Jon Baugh's head had already spasmed backwards into my windowsill at least
a dozen times before I could turn and stupidly ask, "Jon, are you ok?"
It was a pounding thrashing brutal violence like nothing I had seen
portrayed in movies as the way people die.
Death came quickly as he finally settled to a shudder against the wall, sank to the floor
(one, two) stiffened and listed left, a half moment more and he let out that famous last gurgling which is everybody's right.
My final words to him were a very quiet almost unwhispered, "Oh...Jon..."
My shouts to 911 were louder.
Afterwards there was an odd sense that I had shared a very intimate moment
with him, and I wished I could let him know he was forgiven the outburst.
But Jon was gone while his final days were spent in preparation of a new
acting job for which he needed to sing, and at the last moment I was giving him a voice lesson.
In truth I was only getting ready to give him a voice lesson and my back
was turned fiddling with a tape recorder while nursing a massive all-night
recording session migraine.
One of my guitar students was a doctor, an internist, and when I told him
what had happened and what Jon had told me earlier about his condition, the doctor
said, "Anything you did at that point would have been like trying to stop a car tire
blowout with a band-aid. He was dead before he hit the floor."
Jon had been told months before that his time was short, but he worked full
throttle right to the end.
He had trudged main street Sugar Loaf through a bright midmorning bitter cold
blizzard, crossing at the Barnsider (not yet a restaurant), past the Waldren
house, continuing past Resplendent Candles and Our Glass House to
arrive at Fantasy Factory (now retitled Endico Watercolors).
This was to be Jon's first voice lesson: he was 72 years old.
The EMTs dropped chunks of tramped snow from their boots as they frantically ran procedure trying to revive him.
A few years earlier, a warm summer day, I was standing on the corner of our stage in the middle
of a Sugar Loaf with my arms wrapped around my guitar as throngs wandered past
and I bent
over to listen to Jon.
He was telling me about a new idea he had for a music festival and wondering
if I would be willing to help.
I told him I would love to, but my schedule of performance, composition,
recording, teaching, renovations to our house, helping with town advertising (paste-up and editing the content of
brochures), plus helping Mary with her
painting sales made it impossible.
It was the first time I ever said no.
I had finally been worked to the end of my rope by the constant flurry of
Sugar Loaf events, festivals, advertising meetings, and running a full-time art
and music business.
There was plenty of volunteer work to go around.
I mean Sugar Loaf was having at least one large festival a month, usually two.
Even on a regular weekend we would routinely see 5,000 people pass through
our door.
Mary was averaging three painting sales a day—each and every day of the
year—about a thousand annually ten
years in a row according to
our database (which was not established until we had already been here for
nine years).
Our best customers started grabbing the event flyers by our door, not so they could attend
Sugar Loaf festivals, but so they could avoid them, in hopes of getting Mary's special one-on-one
attention without fighting the crowds.
Probably the straw that broke this camel's back was my overseeing the build
of my state-of-the-art recording and video production studio.
It was first of its kind in
Orange County built from the ground up, and it produced videos that on two separate occasions were
breathlessly commented on by first a producer from NBC then one from CBS who
both stood slack jawed beside me and asked, "But how do you get that kind of quality?"
My response was, "Well of course the source material is High-8 and not
Betacam, so you wouldn't expect it, but this box is a fully digital real time
non-linear editor, therefore there is no generation loss, so as close to
straight-wire to product as you can get. Only twelve of these
boxes exist in this country, so I know you people haven't started using them yet, but
you will."
A friend of mine at the time (who went on to receive 6 Emmys and 2 Grammys for his audio
work in television and the record industry) once commented, "You know Bob, if somebody came in here
that
didn't know anything about audio, they'd say, 'Nice little studio', but if they
did know a lot about audio they'd say, 'Nice little studio.'"
So I say state-of-the-art because that was back then, but if it was here
today, well...I guess it would still be considered state-of-the-art.
People had never seen a multi-track recording studio (open to street
traffic), so while working on music I gave constant tours and was often asked how I
was so lucky to be doing
exactly what I wanted with my life.
I would explain, "I once saw a documentary about the California Condor in
which they said, 'This bird needs a great deal of space and habitat. The condor is more than
just flesh, feathers, and bones. It is a place. If the place is destroyed, the
condor will be gone.' I am like the condor. If Sugar Loaf is gone, I am gone."
My studio was the central focus of my
1997 offer
to provide free media production and websites for every artisan in town.
I saw the fast approaching digital age, and I knew if Sugar Loaf was gone, I
would be gone with it.
We needed to be ready.
Nevertheless people found it odd for me to offer massive technical resources
and solid production experience for free, but on our first day in Sugar Loaf
somebody had shaken my hand saying, "Welcome to the land of barter," and I soon
learned it is also the land of volunteerism.
Certainly trading goods and services one-for-one does make things run more
smoothly, but also personally doing what is needed immediately when needed with
no questions asked puts a community into the fast lane.
Eventually I gave the whole studio to my nephew (except the ground-up room, my guitars, piano, and an amplifier) as part of
a promise to my wife
that allowed us to purchase a large format scanning-back camera that we now use to
document and
publish provenance for each of her paintings.
Our digital photography system was put together by the same people who put together the
exact same system for the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, and we could have bought two
nice houses with what we paid for it.
If you know anything about cameras you will know that current high-end
digital cameras are considered around 23 megabytes, 12 megabytes for top
prosumer models, but our 15 year old camera is 120 megabytes (still nothing can
match it), it uses the same
technology as Google Earth, and it required enlisting help from the Department of
Defense when we had a problem with it.
The only other place I have seen the same brand color-proofing monitor, such
as the one that came with our camera, was in the imaging lab of New York Presbyterian Hospital in NYC—many years later.
That is right, what with the camera system plus the significantly more expensive
media production studio before it, plus retrofitting our house to make it more
eco-friendly and energy efficient, we put more money into our tiny property on
main street than was
required to build the Sugar Loaf Performing Arts Center.
Nobody knew it at the time, and nobody knows it now.
But this is not about that, this is about Jon Baugh and what he was doing when I
could no longer help out.
If The Candle Shop is our anchor store, and if the artisan community could not
be here without it, then it is also unlikely that The Candle Shop would be here without Jon
Baugh.
Jon's studio was a single room in the back of the Tobacco Shop (now the
location of
Bodhi Tree), and he worked with broken glass putting it together in a sort of small diorama, or rather a kind
of...actually I guess more like...well, you know, they were framed little wall
hanging glass sculptures.
The problem was (just like Sugar Loaf), there was not a name for what he did.
His shop was called Paintings In Glass.
Some were objective, some totally non-objective.
He was always rejected from craft shows because they said it was an art and
rejected from art shows because they said it was a craft.
I guess nobody had heard the word 'artisan' yet.
He just made the things and sold them, and he once told me if he considered
the amount of time he spent on town advertising and promotion in addition to the
time he spent creating his work, he was making about twenty five cents an hour.
But he loved it, and every time I walked into his shop he was putting together
another town ad, and that was back when paste-up was done by hand.
Later I decided he must
have been paying for all the ad space himself too, because in Guild meetings he was always ultra passionate
about what needed to be done with advertising, and after he died none of the half dozen people
who took over his job could figure out how to pay for any of it.
I only heard their complaints.
At one point during Jon's tenure there was (another) new breed of merchant in town who decided
Jon's group
advertising was too rustic and homey, and they pushed to slicken the logo and make it
modern.
Typical clueless people: Jon resisted.
He was doing the kind of advertising he did because it worked, and it brought people to
town who appreciated what was here, and they purchased.
They purchased fine hand-made items they could get nowhere else but here, and
they were being serviced by the very people who made those items.
Could anything be better?
There was nothing like it, and there still isn't.
Years later (after Jon's death) I was taking another break from playing music on the main street
beside our shop (but on
a new stage) when somebody asked, "Did you happen to know Jon Baugh?"
"Absolutely, this town would not be here without his work on our
promotions."
"No doubt," they said, "I used to work with him when he was
head of a top
advertising firm in NYC. Guy was a genius!"
So much for the belief that people in Sugar Loaf are bumbling country folk
trying their hardest to be exactly like New York City, instead of sophisticated
citizens of the world exceedingly happy to be nothing like New York
City.
Below are two examples of Jon Baugh framed glass sculptures.
The bottom piece is
actually larger than the top which shows closer detail.