Sun Seekers

A black-and-white photograph from 1948, taken in a canyon near Los Angeles, shows a group of seven mostly bearded and bare-chested men holding long wedges of watermelon. Their faces range from beaming to contemplative, their physiques from ascetic yogi to muscled surfer, and their stance, as though emerging from a bush, invokes their nickname: “Nature Boys.”

“We all had a common desire to abandon civilization and to live a natural, healthy life,” one of them later reflected. Their needs were minimal: sun, water, fresh produce, and some companionship. Another photograph shows them beatifically playing mandolin, guitar, and drum, bare-chested on a sunny sidewalk. These are the only two known photographs showing this loose group of what might be called proto-hippies, or perhaps California Naturemenschen, together. 

“We came from different cities, even from different countries,” recalled Gypsy Boots, one of the younger members. “At times there were nearly 15 of us, living together in the hills, sleeping in caves and trees.” Like their earlier counterparts in central Europe, these Nature Boys foraged for fruit and nuts, sleeping under the stars. In stark contrast to their gentle, pastoral ways, Los Angeles was growing exponentially during and after the Second World War, fanning out in neat grids of suburban housing, two-car garages, and flatly shorn lawns. When the free-wheeling, long-haired men emerged from their rustic hideaways, they must have made quite a spectacle.

Not much is known about the Nature Boys besides hearsay. They make a cameo in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, when “an occasional Nature Boy saint in beard and sandals” is glimpsed while passing through late-1940s Los Angeles. But we know they frequented the Richters’ Eutropheon café, which drew such types toward it like bees to wild honey. Some of them even found each other there. 

One of the Nature Boys, eden ahbez (born George Alexander Aberle in 1908 in Brooklyn), played piano in the Eutropheon’s dining room in exchange for meals, sometimes joined by his brethren to form the Nature Boy Trio. His golden wavy hair, full beard, and dreamy, earnest eyes gave him a Christ-like appearance. ahbez, who wrote his chosen name in lowercase because he believed that only the words “God” and “Infinity” should be capitalized, claimed to have crossed the country eight times on foot by the time he settled in Los Angeles. He traveled with a sleeping bag, the clothes on his back, and a fruit juicer, scribbling song lyrics along the way. Sometimes ahbez slept in the Richters’ backyard among their fruit trees. He also camped in various canyons near the city and for a time made his home in the shadow of the Hollywood sign. He continued this lifestyle with his wife Anna (acquiring a double sleeping bag) and their son named Tatha Om.

Then there was Maximilian Sikinger, a chiseled German who train-hopped to California in the 1930s, bringing along his homeland’s mania for physical culture, nudism, heliotherapy, and natural healing (and also fleeing its rising fascism). One story goes that in San Francisco Sikinger met Gypsy Boots (born Robert Bootzin), and thus found an eager apostle of his Lebens-reform philosophies. Boots was already halfway there, raised in a vegetarian household where his Russian mother baked dense black bread and taught her children to forage during Sunday hikes along the railroad tracks. Boots was especially keen to learn more about ways to strengthen the body, having lost his older brother to tuberculosis. Sikinger taught him about fasting and yoga. When the eccentric pair came to Los Angeles, their search for like minds led them to the doorstep of the Eutropheon.

Among the restaurant’s most dedicated patrons, conversation likely turned to musings about leaving the city behind for good. The Richters knew of a certain German vegetarian hermit living about 100 miles to the east, in a hut near Palm Springs. Pester must have embodied a shining ideal, a vision of what was possible should city dwellers choose to fully immerse themselves in the natural life.

“We all had a common desire to
abandon civilization and to live
a natural, healthy life.”

The sparsely populated desert appealed to the Nature Boys, who often headed out to the arid mountains and their hidden canyons. Tahquitz Canyon was a preferred oasis, a refuge from the heat where a rocky trail led to the rarest of sights: a thin waterfall rushing over massive grey boulders into a pool. It was an ideal place to camp, or even live for several months. Boots later recalled a conversation there with ahbez as they took in the calming beauty of the canyon, where redtailed hawks carved into the clear sky. “Someday there will be a million beards,” ahbez predicted. It took nearly twenty years, but he was right.

If ahbez was in the canyon in the late 1930s, it’s possible that he woke one sun-drenched morning to see a wild-haired man treading softly in homemade sandals. It was not a native Cahuilla man nor a sun-blasted homesteader, but a veritable nature boy—rather man, his beard now streaked with white. If ahbez met Pester at Tahquitz, the two certainly would have noticed each other, recognizing kinship.

Their timelines don’t line up seamlessly and both contain cryptic blanks. But it has been speculated for years that Pester was a source of inspiration for ahbez’s one hit song: “Nature Boy.” The original cover of the sheet music, self-published by ahbez in 1946, shows a drawing of a lone man walking in the desert amid prickly cacti, barefoot, bare-chested, and long-haired, with only a small sack thrown over one shoulder. Is it Pester? Is it ahbez himself? Or another, unnamed desert drifter?

As it turned out, the song itself, and its enigmatic lyrics about “a very strange, enchanted boy / they say he wandered very far, very far, over land and sea” reached millions of listeners. Through a windfall of good fortune, ahbez’s song was recorded by Nat King Cole in 1947, rising to the top of the charts and living on as an enduring jazz standard. ahbez was profiled in national magazines and despite becoming suddenly rich, he had no use for the money. In a television interview after his song became famous (he entered the stage in sandals, riding a bicycle), he explained, “All the money in the world will not change my way of life, because all the money in the world could not give me the things I already have. Anna and I have learned that nature, and a simple life, will bring you peace and happiness.”

The fates of the Nature Boys eventually diverged. Maximilian Sikinger published a slim diet book called Classical Nutrition with a picture of him on the cover kneeling naked on a boulder and reaching up toward the sun. He became an exercise trainer to celebrities and taught at an ashram into his seventies. Boots opened the popular Back to Nature Health Hut restaurant with his wife, Lois, in Hollywood in 1958. It lasted for three years and then he switched to fruit delivery. Eventually he did so in a brightly painted van with “Nuts and Fruits and Gypsy Boots” painted on its side (an echo of Otto Carque’s “health wagon” some fifty years earlier). His antics attracted some healthminded celebrity clientele, and in the early 1960s Boots became a regular guest on a television talk show where he played the madcap nature man, swinging by a rope onto the stage in a loincloth, gulping down freshly squeezed juices and exercising with the host. As a beloved eccentric, Boots shared the stage with many psychedelic bands of the late 1960s, and was considered the “original hippie,” passing the torch along to a new generation hungry for an alternative way of life.

As for ahbez, he continued living simply and writing music, including Eden’s Island in 1960, now considered a proto-psychedelic concept album. He was photographed in 1967 holding a wooden flute in a recording studio, sitting next to a young Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys who—following a now-vaunted Los Angeles tradition—had also founded a short-lived health-food store, called the Radiant Radish. Around that same heady year of the Summer of Love, the song “Nature Boy” was given a shimmying, folksy treatment by Jefferson Airplane singer Grace Slick. ahbez’s ardent lyrics: “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn / is just to love and be loved in return” reached a new audience, reflecting the counterculture’s purest idealism.

“Back to nature” was being reborn as “back to the land,” as an estimated one million people dropped out of society to experiment with rural, communal living. They were driven by a sense that American culture was decaying, similar to the impulse that drove some to flee cities or emigrate from Europe at the turn of the century. It was no longer seen as fresh, wide open, and full of opportunity, but a fruit gone rotten. A new world would be built inside the husk of the old. The anti-establishment dogma, strange diets, and revolutionary badge of long, wild, natural hair returned, spreading more widely than ever before. It all felt radical, groundbreaking, and new.

Even the ravings of Arnold Ehret re-appeared. “The beard of man is a secondary sex organ,” he had written in the 1910s. The purified body, he believed, emits electrical “love vibrations” that could be received by “wireless,” i.e. hair. When his books were discovered by a new long-haired generation in the 1970s, his publishers replaced Ehret’s bearded-but-zealous author photo with a mellowed sketch that gave him a dreamy, prophetic look and a cloud of facial hair. He had found a new era of readers. They were returning to nature, again.

Excerpt from “Sun Seekers: The Cure of California” by Lyra Kilston. Copyright © 2019. Reprinted by permission of Atelier Éditions. All Rights Reserved.