Hi Lee,
I don't know. I was a little ... spacey there most of the time. And I was a nobody, tagging along like some little kid at the big kids' softball game. But everyone was nice to me. that i remember so well ...
Did you ever read my piece on meeting him at the Conference. It was in January magazine, oh, about ten, a dozen years ago. Here's a link to it.
http://januarymagazine.com/features/zackel.html
"I met Ken Millar in the summer of 1975 at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, the event that author Barnaby Conrad has so wondrously run for all these years. I went to the conference not to meet Millar (a.k.a. Ross Macdonald), but to quit writing.
'I was 29 years old and was giving up. Oh, I had set off five years earlier, determined like every other writer that I was going to produce those words everyone had always been itching to read, only they didn't know it yet ..."
This article turned out so well that it became the piece that got me seriously writing again.
I had wonderful times at the Conference. There was one night, after a pirate workshop, that Irwin Shaw joined us in the bar and started buying drinks for everybody ... then there were the nude tennis matches some big literary stars were having after midnight on the courts ...
But I digress.
Fred