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in to the Cellar Door, and I’d say, ‘Folks, we’ve got a real folk hero here
tonight. And I’d like to get off stage and let her entertain you,’ and I’d give
her my guitar and she’d sit there and play the rest of the set. She was just a
fabulous lady. A really nice person.”
Fred’s Washington, D.C. exposure brought him an invitation
from the U.S. government to go to Europe to perform at a Food and
Agriculture exhibition.
“I was in Amsterdam on stage singing at the time they announced
Kennedy had been shot,” Fred says. “Someone came running from the
back of the building, and said, ‘Stop the show. Stop the show.’ So we
stopped, then somebody from the wings came out and said, ‘No, no, keep
going.’ So we started again, and eventually somebody came out and said
we have to stop the show. Then he announced that John F. Kennedy had
been killed, that Governor Connally had been killed, and that Lyndon
Johnson had been killed. They didn’t know what was going on.”
The show closed, but Fred wanted to stay, as he had been lined up to
sing at all the military bases in Europe. So he headed back to Washington
to get a new guitar, and to prepare for what he believed would be an
extended tour.
“That Food and Agriculture thing was the best pay I’d ever
gotten. I had a big wad of cash,” Fred relates. “As
fate would have it though,” he continues, “that’s when I met the woman
who became my first wife; she was a stewardess on the airplane going back
to New York City. We got married the following June, and she didn’t like
the idea of me running around bars until two or three in the morning.”
So he hung up his guitar, shut down his career as a folksinger, and
went to work as a salesman for Pfizer Laboratories in the Washington,
D.C. area. He was later transferred to Southern California as a field
manager and lived near Diamond Bar.
When he was offered a promotion to move back to New York City, he
decided he’d rather stay in California.
“I had a boat I kept at Newport Harbor,” he says. “I was fishing and
diving on my days off, and spent a lot of time in Mexico. I just didn’t
want to [go back East], but they kept pressuring me. I’d just flown down
to Cabo [San Lucas] to go diving, and when I came back on a Sunday
evening, I picked up the
L.A. Times
and looked at the classifieds, and it
popped right out at me. It said ‘Seagoing business for sale.’ So I called the
number; the business they were selling was H & M Landing in San Diego,
which was a little over my head; I couldn’t handle that one.”
But, H & M Landing also owned a lease in Santa Barbara, and in
1973, Fred bought the 50-year lease on the John Dory building (where
Brophy Bros is now) that ran from 1969 and came with a boat, all for
Profiles
Hiroko and Fred Benko were married on Santa
Cruz Island on September 8, 1985; the wedding
party had to climb a cliff to reach the matrimonial
site and then change their clothes for the
ceremony. Afterwards, in celebration, Fred dove
naked into Painted Cave. The reception was held
a few days later.