‘Bill and Pablo Return to Brookside’

“Brookside was the most beautiful place I’ve ever lived,� Bill reflects. “Our house there should have been preserved. It was like Will Rogers’s house, but twice as big.�

He remembers how a flood washed out the boulevard in 1980, and afterwards, their house was the last one that could be reached by car from PCH… for a whole year!

Bill and I parked on the dirt shoulder of the boulevard, and ducked under the yellow gate at Brookside Drive. Immediately, we were knee-deep in brush and pushing our way along paths that only existed in memory. Bill came prepared with a machete, but what used to be a 20-minute walk turned into two hours of negotiating every few steps forward in the wilderness.

The clearings that we succeeded in reaching, sheltered under large trees and couched in nasturtiums, were bulldozed home sites. One still had a Jacuzzi, with frogs swimming in it.

These had been the homes of Wendy Tahas and actor Robert Colbert (“The Time Tunnel�), Devon Carter and Merrick Davidson (“Messenger� newspaper founder), folksingers George and Katie Wood (“The Special World of George Wood and Katie�), Thais Rust Sykes (contributor of many photos to the Historical Society), painter Laura Way Mathiesen (whose home was called Marmont Studio), sculptor Arthur “King� Zimmerman, costumer Dean “Skip� Skipworth (“Raging Bull�), electrician Bob Sweeney (who lived in a plywood pyramid), dancer Catherine Holliss, and the corral of “Princess� (the horse celebrated in “Idlers of the Bamboo Grove: Poetry from Lower Topanga�).
It was a rare glimpse of a place once beloved that has been hidden away for decades.