Menlo Park resident Roy Kaylor, who owns a 150-acre parcel of land in Boulder Creek, north of Santa Cruz, where he keeps hundreds of rusted out vehicles, is going to be featured on tonight's episode of one of our favorite Disturbing Reality Shows, Hoarders. As the Santa Cruz Sentinel reports, Kaylor is "a 72-year-old, modern-day version of the Shel Silverstein character Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout, who refused to take the garbage out," but Kaylor actually doesn't consider himself a hoarder. Rather, he's a tinkerer and inventor who claims to have helped Toyota create the Prius (Toyota denies this), and this self-created landfill of his littered with junked vehicles is merely "a resource."
"It's my property and I can do anything I want with it. At least, that's what I thought when I bought the property," says Kaylor. He has a point. But County officials filed suit against Kaylor to get him to clean things up, claiming he's in violation of zoning codes which have his land zoned only for timber production. There are no buildings on the property, and Kaylor does have some kind of timber operation going on (he claims someone's stolen 1,250 cords of lumber from him), but he mostly seems to spend time in a makeshift lab built inside a white, former S.F. municipal bus, inventing things, including, he claims, military satellites.
Kaylor may not be insane, but he definitely shows some signs of, well, funniness. In addition to the whole Toyota thing, he's been raving to everyone who'll listen that the County is trying to run him off the property by suing him for $20 million. The County says no, he's really only liable for $5,200 in enforcement costs and some civil penalties they're will to drop if Kaylor complies. The Hoarders crew helped haul away 20 some vehicles, but it sounds like they only made a small dent in the ginormous mess.
Preview the episode here. It airs tonight on A&E at 9 p.m.