GOLD GULCH

Here is where I learned to listen

to the songs of the trees

Here is where the grasses glisten

with light and gentle breeze

 

Here is where you loved me

 

Here is where the sky I noticed

from my lonely shell

Here is where your soul touched mine

oh how you rang my bell!

 

Yes, here is where you loved me

 

Here is where the city mixes

with fragrant, earthy delight

Here is where our smiles were long

far from this sad, dark night

 

Because here is where you loved me

 

And here is where our bodies fell

into torn feelings of awe

Here is where we drown each other

with dew and skin so raw

 

For here is where you loved me

 

Ah here is where our bodies merged

joined together in song

Here is where we lost ourselves

and fretfully practiced wrong

 

But here is where you loved me

 

So here is where we parted ways

forced to say goodbye

Here is where we hung our heads

shamed with tears in our eyes

 

Yet here is where you loved me

 

Now here is where I come to cry

to write and to remember

For here is where the coal still burns

and lights my frozen members

 

It’s here I’ll always love you……

A lucky college student rolled Hollywood sex goddess Mae West down El Prado (in a rollerchair) June 9, 1935. As she entered Gold Gulch someone hit the bull’s eye and all lights went out. Mae applauded the “little woman,” wearing a clinging black dress and a large-brimmed hat, who swivelled her body into an hourglass shape and said, “Why don’t you come up sometime and see me?” at Midget Village. Upon being told the fleet would be in the following day, Mae remarked, “I’m sorry I didn’t know the fleet was coming in tomorrow as I certainly would have come down then. I’m very patriotic that way.”

The fleet Mae missed arrived June 11, fifty-eight thousand officers and enlisted men in the largest concentration of ships to anchor and dock in San Diego up to that time. Most of the men behaved; however, one red-bearded sailor took several rides in rolling chairs and ate several hot dogs and bags of popcorn without paying, turned a fire hose on the nudists, and induced two sailors to swim across the reflecting pool in the Plaza del Pacifico.

California Pacific Exposition San Diego 1935-1936

Gold Gulch occupied a canyon between the model homes behind the Palace of Better Housing and Pepper Grove, near today’s horse stables for the San Diego Police Department. Here unpainted shacks, an iron- barred bank, a Chinese restaurant and laundry, a dance and music hall, a sign before a brown shack reading “Gold Gulch Planter – Tin Coffins Made to Order,” and a dummy suspended in midair from a hangtown tree recreated the atmosphere of a mining town in the Days of ’49. Barkers lured “drugstore cowboys” to a “shootin’ gallery,” where, if they were lucky, they could put out the lights everywhere in the Gulch by hitting the bull’s eye.

In the interim between first and second seasons, directors decided changes were in order. As Gold Gulch and the Midway — the most popular attractions at the Exposition — were considered too risque for families, they were abandoned. The directors did not renew Richard Requa’s contract. Instead they chose his assistant Louis Bodmer to be supervising architect. Bodmer embellished the grounds with moderne motifs that clashed with its Spanish-Revival character. The most glaring of these was his design of an antiseptic and orderly one-half mile Amusement Zone to replace the honky-tonk Midway of 1935. Streamlined buildings surrounded a rectangular plaza planted with grass and flowers, with a Fountain of Youth at the end of a longitudinal axis. Miles of fluorescent neon tubing tied buildings together. A “Days of ’49 Stockade,” with dining hall and dance floor, across the northern end of the plaza, replaced the notorious Gold Gulch. The infamous Gold Gulch Gertie was, however, nowhere to be seen.

A colony of about fifty nudists read books, played handball and ate vegetables in Zoro Garden, at the northern tip of Gold Gulch. Patrons of the Gulch were quick at finding knot holes in the wood fence between the two attractions. Compared to “Gold Gulch Gertie,” who was arrested for impersonating Lady Godiva, and to dancers along the Midway, the nudists were models of decorum. Chief of Police George Sears saw that the women wore brassieres and G-strings. The men, who were past their prime, had long beards and wore trunks. The “Zoro” in Zoro Garden was the name of a bogus sun-god whose full name was supposed to be Zoroaster, the name of a Persian prophet.

Pioneer merchant George W. Marston, pastor of the First Methodist Church Dr. Walter Sherman, and president of the County Federation of Women’s Clubs Mrs. Karl Thompson protested the nudist show in January. Mrs. Walter Gatrell was not distressed by the nudity, but she objected to the barkers shouting “Beautiful women in the nude,” as the women were “neither beautiful nor nude.” The Exposition had already given up Gold Gulch and the Midway to placate bluestockings, but it drew the line where nudists were concerned. They were, after all, the Exposition’s most lucrative outdoor attraction.

MUMMY MAN

 Bound up & aching

He holds himself back

Far from his feelings

Forgetting his lack

 

Pressing on for the giants

Lusts for money & fame

Sold out to the lies

Still playing the game

 

Wanting to want again

But lost his way home

That place in himself

Where he’s never alone

 

Existing in goodness

Feeling at rest

Not driven by voices

Not rushing, not pressed

 

Satisfied with the simple

The smiles in the slow

Nature of what’s natural

Where the soft breezes blow

 

Who will unwrap him

From this his cocoon

Give him back life

Lift him from gloom?

 

Only the God of Menorahs

His God of the light

The one & true savior

From his wearisome fight

©shoshana rose

 freedom road poetry 10 year anniversary 2002-2012