Kathryn H. Dole (1920–2011) lived with her family at the Hollister Ranch during the 1950s and 1960s, residing in the main house, built in 1910. This arrangement began as an offer of summer lodging in exchange for cleaning up the place, but it turned into a decade in which, as Kate put it, “every day was an adventure, and every night was Halloween.” Many years later, I accompanied Kate as she revisited the house and reminisced about life there with her husband –– the artist William Dole –– their seven children, and a delightfully madcap assortment of visitors and friends.
“We didn’t stay here full-time at first,” she said. “For the first two or three years, we drove back and forth on weekends. Then we discovered that my weekends were starting on Thursday night and ending on Tuesday morning. When I first came up, I wore sandals and shorts and carried a small wrench and a little pair of pliers. After I'd been up here a few years, I’d put on the sturdiest blue jeans I could find, wool socks, boots, a long-sleeved shirt, and heavy-duty gloves. My pruning shears went from miniature to grand. The first chain saw I bought was so big, I could barely pick it up!”
We walked behind the house to a grassy rectangle that had once been a swimming pool, built in the 1930s, but don’t imagine some luxurious aqua oasis. “The pool water was pitch black because the lithium in the water up here, combined with the oak leaves — or bourbon — turns it black,” said Kate. “We’d fix somebody a bourbon and water, and they’d have a few sips and set it down on their armchair, and all of a sudden, they’d look at their drink and it’d be black.”
