Inspired by Ayn Rand to go West but the trail stopped in Death Valley; From Death Valley to a Book Store on the Sunset Strip; Hiding out in Alaska; The Serial Killer who stole his car; Bookselling days in Southern California.

by Paul Hunt

Ellsworth “Kelly” Goodside could be a little on the dour side. I know because he worked for me for years and he was rarely cheerful, an intellectual mind, but always dodging the most amazing personal disasters that increased his paranoia of the dark clouds passing by overhead on a regular basis. Bookselling is a tough business, especially if you have thrown away the good advice to stay away from it and jumped in the river and found out that the rest of trip would be just trying to keep from drowning. The idyllic thought of swinging in a hammock while your little cruise ship sails down the river of life is nothing more than hallucination between gasps of air and thrashing around the fast moving waters. Some of us are lucky enough to flop on to a sand bar for a few months and get some respite, but the river is always rising and the flood is often only days away.

New York Days With Ayn Rand

Kelly Goodside worked as a waiter in New York after his school years, which I know nothing about. He told me that one day he walked by a place where a man named Nathaniel Brandon was speaking. He started to attend these lectures, read Ayn Rand’s books and became a devoted fan of her philosophy, Objectivism, which has been described as “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute“ He eventually was convinced that he should go to the West Coast where there was surely more opportunity. One day he packed up his car with his belongings and his worn copy of Atlas Shrugged and started to drive west to Los Angeles, California to start a new life.

Stop Over at Death Valley

Somehow Kelly ran out of money and a usable vehicle somewhere in Death Valley, where he had stopped for a couple days to take in the scenery. The only place nearby was a tourist attraction called Scotty’s Castle, so fairly desperate to keep from starving in this potentially dangerous desert hell, he applied for a job and was hired. The pay wasn’t much and Kelly had to slog it out for about a year to save enough money to hop a bus and eventually land in Los Angeles. He said he had nightmares of being stuck in Death Valley for the rest of his life, always hot, always thirsty, and always just a few bucks short of the bus fare to get out. I began to see how events like that could make a person a bit on the negative side. In my entire career, I never ran across another individual who actually worked at the famous Scotty’s Castle. Don’t bother thinking you might go there and look around and breath the same dry air as Kelly Goodside did, the Castle is closed for the foreseeable future.

In 2015 an enormous flood washed over the place, followed later by a devastating fire. Scotty’s Castle, now owned by the National Parks Service, is facing decades of work to repair the damages. If Kelly were still alive, maybe he could spin some yarns about his time working there, maybe even tell about the gold treasure mine that Scotty had. Lost tales are now only partially available in a few old tourist pamphlets about Death Valley Scotty. As in many other things, there’s no one left to tell the stories.

From Janitor to Entrepreneur and a Bookstore on the Sunset Strip

When Kelly landed in Los Angeles he needed a job right away. He found one at a place called Preview House on Sunset Blvd. just East of Fairfax. The business had a large auditorium and would show previews of motion pictures, commercials, and other films. The audience was randomly picked but balanced as to the “average” movie-goer. There were buttons on the chairs so the audience could give their opinions of the films and commercials they were viewing. This was important information and feedback for the studios, and sometimes lead to the ending of a movie to be changed because the preview audience did not like it.

Kelly worked there and eventually got a contract with the company to supply the janitors to clean up the theater after a show. Oddly enough, another bookseller was also working there at the time: Fred Dorsett. Fred would later open his shop in the Artisan’s Patio on Hollywood Blvd. This time period of the early 1970s was when I was also bookselling as a book scout and finally opening a shop in West Hollywood. You can check out Fred in the articles on Hollywood Blvd. booksellers and also in the story about Charles Bukowski on this website.

Kelly was doing well as an entrepreneur, he ran a crew to clean up the Preview House and saved enough to open a nice book shop at 7525 Sunset Blvd., a few blocks east of Preview House. His determination and hard work was paying off, and he said that he was inspired by Ayn Rand. I met Kelly through Fred Dorset and was a customer of Kelly’s shop, much impressed by the good quality of books that he had for sale.

 

A couple years later I was driving around West Hollywood looking for yard sales on a bright spring day. I stopped at an apartment sale and was surprised to meet up with Kelly. He was selling everything and moving out of California. He said that his Janitorial company was based on the premise that the employees were “independent contractors”, but the IRS and the State of California disputed that and fined him many thousands of dollars, bankrupting him. (Somewhat of the same fight continues today with Uber and Lyft claiming their drivers are independent contractors and not subject to withholding taxes). In his view, the persecution from the government was just another Atlas Shrugged case.

Hiding Out in Alaska

Kelly closed his book store, selling off the stock, disposed of his personal property, and left for Alaska, where he hoped to find a new life. That lasted a few years. What he found there did not sit well with him: a lot of drinking, months of boredom due to the weather, a lack of an electrified entrepreneur class. He eventually came back to Los Angeles.

Disastrous return  to Los Angeles

By this time, the mid 1980s, I was in Burbank and in the process of opening Best Seller Book Shop, an all-paperback store, under the Book Castle corporation. Kelly had gotten a job delivering telephone directories for Pacific Bell. His car, full of those thick, bulky Yellow Pages, had broken down in North Hollywood, and he wanted to borrow some money to fix what I saw as a really shabby piece of junk. But he needed it for work, so I loaned him the money and he had me drop him off at a run-down motel on the edge of Burbank where he was staying.

A couple weeks later his car was stolen from the Motel parking lot sometime during the night. Kelly was naturally distressed at this “last straw” of bad luck. Without the car he couldn’t deliver the phone directories. I knew him to be a capable bookman, so I hired him to manage the new paperback store we had opened. I also let him stay in one of the extra rooms above the Book Castle that we had fixed up with showers, etc. for our employees who were on hard times. All this helped to pull him out of his depression and the financial hole he was in.

The Serial Killer

Meanwhile, his car appeared in the news. It had been stolen by serial killer Richard Ramirez, and had broken down in East Los Angeles, and when he tried to carjack an Hispanic woman driving another car, some locals apprehended him, beat him senseless and turned him over to the police. This happened in the mid 1980s. And for all the Ripley Believe it or not fans here’s one more weird event. A pretty young woman, obsessed with the killer, came into the Bestseller Book Store when Kelly was running it and paid us to mail a book to her new friend who was in L.A. County jail. A book sent to a prisoner had to be mailed from a legitimate book store, it cannot come from a private person. Kelly took the money and I mailed the book. “What the hell does that young woman see in that vicious killer?” I asked Kelly. He grunted, “sometimes good looks goes forth in life without any brains directing traffic.”

The Final Years

Kelly worked for us at Bestseller and also at Atlantis Book Shop until Redevelopment wiped out Atlantis and our warehouse in one of Burbank’s real estate frauds, tearing down 2 blocks of small business folks and turning the land over to huge developers for $200. I found Kelly a job at Cliff’s Books in Pasadena, which enabled him to survive along with his social security. When Cliff sold out to an amazon.com dealer one day (without telling the employees, like no notice at all, not even 10 minutes) Kelly was again cast out into the darkness. I lost touch with him. He had been considering moving back to New York to live with his brother, I don’t know if that happened or not. Twisting an old saying about soldiers, “Old booksellers never die, they just fade away.” And so Kelly Goodside, bookman to the end, just faded away.

RIP Kelly Goodside.