Metamorphosis was an artists collective that had it’s galleries on Sunset Blvd., in a rundown stretch in Echo Park. They had an empty house that was just a few doors up Rosemont from their shop, and it was perfect for us. What we did for them to earn our keep was run all their machinery. They had allowed their equipment to deteriorate to the point of uselessness, and we fixed it and ran it right. This took 24 hour attention, and the location was perfect. But after a while, the relationship started to go sour. The guy who sort of owned the whole shooting match was a very wealthy and eccentric Englishman with a taste for partying, and among the degenerate elite of the late sixties, the cocaine craze of the seventies had already started. By late summer of ‘69, it was evident that it wasn’t going to work out, and we found and rented a house on old Topanga road in Topanga Canyon. By the end of the year we were settled in there, and had bought the house with borrowed money. By then, I was a dad, and life was getting complicated.
Living in Topanga also changed life for us. We were getting a lot more exercise, breathing clean air, and experiencing quiet for the first time in most of our lives. I liked it, and ended up staying in Topanga for most of the next forty years.
By now, we had amassed a great quantities of both loose carved gems and finished jewelry – and except for a handful of avant garde jewelers in San Francisco, Laguna, and L.A., we had no market, and nobody knew about it. We had to do something.
