the glendoran Nov/Dec 1991
Remembering Old Witches
By Dwayne Hunn
David Cooperfield does magic. If we are observant, and lucky, some of us have magic people dancing in our lives. Often times the magic people guide us, or is it waltz us, through magic places as they fly by.
Only two years remained before the
hip decade of the 60's would be history. Five of
us with two decades of experience under our belts were living on a 2.5 acre "pharm" where piles of
rail road ties were stacked and tottering 15 and 20 feet into the air, neighbors left bags of bottles in the
driveway, rocks and tunnel beams -- taken from the Los Angeles Feather
River project via the pharm's rattling
22 year old flatbed truck -- were
strewn here and there on the acreage.
We knew the "collected junk"
was to build memorable
stuff and Michael's dream -- a
Castle Made of Left Overs. Unfortunately, the ritzy suburban
neighborhood didn't have the
same confident vision, imagination, or sense of foolhardiness.
For the five of us, there probably never was or
could be a better home for that time,
or maybe any time, of our lives. For
me, at least, I don't believe there could have been any better place to live. On the other hand, the expensive surrounding
suburban neighbors felt our home was just a bigger than life Sanford and Son backyard that made their eyes sore and dispositions sour.
Today, with
a lot of help from his friends, luck
and the good Lord, Michael and gang have buried most of
that "collected junk" and
other treasures within the walls of the 7 1/2 story Rubelian Castle Made of Leftovers. Some of the
collected junk became windmills made of retired telephone
poles. Some of the rail road
ties became the walls of my old house.
Some of the siding
from old barns and wineries became
house walls, castle ceilings and
firewood. All of the neighbors' recycled
bottles sit in the walls of the castle, sometimes reflecting their
varied colors to the outside world when
the thirteen pharm fireplaces work their sparkles.
They say that if you put enough monkeys in front
of enough typewriters long enough, you can get the Bible written. If
you have enough people pile enough junk together often
enough, I reckon you can build a castle. I 
guess that's why so much junk sticking together attracts the refined
likes of Harry Reasoner, Barbara Walters, Governor Dukemijian, Prince Charles,
Michael Landon, Alfred Hitchcock, the Washington Post, L. A. Times, etc.
The five who were part of the
Castle then have scattered some, but all those not wanted by the law still
return to sit and talk amidst the bound-together junk. Glen has taken his craftsmanship, skills
and artistry to St. John, Virgin Islands where he is a local legend. There the beauty of his Mongoose Junction
shopping center caused the tour boats to move their dock to front his center
and the Rockefellers of Caneel Bay openly seek his advice. Scott, who believed you really only needed
to make the first few monthly payments on any long term purchase, twice has
escaped from prison and seldom uses the pharm as a reference in his present job
searches.[1] John and his brother became the first 
two Americans to trek from the southern tip of Baja California to the
California border. In part of that journey, they devoured a much thirsted-for
six pack and a crate of fruit as it was thrown to them from a steel yacht -- by
a tall, rugged American screen legend who answered to "Duke" most of
his life. This chronicler, who upon
arrival at the pharm couldn't tell the difference between a pipe wrench and a
socket wrench, became the pharm gopher for many castle building projects and in
the embarrassing process learned how to build a few things. Good training for a guy who the local high
school and then Jerry Brown's California Conservation Corps would try to fire
-- both to their chagrin.
The Castle is a magnet to many,
but those who have been part of its growth come back not so much for its
treasure of collected junk but because of its now portly heart -- Head Janitor,
Michael. We still sit around and talk
about those who lived there in those hectic, hard working years. Most of us probably worked to obtain dreams
then but knew not whether those dreams would be anything other than
dreams. We talk of the others who came
before and after, and the friends who still partake and what they are doing
today.
Often, we touch on those who were loved and are no longer with us. The ones whose spirits we remember best are
probably those whose presence somehow helped us to make some dreams real. Often, they are people who seemed in some
way surreal, above the ordinary, or so wizened that their mere presence could
stoke the fires that built dreams.
Sometimes they didn't look the role of dream builders. They didn't seem to be driving and pushing
you. They just seemed to be wanting you
to have a good time "but be a good boy" in having that good time. They are the kind of people who say "so talking about it won't get
it done -- go do it...." They are
the wise and worldly ladies who say "why don't you call the girl rather
than think about calling her, you'll never know what she’s like or if she even
knows you are alive, if you keep your desires to yourself." They are those who don't dampen and put out
your dreams but somehow put the broom to them just enough to make you trash
them or test and build on them. Mrs.
Freezner had one of those brooms.
Michael knew her for fifteen
years, loving her more each year. She cleaned
for the influential people in town. She
also cleaned for him. She cleaned the
main kitchen, his room and the Tin Palace with its collection of priceless
antiques. Cleaning 4,000 square feet
of hard wood floors is not easy for a lady well beyond the government’s
mandatory retirement age. To better
equalize the work burden she, like all governments, made a law. "All ye who enter here, remove ye shoes
and wear clean socks lest a curse be hung upon you." The law hung beside the door of the tin palace
as a beware for all who entered. It
still does.
Like all effective
governments she realized that education, information and intimidation, when
properly mixed, creates an atmosphere from which effective administration can
happen. That may be why she became
founding publisher and editor of "The
Shriek", the pharm's monthly handscribed newspaper. All of us robust pharmhands soon learned she
had the most pervasive and bewildering network of undercover reporters ever
assembled. How she found out about the
most private and quietly (well, not
always totally quietly) done adventures, we still don’t know. That ability and the power of her often
proven "hexes” made us all contrite about removing our shoes to the Tin
Palace she named and helped fame. A
hex of six weeks without a date for stepping into a no-shoe area, failing to
wash your dishes, or forgetting to clean the tool shop made more than one of us
believers. The Shriek’s monthly ten pages brought a smile to all its readers’
faces with her hand sketched imagery of pharm flowers, peacocks, dogs and birds
and its homilies. Some of us are still
waiting to learn what the back masthead "A shrill bird is a happy bird”
means, although we could guess what the lead masthead implied "A
Clean bird is a Happy Bird!"
As the hunched back, chain
smoking old lady -- on a pharm where no one was allowed to smoke -- she was the
good witch who was also something of a mother and grandmother to each of
us. She seemed to know everything about
us and had fun finding out more. She
never said much about herself. She
asked about you, what you were doing, how you were feeling, were the ladies
treating you right and, of course, were you being nice? She knew our lives, knew who we had seen,
knew what we did last Thursday, knew what boiled our blood, what saddened our
hearts and she told us and her readers before we told others and even ourselves
what was going on with us.
Michael cried the Wednesday
in 1974 when he couldn’t pick her
up. He too never knew where her life
had been. As the hospital attendant
wheeled her by the desk on the ground floor of the hospital, the secretary
said, "Is that Mrs. Freezner?"
"Yes. Did you know her?" Michael said.
"Oh, Yes. Knew her well... Like everyone, loved her deeply."
Then the secretary told us
what none of us had been able to learn.
Yes, Mrs. Freezner had been married.
The husband, however, drank too much and they had problems. One day, in his drunken state, he stumbled
across California' Route 66 with his son in tow. In the middle of the road, that 12 year old watched his father
be run down by a semi-truck. Somehow,
the son blamed it on the mother and never seemed to forgive her.
"Yet she seemed to live,
love, work and save every penny for him.
When she asked for cigarettes, he'd say `I've got my 50 cents, where's
yours?' Of course, when he'd ask for
cigarettes, she's say, "One minute
dear, and I'll go get some.'"
Before Mrs. Freezner left us,
she proudly proclaimed that her son had become a Chinese language expert with a
Ph.D. in Linguistics.
A visit to her spotlessly
neat house, which she rented from Michael, could find her beguiling you with a
number of stories about the adventures of each of her nine cats. Each story revealed each cat's peculiar personality
that she cherished dearly.
The Shriek often said,
"A good witch is a happy witch!"
Well, the only witch some of us have ever met we fondly remember as one
with an awesome arsenal of goblins, warlocks and whammies that forced us to be
nice. Since the floors are still pretty
clean and the law is still obeyed, Mrs. Freezner is probably a "happy
witch". Like the seer that she
was, she'd probably not be too surprised by any of our adventures, since somehow within her 78 years she probably
had our stories pretty much penciled out for future editions of the Shriek
before she left.
"Have a good time boys, but be nice. And remember to keep your rooms clean.
A happy bird is a
clean bird."