15. 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 with my father, 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 the 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 as a young child with his mother. 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.

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.  As my Dad recalled, 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 to speak with the clerk, then asked him 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 Road 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 onto side roads that led 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 replied, “Oh.”

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 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 led 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 its 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.

Upon 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.