Chuck and Carole’s first son, Charles Henry Smith, was born on March 31st, 1940, by which time they’d moved three blocks east of the Parva-Sed Apta Apartments to a small house at 2034 Vista Del Mar Avenue. Perhaps Carole’s singing career had ended now that they had started a family; Charles’ birth certificate shows her as a “Housewife.” Chuck was still working at the Jade Café; his occupation there listed as “Assistant Manager.” The 1940 census reveals that he’d worked 42 hours the week before his first son was born. According to the census, Chuck and Carole had not yet married, although the birth certificate shows her as “Mrs. Charles Smith.”
Chuck was still working at the Jade two years later when a second son, Gary Conrad Smith, was born on March 14th, 1942. In the May 2nd issue of Billboard magazine Chuck was billed as the “producer” of a show at the Jade’s Dragon Room. “There is nothing extravagant about the shows,” wrote reviewer Sam Abbott, “as the club lacks facilities for presentation, but they are packed with talent and [the] current 30-minute show is no exception. Opens with Chuck Barclay emseeing and bringing on Darlene Garner, a blond good-looker who tries vocals to fair results and then socks with rhythm tap. She’s got plenty, including talent.”
Business at the Jade was booming during the war years. According to a newswire story in June 1942, “With the shortage of night clubs effecting the social life of the aircraft workers and service men, Larry Potter has enlarged his Jade Café to include five bars and two nonstop floor shows.” The boom ended abruptly that same month when naval authorities added the Jade to a growing list of establishments that were out of bounds to servicemen, citing violation of Section 62 of their guidelines: “selling to obviously intoxicated military personnel.” On July 15th Potter wrote a letter of protest to the Commandant of the 11th Naval District in San Diego, expressing his surprise at the ruling and offering to appear before the authorities to plead his case. “The Jade has always been very strict in regard to serving people of questionable character, is very proud of the type of it’s [sic] employees, and the cleanliness of it’s [sic] floor shows,” he wrote. Whether his letter had any effect on the decision is not known, but the Jade’s heyday was over. In October 1943 it was announced in Billboard that Potter had sold the club to Arthur Lyons along with another of his Hollywood Boulevard nightspots, the Stardust Café.
The sale of the Jade may have meant that Chuck Barclay was out of a job. It seems to have prompted a temporary change of career. When Craig Smith was born on April 25th, 1945, 31-year-old Charles Gabriel Smith is listed as a “welder” at the “Chastnec Mnfg. Co.” Had Chuck given up bar management and floorshow production and picked up a blowtorch? Apparently so. Interestingly, Larry Potter had once worked in the welding trade in San Francisco and Salt Lake City almost 30 years earlier. (As had his father: In San Francisco in July 1916 Newton Potter was questioned by police investigating a domestic terrorism bombing that left ten dead and 40 wounded. Prior to the bombing, Potter’s father had met with the two isolationist terrorists who carried out the attack and, apparently in all innocence, manufactured the casing of a prototype pipe bomb for them.) It’s tempting to speculate that Chastnec was a front for one of Potter’s operations, but more likely Chuck was just trying to find work wherever he could. When Craig’s sister Deborah was born, on July 15th, 1950, Chuck was listed as a self-employed construction salesman.
By the mid-1950s, the Smith family had moved out of Hollywood and into the San Fernando Valley, settling in a modest section of the well-heeled neighborhood of Studio City. The Smith family home, a typical one-story California ranch house, was located at 13019 Woodbridge, a quiet, leafy, suburban street that intersects with Coldwater Canyon Road, just a couple of blocks north of the city’s main artery, Ventura Boulevard. Perhaps Chuck was working for Larry Potter again. His popular “burlesk” hangout, Larry Potter’s Supper Club, was a few miles down the road at 11345 Ventura. The Pump Room, where Chuck was working in the early 1970s, was just two blocks from the Smith house.
As its name suggests, Studio City was born out of the entertainment industry. Originally known as Laurelwood, the city was renamed for the 20-acre studio lot Mack Sennett opened in 1928 at the corner of Radford Avenue and Ventura Boulevard. The studio was taken over by Republic Pictures in the mid-1930s, and became the shooting site for numerous B movies during the ’30s and ’40s, including popular westerns starring Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and John Wayne. Roy Rogers and his wife Dale Evans reportedly lived just around the corner from the Smiths on Valleyheart Drive. By the 1950s the lot was being used to film many early television shows, including the first season of Leave it to Beaver. In the early ’60s CBS took over the lot and began filming many of their network TV shows there, including Gunsmoke, Gilligan’s Island, and My Three Sons. So Craig Smith was raised in the same neighborhood as Beaver Cleaver, not far from the lagoon on Gilligan’s Island, and across town from what would later become the Brady Bunch house.
Many of the residents of Studio City work in the entertainment industry. Craig grew up with the children of actors, musicians, writers, publicists, and cameramen, many of those kids to become successful entertainers in their own right. The fast-moving currents of the industry continued to flow all around him.
In the early 1950s Craig attended Dixie Canyon Avenue Elementary School, right off Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. “He was one of my brother Jeff’s playmates,” remembers Ken Morgan. “I used to tag along because I was the youngest brother. I’d go over and see my friend Harry Davenport, who lived across the street from Craig, a few houses over. Then we’d go over to Craig’s house and my brother would be over there. Craig’s parents were nice people. I think they might have been in the industry. Seems like 95 percent of the kids I knew had parents who worked in the industry. Harry was the grandson of the famous stage and movie actor Harry Davenport, who was in Gone With the Wind and The Enchanted Forest. His father was a cameraman. My dad was a Hollywood publicist and my mom was an actress. My uncle was a publicist and was also Lucille Ball’s brother-in-law, so Lucy was our aunt by marriage.”
Another Dixie Canyon student, Judy Frisk, remembers Craig having some behavioral problems during this period. “In grammar school, he was one of two boys who the teachers identified as out-of-control problem kids,” she recalls. “It might have been his home life, although I don’t know anything about this. Craig and a John Coulter were both thought of as ‘bad boys.’ There were two classrooms for each grade level, so the teachers used to make sure they were never in the same class. They also tried switching them around, trying them out with different classrooms in an attempt to break the behavior patterns. Weird because Craig made this huge turnaround by high school.”
After Dixie Canyon, Craig went to Van Nuys Junior High where his fellow students included Micky Dolenz, Tom Selleck, Rick Cunha (later of the group Hearts & Flowers), Ruthann Friedman (who wrote “Windy” for the Association), composer Mike Post, and record producer and future Lieutenant Governor of California Mike Curb. Dolenz already had a starring role on the TV show Circus Boy, under the stage name Mickey Braddock. After junior high, Smith, along with all of these budding musicians and future celebs, moved on to Ulysses S. Grant High School.
Interestingly, another of Craig’s junior high and high school classmates was future session drummer Jim Gordon, whose life was also tragically derailed by schizophrenia. “Jim Gordon learned drums in the same program where I learned to play violin,” remembers Judy. “He was quiet but friendly, very nice and really well-liked. In high school he was hired to tour with the Everly Brothers and jumped at the opportunity. He went on to become one of the busiest studio drummers in the business from the late ’60s through the early ’70s. The problem was, he was an undiagnosed schizophrenic, and as the disease emerged in early adulthood he handled it by self-medicating with lots of drugs and alcohol. But by 1983 he was hearing voices, mostly his mother’s. In order to stop them, one night he went to her house and stabbed and clubbed her to death. He then went down to a bar, got drunk and told people what he had just done. Someone immediately called the police and he was picked up within minutes. He’s been in Atascadero [maximum-security state hospital] every since. He is of course medicated now, but his is one of the most tragic stories I know. Both he and Craig were quite popular and held student body offices, yell leader, etc., in junior high and high school. It’s really interesting they each had the capacity to reach quite high, but each succumbed in time. Jim’s case is well documented; unfortunately that isn’t the case for Craig.”
By the time Craig began attending Grant High School in the fall of 1960, he was getting good grades. He became class president in his senior year, and was also on the school’s gymnastics team, excelling on the rings and competing in state competitions in his senior year. “I remember him,” says Ruthann Friedman. “Popular, handsome. Not my crowd, [which was] beatnik; seriously serious.”
Doug Brookins was on the gymnastics team with Craig. “Craig and I competed in gymnastics together until I graduated in ’62,” remembers Brookins. “It was Valley competitions, and citywide competitions. I don’t know if Craig ever placed in the Valley finals or the city finals. He may have ’cause he was a year behind me and a year makes a big difference in the life of a student and athletic competitor.”
Brookins was also a singer and a musician, following in the footsteps of his father, Don, who had been a member of the Avalon Boys, a vocal quartet that appeared in numerous movies in the 1930s, including Way Out West with Laurel & Hardy. At school Doug formed a folk group with Mike Curb and guitarist Davie Putnam, later better known as fuzz guitar maestro Davie Allan. Jim Gordon also drummed for them on occasion. “Believe it or not, we called ourselves the Lettermen because we were both lettermen in our respective sports,” recalls Brookins. “Michael was proficient in tennis and he competed on a very high level as well, and I in gymnastics, and when we went and did our performances we’d wear our lettermen sweaters from Grant High and go and play. So we used that name even though there was a very successful group on Capitol Records called the Lettermen as well. We just sort of absconded their name for our little high school performances.” Brookins, Curb and Putnam also sang in the school choir together. But not Craig. “I didn’t know that he had any interest in music at all,” says Brookins. “To be honest with you, I had not a clue.”
Brookins graduated from Grant in 1962, a year before Craig, but their paths would cross again down the road.
Craig’s interest in music apparently began to blossom during his senior year, by which time he had befriended Heather MacRae, the daughter of singer and movie actor Gordon MacRae (the star of Oklahoma! and Carousel) and Sheila MacRae (also a successful actress and singer). “He was like the typical, wonderful All-American boy,” remembers Heather. “Just the greatest smile and very popular.” The MacRae family lived in a more upscale neighborhood of Studio City on the way over the hills to Hollywood. Craig would often go up to their house on Oakdell Street to spend time with Heather and her family. Music was always being played around the house, and he and Heather would sing together or listen to records. “I remember Craig playing the guitar and a bunch of us singing and just having a lot of fun,” says Heather. “We’d sing pop songs mostly.” Their circle of friends included Pam and Patti Price, the daughters of Loulie Jean Norman Price, who was one of the Henry Mancini Singers. She later sang the distinctive soprano vocal on the Star Trek theme. Pam Price would go on to marry Richie Hayward, the drummer of the Factory and Little Feat, while Patti would marry another friend of Heather’s, Chuck Shyer, who would become a well-known movie director and producer.
Suzanne Belcher, who later married Mike Love of the Beach Boys, was another good friend at the time. “Craig and I used to ride the bus to Grant High School together,” she remembers. “We were good friends for a long time. He was class president, and we just kind of hung out together. We had other friends that hung out in the same group. He lived close by so he’d come over. I don’t remember ever going to his house. He was really friendly. He had a great smile, and was good-looking and amiable.”
When Craig graduated from Grant High in June 1963 he had scholarship offers for several different colleges, but the academic path didn’t appeal to him. He’d already been swept up in the entertainment industry current.
As had Doug Brookins. After graduating from high school, Brookins had enrolled at Los Angeles Valley College, but also continued to play folk music, first with his own group, the Wellinbrook Singers, and then as a member of the New Christy Minstrels. When they hired Brookins in March 1963, the ten-piece folk ensemble was already a hugely successful national act with two albums on Columbia Records and a residency on NBC-TV’s The Andy Williams Show. Several months after joining the Christys, Brookins ran into Smith unexpectedly on the hillside above the Hollywood Bowl. “I had just turned 19 years old,” remembers Doug. “We were booked at the Hollywood Bowl. I didn’t have a car, my folks were driving me to the concert and the traffic was so bad. I said, ‘Look, I’m late, I’ve gotta get out.’ So I got out of the car, they had tickets to the show, and I said, ‘I’ll see you after the show.’ So I went running up the mountains to get into the back of the Hollywood Bowl, and there I saw Craig again for the first time since graduating from Grant High. He hadn’t paid to get tickets but you could watch the show outside of the theater proper up on the hillside above the Hollywood Bowl. I was carrying my guitar, I guess that’s what got his attention, and he called out my name and we renewed our friendship.
Craig (center), high school class president, 1962.
“He said that he had been hooting at the Troubadour and that he had joined a group called the Good Time Singers who were presently being considered to replace the New Christy Minstrels on The Andy Williams Show. I said, ‘Craig, that’s wonderful news. I didn’t know that you were interested in music!’ He said, ‘Oh yeah, my mom was a singer back in the day. She was friends with Peggy Lee.’ So apparently he had a little family music background. I said, ‘Craig, that’s wonderful news. Congratulations! I wish you much success.’ And so we left it at that. The Christys did our show, and I went home. It was an odd destiny that we would come together again in August of the same year and I would be hired by the same group, the Goodtimers, of which he was an original member.”
Senior yearbook photo, 1963.