High Country Harmony : Upper Ojai Residents Share Values, Including a Love of Nature

By DARYL KELLEY

Aug. 8, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Midway between Ojai and Santa Paula, the mountain valley known as the Upper Ojai stretches four miles--a wild and alluring domain of black bear, frustrated cowboys from Los Angeles and souls seeking peace among the mystics of the high country.

Unspoiled by urban development and dominated by the towering Topatopa Bluffs, the area is home to 400 families, a community in the old-fashioned sense of the term where values are shared and neighbors look out for each other.

Children wander the creek beds and join 4-H. Parents go to barn dances, barbecues and fund-raisers at the school. Some of the men--and a woman marshal--rope steers twice a week at Jim Hall’s place. There’s no cable TV.

Not long ago, everybody even pitched in to raise Richard Loy’s new barn on a hot Fourth of July. And when Barbara Vize’s fat sow fell in her swimming pool, neighbors on Chumash Road came running to pull it out.

Then there’s the feel of the place. It backs up against the Los Padres National Forest, so nature is a neighbor too.

Yet young Raul Ortega was awe-struck last winter when two condors from the Sespe Wilderness lit on his roof. And June Behar was more than a little surprised when she thought her husband was in their back-yard spa one moonlit night, but the creature with the hairy back turned out to be a bear.

“The people up here are connected not only with each other and their families but to nature, because they live with the elements all around them,” said Carol Holly, teacher-principal at Summit School, a tiny elementary with only five classrooms.

“This is what people would like to think the whole world is,” she said.

The residents themselves are a mix of old-timers who trace their roots to homesteaders of the late 1800s and newcomers drawn to the country by a simpler, safer life.

The community counts among its number television actors, script readers for Warner Bros. and Paramount studios, a USC professor of medicine, a fire captain, a sheriff’s sergeant, a cabinetmaker, a cutting horse trainer, lawyers and ranchers and a legion of firefighters from Los Angeles County.

Renowned ceramist Beatrice Wood makes her home there. Actor Larry Hagman has a $2.7-million mansion on a nearby ridge. Two foundations offering peace through meditation draw outsiders for soothing sojourns among circling hawks and towering oaks. Herbalists offer tours of the creeks.

Many of the newly arrived fled the Los Angeles Basin but kept their jobs because they are not required to commute to work each day.

“We wanted a rural setting where we could keep horses and cattle,” said actor John Perry, 50, who searched Southern California for the right situation.

“The Upper Ojai just seemed to be the best of all worlds,” he said. “It’s a community with an intellectual base plus a real rural small-town feeling. You can depend on your neighbors. When your kids go out to play, you don’t have to watch them all the time. And it’s only an hour and 15 minutes from Universal.”

At least two families moved to the valley in the last three years as an immediate response to crime. One mother saw a man shot dead near her home in Pasadena and moved to the Upper Ojai a month later.

USC professor Richard Scribner, wife Cathy and their four young boys left San Pedro two months after finding a man standing in the couple’s bedroom one night.

Everything about their new home felt comfortable and safe, Scribner said.

“People come up here with similar sets of values and the same socioeconomic kinds of assets too,” he said. “I was a bleeding heart for quite a while. But I’m not prepared to sacrifice my kids for my bleeding heart. My boys love it here. They’re Robin Hood every day out in their trees.”

‘A Good Mix’

The Upper Ojai feels exclusive. Well-tended orchards, roping arenas and large cattle ranches pick up where the oak forests of Sulphur Mountain Ridge leave off. And tony 10- and 20-acre ranchettes dominate the man-made landscape.

“If you’re going to go rural, it sure is nice to have it near a town such as Ojai, where you can get a cup of cappuccino,” whispered one affluent newcomer who has not quite given up her city ways.

But the people of the Upper Ojai are as much a mix of rich and poor as Ventura County as a whole. Locals call it “a good mix.”

Though better educated and holding more managerial and professional jobs, upper valley residents had a median household income in 1990 of $38,750--about $7,000 below the county norm, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. About 16% of households earned less than $15,000 a year, while 20% made more than $75,000.

There are affordable rental homes along Sisar Creek and in the village of Summit. House prices currently range from $145,000 for a three-bedroom cabin to $2.6 million for a new house on 269 acres of mountainside.

There is a mix, too, of political points of view, although residents are said to have a philosophical streak in common.

“Upper Ojai is similar to Malibu and Sierra Madre,” said architect Joseph Amistoy. “You have people who are free thinkers. They don’t like anybody telling them what to do. Up here, there’s a spread in politics from pot smokers to right-wingers and everything in between.”

Summit School is a barometer of the area’s growth. In eight years, enrollment in the K-6 elementary has jumped from 80 to 153.

Although it’s hard to tell by driving the valley’s only highway, the Ojai-Santa Paula Road, the Upper Ojai had its own building boom during the overheated real estate market of the late 1980s. Half the community’s families moved in between 1985 and 1990, according to the census.

Recent arrivals tend to feel that the valley is just about the right size. But Carl Hofmeister, 72, a community leader for 50 years--his parents moved there in 1897--thinks things are getting too crowded.

“When I was a kid there were maybe seven or eight families in the whole valley. Now there must be 400 or 500, and they’re still moving in. I guess they’re trying to run us out,” he said.

“There’s a lot of decent people here in the valley. And we get along pretty well,” he said. “But some of them bring the city with them. If we run a lot of cattle, people get after us. You can’t spray your crops for bugs or weeds. You can’t make a lot of dust, and you’re not supposed to make a lot of noise.”

The valley is changing, and Hofmeister figures he’s going to have to sell off some of his several hundred acres.

“If you can’t do farming with it, you have to do something with it in a decent way,” he said.

For the Kids

It was summer break and early morning--just after 9 o’clock last Monday--but there was already activity at Summit School, the center of social life for Upper Ojai families for eight decades.

Paul Hofmeister, Carl’s son, was pacing the bare land he planned to shape into a new soccer field. Carl, Paul and all five of Paul’s kids have attended the school, and Paul was donating his time and heavy machinery to give something back.

Though still early, the morning was hot and the temperature would eventually reach nearly 100 degrees. A warm breeze blew and sage was in the air. School secretary Pat Nichols, seated on a bench beneath large mulberry trees, told stories of her community.

Some of the men, including her husband, Jim, a computer programmer, take off each spring for a ride into the Sespe high country.

“They’re a bunch of frustrated cowboys, and they really rough it,” Nichols said, smiling. “They bring in cubes of hay by helicopter and ice for the beer. They’ve had shrimp, lobster and steak over the campfire. The women laugh about it every year.”

Nichols was joined by Judy Enneking and Barbara Vize, both parents, who heard through the grapevine that a visitor was at the school. None of the three--all refugees from the L.A. Basin--has been in the valley for more than a decade. But they all revel in its small-town intimacies.

If they need a postage stamp, they just leave 29 cents in the mailbox. If they have a construction project, they keep it quiet or neighbors show up early with their sleeves rolled up. If it snows or the hail is heavy, the four-wheel-drives pull out to pick kids up for sledding.

When a neighborhood girl got into a strange car last year, “everybody was really concerned,” said Enneking, leader of the 4-H horse program. “It turns out her family had a new car.”

As the women talk, Juli Vize, 12, rides up on her horse. Nearly all the children have one kind of animal or another.

“That’s the primary motive for all of us,” said Barbara Vize, who owns an Arcadia upholstery company with her husband, Jim, an avid roper. “The openness for the kids. Safety, and places they can go. We don’t worry about them terribly much. They’re either at the school or up Sisar Creek.”

Principal Holly was at the school, cleaning out her desk because the school district promoted her to the lower Ojai Valley down the hill.

Holly’s school made the news when students voluntarily gave up television for five weeks last spring. And it has been selected by the state to test an innovative teaching program.

“Right now I’m feeling a deep sense of loss,” she said. “We live together. We play together. Your child is my child. The connection is really deep. We had one family that moved away and they come back every six months for a couple of weeks to visit.”

Mighty Neighborly

To tour the Upper Ojai with Ventura County Sheriff’s Sgt. Rodney Thompson, whose family has been in the valley since 1887, is to remember what it was like to know your neighbor.

“There’s the Brooks,” said Thompson, 44, cruising slowly down potholed Sisar Lane. “Their kids came through school a couple of years after me, Lane and his younger sister.

“The Sedlaks, these are fine folks. Just hard-working and hardscrabble all their lives,” Thompson said. “The 4-H club wanted a pig scale and John said, ‘Here’s $300 as seed money. I want my grandkids to have it someday.’

“Joe Kuddes here, he went to Vietnam,” the sergeant added. “Now he works for the Santa Paula waterworks.”

At the end of Sisar Lane, Thompson paused near the Sisar Creek.

“When I was a kid, my father and I’d go up this stream and catch a trout,” he said. “My son and I went up this stream and caught a trout. And you can still go up this stream and catch a trout 13 or 14 inches long.”

Thompson, a deputy in the Ojai station, knows the crime in his community.

“We had a theft out of the back of my neighbor’s truck the other day,” he said. “We had a burglary a couple of months ago where they took a VCR. Six months ago the hamburger stand was broken into. Speeding is probably the worst thing going up here.”

Violent crime? Well, there was a murder 25 years ago, he said. “Andy Kitley. He went to Nordhoff a year or two ahead of me. Had something to do with a party and a gun. Up there on Highwinds Road.”

From Richard and Virginia Loy’s hillside lot, Thompson points out pioneer ranches and notes the apricots and walnuts left from once-robust orchards. The grapes have all disappeared.

It was at the Loys that the community gathered in 1985 to watch the horrific fires that charred 120,000 acres of the Los Padres National Forest and threatened their valley.

“We brought out coolers and the kids went swimming,” he said. The valley was sociable even as disaster loomed.

But not everybody, Thompson said. Some of the newly arrived are standoffish at first. “So you just have to go out and put the invite to them. But you do it,” he said. “They’re still your neighbors.”

Upper Ojai at a Glance Population: 1,048

Racial Breakdown

Anglo: 85.8%

Latino: 11.8%

Asian: 1.4%

Black: 0.3%

Other: 0.6%

Education (25 years and older) High school degree: 74.3%

College degree: 30.1%

Household Income

Median: $38,750

Under: $15,000 15.5%