For Pioneer, It Was in Some Ways a Real Jungle Out There

Milking the cow was enough of a chore without those lions roaring in the background.

So young Kathy Parks marched down the street to Goebel’s Lion Farm, later known as Jungleland, to tell off the man whose wild animals were upsetting her cow.

“The time to feed the lions was always the time I had to go milk the cow. When they’d bring the feed wagon out to feed the lions, of course they’d roar and jump back and forth for their feed and scare the cow. She’d upset the bucket of milk. So that went on for a long time, and I kept gettin’ mad.”

Mad she might have been, but when she saw Louis Goebel, it was love at first sight.

They soon married, and Kathleen Parks Goebel became mistress of what would become one of Southern California’s biggest tourist attractions.

But her life in the Conejo Valley had begun years earlier when her family moved to a cabin in the Santa Monica Mountains. There they lived in a one-room house, hauled water from a creek and survived a range war between ranchers and homesteaders. The Parks family arrived in the wilderness in 1913.

“My dad at that time was a jeweler, and he was sick most of the time. The doctor told him that if he didn’t get out, away from the business and the store and get out into the open, he was going to go into consumption.”

Taking his doctor’s orders seriously, Kathy’s father, Eugene B. Parks, an optometrist, and her mother, Jenny, sold their business in Santa Monica and bought what was known as a relinquishment from a family of homesteaders in the Santa Monica Mountains.

As part of the Homestead Act, the government released specific lots of publicly held land to those hardy enough to clear five acres for every 40 acres they claimed. The pioneers also had to live on the land at least seven months out of every year.

But the government had also been leasing out public land around the Santa Monica Mountains for private cattle grazing, and the steady growth of homesteaders infringed on the range land that ranchers depended on to feed their herds. Unsuspecting families like the Parkses walked right into a West Coast range war among the state, the people and Malibu Ranch, owned by the indomitable May Knight Rindge.

The Malibu Ranch, a 13,500-acre expanse of coastline property stretching from Los Flores Canyon to the Ventura County line, was the Rindge family sanctuary. Initially the family allowed travelers to pass through the ranch, but cattle rustling and vandalism forced them to block the route off.

Rindge’s husband, Frederick, died in 1905, but she would fight to maintain her family’s privacy and keep public roads off their pristine land for years to come. The conflict would escalate into full battle during the time the Parkses settled into their plot in the mountains above Malibu Ranch.

On Ranch Property

Leaving Santa Monica in the summer of 1916, the Parkses spent two days of quiet travel before they reached the line in the sand at Malibu Ranch.

“When we got to Malibu Ranch, we were going along the road and I could see all day long a guy riding horseback, but I never said anything, just a guy riding horseback I thought.”

The family made camp on the beach that night, fixed dinner and went to bed. “All of us were in bed when all of a sudden there was the darndest commotion. Us kids woke up and saw everybody packing up everything and getting ready to go.”

That guy on horseback was one of Rindge’s outriders, who had waited until they were asleep to loudly roust and threaten the campers. Packing up the camp was hard work, especially in the dark.

“Mama drove a buckboard with our groceries and our trunk of clothing. Then to pull it, my dad had a span of mules, old Duke and Doc. On that wagon we had six goats, two dogs and two cats. I had a pair of guinea pigs and we had somewhere in the neighborhood of a dozen chickens in crates on the horse.”

A cow followed behind and Kathy brought up the rear riding the horse. They headed inland, and because of their early start, the fourth night was spent in the friendly territory of the Russell family’s El Triunfo Ranch, which is now Westlake Village.

One of the duties of travelers passing through was to stop at the Triunfo post office. “If you passed any houses, you’d give them their mail. Other than that, you left it with somebody and the kids would take it to school the next day and see it got taken home.”

After contributing to the spice of small-town news, the Parkses traveled the steep grade of Triunfo Pass and stopped at Carlisle Canyon. They had to leave the wagon and travel the rest of the way on foot, using the horse and mules to pack in their belongings.

They finally reached their homestead on the dividing line of Ventura and Los Angeles counties above what is now Mulholland Highway.

That first year was spent in a 100-square-foot house with no windows and a dirt floor. Kathy’s parents slept in bunk beds, and the kids, wrapped in blankets, slept on the floor. They hauled water from the west fork of the Arroyo Sequit up to the house to be heated for bathing and dishes, and carried their laundry down to the creek to be scrubbed on a washboard.

At the end of that first summer, Kathy hiked up the mountain and down the other side, five miles each way, to get to Yerba Buena School. She was just 10 years old.

The Parkses spent the next 10 years growing corn, hunting and making long treks into town for supplies, dealing all along with Rindge and her armed enforcers.

“Mrs. Rindge tried to keep the homesteaders from going up and down her road. The state wanted to put a highway through. They went to trial I don’t know how many times. Finally, the county put a highway up and she fought them all the way through. She’d dynamite this, and she’d blow up that. Her riders carried guns with orders to shoot any homesteader they saw on her property.”

Leaving the Homestead

After 10 years of hardship, Kathy’s mother, Jenny, yearned for civilization, so the family left the homestead. Moving just over the hill to Thousand Oaks, the Parkses bought a small restaurant up the street from a man who owned many dogs (which he had painted like Huskies for an Alaskan movie), and six lions. His name was Louis Goebel.

Shortly after meeting, Louis and Kathy were married in the Crowely house, which is still standing today at the corner of Pleasant Way and Oakview Drive, and Kathy moved onto the compound.

She switched her attentions from domestic to exotic animals; the only problem was getting used to the lions roaring in the night. Life at an exotic animal farm meant raising baby lions, panthers, elephants, gorillas and even a hyena, in addition to three children of her own.

Boiling huge kettles of rice and raisins, mixing bottles of formula and nursing sick or injured animals 24 hours a day was not out of the ordinary for Kathy. Neither, it seems, was fetching a runaway baby elephant out of someone’s garage (yes, it sat on the hood of a car), or sending a trained chimpanzee up a tree to toss down, one by one, a pack of escaped movie-extra monkeys.

But one early episode with their 3-year-old son Eugene gave the Goebels a scare.

“This lion was laying with her back end toward the front of the cage. He managed to reach through and get hold of her tail, and pull it over, and bite it! I saw him do it. Of course the lion roared and jumped around. I was right there so I grabbed him.”

Louis decided it was time to move the family out of the compound to a log cabin just down the street. Others came to call the animal park home. Circuses would use the location as winter headquarters, finding work at the Lion Farm until it was time to hit the road again. The farm also provided food and lodging for the trainers and their animals.

“The Lion Farm automatically drew in other people with animals. And because we had trained animals that we leased out for the season, when the season was over, those people had to go somewhere, so they came out to Thousand Oaks. They liked it, and the next thing you know, they were buying property.”

Luring People in Show Business

Jungleland was the lure that attracted show-business people and others to build and invest in the town. Thousand Oaks, Westlake and Hidden Valley would have grown on their own in time, but having the popular attraction on Thousand Oaks Boulevard exposed the area to many thousands of people who, exclaiming about the beauty of the mountains and the valleys, decided to move here.

Land was a bargain and the weather was mild. The Lion Farm provided employment and entertainment while keeping restaurants, hotels, gas stations and other services hopping to fill the demands of visitors and new residents alike. The Goebels had the first telephone in town and provided firefighting equipment with a volunteer crew.

Spending her formative years as a hard-working pioneer in the unforgiving Santa Monica Mountains prepared Kathy for the dedication and personal sacrifice needed to create what would become a world-famous amusement park and the center of a growing town.

Her love of animals combined with a unique ability to bond with them helped their business thrive. Because of thorough preparation, Kathy’s hand-raised animals were popular with movies and circuses. People would travel long distances just to get their pictures taken with one of Kathy’s baby lions. Movie stars made certain their portfolios contained a picture of them with an exotic animal from the Goebels’ park.

Over the years, the animal compound changed hands and names, but Louis and Kathy oversaw the running of the operation from their exotic animal import/export business across the street. They had to reclaim the business time and again as no other operators had the fortitude and commitment to make it work.

Times were changing as well. The popularity of wild animals in movies was waning, and the cost of doing business kept going up as regulations became restrictive and insurance costs skyrocketed. Traveling circuses were also becoming victims of rising costs, and increasingly sophisticated audiences turned elsewhere for entertainment.

The Goebels were not running Jungleland when it closed in 1969. Due largely to a multimillion dollar lawsuit brought against the park by Jane Mansfield when her son was bitten by a young lion she was posing with, the once famous theme park went dark; 25,000 people attended the auction of 1,800 exotic animals and the unique equipment that went with them. When the bidding was done, the park closed permanently.

Louis passed away in 1981, and Kathy, who celebrated her 91st birthday in February, lives in Oregon with her daughter and other family members. Nothing remains of the compound, which is the site of the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza. But many remember Jungleland as lions’ roars filling the valley, cars filling the streets and laughter filling the air.

Tomorrow: The Great Depression hits the Conejo Valley. Myrtle Beyer, known as Preacher Beyer for her compassion, was among the early community members who turned to one another to survive.

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Four years ago, a group of Thousand Oaks residents launched an oral history project to preserve the memories of the Conejo Valley’s earliest settlers. With support from the Thousand Oaks Library Foundation, dozens of residents were interviewed and their remembrances transcribed and filed at the library. Tina Carlson, who heads the project, has pared down some of the interviews and provided them to The Times to publish during Conejo Valley Days. Today, using the voice of Kathleen Parks Goebel, 91, she tells the story of a Santa Monica Mountains homesteader who ended up running the former wild animal park known as Jungleland with her husband, Louis.