How a hot-tub business gone sideways taught a twenty-three-year-old what kind of entrepreneur he'd become.

Dad said nothing, but I could sense the mood shift in the room. Mom left the table to check something in the kitchen. Kathleen and Laureen remembered they had homework to do. I fiddled with a fork as Dad looked at me with compassion and frustration. His voice took on the parental tone I remembered from building the log cabin. “I’m not sure you know what you are talking about,” he said. Starting a business required an idea, a plan, and capital, he said, none of which I had.

I left the table angry. Even if what he said made sense, it only stiffened my resolve. My mind raced with business ideas: opening a gas station, starting a wilderness guide service, renting out boats to vacationers. None seemed bold or imaginative enough. Where did opportunity lie? I had no clue. I was in a rowboat without an oar, hoping to wash ashore somewhere magical.

In the meantime, I needed cash to buy a car, go to bars with friends, and have a life. Being a capitalist was harder than I thought. Dad didn’t rub it in my face, but I imagined what he was thinking. Despite my earlier declaration not to work for a paycheck, I reluctantly rejoined the mountain survey crew to put cash in my pocket.

Jim Farrell, a high school friend who had moved to San Francisco, invited me to a hot tub party in Marin County in the summer of 1976. I had never heard of a hot tub. He said ex-hippies communed half naked in outdoor bathtubs, smoking dope and exorcising their inner demons. “It should be fun.” I wasn’t sure about that, but I had nothing better to do. I was up for anything. After traveling in Asia and India, I vowed to explore every cranny of life.

Marin, just north of San Francisco, across the Golden Gate Bridge, was a mecca for affluent professionals, artists, and countercultural figures seeking a blend of natural beauty, privacy, and progressive community living. Its picturesque landscapes, outdoor lifestyle, and proximity to the Bay Area attracted wealthy urbanites, including tech entrepreneurs, corporate executives, and creatives.

It was a three-hour drive on a Saturday afternoon. The party was at a house overlooking a woodsy valley. I met Jim in a little clearing, where a dozen Japanese and German cars were parked askew. A woman in a long paisley dress smooched Jim on the cheek and walked away, ignoring me. Sandal-wearers knotted about, sipping wine from glasses. Five or six people sat in a redwood vat about the diameter of a kiddie swimming pool. I wasn’t sure which toes belonged to which body. I thought: This is where Haight-Ashbury kids go after law school. I felt out of place, a spectator at someone else’s strange ritual. Driving home through the darkness, I couldn’t help reflecting on what I had witnessed. The half-spiritual, half-self-indulgent, privileged life wasn’t my thing, but those people were moving on with life, and I wasn’t.

Barden Stevenot was a successful real estate developer who had bought the old Shaw Ranch that Burt Winslow tried to sell Dad. He was developing a vineyard, hoping to revive a local wine industry that flickered out in Prohibition. Before going abroad, I helped him string fence and lay irrigation pipe. “Come see me when you get back,” he said. “I could use a young man like you.”

I phoned him. He invited me to his office in Burt Winslow’s old house. Forty years old, with smiling eyes and a droopy mustache, he might have fit in with the Marin crowd if he were twenty years younger. He perked up when I mentioned the hot tub party and pulled out a newspaper clipping about Pacific Gas and Electric selling off miles of old redwood pipeline in the mountains for next to nothing. “Do you think someone could make hot tubs from these things?”

I did some research. A Sunset magazine article suggested that hot tubs were the next big home accoutrement. A physical therapist at the hospital explained how whirlpools relaxed muscles and eased stress. I consulted a plumbing supply house, a swimming pool contractor, and the Sears catalog for ideas. A carpenter said he could make one out of redwood, but he thought water leaks might be an issue. I told Barden what I had learned, but his mind seemed elsewhere. I let the subject drop.

Meanwhile, I craved adventure. Surveying had improved my bank balance, but the project had inexplicably stalled. A laid-off colleague named Jack asked, “Want to go to South America?” I said, “Sure.” Two weeks later, with $400 round-trip Pan Am tickets, we set off for Ecuador. The next five weeks are a blur of memories, almost a fever dream: bouncing through the rainforest in a rented Land Cruiser, canoeing down the Rio Napo as howler monkeys screamed and loinclothed hunters stared. In Quevedo, we befriended a Chiquita Bananas heiress who was there to dedicate a public swimming pool the company had financed. She invited us to sit with her and local officials at a ceremonial dinner. Later, I danced into the night with local girls as a mariachi band played, trumpets swaying back and forth with the music. In the end, the audience declared me King of Cabezon (I learned later, to my chagrin, that cabezon means “big-headed”). Jack and I wanted to take in the Galapagos Islands but had no money. Luckily, my backpack held the return ticket home.

Upon my return to Murphys, Barden called. “If I bought the redwood,” he asked, “would you help my crew make hot tubs?” We would haul pipelines down from the mountains, craft the tubs in a vacant vineyard barn, and sell them to locals. He would pay me an hourly wage for work in the shop. Once the tubs were built, I had the option to buy them on credit and sell them for whatever retail markup I could get. I knew nothing about building hot tubs and had never sold anything, but what did I have to lose? On the eve of my twenty-third birthday, my hand shook with excitement as I signed an agreement and became an entrepreneur.

Barden’s motivation for the project was unclear. He didn’t need the money and had his hands full with the winery. Perhaps he saw it as an interesting little side project. Maybe he was giving back to the community by creating a new industry. Or maybe he aimed to help a struggling young man grab the first rung of success. Whatever the case, he was an inspiration, the polar opposite of my risk-avoidant father. He forged ahead, blazed new trails, confident he could handle what came and learn along the way. He was basically building a winery from scratch in an area that hadn’t had a successful one in fifty years. He didn’t know a thing about wine, as far as I could tell, but he didn’t let that stop him. He had books all over his office about winemaking. He gathered all the information he could. He knew that Sierra frost could destroy a grape harvest overnight, but he was willing to take that risk. Going into the nascent hot tub business with a twenty-three-year-old business novice was also a risk. But he never wavered, honored his commitments, and patiently managed my quirks and lack of direction with kindness and support. That made a big impression on me.

My girlfriend suggested I team up with her brother, who worked part time at their father’s construction company in Angels Camp. “He can use power tools,” she said. Her brother and I had been high school classmates—friendly but not close. He was exactly as I remembered: slim, long sandy hair, sketchy whiskers, and a laid-back vibe. He wanted in. I readily agreed to a fifty-fifty partnership because I wanted someone to share the workload, brainstorm ideas, and have my back. In retrospect, it was one of the worst business judgments I ever made. Like teenage marriages, hasty business partnerships often lead to years of regret. Neither is easily nor inexpensively dissolved. It’s a lesson I haven’t forgotten.

My new partner was energetic and worked hard. We winched six-hundred-pound sections of redwood pipe onto a flatbed truck high above the Stanislaus River and trucked them down to Barden’s barn. We cut them into three-foot sections, fashioned bottoms from new lumber, and sealed the cracks with rope and tar. We sprayed on varnish and attached white plastic pipes and an electric heater ordered from a plumbing supply house. Barden stopped by from time to time to offer moral support but otherwise left us alone.

After a month, the newly formed Vintage Hot Tubs company had five beautiful redwood creations ready to go. But where? I posted flyers at the Sierra Hills Market and put a small ad in the Calaveras Enterprise, hoping to attract vacation homeowners from the Bay Area. Silence. Hot tubs might be the new thing in Northern California, but Calaveras County hadn’t gotten the word.

The stress made me cranky and difficult to be around. My girlfriend, my partner’s sister, dumped me. I booked a solitary trip to New Zealand, hoping naively that travel would cure heartbreak. Besides, there was no point in sticking around to build more hot tubs only to watch them gather dust in the corner.

I returned from New Zealand with a newfound appreciation for fly fishing and a bold idea. We needed to be in a bigger, richer market more attuned to modern vibes. Modesto, an hour down Route 99, had much more potential. A city of 85,000, it sat at the edge of California’s fertile Central Valley. Dairy, almond, and grape farms generated a lot of wealth. So did the enormous Gallo Winery. The town had plenty of young doctors, lawyers, and world-wise executives—the kind of affluent up-and-comers who read Sunset magazine and would surely latch on to the latest luxury craze. The little city was enjoying fifteen minutes of fame as the setting of George Lucas’s massively successful movie American Graffiti. It was the place to be. My partner knew the city, having once sold waterbeds at a Modesto furniture store, so I ran the idea by him. “Sure,” he said. “That might work.” It was hardly a rousing cheer, but I suspected that was as much enthusiasm as I would get from him.

We rented a three-bedroom ranch house on Staci Lane in a new development east of town as our home and place of business. A two-car garage fronting the street served as a showroom. With the aid of a small ad in the Modesto Bee, we sold two tubs in the first month, which provided enough money to rent a tiny commercial space behind a coffee shop on McHenry Ave, a busy corridor lined with car dealerships and fast-food outlets.

We installed a working model out back so people could see it in action; we even kept the water warm at night, hoping people would try it out after closing. That would be unfathomable today due to health, safety, and insurance reasons, but it got us noticed. We often found pieces of clothing, orphaned shoes, and other personal items—some of which I can’t mention—scattered about in the morning.

The showroom gave customers a glimpse, but the real sale happened once we planned everything on-site. People would walk into the showroom and look at the model. Sometimes they liked what they saw and gave us a deposit on the spot, but more often than not, they’d say, “We want to see how it would look at our house.” I’d visit their home, and we’d figure out where it would go. We’d discuss details like positioning and interior design to help them visualize the final look.

Contrary to our expectations, few of our early customers were ex-hippies or affluent young professionals. Most were older folks seeking relief from rheumatism and other aches and pains. Families sometimes bought them as kid-size pools.

Before long, we were selling one or two custom-size hot tubs a week. I phoned the specs to Barden’s crew, who built them to order. My partner and I drove to Murphys on Friday evenings, loaded them in a black Dodge van, and installed them the following week. We dug a hole half the tub’s height, put a cement pad at the bottom, connected plumbing and electricity, and in many cases built a surrounding redwood deck. The total cost could approach $7,000, the sticker price of a Ford Thunderbird or entry-level BMW. Even after paying Barden, half of that was profit.

Collaborating with my partner revealed a side of him I found unappealing. He often approached the business lightly, treating it as a lark rather than a serious endeavor. He made immature jokes at inopportune moments. When we arrived at the home of one middle-aged couple to begin an installation, the husband, a lanky, weathered man named Lew, mowed the lawn wearing white high heels and a woman’s yellow two-piece bathing suit. My partner looked at me and started to say something. I gave him a look. As we worked, he sang a little ditty: “Lew, Lew, what’s wrong with you? What do you do? You’re a strange one, blue.” He repeated it, louder. I looked to see if Lew had heard. “Enough,” I said. He rolled his eyes and smirked. I was beginning to wonder whether partnering with him was smart.

It was also clear that while he knew his way around equipment, my partner was painfully awkward around people. We called on an older couple interested in a hot tub for arthritis relief. They invited us into their small living room. As I engaged them in banter, he hunkered silently, shifting impatiently in his chair. He gave the impression that he was there only to get a deposit and get the hell out. Sensing rejection, I turned on the charm, nodding sympathetically as the couple described their aches and pains. I made them laugh and steered the conversation to a successful close.

Driving home, I suggested tactfully that I be the face of the business and that he stick to installation. I expected pushback, but he nodded in agreement. I decided that selling was my true calling. World travel had given me an air of sophistication and an easy manner that the average twenty-three-year-old lacked. I look back on that realization as a turning point in my life.