Some Random Ramblings

Random Ramblings

<Last week The Dead Dog Archive

Last week marked the twenty fifth post here at The Lost Canyon Project. There is much work yet to do. And this last week I was up to my eyeballs in a home-improvement project and didn’t get much else done. And too, I’m not sure where to go with my recollections from way too many years back. So this post is just going to ramble a little.

The blog has not received much traffic. As of this post the total page view count  is just a little over 1,800. That means that other than family and a few friends, no one is visiting the Lost Canyon Project.  Even right here in Whittier, where my wife and I have many friends  in the arts community, I have not been able to generate much interest. At least not yet.

A couple of posts ago I touched on Pete’s disastrous relationship with women and alcohol. That sentence probably says all that needs to be said on the matter.

And yet, some of my best and worst memories surrounding Pete have to do with booze. We both of us had an affinity for the sauce. I remember many nights driving up to the Hampton house late. Pete would be up. I’d tap on the window, Pete would go for beers, and we’d sit in his car or mine, and drink and talk late into the night. More than once I got myself hideously drunk trying to impress the older guys how well I could hold my liquor.

One of the older guys was Tom Malloy, (right) seen with Pete, and Dee Gayer in this photo. Tommy was a hippie. 

He was very much a happy-go-lucky live for today kind of guy. Tom had that charismatic gypsy personality going for him, but he was a reckless stoner. He did some time in Chino after selling a huge quantity of acid to an undercover cop. Eventually he got into playing with heroin, and died from an overdose.

Somehow, Tommy found his way onto the box cover of Pete’s Bygone Oilfields collection. It looks as though Pete had  a show in mind featuring some of  his own horror stories, along with an urban legend called the Green Mist.

Unfortunately there were few completed paintings in this collection.

It was one of the peculiar quirks of Pete’s genius that he saw beauty in utility poles, insulators,  water valves, irrigation, airplanes, and oil wells.  

Speaking of oil wells-- I got the notes from Jeff Goslowsky about the same time that I retrieved  these last boxes of paintings from the storage. And we can add another quirky coincidence to the web.

Jeff didn’t know about this archive; nonetheless he happened to send along these memories of Pete:

Pete was so obsessed with the details of the things he loved that he made a scaled model of his beloved hills in his back yard and even built a scaled down oil rig using the design used by the wildcatters of the 1880's and 1890's. This was not a model. He actually drilled for oil in another of his back yards and struck the water table at 66 ft. of depth. In the previous century it would have made a good well, providing clean water.

 

I remember the hill in the corner of the Hampton's back yard, complete with sumac bush. You may recall this picture of Pete with his home-made telephone pole.

So next week we’ll get into some of the good stuff from the Bygone Oilfields box. There may even be a scary story coming up.


Next: Bygone Oilfields Archive>