Simple Life Still Tops His Agenda

VENTURA —  His music students call him Frog. Or Mr. Frog, if they are well-mannered.

But around Ventura he was known as Dick Bozung. Councilman Richard Bozung, to be exact--until he abruptly stepped down from the dais in 1976, saying he could no longer represent the people of Ventura or believe in the government he served.

Already living in a tepee, he told his colleagues he was ready to pursue a simpler life.

And he has.

He walked out of Ventura, out of California, out of the life he knew, and never looked back. He maintains no contact with anyone in Ventura County.

“I changed during that three years [on the council],” says the 54-year-old Bozung, a founder of Ventura County’s environmental movement. “I was getting in touch with myself. I knew basically I was just a simple person. I felt more comfortable in a rural environment.”

There are those who wondered where he went.

Some even followed his whereabouts for a while, before they lost track and his trail grew cold.

“Last I heard he was in Chicago making violins,” said 83-year-old John McWherter, who served on the council with Bozung about 25 years ago.

A quarter of a century later finds Bozung--who now goes by the name Singing Frog--living on a tiny, forgotten finger of the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia, in a house, on a marsh, in a county with no traffic lights. It is a spot so isolated the population has actually declined since the Civil War.

This man, his hair as long as when he left, his long beard now white--helped formulate the environmental agenda in Ventura County, and waged one of its best-known legal battles.

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He helped spearhead a debate on development and preservation of farmland that still rages 25 years later.

And since walking out of City Hall--barefoot, of course--he has zealously followed through on the budding environmental beliefs he had only just begun to explore then.

“Dick Bozung was one of the pioneers,” said former Mayor Richard Francis, who helped write an initiative to preserve farmland that was passed by voters in 1995.

Adds Planning Commissioner Ted Temple: “He was the father of the environmental movement in Ventura. That was the renaissance period. These people were reformers, not politicians. They sought radical change of the system. And of course Dick took that to an extreme. It was really anarchy.”

Bozung catapulted to local fame when he sued the Local Agency Formation Commission for trying to develop agricultural land without an environmental impact report.

The case went all the way to the California Supreme Court--and Bozung won. The activist, who was then 30, used that victory to win a seat on the Ventura City Council.

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At the time he was a strait-laced guy, his friends recall, who desperately wanted to keep Ventura from becoming like Los Angeles, with its wall-to-wall homes.

But shortly after he took office, something funny started to happen to the buttoned-down Port Hueneme engineer.

Newly divorced, free from the cares of wife and family, Bozung began to experiment. He says he grew marijuana. He says he smoked it too.

He studied the teachings of Krishnamurti and Carlos Castaneda.

With an engineer’s savvy, he built his tepee near a sprinkler up on Creek Road to get closer to nature--and running water. And he strung an extension cord out the opening, so he could plug in his electric blanket. He grew his own food, and raised chickens and bees.

“It was very comfortable. Very aesthetically grounded,” Bozung said in a telephone interview. “It just seemed very appropriate. I still have the tepee.”

Ventura has not seen anything like him, before or since.

His unconventional comportment first perplexed, then irritated, his fellow council members.

“When he came onto the council he was an All-American boy,” McWherter recalls. “But after he got elected, immediately he started growing an uncared-for beard and an Afro. He came to meetings in his bib overalls, barefoot, in his striped shirt.”

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One time he advertised in an alternative tabloid for seaworthy female companionship. As McWherter remembers it, the ad mentioned that he was a Ventura city councilman.

But the real trouble began when Bozung stopped saluting the flag and saying the Pledge of Allegiance at council meetings because he had come to question government’s right to impose laws on its citizens.

He resigned from the council, then dropped out of sight.

The last thing McWherter knew, Bozung had gotten involved with some “environmental nature lover” up in Santa Barbara.

“They used to blindfold themselves and crawl around in the wetlands and feel nature,” McWherter said. “They said that brought them closer to nature.”

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Bozung is still in the wetlands. And he is even closer to nature.

After leaving Ventura, he moved to Georgia to live with his mother. He threw himself into music--making it, and learning it. He invented a “guitar-barre”--a tool to help neophytes learn to play the guitar fast--and patented it.

He eventually settled in South Carolina, in a big old farmhouse near the Isle of Palms. There he lived in harmony with the Earth, making music and writing books until 1989, when Hurricane Hugo struck the Carolina coast.

He has been a nomad ever since, eking out a living here and there, doing odd jobs where he can. Today, he lives in a 1930s house perched on the edge of a marsh, overlooking 800 acres of wetlands owned and preserved by the Nature Conservancy.

He spends his time making musical instruments shaped like flowers, birds and trees and traveling to classrooms to teach children to play them. He writes books and paddles around the Virginia marsh in his snark (a kayak-sailboat hybrid).

He lives without a phone or television, scraping by on less than $8,000 a year.

He spends four months each year on a cooperative in Utah with his 30-year-old daughter Dori, living in his tepee (the same one), wearing a skirt on hot days and growing organic vegetables. He has a lady friend who lives in the hills of Virginia. She is a violinist.

He is hard at work on his latest project: a proposal to build a sculpture--representing time lines of animal extinction and wilderness lost--for the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.

The zoo’s director describes it as something like a “naked tepee.”

“I would say there is a tepee theme running through my life,” Bozung observed. “I’ve just found them to be very earthy, sort of spiritual structures.”

Indeed, Bozung says he has not changed much since he left Ventura.

But the change back then was so radical that some locals are still scratching their heads a quarter of a century later, trying to figure out what happened.

Ted Temple attributes the change to Bozung’s diet. McWherter thinks he was a super-bright guy who was just a little immature and got swayed by the environmentalists.

And Francis thinks maybe it was just the times.

“We had the overall foment of the anti-war movement, hippies moving into co-ops, and those coattails brushed Ventura. And as those coattails brushed by, Dick Bozung took his shoes off, got elected . . . and moved into a tepee.”

Bozung has his own explanation.

“I kind of reassessed who I was,” he says. “I wanted to stay simple. To be a child without an ego, who had a compassionate heart and could relate to certain things, who didn’t need much to live, and is happier with less.”