‘“The Shapers” is an ongoing series of profiles of the people who have shaped and continue to shape Santa Cruz County’s unique culture and spirit. Got an idea for an artist, businessperson, community organizer, media personality, government official or public figure who you think is core to Santa Cruz County, we’d love to hear about it at [email protected].
Tragedy has no mercy. And it often plays dirty. When unimaginable loss comes once, that doesn’t mean it won’t come a second time, and soon.
Four years ago, on the day before New Year’s Eve, Marcia McDougal lost her husband, Bruce, after 57 years together. Marcia and Bruce McDougal were uncommonly close. They were not only spouses, they were partners in art, in business, in life. Together, they operated Big Creek Pottery, a residence art school that attracted people from across the country and helped build Santa Cruz’s rich arts culture.
Those who know the McDougals often thought of them almost as a duality within a single entity — two minds, one heart. Artist Tim Craighead, one close friend, said, “They became my idea of what a marriage should be. I never thought it possible that two people could be together 24/7 and strategize their lives so closely together.”
Then, less than eight months after Bruce’s death, Marcia lost the home she and Bruce had built together. The CZU fires of the summer of 2020 rampaged through the remote hills and canyons off Swanton Road north of Davenport, where the McDougals had lived for more than 30 years. And their home was destroyed, as were the nearby homes of their adult children. The McDougals’ home was every bit as extraordinary as their marriage. It was an expression of their consuming interest in art from all over the world, and by inviting artists, writers, journalists and other friends to their home regularly, it became a kind of community touchstone. “Their house was the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in my life,” said Donna Mekis, another close friend. “It was absolutely filled with antiques, art, beautiful doors, sculpture, so much.”
“We lost everything,” said Marcia, who will be 93 in March. “I mean, I didn’t even have a toothbrush or a pair of clean underpants.”
Still, having experienced two life-defining losses in less than a year, Marcia today sees the terrible timing of the twin tragedies as a blessing, thankful that her husband didn’t have to experience the fire that took everything. “It was a gift, let me tell you,” she said.
An indelible imprint
What is undiminished by loss is the legacy of the McDougals in the artistic life of Santa Cruz County going back more than 50 years. That legacy largely revolves around Big Creek Pottery, which was not too far from where they later built their home in Swanton. (The site of the school, which had been closed for many years, was also destroyed by the 2020 fires.)
Big Creek was the first of its kind in the Western U.S., a residential immersive arts community outside the university/college system devoted to creating fine-art pottery. Established in 1967 by the McDougals and artist Al Johnsen, who later taught ceramics at UC Santa Cruz, Big Creek capitalized on the emerging counterculture’s interest in traditional crafts and attracted young people from across the country to live a life rooted in creativity. Many of those people stuck around Santa Cruz for a while. Some built a life there.
To the degree that Santa Cruz County is a today hub for creative artists, especially in the visual arts, Big Creek Pottery has, for generations, had an outsized influence in making it a welcoming destination for creatives. Obviously, the arrival of UCSC and Cabrillo College were more substantial influences in establishing an arts culture locally. But of all the organizations that exist outside those educational institutions, Big Creek looms large as a beacon for creative people who otherwise might have never called Santa Cruz home.
One of those people was Tim Craighead, one of Santa Cruz’s most accomplished painters, who first came to town to enroll at Big Creek. In 1970, at the age of 20, Craighead was headed to UC Berkeley with plans of becoming a lawyer. He had grown up in the Central Valley and knew next to nothing about art. He stumbled upon a brochure about Big Creek on a bulletin board at Fresno City College and entertained it as a “nice way to chill” the summer before he was to start at Berkeley, hitchhiking to the remote site in the rugged coastal hills of northern Santa Cruz County.
“From the first moment I met those two when I came over for a look, immediately I was hooked,” said Craighead. “I thought, ‘Wow, I don’t know what this is, but I know it’s great.’”
It turned out to be a turning point in his life. Though he didn’t become a potter, his experience at Big Creek redirected him to pursue a life in the arts at a time when the crafts movement “woke up a lot of people to the possibilities of life.”
For Craighead, Berkeley never happened. A summer class at Big Creek evolved into an indefinite stay. “Essentially, they sabotaged me from going to college,” he said. “I got this free stay for the fall to work. It was a no-brainer.” He stuck around for a few years.
Craighead’s story is just one of many from people who credit Big Creek and the McDougals for changing the course of their lives. Another is Bruce Bratton, widely known in Santa Cruz for decades for his work as a musician, writer and columnist. Bratton, too, settled in Santa Cruz because of the McDougals.
Bratton had known the McDougals dating back to the early 1960s in Berkeley. After the McDougals got Big Creek up and running, they invited Bratton to come down. He stayed, becoming a kind of on-site handyman and helped to build some of the student housing. “It was always Bruce and Marcia, for me,” said Bratton. “The three of us hung out all the time.”
Bratton eventually moved into a nearby house and began to build his own influential life in Santa Cruz art and politics. He said that Big Creek served as a beacon for anyone who wanted to live a creative life through pottery. “They drew pottery students from all over the United States,” he said. “Really, they came from everywhere, just unimaginable places, and how they would even hear about Big Creek Pottery in the first place was always a real mystery to me.”
Bruce and Marcia McDougal – he had grown up in Michigan and Ontario, Canada; she was from Southern California – had wandered throughout California in the 1960s, he as a potter and teacher, she as a jewelry maker. For a while, they lived in a renovated school bus. They were living in San Francisco when Johnsen suggested they open their own pottery school in an abandoned warehouse north of Santa Cruz. Eventually, they found a nearby abandoned ranch owned by brothers Lud and Bud McCrary of Big Creek Lumber.
“Bruce and I fell madly in love with it right away,” said Marcia. “We didn’t even want to wait.” Bruce McDougal always wanted to run his own shop as a teacher. In the college environment, he found too many of his students enrolled in his pottery or weaving classes under the assumption it would be an easy credit. By contrast, at Big Creek Pottery, students traveled sometimes from far away to live and work full-time on the premises to learn only the finer points of pottery. Big Creek gave the McDougals a connection to students who were as potentially as passionate about the art as they were.
Gradually, Big Creek began to develop a national reputation at a time when pottery was something of a cultural phenomenon, at least among younger people. The McDougals invited some of pottery’s biggest national names to lead workshops at Big Creek and many of them came, including the celebrated ceramic artist Daniel Rhodes (who eventually moved to the Swanton area). “I said, ‘Hey, why don’t we write to all our heroes and see if they’ll come and teach?’” said Marcia.
All the while, the McDougals were cultivating relationships with creative people in Santa Cruz whether they were potters or not. Poets and writers came to read before the student body.
Writer and historian Donna Mekis said her late husband, poet Morton Marcus, was a regular visitor to Big Creek though he was not a potter. “The way that Mort got to know them is they invited him to come up and read poetry in the evenings,” she said, “and he would help cook, and then he would read poetry with them. They invited people to come up regularly.” Another was the noted poet and printer William Everson, who at the time was known as Brother Antoninus.
Big Creek also symbolized a cultural turn in Santa Cruz that was fundamental to the area’s evolving personality. When they arrived on Swanton Road in their school bus with their three young children, the McDougal were hippies. Property owners Bud and Lud McCrary were traditional businesspeople with deep roots in the industrial, pre-university history of the area.
“Bud and Lud were great,” said Marcia. “They were so supportive of us. Bud was up there every night for a couple of hours. He was intrigued with everything we were doing.”
When they first moved onto the property and began to transform it into Big Creek Pottery, the McDougals were regularly visited by locals curious, often suspiciously so, about what they were up to. “They sat and watched us,” remembered Marcia. “And then when Bud came up, he said to them, ‘Hey, they’re going to be OK. They like to work.’”
‘A life of appreciating different cultures’
The school lasted into the mid-1980s, offering three sessions a year, each session ran between eight and nine weeks. Altogether, more than 1,100 people took classes at Big Creek. While the school was still going strong, the McDougals also opened the Cash Store in Davenport, providing potters a place to display and sell their wares. The Cash Store was a landmark business in Davenport until the McDougals sold it in 2006. Today it is the Davenport Roadhouse.
Linda Craighead, Tim’s wife, also knew the McDougals going back to the earliest days of Big Creek. She said that they symbolized Santa Cruz’s emerging conception of itself as a place where culturally curious and sophisticated people could live and connect with each other. “Bruce and Marcia had a huge influence on the style of living, in the people who came in contact with them, and what they surrounded themselves with, both at Big Creek and the Cash Store,” she said. “They modeled not only an artistic life and what that looked like. But it was also a life of appreciating different cultures, whether it be Mexican, American Indian or Tibetan. It was the art of home, the art of living. It wasn’t the art that was on walls at museums.”
Today, Marcia McDougal rarely visits Davenport, or Swanton Road. For the past few years, she has been living in Santa Cruz. Despite the loss of her husband and her iconic house within a few months, Marcia is living a new life in a neighborhood where she feels at home, still steeped in pottery, art and friends.
“I have a wonderful house now,” she said. “It’s a place that Bruce and I always said, if we didn’t have Big Creek, this is where we would like to live. That was like a second dream come true.”
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