Peter Chapel
Peter Chapel was born in Manitoba, Canada, and moved to New York City at an age of eighteen. He served four years in the U.S. Army during World War II, with two years overseas in the Persian Gulf Transport Command. He attended UCLA under the GI bill of Rights, and since 1951 has been a resident of Santa Monica, California. Home improvement and landscaping have been his main hobbies, primarily, of necessity.
Chapel has been happily married for 34 years. He continued to drive to his Santa Cruz mountain work retreat for a weekend, and later a week, each month for forty-five years. All the work in planning and labor in construction and landscaping on the seven acres of redwood jungle and a rickety little cabin was his own until the earthquake of 1989.
Concurrently, for forty-five years he labored on a five acre vacation homestead on alternate weekends in the high desert of Kern County, a distance of one hundred twenty miles from home. Years before he acquired this land from the Bureau of Land Management, commercial rock supply companies dynamited deposits of agate, jasper and petrified forest in the nearby hills, leaving chunks scattered about of irregular shapes, sizes and colors lying about for which they had no use. Peter drove out into those hills and collected these remnants of abandoned nature, and faced with them half of the outside walls of his house to the height of eight feet and forty feet in length, and an additional forty feet three feet high. A very fine artist and teacher of art at Hollywood High School brought her adult class, in their motor homes and trailers, one weekend for them to see the mosaic murals and abstract art that could be accomplished with material just lying around. (Of course these materials, even if very small, are no longer permitted to be removed from lands under the control of Bureau of Land Management.)
Peter had the preparation to go into real estate sales, but that vocation failed to appeal to his personality, an innate artist whose natural inclination is to follow his heart and pursue a vision to its goal. Instead of selling this retreat to one of the many who wanted to buy, he donated this lovely site to the Career Development Center for the youth of the tribes of Piute and Shoshone Indians in Bishop, California. Hopefully it is appreciated and will do some good. Owning, he has found, does not bring the satisfaction of sharing, or the process of creativity. At this stage in his life, in the second half of his octogenarian decade, he has begun to relive the highlights and the lows of his life in tranquility. To write this memoir he first had to learn, at his advanced age, the use of a laptop computer, but within less than two years of struggling the result was these 32 chapters of salient fragments of an autobiography.