Venice in the Seventies

I lived in Venice/SM on Flower Ave. I was 13 and a flower child haha. Ran away from VA and hitched across country with a girlfriend.
We got seperated in Hollywood and I ended up moving into the little house on Flower Ave.
2 of the guys in the house were Marty and Blaine, they built acoustic guitars in a little shop down off the boardwalk. Another roomy was Phil, he had an afro and had a girlfriend named Eddie. A young woman lived in the house also named Virginia.
They sang in a band part-time but I cannot remember the name of it.
I remember being out by the pier when Wavy Gravy had his cast cut off.
And eating in a little German restaurant, pancakes. Thin and rolled up with lemon squirted on and powdered sugar ( I still eat them this way).
A really cool guy at the unemployment office helped me get a fake SS card and I actually got a job at a cosmetics company there. Putting the crayon in eyebrow pencils. (hated that and lasted a whole 3 days).

Phil was white but had that afro and Marty had dark wavy hair. Blaine had long blonde hair. They reminded me of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.
I would so love to hear from them.

Hi, Diane. I don't know your friends.
I think I ate at that restaurant and so did a lot of us. I'll recognize the name and it is probably mentioned earlier in the thread.
A friend of mine's mother owned a small apartment complex on Flower. She lived in a small house with her daughters not far away. I assume from the kindness of the family I knew that she was an ok landlord, but of course I don't know.

So you lived in a small house? What year(s) were you there?

Hi OSOO,
When you turned onto Flower I lived in the first house on the right. There was a movie theater behind the house you could cut through the side yard and be there. I actually saw Woodstock the movie there. Saw some of my friends from Earth Peoples Park (up in Vermont) are in the movie.
I lived in CA from the end of Jan-May 5th of 1972. I was 13, turned 14 in June of that year. Stayed in Hollywood the first couple of months and moved into the house the end of March.
At the restaurant, there was a beautiful woman who used to wait on us, she was German, not sure if she was the owner. But I have a fleeting memory of maybe her and her brother owning it.
Marty had a small sports car, yellow or red, convertible.
I remember we went to see J. Krishnamurti at a coliseum.
And we went to Disneyland.
I wonder what would have happened had I stayed, but I got antz in my pantz and left to travel up the coast, reached Eureka and it was pouring rain so I crossed Hgwy 1 and came back down then realized I wanted to go back to Vermont and left CA for good on May 5th.
When I got back to Earth Peoples Park, I lived with a guy who I fell in love with, but he was 26 (he did not know I was 13, he thought I was 17) and when winter came it was too cold for me to stay and he was leaving for Ohio. So we went our separate ways.
Stayed in touch with a few letters, but I was put back into foster care and he went out west so we lost touch.
In 1997 I had the chance to travel back to Vermont and found some people who knew some people who might know where he was. I left my phone number with them and 9 months later HE called me !
Neither one of us had ever married. We had not talked in over 25 years but it all fell away. And now we are married hahaha.
But I still would love to know what happened to my good friends in Venice.
Blaines last name is Fisher. I cannot remember Marty or Phils last names.

Sorry for the delayed reply, I had missed yours.

Ah, the Fox Venice theater? I saw at least a hundred movies there - my all time favorite theater. They closed it and last I knew it was used as a kind of swap meet place. Sigh.

Sorry, I still can't place the names of your friends back then.

Honky Hoagy's Handy Hangout on Lincoln. Early to mid 70s. Steve the red-headed drummer was our buddy. A bunch of us lived in a big house on the Santa Monica ocean walk right by Muscle Beach. We were told that it was built for Mary Pickford. (Alas, long gone; now a vacant lot.)
A guy used to bring his chimpanzee down to play on the rings at Muscle Beach.
My best memory of 4H: We were sitting around a table drinking beer when this tall beautiful blond came in, picked up the pitcher, and poured it over my head. She was pissed! I knew right then it was true love. We've been married 37 years.
Our favorite restaurant was the Brandywine, also on Lincoln. Fried Harvey and Orzata sundaes.

It's all changed. I had a small consulting firm upstairs over the old firehouse , which actually is still there.

And my dog Sandpaw ran away to the Firehouse, where they read his tags and called me so I ran over, it being not far away. It happened to be mother's day, so I was invited to take my pick of some pastries..

Nice to see this thread pop up again, Mikevh.
Wonderful story of how you met your wife. (I met my husband when business partner and I had a gallery on W. Washington and sublet it some of the time to a theater group).

Lafayette Cafe. It closed in early eighties...i lived at 33 Westminster then. Owners tripled the rent and it became a t-shirt shop...still is!

I'm rereading this thread, thinking of trying to post links, if any, from youtube from any music back in the Venice seventies to a new thread here:
http://able2know.org/topic/273401-1

I see I never posted any of my promised photos of the area at the time. Does my scanner work, I'll have to check.

One of the people I didn't get around to answering was (lbgrob?) about the Dell mural, his mother painting some of it. I liked it, I liked it.

Additionally, since I last read this, someone has downthumbed almost all of my posts. Silly, silly. Nobody from Venice would blink.



Oh, on Westminster, a friend/colleague and her mate lived there in a building that Wegman had a studio in. She liked Wegman and Man Ray. I'm not sure of the years she was there, nor the exact address.

Pretty amazing thread. Yeah, some pics would be nice! I'm looking forward to seeing Osso bath in a sink. :-)

Hang on. If the scanner works, I'll do it.

Actually, there was the Firehouse and fire house. SandPaw ran to the actual fire station.

Re sandpaw, as a child I had been around dogs very little, and remembered each of them well. The back yard of our leased studio was in no way secured, snort, and by the non used railroad tracks.
Sandpaw was a dog from the tracks, and even I with a lousy voice could sing about him.

Sandpaw is now featured as avatar.

The scanner's better work... :-)

We'll see. I tend to let them die by no-use.

On the other hand, once I start posting, I may post a lot.

I am searching for a recreation of the recipe the Brandywine used for their cheesecake. I haven't been able to find one yet that recreates that lovely, cake-y cheese cake. Any help?

BTW, Fried Harvey's (sometime with cheese!) was my go to dish at the Brandywine.

Hi, sbarto..
I remember the Brandywine was on Lincoln, but not the food or what the place looked like. I've been looking it up online, and a Brandywine restaurant in Woodland Hills keeps popping up and seems to still be in business. I'm doubting they are related though, but maybe that is possible.

Have you found the recipe for the Brandywine's Friend Harvey yet? If so, please share!

My first place in Venice was the funky old brown house at the corner of Abbott Kinney and Rialto. It was called West Washington back in 1984.
The owner gave us a rent to own arrangement and if we made rent payments on time for two years she was going to convert it to a deed of sale and a mortgage.
With no residential neighbors to speak of we could do almost anything we wanted. Radio Tokyo Studio and a funky vintage clothing store was across the street, The Brig was kitty corner and a fast commute down Venice Blvd or a trip to the Boardwalk was just a few yards away. And The Comback Inn, what a superb music venue, so intimate, so warm and inviting.
Who could ask for more?
Unfortunately one of our roommates finally embezzled the rent money we handed him and we came home to an eviction order because he kept intercepting the mailed late notices. But that was The Year That Was while we lived there. Really it was a year and a half but who's counting?
All I know is, I wish we had found our evil roommate out in time, so we could have kept the place.
My next Venice dwelling was my edit bay in a subterranean apartment at 14 Westminster, a building that eventually was named The Morrison, because Jim Morrison slept on the roof there. Oliver Stone filmed a scene on that rooftop but I made my own piece of history by editing a long lost Leon Russell concert video in that basement studio.
I think I probably shot video of every single boardwalk performance artist that plied their trade there. It was really fun to tell edit clients that they could take a relaxing break on the Boardwalk and sample every kind of fun food experience known to modern man.
I sure do miss the old Venice. Today's modern gentrified yuppie Venice doesn't hold a candle to what we had back in the day.

Hello, deepfreeze, I just saw your addition to the thread. Made me smile, even at your troubles, not in a mean way (I had stuff stolen too at one point). We were still around in '84, but by then over on Coeur d'Alene Ave. I took a set of photos of all of W. Washington Blvd. - that is, starting at Venice Blvd - somewhere around then; I should probably dig them out and give them to someone interested in Venice history. (I'm in New Mexico now, and of course miss my old Venice.)

I'm Paul From Arky Zipper , loved to play the 4 H. Had a great time .