When Susan was gone, my brother Dick and his friend, Dick Clotfelter, taught me to body surf one summer. By the time my brother was entering his second year at the Air Force Academy, Susan and Hugh had settled in San Diego, where she resumed her schooling, and he found work building furniture and working as a lifeguard. Hugh’s college roommate, Buzzy, had grown up in California and had learned to ski with Hugh in Colorado. It was only a matter of time before Buzzy returned the favor by teaching Hugh to surf. With Dick away at school, Hugh became like a surrogate big brother to me. In 1959, during my ninth-grade year at Earl Warren Jr. High school, Hugh had gotten pretty proficient on the board and shared his knowledge with me. It took a while for me to finally get the feel of his old balsa wood surfboard, but once I finally caught that first ride standing up, I was hooked. I traded something for a used ten-foot board, which became my training tool as I learned how to ride. As I improved, I knew I needed a better board—and not just any board. I needed a Hobie surfboard, which had to be ordered from Hobie’s shop in Dana Point, about seventy-five miles up the coast from where we lived. The new boards were made out of foam. They were lighter, stronger, and more maneuverable. I longed for that Hobie the way I had longed for a horse when I was younger. Horses, scooters, cars, and surfboards all represented freedom.
By the summer, Solana Beach became my regular haunt. My pals and I would paddle out on a daily basis when we weren’t at our respective summer jobs. These were the “glory days” of California surfing when we would get out of the water, build a bonfire on the beach, and sometimes even sleep on the nearby cliffs overnight to catch the morning “glass-off.” Sadly, that kind of stuff is now illegal in the Golden State.
After a few months, I finally had the money to order my new board from Hobie. I called up the shop in Dana Point and placed my order. Six weeks later, it was ready to be picked up. It was a beautiful nine-foot squaretail with an abstract motif of red and blue painted on the underside. My dad was driving back from one of his Los Angeles business trips, so he picked it up for me and brought it home. I was still only fourteen years old so, not being able to drive the five miles to the beach, transportation was a challenge. Some of my buddies and I built trailers for our bicycles so we could carry our boards to the shore. We were determined to get in that water.
Swami’s was a reef point break, which would break big in the winter. Named for the Self-Realization faith, which was started by Paramahansa Yogananda, the “temple” was built on the cliffs above the beach. I’m not sure who came up with the name “Swami’s” but with these East Indian Mystics living right above the beach, it was the perfect name for that particular break. Steep, twisting stairs led down to the beach. The live-in members of this mysterious sect were fine with us guys using their stairs to get down to the water.
Perhaps it’s fitting that my first real experience of God occurred at Swami’s one very foggy, cold morning in the late fall of 1959. I paddled out with Bob Kramer, an older guy from school. The fog was so thick that we only had maybe four or five feet of visibility. I could hear the waves breaking as we stroked through the set, but it was difficult to see much of what was going on. I thought we had made it past the swell. I knew it was breaking bigger than I had ever attempted to ride before, but I felt we were safely beyond the set and would be able to catch our breath. I heard it before I saw it; we both heard it coming and instinctively turned our boards around and paddled like there was a herd of elephants chasing us down. The wave was cresting as I turned to Bob, who yelled, “We’re screwed!”
The wave was topping ten or twelve feet. These were the early years when everyone rode long boards without a leash, or even a decent wetsuit. When the wave hit, I rolled under and immediately lost my board. I couldn’t even see it as it disappeared into the fog. I was scared; I could swim, but it was cold and I was swimming blind. I started heading for what I thought was the shore but got caught in a small rip current. In desperation, I finally just floated on my back and asked God to help me. I believe He did. I managed to get oriented and worked my way back to shore, where I found my Hobie board washed up on the sand. To some, the surf probably wasn’t that threatening on that particular day, but to me, it was like the devil’s wrath churning me around and ripping my lungs apart. It rattled me, but that experience of reaching for God was like a small awakening of my spirit. It would be years before I fully understood the real meaning of spiritual awakening, but another awakening was just beginning that would set me on a new path and transform the rest of my life.
CHAPTER FOUR
RUNNING
While girls and surfing certainly electrified the summer of ’59, the music of the day didn’t really do it for me. The real rock and roll of Little Richard and Chuck Berry was suddenly replaced by sappy crooners—well-coifed guys from the East Coast with perfect hair. Beneath the commercial surface, however, the Beat movement was giving the world Kerouac and Ginsberg, bongos, poetry, guitars, and coffee houses. Folk music and jazz were filling the void left by rock’s comatose state. All of a sudden, The Kingston Trio were on the Billboard Top 40 music charts, and I liked them. It seemed like they had something to say.
My eyes were really opened to an exciting new world of meaningful music when my sister Susan, ever the artist and intellectual, came home from college with a stack of albums under her arm. She played me Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, The Weavers, and Lead Belly. This stuff felt like the real deal. Suddenly, The Kingston Trio took a back seat as I completely devoured Susan’s record collection. I soon discovered The New Lost City Ramblers, which introduced me to old-time string band music. After that, I was a goner. Music had its hooks in me, and there was no turning back.
After pleading with my mom to buy me a guitar, she finally relented. On one of our shopping trips down to Tijuana, she bought me a ten-dollar gut-string model. Believe it or not, it was actually a pretty good little guitar. My mother made me a promise that if I stuck with the instrument for a full year, she would help me buy a better guitar. “Help me” meant that if I saved up half the money, she’d kick in the other half. I think she was hedging her bets since my brother had taken up the instrument several years earlier but quickly abandoned it.
I was fifteen years old, indestructible, and knew everything about life. Of course I would just become an instant guitar virtuoso! Or maybe not. I hovered over my record player for hours trying to figure out every nuance and every note that these strange and gifted people were playing. How did they do that? I slowed the records down and tried to stay focused. Having the patience of a mosquito, I did the best I could to decipher what I has hearing and translate it to the guitar, but it wasn’t easy. At first, I played rhythm with my fingers on the right hand, while carefully forming the chords with my left. Eventually I was able to clumsily play along with the record on the turntable. In less than a year, I had actually learned enough to go back to my mother to see if she would honor our original agreement for a better instrument. She did. After working out a budget—my savings from working all summer at local hotels and a bit of help from Mom—we took off in search of a proper music store in San Diego.
I had heard of a guitar made by a company called Goya. It was a medium-sized nylon string model, a suitable instrument for the folk songs I was beginning to sing and play. We found a new Goya for about $100.00, and I counted out my bills. And just in time. My Tijuana guitar was about ready to explode. Good as it was for my needs in the beginning, it was undoubtedly time to move up a notch. The Goya played great, but as I got further into bluegrass and old-time string music in the following months, I realized it wasn’t the right instrument for the music I was increasingly gravitating to. Not understanding the workings of a fine instrument, one day I decided to change out my nylon strings for a set of steel strings. The next morning, I opened my guitar case and saw what the tension of the new strings had done. The neck looked like somebody had bent it into a bow and was ready to fire off an arrow. It was that bad. I’d singlehandedly destroyed my Goya,
and now I needed another instrument—quick. I started searching for a used dreadnaught like Lester Flatt or Carter Stanley played. I knew I couldn’t afford a Martin or a Gibson, but I knew I would eventually find another instrument.
One day while my brother-in-law Hugh and I were down in San Diego, we stumbled upon a dusty antique shop that also dealt in musical instruments. It was owned by a guy named Frank, and he had some rare and beautiful things. Hugh was refinishing antique furniture at the time and would pick up items to be worked on from different antique stores around San Diego County. That particular day that I was riding around with Hugh, I asked Frank what acoustic guitars he had in stock. The first one he pulled out was a 0–45 Martin “New York” model, very old with beautiful inlay and in excellent condition. He said, “I can let this go for $125.00.” $125.00! That was a huge amount of money! Had I known anything about that guitar back then, I would have done whatever it took to get a hold of it. It would easily be worth six figures today. That was the first “one that got away.”
There would be many more through the years. I told Frank I couldn’t afford the Martin and asked what else he had. He retreated way back into his shop, pulled out an old case, opened it up, and took out an Epiphone dreadnaught guitar. It wasn’t a brand I was familiar with, but once I sat down and played a few chords, I knew I had to have that guitar. It was a really fantastic instrument. When Frank said I could buy it for fifty dollars, I couldn’t believe it. I left fifteen bucks with him that day and promised to come back in a week to pay it off. Several days later, I returned and collected the instrument that would unlock the next phase of my musical growth. I loved that guitar. It’s been more than half a century, but sometimes I wish I still owned it. It was that good.
Now that I had the right equipment, I was on my way. Listening to The New Lost City Ramblers, Flatt and Scruggs, The Stanley Brothers, and all the other great bands I was discovering energized me in a way I couldn’t explain. It was a combination of the singing and the instrumentation: hillbilly jazz, fiery solos, and soulful vocals. Then, when I discovered Bill Monroe and the mandolin that really did me in. The mandolin hit a nerve like nothing else I had experienced in my life before. I had to learn how to play. I was still working on my guitar, having moved to a flat pick instead of using my fingers to play rhythm, but I couldn’t stop myself from adding another instrument to the mix. I started out with a few rudimentary chords on an old Italian bowl-back mandolin I’d picked up somewhere. At least I had something to get me started, but the real prize was staring at me from a shop window of a small music store in Encinitas called Singing Strings. It was a brand-new Kay mandolin that slightly resembled the high-end Gibson F models that would remain years away from my grasp.
As I’d done with my first two guitars, I started to work on a plan to get that instrument as soon as I could come up with the money. The total was $55.00 out the door. The store had recently been opened by a man named Ed, a nice older guy who had retired and moved down to San Diego County from Los Angeles. Ed was very understanding about my financial situation; I was still in high school and, although working after school at the local hotel, $55.00 was a lot of money in 1960. Ed offered an extended layaway plan for the Kay mandolin but wisely held onto the instrument until I had paid it off in full. He knew I wasn’t going to flee the country, but, as I look back, I think he was trying to teach me patience and responsibility.
After I finally paid off Ed and had my new mandolin in hand, it was time to practice and, once again, try to decipher what these guys on my records were doing to make those wonderful sounds. There wasn’t anyone in the county I was aware of who played or gave mandolin lessons; heck, it was hard enough finding bluegrass records in the music shops.
At San Dieguito High there were maybe two other guys who played guitar or banjo, but there were no mandolin players yet. Finally, I met up with a guy named John McLaren, who was about a year older than me and shared my obsession with bluegrass and folk music. John had a Martin D-18. Nobody had a Martin guitar, especially not a D-18 dreadnaught! This guy was serious. In addition to being an outstanding player, he was also a really good singer. We immediately hit it off and started playing music together. John would sing tenor harmony to my lead vocals. We were having fun, learning, and exploring old music that was completely new to us. John’s parents were immigrants from Scotland, wonderful people who always welcomed me into their home. John’s older brother Scotty was also a great guy and an incredible surfer. Scotty encouraged our musical pursuits and welcomed us into his surfing crowd. All the older surfers who were out of high school and starting college were big folk and jazz fans, so John and I were always invited to their parties where we would play a few tunes and get handsomely compensated in beer. Honestly, John and I weren’t that good, but we made up for our inexperience with a lot of enthusiasm.
Soon thereafter, I was at school one day when a friend of mine mentioned, “I think the janitor plays guitar, and I think he plays bluegrass.” I immediately sought out San Dieguito High School custodian Bill Smith who, I found out, was originally from Arkansas. I told him I was trying to learn guitar and mandolin, and we became instant friends. He invited me over to his house that weekend, marking the start of my formal education in country music. Bill was my window on authenticity. This guy was the real deal. In addition to his day job at the school, he worked every weekend in a local bar, playing and singing with a small band.
Bill became my mentor as he patiently showed me all he’d learned over the years. On my very first visit, he set me straight on my rhythm and chord approach, and he encouraged me to sing more. One time he pulled out a new record he’d just bought by a new artist I’d never heard of named Buck Owens. “Someday this guy will be a huge star,” Bill assured me. He played me the album, and I really liked it, though I was years away from really appreciating country music. It was bluegrass I was chasing, and Bill Smith was my guru.
While music was igniting a new burning passion in my soul, the world around me seemed full of promise and opportunity. It was 1960, and I was a sophomore in high school. John Kennedy would soon be sworn into office, and there was a sense of optimism among young people around the country. Just as I was cluing into the outside world, however, life at home was beginning to feel more strained. Something was “off” when it came to our family life, and I noticed that my dad was acting differently. He was often nervous and could be short-tempered, which wasn’t his typical demeanor. I noticed he wasn’t keeping his usual routine, instead coming home later each night and drinking a lot more. One night he announced to the family that we were going to sell the house and move closer to town. I had a feeling that money was becoming an issue, but, being a naïve and self-absorbed sixteen-year-old, I didn’t really grasp the gravity of the developing situation.
My mother and father eventually had to close down their Corral Shop; they just couldn’t balance running a weekly newspaper with operating a retail shop at the same time. Though the two businesses were only within a block of one another, both required a daily presence and full-time attention. Small towns—always noted for their intimacy, quaintness, and beauty—are not the best settings for privacy. As the old saying goes, “bad news travels fast.” It wasn’t long before most of the residents of Rancho Santa Fe were aware that the Hillman family was having financial difficulties. These weren’t minor issues, as I later found out, but serious money problems. When the house finally sold, we moved into the top floor of a new home that had just been built by the local restaurant owners, Bill and Emma. I’m sure it was devastating to my parents to rent a portion of a house in a town that would quickly become one of the wealthiest enclaves in America.
It was a big change, but I didn’t have the emotional capacity to deal with the various feelings swirling inside. When my beloved childhood tree house was torn down by the new owner of our old property, I felt betrayed. When he began building his new house, I took my BB gun and shot out some of his brand-new windows. Unfortunately, I got caught
, so I got grounded, temporarily lost the use of my trusty rifle, and had to pay for every single window I destroyed. It wasn’t a good time for us Hillmans.
I found out later just how bad things had gotten for my father, a proud man who was forced to scrape by any way he could to keep us fed and clothed. He kept the newspaper open, though it was struggling. I spent the summer of 1960 working for my dad and his partner, George Laws, as well as doing some other odd jobs on the side when I wasn’t working to master the guitar and mandolin.
My friend Pebble Smith, who I’d known since elementary school, worked part time with me at the paper, too. We enjoyed hanging out together after work, which usually consisted of spending Friday nights at the corner liquor store that was two doors down from the Rancho Press. When we got lucky, an older guy or a willing migrant worker would come along and we’d ask them if they’d buy a couple of big bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon for us. It usually worked out, but if it didn’t, there was always Frank’s Market in Eden Gardens. Frank would sell beer to anyone who had the money. Underage drinking was plenty of fun, but we conjured up a grand scheme one day that would take our beer acquisition skills to the next level. The Rancho Press had what was called an offset printing system. We figured out a way to change the date of birth on a driver’s license by crudely typing over the real date and reprinting or copying it. Why embark on a life of crime with our fake ID scam? Because it was dangerous territory, and like most young guys, we never stopped to think about the potential consequences.
After creating our first masterpiece, we tried it out at the aforementioned corner liquor store. No more loitering in the parking lot waiting for an accomplice. We just walked in, bought the beer, showed the altered driver’s license, and walked out with our prizes in hand. It was a rush! Not wanting to draw too much attention to our new business venture, we were very selective about our clientele. Only a few close surfing pals were eligible to receive a carefully-doctored Hillman/Smith ID.
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