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Books with reference to the RV

  • Santa Barbara by Barnaby Conrad (Author), Marc Muench (Photographer)
  • Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology (Library of America) by David L. Ulin (Author)
  • Horses: A Guide To Selection, Care And Enjoyment, 3rd Edition by J. Warren Evans (Author)
  • The Art of the Western Saddle: A Celebration of Style and Embellishment by Bill Reynolds (Author)
  • Sideways in Neverland: Life in the Santa Ynez Valley, California by William Etling (Author)
  • Cowboy Hat Book, The (rev) by Ritch Rand (Author), William Reynolds (Author), Banning Co. (Photographer)

Rancheros Visitadores 715 Santa Barbara St Santa Barbara, CA 93101View Map 805-962-3000

Members start meeting up the first thursday of every May at Camp Jackson and on the following sunday they move to Camp Janeway.

Santa Barbara CALIFORNIA HISTORICAL LANDMARKS NO. 308 COVARRUBIAS ADOBE - The adobe was built by Indian labor in 1817 for Don Domingo Carrillo. In 1838, his daughter married Don José María Covarrubias, who in 1852 became the first federal elector from California. Descendants of these families, many of them leaders in public affairs, occupied this house for over a century. John R. Southworth moved and rebuilt the 'Historic Adobe' here in 1924 as part of a civic program of historic preservation. Los Adobes de los Rancheros acquired the property in 1938 as headquarters for Los Rancheros Visitadores and for the use and enjoyment of the people. Location: 715 N Santa Barbara St, Santa Barbara

members camps

notable members


http://members.impulse.net/~mlynch/Brooke/rancheros.html True Grit - Rancheros Visitadores

by Brooke Comer

Santa Barbara Magazine - April / May 2004


FADE IN: Jackson Camp, Alisal Ranch. High noon. Saturday. First week of May. The oak-studded hills of the backcountry bask in silence broken only by the cries of blue jays and the rustling of dry grass. A distant sound of horses' hooves builds to a low roar. We hear shouts, the creaking of wagon wheels and the muffled squeak of leather saddles. As the largest and oldest men's riding group in the country approaches, robust voices and hearty laughter transform the stillness, making their camaraderie tangible, obvious, even before we see them. CUT TO: Mission Santa Ines. A large crowd gathers to witness the traditional blessing by the Padres and cheer the riders on their annual spring trek. Dust, smoke and anticipation electrify the air as 600 Stetson hatted cowboys finally ride into view. The legendary Rancheros Vistadores, bonded by a common love of horsemanship have arrived and the Old West lives again. FADE TO BLACK. No it's NOT a movie, it's REAL. Hard to believe, but in a ticker tape media world rife with change, the "soul satisfying camaraderie" that Rancheros founder Jack Mitchell envisioned when he and cowboy artist Ed Borein began the legendary riding group in 1930 remains virtually unchanged. And why not? Who wouldn't want to step back in time for one week a year and relive the days when the West was wild? These men could conquer the wilderness, and knowing that made the world, or their world, secure. So as the group approaches its 75th year, the cry goes up, "Who are these guys?"

A mix of ranchers, CEOs, politicians and professionals, from most of the 50 states and beyond, today's Rancheros members will talk, up to a point, though most prefer not to comment. This wasn't always the case. Revered Santa Barbara historian, Walker A. ('Tommy") Tompkins writing about the group for this magazine in 1983, noted that, "When News-Press editor and Rancheros member Tom Storke was alive, he always assigned a reporter; Len "Como" Swanson, to go on the treks and send out daily copy and photographs for publication. Since Storke's death in 1971, the group has maintained a lower profile, but rumors of their outrageous pranks, droll knavery and innovative practical jokes continue to leak out to delight and bemuse the paisanos.

It is these rumors, and some unwanted publicity about the group's alleged antics, which have lead to the Stetson wall of silence. Direct questions to Rancheros' president Tony Merrill concerning current membership numbers, status of the wait list and initiation fees today are met with a polite but firm, "no comment," though he did suggest that, "a week with us costs less than a week at Barcara!"

Despite the secrecy, much is a matter of public record. The first ride took place in 1930 when 90 men gathered at Dwight Murphy's Los Prietos Ranch. When banker Thomas Wilson Diblee returned and told his wife of the experience and plans for an annual ride, she suggested the name, Rancheros Visitadores ("visiting ranchers").

After WWII, membership swelled and by the 1950s was up to 550. Reportedly now capped at 600, plus invited first, second and third year guests and wranglers (the latter along to cook meals, feed and groom horses and other chores), the ride is now some 800 strong. The logistics of providing hot meals, nightly entertainment, lodging and other essential services for hundreds of men and their horses out in the backcountry must be daunting. Since the beginning, the Rancheros have kept to a strict schedule. Nobody sleeps late, even though the first night party is a long and wild night. These are men who know what "rise and shine" means, and by 8 a.m. the whole tribe begins the morning horseback ride, heading from Jackson Camp through the hills and valleys of the Alisal Ranch. The next day, they follow a 20-mile trail to the 7,000 acre member-owned Janeway Camp above Lake Cachuma, where scheduled daily activities revolve around skilled horsemanship. Exactly what goes on in those five days -- besides cutting, team penning calf branding, team roping and horse racing -- may never be revealed.

The original ride began in Santa Barbara and later moved to the Santa Ynez Valley. But, other than that, not much has changed. After World War II, members formed camps with names like Los Amigos, Los Bustardos, Los Vigilantes. Old traditions -- like the rodeos, sleeping under the stars (some prefer tents)7 and dining on roasted bull's head -- cooked underground early California style on a bed of hot rocks -- keep the Rancheros connected, to the legend of the West and to each other.

Members start out on a ride as invited guests and need a sponsor and two "seconders" to be voted in. (But space is so limited that it's not uncommon that would-be members die while on the waitlist.) Members have included politicians, CEOs and celebrities, although more movie stars joined in the days when Westerns reigned. Tom Mix, Leo Carrillo, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Slim Pickens, and rodeo stats Monte Montana and Cotton Rosser were among the members and invited guests. So were Edgar Bergen (and Charlie McCarthy), James Garner, Art Linkletter, Walt Disney, Bob Hope and President Ronald Reagan.

Given the number of statesmen, attorneys and CEOs amongst the group, the Rancheros wield enough resources to solve the problems of the world in one all-night pow-wow. "But we're there to talk about horses and ranching," says J.J. Hollister, attorney, lifelong rancher and third generation member. "No one hangs up a sign and says we can't talk business, but we're there to get away from work and problems. Being a Ranchero changes you. It's a way of life, and that's why we're here." Not everyone is a big name. According to co-founder Mitchell, a position of social, economic, or political importance has no bearing on what makes a true Ranchero."

What does make a true Ranchero? "We capture and preserve the spirit of ranch life in the old West, when survival depended on a good horse and a close friend," says Santa Barbara landscape architect Brad Bartholomay. "It's a commitment to a way of life that once was -- and still is for seven days each year." Bartholomay notes that when he took his first Rancheros ride in 1983, El Presidente Park Myers, a respected Texan, told the newcomers, "You boys have joined a privileged group, but just because you've been accepted doesn't mean you should think you're more important than anyone else. As Rancheros, we're all equal."

Equality means everyone is a target for camp pranks. Each camp goes to extravagant lengths to create floats themed around historic western battles for the rodeo parade. After the prizes for best presentation, the real battle begins: water guns fire, paper mache floats melt. One year James Garner was the Grand Rodeo Marshall and, as he eyed a float with fire hoses, asked nervously, "You guys aren't going to turn those things on me are you?" The pranks don't end when the parade is over. Local food entrepreneur John Jordano, Jr. ordered meat for a barbecue at his camp, but when the truck pulled up, a member from another camp said, "Over here!" That camp cooked it up, then invited Johnny over and said "Johnny, we've got the best meat, try some" One night, a member passed out after over-indulging in spirits and a camp doctor (a team of paramedics and surgeons are always on call) put a full cast on his left leg. When he woke up, his friends told him he'd broken his leg and gave him some crutches They let him hobble around for five days before they told him the truth. No one will ever forget the night Brooks Firestone dragged a fox skin over every cot, then let his fox-hounds loose at 5 a.m. "They jumped over every hunk," remembers Ranchero J.J. Hollister. "They woke everybody up with their wet noses, looking for this non-existent fox."

Each night there are festivities: a wine and cheese party, a Scotch and Haggis (traditional Scottish sausage made from mutton stuffed in a sheep stomach lining) party and a "Dean Martini" party. Some of the most memorable moments at camp take place around the campfire, with live entertainment from some of the best cowboy music performers in the country. "It's the other members who make it special," says Bartholomay, "Everybody's [there] without any pretences, because they're free to be exactly who they are, to speak from their heart and soul."

Bartholomay recalls one night at the campfire meeting Navy Admiral Howie Greer; who had commanded the Pacific Fleet during the Vietnam War, and he learned that his cousin Bart was one of Greer's ace pilots. "It's amazing," Bartholomay says, "to be able to meet one of the most famous military people of our time and speak frankly about world affairs. But my greatest memory was to have the honor and privilege to meet with President Ronald Reagan. My cousin, Anne, and his daughter, Patty, were childhood friends, and President Reagan taught them to ride on the family pony, Cutesie, at his family ranch in the Palisades near Will Rogers' ranch. He recalled Cutesie vividly; it was clear that he had fond memories of that period in his life."

All the riding and carousing culminates in an experience that's physically exhausting but enlightening. For when the ride is over, lifetime bonds have formed amid rugged, rough and tumble horseplay and each Ranchero will take a reinvigorated attitude back into real life. As Ranchero Frank Borden Hanes said, "Most of all, he will think back on the one time in his life when he met more legions of fine people, made more friends and embraced longer the sheer atmosphere of joy in comradeship than ever before."


http://home.planet.nl/~reijd050/organisations/grove/1985_08_05_Time_The_male_managers_last_refuge.htm Fortune, August 5, 1985 v112 p38(5)

The male manager's last refuge. (all-male clubs) Walter McQuade.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1985 Time, Inc.

WHILE the women's movement has altered American business life forever, it appears to have mightily reinforced one atavistic tradition: male managers going off into the rugged countryside to commune with one another and with nature. No women is the rule. Cutting themselves off from the outside world, these masculine corporate masters indulge in vast camaraderie and picturesque rituals, often with druidic or old Western overtones, and come back refreshed. Perhaps more important to may of them, they may also come back with powerful new friends in the world of business.

With the season of their annual conclaves under way, the male outdoor clubs are under siege. Prospective members are clamoring to get in as never before, while various interest groups protest what they darkly suspect goes on when the powerful congregate--and women try to crumble the barriers that exclude them.

The antics of the escaped males are colorful. The Conquistadores del Cielo--"conquerors of the sky"--gather at a Wyoming ranch each summer. These are men from the aerospace industry, and their fun and games include quick-draw handgun competitions with harmless electric pistols. The moles are executives in the business of building tunnels and other heavy-construction projects. They periodically come forth out of the earth--or, more usually, down from sky-scraper office suites--and gather at ground level or dinner meetings, games, good fellowship, and glancing business contacts. Travers Island, near New York City, is their summer ground.

In California the Rancheros Visitadores--"visiting ranchers"--meet near Santa Barbara each May and ride on horseback for a week through the countryside, feasting by campfire, playing pranks, sleeping in tents, then rising in the morning to saddle up and forge on. For the saddlesore and hung-over, rubber-tired wagons trail the procession. A similar group based in Colorado, the Round-up Riders of the Rockies, mount their steeds in late July for a week of cross-country riding, with catered grub and liquid refreshment brought in by pickup truck. They climb above the timberline to the Continental Divide, encountering snowbanks and traversing mountain trails so steep that lunch must sometimes be delivered by helicopter. All this is good for the soul but not the back; ka staff masseur travels with the group.

The largest, oldest, and most impressive of these retreats into nature takes place in a tranquil private redwood grove beside the Russian River, 70 miles north of San Francisco, where the men of the Bohemian Club assemble for 16 days each July. Founded in 1872 by such true bohemians as Bret Harte and Ambrose Bierce, the club still enlists artists, musicians, and writers, but the main contingent makes up a dream roster of American executive talent and power: John Swearingen, chairman of Continental Illinois Corp.; A. W. Clausen, president of the World Bank; Harry Gray, chairman of United Technologies; Walter Haas, former chairman of Levi Strauss; Lowell Dillingham, chairman of Dillingham Corp.; Frank Borman, chairman and president of Eastern Airlines; Stephen Bechtel of Bechtel Corp.; Edgar Kaiser Jr., chairman of Kaiser Resources Ltd.; David Packard, chairman of Hewlett-Packard; and quite a few others whose names resound with a firm corporate clunk. G. William Domhoff, a sociology professor who one year got hold of the Bohemian Club's membership and guest list, calculated that it included at least one president or other high officer from 20 to the top 25 commercial U.S. banks, 12 of the 25 biggest life insurance companies, and 40 of the 50 biggest industrial corporations on the FORTUNE 500. Politicians are also well represented. Ronald Reagan is a Bohemian, as are Vice President George Bush, Secretary of State George Shultz, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, and Secretary of the Treasury James Baker Jr.

The retreat groups are unprecedentedly prosperous and popular. The Rancheros recently bought 7,200 acres of the Santa Ynes Valley for their annual shindig. The Bohemian Club, like the others, faces a plenitude of membership applicants. More than 3,000 are in line to pony up a $7,500 initiation fee and join the 1,200 voting members--some of whom waited 18 years to fill vacancies.

Ambition alone could inspire executives of either sex to petition these outfits for membership. The business opportunities to be found riding for a few miles next to a prime prospect or walking through the woods with a Cabinet officer are enough to make an eager manager's mind reel. The clubs disclain any business purpose. "No women, no gambling, no business or arguments" is the general rule for the Roundup Riders of the Rockies, as expressed by a member. Nor do the Bohemians officially sanction deal-cutting during their retreat. Their motto (from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream): "Weaving spiders, come not here."

But against such concentrations of high-powered managers, these proscriptions don't stand much chance. Cap Weinberger once explained to a reporter that the Bohemian Grove "isn't designed for business or even statecraft." He then added, "But it's a very pleasant place and inevitably sometimes talk turns to substantive matters." Beyond an occasional deal begun in the wild, the Bohemians often turn their attention to serious lectures on economics, science, and politics. Seven Presidents of the U.S. have been Bohemians and, by tradition, some candidates aspiring to the office test the waters at the Grove. Barry Goldwater, Nelson Rockefeller, Robert F. Kennedy, Henry Jackson, and Alexander Haig all went for precampaign examination.

Still, the chief purpose remains fun--juvenile, uninhibited, rude, and extravagant. The Rancheros Visitadores, many in Spanish colonial gear, always begin their cross-country ramble by assembling before the ancient Santa Ynes Mission Church so the padre can bless the horses (and their riders too). Then El Presidente yells, "Ride, Rancheros!" and they thunder into the past. A similar spirit pervades the doings of the Conquistadores del Cielo, as they ceremonially don Spanish colonial costumes with swords, Toledo steel helmets, and breastplates.

The fun finds its highest expression in the Grove. Attendees reside in colonies of primitive huts, treehouses, tents, and tepees, which cling to the steep redwood slopes and bear such names as Cave Man, Rattlers, Woof, Moonshiners, Silverado Squatters, Mandalay, and Poison Oak. As at all the escape clubs, drinking is not only copious but also joyous. At the Grove the wine cellar is actually a warehouse, and stored in it as summer came on were more than 3,000 cases of California and European wines.

On the first weekend of each annual encampment, the Bohemians celebrate the feeling of release that all the retreat groups strive for. They stage the spectacle shown at the beginning of this article--a photograph never before released--in which workaday concerns are burned symbolically in a stentorian ritual called the Cremation of Care. On the final weekend a vast musical is presented in the outdoor theater, set against the backdrop of a steep wooded rise. Written, produced, and acted by Bohemians, the show is different each year but loosely takes the form of a declamatory talbeau, sometimes likened to Elizabethan court masques of the 16th century. All Bohemians must be willing to help out; George Bush has served as a stagehand, as has Unocal Chairman Fred Hartley. The show is accompanied by a 135-member all-Bohemian symphony orchestra (playing music composed by a Bohemian) and is often heightened by special effects. At the end of one show about Scotland's Bonnie Prince Charlie, the prince's death cued a long line of bagpipers imported for the occasion to file slowly down the dim hillside backdrop, pipes shrieking, to carry his body away. The audience of Bohemians rose and cheered.

To balance the dramaturgy of the big production, there is always an evening of ribald farce, also written, composed, and produced by Bohemians, called Low Jinks. This summer's farce: a burlesque of Robert Graves's I, Claudius called I, Gluteus. Bohemian Walter Cronkite, clad in toga, was expected to play a cameo role in the show. At the conclusion, Cronkite was to step forward and say, "And that's the way it was."

SINCE THE OUTDOOR male clubs are devoted chiefly to such nonsense, many members are distressed that some caustic critics are taking it all very seriously. Most prominent among these are feminists, who regard the organizations as the last stand of masculine chauvinism. They may be right. Most of the clubs bar women from membership outright. The Bohemians ban them from the Grove in any capacity during the encampment.

When a waitress applied for a job at the Grove and was turned down, she proceeded to the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing and filed a complaint, which the department laid before an administrative judge of the Fair Employment and Housing Commission. Intoned the department's lawyer: "The fact that members [during the encampment] prefer to go unclothed is not a matter of constitutional import. The right of privacy does not allow club members to expose themselves at the expense of equal employment."

The Bohemians fought down that first assault and won their case before the judge, whom the commission then overruled. The Bohemians appealed that action to the Sonoma County Superior Court, protesting that, although they do employ some women at their San Francisco clubhouse, at the Grove women would be inappropriate. They would be an inhibiting presence, argued Del Fuller, the club's secretary and a prominent San Francisco corporate lawyer. Bawdy jokes, pranks, and towel snapping would have to be curtailed, as would casual urinating on the redwood trunks. In the theatrical events the Bohemians' century-old custom of casting men in drag for female roles would be too embarrassing with real women around. Fuller cited as an example his own part in the theatricals of 1972. He had enacted a wood nymph, wearing wings and a body stocking. The commission lost the case but did not give up, appealing the decision to the District Court of Appeals, where the case is pending.

ARDENT FEMINISTS are not the only anti-Bohemians. Five years ago a spectrum of activists united into the Bohemian Grove Action Network and each year since have picketed the gate of the Grove 24 hours a day during the summer encampment. They include a shifting assortment of groups, male and female, that support such causes as independence for Puerto Rico, abortion rights, American Indian concerns, and herbal therapy. Petaluma Students for Social Responsibility have picketed. So have Sisters of Lesbos Against Radiation, Prostitutes for Peace, representatives of the Universal Life Church, and an organization called No Nuke of the North. the message is often antinuclear: one year a picketer's sign read "Hail to thee, O keepers of the divine bomb."

During the early years of the protest certain Bohemians, amused, saw to it that cases of cold beer were sent out to the picket line, but last summer the action got more strident. The protesters tried unsuccessfully to block the entrance to the Grove and prevent Bohemians from leaving.

Such scenes must force members of all the male outdoor clubs to worry about their organizations' futures. The faintest signs of change have begun to appear. The Moles recently altered their bylaws by substituting "individual" for "man" in defining eligibles. All the individuals remain male, however, and it would be shortsighted to predict the demise of the male outdoor clubs, for their appeal is deep-seated and enduring. A Roundup Rider of the Rockies once composed a campfire song that catches the emotional tug of these stubbornly resistant male executive clans: We're all pals together, Riders--birds of a feather, Rootin' pals, tootin' pals, Scootin' pals, shootin' pals, In rain or sunshine . . . Man to man!