The Elephant Down the Road: De Palma’s Italian Restaurant 1978

This article was published in Community College Moment, Spring 2011.
Special thanks to the many people who assisted me with my research: Jody Blechman Isaacs, Vince Bond, John Gray, Ann and Ted Nugent, current owners of the De Palma ruins.

There is a photo gallery at the end of the article with pictures taken by Peter Jensen when the Nugents showed us around the De Palma ruins Dec. 3, 2010.

The Elephant Down the Road: De Palma’s Italian Restaurant 1978

I have always loved elephants, but they are as far away from my life in the West as a chickadee from the moon. Not only are they astonishingly large, but they have a kindness of eye and gentleness of spirit I can only aspire to in my short human life.

There is a saying that a person can have “a memory like an elephant,” and I saw on a Nova special that their legendary memory is based on biology, not myth. In the program I saw, an old matriarch of the herd dies, and the others seem to mourn her loss with great dark tears running down their wrinkled cheeks. However, eventually, they move off on their great migrations.
What astonished and moved me was that years later, the herd returned to the site of the matriarch’s death. Only the tusks and the bleached ribs remained, yet old and new members of the tribe gathered to lift and handle the bones of their elder. Who knows what memories flooded through them in this ritual of return?
A long time ago in the 1970s when I was a young girl, I belonged to a spiritual group (dating from the 1930s) called the Emissaries of Divine Light. Emissaries live in intentional communities, not exactly like a herd of elephants, but there may be similarities. I lived in a brand new one called Glen Ivy Community. We had purchased sixty historic acres; we were restoring the springs as a business and all living in the old inn called The Lodge. At the time, there were about twenty of us under the spiritual guidance of John and Pamela Gray, having what would turn out to be literally the time of our lives. We were young and embarked on the soul’s high adventure.

This all took place in Southern California in Temescal Canyon, which is directly over the Santa Ana Mountains from Laguna Beach. In my exploration of my new home, I learned about the indigenous Luiseños who lived at the hot springs for thousands of years before we appeared as a blip on its historic screen.
And I learned that twenty years earlier, in the 1950s, an elephant had lived in our valley, five miles up the road at a surreal experiment in restaurant theme parks, a place called De Palma’s Italian Village. As I look back through the dusty, sunshot window of thirty years, I feel more and more like that elephant, who must have held so many memories of our valley between her floppy gray ears.
The elephant was gone by the time my rowdy group of eight or ten friends and I showed up at De Palma’s Italian Village for a Friday evening birthday party in July of 1978.
“Where are we?” Mary Ann Conoscente, the birthday girl, asked when we turned off Indian Truck Trail, just five miles east of our communal home at Glen Ivy.
Rich Kenny, the lead driver, slowed at the sentry box and rolled down his window to speak to the guard. “What’s up?” he asked the crash dummy who was leaning out of the guard shack door, grinning like Pinocchio on crack cocaine, “Which way to De Palma’s Italian Village?”
The dummy’s fixed grin and rigid hand pointed deeper into the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains. A large sign spoke for him: “You are leaving Alberhill, California. Welcome to De Palma’s Italian Village, Little Italy.” Cheat grass crazed the road surface into chunks approximating a map of the boot of Italy as we bumped past a series of cattail wetlands and ponds.
Two carloads of us communitarians got out in the parking lot welcomed by a chorus of frogs. Chef Rich listened to the enthusiastic amphibians with appreciation, “I hear supper!”
“Where’s the restaurant?” George Carpenter asked. George always reminded me of one of the kids from the Little Rascals, a series of short comic films from the 1930s featuring a dim-watt character with plenty of spunk.
Doc Lynn, cute and smart as Nancy Drew, pointed out signs and arrows. The ten of us trailed after her into a maze of dilapidated buildings, choked fountains, and ruined lawns.
George studied one building carefully, figured it out, and disappeared inside. His grinning, blond-shocked face popped up framed behind bars with a sign that said, “Corona City Jail.” Rich said he looked right at home with the metal bed, chalk-marked walls, and loose bottles kicking around on the floor. “Just like your room back at the ol’ commune, isn’t it, George?”
“Oh, my God!” Mary Ann, a recovering Brooklyn Polish-Catholic, stopped short and grabbed Rich’s arm. With the other hand, she crossed herself.

Rich, also no stranger to Catholicism by way of the Irish, followed her gaze to the Chapel of the Holy Trinity. The door was ajar. We filed in respectfully and gaped at the wildly decorated statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. Joseph, and the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which looked trussed and bleeding like a roast for the restaurant kitchen we had been told was here among the ruins.
George, always a great one for slowly sounding out signs, read for our collective edification, another large plaque: “This Shrine is dedicated to St. Joseph and the Holy Family. As our little way of giving thanks for all the blessings that we have received. The De Palma Family.”
I stumbled back out to De Palma Street, so labeled by a city street sign liberated, it turned out, from Vineland, New Jersey. I say stumbled because there were free-range chickens underfoot dodging low-flying bats.
The next building informed me that it was a reconstruction of Grandpa De Palma’s shoe repair shop transported lock, stock, and black plaster shoeshine boy all the way from the New Jersey homeland.
We moved past a little post office, a wooden outdoor stage, and a has-been “Gay 90s Saloon and Pizzeria.” Everything showed sopped evidence of the rainy winter we had all had to mop up after.
It was Vince who pointed out that the place was built on a flood plain at the mouth of Horsethief Canyon, a major Santa Ana Mountain drainage. When you build cute streets that channel flood waters straight in through the door of your 385-seat Italian restaurant, it’s reasonable to assume fountains will choke on cheat grass, and dilapidated buildings will throw up their splintery hands and fall with a screech into the water.
Vince, our resident wizard, a short, strong guy with thick, black hair and mustache and intense dark eyes, said, “I’ll bet they’ve had to clean up this place after more than one flood.” He kicked some pile of evidence obscure to me and added, “It’s burned down a time or two, as well.”

“That’s very reassuring, Mr. Wizard,” I said, pointing to the bare wires and dangling bulbs strung out on either side of the walkway, giving out a dim but cheerful light into the dusk. “You think those are up to code?”
“This place could go up like a monkey playing with matches in a Chinese firecracker factory,” he answered cheerfully, then pointed out the old-fashioned gas lampposts, “but it could be worse. Imagine using gas lamps in this climate. One Santa Ana wind, and all these wood structures would remind us of just exactly how fast Rome burned.”
To find the front door of De Palma’s Italian Restaurant, we had to run the gauntlet of live food birds—noisy pheasants, partridges and peacocks stacked in chicken-wire cages. Chef Rich looked in at them and smacked his lips, “I see the menu spread out before me.”
Jody, who had been a waitress here, said, “No kidding. In the old days I heard they killed and ate anything that moved.”
We peered in at the worried-looking peacock then found the restaurant door through a hobbit hole cut in an overgrown bank of hot pink bougainvillea. The restaurant was a ramshackle, multi-level building with five large dining rooms that had obviously seen a heyday and hey! That day wasn’t today. But I loved the red velvet flocked wallpaper and the bubbling lava lamps.
We may have been their only customers at the far end of a run that had begun in 1959 when Giuseppe (aka Joe) De Palma and his wife Alleyne (and their four daughters) bought the land, but we were a party of ten, and they knew all about creating that intimate Italian party atmosphere even as their world was ending.
We sat at a long table out of an early Hollywood set—the red and white checked tablecloth, the long stemmed wine glasses, the plastic salad bowl, and red Italian wine that started flowing like blood at the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and didn’t stop until the last body staggered out the door.
This meal was none of your fancy-schmancy squid ink linguini and white truffle oil minimalist expressions of haute Italian cuisine. This was old school spaghetti and meatballs, veal scaloppini, and all things breaded, fried, drenched in red sauce and snowed with Parmesan cheese. We started with the antipasti plate: prosciutto, salami, mortadella, coppa. Artichoke hearts, roasted red peppers, pepperoncini, marinated mushrooms, cheeses, Sicilian olives wrinkled as the face of a shoemaker’s widow, and lots of squishy garlic bread. After that, red sauce ruled: across the tablecloth, up our elbows with frequent side trips onto shirtfronts, and down our gullets. Thankfully, we weren’t offered frog’s legs or even the worried peacock. On-the-spot slaughter of livestock seemed to be a treat left to bygone days.

 

Jody, her mass of dark hair pulled back with a silver clip, face lively as any cute young elephant’s with memory, pointed out an antique walnut sidebar. “That used to be the cheese bar; like a salad bar only with cheeses from all over Italy. Down in the basement they kept cheese wheels as big as I am, and I had to cut it with a contraption that had wires and a foot lever.”

Inspired by the cinematic moment, Doc started doing imitations of Dean Martin. Rich did a passable Frank Sinatra, and it was only George who had the nerve or enough wine in him to do a spot-on Sammy Davis, Jr. And they were right; the De Palma’s must have been from the same region of Italy as the sentimental mobsters who built Las Vegas–the Rat Pack, at least in the movies, were always eating spaghetti and meatballs in places reeking with this over-the-top Hollywood conception of a lost, golden Italy.

In every Emissary of Divine Light community (I’m not talking about the Rat Pack now) the individual stories of how they met each other are told and re-told as if they had mythic dimension. The room lights up with an intensified joy, a collective amazement. I have read that the society of elephants is among the most complex known in the animal kingdom. Each animal has the ability to recognize and track individuals over long periods of time through changes of age, status, and condition, just like human friends. Perhaps elephants, like humans, also memorize the complexity of their relationships through story telling. For example, “Vince, who has been a part of our community for so long and is so beloved, met our Jody when she was a waitress for six months at this crazy Italian restaurant down the road. What an insane coincidence! It was meant, ordained, a configuration of events written on the great wheel of Fortuna, Goddess of the Possible.”

And sure enough, Vince, who was dating Jody at that time, had a story to tell. He stood up and tapped a glass. Vince wanted to explain why this down-at-the-heels restaurant out in the back of nowhere was worthy our collective pilgrimage: “I was working for Union Oil Research as a research technician, wet chemistry mostly,” he began, “when the biologist, Subaro Hashimoto, said he needed a tech to go with him on a field trip to Hemet where we were doing nitrogen tests on potatoes grown by a corporate farmer in the area – Inland Empire Growers.

“’Hash and I worked all day taking soil and potato samples and spent nine hours in the field. Any time exceeding eight hours in the field entitles the employee to a dinner on the company.”

“Yes! Here’s to dinner on the man!’” I don’t know who shouted that, but it involved leaping to our collective feet for a rowdy toast.

You couldn’t shout Vince down, though. He waited serenely until we subsided, and picked up the thread of his story. “ Just by happenstance, Hash had gotten directions from two of the other senior techs the day before on how to get to DePalma’s Italian Village where you could get an eleven course meal for a very reasonable price, and it just happened that if we took the long way home, we would drive right past the place! Even though I was a very fit 27-year-old, I was wondering how I was going to be able to eat an eleven-course meal, but to appease Hash, I went along with it (and he was driving).

“When we arrived, we saw that DePalma’s was a very strange place with wooden buildings and facades made up to look like a western town. We were seated in one of the back rooms with bench tables. Between courses, which were long, drawn out affairs…”

“Sort of like this story?”

“ I had the audacity to light up a cigarette. What can I say, I was young and stupid then.”

“Wasn’t this like six months ago?”

“Just as I lit it up, Jody, the hostess, came down the stairs leading a group of ten people. One older woman in the group complained in a stage whisper that someone was smoking and asked if there were another table. Jody politely told the woman that the table adjoining ours was the only one left that would hold a party as large as theirs, so no, there was no other place they could put them.

“I, in the meantime, had put out my cigarette. I motioned Jody over and told her that I would refrain from smoking, so the old woman would stop complaining. Jody put her arm around my shoulder and said, ‘Thank you!’

“There was something about that girl that I couldn’t put my finger on… something ‘special,’ as if I knew her already….”

As if I knew her already….this is where the whole table leaned forward, absorbed in a plain old boy meets girl story, knowing that Vince’s magical ability to recognize Jody as his entry point to the zone of heightened power that was our community, our herd, was the spiritual crux of the story.

“ I told Hash, ‘There is something about that girl…’ and he looked at me as if I had a screw loose.

“We finished our dinner, paid, and as I had my feet straddling the threshold of that restaurant, I couldn’t leave.”

He couldn’t leave…he had never met us, but he felt us calling to him. Elephants are very vocal creatures, yet we didn’t really know this until it was discovered in 1984 that much of their talk is below the threshold of human hearing. Emissaries feel there is likewise a subacoustic bond between us that calls each to each across time and space. Would he honor the compulsion to ask this girl with the spirit eyes for her phone number?

Rich had a song for every moment, “Zing went the strings of my heart!”

“I went back inside, told Jody that I was never this forward, but would she give me her phone number! She handed me a Glen Ivy Hot Springs brochure, circled the number on it, and said I could reach her there. That raised many more questions in my mind, but I accepted the brochure, told her ‘thank you,’ and left.

“About a week later, I called Jody at that number and wound up having a three hour conversation with her about the community at Glen Ivy, who she was, and well, the rest is history.”

Vince sat down to general applause. Jody stood up, Frida Kahlo eyes vivid with abashed laughter. She extended her slender arms and shrugged her bare shoulders. “Well, thank heaven Guiseppe isn’t here tonight because he was very strict about the girls not fraternizing with the spaghetti-grazers and always having their armpits covered, no matter how hot it was. When I met Vince, I couldn’t figure out why he kept coming back for more spaghetti.”

Vince added, “I couldn’t believe my luck when she invited me home to meet her family, and there were twenty of you.”

In my old elephant memory, the faces of my laughing friends at that table are bathed in the red-gold light of heavily fringed bordello lamps. To be an Emissary was to believe we had all known each other since the foundations of the Earth were laid. Our mission was to recover all the lost members of our Tribe. Once reunited, we would restore humanity to its lost state of grace.

The rest of the restaurant was kept dark, and I could feel the gloom behind my back, outside the circle of our light and our focus on the story-telling faces.

A half-sized replica of the David loomed over the dinner table on a marble plinth, and Doc Lynn claimed scientific objectivity as she discussed the anatomical accuracy of his famous equipment.

I got up between courses and wandered around with a wine glass in my hand, looking at framed newspaper articles, relics of self-promotion, and a less than tasteful reproduction of the Mona Lisa rendered on black velvet. LOTS of pictures of a big, broad-faced guy, balding, grinning, missing a front tooth, glad-handing celebrities—that would be mine host, Joe.

I turned to the waiter, who was refilling glasses from a carafe of the bloody red Chianti. “Where’s old man Giuseppe now? Looks like he never missed a night.”

“He’s recovering from open heart surgery.”

“That would explain it.”

“Look,” I said, reading out loud. “Just imagine. There used to be an exotic animal zoo here, including an elephant, lions, tigers, and bears.”

“Oh my!” the entire table yelled at once, clinking glasses in a kind of high five with wine.

“And a tropical rain forest with a roof-top sprinkler system. All the fountains worked, and they used to see 700 people a day.” Down the road at Glen Ivy, we were in the throes ourselves of bringing the run-down hot springs business back from a long decline, so 700 people a day seemed like the rich plebian hordes to us.

“Place burned down in 1969.”

“Ha,” said Vince, “I knew it.”

“There was nothing left but a stainless steel pot and a two-foot plaster clown.”

“Did he rebuild from insurance money?”

“How did you guess?”

“Guy probably wanted to start over and burned the place down himself,” was Rich Kenny’s contribution, which turned out to be prescient.

“A toast to Vince and Jody’s story,” I proposed, and glasses clinked all around.

“Here’s to false teeth!” Mary Ann cried. Nary a pause for the non sequitur, we all shouted, “False teeth!”

Three and a half hours later, feeling very good about the decorative spaghetti sauce dribbles down the fronts of our shirt and bosoms, and all that Italian wine moving us to burst into spontaneous song, we groped our way back out into the ghost town. The moonlight was so white, it looked like the cosmic laundress had thrown her wash water with bleach over the mixed-up jimble-jamble of streets, buildings, courtyards, and lakes and rendered them whitewashed and ready for the afterlife.

I looked around at what was clearly the last round up for De Palma’s Italian Village. This wasn’t a cute, high-end faux-town like Main Street, U.S.A. in Disneyland. Translocated as the elephant they had brought to California, the De Palmas sought to restore memory; the Italian Village was Joe’s frantic effort to give his father back the Italy he’d sacrificed for a new life in America. It turns out the Emissaries of Divine Light aren’t the only ones seeking to restore a lost golden age.

In the moonlight, a very large, white, trumpet shaped flower growing in the untended garden caught my eye. I recognized it as a common and potent native, datura.
“You know,” I said conversationally to anyone who might still be within earshot, “The Indians who used to live here were the Luiseños. Their hallucinogen-of-choice was this plant here, datura.”

“Beautiful,” Mary Ann said, sticking her nose in close. How did they take it?”

“The blossom nectar is a powerful hallucinogen. All the roots and leaves can be prepared for lift off.”

“I hear it’s really unstable,” said Vince, the chemist.

“Extremely. It’s said Lucrezia Borgia was the last compound pharmacist in the Western world to prepare controlled doses.”

“The Italian connection,” Doc said.

I could count on her to appreciate my clinical addition, “Witches used to use broomsticks to apply it in a very personal area, and that’s where the myth of witches flying on broomsticks comes from. Those women really knew how to have a good time!”

“And how to keep their men in line. I would love to see her poison ring.”

“My point is, the Luiseños pretty much took datura, men, women, and children, on an almost daily basis. It was a part of their deep culture.”

“You going somewhere with this, Brownie?”

“Stay with me here: what if that hallucinogenic view of these mountains and valleys, this place we’re standing on, is imbued with the psychic DNA of the hallucinating Luiseños?”
“And that Giuseppe was a walk-in? One of those Indian spirits walked into him and took over his brain, and that’s why this place looks so drug-induced?” Vince finished my thought.

“I’m only saying…”

“We know who’s been sipping the nectar around here,” Rich said, “According to your woo-woo theory, we’ve got the same haunts at Glen Ivy.”

“Oh, yeah. Oops. Sorry. I kicked a chicken. I know. We bought an old restaurant, too, and those oil painted canvas murals circling the dining room when we got it prove my point.”

“A John Wayne vision of local history,” said Doc.

“But at least our Lodge is built into the hillside, and the creek is channelized around the buildings,” Vince’s voice floated in from the shadows under Holy Trinity.

Mary Ann, too quick-witted to always be the diplomat, but managing nicely on this occasion, said, “Giuseppe’s just had open heart surgery, so the place is a little run down. Let’s give him a little bitty break here. I’ll bet this crazy place still has a future.” But she was wrong about that.

Rich started a song, and we all piled into the cars and stuck our heads out to harmonize all the way home to “Third Rate Romance, Low Rent Rendezvous.” George was singing his heart out in my ear, his own distinctly avian understanding of the lyrics, which were something like “Bird-brain romance, low wren rendezvous.”

We pulled up and parked in front of the Chalet. John Gray, our focalizer and spiritual leader, was standing on the stone steps watching as Mary Ann fell out of the car at his feet, laughing hysterically. I’ve heard her tell this story many times, and I think her Catholicized view of John in that moment was as disapproving papa to our naughty drunk kids with spaghetti on our faces. I always thought he looked left out—we’d gone out and had a lot of fun without him, and what was up with that? But mine is a pagan world-view; I think all of Dionysus’s children should be called to the revels.

 

Nobody knows for sure whether Giuseppe De Palma set his 1969 fire for the insurance money, but he did rebuild his all-new, re-imagined Italian Village with the settlement plus a loan from the Small Business Administration, which, oh by the way, he didn’t get around to repaying. And the IRS had issues with Guiseppe/Joe as the 1970s rolled around. All these financial chickens finally came home to roost in 1980. De Palma first filed for bankruptcy, then bethought himself, perhaps, of a previously successful revenue source, and burned the old village to the ground yet again. There wasn’t even a two-foot high plaster clown left to say to him, “What’re’ you thinking, Joe? Are you nuts? Do you know nothing about fire science forensics?”

Because the fire inspector came into the smoldering ruin and spotted the two ignition sources right away. De Palma was there, wandering around like a stout Italian male version of Lady Macbeth, wringing his hands.

The fire inspector felt kind of bad about having to ask the emotional old man such a question, but he finally put it to him, “Joe, did you torch the place?”

“Yes,” said De Palma, his bass voice vibrato with loss. “When I bought the land, it had nothing but sagebrush and rattlesnakes. It goes back to the bank the same way I got it.”

And to prove the true vein of Italian revenge tragedy ran hot in his blood, he added, “And I poisoned the wells.”

Eew! I don’t even want to know how he did that, and I’m afraid to ask if it involved drowning any of the captive fowl.

I’m pretty sure arson involves some jail time, but I’ve lost Giuseppe’s thread after that darkling moment upon the smoking plain.

In the shadowy five-dining-room-restaurant that is my elephantine memory of those times, there are laughing faces lit by red fringed bordello lights, and there are short runs of video tape looping stories around and around. One of them is Joe’s story, one man’s life dream that rose up in hope out of the sagebrush that he burnt to the ground in furious revenge.

But there are other stories, like the one Vince told, that make up the complex interweaving of stories that was our community life together. When I think of those days and those people, the stories I have recovered, and the faith in fate I have both lost and regained, I keep coming back to my vision of that elephant in Glen Ivy’s backyard, she of the gentle eyes, whose memory is greater than us all.

 

Just imagine, I think to myself when my memories get convoluted and strange, when it feels as if I am handling bleached bones and trying to remember the heartbeat of an age gone too far away, an elephant!

END

Message to my readers: Did you ever visit De Palma’s? Do you have a memory fragment you can share an add to my collection? Leave it in the comment field below!