Most of these were taken in the jungle-like back yard of the Santa Monica Canyon house, just above the beach. Two are probably in Malibu. The cat was named Nexus.
During the summer of young niece Gabrielle’s visit, much of the evening entertainment consisted of live group readings (everyone would take a turn) and listening to music. Guests seemed to drop by regularly. And sometimes we went to the San Fernando Valley to watch velodrome racing, to supplement the late afternoon impromptu pickup racing brother Dennis engaged in, riding up Pacific Coast Highway with his exotic featherweight bicycle. This followed his work by day of building and repairing bicycles (and working construction) when he was not writing.
Memorable from that period were some of bicycle treks — shown here are two photos of an early morning departure for a run from Venice to Laguna Beach (60 miles each way) with Dennis and Mike (aka Rojo) and a couple of scenes from the sojourn from Venice to Solvang (about 125 miles each way), where I experienced the most excruciating relentless uphill stretches ever in the mountains out of Santa Barbara. (Even bicycle racer/mechanic “iron man” Dennis suffered a blister or two.) And the best memory highlighting that summer was a visit of a few weeks by niece Gabrielle, all the way from New York City. (The white-haired gentleman, whose name I forget, was her maternal grandfather.)
More never-before-seen resurrections from the archives.
Friends, acquaintances and neighbors in and around Venice …
Rich and Dennis on a chilly early morning …
Today, more from the B&W negative archives. Venice, as you may recall, was once known as “Dogtown”. 
Point Vicente is on some of the most rugged and interesting of Los Angeles-area beaches, between the “tourist” beach cities of Manhattan, Hermosa and Redondo and Los Angeles Harbor/Long Beach. Its lighthouse stood on the tip of the Palos Verdes peninsula overlooking the seafront where these photographs were made in March of 1975. This is a place where metal blends into rock.
I’ve been (surprisingly) getting a fair amount of feedback on my old Venice image resurrections. Some is from old friend and ex-UCLA-colleague, John, who tells me that he was coming of age then in the Dogtown (aka Venice) skateboarding culture era. Along with many fascinating details of the sport, the music of the time, Venice itself and his own youth as a skateboarder, he reminds me of the 2001 documentary, narrated by Sean Penn, of the skateboarding scene in Venice in the 1970s. Here’s the trailer (and I will try to see if it can be viewed online in its entirety somewhere — perhaps YouTube):
Another random discovery …
And here we meet Victor, from early 1975. He and his dog lived in an old circa 1952 Pontiac and a decrepit immobile old delivery van on the vacant lot next to the beachfront apartment where I stayed at the time. Some say that he had a PhD and once had a career as an engineer. Sometimes Victor was quite lucid, sometimes not at all. He saw himself as king of the lot and sometimes tried to extract fees from people who parked there. He seemed to survive on that as well as odd jobs (I paid him once to help me out with a fix to something on the Landrover, which is pictured here with Victor and a neighbor.) We were all quite astonished one day when, according to some neighborhood eyewitnesses, a well-dressed woman appeared in a Mercedes, claiming to be his wife, and took him away with her. As I recall, he reappeared not long after.
I didn’t know her at the time, but my later-to-be friend, Ann Nietzke, was living almost next door to me when she wrote her “Windowlight” book about her life in the neighborhood. The flavor of the place, and her observations and musings, came back to me as I stumbled upon a few more photographs from that time …
Incidentally, if you want to get a taste of the transformation of Venice Beach in recent years, visit the website of the contemporary Cadillac Hotel.