Lupin Naturist Club, founded in 1936 has survived time and adversity to become a notable symbol of body liberation and a respected fixture in the nearby community of Los Gatos and its hillside neighbors. Thousands of Northern Californians spanning several generations have discovered the joys of recreation in the buff at this unique haven in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It has attracted scores of curious visitors from all over the world to experience its relaxing, humanizing ambience. For many that experience has been transforming, and often filled with unexpected personal insight.
That any organization or institution can endure for 50 years is remarkable. For Lupin to still be around and flourishing is nothing short of miraculous. It made manifest an idea well ahead of its time in 1936, and to some it still is. Yet, the club has outlasted several owners, multiple identities, the wolf at the door more than once, and a world turned completely upside down, all by consistently offering people a simple, liberating leisure lifestyle of relaxing and playing in the most natural state of being human---nude.
(*Reprinted from a series of articles in California Naturist during 1986, Lupin’s Golden Anniversary year.)
Part 1: The BeginningThe midst of the Great Depression was scarcely a propitious time to launch such a daring new venture, except that the upheaval of the times had shattered lots of traditional values and introduced American minds to a bewildering array of utopian ideas and social solutions. In 1936 Franklin Roosevelt, vilified as a traitor by his patrician peers, was running for his second term under a program of willingness to try just about anything holding the promise of turning things around. He went on to defeat conservative Alf Landon in an unprecedented landslide that clearly signaled a pendulum swing towards more change in much of the culture.
Across the Atlantic, Jesse Owens was destined to spoil Adolf Hitler's theory and celebration of "Aryan supremacy" at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. "Der Fuhrer" had not yet fully consolidated his political power, and except for a little "weapons testing" in the Spanish Civil War on Franco's behalf, his infamous years of military aggression and brutal suppression of minorities were mostly ahead of him. Among those he would soon begin to repress were the millions of his peaceful compatriots who were then involved in "free body culture" (as it literally translates).
Social nudity, strongly influenced by German author Richard Ungewitter's idealistic 1904 book "Die Nacktheit" ("Nakedness") and a prototype naturist retreat founded by fellow countryman Paul Zimmerman in 1903, had by 1936 developed into a significant philosophical movement of international scope. The movement's simple values (which today might be described as early "New Age") included acceptance, health and fitness of the whole human body. It distinguished the integrity of natural nudity from mindless pornographic objectification of the genitalia by simply removing curiosity, and thus unhealthy feelings of shame, fear and guilt resulting from Victorian prohibitions.
A number of war-weary, progressive Europeans, especially in Germany and France, were inspired to establish protected naturist centers, form organizations and attract a widening segment of highly motivated followers, especially during the 1920's. The American authors of a 1931 book, "Among the Nudists", a firsthand investigation of the spreading phenomenon of social nudity on the Continent, reported estimates of from 2 to 10 million European (mostly German) participants who had rejected centuries old body taboos and experienced an unclad return to natural living within a wide variety of environments.
Perhaps fear of the revolutionary movement's cross-cultural links and homegrown origin, or its humanistic antithesis to Nationalist-Socialist values, or maybe just a strong preference for uniforms caused the volatile Hitler to drive social nudity underground in Nazi controlled territories until after World War Two. Naturist lifestyles would eventually re-emerge in post-Hitler Europe much stronger than ever, as any visitor to Mediterranean beaches can attest. (A 1978 BBC TV documentary estimated 50 million Europeans with naturist experience!)
The sight of a naked homo sapiens (of either gender) was even less accepted in the U.S. fifty years ago, as a German immigrant named Kurt Barthel had earlier discovered when he attempted to introduce European-style social nudity to a 1929 Labor Day outing in the New York countryside. Publicity following his arrest and that of his wife and two other couples was generally credited with beginning to spread the highly controversial, much misunderstood concept of "nudism" throughout America in the early 1930's.
Nudity in American movies or public print (with the possible exception of the somehow-less-corrupting photos of bare-breasted tribeswomen in "National Geographic") was censored and virtually unknown in 1936. A man could still be arrested for indecent exposure if he bared his chest on a public beach, although the influence of Hollywood had earlier begun to relax the custom, if not yet the law, towards discrimination in favor of male torsos.
That someday women might also wish to go topless on those same beaches, or that both sexes might relax and swim together without suits, or sunbathe nude without shame, even in designated areas, as is now done in much of Europe, was almost unimaginable. Yet, such was the ultimate goal of the early "nudists", as they came to be labeled by the American press. ("Naturist" is generally preferred by the rest of the English-speaking world, as well as by the French and many liberated Americans who apply the term to their occasional clothes optional lifestyle.)
It was more than a little ironic (and perhaps useful) that the early 1930's leaders of the U.S.A. version of this humanistic, nonsectarian philosophy---naturist intellects with noble names like Ilsey Boone, Alois Knapp and the Yale-educated Henry Strong Huntington---all had some sort of religious background. As the earliest "nudist parks" began to dot the American countryside, TV evangelism's predecessors, the fundamentalist Bible-thumpers of the time, had a field day with flesh-and-blood examples of Sodom and Gomorrah to rail against.
Pristine pure (if somewhat primitive) Gardens of Eden was a more generally intended public image by early naturist club founders. Alcohol and anything remotely suggesting sex were universally forbidden on the grounds, and most adopted rigorous screening procedures and a couples-only policy.
There had been earlier, unpublicized American attempts to create communities encouraging social nudity (such as at Home, Washington, on the Puget Sound just before the turn of the century), but despite the implied endorsement of naturist values by such American thinkers as Franklin, Thoreau, Whitman and O'Neill, social nudity has never enjoyed easy acceptance in The New World. (Perhaps it's an uncomfortable reminder of the natural lives of earlier Native American and Hawaiian civilizations destroyed by rationalized greed, and then fully cloaked in the guise of virtue and progress.) The basic naturist concept survived the gymnophobia of America's puritan heritage only by retreating to remote wilderness areas or private enclaves, such as did Lupin's primogenitor, one George Marcellus Spray.
The geography around Lupin that Spray would have observed in his search for an appropriate naturist resort site had much different landmarks 50 years ago. Travelers from the North and East Bays could still take the train through the Santa Cruz Mountains' rugged terrain, misty redwoods and picturesque-if-unstable tunnels to coast side destinations.
The S.P.'s Aldercroft Heights Station was located just below nearby Alma Bridge (constructed years after the trains ceased running), and the earliest club members were thus able to ride each direction on the "Sunshine Special" and enjoy a full day's nude excursion at Lupin between trains.
In 1936 Highway 17 was just a project for future completion. The once active (and then still visible) towns of Lexington and Alma, important stops on the old toll stage road built in the previous century, now lie beneath the silty bottom of the more recently developed Lexington Reservoir, as does much of the abandoned roadbed of the South Pacific Coast Railroad Company.
The colorful religious community of Holy City, a highly commercial tourist trap a few miles down Old Santa Cruz Highway, provided an amusing rest and re-fueling stop for the bumper-to-bumper traffic of Bay Area urbanites (yes, even then) seeking weekend coastal recreation or favorite mountain retreats. The sign over the town's roadside zoo, salvaged decades later to become the identity of a San Francisco bistro, is one of the few surviving artifacts of its once thriving existence.
The unique property that Spray found, previously a vineyard and orchard worked by a hardy woman and her two daughters until Prohibition killed the winery and probably forced its sale, had an excellent southern exposure to the afternoon sun. By 1936 it had become the underutilized, 120-acre summer estate of a wealthy East Bay widow. Our ambitious, if somewhat under-financed founder arranged to rent the facilities on a month-to-month basis from this obviously tolerant landlady and initiated the construction of five small overnight guest cabins (along "Sleepy Hollow") to complement accommodations in the main farmhouse, or lodge-to-be.
The old winery building, then adjacent to the lodge, must have seemed perfect for a makeshift clubhouse. (Some of its salvaged materials were eventually re-cycled into construction of the existing, larger clubhouse in the late 1940's.) The gatehouse was the original club office. (The present office, before its first remodeling into living quarters, was a stable for the horses used during the winery era.) The two open reservoirs on the property could have been designed for conversion to swimming pools, and they were. Facilities, though limited, were much nicer than most early "nudist parks", and the spectacular view of the redwoods on the horizon must have been just as beautiful as today's.
Spray was neither the first nor the last naturist entrepreneur in Northern California. There have been at least a dozen or so attempts at establishing nude resorts in the Bay Area over the years. Very few survived the brutal economics of their risky, undercapitalized investments. Although Lupin's predecessor also came very close to going under its first year, it was not because George Spray lacked a flair for marketing.
Optimistically combining "a mythical place of perfect happenings" with the notion of a well-endowed institution, he gave his nude retreat a classical Greek image by naming it the "Elysium Foundation". The original brochure was articulately written and tastefully illustrated with a dreamlike scene around the lower pool reminiscent of a Maxfield Parish poster.
Public relations efforts began with an advertisement in the San Francisco press announcing an organizational meeting at the Warwick Hotel. There Spray and his charming wife, Serena, met and interviewed the first applicants for membership in the club during the early summer of 1936. The rest is history, and grist for another chapter.
Part 2: The Founders FlounderThey bore names like "Suntanners", "Sun-O-Ma", "Madrones", "Eden West", "Oakleaf Ranch", "Calyptus Grove", "Cottontail Club", "Valentine Acres", and (most recently) "Tan Oaks Park". Their traces dot the landscape of nudist history in Northern California like bleached bones on a barren desert. Ethel Plant was told in 1950, when she and her husband, Ray, moved to Lupin, that there had been nine different nudist clubs attempted just within the general area since Lupin's founding, a span of some fourteen years. These and others arose, struggled valiantly, and then sank for a variety of contributing causes common to such small ventures, especially ones as controversial as nudist parks in earlier, less tolerant days. Problems included: hassles with Local/County Governments/ Boards of Health, displacement by Public Works, denial of public access/right-of-way, death of owner/manager, disapproval by neighbors/owner's relatives, fraud, embezzlement, IRS, divorce and mismanagement. Many were victims of internal conflict and the Law of Schisms: the smaller the subculture, the more factions into which it will tend to divide (and subdivide) itself.
They were all under financed, i.e., undercapitalized, under priced, understaffed, underdeveloped, and under promoted. Too risky to attract scarce capital from rational investors, they also could not charge enough or otherwise accumulate survival funding from what was a very narrow market in the best of economic times. One of the properties was ultimately sold to the Girl Scouts, presumably one of the more successful economic conclusions.
Lupin has experienced many of those same problems in the course of its own fragile existence, and yet, against improbable odds, it has survived into the 1980's. The difference has been a little luck and the fortuitous emergence of a few dedicated people who put sustaining energy into it at critical times and somehow kept it together between crises. The History of Lupin is largely the story of their contributions.
The socioeconomic climate for beginning a nudist club in 1936 could not have been less promising. The economy was still wallowing in the depths of the Great Depression and nudism was still a very new and controversial concept in this country. Founded as a modern philosophical base in Germany in 1903, it was not introduced into the U.S. as a practical matter until 1929, just in time for the crash.
There had been earlier cultures (notably, classical Greek) in which nudity was accepted, even celebrated, but it was primarily in Germany and, to a lesser degree, Scandinavia and England, that a "movement" had begun to emerge in the years following World War I. Still dominated by the Puritan Ethic, the U.S. in the 1930's was somewhat less than fertile ground in which to plant the seed of acceptance of the entire human body. Nudism was regarded as certainly immodest, if not downright immoral, and community and legal pressures were commonly brought to bear almost everywhere that formative groups emerged. The "sexual revolution" was at least three decades in the future, and the 1930's were light years away in terms of cultural acceptance of alternate lifestyles. (What alternative?)
The news media took early days nudism seriously only in disapproval. Mostly it was ignored, except for an occasional eye-grabbing article about the naked crazies in the woods. Even the friendly articles seemed washed by the embarrassed (em-bare-assed?) overtones of their authors.
The movement probably never fully recovered from the Press label: "Nudist Colony." That image stirred various contrary notions: pagan orgies in secret backwoods sites; cults of regimented health nuts; or cells of revolutionaries plotting to break out and undress the world. It hinted of social "lepers", people who huddled together in a remote "colony" to share a common affliction. Only the most daring learned otherwise.
One such bold idealist was George Marcellus Spray, who in 1936 rented the mostly unused summer estate of a well-to-do Berkeley widow as the site to begin one of California's most durable experiments in alternative recreation and living. He formed an organization he named The Elysium Foundation to provide a structure for the development of his ideas. It was Lupin's primogenitor.
According to The Random House Dictionary, "Elysium" means: (1) the abode of the blessed after death in classical mythology, (2) any place or state of perfect happiness. Spray apparently intended to create a sort of Heaven on Earth without the handicaps of religious structure. It would be a place for civilized people to play, relax, and relate to one another in harmony and health without the traditional fig leaf barriers adopted by Adam and Eve upon their sudden departure from The Garden some years earlier.
In many respects, he discovered a splendid location for materializing such an improbable (then) dream. Located on the sunnier slopes of the wooded Santa Cruz Mountains south of Los Gatos, the property enjoyed the benefits of good weather, beautiful scenery, and reasonably close access to the cosmopolitan populace of the Bay Area. Southern Pacific's Aldercroft Heights Station was situated within a few hundred yards of the entrance gate, enabling adventuresome San Franciscans to buy a round trip ticket on the weekend "Sunshine Special" to Santa Cruz, pull the emergency stop cord a few miles after departing Los Gatos, and enjoy a liberating day in the buff at Elysium before dressing and boarding again as the train returned that evening from Santa Cruz. Highway 17 was still a dream of the civil engineers.
The prior history of the land is somewhat hazy and unreliable. There are stories of transverse deer trails, Indian trails, and stagecoach trails (between Los Gatos and the coast). None are around to personally verify where they crossed. Modern lines of ownership may or may not have originated in a Spanish land grant. Sometime prior to Prohibition (1918), the land was worked as a vineyard for a small winery built over the flat area to the right of, and just below, the present lodge. Two sisters, whose mother owned the property and operated the business, tended the vines. Rumor has it that their limited production yielded some very fine wines. The Volstead Act must have ended that.
By the time George Spray first saw the land, It had been a country estate for years and was reasonably well developed for his purposes. (Los Gatos was then a fashionable area for wealthy North Bay residents to build or buy summer homes to escape seasonal fog and the rush of city living.) The property included the lower pool with a small surrounding sundeck enclosed in latticework, the sprawling farmhouse for a Lodge, and the old winery for a meeting room/clubhouse. He had the five small overnight cabins built along what is now Sleepy Hollow and graded off an unsurfaced volleyball court for that already traditional nudist sport. There was a badminton court set up in back of the Lodge. The upper pool was basically a concrete reservoir with potential.
Accommodations and meals were offered in the Lodge and there was a sandwich stand (the soon-to-be recycled pipe shed) located at the intersection of roads across from the wishing well. The gatehouse was the office and the new, remodeled office was a stable. There was no electricity.
Spray, then in his 30's, moved his wife, Serena (who, it is said, was aptly named), and young daughter into the Lodge and for almost two years attempted to launch his creation. Recognizing the value of promotion, he had a very professional brochure prepared and managed to get at least one article printed in the San Francisco Examiner in June 1936. That and word of mouth began to draw a few adventurous initiates, and membership began to grow slowly. He was a very personable individual with a lot of energy and imagination, making him an effective spokesman for his ideas. Careful to preserve his idyllic vision as well as some protection from legal risk he personally interviewed each new visitor and made it clear that he would tolerate no improper behavior.
Club activities were lively and wholesome. There was a platform near the abandoned concrete fountain (just above where the present clubhouse was later built) where dances were held In the headlights of circled cars (when Japanese lanterns were not available). There were potluck dinners and parties in San Francisco during the first winter. The tall conifer in the middle of the Lodge lawn was planted after its acquisition as a 1936 Christmas tree. People played, sunbathed, and talked much as they do now. A few of the more ambitious members worked on various land clearing projects.
By the end of the summer of 1937, however, membership and revenue growth was not yet sufficient to support the modest operating expenses and a serious crack in the structure developed. It is not clear whether Spray was more of a visionary than an entrepreneur or whether the idea just gained acceptance too slowly for the viability he sought. He may have been just too far ahead of his time.
Shortly thereafter the creditors made it clear that they would brook no further delay in payment of their overdue bills and he was forced to call it quits. Thus, sadly ended the personal dream of George Spray. If the concept were to survive, it would require other, more solvent, champions.
Part 3: From Elysium to Rock Canyon LodgeGeorge Spray, Lupin's founding father, was fending off creditors (the wolves of fiscal reality) towards the end of his second summer of operation in 1937. It was not, however, to be a single-handed combat to the death, fortunately, for him and for us. Elysium, as Lupin was then known, had a guardian angel in its midst.
Gene L., a moderately successful entrepreneur and then unmarried member, probably recognized early on that the leader was more of a visionary than a businessman. Some months earlier, he had offered to help Spray cope with the commercial side of operating Paradise. Thus, the role of financial angel seemed to fall naturally to Gene at a time when a cash transfusion was required if Spray's original concept were to survive in any form.
He paid off all the creditors, including the landlady, and hired a couple, Arch and Carol, to become resident managers/ caretakers. He also proposed some innovative ideas about building Tahitian huts and doing more group cooking to develop a South Seas ambience, but those thoughts were never fully developed.
Although still actively involved in his outside ventures, Gene became Elysium's patron/leader for about a year or until he married his bookkeeper. When he returned from his honeymoon in 1939, he called a meeting of the dozen most dedicated members to announce that he would no longer support the club---primarily because of his bride's opposition---and that they were free to make a go of it if they could. (One can only speculate whether his spouse's objections stemmed more from conventional morality or the insight gained from keeping the books.)
Gene's yearlong intervention represented a transition into the next era of Lupin's history, nearly a decade of membership "Ad Hocracy", lasting from 1939 until 1947. That period included a minor disruption called World War II, which was to stress the club's survival even more than the Depression. More on this in future chapters.
Whatever became of George Spray? One can imagine the disappointment of any founder forced to recognize at least the economic failure of his creation. How much more difficult to accept that discrepancy when the dream was "Elysium"?
Moving his family from the lodge in 1938 may have reminded him of an earlier eviction from an earthly paradise-the one prompted by the occupants' confession of munching out on the fruit of the Landlord's forbidden knowledge tree.
Spray was to emerge in the news again as the sponsor of Sally Rand in the 1939 World's Fair held on San Francisco's just completed Treasure Island. Sally Rand was an exotic dancer whose most celebrated performing costume consisted of two large feather fans through which she offered artfully revealing glimpses of her very lovely body (judging from photos of the day.) Alas, the world in 1939 was still not ready for the beauty of a living human form and her performance at the World's Fair generated more controversy than acceptance. On the other hand, the publicity did further Miss Rand's subsequent career, so George Spray's last known promotion of "taking it off" was at least partially successful.
Subsequent to his World's Fair experience, he apparently decided to switch careers from nude promotions to a somewhat more socially acceptable sort of manipulation. Rumor has it that he eventually became a chiropractor practicing in the Pacific Northwest. It Is doubtful, but not known, whether he ever returned to witness the remains of his dream of a clothing-free lifestyle in the Santa Cruz Mountains-especially after the name was changed in 1939 from "Elysium" to the less ethereal "Rock Canyon Lodge".
Neither he, nor for that matter, George Washington, were flawless founding fathers, but both their legacies live on perhaps closer to their original concepts than many believed possible at the time. The next time you enjoy the freedom and beauty of Lupin, you might reflect upon the courage that Spray's crazy risk must have required in 1936. My reprinted portion of the original pamphlet, entitled "A Leader", is the only written allusion to him found in the Lupin archives.
Part 4: The Uncertain YearsIn the fall of 1938 the dozen-or-so most active members of the club, then still named "The Elysium Foundation", faced a crisis. Gene, the organization's second entrepreneur/patron in two years, had just pulled the plug on continuing his financial support at a special meeting he had called in the San Francisco office of his considerably more successful primary business in health care.
His personal bookkeeper and new bride, he explained to the small gathering, wanted no part of such a money-draining, socially unconventional venture as sponsoring a nudist retreat, and he was reluctantly acceding to her wishes. Thus, any members who cared to do so were free to pick up the pieces and carry on the best way they could, or they could just let the club die a natural death.
Represented among this group of the most dedicated were two couples who were to have particular impact upon Lupin's future: Walter and Alcinda Weber and George and Paulette Bouffil. Like most of the membership at the time, they were San Francisco residents. (In those days the South Bay social milieu was considerably more agricultural, somewhat less cosmopolitan and perhaps less receptive to more liberating values about the body. The sunny Los Gatos area had also long been a fashionable weekend getaway from summer fog and city stresses.)
Walter and Alcinda had joined The Elysium Foundation within the first weeks of its opening and were therefore charter members, as were a few others. Walter was the first member to crawl through (then) dense underbrush to discover in 1936 the gentle slopes of what is now Lupin's "Little Village" He had built the first cabin there in 1937 and was soon followed by others who also wanted more accommodating weekend retreats. (One farsighted member built a cabin in two modular parts, no doubt influenced by the club's uncertain future to consider portability in his design.) Walter and other "Villagers" had already piped in water, cleared and graded a crude road through the poison oak infested ravine from the lower area, and thus had a considerable investment of time, energy and rashes in the project.
After agreeing among themselves that they indeed wanted the fledgling club to survive, Walter was appointed as representative of the group to negotiate the continuation of their relationship with the property's landlady, Mrs. Taylor, who was probably happy to retain the extra income so long as the 1930's Depression dragged on. Arch and Carol McDowall, who had been "hired" by Gene to manage and care take the property on a live-in, part-time basis after the Sprays departed, stayed on and were instructed, no-matter-what, to pay the rent on time or to let Walter know in advance of a short-fall so the hat could be passed for an informal assessment.
With dues of $40 per year for a couple and no more than 50 members total, the club coffers obviously left very little surplus to cover expenses after paying the $40 monthly rental for the property. The slack was mostly taken up with added volunteerism, mostly by the "dedicated dozen", who also acted as an unofficial board of directors. (One of their actions shortly after assuming the reins in 1939 was to change the club name to something less esoteric and more down-to-earth: Rock Canyon Lodge, perhaps after reflecting upon terrain they had recently been excavating.) Somehow the rent always got paid in spite of the informal, "ad hoc" organization, and Rock Canyon Lodge continued to stay afloat 'barely' for three relatively uneventful years until confronted with the effects of the most cataclysmic event of the 20th Century, World War II.
Those born since that all-out, almost-universal war may be unaware of the totality of impact it had upon the everyday fives of Americans then and thereafter. (Much of what we have learned about it came after the smoke cleared and the historians took over.) Most of us can only imagine the trauma of those who experienced its violence directly.
Although "WWII" generally began when Hitler invaded Poland in September of 1939, it was not until the Pearl Harbor attack and the U.S.'s official declaration of war in December 1941, that many in America really began to notice much besides a slight quickening of the economy driven by the build-up of arms. Then, beginning in 1942 and continuing through 1945, the pace of change exploded: lives were suddenly uprooted, at risk or lost; families were widely separated; housewives became welders in unexpected role reversals; untraveled farm boys saw an unimagined world; governments, armies and cultures struggle for raw survival; and the secret development of a new form of energy was to change the nature and risk of warfare forever. (San Francisco was a major crossroads for millions of travelers throughout the hostilities, and many resolved to return and stay someday---and did.)
Practically every able-bodied man of draft age was soon either in uniform or at work in an essential, war-related job that was often a 7-day-a-week responsibility. Many women also enlisted and were widely employed in the shipyards and weapons factories as well as in other jobs formerly held by men. Amidst such chaotic conditions few of the Rock Canyon Lodge members remaining in the area had the time and opportunity to relax at their Santa Cruz Mountain retreat very often, and attendance during the war rarely exceeded a half dozen, usually pale naturists on the busiest of days.
The club was also considerably affected from 1942 to 1945 by gasoline and tire rationing, which didn't leave much capacity for excursion driving. The rail line from Los Gatos to Santa Cruz, which traversed the San Andreas Fault and whose tunnels were never very stable, had been abandoned as unmaintainable by Southern Pacific just before the war began. Basic transportation was thus a big problem, especially for the San Francisco members.
Activity at the club generally remained pretty dormant until 1946. Its survival during the war is a tribute to the members who continued to pay the rent of a place they could rarely enjoy.
The war ended as noisily and suddenly as a midwestern thunderstorm, and the priorities of nations and people changed almost as quickly. Restoring order, reuniting families and building security after years of such dreadful uncertainty became the cultural priorities of the day. This feeling no doubt accounted for much of the post-war " Baby Boom". Agonizing over the deadly ramifications of the atomic bomb ("thermonuclear winter") came much later Rock Canyon Lodge also began to recover once people could again drive for pleasure jaunts, and for a few months things seemed almost as normal as before the war. Then on a weekend in 1946, one couple, George and Paulette Bouffil, announced to a surprised group gathered around the pool that they had purchased the property that the club had been renting from Mrs. Taylor on a month-to-month basis for the past decade.
Although their investment decision would ultimately add at least another forty years to the life of the club, George and Paulette were not universally applauded at the time for their risk. Some members may have felt loss of opportunity, others the loss of power and control over their loosely organized co-op. A few members quit and never returned.
All of them might also have been a little uneasy about George and Paulette's intentions to move into the lodge and bring over all their relatives from war-ravaged Europe to live with them. (Paulette's Northern Italian parents, her brother and his family eventually did make it to America, but George's parents---his father was a singer in a neighborhood opera---were determined to remain Parisians unto death.)
At first it was not entirely clear that they planned to continue operating the property as a club, but that's the way it worked out. Changing the name from Rock Canyon Lodge to Villa Paulette must have made it clear to the remaining members that things would never be the same again, and soon the new regime was accepted as simple reality. Walter and Alcinda had been good friends with George and Paulette before they bought the property and continued to be strong supporters of the club thereafter.
George and Paulette had been members of a naturist club in the south of France before immigrating to the United States in 1929, just before the stock market and the economy crashed. Both brought with them the values of a burgeoning international naturist movement that they had continued to support after they moved to California (from New York via Minneapolis in the mid-1930's).
They had initially joined The Suntanners, a somewhat primitively developed nudist club near Soquel. Just one look at Lupin's more estate-like predecessor during an inter-club, exchange visit in 1937---a volleyball competition---was all they had needed to switch their membership to George Spray's venture, where they soon acquired a cabin in "Little Village".
Like many entrepreneurs, George Bouffil was a lover of individual liberty and a man of varied interests. (His non-vocational pursuits, in addition to naturist outings, included ham radio operation, flying small planes, and bodybuilding.) Like millions of Europeans in the late 1920's, he perceived America as the last great land of opportunity and freedom.
Although somewhat more mechanically inclined by experience and preference, he had studied the art of hair styling with Antoine's of Paris in order to bring a marketable livelihood to his adopted country. Well respected for his craft even before moving West, he had operated the beauty salon in one of San Francisco's finest department stores for some years before opening his own salon on the Peninsula soon after WWII ended.
Before the war Paulette had also been a professional hair stylist, however she all but abandoned it as a career in 1946, when managing Villa Paulette became her full-time interest. (George was engaged in the daily demands of his recently opened Redwood City business, to which he commuted from their new home in the lodge.) During the war she had worked in a Bay Area shipyard as a draftsperson.
A petite, cheerful, vital person, Paulette instilled the club with a feminine sensitivity and Old World charm that persists in tradition to this day. She had a genuine interest in people and their lives and a natural skill as an organizer of tasks and events, a perfect combination for the job of managing a naturist retreat. Her less gregarious spouse seemed generally content to let her run the show, which she did most ably for the next three years.
George and Paulette were apparently persuaded to associate the club with the American Sunbathing Association sometime before the summer of 1949, for they agreed to host a memorable convention of the regional Western Sunbathing Association that year, the club's first. Just prior to the convention, Paulette decided to give the club its fourth (and most enduring) identity in a decade, Lupin Lodge, named after the small purple flowers of the bluebonnet family that grow wild along the nature trail.
It is not clear why she chose to drop Villa Paulette in favor of the less personal Lupin Lodge, for newspaper reporters were allowed on the grounds to cover the convention only after agreeing not to publish either the club's name, its location, or the identities of anyone associated with it. Protection of privacy was obviously more important than public relations, for the club received no value from the latter. (S.F. Chronicle reporter Vance Bourjily in an amusing,, surprisingly positive article published July 31, 1949, described the convention as being held at "Hillside Lodge", somewhere near Los Gatos.)
The major issues of the 1949 WSA Convention at Lupin were not much different from some still debated decades later, proving that the sticky ones never go away. Contested matters included: (a) what to call themselves---"nudists" (too cultish/crackpot), "naturists" (too vague), "sunbathers" (too misleading) or, as I suggested tongue-in-cheek, "epidermists"; (b) coping with legislators and elected law enforcers who catered to the opinions of that era's version of the "Moral Majority" (they managed to kill a California Assembly bill in committee that year which would bar children from their parents' naturist clubs on the spurious grounds that social nudity encouraged juvenile delinquency); (c) balancing the needs for club security, membership screening, and personal privacy versus the need to educate a largely ignorant and fearful public about the simple values of body acceptance; and (d) photography, especially pictures taken at clubs for publication in the yet-to-be-court-tested nudist magazines, which a few, including George and Paulette, considered provocative, misleading, and appealing to the wrong element (those quaint 1940's pictures with air-brushed genitalia were like " Ken" and "Barbie" dolls compared to some which came after the Supreme Court's 1958 Roth Decision and would become a major source of conflict between Lupin and the ASA).
All in all, the convention was quite successful and a personal triumph for Paulette, who had energetically led and organized the preparations. (It was also the only convention held in the old converted winery clubhouse adjacent to the lodge before it was torn down and replaced by a clubhouse/restaurant structure in 1955.)
Old-timers can only remember the 1949 Convention with a touch of sadness, however, for within a matter of days of its conclusion Paulette had died in her late 40's of a sudden, yet not totally unexpected heart attack. Lupin was faced with yet another crisis---and the beginning of a different era.
Part 5: George's HobbyWalt Webber could barely understand his friend's sobbing explanation in mixed French and English over a bad phone connection, but he knew that George needed his help. Taking the rest of the week off from work, Walter drove immediately to Lupin to support George through a personal tragedy that few confront rationally, the sudden loss of a beloved mate.
Paulette had suffered from a "heart murmur" for many years (probably a congenital defect) and therefore knew she was at high risk. An awareness of her mortality may well have been a source for her Gallic "joie de vivre", spurring her to live and work each day as fully as possible, for she spent her energy as if the account were unlimited.
Even George, her relatives and close friends had been largely unable to slow her down, especially during preparations for the convention of the Western Sunbathing Association, 1949, Lupin's first such event and a big success. Then, suddenly, within days after its completion, she collapsed and expired of heart failure in the Lodge, which was their home. (Lodge guests hearing unexplained sounds in later years have speculated that her gentle spirit may still roam the structure she loved so much.)
Walter somehow managed to sort out the chaos he discovered at Lupin upon his arrival from San Francisco. Between consoling a grief-stricken George as best he could, he dealt with Paulette's accusatory relatives (who insensitively blamed George for "working her to death"), made funeral arrangements, and walked him through the bureaucratic and ceremonial processes of death.
With Paulette gone, the Lupin ambience she had largely created and personified could never be the same again, either. The relatives quickly vacated the premises and were soon followed by George, who could no longer bear to live amidst the sad memories.
"Max", a member who had been residing in a cabin on the grounds, was hired through barter to manage club affairs in George's absence and moved into the relative comfort of the Lodge for the approaching fall season. Some of the members must have wondered at the time if there would be a spring season to return for in 1950, especially if George lost interest in Lupin without Paulette's sunny optimism and day-to-day management.
In September 1949, Ray and Ethel Plant paid their first visit to Lupin and promptly fell in love with it. So much so, that they vowed to do whatever was necessary to be able to live on the grounds. Eventually persuading George to help fulfill their new dream, the couple moved from Santa Barbara into the "Red House" (or what is now the office) in January 1950. In monthly exchange for rent and $50, Ray planned to work part-time at Lupin (particularly to maintain the pools) in addition to providing private landscaping and gardening services on the outside. Ethel expected to remain a housewife in the simple paradise they had discovered in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
By September 1950, George suspected the club was being systematically relieved of some of the cash gate fees and sacked "Max". George, being somewhat shy and more fluent in French than English, never wanted a managerial role at Lupin and preferred staying somewhat in the background. The management he needed was already conveniently living on the grounds in the former-stable-converted-to-living-quarters near the entrance gate next to the "Gate House", i.e., the present office.
Ray and Ethel were hired to replace "Max" (at not much of an increase in salary), and thus began an era of management stability previously unknown by the club. Ray began with the primary responsibility, but it was Ethel who, over the course of the next 30 years, would eventually become so identified with Lupin that even many members were surprised to learn that she didn't own the place.
As a relatively young, fit, handsome, intelligent, moderately affluent widower during the heyday of the institution of marriage, George was considered quite a "catch" during the courtship interval after his mourning for Paulette had subsided. It was rumored around Lupin that several hopeful, unattached ladies were disappointed by his 1951 wedding to a vibrant woman with whom George seemed to share much in common (including an on-going preference for anonymity, which I will respect).
A former actress in a family stage company, "Eugenie" (her thespian identity) was the prototypical Woman-of-the-1980's, a full thirty years ahead of her time. An independent Parisian who preferred San Francisco, she had "done it all" on her own, including a professional career managing the beauty salon of one of Union Square's retailing flagships, successfully raising a son as a single parent, and maintaining a fashionable Twin Peaks apartment with a spectacular view.
Like George, "Eugenie" was very health and fitness conscious, being an expert horsewoman on English saddle, a dancer from her acting days, as well as a naturist. Originally introduced to Lupin by some friends from Hollywood several years earlier, she had joined the club and acquired a small cabin in "Little Village" even though her personal style was decidedly more urbane than rustic.
She, of course, had known both George and Paulette before her death. It was one of those highly improbable, multiple coincidences that she and George were both French, had comparable professional careers at competing enterprises located within blocks of one another, and happened to be members of the same naturist club at a time when George lost his wife and companion of many years.
Although she had many characteristics in common with Paulette---energy, drive, management capabilities, small stature, personal charm and physical attractiveness---"Eugenie" definitely did not have the same interest in living at Lupin or in managing the club and, probably wisely, did not attempt to fill the shoes of a ghost. Although it is interesting to speculate how Lupin might have evolved differently with her participation, "Eugenie" continued her professional career in the city she loved and would have a diminishing involvement with the club as years passed in her marriage to George. Lupin was to become entirely "George's thing"; she preferred travel as an avocation.
George always treated Lupin more like a secret hobby than a business, and it would rarely provide him with more than enough income to perform crude maintenance, pay subsistence wages to a skeletal staff, and barely operate it as a seasonal park. Capital improvements involving cash outlay of any magnitude were virtually out of the question. Despite working half-time at Lupin until he sold his Peninsula beauty salon in the mid-1960's and nearly full-time thereafter, Lupin as a business could not generate enough gross revenues (much less net profit) to pay for the market value of his entrepreneurial contribution, labor and time, so he settled for the club's survival on a minimal scale with token withdrawals when a relatively successful season ended.
An economic return on his investment in property and personal energy could only have been a dream that George never considered probable, for he always seemed reluctant to make the strategic decisions which any business requires on an on-going basis, particularly in pricing and promotion. That Lupin dues, after adjusting for inflation, would actually steadily decline throughout his years of sponsorship probably stems largely from membership response to George's initial attempt to adjust rates to marketplace realities.
Encouraged by Walter and stimulated by rising expenses, George decided in 1950 to charge $20 a year additionally for those members who had cabin or trailer sites, since they obviously received more value and required more services than members without reserved spaces. (Despite the fact that the 1940's had been the most inflationary decade in American history, regular Lupin dues for a family had remained at $40 a year since 1936, and were not even part of this announced increase.) To his surprise, five site-holders---some of them old "friends" and a relatively high percentage of the club total at the time---were so angered by his modest attempt at pricing equity that they dropped their memberships in protest. Dues increases thereafter never caught up with the consumer price index.
Replacing drop-outs in 1950 was not easy, for the primary mode of marketing was word-of-mouth, and most of the members, including George, led two quite separate lives: one clothed, public and conformist, and the other nude, private and mostly secret. For many years the only Lupin advertising was an occasional "Business Personal" in the San Francisco Chronicle want ads vaguely suggesting "sunbathing for health and relaxation" and giving a blind Redwood City Post Office box number.
In George's situation his personal anonymity as club owner and Lupin's low public profile served several purposes. His professional reputation and primary livelihood could remain protected from misunderstandings by his conservative beauty salon clientele of affluent Peninsula matrons; there would be minimal local controversy and thus less potential public negativity about Lupin at a fragile stage in its evolvement; and he could preserve some privacy and a limited degree of insulation from the occasional criticisms and almost unlimited wishes of well-meaning members who were too often unwilling to pay for what they already had.
Such secrecy did not serve Lupin's growth or economic health, however, and the numbers showed it. In 1951, the year Stan Sohler and his family became members and just before Sol and Toby Stern first discovered Lupin, the club had fewer than 100 members and had enlisted a grand total of two new memberships in a whole year!
Stan Sohler and Sol Stern represented a different breed of member than Lupin was accustomed to having. Both were natural entrepreneurs, both were unafraid to make their nudist lifestyle public, and both saw that George needed help in marketing if Lupin were going to survive over the long haul.
Each in his own way would contribute to Lupin's "coming out" in the mid-1950's, the period of its most rapid growth in membership. The primary vehicle of opportunity they saw was the American Sunbathing Association, with whom George was to have a somewhat thorny relationship.
Part 6: The A.S.A. YearsVarious observers of America's on-going social cycle have noted similarities of the 1980's to the decade of the 1950's, particularly the two-term elections of a pair of highly popular, Chairman-of-the-Board-style, Republican presidents of an age and inclination to nod off during dull cabinet meetings. (There are a few important political differences. Ike was fiscally more conservative than the Gipper, far more aware of incest in military-industrial-educational relationships, and less inclined to court favor from the sanctimonious pulpit pounders of the religion industry.)
Those who came of age in the 1950's tend either to wax nostalgically about Norman Rockwell images of life in happy nuclear families in the suburbs or to put down the stultifying conformity of "The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit", the Yuppie image of the day. "Drug", "pornography", "race" or "sex" problems seemed largely invisible social issues because the media mostly ignored them, its majority white audience rarely encountered them in public and few considered alcohol and nicotine as either drugs or problems. In either case, the stereotype seems a bit like a movie plot of the era that was required by a pristine industry code to eschew erotic suggestion and to punish all unrepentant sinners before the end of the final reel, i.e., boring and unrealistic. The realities of the 1950's were anything but dull, however, as several revolutionary trends more often credited to later decades emerged during those years. America was introduced to the beginnings of the Information Age: television in the home and computers in the workplace. Mass global travel became possible with the first Boeing 707. Outer space suddenly became important (remember Sputnik?).
Things were not so placid on the social scene either. The "Brown Decision" and later images from little Rock helped sound the inevitable death knell of America's shame, legalized racism.
There were also signs of sex (a famous nude Marilyn Monroe centerfold launched Hugh Heffner's empire, and the national birth rate was running at maximum rpm). A vast smorgasbord of new "miracle" drugs was developed (all quite legally) in the labs of the pharmaceutical industry. Tranquilizers, uppers, downers, antibiotics, and birth control pills began transforming medicine and cultural attitudes, while the CIA and the Army were experimenting with massive doses of LSD on unsuspecting U.S. soldiers as a potential new weapon for humanely disorienting the Russkies). And there was plenty of good old rock-and-roll (Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino and Elvis Presley were providing parent-testing material for adolescent rebellion a full decade before the Grateful Dead and "Flower Children" became popular media images).
The 1950's were likewise anything-but-tranquil years for the development of organized social nudity in this country, and Lupin was smack in the middle of it all, mostly through its on-and-off affiliation with the American Sunbathing Association. George Bouffil, Lupin's owner, generally agreed with the stated ideals of the ASA, but he frequently quarreled with some of the organization's policies and means of accomplishing them and, lacking complete trust in several of the colorful personalities most notably involved in the "nudist movement", he dropped out of the ASA on several occasions, not all of them recorded in ASA files. (After all, he controlled the membership information and the dues.)
Although it is not clear when or why George dropped out of the national organization after the WSA Convention of 1949 (perhaps Paulette's death?), Lupin was not a part of the ASA in 1951, the year that the ex-Rev. Ilsley "Uncle Danny" Boone was toppled in a milestone "coup d'etat" during the ASA Convention at Penn Sylvan, near Reading, PA, thereby losing his hammer-lock on the official files, identity, communications and finances of the nudist dynasty he had shaped and monopolized for twenty years. (Some ASA idealists said it was a victory for democracy; a few cynics have suggested that it was probably master-minded by would-be competitors in the burgeoning nudist magazine publishing business which Boone had helped pioneer, as evidenced by the more creative and controversial imitators which began to flood the market thereafter.)
Stan Sohler had joined Lupin in the summer of 1951 with the dual goals of (a) developing Lupin volleyball to a competitive par with the Sundial Club team in Southern California from which he had recently moved and (b) getting Lupin to re-affiliate with the ASA so he could play against his old friends and teammates at a convention. He soon had an effective ally in Sol Stern, another new Lupin member with a strong volleyball background as a setter and coach at the Olympic Club in San Francisco.
Sol, who was also trained in the law, was a successful entrepreneur/investor then enjoying an early retirement. On sunny days he often held a sort of open social court and informal volleyball tourney on the San Francisco Marina Green. It was a style of personal interaction he and his wife, Toby, would transport with them on their trips to Lupin, sometimes with friends from the Marina.
Sol and Stan each envisioned larger opportunities for the growth of the lifestyle. They saw the need for effective public relations both for Lupin and the national nudist movement and became persuasive advocates for using the then almost leaderless and now highly regionalized ASA as a vehicle to that end. ("Uncle Danny" had by then formed a rival organization, the National Nudist Council, consisting of a few midwestern loyalists.)
George, with reservations, agreed to re-associate Lupin with the ASA in 1953 while pretty much leaving the personal participation and politics to Sol, Stan, Carl Apkar and other members who enjoyed the ASA's often byzantine intrigues. (George, whose election to the WSA Board was engineered by Sol in later years to get him more involved, never bothered to attend a meeting.) A plan was soon developed to bring the next available regional (or Western Sunbathing Association) convention to Lupin.
In 1954 Stan and Sol boldly enlisted the aid of the promotion-minded San Jose Convention Bureau in lobbying for Lupin as the site of the 1955 annual WSA Convention, including a welcoming telegram sent from San Jose city officialdom to the assembled WSA delegates pondering the question. Impressed by such easy acceptance---it demonstrated impressive legitimization of the lifestyle which so many of them were accustomed to keeping in the closet---a majority voted for Lupin to host the 1955 confab. (Stan and Sol were also very articulate and persuasive salesmen of their point of view)
Stan was privately hired by George to assist him (and to enlist the aid of others) in preparing for the big event. Major projects planned included paving the volleyball court, building a large number of convertible benches/tables, and constructing a new clubhouse.
George's old friend, Walter Weber, was asked to develop plans for a clubhouse/ restaurant and to assist in obtaining the requisite permits. (George felt the old barn-like winery building adjacent to the Lodge, which had been used in the 1949 WSA Convention as a meeting site, was unsuitable and unesthetic, so he had it torn down and salvaged for re-cycled building materials to be used in the new structure.)
Many hands were involved at various times in Lupin's first major building project (including Walter, George, Ray, Stan, and Archie among others) and, like most Lupin projects even in later years, work was not quite finished when the day of the event arrived. The new clubhouse had a floor (salvaged from a mountain school building then being torn down), a corrugated metal roof and the basic sidewalls in place, but it lacked doors, windows and interior walls.
It was only a minor offset to a very successful occasion, however, for the 1955 WSA Convention was an unprecedented public relations triumph both for Lupin and the WSA/ASA. Given the solid support of San Jose and Santa Clara County officials interested in promoting tourism and conventions, Sol and Stan also planned and executed a text-book example of how to deal with representatives of the press, including how to get them to report their experiences in the flesh.
Compared to the virtually incognito coverage of the 1949 gathering, the stack of newspaper clippings from the 1955 WSA Convention, all clearly identifying "Lupin Lodge" as the host club, could fill a scrapbook, and all of them were positive and well-written. These spectacular results "put Lupin on the map" for the first time, and their leadership skills clearly marked Sol Stern and Stan Sohler as political forces to reckon with in the ASA. They would rise quickly in the regional and national ranks in the next few years.
The convention itself was eventful as well as abundantly reported. Two young gawkers in a rented plane with a nose painted like shark jaws crashed without serious injury in nearby Hendry's Gulch, and a reporter who ran to cover the story only later realized he was still nude. The delegates censured stripper and self-proclaimed nudist, Evelyn West, who had insured her chest for $50,000, for questionable publicity. "Mr. and Mrs. Sunshine" candidates were judged and selected, Lupin won the volleyball tournament over teams from 18 other clubs, and Sol Stern suffered his first heart attack (which he fortunately survived) during the competition.
Even before the 1955 WSA Convention began, strategists Stern and Sohler had gone to work on a campaign to capture the national 1957 ASA Convention for Lupin, even arranging to have a "quickie" promotional movie made of the proceedings to convince delegates to the 1955 ASA Convention (scheduled to be held in Spokane a few weeks later) of Lupin's desirability as a host club. There, again employing invitational telegrams from the Mayor of San Jose and the Chairman of the County Board of Supervisors along with the backing of the Chamber of Commerce, Lupin's PR Team brought forth the movie as well as recent WSA Convention clippings demonstrating their track record in PR and generally displayed impressive salesmanship to win an easy delegate vote for Lupin to host the 26th annual ASA Convention in 1957, two years hence.
Although the ASA Convention of '57 may have been no easier to prepare for than the WSA event of '55 (Ethel remembered all conventions as ordeals), and while attendance was no greater (about 800 for each), it was certainly a high point in the history of Lupin. It clearly provided another public relations bonanza for the club, the ASA and the lifestyle.
It began with an unprecedented (and clothed) opening session in the San Jose Civic Auditorium where ASA members were welcomed to the area by representatives from the city. A press lunch (financed by Sol) was held to supplement the publicity materials sent out earlier. Attending were some 33 reporters to cover the convention, including one from Japan. Several of their stories were eventually picked up by the wire services and printed nationwide.
ASA Convention actions generated no public controversies in 1957. Maria Park, the third woman elected to the ASA presidency, was a midwestern compromise candidate chosen to succeed Lupin's Stan Sohler (elected in 1956) when the rival eastern and western delegations could not agree upon a nominee from either coast.
Although Lupin would host another WSA Convention in 1960, the 1957 event marked the high-water mark in George's relationship with the ASA. So far it had been very productive. Lupin membership would grow from about 100 members in 1955 to almost 700 by the end of the decade, mostly from the two conventions' publicity and a minimum of advertising. The honeymoon was not to last, however.
Part 7: Lupin Drops OutDespite Stan Sohler's and Sol Stern's impressive successes representing Lupin within the power structure of the American Sunbathing Association in the mid-to-late 1950's and the substantial membership gains ASA affiliation had meant to the club, George Boufill probably never felt entirely comfortable about his relationship with that sometimes quarrelsome organization. He was not the only club owner, or individual, to have concerns about the ASA during those years. It must have seemed chaotic, to say the least, with some clubs dropping in and out of affiliation (or threatening severance) over any decision in which they were in the minority.
In place of the superficially united, somewhat self-serving, "benevolent dictatorship" of Ilsley Boone, the heart of the American nudist movement had become a perpetual power struggle among diverse individuals who, being human, were not necessarily an improvement over the previous, more orderly, if autocratic regime. All of democracy's shortcomings (and too few of its strengths) seemed to surface.
Fragmented differences of self-interest loomed larger than overall purpose in the wake of competition for annual control of a perpetually under funded organization representing a cause whose legal existence had always been on shaky ground. Small issues divided club vs. dub, owner vs. owner, owners vs. members, landed clubs vs. travel clubs, East vs. West, progressives vs. conservatives, ASA vs. NNC, and on and on, each faction jockeying for position, wooing allies and bargaining with uncommitted constituencies.
The ASA probably seemed all too much like the European political disorder George had left behind him when he came to America from France. (Only Italian politics from Mussolini to now provides comparable analogies of the political volatility, contrasting leadership styles and deal-making intrigues behind the scenes of ASA councils and elections.)
None of that political jousting fit George's low-profile entrepreneurial style or personality. While he may not have liked the flamboyant Dr. Boone any better than anyone else (if indeed he cared at all), he could appreciate "benevolent dictatorship" as an operating policy, He had his own visions of how Lupin should be, and he guarded his independence jealously, especially from the increasingly bureaucratic structures and notions of an ASA attempting to re-organize itself with rotating, part-time leadership and struggling to finance itself from within a too narrow, self limiting market.
Along with perceived challenges to his entrepreneurial control, Lupin's affiliation with the ASA also forced George to confront some of the social issues then beginning to bubble up amidst the national nudist movement (and in the wider culture). Most troublesome to George's mostly traditional values were tendencies towards re-defining acceptable limits of sexual behavior, alcohol use and nude photography.
All forms of the above activities were strictly forbidden upon pain of banishment from Lupin, as they customarily had been throughout the nudist/naturist movement since its Old World inception. (Their absence certainly simplified management problems, if nothing else.) Although George was no prude, he was a visceral conservative when it came to changing the ambience and policies of the Lupin he had nurtured.
Some found such absolute taboos too confining. At the vanguard were a few of the pioneers of the sexual revolution of the next decade who possibly saw the nudist movement as just a step along the way to greater sensual freedom. Others believed that the prohibition of alcohol worked no better in a nude environment than it had in the wider society before its repeal in 1933. And the publications of the ASA itself were actively resisting society's censorship constraints against the natural depiction of the human body as a major goal and were therefore pushing photography at the clubs to help fill their pages. None of the above made George feel easy, to say the least.
He also found himself on the opposing side of attaining another primary ASA goal, at least in Lupin's market, the legal designation of nude beaches. In so doing, he missed an historic opportunity to support a major source of future new members.
By 1958 both Stan Sohler and Sol Stern had attained elected positions as trustees of the ASA and, being natural activists, they were looking for ways to move the organization towards its historic objectives. Along with fellow West Coast trustee Ed Lange (who later founded Elysium in Topanga Canyon near L.A.) they banded together to break the nude beach barrier with a plan, which they came to call "XB-58" ("Experimental Beach 1958"), somewhat in the manner of a new aircraft in test flight approaching the sonic barrier.
In 1954 Stan had written Gov. Earl Warren (later U.S. Chief Justice) seeking to obtain designation of a "clothing-optional" beach in California. The reply, finally received in 1957 after several bureaucratic wheels had ground in slow anguish over it, skillfully evaded the issue by indicating that it was possible only if local authorities agreed. That was sufficient opening for the "XB-58" strategists to devise a tactical plan.
In the spring of 1958 Stan found a somewhat secluded, private beach north of Davenport that the owner would agree to rent for a weekend. Then he took the rental agreement, a welcoming placard from the San Jose Visitors' Bureau for the 1957 ASA Convention at Lupin and the State's waffling letter of reply to a member of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors to negotiate the conditions under which a nude beach outing could be held on a controlled, experimental occasion. (Actually, neither Santa Cruz nor San Mateo Counties had specific anti-nudity ordinances, so "permission" was more symbolically important than legally necessary.) The matter was referred to the DA and eventually the sheriff.
Quite reasonable in nature, the terms eventually agreed to were: (1) that there be no pre-publicity and (2) that no nudity be visible from the road. That an agreement had been reached with local authorities at all, of course, helped legitimize the notion' of a nude beach and would create an important precedent. The sheriff's deputies would be there to protect, not to arrest, the nude participants!
Hearing of the plan, George was negative towards the whole idea. (His real concerns may have been equally divided between the inherent lack of controls in a nude beach situation and the prospect of free, tax-supported competition for Lupin.) He wrote a letter of protest to the ASA, which had been invited to co-sponsor the event, and was apparently persuasive, for a majority of the ASA Board of Trustees voted against any official involvement, thus leaving the West Coast trio of trustees somewhat dangling on their own.
Regretting the negative reactions but feeling the risks justified, they continued with plans. Each agreed to bring a group of 20 people to the party: Stan from Lupin, Sol from San Francisco and Ed from Southern California.
The actual outing for the 60 brave souls was uneventful (except for unexpected burns during an uncharacteristically sunny June weekend) and, of course, such an anti-climax was truly desired by all. The whole idea was to prove the quiet feasibility of a clothing-optional beach to officialdom. The Sheriffs deputies patrolling the beach party were friendly witnesses when later interviewed.
The event was duly reported by the press after the fact, stimulating only a couple of colorful crank letters, and Stan pressed on with the rest of the plan: to get designation of a permanent site for a clothing-optional beach, preferably at one of the many state beaches in north Santa Cruz County. He appeared before the California State Park Commissioners at their meeting in Santa Cruz in July of 1958 to make that request and won a small, temporary victory. The Commissioners instructed the State Division of Beaches and Parks staff to "restudy the feasibility" of such a beach for nudists.
Since the primary objective of bureaucracy has always been to avoid being "wrong", the results of re-examining a previous position were predictable. In October of 1958 the Commissioners rejected the request without further explanation, but the idea remained very much alive. People began to go nude on the relatively secluded north coast beaches in much greater numbers despite (or perhaps in defiance of) their ruling.*
(*In less than a decade nude sunbathing would become so prevalent in Northern California as to create parking problems along coastal roadways and was the subject of several articles on the front page of the "San Jose Mercury News" [Sunday, July 24, 1966]. By the late 1970's the "San Francisco Bay Guardian" was publishing an annual "Nude Beaches" issue listing up to 100 sites around the Bay Area where social nudity was generally practiced or accepted.)
George eventually softened his attitude about nude beaches, although he would become increasingly disturbed about the rapidly proliferating nudist magazine publishing industry of the late 1950s and early 1960s when it flared and fell like a skyrocket. It would ultimately cause him to drop out of the organized nudist movement, taking Lupin with him.
"Sunshine and Health", created, published and distributed by Ilsley Boone family businesses, was "Uncle Danny's" primary means of marketing the lifestyle and holding on to power. (He had used proxies solicited in that "official publication of the ASA" to win all elections at conventions until 1951, when several club owners and leaders consolidated as an opposition, having gathered enough proxies of their own during the previous year to oust him under by-laws, taking him by complete surprise.)
Although somewhat crude in quality and limited in distribution to a small number of liquor stores and other secondary outlets, the magazine had nevertheless provided Boone with a vehicle for successfully testing "blue nosed" censorship laws during the 1940's and 1950's, when even partial or air-brushed nudity was rarely found outside the pages of "National Geographic". (Dark-skinned bosoms apparently did not corrupt public morals in pre-Hefner days.)
The ASA revolt broke the Boone family publishing monopoly, and new nudist magazine titles were spawned over the next decade at a rate comparable only to computer publications in the 1980's. Some were ASA approved or otherwise connected to the legitimate nudist movement, and others were not.
Ed and June Lange, Mervin Mounce, Donald Johnson, Brooking Tatum, Jim Hadley, Sol Stem and Stan Sohler were among the many editors and contributors from the nudist movement frequently appearing in the former, and Lupin was the subject of quite a number of promotional articles in these generally more professionally edited and better produced publications. Conventions of the ASA began to swarm with opportunistic photographers pestering potential models (few of them families, men or less-than-nubile women) for marketable shots.
A more disturbing aspect was that the only printing and distribution services generally available to nudist publications were also those already involved in publishing "girlie" magazines. In those channels only the magazines that had the sexiest poses sold well enough to justify the expensive production costs, literally proving the relative value of one "pin-up" picture to a thousand words of earnest nudist philosophy. There was some crossover of professional models used and significant nudist concerns over photos being potentially misused.
Nudism, in effect, legalized pubic hair for less scrupulous, "pseudo-nudist" publications. Moreover, the more publishers extended the rights Boone had earlier won in court to print photographs without air-brushed genitalia, the closer it moved the nudist magazines towards the newly emerging "adult bookstores" which were even less desirable outlets than liquor stores.
The magazines increasingly projected an image of nudism that felt uncomfortable to George, and sometime during Lupin's 25th year as a club he encountered the final straw, a particular shot of Diane Webber (nudism's most photographed model) with a facial expression hinting, to his sensibilities, of pleasures somewhat beyond simple relaxation in the sun. Surprising many that he would feel so strongly about such a subjective issue, he nonetheless decided to drop out of the ASA and wrote other club owners of the reason for his action. Lupin Lodge was no longer part of any national nudist organization after 1961.
Part 8: The Mellow Middle AgeThose of us introduced to Lupin between its 25th and 40th years tend to remember it as a protected island, gracefully lost in time and space, mostly because not very much happened to disturb that delightful illusion. Besides providing a relaxing mini-vacation from the stresses of career, it offered an almost childlike* escape from the surreal turmoil invading our homes via those flickering news channels to the "Global Village". (* Lupin has always felt a little like summer camp.)
During the publicly turbulent times from 1961 to 1976 we felt fortunate to discover that the searing images of shocking crimes, nuclear showdowns, tragic assassinations, urban race riots, mindless terrorism, corrupt politicians, napalmed children and powder flashes of regional wars could all be put on temporary hold in our numb psyches while basking blissfully naked under the California sun in the beautiful Santa Cruz Mountains. More than just an escape, Lupin seemed both a natural bridge to humanity and a saner anchor to a more positive reality, if only for the moment (lasting, perhaps, the weekend). (May it remain forever so.)
It was not altogether coincidental in hindsight that when Lupin Lodge (as it was then known) and the American Sunbathing Association parted company in 1961*, they were each near peaks of growth and public awareness. George was possibly too confident about the membership total (700) Lupin had accumulated until then, for his pulling out of the ASA very nearly completed the club's separation from the "outside world" and all but restored the clandestine insularity of the 1930's and 1940's.
(*Once George had made up his mind to cut the ties to organized nudism as represented by the ASA, no one could persuade him otherwise, not even those who had helped him use it to "put Lupin on the map" so successfully in the 1950's. Sol Stern remained actively involved with the ASA for the long term, serving both in elected offices and as "pro bono" legal advisor/ political mediator for that troubled organization, which lost a block of seven additional California clubs in 1962. Stan Sohler left the Bay Area shortly after the summer of "XB-58", worked for one of the nudist publishers in Los Angeles for a time and has in more recent years authored two guide books to natural hot springs under the name Jayson Loam.)
By ceasing to advertise or otherwise court media attention after leaving the ASA, George also virtually shut down all other sources of new members except "word of mouth" at a time when only first names were used to avoid public identification. It also created quite a void of photographs and news clippings in the Lupin archives after 1962.
To learn of Lupin's existence in those days one had to be lucky or know someone very well. One nearby Los Gatos couple first heard about Lupin in the mid-70s while visiting Koversada, a large nudist tourist resort in Yugoslavia!
Although George Bouffil may not have been particularly attuned to contemporary marketing, his negative instincts about the nudist magazines were ultimately prophetic; all were defunct by the mid-60s. Besides lacking mainstream distribution, they were also too thematically limited and genitally explicit for the peek-a-boo "Playboy" market and much too wholesome to compete with the formerly under-the-counter porn just beginning to line the shelves of emerging "adult" bookstores. Neither market segment seemed particularly promising targets for a social movement involved in "naturalizing" the bodies of all humans.
Perhaps George, long accustomed to serving women in business, understood the magazines' most obvious flaw. Somewhat in content, but particularly in imagery and distribution outlets, they seemed much more heavily aimed towards male perspectives, despite the higher probability that the more critical decision-maker on the subject of social nudity was (and is) female. Two decades of revived feminine consciousness later, it is easy to see that most nudist magazines were almost embarrassingly sexist, although on balance, probably less so than the rest of American culture at the time!
Thus ended in strategic failure an era of the nudist movement's most ambitious public outreach, its publications judged unmarketable very near the beginning of the somewhat over-publicized "Sexual Revolution" of the 1960s. (Left to ponder is how a society could truly go through a sexual revolution without first coming to better terms with the natural human form along the way.)
Lacking those lifestyle magazines in circulation (however dubious in quality), most nudist clubs remaining in the ASA soon became just as isolated from public awareness as Lupin. Most, like Lupin, would struggle vainly to maintain membership levels throughout the 1970s, even as bare buns began to appear more frequently on a growing number of beaches and around a newly emerging phenomenon of California culture, hot tubs. (Polls in the early 1980's would reveal that about 1 in 4 of those living on the laid-back West Coast had previously experienced some form of co-ed social nudity.)
Lacking any on-going promotion source, new Lupin memberships began falling behind the attrition rate, and the club gradually drifted into long-term decline. Most of us members were not particularly aware of such a problem; we were too engaged in relaxing or having fun, and very few would have liked the nagging involvement required for a co-op style club, anyway. (The most controversial issues among members in an otherwise tranquil Lupin of the 1960s and 1970s tended to revolve around the tennis sign-up board.) George probably would not have volunteered membership information even if we cared to inquire, for he played the game of business with cards held very close to his chest.
Operated mostly as a no-frills, weekend park, Lupin was rarely visited by members except during summer months, since there were fewer warm things to do in "pre-Hot Tub" times. Anyone of entrepreneurial bent who idly estimated the annual gross revenues quickly saw that Lupin was more of a seasonal hobby than a business. (The few would-be competitors who optimistically dared to emerge without a realistic projection soon discovered the brutal mathematics of such a venture. Eden West, Valentine Acres, Tan Oaks Park and Getting in Touch are all names on tombstones of nearby, unsuccessful efforts to operate a commercially viable environment involving social nudity.)
Easily understood by most members was why Lupin's aging facilities remained crudely developed, maintenance was mostly deferred and services were minimal. Overall, though, the place projected a genteel rusticity approaching charm, and its dated character even provided a comfortable sense of security, like having all your grandparents alive and healthy. Mostly, we were just happy that Lupin existed at all, and we could forgive a lot of minor inconveniences, incongruities and idiosyncrasies.
It was the quality of the personal relationships we found here---supported by a natural, idyllic, family-like ambience---that provided the most important attraction. Then, as now, the membership mix encompassed an eclectic, free-thinking community of mostly charming characters of all ages and both genders, although those unique personalities were less likely to be either single, black or a woman with a career as is the case now. Almost all of us came in couples or traditional families in those days and could only hope to turn fashionably darker on a seasonal basis.
As has forever been true at Lupin, our career roles (and income levels) were as varied as our bodies, backgrounds and politics, not that anyone much cared. Being here in the simple pleasure of the moment has always seemed to make job titles about as meaningful as the labels in our temporarily discarded clothing.
Reigning over our fun loving, if slowly decaying, magic kingdom was Ethel Plant, the person most of us recognized as Lupin's primary authority figure. (Ray Plant had died of an accidental fall in 1963, having moved away from Lupin following the end of their marriage sometime earlier, and Ethel had remained as solo club manager.) Many members, not knowing George personally, naturally assumed she owned the place.
She lived and worked alone in what is now the office and managed Lupin on a day-to-day basis without much paid help (rarely more than a groundskeeper/ caretaker). At various times over a span exceeding 30 years, she capably filled the roles of general manager, receptionist, salesperson, security guard, interviewer, bookkeeper, innkeeper, gatekeeper, disciplinarian, project assistant, pastry chef and social hostess, among others. Despite how little the unofficial tide might have been worth to her at the supermarket checkout counter, to us she was the virtual "Queen of Lupin", and her word was Law.
Possessing a phenomenal memory for names and faces, Ethel knew all members and most returning visitors by first and last names and reputedly missed very little of what went on at Lupin. Although she was rarely seen on the grounds, her sources were rumored to be everywhere, providing an omniscient deterrent to naughty behavior should anyone be so boldly tempted. Being summoned by her no-nonsense voice on the camp-wide loudspeaker then in place, usually to meet one's guests, inevitably stirred childhood memories of less-innocent trips to the principal's office.
She was also a formidable personal barrier to any would-be visitor she deemed slightly unsavory or even questionable. Self-confidence and perseverance were required for one's first visit; if Ethel herself didn't shake you up enough as she intuitively checked you out, then her slightly schizoid German shepherd could be counted on to make certain you understood who was boss. Legendary tales (bordering on apocryphal) grew up around her reputation for gritty unflappability.
Once, confronted by a mostly curious entourage of Hell's Angels at the gate, she coolly asked for help from the male members present over the loudspeaker and strolled out to meet the outlaw cyclists with shotgun in hand. Seeing her, and a horde of male figures clad only in tennis shoes running down the hill, must have created the same effect as the naked, blue-painted warriors that terrified Caesar's legionnaires when they invaded Britannia a few centuries ago. Quickly wheeling their Harley "hogs" around, the gang and their "old ladies" left in confusion, never to return.
Bolstered by friend Walter Weber's long-term encouragement to consider the realities of inflation since World War II, George eventually raised annual dues (at least for newcomers) to the under whelming sum of $135 per couple by the mid-sixties. The combination of higher dues and the remaining membership momentum of the late 1950's had finally brought George's hobby to a level of positive (if slowly declining) annual cash flow. (Net profits after paying "bare bones" operating expenses were never sufficient to make significant property improvements, however.)
Until 1965 George could only spend Mondays at Lupin, the usual day his beauty salon was not open for business. In that year he became eligible to receive his retirement benefits, and so he sold his Peninsula business and began spending weekdays working at Lupin and weekends at home.
Ethel continued to deal with the hassles of membership administration and provided a management presence that became less visible over the years as her arthritis grew worse. George, who was himself growing deaf, preferred his usual background role at Lupin. Concerned about Ethel's decreasing mobility, he persuaded Ed and Mary Gladwin to come live in the Gatehouse in 1968 to give her some part-time help.
For almost a decade thereafter George adopted a stable routine for his "retirement" years. Most of his time at Lupin he spent happily puttering with small maintenance projects that fit his diminishing energies and Lupin's meager income.
So little changed for so long that we members began to believe our secret paradise would last forever. It was an ideal situation for everyone, as long as George stayed healthy.
Part 9: A Crisis of TransitionFrom its inception Lupin has always seemed extraordinarily fortunate in somehow having the "right" people come along just in time to prop it up in situations of particular need. By 1976, the year of Lupin's mostly uncelebrated 40th anniversary, the charmed life of the club would become highly dependent upon the personal energy and unique talents of a recently re-hired caretaker. She was the only person employed by the club with both the dedication and the capability of providing on-going maintenance and physical staff support.
George and Club Manager Ethel Plant were each in their 70's and understandably slowing down from the toll of their years. After decades of dedicated dual-careerism, George Bouffil was finally, and certainly deservedly, becoming more willing to pause and sniff the flowers in the unique environment he had nurtured for 30 years. The priorities of his personal Lupin projects, such as adjusting the ancient ram (or water-driven) pump, more frequently tended to keep him near the verdant beauty, filtered sunlight and natural tranquility around Hendry's Creek, his favorite part of the property.
Increasingly hobbled by arthritis, Ethel could no longer deter potential misbehavior by merely touring the grounds to show the comforting flag of authority as she had done in earlier years (formerly lending a measure of regal dignity to the club's old dust-covered, white Rambler station wagon as it belched and coughed its resolute way up and down the unpaved roads). Even getting upstairs to her bedroom above the office was becoming something of a chore. Except for Saturday night dinners in the Clubhouse where she would preside over a table full of favored friends (including the scholarly Wil Binkley, who would chauffeur and assist her), she mostly confined her movements to her home where she interviewed visitors, ran club business on a 7-day week and additionally prepared succulent desserts for the restaurant that were usually reserved and sold out well before dinner began.
Physical infirmities notwithstanding, she projected Lupin's family image well (maintaining good relations with suppliers and the community), and her remarkable memory also remained a major club asset. Still the club spokesperson, she was the subject of two January 6, 1976, feature stories in the "San Jose Mercury News" which were picked up by the wire services and published widely.
Ed and Mary Gladwin, who had re-instituted summer weekend food service a few years earlier before turning over the concession to a younger couple from the membership in search of supplemental income, were highly involved in a business some distance from their Lupin home in the Gatehouse. Not that much younger than George and Ethel, they had very little spare time beyond Ed giving tours to newcomers on weekends and both assisting Ethel with personal errands when they could. (Ed and Captain, their coal-black German Shepherd, also monitored the club's old wire-mesh gate outside their home after hours, or in an emergency.)
Club facilities, often constructed many decades earlier with amateur help and recycled materials, had themselves become a reflection of the inevitable march of time, and all were badly in need of refurbishment, if not re-birth. Many of the basic amenities and primitive utility systems (water, power, heating, plumbing, pool filtration, roads, bathrooms, showers, etc.) were either significantly inadequate, poorly distributed or virtually unmaintainable. It was not at all unusual for an unsuspecting member's foot to plunge through flimsy 1" x 12"), dry-rotted decking or trip over wide divots in the thin asphalt tennis courts, victims of chronically cash-starved attempts to minimize costs.
Having passed through "rustic" on their descent, most buildings and cabins were weathered and critter-gnawed far beyond the simple redemption of a good paint job. Even the lodge, constructed in the previous century of heart redwood, seemed more dank and musty than quaint. The clubhouse, structurally sound if porously roofed, had all the style, warmth and appeal of a barn, and the kitchen was dark, cramped and impossible to clean adequately, making dining in the restaurant a minor health decision for the fastidious.
In short, the aging Lupin Lodge was becoming a repair-and maintenance nightmare of some magnitude, and there was no one who was not-yet-eligible for Social Security employed in reversing the trend. As a business, it was as much "under-energized" as it was "under-capitalized", and there was very little George could afford to do about either problem, much less stop Father Time.
Lacking a very wealthy (and blindly generous) benefactor, what the place badly needed was a younger, incurable optimist with unlimited energy, patience and imagination. Lora Boswell came much closer to the latter profile than the former, and, propitiously, happened to return to Lupin just in time to re-claim the job of caretaker from her earlier successor, "Como" Don Baynes, a provocative character in his mid-sixties who was retiring to the beaches of Hawaii following three years of testing the club's tolerance for diverse personalities and spotty work ethics. (Of course, the pay wasn't that great, either.)
Lora, no stranger to Lupin, had reared a family of three children with spouse, Warren, as part of the membership since 1958, and all had lived on the grounds for a short period in the 1960's while they built, from scratch, an innovatively designed adobe house in nearby Aldercroft Heights. After their goals as a couple diverged in the early 1970's, Lora first became Lupin's caretaker for a short transition period in her newly single life before moving on, leaving the job to the colorful "Como" Don until her timely return in 1976.
Just as for many of us who find it difficult to explain to the uninitiated our attachment to Lupin and the liberating lifestyle it represents, moving back was an almost mystical home-coming for Lora, a re-discovery of a familiar place for re-centering one's basic being. Once, when asked in a media interview to summarize what the attraction of Lupin was for her, she described it simply as "the feeling of freedom".
Raised in a naturist environment during her childhood in the 1940's by somewhat unconventional parents in Berkeley (that renowned intellectual spawning ground of alternative lifestyles, experimental social systems and polemical politics), Lora would be a superb role model for any feminist wishing for her daughter the self-confidence to open her mind, take reasonable risks and reach for her personal potential. Multi-talented---artistic, intelligent, athletic, attractive and well-educated---she never seemed to consider gender a limitation and had established a very respectable record of family and career accomplishment years before "becoming Superwoman" became the impossible dream of this decade's more liberated distaff generation.
As an entrepreneurial veteran of two family business start-ups (including "The Good Earth" natural food store in Los Gatos, one of the area's earliest commercial efforts to satisfy renewed interest in chemical-free nutrition), she well understood the limitations of Lupin's resources and had practical experience in making a little go a long way, i.e., she could "scrounge" with the best. Empowered by self-realizations found only on the other side of one's mid-life crisis, she also brought good humor and a free spirit to the job of "care taking" Lupin, a task she viewed in a larger context than merely mowing the lawns and balancing the pool chemistry.
In effect, she would become the Lupin family's all-purpose "Earth Mom", a variation of that selfless, societal role of over-qualification and under-compensation dumped on women to perform out of love and duty. In all respects but wages, which were necessarily token for everyone on the payroll, she was personally strong enough and aware enough to be able to play and enjoy that usually one-sided game on her terms. While the marginal Lupin might never become a beacon for materialism, it was like a large blank canvas to the creative artist in Lora. She saw only possibilities.
Confronted with the lack of resources, a lesser spirit would have viewed the Herculean task of significantly arresting (much less actually reversing) Lupin's decline as next to impossible and would have settled for keeping the leaves raked. Not content with just minding the store, Lora set out to tap hidden sources for a few highly visible projects of modest investment.
First, building enthusiasm among some of the more affluent members she knew for the introduction of a recently emerging phenomenon of California culture, a hot tub, she soon had some of us raising the money and others offering materials and professional skills to assist her in its construction. George could scarcely refuse an all-but-accomplished gift, and within weeks a somewhat crude but charming redwood tub was installed overlooking the creek, nestled in a rarely visited grove of oak, bay laurel and madrone trees named "Tranquil Forest". It was an immediate hit and a great boost to club morale.
Buoyed by that successful improvement, some of the more dedicated players were persuaded to split the cost of patching the crude tennis courts, which more resembled cross-sections of a moonscape than level playing surfaces. George found a parking lot paving contractor who would fill in the holes with a thin veneer of asphalt for a relatively modest $2,000. After a green paint job with white striping and new nets, they looked and, until rains and roots created new cracks, played much better than warranted by the inferior reality of their subsurface.
By then on a roll, Lora next hit George up for the maximum budget he could afford for some cosmetic materials to re-new or disguise the run-down appearance of the clubhouse. Working mostly alone except for some part-time volunteer help, she gave both the exterior and the interior a creative new look during the winter of 1977, including an additional layer of decking, new railing, wood awning, shingled siding, decorative trim, wainscoting and an imaginative wood mural to hide the tacky patchwork wall of aqua-and-salmon Formica scraps which separated the kitchen from the clubhouse.
Lora's enthusiastic energy was like a tonic to all, including George, who never seemed more cheerful and outgoing to those of us who only knew him slightly. Although he could not keep up with her---she could probably out-work most men half his age, belying her slender frame---George looked forward to tasks they could work on together.
Then, in February 1977, his confidence was quite suddenly shaken when he suffered a mild stroke at home for which he was secretly hospitalized for a few days. Until then, illness had not been a major issue to George, who had always led a very health-conscious lifestyle.
Such a short absence in the winter was not that unusual, and soon he resumed Lupin visits on a less regular basis. A few weeks later in April, however, he suffered a second, far more severe stroke at home causing several physical disabilities including aphasia, the inability to speak and use language, although he could still understand what his already impaired hearing could pick up from others. In George's case it adversely affected his use of English more than French, his native tongue, making the simplest of communications a very frustrating task.
No one at Lupin actually knew of his plight except Ethel, who, ever loyal to George, kept it a secret. (Such news could have severely impacted membership renewals.) Soon, however, his extended absence became conspicuous to a few of us who were familiar with his routine and knew of his love for being here.
The critical problem, of course, was that, as a sole proprietorship, the business and George were the same legal entity. Anything that threatened his life also threatened Lupin, and none of us were aware of any provisions for its survival.
And, because of his wife Eugenie's long non-involvement, speculations about the club's eventual fate had always been wild and rife. Our low-budget mountain paradise was mortal and beginning to feel very vulnerable.
Part 10: A Lease on LifeIn the spring of 1977, after 10 years of membership, I became a more active participant in this half-century-long Lupin saga, thereby losing, no doubt, some measure of scholarly objectivity as well as adding a plethora of unedited detail to these pages. Such is the "Catch-22" of information from any source; all "history", if not exactly bunk, is mostly a highly selective and interpretive distillation of what some self-appointed expert with a pen and a point of view said it was.
Like many before and since, Lupin hooked me the very first day I visited here in 1967. I couldn't credit any single factor; it was a mix of the breathtaking Santa Cruz Mountain vistas, the surprising feelings of relaxation and freedom the experience offered, the delightful diversity of the family environment, and the accepting openness (tempered with a respect for privacy) of most of the individuals I encountered. It was certainly a very humanizing and memorable occasion, and my wife Sandra and I joined the club as soon as we moved back to the Bay Area in 1968.
Lupin soon became our regular weekend retreat, spanning a stressful, busy decade during which each of us as individuals were stretched to our limits by very challenging career and marital circumstances. The tranquil contrast Lupin provided us over the years was a balm as well as recreation, and we developed many special friendships, especially among those with whom we shared interests in our favorite athletic outlets, tennis and volleyball.
Of all the institutions I had experienced during the strangely eclectic resume of my youth---public schools and a Bible-thumping assortment of Christian churches (both traditional and fundamentalist) in Conservative West Texas, a great liberal arts university (Yale), peacetime shipboard duty in the backwaters of the Orient, the grind of a prestigious business school (Stanford), and various commercial enterprises both large and small---Lupin was clearly the most culturally radical, and yet it had come to feel most like "home" to me. (And so it would become in fact.)
After I was seemingly destined in 1976 to completely re-think my relationship with institutions of all types (including business and marriage), Lupin thus became a natural site for a 6-month sabbatical to sort through my personal version of "Passages", a transition lasting into the winter of 1977. (Aside from the inevitable lesson to live more in the moment than in the future, extended soul-searching also led me to re-affirm that the only human relationships worth pursuing involve two essential elements: "win-win" mutuality and maximum freedom of choice. Independence was a big issue in those days, and being single was just emerging as a respectable social choice.)
Lora Boswell, a long-time acquaintance who had become a sympathetic friend during my midlife readjustment period, wisely involved me in mindless, physical tasks in her clubhouse cosmetology project. It was a highly therapeutic contrast to the mental stresses of too many years as corporate warrior compounded by a routine work style of sedentary meetings and too many cardboard meals on America's airlines. With Ethel's permission, I decided to extend my temporary Lupin residency on a month-to-month basis, or until I was well launched in a new direction I had been contemplating for several months.
By early 1977 1 was highly involved in a loose consulting association with an old friend and respected colleague dating back to my Navy days. We had decided to focus on strategic growth issues in small-to-medium businesses and soon found several clients where our individual strengths in tandem could make a unique contribution to entrepreneurial objectives in a mushrooming economic phenomenon that pundits would eventually label too narrowly as "Silicon Valley". The opportunities for investment of skills and capital seemed almost endless.
In May, citing George's highly unusual spring absence, Lora privately shared with me her concerns about his health and Lupin's future. She had learned some weeks earlier from him that he had made no provisions, for Lupin's continuity and, despite rumors to the contrary, had never been approached by sincere investors wishing to perpetuate it as a nudist club. (We were not aware at the time that George had very recently received a serious inquiry by a group of psychiatrists interested in the property as a patient treatment center, and an obviously juicy tax shelter for professional incomes.)
I composed an earnest, lengthy letter to George on May 16, detailing my credentials and business background, expressing my admiration for what he had created at Lupin, and, as a member, offering my consulting services at no charge to help him plan for Lupin's future. I assumed that George, like most entrepreneurs of my acquaintance, might wish to see his enterprise continue, but, also like most of us, did not enjoy serious contemplation of his mortality. Ethel, who was careful to guard George's address, telephone number and privacy, dutifully forwarded my epistle.
After I had received no response from George for about two weeks, Ethel finally speculated in confidence that his condition as a result of a major stroke suffered several weeks earlier was perhaps more serious than either Lora or I had known or imagined. She also hinted that perhaps he might be more open to a specific offer to buy Lupin than strategic assistance in estate planning.
Her revelations brought me nose-to-nose with the very question I had tap-danced around almost too nimbly until then: was I personally interested in making a significant investment in Lupin? That question stirred a nervous flutter of others that had been floating aimlessly in my sub-conscious for some time.
Most fundamentally, could Lupin ever become a self-sustaining enterprise at the level of investment in property and improvements that would be required at current marketplace values? (Could George's lifestyle/ hobby become a real business?) My generous guess at probable gross revenues---about twice George's reality---indicated a near-hopeless income shortfall, especially if, after financing the purchase, the club were to have any staff services or decent facilities. Only a minor marketing miracle could provide the growth of cash flow required.
What was the potential for a marketing miracle"? Foremost was the problem of positioning a much-misunderstood lifestyle in a largely body-alienated culture. Neither were there comparable, trail-blazing models of excellence to follow in the traditional American nudist movement, which was slowly losing ground despite a growing public acceptance of casual nudity at select beaches and private backyards. Only the popularity of a few huge naturist resorts in Europe hinted of any possibility for success.
What were the alternatives? A group of member-investors? A Co-op? Previous negative experiences of governing by committee (the responsibility of all becomes the responsibility of none), the delicacy of negotiations required, the complex nature of the overall task, the financial risk, and a general sense of the laid-back membership strongly suggested to me that a high level of group involvement in Lupin management was undesirable, particularly during a fragile transition.
Who would be the hands-on entrepreneur to make it fly? Lora Boswell was the obvious candidate; however, having chosen a non-materialistic path (and barely receiving enough income from Lupin to buy groceries), she would require 100% financial backing.
What was Lupin worth, and how could I finance its purchase? The presumed urgency of George's health allowed no time for a qualified appraisal even if the necessary information were available (although, unbeknownst to me, an appraisal of the property had just been completed in connection with the psychiatrist group's "feeler"). Almost all of my investment assets were then quite illiquid and unsuitable as collateral; however, I could conceive of several different financing alternatives based upon the property value and did not deem that an insurmountable barrier.
Weighing it all, especially in light of the probability of otherwise losing forever the special retreat that had come to mean so much to me, I felt compelled to stay in the game for at least another round. Arriving intuitively at a purchase figure that felt about right, I wrote George a short offer letter on June 3.
Now that I was committed, a partnership with Lora seemed to evolve naturally from the foundation of trust and affection that already existed. We shared basic values and beliefs, and I particularly liked her energy, integrity and sense of humor, all quite essential traits for the task ahead. We both felt Lupin to be a project worth risking.
We also could give the new enterprise a certain balanced team quality. I found the financing/ marketing puzzle a fascinating professional challenge, and she was clearly a most capable operator of the club and enjoyed the respect of the membership. We each had entrepreneurial experience and could provide a perspective of each gender where it might be relevant.
Within a few days of my offer letter, Ethel received word to provide Lora and I with George's unlisted phone number. After a short, polite conversation with "Eugenie", we were invited to their home for a get-acquainted visit.
Fortunately, my "wild-horseback-guesstimate" offer had come in just over the property appraisal value and probably helped put the competing psychiatrist group into a secondary negotiating position thereafter. Besides, given our ties to Lupin, we obviously intended no change of use and felt comfortable that George would consider that in our favor.
Our first meeting revealed another obstacle: George wasn't quite ready to pass on Lupin's baton, despite his stroke-weakened condition. While he seemed significantly frustrated by his difficulty in making speech express his thoughts, he had lost none of his spirit' and certainly none of his love for a place that held 40 years of fond memories for him.
"Eugenie", who was clearly concerned about minimizing additional stress on George, was in favor of selling Lupin to us outright as soon as possible. She became our instant ally and ultimately a very good friend. Belying all fears to the contrary, she was a charming, intelligent person prepared to deal with us in a helpful, businesslike manner.
Resolving the impasse took a simple solution assisted by the timely and unanticipated intervention of others over the next few weeks. Walter Weber, learning in confidence of the situation, decided to take upon himself the task of convincing his old friend George that his passing on the headaches of the business to us was in everyone's best interest. At the end of their conversation, George finally gave in to common sense with a tearful "Cest fini."
An introduction to Eugenie's son, an obviously capable executive with a giant firm, provided us with someone to test and negotiate alternative solutions more acceptable to George. He also persuaded George to give us a peek at Lupin's books, which only confirmed the marginality I had suspected.
The ultimate solution, obvious in retrospect, was something of a compromise that actually worked much better for all concerned than a simple sale: a lease-option. George could retain an ownership connection to the club and receive a fixed income for his equity. Lora and I could use our sparse capital to help build up the business from a lower level of financial risk and hope to position ourselves to exercise the purchase option later if we could make a go of it.
Finally, at a meeting on August 25, George accepted our formal offer of a five-year lease of all assets with an option to buy at the end. The agreement was drawn up by his attorney and signed on September 15, 1977.
Lupin had a new lease on life---or, at least, an extension. It was merely a license to attempt survival in an all-too-real world.
Part 11: Up By the BootstrapsOctober of 1977 found our two new Lupin custodians, having successfully negotiated the continuation of what had become a venerable Bay Area institution, now nervously contemplating the long winter ahead. As assets the club had certain leasehold rights to a lovely, well-located piece of property (with underdeveloped and badly depreciated facilities), 378 pre-paid adult members (or about half the peak membership of the late 1950's), a generally respectable public reputation (to the limited degree that it was known), and nary a nickel in the till. All club funds on hand at the end of the summer season had become pre-paid rent as part of our lease agreement.
Complicating this cash(less) dilemma was the potentially negative reaction of the membership to a sudden change in unelected authority and the necessity of facing a new economic order, a reality from which we had all been sheltered for three decades by George's reluctance to keep pace with inflation. Since Lupin had become almost every member's second home, the subject of almost any change could be expected to stimulate an emotional response. We knew that some boats were going to be significantly rocked by waves we could not avoid making.
Both Lora and I had initially received generally positive feedback from friends and acquaintances among the membership for our new partnership in Lupin, but we were concerned about many others who seemed less communicative. There were rumors in the Lupin grapevine of secretive real estate searches and groups breaking off to form other clubs even before our September 16 announcement of the new lease-option could be mailed to members. How would people vote with their feet and their checkbooks come renewal time in the spring?
Although our overriding purpose was conserving the best of what "Lupin-the-family-retreat" had become, especially its unique ambience and broad mix of people, all those incalculable risks forced us to regard "Lupin-the-business" more as a bootstrap, start-up venture than the 40 year-old establishment it was. We needed a fast way to assess the bottom-line mood of the membership, a device to reduce uncertainty as well as to begin replenishing the bare club coffers.
There was every reason to be clear about Lupin's current (and ultimately future) financial needs as early as possible in the game, for if Lupin's preservation wasn't worth an additional investment to enough members, our hopes of rebuilding it would prove to be well beyond reasonable risk, i.e., mathematically futile. Our first official act was therefore the announcement of a small charter membership assessment fee ($45 per adult) that we hoped would at least enable us to predict the membership renewal rate and pay the utilities until spring.
We must have succeeded in getting members' attention, for very soon we began receiving a flood of thoughtful replies to the open-ended questionnaire we had included with our original September partnership announcement as well as a flurry of checks in response to the October assessment. Some members, clearly anticipating an increase, even offered to pay their next year's dues early if only we'd tell them the exact amount.
While the assessment notice also stimulated additional speculation and troublesome rumors, our receiving mostly positive questionnaires from over a third of the membership and having enough new cash in the club account to operate for a few more months reduced the stress level considerably. After all, though supportive members were acting mostly on blind faith and trust at that point, we had not, as yet, developed specific plans to share with anyone because sheer survival was the first-and-only order of business.
The most important thing the encouraging member responses accomplished was to confirm that there were many others who saw the same need for improvements that we perceived and who would be willing to spend more to get something better. There was indeed a market for a quality club! The questionnaires also suggested some specific enhancements whereby we could add significant value to a Lupin membership without incurring too much additional cost.
Bolstered with new confidence, we attempted to combine all our previous ideas and hopeful plans with what we had learned from the members and to "reduce" this consensus "big picture" to writing in some organized format. The result was our first newsletter, published in early November 1977, a densely packed, 18-page tome (graciously and meticulously typed for us by Alcinda Weber) which, with some whimsy, we initially named "The Naked Truth"*. (*After the second issue we learned of a pre-existing publication with the same name and, lacking a better suggestion, eventually re-named ours "Random Times".)
Containing perhaps more information than any member would even care to know, this premier issue included: our overall objectives (short and long-term); a general strategy of some flexibility; a 12-18 month plan of specific changes and improvements; a wish-list of larger projects; an interim staffing plan; our philosophical views of rules and policies; summarized results of the membership survey (covering facilities, activities, rules, food service, maintenance, financing, marketing and "dreams"); a calendar of social events for the remainder of 1977; and, finally, "the other shoe" (a new dues and fees schedule for 1978), along with our rationale for its particular structure. It reflected major rate increases of from 100 to 200 percent!
While the new rates were, no doubt, a considerable shock to a majority of the members, the sad fact was that (at least by any reasonable marketplace standard) they were still far too low. In our initial rate-making we had considered inflation, our "real world" projected operating costs, Lupin's almost bottomless capital needs, and prices of comparable alternatives with similar facilities (swim and racquet clubs, YMCA's, health spas, private campgrounds, etc.), but we felt it unreasonable to expect the members to make up the entire gap in one year. (Unfortunately, compounded by being in the midst of the nation's most expensive area during the worst period of double-digit inflation since World War II, it would take several more years of smaller, but still aggravating annual increases before we could bring the club's finances into better alignment and afford to stabilize rates somewhat.)
Improving Lupin's year-round appeal became a major part of our early strategy. Except for summer weekends, the facilities were significantly under-utilized, offering a growth opportunity in slack times as well as a way to add value to membership and perhaps improve the annual renewal percentages.
Extending the club's usable season was a recurring theme in the member questionnaires, and both of us knew from living here that mild winters and verdant scenery made Lupin a delightful place to relax almost anytime, even days when clothes are more comfortable than skin. (Not only is Lupin well inland from the summer coastal fog belt, it is also located within one of only six uniquely comfortable "Mediterranean Climate" zones in the world.)
As soon as we could begin buying, begging or scrounging minimal materials, Lora "kick started" a whirlwind array of projects designed to enhance Lupin's off-season attractions and overall appearance. Not the least of those tasks was the removal of many years of accumulated clutter and debris from the grounds.
Before spring's advent in 1978 the lower pool area had some new decking, a shingled sunburst, a re-painted reservoir, a new perimeter fence and gates, a re-cycled heater and an energy-saving, air-supported, translucent dome covering the warmth of 85 degree water just down the newly completed broken-concrete pathway from the nearby redwood hot tub. For the first time in its history Lupin could offer year-round swimming and water comfort.
The lodge was the object of a somewhat less drastic facelift, receiving an only-slightly-used carpet replacement (courtesy of Ed Gladwin), the donation of some better-if-not-new mattresses from members, an interior paint job and, one of Lora's favorite building cosmetics, shingles applied to the visible exterior sides. (While many kidded her about her use of shingles for Lupin "stage sets", they seemed to me, at least, to suit a mountain resort ambience much better than what they hid.)
The winter rains of 1978 ended a severe, three-year drought, and Lora used their most welcome occasions for her major indoor project, remodeling the clubhouse kitchen for cleanliness and efficiency and further improving the restaurant decor. (Both of us felt that convenient, year-round food service of good quality in a pleasant atmosphere was an essential factor in upgrading Lupin overall.) Discerning diners, Health Department inspectors and the resident staff were all delighted with the changes, completed in time to re-open the restaurant on April 22, 1978.
The human energies to accomplish all those tasks in just a few months were recruited primarily by Lora, whose own enthusiasm sparked members, residents, friends and family to participate more or less voluntarily. The club checking balance was still far from adequate to pay market value for anyone's skills and still cover basic utilities and rent, too.
Included among individuals variously recognized in newsletters for personal contributions to Lupin during that lean winter of 1978 were an extensive (and probably incomplete) list of first names: Walter (of course), Chris, Tyler, Bari, Clifford, Pam, Marcy, Jean Luc, John, Veny, Janet, Fred, Ethel, Glenn, Bobbie, Greg and Kerrie (who, would co-manage the rejuvenated restaurant), Alcinda, Ed, Mary, Jerry, Elspeth, Jim, Wil, Bob, Susan, Merv, Mike, Eddie, Charlie, Ray, Harvey, Dan, Len, Patrick, Jeannie, Gary and Brady.
Members wanting to reside at Lupin have traditionally provided the club with a particularly fruitful source of talent, though not always for very long. Temporary Lupin residency often offers an ideal "bridge" opportunity for individuals to make an important transition in their lives---significant changes in relationships, lifestyle, career, geography, etc.---before moving on after they're quite sure about what to do next. (A few of us take longer to make up our minds than others, of course.)
One such talent from the winter of '78 who would stay longer than most (to the club's great benefit) was Jim Hurst, who brought an exceptional mind, selfless integrity and a craftsman's pride to the task of improving Lupin over the next six years. His diverse prior experiences---in engineering, residential construction, computer-based research and financial planning (he had published a book about investment timing in the stock market)---and his quiet, characteristic thoroughness made him the perfect foil for the energetic Lora, who was much better at starting and advancing projects than either analytical planning up front or finishing tasks to the last detail near their completion. The mutual respect of these two somewhat opposite personalities would eventually develop into a much closer relationship and provide a valuable balance to future Lupin improvements.
After warm, dry, spring weekends began to draw old members, new visitors and a number of the skeptics back for a peek at the emerging Lupin, it became clear that we had all but weathered the worst of our first season. Even some of the most vocally, disgruntled holdouts paid their assessment fees and renewed their annual memberships when they eventually came due. (The rumored competitive club never materialized. Perhaps someone did some hard-nosed financial projections after visiting a real estate broker and consulting a contractor.)
Now that truly reliable "polls" could predict basic survival for the balance of the year, it was time to focus on long-term marketing. Achieving crucially needed net growth would require developing new membership sources that more than merely replaced normal attrition.
Part 12: Shaping a ConceptSurvival beyond 1978 demanded that the club grow into a self-supporting venture as quickly as possible, and more than mere solvency and the hope of future refurbishment were at stake. It also seemed very important not to lose in the growth-and-development process the uniquely humanizing essence of Lupin most worth preserving: that comfortable, family-like ambience which tends to liberate the ageless child within while naturally tranquilizing the rest of the whole person body, mind and spirit. (Obviously, the quintessential Lupin is simpler to experience than to describe.)
Social nudity in a safe environment has always been key to Lupin's special charm, helping to form a self-accepting, common bond among a surprisingly diverse collection of personalities of both genders from backgrounds as varied as their physiques, ages and interests. Maintaining that cherished choice* of personal freedom was a given.
(*Nudity, now an encouraged option and aquatic tradition at Lupin, was in earlier times more of a club requirement, weather permitting, presumably to dispel false modesty and discourage objectifying recreational gawking. The incongruity of bathing in a suit on these liberated grounds has always seemed a gratuitous insult, the reverse equivalent of mooning the choir in church, so all attire has always been banned in the pools and sauna.)
Lupin of the late 1970's had no monopoly on social nudity in Northern California; however, in addition to about 100 nude (or "free") beach sites annually reviewed by the Bay Guardian, there were many direct and indirect competitors of a more commercial nature. The backyard hot tub boom was also just beginning to emerge. It was vital to position Lupin in the best niche from which to appeal effectively to this growing minority* of body-accepting people, especially those whose membership would contribute to the club. (*Polls would later indicate that in the West almost 25% had sampled group co-ed skinny-dipping.)
In other words, we faced the challenging task of creating a business strategy for a unique Garden of Eden---to be somehow profitable despite competition from many free, or at least cheaper, alternatives---appealing to some undeterminable market of open-minded souls who were scattered randomly amidst a majority culture still stuck in fig-leaf Puritanism. Lupin had to offer something less boring and more revenue-producing than the legendary biblical prototype without alienating potential supporters or overtaxing members, indeed a complex puzzle worthy of a "biz-school" policy class.
Reconciling such rarely compatible considerations as "people" and "profit" required as a priority that we please many more of the former before the latter could possibly materialize. Who was Lupin's best market and what could we offer them? How could we reach them? Who were the current members and what did they seek from their club? What image should Lupin project? How should we concentrate our very limited resources?
Our earlier survey revealed that Lupin was many things to different members. We could identify several promising constituencies each touting favorite areas of developmental emphasis and potential opportunity. While the club already contained the nucleus of each of these notions, significant progress towards implementing any of them generally required upgrading facilities well beyond available capital. All had some merit, however, and became part of our emerging vision and growing wish list.
Swim & Racquet Club. Lupin has always attracted its share of dedicated athletes, and the demand for tennis, especially, was then at its peak. Unfortunately, while Lupin could be a limited athletic club to some so inclined, our capacity to grow in this direction depended upon much more flat space for additional courts than the terrain offered. Two makeshift tennis courts and a reinvigorated volleyball program couldn't support very much of an expanded athletic load, even after facility renovations. A marketing focus on "jocks", stereotypically a socially conservative lot anyway, also seemed too narrow for Lupin's cosmopolitan membership.
Health & Fitness Facility. The eldest "Baby Boomers" were just beginning to discover they couldn't trust their bodies to stay in shape past 30, and a group of fitness-co