Yeah I remember her place on West Baltimore it was the last house betore the trail that led up the canyon, years later I met the son of the people who bought that house, while doing some remodeling in a rec room they removed a piece of loose trim on a wall & found a very old bag of marijauna hidden there.
Another place name: "The Silver Forest" was up Madrone Canyon, past all the houses. I think there had been a low dam that had filled in with gravel, and some alders with their white trunks had grown in, thus the silver forest. In the very early sixties my family drove to the site for a picnic, I don't think we had the name for it then. A few years later as I got older it was the place to go to on foot catch lizards and snakes, as it was a sunny, rocky opening in the canyon. Then in teenagehood it was a place to pass through, on hikes up the mountain. In the late sixties one or two new houses were built at the end of the paved road, messing up access but you could still get around. We knew Janis Joplin was living in the house you had to skirt around....two friendly dogs came out and followed us, they wouldn't go home, one finally did, but the other hiked with us all day until we dropped him off on the way back (no one was home). Janis-ophiles may prove me wrong some day, but I swear that the dog had a tag that said "My name is Butch, I belong to Janis Joplin".
I remember going to the house on Blithedale when he would open to the public with the place filled wall to wall with Americana (I don't know what he did with his personal items)
My kid loved the Barbie's and lunch boxes and I loved everything.
Mickey Mc Gowan ran the Unknown Museum with Dickens & continued on when Dickens left to move to the Phillipines, you're right about the location being on Corte madera Ave. where Smith & Hawkens opened it's first location, after being evicted Mickey moved the location to the house across from Perry's Deli on Blithedale, until that building was razed to make way for a small development of townhouse type units, Mickey currently lives in San Rafael along with his wife & an ever growing collection of American pop culture.
We called Camino Alto "The Old Grade" and then just "The Grade"
About the Unknown Museum, I must be confusing it with someone else becuase I though that was run by Micki McGee or Michael somebody and located at the old Richfield Stn on Corte Madera Ave in MV and the on E Blithedale across from Perry's Deli (both had stacks of old televisions out front) If I'm wrong, what was the name of the place I'm thinking of ?
As I was driving Camino Alto today headed from Mill Valley to Corte Madera I recalled that during my high school days we called that road 'One Joint Hill', since it was possible to spark 1 up at the base and be finished with it by the time you reached level ground on the other side, some others I recall from the late '60's & early '70's were 'Dark Park', which was the park at the entry to Madrone Canyon in Larkspur, 'Grub Hill', an area on the hill south of the Corte Madera Library, 'Toyota Road' which was a road cut straight up through the woods from Madrone Canyon to Fireroad 10 where Probert's Toyota had supposedly tested & filmed Toyota Landcruisers in the early 1960's. Also remember the Free Store in downtown Larkspur which was run by assemblage/glue mosaic artist Dickens Bascomb before he went on to Mill Valley to open the Unknown Museum, the Free Store was just what the name implied, a store full of useful and useless stuff, that was all free, it was about one half block north of the Peso.
