But Vacik's reminiscing is affectionate, spiced with mischief and profanity. He recalls fistfights, rattlesnake bites and bronco-busting under the tutelage of the Llano blacksmith, a "half-breed Cherokee" named Bigelow.
Vacik also said he knew and played with actor John Wayne, formerly Marion Morrison ("the Morrison kid"), whose family lived in the Antelope Valley for a time and whose horse, Vacik said, "smelled like a glue factory."
Vacik said he has vivid images of playing the trumpet in a colony band and baseball with the colony team, of the monotonous diet forced by Llano's isolation and economic hardships.
"No 'frigeration in them days," Vacik said. "Beans'd keep. Spaghetti'd keep. Too much spaghett', I hope to tell ya."
Avowed Socialist
Tony Vacik's father was an avowed socialist who came to California via his native Czechoslovakia and Switzerland. Anton Vacik became good friends with Harriman, a major national figure in the socialist movement at the turn of the century.
Harriman was the Socialist Labor Party's California gubernatorial candidate in 1898 and labor leader Eugene Debs' running mate on the Socialist Party presidential ticket in 1900. During the following decade, Harriman, a compelling speaker, built a strong base of socialist and labor union support in Los Angeles. According to Mellon, Harriman's ideology was a kind of "right-wing socialism." He continued: "He saw a fusion between socialism and trade unions. He was willing to make compromises."
Harriman's legal and political careers fused during the celebrated McNamara case in 1910, when a bomb killed 20 men in the alley behind the Los Angeles Times, which was a leading opponent of organized labor at the time. Harriman aided Clarence Darrow in the legal defense of John and Joseph McNamara, two of the Midwest union organizers accused of carrying out the bombing.
At the same time, Harriman mounted a strong campaign for mayor of Los Angeles. But the abrupt confession of the McNamara brothers shortly before the election was decisive in his loss to George Alexander in December, 1911.
The unsuccessful electoral bids contributed to Harriman's decision to shift his politics to the economic arena. According to historians, he envisioned a community that would exemplify a socialist triumph of equality and cooperation over capitalistic competition. Llano del Rio--a barren area near Big Rock Creek, which Harriman and five partners purchased for about $80,000--would be a "gateway to the future."
Harriman's magnetism and considerable stature in Los Angeles labor circles moved a collection of left-wing activists, farmers and union members to make the arduous trek to the Antelope Valley. New members were initially required to buy 2,000 shares of the Llano del Rio Corp., with $500 cash as the minimum requirement. They earned $4 a day, $1 going toward unpurchased stock and the other $3 to be paid in cash when and if the colony realized a profit. As time passed, the colony accepted more and more members unable to pay up front, and the wage system dissolved. Food and other necessities were provided in exchange for work.
Tent Homes
Homes were made of wood or adobe; crowding required some families to live in tents. There were three schools and a post office. The colony's board of directors oversaw a thriving assortment of economic activities that reflected the colony's temporary success in overcoming the harsh terrain. One of the two Llano newspapers, Western Comrade, published in 1917 a list of 60 departments within the colony including agriculture (alfalfa, corn, pear orchards), a dairy, a lime kiln, a printing press and a sawmill, where Vacik's father worked.
In his 1953 book "California's Utopian Colonies," Hine praised the colony's achievements in education and particularly agriculture. "The total agrarian accomplishment cannot fail to inspire respect, and the prosperous condition of the Antelope Valley to this day may be in part explained by Llano's agricultural pioneering."
There has been a good deal of discussion by historians and journalists about the factors contributing to Llano's fall. Vacik gives this analysis: "It's hard to get people to cooperate, y'know. They got to bucking Job Harriman. Some of 'em got lazy. You've always got loafers and deadbeats; they had them there like you have them everywhere."
Hine and Mellon say the fundamental difficulties of cooperative life produced debilitating disputes.
There were complaints that, rhetoric aside, managers were "more equal" than workers. The colonists from farm backgrounds, who tended to be less ideological but more technically adept, criticized the questionable effort of some of the former political and labor activists. Several accounts describe a Comrade Gibbon, an International Workers of the World veteran so notorious for avoiding physical labor that colonists came to call shirking "Gibbonitis."
