Little Flutes, Escaping London, and The Writers’ Colony 

Hanna was a 1946 Dodge pickup with a camper on the back. When we escaped back to America we bought her after hitchhiking to Columbus Ohio. She was an old farm truck that would probably run on kerosene. We lived in her for about five years ducking and dodging goons we imagined from the UK who were after us for skipping out of the country. Tony Secunda had a bad reputation for sending out thugs in both countries. The telling sentence spoken by him was, “But you can’t leave England we have your passports”. Well, challenge accepted. And so much for the big music biz.

My dramatic acting at the Home Office was Oscar-worthy. In less than 24 hours we left everything except our instruments. And we were gone.

Back in Austin, I worked in the Zoology department, PJ played bass in a jazz band Geneva and the Gentlemen, and rebuilt motorcycles in our rented living room, until we could get back on the anonymous highway and live full-time in Hanna.

We made tiny ocarinas that played the chromatic scale… and sold them at craft fairs all over the country. You could wear the “Little Flute” on a cord around your neck. Old Number One got a design patent for them. The Patent cost us 5k but as soon as we were infringed we learned we’d need 40k up front to fight the copycats. That might as well have been the moon. 

My dream was to own some land where I could live and make the kind of music I wanted to make. Somewhere where no one could make me need to leave. The dream was not to be owned by a big company. I remembered the days in Woodstock NY as a child and longed for a creative environment. Years later, I helped found the Dairy Hollow Writers’ Colony in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, which is still going 25 years later. Thanks to dedicated dreamers and contributors to the non-profit.

Before we went to London to make it in the biz, we lived in a tent on the sheer side of the Rock of Gibraltar.  Old Number One found and rebuilt an old Velocette motorcycle which he took to North Africa for a winter. It was his “walkabout” of sorts. I went back to England and got a job in a bakery with the mission to meet him at a post office on a set day at high noon. He was a few weeks late. 

In all fairness, my husband’s dream became working on antique motorcycles and living in the American SW desert without bugs and rust—-and with an independently wealthy woman. Our dreams came true, although separately. It’s funny how dreams do that.

A few years after he left, in 1978, my divorce was granted on the basis of abandonment. That winter I traveled to Mexico with two good friends and two great dogs…. and “began again”.  That same winter Michael Johnson and Mary MacGregor each recorded my song “In Your Eyes” and I heard Mary’s version over a public address system in a shoe market in Guadalajara.  Talk about a surreal experience.