The Sawdust Festival-- LAGUNA BEACH, 1970

     Somewhere in the early 80s, before the floods of '83, ceramics innovator James Kouretas, had moved back from Laguna Beach after graduating from Cal State Fullerton. He rented a run-down quonset type tin-roofed shed on east side of Sacramento in North Highlands on Madison Avenue and set up shop to manufacture pottery. Along with a fellow ceramicist, Phil Schuster, they built kilns out of brick and sealed them with clay, using wood and gas to fire them to temperatures that would reach a desired temperature according to cones inside. They had access to walk-in types at Sacramento State and those were employed for large vases that James and Phil would eventually begin to create. For the most part, the handmade kilns were used solely for firing small plates, dishes and goblets. I had been with James from the beginning, from the days of the early Sawdust Festivals in late 1960-early 1970 in Laguna Beach.

     The Sawdust Festival was originally billed for those who couldn't qualify for the Festival of Arts Pageant across the street at the entrance to Laguna Canyon just on the outskirts of the town. Most of the products featured at the festival were smaller tourist-type starving-artist items, such as paintings, jewelry and pottery in the style of Kouretas. In the late 60s, James confined himself to small cups and goblets, not so perfectly designed as on a potter's wheel, but more handcrafted, with glazes that were offbeat, mismatched and often gaudy and ornate. They were innovative at best, unique at worst. He may have had a booth at the Sawdust in 1969, but he certainly had one in 1970; I built it out of driftwood, old sticks and junk that had washed up on the beach. James had taken off for points unknown for a matter of business and left me to run the booth.

     There wasn't much to running the booth, do a lot of nothing but play guitar and wait for prospective customers to buy; hardly anything was sold that summer, but it was a place to be and drew as many visitors as the big deal across the canyon boulevard. The festival got its name from the sawdust that was scattered on the ground and there were few elaborate booths in those early days, not like the ones that followed when it was discovered by the local rich crowd that pushed out the starving artists and sold upscale beads and similar overpriced junk. By then, booth space had also become too costly for the pioneers of the enterprise, that included Kouretas.

The Barn in Santa Cruz

 

 The barn was located about two miles up Old San Jose Road at 1461. James Kouretas, one of the original members of the "White Lightning" party, Laguna Beach, rented it from an old half-cripple named "Charlie," who spent most of his time at a local golf course drinking highball. 

     Tucked away across a small creek with a wooden bridge, the structure was made from wood, had two decks and two wings which served as horse corrals, on each side of the main room, accessed by massive doors that rolled open. Surrounded by trees, the barn wasn't visible from the road; additionally, a great deal of lower vegetation was in the immediate vicinity, mostly weeds and grass that needed to be chopped back to make the place habitable. It had water, there was a small bathroom in one of the outlying houses just up the small dirt road from the main house where Charlie lived alone, along with his black Labrador dog, Midnight. 

     The main lower deck of the structure was cluttered with junk; old barrels, half torn apart engine blocks, probably from some farm tractors, and a variety of rusted-out and partially useless tools for cultivating the property. The ranch, or farm, itself, extended halfway up a distant hill where a spectacular panoramic of the farm, with all the apricot and peach trees in an orchard along the highway, could be seen. In addition, the neighbors on the west side grew a variety of fruits and vegetables in the many different rows on the other side of a small fence. In addition to the weeds, gras, trees and overgrown shrubbery, there were the token critters that lived there. They included yellow jackets, centipedes and a variety of some very dangerous looking spiders, crawling and creeping from under every piece of rotten wood and rusted out tool. Ants were everywhere, birds swooped down and paid brief visits to the new occupants, that in particular being me, since James would commute from his other run-down studio at the edge of deactivated McClellan Air Base in North Highlands, on the outskirts of Sacramento.

     The barn was about 50 feet in length with the main deck at 25 feet and each corral wing extending out another 10-20 feet. The height at the crest was about 25-30 feet. The barn needed a Hollywood makeover to make it livable. Most of the junk on the main lower deck was gradually moved into the horse stalls on the wings. Kouretas rented it in the early 80s for $50/month, I lived there and we set up a kiln to fire ceramics. I spent the days working on Gomez cars, the nights in the beer bars in Capitola, and had no money at all. Now long forgotten are those days in the past, it's now a wedding venue for the rich.