in 1973, Rick the Stick asked Janet if we would teach school for his children. This evolved into a little one room schoolhouse in the Zalate, which we ran between 1974 and 1977. Bett’s children, Drew and Trevor attended every morning for 3 hours, as they lived a few houses up the path; The Robinson kids were there occasionally and Liuba’s kids took the putt putt in from Colimita and landed at the beach when the ocean allowed.
I ran into Kathryn Hill a few years back and she gave me this photo of us at a party at Betts and Byron’s. 1977
In May of 1982 Casa Zalate, often referred to as the Casa Juanitas (1975-2002) caught fire from the heat spreading from the fire at Rita Tillets’ house. There were two theories about the fire: one was that the Mexican owner burned the place down so he could get the property back from Rita and Howard who were trying to arrange for Zona Federal, and the other was that in a drunken state one of the Tillets knocked over a candle. Quien sabe?
(Photo credits) Celeste Greco1982, gave me this photo that she took of the fire.
In 1997 Rudy was speaking at a conference in Los Alamos at the invitation of Marjorie Bell-Chambers, on the 50th anniversary of the end of WW2. He put some of our Yelapa seminar brochures on the speakers table. After his talk, Kay Harper, 83, introduced herself to him and told him her story about how in 1958 she canoed over to Yelapa with her husband, the Los Alamos Laboratory photographer Bob Harper, and Steve Glumaz whom they’d met in a bar in PV.
Betts paid us $20 a week to teach her kids, which was just enough to live on. Betts was very committed to her kids and their education. Since I had always hated school (and had recently dropped out of the university) I had the opportunity to teach all the things I wished I had been taught; together we danced to trance music, did yoga, wrote poetry while listening to Stravinsky, spent time down by the lagoon to study frogs, read National Geographic and cooked, baked and shopped at the tiendas in order to learn arithmetic.
Rick died in ‘74 and we never worked with his children, but we came to inhabit the Zalate because Fran, a mid age American Spanish teacher who had lived her adult life with a Mexican husband in Morelos somehow got the house. She wasn’t staying long and like many people she liked the idea of a house in Yelapa more than the reality of it. She asked us to housesit which we did for years until she let us take over lease in ‘77. We re-roofed the house in ’79 and built the little treatment house next door and then did so again after it burned down in ‘82.
I ran into Kathryn Hill a few years back and she gave me this photo of us at a party at Betts and Byron’s. 1977
In May of 1982 Casa Zalate, often referred to as the Casa Juanitas (1975-2002) caught fire from the heat spreading from the fire at Rita Tillets’ house. There were two theories about the fire: one was that the Mexican owner burned the place down so he could get the property back from Rita and Howard who were trying to arrange for Zona Federal, and the other was that in a drunken state one of the Tillets knocked over a candle. Quien sabe?
At the time Airforce Dan was watching our house as he lived in the Galeria next door. He later told me that he raced over to dampen down the house with water with a hose from the watertank, but the ground was so hot that when he got close he could tell that the house was going to erupt from beneath. He said he ran for his life as it exploded.
I was up in Boston in the middle of giving a Polarity treatment when Byron called me with the news. We rebuilt the Zalate and the small treatment house that summer with money loaned to me by my parents.
People in the village brought plants for the garden. Don Juan Cruz gave us free rent for a few years, Buddy Berlin paid for the rock wall to be rebuilt and Saul Kaplan (of Saul and Sandy, who had built their house next to Ratza’s a few years earlier) personally installed the whole water system.
(Photo credits) Celeste Greco1982, gave me this photo that she took of the fire.
In 1997 Rudy was speaking at a conference in Los Alamos at the invitation of Marjorie Bell-Chambers, on the 50th anniversary of the end of WW2. He put some of our Yelapa seminar brochures on the speakers table. After his talk, Kay Harper, 83, introduced herself to him and told him her story about how in 1958 she canoed over to Yelapa with her husband, the Los Alamos Laboratory photographer Bob Harper, and Steve Glumaz whom they’d met in a bar in PV.
These are a few of Bob”s photos of their stay in Yelapa. Later that year, Kay donated her husband’s Yelapa photos and her notebooks about her travels to Mexico, to our non- profit the Center for World Indigenous Studies’ www.cwis.org <http://www.cwis.org> , where we host the online Bob Harper Collection which includes some great shots of both Yelapa and PV in 1958.
Photo Credits: Robert Harper 1958
Photo Credits: Robert Harper 1958
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