Open Air Greek Theater
Raja Yoga Academy, Point Loma, California-ca. 1912
Theater erected by Katherine Tingley in 1901

LOMALAND SNAPSHOTS

By Vic Head, Spring 2009

At the Theosophical “Raja Yoga Academy” on Point Loma, San Diego, January 1921 to January 1926

Surprise, Surprise:  while thumbing through my old Raja Yoga “Messengers,” I found a picture of Dr. Barkema, newly arrived from the Netherlands, a Theosophist.  Heretofore I had only known him as director of the tuberculosis sanitorium on the east side of Tavern Road in Alpine.

I had just turned three years old (31 December, 1920).  Sitting in a sandbox screaming my head off, with my five-year-old sister Consuelo trying to console me.  I can only suppose it was my mother’s goodbye that was bothering me.  Here I will tell you a few flash memories, not necessarily in chronological order.

Twelve boys of my cottage getting their first spelling lesson. Clap as we recite:
" H-A-P-P-Y—Happy.  A-T-T-E-N-T-I-O-N—Attention."

I am sitting at a dining table in the refectory for an hour after the other eleven boys of my group have gone out to play.  I simply cannot eat the diced boiled eggplant!  I poke it around with my fork, arranging it in a half circle, lighter gray cubes, progressing around the plate to the darkest gray cubes.

Twelve of us tots are equipped with wings and run out into view of the amphitheater (“Greek Theater”) on cue as Midsummer Night’s Dream, by Shakespeare, is presented.
Can’t stand asparagus but it’s not as bad as eggplant so I don’t miss playtime after dinner.

We are sitting around a big table snapping green beans.

Playtime.  One of the boys stands a four-inch log about four feet long on end, proud of his strength.  The log slips, falls against a bee hive.  We are stung and stung.

There are steps in the cliff that drops down to the sea on the west side of Point Loma.  What a wonderful afternoon until an adult shouts, “Sting-Ray!” and we leave in a hurry.  There is a cave-like tunnel washed out by eons of wave action.  My sister Sylvia writes a very condescending theme, published in the “Messenger,” about “little brother” at the shore.

At the Greek Theater the school is presenting Alice in Wonderland.  I can still hear in my memory the opening song:

      I’m getting sleepy,  It’s very warm.
            There’s going to be a thunderstorm.
      I’ve walked at least eight miles today
            And now I’m afraid I’ve lost my way.
      I’m tired of making daisy chains,
            What is there left to do?
      Oh tell me Dinah, dearest dear,
            Oh tell me Dinah, dearest dear,
      What is there left to do?

Of course, the Queen was conducting a trial, shouting “Off with his head.”  My brother Norman (I had to be told he was my brother, whatever that meant.) held a scroll and read the charges against prisoners.  “Tom, Tom, the piper’s son, stole a pig and away he run….”  But Tom’s head was saved when it came out that the sound of a pig which one witness heard was really only an attempt by Tom to play his father’s bagpipe.

Boys and girls were mixed for music lessons and for public performances.  Baggy pongee pants for boys, pongee skirts for girls.  In one group lesson we had cardboard imitations of piano keyboards and we sang:

      Happy little sunbeams
            Shining through the blue,
      Even little sunbeams
            Have their work to do.
      Shining at our brightest     
            We with radiance glad
      Help to make the rainbow
            Make the whole world glad.

I was totally unaware of the huge audience at the Isis Theater in San Diego (could this be the same as what, these days, Patty Heyser called the Egyptian Theater?), but my mother told me later that some eight hundred people roared with laughter when Esther Montgomery was standing in the wrong place on the stage and I took her hand and showed her where she belonged.

Little tots weren’t taught much of the Theosophical Religion, but we had a rough idea of Nirvana as akin to heaven achieved after numerous reincarnations; but if you are a bad boy and you died you might come back as a grasshopper.

Easter would have been fun, but they hid the eggs in a vast poppy field, plants as high as my shoulders when I was small, and I never found any.

Another loss of playtime was when they made me sit staring at the fat I could not swallow.  Once my mother took me to Dr. Wood, complaining that I was not given milk.  Oh, what joy when Dr. Wood explained that either milk or meat, but not both, were given to children.  Mother insisted on milk for me so the horror of fat disappeared from my life.

Our not very popular caretaker married the Athletic Director Mr. Forbes, and a new caretaker whom we soon learned to love took over, Miss Beth Plummer.  Often as the sun was setting as a red ball in the fog and forming a red path on the water right to our feet, she would read Grimm’s or Andersen’s fairy stories to us as we sat on the edge of the western cliff.  Among my favorites, especially for acting out, was the story of the Billygoats Gruff. 

The four Head children were said to be excessive talkers.  I got so tired of being called chatterbox that as I grew older I didn’t want to talk at all.

Occasionally my father and mother, divorced though they were, would get together to visit us.  The six of us would sit on the steps of the huge amphitheater.  In a photo when I was about five, I was inordinately proud of my knitting.

I have no memory of classrooms.  Once I was leaning against a tree having a terrible time with long division.  Just couldn’t get the same answer twice until a passing adult showed me how to draw vertical lines and put all the multiplication digits in proper places.  End of problem.

There was a Japanese teacher named Miss Tamico who always wore bright clothes.  My but she was pretty. 

We wrote little themes, perhaps fifty or one hundred words. 

Typical:
      "Before I came here there was a nice lady who chased butterflies with a net and put them in a jar.  They would go to sleep." (Of course, I learned later that was my mother with a cyanide jar.)

Men in Scottish dress would do the sword dance—two crossed swords on the ground.

Then women in Swedish dress would sing:

      Sol do mi Sol do mi sol re
            Fal derah!
      Mi fa fa fa fa sol fa mi re mi
            Fal derah!

All my life I have resented the existence of words like corny or trite, so that my children grew up totally unfamiliar with the songs and poems of my youth.  Was this true of other nations?  In recent years we were entertained at an Elderhostel by a Swedish American Jazz Band.  After the program I asked if they had ever heard Sol do mi Sol do mi.
I got only that far when the whole group burst out with "Sol re FALDERAH!"--which I hadn't heard for seventy years.

On at least one occasion my mother was allowed to take me off the school grounds and walk me into San Diego proper.  Oh, how I loved the smell of automobile exhaust!

Mother told me of a time when the great opera singer Madame Schuman Heink sang at the Isis Theater.  There was standing room only and they arranged a double half circle of chairs behind her on the stage, where Mother had a seat.  Suddenly the singer announced “Now I sing for my little audience,” and she turned to those on the stage.  With tears streaming down her face she sang “Oh Danny Boy.”  Mother told me that the opera singer had lost two sons in the “Great War to end all wars,” one fighting for Germany and one for America.  And so I came to understand how two armies of men on opposite sides of a field would shoot guns at each other to kill as many of the “enemy” as possible.  No, the men on opposite sides had no reason to hate each other, only their leaders did.  Well, why didn’t the leaders do the fighting and leave the rest of the world alone?  Well, that’s what soldiers are for.

The other boys in my cottage got dozens and dozens of toy soldiers for Christmas and would set them in battle arrays on the floor.  My only interest was aroused when I learned that each soldier was formed from melted lead.  I begged my mother to bring me some lead so I could try to melt it.  It never happened, but Mother decided at once that I would grow up to be an engineer or scientist.   My fondness for making “mud pies” further convinced her.

One time after a noontime dinner with no eggplant or asparagus or fat, Miss Beth asked whether we would rather spend playtime marching like soldiers or playing something like Billygoats Gruff.  Only one vote for that, eleven for marching.  Followed the only tantrum I can remember.  I lay on the ground and kicked and screamed until Miss Beth got me into my pygammas, pinned them to my mattress, and left me while the eleven other boys did their marching.  My first lesson in majority rule and democracy.

When I told Mother about my tantrum she said that when we lived at Sacratero Valley I had been a pretty good boy, but had one terrible tantrum at about age one and one half when she refused to put honey on both sides of my toast.

Mr. Forbes sat on a fence with a huge megaphone.  The little boys ran a twenty-five yard dash.  Booming voice:  “So and So First, Julius Cotter Second, Bobby Neeval Third.”  I walked close to the fence to tell Mr. Forbes,  “No, Bobby Neeval and I were tie.”  Booming voice:  “Victor Head SAYS that he and Bobby Neeval were tie.”  Roar of laughter.  I want to sink into the ground with shame.  So I learned that in athletics, referees have the last word.

Once, some of us were walking through the vast vegetable garden.  The growing beets and carrots were beautiful to see but little sprigs of something called fennel was delightful to chew!  I wanted to walk there often.

As I continue to write day after day, I find myself dreaming an endless stream of memories so I better stop soon.

 What a big thing was Christmas, way better than birthdays when girls wore wreaths of flowers on their heads and boys had similar wreaths pinned over their hearts.  But oh, the excitement of Christmas which had no religious significance.  Six boys in each of the two dormitory parts of our circular cottage would hang stockings at the foot of our beds.  In the dark of night I would wake up and feel my stocking.  My last year’s harmonica and gyroscope had long since gone the way of children’s toys, but yes, this lump was surely a box containing a new Marine Band Hohner Harmonica, in those days about fifty cents (Nowadays, many dollars).  Of course, we tots didn’t think money at all.  Oh, and this cubical box must contain a new gyroscope!  Most of the boys seemed to like their lead soldiers best, but I never tired of the way a gyroscope seemed to defy gravity.

Christmas morning:  Breakfast at the highly decorated refectory.  What a thrill when men in green with curled up toes were announced as “Robin Hood and his Merry Men.”  I suppose they were students of college age.  Oh, how they could sing!  I could have listened all day.

On Christmas evening, the whole school would gather in the rotunda of the domed academy building.  There was a stage.  Tension grew.  At last in marched Santa Claus, up onto the stage with a huge bag on his back.  He placed the bag on the stage floor and out jumped a little girl holding an evergreen tree perhaps one and one half feet high.  This had one light on it.  Santa and the girl backed away, and suddenly all lights were extinguished as Santa was heard to say “GROW LITTLE TREE, AS YOU NEVER HAVE GROWN BEFORE.”  A few colored lights near the floor, then more and more lights programmed to light up in such order as to give the impression of a tree growing to full stage height, and when the house lights came on, there was the huge tree.  MERRY MERRY CHRISTMAS!  Best of all, we all sang JINGLE BELLS.