.  (Interesting to note that many musicians are spiritually oriented, especially the best drummers I have worked with.  My composing partner Mel Wiggins, John Kleckley of the Philadelphia Gamble Huff studios, Richard Ramsey and Hector Pena, leaders of the Griffith Park drummers, as well as Steve Barbose - all were totally spiritual and often into meditation).  Philip was always turning bass parts into a bottom melody - Paul McCartney was Philip's bass ideal. My Booker T. organ worked as connective tissue, tying all these basically staccato parts together - and adding a fancier solo than the other instrumentalists of Chambray could manage (because I'd had those classical and blues scale lessons – aha!).  
          Alas, most of the tapes Chambray made - and there was usually one made by our sound man Michael for every performance - have long since died from CD rot, tape fading, and other tape diseases. On top of which, Chambray never recorded in an actual studio.   All of our tapes were made from live gigs. 
          A few bits and pieces have survived.  I found some parts of My Sweet Annie, Talking to   Your Neighbor (a peace and love theme typical of the time) and Mike Hansen's signature composition from his Chicago days, "Bus Stop”.  All three are on my Youtube site, you can reach them by clicking on the links given beneath each song description.
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                                                   Bus Stop

 "I've been waiting at your bus stop - got no carfare - in my jeans.                                        

Yeah I been looking at your billboards – I don't understand - a word they mean.       
            Seems  like I’m in a foreign country - though I was born - beneath your flag."   

            

                 Artistically the most interesting of the Chambray repertoire, I think.   Note especially the echoing vocal duets between Mike and Pat - and a few bits and pieces of my Booker T, groove., all on top of the power-driving bass and drums. 
             https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLJEwv52jSc  
 
 
                                                 My Sweet Annie 
 
            This is one of my favorite Hansen/Chambray compositions  - simple but beautiful chord changes and powerful lyrics. Later I used this chord progression for teaching students how to make a blues solo with a country or religious flavor.  
            The lyrics tell the story of a guy who has just been arrested, and sees his girlfriend in the side-mirror of the police car which is driving him away to jail.  I always thought it was beautiful, and then a few months later ending of this fictional story was enacted in real life,  leading to the persecution and death of one of my best friends. Here are some of the lyrics and the story that Mike prophesized. 

"Did you see my sweet Annie, dressed up and looking fine?

    Did you see my sweet Annie, I won't de seeing

           her for a long long time...

        Chorus: Take a ride in a shiny shoe police car

               Take a ride, ride for free

                Take a ride, you won't be going far Out of

                     sight, where no one sees..."

        

                            (and here the music drifts off into an ominous silence before the next verse).    

   

             https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWCzmHQ-Q14    
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            Nice concept, I thought, but maybe a little exaggerated. Mike may have been busted once or twice, but he was never sent away 'for a long long time...." but suddenly while writing this my memory burst open -- yes, Chris the ex-Maoist early Jesus freak, forced into exile, dying from exposure and amoebic dysentery because 5 years earlier the police had him marked down as a subversive ... .yes! yes! Mike Hansen had told Chris' sad story .... without ever knowing him.
            I met Chris in 1965. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement was still going strong - and Chris was very much a leader of it, A thin, short, wiry guy with a really loud voice and flashing black eyes, Chris could come up with slogan after slogan to keep up the marchers' spirits. In a few months there was a huge change in Chris's thinking. From a Maoist with Stalinist tendencies Chris turned into a born-again Christian! Chris continued living in the communal house, constantly debating his new religious philosophy with all his old leftist friends. One mellow summer evening I was wandering through the beautiful Berkeley campus, and then ran into Chris. He offered to share a beer with me while we sat on a bench near the fountain and he continued his religious discourses. We finished the beer, threw the can into a nearby trash can, and started to leave, when we were surrounded by a circle of twenty or more police. One showed the can to Chris: "you were drinking on campus?" "Geez," I thought, "just a Budweiser!"   I went up to one of the police to protest this - and if I had a chance let them know that Chris was no longer the radical activist of the Free Speech Movement – when one of the police looked down at me when one of the police  looked down at me and ordered me to leave immediately.   
          "Yes sir," I said,* and thought "here's my chance to call his girlfriend Sonya and see if I can get Chris a lawyer." Chris kept in touch - a few months later, he phoned me to say goodbye, and tell me some hard news. Sonya had gotten him a lawyer, a good one - but the lawyer's counsel was to flee the country! The reason for that mass police raid on a beer can was that Chris had been way too active in the Free Speech Movement for the liking of law enforcement, so a combination of local and federal police decided to put Chris away on a felony charge "for a long, long time." 
            So they found a teenage girlfriend of Chris and told her that she was in possession of enough marijuana to make it a felony conviction. But if she would just testify that Chris had raped her, all the drug charges would go away. "So', the lawyer told Chris " you are just going to have to leave the country for a while - cross the border illegally into Mexico - hide out in the wilderness there in Baja for a couple of years until they get tired of you." So that was goodbye Chris, goodbye Sonya (she left California permanently), and he vanished for three or four years,    Flash forward to summer 1970 - I was going great guns with Chambray, bopping around the Bay area scene in my Blue Ford Econovan, when who should I see hitch-hiking by a stop sign .. but Chris! He got in and told me what had happened. After several years law enforcement was no longer interested in Chris - maybe they had finally caught up on his religious changes - and the lawyer said it was safe for Chris to come back. Just a few problems - Chris had no job, no money, no girlfriend, and a severe case of amoebic dysentery which had gone too long untreated during his stay in Baja. Luckily, right across from my current apartment was a Jewish-Israeli commune, which seemed to specialize in taking care of the "walking wounded." Chris stayed with the commune for a few months, until the local doctors gave up on Chris. He was drinking a half- gallon of Gallo Red daily by then, and I last saw him hitchhiking out of Oakland, "Going North, Lee," he said ("where no one sees...") And it was only while writing up My Sweet Annie that I realized that Mike Hansen had told the story of any number of small time revolutionaries or agitators who had their lives crushed like  bugs against the social machinery. When it came to how societies worked, and how people thought, Mike Hansen was a very, very smart cat.
                                    -----------------------------------------
 *The reason why I was so docile with the police was because the cook of   my wealthy  St.Louis relatives had given me a warning.  I had been active in St. 
Louis CORE, and it was an easy protest.  I was arrested and taken to jail for one days, but the plainclothes man who arrested me was Black, and treated me to wonderful meals both to and from the ride to jail.  And in the jail no-one bothered me – one guy started to harass me, when his friends said “Hey he’s a protester” and so life was just lounging on my bunk until the friendly detective took me back for another deluxe meal on route. As far as Black law enforcement folks  were concerned, any civil rights demonstrator was a prince!  But soon I got a warning that this was not I should expect out West.
                      When I went to the relatives they were upset – “What! A Cronbach in jail! That’s a disgrace!”  I replied that they had always told me that we owed Blacks so much for our mistreatment of them, and I was just trying to make a payback.  Which statement went nowhere with the family.
                        But then their cook covertly signaled me to go into the kitchen.   When I got there, she said “Lee, I hear you are going out to California.  Well, just be aware that the police there are very different than here.  They are worse than Mississippi – you got that?”  I said thank you, and for the 28 years I was in California and Seattle, I always said ‘Yes sir” to any uniform, and did exactly what I was told.  Hence my rapid departure from Chris’s arrest.  I did call his friends to get him a lawyer, so I was not a complete schmuck.
                        And even my ‘sir-ing’ didn’t always work!. One time in 1970, when I was driving back to Berkeley with a really cute teenage fem boy, we were stopped and searched by a policeman at the Berkeley exit from the bridge, and it turned out my date – an inexperienced young man from ‘the boonies - had an ounce of marijuana he had tucked under his seat,  After one night in jail, he confessed that the grass was his, and so I got out while he was let go with a warning and probation.   BUT – when we were stopped and I was sitting handcuffed in my van, another policeman came up, pulled out his gun and stuck it in my mouth while raving “Why don’t you try to run for it hippy! Go on, run!”  And what really rattled me was that this cop was literally FOAMING AT THE MOUTH!   A lot of spittle was running down to his chin and dripping onto my van’s window.  If this cop had sneezed ………. 
                        And years later, when I was living in East Hollywood, I saw several brutal examples of Rodney King style policing .. but I will save those anecdotes for my Los Angeles days.
                                    ===================================
            My only successful composition for Chambray was Elephant, a stone Booker T. groove but with a semi-Near Eastern half-step chord vamp at the end.   My Mike led it off with a fast funky guitar intro and a dance rap - "everyone's talking about their hot new dance, supposed to be guaranteed ... here's Elephant  ... shake your trunk, swing your tusk .. ELEPHANT!"
            And how all those dancers got into shaking their trunks and swinging their tusks!   
                                  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsI3M_PcDAc&t=36s  
                             ---------------------------------------------------------------
          Having an out gay band member was also a new experience for them, but it didn't take long at all for my sexuality to be accepted, in part because this immediately led to one of our first gigs, at Berkeley's new-born Gay Liberation Center.  This gig set the pattern for strange things happening during our performances.   We set up the speakers and instruments up in a circle so that we could all face each other while we played.  But as soon as we got even moderately loud  a low drone suddenly sounded on the bass speaker, then with increasing speed when around and around and higher and higher through all the   speakers, until they all blew out at its top pitch.    Our sound man Michael  managed to get everything functioning again in fifteen minutes, and we completed the gig.  
                   At that time free outdoor concerts were happening all over Berkeley, and we played many of them.    These led ultimately to playing in some of the local rock bars, and then to private parties and the biker bars on San Pablo Avenue.  Chambray was starting to move!

                     
 
 
  ENTER THE COCKETTES - One night when I was cruising the more hip gay bars in San Francisco I was picked up and taken home by an interesting gay collective, the Cockettes: they pioneered the hippy drag look - dresses and beards and lots of exotic clothes and jewelry from the local Goodwill stores.  I spent the night at their communal house and had a wonderful time.  

 
                  
The next morning, when I told them I was a keyboard player, they asked me to play the next Saturday for one of their increasingly famous Midnight Shows at the Chinese Theater.  
         The rehearsal went great.  But, unfortunately, come Saturday morning,  some friend gave me some mescaline – which, since I took it at 8 in the morning, I was sure would be long worn off by the time the show started,   But all day long, nothing happened ..... and still nothing happened.   I wrote it off as a weak hit, and then, punctually at midnight, as the Cockettes danced on stage at the Chinese Theater, the mescaline danced into my brain, and my minimal chops were totally scattered.  To make it even worse, Sylvester - a Cockette who was later a big disco star, and with deep roots in gospel piano from her L.A. days - heard my pathetic attempts to overcome the mescaline - and that was the last time I ever played piano for the Cockettes.         
         However, they did like the rock sound of Chambray, and my organ playing in that band.   So, despite my personal disaster, Chambray started getting gigs for Cockette parties, and then for other gay-themed events (such as the gay bikers convention - cf. Car Chase No. 1)

 
 
                                    LINK MARTIN                   
          LINK MARTIN  (Luther Thomas Cupp) – I had dates with several of the troupe, until I fell in love with Link, who combined a gorgeous body with a brilliant mind.  He was a Native American of mixed Cherokee and Eskimo heritage. – an orphan raised in a reformatory, one of those horrible schools which combined sadism  with a racist attempt to force the children to abandon their heritage and become real ‘Americans.  In his early teens Link escaped from the school.   Link claimed he set fire to a neighboring church on his way out – he believed in revenge.  
         Link  wound up in Boston, where he joined one of the very first hip communes, led by Jack Spicer.  Jack was his third lover – Link was bi-sexual, and his first lover was a Scottish poet Helen Adam, when he was 15.  His later lover Jack Spicer gave him the nickname Link, and Link then added the Martin When the commune moved to San Francisco.  Link went with them and there he stayed. 
         By this time Link had edited several issues of a literary magazine, called Cow.  
He also wrote some of the most successful Cockette revues, notably “Pearls Over Shanghai,”
and appeared in all their revues, including the cult film Tricia’s Wedding (still available on the Internet).    
         All the information I have about Link aside from my personal experience comes from this Internet site,https://counterculturalbooks.fandom.com/wiki/Link_Martin#:~:text=Link%20Martin%20was%20of%20mixed,unique%20sense%20of%20personal%20style.
          This site also has a good description of Link’s stunning appeal: “he was a wild child, but stunning, with long black hair and a nice body   … in the nude he was spectacular …” 
         We shared many intellectual interests and had some great sex, but the romance ended after a month – except for an occasional nostalgia date.  I was just too macho looking for Link: he said he got embarrassed holding hands with me on the street because he looked fem by contrast.   After me Link’s main boyfriends were cute, chubby, blonde sweety-pies.
         When I went to Boston Link went to New York, where he became the lover of the famous science fiction writer Samuel Delaney and also of Delaney’s wife the poet Marilyn Hacker. Link published one brief prose-poem in an anthology edited by Delaney, Quark 1 (1970).  
         When I returned to San Francisco to visit Mike Hansen and the Sonoma crowd, I stopped by the old Cockettes house and had a blissful sexy final encounter with Link. I will always remember his smiling face looking down at me.   Soon after this he went to India, where after a few years he passed away,
         My most vivid memory of Link is when he asked me to drive us to Reno in my blue Ford Econovan.  After a brief food stop in the town – neither of us was into gambling or lounge singers – Link directed me on a half-hour drive to a big stretch of desert, modified only by occasional clumps of grass and a almost dry river.  Link asked me what I thought about this place.  “I don’t see how anyone could live here”, I replied.  Link laughed and told me that this DESERT was the tribal reservation given to his people by the US government.  Hitler with the Warsaw ghetto couldn’t have done any better.  
            Then we took mescaline together, and as I was climbing up the tiny river-bed my heart started racing and I had a small heart attack.  I didn’t know if I would live or die but I felt at peace either way – I had accomplished all my lonely teenage dreams:  playing music with a fun band and getting some fame, making love with lots of beautiful boys, eating wonderful meals in the Bay area, one of the foodie capitals of the world, and even having helped to create a son (and I didn’t even know that my son would turn out to be more famous than his father).
So I thought “If this is my time, I can’t complain, I have had such a rich life.”  Once we returned to the Bay area I completely changed my mind – I had a lot more things to do with my life.
                  At this point I tried to moderate my drug intake, but I just could not resist temptation.   This is when I got Frosty’s letter suggesting music studies in Boston.   And I thought “Aha!  Boston has to be boring compared to Berkeley – I will be able to practice with a lot less temptation.”
                  And this came true, hard as it was after my joyfully sensuous life in Berkeley. And just think, if I had died in 1970, I never would have met Tribal Rhythms or Ben Petrucci or Michael Gullage or my years of good music with Mel Wiggins or the ten years with Norteno bands and all that incredible food and ….. well, Providence had a lot more waiting for me.Chambray and the Cockettes were just the second act of my life.  
                  Link lives on in a sonnet sequence written in his memory by Marilyn Hacker:  In the series of remarkable sonnets called “Geographer: For Link (Luther Thomas Cupp) 1947-1974,” Hacker is at her most desolate emotionally and at her most adroit technically. There are five numbered sonnets, four unnumbered, and a final coda of five lines. Each of the sonnets is patterned so that six of the fourteen lines end with a single word; each of these words reappears as the final line of the coda.. The words are (in the order in which they are used) “death,” “words,” “child,” “time,” and “city,” and the resonances Hacker achieves with these few words hold the poem together.”……  Link, whose death as a young man is the occasion of the poem, is associated with mapmaking, with imaginary cities, with drawing and writing. It is as if one could, in drawing the world, imaginatively possess it. The poet remembers “the time/ we mapped an imaginary city/ on your graph pad. Shanghai, Leningrad, what cities/ we pored over in picture-books, marking time” Now that the geographer is dead, the poet remembers his body as a kind landscape: “Night after day after night, I mapped the city/ on the brown geography of its child.”    - quote from this site: (https://www.enotes.com/topics/marilyn-hacker/critical-essays )
                                                
                                                   
 
                                                  BACK TO CHAMBRAY
      
      
         Meanwhile the straight biker bars on San Pablo Avenue (deep in the heart of 'Brokeland") were continuing to patronize us, and at this point we were playing regularly several times a week, and actually making a small living at it. 
       The final piece in our audience puzzle came from colleges and social gatherings in the country part of the Bay area.  My recollection of these gigs is a little hazy - but I thought someone's Grandma from the area gave the band some of her own home-grown ("been in the family for generations") or was this just a grass fantasy that ran through my mind on the long drive back to Berkeley?
        (Tim): "You and your merry band rehearsing every day and into the nights at the University House where 6 or 7 seven of us lived… of course there were some us trying to sleep because we had early classes and/or jobs we couldn’t be late for…but let me say this it was worth it….  Remember all those places and people you played for fun …  and for very little profit…The Family Dog, Inn of the Beginning, our UC Sproul Plaza, San Francisco State college, and at those strange hidden worlds of the Classic Kitten, and the gay motor cycle club.."
              And after this it was the Family Dog!  And then we played at the most prestigious  rock bar in the East Bay,   where we followed none other than Creedance Clearwater Revival, considered the hippest, cleanest and hardest rocking bar band in the East Bay.  It was a real coup for us.
             On the down side, however, neither me nor Mike was writing new songs as strong as our initial repertory, and even worse, my body was sending very strong signals that it wanted to say goodbye to non-stop sex and drugs and move to a dull city with nothing to do but practice and sleep.
           So at the end of our Creedance-bar gig, I sold my Hammond to friends of the band, gave everyone a warm goodbye, and one of the band drove me straight from the club to San Francisco airport, where I took the midnight (not 'train to Georgia") plane to Boston.   
            Now I had been wearing wilder and gayer clothes in S.F.  One performance I was wearing sky-blue pants and a hot pink shirt, and the next morning at his breakfast Mike laughed his head off - because the milk he was pouring into his coffee was "Lady Lee" brand, and - you guessed it - sky blue on the bottom of the carton, and hot pink on top.
            So when I arrived at Logan Airport in Boston, and was taking the metro to Frosty's band house in Allston, I suddenly realized from the looks I got from the Boston late night shift in the subway, that my clothes and color scheme were asking for nothing but trouble. So around 3 am I left the subway, rented a room in a local YMCA, abandoned my flashy attire and went back on the trolley in a much more Boston-friendly outfit - blue jeans and a work shirt (made of Chambray fabric - how's that for irony?) 
             
                        
             CHAMBRAY BECOMES BEARGREASE AND MOVES UP NORTH
 
            Mike and Tim and friends moved up North to Glen Ellen, where Mike, after working with Tim as a farm worker, Mike got a job as a 'sautee chef' in one of the classier restautants/bed and breakfasts in the area.   He also went back to acoustic guitar, both as a band-leader and accompanying a several folk singers in the Sonoma area. 
       Turning the mike back to Tim Metzger again:
                "Then we moved to Glen Ellen in the early 70’s.  I was a struggling young photographer trying to find focus and you were a songwriter-musician with lots to say, and there we were living in the Old Dahalquist’s deserted boy scout camp ...for free of course… along with no running water or electricity and very little firewood to keep us keep warm… picking grapes for a few dollars per box and making a lot less then our bracero friends who could pick a lot and faster and better then we ever could. Even when times were hard …you could make it fun and make those moments sing a little…thank you again. We watched as “Chambray” morphed into “Bear-grease”… whose name you said came to you in a Dream… 
               You and your friendly band …and followers having the times of our lives hanging out at the Old Rustic Inn or the infamous “Juanita’s ”, or at Brothers and/or at “Shannon’s Bar” This is where you made people, laugh and dance and listen…and I remember… watching …you entertaining the Hells Angels …and Jack London’s ghost, 
       Mike Hansen still had one more treat to give me.  In 1972 I flew back to the Bay area for a visit.   Michael invited me up to the Glen Ellen area, and gave me a wonderful and unexpected 'busman's holiday' - he set up a little tour for me, where I went from cabin to cabin, each cabin having an acoustic piano and a nice selection of grass.   And that night he hooked me up on a date with the only gay guy in the area!  Thanks for this final treat, Mike!
        And before we say goodbye to Mike, who passed away around 2015, here is one last story about him from Tim's farewell letter:
         Out of all this …your dear old friends and family have merged into the present and hopefully we have found our true selves. Some of us became artist, filmmakers, musicians, some lawyers, some writers, Nurses, Carpenters, Teachers, Winemakers, Professors and probably the most important …Mothers and Fathers raising their sons and daughters. And now after more then 40 years we can all look at the those beginnings and realize how much we all touched each other… and how you touched all of us. Bravo my friend you did it well… And we will miss you.
          Love and Later, 
         Tim
             
                

             
 
  
  Mike sent me a few letters in the early 70s: this one has a song in it