Back in July 1982, Timothy Roy used a ladder to settle into a treehouse that overlooked Golf N’ Stuff’s mini-golf course situated in Norwalk. Roy stayed there for 431 days on the trot. Meanwhile, Michael Jackson released ‘Thriller’, Argentina invaded the Falklands Islands, and the whole 1982-83 season of the NBA happened. Roy came down from there in September next year.
During Roy’s long and lonely stay, he had all the features for a comfortable residence, such as food, a sink, and a functioning toilet. It is also said that many curious people visited the area to gawk at Roy and offer him some amount of company.
Roy lacked a mission except for making people notice himself and his antics. He was thought to be a jobless actor. His effort happened when the Screen Actors Guild’s strike was becoming less intense. Anyhow, we do not have anything to imply that it was a political event or some sort of movement.
The only thing that remains from Roy’s stunt is a hand-painted and faded sign on the tree around Golf N’ Stuff’s location. That sign has a king’s drawing, and it lets us know that two Guinness World Records for tree-sitting were set there.
The holder of the record before Treehouse Tim was a man named Glen Woodrich. Back in 1978, Woodrich settled into the treehouse for almost half the number of days Roy did. Woodrich’s stunt was also not political, and we do not have any piece of information implying that it was an anti-golf or anti-war effort.
The sign not only details Roy’s record-breaking act, but it also terms him the then champion, maybe pleading other people to seek a record like that. The treehouse is still there, all ready to offer space for millennials who accept that kind of invitation. In this period of cell phones, social media, and instant gratification, someone is unlikely to break that record.
Norwalk city is technically in Los Angeles County, but it has an undeniable quality of being near Orange County. OC inhabitant Tori Greger worked at that amusement park with the golf course when Roy did the daring thing. Greger recalls people from Orange County cities such as Huntington Beach visiting the real estate property to see Roy, the so-called ‘Treehouse Tim’.
Then again, the mystery remains: Why would someone do such a thing?
Perhaps Roy was innovative and radical by the standards of the time. Back in the 90’s and the noughties decade, people would have treated tree sitting as an act that deserved more attention. Reports indicate that political idealists of progressive groups like Greenpeace and Earth First! used tree sitting as a serious protest type alongside the Paris Agreement and the more recent G7 summits.
Anyhow, no one would claim that Roy’s action had those kinds of political overtones to it. Rather, it had the necessary qualities to be an act straight out of a Hollywood movie.
Roy told People that he treated it as a film that he wrote, produced, and acted in. He also told the magazine that him getting sick was not part of the script, so it never happened. He just played his part up to the time of the curtain falling on it.
Just like any half-decent Hollywood movie script, there was no happy ending in Roy’s outrageous stunt. There is also no record suggesting that he later kept working as a Hollywood actor, or got any notoriety besides the aforesaid People magazine blurb and a wire story published through Associated Press. The mere fact that that tree sign references him may suffice.
More remarkably, three SoCal teenagers who visited the amusement park were murdered only a few months after Roy came down from the treehouse for the final time. As per newspaper reports, Eddie Kaster accidentally visited the golfing area to notify anybody of the corpses of his sibling, Rachel, and friend Flores lying in the San Gabriel riverbed. Kaster passed away a while later, and the murders of the trio went unsolved. Greger and other people who worked there back then remember the triple murder as a more memorable event than what Treehouse Tim did.
Later in 1984, the real estate property was getting a lot of attention again thanks to the movie Karate Kid’s release. For your information, some of the scenes of that martial arts film were shot there. Everything that happened around the Norwalk-based amusement park in the 1980’s made law-school student John Sklut say that the property owners should recruit a docent on a full-time basis.
Anyhow, for all the good and bad things that happened at the venue, the sign is still a reminder to present patrons of maybe the most typical example of a 1980’s cultural event on the ground. The sign does not outwardly explain that the event of an adult sitting in his treehouse and later being romanticized for the act can only happen in early-1980s SoCal.