Chapter 15
We’re in the News Again
We arrived in San Luis Obispo at dusk, to visit a guy Skip put on the list, too late to find the back road over the last mountain range to Muir Beach, so we parked in the Walmart lot. We’d heard that Walmarts – across the land – were okay with RVs and their occupants staying overnight and it turned out to be true. There were almost a dozen RVs already parked when we pulled in. We were glad to arrive in the cover of darkness having had our fill of adventure for the day.
Over a Walmart supper of pan-fried salmon, corn-on-the-cob, and salad, Skip told us about how he got to know his Muir Beach friend Rick Feldman, a former major league pitcher.
Skip Dewar’s claim to fame back in the Cities was being a politician, with a winning record, but his first claim to fame was baseball. After a so-so college pitching career, he taught political science, and coached both Little League and high school baseball. In the summer, he made a name for himself doing the play-by-play for the minor league baseball team. In the inner-city neighborhood that elected him to office nine times, he was “Skip.” “At the legislature, it was “Scotchy.” Some of us on the bus knew him as the Sunday morning barefoot, bare-handed softball player on our co-rec team, the Saint Paul Riff-Raff, also starring Patty, Huck and Rocky.
Skip got to know Rick Feldman when Rick was pitching for the Saint Paul Saints. Back in the day, minor leaguers often stayed during the season at some local’s home, and Skip took Rick in. Rick eventually made it to the major leagues, playing for the Dodgers, but his first love was horticulture, and thus the backyard orchard/nursery in Muir Beach we were about to visit.
Waking up early in cramped sleeping quarters, Steve, our lawyer, went for a jog in the early morning haze and came back with the morning papers. (He had drawn the short stick the night before, which meant sleeping in the Land Yacht’s reclining passenger seat.) We all woke up when he came back exclaiming “We made the paper!” and read the story out loud:
Strange Goings on at the Hearst Castle
Patty Hearst Redux?
National AP Wire Services
Dateline: San Simeon, California, Tuesday, October 18, 2022
Monday was a weird day at the Hearst Castle. No one seems to know if it was really Patty Hearst who showed up at her grandfather’s castle yesterday with a group called “The Rumpkins.” Hearst has been mostly out of the public eye for years, reportedly living in Mexico since the death of her husband. This reporter was unable to make contact with her or her immediate family.
Patty Hearst was in the headlines in the 1970s after being kidnapped by a radical group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army (or SLA), and then, according to her family, brainwashed into joining the revolutionary group as a gun-toting, anti-capitalist foe of the American way of life in general and her family’s fortune and newspaper empire in particular. The government saw Hearst as a willing participant in the SLA’s criminal activity. At her trial she testified that all appearances and statements that she was a sympathizer of the SLA’s cause were due to her being drugged and brainwashed, but after the trial there was speculation that her testimony was based on family threats to disown her unless she told her family’s version of the truth.
Around mid-day yesterday, the Castle’s tour bus operator had an apparent heart attack, lost control of his vehicle, and almost ran down some tourists. One of these so-called “Rumpkins” was on the bus at the time and grabbed the wheel before anybody was hurt. Another “Rumpkin,” who said he was a doctor, came to the aid of the driver, who, it turned out, was just pretending to have a heart attack. Things then got weirder yet. The “doctor” claimed the high cost of prescriptions was responsible for the man’s heart failure and the crowd of onlookers took up a chant of “Lock Trump up!” At that point some woman climbed on a table top and told the crowd of about a hundred tourists she was Patty Hearst and now a member of the “Rumpkins” group.
Mrs. Prescott Pemberton, visiting from Maine, saw the whole thing:
“It all happened so fast,” she said, “but you could tell, whoever they were, they wanted Donald Trump locked-up – and it surprised me so many tourists seemed to agree.”
According to the California Highway Patrol, this was all staged by a traveling street theatre group out of San Francisco known as “The Rumpkins.”
The bus driver was interviewed and confirmed that he was paid to act the role of a heart attack victim. He said the Rumpkins told him they were shooting a movie about a terrorist plot to mow down all the tourists in the garden.
The State Trooper on the scene admitted he had never heard of the SLA and didn’t connect the dots that the name “Patty Hearst” had any special significance. It’s still unknown if this was a re-appearance of the real Patty Hearst. She has some history as an actress.
The manager of the state park site, Thomas Kolavitch, said no one was hurt and everything was back to normal within minutes.
Attempts to contact the Rumpkins last night were unsuccessful. They were last seen driving south on Highway 1 in a rainbow painted RV with Minnesota license plates. Possible charges include “causing intentional unnecessary deployment of police resources.”
–End of Story–
After hearing the newspaper account, Steve dialed the L.A. Times to report that it was indeed a group of actors and not the real Patty. Also, Sally got on our website to, as she put it, “not exaggerate, tell the truth. I don’t want us busted!” – although some of us wanted to maybe play this up a bit longer.
With breakfast delayed due to all the excitement, we opted for Walmart sweet rolls and a quick departure, but not before someone in the parking lot exclaimed, “There it is! The Rainbow Family RV!” Turned out to be friendly fire. The guy who shouted waved us to a halt, told us we were already famous in RV circles. “Yah, wow, far-out man,” he started with an almost ear-to-ear grin, “Lots of us talk as we visit, ya know, and this mornin’ we was all asking around if anybody’d seen ya.” Then his wife came ambling up and wanted to know if we were really Rainbow Family. She had been to every Rainbow Gathering since the first one in 1972 at Strawberry Lake in Colorado.
“I was there too!” Huck exclaimed. So we invited them into the Land Yacht, where Huck and Sunshine (that was the name she gave us) could recount their adventures at Strawberry Lake (maybe even having seen each other back then).
“Did you go naked in the sauna?” Sunshine asked.
“Were you part of the group that had to hike in the back-way ‘cos of the police roadblock?” Huck asked.
“Did you do the acid?” they asked each other.
After a few minutes we said we had to be going. “Naw, stick around,” said Peaches – that was his name – “You should meet some of the rest of us staying here.”
“We’re already a day late to catch up with our buddy,” Skip said. “We’ve got to get going.”
“Where ya goin’? Maybe we’ll follow you,” Peaches said grinning.
“Nahh, my buddy’s already uptight there are so many of us,” Skip replied.
“Well, where you goin’ after that? We could have some fun together,” Sunshine piped in.
Leaving the parking lot, Huck said, “Wow! Friends from the 60s – still hippies!”
“I don’t know, seemed kind of ‘out of it’ to me,” Patty said.
“Kind of scruffy-looking to me,” said Sally. Sunshine (the female) had cut-off shorts (way high cut off shorts, right to the crotch) and was very bouncy (with no bra). Peaches (the male) had a cherubic, roly-poly pumpkin-like face under a scraggly beard, and hair down to his waist, and, apparently, a never-ending grin.