Post #586045 by congawa on Fri, Apr 22, 2011 10:23 AM

On 2011-04-21 17:55, bigbrotiki wrote:
Thanks!

On 2011-04-21 16:59, JOHN-O wrote:
And we could have gone from place to place in a boat !! :)

The boat to do that in style would have been the Wild Goose, John Wayne's yacht...

Well, I guess it's about as good a time and place as any to tell my Wild Goose story. It was circa 1968-69, my mom (the one who first exposed me to the original tiki restaurants and exotica music as a kid--though I typically had no interest then) was a reporter/photographer for a south Orange County paper, and there was some kind of a press junket (related to the building of Dana Point Harbor, which was about to begin) in which the Wild Goose anchored in Dana Point, and then took the press throngs north to its berth in Newport Harbor. My mother brought my brother and I along for the ride. John Wayne wasn't aboard, but when we entered Newport Harbor and passed by his house, there he was along with wife Pilar and their kids, waving at all of us aboard their boat. My mother later went on another Wild Goose junket--that time "the Duke" was aboard, and she got her picture taken with him (she later wrote a history on Dana Point called Home Point for Romance, and the picture is in her book). I remember the captain was a guy named Stark (can't remember his first name), who my mother knew, and in the mid-70's he was lost at sea somewhere off Cape Horn.

I remember all the teak interior, and running around the decks with my brother. I'm sure the members of the fourth estate partook in many fine cocktails inside the boat during the trip. Lon Chaney Jr. (who lived in Capistrano Beach) also had a yacht from a converted Navy ship called the "Simile(?)", and we went aboard that once in the harbor, though it stayed anchored. I actually once started to write a country song about the Wild Goose, in a Johnny Horton story-song vein. I may have the inspiration to finish it now, and maybe turn it into a Ding Dong Devils song.

Caltiki Brent