By Jesse Phelps

The True Story of My Near Misses with Michael Jackson in Ojai and the 805

At around 11 o’clock one temperate Spring evening in 1989, three wily sophomore boys slipped on their blackest clothing, grabbed smoking materials and other nefarious objects and silently exited their cabins in the Upper Yard at Midland School in Los Olivos. Using the light of the moon in conjunction with a practiced knowledge of the rural landscape and laxity of the boarding facility’s faculty, they ambled from shadow to shadow and across a field, a road and a fence. The objective? Infiltrate Neverland.

We were intrepid souls. Through massive oaks and prickly brambles we trudged. But when we reached the top of a rise and saw down below us lights, rides and animals, the fear set in. All at once, the reality of what it would mean to get nabbed intruded, and we hurriedly bailed from the Neverland Ranch property and back to our cozy beds. In terms of pure proximity, that’s the closest I ever came to meeting Michael Jackson.

After all, we didn’t want to ruin it for everybody. All throughout that year, a rumor had persisted among the student body that Michael would come to visit our high school campus, the entrance of which was located directly across the road from that of his famous ranch. But he never did.

What many of my fellow students never knew was that I’d already had a correspondence with Mr. Jackson about five years earlier, resulting from his sojourn to Ojai.

Given that I was born in the front half of the ‘70s, it should come as no surprise that the first record I bought was Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” A precocious ten year-old, I’d saved my meager allowance for a few weeks so I could add a third LP to the vinyl collection my Uncle Randy had jumpstarted with a most memorable Christmas gift: a package containing “Business As Usual” by Men at Work and “Built for Speed” by the Stray Cats.

Blue Sky Music was an awesome store and an Ojai staple back then. Its proprietor, Sal Lucido, scared me a little bit at first but over time he got to know my musical taste and would recommend things to me – you seem to like a mix of pop and progressive, harmonies and good songwriting; check out the Alan Parsons Project – that would push me in different directions. 

I loved poring over the Billboard Hot 100 list at his counter and staring at the big west-facing wall in his arcade shop, where he proudly arranged the entirety of that venerable magazine’s top 100 albums. He’d dutifully shift the records around each week to reflect the new standings.

My love affair with the music of Michael Jackson started that one sunny Ojai afternoon when I marched into Blue Sky and gleefully added what would become the best selling album of all time to my infant collection. I listened to “Thriller” nonstop, memorizing the lyrics sheet from the interior sleeve and admiring with wonder the centerfold spread of Michael, perfectly coifed and looking so freaking cool in a stylish white suit, replete with a baby tiger on his knee and pocket square to match.

So when I heard, about a year later, that the King of Pop was in Ojai, I just about lost it. I wanted to meet him, bad. I begged my mom to let me show him how I could hit all his notes with my crisp adolescent voice and how’d I’d learned to moonwalk and mimic most of his signature moves.

But even my mom wasn’t allowed to see him, though he’d arranged a special visit to her place of business, the Ojai Library. It seems Michael loved books and libraries and wanted to check out ours once the day’s patrons had left and he could enjoy it in peace.

According to my then stepfather, Tony Neuron, who worked with my mom, head librarian Ann Crozier selected him to host that very special evening because he was the only employee who could be entrusted not to “go all fangirl” on Michael. (As an aside – and I love my mama with all my heart – if the day she and I met Sandy Koufax at a celebrity golf tournament at the Ojai Valley Inn is any indication, Ann made a wise choice. I don’t think I could have survived knowing she’d made yet another profession of enduring love to a longtime famous crush.)

“I didn’t lobby to be the one because I knew I would probably gush and embarrass,” she admits.

Anyway, legend has it that Michael was holed up at the Oaks, where he may or may not have been recovering from a procedure of some kind. When the library closed at nine, he walked over with his manager, Frank DiLeo. There he perused the space and had Tony enter him into the system so he could check out a couple of biographies – one large format, picture-laden tome on Michelangelo Buonarroti and another that detailed the lives of a host of classical musicians.

And though it had been determined I would not be allowed to crash the party (in retrospect, this may have been a good thing on many levels), God bless my mom for her creativity. We hatched a scheme, she and I, to try to involve Mr. Jackson as an advocate for libraries.

At the time, the American Library Association had a promotional campaign in which famous personalities posed with their favorite books for posters with the word “read” above or next to them in large capital letters. Not satisfied to simply suggest Mr. Jackson pose for a poster, I penned a version of “Beat It” called “Read It,” which we planned to pitch to him as a possible PSA for the ALA.

We were thinking, hey, this is tie-in city, baby. This is perfect.

My mom wrote to Michael via Mr. DiLeo and included a copy of the lyrics (and a horrifyingly ghastly picture I’d drawn of Michael).

Lo and behold, despite the presence of that drawing, my idol actually wrote us back.

While he did not ultimately record the song, it turns out he did, in fact, read it. He had kind words for my efforts, and even sent me an autographed photo. I cherished that thing for years – right up until I brought it to Midland, where another student promptly boosted it from my room.

Either that or my mom lost it. I find it likelier that I idiotically brought it to the school, where we had an “open door policy” – no locks – ostensibly meant to promote trust between all members of the campus community but effectively an invitation for students to steal from one another at will.

But hey, at least I still have those signed letters from Michael, the original copy of “Read It” and some really good memories of trespassing and of an icon who took a little time out to make a lonely kid’s day. 

And for all those who have made the determination that Mr. Jackson may have been an unethical human being, I’ll leave you with this. He allegedly piled up quite a fine on the two books he borrowed (ten cents per day really adds up). Inundated with overdue notices, his manager contacted library staff and offered to purchase them outright. Informed that the library did not sell books from its collection, he ultimately mailed them back in perfect shape with a check for $20.