Virgil Remembers the Mill, Part 2
Excerpts from an interview with Virgil Byxbe by Evo Bluestein, 1990
Balkan men’s dance, photo by E. Z. Smith
Jim White1 came up [to the Mill] from the college Y2 and gave classes in non-violent protest during the Vietnam War. After a series of classes would finish, they wanted to practice, so they had a weekend in which the class came up to the Mill. They needed to practice with real violence, so they got former National Guardsmen to threaten [them] and they had to figure out how to handle it. The Guardsmen brought their M-1s and shot ‘em off at all hours of the night, and they made an awful racket. You could hear them clear down to Auberry where the justice court3 was and the constable.
Cesar Chavez also used the place. That upset the local constabulary. Doug Rippey4 worked with the Chavez folks, and he told me they were looking for a place to plan a strike and what did I think about using Sweet’s Mill. I invited them up. They came because it was the only place they could think of that wouldn’t already be bugged before they got there.
There they planned the Gallo strike5, which was the first one they won. They came up two or three more times. That upset the rednecks. It’s a narrow highway going through town. When you have several carloads full of Mexicans going somewhere, the country people wonder where. I don’t know how they traced them–probably some of them stopped for something at the stores [in Prather and Auberry].
The Auberry constable and members of the justice court were told about this place, up in the hills, where there were radical black nationalists parading on the parking lot and practicing shooting guns and that it was a hotbed of sedition. So on a warm spring day, not during camp, they all came up to see what was going on. Nobody but me and Larry White6 were living there.
The constable asked me about these radical militants. I told him there was no such thing. Those guys were from the OEO7 and were having meetings about housing. As far as marching on the meadow, I told him to go over and look at it. There were no flowers trampled down at all. It was springtime and it was full of brodea.
Then they asked me about the target practice. I said there was no gun shooting up here. I asked him when that was and he told me, and I started laughing. I told him that was the college Y and the National Guard making all that noise.
The constable had also heard that we were having rock festivals up here. We hadn’t ever done that yet. I told him none of that was true, and that we were going to have our folk music festival in a few weeks, and invited him to come up, walk around and see what’s happening.
The festival date came around and people were having a good time. I happened to be out near the gate when a bunch of cars drove up, all up close together. They told me who they were–from the Auberry justice court, and I told them to park their machines in the parking lot and come back to the house.
Dave Ricker, photo by E. Z. Smith
While they were doing that, I found Barry Olivier8 and asked him to introduce himself [to the Auberry contingent] and talk to them. Then I went around the lake, and stopped at the tree house. The guy who built that two to three-story tree house was an architect. I told him what was happening–that the grand jury was coming around–and I was going to have them come by and meet him.
Then I went around to the end of the lake and there was David Bradley9building that little dock in front of the sweathouse, and I told him what was happening. I kept going around and by the time I got back, they [Auberry contingent] were talking to Barry, who used to run the Berkeley Folk Festivals. He was very savvy, politically, and he handed them over to me.
I took them around the lake. We got to the tree house and the architect engaged them in conversation. He explained what he was doing and that his real job was as an architect working for the city of Oakland, where he determined which houses should be torn down and which were historical monuments.
They kept on going and they came to David and he told them what he was doing, what a good time he was having and that he was an engineer. We got to the dam and one of them [Auberry contingent] asked me why did all these people come up here? I said, I didn’t know and that I had wondered that, myself, for a long time. I suggested we stop people and ask them, so that’s what we did.
It was just terrific because everyone had practically all the same reasons. They come because they meet old friends, people they’ve known and trusted a long time; they can talk freely about problems they can’t talk about in other places and because the music was great. Every one of them said the same thing.
concert, photo by E. Z. Smith
In the process of asking folks what they did for a living, I, too, discovered they were a bunch of professionals! That surprised the hell out of me because I knew in a blurry kind of way that was true, but it was bad form up there to ask anybody what they did for a living. Nobody knew what anyone did! In the hippy movement, you didn’t dress like a lawyer or an engineer, so you had to be taken as you appeared–before that guy–at the very second. Nobody really cared what you did.
Even before we got to the dam, one of the [Auberry] ladies says, “I don’t think you’ll have any more trouble [from us]. I think it was just political.” Which it was. You know these redneck Republicans didn’t want anything liberal to happen in their jurisdiction, so they went away happy, I’m pretty sure. They had come up expecting to see a bunch of hippies. They were seeing hippies, but they didn’t know it. They expected them all to be bleary-eyed on dope.
After that, the constable was pretty nice to me. Every time he’d see me on the street he’d wave at me. I was coming down the hill, one time, and I got drowsy and pulled over and went to sleep. He stopped and asked, “Are you okay Mr. Byxbe?” I think, in general, the attitude changed after that. Word got around that people going up to the Mill are all right and, if you think otherwise, don’t mess with them because downtown [the local officials] thinks they are.
Side note from Larry White: I once got a traffic ticket for blowing through the boulevard stop sign coming down from and below shaver Lake, right where the road to Meadow Lakes takes off. They sent me to the local court, I think Auberry, it was tiny, and since I didn’t have money to pay the ticket the judge started to reprimand me to for being indolent and in general a no-goodnick! I got pissed and told him off, said it was my choice to live on the land and not make a lot of money, and resented his implications! Fortunately, he actually listened to me, and for a fine had me deliver veggies to the local Indians, which I did, but after a couple of times they probably took pity on me, and said I didn’t need to do it anymore!
Notes
1Jim White worked with the College Religious Center (American Baptists) and was on staff at the YMCA-YWCA.
2A joint student YMCA-YWCA was once located across the street from CSUF.
3Auberry was the seat of a Fresno County Court of Justice.
4Doug Rippey, librarian and activist, knew Virgil Byxbe since the early 1960s through the CCFMC (Central California Folk Music Club). Below, he provides clarification regarding two different Fresno County legal bodies that Virgil refers to:
(1) The Grand Jury was a group of citizens impaneled by the presiding Superior Court Judge to investigate “crime and malfeasance” either on their own, or when the District Attorney brings a case and asks for an indictment. In those days, the Superior Court was a higher court above the municipal and justice courts. Since then, the lower courts consolidated into the Superior Court.
(2) The Ponderosa Justice Court was in Auberry, and had a Clerk, a Constable and a Judge, who was not required to have a law degree until some time in the early 1970s when the CRLA lawyers got tired of their poor clients being screwed by non-lawyer judges and took a case to the Colorado Supreme Court, which decided that Due Process required all cases to be tried before a judge who was a member of the bar.
5A reference to Gallo and the infamous United Farm Workers strike of 1973.
6Office of Economic Opportunity
7Larry White is a musician, who created a garden at the Mill.
8Barry Olivier directed the Berkeley Folk Festivals and teaches guitar in the Bay Area.
9David Bradley is musician and an engineer, who lives in Arcata.