Deep Throat's Devoted Daughter

The poem by Janet Hamill on my web site says I am revealing myself to you. I would now like to expose a bit of my past compared to the present. Mark Felt who was Deep Throat died this week.

In 1974 my then husband and I packed our hand painted yellow VW bus and crossed the country to move to Santa Cruz California. My dear friend Candace Falk, who teaches at Berkeley, was then getting her doctorate at the University of California at Santa Cruz in their History of Consciousness Program. We stayed temporarily with Candace, in her aerie on Redwood Drive up in the Santa Cruz mountains.

Candace introduced me to her next-door neighbor John Grinder who with Richard Bandler would found Neuro-Linguistic Programming. My husband and I really needed a place to live and John suggested the place where Richard was living in Ben Lomond.
The available abode was in what was a phantasmagoria on several acres at 1000 Alba Road, the steepest road in the county. It was an old chicken ranch. We rented the main house and below us lived a jazz group the Hytones who became famous in Santa Cruz and introduced me to jazz and a life long love of McCoy Tyner.

Richard Bandler lived in an A frame on the property. A country and western loving couple, Nina and Barney occupied the house across the drive and played banjo and harmonized half the day on their old porch. I thought I had died and gone to early 1970’s heaven.

In one left over chicken barn lived the woman who started the home birth movement in Santa Cruz and wrote the now famous Birth Book, Raven Lang. She was, at the time, in Canada. In the back of the barn lived Joanie, a pregnant women, who very beautiful, quiet and mysterious. With exquisite taste , she took that chicken barn and decorated it with vibrant oriental rugs. I hardly knew her but when I was washed back to New Jersey, I began to buy those geometric carpets, based on Joanie’s highborn taste.

Joanie it turns out was Mark Felt’s daughter. I found this out only a few years ago by seeing her picture in the paper when Felt came out of his cover. I looked at his daughter’s face and it was Joanie.

I am writing this blog a tribute to her. She ended up caring for her Dad till his death at 95, moving him in with her and it seems to me protecting him. Joanie at the time like all of us, was a rebel- leaving some path to create another. It always made me marvel that Joanie, from a straight background like all of us, had a really straight Dad who was the ultimate rebel

I have never seen her since. She had her baby when I was heartbreakingly forced back to New Jersey a coast away from magical property. My friend Candace just reminded me ,on my birthday, that I returned to the east with a VW bus full of hanging plants. I took California with me.
I returned to 1000 Alba Road in 1976 alone- to commute to UC Berkeley to get my masters in social work. Joanie was long gone. The basis of my interest in family dynamics came from John and Richard, Virginia Satir and Gregory Bateson- all of whom were around the storied 1000 Alba Road. All residents were change agents and one of the most mysterious was Joanie- Deep Throat’s daughter- and it turns out a devoted adult daughter with the ultimate revolutionary parent.