A Proper Burial
When young Sam Farr and friends confronted a death at the family's remote South Coast ranch
Sam Farr will tell you the first press conference he ever gave was an impromptu gathering at the remote family ranch down the South Coast of Big Sur.
The reason for his introduction to media relations was rather macabre: Farr had to explain to reporters why his friends had buried the ranch’s caretaker before telling anyone that he had died.
This happened in 1961, long before Sam Farr was elected to the Monterey County Board of Supervisors, years before his time in the state Assembly, and decades before he replaced Leon Panetta as a well-regarded Congressman representing California’s Central Coast.
At the time, Farr’s father was a hard-charging state senator, an old-school progressive with all the right credentials. Among other notable achievements, Fred Farr was a conservationist who helped create the scenic highway system in California. Sen. Farr also introduced bills to abolish the death penalty, and he was instrumental in passing legislation requiring toilets in the fields for farmworkers.
In June of 1961, Sam was a 19-year-old kid home for the summer from Willamette University, a tiny but prestigious college in Oregon where he eventually earned a BA in biology.
Fred Farr and several other local bigwigs had purchased the Circle M Ranch from John Nesbitt two years earlier. The property — both gorgeous and perilous — is located about 50 miles south of Monterey, not far from Lucia. Nesbitt was a radio announcer who got famous with a popular national radio broadcast called “Passing Parade,” which specialized in oddball notes and anecdotes that focused on strange-but-true historical events.
Nesbitt had hired Roland “Bunny” Hall as the caretaker, and Hall stayed with the place after the Farr group bought it.
Sam Farr and his pals liked to hang out at Circle M, and they had spent a weekend at the ranch in mid-June in 1961. Access to the property required a rigorous hike up a mountain trail. The provisions were rustic, and being there was like hanging out at an adventure camp.
Farr had last seen Bunny Hall alive after the caretaker told him his father had left a phone message for him at the store in Lucia. Sam walked down the hill, found his way to the tiny town high on a bluff against the Pacific Ocean, and returned his father’s call.
He returned to the ranch the next morning; along the way he found Hall’s body sprawled out on the trail. Sam remembered that Hall was clutching a fern in one hand, as if he had been looking at it when he died.
Naturally shaken after stumbling across the corpse, Farr returned to the ranch house. Roland Hall’s son, Roland Jr., and three other friends were there to hear Sam deliver the tragic news. As a team, they retrieved the body and dragged it up to the house with the help of a platform made of tree branches they had lashed together.
According to Farr, Bunny Hall’s son said his father loved the Circle M Ranch and would have certainly wanted to be buried there. So the young friends decided to do just that. Young Roland Hall crafted a pine coffin while the other young men dug a six-foot hole in the center of an oak grove with a sweeping view of the coastline.
After a brief and somber ceremony, they buried Mr. Hall after placing him in the coffin, along with a half bottle of liquor and a painting the old man had appreciated.
Meanwhile, Farr scrabbled back down the hill and told his father what had happened. The proper authorities were notified. The county coroner, Christopher Hill Jr., announced publicly that the burial had been improper because the death certificate had not been filed and because an autopsy had not been prepared to determine the cause of death.
On the morning of June 23, 1961, a party that included Hill, Sen. Fred Farr and his son Sam, Sheriff Victor Tibbs and several other officials trudged up the mountain to exhume the body. Also joining the expedition were several reporters from Monterey and Salinas newspapers; they were apparently invited to join the expedition by a sheriff who understood the awkward implications of the situation. It’s not every day that a dead body turns up on a state senator’s remote ranch.
It was there that Sam Farr answered reporters’ questions.
The body was dug up and driven to Salinas for an autopsy. A county pathologist determined that Bunny Hall died as a result of a heart attack. He was 60.
The District Attorney’s Office did not file charges against the young men for burying Hall without a permit. Per his son’s request, the body was cremated and his ashes were buried on the ranch.
Postscript:
Sam Farr later spent two years in the Peace Corps, where he taught community development skills to poverty-stricken residents in a barrio near Medellin, Colombia. After a decade as a staffer for the state Assembly, he was elected to the Monterey County Board of Supervisors in 1975. He was elected to the Assembly in 1980, and then served seven terms in the U.S. House of Representatives after winning a special election after Rep. Leon Panetta was named President Bill Clinton’s budget director. Like his father, Farr’s legacy is tied to his active support for the preservation of California’s natural resources.
Sources:
The Monterey Peninsula Herald
The Salinas Californian
Interview with Sam Farr
“Congressmember Sam Farr: Five Decades of Public Service.” An oral history with Sam Farr by Irene Reti; UC Santa Cruz University Library, 2017.
“In the Rough Land to the South: An Oral History of the Lives and Events at Big Creek, Big Sur, California,” by Susan E. Georgette. Environmental Field Program Publication No. 5, UC Santa Cruz, 1981.
“Fred Farr Papers.” Digital Commons @ CSU Monterey Bay.
“Oral History Interview with Fred Farr.” Interview by Ann Lage, UC Berkeley, 1987.\
Photos courtesy Creative Commons.
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I remember asking a Herald reporter about the consensus around Sam when he was newly elected. He said, “he’s too dumb to do much harm.” I also recall he promised the Monterey Bay Labor Council a no vote on NAFTA, but was convinced by charismatic B. Clinton to vote yes anyway, and he’d give him fed funds for a university on closed Fort Ord property. Which, last time I checked was more of a real estate empire than a school, with a campus resembling a ghost town. Monterey loves its dynasty politicians.