By Mark Lewis

In his book “Children of the Sun,” Gordon Kennedy traces the hippies of the ‘60s back to a similar youth movement in 19th-century Germany. He asserts that a key figure linking these two countercultures was the frequent Ojai visitor, Gypsy Boots.

ONE DAY EARLY

in 1983, Gordon Kennedy was sitting in his Meiners Oaks farmhouse, flipping through a scrapbook he recently had inherited from his late father, when two vintage postcards caught his eye. Both featured the same man, Bill Pester, who looked for all the world like a classic hippie — long hair, long scraggly beard, wearing sandals and little else. But these postcards dated from early in the twentieth century, decades before the hippies’ heyday. 

Kennedy had never heard of Pester, but he thought he recognized the place where the photographs were taken. In the mid ‘70s he had spent time in the Coachella Valley, and he thought Pester’s stomping grounds looked familiar.

“That’s got to be Palm Canyon,” Kennedy said to himself. “And that guy looks German.”

Right on both counts.

Born in Saxony in 1885, Friedrich Wilhelm Pester joined Germany’s lebensreform (“life reform”) movement as a teenager.  People like Pester were known as naturmenschen (“nature men”), because they rejected industrialization and urban bourgeois materialism. They sought to live simply in the wild as sun-worshipping neo-pagans. This was difficult to do in Germany, so some nature men sought their Eden instead in thinly populated stretches of the American West. Which is what ultimately brought Bill Pester to the Coachella Valley.

He arrived in the U.S. in 1906 and eventually holed up in Palm Canyon on the outskirts of Palm Springs, which back then was little more than a railroad whistle stop. The warm weather supported Pester’s semi-nude lifestyle, and the abundance of fruit supported his vegetarian diet. His hut was located on the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians Reservation, but the tribe tolerated his presence. 

By 1916, Pester was a tourist attraction, profiled in the Los Angeles Times as the eccentric and picturesque “Hermit of Palm Springs.” He sold postcards to tourists with his image on the front and tips for healthy living on the back: “Eat fresh fruits and vegetables, take sunbaths, drink pure water, and abstain from unnatural stimulants like alcohol and caffeine.”

No unnatural stimulants? That didn’t sound like a hippie. But Gordon Kennedy, as he learned more about the lebensreform movement, saw parallels between the two countercultures. Kennedy was already familiar with the flower children of the ‘60s, having been something of an apprentice hippie himself.

BORN IN

1956, Kennedy mostly grew up in Orange County. But his family moved to Solvang for a couple of years in the late ‘60s, where Kennedy had a ringside seat for the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. He was only 13 in 1969 — the year of Woodstock — but he had three older siblings to tag along with. 

“I knew everything that was happening with the hippie lifestyle,” Kennedy said in an interview for this article. And he expected to become a hippie himself in due course: “I could hardly wait.”

He did not make it to Woodstock, but Santa Barbara County offered some similar experiences. He observed the hippie scene at the Red Rock Pools along the Santa Ynez River, where the local flower children partied every weekend.

“This was our Woodstock,” he says. “There were literally thousands of people up there, and nobody had any clothes on.”

Southern California hosted its own rock festival that year, the Palm Springs Pop Festival in April. But there were more hippies in town than there were concert seats, so thousands of would-be festivalgoers flocked to Tahquitz Canyon. (Which, like its neighbor Palm Canyon, is on the Agua Caliente reservation.)

Tahquitz is a beguiling place, so much so that filmmaker Frank Capra used one of its waterfalls as a stand-in for Shangri-La in a scene in his 1937 movie “Lost Horizon.” To the hippies of 1969, it was a paradise right out of their collective unconscious.

“A real Eden scene,” one young reveler told a reporter.

Kennedy was not there, but a friend told him all about the Tahquitz scene. Years went by and the ‘60s became the ‘70s and the hippie dream died, at least for most people. But Kennedy read “Be Here Now” by Ram Dass and “Siddhartha” by Herman Hesse, and when he graduated from high school in June 1974, he hitchhiked to Tahquitz Canyon, where hippies were still living in caves. 

 “I went out to explore it and I fell in love with the place,” he said.

One difference from 1969 was that some of the 1970s Tahquitz denizens were living much healthier lives than the drug-addled hippies of the ‘60s. “I began to meet people out there who were very much into the natural lifestyle,” Kennedy said. 

He spent 15 months there, while flirting with the idea of going to college. To help feed himself, he started growing things.

“I learned how to farm in the mountains above Tahquitz,” he says. “I just started planting everything I could get my hands on.”

He read books by the German naturopath Arnold Ehret (1866-1922), who wrote about fruitarianism. Eventually Kennedy forgot about college and set out to become an organic orchardist.

“Tahquitz taught me what I wanted to do with my life,” he said. 

The Agua Caliente Indians cleared the hippies and their trash out of Tahquitz and closed the canyon to visitors. Kennedy began traveling up and down the West Coast, chasing his dream. His path eventually led him to Carpinteria, where he had charge of an organic orchard. But he wanted to have his own, so he looked around for a likely property, and in 1978 he found one in Ojai.

TWO ACRES 

on Oso Road in the Riverbottom district of Meiners Oaks did not constitute a sizable orchard, but it was big enough for Kennedy to grow 30 types of fruit there. There was a health food store and restaurant in town called Solar Winds which sold organic produce, and where Kennedy periodically encountered an extraordinary person who called himself Gypsy Boots. 

Gypsy had the long hair and gray beard of an elderly hippie, but he was much older than the oldest hippies extant. He was born Robert Bootzin in San Francisco in 1915, into a family of Russian Jewish origin that practiced vegetarianism. As a young man during the Great Depression, Gypsy fell in with the so-called California Nature Boys, a band of itinerant fruit pickers who rejected bourgeois materialism. By the 1940s they were living in caves in Tahquitz Canyon.

Bill Pester was not around the Coachella Valley for much of that period (he was serving time in prison on a morals charge), and it remains a subject of debate whether he ever met the Nature Boys face to face. But there is evidence that they knew who he was, and Kennedy is sure he influenced their lifestyle.

The Nature Boys had the same look as Pester; they shared a similar philosophy of life; they lived for a time in the same area; they were known to frequent Pester’s favorite Los Angeles restaurant, the Eutropheon, a raw-food cafeteria. Too many similarities, Kennedy thinks, to explain away as coincidence.

In Tahquitz, a Nature Boy named Eden Ahbez wrote a ballad about “a very strange, enchanted boy,” who “wandered very far, very far, over land and sea.” This boy was “a little shy, and sad of eye, but very wise was he.” Naturally, Ahbez titled his song “Nature Boy.” He offered it to the singer Nat King Cole, who released it as a single in 1948. It shot straight to the top of the charts and stayed at No. 1 for seven weeks.

Now the Nature Boys were famous, especially Ahbez. But Bill Pester faded into obscurity. He got married and moved to Arizona, where he died in 1963. By then he was entirely forgotten, and his death passed unnoticed by the media.

Gypsy Boots, on the other hand, was at the height of his fame in 1963. He too had gotten married, and had three sons, whom he and his wife raised indoors in L.A. in a house on Cumberland Avenue. Gypsy had leveraged the enduring “Nature Boy” mystique and his extroverted personality make himself a minor Hollywood celebrity. 

He pitched health-food products as a regular guest on Steve Allen’s television show, and opened the Health Hut, a health-food store and restaurant. He also became a regular visitor to Ojai.

“Gypsy went to Ojai often back in the old days, the ‘60’s, the ‘70s, the ‘80s,” his son Alex Bootzin told the OQ via email. “No doubt he got to know many orchard owners. Gypsy peddled organic fruit from Ojai all over Southern California. He probably also sold his own health products to Solar Winds.”

One orchard owner Gypsy got to know was Gordon Kennedy, who pumped him for Nature Boys stories. Gypsy was happy to comply.

“Connecting with people was as important to Gypsy as his vegetarian regime,” Alex Bootzin said. “Also, when he lived in Los Angeles, getting away to places like Ojai was how he recharged his soul.”

His visits became more frequent after he moved in the ‘80s to nearby Camarillo. Later he was a regular at the Garden Terrace restaurant, co-owned by Alex’s friend Gay Martin. 

Meanwhile, Kennedy continued gathering information about Gypsy and his peers and their possible connection to Bill Pester. 

“I just had this idea that there was something going on that all these people were connected to,” Kennedy says.  

After collecting many pieces of this puzzle, Kennedy began putting them together. The result, eventually, was a ground-breaking book called “Children of the Sun: A Pictorial Anthology From Germany to California, 1883 to 1949.” 

Self-published in 1998, the book introduced its readers to the history of Germany’s lebensreform movement – and its influence on the Nature Boys.  Per its Amazon.com blurb, it reveals “the true origins of the organic, alternative and natural lifestyles which eventually took root on American soil and have become the huge phenomenon that they are today.”

“It’s kind of an unusual part of history that most people don’t know much about,” Kennedy said.

He carries the story forward into the ‘60s. When the hippie movement bloomed in California, Gypsy Boots was right there in the public eye, with his long hair and beard and his exuberant embrace of the moment. (Minus the drugs and the alcohol.) Having been flying his freak flag for many decades, he seemed like an elder statesman of a movement that had just been born.

Gypsy died in Camarillo in 2004, just short of his 89th birthday. The original Nature Boys are long gone and mostly forgotten.

As for Kennedy, he left Ojai in 2007, after 29 years on Oso Road. These days he grows organic dates on a farm east of the Salton Sea. “Children of the Sun” is out of print, but used copies periodically are available online, and a Google search turns up many articles and interviews on the topic. (See also “The Summer of Love: How Hippies Changed the World,” a BBC documentary that includes an extensive interview with Kennedy.)

Kennedy’s date farm is little more than an hour’s drive south of Tahquitz Canyon, which is once again open for visitors — but these days one must buy a ticket. The Agua Caliente Band wants no repeat of the hippie invasion of 1969. But visitors can hike to the “Lost Horizon” waterfall and commune with nature, following in the footsteps of Bill Pester, Eden Ahbez, Gypsy Boots — and Gordon Kennedy. In a sense, Kennedy has come full circle since he first explored Tahquitz as a wide-eyed 18-year-old back in 1974.

“I bought an annual pass,” he said. “I’m there virtually every week!”