15. Holy City

by Susan Tiner on August 31, 2010

1934 - Holy City

In October 2000, when I was still married to my 3rd husband, my father came for a visit. He called several weeks earlier to inform me of the dates he planned to travel to the San Francisco Bay Area for business and the dates it would be convenient to stay with us.

“Hello Darling,” he said when I answered the phone, and before I could get a word in edgewise everything had already been arranged, like Cary Grant in North by Northwest telephoning the hotel concierge to arrange for his suit to be pressed after the unfortunate incident with the crop duster plane earlier that day.

I had given up protesting. No Dad, that’s a horrible weekend. There’s a project deadline at work. The kids have a school event. One of the kids is visiting family with my ex and won’t be here.

Protest had always been futile but throughout most of the nineties we had a game plan that helped make these visits easier to tolerate.

My father adored my third husband. When he learned we were getting married he said, “You know darling I always love coming to your weddins.” Belly laugh. “And besides, you’re finally marrying someone at my intellectual level, someone I can really relate to.” This had to do with my husband’s credentials — an undergraduate degree in Math from Princeton and a Phd in Math from Stanford — and my father’s opinion of his own genius.

The visits generally lasted two days, three days maximum, and the game plan involved my husband and father going by themselves to Half Moon Bay for breakfast in the morning so that I would have time to shower, dress and collect myself before actually participating in the plans for the day. This was crucial, as my meltdown button, the one my father would inevitably press before the visit was over, could only be activated after several consecutive hours of exposure to a non-stop brain dump of everything-going-through-Jack’s-mind.

Sensing that death was near my father wanted to revisit places in the San Francisco Bay Area he loved or that were familiar to him from the years he lived in San Francisco with his mother as a young child. We had grown used to there being a request list and didn’t mind accommodating day trips to various venues, such as his favorite viewpoints in San Francisco. One of these viewpoints — the spot by Ina Coolbrith Park on Russian Hill at the intersection of Taylor and Vallejo Streets — we visited repeatedly. He would stand on Vallejo near the steps to the park  in the foreground looking out towards North Beach and the Bay for several minutes, lost in thought. I did not know what he was thinking or feeling but his expression conveyed sadness. Sometimes he would sigh.

Taylor and Vallejo

During this particular visit my father wanted to visit Holy City which was, as he recalled, somewhere in the Santa Cruz mountains, near La Honda. On the way to Santa Cruz my father and his mother would stop at Holy City for lunch or ice cream. There were life-sized Santa Elves that looked like garden gnomes lining the road approaching the village as a way of welcoming visitors. He wanted to see the elves again. We loved driving out to La Honda and anticipated seeing some pretty Fall colors so it was a plan. When they returned from breakfast I packed some snacks and water for the car and we were off to La Honda via Route 84 West, expecting to see signs for Holy City along the way.

There were no signs. We drove past the La Honda Post Office for about ten minutes, then turned around and came back. I went into the Post Office, waited patiently for my turn, then asked the clerk if we were near Holy City? There was a large map of the Santa Cruz mountains on the wall behind him and he pointed to the place where Holy City was, very, very far from our current location, on a mountain off of Highway 17 towards Santa Cruz.

Still in good spirits, we reversed the drive back to Highway 280, then headed South on 280 to connect to Highway 17 towards Santa Cruz. My father talked incessantly along the way, mostly about politics, with my husband interjecting a point here and there. I listened and looked for signs. On Highway 17, near Redwood Estates, we turned off on Holy City Rd and started climbing up a mountain. On the way up we passed a building with the sign Holy City Art Glass and this seemed to confirm that we were on the right track but after miles of meandering off on side roads that lead further up the mountain and seeing hardly any homes let alone signs of a village we turned around and came back down the mountain, again passing the reassuring Holy City Art Glass building. At the bottom we crossed Highway 17 and ascended a different mountain up, up and up then slowly back down. No Holy City.

At this point, growing concerned that this might be yet another tall tale, I forced an interruption of my father’s stream of consciousness to ask “Dad, when was the last time you visited Holy City?”

“Hmm,” he said. “It would have been 1936 or 1937.”

I said, “Oh.”

Then after thinking about it for a moment I suggested we visit the Holy City Art Glass building and ask someone there about the village. They agreed and so we drove back, parked in front of the Holy City Art Glass building near a few other vehicles and came into what turned out to be a large art glass workshop. A man wearing a protective mask and holding some kind of blow torch tool saw us come in and greeted us. We explained our mission and he told us his business was basically all that was left of commercial enterprise in Holy City. The village was lost years ago as a result of fire and earthquake damage, and now only a few private homes dotted the mountain. He lead us to the back office and on the way explained what he knew of the history of Holy City.

The office walls were covered with memorabilia of Holy City and it’s founder, Father Riker, a white-supremacist religious preacher and huckster who founded Holy City as a commune for followers of The Perfect Christian Divine Way sect he also founded.

Father Riker, founder of Holy City, and Irvin Fisher, in front of their offices for the Perfect Christian Divine Way in Los Angeles.

On entering the office my father immediately recognized the Santa Elves in a faded old newspaper photograph tacked to the wall.

“Look, there’s the Santa Elves! Just the way I remember them.” He was delighted.

If you look closely you can see the Santa’s Elves in the lower left corner of the first photograph above. A better close up of the Santa Elves is on the second page of a San Francisco Bay Area Postcard Club article on Holy City by Dan Saks starting on page 3 of this document. A more in-depth article “The Whole Truth Right Here at Holy City” by Roxanne Nilan is available on page 3 of this issue of the Newsletter of the History of San José.

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11. Thumbelina for iPhone and iPad

by Susan Tiner on August 28, 2010

I normally post a memoir piece on the weekend but I love this brand new App for iPhone and iPad hence couldn’t resist squeezing in a review. And the timing is perfect because it’s currently available at an introductory discount price of $1.99 for both iPhone and iPad through this coming Tuesday August 31st and is free to the first 200 people who register here for the Thumbelina contest.

The colorful, whimsical illustrations by Hagit Hashimshony drew me right into the story, which is only loosely based on the beautiful but dark fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen. In this adaptation, the reader participates in helping the story unfold via touch events, such as helping the white winged butterfly pull Thumbelina along the stream.

The sound effects are charming and peaceful. For example, in the scene above, as you swipe your finger to help the butterfly pull Thumbelina, you hear the sound of a stream gurgling from the wave created by the motion.

There is a lovely balance between the rhyming text, which you can read aloud yourself or hear narrated in one of multiple language translations, and interactive touch events that reveal the full audio and visual possibilities of each scene.

Click here to watch a YouTube video — currently the #1 YouTube hit for iPad kid’s books — demonstrating the features of the App.

The developers, Touchoo, are members of our family-friendly App development group MomsWithApps profiled yesterday on ABC News. Touchoo strives to create Apps that help a child “learn a new skill while reading and playing.”

What I love best about this App is the way its interactive elements let you help Thumbelina progress through her journey. It makes you feel like you are also a character in the story befriending Thumbelina. Sometimes she needs your help to move the story forward and sometimes she needs help getting out of pickle, like when she realizes she wants to get out of Mr. Mole’s hole and you have to pull her up to safety. “Yay” she says when you have placed her above ground.

Our favorite reading Apps incorporate charming multimedia elements that enhance the traditional print reading experience yet are appropriate for bed time reading for a young child. Thumbelina is one of these Apps.

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10. Aesop’s Fables for iPad

August 25, 2010

Normally I post mid-week on some aspect of our App projects but there’s not a lot to talk about this week — we’re waiting for Apple to review our 2nd App, porting both Apps to iPad and updating the free App with a rewrite of the English text and support for Spanish text and audio. [...]

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14. The Eighties

August 20, 2010

Note: I hope these photos are old enough and obscure enough – the one of my kids is the cutest one ever of the two of them and besides I made that dress. Brother is now 31 and sister 25 and they love each other very much. There was more to the eighties than big [...]

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9. Bells Jingling and Ringing

August 17, 2010

Click here for sleigh bells and Jingle Bells. As of today the Gray Kitty Goes to School iPhone App story is done, but there are many, many details involved in submitting to Apple so it will be another week before I can press the “Submit” button and take a deep breath. The last page of [...]

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S Corp Cash Transfers

August 14, 2010

In a previous post I wrote about S Corp Loan to Shareholder tax implications but what I see more often than cash outflows classified as Loan to Shareholder are frequent cash flows in and out of the business, with inflows classified as Loan from Shareholder and outflows classified as Loan to Shareholder. There is some [...]

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13. Class Vicissitudes

August 11, 2010

I’ve been debating whether to file posts reflecting on my experience grappling with class in the History of American Money Values Series or in the My Life Unscrambled thread. Reflecting on my experience from a sociological point of view detracts from a straight telling of the story but I believe class is part of this [...]

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8. Smiles and Sounds

August 10, 2010

Listen to the Big Yellow Bus Toot its Horn We’re putting the final touches on Gray Kitty Goes to School, which means specifically that we’re doing last minute art and text edits and creating the English audio files as we wait for the Spanish translation text and audio. The Spanish translation is a major big [...]

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12. Portrait of the Artist

August 6, 2010

Note: for privacy reasons I will share only this one reference to husband #1, no references besides basic profile facts, e.g., occupation, marriage dates, etc. of husbands #2 and #3, and nothing besides birth dates and possibly a photo here and there like the one below of the kids if it doesn’t show the face. [...]

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7. Using Hearts?

August 5, 2010

This will be a short post as we’ve been insanely busy. The new iPhone story, Gray Kitty Goes to School, should be ready for submission to Apple by this time next week. The English artwork and text are complete, the Spanish translation is in progress and we are busy elves finishing last-minute technical details, including [...]

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