by Pablo Capra
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| Detail of photo by Jim Ganzer, 1960s |
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| Photo of David Hayward by Katie Dalsemer |
Growing up in Lower Topanga Canyon, Heather Hayward’s favorite pastime was to walk down the creek with her three dogs to the strange little cabin hidden in the arundo where her nearest neighbors lived.
The cabin was the most simple house imaginable. The walls had no paint. There was no running water, no telephone, no electricity. A steep roof slanted over the porch. A suspension bridge and pulley for carrying groceries across the creek connected the cabin to Topanga Canyon Boulevard. In the back there was an old-fashioned outhouse, the kind with a moon on the door and a hole in the ground.
The people who lived there were the oldest people that Heather had ever seen, and so she called them the “Old Folks.”
The Old Folks were three siblings who lovingly referred to each other as, “Brother, Sister, and Joe.” The sister called Joe by his real name to distinguish him from their older brother. It took a long time for Heather to learn that Sister’s real name was Francis. She never learned Brother’s real name. Her father David Hayward remembered that the family name of the Old Folks was Plesche.
According to David, the Old Folks were railroad workers from a small town in Illinois who had come west laying tracks. They worked up and down the California coast before settling in Lower Topanga Canyon around 1929.
The Old Folks remembered when actress Ida Lupino built the Hayward house, and actor George Raft lived there. They said that during Prohibition the Hayward house was a gambling and bootleg roadhouse. Joe said that he used to sit on his porch and watch “all the gangsters and their women” drive up the then sleepy Topanga Canyon Boulevard in a long line of limousines to attend parties at the “bawdy house.”
“The Old Folks were extremely private people. They didn’t talk much, and they never had friends over. The gate and suspension bridge leading to their house was completely hidden from the highway by a thicket of bamboo (arundo),” David said.
Heather first met the Old Folks between 1968-9 when she was five or six years old. She is the only person known to have actually visited the Old Folks inside their cabin. “I always knew it was a very special privilege,” she said.
According to Heather, the inside of the cabin was one big room divided by curtains instead of doors. Joe and Francis slept in a bunkbed in the “bedroom.” Brother slept on a couch/bed in the “livingroom” next to the pot-bellied stove where they did all of their heating and cooking. Jugs of raw honey, oatmeal, and water lined the shelves of the “kitchen.”
The Old Folks refilled their water jugs at a spring at the bottom of the S-curves. Heather doesn’t remember seeing a beehive, but believes that they harvested their own honey too. They washed their clothes on a washboard.
“Francis made bread on the pot-bellied stove, and sometimes she would make pancakes for me,” Heather said.
The curtains and blankets were made of the coarsest fabric. The cabin was lit with kerosene lamps. Everything creaked. “There were no frills,” Heather said. “And yet their house was impeccably clean.”
The Old Folks loved pets. They had chickens and foxes. “They were always nursing some wounded animal,” David said.
“The most magical place was the Old Folks’ garden facing the creek. They were expert gardeners,” Heather said, remembering the beauty of the plants and flowers.
She would spend hours and hours in the garden talking with the Old Folks. “I was definitely the one who did the talking,” Heather said, “although I don’t know what I talked about for so long. They were very captive listeners. When I came over, I felt like I was walking into an incredible fan club. I was always welcome. Their cabin was like my other house.”
Heather’s mother Joy Hayward remembered, “Whenever Heather learned a new dance or drew a new picture, she would rush over to the Old Folks to show them. Joe would be sitting on the porch, and he would say, ‘Oh, I have to show Francis!’ Heather was the only one who could open them up.”
“One of my favorite games was to sneak up on the Old Folks and scare them!” Heather said. “Sometimes I scared them really good, but they never got angry. We just laughed about it.”
On her tenth birthday, Heather remembered that the Old Folks gave her ten dollars. “I was floored that they gave me ten dollars because I knew that they didn’t have anything,” she said.
Heather described the Old Folks, saying, “They didn’t have teeth, and they smelled like moss.”
Brother, the oldest sibling, gradually became an invalid. “He needed rest and quiet, so he was more distant that the other two,” Heather said. He and Joe always wore the same faded overalls.
Francis always wore the same faded dress and carpet slippers. She was bent over with arthritis, and she seemed to be constantly cooking, cleaning, and washing clothes. “She was like the ultimate grandma,” Heather said.
According to the Haywards, Francis never left the cabin. “Isn’t this life too hard for you,” Joy once asked Francis. “No, we love it here!” Francis replied.
Joe was the most outgoing of the Old Folks. Hard, tough, sparkly-eyed, there was nothing fragile about him. He sometimes wore a bandanna around his neck, and was always doing some handyman job around the house. “He looked like Robert Duvall,” Heather said.
Joe was quiet like the rest, but he liked to make jokes occasionally. Once when Heather’s poodle barked at him, Joe sized the little dog up and muttered, “Hm, I can tell, got a streak of wolf!”
During the flood of 1968 the creek washed out the Old Folks’s suspension bridge and they were trapped for several days. Joy worried that their pick-up truck, parked too close to the opposite bank, would get washed away so she called someone to help her tow it away. The Old Folks watched from their porch as she tied a chain to their truck. Suddenly they began to yell. Joy moved closer to hear what they were saying over the creek’s roar, but the Old Folks shook their heads and motioned frantically for her to step back. She stepped back just in time. The whole bank collapsed, taking the truck, the gate, the arundo thicket, and the Old Folks’ mailbox with it! Later, Joe said that he could see the bank being eaten away underneath Joy.
Without their gate and arundo thicket, the Old Folks lost some of their cherished privacy. It was also much more difficult to go in and out because they had to walk across the rocks of the creekbed instead of their bridge. Luckily, their pulley for carrying groceries across remained. They put their new mailbox by the Hayward’s mailbox, and parked their new pickup truck in the Hayward’s driveway.
Brother, who had been sick for some time, died in the late 1970s.
Afterwards, David began to help out more. He bought groceries for Joe and Francis. When Joe got too old to drive, David took him into town to do his errands.
“Whenever I came over Joe would sit down in his rocking chair on the porch and talk with me for a while. Francis came out sometimes to say hello, but never stayed long,” David said.
The only gadget that the Old Folks owned was a battery-powered radio, and they loved to listen to old radio shows.
Joe surprised David, a professional astrologer, by telling him that he listened to Farley Maloris’s half-hour astrology show. “What do you think about what Farley said about Capricorn?” Joe asked him one day after the show. David learned that Joe was very knowledgeable about astrology.
“Joe liked to be in touch with what was going on in the world,” David said.
As the Old Folks got older, Francis began yearning for their hometown in Illinois. She said that she wanted to see her family again. At first Joe laughed at the idea, thinking it was a joke, but Francis’s yearning quickly grew into an obsession.
“I think she suffered from an advanced form of dementia,” Joy said. “Joe would explain to her very rationally that all of their family was dead, but Francis kept believing that she had to go back and see them.”
The Old Folks had always lived happily together, but now they fought every day. “It put a lot stress on Joe,” David said.
Worried that the Old Folks were too old to live alone, David called a social worker to see what could be done for them. According to David, the social worker was shocked when he brought her to the cabin. “These people have nothing!” she exclaimed.
The social worker’s solution was to get the Old Folks a room in a retirement home in Santa Monica, where they lived for several months.
It was a big change from their pioneer’s cabin. For the first time, Francis discovered the world. She enjoyed going for walks day and night in her faded dress and carpet slippers. But she still had her one obsession, and she was often secretly looking for a bus station where she could buy a ticket home.
Joe pleaded with his “worldly” neighbors the Haywards to convince Francis that it was dangerous to go for long walks all alone, and that none of their family could be alive. But when the Haywards tried, Francis only said, “I have to hurry home before dark....”
Joe watched over Francis during the day, but at night she would sneak out while he slept.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do with Sister!” Joe exclaimed to Joy one day with tears in his eyes.
One day in 1988, David went to visit the Old Folks and was told by their social worker that they had finally decided to catch a bus home. It was the last that David ever heard of them. He guessed that at the time Joe was about 89 years old, and Francis about 90 years old.
The Haywards weren’t surprised that the Old Folks didn’t tell them they were leaving. They were very private people, as David said. He thinks that once Joe gave in to Francis, they probably left quickly.
“They wouldn’t have called because they didn’t like telephones. If Joe ever came over and had to make a call, he asked me to use the phone for him.” David said.
Years later, the Haywards tried to find out if the Old Folks were all right, but the social worker could only say that there were no reports. The Old Folks carried their social worker’s card, and if anything had happened to them, she would have been notified.
The Old Folks remain in the treasured memories of the Haywards, and as part of the history of Lower Topanga Canyon.
Heather is grateful for the magic of growing up with the Old Folks. “I was a little a girl in kindergarten reading about early America, and then I went home and visited the Old Folks and I got to be there!”
David and Joy said, “The Old Folks were out of time and space. It was like living next to Oz.”
