Those with whom he clicked were offered one-acre lots for unheard-of-low down payments of $50, coupled with $50-a-month payments whenever they could afford them. Hyde connected with GIs returning from World War II who were enrolling in classes at Santa Barbara College, then located on the Riviera. After World War II, he and his wife and co-conspirator, Floppy Hyde, began looking for like-minded spirits who might fit into the brave new world they had in mind. Hyde bought the land - then 50 acres of fire-charred chaparral - for a song in 1940. The guiding hand behind Mountain Drive was Bobby Hyde, a writer and utopian experimenter who extolled the virtues of living in and with nature with a passion bordering on the erotic. Out of all this has come the exhibit opening at the museum October 6, bringing the much-mythologized Mountain Drive community - off the grid before there was even a grid to be off of - back from the ashes out of which it sprang. ![]() With this unexpected find, he was only too happy to oblige. “It hit me in the face.” At the same time, higher-ups within the museum - better known for its ultra-traditional approach to local history - had been encouraging Ervin to try something edgier. “It jumped out at me as something special,” he said. ![]() Ervin quickly discovered there was not just one oral history in storage but a whole box of Mountain Drive oral histories totaling about 30 hours. ![]() Historical MuseumĮrvin’s “Eureka!” moment came when the granddaughter of a Mountain Drive settler called, asking to hear her grandmother’s oral history. Credit: Chiacos Mountain Drive Papers, Gledhill Library, S.B.
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