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Southern California #3, Jamul Haven: A Search for Privacy

Story and photography by
Nancy & Eric Anderson 

 

Jamul (pronounced Hamool) lies in the foothills of the Laguna Mountains as a remote, unincorporated part of San Diego County, about 20 miles southeast of downtown San Diego itself. Jamul was originally part of an 1829 9000 acre land grant from the governor of the Mexican republic to Don Pio Pico, the last Mexican governor of California, a man often called “the last of the great Spanish Dons” and one who has appeared in so many stories from California’s past. Pio Pico was described by historian Loverne Morris as having “a face like a moose.” This man who became wealthy beyond dreams when, as governor, he secularized the Spanish missions was born, Morris says, “in 1801 in a shack at San Gabriel Mission where his father was then corporal of the guard.” He was deceived in business as an old man when he signed for a loan and was given a mortgage form to sign that gave his vast land holdings to the lender.

Not much has happened in the last 200 years or so although the 64 members of the Tipai Kumeyaay Indians have announced they want to develop a casino on their six acres of sovereign land in Jamul. The locals hope not; they value their privacy. Jamul today has a population of about 6,000. In recent years it has become the home of retired country folks, farm workers and cattle barons. And a couple of legends. The celebrated gardener and nurseryman, Hal Simpson who died in 1987, made his mark here as did the renowned Olive King, Charles M. Gifford.

Gifford arrived from Michigan in 1888 with the dream of planting multiple groves of the Spanish Manzanillo and Ascolano olive trees that had been so successfully introduced in the 1700s by the Spanish missionaries. Gifford’s olive empire expanded until he was selling 400 tons of olives a year. In 1890 he built an impressive Queen Anne farmhouse along Jamul Drive for his expanded family. His 2,178 sq ft home became the first building in Jamul to have a telephone, in fact for many years the only one, and locals would come to his house to use the telephone if they ever had an emergency. His home, built with a circular driveway, became ideal as a stage coach stop and horse exchange location for the stage that ran between San Diego through Mexico Canyon to the little town of Campo to the east.

Jamul Haven Reborn: Guest Luxury Re-Created

If Gifford was proud then that his expensive dwelling was recognized as a magnificent example of late 19th century Victorian architecture, think how pleased he would be to see what his home has become today: Jamul Haven, perhaps the most beautifully rebuilt Bed & Breakfast in Southern California.

The owners, Bill and Marianne Roetzheim, are even more colorful than the Giffords who preceded them. In 1977 Bill, a research chemist who had just completed the challenge of a complicated project, now bored, saw a newsreel about joining the US Navy and, before he quite knew it, was flying Lockheed S-3 Vikings. One year before, John Travolta’s Saturday Night Fever had shaken the dancing world and disco was now all the rage. Bill, a typical Navy pilot who “had learned to dance in order to meet women – I was shy so I took dance lessons,” asked the prettiest woman in the dance hall, an occupational therapist to dance with him. They were married eight months later and have now been together for 29 years.

“Was it love at first sight? Was it his Navy pilot uniform that attracted you?” his wife is asked. “Not really,” Marianne replies, “He was wearing a three-piece polyester suit!”

In subsequent lives, Bill won a national US gymnast championship; got his MBA; started, developed and sold two business software companies; wrote several books of poetry and 17 or so books on business and, with Marianne, decided to run an upscale Bed & Breakfast. “My claim to fame, “ says Marianne. “I feed him.”

And, of course, in between, he’s writing a light opera based on part of the life of T.S. Eliot. But where Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote Cats based on Elliot’s poem “Old Possum's book of Practical Cats”, Bill’s musical Eliot will be centered on his own poetry. 

There are paradoxes: MBAs don’t write poetry, poets don’t rebuild Victorian houses, software engineers don’t enjoy the presence of others – they are not usually people persons.

So why on Earth did you want to own and run a B & B? he is asked.

“Marianne and I don’t have a simple answer,” he says. “We love it here. We thought of running a restaurant, or perhaps a simple country store, then even a board and care. We just wanted to meet interesting people and get to know them – it’s fun to learn from others.”

Marianne adds, “I miss being an occupational therapist, I enjoyed taking care of patients and now I feel good about meeting the special needs of house guests.”

The Roetzheims believe the special needs of those coming to Jamul Haven will be for privacy. The upscale B & B has four attractively furnished Victorian rooms, each with its own bathroom but all four rooms could be booked by celebrities, Hollywood names, entertainment personalities or casino big players to give themselves a secluded retreat.

The Sycuan Resort and Casino, for example, is only four miles away with its Showcase Theatre and the 54 holes of golf that have been recognized for four consecutive years as the #1 golf courses in San Diego by readers of the San Diego Union-Tribune. Golfers will find two other first class courses much closer and the B& B sits only a few hundred yards from one of them the 27-hole, Golf Digest 4-Star, Gary Player Signature Steele Canyon Course. Non golfers can hike mountain trails or desert canyons, bike the area on the B & B’s bicycles, or drive about four miles to Bright Valley Farms for horseback riding on the many trails. A 15-screen movie theater is about four miles away. Every thing, indeed, seems to be about four miles away, which emphasizes the remoteness of Jamul even though its country roads can, at times, be busy.

Guests will probably not want to be busy themselves or to wander far from their B & B home. There’s plenty to occupy them there. There’s a gorgeous outdoor pool, solar-heated, made out of local rock and granite. Beside it stands a large pool house, one of the three buildings on the property. The other two are the main house which was Bill and Marianne’s first purchase -- in 1989 -- and the Gifford House, on the lot next door, which they bought in 2004, now the B & B. A guest once admired this pool and asked Bill if he’d advise him to get one like it. Said Bill: “You have to decide, if you want it, that money’s no object!”

The pool has three Roman-style mosaics (one in the pool floor and two around the water fall) and seven small faces embedded in the granite walls around the spas that illustrate the seven deadly sins. Four more antique mosaics all from Lebanon grace the four bathrooms in the B & B. The pattern of the one in the downstairs Peacock Room consists of 45,000 individual squares all of natural color. The swimming pool cost several hundred thousand dollars and the Roetzheims, with reason, are enormously proud of it. Clearly their circumstances were different before they sold their software companies. They recall how thin they were stretched financially when they bought the main house. Bill and Marianne were working 80 hour weeks. They couldn’t afford trash pickup so Bill would take their trash to work in his Pinto Hatchback to drop it into the company dumpster.

Times changed. They actually employed ten men full-time for three years to restore the Victorian house, surely an expensive act of love. Asked if he felt empty or disappointed when they were finally finished with the house, Bill replies, “No! I felt broke. We were putting $50,000 a month on our credit cards and when it was over we had more than a million frequent flyer miles with United.”

Their passion for doing the restoration properly is palpable. They jacked up the house to create a new foundation, added structural beams, then removed -- and laid reverently on the ground -- all the outside and interior walls, leaving only the frame. They replaced the electricals and added plumbing, changed the floors and suspended the ceilings, added a second floor porch and a turret and when the immense jigsaw puzzle was finished turned finally to the interior decoration.

They heard of a massive door, 300 years old and weighing more than 800 pounds in Poland that might be available from a baptistery that was being demolished. Bearing a hand carved angel it seemed just right for their B & B. They arranged for someone they knew, an East German Stasi officer of all things, to buy it on their behalf and ship it to them. They wanted new hardware for the door and found a company in Great Britain that had been making such hardware since the 1700s.

They added a kitchen and a stamped copper ceiling to the vaulted ceiling, then created hand-worked cabinets of saporo mahogany, placed a hand-beaten copper farm sink from Greece in the kitchen counter and inserted stained glass windows. A neighbor gave them the original house telephone. They decorated the walls with new wallpaper using patterns from the 1890s

In the parlor sits the original upright piano on which Charles Gifford’s daughter, Ruth, learned to play although, at the moment, it’s a bit out of tune. A display case across from the piano is filled mostly with antiques donated by other neighbors and another case contains nostalgia objects found hidden in an old box under the floor during restoration in the Gifford house. One of the box’s contents was a World War II Navy Aviation recruiting flyer asking men from 17 and up to join the US Navy, a spooky finding since both Bill and, in February 2008, his eldest daughter Elizabeth have won their Navy wings.

We chose the Peacock Room for our three-night stay (all the rooms are the same price). The parlor beyond had, among its decorations, the wedding dress of their daughter Elizabeth. Some of the curtains were made from lace tablecloths from Marianne’s mother’s home. Our room had all the extras that we’d read about: robes and slippers, Casswell-Massey toiletries, modern temperature controls, WiFi access, a DVD player, DVD library and flat-screen TV about the size of our 19 inch computer screen, hair dryer and shoe horn. Our newspaper arrived early each morning. Snacks, candy and cookies were available in an open basket in the kitchen and in a personal box in our room. Coffee was available each morning and all day. The kitchen was available if we’d wanted to cook something. Not sure when a guest would ever want to do that as the very substantial breakfast cooked by chefs Marianne and Glenda lasted us through lunch and the heavy hors d’oeuvres and drinks at the complimentary Happy Hour really kept us going through the evening.

Breakfast is served in the main house. That’s where the bar with complimentary alcohol and wine is situated next to the special disco room that has all the professional extras you’d ever want in a home disco. Those people must love to dance! A game room with table tennis and pool tables is in the floor above. There is a small exercise room well enough equipped to keep Clint Eastwood busy. They also have bicycles.

Guests are provided with information on local attractions and, yes, there are places to go like Simpson’s Nursery but part of the pleasure of staying in such an interesting yet comfortable B & B is surely for many to stay put and restore the soul.

Simpson’s Garden Town Nursery: Plants, Cars and Philosophy

If you hop into your car and drive a few miles past roads called Peg Leg Mine, Sky Line Truck and Casa de Oro and beyond signs proclaiming Dulzura Fence, Xtreme Sports and Jamul Hardware, you come to one saying Simpson’s Garden Town Nursery. Signs are not always truthful. Here’s one amongst the vast reaches of the nursery: “Elvis was spotted on Row 13.” But others amongst all the plants make more sense. Here’s a homely “The hardest things to handle in life are failure and success.” And another, “Maybe if we did a better job of listening History wouldn’t have to repeat itself.”

By now you are thinking, We are not in Kansas, Toto! This is not a normal nursery. You are so right. It’s the one started by Hal Simpson. Simpson had established a garden nursery in Pasadena, California in 1928 then his land was taken for Highway 210. He retired and in the 1960s bought the Barrett House Ranch in Jamul with its 185 acres. Soon he was bored so he used 25 of those acres to establish a simple nursery: self-drive and no phone on the premises. It worked. Along came his energetic granddaughter, Cathy with her husband Lee Smith, a keen car collector. It was a marriage made in heaven, both theirs and this combination of car collecting with a lot of space. Lee’s first purchase was a 1931 Ford Model A. “I still have it,” he says showing us around his collection, “I haven’t really sold much stuff.” They now have 97 antique vehicles in two barns and some more old trucks that are used for decoration out amongst the plants.

Are they thrilled by the positive feedback they get from people because locals are very proud of this collection and say so? Lee takes of his cowboy hat and scratches his head. “We don’t need our egos stroked,” he says. “I’d rather get a thank you from a visitor than a compliment. We have those cars on show because we love it. We don’t charge.” He stands beside the 1940 black Ford Coupe his wife gave him for his 40 birthday, and says, “For 80 years this place has been run by family. You don’t stay in business for that time unless you are fair with your prices and also entertain your customers. He looks down at his wife of 28 years, smiles and says, “We’ve only had one argument all the time we’ve been married. It was 2AM on a cold, cold morning and we were trying to hang wallpaper ourselves because we didn’t have enough to pay a painter. And we made a mess of it!”

They laugh and smile benevolently at each other. Wow, more love birds. First Bill and Marianne Roetzheim! Now Lee and Cathy Smith. They’re the second long-married, still-in-love couples we’ve discovered in Jamul. What is it about this place? Maybe it’s the water. 

 
 

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