Pictured above are Richard Allen, Bill and Harvey Budd in front of the Subterranean Circus. When the store was about a year old, Harvey, a recent UF graduate, walked in and told Bill, "You need an accountant." Bill looked around at his accumulated detritus and said, "Well, no shit." Harvey got the job, built an empire and later hired Richard, who soon inherited the Circus account. Both accompanied Bill to separate IRS audits and won the day. Harvey later developed a television station and foolishly entered politics, even becoming a Gainesville City Commissioner. Richard was involved with the startup of Regeneration Technologies in Alachua, accumulated a lot of stock and now has a money bin in his back yard. He and his Rotarian buddies have built schools for over 3000 children in Cambodia. Both married excellent wives (Richard did it twice) and still live in the city. Their successful lives have proven once again that the influence of psychedelia and Indian incense should not be scorned. (photo by Kimber Greenwood)
Origin Of An Institution
Through the summer of 1967, I had skittered through life on a wing and a prayer, with barely enough money to pay attention. In the penultimate issue of the Charlatan magazine, however, girlfriend Pamme Brewer had posed nude, challenging the University of Florida’s en loco parentis policy and creating a giant hullaballoo across the land. Newspapers everywhere ran the story, Walter Cronkite and his CBS crew raced down to record the doings and the magazine sold out of two separate printings. I had accumulated the massive fortune of $1200 to do with as I pleased. What I pleased was unorthodox, to say the least.
For several months, housemate Dick North, Pamme and I had been mulling over opening a bookstore, but not your average bookshop. Our place would sell the leading underground newspapers like the L.A. Free Press, The East Village Other and the San Francisco Oracle that were popping up everywhere, vanguards of the rising hippie tide. There was also a flood of literature being published about the care and feeding of marijuana and esoteric advice about other drugs soon to become popular, but none of these books were being sold at your friendly neighborhood newsstand. Nor were the budding underground comics which were flowering in California, too licentious for your mall bookseller, available only in an unmarked brown envelop from the unaware U.S. Postal Service.
Finally, the coup de gras that would separate us from all others---a massive poster selection, the equal of San Francisco’s Print Mint or The Infinite Poster in Greenwich Village. Add a few buttons, some hip sunglasses, a pinch of incense and---voila!---you have your inventory. But Dick North, to his eternal credit, wished to sell marijuana pipes. “All we can buy are bongs from the guys coming back from Vietnam,” I told him. Where are you going to get marijuana pipes?
“I’m going to make them out of lamp parts,” Dick assured. "We can get screens from plumbing supply places. They’ll be great. We can sell them for a couple of bucks. Everybody will want one.” And everybody did. It was the beginning of an agenda which lifted the store above all others---have an item which suited the growing culture before anyone else had it; water pipes, Nehru shirts, bellbottoms, blacklights, waterbeds, the works. The competition, what little there was of it, never caught up. Traditional stores were lost in our backwash. The Subterranean Circus made $27 the first day it was open, in September of 1967. Three days later, Pamme Brewer was on the front page of the Gainesville Sun and we made hundreds. By the end of the first year, the store grossed $1000 a day. The perennial poor boy was in danger of becoming, well…comfortable.
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Pamme Brewer: NOT the shot that broke the bank at Monte Carlo, but good enough for blog work. |
A couple of years after opening, the Circus was stuffed to the gills with inventory. Where once much of the merchandise was homemade, now the psychedelic shops were supplied by hundreds of young wholesale businesses which cropped up almost overnight. The National Boutique Show held at New York’s McAlpin Hotel offered a cornucopia of hippie merchandise on thirteen floors of drug-filled showrooms where retailers could shop for inventory to their hearts’ delight while taking a whiff or a puff.
Among other things, brazen new wardrobe choices were everywhere. Men were no longer required to dress exclusively in striped Sego shirts. Diaphanous dresses were all the rage for the ladies. The Circus’ vast 2800 square feet of floor space could no longer contain the inventory. We bought the large building next door which then housed Cecil Shannon’s greasy automobile rejuvenation business, a visual catastrophe. A squadron of hippies was enlisted to clear the place out and spray the walls and floor with hydrochloric acid. Then the fun began.
We cut a large skylight into the high roof, hung a jungle full of plants from the rafters, built an enormous garden and imported a 16-piece fountain from Tlaquepaque, Mexico. The shipping cost more than the fountain. A platform was built about six feet off the floor and a portal inserted to open into the Subterranean Circus. Ron Blair, not yet one of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, was hired to fashion a large curved stairway from the floor to the platform where the clothes were arrayed. Ron thought Bill was far too fussy about his curves, but he painstakingly accomplished the task. Silver City opened to rave reviews and often outpaced its next-door neighbor in daily sales. Legendary Circus performers like Debby Brandt, Jagger Hatcherson and the incomparable Ricky Childs plied their trade there happily for many years (18 for Ricky). Adding to the hilarity, Bill found his second wife.
Harolyn
Now and then, a person walks in the door and you just stop and say “Wow!” So it was when Miami dress salesman Al Roller stopped in to the Circus on his way to a clothing show in Atlanta. We were already selling a few of Al’s lines and he was sharp enough to see the unlimited potential of these strange new “head shops.” Al brought with him a fashion model named Harolyn Locklair, who donned a few of the products, made helpful observations about their assets and debits and provided useful thoughts about colors. Harolyn looked great in everything, of course, so we bought a lot of stuff.
The next day, I mailed a letter to Al in Georgia, asking about the likely arrival date of a couple of the items we bought. I also asked him to tell Harolyn that I loved her, which was a bit over the top, but gave Al a chuckle. “Who doesn’t?” he answered. “But I’ll pass it on.”
One afternoon several months later, I walked into the store and Johnny Bolton told me a woman had been in looking for me. “What did she look like?” I asked. “Not like anybody who ever comes in HERE,” he replied. She left no phone number but returned two hours later. “Hi, Bill,” she said, with a huge smile. For some reason, I noticed that all her teeth were perfect. “Sorry, but do I know you?” I wondered. She took on a faux-pouty expression. “You tell a girl you love her and you forget her six months later?” she teased. I turned around to my co-worker and apartment-mate, Danny Levine. “Get over to Summit House and clean up the place,” I muttered. “And see if you can find someplace else to sleep tonight.” He saluted, smiled and was on his way. From such beginnings, ten year marriages are sometimes made.
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| Art Historian, supersalesman, man-about-town Daniel Levine, Bill's only male roommate. One was enough. |
Jailbreak
Harolyn liked horses. Shortly after moving to Gainesville, we bought her an Arabian mare she named Odessa, which she boarded on the east side of town miles from our house next to the Circus. One day, she carefully rode Odessa all the way home from the stable, much of the trip on asphalt. When she arrived, she temporarily stashed the mare in our garage, which was never used for cars. The idea was to drop into the store for a few minutes, have some lunch, and ride Odessa back east. Alas, the wily mare had other ideas.
You can’t blame, Odessa, really. After all, it was a dark garage with no hay net, a dearth of grain and no equines to palaver with. Fortunately for her, Harolyn had neglected to secure the garage doors properly, a classic case of locking the garage door after the horse has escaped. So Odessa, unencumbered by anyone giving her orders, barged through the faulty security system and took a jaunt through town. Her owner jumped in our vehicle and sought to find her. Is this a Marx Brothers movie or what?
But wait. Horses, especially Arabs, are pretty smart when it comes to remembering where their bread is buttered. Even from a distance, they can usually remember where their feed buckets are. I thought Odessa might head back for her barn, despite the circuitous route, so I told Rod (The Biker) Bottiglier, who was working at the Circus to fetch his step-van parked nearby and we’d try to lasso the beast. Figuratively speaking, of course.
Now you would have to understand the religious fervor the average Harley Davidson owner has for his steed (and multiply it by ten) to appreciate Rod’s dilemma. His bike was stashed in the van but not secured as well as he would like it, so rather than have it fall and slide across the floor, he opted to drive like 10 miles an hour. On her worst day, Odessa would be leaving such a pursuer in the dust, and that’s where she left us. Despite my constant badgering, Rod refused to percolate any faster than 15 mph and the mare was long gone. “Thanks a lot, Rod, I could have walked faster than that.”
Odessa, of course, went right to her barn, no fuss, no muss. I later bought Harolyn a Tennessee Walker named Sundance and we boarded both horses at the current location of the Oaks Mall, then just a big field. Before long, we had our own farm, a 40-acre pearl just off the south shore of Orange Lake. One day, a visitor and friend named Shelly Browning, a big fan of thoroughbred racing, came visiting. “Look at all this room you have for just two horses,” she observed. “What you need is some racehorses. Let’s face it, Bill, you’re a competitive guy and you’ll never own the Red Sox” The web was spun, it was only a matter of time before the spider nailed her prey.
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Star Spectre, Harolyn and Bill's first winner |
Down The Stretch They Come….
A man named Fred Hooper, new to thoroughbred racing, bought his first horse and named it Hoop Jr. Junior promptly went out and won the Kentucky Derby in 1945, which might cause a man to think this racing business is easy pickin’s. The wags say if you’re lucky enough to win the Derby once you’ll spend the rest of your life and most of your money trying to do it again. Fred Hooper lived to the ripe old age of 104, had several champions but never won the Kentucky Derby again. For any owner, it’s the ultimate crapshoot. Most of us are happy to win a little stakes race every now and then but all of us have dreams of having a horse just good enough to get into the Kentucky Derby. The odds of doing it for a small owner are astronomical but most of the people who get into the business are dreamers to begin with. Everyone thinks he will be the guy who beats the odds. The thoroughbred business is built on such notions.
Our first runner, Star Spectre, broke his maiden at Arlington Park just outside Chicago. Harolyn and I sat on the bed of the big hotel overlooking the racetrack and called everyone we knew to tell them about it. Star Spectre was a powerful horse with a stamina pedigree, the type of colt who was bred to run the mile-and-a-quarter of the Derby. We quickly nominated him to the Florida Derby and were all agog with excitement. In his next start at Calder Race Course in Miami, Star Spectre bowed a tendon and his promising career was quickly over. We quietly drove over to then-empty South Beach, sat on the sand and looked out at the ocean, feeling sorry for ourselves. Such is the day-to-day of your typical thoroughbred racehorse owner. Everybody can’t be Fred Hooper.
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| Vaunted Vamp (outside) nips a rival at the wire. |
Vaunted Vamp, Educator
Seafaring folk like to laugh and tell you the two best days in a boat owner’s life are the day he buys his craft and the day he sells it. The expenses of maintaining a boat are legendary, but small potatoes in comparison to the draw on the budget of the serial horse owner. Ten years and one divorce down the road, I owned approximately 50 horses and the weekly feed payment was enough to eradicate hunger in a small third-world country. Though several of the horses were successful on the racetrack, I was barely paying the bills for those who were not. Just about the time I was getting ready to climb out on the ledge, however, a miracle occurred. Her name was Vaunted Vamp.
I was now living with Siobhan Ellison, my equine veterinarian, at her homey abode in rural Fairfield, equidistant from Gainesville and Ocala. Siobhan was offered a free mare by a client awash in horses and was on the verge of turning her down but decided to show me her pedigree. “If you don’t want her, I’ll take her,” I said, marking the reasonable quality of her ancestry. “She’s all yours,” said Siobhan and thus I acquired a nice-looking grey mare named Peace and Quiet. I bred her to a free stallion named Racing Star, a multiple stakes-winner on the grass then standing at Farnsworth Farm in Ocala. Despite his success on the track, the stallion was not a popular option for many breeders because he had not proven his mettle on the dirt, thus the complimentary season.
Despite some good works and a lot of optimism from trainer Jimmy Hatchett, Vaunted Vamp was unplaced in her first two races against allowance competition at short distances. We reluctantly dropped her in for a $25,000 claiming price at six furlongs, however, and she trounced the opposition. It was the last time until her final year of racing that she ever ran for a tag. As the distances of her races increased to seven furlongs, then a mile and finally a mile-and-one-sixteenth, the young filly began to dominate. She won on dirt and on the grass, on off tracks and fast ones and earned black type (third or better in a stakes race) many times over. Vaunted Vamp never won a stakes race but was second six times. By the time her career was over, she had amassed 21 wins and $420,000 under trainers Hatchett and Larry Pilotti. Siobhan went out to our backyard money bin, collected a few bucks and went back to school to get her PhD. The two best days in a horse owner’s life are not necessarily the day they buy their horse and the day they sell it.
That’s all, folks….
Aftermath
No account of Gainesville's Golden Years would be complete without mention of George Swinford, left in the photo below, hoisting one with Bill. In 1972, George opened Lillian's bar downtown; the place was an instant smash, its customers including the young and the beautiful, a variety of new entrepreneurs, the usual loud attorneys and people of interest to the local police. As the bar grew older, its customers aged with it, never abandoning the old watering hole for the New Girl In Town. If there was a tavern in Gainesville where everybody knew your name, it was Lillian's. If you went, you were all but certain of running into someone you knew. People celebrated birthdays there, also marriages, divorces and releases from jail. George presided like a sometimes irascible pasha over it all.
George also opened the adjacent 12 East restaurant with a few partners. It was a beautiful space, expansive and colorful, with an outside dining area at the terminus of a little alley. Lillian's and 12 East were separated by the iconic Mike's Book Store, another long-running Gainesville institution owned by the popular Bliziotes family. The trio comprised the hub of downtown Gainesville, which only became brighter with the arrival of the Hippodrome Theater. Without George Swinford, much of G'ville's downtown pizzazz would never have happened.
Today, George spends his time organizing the local resistance to tyrants in Washington. He is an avid moderate Democrat, eternally pounding out his message that Progressives might be wonderful folks but not enough people tend to vote for them. George insisted for months on end that Joe Biden was the only candidate who could overtake the Trump Train and he worked to make it happen. And guess what? To noone's surprise, George Swinford was right again.
(photo by Jaime Swanson)
