“He was a pain in the ass but a very personable guy,” reported one La Honda local, who asked that his name not be given.
A colorful, enigmatic addition to the community, Kay’s reputation for being a particularly whimsical, ornery character and a temperamental artist seems just as present in the minds of La Honda locals today as it was when he scoured the territory in search of a brick to mason. Kay died in 2005.
 Brickwork and the chimney of 'Limey' Kay's old house in La Honda show an artisan's touch. |
Kay’s name has been on a lot of La Honda lips of late. Recently, his neighbor Joe Cottonwood, posted a blog dedicated to Kay’s work. And that spawned a flurry of threads on an Internet chat board devoted to all things La Honda.
Apparently, according to the crowd at Apple Jack’s, Kay’s talent as a brick worker was so well-known that folk singer Joan Baez swung by the bar one day in the 1960s with a pickup truck full of bricks and cases of Coors beer and recruited Kay to build her a fireplace.
His old watering hole, his “other living room,” Apple Jack’s bar, is located in La Honda, less than a mile down the road from Kay’s old house.
A large brick fireplace — a Limey original, abalone shells in tact — sits solidly on the northern wall of the bar like a shrine, untouched, save for a piece which was removed many years ago when a building inspector deemed it hazardous due to “unstable foundation” — the story of Kay’s life as told by his close friends who still frequent the bar today.
Anecdotes of brakeless motorcycle races and cross-country hitchhiking jaunts serve to paint the background of the colorful man who many remember as sheer myth, a timeless character, one of the last of a dying breed of true American drifters.
“He kind of looked like the Robert Duvall character from ‘Lonesome Dove,’” close friend Tom Krumvieda recalls. “He carried a pearl-handled .44 Magnum revolver around just to be cool, with only one bullet — in his pocket! But nobody considered him dangerous, he was just an attention-getter.”
Kay was born in Menlo Park in December 1929 in the house where he lived until 1961, when he married his first wife. He raced motorcycles for fun and laid bricks for money, working to establish himself as a truly talented masonry artist.
Perhaps nowhere has Kay’s spirit been preserved more than in his old brick house, still standing, all six chimneys intact, in the back roads of La Honda.
“He used to get hundred dollar bills (presumably from recently completed work projects) and guns (from who knows where) and brick ‘em up, seal ‘em in the walls in his house in one night’s time,” Fox recalls. “You bust that place apart, no telling what you’ll find in there.”
The man who purchased and is currently restoring Kay’s house, Larry Gullman, has found no such items.
Reportedly not the biggest proponent of building permits or foundations, Kay built his two-story abode on a slanted hillside from the ground up, with his bare hands, in the early 1960s. His signature abalone shells, along with a number of other unconventional artistic eccentricities, are still as solid today as they were the day he installed them.
On his 50th birthday, Kay married Nancy, 29 years old at the time, with whom he had a daughter five years later named Jody Rose.
“I had already had three kids and he had four from a previous marriage,” Nancy Kay explained. “Jody was number eight and pulled the whole extended family together. Those were some of the best times of our life together.”
Nancy said the Kay family lived a happy life in the years following Jody’s birth, with Limey taking the lead in caring not only for the immediate family, but for stray animals as well — goats, rabbits and 22 feral cats, which he loved even though he couldn’t pet them.
Kay’s La Honda neighbor, Joe Cottonwood, remembers Kay taking in stray teenagers as well during the later years of his life, “feeding them, giving them a place to stay and basically taking care of them.”
Around then Kay began suffering from dementia, a condition that worsened as he continued to age into his 60s.
“As time progressed he changed from being an able-bodied man to being confused a lot,” Nancy Kay said. “He never quite came back, he slowly faded.”
But a fading memory couldn’t keep a stubborn man like Kay out of commission for long, and he soon found other outlets.
“I did have to take his guns away, but I gave him a camera,” Nancy Kay recounted. “I said to him, ‘You wanna shoot people? Shoot ‘em with this,’ and I gave him a Polaroid camera. Soon enough he had at least 20 cameras — all over the place. He’d take pictures of everything and everybody — to help himself remember.”
w