 I'd like to introduce Camille Houston, a member of the Haydashbury community for many years, also my good friend and known by a lot of people, I'll have her explain as Camille Colorado. My name is Rebecca Nichols and I'm moderating this oral history for the Haydashbury Library. Camille, can you tell me a little bit about your nickname I've heard, Camille Houston? Camille? I mean Camille Colorado, excuse me. Camille Colorado was my a.k.a. when I was working in a lot of alternative organizations, when I first began doing textile work in the 70s and I was working for a lot of organizations that even though I come from a very liberal family, I wanted to be independent of them and I had a name that was based on a talent that I had which was face painting and it means Colorado, it means painted, as in Palo Colorado which is also the name of a redwood tree and a canyon in Big Sur where I have some land that's very special to me and so I went by Camille Colorado because I was doing banners for Coyote, the prostitutes rights organization and I was doing banners for Proposition W, the marijuana initiative and the Libertarian Party, enough said, and liberal and sometimes radical organizations and so I wanted to name separate from my identity as a private person. Exactly. Well it's a very sweet name but it suits you. Thank you. I want to ask you some questions about your beginnings. Your parents, your parents' names, where did they migrate from or their parents, where did they migrate from, originally, where were they from and how did you find yourself here and where were you born and did you have any brothers or sisters and children? All right. Okay. Well my father came from Austria and my mother came from then Czechoslovakia, the Czech Republic now when they were very young. Probably shortly after World War I and they met in Southern California which is where I was born and my brother, I had a brother who was two and a half years younger than me named Gilbert after his father and we lived in Southern California until I married and then I married you. What's your husband's name? My husband's name is Tom Houston and he was my childhood sweetheart. We met in the seventh grade and we married when we graduated from college. So at that point we moved to Madison, Wisconsin on a three-year National Defense Education Act fellowship and it was there that I met the San Francisco Mime Troop when they came to town with their show Oden Watermelons and the minstrel show. We were expecting one of the Mime Troop to come to our house because he had been a schoolmate of my husband's at Harvard and instead we ended up getting the entire Mime Troop because what had been planned as a lecture on the campus by Ron Davis on Barilla Theater turned into the first Dow demonstration in the country and we went to hear the lecture and it was canceled because there had been tear gassing and a riot and the band was wanted for inciting a riot and so we happened to live at the end of a dead-end street near a lake and it was a perfect place to hide out. So I ended up with the whole Mime Troop there and they gave me some beautiful posters, psychedelic posters from Wes Wilson promoting bands at the Fillmore and they told me there was an incredible art form coming across in the Haydash Berry and to visit them when we came to town and they'd give us more posters. So that was my introduction to the San Francisco psychedelic scene and then later on we moved to Baltimore to Johns Hopkins University where my husband was an associate professor and I had my only child who is a beautiful young artist named Tara Clare Houston and at that point we decided we wanted to get serious and come to California so my husband could pursue his photography and we moved to Berkeley and then very quickly into a family home in the Haydash Berry in 1971 right after my daughter's first birthday. Now this family home was in your husband's family for a while? My husband's grandmother had rented it in the thirties and they had always been renting it until we moved in and even when we moved in it had been abandoned because the neighborhood had gotten very, very dangerous and most of the relatives had died or married and moved somewhere else. And so there was this enormous beautiful flat absolutely available, it was on Page Street it still is, I still live there between Baker and Lion Street. So we moved into that house and the lady who owned the house lived upstairs in two floors we lived downstairs in two floors and the rent at that time was $125 we had 18 rooms but it was just a wonderful place. So you're telling me this was a Victorian and it was not split like many of the Victorians in the Haydash Berry. No there had only been two owners at that point. So it still is not split it is still it was built as a duplex and it's still not split. We're the third owners we bought it in 1975 when the lady who owned it who was a very close friend of my husband's family all that time finally moved out into the avenues where it was more convenient for her for her health and then we moved upstairs to that duplex. I just think that it's just so amazing historical that to find in San Francisco and in the Haydash Berry a Victorian that has not been split into four floors you know private entrances and the original design of the building to be a family home with an attic with a study with a library it still has that feeling its original stained glass turn banisters and moldings and things. It's an amazing historical building here in Haydash Berry because very few have not been split through the years because of monetary reasons or whatever. I know but the families have been very constant and many families have lived in it during that time but they have all been our personal friends so it's been like an extended family. Amazing. So you mentioned your daughter about how old is she now? She is in her 30s and she is an artist? Yes she is an artist she is in the UNICEF Permanent Children's Collection in New York City and she was she had a six person show when she was about 11 at the D Young Museum. Wow. A psychiatrist was studying talented people and the growth spectrum from children from a very early age till seven and she was one of the six students in that study. Wow. And so she had a show at the D Young Museum that was very pivotal for me because it opened up several categories that led to my future work here in the Haydash. Wow. So I'd like to ask you about some of your, I would like to ask you about some of your experience. I know you've done some work with the D Young yourself, you've had some creative inspiration and you've been around creative people and kind of what happened here in the 60s that continued through the 70s somewhat. There was a lot of the inspiration and what was going on. Some of the storefronts were empty on Hayd Street because it was such a transition but yet here we are in 2005 and children are still coming from all over the world looking for something and a lot of the people on the interviews we've done said they hoped that maybe we could make peace in our lifetime. They hoped that by loving their community and their neighbor they would show on a small scale that we could really work together and find things we agree on on common ground. And some people have told us that they've been inspired by the music. Some people were inspired by the posters on and on. You lived here and you still live here as part of the community in the Haydash area. What makes you feel comfortable to be in this community as a creative person and maybe a little bit about your walk down Hayd Street that one day inspired this idea to get more creative and actually interact with the public on a business. I'd love to hear a little bit about that on any level. Well at that point we had many people coming to our house all of the time. We had artists we were involved with a lot of music festivals and people would come and visit us and it got very hectic for me and a friend invited me to go out for coffee one day and I went up to Hayd Street and walked into a coffee house that had been an empty space a few months before when I had looked at it and tried to imagine what business I might be able to do with it. Where was this? It is in the very center of Hayd Street on the 1500 block between Ashbury and Clayton Street in the middle of the block and it had been developed with an infrastructure from recycled old pier pilings into several small shops leading on to a coffee house that had a moat around it with goldfish and a bridge. It was very romantic and imaginative and fantastic. So the time you saw this before it was empty? It had been empty. There were piles of rags. The people who were clearing it out were taking things to flea markets. Right. And it was a vast cavernous space and now there were these individual little shops, tiny shops and it all led down to this beautiful coffee house. And there was a rent sign there. And so finding my home very hectic I decided this would be a fantastic experience to have my own place to get away just a few blocks away. And I rented it from these three men who had been to India to follow the Maharishi Ji and had taken the name Haranya Loka Limited for their business operation. And they ran the cafe which was called the United States Cafe and there still is a very famous restaurant that had been there for decades called the United States Cafe in North Beach. But this was a more metaphysical concept, the United States of consciousness and love rather than the United States of America. Right. Even though it was a reference. Right. Gradually people began playing guitar there in the afternoons and one thing evolved into another until it began to be a regular nightclub. And through that I met many musicians and began doing stage clothes for them. Tourists were beginning to come back into the hate at that point. And people would come from all around the world. And so the denim jacket that I did for the denim art contest that I refer to in Levi's denim art book to a Swiss psychologist. And people came saying they'd seen my hats in Paris in London and in Hawaii because we made denim hats with pieces of recycled fabric from gowns and curtains and crochet and lace, anything we could find. We beaded them. We made beaded bracelets like this with Indian looms. That's wonderful. Now they're just coming back. Is this one of your bracelets? No. This is one that I bought last week on 24th Street. Which reminiscent of them. Totally. This was just what we were selling except we were selling ones that we made personally with designs from Indian rugs and Afghan rugs, tribal rugs and Art Nouveau designs. Do you think that a lot of your artwork that came from vintage curtains, lace, you name it, somehow had some kind of idea behind it of we're saving our environment, you know, let's use up what we have rather than cut what is not used yet. Let's use all the stuff not being used. Let's save our earth and our resources somehow. Well, Rebecca, it wasn't exactly that because it was more an act of preserving the culture in whatever pieces we were using, preserving patterns, textures, crafts that were becoming hard to find. They were almost becoming extinct. It wasn't that they were cheaper. It was that they were rarer. Right. They were more beautiful. Sometimes we would go to thrift stores in Salinas, go way out into the country to thrift stores to places where veterans from the different wars had brought back Japanese kimonos from World War II and things like that. We picked those things up. It was more of a sense of preservation and beauty. Then, of course, it was the challenge to create something beautiful from it and something that worked and clicked like you're making a painting. Textile art is an art. You then saw this sign for rent. Was it history? Did you rent the place? Yes, I rented it right there. Did you give it a name? I named it Vexilla, which is Latin for banners. I've always had a Latin classics background, so has my husband. Places on Hick Street had outrageous names. It had a history of that. I like the esoteric reference, but it also seemed heraldic that it was maybe a spearhead of the culture in some way. I did end up making banners. Ultimately, it developed into my primary work, which has been banner work. Did you bring anything with you? This is one of four banners that we were hanging from the loft at the United States Cafe. We used to project light shows, and we had these hanging from the loft, and I did four of these. Usually, the work that I did was much larger than this, but this was actually meant to be hanging this way. This set of four banners was used at one of the very early Hick Street fares. Then I had a larger banner that was stretched across the street, and that was really exciting because the wind comes down Hick Street. We had people at the tops of buildings risking their lives to try to get the lines across. That was my work at the United States Cafe, which turned then into Shady Grove. Those people began producing concerts in the park. Also, we had an interview with Joe Buck, well, Marty Ballant's father. He talked about his times of going to Shady Grove and Marty playing there and the involvement of it, and now I'm seeing through this oral history project we're getting to know what was there before and what it was. I see you brought some other pieces that you made. These pieces made for friends are pieces that are similar to what you sold in your shop. Any stories behind these? The pieces that I made, I made them custom for people. I also just explored textures and color, and they were just the available inventory at the store. Some pieces of yours were used in a display from the 66 exhibit or read in your credits. You had done some internship with the Museum of Modern Art, and that it was on your notes? The D'Yam Museum. I worked on the rainbow show at the D'Yam Museum. We basically used the skills that I incorporated into decorating the clothing and doing the inventory. The only things we sold that we didn't make ourselves were leotards and tights, and at that point it was very difficult. Clothing didn't involve leotards unless you were a dancer, and so I had to get a special contract with Danskin to be able to have the leotards, and that was pretty interesting because now you see stretched clothing all over the place, but it wasn't around in the early 70s. Right, it was all cotton. But through working on the rainbow show, I worked with women from the Rhode Island School of Design and the College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, and we did everything. We made at that point the largest quilt in the world, and all the panels we would treat differently. We would dye them, we would stud them, we would fringe them so some of them loose, some of them very tight, and we made an enormous quilt of a water lily pond that took up an entire room, and then we would make rocks and wall hangings, and it was two entire rooms of the Deion Museum. It took one season that those rooms were closed to the public to produce. What you have on right now? This is a dress that I made from a tablecloth, and this is the kind of thing that we did. We found these pieces in stores that were considered old fashioned, and you've kept the integrity of the piece because that's what you can head your arm down. That's the complete circle. The other part is that it's easy. Amazing. They were angel dresses. Angel dresses. I saw many different fabrics in the 60s and 70s. The style, it's beautiful, and you still have it. That's amazing. And these styles are still coming back. Oh, it's all retro and the best of the past, hopefully. You have some other pieces that you made? I would love to see them. Well, this is one of our hats, which is basically denim, but sometimes only a brim would be denim, and we would use different materials. Now they make them in different materials, solid, but we were playing with color and texture. This is silk screen. This is the name of my shop that still I made. This is a promotional hat. Very. It's amazing. You still have it. This is an applique from an evening gown. All different textures. This is a pull-stream material. All different textures. This is a embroidery applique. This is an old princess dress. Wow. See, that's what patchwork is. Each piece of fabric tells a story. And that's what you've done there. Another version of patchwork quilt. I would love to see something else. Have you seen this jacket yet? No, I'd love to see it. This is a jacket from my boutique. Military insignia, cords from stage curtains. The two sleeves have different cuffs. It's beautiful. Things aren't matching, but they go together. And then the cotton-venuated collar. The collar is a fur collar. A sheet skin. It's a warm jacket. Like the Air Force jackets used to have. It's beautiful. Yeah. Well, you need a warm jacket on Haight Street after five. It's beautiful. I still fit you. It's wonderful. Whoops. Here we go. Really, really beautiful. That's a beautiful jacket. Thank you. It's a museum piece. It should be in a display case. Wonderful. Wonderful. Well, the jackets were in the museum. They were in the Deion Museum. The jackets that we made for the Dan and Mark contest. Me and my partner, Martha Coleman. And they went on tour across the United States. And those are the jackets that are in the book. Levi's Dan and Mark. So it's probably not enough time to mention all the things you've made and been involved with. But I understand that you were also beyond the early 70s here and your arts and carried you in this community, worked on a lot of events in Golden Gate Park. That's part of the Haight Ashbury Golden Gate Park. And work backstage, whether you were making articles of clothing for entertainers or whether you were designing the look and putting a backdrop. Well, actually, I made the backdrops for quite a few shows with Billy McCarthy and Unity Foundation. I did the Unity Foundation banners, which would be up at every show. Often I would work with organizations like Chet Helms and Margo St. James who would do repeated concerts. And so the same banners would be used in different locations and for different events. Do you remember where the location or any of these events were or what any of the bands were that played or any of the names of the events? Well, I did banners for the Hooker's Ball, starting with the second Hooker's Ball. I did actually a custom jacket for a bail bondsman for the first Hooker's Ball. And as I was finishing it up for him to wear, I did a tuxedo jacket out of pieces of recycled denim. And as I finished the piece, he invited me to the ball. So that was my introduction to the Hooker's Ball. And I didn't have anything to wear. The ball was that night. So I used the cutout pieces that were left over from the jeans that I had cut to make his jacket, to make a very brief screen, but it worked for a Hooker's Ball. It was perfect. And that was at Longshoreman's Hall. And then the next year I did the Coyote Banner, which is a charming design done by David Wills here in the Ashbury. And he has worked with Margo for several designs. And I have interpreted his designs with actually interviewed David for the Masquerade Corporation. Compliment what he said. I did the Coyote Banner. I did the Masquerade Corporation Banner for another Hooker's Ball. And I did the most ambitious of them all, the Victoria Woodhull Foundation Banner, which is based on the design of the Great Seal of the United States. And that's an 11 by 11. And I believe that was at the Cow Palace. We had them at the San Francisco Hilton at the Cow Palace. They were very large venues. And they got bigger every year until Margo finally decided to retire them. And then the tribal stomps, Chet Helms gave what was, I think, dedicated to the first tribal stump in the 60s here in the Haight-Ashbury in the Panhandle. And he gave that at the Greek Theater in Berkeley. And I did the banners for the two sides of the Greek Theater stage, which were used again at the Monterey County Fairgrounds for the second tribal stump. And they were borrowed by several other music producers for their shows. And family FLOG Productions was Chet's company. And Family FLOG Productions, Doug Green's company up north, used them for several shows. Wonderful. Wonderful. And do you now, that is 2005, and this is your home and you live here and you're a member of the community, and a very active member and being creative with all the spirit that the Haight ever had. And through the 60s and now, do you still feel comfortable here? Do you feel the Haight is a place where you go up down the street and maybe meet a friend? Always. As a matter of fact, I can never, I can never promise when I'll be home if I go up to Haight Street for anything. You know, I might be an hour later. I always run into people, I know. And it's really come around to being as beautiful as it ever was. How do you feel with your dreams of what you want in life and your creativity? Where do you see life going in creativity? Where would you like to focus your future on, on the work you do? Well, I've always followed the trail of consciousness and people I feel at home with who have similar ideals and similar aesthetics. And everything I've done has, has been led to me by, by another person. So I think it's communication. I think it's communication and appreciating everyone that you know and how briefly we may have the opportunity to know them, to realize what their skills are and to make everyone feel a part of it. Exactly. So you would like to continue that journey in your life? Absolutely. Absolutely. I, I continued working with Maritime Hall doing more concerts. And there are more coming up that I hope to be involved with. But what I enjoy most is seeing large numbers of people getting together, feeling really good, really happy, being with their friends and meeting new friends. Well, this, well, this is very inspiring and I'm hoping that when this video is shown, we will invite you back again. We can add to your life's history and your contribution to the Haight Ashbury and beyond. I'm just, I just know when this video is pulled in 50 years and some young person watches it, they might find themselves there and might be inspired by the works that you've done. I want to thank you so much for being here and I took pleasure and to document what has happened, helps inspire when one person sees one person can do it, they can try themselves. So thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Rebecca.