Here is my James-like male character. Janke is John
John
John of San Francisco
Posted on June 12, 2021 by Royal Rosamond Press
John of San Francisco
by
John Presco
Copyright 2021
Mr. John Holmes John bought Bullocks & Jones Tailor Shop the second he heard it was closing.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” John asked incredulously.
Preskowitz – Master Tailors | Rosamond Press
John-John – as his friends and family called him – was the great grandson of Charles Janke (John) the son of Carl Janke, the founder of Belmont, and California Pioneer. Carl married Dorothea Peterson, an English spy, that Carl met on Heligoland Island, that was known as ‘Spy Island’. Here spies from many nations came to spawn, as they called it. Who do you trust? You had to trust a fellow spy long enough to let down your shield in order to form a bond, even get married – and have children. Sherlock Holmes grandfather was no exception. He met Miss Peterson, and fell in love. Then Mr. Holmes – was gone! Going to the dock to see her lover off, she was severely distracted by the handsome figure of Charles John, who infamous ancestors were Prussians who did business with the Welsh in order to create that special Nation-People, that in all affects was the first European Union – that tried to conquer the world on two occasions with a military that was par excellante’.
The European Union Kingdom of Heligoland | Rosamond Press
Lewes John MP was a wine merchant of “dubious origin” who swore both his parents were Welsh. This was true of his mother. The De Vere and Montagu families are in the mix. Legend has it the Shakespeare family had dealings with the John family who produced exceeding handsome – and romantic men – who were experts at dueling.
John is described as the ‘King’s servant’, and had been granted 1s. a day for life from the issues of Oxfordshire. He was also well known to the prince of Wales; indeed there is some foundation for believing the report that Prince Henry and his three brothers were wont to drink and dine at his house in the Vintry, where the entertainment included the declamation of poetry. He was a close friend of Chaucer.
Carl Janke and Dorothea compared their dreams, and discovered they wanted to create a Fantasyland. They looked at property in Belmont California that they name Walterview after the FitzWalters that descend from Lewes John. Their dream came true. However, when Carl died, there was a fight between his two sons over the estate. William Janke lost, and retreated to a home on Height Street in San Francisco. Feeling a bit guilty over the family feud, John changed Janke to John, and became an investor in the financial district. He also bought some farm land in the San Joaquin Valley that his son increased in size.
When George Shima ‘The Potato King’ was interred in a Japanese camp during the war, he was bought out by the Janke-John family who were beginning to find each other. The discovery that the world famous artist, Augustus John, was a close relative, John bought many of his pieces – along with a few Van Goughs. He was secretly called ‘The Spud King’ and, his vast potato filed could be seen from space!
John was the epitome of ‘Quiet Money’. He let his suits do all the talking. However, the John Family Winery produced the best wine in the world! A lost John vineyard had been located, and in the center of the potato fields was a replica of a French Chalet that belonged to the de Bourmont family. There was a private airport that flew in wine lovers from France. Some of the richest people in the world laughed when they saw the potato fields. Then they beheld……the grapes!
John-John could not help notice a stunning woman admiring his Van Gough. Gliding over to her, he asked the question of the age.
“Do you like Van Gough’s work?”
When she turned full face to John, his heart raced. Her face had perfect symmetry. She gave him the most knowing smile.
“Do you know we are kin to James Bond?”
“Never heard of him.”
“He knows who you are….and wants to meet with you. Here is my card. We are cousins.”
John read the card aloud..
“Vivian von Rosamonde!”
“I’m impressed. I will name a wine after you. How does Rosamonde Belmonde Wine sound?”
“It has a cultured ring to it! Very French – and well bred!. Is it true you can see your potato field from space?”
John pulled out his phone, and with deft swipes of his manicured fingers….
“Come! There’s a satellite passing over this moment. My friend Bill Gates put one in orbit so we can keep an – eye on all the potato fields in the world – excuse my pun!
John took Vivian’s hand and they ran out the castle and stood on the drawbridge!
“Wave Ms. Rosamonde! There we are! Say hello to Spudland. Bill and I got McDonald’s by the short hairs!”
Rosamunde – Schubert – YouTube
Honoring Germans Who Fought For Freedom
Posted on May 31, 2021 by Royal Rosamond Press
I was going to send an e-mail to a woman at the San Mateo Historical Society, but then found this article on the monument Germany is considering of an American Veteran, Carl Schurz. I was going to point out the remains of my Janke grandparents being dug up and moved to the Union Cemetery in the middle of the night. If I had received anything that resembled a civil greeting from any member of Belmont Historical Society, I might have visited the Union Cemetery this very day – that Nikki Haley called our VP “unprofessional and unfit” . I suspect I was snubbed by the BHS because I posted some Oakland History of Kamala Harris. Politics makes up a huge chunk of our history. I just posted on my Patriot Rosamond Family who owned slaves in South Carolina where Haley got votes. I wrote Ursula von der Leyen about this matter – which is a huge world concern – and can not be constricted by teeny tiny prejudiced members of the BHS.I am done with the Lilliputians!
I believe that is a image of William Janke taken in Twin Pines Park. His daughter, Augustus Janke, married William Stuttmeister. He moved our family to Cypress Lawn after our graves were dug up and evicted from the Odd Fellows cemetery. That is the Stuttmeister monument in Berlin with a replica of a famous statue of Jesus.
John Presco
President: Belmont Soda Works
John of SF – Battle of The Spud
Posted on June 12, 2021 by Royal Rosamond Press
John of San Francisco
by
John Presco
Copyright 2021
After making contact with James Bond via an e-mail, John Holmes John received a small package by special courier. Opening it, he was reading a letter from Queen Elizabeth explaining the coin she gifted him. He was also being informed that his ancestor, Lewes John 11, was also the master of the royal mint, who melted down the treasure Sir Francis Drake had captured in the New World, to make coin of the realm. For this, John was knighted. The coins that Philip von Habsburg was minting from Incan gold, was a threat to capture all of Europe’s commerce – in the name of the Papacy. If British traders could not keep their coins on the world market, then the world would be forced to trade with the King of the Romans, exclusively.
“This is what our piracy was all about. Please keep it a secret. As a profound coincidence, Drake introduced the potato to the Isles, and John introduced the potato to Germany and Prussia. My agent, James Bond will explain the crisis we will be in, if something happened to our tubers. I bought a bottle of your wine. I have to say the Teutonic Monks make the best wine in the world. Your ancestors brought vines from the Holy Land.”
Standing on his runway, John waited to catch sight of the Lear Jet that would bring James Bond to his, dominion. John-John was feeling light-headed, and other-worldly, after Vivian Rosemonde explained how they were related. Bond descended from Sherlock Holmes, that he learned was not a fictional character, nor was James Bond. For all his life he believed Sir Francis Drake was fiction, as was his lost treasure. Now, there is this spud connection that the alleged Queen of England is extremely concerned about. Why is it her business? Isn’t she just a figurehead? Is it any wonder that Meghan wanted to take her life. There is a very unreal quality to it all. James ends his e-mail with this request;
“I want you to study up on the potato blight and famine. You will be knighted into the Teutonic Order in abstention. Put on your best suit!”
Is it possible, I am caught up in a fantastic confidence game, and, an incredible hoax? John put this question to himself, then he spotted the jet coming out of the sun in the west.
To be continued
John & John
Posted on June 15, 2021 by Royal Rosamond Press
John & John
Idea For Netflix
by
John Presco
Ms. Jean Katrina Easton liked to meet strange men who wanted to see her, out in her potato field. She could tell a man’s character by how he made his way through the uneven ground, there always a stray spud to trip you up. When she saw John-John coming her way, she took the straw out between her teeth, because from here….she wanted to give him – such a kiss. She was told he was a big spud grower, but, she took him for another wanna-be Spud King. Now, by the way his narrow hips kept an even-keel while his long legs instinctively found good ground – like a horse in a creek full of boulders – this tuber dude made her stomach flinch. Was he the breeder she had been looking for – aching to get her long legs around – for all these years?
James Bond warned John-John about not getting into any esoteric conversations with this very volitile woman. Her mother tried to kill Richard Wagner. She blamed him for the death of her sister, Natalia Wood. Ekatirina did not follow in her sister’s footsteps, she claiming Hollywood had ruined and destroyed everything she loved. She ran away with a leftist radical from Berkeley and lived in Cuba where they hung with Che Guevera. From there they went to Mother Russia. It was while in London she ran into Admiral Ian Easton of the British Defence Staff. And, she had to have him, and give him – such a kiss! In three days, they got married.
When Jean came to town (Bozeman) she liked to wear a cape. She had a collection. In the photograph above she is wearing her satin summer cape with sheer see-trough body-suit perfect for the hot Montana evenings. Jean loved Boho Fashion. She got goosebumps when fake cowgirls insulted her – told her she had no family values, and, was a traitor to her country. She grinned ear to ear as she swore at them in perfect Russian.
“What did you just call me you friggen vampire?”
Jean knew ancient Russian kick-boxing that the Verangian Guards developed when they guarded the Caesars. Like her mother, she kept to herself. When Jean and Ekaterina came to town together, folks cowered, and slunk away. There was some superior genetics at play. As John-John got closer. Jean whispered under her breath…
“I’m going to marry that man!”
-In three days they were honeymooning at the Saint Francis Hotel. While in bed drinking champagne, John-John made a confession.
“I’m bored silly growing patatos. I want to open a Private Detective firm. I love Sam Spade.”
“Me too! I got a whole collection of Pulp Detective magazines and dime novels. Let’s get a office in the old downtown!”
And, that’s how John&John Private Eye got started.
Belmont History Scandal
Posted on March 23, 2021 by Royal Rosamond Press
Here is the come-on. The City of Belmont offers free membership to THE Belmont Historical Society IF POTENTIAL BUYERS ATTEND the book signing ceremony for the book CYNTHIA KARPA McCARTHY wrote 2014. Why didn’t the city, the society, and Cynthia, get on google to see if anyone had copyrighted some of this history – before they singed off on it, gave their signature and O.K.? I have every reason to suspect they went into my archives via the search, and found my copyrighted material. THEY knew what was going on, and kept me in the dark. Then THEY threatened me and GASLIGHTED me. Never in the annals of History Keeping, has such an outrage occurred. I am actively seeking an attorney. I have a right to affix my name to my family history and have it publicly displayed with other history pertinent to my family. How did McCarthy come to own – MY HISTORY? Who sold it to her?
Here is Cynthia saying my family history is not – that important. Then she says there is no competition – after I sensed there was. Finally, she mentions a copyright which causes me to google her, and discover she wrote a book on Belmont that THE CITY helped promote.
“We are related to historic people somewhere.
Belmont Historical Society, Belmont, CA sent Today at 9:39 AM
“There’s no competition, for Pete’s sake.“
Belmont Historical Society, Belmont, CA sent Today at 9:39 AM
“Maybe your friend the editor can explain copyright to you.“
I just sent this to the City Council”
As of 3-23-21 I can no longer post on your Belmont History site. I want to make you aware I copyrighted the name Carl Janke and his history with my kin, the Stuttmeisters, in 2012, two years before McCarthy published her history of Belmont. I found an advertisement for my copyrighted material and family history on a Belmont City site, where if one comes to the book signing of McCarthy’s book, they get free membership in the Belmont Historical Society – that gave me a very hard time when I posted my history there – it all taken down. Has the City of Belmont captured my copyrighted history, or, are they just helping Cynthia McCarthy sell it?
John Presco
John Presco
President: Royal Rosamond Press
HERE IS MY BELMOMNT HISTORY COPYRIGHTED TWO YEARS BEFORE!
William Janke on Haight St.
Posted on June 9, 2012 by Royal Rosamond Press
Belmont Legacy of Carl Janke | Rosamond Press
William Janke on Haight St. | Rosamond Press
Wood was born Svetlana Gurdina[1] to Russian immigrant parents, Nikolai Stephanovich Zakharenko (1912–1980) and Maria Stepanovna Zakharenko (née Zudilova, 1908–1998).[a] They had each left Russia as child refugees with their parents following the Russian Civil War, and they grew up far from their homeland. Her father’s family left Vladivostok after her grandfather, a chocolate-factory worker who joined the anti-Bolshevik civilian forces, was killed in a street fight in 1918; they settled in Vancouver, British Columbia, with their relatives, then moved to San Francisco. Lana’s maternal grandfather owned soap and candle factories in Barnaul; he also left Russia with his family in 1918 after his eldest son was killed by the Red Army, and settled in a Russian community in Harbin, China.[6] Maria married there, and in 1928 with her first husband had a daughter, Olga Tatulova,[7] who died in May 2015.[8]
When Nikolai and Maria married, she brought her daughter Olga to the household. The couple had two daughters together; the first was Natalia, known as “Natasha”, the Russian diminutive. The family settled in Santa Monica, California, near Hollywood, and changed their surname to Gurdin. Svetlana, known as “Lana”, was born there.
The Eastwoods of Oakland
Posted on June 3, 2012 by Royal Rosamond Press
In the biography of Clint Eastwood by Patrick McGilligan ‘Clint, The Life and Legend’ I read this on page 30.
“Glenview, near Ardley Avenue, Crocker Highlands (named for the banking Crockers, who donated the site) and Frank Havens School (named for one of the Piedmont city fathers – three of the grammar schools the boy attended – were within a close radius of Piedmont. Haven was already a local institution, and one day, at Crocker Highlands, the tousel-haired boy sat for a class photograph with schoolmates that included Jackie Jensen, the future outfielder for the Boston Red Sox.*
Very few families can say their kindred owned a Stagecoach Line, Theme Park, and a Turnverein Hall, or two. Carl Janke was half owner of the Belmont Accommodation Company that ran between Belmont ‘Beautiful Mountain’, and Halfmoon Bay. Mrs. Walter E. Janke was the President of the Cap and Bells Club that employed the cap of the Jester in its emblem. Consider the Merry Pranksters. Musicals, plays, and “Jinks” were performed. Consider the Hi-jinks of the all male Bohemian Club. Is this a feminists answer? It appears the Cap and Bells founded an art gallery. Was this the formation of the Outdoor Art League?
“CAP AND BELLS CLUB OPENS ART GALLERY
An event In the life of the Cap and Bells club took place yesterday afternoon with the opening of the permanent art gallery for women at the clubrooms 1509 Gough street. About 70 canvases are hung in the gallery at the rear of the building, which has a most excellent northern light. , The pictures shown are by women artists only. Paintings from this city, Piedmont and Monterey were shown. The president of the club, Mrs. F. H. Colburn. received the guests, assisted by several club presidents from around the bay. Mrs. Lyman Dickerson Foster was tea hostess and will continue to be at the receptions on the three opening days, with an able corps of assistants. Other club presidents will assist in receiving the guests today and tomorrow.
The California Dream Barrel
Posted on May 4, 2023 by Royal Rosamond Press
Meg Whitman and I have three things in common:
- We own the California Barrel Company
- We loathe and fear Donald Trump
- We loathe and fear Ron DeSantis
Meg Whitman was the head of Disney and made this company money, like she did when she was the head of Ebay – and Hewitt Packard. However, he QIBI company – was a huge flop. I tried to warn her it would not work, but, could not contact her personally.
On August 31, 2011, I copyrighted the name California Barrel Co. because the day before I received a genealogy from a cousin that covered the Brodericks and Stuttmeister. I have to guess as to how a company associated with Whitnan, took California Barrel Co. LLC as a name. Planners must have looked at the history of companies in Dogpatch – and assumed no one wanted this name?
In the last two days I have come up with a plan on how to win The Widget Wars that are now a partof the Culture Wars. I am seeking partners and a promoter. How about a attorney. I will be composing a proposal for my new company.
John Presco
President; California Barrel Co.- Belmont Soda Works – Royal Rosamond Press
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/21/quibi-to-shut-down-after-just-6-months.html
Meg Whitman, Calling Donald Trump a ‘Demagogue,’ Will Support Hillary Clinton for President
- Aug. 2, 2016
Meg Whitman, a Hewlett Packard executive and Republican fund-raiser, said Tuesday that she would support Hillary Clinton for president and give a “substantial” contribution to her campaign in order to stop Donald J. Trump, whom she berated as a threat to American democracy.
“I will vote for Hillary, I will talk to my Republican friends about helping her, and I will donate to her campaign and try to raise money for her,” Ms. Whitman said in a telephone interview.
Here.
The California Barrel Company – Lives!
Posted on February 15, 2019 by Royal Rosamond Press
0674, 5/17/05, 2:30 PM, 8C, 6784×4902 (423+3151), 100%, humbolt, 1/80 s, R49.7, G29.0, B61.2
I just found this in the parallel business world. William Broderick, the husband of Alice Stuttmeister, was the Vice President (a Director) of the California Barrel Company that was located in the Dogpatch, south of San Francisco, and Arcate in Humbolt County where the photograph of Melba and her grandfather is taken. The photo says it is her father, but, it is her grandfather, William Oltman Stuttmeister. I know this because according the Daryl Bulkley, William was very tall, and William Broderick, was short. That is how I remember him.
The President of Cal-Barrel, was Frederick Jacob Koster, who was a member of the Bohemian Club, as was Joaquin Miller, and George Stirling, seen in a traditional tent at the Grove Gathering. When Rosemary would show us the family photos, she would say this about our kin gathered in the redwoods of the Oakland Hills.
“Those are you Bohunk kin.”
Why Rosemary would say this, knowing the Prescos came from Bohemia in 1882, is puzzling. Was she once told they were Bohemian Bohos?
My father and I own the same facial features Will Stuttmeister does, who has a long face.
Jon Presco
http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Story_of_Dogpatch
Plans Revealed for Enormous Waterfront Development in Potrero
- by Carlos Olin Montalvo on Sep 25, 2017
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Credit: Bob Ecker
Cleanup is currently underway at the industrial area surrounding the old Potrero Power Plant site and adjacent shoreline. Draft plans were recently created and unveiled for a 29-acre Central Waterfront site at 1201 Illinois Street (bounded by Illinois, the Bay, 22nd and 23rd Streets). This area is being prepared for over 5 million square feet of development rising up to 300 feet in height.
The project is currently funded and led by California Barrel Company, with support from Associate Capital and Meg Whitman, the CEO of HP Enterprise. The overall development would introduce up to 2,700 new housing units, 220 hotel rooms, 600,000 square feet of office space and more than 100,000 square feet of retail (including a new grocery store).
To ensure capacity for these new businesses, new parking will be added for nearly 2,600 cars and 1,700 bikes. There are also plans to add a dedicated bike land down 23rd Street. Interestingly, the plans call to keep the power plant’s old smokestack and its nearby Power Block structure intact.
Cat Down On Hancock Street
Posted on November 1, 2021 by Royal Rosamond Press
The Portrait At Hancock Street
by
Vincent Rosamond Rice
Copyright 2021
At the end of our two hour Halloween talk, Christine Wandel tells me she got a letter from her “fake mother” informing her her cat had to be put down after it attacked her “fake sister” Louise.
“What color was the cat?” I asked my friend of fifty-four years.
“White.” Christine told me, and I got chills.
“What color were it’s eyes?” I asked.
“I don’t recall.”
“Think. This is very important! Where did you get that cat.
“From a cat farm outside Boston.”
“You made a special trip. Was it a special cat?”
“It was special to me.”
“Did it have blue eyes? The reason I ask is because in my novel ‘The Gideon Computer’ you (Monica) own a stuffed white lama given to you by your father, And – it has blue eyes! Your father had blue eyes. Were they the same color as my eyes?”
“When did you write this book?”
“I began it in 1986 after my friend Nancy suggested I author the history of the hippies. I thought if I wrote about The Last Hippie, I could better tell our story. This book began to come true. This is why I got sober. The head of Serenity Lane thinks I am a walk-in. But, I believe I am a Futurian. Who was in the car with you?”
I told Christine that I highly suspect Lousie wanted her dead. I was told her fake sister beat her up all the time, and no one came to her rescue. I suspect the appearance of Christine’s twin at school, opened a closed door. The Good Doctor owned a crystal ball and a large black Chrysler. He sent his daughter to a college as far away from Louise as he could – without sending her to Europe. How about Le Rosey?
Here is a photograph of me up a tree with the cat I saved from a Warlock, when I saved Dottie Witherspoon. It would walk with us to the park – to play with her dog-friends. I was going to ask Christine if she saw the movie ‘Whatever Happened To Baby Jane’, but we were weary of this look into a glass darkly.
The Gideon Computer Atop Beacon Hill
Posted on November 19, 2020 by Royal Rosamond Press
After I talked to my friend, Casey Farrell, I realized I had employed my science fiction novel, The Gideon Computer, to return to Beacon Hill – in the future! It was not safe for me to do so in 1987, or 1986, because I should have died at the hands of very bad men stabbing me to death with knives – back in 1972! Being a Futurian can be confusing. Memory loss – works both ways! I suspect Casey is a Futurian, too, because he came up with a antidote for the creative condition, and not writing it down – he forgot it! This indicates it is a common antidote – of the future – that we both got a glimpse of, and, may return again in one of our hour long discussions. We are going to do a radio show, the name of, will remain a mystery – for now – excuse my pun. Edgar Allan Poe was authoring the first Science Fiction.
Six years ago Chris and Stefan bought a house together in Wilkes-Barre. They only knew each other for a month. I told Chris this may have been a very bad idea. How did she know he would not take advantage of her? He may be a famous artist, and all that, but, do all artists have a stellar reputations?
They had met at a Landlord dispute group in the Village. Christine was being evicted because she had twelve cats. Stefan came to her rescue when she began to cry, and helped find homes for most of the felines. He also painted my ex-lovers appartment – and turned it into – his museum! Hmm! Stefan was living in a hotel. Then they wanted me to buy the abandoned house next door that was about to be torn down. Christine said there was a black cat living in this ruin – that would not let her near it. I was appalled!
“You want me to spend my Trust from my uncle on a building I would not be able to live in – just to save a black cat?”
“Yes!”
“You’re insane!”
Then Christine told me she believed Stefan wanted her dead so he can sell the house.
“He needs money to spend on his Euro-Skanks who have been tricked into seeing him as a great artist. But, he’s not. In half a minute, he twisted a piece of wire, and hung it on a nail!”
“Did he drive the nail into your wall?”
“No! It was already there! He is so pleased with it. He hung all this other trash next to it. We worked so hard fixing my place up. I wanted us to get married after I put him on the Deed. He squiggled this Love Contract on a piece of paper with a badly drawn heart. It’s embarrassing. He put a picture of just himself under it. I take the heart down when we have company, which doesn’t happen anymore. At a gallery, he covered my mouth when I wanted to talk about the show. The artist was asking for some input!”
One of these skanks is an artist – who tried to kiss Stefan on the mouth as a art gallery. Christine physically prevented this. The video shows the three swirling round and round. Chris throws her cup of wine on the rude woman. This artist empties her cup on Christine’s head. This skank is seen with Eins and Herman Nitsch who conducts blood crucifixion rituals. My Boston Blue Blood ended up shoving her lover into a large plastic garbage can full of cheap Dixie cups and Styrofoam paper plates.
To discover The Black Cat, by Edgar Allan Poe, allowed me to ground all my information in my Gideon Computer. Christine had called me a hundred times to make a report on the insane relationship she was having with Eins. I told her many times to not tell me about them because she was triggering my PTSD. The alleged rape of Eins with a toilet plunger by a three hundred pound homeless woman – was enough! She showed the NYPD spatters of blood on the ceiling. When she changed the locks on the door he went to the hardware store – and bought a crowbar!
“You got a hardware store in the Village? He actually slammed the crowbar down on the counter and asked in his German accent; ‘How much?”
Six years ago, I began a painting of this quarrelsome couple. On Halloween ( a year ago) I added tombstones with the name ‘Cat’ on them. I warned Chris not to be alone with Stefan at the house that I put in this work. Stefan goes once a year to tend to his statues in Austria – where the long arm of the law could not reach him. It now occurs to me Belle’s angel warned her daughter about Eins – who couldn’t wait to meet her! I told Stefan we were coming on the train.
“He’s a Doctor Strange kind of guy!”
Three years ago Peter Shapiro, who played for The Loading Zone, wanted to pay my plane fare so I could see what was going on with his old flame. Stefan was avoiding me. The Zone had played with the Grateful Dead at one of Kesey’s acid tests. Pete met our mutual lover at a college mix in 1994. Christine was going to Mill’s College. Peter formed a group called ‘Benny and The Boners’ and played at frat parties. Pete’s father was a professor at MIT. It was love at first sight. The three of us lived with the band in an old Victorian in downtown Oakland.
Oh how I miss our midnight chats coming from a park in the Village. I asked the woman who took my virginity when I was twenty, shortly after I was told by psychics I had died, if she was afraid to sit in that park at night.
“No! Many people know me, and are afraid of me. Strangers to this park pick this up. No one sits closer than ten feet. They walk around me. Predictors do not want to get hurt. A infected scratch can take them out of the hunt. They need their fix. They may have even heard rumors about ‘The Cat Lady of Greenwich Village’.”
John Presco a.k.a. John Wilson Poe
Copyright 2020
I will be reading from The Spoon River Anthology on my facebook.
https://www.facebook.com/greg.presco
Yam Eating Scanks
Posted on August 9, 2019by Royal Rosamond Press
When Christine told me she went to an Art Gallery opening, where on a table was a big plate of freshly nuked yams – next to cheap bottes of wine – I began to salvitate, because I saw Van Gough’s famous painting ‘The Potatoe Eaters’ . Yams are called ‘Sweet Patatoes.
“Was there a table cloth? If so, what color was it?” I wanted details. What a bi-line!
“You should have seen them. Some of them had colorfully dyed hair. They were almost eighty. It was like Easter for old hags. They made sure to wear dresses with no sleves so everyone can see their arm-flesh flapping. The more winkled – the better! Half of them were wearing black leotards with holes and rips in them.”
“Who are you talking about?”
“The scanks, the old European scanks, who came up to Stefan to get their Euro-kiss! It was disgusting. The germs! The dirty nasty scank germs. I didn’t want to catch what they got!”
This was my inspiration for my painting of Chris&Eins. I pictured them coming to the door of the gallery.
“Excuse me. Can I see your invitations?” the scank at the door asks.
“We don’t need no invitation. We’re Yam Eaters – of the Village!”
“Oh my God! What a privilege to have you here.”
“We came to eat some yams. It says you will serve them. We love yams!”
“You Yam Eaters go way back. To Holland, I believe?”
“Yes, Holland. You have pegged us. Now can we eat some yummy yams?”
“Excuse me, art lovers! Attention! We got members of the Yam Eater tribe with us!”
This review dovetails nicely with my review of Pynchon’s ‘Inherent Vice’. I am getting to own the Big Picture, being I have been up close to very beautiful women, and, they light up your consciousness, in ways – still to be explained. They are other worldly creatures. The Greek acknowledged this – and the church – who owns thousands of naked statues.
I camped fifty days with a young woman who looked like a young Gene Tierney, who like Rena, suffered from mental illness most of her life.
The truth is, Stefan Eins is jealous of me, and not because Christine and I were real hippie lovers. It is because of the photograph I took and sent it to him that depicts a fossil of his famous horsehoe crab in the cement in downtown Springfield Oregon. I pointed out the smashed-down pipe that the citizens identified as the source of The Creature that came to dwell in their world. Was it from another planet, a planet of Yam Eaters?
“Take note of the flattened pipe. It looks like a penis that delivered The Demon Seed!” I said in my e-mail to Eins.
For five months Christine gave me a eerie report on the hole neat her radiator that she claimed her landlord had drilled in order to spy on her.
“Do you think he is using a spy camera?”
“No! I think he is using his nose – to smell if I still got too many cats!”
I finally got wise. All my life people have been punishing me, torturing me, because I own a UNLIMTED IMAGINATION that has to be from another planet. I am – alien! I was forced to grade potatoes when I was a child. My father was The Spud King! His secretaries called him Vic The Nazi – to his face!
“This battered pipe represents the oppressive church that hides the truth of our real Genesis. They intercept our sexual beings – then pound the shit out of us!” I said to Ein’s on the phone. He called me.
A year later, Christine is telling me Stefan’s mother used to torture her son’s penis by sticking objects up it.
“She wanted him to become a priest. He went to seminary school for awhile, but, he was haunted by bad memories!”
“She was sticking a piece of straw up his penis.” I offered. “This was a common practice amongst German mothers. They did it get all the urine out so the baby won’t dribble. My father claims the same form of abuse, and thus is his excuse for abusing all four of his children. His people came from Germany. This shit gets passed down. Parents refuse to believe the truth that our memories go back – more than they want to know! They don’t want to miss their chance to recreate their abuse!”
Stefan was traumatized as a boy. But, I shocked the shit out him. I had done his portrait, captured his inner self, that he believed would never be revealed. Too many people are hiding in the places made for Creative Open People, they using this opening as their Cloak of Invisibility!
“See! I am wide open to almost everything! Even though I hate yams! I have no problem eating Art Yams!”
I am done with that! I am very psychic. Stefan sent me an e-mail, and called me up and asked if I could resend him this image. He must have got spooked and deleted it.
As for the hole in Christine’s floor………..
“Get a box of Fix-All.”
“What is that? How do you spell it! Hurry, the store is about to close, and I need a bag of kitty litter. My wrists are giving out. I may not be able to carry food home, just the litter! God! Why am I so hungry? This stems from my childhood, where at dinner-time my parents would make me sit at the dining table and watch my brother and sister eat steaks. When they were done, my Fake Mother brought out a bowl of luke-warm, Cream O Wheat. My family would snigger as I ate. I cried and cried! They didn’t care! I don’t know where I am going to get the money to feed all my cats!”
“Christine! Did we talk about the German Psychologist, Allice Miller. I think she is suggesting the reason you adopt so many cats, is, because you are ‘The Un-Wanted Child’. Your parents only wanted – TWO children. That was their ideal! Every time you bring home a new cat – you are spitting in your parents face!”
“Oh that’s nuts! My mother – is not my real mother! My father met a beautiful woman who wanted only ONE child – ME! After my father delivered me downstairs in his office, my real mother – who wanted me – disappeared! I think she was/is a Catholic!”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Miller_(psychologist)
I’m done fixing stuff, unless you want to hire me for a lot of money! Has Stefan ever fathered a child? Did he get a vasectomy? If you don’t want people to react to your art, don’t create. If you don’t want people to react to your writing, don’t write! If you don’t want people to response to your acting – don’t act!
Christine claims Stefan is not a real artist.
“He rarely paints, or twists a piece of wire anymore!”
I think Stefan became an artist in hope of meeting someone who could figure him out – and fix him! The Catholic Church – failed! I did not! Now what is Eins going to do? If you don’t want get fixed – stop going to a shrink!
Has anybody painted a box of Fix-All? Consider this box my Ready-Made.
John Presco
Copyright 2019
Reading from ‘The Gideon Computer’
Posted on January 2, 2014by Royal Rosamond Press
Here is John Gregory Presco reading from his novel ‘The Gideon Computer’. This is a time capsule for my grandson, Tyler Hunt, the son of Heather Hanson.
Copyright 2014
Prologuehttps://www.youtube.com/embed/usJAysuIwo8?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en&autohide=2&wmode=transparent
Chapter Onehttps://www.youtube.com/embed/_kGDI4wBiAE?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en&autohide=2&wmode=transparent
Part Twohttps://www.youtube.com/embed/EerNhlauYIw?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en&autohide=2&wmode=transparent
What’s In The Bag – Psycho Goose?
Posted on December 29, 2019 by Royal Rosamond Press
Capturing Beauty
by
John Presco
Copyright 2019
Chapter Two
Psycho Food Abuse
When I attempt to describe the Food Abuse VW inflicted on his family, I do so in a humorous manner, because, if I did so after getting in touch with my Lost Child, I would be telling this Dark Tale – that rivals Hanzel and Gretal – with tears in my eyes.
Rosemary and VW fought a lot, and like crazy! Saturday was Fight Day. The four Presco Children would rise early and take refuge at our friends house. I came in from playing when we lived on 13th. I was seven. Through the service window, I saw my father rush at my mother, and in one motion, tore her clothes off. She stood their completely naked, screaming. This was the first naked woman I saw. When Belle and The Downtown Savages came after me, I had called off our modeling appointment. I wanted to render her as Venus.
Shortly after this, scene, Mark and I were sent away to live with our grandmothers for several months. VW had gone on a work strike. He threatened to desert his family unless we did things his way. When my brother and I were allowed to come home, VW made an example of us. He got out mother to believe in his Psycho Babel about her sons being against him, and, we secretly wanted to destroy him so we could have sexual intercourse with Rosemary. Victor had read a little bit of Freud. He figured it all out. He would repeat our Dastardly Plot to me several times in the ensuing years.
At our table, at dinner time, VW laid his pecking order on us. Usually he had a beer buzz. He would cook up a big thick steak, then share it with his wife, who he made his secretary in Acme Produce. Christine and Vicki got weenies. Mark and I got heaping hot platefuls of produce that VW could not sell, because it was going bad. A big plate of steaming Brussel sprouts would be put before us. When we finished, Victor went to the stove and came back with a big pot. He came at us with a big spoon that hovered over our plates.
“Would you like some more?”
“No thank you!”
“You want more! Here you go! Eat up!” VW said with a smirk, he thinking he was very clever. Here was a good tale to tell the Barflies at Oscars. When I saw footage of Autzwitz and hear the Liberating GIs killed the Jews due to feeding them too much, I beheld the source.
And.. he would empty the pot till all the stale produce was gone.
You see, he figured it out…what was going wrong with his life, and why Rosemary was saying he was a bad husband and provider. There were TWO PARASITES on board his ship that like to run and play, then, cry to mommy they did not like Vic’s food. Almost everynight he demonstrated what a good provider he was. The Two Traitors that undermined Ship Presco were punished. Our devious game was up. Our childhood would be taken from us. Playing and eating meat is what made Victor a Failure. When I saw Van Gough’s ‘The Potatoes Eaters’ I saw my real family. I beheld the power of art.
Being fired from his job delivering Granny Goose Potatoe Chips, and losing his bond, made VW un-employable. He began working on his own. We were company property – his assets. We became ‘Lumpers’. VW showed us how to use a dollie, a hand truck. When he saw we were not carrying a full load, he violently threw more crates on. The grown Lumpers wanted to kick Vic’s ass. But, apparently he had gotten in a fight, and kicked butt. VW boxed in the Merchant Marines. Vic shamed all the workers in the Oakland market that was next to Jack London Square. VW would tell me many years later that he used Wolf Larson as a model on how one should raise sons. This puts the Prescos in a Literary domain. Vic made a loan to Jack’s daughter.
Acme Produce was located on Webster Street next to the train tracks. He made a potatoe grater that he hoisted up to the ceiling with pullies and rope. It was lowered for his workers. Grading potatoes is an art form. When I read John Steinbeck, I was blown away. John’s folks – were fiction!
Vic used a piece of hemp rope to keep the front door of his Plymouth shut. He had to tie and untie it to get in and out. When I was sixteen, a watercolor I did of the produce market toured the world in a Red Cross show.
I did not hear from any family members on Thanksgiving and Christmas. My daughter claims I suffer from a personality disorder. What I suffer from is, seeking the truth – and writing about it. Jack London was an Oyster Pirate and wrote about the abuse of the Working Man. He was a Socialist.
When I was twelve I ordered drunken VW out of my home when he came to take Vicki on a drunken drive to Grandma’s. When he reached into his drawer for his pistol, I shouted;
‘Grow up!”
I knew VW was a fucking fraud because Mark and I would stay at Vic’s mother’s house as a reward. We slept outside in a tent. Melba cooked for us all day. Rosemary called Vic’s mother and said;
“Stop feeding Mark. He’s as fat as a butterball!”
VW made Mark the boos over me. He is eleven in this photo. We both have worked for VW for three years. We were paid a dollar a day, which Vic put in our banks accounts. When Rosemary stabbed Captain Victim between the eyes with a steak knife, he ran out of our lives – straight to the bank – and emptied out accounts. We had about $400 dollars apiece. Vic never paid a dime for child support. We went hungry.
I had to ask Mark’s permission to stay in the tent. I was forbidden to read his favorite comic books grandma bought him. When I was twelve, the watercolor I did of sailboats toured the world in the Red Cross show. I was never good enough, never an equal. I see Mark destroying all evidence he existed, then going to a local park and shooting himself. He has gotten rid of his million dollars, all traces of his bank account, and does not have his wallet in. There are no ‘Next of Kin’ to be found.
We used to have lifting contests during our break. We both could lift 75 pounds over our head when this pic was taken. Soon, we could press a 100 pound sack of potatoes over our head. No one in school fucked with the Presco Brothers. I see Mark in a Nazi film. He is Vic’s Drummer Boy!
The truth is, Vic was a Momma’s Boy. His father was a professional gambler who left his family when VW was nine. He felt his mother emasculated him when she assumed the role of his slave. He believed that children were extensions of the parent, and, instead of going into therapy, you get to work out your psychosis on your children, affect the outcome of their lives in extremely drastic ways, as if this was The Way to fix yourself. Somehow, the DNA got reversed, swam back to the womb, and altered the Major Sperm and Womb Donors. Many Babyboomers took LSD and beheld THE BIG LIE. Vic knew I was THE REAL DEAL, and he was A FAKE. So did Psycho Billy.
When I was seventeen I hitchhiked to New York and got a job at Yale Trucking. I worked with real bad-asses. I took the Mafia to court. When Bill Cornwell called me a “parasite” and got my daughter to use this word on him. I told him I was coming to Santa Rosa to kick his ass. We agreed to meet in Williamsberg, half-way. This is when I became ‘Psycho Johnny’ and, never lay eyes on my daughter and grandson, again.
My father knew I could see right through him. This is when he claimed I was not his son. I cry when I see images of Lil Vicki who was used by both our parents to be the Shining Proof they had not fucked up their three oldest children in what can be described as a Post-Nazi Experiment.
John Presco
Copyright 2019
The term “oyster pirate” appeared in several literary works by Jack London. London usually used the term without explanation (“I wanted to be where the winds of adventure blew. And the winds of adventure blew the oyster pirate sloops up and down San Francisco Bay”).[1] Writers about London also use the term without explanation (“he was a sailor, seal-hunter, tramp, fish warden, oyster pirate, cannery worker, jailbird, boxer, and gold digger”[2]), as if everyone knew the meaning of the term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oyster_pirate
“Granny Goose is the name of an American brand of potato chips and other snack foods. Its logo and mascot, also named Granny Goose, is an anthropomorphic cartoon goose. In a series of television commercials first aired in the 1960s, the company’s spokesperson, who self-identified as “Granny Goose”, was portrayed by actor Philip Carey as a tough James Bond-style spy.[1]
Granny Goose Foods, Inc., was originally founded in Oakland, California, by Matthew Barr in 1946. In 1993, the company acquired the Laura Scudder brand from Borden, Inc., but still could not make a profit due to intense competition from PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay and Anheuser-Busch’s Eagle Snacks, so the entire company was put up for sale in 1995.[2] The company moved most of its operations from its corporate headquarters in Oakland to Kaysville, Utah in 2000.”
When Bill Cornwell called me up and told me I was truamatizing his lover, and, because I was a parasite I was on the verge of losing my family, I heard the captain down in my War Code Room, say with a grin;
“Uh oh! Daddys home!”
These are words I often applied to my brother, Mark, when he came home from a hard day at school. Once in the door, he was the Good Child, the Perfect Child, Mommies Little Helper – The Man of the House! The best thing that anyone did for Mark, was provide him with the Perfect Scapegoat when Rosemary born me, her second child. For gifting Mark with a whipping boy, Mark was expected to support Rosemary in her old age.
“Mark is exempt from work so he can study. He’s going to be electronic engineer someday and be a millionaire. However, just to be fair, Marks main task is to change all burned out lightbulbs. Stand up my Good Son and receive you honorary lightbulb changing oven mitten!
Now Greg, why are standing around glomming on to your brothers glory. Get in that kitchen and serve my Little Man his supper!”
“Yesum Ms. Presco!”
When Mark was sixteen he carved out a swastika and a Nazi giving a salute in his friends shop, and hung his Superman over his bed. Mark titled ma a parasite on society because I wanted to be an artist. We stopped eating at the table as a family after Vic was ousted from power, because he conducted Food Abuse. One day, I must write on this topic and appear on a talk show. Food Abuse did not end with King Victor.
One day as we sat watching T.V. eating the dinner I cooked, I tapped on my half-empty glass of milk.
“Execure me! I want to make a Family announcement! I am proud to say that this morning in home room, I stopped standing to salute the flag and pledge allegiance to the flag, because this is pure propaganda, and preparation for the Military. Because my ambition is to be what I am, an Artist and a Man of Peace, then I do not want ,nor do seek, anyone’s approval but my own! Thank you! Now return to the delicious meal I have prepared!”
“I’ve had it!” Mark growled; as he put his tray aside and rush towards me. Standing over me he is screaming till he is red in the face;
“Youre never going to make any money as an artist. No one makes any money as an artist, thus you are a parasite on society. You’ll never amount to anything. You are a leach! A LEACH!”
“You’re the leach. You don’t do shit around here. I want your lightbulb changer job. I want you to go into the kitchen and see if you can whip us up some desert for a change!”
Mark grabs my tray and heaves it to the floor, the glass of milk all the way empty now. I rise up with a right-cross to his jaw, and he throws a left. I throw a series of jabs, and he goes into his whirlwind attack, his head down, his arms spinning like a dervish. I looked for AN opening, AND WITH AN with an upper -cut – Down goes Fraser!
The reason why HBO or SHOWTIME should turn this blog into a Series, is it is the Genesis of cultural Warfare in America. The Presco are the Real McCoys.
When my daughter parroted Bill’S belief that I was a parasite, and thus must be removed from the New and Latest Family Order, I disowned her, put her out of my life, because it broke my heart to see this EXTREME ABUSE of the Family Scapegoat being championed by my own flesh and blood.
I told Heather as she read from the New Nazi Manifesto, that Bill sounds just like Mark.
“You should have Bill read Mark’s essays. Bill will say he has been cheated, by I being your father, and not Mark!”
To know that Mark 2 will have a strong influence on my grandson, is a real defeat, a reversal of all I have tried to do.
Above is a photo of Mark sticking his chest out – like a real man! My uncle Dick is egging him on! Dick lew over sixty bombing missions over Germany. There is a big scar on his chin and cheek when shrapnel flew into the cockpit. When Heather said I was that much more of parasite because I did not serve in the military, I asked;
“Did Bill serve?”
“No,but he wanted to. That’smore then what you wanted to do!”
Uncle Dick and Lillian believed Vic when he declared I was not his son. Marked, smirked when he herd the good news. Getting a job at eighteeen, he moved out, but, never returned with one bag of gorceries, nor did he take his mother to dinner – every! This is because we were a Tribal System, and a martiarchy.
Here is part of Mark’s essay that declares all races not white, as parasite, and pretty much declares all women, parasites. Now that Mark sees that he has like minded folks in the family again, he might come out of hiding and bounce Tyler on his knee – because the Real Family DAddy – is back!
Needless to say, I was the family Jew.
Jon Presco
I met a young man today with the surname Rose. I told him that was a family name. He asked me if that was my last name. I told him my mother was named after her grandparents, Ida Rose and William Rosamond.
“My mother was named Rosemary Rosamond!”
The young man caught how depleted and unhappy I was when I said her name. An hour later I am telling my nutritionist I am a victim of Food Abuse. We were talking about portions and eating more vegetables.
“When I was eleven I saw my mother stab my father between the eyes with a knife, over a big steak he was cooking. Her children ate weenies and sauerkraut. Se was cutting his giant steak into five sections and calling to her sleeping cubs.”
“What else don’t I know about you?” she asked?
“I suffer from PTSD. I have seen a lot of violence and have been in a lot of gunplay, more then cops and soldiers. When I got sober I realized I went out of my way to take on the bad guys.”
Two months ago I took down a post that revealed my mother’s violence and incest. I was afraid Stacey Pierrot and her latest Ghost Writer would steal it and use it to make money. I had a image of black eye, and was telling myself Pierrot has been selling our black eyes and bruises on the Black Market. She didn’t get a black eye or a one bruise from any violent member of my family. But, thanks to Sydney Morris and Bob Buck, we got this parasite selling my family wounds. How much is a broken leg worth? She said there is a new revision of the film script she can’t sell. This is wonderful therapy for Stacey, whose life took a upward turn – the day after Christine drowned! All her fingernails were torn as she clutched to the rocks.
Then there was the extreme verbal and psychological abuse Rosemary practiced non-stop. She used our need for a sane parent to get our shields down, so she go in deep and leave permanent psychological scars – she knew would never heal! I began to speak of these dark and evil things – for free! But, then I realized Pierrot could not sell her movie about my sister because it is second hand information, aimed at bringing fame and money to a freind that has done much psychological damage! She keeps our wounds open and fresh so she can suck our blood and tears!
A woman caught up in the Weinstein Abuse, took her life today. I am getting high glucose readings from the stress. Four hundred and ten! I have talked with my doctor about the extreme stress I have been suffering after I read Snyder’s biography of my late sister. He depicts her as a monster. When I was seventeen, I stopped Rosemary Rosamond from tearing more hunks of hair out of Christine’s head. Her shrieks of abject pain will always be with me. A year earlier, I stopped her from pulling Marilyn’s hair out as she round-up and delivered more hard slaps to my first girlfriend’s face.
Tonight, I beheld Jennie Willoughby perform a miracle that unlocked the cell door for millions of human beings who have been taken prisoner by abusive men – and women! Jack Webb admires her from his grave.
“Just the facts, Mam!”
Very calmly and methodically Jennie isolated and magnified ‘The Cover-up’ that does all the damage. Rosemary married two extremely violent and abusive men that terrorized her four children. She reveled in it. Her monsters did her dirty work. We needed love. We deserved, love. We never got, love. What we got was – drama! We were bit players in their Theatre Macabre that produced scripts so diabolical and fiendish, we Presco Children guessed at what reality was in all our waking hours, and, when we tried to sleep. Both my parents went after our lovers, the people we married, and our children. And, we stayed around them in hope there was a happy ending, or, some resolve.
Lennie and Colbie got out. But, they were being dragged back in by the All The President’s Men who were in a constant PR Crisis, and, who were, and are, lying around the clock! Of course there is a cover-up.
“Get out!” I shouted to these monsters who took over the Republican Party. Get out!
The photograph of Rosemary holding someone else’s child, give me the creeps. The last time I saw her in 1994 she asked me if I sired any children.
“A psychic said I have two children.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I didn’t want you to get your hands on them!”
I wanted to add PSYCHY, but, she got my drift. The Rose died in 1997.
My nutritionist is married, and, she is pretty. I try to spare her most of the Hell we experienced. We talked about my cooking habits. I told her I became the Family Cook when I was eleven. Six years later, Rosemary drove me out of the house after I shoved her in a closet still clutching Christine’s hair. I was afraid of her – most of my life. I saw the blood pouring down my father’s face in our kitchen were most of their battles took place.
“If you come out of there, I will hurt you. I will kill you!”
Before I was ‘The Cook’ I was a Lumper in the produce market. I told my therapist we grew up on a lot of vegetables because Vic owned a produce market. Lara perked up, saying this was good. I stopped myself from telling her the truth. My brother and I were nine and ten when we were put to work.
“Did you ever read the story ‘The Sea Wolf’ by Jack London? When Vic ran out of the house and never came back, Rosemary came home with a set of T.V. trays and told us we will never it at the dinner table again. (As God is my witness) The survivors had been traumatized.”
This is not Norman Rockwell. It’s hard telling a healthy and happy person you did not have a childhood because your parents gave up on parenting, and made you the parents, and ‘The Slaves’…………..and their lovers! Lara is trying to save my life, keep my feet from being amputated. Then I will own a peg leg. Then, I will be Long John Silver, and, never…………Vic and Rosemary’s son!
My older brother was not there for anybody, but himself. I was a ‘Teen Psychiatrist’ to the damaged women in the family. I had a heart. I tried to heal them. Here is Mark’s view of women.
http://mbpresco.blogspot.com/2008/08/problem-with-womens-movement.html
Jennie and Colbie signed up to be Wives. These White House FBI papers, with pic, say they did not get married to be punching bags. I wish them well.
Jon Presco
Copyright 2018
The Problem With The Women’s Movement
The Woman’s Movement is based on two entirely false premises. The first is that “Women have been oppressed and sexually exploited by Men”. This is just the opposite of what is really true. Women enjoy a privileged position in this society and have been making a living sexually exploiting Men for the last five million years. The second is that “Women want sexual equality”. This is the last thing Women want. It should be clear to even the most casual observer that Women have no intention of giving up a single privilege or prerogative or being Female, nor have they. All traditional Female privileges and prerogatives are intact and Women have no intention of giving them up no matter how much they screech about sexual equality out of the other side of Their face. The Women’s Movement has degenerated into a group of spoiled rotten Females demanding to be even more spoiled rotten than they already are.
What do Women want? This can be defined by be phrase coined by the Women’s Movement, “Having it all”, and can be taken literally. Women want all the privileges and prerogatives of both sexes; and the duties, responsibilities and disadvantages of neither. The first thing the Women’s Movement did was disavow all traditional Female responsibilities. Women no longer are required to cook, sew, clean house or be responsible for any of the duties traditionally assigned to Women. Currently there are no obligations that Women feel bound to perform, especially the ones traditionally undertaken by Men. Men, on the other hand, have not shirked any of Their traditional responsibilities; including protecting, defending and providing for Women and Their Children.
6. And above all, white people do not have to tolerate becoming minorities our own countries and cultures as the non-achieving races of the world decide that the only chance they have of attaining a better quality of life is to elbow their way into white cultures, dump themselves on white people and demand that white people provide them a quality of life they cannot provide themselves in their own countries and cultures.
Most white people will think I am cold and heartless. They feel guilty that they have so much and so many others have so little. They want to help alleviate the suffering of the poor people of the world. But I warn you, you can only help them help themselves, and if they cannot do it for themselves there is little you can do. If you continue to subsidize the population explosion of these non-achieving races they will turn your culture into their culture and you will watch your children suffer the same low quality of life as theirs.
The most important thing you can do for them now is to stop the population explosion of these “poor” people. The sheer numbers are keeping them poor and “enslaving” them as cheap labor.
t should be clear by now that black Americans enjoy a much higher quality of life than they have earned. But they still see themselves as victims because they are not provided with economic parity to white people and they hate us for it. This is irrational because white people don’t do this for each other as explained above. Statistically there are twice as many poor white people than black people, but these poor whites don’t seem to get the same attention.
I will now make the case that black people are the real victimizers in this country. I will use negative racial stereotypes which if not entirely accurate reflect the way black people are perceived in this country.
The first victims of black people are their own children. Blacks have a higher birthrate than whites, 70% of their children are born to unwed mothers and get little help from their fathers. There is a very high infant mortality rate. They know these children are going to grow up in the mean streets of the black communities. They don’t care because I believe too many of them try to use their children to retire on the welfare system. If they want a raise they drop another one. These children are raised to believe they are victims of white oppressors.
Janke Park, Hall, And Stagecoach Line
Posted on November 27, 2014 by Royal Rosamond Press
Parents
Spouses and children
- Married in 1900 to Ida Nettleship, born in 1877, deceased in 1907 aged 30 years old (Parents : John Trivett Nettleship 1841-1902 & Ada Hinton) with
- Caspar John, Admiral 1903-1984
- Romilly John 1906-1986
- With Dorothy McNeill, born 19 December 1881 – Camberwell District, London, England, deceased 23 July 1969 aged 87 years old with
Poppet John 1912-1997 With Willem Jilts Pol 1905-1988- Vivien John 1915-1994
- Married between 1917 and 1925 to Evelyn Beatrice Sainte Croix Rose, born in 1885 – London, Middlesex, England, deceased 27 July 1964 – Sussex, England aged 79 years old (Parents : George Alfred Sainte Croix Rose 1854- & Beatrice Quain) with
- Amaryllis Marie Louise Fleming 1925-1999
| (hide) |
Events
| 4 January 1878 : | Birth – Pembrokeshire, Wales Sources: Dowling Family Tree – Tim Dowling – rootsweb, 2001-2015 – – electronic – I130562 |
| — : | Pic |
| — : | Occupation – Artist |
| 1900 : | Marriage (with Ida Nettleship) |
| between 1917 and 1925 : | Marriage (with Evelyn Beatrice Sainte Croix Rose) |
| 31 October 1961 : | Death – Hampshire, England Sources: Dowling Family Tree – Tim Dowling – rootsweb, 2001-2015 – – electronic – I130562 |
Evelyn St. Croix Fleming, born Evelyn Beatrice Sainte Croix Rose, in Kensington, London, known as Eve Fleming (1885 – 27 July 1964),[citation needed] was an English socialite.
Life[edit]
Evelyn Rose was the daughter of George Alfred Sainte Croix Rose (31 January 1854 – 14 February 1926), a captain in the service of the Royal Buckinghamshire Militia (King’s Own) and Justice of the Peace (J.P.) for Berkshire, son of the 1st Baronet Rose, of Rayners, by his marriage on 8 April 1880 to Beatrice Quain (1857 – 4 January 1911), the daughter of Sir Richard Quain, 1st Baronet, graduated with a Doctor of Medicine (M.D.). On 15 February 1906 she married Valentine Fleming (1882–1917),[1] and by that marriage was the mother of four sons: Peter Fleming, Ian Fleming – the novelist who wrote the James Bond books, Richard Fleming and Michael Fleming. Evelyn was thus the grandmother of actress Lucy Fleming. She was known for her flamboyant beauty.
After her husband’s death in action in the Great War in May 1917, Evelyn Fleming inherited his large estate in trust, making her very wealthy. However, the conditions of the money in trust transferred it to others should she ever remarry. She became the mistress of painter Augustus John, with whom she had a daughter, the cellist Amaryllis Fleming.
During the 1940s and 1950s, she resided at The Abbey, Sutton Courtenay. She died only two weeks before the death of her son Ian on 12 August 1964.[2]
Chateau de Breze & Bourmont Wine
Posted on April 23, 2015 by Royal Rosamond Press
“Richard Eldridge, owner and winemaker, stumbled into wine through marriage to the late Valerie de Bourmont who introduced him to wine. In a sense, the rest is history.”
I met Virginia Hambley in 1998, and wanted children with her. When I learned she could not have children, and when my sixteen year old daughter appear in my life, I told Virginia I would share Heather with her. The same went for grandson, Tyler Hunt, when he was born. Virgnia was not born when her two older sisters attended the wedding of their cousin in New York where she was born. Clark Hambley was an artist and worked at a prestigious advertising agency.
Like her sister before her, after graduating from High School, Virginia was invited to stay with her Bourmont kindred in France. She told me they had a winery. When I showed her a photo of Breze Chateau, and asked her if this is where she stayed for nearly month, she said this was the place of the family winery.
“You didn’t tell me it was a castle!”
Jon Presco
Château de Brézé is a small, dry-moated castle located in Brézé, near Saumur in the Loire Valley, France. The château was transformed during the 16th and the 19th centuries. The current structure is Renaissance in style yet retains medieval elements including a drawbridge and a 12th-century trogloditic basement. Today, it is the residence of descendants of the ancient lords. The château is a listed ancient monument originally dating from 1060.[1] A range of wines are produced at the château which has 30 hectares of vineyards.[2]
This Spuds – For You!
Posted on July 7, 2017 by Royal Rosamond Press
On Frog Mountain I discovered that all roads lead to Rena. No matter where she be, her Seekers will find her……..The Sleeping Maiden of Rose Mountain. Above, is our road to the beach, the other place I took Rena to swim. Would she let me in, there?
When Rena emerged from the tent to get her first Continental Breakfast, there was a halo around her head and a smile on her face. Alas we had consummated our Destiny together, but, our love making was subdued and gentle. She wanted me to move my hips as little as possible. She told me she did not want to cry out, have our love-making be overheard thru the thin walls of the tent. At the Frog Pond, I assured her we were all lone, as we were on Tam.
‘There’s not a soul within a mile of us!” I said, and, then it occurred to me, she did not know me, and thus, did not trust me – yet. Then came our conversation at the waterfall.
“No one has ever talked to me before. You are the first one.”
As Rena licked her whiskers with the back of her paw, I got my drawing pad and paper ready to do my first masterpiece of my Muse. What can go wrong, now? That’s when I spotted him out the corner of my eye as he quietly emerged from the bushes. He was wearing cut-offs, sandals, and a neckless. He had a big potatoe in his hand. He approached, with caution. He knew men in the ccompany of gorgeous women can be very possessive, very territorial.
With a grin on his face, he is making stabbing motions with his spud.
“Oh look Rena! Here come a mad man from the forest who intends to do me in with a vegetable so he can have you all to himself. Do you think he is a vegetarian, and, has been riled with the smell of frying pork meat”?
I looked at my wide-eyed beauty who was even more aglow at seeing what she really came to California to see – a Holy Man! And, I got it! He had come to Frog Pond to meditate, he on a mission of some kind. He had taken a vow of silence, guessed I.
He now stood by our fire and made motions that said he wanted to put his big patato in Rena’s fire. How did he know she was a red-hot Aries? He only pretended to look at me. He could not get his mind off what he saw as he lurked in the bushes. He awoke to the tinkle and chime of her beautufl laughter. Then, he brought back the veil of the forest, and almost had a heart attack – with holy halo and aura!
Now his dirty hand came at me, his fingers making the sign of the claw. He got closer, and closer……to my pencil!
“Oh look! He wants to use your pencil to write on your pad of paper. Give it to him. I want to hear, I mean, read, what he has to say!”
I threw my No.4 down on the table, in disgust!
“Don’t be such a party-pooper!”
Rena read out loud what he wrote;
“My name is Totu Sahd Mingu. I am a Buddhist monk, come to Frog Mountain to observe a week of total silence. I am not allowed to make fire. Because I took a vow of poverty, I only brought potatoes to eat. After two days I am bored with my diet. Can I put my potatoe in your fire?
P.S. I did not hear your loud love-making. I had a good nights rest.”
Beccause I do not recall exactly what Rena’s personal guru and trainer looked like. I am holding a contest. Pick one!
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The Spud & Default King
Posted on November 22, 2011 by Royal Rosamond Press
Like Vinnie ‘the chin”Gigante, Vic ‘six bucks’ spent allot time in a bathrobe. Vic fashioned himself as the ‘singing Don’ he a member of the Barbershop Quartet. Above we see ‘the crooner’ breaking out in song in the morn after a all-niter. When it came time to close the Kerry House, where I met Patrice Hanson, Vic & Son got to stay till sunup. I drank with my father, and called him Bill while in a nudie bar out on the highway. We were on our way to grandma’s for X-Mas. William was pop’s middle name.
When any of Vic’schildren would stop by, he would ceremoniously hand us a real estate paper and a stack of post cards. We must work before we play. We went to work on looking for folks who had defaulted on their home loan. We would write their address on the post card that introduced these desperate people to Captain Vic, Loan Hero. We did not speak while we worked, lest we make a mistake, or waste precious seconds. Vic expected allot bang for his bucks, he never able to get over his capitalist vision he had when he put his sons to work at Acme Produce. Free Labor was the way. Vic told me he wished he was born during the height of the Roman Empire. When I recognized I had a Christ complex, I began to wonder.
I can’t speak for my other siblings, but, I never got paid. What I got was a perk instead. I might get a bowl of squid soup, or, a big salami sandwich. Vic took me to lunch at the real estate guy bars. I might get an item of clothing, or, a new-scent for my car. When I saw the new house in Lafayette, Vic demonstrated his up-graded perk system. Near the end of the work day, Vic broke the silence;
“Who wants to go shopping?”
“Me!”
“Me!”
“Me!”
Spoke Vic’s three little help-meets, and out the door they run with the credit cards Vic tossed atthem – like candy! Two hours later they came home like hunters from the hunt, and began to hold up their new dresses for the Master Boss Man to see;
“Oh, that’s pa retty one. Turn around and let me see it from the back!” said their captain who wore a black eye patch a year earlier after crazy Dee-Dee knocked his out out with a four pound ashtray.
“Duck Captain Victim – INCOMING!”
Above it the new edition to the Lafayette home that Vic built for Connie and her eight children. Vic was trying to get his new bride into the United States, and her children. Connie and her children were citizens of Mexico. Having married Connie when she was smuggled across the border in a marijuana shipment, it looked like getting Vic’s new family into the new digs, was not going to pan out. I took a photo of Connie’s Folly because Vic’s real children never got such a huge perk, and that was because we were never really loyal to our captain. No one lived in that house. According to Roseamry, Vic would steal our dental appointments she paid for after she was forced to go get a real job, get off the bad movie lot where we were slaves to the Star.
We clever Presco children faked our loyalty so we could cash&prizes out of the good captain. We were not the salt of the earth, as basic and asloiving as Mexican people, who love each other naturally. It’s inbred in them.
When I was eleven I bought my father a new fishing knife. Being quite the worker, I got jobs watering lawns, running errands for the elderly, and weeding. It was Vic’s birthday, August 12. I asked my father to come out on the front porch with me. I handed him the knife. There was silence as he looked at it. The he spoke;
“You didn’t buy this knife for me. You bought it for yourself. Here. You keep it!”
I fought back the tears as he turned and went back in the house. I struggled to understand what had happened. My father had accused me of having a hidden agenda, and I wondered if this was true. Then it came to me, a voice form heaven.
“There is nothing dark about trying to purchase your freedom! Your father wants you to be ownen to him till the day he die!”
I now knew my father was psychotic, severely mentally ill. Not one dare say this about him, or title him a parasite, even when he got convicted of Loan Sharming in in 1994. In 1991 I got a glimpse of the Mortgage Meltdown, the coming Doom! I was seen as the boy who cried wolf. I posted the fallowing six years ago.
I Scapegoat
“The child plays”
After Ms. Pierrot bought the Rosamond estate on February 15,1996, she
put out a website for Rosamond Publishing, in which the ghost writer
she hired, claimed Christine did not “hasten her death as many around
her feared she would.” Back to this paper I found yesterday, as if
the ghost of James Coakly had led me to it. On September 19, 1996
Attorney Lawrence J. Chazen via his attorney filed a claim against my
late sister’s estate for $59,100 dollars. He did this 2 1/2 years
after Christine’s death, and seven months after Ms.Pierrot bought the
estate of $75,000 dollars. Why didn’t Mr.Chazen file sooner, after
all, he had tried to become the special executor, after Garth’s
attorney got another attorney dismissed by Judge Silver. To quote
from testimony of proceedings of June 3,1994; “Ms. Beare again
expressed her opinion to me that Ms. Winterhalter was not qualified
or bondable and that San Francisco Attorney Lawrence J. Chazen should
serve. Mr.Chazen had appeared before Judge Silver with Ms.Beare at
the June 3 1994 hearing and attempted to be appointed. Over the
specific argument of Ms. Beare, Judge Silver refused to appoint Mr.
Chazen. Neither Ms. Beare nor Mr.Chazen disclosed to the court the
very critical fact that Mr.Chazen has the largest single creditor’s
claim against the estate and is a former business partner and
business associate of Garth Benton who the court had removed as
Special Administrator just moments before.” By, Larry was hasty then!
I asked my father, when he was alive, where he met Lawrence Chazen.
He said he met him at the Copper Penny in Walnut Creek that was a
hang-out for real-estate Brokers. In California, if you had a real-
estate Liscence, you could make mortgage loans. In May of 94, Vic was
convicted of loan sharking, he and another real-estate guy taking a
woman’s home from her. My cousin
Bill Broderick helped Vic with this case, he a Attorney.My mother had
been an executive secretary for Caldwell Bankers, and knowing she was
brilliant, and loved a intriguing tale, I lay this one on her. “Do
you recall the Movie ‘Paint Your Wagon’ where Clint Eastwood is
underneath the saloons and gambling houses scooping up the gold dust
that has fallen between the cracks during a Gold Boom. Suppose you
found a way of doing this in the California Real-estate Boom, that
is, as the price of real-estate went through the roof, and thus the
number of defaults, if you could manipulate these defaults, then you
would be a rich man. Mother, I think Vic invented the Savings and
Loan Rip-off scam – by default!” I went on to explain my theory. “If
a lender approached free-lance real-estate guys that were popping up
all over the Golden State, and set them up to make default loans for
you, then, if you had enough of these guys, the Feds would not know
who much real-estate was involved. When these default loans failed,
they go up for auction. If you knew when this was going to happen,
like gold dust falling through the cracks, and you bought these
houses you held a secret mortgage on through small-timers you made
privte loans to, then this is Big Time loan sharking – involving
millions of dollars! One is in affect, acquiring much valuable real-
estate, for a song.” After I gave same names of Vic’s business
associates, and told her one of them was known to haunt default real-
estate auctions, my mother gagged on her Vodka. “Jesus Christ Greg.
These are bad men. Stay away from them they will kill you. Your own
father will kill you! Bob Woodard took our house in Concord.” Tom
McKinny, was dismissed for inproprieties, he the President of
TransAmerican Title, a Savings and Loan business headquartered in the
TransAmerican pyramid building in San Francisco. He was a member of
Vic’s gang when they attended Oakland high school together. In April
of 97, my Detective friend sent me an article from the San Francisco
Examiner (4-20-97) he found on page three. It reads; “Broker defends
loan to widow, by Anastasia Hendrix. The lender and loan broker
embroiled in controversy over the threatened eviction of a 78 year-
old Oakland widow denounced unscrupulous lending practices, but
insisted there was none in this case. In seperate interviews, broker
Charles H. Oliver Jr. and San Francisco investor Lawrence Chazen,
angrily objected to the cross-fire of publicity and politics.” This
article went on to say; “The Olivers are outraged that the U.S.
Department of Housing and Urban Development officials publicly said,
before investigating, that they believed Aiken’s case was an example
of predeotry lending practices.” Mark and I attended Oakland High
School with Mattie Aiken’s grandchildren. Before I lost touch with
Shannon over eight years ago, she said this to me at then end of our
phone call, after I and my detective friend assured her we were on
her side; “Be careful Greg. My friends think my life is in danger.
The first thing they’re going to do is make you out to be insane.”
Kidnapped To Sea Wolf Island
Posted on May 24, 2022 by Royal Rosamond Press
Red Rock Island, San Francisco Bay
There is a boat ride I’d like to be on. A boat with members of the Jack London Society – that has met in Belmont – that leaves Vallejo, where Christine Rosamond Benton was born. This boat has to go by Red Rock Island where my series ‘Sea Wolf Island’ takes place. Are you kidding (kidnapping) me? I told you my stories write themselves – and I am a Futurian. Jack London claimed he was a Futurian. I’m going to have the Pacific Pearl encounter a strange summer fog lingering around Red Rock Island. Entering the fog, the sightseers encounter Captain Vic in his old Chris Craft, who boards with his motely crew made up of old Oakland Raiders and Hell’s Angels.
Disney Studios made the movie ‘Call of The Wild’. Jack lived in Belmont. Governor DeSantis and the Tea Party are trying to hijack Disney World, and destroy the leftist media. London was a socialist.
John Presco
https://aletageorge.blogspot.com/
London In Belmont | Rosamond Press
Horgan: Author Jack London didn’t last long in Belmont (mercurynews.com)
The Red Rock Sailor | Rosamond Press
‘The Rock’ Is A Bond Movie? | Rosamond Press
Davian Hurt and Belmont Mayor Censored Me | Rosamond Press
___$80 Jack London-themed guided Boat Tour of the Carquinez Strait, December 12
ALL ABOARD FOR A JACK LONDON-THEMED BOAT TOUR ON THE CARQUINEZ STRAIT, THE PACIFIC PEARL SETS SAIL(UM, MOTOR) ON SUNDAY, JUNE 5, 2022
by kbrandt2013
The Jack London-themed boat tour of the Carquinez Strait is fully booked and we are starting a wait list. If you’d like to be added to the list, please send an email to Aleta George. Don’t send money at this time.
Join author and historian Aleta George and the Jack London Society for an exclusive Jack London-themed boat tour on Sunday, June 5, 2022, from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. The Up Bay tour aboard the Pacific Pearl, a 50-foot Delta Marine charter boat, begins in Vallejo, motors about eight-miles up the Strait to Benicia, and returns to Vallejo.
Jack London is best known for his world adventures, but his training ground, muse, and lifelong love was the San Francisco Bay. He sailed these waters at the turn of the 19th century as a teen wharf rat, pirate, freelancer with the California Fish Patrol, and bestselling author.
The trip will take you on a journey of fact and fiction to geographic locations that serve as touchstones to London’s imagination and experiences, while exploring the cultural diversity of those on the water with him. Aleta George, your guide, is writing a book about Jack London and his lifelong relationship with the San Francisco Bay.
This tour is being presented in partnership with the Jack London Society and in cooperation with the Vallejo Yacht Club, of which London was once a member.
Register here for an exclusive Jack London-themed guided tour of the Carquinez Strait aboard the Pacific Pearl. Our tour guide will be Jack London Society’s own Aleta George. We launch on Sunday, December 12, 2021, from Vallejo Yacht Club at 11 AM. The tour will last approximately 2 hours. Space is limited to 30 people.
Sea Wolf Island
Posted on February 11, 2020 by Royal Rosamond Press
Red Rock Island, San Francisco Bay
Shanghaied – Kidnapped to Sea Wolf Island
A Philosophical Business Adventure and Reality School Show
by
John Presco
Copyright 2020
Learn The Hard Way
Simulated Violence – No Children Allowed
As a historian, I am amazed what my ancestors did, and everyone’s kinfolk. Most of them had only the Bible to read, and use as a reference, to see if they are doing things the right way. Everything’s in the Bible. Jack London looked to Nietzsche and Spencer, for a newer clue. His Sea Wolf is about new adventures. Has the world run out of them?
EXTRA! Three hours after I posted this, I am sitting in Burger King watching a trailer for London’s ‘Call of the Wild’. I have seen other humans for days. Last evening I’m talking with Casey Farrell (Spooky Noodles) on Irving Street in San Francisco, about the Topical Merry-Go-Round, how there exist only so many Great American Stories – and they’re all due to come around again. Perhaps it’s because we are Old Timers, now, or, we have acquired ‘The Wisdom of Solomon’ we have the sight. And, we agreed to split the gold of one of us strikes it rich. Which is saying, we don’t have much time left to strike it rich – and spend it if we do!
We are such a young nation and culture. China, Japan, Russia, are very interested in what’s going down here. Once the reign of ‘The Stable Genius’ is over, I believe all us Americans are going to enjoy an incredible renaissance!
In the top photo is Lilian and Dick, Rosemary and Vic. My uncle flew around sixty missions over Germany in a bomber. He had a huge scar up his neck and across his chin from a piece of shrapnel. This is like a Heidelberg Dueling Scar. My father served on a Merchant ship up in the Elutians. He claims a Eskimo Chief offered him his daughter after he gave him knife. When these two Veterans got in the same room, they exchanged wars stories for hours, off by themselves, they making them all fresh, lest they forget.
THE SEA WOLF
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1074/1074-h/1074-h.htm
Yesterday, I discovered Red Rock Island is for sale. How perfect, because there remains one last great adventure Out West. Have you ever wanted to be shanghaied (simulated) while enjoying a cocktail in Sam’s Anchor Café, then taken to an island and held captive by a megalomaniac, a despot, who has absolute control over you – a real man -who crams his philosophy of life down your throat? And you better swallow it, or things will go bad for you…….Very bad!
Well, apparently millions of Americans want to do just this. But, do they really know what they are getting themselves into? Is there a School of Abuse that can prepare our young for what lie ahead? According to the hired Rosamond Ghost Writer, if you were a child of Victor William Presco (who I call ‘Captain Victim’) you have a fifty-fifty chance of becoming a gifted artist if you were his child, and, you were severely abused by him! You can’t get these odds in a expensive Art School. Send them to Presco’s Pre-School of Hard-knocks, and save a ton of money!
Jack London’s ‘The Sea Wolf’ will be used as a guide. My uncle, Jim Bigalow, owned Sam’s in Tiberon, and Crucheon’s in Berkeley where he hung a painting allegedly done by Walter Keene. It was a blonde woman standing by a old white shack. Jim had the Keenes over for dinner at his home in the Marina. Female artist wannabes can feel doubly oppressed, when in Sam’s appear Larsen’s crew. They throw gunny sacks over the heads of our Victim’s, then herd them down a gangplank. Our captives have to wade ashore before the bags are removed. They will see the lights from the bridge. So close to civilization, yet, so far away. The movie ‘Big Eyes’ will be shown how willing people are t give up their free will, and allow a Abuser to control their souls.
There is a cave on Sea Wolf Island, that Larsen’s Lackey’s will stay in the first two day. On the third day, tents are set up on the beach, and the cave is turned into a jail. Rebels will be lowered from a rope to scrub the graffiti away.
Spencer will be required reading, as is Rosamond’s bio. There will be discussions around the campfire about how the hell did Captain Vic’s famous daughter end up in the sea. Vic drilled water safety into us.
There will be two Art Schools of Cruelty down in L.A. Knight Templars will kidnap students and take them to Santa Rosa Island where members of the Black Mask camped with my grandfather, Royal Rosamond. Hammett’s ‘The Maltese Falcon’ will be discussed, and the Film Noir of Raymond Chandler. One will learn how t get themselves in and out of real trouble so they will own a real palette to work from.
There will be an All Woman’s Class at the Scary Dairy located on the grounds of the Camarillo State Mental Hospital where Rosemary claimed she had a scholarship. This is a week long course that ends with the faux crucifixion of a woman named Susan. You will receive a diploma.
To you father’s out there….Is your child turning into a Sensitive Snowflake, and a habitual liar? Time to take them to Sam’s, and buy them a slow-gin fizz! Captain Larsen will straighten their sorry-ass out. Who will be the next great artist and writer to emerge from the ranks of the thoroughly abused?
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1074/1074-h/1074-h.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Spencer
“I was peeling potatoes. He picked one up from the pan. It was fair-sized, firm, and unpeeled. He closed his hand upon it, squeezed, and the potato squirted out between his fingers in mushy streams. The pulpy remnant he dropped back into the pan and turned away, and I had a sharp vision of how it might have fared with me had the monster put his real strength upon me.
“Well, in a way there has come to be a sort of connection,” I answered unsurprised by this time at such gaps in his vocabulary, which, like his knowledge, was the acquirement of a self-read, self-educated man, whom no one had directed in his studies, and who had thought much and talked little or not at all. “An altruistic act is an act performed for the welfare of others. It is unselfish, as opposed to an act performed for self, which is selfish.”
He nodded his head. “Oh, yes, I remember it now. I ran across it in Spencer.”
“Spencer!” I cried. “Have you read him?”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Rock_Island
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Circle_(Eggers_novel)
Burying The Mongoloid-Idiot In Potato Sacks
Posted on June 12, 2021 by Royal Rosamond Press
Capturing Beauty
by
John Presco
The only time we Presco Children were shamed in public – before the law firm of Robert Buck had a go at us – was when we were scolded for burying the mongoloid-idiot under a large pile of Santos patato sacks.
“What are you kids doing? Shame on you!”
“He likes it!” we retorted with scowling faces.
We learned the term mongoloid-idiot, because this is what Victor Presco ‘The Spud King of Jack London Square’ would call us when things were not going his way. Things never went his way. We Prescos were heading for financial ruin that I would see replicated in the movie ‘East of Eden’. The ice was melting in the cars full of picked lettuce. In our case, our father put too many 100 hundred pound sacks of spuds on his truck, and a tire blew on the freeway. He could not get a big of enough tow-truck until the the morning. When we got there, many of the sacks had been slit open, and a thousand Bakers – stolen!
I talked online to my therapist on Thursday, and we set a goal where I will takes steps to be rewarded for MY WORK. How threatening this is to me, will be discussed in this blog, named after my mother’s father – who claims he was worked as a slave after his mother died. He was sent away to live with a uncle when he was nine. He had a farm, a daughter, and no son.
Captain Vic paid my brother and I a dollar a day to work at Acme Produce that was headquartered in a Victorian Warehouse on Webster Street next to the train tracks in Jack London Square. If things were slow, I liked to go stand near the clanging bell and red light warning to watch a train go by. I loved to feel the ground shake beneath me. After the Great Baker Potato Disaster of 1958, Rosemary had it. She stabbed our father in the forehead with a steak knife, and out the house he ran. The next day he took $400 dollar from my brother and my bank accounts. Four hundred days of our summer – were lost of our youth. But, we had lessons. We were deliberately denied food so we would know – real hunger. Victor made sure the barflies at Oscar’s….had enough to drink.
When we walked into the giant Santos warehouse in Hayward California, we were taken back. On one side of the warehouse was a mountain of patatos, on the other was a mountain of patato sacks. In the middle were twenty or so converyor belts used for grading. We were told to stand on a box and pick out THE BAKERS that had to be just the right size.
“Let me see you do it!” Victor growled.
We looked at our mother who had a blue bandana on her head. She had a smile on her face, she having every right to see herslef in a scene from Gone With The Wind because the Rosamonds had plantations – and owned slaves! There were these shaded lights overhead with giant lightbulbs. When I saw Van Gough’s The Potato Eaters’ I wanted to be an artist.
“No! No! No! What did I sire – a bunch of Mongeloid-idiots?”
It was eight at night. We might be here until one in the morning. Just then the conveyors stopped. A man stood on some pallets.
“I’m the sheriff, and I got a paper ordering you children off the line. Child labor laws wont’s let them work on any kind of machinery!”
And so ended a long tradition in the Bay Area except for the Presco Boys, who would be put to work on a french-fry cutter machine in order to make fries for restaurants. To read about Bill Gates vast potato field that can be seen from space, and that he has the McDonald Golden Arches in his back pocket, is to see Victor’s dream come true. He knew returants wanted fries, and not bakers, that would fill the customoers up, there no room for their steak. Fast Hamburger joints were popping up all over the suberbs that were spreadin everywhere. Straberry fields were now track homes.
So, we Presco children had the night off. Looking for something to do while our Hollywood Mother furiously graded potatoes, we played on the gunny sack pile. We took turns burying each other in the bundles of ten, then… WE BROKE FREE!
“Can I play?” asked the real mogeloid idiot. Never seeing our namesake, we took him in.
“Sure! Lie down!” This boy was – real strong!
“Bury me deeper!” he cried! To see him burst out from under the sacks was impressive. He had a big grin on his face. We squealed with delight. When I saw ‘The Hunchback of Nortre Dame, that was my favorite movie.
“What are you naughty kids doing. You should be ashamed of yourself!”
As reported in The Post, the soon-to-be single computer magnate happens to own more farmland than anyone else in the United States. Known for loving fast food — although his burger of choice comes from the Washington-based chainlet Burgermaster — Gates, according to NBC News, grows potatoes for McDonald’s in fields so vast they can be scoped from outer space.
Bill Gates is a potato farmer, hoeing for McDonalds fries | Fox Business
My First Job
Posted on July 11, 2015 by Royal Rosamond Press
Victor and Rosemary
Chapter Two
When I was seven I was employed as a BF Goodrich tire salesman. I was a Bald Tire Spotter. My job was to ride around Oakland in the backseat of Vic’s 1940 Plymouth and look at the tires of a car to see if the tread had worn down enough to warrant me taking down the license plate number – while the car was still moving! If you didn’t get the whole number in the short time you had to do this, you whipped your head out the window to get the rest of the number – on the front license plate. Mark sat on the left side, and usually got it right – the first time. He was a year older than me.
Looking in his rearview mirror, with disgust, my father saw that I was a Head Whipper, and may not be cut out for this job. However, this did not mean I got to stay at home with my Mommy.
After Victor went on Strike, and refused to go to work because he saw he got the raw end of the deal, and, after we came back from our merciful vacation at our relatives house, Captain Victim called for a family meeting, and announced in a stern voice;
“From now on. There is no free lunch in this family. You boys are going to work – with me!”
My brother noticed off the top our younger sisters were not going to go to work. Christine was his favorite child. There already existed rumors I was not conceived by Victor, but by a stranger my mother used to attack his masculinity, and, render him impotent. This is why Victor kept a close eye on me because there is that Oedipus thing. Never mind Vic is not my real father, in his mind. Like I said, Vic went out of his way to butcher Freud.
Suddenly Vic hits the breaks, grabs the back of the seat and whips his head around in order to give me his best menacing stare. I do my best to conceal my terror.
“What about that car we just passed! Why didn’t you get its license plate? What are you, a moron?”
Vic throws the car in reverse, and hits the brake.
“What did I tell you. If it’s under a quarter of a inch – IT’S BALD!”
When Victor was hired for this job, his boss never dreamed his employee would use his sons as slave labor. We were not paid a dime. We worked for food and shelter. Rosemary was not allowed to show us affection because she was the Presco Family Secretary. After Rosemary drove Victor out of our house with a knife, our mother told us her husband refused to wear a contraceptive, he telling his help-meet when she begged him;
“It’s like taking a shower with your socks on!”
Vic’s job description was for him to drive around Oakland, by himself, spot a balding tire, then go up to the door and knock. The problem with this, Oakland was full of working stiffs, and many housewives who were home alone were afraid to open their door to this menacing looking man – who was always in a rage! He was not allowed to leave a card, or brochure. Sometimes he knocked on the wrong door.
“That’s not my car, Moron! Why don’t you get a real job, and stop playing grab-ass!”
This is when he had a brainstorm. He would take down the license and have his buddy Skip run it at the police department, and get the name and address. He then got these cards printed up that looked kind of official. There was talk about how a bald tire could cause an accident. I am sure Vic asked for permission to use the Oakland Police seal. I do not recall seeing it. But, the idea was to Bust the Dangerous Baldies, and shame them into buying new tires from Mr.Presco.
If you dare give Victor ‘The Leo’ an angry look, it was evidence you wanted to kill him so you can have your way with his beautiful secretary. The fact that Mark and I would not reach pubescence in four years, or so, did not alleviate Victor’s paranoia. As the weeks wore on, he became more convinced we wanted to do him harm. With my father, the Golden Rule……never arrived! I believe Vic owned much anger towards his father, and, he needed to see what that looked like, with his sons.
As God is my witness, I will make his cruelty famous one day!
* * *
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_the_King
Because all four of Vic and Rosemary’s children became hippies, I believe it is historically and culturally vital to tell their story, along with ours. ‘The Wonder Years’, was fiction.
William Janke on Haight St.
Posted on June 9, 2012 by Royal Rosamond Press
William August Janke, the son of Carl August Janke of Belmont, lived in a Victorian house at 320 Haight St. a a block and a half from Fillmore St. Carl founded what may be the oldest theme park in America that catered to members of the Odd Fellows who lived in San Francisco. Carl Janke hired a special train to bring people to his theme park modeled after a German folk town and beergarten. Carl owned the Belmont soda works and sold a drink that may have contained cocaine. Carl made a jail for his town because folks got out of hand. Consider the Haight-Ashbury that was the haven for the Hippie Movement, that got out of hand. It became a theme-park that attracted folks from all over the world, and was the focal point of the war on drugs.
Consider the rise of the Republican religious-right that has become very powerful by opposing and demonizing the fun time my kindred were having – before California became a state! You could say my good buds and I made them what they are to day, fake political Puritans that destroyed our economy, and spent a trillion dollar on the Bush holy war. Too bad there is no longer a land of the free to go to out west, that is not under the jurisdiction of the Federal Government of the United States, so we can do what we want – and have more fun! Making fun is a huge industry, verses making blue laws.
Google 320 Haight to see my great grandfather’s home (grey-blue) and 2795 Pine St. to see the second story apartment I lived in with Nancy Hamren, Keith Purvis, and Carrol Schurter. Two members of the Jefferson Airplane partied with us, and hung out the bay window while on acid trying to cause an accident – which they did!
Keith, Tim O’Connor, Peter Shapiro, and myself, lived in a large Victorian house in Oakland. That is us on a bridge in Venice California. Peter played with The Marbles that played at the longshoremen’s Hall, and later with the Loading Zone at the Fillmore. Zone members also lived with us in Oakland.
Bryan McLean of Love sang at my wedding, and was good friends of the folks that began the Renaissance Fair, another theme park. Disney studied Fairyland in Oakland for his theme park. Add to this my conection to Elmer ‘Big Bones’ Remmer, gambling, and Tanforan horse racing, then you can say my kindred started the greatest party of all time!
Here is the obituary of William in the San Francisco Call.
JANKE – in this city, Nov. 22, 1902 at his residence 320 Haight St. William August Janke, beloved husband of Cornelia L. Janke, and beloved father of Mrs. W.O. Stuttmeister and Carl and W.E. Janke, a native of Hamburg Germany aged 59 years. Internment, Laurel Hill
“According to Belmont Historical Society records, Dorothea and Carl August Janke sailed around Cape Horn from Hamburg, Germany, in 1848. After landing in San Francisco, they settled in Belmont in 1860”
I found Carl and Dorothea (also and Doretta) are buried at the Union Cemetary in Redwood City.
Carl_August_Janke
Names Listed on the Marker:
Janke, Carl August
Janke, Dorette Catherine
Janke, Mutter Heinrich
Inscription:
— From the 1937 headstone survey —
Carl August Janke, born in Dresden, Germany Oct. 1806, died Belmont, Calif. Sept. 2, 1881
Dorette Catherine, wife of Carl August Janke, born in Hamburg, Germany, July 21, 1813, died in Belmont, California, Feb 16, 1877
Mutter Heinrich, mother of Dorette Catherine Janke, born in Island of Heligoland, Germany, 1781 died in Belmont, California 1876
NOTE: In 1937 the Daughters of the American Revolution recorded all the headstones.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF UNION CEMETERY
By: John G. Edmonds
Before Union Cemetery
Times and Gazette Building
The first entry that mentioned a cemetery in the Times and Gazette (which was the only newspaper in San Mateo County at that time) was in early January 1859. William Cary Jones had allowed 13 burials on his property, the site of today’s Sequoia High School. Now that Horace Hawes had taken over the property, he informed the county that he no longer wanted the dead to be buried on his property and he wanted all 13 bodies exhumed and moved elsewhere. This caused great anxiety in Redwood City.
1864-1910, page 133).
Records from Tombstones in Laurel Hill Cemetery, 1853-1927 – Janke
– Stuttmeister
Mina Maria Janke, daughter of William A, & Cornelia Janke, born
February 2, 1869, died March 1902.
William August Janke, native of Hamburg, Germany, born Dec. 25,
1642, died Nov. 22, 1902, son of Carl August & Dorette Catherine Janke. Frederick William R. Stuttmeister, native of Berlin, Germany, born
1812, died January 29, 1877.
Mrs. Matilda Stuttmeister, wife of Frederick W.R. Stuttmeister, born
1829, died March 17, 1875, native of New York.
Victor Rudolph Stuttmeister, son of Frederick W.R. & Matilda
Stuttmeister, born May 29, 1846, died Jan. 19, 1893, native of New
York.
Jon Presco
Copyright 2012
Belmont park has history of sun, libations, mystery and disasters
October 22, 2001, 12:00 AM By Paul D. Buchanan Daily Journal Feature Writer
The most popular daytime excursion destination on the Peninsula during the late 19th century once occupied the area in Belmont now known as Twin Pines Park. The Belmont Picnic Grounds proved so popular, in fact, that scores of picnickers would travel regularly from San Jose and San Francisco for sun, fresh air and libations.
The size of the crowds and the fondness for libation, however, eventually led to the attraction’s demise.
According to Belmont Historical Society records, Dorothea and Carl August Janke sailed around Cape Horn from Hamburg, Germany, in 1848. After landing in San Francisco, they settled in Belmont in 1860. Industrious and entrepreneurial, Carl Janke purchased land in the vicinity of 6th and Ralston. Janke set out to create a site for leisure activities, modeled after the biergarten in his native Hamburg. His creation became Belmont Park.
Janke’s park offered all the necessary provisions for an outdoor holiday, which included a dance pavilion to accommodate 300 large glassless windows, a conical roof and a dance floor situated around a large spreading tree. The pavilion was also equipped with a bar, an ice cream parlor and a restaurant.
Outside the pavilion, the park provided a carousel for children, footpath bridges crossing the meandering of creeks, and a shooting gallery, with picnic benches and lathe houses situated about the shady grounds. Brass bands performing from bandstands could be heard all around the woodland.
In 1876, Janke opened Belmont Soda Works, located north of Ralston along Old County Road. Janke’s sons, Gus and Charlie, operated the soda works, which offered a variety of sarsaparillas. Within two years, the Soda Works produced more than 1,000 bottles a month — a large percentage of which would be sold at Belmont Park. Between the Soda Works and the several bars situated in and around the park, the liquid refreshment flowed abundantly.
Belmont Park became so popular that Southern Pacific Railroad began reserving exclusive trains for the sojourn to Belmont. Several local organizations and fraternities used the grounds for the celebrations, such as the Germania Rifles, the Apollo Verein, the Blue Bells, the Bunker Hill Association, the Ignatian Literary Society, the Hibernians and the Purple Violets. Races – foot, three-legged, and pony cart – as well as other amusements became commonplace at the gatherings.
The same year the Belmont Soda Works opened, the Independent Order of Odd Fellows (I.O.O.F.) hired 75 Southern Pacific railroad cars to transport 7,000 of its members from San Francisco to Belmont Park. There, 1,000 other members met them there, making the largest picnic ever held at Belmont Park.
With all the alcohol, dancing and overheated bodies gathered in a relatively small place, trouble seemed destined to follow.
In 1880, rival gangs started a small riot at Belmont Park, leaving one person dead and several injured. On another occasion, a young girl named Anne Mooney mysteriously disappeared. Authorities assumed she had been kidnaped, but a suspect was never identified. The fate of Anne Mooney remains a mystery.
By the turn of the century, the weekly treks to Belmont had become something of a nuisance. The drunken tussling would often begin at the on-board bars, continuing and intensifying by the time the passengers reached Belmont. The small communities through which the trains rumbled complained about the outsiders cavorting and otherwise disturbing their peaceful Peninsula neighborhoods. Southern Pacific, tired of the rowdies and the damage inflicted to the railroad cars, finally stopped operating the excursions in 1900.
In her book “Heritage of the Wooded Hills,” Ria Elena MacCrisken writes, “… if the railroad looked down its nose at the San Francisco picnickers, the little town of Belmont welcomed them with open arms. These early-day tourists brought lively times to Belmont and revenue to its stores…” Unfortunately for the Jankes , when the train stopped bringing carloads of revelers, much of Belmont Park’s clientele disappeared.
By 1910, the property had sold to George Center, the director of the Bank of California, who built a home on the property. Later Dr. Norbert Gottbrath opened a sanitarium called “Twin Pines,” which operated until March of 1972. The City of Belmont took over the property, dedicating Twin Pines Park in June of 1973.
theme park is the modern amusement park, either based on a central theme or, divided into several distinctly themed areas, or “spaces” as is often used. Large resorts, such as Walt Disney World in Florida (United States), actually house several different theme parks within their confines. The first such built park still in operation is ‘Bakken’ at Klampenborg, north of Copenhagen. It was founded in 1583. Walt Disney is credited with having originated the concept of the themed amusement park. Disneyland was based loosely on Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, Children’s Fairyland in Oakland, California
History of American amusement parks
The first American amusement park, in the modern sense, was at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago, Illinois. The 1893 World’s fair was the first to have a Ferris wheel and an arcade midway, as well as various concessions. This conglomeration of attractions was the template used for amusement parks for the next half-century, including those known as trolley parks.
Children’s Fairyland, U.S.A. was the first theme park in the United States created to cater to families with young children. Located in Oakland, California on the shore of Lake Merritt, Fairyland includes 10 acres (40,000 m2) of play sets, small rides, and animals. The park is also home to the Open Storybook Puppet Theater, the oldest continuously operating puppet theater in the United States.
Fairyland was built in 1950 by the Oakland Lake Merritt Breakfast Club. The sets were designed by artist and architect William Russell Everritt. The park was nationally recognized for its unique value, and during the City Beautiful movement of the 1950s it inspired numerous towns to create their own parks. Walt Disney even came to Fairyland often to get ideas for Disneyland.
Numerous artists have contributed exhibits, murals, puppetry, and sculptures to the park. Some of the better-known artists are Ruth Asawa and Frank Oz.
In the mid-1960s, The Fillmore Auditorium became the focal point for psychedelic music and counterculture in general, with such acts as John Mahon, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix Experience, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Carlos Santana, The Allman Brothers Band, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Miles Davis, and British acts The Who, Pink Floyd, Elton John, and Cream all performing at the venue.[2] Besides rock, Graham also featured non-rock acts such as Lenny Bruce, Miles Davis, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Charles Lloyd, Aretha Franklin, and Otis Redding as well as poetry readings.
The venue had a legendary ambience as well as the stellar performances, often with swirling light-show projections, strobe lights and uninhibited dancing. The cultural impact of the Fillmore was very large. It is referenced by Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in a description of the counterculture of the 1960s in the San Francisco Bay area.
The Fillmore was mentioned in the film Dirty Harry.
Concert Summary
The Loading Zone was one of the first Bay Area bands to incorporate a horn section into the emerging psychedelic sound emanating out of San Francisco. Formed in Oakland in 1967 by keyboard player and vocalist, Paul Fauerso, the Loading Zone opened many a show at the Fillmore, supporting acts like Cream, Big Brother & The Holding Company, the Grateful Dead, and many others. From the Berkeley psychedelic-rock band, the Marbles, Fauerso recruited both guitarists, Pete Shapiro and Steve Dowler. The rhythm section of Bob Kridle and George Newcom held down the bottom end, forming the core group.…entire summary
Linda Tillery – vocals
Paul Fauerso – keyboards, vocals
Pete Shapiro – guitar
Steve Dowler – guitar
Bob Kridle – bass
George Newcom – drums
Todd Anderson – saxophone
Pat O’Hara – trombone
The Loading Zone was one of the first Bay Area bands to incorporate a horn section into the emerging psychedelic sound emanating out of San Francisco. Formed in Oakland in 1967 by keyboard player and vocalist, Paul Fauerso, the Loading Zone opened many a show at the Fillmore, supporting acts like Cream, Big Brother & The Holding Company, the Grateful Dead, and many others. From the Berkeley psychedelic-rock band, the Marbles, Fauerso recruited both guitarists, Pete Shapiro and Steve Dowler. The rhythm section of Bob Kridle and George Newcom held down the bottom end, forming the core group. Though rooted in R&B, the group also veered off into psychedelia, rock, jazz, and electric blues initially. Adding horns to the mix, they paved the way for bands like Tower Of Power. In early 1968, Fauerso placed an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle seeking a new lead vocalist, resulting in Linda Tillery joining the band just prior to them signing with RCA Records. Tillery was the key ingredient; a charismatic singer who became the focal point on stage and her powerful voice provided much of the band’s identity.
However, the group’s self-titled album failed to capture the onstage excitement, receiving poor reviews and the group was soon dropped from the label. They did soldier on to record another album, but after internal problems and the failure to gain support of radio, the band broke up in 1969. Fauerso and Tillery revived the group with new members in 1970 before breaking it up for good less than a year later. Shortly afterwards, Tillery began pursuing her own path, releasing her solo debut album, Sweet Linda Divine, on CBS in 1970 to enthusiastic reviews and high praise, becoming a prominent musical figure on her own throughout the next several decades.
This performance, recorded on the final night of a three-night stand at the Fillmore Auditorium supporting Arlo Guthrie and John Mayall, captures what the Loading Zone was all about. In early 1968, when Tillery had just joined and the group, they had serious potential and were unquestionably powerful onstage. Although this recording features none of the material soon to be recorded for their debut album, it does contain thoroughly engaging performances of two remarkable covers that were often highlights of their early live performances. The meat of this recording is a highly extended take on “Cold Sweat,” an infectious cover of the Pee Wee Ellis song released by James Brown the previous year. One of the precursors of funk, this classic song gets a thorough workout here, with Tillery belting out the vocals and the band providing a relentlessly propulsive backing. The Fillmore Auditorium was geared toward dancing and this performance proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Loading Zone knew how to get those audiences moving. The set concludes with a soulful rendition of “Try A Little Tenderness,” a song dating back to the 1930s. Recorded by countless artists over the years, including Frank Sinatra, Percy Sledge, Nina Simone, and Three Dog Night, to name but a few, here Tillery makes it her own. Starting off slow and with plenty of soul, this continues to build into an explosive frenzy that delights the Fillmore audience and brings their set to a memorable close.
Performers:
Love
Grateful Dead
Moby Grape
The Loading Zone
Blue Crumb Truck Factory
Tour/Show:
The First Annual Love Circus
Artist:
Herrick
Date:
Mar 3, 1967
Venue:
Winterland (San Francisco, CA
http://thefillmore.wordpress.com/
The Marbles had the following members: Peter Shapiro on lead guitar, Steve Dowler on rhythm guitar, David Dugdale on bass and Ray Greenleaf on drums. They were a psychedelic group whose most notable performances were at the Tribute to Dr. Strange at the Longshoremen’s Hall in San Francisco on October 15, 1965, and again at the same venue for The Trips Festival on January 21, 22 and 23 along with Jefferson Airplane, The Charlatans and The Great Society. Both Shapiro and Dowler went on to become members of Paul Fauerso’s The Loading Zone.[1][2]
The Loading Zone[1] was an American rock band of the late 1960s and early 1970s. They issued two albums worth of material, with differing band lineups, before disbanding in 1971.
Contents
[hide]
1 Career
2 Discography
2.1 Albums
3 References
4 External links
[edit] Career
They were formed in Oakland, California in 1966 by singer-keyboardist Paul Fauerso, following the dissolution of his jazz group The Tom Paul Trio. The original lineup was Fauerso, bassist Bob Kridle, drummer Ted Kozlowski (replaced by George Newcom), and guitarists Peter Shapiro and Steve Dowler,[2] both formerly of Berkeley psychedelic rock band The Marbles, who had supported Jefferson Airplane at the historic “Tribute to Dr. Strange”, the inaugural Family Dog promotion concert held at San Francisco’s Longshoreman’s Hall in October 1965.
The Loading Zone’s first major concert was the Trips Festival at the Longshoreman’s Hall in January 1966.[3]. Although primarily an R&B band, The Loading Zone added contemporary psychedelic influences and soon became a popular attraction on the burgeoning Bay Area music scene. The Loading Zone was based at the Berkeley venue The New Orleans House, but performed numerous times at major venues including the Fillmore West.
Although The Loading Zone occasionally headlined, the group is better known for supporting some of the biggest acts of the period including Cream, The Who, The Byrds, Big Brother & the Holding Company, The Grateful Dead, Country Joe & The Fish, Howlin’ Wolf, Sam & Dave, Chuck Berry and Buddy Miles.[4][5]
In 1968 Fauerso placed an advertisement in the San Francisco Chronicle seeking a new lead vocalist, which led to the recruitment of Linda Tillery, who joined just prior to the band’s signing with RCA Records. Despite their live popularity, the group lacked a strong base of original material; their self-titled debut album was poorly received, and was criticised for its excessive production and its reliance on cover versions. The Loading Zone was unable to garner support from radio, and eventually split in 1969.
In 1969, Fauerso re-formed the group with new members- guitarist Steve Busfield, bassist Mike Eggleston, and drummer George Marsh, and initially with previous horn players, Todd Anderson (tenor sax) and Patrick O’Hara (trombone). Anderson was replaced after a few months by Ron Taormina. The new Zone also recruited old friend and drummer, Frank Davis to play with the group for a while. During this brief period, the band performed with two drummers at the same time – Davis and Marsh – with some exciting results. The band recorded their second LP One for All for their own label, Umbrella, before disbanding in 1971.
Tillery released her solo debut album Sweet Linda Divine on CBS Records in 1970. It was produced by Al Kooper of Blood, Sweat and Tears fame. Fauerso went on to produce the unreleased Mike Love solo album First Love and more recently, a second entitled “Only One Earth”. Fauerso went on to make recordings of new age music and also to compose and produce award-winning commercials for radio and TV. Tillery resurfaced with the jazz fusion group Cesar 830 before embarking on a solo career.
In 2005, Fauerso reconnected with Eggleston and Marsh to record a new Loading Zone CD entitled “Blue Flame” (available through CD Baby and iTunes) The album contains five new tracks and three cuts from the second Zone album, “One For All”.
George Newcom died from a heart attack on July 1, 2010, in Red Bluff, California. He was 63 years old.[6] Pat O’Hara, trombonist, later worked with Buddy Miles on “Cold Blood” and others, and died in the late 70’s or early 80’s of an overdose.
In October 1965, a small commune called the Family Dog threw an unusual dance at Longshoreman’s Hall, starring a rock band called the Charlatans that had played the previous summer at the Red Dog Saloon, a restored silver rush dance hall in Virginia City, Nev. The second-billed group, which had an even weirder name, Jefferson Airplane, was making its first appearance outside the Marina District nightclub it had opened the month before. The third act on the bill, the Great Society, featured a former model from Palo Alto named Grace Slick.
More than a thousand people turned up for the dance. Hair flowing over their collars, the revelers were dressed cheerfully in colorful discards plucked from thrift stores. Many were on LSD, as were many of the musicians. Virtually everyone who attended “A Tribute to Dr. Strange,” as the dance was called, seemed to have the same thought about the gathering: “I didn’t know there were this many of us.”
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/05/20/MNG2NPUD1C1.DTL&type=printable
The other development that helped form the Haight’s early temperament took place at a Western-style dance hall, the Red Dog Saloon, in the ghost town of Virginia City, Nevada. In June 1965, a San Francisco band, the Charlatans, took up residency at the saloon. Their easygoing attitude and meandering performances–as they played sometimes under LSD’s influence for an audience also sometimes under LSD’s influence–set another model for psychedelic gatherings, one less tense and sardonic than Kesey’s.
In San Francisco in October 1965, some Red Dog veterans, now calling themselves the Family Dog, staged an evening of bands and dancing at the Longshoremen’s Hall; billed as ‘A Tribute to Dr. Strange,’ it featured the Charlatans, Jefferson Airplane and the Great Society. The event spontaneously fused the lenient spirit of the Acid Tests with the Red Dog’s focus on dancing and proved a pivotal occasion in the psychedelic scene’s history. Over the next two years, San Francisco dance ballrooms–primarily the Avalon and the Fillmore–became not merely a central metaphor for Haight-Ashbury’s reinvention of community but also a fundamental enactment of it.
By the time the fabled Summer of Love hit San Francisco 40 years ago, the party was already over in the Haight-Ashbury.
Yet the mythology of that summer in 1967 has never disappeared. The San Francisco hippie, dancing in Golden Gate Park with long hair flowing, has become as much of an enduring American archetype as the gunfighters and cowboys who roamed the Wild West. More importantly, the rise of ’60s counterculture has had a significant impact on our culture today. The Summer of Love resonates in strip mall yoga classes, pop music, visual art, fashion, attitudes toward drugs, the personal computer revolution, and the current mad dash toward the greening of America. While some of the counterculture’s dreams came true, others, particularly the movement’s idealistic politics, evaporated like the sweet-smelling pot smoke that saturated the air that summer.
“If you look at all the political agendas of the 1960s, they basically failed,” says actor Peter Coyote, who belonged to a Haight-Ashbury commune called the Diggers in the late ’60s. “We didn’t end capitalism. We didn’t end imperialism. We didn’t end racism. Yeah, the war ended. But if you look at the cultural agendas, they all worked.”
“It was sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, and those were all fun,” says social satirist Paul Krassner. “But at the core of the counterculture was a spiritual revolution.”
In the weeks leading up to the end of the 1967 school year, while many of the more forward-thinking of the Haight community left town to continue their social experiments elsewhere, San Francisco braced for an anticipated onslaught of more than 100,000 young transients for a psychedelic circus in Haight-Ashbury. “The Invasion of the Flower Children” announced one Chronicle headline.
The phrase itself, Summer of Love, echoed for months in advance throughout the national media, which took great delight in cluck-clucking over those kooky kids out in San Francisco, the ones on space-age drugs who called themselves hippies.
There couldn’t have been better advertising. College students read about the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in January 1967. Some of them came to check things out during spring break. The rest couldn’t wait for the school year to be over.
That summer was ripe for change. It was only two years after the Watts riots in Los Angeles, 3 1/2 years after the Kennedy assassination, and more and more American troops were being sent to fight in the Vietnam War. Against the backdrop of an ever-widening chasm between the nation’s youth and their parents that would eventually be dubbed “the generation gap,” young people all over the country headed toward San Francisco.
“It was sort of like a farmer unloading a truckload of onions — once the onions start to move, there’s no stopping them,” says Carolyn Garcia by telephone from her home in Oregon. At the time, she was known as Mountain Girl and lived at 710 Ashbury St. with her boyfriend (and eventual husband), guitarist Jerry Garcia and the rest of his band, the Grateful Dead.
“That’s kind of how it felt, that the streets were just filling up with people, vegetables yearning to be free,” she says with a laugh.
Ground zero for the Summer of Love was an old San Francisco neighborhood filled with large Victorian rooming houses built for Irish workers, where a student could get a room for as little as $25 a month. San Francisco State was a bus ride away and, in those early, innocent days, just after the Beatles came to America, the beatnik underground had begun to drift away from the coffeehouses and jazz clubs of North Beach into the Haight.
In September 1965, a small commune called the Family Dog threw an unusual dance at Longshoreman’s Hall, starring a rock band called the Charlatans that had played the previous summer at the Red Dog Saloon, a restored silver rush dance hall in Virginia City, Nev. The second-billed group, which had an even weirder name, Jefferson Airplane, was making its first appearance outside the Marina District nightclub it had opened the month before. The third act on the bill, the Great Society, featured a former model from Palo Alto named Grace Slick.
More than a thousand people turned up for the dance. Hair flowing over their collars, the revelers were dressed cheerfully in colorful discards plucked from thrift stores. Many were on LSD, as were many of the musicians. Virtually everyone who attended “A Tribute to Dr. Strange,” as the dance was called, seemed to have the same thought about the gathering: “I didn’t know there were this many of us.”
LSD was the secret ingredient. The psychedelic drug had become increasingly popular in Haight-Ashbury underground circles by the time Life magazine trumpeted the mind-altering chemical in an April 1966 issue. Again, the advertising couldn’t have been better. By October, LSD was illegal, but the cork was out of the bottle.
In January 1966, former San Francisco Mime Troupe business manager Bill Graham began throwing weekly dances at the Fillmore Auditorium and, within weeks, his onetime partner Chet Helms, who took over the name Family Dog from its original owners, was producing weekly shows at the Avalon Ballroom at the intersection of Sutter Street and Van Ness Avenue. Rock bands with funny names were springing up everywhere — Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Country Joe and the Fish — and the golden age of San Francisco rock was under way.
In January 1967, 15 months after the “Dr. Strange” dance at Longshoreman’s Hall, a crowd estimated at 35,000 filled the Polo Fields in Golden Gate Park for the Human Be-In. Subtitled “a gathering of tribes,” the Haight-Ashbury community event featured several rock bands, beatnik poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure, and the LSD evangelist Tim Leary, who urged everyone there to “turn on, tune in and drop out.”
As spring turned to summer, a human tidal wave swept from the East toward San Francisco. Gray Line began driving tourist buses down Haight Street and hippies ran alongside, holding up mirrors to the visitors. Graham predicted 3 million young people would descend on the city that summer and said he would operate the Fillmore six nights a week.
“Law, order and health regulations must prevail,” proclaimed Police Chief Thomas Cahill.
Even the hometown paper got into the act. The Chronicle dressed reporter George Gilbert in a turtleneck sweater and sent him to spend a month skulking around Haight-Ashbury crash pads for a front-page series, “I Was a Hippie.”
By July, the Haight was swarming.
“People were walking down the street six deep,” says Peter Berg of the Diggers. “Kids were coming in from all over the United States wearing rainbow-colored clothes and psychedelic scarves around their neck.”
When a bunch of street people experimented with stopping traffic and jumping on car bumpers, the police came down hard and the resulting hourlong melee left four people badly injured and nine arrested.
Almost as soon as the party began, the nature of drugs on the street changed. Speed became an epidemic. The colorful, carefree characters who populated Haight Street only a year before had been replaced by long-haired urchins holding out their hands and asking, “Spare change, man?” Health and hygiene issues festered.
“When the Haight was healthiest was when it wasn’t known as the Haight,” says political activist Michael Rossman, one of the organizers of the 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement that started the era of student protests.
“There’s a funny thing. I’ve known a number of people who’ve become famous and, by and large, the experience is really destructive,” he continues. “Why do I mention this? Because something certainly as destructive happened from media attention to the Haight.”
The neighborhood made it through the summer, but it has been a long, slow recovery process for a strange little nook of San Francisco. In October 1967, some local characters staged “The Death of Hippie,” complete with a funeral procession down Haight Street. The Grateful Dead made it official when the band moved to Marin County the following March. The chapter was closed and Haight-Ashbury has become as much a commercialized tourist destination as Fisherman’s Wharf.
No matter how quickly things turned bad, and no matter how far the actual Summer of Love fell short of its cultural legend, many of those who were there believe good things came out of it.
“If these young people hadn’t declared the possibility of a new culture, a new family,” says beat poet Michael McClure, “a new tribe, believing in peace, nature, sexuality, the positive use of psychedelic drugs — if they hadn’t been there to broaden and deepen the hundreds of thousands and then millions of people who were broadened and deepened by this — we would be in an even bigger stew.”
But as the Airplane’s reputation spread, there was more of a demand for their services and, like any new band, they needed all the work they could get. The most pivotal of the first outside gigs was undoubtedly the one that took place October 16th at Longshoreman’s Hall, at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, dubbed by its comic-book-loving promoters “A Tribute to Dr. Strange.” Also featuring the Charlatans, the Marbles and the Great Society, the event was presented by a four-person collective calling itself the Family Dog, who took their name in honor of Harmon’s recently deceased pooch and lived together in a communal house on Pine Street. It was billed as a Rock ‘n’ Roll Dance and Concert.
Daily Alta California, Volume 42, Number 14175, 24 June 1888 STUTTMEISTER-JANKE. One of the most enjoyable weddings of the past week took place at Belmont, Wednesday morning last, the contracting parties being Miss Augusta Janke, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. August Janke of Belmont,
and Dr. Wm. Stuttmeister of San Francisco. The house was handsomely decorated with a rich profusion of ferns and flowers, and at the appointed hour was filled with the relatives and intimate friends
of the contracting parties. At 11 o’clock the wedding march was played and the bridal party entered the parlor. The bride was attended by Miss Alice Stuttmeister, a sister of the groom, and Miss Minnie Janke, a sister of the bride, as bridesmaids, and Dr. Muldownado and Wm. Janke, a cousin of the bride, were groomsmen. The Rev. A. L. Brewer
of San Mateo performed the beautiful and impressive ceremony under an arch composed of flowers and greens very prettily arranged, after which the guests pressed forward and offered their congratulations. The bride was attired in a very pretty and becoming costume of the crushed strawberry shade, and wore a corsage bouquet of orange
blossoms. She carried a handsome bouquet of white flowers. After the guests had paid their compliments the bride and groom led the way to the dining-room, where the wedding dinner was served and the health
of the newly married pair was pledged. The feast over, the guests joined in the dance, and the hours sped right merrily, interspersed with music singing and recitations, until the bride and groom took their departure amid a shower of rice and good wishes. Many beautiful presents were received. Dr. and Mrs. Stuttmeister left Thursday morning for Santa Cruz and Monterey, where they will spend the honeymoon. On their return they will make their home in Belmont. 1911: Dr. Willian O. Stuttmeister was practicing dentistry in Redwood City, CA. (Reference: University of California, Directory of Graduates,
1864-1910, page 133).
Records from Tombstones in Laurel Hill Cemetery, 1853-1927 – Janke
– Stuttmeister
Mina Maria Janke, daughter of William A, & Cornelia Janke, born
February 2, 1869, died March 1902.
William August Janke, native of Hamburg, Germany, born Dec. 25,
1642, died Nov. 22, 1902, son of Carl August & Dorette Catherine Janke. Frederick William R. Stuttmeister, native of Berlin, Germany, born
1612, died January 29, 1877.
Mrs. Matilda Stuttmeister, wife of Frederick W.R. Stuttmeister, born
1829, died March 17, 1875, native of New York.
Victor Rudolph Stuttmeister, son of Frederick W.R. & Matilda
Stuttmeister, born May 29, 1846, died Jan. 19, 1893, native of New
York.
info]
Janke
Augusta
1889
145
145
bio of Charles Janke
[info]
Janke
Carl
1889
145
145
bio of Charles Janke
[info]
Janke
Charles August
1889
145
145
bio of Charles Janke
[info]
Janke
Charles Ferdinand
1889
145
145
bio of Charles Janke
[info]
Janke
Dora
1889
145
145
bio of Charles Janke
[info]
Janke
Elizabeth Dorothy
1889
145
145
bio of Charles Janke
[info]
Janke
Lulu
1889
145
145
bio of Charles Janke
[info]
Janke
Rose
1889
145
145
bio of Charles Janke
[info]
Janke
Walter
1889
145
145
bio of Charles Janke
[info]
Janke
William
1889
145
145
bio of Charles Janke
[info]
Janke
William August
1889
145
145
bio of Charles Janke
The Schellens Collection
Schellens, Richard comp.
Schellens Collection of California Materials 1852-1975
191 v.manuscript
Richard Schellens, one of the founding members of the Redwood City Archives Committee, was an accountant by trade and a historian by obsession. His love of the history of San Mateo County and San Francisco has left us with a collection of abstractions that have been organized into binders by the Redwood City Archives Committee. The originals of these volumes, which cover the whole county rather than just Redwood City, are housed in the Redwood City Main Library History Room.
Schellens gathered not only current day information, but he systematically went back through old directories, county histories, great registers, county record books and newspapers, extracting, abstracting, photocopying and indexing the lives of the residents of San Mateo County, San Francisco and beyond.
Three volumes of Redwood City real estate transactions include hand drawn maps and references to the deeds in the San Mateo County Official Record books. More than 50 books hold records of Redwood City residents sorted by the main surname of the record. Other volumes are sorted by township, with both current and no longer existent townships being covered.
While the Schellens Collection would seldom be considered an end source, being comprised of second hand materials, it is a wonderful finding aid for records of tens of thousands of San Mateo County and San Francisco residents, as well as residents of other California counties and the western states. The main limitation of this work was the lack of an index. With the help of many dedicated SMCGS members as well as members of other societies around the state, the entire 191 Volume collection has been indexed and you can find links to the indexes below.
It is important to note which index you find a name in if you are ordering copies or trying to find the item in the library.
The original volumes are housed in the Redwood City Public Library History Room.
Carl Janke
Born May 13, 1844; baptized May 27, 1844. Parents: Michael Janke and Rosine Rehbein. Witnesses: Friedrich Ruhnke (?), Ferdinand Splitt____ [unable to decipher last part of name] and Dorothea Rehbein (frau). [LDS Film #0245420 – Vandsburg Evangelische Kirche, Record #1384]
Carl Aug. Ferdinand Jahnke
Born Aug. 22, 1862; christened Sept. 7, 1862; parents – Carl Jahnke and Justine Marquardt; location – Neulubiza [?] [LDS Film #245422 Evangelisch, Vandsburg, Prussia, records]
Carl August Jahnke
Sept. 1829 (birth/christening record?); parents – Carl Wilk [?] Jahnke and Ana Dorothea Wandrey [line over n in Ana]; location – Chodziesen [LDS Film No. 807992 – Evangelische Kirche Kolmar – Kolmar, Posen, Prussia]
Carl August Janke
Born Dec. 4, 1841; baptized Dec. 26, 1841. Parents: Michael Janke and Eva Rosine Rehbein of Schonwald. Witnesses: David Schauer, Johan Rehbein [line over n in 1st name] and Eva Splitt___ [looks something like Splittstozer] [LDS Film #0245420 – Vandsburg Evangelische Kirche]
Carl August Janke
Born Jan. 1, 1843; baptized Jan. __ (2 or 8?), 1843. Parents: Christoph Janke and Louise Meyer of Vandsburg. Witnesses: Gottfried Hamler, Rose Goms (?) and Michael Schrand (?). [LDS Film #0245420 – Vandsburg Evangelische Kirche, Record #1061]
m
Janke
Anna Dorothea
10
Jun
1862
3
182
183
grantor
Janke
Carl August
10
Jun
1862
3
182
183
grantor
Janke
Carl August
1
Dec
1858
1
457
grantee
Janke, Dorette Catherine
DIED: 1877
Click [here] for more information on this marker!
BURIED IN UNION CEMETERY WITH THE SAME LAST NAME:
Janke, Carl August
Janke, Mutter Heinrich
Carl_August_Janke
Names Listed on the Marker:
Janke, Carl August
Janke, Dorette Catherine
Janke, Mutter Heinrich
Inscription:
— From the 1937 headstone survey —
Carl August Janke, born in Dresden, Germany Oct. 1806, died Belmont, Calif. Sept. 2, 1881
Dorette Catherine, wife of Carl August Janke, born in Hamburg, Germany, July 21, 1813, died in Belmont, California, Feb 16, 1877
Mutter Heinrich, mother of Dorette Catherine Janke, born in Island of Heligoland, Germany, 1781 died in Belmont, California 1876
NOTE: In 1937 the Daughters of the American Revolution recorded all the headstones.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF UNION CEMETERY
By: John G. Edmonds
Before Union Cemetery
Times and Gazette Building
The first entry that mentioned a cemetery in the Times and Gazette (which was the only newspaper in San Mateo County at that time) was in early January 1859. William Cary Jones had allowed 13 burials on his property, the site of today’s Sequoia High School. Now that Horace Hawes had taken over the property, he informed the county that he no longer wanted the dead to be buried on his property and he wanted all 13 bodies exhumed and moved elsewhere. This caused great anxiety in Redwood City.
Heligoland (German: Helgoland; Heligolandic: deät Lun [“the Land”]) is a small German archipelago in the North Sea.
Formerly Danish and British possessions, the islands (population 1,127) are located in the Heligoland Bight (part of the German Bight) in the south-eastern corner of the North Sea. They are the only German islands not in the immediate vicinity of the mainland and are approximately three hours’ sailing time from Cuxhaven at the mouth of the River Elbe.
In addition to German, the local population, who are ethnic Frisians, speak the Heligolandic dialect of the North Frisian language called Halunder. Heligoland was formerly called Heyligeland, or “holy land”, possibly due to the island’s long association with the god Forseti.
The neighborhood became the center of the San Francisco Renaissance and with it, the rise of a drug culture and rock-and-roll lifestyle by the mid 1960s. College and high-school students began streaming into the Haight during the spring break of 1967. San Francisco’s government leaders, determined to stop the influx of young people once schools let out for the summer, brought additional attention to the scene, and an ongoing series of articles in local papers alerted the national media to the hippies’ growing numbers. By spring, Haight community leaders responded by forming the Council of the Summer of Love, giving the word-of-mouth event an official-sounding name.[11]
The mainstream media’s coverage of hippie life in the Haight-Ashbury drew the attention of youth from all over America. Hunter S. Thompson labeled the district “Hashbury” in The New York Times Magazine, and the activities in the area were reported almost daily.[12] During that year, the neighborhood’s fame reached its peak as it became the haven for a number of the top psychedelic rock performers and groups of the time. Acts like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin all lived a short distance from the intersection. They not only immortalized the scene in song, but also knew many within the community as friends and family. Another well-known neighborhood presence was The Diggers, a local “community anarchist” group known for its street theatre who also provided free food to residents every day.
During the “Summer of Love”, psychedelic rock music was entering the mainstream, receiving more and more commercial radio airplay. The Scott McKenzie song “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair),” written by John Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas, became a hit single in 1967. The Monterey Pop Festival in June further cemented the status of psychedelic music as a part of mainstream culture and elevated local Haight bands such as the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company and Jefferson Airplane to national stardom. A July 7, 1967, Time magazine cover story on “The Hippies: Philosophy of a Subculture,” an August CBS News television report on “The Hippie Temptation”[1] and other major media interest in the hippie subculture exposed the Haight-Ashbury district to enormous national attention and popularized the counterculture movement across the country and around the world.
The Haight-Ashbury district is noted for its role as a center of the 1960s hippie movement. The earlier bohemians of the beat movement had congregated around San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood from the late 1950s. Many who could not find accommodation there turned to the quaint, relatively cheap and underpopulated Haight-Ashbury. The Summer of Love (1967), the 1960s era as a whole, and much of modern American counterculture have been synonymous with San Francisco and the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood ever since.
Valerie de Bourmont Married To Richard Clement Eldridge
AUG. 30, 1964
Miss Valerie de Ghaisne de Bourmont, daughter of Comte Joseph de Ghaisne de Bourmont of Chateau de Bourmont, Freigne, Maine et Loire, France, and Comtesse Mary de Ghaisne de Bourmont of 132 East 82d Street, was married here yesterday to Richard Clement Eldridge. He is a son of Mrs. Arthur C. Eldridge of Baltimore and the late Mr. Eldridge.
?s. of John.1 m. (1) between Sept. 1413 and Jan. 1414, Alice (d.c.1431), da. of Aubrey de Vere, 10th earl of Oxford, by Alice, da. of John, Lord Fitzwalter, wid. of Sir Francis Court of Tytherley, Hants, 2s. inc. Lewis Fitzlewis†; (2) c.1433, Anne (d. 28 Nov. 1457), da. of John Montagu, 8th earl of Salisbury, by Maud, da. of Adam Francis† of London, wid. of Sir Richard Hankford of Hankford, Devon, 3s. 4da. Kntd. Kennington 24 May 1439.2
Offices Held
Dep. butler, London by 13 Nov. 1402-Nov. 1407.
Collector of customs and subsidies, London 11 Dec. 1404-Apr. 1413.
Master worker of the Mints in London, the Tower of London and Calais 1 Apr. 1413-6 Feb. 1422.
Sheriff, Essex and Herts. 30 Nov. 1416-10 Nov. 1417, 16 Nov. 1420-1 May 1422.
Commr. of inquiry, Aug. 1417 (estates of Walter, Lord Fitzwalter), Mdx. Mar. 1431 (concealments), Essex Dec. 1438 (extortion by millers); array Mar. 1419, June 1421, Jan. 1436; to raise royal loans Nov. 1419, May 1421, July 1426, May 1428, Essex, Herts. Mar. 1431, Essex Feb. 1434; take musters, Winchelsea June 1422, Honfleur May 1441; of oyer and terminer, Essex Dec. 1423; to demise lands of the duchy of Cornw. July 1427; take custody of the priory of Talley’s possessions Wales May 1430; distribute tax allowances, Essex May 1437, Apr. 1440; treat for payment of parliamentary subsidies Feb. 1441.
Receiver, duchy of Cornw. 10 Feb. 1423-21 Mar. 1433.
Steward, duchy of Cornw. and warden of the stannaries, Devon 10 Feb. 1423-d.
Steward of the lordship of Havering atte Bower, Essex 5 Mar. 1424-d.
J.p. Essex 8 May 1435-d.
Ambassador to Scotland Apr. 1436, Brittany Feb. 1438.
Biography
A Welshman of dubious origin who became a financier, a landowner of substance and the son-in-law of two earls, Lewis John was an unusual and interesting figure. Petitioning in the Parliament of November 1414 (when himself sitting for Hampshire), he stated that both his parents were Welsh, and a number of documents about his background date from between 1424 and 1427 when, in an attempt to dispel rumours that he was a bondman by birth (which perhaps stemmed from envy of his rapid advancement), he obtained certificates from various Welsh municipal and ecclesiastical authorities testifying to his independent status. The mayor of Carmarthen, for example, declared that John was ‘a gentleman of our country’, free-born and of ‘the best family in this part of Wales from the Conquest to the present day’. It is not known exactly when John settled in London. He claimed to have been made a freeman of the City before 1401 (the date of a statute prohibiting Welshmen from holding office or land in England), and was certainly living there in 1402. The early part of his career was spent in mercantile dealings with a particular interest in wines, and it was on this that he laid the foundation of his future wealth. In 1406 he was referred to as a citizen and vintner of London, and in the same year he acted as administrator of the will of another London wine merchant, Stephen John (almost certainly a relative). He purchased property in the City, where by 1412 his holdings were of an estimated annual value of £20 6s.8d.3
Undoubtedly one of the main reasons for John’s success was his close association with Thomas Chaucer* of Ewelme, Henry IV’s chief butler and cousin of the King’s half-brothers, the Beauforts. The connexion must have dated from well before 1402 when Chaucer appointed John as his deputy butler in the port of London; and together the two men supplied wine to the households of Henry IV and Henry V. In 1408, for example, tallies for £140 were issued from the Exchequer in the names of Lewis John and his fellow collector of subsidies in London, to reimburse the former for wines supplied to the Household; and in 1413 his successors in office were ordered to pay him and Chaucer £795 10s. for their discharge towards various merchants from whom they had bought wine for royal consumption. On the latter occasion payment was not forthcoming and in the second Parliament of 1414 John and Chaucer (both Members of the Commons), together with their associate, John Snypston, presented a petition claiming that more than £868 was still owing to them for wine purveyed for Henry IV. No doubt in return for such services in November 1408 John, described as the ‘King’s servant’, had been granted 1s. a day for life from the issues of Oxfordshire. He was also well known to the prince of Wales; indeed there is some foundation for believing the report that Prince Henry and his three brothers were wont to drink and dine at his house in the Vintry, where the entertainment included the declamation of poetry. In 1414 John was paid more than £125 at the Exchequer for ‘various things’ (certaines choses) which he had provided for the prince before his accession.4
It was to attend Henry V’s first Parliament, in May 1413, that John was elected as Member for both Wallingford and Taunton. Both elections were undoubtedly the result of Thomas Chaucer’s influence, for he was constable of Wallingford and Taunton castles, whereas John himself had no other known connexion with either place. Only shortly before the Parliament met he had been appointed master worker of the Mints in London and Calais. This gave him considerable control over the system of foreign exchange, for which privilege he was to render £1,500 at the Exchequer in the first year, though from 1414 he held the monopoly for only 200 marks a year. His promotion as master came after a succession of unpopular foreigners had occupied the post, and marked the beginning of a period of 30 years in which the Mints were controlled by well-to-do citizens of London. He probably owed his position to Chaucer’s cousin, Bishop Beaufort of Winchester, then chancellor of England, and it is of significance that his closest associates at this time were other members of the Beaufort circle, such as Thomas Walsingham*.5
At some point towards the end of 1413 John married the sister of Richard, earl of Oxford. Alice de Vere, as the widow of Sir Francis Court, held dower estates in Hampshire, and it was in her right that John came into possession of land in Holbury and East Tytherley in that county. He also obtained formal custody of the manors of Tytherley and Lockerley during the minority of Court’s heir, but his election as knight of the shire for Hampshire in 1414 owed much more to the manipulation of Chaucer (sheriff of the county at the time) than to any recent acquisitions of property. In the course of the Parliament, in which Chaucer was Speaker for the fourth time, John presented his petition for denization. The granting of his request, taken in conjunction with his recent marriage, marked a vital turning point in his career, providing legal security for his property transactions. Like so many prosperous London merchants he had been investing in land, and in July 1414 he had obtained a royal licence to enclose and empark 300 acres at West Horndon and to build and crenellate a lodge there. It is difficult to determine whether the choice of Essex for the establishment of his landed estate was cause or effect of his marriage to a member of the de Vere family, for the de Veres were prominent landowners in the county. It is clear, however, that most of John’s holdings there were acquired by purchase and only one or two manors came to him as a direct consequence of the match.6
John became closely involved in the campaigns in France. On 29 Apr. 1415 he completed an indenture to serve abroad with two men-at-arms and six archers; but although some of his men were to fight at Agincourt (under the leadership of his friend, Sir John Montgomery†) he himself was invalided home at the very beginning of the siege of Harfleur. Among the prisoners taken at Agincourt was Louis, count of Vendôme, over whose ransom there arose considerable dispute. Eventually, in 1417, the sum of £5,000 was offered, and while two-thirds was found by two Florentine financiers, it was John who provided securities for the payment of the first instalment. This was by no means his only encounter with the Florentines, for in 1422 he agreed that a debt of £2,000 owed him by one of them, John Vittore, should be reduced to 2,000 crowns, and in the following January Vittore granted him the lordship of Blainville in the bailliage of Rouen, allegedly ‘out of love and affection’ but apparently in settlement of the rest of the debt and for an additional payment of 3,000 crowns. John retained Blainville until his death. (Fortuitously, his eldest son was to sell it in 1447, before the expulsion of the English.) Meanwhile, in May 1422, John had given up his office as sheriff of Essex and Hertfordshire, and in the following month had received £20 for his expenses in going to visit Henry V in France on business of the Council.7
In February 1422 John had asked the Council to be discharged from the office of master worker of the Mints. His departure may have been hastened by recent agitation against the excessive charges demanded at the Mints and Exchanges, which had found expression in Commons’ petitions to the Parliaments of the previous year. It was no doubt John’s connexions with Bishop Beaufort which enabled him to acquire, in compensation, from the Council of Regency in Henry VI’s first year the offices of receiver of the duchy of Cornwall and steward of the duchy lands in Devon together with that of warden of the stannaries in Devon, for the combined annual fee of £40. In 1424 Henry IV’s widow, Joan of Navarre, appointed him as her steward of Havering atte Bower for term of her life, and the period of appointment was to be extended by Henry VI in 1437 when she died. These offices, together with his 1s. a day from the issues of Oxfordshire, gave him an annual income from the Crown of over £60 in the 1420s, falling by £20 in 1433 when he was replaced as receiver of the duchy. But this was by no means his only source of revenue. He had continued to trade as a merchant, and in 1429 and 1430, for instance, he obtained licences to export dairy produce to Flanders. Yet it was his political affiliations rather than mercantile interests which led to his involvement in the acrimonious dispute over the captaincy of Calais in 1428. Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, discharged from the post on his appointment to supervise the education of the young King, and replaced by John, duke of Bedford, deeply resented his removal and suspected that it had been engineered by Lewis John, Richard Buckland† (the treasurer of Calais) and Richard Wydeville† (Bedford’s chamberlain). A letter to the duke complained that ‘oure lorde of Warrewik sheweth himself alway hevy lord’ to the three associates, ‘surmetting upon thayme that they were causers therof, which God knoweth the contrary’. There may well have been good cause for Warwick’s suspicions, however, for John, Buckland and Wydeville were all members of Bedford’s council, having been so for the past two years at least. John showed a continuing interest in affairs in France where Bedford was Regent: he assisted Sir John Montgomery to raise a ransom for his brother; and in 1430 he crossed the Channel for the coronation of Henry VI as king of France in Notre Dame. (With a view to his forthcoming departure, in the Parliament of 1430 he had petitioned for a legal distinction to be made between him and a Lewis John of Fowey, who had been sentenced to outlawry.) In November 1430 the abbot of St. Ouen in Rouen granted him a share in all the prayers, masses and good works of the abbey. Then, in May following, he was issued royal letters of protection for another journey to France, this time travelling in the retinue of Cardinal Beaufort, with whom he evidently remained on amicable terms.8
During John’s absence abroad his wife died, and a dispute arose between him and her nephew, John, earl of Oxford, over the manors of Langdon and ‘Ames’ in Essex and Dullingham in Cambridgeshire, these properties having been settled on Alice and Lewis John by her brother, Sir John de Vere. Lewis John enjoyed better relations with other members of the gentry in Essex (although during his shrievalty of 1420-2 certain men of Waltham had allegedly ambushed him and besieged him in a house), and he had been closely connected with other relations of his wife, notably Walter, Lord Fitzwalter. In 1422 he had shared with others, including Bishop Beaufort, the wardship of the estates and marriage of Thomas Coggeshall’s* grandson. He was occasionally associated with his neighbour (Sir) John Tyrell*, and among those whom he served as a feoffee were Sir William Coggeshall* (Tyrell’s father-in-law) and John Fray*, the chief baron of the Exchequer. John’s standing in Essex, exemplified in his five elections to Parliament by the shire community, was founded on substantial estates, mostly acquired by purchase. Over the years he had made regular acquisitions of land in the parishes near his place at West Horndon: thus, for example, in 1418 the abbot of Coggeshall had leased to him an old dried-up pond, for him to refill and stock with fish. Property granted to him by Waltham abbey in 1424 to enlarge his park, led later, however, to a Chancery case over the abbey’s right to alienate.9
In about 1433 John married again, his new wife, Anne, being once more the daughter of an earl. Successive marriages to a de Vere and a Montagu illustrate his increasing wealth and importance, but his second marriage was also indicative of his continuing association with Thomas Chaucer, whose daughter was Anne’s sister-in-law. The widow of Sir Richard Hankford, she held dower lands in Wiltshire, Somerset, Berkshire and Devon. In March 1433 John was granted for £200 the marriage of his infant stepdaughter, Anne Hankford (she was subsequently married to Thomas, earl of Ormond), and he also obtained custody of some of the estates she was to inherit. When, that same year, he settled his own estates on his wife in jointure, his impressive selection of feoffees included his old patron, Cardinal Beaufort, Archbishop Kemp, Bishop Alnwick, the earl of Salisbury (husband of his wife’s niece), the earl of Suffolk, and his wife’s brothers-in-law, the Lords Willoughby and Ferrers of Groby, as well as friends like Chaucer and Montgomery. Quite clearly, John had risen to a position of considerable wealth and influence. In 1436 the estimated taxable value of his lands in Essex alone was £350 a year, placing him as second in wealth only to Sir John Tyrell and Robert Darcy* among the knights and esquires of the shire. He had presumably lost possession of the Court properties in Hampshire when his first wife died, but he may have acquired other lands there, for his will was to be dated at Catherington in that county. Meanwhile, in June 1440 he profitably exchanged his royal pension of 1s. a day for a grant in tail-male of the reversion of the manor and advowson of Dunton (Essex), worth £24 a year. By the time of his death, besides various properties in Middlesex and Hertfordshire (held by grant of Lord Fitzwalter), he owned at least five manors and over 1,200 acres of land in 17 parishes in Essex, as well as receiving the income from the ferry between West Thurrock (Essex) and Greenhithe (Kent), and this was by no means the full extent of his holdings.10
John’s standing is suggested both by his summons to meetings of the great council in April and May 1434 and his inclusion in a royal embassy to Scotland in 1436. Payment of his expenses for the journey north was authorized on 13 Mar., and on 2 Apr. he was granted letters of protection, only for these to be withdrawn the following month when there was doubt as to his having departed. However, a writ to the sheriff of Middlesex to make inquiry brought the response on 12 May that he had indeed been to Scotland and had already returned. In January 1438 John and Sir John Popham† were sent to France by the Council to take instructions to the earl of Warwick, inspect the garrisons in Normandy (with a view to reporting on their return), and proceed to discussions with the duke of Brittany. Evidently, his performance met with satisfaction for in the following year he was knighted by the King at Kennington. Sir Lewis paid another visit to France in 1441 when, in May, the Council ordered the delivery of money to the duke of York for the wages of 150 spearmen. The cash was to be transported in a chest which, furnished with two locks (John being entrusted with the key to one of them) was not to be opened until the duke landed in France. John was commissioned to muster the men on their arrival, and, accorded the status of a member of the Council for the purposes of this journey, he was given £50 for his services. He took verbal messages from the Council to the duke and returned in November with replies from the latter to the King. While in France he had been retained by York as a member of the ‘grant Conseil de France et Normandie’, with an annual salary of 1,000 livres tournois commencing in October; and he returned to Rouen to report back to York and his fellow councillors on 9 Apr. 1442.11
John died, perhaps while still overseas, on 27 Oct. 1442. In his will made two years earlier, on 2 June 1440, he had requested burial in a tomb already prepared for him in the abbey of St. Mary Graces in London, and among other instructions was one to the effect that the ‘inning’ of the marsh at Woolwich was to be completed and the land so reclaimed made over to the abbey. To Waltham abbey he left £100 for the purchase of property he held on lease and for masses for himself and his two wives. For 20 winters a priest was to pray for him, his parents, his wives and one Master Pierre de Alcabasse. The bulk of his property was left to his widow, with remainder to his children by both marriages (‘my children and her children and myne’). The possession of so much property in Essex made inevitable the establishment of a county family, which adopted the name Fitzlewis. John’s eldest son by his first marriage, Lewis Fitzlewis, obtained the stewardship of Havering in his place and in 1444 undertook to fulfil the obligations contained in his father’s will, should the resources specified prove insufficient. Another son, Henry Fitzlewis, married the youngest daughter of Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, thus continuing his father’s long association with the Beauforts. John’s widow married John Holand, duke of Exeter. By the time of her death in 1457 the only children of her marriage to the Welshman left alive were Elizabeth, wife of Sir John Wingfield†, and Margaret, wife of Sir William Lucy†.12
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