On June 10, 1970, Reprise Records released "Mill Valley" by Rita Abrams and the Strawberry Point third grade. Within weeks it was on the Billboard Hot 100, on Armed Forces Radio in Vietnam, and on radio stations in countries Rita had never visited. It had been written five months earlier in an afternoon, on a bench, by a 26-year-old kindergarten teacher from Cleveland who had barely heard of the place before she moved here.
Rita Abrams drove into Mill Valley in 1968 on one cylinder of a Volkswagen bus, having picked the town off a map. On Christmas morning 1969 she walked through downtown alone. "I walked along in sort of a haze of contentment and peacefulness," she recalled in an oral history recorded that August in 1970. She sat down on a bench by the bus depot and began writing. The song described what she found: a mountain that belonged to everyone, creeks running endlessly, people who weren't afraid to smile and stop and talk. And a last line she couldn't have known would one day follow her: "How could I leave Mill Valley?"
When Reprise Records called the school frantically asking for photos, fellow teacher Don Kline came running with his camera. This one ran in newspapers worldwide. (Photo: Don Kline)
She met producer Eric Jacobson at a party, played him the demo, and he said: "I like it, let's do it." The third grade recorded it in a San Francisco studio. Warner Brothers executives stood up when they heard the children sing the first chorus. The record was rushed to release. When Jack Carney at KSFO called the school ten minutes before playing it on air, the building, Rita recalled, "went into absolute chaos and pandemonium."
Fifty thousand records sold in the first months. Letters arrived from everywhere: a boy in a Midwest reformatory for whom the song was his only tie with home, a Vietnam soldier who heard it on Armed Forces Radio, a girl in a violent household in Santa Clara who locked herself in a closet with a portable turntable and played the 45 over and over. Fifty-five years later they still come. "It was a total, unadulterated miracle the way the whole thing happened," Rita told the Briefing. "Totally amazes me that it's still alive."
In 1970 she told the oral history interviewer she had found the place she wanted to call home. In 2014, she put her Mill Valley condo on the market. "The last line of the song is, 'How could I leave Mill Valley?'" she told KQED. "And here I am, leaving Mill Valley and not wanting to." She was clear-eyed about what it meant: "There are an awful lot of people who would love to live in Mill Valley who can't afford to, and I'm probably one of them now."
