Stories of the Aquarian Revolution

#19

2008-06-04T10:42:00.000-07:00

Interview conducted at urban hillside residence of subject, born in 1949 - New Orleans.

When I was high school senior, I had a friend named Jack Erskin, and he was pretty well read. He turned me onto contemporary writers of the time who made me aware that something was about to happen - ‘67 in Shreveport, which was a little behind the coasts in terms of that movement. It didn’t really catch up to me until my freshman year in college -- my consciousness began to include that movement at about the same time I started smoking pot. War stuff, but it all seemed concurrent. The music - the Beatles were happening in a big way. I had an awareness of them when I was in high school - I remember it was a big deal to stay home from church one night to see them on Ed Sullivan, and of course, the music then was different. The music became more insightful and evocative later in their career. In college I was away from home for the first time, meeting people from all over the country, many of whom had been doing pot for years, and getting exposed to groups like the Velvet Underground -- and it was like, who are these guys. I’m just a little country boy from Shreveport, and I was being exposed to a lot of things I never knew was out there. Of course, that’s what’s going to college is supposed to be all about, and in that mix of things was drugs --- pot -- people who had smoked for awhile, and who taught me a new consciousness about my life, and an awareness of what was going on in the world.

Of course, there’s probably not anybody with a mind who—when they left home, no matter under what circumstances—didn’t begin to realize that what they thought the world consisted of was actually more than that, that there was a lot more out there. I mean, I was as parochial as the next guy, although I was a smart kid and thought I knew a lot. But it wasn’t just drugs and rock and roll, it was folk music, the New Christy Minstrels, poetry, long hair, a book called ‘been down so long it looks like up to me’ -- books that were at the edge of the literati movement of the time. I’d read it and think, shit, this is hot -- there’s something happening here. This is cool. I mean, a lot of it was ‘this feels good and I’m going to do it.’ I was a pretty straight kid -- I pledged Sigma Chi - and I was into it, but I was also getting high and listening to rock and roll and exploring the dark side of college and society. I had always figured my life would be wife, children, car, and job, without much thought about what those things would be or the nature of those things -- I had never even thought about it.

Another thing that happened at that time was that I got involved in theater -- started hanging out with theater people who were artists and maniacs. I went straight for this stuff that was distant from anything I’d ever done before. The war was an issue, but distant because I was a diabetic, and the draft thing was only an intellectual thing for me -- it wasn’t a personal issue. I saw that from the sidelines. I marched and wore my armband and threw rocks at the ROTC guys and I was angry about the impotence of us as young people in the political structure. One of the most amazing things that ever happened was my college roommate was married for the third time recently -- his dad who has been like a surrogate father of mine -- we were talking at the rehearsal dinner and he said, “You know, when you and Robin were in school, Millie and I were so outraged about the way you were behaving and the things you were saying, and what an affront it was to us and the things we believed, and you know it took me awhile to understand, but you were right!” It was kind of a justification long after the fact.

I have three stepchildren -- the youngest is into drugs and really rebelling, and at 15, I say she’s too young -- but I’m not unaware of the parallels between these children and us who did the same thing. I’ve learned that it’s not the act, it’s the propriety of the act against an age. It’s one thing to smoke pot when you’re 18, it’s another when you’re 14. It’s a very different situation, and it isn’t that it’s wrong, it’s just not the right time. It fucks you up in major way, not only with loss of ambition and loss of memory, but during a child’s development. It’s a mistake to introduce substances like alcohol and drugs that screws up their development.

The events I remember from my growing up years -- during my first semester at college I met this guy Tom a writer, and precocious kid. His parents had money. He declared that school was a farce, meaningless, a bunch of old farts trying to cram information into your head, and the only real way to learn was to experience life first hand. I’m hearing this from the 14-yr-old now. Tom and I decided we were going to quit school -- we’d go home at Christmas, tell our parents we were going to quit, buy a VW bus and travel across the country and work at odd jobs and write the great American novel or something. I was looking for expression for things that I didn’t even know what they were. One of the things that doing drugs has made me aware of is that there is another life apart from and in addition to the one that we live everyday. Acid really did this -- it’s the same life, but it kind of has different rules. I became aware of this other reality that I got to create, that was shaped by my dreams and my intuition and my sense of myself -- my sense that I was somebody who had something important to do. And so a turning point for me was going home for Christmas and telling my parents what I was going to do with Tom. My father set me down and called Tom’s parents and within a few minutes, the whole thing was undone. As I remember, Tom had failed to mention this to his parents. Two lessons -- be careful what you believe about people and don’t ever underestimate the power of your parents to interfere with what you want to do.

So I went back to school/ The following summer I went to LA to visit my sister. I lived in downtown LA summer of ‘68, worked at the LA Herald Examiner as an advertising writer, wrote a weekly column of drivel about products. I was around some very cool people in LA, and at the end of the summer, I thought ‘gee I could stay or go back to school...’ I went back, thinking it was the right thing to do, but halfway thru the semester I quit and hitchhiked back to CA thinking I would finally do what I wanted to do. Had some delicious experience and visions of America out there on the road, met very interesting people, got to LA, moved in with a girl I had met before, but couldn’t find a job. So I lay around the house and smoked pot most of the day while she worked, got angry and frustrated and wasn’t producing anything, and got to be unhappy.

I went back to Shreveport a few months later, and got into school there as a theater major, and kind of had an understanding that I needed to get a degree. Without a degree, you’re not much. You may not know what you’re going to do when you get it, but I began to buy into the idea that you’re more with one than without it. I hung out with some extraordinary people, very talented and intellectually stimulating people. We created an imaginary society on an island called Dominica down in the southern Carribean, a virtual country where I was the minister of culture and this other guy was the minister of health. We wanted an alternate but parallel universe that had all the stuff we wanted but none of the stuff we didn’t want. We wanted friendships, relationships that were close and intimate and sustaining. We wanted to get high because it helped build our sense of community. We envisioned an alternate economy. It was a peace love kind of thing. We’re going to try again, but our premise is going to be different, it won’t be capitalism exactly. It’ll be an enlightened kind of capitalism -- but not to this extent. This was a transforming experience [hands me the Whole Earth Catalog] -- what a great thing this was -- it’s a trip. I’ve moved it dozens of times. In a way, we were trying to whole earth catalog our way into this fantasy -- thinking through civilization from a ground zero kind of perspective. Like ok, not only can you do this in the way you want to, but you’ve got to do other things -- have an economy, an infrastructure, a lot of stuff. In all the time that we talked about it and made up stories about it, it was a place we thought would be a cool place to be.

In my senior year I married a classmate, and after graduation we moved to the country into a house in the middle of a cotton field. We didn’t want to live in the city, wanted out on the land, listened to John Denver. We grew pot , had animals, but it wasn’t an attempt to be a self sustaining homestead -- we worked in town. But then, pretty soon, it was like, ok, what’s next? So I decided to go to graduate school. We moved to Dallas -- and all along I’m trying to find something to do that I liked. Grad school gave the potential to have credentials and work in something that I knew something about and have some fun, which was theater. So I did that and ended up with a job in Tulsa in the theater as a business manager -- and found myself pretty far away from what had attracted me to theater in the first place. I did that six months, hated it, got recruited as a marketing guy in real estate, and started making more money at that.

Children have not ever been a clear goal for me. I’ve been a diabetic since I was six. I guess I assumed that having children was not necessarily in the best interest of the gene pool. Plus I’ve never had a strong desire to do it. It’s kind of ironic that I’ve been in the lives of three different children in the times of my marriages.

We were making plenty of money but not real happy, so we divorced, I quit my job and went looking for Dominica again. What I see looking back is that I do something, do it intensely and well, and then I start looking around saying is this all there is? And then I quit doing it. I used to think I had to pretend to be successful, pretend to be a businessman or pretend to be conservative, or whatever. My business deals a lot in illusory kinds of things, perceptions, and so for a long time I operated believing that people needed to perceive me in a certain way for me to get what I wanted. And I operate that way even now. But now I realize that I have to bring some of what I am to what I do or I end up feeling separated and if I do that I run the risk of breaking off again, saying what the fuck am I doing, I’m not getting anything out of this, where am I? And here I go again. Somehow the wisdom has come to me that I’ve got to bring enough of who I am to what I do to feel that I’m there, because if I don’t I end up feeling empty and cheated.

I have a live and let live attitude toward people. At my heart, I’m a peace love kind of guy. I want people to get what they want, to be fulfilled and be happy. I think there are ways to do that, ways to live life that are enormously satisfying and rewarding. In my dealings with people, I’ve tried to -- instead of saying what I think they should do, I’ve tried to ask questions like, is this what you want? And validate them in their own journey.

I was in the bathroom yesterday morning getting ready for work, and I thought my hair was getting pretty long, starting to flip up in the back, and I thought, man, I’d really like to let my hair grow long, and then I thought, no I can’t do that, I’m in contact in my work with people who look at me and judge the whole organization, and so I’ve decided to present the best image I can, one that is responsible and professional. When I don’t have to do that anymore, my hair will be in a ponytail. There’s still this part of me that wants to make sure that people recognize me and that they know I’m there, and there is a part of me that wants to throw my hair back over my shoulder and say ‘fuck you’. I think as much as I can I try to do that, even without my hair.

I do believe in preserving the planet. I believe that if we don’t do that then we should be damned because if we don’t live to see what we’ve done, our children will. There is life after we’re gone. If you value that, you’ve got to have some consciousness about the world and about how to treat it. Some people [of the ‘60s generation] started movements and began organizations that will help ensure that we don’t miss the point, and some people have consciously chosen a path to raise my consciousness about those issues on a regular and ongoing basis so that I don’t forget those things. After awhile, making money is just a way to keep score of your own accomplishment - you don’t need all that much to survive. Beyond a certain point, it doesn’t mean very much. That’s been a revelation.

There are three or four environmental things that I support -- Save the Whales, Greenpeace, Nature Conservancy. I give to social issues -- there are so many people in need it’s unconscionable to not give something. I’m challenged by race issues -- I’m a southern boy, grew up in the south -- I’m puzzled by the whole racial dynamic. It’s that bigotry has two sides now. There isn’t just white people who think black people are stupid, it’s that there is a lot of that coming from the other side -- blacks think Koreans are awful and Jews thinks the blacks are idiots. I have a friend who says that racism is economic, and that what we really don’t like are people who aren’t as well off as we are. I like to think of myself not as a racist or not as anything but a Christian kind of person when it comes to people of different color, but I don’t have many black friends, and my life doesn’t include black people on a regular basis. Yes, we’re different -- but then we’re not. We’re all pink on the inside, we’re all children of God, we’re all part of the same family, and it’s important to remember that. Those people have children, they worry about money, they worry about issues, they have kids who are in trouble, their moms get sick and die, there’s nothing that happens in my life that doesn’t happen in theirs, and yet I feel a real distance from people of color. It troubles me, because I feel impure, like I’m somehow not right. I’m real confused by issues of race and equality. I’m a good liberal and so I believe we’re all the same, it’s just that I look around my life I see some kinds of hidden bigotry and racism that worries me. I don’t like hillbillies -- guys without teeth that chew tobacco and have sex with their children - I don’t like them. Here’s something new: I have noticed a distinct lack of patience for people who do certain things - parents who don’t take care of their children, fathers particularly who divorce their children’s mother and don’t support their children. They seem to be prevalent in Arkansas.

I continue to think in a lot of the same ways I thought when I was in my 20s, and I’m almost 50. I know it won’t be a perfect world, but somehow I think if I keep acting like it -- I grew up in a real Christian ethic kind of a family, and what we grew up believing was that if you do the right thing, and you honestly try, then good things will happen for you. It’s crazy, because that’s no guarantee at all that good things will happen. It’s just been my good luck. I think if you keep trying and do the right things and treat people like they’re human beings like you, then God will smile on you and you’ll be happy.

I think many of us have failed as parents because we forgot that childhood has to include real specific black and white rights and wrongs. Long before they were ready for the nuance of the gray, we’ve told our children, well, sometimes that’s right and sometimes that’s wrong -- when they’re six years old. It’s way too confusing. You can’t. My friend has this great expression about parenting -- he says, ‘what I’ve learned is you can’t be an existentialist and raise a child. You can’t act out your basic existential view of the world and raise a child. You have to be definite, you have to black, you have to be white, and you have to teach them here’s this side of the road, here’s this side of the road. You get off the road, you get fucked up. Your job is to stay in the middle - stay out of the ruts. This over here is bad, don’t do that. And for all those who took classes like situational ethics in college, that’s a perfectly plausible and meritorious discussion to have with an adult, but it’s completely out of place for the children.’ We forgot that somewhere along the way. I worry about kids B--’s age [14] who don’t get the right and wrong -- it doesn’t mean anything -- it’s all relative to what they want -- and regrettably that’s mostly the kind of kid I see. I don’t think that’s all there are.

#13

2008-05-22T07:40:00.000-07:00

We traveled to subject’s remote retreat and sat in the open evening air, looking east across a wide natural meadow toward a wooded mountainside.

For breakfast we would have what we called bread cereal, where we’d tear up bread and put on a little cinnamon. I loved it. It’s comfort food, even today. But my mother remarried when I was eight, and we became middle class, even upper middle class. I went to catholic schools all my life. Right out of high school I entered a monastery. I was there for a couple of years. I was in pursuit of spirituality and salvation. I lived at a monastery in Santa Fe with other young men who had become brothers or who would become brothers. I spent a lot of time reading, contemplating, questioning and basically I got to a point where I thought, hey, all this is bullshit. What the fuck am I doing here? There was a book I read, Narcissus and Goldmun (Herman Hesse) that really affected me. I had an older brother who was my mentor who was the intellectual type. We had a Narcissus and Goldmund type of relationship. We stayed connected throughout his life. So, I really related to the book. The book played a big role in me leaving the monastery. I left to experience the pleasures of the world, and since I wasn’t sure if I believed in God anymore -- I was an agnostic -- I thought, well, I should at least experience the pleasures of the world. I remember during that time thinking that entering the brothers was like my real conception into being and that leaving the brothers was like my birth into personage. I entered on my 18th birthday, and I was exposed to a lot of radical ideas in the brothers. A lot of the brothers were radical, on the war, and on religion -- When I think about the values of the ‘60s, it was truly questioning authority. And the brothers -- you took a vow of obedience, but there were a lot young brothers questioning everything. Then I went to St. Louis where other brothers, some who were still in and some who had left and started a school for delinquent boys.

I had gone to visit one of the brothers who had left, in Wash DC, and I arrived there when they were protesting the Vietnam War, closing down streets -- I had never really thought about this before, about the war and what was going on. I was up there with all these people who were protesting, getting up and making speeches -- I wound up being tear-gassed -- my whole world view fell apart then. I thought, what’s going on? Before that, I hadn’t thought about it. I had given a speech in high school about why we were in Vietnam, why it was necessary. I got my info out of a Reader’s Digest -- all of a sudden I’m going oh my gosh, and that’s when I really started questioning -- I couldn’t defend it any more -- I remember going home to New Orleans -- all my friends and neighbors had thought of me as this nice young man who had gone off to the monastery -- I had been well thought of, made good grades -- came back with long hair, beard, wrote letters to the editor about why we needed to get out of Vietnam.

Religion played a big role in my life -- I went to Catholic schools for 14 years, had been an altar boy, and gone to a monastery -- and some of those beliefs, when you think about it, put reason to it, didn’t make sense. I read a book called These Questions Mock Me, which made me question the whole basis of religion. ( Well, sometimes I think I threw the baby out with the bath water, because when I discarded religion, I threw out spirituality with religion.) Later on, I realized that a lot of things like intuition, and insights that are instantaneous without a lot of reasoning behind it, are real but not always reasonable. I think one of the things that came out of the ‘60s was questioning authority. You just don’t accept everything the government tells you, your religion tells you -- you have to figure it out for yourself. Just don’t be a blind follower. Take personal responsibility.

I remember working in St Louis with the brothers -- we were the only white people in the neighborhood. That was an eye opener. Everyday was like a month of experiences, just seeing how the other side of America lives. I mean, I was aware of black people in ghettos, but now I lived in the middle of a ghetto trying to survive. Six months or so. Not that long but it was like living in a foreign country compared to white middle class suburbia.

Trying not to capitalize on other people’s labor – not exploiting the masses -- that was another ‘60s value I adopted. I quickly got another perspective once I started my own business. I had started a painting business, by myself. Then somebody else wanted to work with me, and then I had several people working with me, and we had the attitude that we would all split the money evenly. But I was the one buying the materials, the one with the ladder and brushes. I was the one who went out after work and made the bids to get the jobs. -- I was doing more work than anybody else, but everybody expected to share equally. So there was this argument about what’s really work -- like if I’m going out getting the jobs, is that really work? They had this attitude that it’s only work when you’re painting. They thought they should be paid more than me. So finally, I decided I was being exploited. I told everybody you get so much an hour, and if you don’t want to do it, don’t do it and I’ll find somebody else. I learned that what’s fair is not always real clear.

I went to the University of North Dakota, in Grand Forks, because I read an article in Atlantic Monthly. It was an experimental school with no grades and no tests. It was quite an experience to go to a school where you literally created your own education. You could have slept for two years and probably get a degree, because everybody had an advisor, and you might find one who would say, yeah, that’s cool. In fact for my first semester -- the advisor said, what do you want to do? I said, well, I’d really like to see what it would be like to live by my wits alone -- just take off on the road with my backpack and thumb my way around the country and see where I end up, where I go, what I do, how I survive. See what happens, go for it. I did that for six months. That was really interesting -- I left with about $40, and came back with around $30 six months later. I wound up speaking at two universities as a guest lecturer. I remember being really excited about being able to tell my advisor that. I talked to an education class at the University of Kentucky -- and talked to a graduate class at the University of Maryland. UND had a reputation around the country for being experimental with how they were approaching education -- I was getting a degree in elementary education, and I was traveling around the country and getting credit. But the way I got to be a guest lecturer was that I was picked up by professors while I was hitching, and they would ask, well, what are you doing, and I would say, you’re not going to believe this, but I’m earning 22 semester hours. They were education Profs, and they wanted me to talk to their classes. Sometimes a carpenter picked me up, and I’d help him work. I had some destinations in mind, but sometimes I’d go where the ride would take me. Those were different times. What I remember was that people took care of me. This old lady in Mississippi picked me up, saying “honey what are you having for supper,” and I said, “I don’t know,” and she took me to her house and fed me and gave me $10 to make sure I had breakfast the next morning. Those sorts of things happened a lot. Amazing things. Early ‘70s, and more people were doing that.

I stayed at North Dakota and got a degree in elementary education and taught for a year, but my girlfriend left me for a poet and it broke my heart. All I could do was cry for a couple of years. I went back to New Orleans in a real funk about my life. Then a bunch of us city folks decided we wanted to get some land out in the country. We sat down and figured all the things we wanted -- an area with four seasons, we didn’t want to be too far away from New Orleans, we wanted to be near a university town, maybe bordering on national forest, maybe 300 acres of land. Then with all of our requirements one couple went off to scout for us. But after the first five days they decided it wasn’t much fun, too confusing trying to see so much, and then one day, J called and said “We found this place in Arkansas that has all our requirements but one. It’s pretty nice.” I wanted to know what requirement was missing. J said the land was 150 acres not 300. For some unknown reason I couldn’t accept 150 acres. “ No, that’s not enough. It has to be 300 acres.” J paused for a while and then asked, “ Do you know how big an acre is.” “No, I actually have no idea, but we need 300 of um.” Well, 150 acres is a lot. We bought it. I was such a city kid. Maybe I grew a tomato plant for a classroom project but that was it.

It was part of the Mother Earth News concept to be self sufficient, go to the country, live off the fat of the land -- society is crumbling, things are going to fall apart -- you had to have your five acres and independence. Lots of people were buying Ozark land -- it was cheap. We bought the 150 acres, with a house, barn, three creeks, a couple of ponds, an apple orchard -- for $38,000. There was a well, with electricity to it. Plus, it’s at the end of the road. No cars will pass in front of this field.

The first time I ever got drunk I was with the brothers at the monastery. The first time I ever got stoned I was in St. Louis, with brothers and ex-brothers, sitting around in this room all of us smoking, and I remember saying I don’t feel anything [and his arm is rising] and then oh my god, what’s this, and we all started laughing, rolling over. I think because of my experience of being stoned with the brothers, they tend to approach it as a spiritual experience. When I got out into society, a lot of people just wanted to get fucked up, and I always thought that was wrong, abusive. I really believed it was a spiritual thing. I still use it as a spiritual tool. It’s what brings me back to reality sometimes. And coming out here [to the land] is definitely a spiritual tool. When I’m absolutely stressed out or crazed -- I come out here and it slows me down. Coming out here, sitting out in the field for a couple of hours is great, At first I’m going, ok when I get back I need to take care of this and this, and I gotta do that, and tell this person that, and da ta da ta da ta, and about two hours later, I’m sitting there, and then it’s like oh look at those clouds, and then I forget all that stuff and leave it behind me. I can reach the point where I can say; I’m not going to worry about that for a while. Nature is pretty powerful. It’s a meditative place you can get that recharges your batteries and restores your soul. It is so important to me, that awareness. It gets you in touch with your soul, what your path is supposed to be. And that’s where the logic falls off. You just are, just being, you just know certain things, as opposed to trying to figure it out. I’m great at always trying to figure things out, plan things. A lot of people approach religion that way. Very legalistic, follow the law. There’s no room for spirituality. That’s the thing I rebelled against. You don’t even have to think. Someone’s already done that. Just follow the rules.

We were going to raise tomatoes when we came here. We planted three acres of tomatoes down there in that field. Somewhere along the line, we decided there must be something wrong with the tomatoes. We went to one of the old farmers out here. I’m sure he wondered what these young kids were down here doing, and he came and looked at our tomatoes and said, well, commercially, this is worth zero. He said, you young kids would do a lot better growing yourself some pot. This was one of the old back hill guys that we thought if he knew we smoked pot, he’d probably kill us. What was amazing to me during that time was how well accepted we were by our neighbors. One of the neighbors gave us a cow. Actually, we were talking about getting a cow and he said we could borrow his for a while to see if we really wanted one. We returned it a few months latter. The first winter, we were snowed in, and he came to the top of the hill and left us food. One of our guys had snow skis, and would go up to get the food. We couldn’t have made it without them. They would say how their kids were leaving, going to the city, and they were left alone. And here are these kids coming back to the country, and they were more than willing to share what they knew. Old Peewee would come down here and tell us about the trees, which trees we wanted to have around the house, which ones to cut. It was live and let live. They might have thought we looked weird, but shit they were real easy. Not what I expected. I thought of myself as a tolerant person but the truth was they taught me about tolerance.

We developed a network with other people who had moved here. We would have workdays when everybody would go to one farm and work for a day. It was great – the mid to late ‘70s --we helped clear land, work on their house, garden, -- my house had a roof-raising party. I can remember when I made a change from the ‘back to the land, live a simple life’ and believing everything was going to fall apart in society. People would always talk about what we were doing, and when things were going to fall apart -- things were supposed to fall apart soon, but whenever we heard any good news about the economy, we would get disappointed. That wasn’t supposed to happen. I didn’t want to live my life like this. Bitching that I don’t have enough money and upset when I would hear that the rest of the economy was recovering. There’s something wrong with this life view-- I can remember when I was having a conversations with some friends and we were discussing all the things we wanted to do with our land to prepare for the collapse. We all needed more money to do some of these things yet didn’t want the economy to improve. I can remember deciding I wanted the economy to improve and I wanted to make some more money.

In New Orleans I had been buying old houses, remodeling them, and then renting them or selling them. I had a reputation, doing it a few times, the bankers knew me -- I had some history there. I decided I’d go Fayetteville and see if I can find some houses, etc. -- I walked into the bank, to talk to a loan officer, and I felt so stupid -- I knew there was no way in the world this guy was going to lend me anything. He doesn’t care what I did in New Orleans -- I remember thinking I had cut off all my roots, no family, no one who knew me, -- I was up here and I was a nobody -- I’m never going to get money to go do this. What the hell am I going to do? I felt very insignificant and lost.

So I decided to use my teaching degree, but it was impossible to get an elementary teachers job in town because there were too many of them. I liked math and science, and I knew there was shortage of math and science teachers, so I went back to school and took some classes to get my certification in secondary math and science. I got a job. I had to make a living. I loved teaching, once I learned how to discipline. I was a popular teacher, known for being hard and strict and fair and funny, and they loved being in my class. I loved to teach, I loved the kids. One of the highlights was at the end of the year, one of the kids, a tough kid, walked out, and then came back and said, “I just wanted to tell you that when I first took your class, I knew I was no good at math, but now, I know I’m good in math. Thanks.’ I almost started crying. I got out of it when we had our second child, and we decided that one of us would stay home with the kids. My wife could make more money as a nurse than I could as a teacher, so I stayed home as Mr. Mom for over a year. I was going nuts. I remember thinking that being a homemaker was not as easy as it looks. I had a hard time. I once made banana pudding that would bounce off the wall. It was like rubber. But I also really enjoyed taking care of the children. D was much better at being a homemaker than I ever was, but still it was quite an experience.

After that I got a job selling insurance with one of those mass marketing companies. I had an experience when I discovered that I could excite a crowd, move a crowd, and that was strange. It scared me actually. I went to this meeting, and they picked me to give a speech. I prepared what I thought would be an inspiring speech. I was so nervous. But as I was giving the speech people were standing up and cheering. I imagine it’s like it would be for a preacher, who gets up there and the people are going crazy. I mean, I was scared to get up in front, but I also realized I can do this. This is an interesting skill, talent -- something -- but I’ve never done anything with that. Scary, exciting, fearful -- I was on a crusade. I was not selling life insurance to make money. Of course, I wanted to make money, but that’s not why I did it -- if you had asked me before that time, like when I was living out here, one of the worst things to do with your life was to sell life insurance. It was a joke. It was like that line in the comedy The Two-Thousand Year Old Man, “You mock the things you are to be.” I really got into the difference between whole life and term -- what the insurance companies had fostered upon the poor -- I was a hell of a salesman, but I wasn’t making much money. I went to this regional meeting and got this award for selling more policies than anyone else. And I’m thinking I can’t even pay my rent. And this is big sales? But in the process I met this guy in Bentonville who said, I like you, did you ever think about selling real estate? So I went to Bella Vista and sold lots. I sold lots of lots and I learned a lot. That was interesting because when I went there, I thought, oh I’ll make about $20 or 30,000 a year -- and after the first month, I freaked out, because I realized I could make $60, 80, 100 thousand a year -- but I didn’t have an image of myself making that much money. I realized that I would never do that -- if you don’t have an image of yourself doing that, or think you’re worthy, then you’ll never do it. I felt I was inadequate, that I didn’t deserve to make $60,000 -- for stupid reasons. D asked me why, and I said, I don’t look like somebody who makes that much. My fingers are too thin. And I realized that it was because my father was successful but he was a thick kind of guy, and I didn’t think I fit the image. How stupid. I realized how stupid it was, but you have to deal with that stuff.

I got over it -- I made money. I did that for about 7 or 8 years -- but actually, I look on that time as one of the worst times of my life. I would get real depressed. Looking back on it now, I would say it was because I wasn’t on my path. Maybe it would have been all right for a year or two, but I should have stopped. But I kept doing something just for the money that did not speak to the higher aspirations of my life, or to the needs of my soul. I remember talking to a counselor, and he told me that my depression was blessing. I wanted to kill the sonofabitch -- this is not a blessing! But I understand now, it was a blessing. It was a sign that I wasn’t doing [what I was supposed to be doing]. I mean you can mask depression with alcohol, drugs, or a lot of activity without being aware of it.

I would get up, go thru the motions, do what I had to do, but I was miserable. The doctor gave me an anti-depressant, but I didn’t want to take drugs. I had the prescription with me, and he said, if I was ever at a point where I thought I couldn’t handle it, go get the prescription filled. I kept it with me in my wallet. At one point, I was so depressed, and thinking about getting the prescription just to see if it would relieve the symptoms. I thought I’d fill it in the morning. That night I went to read a story to my middle daughter, she was about six -- I hope I don’t cry when I tell this story -- but I was reading to her, and she was as cute as a 6 year old can be -- just talking a mile a minute, and then I realized she was the age I was when my father left me, and I didn’t know what had happened to him, hadn’t seen him in twenty years -- I wasn’t allowed to bring up his name -- and my marriage to D was not good - I was thinking about leaving-- and leaving her meant leaving the kids -- and I thought about not having my father and what that meant to me, and thought about my daughter not having me. Tears started running down my face, and I got up and walked into the hallway, and all I can describe it as is a primal scream. Grief overcame me so much I fell to the ground and wept. All I could think about was losing my father, all that stuff just cascaded in on me. I remember pulling myself up and going don’t do this, pull yourself together, and then I fell down again, crying. It was intense. The next day I woke up and I was taking a shower, and it was, oh, I’m not depressed. I must have been holding all these fears and feelings inside all that time, and just realized it. I was so glad I hadn’t taken the drug, because I don’t think I would have been able to feel all that. From that, I think I learned the importance of going through the pain, because you come out on the other side a lot stronger.

D and I were at a point in our relationship where D didn’t even want me to touch her. I thought, why am I in this relationship? I’m not a mean sob, I provide for the family, I work hard, we have our house. What am I doing wrong here? I’m not even doing what I want to do, but I am doing what I’m supposed to do. We had just had an argument. I went into my room and banged my hand on the cabinet; hurt the hell out of my hand. I’m sitting there and she came in to me and says, A--, I just don’t respect you any more. My reaction was to start laughing hysterically. It struck me as absurd that she doesn’t respect me. I’m doing things I don’t even want to do because I think they’re the right things to do, and she doesn’t respect me! How absurd!! I should be doing something I want to do. I started laughing. She told me later that it was the hardest thing she ever had to tell me. She thought I was going to be real upset and was kind of dumbfounded when I started laughing. It became so obvious to me that ‘I’m not on the right path here! She was just letting me know.

The next day, I went to Winfest, and I was about as low as one could get. I went alone. I didn’t want any of my family to go. I’m thinking my life is worthless. What the hell am I going to do? So, I’m at Winfest, and I give my ticket to this guy at the gate, and he says, are you Mr. R? I said, yeah, and he said, oh, man, it’s good to see you -- you were such a shining light for me. I hated school but you did me a good deed. It really affected me. I mean, here is this young man who remembers me in a positive way. That was kind of nice, a little bit of an uplift. And so then I go set my chair up, and I’m really early. People start coming, and then this guy sits his chair next to me. He looks familiar but I can’t quite place him. So I asked him if we’ve met before. He says no he has never been here before. He’s just arrived from New Orleans and just wanted to get away. He heard this was a pretty nice music festival. I tell him I’m from N.O. and it turned out we are from the same high school. He asked me my name and I tell him. He says you’ve got to be kidding I just came back from my high school reunion and we were talking about some of the funny things we remembered. Someone brought up the time you took your sweats off to go into the basketball game and all you had on was your jock strap. We all had a good laugh because you were out there for a while before you realized it. No one knew what you were doing. Someone said the last they heard was that you were in the monastery. I remember thinking that my life seemed pretty worthless but at least I had made some people laugh and they were still talking about it.

Then Washboard Leo gets up, -- he plays the electric washboard -- he’s the self-proclaimed king of the Nutrafrog Kingdom -- he has this whole aura about what he does with his music -- and anyway, he decided that part of Winfest is to do the Nutrafrog Stomp. I’m sitting in front of the stage and he throws me some Mardi Gras beads and little plastic eggs that are supposed to be Nutrafrog eggs, whatever that is. He tells me I’m supposed to lead the Nutra Frog Stomp. I do NOT want to do this but I start doing this little stomp and then I start to ribbit like a frog. I feel pretty stupid. I start motioning to other people to get up and stomp with me. Pretty soon I’m stomping and ribbiting with a little more enthusiasm. I’m up there and I begin to let go. I had my Nutrafrog egg, and I’m yelling RIBBIT, dancing, stomping around, and started really yelling, RIBITRIBITRIBIT and stomping like a Wildman -- getting more people to join me, and we’re stomping around the place, and everybody is laughing. It seemed like we danced for a while. We stirred up a lot of dust because there must have been a hundred people following me around the ballpark. I don’t know what place I went to, but when the whole thing ended I was exhausted, sweaty and covered with dust. It was then that I had an epiphany. I know what I want to do with my life. I want to open a (;lkjhasdfg).

I went home and told D and the kids. I said, I’m going to open a (;lkjhasdfg )-- it’s what I want to do. For me, what (;lkjhasdfg) meant was real communication -- a place for people to talk. I wanted to create a place where I wasn’t always trying to sell people something, I could just talk to people, just be with people, create a sense of community -- I was an obsessed person. I quit my job and -- I did it.

This was not figured out by looking through business magazines or figuring out what business to start. It was totally -- well, it was the process of dancing. I think it lets you get in touch with your soul in some ways. Dancing, music -- there was a shedding of all that I thought I was supposed to be, really getting in touch with my essence. There is a banner at Winfest that says ,”Music washes from the soul the dust of everyday life.” I felt that is what happened to me. I didn’t care that I was making a fool of myself. I remember some friends looking at me when I was dancing and wondering about me. I mean, I was out there. I didn’t question it. It felt right. I’ve thought about ;lkjhasdfg every day since then.

I believe the desire to do this type of business had to do with my experience being with the brothers and a sense of community. I feel a sense of community at the ;lkjhasdfg -- a sense of connection with the people. It’s not just trying to sell you something or what’s your marketing purpose for meeting me? I find myself in a role in the community where I can connect other people -- I talk to the young kids, some down and out, homeless people, then I talk to the business men with the coats and ties, and they see me talking to each of them, and there’s a connection made, maybe they’ll start talking to one another. I’m very conscious of that role that I play. I really try to do that, now that I’ve realized I do it. I see that as my purpose in life, getting people together, not concentrating on our differences, but concentrating on our humanness, what brings us together. That’s why I love my business. It gives me an opportunity to be with people in a very basic way.

When I think about my path, my purpose, it has to do with community, connecting people. I want them to feel a sense of community, and I try to convey that to the people who work there -- this is not just about (;lkjhasdfg). It’s about connections people make when they come in. And it’s about space, too. A lot about art in space, because -- you go into McDonalds, it’s not warm, you know, it’s designed that way, get you in, get you out -- my whole thing is ‘Come and stay awhile. The colors are warm, the space has a quality of art to it that makes you want to hang around, maybe talk to somebody. And when you’re in the( ;lkjhasdfg), you can start talking to somebody and meet a new friend.

That’s why I think depression was a blessing, and that’s why I’m glad I didn’t take the drugs to make me not feel depressed. I think our whole country is fucked up because we have so many people on Prozac and what not. They can’t feel the pain. And if you can’t feel the pain, you’re not going to get to the other side. I’m not going to say that people don’t have chemical depression and that drugs are always bad -- all I can really talk about is my experience. If I would have taken those anti-depressants I don’t think I would have had that experience. We need to be careful. We could drug ourselves to oblivion.

#20

2008-04-24T08:25:00.000-07:00

Subject G. and I sat in the dining room of her restored Victorian home in the historical district of town, surrounded by eclectic art, antique furniture and brightly colored walls, occasionally distracted by the demands for petting by her old yellow tomcat.

I first married in 1966 to a mathematician who was pretty straight. He was an extremely straight and narrow kind of guy. At one point, about a year into the marriage, I realized I did not want to be a housewife. I didn’t want to clean house every day, entertain his associates, and have babies. I realized there was something else going on. At that time I was in publishing and I decided, with my husband’s approval, to go to the school of visual arts in NY to study photography and graphic art. I had been an artist in high school, my friends had pretty much talked me out of that, talked me into going to law school -- [with art] I would never make money. I decided to do that, and that’s when it first really hit me, at the school of visual arts - we were making films in class, looking at graphic arts as a way to truly express your values. I was the straightest kid in the class going, yeah, uhhuh, yeah! I had never done drugs, I was totally straight. At that point, so much of what I had seen and felt while I was at school -- I met some people who were smoking marijuana and doing LSD and taking mushrooms, and I didn’t know if I wanted to relinquish control -- but ultimately, I got past that -- I would say ‘67 is where it really hit me between the eyes at school. I walked around with a camera slung across my shoulders, changed my mode of dress -- I had always been fascinated with antique clothing but really got into 30s clothes -- evolved ultimately. I did have to make a living since I was a single woman -- I went to Wall Street at that point, doing marketing for tax shelters and oil drilling funds. Pretty successful at it -- working for a big brokerage house -- pursuing my alternative lifestyle at night -- carrying my briefcase, getting on the subway every morning completely dolled up in my full douche regalia, going to work, and then on the weekends going to the Fillmore East and seeing the Grateful Dead. That lasted until ‘71. I was making a lot of money at that time, and I was single woman, maintaining an apartment in Brooklyn, maintaining a life style, and I didn’t see any way around it.

I finally got to the point where I was sick and tired of those asshole bosses, shaking their finger at me, telling me how it was, I finally just quit. I said, that’s it, I’m never working for anyone else again, I don’t give a crap about anybody ever paying my rent, I’ll figure it out. I went off to Europe for 6 weeks, and when I came back, I went to the Fashion Institute of Technology and studied clothing design. I did that off and on until ‘87. I made leather clothing, went to several boutique shows in NY, had clients in Tucson, Chicago, NY -- I did a lot of hand painted clothing, mostly deer skin and lamb suede. I ended up opening a store on Long Island, and did that for awhile -- and wearing what I considered the most beautiful clothes in the world, fashions from the 30s and 40s. I would get on the Long Island Railroad in some long silk dress with a little short fur jacket and a big hat, decked with jewelry -- at one point I finally realized that antique clothing was really my love, and I gave up the leather, closed the store for two months, painted it all white, bought all these beautiful antique clothes, and reopened the store as an antique clothing store. That was in ‘73. The man I was buying clothes from had stashed away all these huge dresses made out of these beautiful fabrics, and he had bundles and bundles of clothes, so he talked me into closing my store and moving my business into Manhattan and manufacturing clothing out of recycled dresses. We had ourselves a business called Garbo Garbs -- we made it at Bloomingdale’s. We had windows on Lexington Ave., the highlight of my career.

Then I met N--, and I couldn’t not go with him, so I gave Garbo Garbs back to my partner and moved to California. I made belly dancing costumes. We lived on top of Mt. St. Helena at Calistoga, and he was working in a vineyard. Baking bread -- it was fabulous. But we couldn’t afford to buy land. We knew we were doomed to be together for the rest of our lives, and we wanted to settle down, have a family, have a garden, do the do. Neither one of us wanted to go back to the city. He had escaped NY when he was 18, and the only time he ever came back was that one summer when he found me.

So we wandered the country in a van, looking for a place to live -- made it to Florida, wandered around until we came to Fayetteville AR in ‘75. We had met a woman in Madeira Beach FL -- she had run away from her husband but she had grown up here. She had bought a little motel in Madeira Beach and was making pottery. She was doing her hippie thing. Our basic plan was, we wanted to be in a university town, I wanted to open an antique clothing store, and N-- wanted to learn a trade. He was a window trimmer when he had been in NY as a kid, and he had worked in the vineyards in CA, and he was a fisherman, none of which translated to -- he’s seven younger than I am, so he didn’t go through the initial angst of having to leave the straight world. He graduated high school in ‘68. He was already there. He knew he was never going to fit into corporate America. So we didn’t have that issue on his life. I was the one who had to step through that door.

So we followed this path, going through Tennessee, the Carolinas -- we went to Eureka Springs first, and it was uh, no, not Eureka, too cool for us, we’re not so spiritual. We showed up on Dickson St. in Fayetteville and went, hmm, this looks like the place, and we haven’t left since. I opened Second Time Around.

Most of it was the anonymity of being in a city and having three friends and five friends and never really being intimate with anything -- not the earth, not people, barely yourself. You got up and you functioned. You created whatever aura you could to make yourself happy, but there’s this very big feeling of isolation, no matter what you’re doing. I grew up in a small town, but when I went to NY and got into the excitement of what the city had to offer, I had 12 years of it, got real juiced on it, took advantage of it as much as I could, but I was 30, and it was time to evolve into who I really wanted to be when I grew up. California was a groove, a wonderful place, very laid back. Napa Valley now is not what the valley was in the 70s. It depends on how far you want to buy into it -- it takes an incredible amount of money to maintain this very groovy lifestyle. We didn’t particularly want to do that. We had friends there very much like us, the only problem was that we couldn’t afford to do what we wanted to do, which was buy a piece of property, build a house -- even then, raw land was $25,000 an acre in the valley. We lived just below Mt. St. Helena on the Silverado Ranch -- I went from Brooklyn to the Silverado Ranch. It’s A Beautiful Day had lived there, and Taj Mahal lived there. We lived in a little cabin with wood heat and it was wow, this is it -- this is what N-- had promised me, come away with me darling this is what I’ll give you. We had a beautiful garden, and in the middle of our beautiful garden we had this bed -- he built me a four poster queen size bed with a big foam mattress, and we would lay out there at night and stare up at the stars, I mean, come on, it was perfect. And that was the adventure -- it was so spiritually satisfying. It was real, me hoeing the garden, or him splitting firewood, sitting by a roaring fire, making soup, sewing belly dancing costumes.

We were looking for cheaper real estate and something that would sustain us. Although we were hippies, we both came from middle class families, both of our fathers were in the jewelry business. His dad was a diamond cutter and my father was a watch maker, self supporting -- both Jewish -- anyway, the values we were raised with -- we wanted indoor plumbing and hot water. We lived the wood stove, but I wanted a toilet that flushed, and so to synthesize all it required that we actually work for a living, not ever being on the dole anywhere, and create our own world. So this proved to be the perfect place for it.

The first day we got here we walked into ROTC for lunch, and G-- M-- came over and said, hi, who are you, are you planning to live here, do you need a house to rent? I mean, the first day. We said, hey, this is a community. Another person said, we’re having pot luck tonight, come over, we’re going to play some music, come on over, meet some people. We knew we had arrived immediately. It took us awhile. Fortunately N-- got work, the guy we lived next door to was building dairy barns and he hired N-- on as a laborer, taught him how to lay stone and brick, he took it from there. The following April I had opened Second Time Around -- my parents and N--’s parents lent us money, and I flew to NY and went to my old partner and bought clothes, and he gave me the name of a rag house in KC and in Dallas and in St Louis, and I made those connections.

Then I got pregnant, and we bought a piece of property -- and it was like, here we are. I have a child -- she just graduated college. She’s more ambitious, straighter, than we are -- she drinks a little, but doesn’t do drugs at all. I smoked pot in front of her, and it wasn’t until she was about ten that we pretty much stopped smoking in front of her. She says some of her most amazing recollections were at the house we built out in the country. We had this big deck that wrapped around the house, and we would sit out there and roll joints at night -- we exposed her to stuff like that. We skinny dipped in the White River every day in the summertime. She learned to swim naked in the river, I nursed her when she was 3 months old in the river, so that she would have no fear of water. I would stand in the water, and N-- would throw her at me, and we’d put her under, bring her up. She never had a fear of water, in fact, she swam competitively. We ran around naked. To this day, she’s like, mom, dad, but then, she’ll get undressed in front of us, and she’ll say, don’t look, and it’s like, oh come on, like we’ve never seen your body, come on -- and there’s a part of her that’s very modest.

As far as drugs, her rationale is, I know how brain damaged you get smoking pot, so why would I want to do that? [laughs] I’ve said to her many times, you know you ought to smoke a joint and kick back, and she says, thanks anyway, mom, but... She drank one summer, between her junior and senior year. They had this big deal, a place they called safe spot, and they would go, had a designated driver -- I was the only adult who knew where safe spot was -- in case something ever happened, they wanted one adult who knew where they were. I became the designated adult. And those kids still come over here and hang with me -- they bring beers over - I’ve had kids come over and say, we’ve got this killer pot, you want to smoke some with us? You’ve got to try this shit. -- I don’t see anything wrong with it. The things that concerned me when I decided to have a kid -- I had taken LSD, is my kid going to come out totally warped. I mean the kid is so bright and so driven, and refutes all these horrible things in the media about -- I mean, I have never said to my child, did you do your homework? I never had to. I gave her the option in her life -- you are responsible for your own life - here is your choice, this path, or this path -- you choose, you do, I’ll help you.

I had a repressive mother, and all my life I was very resentful of the fact that she threw my art away and told me I would never make it. She should have seen that my father got up every morning whistling -- he was an artist, a watchmaker -- about the fact that he dropped out of law school and became a watchmaker. From dealing with a resentment toward that, and suddenly getting this incredible clarity on LSD, that there was more to life than the little ant going to work and coming back, going to work, coming back, etc. stash it away, money is so important -- I mean, it was a combination of my own hurt feelings, working out of that, and suddenly realizing that there was so much out there that didn’t have anything to do with commerce, and you only got to go around once, I didn’t care what anybody else said, it better be fun, dammit. That’s been my life -- I want to lay down every day and say thank you god that was a great day, and most days I can do that. You have to look at the big picture --human rights, environmental issues -- the fact that you yourself make a difference in the universe -- take responsibility for it. Every action that you take is karmic, on every level. If you impact one other person in the world and they in turn take responsibility, and acknowledge that what they do is karmic, they’ll impact somebody else, and constantly expand that base of knowing --

I always talk about these issues, usually on a one to one basis. Stuff like recycling and environmental issues, I’ll do whatever I can, whatever it takes. Petitions, signs, go out to talk to every person on this block and say, when it’s time to do the recycling, I want you to participate, and this is important... When we first moved here, everybody on this block was a bunch of old ladies -- it’s changed a lot in the 15 years we’ve lived here. But it was important for me to talk to everybody -- like, ok, we’re going to have recycling over here at IGA. If you want me to, I’ll take your stuff -- if you don’t and you want to do it, fine, but I think it’s important, so if you will separate, I’ll do this.

I prefer dealing with people on a one to one, but I’ll go and talk to the little old lady on the corner, it’s time to have a mammogram, they’re having cheap mammograms in Springdale -- if you need a ride, call me -- make an appointment.

At this very moment, there is a difference, in that I work in a new job, and it is for a big corporation. Now, the vice president, who is in charge of our office, is a guy I got high with for years, so he knows and I know -- I don’t know if anybody else knows. There are a couple of other people in the office that I would bet -- but we have never said -- I would never at this point feel free to say hey, you want to smoke a joint, come on over. I don’t know if that will change. About a week after I was hired -- I had no idea my friend worked for this company -- he came up from Little Rock and walked into the office, and said, what the hell are you doing here, and I said, I work here, what the hell are you doing here, and he said, oh, well, I’m vice president in charge of this office, and we both went, oh, ok. He turned around to the office manager and said do you have any idea how lucky you are that you have this woman working for you? It made everything different, immediately, for me, this tacit understanding that the broom wasn’t stuffed all the way up.

I’m not pessimistic [that our vision] will never come to pass - -I think it’s cyclical, I think the pendulum has swung the other way, that the generation of children that we have raised, when they get to be in their late 20s and early 30s will again pick it up and carry the banner and really impact -- so on that level I’m very optimistic. I truly believe our children know what’s really real, and as soon as they are ready to seize power, they’ll do it with a vengence. Not only did they have their parents’ idealism, but they have also been in the world and they’re working for Compac computers and ATT and ugly stuff, and they’re saying to themselves, as we said to ourselves in the 60s, hey wait a minute. It was foisted on us. They have chosen this. As we walked away from consumerism, they will too -- I truly believe they have our values in their guts and no matter what, when it gets really ugly they’re going to say fuck all this and walk away from it. Plus the economy is going to crash around us pretty quick -- Japan, it’s all going to come tumbling down here in a few years, and all these kids who make $70,000 are going to be out of work, and then what. They’re going to have to downsize their lives and find out what is really important to them, what they truly want, whether that brand new $50,000 car every other year is really important, or if putting food on their table and feeling a sense of self pride isn’t really more important.

The generation who is now in their mid-30s were raised by the generation just older than us, and that generation grew up in the 50s, and they’re very straight. Most of my cousins are at least a generation older than I am, and their kids in their 30s are the young excutives and young bulls, and they’re just out there, building quarter-million dollar homes, buying BMWs, -- I don’t buy anything new if I can help it. My concept of consumerism is, if you can find it used, it’s better. It’s recycling, dammit. The real deal. I do that as much as I possibly can.

I think the reason I haven’t left here is that I have found the greatest concentration of people of like mind here, and a whole lot very crazy people that make me feel normal - you’re allowed to be eccentric, even encouraged -- You don’t need a whole lot of money to live reasonably well here, so that craving for money, that desire, lessens. You can maintain a pretty decent lifestyle -- my friends in the city laugh at what it costs us to live here - the mortgage is $450 a month. It doesn’t matter - we could scrape together enough money no matter what to keep this house -- I can walk anywhere I want, I really don’t even need a car -- if it came down to it, I could grow a garden, raise vegetables -- I can survive here, easily. We have squeezed through several economic situations in this area and came through it with a very pleasant life. We still play with our friends -- instead of going out to eat, everybody has a pot luck. Everybody brings food, we party, play cards, listen to music, dance -- life is wonderful. You can have everything, as long as you can have the things that are important, the sense of community, the sense that you’re not tearing out each other’s guts to survive, no matter what. A lot of us talk about, and when we’re old, this is what we’re doing... I have a bunch of friends who bought land up on Beaver Lake -- there is a whole community being created of people who, in their late 40s and early 50s, that when it’s time, they’re all going to live together, farm together, take care of one another until we’re all dead, and then pass it on to our kids. It’s an old folks commune. We talk about it a lot, about when we get too old and feeble to take care of ourselves, do you want to be in a nursing home, or do you want to live with a bunch of friends, share the cooking and cleaning, and nursing, pool the Social Security, play bridge every Sunday night, live out our days then the way we’ve lived out our days. Say every day, god that was good. What more could you want? We’ve talked about lining up the rocking chairs, rolling joints, and passing the joints up and down -- I’ve told everybody that for my 70th birthday I want a walker so that I can go hear the Cate Brothers and still dance, cause they’ll still be playing.

This is a regional community. I have friends who live out on the Buffalo River -- we play with people out there, we have friends in Little Rock. I had a T’ai Chi teacher who lives in Boulder, and he said that this is one of the high places on the earth, that there was an energy here that made magic, and that was why he came back here and taught so much, because the earth had magic here. There is a peace, and when you walk down the street, people say “Hi” to you - -when you drive down the road and you pass a car, you wave -- or give the peace sign -- it’s an acknowledgment.

My nephew is thinking of moving here, and I told him, I walked into Wal-Mart the other day to buy some shrimp, and I had this conversation with this guy behind the counter, about travel. Out of the clear blue, very deeply satisfying, a wonderful conversation. We thanked each other.

I mean, I greet people every day with a hug and a kiss. Where else in this country do you greet people that way? There are people I’m friends with that it’s like, no no, not over the counter, I want full body contact -- come mere. I want to feel that energy, I want that body in my arms. friends. that full body contact, you don’t get that many places. you can’t see that in Chicago -- full body contact? That is a very fulfilling thing to me on a spiritual level, having physical contact with people -- I don’t know how I would have evolved any place else. There is no way of knowing that. But the people I am friends with would say about me, she’s always there with a hug -- if something is bad for them, I will put my body on theirs and give them my energy, plug into this. And when I’m having a bad day, that is the best thing in the world, when somebody just puts their body right there and says, hey, have some --zzzzt. Even if it’s just for a few minutes. I try to get it and give it as much as I can.

I go an exercise class, called NIA, neuro-intramuscular something - it’s a combination of yoga, tai chi, karate, dancing, breathing, laughing. I feel I’ve been blessed -- I tried to not put my own prejudice in the way, tried to step out -- I’ve tried to find the right thing to do. I have a sister three years younger than me, but she missed the whole thing. And her son is 28 yrs old, and he doesn’t have one clue - my sister never gave him the responsibility to figure it out. My kid, it was like from the time she was born, hey, you make your decisions, if they’re really bad, I’ll stop you -- and she’s got incredible values. I just say, darlin’ whatever makes you happy makes me happy, as long as you get up every morning with a song in your heart and pay your own goddamn way! Made dean’s list with 19 hours -- twice in one year...

#12

2008-04-13T09:36:00.000-07:00

S. and I met in his office, comfortably but narrowly fitted between books, files, souvenirs, photos of his family, and plants. Born 1947, Massachusetts.

When I went to college in the mid-60s, I was aware of alternative lifestyles and the hippie movement, but it wasn’t until I graduated in ‘68 that I ever really did anything out of the ordinary. I did spend a couple of summers working in social service areas -- I was aware of the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam war -- I went to a few demonstrations while I was in college. Several midnight trips to Washington D.C. on buses. It was when I got out of college and entered the Vista program that I began to see things in a different way. All the males were under a great deal of pressure because of the draft, and Vista seemed a good alternative at the time, to give myself time to think about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, and also to be of use to someone else, and at the same to avoid being drafted into a war I knew I didn’t want to participate in. I knew the war was the wrong thing. I applied for conscientious objector status, which was denied to me. Regardless, I was always totally against the war. We had quite a lot of discussion about it on campus, several professors were adamantly opposed, and they really encouraged us to think about it.

In my experience, marijuana wasn’t really prevalent at the college I went to, as much as alcohol. Drinking age was 18, and liquor was available and prevalent.

I had a vague idea of becoming a social worker, and I also wanted to use the language I had studied - Spanish -- some clear ideas of using language somehow. My family had owned a retail merchandise store, and that was the farthest thing from my mind, because my dad had spent his live slaving at that store, and that was a model I didn’t want to follow. He spent no time with his family. our relationship was always strained because he was working and he demanded that his children, regardless of what else they had planned, come and help him at the store. It was something I wanted to steer clear of. My dad was a very fine person, but one of my greatest regrets today is that I didn’t really get to know him. He died when I was 22. All thru those years when I was growing up, he was a wonderful provider, loyal to my mom, perfect as a father in almost every way, except he was driven to work. He did not spend time with his kids, or show us the value of a father/child relationship from the perspective of just spending time with us. That left a big hole.

At the time I served in Vista, there was a tremendous political upheaval in Chicago. It was the time of the Democratic convention in Chicago. There were all sorts of ethnic groups there, Indians, Puerto Ricans, hillbillies from the mountains of West Virginia and Kentucky who had come to Chicago to work after World War II and their children were my age and they would spend the week in the city and then take off for the mountains on the weekend and even they were politicized to some extent. There were poor people’s coalitions, welfare recipients coalitions, blacks, Puerto Ricans, every variety of human being active in some kind of organization, and that was the world that swallowed me up in ‘68, ‘70. The first year I worked in a mental health project in a very poor area of Chicago -- that’s where I met my wife. We were both Vista volunteers-- and in fact we had grown up 25 miles from each other, but met in Chicago -- very odd.

The mental health project where we worked there were a lot of chronically mentally ill who had been dislodged from the state mental hospitals and put into halfway houses, these old converted hotels, packed three to a room. The owners got a lot of money out of it. Our job was to re-integrate them into the community, provide them with activities, socialize them and do whatever we could to increase the chance that they wouldn’t be sent back to the state hospital. One woman had been on the wards of the state hospital for 40-50 years because she was crippled, and in those days, if you had someone who couldn’t walk, it was just as easy to put them in a sanitarium as to try to provide for them at home. and the surprising thing about her was that she was mentally clear, able to function and think, despite having been put in that hospital for all that time. She actually got her civil rights back and moved into her own apartment, and accessed social services that she needed. It was kind of fun to get to know her. I have an old Studs Terkel newspaper article that was written about her.

The 2nd year I worked in a much more political environment. There was a group called Uptown Coalition in that area of Chicago and they were trying to make improvement in the living conditions of the people there, and the project I worked on was a housing project. We were fighting urban removal by trying to determine who owned some of the huge apartment buildings there. The idea was that if we could get in touch with the owners and get them to consider selling to this coalition, then the coalition would encourage cooperative development in these buildings, give the tenants a sense of ownership. It was pretty much a failure. We did a lot of title research. There was a lot of conflict between the lower income people fighting for a little piece of the pie.

From there I went to California, looking for L. I spent a lot of time in Venice Beach. I didn’t work for awhile. I had never lived in California before, and the scene seemed like a permanent vacation. I ended up coming back to Boston to try to go to graduate school in social work, but I just couldn’t get myself to concentrate. I wanted to be of some help in society -- I didn’t want to forever be a beach bum, and I’d grown up in Boston and knew that the school of social work at Boston College was just a stone’s throw from the house I’d grown up in. But after a semester I left again. I was mildly interested in health reform and community health programs, had taken a few courses in California and had volunteered at a free health clinic, making myself useful.

I went back to California and L and I ended up in San Francisco together - ‘73 or so. I did these little jobs driving a truck around San Francisco. I put an ad in the paper that said man needs work, survival at stake, do anything -- all sorts of crazy people called me to do odd jobs. I wasn’t that great with my hands, but I could do rough stuff, moving things, fixing little things. and that’s when our daughter was born. Then I got a little more serious about things, realized I had a child to support. We moved to southern California to be closer to L’s sisters who were living there, and I got a job at a community college, and started thinking more seriously about grad school and health educ. I was working as an aide. We left there because L’s brother had a kidney transplant back in Massachusetts.

Coming back to California from Massachusetts afterwards, we stopped in Russellville Arkansas. Some friends of ours, who we’d met as Vista volunteers in Chicago, had moved to a community on the Mulberry River. I was told a whole group of people from Chicago moved down to live the country life and start a school for city kids, removed from all the urban pressures. I don’t think the Mulberry Farm project lasted too long. The people scattered to different parts of Arkansas. Our friends ended up in Russellville We stayed because the job I had in California evaporated, the mental health center in Russellville had just opened with a huge Mental Health Institute grant, and they were pulling people off the street to work there. My friend said given your situation, why don’t you go over there and see if you can get a job for a little while, save up some money, and decide where you want to go. I was interested in mental health, and when I went to the center, a lot of good people were working there, and they had the best interests of the area population at heart, and I got a job.

I’ll always remember seeing Russellville for the first time - the day after Richard Nixon resigned -- August. the humidity was so intense and it was so hot, I thought you could easily fry an egg on the street, and the city looked like a set for a movie, for ‘Last Picture Show’ a sleepy little town. I mean, the town didn’t attract me, it was the people I was meeting. Little did I know that the Ozark National Forest was just north of Russellville, that these gorgeous areas – beautiful creeks and waterfalls, camping areas, trails – were up there, and virtually nobody used them. I was amazed. I guess back then, and maybe it’s still true, it gets real hot in July and August, and people stay inside. So there was this whole world you could have to yourself, and it was just beautiful. It was the scenery that really attracted me. Every second we got, we’d drive up to recreation areas and explore. And we met people who were living in the country, and started building friendships, which made it a lot more attractive to stay.

I realized that people were so stigmatized by coming into a mental center and being considered crazy or emotionally disturbed that what was really lacking was some kind of healthy environment where people could come without that stigma and be accepted, interact with other people, and so the idea of starting a free school there in Russellville helped as an alternative. People were coming for day appointments and not being integrated into the community, being treated for a disturbance but not offered an alternative to isolation. I had been driving back and forth between Russellville and Little Rock to meet people on the wards of the state hospital who would be released back into the Russellville area and my job was to introduce them into the health center and its services, be a bridge between people who had ended up in the state mental hospital with very severe problems.

The free school developed to encourage anyone who wanted to teach a course or lead a class to do so and encourage others to sign up for these classes under the umbrella of the mental health center. We formed a little board, and twice a year or so we’d have a catalog of courses and it was wonderful. Even some of the people we considered patients offered to teach classes in cake decorating -- no one knew who was a mental health patient. You might walk into a Chinese cooking class -- ten people in the kitchen learning to do this -- and you might have a bank president there and somebody who just got released from the state hospital -- and nobody knew. All of the status and stigma was gone. It was really neat.

This was at the beginning of the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, and they put money into it. Ultimately I got a salary to do just that, and while I was doing that, a guy came by who was a professor from Fayetteville, who taught adult education courses at UALR. We talked and he said, there is a whole academic, scholarly interest in adult education/community education that you fit into, and if you’re ever interested in taking a course to learn more about what other people are doing, or if you want to work toward a degree, I teach this course... and that’s when I started learning more about adult/community education. I started working toward a grad degree in adult education. Ultimately, we moved to Fayetteville so I could finish this degree, and my wife could position herself to be able to go to El Paso to study at a maternity center to be a midwife.

I was interested in how adults process information, how they learn, what they do with it. I saw myself as someone who could be a resource for other people, maybe give people ideas and help them develop them wherever they were. It wasn’t a precise vision. but intellectually, I was interested in adult learning. I wanted to get the degree out of the way and see where I went from there.

Having kids was one of the most wonderful things that ever happened to me. As a parent and a father, I wanted to do it in a way that would help and my kids at the same time, maybe make up for the relationship I didn’t have with my dad. I loved being with kids. It turned me into a story teller. You’d sit there and try to entertain them with a story, and soon, you’re making up stories and other people say, hey, that’s a good story.

When it came to the point where we had both finished school and we had to decide where we were going, we decided Fayetteville was a nice place, a great little town. I got a job at the Economic Opportunity Agenda as a CETA worker -- helping low income people train for employment. A few months after I started work there, the woman who had hired me quit -- she had been the planner, wrote grants, did community organizing work, submitted reports. She said, you could do this. So I became the planner at EOA. I had no idea about what a community action agency was, where these things came from, even though they were part of the same poverty program that developed Vista. I learned about Headstart, job training programs, battered women’s shelter, children’s house, weatherization -- all these things that had sprung out of the EOA - farmers market - a lot of things had sprung up and become independent. EOA was a clearinghouse for ideas people had for economic development projects, community action, facing problems. Staff was supposed to work with local people to empower them. That was the original idea behind community action - a ‘60s idea - Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty.

I was really interested in the principles of community organization, where a person in a position like mine could talk with different groups of people and say what is it that needs to be done, let me be of help in focusing on what the problem is and how we might bring resources to bear to solve it -- human and financial resources. I got involved in a project at Winslow to help people decide what their priorities were and how to get there. They had a cannery -- several other projects -- it was wonderful to go down there and talk to people and participate in meetings and get involved in the life of the community, addressing different problems. Did the same thing in Johnson.

Then in south Fayetteville, I got involved in bringing people together, doing surveys of the needs. We formed an organization, the SE Fayetteville Community Action Committee. The first few projects were small, putting the city to put a footbridge over this creek so kids didn’t have to dip down into the creek to get to school. The city built a sidewalk along south Washington to Jefferson Elementary school - we did housepainting projects for elderly people and then along came a doctor who was working at the health dept. She heard about our organization and she said they’re a lot of health needs that are not being met, a lot of people falling through the cracks, the health dept is very limited on what it can do -- the dr’s don’t want to see these people because they have no health insurance. So this doctor, who had come from West Virginia, said if we would provide the building, solicit volunteers, get equipment, I’ll be the doctor, if you want to work with me to develop a free health center. That was the beginning of what became the NWA Health and Dental Clinic, which is a very viable organization. It followed community organization principles: you go to people, you talk about what they see as being needs, ask them to come together and talk about it as a group, build a sense of community, and then whatever people want to do, whatever they identify as an issue or problem, you help them to work on it. and at the same time, the group becomes kind of a political force.

I moved up thru the ranks at EOA. I became the director in ‘85, and I was doing a little of everything. I did that for 5 yars, but I never really liked it. It took me away from the front line work that I was used to doing -- I didn’t like not having my own project. I needed something I could call my own. I wasn’t much of an authority figure, and I never felt that comfortable doing it. Early on, we had been asked to do a survey by our main funding source on the needs of people in Washington County. That’s when the idea of the Single Parent Scholarship Fund came through. People gave me very common sense responses to the survey -- what do you do about poverty? help people get education and help them train for jobs. I was educated about the needs of women and children by talking with people who were working directly with single parents -- vo-tech, welfare department, anyone who had contact with single mothers -- and the occasional single father.

I came back to the realization that there are people in society who are almost invisible, who you could see at the grocery store with food stamps, buying food, see walking alone the street with little kids, having no transportation, you could see them in the welfare department waiting to see a social worker, but you never really know what’s going on in their lives because you’re not part of that world. And that awareness of what women go thru when their husbands leave them and don’t give them child support, don’t come and pay any attention to the kids, especially women who don’t have an education, don’t have work experience to be able to fend for herself. In talking with other people, I realized there are all these local services out there -- my eyes suddenly opened and I saw all these women coming into EOA and asking for food, utility payments, rent, every immediate crisis -- I really wanted to know what could be done over the long haul to help women so that they wouldn’t have to beg, so they wouldn’t be in this very embarrassing situation and having to find money. They were powerless.

If you have a bunch of kids and you don’t have money or family that can help and the father is not around, what do you do? You can battle the system, but I’m not sure you make enough progress just taking on the whole system that puts people in those situations. You have a lot more success with the individual, building her ability and skills to deal with the world at large, and then, incrementally, in different institutions within the system. One thing we had to immediately deal with when we started the scholarship fund was the food stamp program. Soon as you gave a scholarship to someone and that money was reported to the food stamp authorities, in that month that they got a check for $300 or whatever, they’d yank the food stamps. And why on earth would someone apply for a scholarship if she knew she was going to lose a very important part of her ability to feed her family. So we marched down to Little Rock and talked to this guy in charge of the food stamp program. Look, this makes no sense at all, to penalize someone for wanting to better herself, and discourage her from doing what she needs to do. He said, you’re right, it makes no sense at all. He figured out a way to get around that Catch-22. It was merely a matter of taking a problem and figuring out who you can talk to in a sensible way. I don’t know if it’s chutzpah on my part, or just a sense that we’re all reasonable, rational people, now let’s talk about these problems that we’ve created -- now let’s do something about it.

We did the single parent scholarship fund project for several years before I decided this was something I wanted to work on full time. I went to Bernise Jones, our matron saint, and said if she would be willing to put some money up to cover a salary and travel expenses and few other incidentals for a year, I would be willing to throw myself into an effort to develop a statewide network of single parent scholarship funds, what we had done very successfully in Washington and Benton counties, to see if the rest of the state would work with us. And she did.

So since May ‘90, we’ve been working statewide. It’s hard to take something created here, where we’re very fortunate to have such a community that values education, is concerned and caring about its people, and has the affluence to put resources where they can do a lot of good. You go across the state to some of the Delta areas, or southwest Arkansas, and you don’t find anywhere near the same attitude toward people, education, or optimism. Their economy is completely different.

There’s the whole racial thing in other parts of the state. When I’ve been in the delta, I’ve realized that underlying everything is this issue. People may not talk about it, but it’s there. When you try to bring people together, blacks and whites, they’re not used to working together. So it either becomes an all white thing, or an all black thing. In one county, people north of the river wouldn’t work with people south of the river -- an inheritance from before the Civil War! It’s incredible. In some places, it’s seen as another handout. They assign a lot of blame. But it’s been interesting, going around the state and meeting people who view things in different ways.

But there have been those who view things in similar ways, and in those counties we’ve been very successful. We started this program thinking that if each county starts a scholarship fund like we have, and they have leadership that is taking responsibility for it and ownership of it, then that’s what we should be building -- their ownership, their empowerment, their acceptance of this project as their own. So we offer matching grants to them, and they have to qualify by raising their part. When they do that, they get a lot of people involved in the scholarship program. Maybe some of these will be self-sustaining someday. We’d like to be just a support system.

There is a lot of interest in welfare reform among all these groups. But you have to understand that not all these groups sprang out of nothing. It might be part of an organization that does a lot of other things at the same time. For those people who work within the system -- the clients -- they are being encouraged and forced into low paying jobs -- they don’t have the education -- that’s what they qualify for. Whether they can move up within those employment situations, I don’t know. A lot of people have been scared off welfare entirely. The rules keep changing, discouragements are there rather than encouragement, like to go to school -- and for our students, many of them think, why do I need welfare -- they’re telling me to get off welfare -- I’ll just go get a job, I won’t have to bother with all their regulations. And for those who have been in school, dependent on welfare to get them through school, if they give up school, and go into these jobs, they may be in that situation all their lives.

I got involved in this TEA coalition, the welfare reform local constituencies the state is saying, come up with new ideas and there’ll still be money - Transitional Employment Assistance -- a new acronym for AFDC, with the emphasis on work. I participated in an effort to write, design a new program, which they’re calling the diploma project, asking for state funding, as opposed to federal and state funding, so that the person who qualifies for TEA won’t have to go to work. She can stay in school, get all her benefits -- monthly stipend, food stamps, medicaid, child care assistance, etc. -- as long as she is career focused, making progress in her education, maintaining a certain grade point average -- and she won’t have to go do those 25 hours of work. According to welfare regulations now, there’s a rule that you have to work at least 25 hours a week to keep this stipend - federal -- and Washington County adds another 5 hours a week -- all built in to get rid of people on the dole. And women with kids is the largest single group of poor people in this country.

I don’t know if there is anything anyone can do about the trend in society where families are not staying together -- for a variety of reasons. I cannot personally understand -- because of how I grew up in a very close knit family with a father who was very responsible, and I feel like I have been a responsible parent/father myself, and with a very deep love and affection for my children. And when I hear about men who just abandon their families, they don’t visit their children, they don’t do anything financially, emotionally, to care for the children that they have played a role in bringing to life, it’s just beyond me. I don’t understand how they could do that. I think if you grew up without the love of a parent or enough love or attention, as a male, and you’re not made to feel that people love you and you can love back, then it would be a lot easier when you become a parent to completely disregard your children and your wife. Otherwise, you would feel that emotion, that responsibility, toward the people that are closest to you.

We’ve gotten a lot of inquiries over the years, dozens of people, who have said ‘gee, I’ve heard about your program, how can I get something started in Kansas, Missouri, California, wherever -- but I’ve never heard one word from those people after we’ve told them how we got started and what it takes to open a program like this. I think just the intensity of fund raising and organizing and committee work and everything it takes to do this successfully puts people off. It’s like, where’s the big grant? I would think that people in other states would be able to do this kind of thing, if they just gave it a little thought. If there is something like this somewhere else, I never heard about it.

Every so often we’ll get some kind of communication from Hillary Clinton’s office. She was our founding board president in our state program when she was in Little Rock, until ‘92. She was very helpful. Every so often, she’ll send us a note and say would you please send info to so and so, or what do you think about doing something on a national level. We haven’t even got all the counties in Arkansas to do this thing. Out of 75 counties, we’ve only got 48. It’s too grandiose to think of going off to who knows where to tell other people to do it when we haven’t completed the job here. And it comes down to time. Time is a very precious commodity, and the more you’re off doing something with people out of state, traveling, on the phone, writing letters, or whatever, the less you’re doing in your own area.

I see programs like Habitat for Humanity springing up, and I have lots of respect for people in that program, and things like it. I think of the old barn raising concept when I think of the houses they build, or scholarships being given, because everybody has a role in it. Then, after someone gets educated, or you’ve helped someone build a house, you can see the results, and feel a sense -- I participated. I get a lot of reward for doing this sort of thing. I think we have accomplished something here.

Every time I get something like this graduation announcement, I think all right, she did it. she got there. And every time I’m out somewhere and run into someone we’ve helped who is working in a hospital or a bank or teaching, -- we have a professor at the university, by the way -- one of our scholarship recipients in the mid-80s -- 9th grade dropout, GED -- went and got her doctorate in sociology and is teaching at the university. You meet people like this and see them in their environment, and think -- it’s worth it. It works.

I think that the social movements that occurred in the ‘50s and ‘60s -- civil rights movements, the war – had a lot to do with the social consciousness that the ‘60s generation seems to hold. But I also think a lot of us who grew up in prosperity realized that there’s more to life than just making money and accumulating possessions and living in the suburbs and driving big cars and spending the weekend at the country club. I think we saw our parents as extremely hardworking but upwardly mobile people who accumulated things in order to assure themselves that they were ok -- and we didn’t need to do that because it was all before us. In a sense, it’s an intellectual rejection of materialism. We had it. And therefore we had the luxury of rejecting it. If you don’t have it, you want it all that much more. But if you’ve been educated in a liberal arts way and you’ve had the advantages of parents working very hard to join the middle class, giving you what you needed, then you can look at your own life and say, well, what can I do to make this life meaningful? If you’re lucky enough to marry somebody, to live with someone who shares those values, you can do it together -- make a life for yourselves together that provides the basic needs but also allows you to give it back. And if there are people at the lower end of the economic ladder who need people like us who have things to offer, then you’ve got opportunity to be of service.

The wealth of my upbringing had translated into a good education, a brain, an ethic, to be able to do this. We live in such an affluent, resource-filled society, that you can find a niche for yourself somewhere -- it’s not like India, where there’s a tiny, extremely affluent group, and a huge underclass. If you wake up in the morning and you’re happy, happy to see the sun rise, happy to see your wife or husband lying next to you, happy to be doing what the day promises for you, then I guess you’re in a good place, you’ve done what you’re supposed to do. I feel extremely fortunate to have found a place like Fayetteville where so many wonderful people of such a diverse nature -- people from everywhere else seem to have collected here. I’ve heard someone describe it as a national chakra, a national energy center.

#37

2008-03-31T07:39:00.000-07:00

R. stopped working long enough to sit in his self-built house, bright morning sun warming us in his solar room, on property approached from the county road by driving alongside bluffs and creeks. Born 1949 Illinois.

I was a late bloomer. I didn’t figure it out until, well, until I started smoking pot. Then I figured it out. What everybody else had figured out. I was in college in Kansas City. It was an all-male Catholic college, pretty conservative. I went there without a clue. Very nice, very expensive education. But UMKC was across the street, Volker Park, Kansas City. So – I was smoking pot. All of a sudden I realized why people were protesting what was wrong with the war. That was pretty scary. I was afraid of being drafted and that was why I stayed in college. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I ended up with a degree in accounting. But it was total awareness of everything – why am I going down this road. I started questioning myself and figuring out things from how I was raised with 16 years of Catholic education.

I can remember when I was a freshman, these seniors who were friends of mine were getting their draft notice before they got their diplomas. Scared the shit out of me. I knew I was going to face the same thing when I graduated, so it was like, go to Canada or go to jail. Or go to war. Right before I became aware and started figuring things out, I joined the reserves to avoid the draft. I barely got through basic training, and we were really starting to smoke pot then, getting high, going to lots of concerts, the whole hippie scene, hanging out. I stopped watching TV. I’ve never owned a TV. It was music that I always focused on. There are a lot of messages there, in the music and the lyrics. I remember going to see Moody Blues and I told everybody I was going to see God. I said, it’s as close to God as you can possibly get. The messages were strong, real clear – it was an incredible time. And the ‘70s were great. It’s been great ever since. It’s still great!

We got into another way to eat, another way to live, started raising our own food, tried to use less energy, tried to live in peaceful co-existence. After college we – another man and I – lived in a racially mixed neighborhood, and I was working with kids. I was stuck in the reserves. I got a job working at the probate court in Kansas City. I also worked a second job waiting tables. I waited tables 7-8 years. There was better money in waiting tables than there was working with a degree in accounting, for me. I lived in this house five or six years, working with a youth group, troubled kids, mostly black. It was the YMCA. I had a real keen interest in working with kids, trying to give them a break. These kids never really had a chance.

During college, I worked at Kroger’s grocery store for six years. I was head of a department and part of the ethic that evolved for me was about the godawful waste that happened in grocery stores. Kroger’s had a policy that if there was one broken egg, you threw the other eleven away. If you had some ice cream melt, all the packages that were sticky got thrown away. If you had some moldy cheese, throw it away. If there was a broken carton on a Mrs. Smith’s cherry pie, throw it away. If a bag of frozen peas ripped, you threw it away. Crackers, bread, milk – things were dated. And we couldn’t just put it out on the back dock. We had to open it and pour it down the drain. That went against my grain.

I was trying to figure the other day how I got into what I’m doing and how I got to hate waste so much. I remember my mom sitting me on the steps and telling me I wasn’t getting to leave until I finished my stewed tomatoes. I had to eat everything on my plate. Maybe learning not to waste was part of my growing up. But I always saved little things here and there. I remember working at the grocery store. I would take that food and I wouldn’t dump it. I’d put it on the back dock and slip back there after work with my car and take it to these neighborhood families that I thought were in need, you know, five, six kids, poor section of town, and I distributed all this food. Kroger’s fired me for it. And it wasn’t ten years later that Dennis Weaver got some award for putting together a program that took food from stores in California and distributed it to the poor people. Great idea. But you’ve got to be famous to do it, or I was ten years ahead of it. What a shame, seeing all this food getting thrown out.

That evolved into a lifestyle when I moved to Arkansas, as far as not wasting energy. I got obsessed with not wasting energy. I felt like if I could burn wood and save energy for that little old lady in New York City who couldn’t afford it, maybe there would be electricity for her. If everybody burned wood, there would be more electricity for everyone. I mean, at that time, we didn’t think about air pollution. Wood was available, free, it was a renewable resource.

When I was sitting in that office working for the probate court, I could see I-70. There were all these people hanging their thumb out down there. They were all hitchhiking and traveling in those days, and I was having to sit in the office. It ate a hole in my soul. I had such wanderlust. So N and I were pretty tight, we had been together for nearly three years. We bought a house together, saved our money, she worked extra hours as a nurse, and I worked two jobs. We saved up $3500, put all our stuff in storage in the attic and had friends take care of the house, and we took off. We took a VW camper, a dog and a cat and a canoe, all our camping equipment, snorkeling equipment, took off for a year. We camped for a year – stayed in the east, went as far as Newfoundland and as far south as Yucatan and never once paid for camping. We ate out once a month and got by real cheap. At four o’clock every day, we looked for a secondary road that took us near a stream or a lake and that’s where we spent the night. We cooked on a campfire. It was great traveling.

And while we were doing this, we were trying to figure out where we wanted to live. I figured if the two of us could live in this VW for a year, we could survive a marriage. I was strong about that. I did not want to go through a divorce. So I went to those extremes to make sure we knew what we were doing before we got married. Her folks’ place got hit by a tornado, and that ended our travels. We helped them fix their place, then went back to Kansas City and stayed with friends, tried to get a group of us, maybe eight of us, to move to the Ozarks. We wanted to be within four hours of her family, eight hours of my family, within an hour’s drive from a hospital because she’s a nurse. Within an hour’s drive of a university. You start putting these things together – and on a school bus route, we had thought about having a family and weren’t going to home school – so all those things. We were looking for like-minded folks too.

So we took off and started looking and found Northwest Arkansas, found the university, the hospital, and we found folks in Madison County. We found a place to rent, went back and got married, took the Carribean cruise on a 42-foot sailboat, then moved to Arkansas.

We wanted to live in the country because instead of gardening in a little plot in the back yard and raising kids in a little fenced in yard, I thought, well, let’s have a big place where we can raise more food and let the kids run as far as they want to run, and not have to be held in by fences and using to be worried about their safety. We wanted a place that was free and open and safe, safe for our kids. We wanted clean air and clean water.

I wanted to be with a like-minded community. I sought out the community, the people, the folks that were living here. That was in ‘77. People had started moving in here. I mean, there was one couple that had moved here from Haight-Ashbury and they were moving out when we were moving in. They had been here seven or eight years. I thought, OK, is that where I’m headed? No, I had a stronger commitment. Also, I’d always hunted and fished all my life because my family did, my father. So I had a real sense of rural woods-type living. We spent our summers in the woods. And had a garden, and N’s family gardened a lot. But a lot of city folks didn’t have a clue how to make it back here in the woods.

We were reading a lot of stuff about organic gardening, Mother Earth News, all those publications, East West Journal, Whole Earth Catalog. Now we still produce most of our own food, although this was a real bad year. We usually have two years’ worth of canned goods stored up, and this year, thank god we do, because we don’t have the potatoes we usually do. We butcher two hogs every year, a couple of goats. Starting last year we started butchering a beef. We’ve got three teenaged girls now and I trade my folks beef and pork for a cooler full of crappie fillets. My dad still fishes. And goose and duck and venison. They turn us on to a lot of game which is pretty clean food, generally speaking. So that’s good. We milk every morning – cows. We used to milk goats. We raised cows for fifteen years. We’ve got three milk cows, about seven head in a little beef cow/calf operation we have with our neighbors.

We have 90 acres – we’re in the middle. We have eight springs. No ponds, no clay dirt. We don’t need to store water, we have so much flowing water. The overflow from the springs runs to the cattle. One of our springs drops 70 feet in elevation, so we’ve got 35 pounds of pressure. I can irrigate overhead 24 hours a day, double and triple crop. No problems with crops. Some extension service film 30-40 years ago joked about a field of strawberries and somebody asking, what is that out there, and they said, rocks, and they said, you’re growing strawberries in rocks? Yeah. People don’t realize you can grow things in rocks. We’ve got a bottom here and it’s real silty soil. We can go in six hours after a three inch rain and till it.

I used to raise calves on goats and I used to milk goats. We still have goats – they’re hard on snakes. They free roam and keep brush down all around. Pretty much six feet up as far as you can see it’s clean and I like that. They really keep it clean. And I like goats. We’ve got our own eggs, our own milk, we have cream and make ice cream. We work really hard to stay away from processed foods. It’s been a focal point for our family and for N. We’ve always joked that we make more work than money at our farm. But I really firmly believe in teaching kids a good work ethic, and that’s what we have here. Every morning they’re up doing their lunches and their breakfast and every night they’re doing chores and they don’t even think about it. It’s just part of life. When they get out in the work force, not only will they have an education, but they’ll work. It won’t be something they disdain or hate because they’ve never had to do it because they were spoiled. It’s real work, real rewarding, it’s food. What a great way to raise kids.

We got some good advice when we moved here. People said don’t just buy something. There were folks who had lived here for a few years and knew the mistakes people make when they buy too far out. So we rented for $40 a month. We tried to live without electricity at first, because we didn’t know if we would buy something with electricity. We ran with 7 or 8 kerosene lamps – we did that for four years while we searched for a spot. We wanted a southern exposure, we wanted to overlook our garden, we wanted live water, gravity flow – and we’re just 20 minutes from town. We paid dearly for it – $700 an acre. Most land out here was $250 an acre. But he was selling the water. He knew what he had and I knew too, because after looking for four years, we knew there wasn’t anything available with live water on small acreage. This was a special place.

I prepared a little bit, after we got back from traveling, and I had worked in carpentry about a year in Kansas City after I got out of the probate court. And those four years I worked in carpentry. That was my goal, to be a carpenter and so I could learn how to build a house. That trade was a means to an end, not something I thought I’d stay with for the rest of my life. It sure fit in with what I wanted to do – working with wood, working with your hands, working outdoors, all those reasons were good healthy reasons to get a job in carpentry. So after four years of building homes, I pretty well knew how to build and design homes. There were solar books out there by that time. Lots of information, tried and true. But look – now I have an air conditioner.

The job that I have become involved with is an extension of this waste ethic that goes back to the Kroger’s where I hated how they wasted food so bad. Yesterday [at lunch with some professional associates] I looked around. I don’t eat out much, and I looked at what was left. You know, I feed two hogs. And there were big old pieces of shish-kabob beef. I asked for a container to put food in, a big piece of aluminum foil. We brought it home. There was a pile of food that high, just from eight people that are all in waste reduction, source reduction, recycling and integrated waste management. I guess it would be too weird to share a plate. So there we all were, all the waste reduction people sitting down for lunch, and all kinds of food waste.

That’s why I never made any money being a carpenter. I was obsessed with trying to use the wood in its best usage and not wasting anything. Don’t just grab any board. Quite often you can have a two-foot piece of scrap of less – you should never have more than two feet. But if you use it property you can cut that down to six inches. That’s just how my brain thinks. I’m constantly thinking about how I can reduce the amount I’m wasting, no matter what I’m doing.

We’ve received a lot of awards for the recycling center we’ve set up for this county. It’s nine and a half years now. I thought after ten years, if it’s not getting better, then are you just going to maintain it? But the long term – this is at least a generational thing. You’re just constantly going back and saying the same things over and over and over to new people, why you should do this, why we can take this but not that. My waste ethic is what I’m continually trying to teach people, one on one. I firmly believe in that one on one. And that’s what we have at the drop-off center. We see our customers every time they come in, there’s someone there to greet them. We ask them how they’re doing, if they need any help, “oh, I’m sorry, no we can’t take that, no caps have to be removed”. A gentle reminder, we try not to nag. Constantly teaching them to do a little better. And it’s difficult because it’s not a typical facility. There are so many things to remember. And you can’t let it bother you that these folks are not getting it right away. It’s a pretty small part of their world. You have to know that part of what you’re going to do is teach.

We’re still making incredible progress. We’ve got two VISTA volunteers starting Monday and grant money has continued to help us improve. Now our re-use sales program is around $8000-9000 per year, just selling stuff that other people want to get rid of: clothes, furniture, appliances, everything. And we’re going to get a household hazardous waste trailer so we can take HHW everyday. The paint, the thinners, bad gasoline, herbicides, pesticides, stuff we really want to get out of the community, along with household batteries and fluorescent bulbs. I don’t know of anybody else that has a program this intensive, at least in this state. I haven’t been to a national conference in four or five years, but I don’t see anybody doing this much.

Granted, it’s small. Volumes are low, and that’s what makes it manageable. We buy all the non-ferrous metals – copper, brass, stainless steel, heater cores, radiators, aluminum cans. That’s a whole other operation. We take tires, oil – plus we take all the trash. We take four different types of trash. We take wood waste, Class 4 demolition and construction debris, we take dimensional lumber, no plywood, particle board – and we run that through a grinder and a value-added process and it turns into a marketable product we sell by the scoopload for mulch. We’re still learning how to manage trash without a landfill.

We’re still struggling with markets, so I’m on the board with Ozark Recycling Enterprise. Right now we’re having trouble moving corrugated cardboard. The cooperative can’t move it because they can’t get any guarantees from the mills. It’s a mess right now. All the metal prices are down, so our business is off there. If it wasn’t for our re-use sales carrying a great load, we’d have a hard sell to our elected officials. The bottom line? Diversity, educate – it’s not just an environmental thing. It has to be an economic thing in order for it to be proven to the powers that be.

We want to put a video together that will go to the state coordinator who teaches classes for those who want to be certified to run transfer stations, where they pooh-pooh recycling because they say it doesn’t work. And the state coordinator is saying, but our county has the best program, they continue to survive, they’re successful. So we need to have that as a model, transfer that information, to get one going in every county.

If you want to plug into what we’re doing, then you can take it to whatever level you want. Use the facility. Don’t dump it on the back forty. That’s a lot of the ethic, just getting people to take care of the trash properly, much less recycle. So there are so many issues. But it comes down to air and water, water quality. I drink out of the ground. I haul that spring water wherever I go……it’s the cleanest water can get……..a natural order to things…….a natural cleansing.

This latest fifth grade class we toured through the center, I took it to the next level and got them close to the planet. After the tour of the recycling center, I ask if they have any more questions. And then I say, “Before you go, I’ve got a question for you. What is the most beautiful thing in the world?” And they go, “My girlfriend ... This place ... Uh, the stars, the mountains.” And I say, “Oh the stars are pretty and they mountains beautiful and the rivers are so pretty, but you know, I saw a picture one time and you know what I think? The most beautiful thing is the planet itself. Have you ever seen that?” I bring out a posterboard picture of the planet seen from the moon. “Isn’t it beautiful? It’s gorgeous. Did you know this is the only planet in our solar system that sustains life as we know it? Did you know when you’re sixty years old there’s going to be twice as many people on the planet as there is today, 16 billion people? We need to figure out better how to take care of this planet. We’ve got to have somebody to take the ball here, because we’re getting older and somebody’s got to do it and we’re not doing a very good job right now. We’re getting a start, but we’ve got to carry it further. I want to leave you with that, I want you to take that home and think about how you can make the planet a better place to live.”

So that’s really pushing the envelope, when I give them that rap. Some of the fifth grade teachers, new this year, are going – “oooh” and sucking air. They don’t want to hear it. It’s not their ethic, not the way they were raised. It’s too foreign, pushing the environmental envelope too far. So how far can you push it before they yank you back and say ‘we don’t like what you’re doing’ and try to get me out? I’m continually pushing that envelope as far as I can and still keep my job working for county government in a good ol’ boy county. I mean, can they pay me to be an environmental activist? Is that what the people in our county want? Is that what they elected their officials to do, to hire people who teach people how to take care of the planet? Yeah, that’s pushing it. I mean, I’m supposed to be out there taking care of the garbage, by golly. I mean, we’ve got to do this recycling because it’s required, and now he’s up there teaching the kids all this crap. You can just hear it.

In the middle of that, I have three teenage daughters and a wife who are plugged into the mainstream of America and they want to live the way they want to live, so I have to balance myself and my philosophy with that of my family’s. So here you see me building a house that’s bigger than most people have and a garage that’s bigger than most people need. Maybe 1800 square feet, 2200 with the garage. Excessive. Producing the food is getting harder all the time. Starting to feel some aches and pains.

I’m doing what I’m doing because of water. I moved to this area because I wanted to drink good clean water. I believed years ago that there would be a limit as to what water could absorb, as far as chemicals go. I mean, how many times can you go through the hydrological cycle and the water be truly cleansed of all contaminants? How many places in the world can you still drink good clean water out of the ground? That’s what I’m fighting for in northwest Arkansas. I mean, you can drink water out of Beaver Lake. Processing takes out the biological factors. But what about the chemicals? Are they taking all of them out? Give me a break. They don’t even know what’s in it.

#60

2008-02-17T11:25:00.001-08:00

Subject met with me at her home in a rural woodland. Born 1948 Arkansas.

It was the ‘70s before I really connected with what the ‘60s were about. I had a strict religious upbringing in a family that had come up from dirt farms of the Ozark Depression – we didn’t have a television til I was 16. My big focus was getting away from home, which I managed to do at 19, when I became engaged and followed my fiance to California. My folks told me I couldn’t go out there because we weren’t married. I’ll never forget the incredible sensation of the plane lifting off the runway at the Fayetteville airport. The ground was dropping away and I was free to live life on my own terms.

I ended up working in a federal prison out there which was one of the best paying but most depressing jobs available. It was a correctional facility, so the inmates were younger or less hardened than the ones they sent to penitentiaries. I sat in an office and typed all day, transcribing caseworker dictation about an inmate’s background, crime, education, psychology. It was an amazing education about a whole world I had never known – mostly lower class urban kids who had a lot of illiteracy, addiction, and no real idea of a career except crime. There were a few middle class kids caught in the early days of the drug war for bringing kilos of marijuana across the border, and lots of guys in for refusing to be inducted. I was shocked by many things there, like the attitudes of everyone who worked there as a career person – they were hardened about the inmates and thought they were all scum and treated them accordingly. It seemed to me that attitude pretty much precluded any chance for rehabilitation. There were “girls” who were allowed to wear makeup and shave their legs and function as female, which the guards said kept pressure off the new ones who came in. But new admissions were mostly raped anyway, and “turned out” to be “owned” by one gang or another. The gangs were organized around skin color. Before this I had no idea about homosexuality, forced or otherwise, or about gangs. I had no knowledge about the urban underclass, or the desperate conditions of reservation life for Native Americans. Within months I had a lot of ideas about how much it all needed to change, and finally I took a lower paying job on the nearby Air Force base, typing reports for an engineering group who tracked downrange telemetry on missile shots.

Right after Bobby Kennedy was shot, my fiancé and I drove to Las Vegas and got married. Our lives revolved around our work, going to the officer’s club after work, drinking and going to parties. I tried to participate in the wives’ groups to exchange recipes and gossip, but it bored me terribly which I thought meant something was wrong with me. We were also going to night classes at the local community college, and going to art shows, and visiting scenic spots and spending lots of time on the beach. We bought a sports car and went to Vegas as often as we could manage, and I felt like we were successful. Although we watched TV and knew about the protests and other stuff, we were very distant from it. We didn’t see anything in the protests that made us feel connected to it, except the general idea that the Vietnam war was wrong. But as more of the officers, especially the pilots, came back from southeast Asia, there was more exposure to a different point of view. And exposure to marijuana. One time we decided we wanted to try it, and one of the engineers at my work said he would bring us some. He came by our house later with a shoe box, and hurried away. Inside was one joint, which we smoked and didn’t feel anything.

The last year of his service in the Air Force they sent him overseas and I came back to Fayetteville to finish my degree. Things at the University had changed tremendously in the three intervening years. It was like a different world. Everyone wore patched jeans and long hair and there were war protesters with their signs lined up at noon every day on the sidewalk across Maple Street from the Union. I really didn’t fit in, but felt OK about it because I was married and older and more self confident. Slowly I met people and began to question my lifestyle. At one point, a person introduced me to marijuana and this time I definitely felt something. It was an amazing experience. Within the next few months, I had tried opium, hash, LSD, and mescaline. Each new drug brought a new set of experiences, mostly a continuing expansion of my thought and understanding. At that time, the drug experience was approached reverently, at least within my circles – I had an experienced guide for my first LSD trip, and there was always the intent to explore spiritual questions or to expand understanding. We kept our experiences ‘pure’ – especially for tripping – no alcohol or other drugs to adulterate the trip, except maybe near the end to help come down.

In the summer of 1972, which I spent with L. in the Philippines, there was an occasion when I had a long conversation with three young local men who explained their point of view about the “imperialist” Americans. They were part of a communist underground trying to get Marcos out of power. I had never considered the “ugly American” viewpoint before, but they explained how the U. S. wasn’t in foreign countries to help the people there – it was about getting what we wanted, exploiting natural resources or using cheap labor for corporate profits, and extending our military power base. This was just one more revelation.

I think the most important thing for me in shifting to a new awareness was sex. Sexual freedom helped get rid of the fundamentalist brainwashing I’d heard all my life where women were vessels of sin and forever subordinated to male domination. Fortunately for me, it was part of the times to participate in “free love.” It helped me gain confidence in myself as a human and as a woman.

I did a few political things – went to some meetings and tutored local black kids; signed petitions and distributed literature about saving the Buffalo River; went door to door for the McGovern campaign. But I felt like most of the ‘60s had gone by when I wasn’t looking. By now, most of the generation was looking for a way out. We joined in the exodus from the city when we bought a gas station/grocery store/apartment in a nearby small town about 10 miles from Fayetteville. Unfortunately, the oil embargo of ‘73 didn’t help our situation and our marriage ended that year.

I met my second husband at the station, and then sold the place in ‘74 and moved into a cabin on land his parents owned in that area. A few months later we got married and ended up on a few acres where we built a small house and started our family. We heated with a wood stove, and carried in drinking water while pumping the spring-fed pond for the first year. We jumped into the whole back-to-the-land farm thing – goats which I milked, hogs, chickens, dogs, cats, a horse, even a calf or two at one point. We put in huge organic gardens and I learned how to can, freeze, dry, and otherwise preserve food. We stored salt, bullets, batteries, and the other supplies we knew we would need when society crumbled, based on what we learned from reading the Foxfire books, Mother Earth News, the Whole Earth Catalog, and from talking with all the other people around here who were doing the same thing. We didn’t know if the ‘end’ would be nuclear, or some kind of political collapse, or what. We just wanted to be sure that our family could be part of the new tribe that sprang up to build a new, better world.

I found it calming to live my life based on what Mother Nature demanded. But with three children by the early 80s, we had to find ways to make money and so we spent more time in town. Some of the animals had to go, and the garden shrank. The more I was in town, the more I paid attention to political issues. In the1980s, I became involved in the local NOW chapter in working on abortion rights. We held demonstrations and vigils and other activities over the 4-5 year period I was on the executive committee. Also I organized a parent-teacher group at the school, and we raised money for playground equipment and other worthy goals. Then in the late ‘80s I became intensely involved in environmental work. In the meantime I had built a successful self-employed career and the farming activities continued to shrink. I felt bad about this, because I felt like I was betraying what I really believed in. But on the other hand I wanted my kids to have piano lessons and dance class and karate. We transferred our kids into Fayetteville schools trying to get them a better education than the small rural school offered, and I was the mom-taxi driving them in every morning and doing the after-school rounds. I wanted my kids to have full exposure to what society had to offer while at the same time to know how to grow their own food and survive on the land. I felt then, and still feel, that they will see a time in their lifetimes when they will need to know those things. It may have been difficult for these kids to grow up in an “alternative”home, at least in some regards, but I think that what they learned will be important, especially knowing how to keep up the establishment front while simultaneously carrying on subversion if necessary.

The 60s thing that has become most upsetting to me is that the corporate/establishment propaganda machine has mostly succeeded in twisting the accomplishments of the 60s generation into some kind of dirty word. Every where I turn there seems to be some kind of perverse co-opting of the generation’s identifying characteristics. Like the music – Beatles music, which I consider holy, being used for TV ads to sell something. Or images of people reveling in pristine nature displayed in ads to sell big gas guzzling autos. Never does anyone give any credit to the ‘60s visionaries who pushed for organic food and natural medicine and improved education and rights for minorities and women, and environmentalism. These things have become part of the culture, but everyone acts like they just sprang fully formed from the head of some corporate Zeus. In the meantime, while everyone is busy benefitting from what the ‘60s generation has wrought, the actual members of the generation are defiled in every possible way – arrested for using the drugs that enlightened us, rejected in the workplace because of long hair or other personal features that have been proud symbols of the movement, ignored, disenfranchised, insulted – even the word “hippie” has become synonymous with “loser,” or “dirty,” or some other denigration. Oddly, I never considered myself a hippie. To me, a hippie was someone much freer than I ever was, someone who knew what was going on during the 60s and was part of it then. So I never felt authentic, but more like a copycat who came along later and said, yeah, me too.

I’m sad that often we are so terrified of ostracization that we fail to stand up for what we believe in. Most of us managed to fit in by disguising our appearances and hiding our beliefs. I can take small comfort in the fact that if “they” didn’t fear us so much, they wouldn’t go to so much trouble to vilify what we stand for. That means we have power, but then, it is power only if we use it. I think as we get older and can free ourselves from the demands of wage earning and child rearing, we will gain greater confidence and assertiveness about our power. Hopefully that will translate into a greater fulfillment of the vision we can bring to the world. I hope it for myself as much as for everyone else of my generation.

#26

2008-01-01T11:20:00.000-08:00

Subject E sat on the floor of his living room, leaving me to the couch in a tiny house not much changed since its original construction in the late 1800s. He had to disconnect his radio in order to plug in my tape recorder, observing that there were only two outlets in the entire house. It might have been more convenient to sit at the kitchen table, but the living room held the only fan.

I started college in Louisiana, doing pre-med studies and working to support myself. I had a partial scholarship and student loan money, but I was trying to work a lot so I wouldn’t have to borrow so much. I was so wrapped up in that that I really wasn’t paying much attention to what was going on. I heard about student protests, but it just went right by me. Then one evening I walked through my parents’ living room, and they had the TV on, and there was this boot that was stepping down on the moon, and I said, what’s going on -- and they said, well, we just landed on the moon, and I said, great -- and then kept on going. I was that removed. My life was so intense it kept me away from everything else.

I missed most of what was happening in the world. Even Vietnam didn’t much come into my consciousness until after four years, my 2-S was done, and suddenly I got a letter, saying it’s time for you to report for your physical, and it was like, oh, well, what’s this Vietnam thing? That’s when I began to connect and start paying attention to what was taking place. I had friends who had done some protests against the war, but I was so aloof from that it hadn’t sunk in.

I was 20 before I started smoking pot, which is good, because I had pretty much shaped myself as an adult by then. It was quite a relief for me, because I think I was heading for a nervous breakdown. I had been neglecting myself, not exercising, not eating well -- so the pot lightened me up. I began to shift my attitude, began to not be so serious about it all. I had been so straight. I had found myself not being able to sleep, sitting up in city parks all night long, talking to the stars -- I was doing too much, hadn’t had a date in two years. Very narrow in focus. So smoking pot relaxed all that and began to open doors of consciousness. I began to listen to music more.

Then I went to Houston and found a job, doing simple work, making some money, checking out life. I started doing more drugs -- I was working at a hospital and had access to a lot of drugs, pharmaceuticals -- so for six months I played with everything. The drug salesman showed up every Friday with suitcases and would go into the drug room and restock the shelves. After he left, we would go in there immediately, going where’s the good stuff, really getting ready for the weekend. We’d take all the good drugs home, and so I did that for about six months and then began to realize that pharmaceuticals were poison. I was getting so toxic -- side effects – and so I did a shift and decided I would only do drugs that came straight from nature -- straight from plants, and I wouldn’t do anything else. Nothing processed much at all. And at the same time, I began doing yoga, changing my diet, and tapping into a whole different reality that I hadn’t known existed.

The whole situation snowballed. I did mushrooms -- not a lot of acid, because it was processed -- same with cocaine or heroin -- altho if I’d been given a coca leaf, I would have chewed it. Mushrooms grew all around Houston, and they became an important thing for me. I used these drugs not so much recreationally as to alter consciousness. The mushrooms became very much that for me. Pot was just kind of neat -- you could do it every day, stay stoned a lot and have fun. But mushrooms became the way to do deep spiritual work. I read one particular book called the Psychedelic Experience, written by Ralph Metzger, Timothy Leary, and Richard Alpert, who later became Ram Dass, who wrote Be Here Now, The Only Dance There Is, and a couple of other grist for the mill -- I think he’s Richard Alpert again now. The book talked about using psychedelics as a spiritual transformative process, and their book was based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead because they had discovered that was the only text they’d ever found that adequately described what took place during the psychedelic experience. So using that as a guide I went into it with mushrooms, and got a little frightened by what happened. I had an out of body experience.

Part of what I was going for at the time was to understand death. I had been working in hospital emergency rooms, watching people die almost daily. I was sensing things going on at many levels, and I wanted to understand more what it was. This thing -- life -- it didn’t just end. It was like a transition thing. I would sometimes feel a person’s presence in a room long after they were pronounced dead. And I was often the one who was left to clean everything up, the person included. I had some interesting connections with the people sometimes, just in a sense, which might sound crazy to some people. I began to realize that there was something more going on here.

So I began reading, Elizabeth Kubla Ross and this guy named Moody, who wrote Life After Life, or something -- So anyway, doing mushrooms was to explore that. My out of body experience was like the whole deal, and I was like, whoa, I’ve overdosed. But I realize now I was given what I asked for. Things like that made me begin to pay attention.

Then there were the social influences of the 60s, that were still there in the early 70s, the music, etc. And the remnants of the war -- I was still trying to figure out how to not get drafted because they had gone to the lottery and my number was like 160 something, but then I got a call from the draft board saying the draft call had been cut, and they weren’t going to draft up to my number. It was like [looking up] thank you. It was like, hey this is a bunch of crap, this whole war, why are we fighting this war, why am I being asked to go and die? What’s going on? I had a lot of friends who had gone, and I began to listen to their stories, and began to sense there was something really amiss. That combined with all the yoga and all the consciousness altering stuff I was using caused a whole shift in my reality.

The big thing for me was what I saw in the medical profession. I had gone in with an attitude like, oh man this is what I want to do, that medicine was this great thing, because that’s what I grew up believing. Being a doctor -- that’s how you could really help people out, ease suffering -- I remember as a child feeling compassion when I saw somebody in pain, thinking I wanted to help, and I thought that being a doctor meant I could relieve suffering on the planet. So I went into the medical profession and saw just the opposite. I saw people suffer from their treatment. I saw people go through hell as a direct result of what we did to them. It was like it fractured something in me. When that broke, it was like, ok, all bets are off. This is a wide open game. Then it was, ok, now what do I do with my life?

To try to figure that out, I had to ask the question: what am I doing here? What’s my purpose? I had no idea, because what I thought was my purpose was shattered. So I had to begin looking in other places. I began reading lots of philosophy, exploring ideas, particularly ideas about what it means to be human. Of course it’s much more complex than what I’m saying. I began to become more aware of some of the ideas of the 60s, what people were saying. I began to connect, to think about the Beatles and how they transformed. I saw a great thing happening. I like to look at specifics, but I also like to step back and look at the big picture, to see how it looks, and I found that interesting things were there. And I was in it.

Hell, when I was in high school I lived close to Woodstock, and if I’d had any idea, I would have been there. But I missed all that. I wasn’t even aware of it. I got tickets to go see the Beatles in Shea Stadium, but I didn’t know what it was all about. I sat way up high and watched the kids try to storm the field and get hit by the police. To me it was nuts, watching girls screaming until they passed out. You couldn’t hear them singing. I didn’t have a clue what they were about at that time. But later, I listened to the records and started understanding.

I became familiar with a biologist from England named Rupert Sheldrake and his idea of morphogenic fields. It’s not exactly unlike the idea of the hundredth monkey, which I have heard from some people was not a true story -- but supposedly, some scientists trained some monkeys on this island to wash their sweet potatoes, and there were other islands where the same species of monkey lived -- and washing sweet potatoes was not an instinctive habit, but learned behavior -- but when they went to the other islands, they found the untrained monkeys washing their sweet potatoes.

So Sheldrake said that all species have a morphogenic field or an overlying energy to who they are, and that behavior patterns are part of that. An example of that now would be that young people know computers so well -- it’s like, the older generation started the computer thing, but all of a sudden, kids are being born with almost second sight into computers -- they just know it. He would say that’s because we placed computers into the morphogenic field.

I look back at the 60s as a shift in the morphogenic field, and I think it’s still going on today. The effects are accelerating in some ways, and it’s happened at an interesting time, when there’s all this electromagnetic stuff happening and a shift in weather patterns. All this neat stuff is going on. I think most of the physical phenomena we see is at its core electromagnetic, including weather. I think earth stuff, energy from the sun, spiritual stuff -- it’s all connected -- if you look at physics and go all the way down to the basic blocks of matter, you find that sub-atomic particles are there for a second and then they’re not, they’re light and then they’re particle, flickering between being tangible and being intangible, being pure energy. So if all matter is that way, then all matter is influenced by electromagnetic energy, which is just a way to categorize vibrations. So the whole idea that it’s all mind, it’s all illusion in a way is true, but I still can’t put my hand through that wall, although theoretically I ought to be able to. So to me, the morphogenic field idea, consciousness and spiritually are all connected, all the same thing. These understandings just continue to develop.

I got into gardening when I tried to consider what would be a good alternative to medicine. I wanted to find something that I would feel good doing. I ended up sitting in my back yard years ago, saying, ok universe, what is it I’m supposed to be doing here? But of course, I didn’t get an answer, so after while I started pulling weeds, messing around, and then lights, bells and whistles started going off, and I realized, this is my answer. But it was actually a year before I really understood. Then I connected -- the very best food you can eat is what you grow yourself, coming straight fresh from the earth, so full of life - and you have the added benefits of being out in fresh air and sunlight, working with the cycles of nature, and then there’s all the airy-fairy kind of vibrational stuff. So I decided that’s what I would do.

It was tough trying to make a living at that. I was married at the time, and my wife worked part time. We didn’t need much money because we lived very simply. But then she decided she wanted the whole thing, big car, big home, and her price to stay with me was for me to get a job and bring home $30,000 a year. I said, I don’t think I can do that -- I mean, I entertained it. I thought maybe the universe was telling me to get a job. But I couldn’t do it.

As I became more connected to the earth and experienced personal healing, more of the idea grew for me, this connection of all these things, and I don’t even begin to think I understand it -- the more I delve into it, the more I perceive. It’s becoming more fun in a way, more wide open. It’s exciting. I look around me and see that most people don’t get it, don’t see the connection between ourselves and the soil. They haven’t been taught. In this country we’ve become so removed from nature.

I started writing a newspaper column, Dirty Dan the Garden Doctor -- I wrote sporadically for a few years. It took a lot of time and energy -- I carefully worked the words, sometimes making them vague or broad in meaning. But now instead of that, I’m doing this TV show. It’s been going on for six years. We do a new show every other week. It’s been a great opportunity for me to take information that’s right out there in public and hang it all together in unusual ways, connect things that people don’t connect, and then present it. I excited and pleased to be doing that, because it’s effective and reaches a large audience. I feel like I’m helping shift things.

Social, politics, religion -- the main focus is with health still. Recently I had a piece -- the Republicans decided they wanted to stop all discussion by the EPA about global warming issues. They came up with a bill to suppress any discussion by the government about global warming issues. They’re afraid it’s going to lead to a back door endorsement of the Kyoto agreement, which of course industry doesn’t want because they don’t want to limit CO2 production. So the Republicans proposed a bill -- and I read that piece on the show after I read about six articles about how erratic the weather is, and how everything is going off, and it’s like, what planet are these guys on? Can they not see these major things taking place? They’re afraid of it even being discussed, because their pockets are all lined with money from the coal industry and others. I love presenting this kind of stuff.

One of the stories preceding that was the big temperature shift in California’s coastal waters, how its killing off the phytoplankton -- well, that’s like the beginning of the food chain. People ought to be alarmed, if they have any idea about biology. The seals are starving, which is of course partly from over fishing. So all of life on the West Coast is affected -- but then, here’s the Republicans -- let’s don’t even talk about it. Let’s sell more sport utility vehicles. Hey, folks -- none of us are victims. WE have to understand that we all have power, and our power is the power to choose. We’re all making choices which are affecting life on this planet. It’s not like anyone can say, oh my god it’s happening to me and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. We can choose to drive sport utility vehicles and get less than 20 miles to the gallon, but we need to realize that this is what we’re doing. Be aware. We’re saying one and one equals two.

I get lots of good feedback. I meet strangers almost weekly who come up and say they really enjoy the show. They enjoy getting the information. They say, hey, you guys are getting stuff I never hear about. But fifty percent of our stuff comes straight out of the local newspaper -- it’s just going right by folks.

And this is all an outgrowth of a process that goes back to the 60s, this whole morphogenic shift. What I’m trying to do with the show is work with that shift, and when I get feedback from strangers, then I know it’s working, even tho I have a quote from somebody that says if everyone agrees with you, watch out, you’re doing the wrong thing. But truly, not everyone agrees with me. There was one guy who stopped one day and said, I really like your show, but I almost never agree with anything you say. And I said, that’s great, because you’re not supposed to. You’re supposed to take the information and decide for yourself. We’re not trying to say this is the right way to think. We aren’t sure either, that’s why we talk about it. We’re no authority. Just a couple of bozos doing a show. It’s its own reward. I feel like I’m stirring the pot a little, helping the shift. We’re at the end of a millennium and the whole thing is about to change, the way it present itself.

This one author I’ve been reading says we’re coming out of the Piscean into the Aquarian, characterized by a change from rugged individualism to cooperation. We’re not going to survive if we don’t learn to cooperate with each other and with nature. The whole energy is going in that direction. Another characteristic of the Piscean is the parent-child relationship -- and that’s all our institutions, the government -- we know what’s best for you. That’s all going to shift. You can see it -- people want to take responsibility for their own care, working with each other. I see it in medicine, moving away from a tradition of treating the symptoms -- symptomatic treatments are becoming deadly -- drugs and surgery, which maim people and cause them suffering. I mean, properly prescribed and administered drugs have become the fourth leading cause of death. I mean, I worked there - we would give somebody a drug for some symptom, and they’d have a reaction, so we’d run in with another drug, which caused another reaction, and suddenly the person would crash and die -- and it’s like, what’s going on here. It was not a rare phenomenon. I saw over and over again that the drug salesmen would come to the physicians and say hey we have this new product, here it is, here’s a bunch of free samples, pass them out. The drug salesmen are educating the physicians about treatments. Thousands and thousands of drugs, the PDR is immense. The doctors depend on the drug salesmen to keep them caught up. And now we have commercials on TV educating the public, so the public will go and ask for drugs, whether or not it’s appropriate. The drug companies were rich enough to convince enough lawmakers to change things so they could do that.

It’s a great time to be alive and be in the thick of it. If we can keep our sanity.

I was trained in yoga years ago and certified as a yoga teacher. I never taught. My yoga practice now is mostly damage control. I do a lot of physical labor now, construction, painting, odd jobs -- I like that because it keeps variety in my work. I enjoy the challenges and the cleaning of energy, making things look nice again. It’s all healing, especially if you’re happy doing what you’re doing. It all comes from your heart.

I’m afraid that people are so asleep it’s going to take a major shakeup to wake them up. I don’t pray for that. I pray for it to be gentle. The shifting is coming now. The big quakes haven’t happened yet. I think the future is tied to our consciousness. Once people apply their vision, change will happen. We choose what we think about. I mean, if you want to think everything is going to hell, we might. Or if you begin to say you see a possibility, then that might create a change in the right direction. It’s not set in stone.

I’m real hopeful that there are enough people with enough common sense. I leave it up to the universe. I decided that a long time ago. I thought I had it figured out, and it became real clear to me that I didn’t. So it’s like, ok, I give up. In a way, it’s the whole idea of surrendering your will -- and in a way, that’s not what I’m doing. It’s more that I’m aligning my will to the will of the universe, which is more like my deeper will. It’s like we have this superficial will and a deeper will that’s not very conscious. It goes back -- the ideas have always been here. If you study philosophy and stuff, look at the yoga philosophy, or that of the Sufi -- it’s been thousands of years. It’s exactly the teachings of Christ. I was raised Southern Baptist, with the stories of Jesus and all that -- and I looked at that and I looked at the church, and it was like, wait, there’s something really off here.. You guys aren’t doing it! You’re talking about it, but you’re missing the point completely. You talk about Jesus and then you talk about hatred or express hatred -- What I saw in the music and ideas of the 60s are a more clear expression of those principles. So the concept preceeded the 60s. It’s always been there. The 60s are just when it began to bloom. It came thru in the Beatles music. The time was right.

It’s been said of our generation that we bought into consciousness raising and then we bought into money. Maybe that’s true to a certain degree, but I don’t think it’s entirely accurate. There’s still a big movement in this generation that’s got the consciousness.

#27

2007-11-13T05:13:00.000-08:00

Subject C and I sat in the shade of an old mimosa in his backyard. b. 1942 -- NYC

I grew up in the burst of post-war prosperity. My father was a junior high school music teacher and my mother was a pretty typical middle class housewife. I was marginally successful in school and with no goals of my own went to small Lutheran college in Pennsylvania. When I graduated I had no more idea of what I wanted to do with my life than I had when I was in high school. I’d say that “the sixties” didn’t begin for me until I was living and working in NY City and then really not until the Beatles invasion hit. It was the civil rights struggle that first grabbed my attention although at that time I knew nothing about protest and precious little about inequality in America (my boyhood hero was Jackie Robinson and his story was compelling but I remained ignorant of the pervasiveness of racism in America and ignorant of the Jim Crow south).

Public protest of any kind was a foreign idea to me. I knew nothing of labor’s history or the history of suffrage marches. It seems that “history” in school never made it to the 20th century. Of course there were no protests of any sort at my college. But after college the civil rights movement was getting cranked up, and that got my attention. In 1964, my new wife and I traveled to Morocco and, in a youth hostel in Tangiers, I had to defend the blazing ghettos of Detroit to a group of black Africans. I think civil rights was the beginning of my Sixties consciousness. I found myself cheering for the people who were burning down the ghettos, sharing their anger.

The last 5 years of the decade finally gave shape to my life. The civil rights struggle was on television and in the streets around me, the war in Vietnam compelled me seek a draft deferment by teaching school in the ghettos of NY, and all around me young people were acting up, growing their hair long, taking drugs, dropping out of the 1950s middle class.

You know, I’m a child of the 50s, and I got all that Eisenhower stuff -- diving under my desk for air raid drills, wearing dog tags -- WWII movies -- very much a part of my growing up -- cowboy movies, people acting from principle, regardless of the consequences. My aggressive nature and something else in me resonated with that notion of acting out of principle.

In 1966, I became a school-teacher in NYC - started off teaching special classes of emotionally disturbed grade-schoolers for two years, then 4th grade for three years, then again emotionally disturbed. But teaching in NY’s poor and colored neighborhoods was my way out of Vietnam. They said that with a bachelor’s degree and a minimum number of education credits, I could receive an emergency license to teach in those schools. I never understood why such a deferment was proper. It was tough work in tough neighborhoods but comparison with the experience of combat is pretty lame.

Being in those neighborhoods, dealing with those kids and getting a first hand look at poverty and social adversity heightened my appreciation of the civil rights movement. In 1968 there was a teachers’ strike in New York born of black-white conflict. The board granted the community in the Bedford-Styuvesant section of Brooklyn control of their schools. They immediately fired seventeen white teachers saying they were racist, were underqualified or underperforming. The union struck and I crossed the all-white picket lines together with one other white teacher and all the black and Puerto Rican teachers.
I was, up to then, a United Federation of Teachers union delegate for my school. The split in the teachers in my school by race was symptomatic, I believe, of the atmosphere of fear that drove white teachers to betray their principles.

When I was a student protests were unheard of and I found the 60’s campus protests kind of self indulgent, immature behavior. But in the 60s I drove to Washington DC to march in support of civil rights and later against the war. Me, a white man, talked to my 4th graders about black pride and about racism – as best I understood it at the time. I supported the Black Panthers and opposed the war.

Although the whole hippie phenomenon was happening all around me I stayed separated from it. It was too wild, too druggy, too irresponsible. I didn’t smoke marijuana until 1968. I was unprepared for the experience but ready to embrace the new perceptions I had from the drug. It put me on the path out of the mainstream.

F and I had gone to San Francisco for the summer of love. We had seen people our age – well, mostly younger than we were – living outside of the culture in which we’d grown up and outside the law as well. We did psychedelics for the first time - we stayed with my sister in San Francisco, were given some mescaline, and went to Yosemite to take it. As with my experience with pot this trip was seminal – again it changed my view of the world completely. Not like it made me crazy, or anything -- it gave me the knowledge that there are other ways of looking at things, that my sureness about reality was not very firmly grounded. It informed me that change was possible, that I didn’t have to do what I was “supposed to,” that I could change myself and that I could find other ways of living. This was the overall effect of drugs. I didn’t do psychedelics very many times in my life -- maybe six times. I smoked marijuana when I could get it, which wasn’t very often back then. But I think that drugs were responsible for, if not raising my consciousness, making it acceptable to think new thoughts, to admit to other realities. It made me open to reading about yogis, and reading Ram Dass and Carlos Casteneda, and rejecting my very rigid scientific background.

In 1970 F and I discovered Mother Earth News, and here were these descriptions of people living out in the country, growing food, taking care of themselves, and it was a world removed from my urban world. NY was increasingly becoming a place where I couldn’t live peacefully. I was a paranoid and aggressive person throughout the 60s -- I was angry and it was getting me in trouble and the city was becoming more dangerous. My hair was getting longer and hair covered more of my face. I didn’t know where I was going but the winds of change were pushing me.

I have a recollection of sitting in Brooklyn in ‘69 or ‘70, writing page after page, trying to conceptualize how people could live together, how you could restructure relationships among people as a commune, as a community. This was not based on any experience, it was not even based on reading about other communities. I was dreaming about what might be, but I don’t think I would have been dreaming if the 60s hadn’t happened; I would have continued being an unhappy straight guy. I was still working with a 50s’ head.

F and I went to a few meetings with neighborhood people -- by this time, Brooklyn -- of other ‘’hippies” -- people who were saying that life here in the city, in the mainstream, was crazy, that there was a better way –with Mother Earth News and United Farm rural land catalogs we started dreaming about leaving.

Our first attempt to leave got us as far as upstate NY – only a few hundred miles from the city. We were miserable there, without friends or compatriots. I taught school again and with my beard and long hair and uppity views about teachers’ rights I was pretty unpopular at work. Our first daughter was born.

Our attempt to escape from our NY City life was a failure. The next year we came back close by the city and rented a house in northern New Jersey. We were even more miserable there, both with our circumstances and with our personal relationship. I hustled a piece of a living as a cabinet maker and general carpenter. We came perilously close to breaking up and would have if we could have afforded two rents. We went on welfare. I worked as a stockboy in a department store and walked out after two weeks. We had committed to two years in the house we were renting and counted the days until we’d be free to leave north Jersey and find a new life.

Finally in 1973 we headed out once more. We stopped in southern Ohio and stayed with a friend on his farm, the first experience I’d ever had actually living in the country. We came to Arkansas because we had made some contacts with a guy in Pettigrew -- his letters to Mother Earth News brought quite a few people here. From our first drive through these mountains and the first hippies we met we knew we’d come to the right place.

Our first home here was a little shack up on Wharton Creek near Huntsville that we rented for $25 a month. Located in a deep valley on a horrible road this primitive old homestead was paradise to us. That first year we met M and his wife – they had moved here from California the year before. They had bought lots of land, and said why don’t you come build a place on our land. And we did. We moved to their farm, cleared a space in the trees and put all our youthful vigor into building a house, establishing gardens, and hustling a very small living doing carpentry and farm work.

F, who had a BFA and considerable experience as a calligrapher, started painting signs. We became ‘the’ county sign painters for 7 or 8 years. Even with that we earned barely $2500 a year. We got food stamps on and off, until we found the process too demeaning to continue. We had a second child in 1976 and a third one in ’79. By then we had started a crafts business using F’s calligraphy and combining it with pressed flower collage and making framed pictures which we sold at crafts shows. By the early 1980s it was providing a small, welfare-free income.

We derived great pleasure from our surroundings - sitting outside and looking at a bug on the ground, watching flowers bloom and trees change color and grow, interacting with wildlife and farm animals, growing our own food – and from the wonderful community of friends, all of them in-migrants like us.

We never had running water for the eleven and a half years we lived at M’s - well, we did have a line running from a muddy pond half of the year - in cold weather, the line would burst, because it was just half-inch black plastic on the top of the ground. For years, we hauled all our water from the creek behind the house, a hundred yards downhill, in buckets. We did and our children did. The summer [drought] of 1980 ruined the spring at the creek; it never recovered. The drought killed huge oak trees in our yard -- it was awful.

We didn’t have electricity for the first six years at M’s, just kerosene lamps. Bathing was in a wash tub in the middle of the cabin -- we would ladle water over each other. In warm weather, we had a shower of sorts - water coming from the pond to a hose hanging in a tree.

By the time we left in 1985, F was really dissatisfied. It had become oppressive to live as primitively as we were. Our oldest daughter was 13 and she was ready for something else. After a 3-year attempt to find a new life in Lawrence, KS we ended up back here in Arkansas at this house on the edge of town.

The whole hippie thing of the 60s was truly a rebellion, a cultural rebellion. For me it was a real act of defiance to refuse to wear a tie, to let my hair grow, to have a beard. You have to remember where I came from, culturally, and what expectations others had for me that I pitched overboard. I feel like I grabbed the 60s by the tail, and it kind of whipped me into the 70s and 80s. I really was too old to feel the rebellion from the innocent inside as all the young hippies but the spirit of it had a firm grip on me.

None of my college classmates that I’ve had any contact with followed the course I did. They all went on to become doctors, lawyers, ministers, college teachers, professionals of one sort or another. I never found anybody who freaked out, which is all I can call what I did, relative to my generation. But in no way do I regret my choices. I found my way to a freedom I didn’t have when the decade began. I found I could dream of another way of living, that I could act in ways that suited my feelings and philosophy and not be tied to what others thought I should or shouldn’t do or think or believe. I think I’ve become a more compassionate person and certainly more conscious of how people live together in the real world. And these are the basic values.

I have a job now, a business, and we can afford rent on this house. When we were doing craft shows we needed some kind of tent to keep us dry, and a fellow craft exhibitor and I designed and built one. When we took it to a show other exhibitors wanted to know where we bought it and so I started to make them – in the shade of an oak tree using hand tools - with the help of C sewed the tops on an industrial treadle machine in her tepee. Now we have drill presses and power band saws and C has electricity and commercial sewing equipment.

It is said that the ‘60s were about self indulgent youth, about sex and drugs and parties and rebelling as children rebel. It is said that all that noise and fuss had no merit and can’t be looked at for its long term effect. My feeling is that the experience of the ‘60s (and ‘70s) changed not only America but the world. First of all, the rebellion didn’t just happen here. It happened in Prague, in Paris. There were lots of places where the youth were saying the whole mind set of their parents, of the ‘50s, was crazy and hypocritical. It was the ‘60s that brought anti-war protest to the mainstream. In the ‘50s, there was no such consciousness. War was glorious, heroic. The ‘60s exposed the underbelly of the principled America we’d been taught about in the ‘40s and ‘50s. It was shocking to see television pictures of dogs attacking black people in the south. Up to then I knew nothing of Jim Crow. The ‘60s gave the lie to everything I had been taught, all the values I had been brought up with. My search was to find some ground to stand on because what I had been given as a child was pulled out from under me by the ‘60s. I couldn’t rely on any of it. I had to rely on what I thought, what I felt.

Then there was the practical thing of working with those new ideas. I don’t know of any communes that have succeeded but our communities here in the Ozarks have survived. I have learned that change itself is necessary and inevitable. I have learned not to be complacent, not to become too established, because everything will change. And that’s not a consciousness I grew up with. I grew up with the idea of immutability, that there are principles, things that are absolutely true -- and the ‘60s said there was no truth, that you have to find your own truth. The hippie idea was that each of us has to find his own truth.

All those people who took on the values of the ‘60s came from the ‘50s -- and much as they wanted to change, there was an awful lot ingrained. And we repeated some of the mistakes we rebelled against and failed at our attempts to create a different way of life - open marriages, communes, exotic religions. But understand that we had no basis for these experiments. We didn’t know, for instance, how to live together, and it was proved out time and time again in the many failed communes. They would break up because people had no experience in the principles of communism or the practice of it. When they tried to live out their ideals they constantly ran into themselves, or their former selves.

So much changed when I came here to Arkansas. We really were divorced from the mainstream, and this setting made it possible to be. I didn’t have a radio, no tv, I didn’t read newspapers. In 1974 we founded Headwaters School. We were establishing our own world, and we stumbled numerous times, but I think it’s testament to our determination that many of the people who came here in the 1970s are still here. We still talk about community values. We talk about who we are as a group and how we function together. It’s an ongoing topic of conversation within the community of people who came here -- old hippies.

It’s taken me a long time to learn how to be a good teacher, how to lead learners to learn. I taught two of my daughters for three years, here at home. Thinking about it, I became a better teacher. I think I’m a good teacher at this point, but I’m not doing it professionally. I’ve been warned by several principals I met while taking an upper graduate level course here at the University that I’d never make it, that the system would chew me up. The system these days requires that you to do it their way precisely, that at 10:15 am you’re teaching science, and following the prescribed curriculum. And those folks are undoubtedly right. The only way I -- and I still fantasize about going back to teaching because I think I am good at this point -- the only way I could do it at this point is to go into a really bad school where I won’t be bothered, where they’re not going to make me walk any lines, and I know I could connect with the kids. My solution to the educational crisis we have now is to fire the entire administrative staff, put more teachers into classrooms, and have no more than ten kids per class. You don’t need expensive books, you don’t need elaborate equipment, you don’t need athletic stuff. One teacher, seven to ten kids and a small budget, and then go -- my guess is that 90% of teachers would become successful, because they wouldn’t be dealing with an impossible situation. Most teachers didn’t become teachers because they didn’t have anything else to do with their lives. They had – and have - ideals, but they’ve never been put in a situation where they could put them into practice. I still might find myself back there one day. I think there is a possibility. I’m not sure I could function with the system the way it is now. I want to give back and I think I have the skills to do it but I don’t know if it will ever happen for me. My sister went back; she’s teaching in Harlem, one of two white teachers in a totally black school. She’s a really good teacher and puts a lot of energy and time into it. She’s in a state of perpetual exhaustion compounded by the frustration of large classes in a difficult environment.

I think that in my interaction with the local community here just being whoever I am has always had an influence. I just finished working with some local guys on a job and we talked about stuff, about owning your own land and immigrants coming in, current events. I don’t try to push my point of view -- when possible, I just state it and let it sit there. Think about it if you feel like it. I don’t proselytize. I think that the consciousness and ideas of the ‘60s have permeated the general culture in ways. For instance the idea of brotherhood and sisterhood is straight out of the hippies and ‘60s, and the black power movement – that idea of our interconnectedness and responsibility for each other has spread to a large portion of society. If it is nurtured, it could be brought out. The whole environmental movement -- so many people have accepted these principles and ideals that they are now mainstream.

So many ideas that are now mainstream were dismissed as hippie dreaming. The sense of social justice that came out of the civil rights movement, the first time many of us had to think about social justice, happened to us in the ‘60s. Life-directing experiences like meditating, being conscious of what we eat, doing yoga, greeting each other with hugs – all have insinuated themselves in the mainstream.

# 21

2007-10-30T05:08:00.000-07:00

Subject L. and I met at her rural home, surrounded by plants and the steady rasp of cicadas in the nearby woods.

Folk music and a good friend who liked to play folk music were my first awareness of Sixties culture. I went to an all girls’ Catholic high school -- in retrospect, I think I had a pretty wide range of experiences there. I went all the way through Catholic college, and it was not a conservative or repressive environment, at least at the time I was there. My most respected professor -- of philosophy -- ended up leaving the priesthood and getting married. There was a lot of choice. The basic thing was, what you got out of it depended on your experiences. That background, for me, was that it was alright to ask all kinds of questions, and nothing was taboo -- There was a lot of conversation and questioning, different backgrounds and lifestyles.

In high school, I was interested in social causes, like civil rights and integration. When I was a junior or senior I did work through some classes, went down into the inner city in the mid to late 60s to work in the housing projects. As a sideline I did some work with the school for the deaf -- we learned sign language. But once I got to college (in 1968), I became more aware of the Vietnam War and that whole thing. My focus shifted from civil rights into the whole Vietnam era. My taste in music changed too, from folk to rock and roll. Another element that ran all the way through my life, and was especially strong in the late 60s and early 70s, was this back to the land hippie peace flower child thing. I grew up in suburbia but had grandparents who lived in the country, which caused my mother untold grief because I wanted to be a country girl. As a child, I’d go to my grandmother’s and cry when I had to leave. I also loved small towns. I didn’t see anything good in suburbia, although now I do see the convenience.

I was a sociology major in college, and I was going to save the world. I had one very good professor -- the department was split between two people: the head of the department was a sociologist, and he was very interested in people getting a good background in all the readings and the theories, and then the other fellow was very practical, social work oriented. I don’t think I appreciated the sociologist enough, but I was really impressed with the social work guy, so in college I ended up with a sociology/psychology degree. We had classes where we were working and it brought to the forefront the actual reality of working in that field and how bureaucratic it was, how difficult it was to actually get things done. I enjoyed the hands-on social work more than the theory.

When I did graduate in ‘72, there was a hiring freeze and there was no way to get a job. By the time I got a job offer, it was two weeks before I had my daughter, so I didn’t take it. When my little girl was young, up until 8 or 10 yrs ago, I worked as a volunteer in some sort of area related to social work things, women’s centers, adult day care centers.

During college, I became a vegetarian, and I was sympathetic to a variety of issues, but there weren’t any major protests in the small town where the college was. I had an early and very strong interest in environmental issues, which didn’t go away, and I was interested in Buckey Fuller’s work. I managed to get them to bring him to the school as a visiting scholar, then I was excluded from the formal dinner -- school politics. He was pushing the geodesic dome, and it was related to environmental issues in that there was a lot of passive solar and low use of natural resources -- very efficient. He also had an automobile that he had made that was extremely efficient -- the dymaxion car. I tried to find out if there were schools that worked on that -- you could get into a specific program, but there weren’t many schools offering just plain environmental programs at that time. I started getting involved in World Watch -- back in ‘71. Their state of the world report was really dire, but some things have been done that they said needed to be done. But from the perspective at that point in time, we figured that we’d be long gone by now and the earth would be a crisp cinder. I also had a lot of awareness of the nuclear arms race. I was more involved with social and environmental issues, but I wasn’t involved in protesting the draft or the Vietnam War, even tho I had friends who went off into the war and friend who went to Canada.

Getting back to the land was extremely appealing to me, going back to when I was a child, maybe more so than a lot of people. I had fancied living in a commune but never did. I lived with groups of people, but not on an official commune. When I left college, I got pregnant. That changed my life. I was a single mom, and pretty much deserted by everybody for awhile there. My family was there but not there. I’m the oldest of five children, and there was the recommendation from a particular parish priest that my family shouldn’t allow my younger brothers and sisters too much exposure to my evil influence. My family was actually more supportive than most of my friends, because my friends felt that there was no excuse for me not to get an abortion. My plan had been to travel the world, the whole thing, go back to the land, somehow do all these things, which now as an older person I realize weren’t going to work well together. Maybe I could do them consecutively, but I couldn’t do them all at once. I was sidetracked -- which disappointed everybody but me. I was pretty happy about it (being pregnant). It was an accident, but once I found myself pregnant I had no doubt about what I was going to do.

I was on welfare, AFDC until F. was two. I had good friends, and lived in a community in the country, and that’s where I met C. He and I moved in together. He was graduate student and had no income. After we met, I began moving into what I do now, which is archaeology and anthropology. I had been interested, but my college did not have an anthropology department. I guess from the point where I was interested in sociology as a social science, I was almost more interested in anthropology, in its cultural aspects, where you’re going out learning about cultures you can interact with. When I met C. I became more interested, even tho I was in the middle of working at the women’s shelter. I just took F with me. I spent probably fifty percent of my time doing volunteer work when she was little, basically working with poor people. In women’s issues, it was primarily the women’s shelter. I did that in Illinois, then again in Tennessee when C got a job, and I worked as a field cook. That was pretty interesting, I cooked for 16 people. Then we moved to Alabama and I found places to work. I did start working part time in archaeology, but also continued doing volunteer social work.

C came to Arkansas in conjunction with his profession, and by that time F was in first grade, and I started doing archaeology, and volunteered at the battered women’s shelter. After three years, the government contracts changed, and our jobs abruptly ended, and that was right after our second child was born, so we decided to start our own business. We bid on government jobs. C is the archaeologist, and I do the business aspect. I enjoy the field work and have done some of it, but I do the money and personnel management, editing and quality control, and we’ve been in business for 15 years. The last two years have been difficult for the whole profession. All the cutbacks, all kinds of upheaval, again trying to change the procuring process, and the death knell for the small company in this field.

We grow a big garden. For years, we’ve done organic gardening, pretty successfully. I enjoy gardening a lot. I did a lot of canning, but now I do more freezing. I do more specialties, like pickled okra. In Alabama, I was very organic, only not the point where I was making my own flour or anything. Eating good, home grown organic food was very important to me. I had neighbors who thought I was an abusive parent because I did things they didn’t consider good parenting. I did not give my children sugar, which was their term for love, their way of demonstrating love, and I also didn’t believe in hitting children. I worked temporarily as a substitute teacher, and I did a good job, but they didn’t want me back because I wouldn’t hit the kids. The teachers all carried a paddle, kind of like a ping pong paddle, right on their belt, and I didn’t believe in that.

I’ve run into downright bigotry here in Northwest Arkansas. People can be bigots in all different directions, and I’ve run into my share. I think that’s where the anthropology part comes in handy, gives an uninvolved perspective. Observing people who fancy themselves big liberals and yet they’re not truly liberal, because if you don’t go with exactly what they think is good, then your ‘aura’ is wrong, you’re not cosmically cool enough. Maybe I’m not as liberal, maybe I’m not as cool as they are, I’ve never really gone with that. I consider myself conservative in some areas, especially in terms of the environment.

I used lots of drugs. I used nicotine and alcohol in high school. I started smoking cigarettes when I was 13, and quit when I was 22, when I got pregnant. I drank heavily in college, for the first year or so, but then I considered myself superior to the riffraff who used alcohol because I had better drugs. I enjoyed pot much more, but I didn’t get to pooh-poohing alcohol until I got to the hallucinogenic drugs, which I did do the last two years of my college career. That was combined with the back to the land thing, and I did it for the spiritual part of it too. I do think that hallucinogenic drugs do expand your consciousness. I do believe that. Yet, I would be petrified to see my high school age child get anywhere near it -- I lost a couple of friends to drugs. I formed strong opinions about drugs then. I’m very against speed. My experience was that speed turned people into monsters. My basic opinion now is that I wish they’d (the government) stop wasting all their (our) damn money fighting marijuana and I think we’d have a lot of support from a lot of people. My personal feeling is that it (drugs) should all be legal. That would be the best way to go at it, the most effective way. Then maybe we could deal with the people who have the real problems. I had friends who were heroin addicts, I thought they were crazy but I still liked them. I had friends who fell into speed and they were no longer my friends. And those are the people who we lost, people who went out of second story windows. I never knew anybody using heroin who was that crazy.

I no longer imbibe, because I found in my late 20s that what marijuana did for me was put me to sleep, and I didn’t need to go to sleep. I had a thyroid problem, and I think that was one of the reasons I was so reactive. I finally did have to have one gland taken out. Both C and I have communicated our attitudes on drugs to our children, because I think we need something honest, and I think this baloney that they’re teaching in the school systems is harmful, because these kids are too smart, and they all of a sudden realize that marijuana is not this evil substance -- like T-- already will spout off that it’s only a gateway drug if you have to keep going to people pushing other garbage. To me, tobacco is the worst drug we’ve got out there right now, not counting speed and so forth -- it’s so readily available, so addictive. C’s been trying to stop smoking since I’ve met him, he’s been smoking since he went to Vietnam. T says she went to some sort of music thing, and she said 80% of the kids in there were smoking cigarettes -- kids under 18, 20. My brother has been a strong member of NORML for years, and I’ve sent him money, but we don’t give directly because of work restrictions. At least as archaeologists we don’t have to be very straight to keep a job. I think that’s why I’ve developed some of my attitudes.

These two sides of the spectrum, liberals (progressives) and conservatives (traditionalists), the terms are used to stereotype people. I think one of the main earmarks of a truly liberal person is tolerance. I keep trying to teach my children that. The main place we give money is to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has a teaching tolerance program, which is fantastic. I think it’s a thread that’s gone all the way through my life, trying to fight intolerance. You can find intolerance everywhere, in right wing ultraconservatives and in the yuppie liberal political agenda -- I may agree with more of the liberal political stances, but I don’t agree with the social attitudes that close out others. We can learn something from everyone. I attribute my desire for tolerance partly to some of the drugs I took in college, because the experiences showed the kinship of people, that we’re more alike than different.

I’m optimistic about the future. I think you’re born that way (optimistic). To me, if the glass is half full/ half empty, why not think of it as half full? What’s the point in the thinking it’s half empty? I think that human beings can do it. Looked at historically, things are getting better -- maybe not as fast as I’d like. I think we have ourselves up against the wall environmentally, but I think the human being per se is trudging along slowly in a positive direction. Look how long we’ve been around -- we’ve made immense leaps and bounds, just in the last century or two, the centuries we’ve got recorded information. But then, based on my experience in anthropology and archaeology, in some ways it appears we haven’t changed at all. In other ways, both physical and the whole spiritual/moral aspect, I’ve seen just in my short lifetime some change for the better.

I like my kids, and I think they offer promise for the next generation. I think there’s a dual reason for our children’s adherence to our values. In my experience, in some ways it was more difficult to discuss and explain, rather than to just whack a kid for some misbehavior. But these kids grew up asking questions, thinking about things. Also, I think the information age has had a great impact. I’m reading a book called On Photography by Susan Sontag, really interesting, and it makes you realize that a lot of these changes (relating to the information age) started with photography because all of a sudden images were available everywhere. We all talk about the influence of television, video, how the world has gotten so much smaller. But I think some things have gotten better, and even tho on a personal level maybe people are not that much more improved than they were a hundred years ago, there’s a perception that we are. Look at the emphasis on all this human rights stuff -- . And when people are actually interviewed about these things (such as human rights, the environment) they say these issues are important to them. I think the culture is changing. You don’t have to go too far out to see differences, and I think it’s spreading -- the integrity of the human being is becoming important -- our definition of who deserves respect and integrity has become a lot wider.

One of my pet peeves right now is this whole thing that’s going on with homosexuals -- how can people be such bigots, it drives me crazy. I have two siblings who are homosexuals, and this is not a life that they choose -- it’s who they are. Assuming we accept people are born as homosexuals, for people to say that they are just born evil or choose to be evil, that’s beyond my comprehension. This sexuality is a divergence, different because most animals are born to reproduce, and obviously homosexuals do not have that drive to reproduce. It’s an issue that really gets my goat. Take Trent Lot’s stance on the guy they’re trying to make an ambassador to the Netherlands—a gay man, extremely capable—Lot is holding back the vote because Lot says he’s (the prospective ambassador) a sinner and being gay is a decision and we don’t want such an evil person representing the U. S. Lot stated that homosexuality was a moral choice and they can go get it fixed if they want to, that people choose to be homosexual, just like someone would choose to dye their hair —then the first lovely person to support Lot was our representative here from NWA, who said the prospective ambassador had some kind of gay agenda. We’ve tried to figure out what this gay agenda might be --

Anyway, it goes back to my thing about intolerance. I’ve tried to teach my children to be tolerant and have a sense of humor. I think if you go from there --

# 54

2007-10-23T10:11:00.001-07:00

Met with subject near his Fayetteville home. Born 1949, Michigan

My sister bulldozed the way for me into the 60’s. She is six years older than I. After transferring from Oberlin, a well respected liberal arts college in Ohio., my sister was attending the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI., U of M. She got somewhat involved with the civil rights movement while there. My parents, specifically my father, really didn’t like that. Their most discussed fear was the possibility of her getting arrested and what their friends and neighbors would think if they found out about it. My father wanted her to transfer again to a different school. She agreed and decided upon the University of California, Berkeley campus and would pursue an advanced degree in marine biology. At that point in time, Berkeley didn’t have the student activist reputation it was about to develop as the Free Speech Movement (FSM) got going soon after my sister transferred there. She became very involved with the FSM and was arrested several times.

She and I stayed in touch, as best we could. There was a point at which she was banned from coming home or having any communication with any of us -- mostly my father’s doing. She was very intelligent, had worked several summers at Ford Motor Co. where my father had worked for 20+ years and she had received a Ford scholarship to college. Consequently, a lot of my father’s co-workers knew my sister. Through a series of events it had become general knowledge that his daughter had “gone off the deep end”. Much of the details were also general knowledge, i.e. getting arrested, involvement with the FSM, and dating a black man.

One of my last conversations with my father before he had a heart attack and died, we got into a pretty big argument after he admitted to me that he had recently voted for George Wallace for President.

I didn’t see my sister for several years while she lived in California and we were not supposed to be in any communication. She wrote me birthday cards and sent other communication to me via a friend. It is unfortunate that this huge schism in our family was not resolved until after his death.. He died very suddenly of a heart attack in 1968.

As I graduated from high school, I was planning to go into the Air Force. My girlfriend and I were going to get engaged as soon as we were a couple of years into school. I had chosen entering the Air Force because I wanted to learn to fly. It hadn’t occurred to me, when you’re up in those planes, what you drop on the people on the ground. I went to the U of M. too. As I got there, some lights started going on pretty quickly. I had started having conversations with, first, my dad, that quickly got very conflicted and then he died. My mother tried to pick up his torch, but she didn’t feel the same as he did.

When I graduated from high school in 1967, there were two kids in high school that had ever smoked marijuana. Where I was in suburban Detroit, it wasn’t happening yet. That summer the black communities in Detroit and all over the US burst into flames. John Sinclair and the White Panther Party were just moving from their commune in downtown Detroit to Ann Arbor. The Black Panthers and the Black Muslims were just beginning to organize in Detroit and I knew nothing about either of them at that time. My sister told me I should look into a CO [conscientious objector] status -- don’t just register. I remember talking to my high school counselor, and he said, “Oh, CO’s are just for Quakers and other ‘unusual’ religious people -- that’s not for you, you can’t do that -- just get your 2-S deferment”. A 2-S was a deferment to go to school -- and initially, that’s what I did. Then as I got to know people who were involved with setting up a draft counseling center I got interested in helping. They needed people to act as counselors and I went to a training program offered by the American Friends, Quakers. That’s the point when things started to add up very differently for me.

At the same time, I had a lot of good profs and people I got to know personally at the University who were showing me things I’d never seen before. New ideas. Pretty quickly it seemed pretty clear to me that “we”, the US, were making some major mistakes and that we shouldn’t be doing what we were doing. Soon before his death my father had shown me plans of the assembly plant that FoMoCo had planned to put in what was then Saigon. He made it very clear.

He said, “The reason we’re over there is so Ford Motor Company and other people can go over there and exploit cheap labor.”

He didn’t think that was ok -- it was complicated. He wasn’t just this totally crazy right-wing racist. He grew up in a small town in the Upper Peninsula (UP) of Michigan, as did my mother. He had no exposure to blacks, some exposure to Native Americans, who were mostly people who had real serious drinking problems in the UP. He came down to Detroit, this wide-eyed kid, and the guys -- the blacks and the other people that were around Ford’s headquarter’s in Dearborn, MI, Rouge plant, were a rough bunch, common laborers making good money. It was a real rough and tumble environment. He didn’t come into contact with blacks who made the best citizen role model. He got an impression -- and it was hard -- as I got older I started to see. He had just wanted the best for his daughter and saw his daughter doing things that could possibly create problems for her in the future. He didn’t know how to express that very well. He and I actually had had a very good relationship. And most of the time, my sister and he did too. All through school while she lived at home she had toed the line, had been a good little daughter, pulling straight A’s, was popular at school. Earlier I had always heard, ”Why can’t you be more like your sister?” And then all of sudden, “OK, if you want to work on drag race cars and hang out with these motor-head kids -- just don’t get involved with politics or racial issues and civil rights.” So she really broke the ice for me.

I was working at Ford Motor Company during the summers. I was still drag racing. I’d never identified with hippies. Summer of ‘68, after the Summer of Love, my sister was at Golden Gate park -- I didn’t have a clue. I was a motorhead.

But next year as the Vietnam War was raging on, I did get involved with draft counseling as I mentioned earlier. Because I was living in Ann Arbor near Detroit and Canada just across the Detroit River, I soon found myself helping to get AWOL’s out of the country. Helping young fellows my age leave military service and move to Toronto. There was a huge community of people who were deserting the armed forces. I made several runs over there with people. People stayed with me who were AWOL, people who had joined or had been drafted. I heard several young guys say, “Oh my god, what am I doing in this army uniform.” Large numbers of these guys wanted out regardless of the difficulties it would mean for them in the future. We were draft counseling mostly in Detroit and Ann Arbor with AWOLs. The volunteers were committed people working loosely within the American Friend’s service -- networking all over the United States -- a big operation getting people out of the country. We shuttled hundreds into Canada, people, friends, wives.

As I got more involved, I began to change and became more involved with other political activities as well. Students for a Democratic Society, SDS, got started on the U of M campus and I got involved. During this whole period, I was still in school. I transferred into the veterinarian program at Michigan State University, MSU.

I ran into some big problems there -- we were demonstrating to abolish ROTC, working with a small group. We had regular weekly demonstrations at the ROTC building -- maybe a dozen or two people at most -- it was a much less active campus than Ann Arbor. We’d go on radio and do talk shows about why the military should not be allowed to recruit on campus. Then Nixon invaded Cambodia. There was going to be a huge increase in the draft. Then some of these disinterested students on campus got more concerned since now it might be THEIR asses out their in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

By then I had come to the conclusion that I should not continue taking a 2-S deferment and was 1-A. I was really just waiting for my draft notice when I would be leaving school and immigrating to Canada myself

My girlfriend’s mother forbad her from getting on my motorcycle -- I was just a troublemaker -- I was going to wind up in jail or in Canada or both -- a lot of things were changing very quickly.

Then we had another one of our weekly demonstrations at the ROTC building and 1800 people showed up. Two of us had bullhorns as usual -- we hadn’t anticipated so many people -- we saw a parked car, people taking something out of their trunk -- walking toward us – a bullhorn with a BIG amp. Another one of these guys had a box full of stuff -- their bullhorn was massive and they were much louder than we were.

The guy with the bullhorn told us to “Shut up!” They said, “We’ve come from Detroit, we’re from the Hole in the Wall Gang -- it’s time for you to have an option -- instead of being involved with these rinky-dink demonstrations, it’s time to ‘seize the time’ and change the basic operating rules of how demonstrations are going on. Those of you who want to participate in ending the ROTC program, we’re prepared to do that right now.” They then uncovered this box with dozens of Coke bottles filled with gasoline and rags hanging out the tops.

We tried to speak but they were much louder and ignored us. They had obviously decided what to do. This was one of the first “actions” of the Weather Underground -- the ROTC building was badly burned but not destroyed.

The next morning I got called into the dean’s office and he said, “Young man, you’d better transfer from this school, right now. And -- pick a new career, because I’m going to see to it that you never get into another vet school here or in Canada or Europe.”

I did not see it coming but my career plans had been interrupted that afternoon during that demonstration. My life had been permanently altered in a matter of minutes. It was a very radicalizing experience. I tried to explain, “Wait a minute…”

Ignoring me, he went on, “Well, you called the demonstration and you couldn’t control it -- you’re responsible as I see it.” We got called into the police department, the FBI -- the whole thing. His message had been pretty clear so at the end of that semester I transferred, ending back at U of M finally.

I saw people I’d been working with politically burn out. When I finished school, some friends and I started a garage in downtown Detroit to help people learn how to work on cars. I had also helped start the Ann Arbor food coop when I made some major dietary changes and decided to become vegan. What started making sense to me was setting up alternatives to the mainstream. I got involved with the cooperative community and doing things in groups. I lived in a communal situation in Detroit. We taught classes in auto repair. I did engine rebuilding. I was making good money, actually. And I was having a really good time. I grew up a lot in three years from being a sheltered college kid to living in inner city Detroit learning to work with a lot of different kinds of people, different races, gaining respect for people who were able to survive in that kind of environment.

My politics matured. I saw it wasn’t as simple as the black and white issues I might have looked at in college. My mother’s mother had lived with us part of the time and she had introduced me to cooking and baking. As a little kid, I loved it. I had a great time making pizza, making cinnamon rolls -- she had lived in the upper peninsula and worked as the scratch baker and cook in a lumber camp for about forty lumberjacks, cooking all the meals. She taught me a lot. So while I was working at the garage, some friends said they wanted to start a collective bakery. I got into whole grain baking, trained with some people in Lansing I’d had known -- when I left I decided I didn’t want to keep working on cars -- it was like, god, what a backward way to move around -- we had switched over to just working on Volkswagens -- I had completely forsaken my Ford heritage.

I thought it was very likely there would be a severe economic shakeup -- which hasn’t happened yet -- and I also wanted a warmer environment. I was really tired of working on cars with slush dropping on me, my hands cold. This lady I was with was a finish carpenter, and I was a mechanic wanting to get into baking, and we traveled around the country looking at different places, and it came down to flipping a coin between Ashland, Oregon and Fayetteville, Arkansas. That was in ‘74.

I had a friend from Detroit who was teaching chemistry at Kingston High School. He’d been in the Peace Corps and had bought land near Ozark. We came to visit and met some of the people he knew, one old woman who made rugs and I hit it off with all the people. They were friendly, straight forward -- I never liked being in the -- what would you call it -- I’d go to Boulder and be like, oh god -- too much affectation -- and Berkeley was much the same. I felt more comfortable in the backwoods areas like the Ozarks than I did in these chic cities. I continue to feel comfortable with country people. I go down around the Gulf to play around -- this same friend now lives on a sailboat near Biloxi. I run down there with a catamaran I have and going into towns in Alabama or Mississippi I have a good time. And I realize that my being a white boy gives me a lot of privilege that if I were black or a woman could make my experiences very different here in the South -- but there is nothing gained by my beating myself up about that either.

I seem to hit it off fine with people that others would go, oh god, you know -- weren’t you worried they’d hit you with a monkey wrench or something? It was working in Detroit that I learned to be comfortable with the working class. A lot of it comes from what I’ve done because even though I’ve been to school, I’ve ended up working with my hands and doing work that’s blue collar. I’ve done welding, worked as a journeyman electrician -- I’m glad I went to college -- if I hadn’t gone -- I went back to my high school reunion a couple of years ago, and it was scary. Some of these people were like -- same mentality as high school -- most of them very unhappy -- I’m glad I got out of there.

I wanted to buy property. I got involved with several others in a farm near Cane Hill, AR. We built a home out there -- but the property never was properly deeded and while it was supposedly collectively owned, it actually stayed deeded to this one couple, who ended up having marital trouble and the whole thing blew up in my face. I ended up losing my house and getting only a fraction of what I had invested. It was my own stupidity, to build a beautiful three story solar home without assuring my ownership before hand.

I had started my business then, baking regularly. Initially, a lot of my time was spent learning more about gardening and making my business succeed. It was set up as a worker owned business -- it was pretty helter-skelter for several years. The garage and bakery stuff in Detroit had been set up that way -- the only other business that was run that way around here then was the Ozark Food Coop and soon after the Ozark Coop Warehouse.

By the early 80s I had a partner with whom I had been living for several years and we had begun a family. We both were working with people who didn’t want to see the bypass cut through beautiful farmland near Springdale. And I got to know a woman who was working around Gore, OK, named Jesse Deer in Water -- I really respected her and what she was doing, working with the Cherokee against the nuclear processing facility there. And I got to know Carrie Dickerson, who was instrumental in the fight against the proposed nuclear power plant at Claremore, Okla. She raised thousands of dollars and was inspirational to me. Then Ben Spock appeared on the scene wanting to help in anyway he could. Both Ben and his wife, Mary, got really involved. We saw that we could raise money making jams that helped pay for legal intervention to stop the Black Fox Nuclear plant..

From that, my interests went to looking at nuclear power and nuclear weapons. We did a bunch of surveying around Gore, and it was scary, the number of cancers and other things that were obviously a result of that plant’s existence. Then we started looking at the plant at Russellville -- and some other people -- we started making trips to the public documents room at the Russellville, researching the plant -- then Three Mile Island happened, and we started really pushing to get the plant closed. We continued to go down to research operating history which we then publicized.

My partner was very supportive. By then we had two children. Both of us were burning our candles at both ends. Very busy.

I knew a little about what the United States was doing in Central America but. I’d never been involved with public political actions concerning it. OxFam contacted me –my partner and I had been steady contributors -- I don’t know why they did this but they contacted me and asked if I would be interested in going to Nicaragua with a Tools for Peace program they were doing throughout Nicaragua to appraise how they should spend $300,000 that they had earmarked. They asked me to look at irrigation equipment, tractors, farm buildings, etc. As I considered this OxFam offer, Duncan Murphy came on the scene with people who had been involved with exposing the US intervention there. Before I actually spent nearly two months in Nicaragua and saw the horrible effects of US intervention there, I got swept into that work.

I went to Nicaragua for six weeks. I saw schools bombed, hospitals bombed by terrorists the US supported, with bombs we had supplied. I kept asking myself, “What is going on here?” I looked at it more, studied it, got engrossed in it, came to see we were making a terrible mistake there. I was involved in that for four years.

There were some reporters at the Gazette who alerted me that they would pay for an FOI if they could use part of it for articles. People had said we were being watched by the FBI. I didn’t know what might have been in my file but was curious enough to agree to their offer. I got this large stack of primarily blocked out pages back. More pages than I had assumed would be there but no real surprise. It was clear that my phone had been tapped, I’d been followed, and my public Nicaragua presentations in various cities had been recorded by what was undoubtedly very expensive taxpayer financed, undercover federal employees. This was while Reagan wanted especially to silence people who were involved with a major anti-US intervention public political organization, Citizens In Support of the People of El Salvador (CISPES). I wasn’t really surprised the federal investigation had greatly expanded the group of dissidents they had under illegal surveillance. Pretty much standard operating procedure for our intelligence community in the US. The stuff I was doing, exposing US support and arming terrorists and brutal military regimes throughout south and central America -- they didn’t want us to do. I had been aware that I was possibly, no, likely, being watched.

Earlier I had not felt like I quite fit in with the “counterculture”. I had considered myself working class. Going to Ann Arbor, being in the college environment did something to me. My first year of school I was in a dorm, and my roommate was this party-going fraternity pledge. He just on my own as far as I was concerned. I didn’t want that. All they were interested in doing was getting drunk and seeing how many girls they could lay. I met this guy from England who lived in the dorm. One night he said, “ Here listen to these guys with these earphones.”-- it was the first time I ever heard a group called The Cream. I went, wow -- they’re really good. He goes over to his dorm room door, rolls up a towel and shoves it under the door and says, “If you’ll smoke a little of this and then listen, you’ll REALLY like them.”

I knew what it was, and I was a little frightened maybe. He said, “It’ll be fine…just try it once.” And he was right, I really did like the Crème afterwards. Then he brought out this album with a picture of a dirigible blowing up -- the Hindenburg -- Led Zeppelin’s first album, before they had released it in the US-- I listened to it and thought this is REALLY good.

So several Friday nights after that while most of our dormmates were partying, getting drunk and throwing up 3.2 Budweiser beer, we’d have a towel under his door, listening to music that friends of his were sending from England. Definitely opened my eyes to some new ideas -- That is how I got to know people involved with draft counseling because they came over to visit him. One of their dads had been to Togo, Africa with the World Health Organization and brought back some green contraband. Seems the doctor father had given some of it to his son -- so we tried it too. I remember not being able to find my dorm room down the hall. This was just prior to the citywide legalization of the public recreational use of marijuana in Ann Arbor and the John Lennon and Yoko Ono concert there to raise money to win the release of John Sinclair from prison for giving a narcotics officer a free marijuana cigarette at the White Panther commune.

I could see things getting a whole lot better or things could go to hell in a handbasket. I want to continue to work in a positive vein. I’m going to be going to Cuba. Their major trading partner is no longer exists since the fall of the Soviet Union and there’s been terrible poverty and malnutrition under the decades long US embargo. I’ve always been interested in this little country so close to the US, thumbing its nose at the US for the last thirty years. And as I’ve learned from others about what we’ve done to some of our neighbors in Central America, I feel almost as if I have something of a personal responsibility to undo some of the damage. I stumbled onto several thousands of dollars worth of food processing equipment for soy foods -- and the Cuban agriculture department is working with OxFam and others -- so I’ve been getting this equipment moved down from Missouri, cleaning it up, getting it ready to go, shipping it to Cuba -- I hope to go down and help assemble it and set up a good sized soy operation in rural Cuba. They’re trying to pull as much land as they can out of sugar production and grow more soybeans. There’s a lot of mental retardation among the young kids in Cuba because of lack of protein. They’re pushing hard to educate people about soy beans.

We are also involved with monitoring Nuclear One at Russellville. We’ve involved the Arkansas Public Policy Panel in getting a few VISTA volunteers to watchdog at the plant. They’re now storing high level waste on a parking lot -- and they’re still operating these old Babcock-Wilcox reactors like the ones that failed at Three Mile Island.

I’m more drawn to do things on an international scale than I am local politics, although I realize local stuff is also really important. My personal interest seem to point me more toward international projects.

#53

2007-10-14T12:27:00.000-07:00

Subject talked while chopping vegetables and cooking in the small kitchen area of her urban cabin. Born 1953, Texas

I was young--in junior high and high school--during the Sixties. You’re not too conscious at that age. But I remember sitting on my parents’ bed, watching the evening news with my father. There was always an update about the Vietnam War--bloody, terrifying scenes-- and sometimes that segued into protests against the war. I didn’t have an older brother or friends who were dealing with the draft, so the war wasn’t personal to me. I remember a very low level of dissent among a small minority of people -- wearing black armbands to protest the war -- in my high school in Corpus Christi, Texas. I wasn’t part of that.

I didn’t try marijuana until my sophomore year in college so I may have been a little behind the times. I went to college at a small women’s school in Missouri and remained fairly distant from the new cultural Zeitgeist, as it swung into the 70’s. I think it takes awhile for a movement to take form--I would say the Sixties as a movement was fairly amorphous, even to itself, until the Seventies. I think the intellectual convergence started happening in the Seventies, and continues today.
When I transferred to the University of Texas in 1973, I attended one or two demonstrations before the whole protest movement shut down. They were large-scale events, maybe about Watergate, or the war. I’m not sure. I was interested in attending and observing, just as I was interested in the streakings that were taking place at the same time. People would gather spontaneously at one of the fountains at the UT campus, usually in the evening, and then, strip down and run naked through the crowd. It was fun. I didn’t personally streak. Like most, I was a voyeur.

My parents persuaded me to get a degree in business, so here I was again in a fairly conservative environment. I was the radical in that group, which indicates that a personal ideology was beginning to take shape. The first energy crisis took place in 1973, during my undergrad years. It shocked a lot of people into an awareness of limitations. Later, as a graduate student at UT in Austin, I studied community and regional planning. One day I woke up and read the paper. There was a story about a small town in the Rio Grande Valley, Crystal City. The city had a municipal power plant that supplied all the electrical energy for the town. Problem was, Crystal City couldn’t afford oil for its turbines. People were going without electricity, so they were extremely vulnerable. It really disturbed me that these low-income people were suffering. That was a Seventies kind of social consciousness, building from Sixties. As a general rule, we were much more activist back then. When something was screwed up, people tried to take action. So I went to a place on campus called the Center for Energy Studies and talked to the associate director. I said, “Somebody needs to study solar options for Crystal City and other towns like it.” She loved that idea and got a grant. In putting together the team to work on the project, she hired me. That’s how I got into energy and environmental issues.

When you’re into alternative energy, it’s solar energy, it’s the whole appropriate technology movement, and then you’re into organic gardening, and you’re starting to look at alternatives to conventional society in many arenas, including alternative forms of living, more ecological ways of living, and ways to be self-sufficient in case the doomsday scenario--smacking into the limits to growth and subsequent collapse--does occur.

Unlike the Vietnam War, my concerns in this arena were not hypothetical or detached but personal. This may have a seed of the Sixties sprouting forth. To me, the Sixties were about being a part of something larger than ourselves, concern for a greater and more idealized society than our own. Some of that concern took the form of reaction against pre-existing norms, and some of it took the form of going in completely new, creative directions. When I and others remember the Sixties with fondness, it’s because of a feeling that we were part--even if only in a very small way--of something greater than ourselves. We don’t have many opportunities to experience that in our lives. Sometimes we’re part of a team experience that’s really remarkable, and we remember those team experiences, but on a broader more collective level, it may happen only once in a generation. I feel lucky to have been on the fringes during the Sixties and smack in the middle of it during the Seventies.

The environmental issue has been a significant thread in my life ever since. It’s a concern that manifests in the way I live my life and my work--some of which has been directly involved in ecological matters and some of which has been totally unrelated, but to which I have brought an ecological ethic. If I were to take my life and try to unweave it, environmentalism would be a major strand of color in the tapestry.

For example, one of the ways it manifests is living simply. I’m trying to live a life where I’m not working all the time in order to have material goods. My priority is having time for contemplation and leisure, and purposes other than the accumulation of goods. So I live in a small cottage, about 900 square feet, a building I bought for a song in 1990. It was a shack. Slowly, over the years, I tore it apart and renovated it from the top down and the bottom up. Now, it’s a sweet little place. It’s not fancy in any way, but people walk in and have a sense of comfort and appreciate the aesthetic. It’s right in the middle of town, but I have a quarter acre with a large garden. There’s a wood stove, so I’m fairly well set up if Y2K happens. There’s a concrete pond in the back yard for water storage and an old well too.

Right now, the main force of my energy is directed at writing. I write environmental/ecological pieces for magazines. I’ve also spent a couple of years working on an essay that reframes the environmental crisis from a pro-humanity framework. I think the underside of the environmental crisis is that it has bred in many of us activists and foot soldiers in the movement a lack of faith in humanity, a sort of disdain for humanity because the language in the environmental movement has been cast in terms of a second great fall from grace or as another manifestation of original sin. We believe humans are the cause of the problem and don’t have what it takes to solve it.

But going back to the Seventies…As the decade progressed, I found myself getting involved in other issues too. Feminist and lesbian politics, collective and cooperative households, organic gardening. I loved living in collective households, and they worked pretty well. Certainly as well as any romantic relationship works, in terms of expansions and contractions, the good times and the not-so-good ones. Since the early 90s, I’ve been active in the co-housing movement, trying to launch two different groups in the Fayetteville area.

Co-housing takes the cooperative/collective/commune model and brings it into our times. You own your own home, which you can buy or sell at your pleasure. So you’ve got autonomy and privacy and flexibility. But you also have community because cohousing is a group of people who are designing, planning, and building an intentional community from the group up and later managing it themselves. It’s really a neighborhood. Physically, it looks like a planned unit development or PUD and it’s usually designed from a very ecological standpoint. The scale varies quite a bit. Cohousing runs from eight units to hundreds of units--an eco-village. In addition to owning a house, you have an undivided interest in community property--the common house and other community features. Generally, the common house has a large kitchen and is a place where people can gather for meals. It may also have child care facilities, maybe a workout room, a laundry, so you don’t have to have a laundry in every individual house. And sometimes they have guest rooms, so you don’t have to build your own home as large. The idea is to also share meals several times a week so you don’t have to cook every evening. Beyond the common house, they may be other community assets--a workshop, community gardens, a softball field-- anything you want to have, even a swimming pool.

The idea came from Denmark in the 70s, when low-income families were trying to figure out how they were going to get home after work, put dinner on the table, and take care of the kids too. They invented co-housing, and it’s been very successful in Denmark. There it’s practiced in a high-density apartment format. People who come to co-housing tend to be social innovators who live and work at the margins, or beyond the margins, of society. They are also more educated and more politically active than the average person.

In terms of spirituality, I’ve been exposed to pantheism, transcendental meditation, goddess-based religions--ideas and practices that burgeoned in the Sixties. These and especially experiences with Nature led me to a universalist view, as opposed to a limited or Christ-centric view of spirituality. Nature is a very important part of my spirituality. Sometimes its a way of getting out of the mind, feeling more connected to the web of existence. Sometimes it’s a joyous aesthetic experience. When I lived in Alaska for 14 months, I had profound spiritual experiences of encountering spirit within the old growth forests. Right now, I’m a member of the Religious Society of Friends or Quakers because their universalist theology matches mine. The theology is pretty straightforward. It’s basically about living our values. For Quakers, these values or testimonies are equality, simplicity, integrity, and peace. What could be more Sixties than that?

#48

2007-09-23T06:29:00.000-07:00

R sat in the living room of her home in Fayetteville, looking out through large windows to a deck that hangs over a steep, wooded hillside. Born 1949 Ohio.

The summer after I graduated from high school, we moved to the Bay area in California, and I started at a convent school in January. While I was at that school, the first Vietnam moratorium was held. That and some flyers that were put up about women’s needs and nobody paying attention to them, and the women’s movement – on the fringes, I noticed it. I was finally away from my parents, away from Cleveland, and in a place where I could think for myself without anyone around to measure it against, and that’s when it finally hit me. What was really strange, was that I’d been going to work – my dad drove me to work every day in Oakland, Berkeley – that was when the People’s Park stuff was happening, we drove right by it. I just thought there was a bunch of junk going on there. I had no concept of what was happening, probably because I was in the presence of my dad and had I said anything, he would have said, oh, just a bunch of troublemakers.

I was heady with the idea that we had all this power and we could think about all these things and change the way our lives were going to go. It wasn’t predetermined according to, in my case, what the nuns, the church, the parents thought I should do. I thought I should do it too. But I thought I should do it within the scope of realizing there was a wide world of possibilities out there and that politics was open, a wide open field. As it turned out, in the ‘70s I was very political. I ran for quorum court, stood up for women’s rights at my job, and got myself fired a few years later. But in the meantime, I got equal pay and compensation for all the women. I got really political in the 70s and it was something I didn’t realize was available to me when I was in high school. I only had two years of college before I went into VISTA. I left college to go into VISTA.

My parents weren’t happy with all these new ideas that were coming out of my head. The protests were very minor, just gathering on the steps in front of the cafeteria. This was a girls’ college of 300, so it was really small. I didn’t have a car, so I didn’t have mobility. We were protesting the Vietnam War. I remember them saying that the war was economic, being waged for economic reasons. I wasn’t really fully aware of what the Vietnam War was while we were still in the ‘60s and while I was still in college. It wasn't really until I got married – I met somebody in VISTA and got married and that’s how I got to Arkansas – his parents talked politics all the time. And he and his brother had both just come back from Vietnam. That’s when I began to realize that I was very much opposed to it – and Senator Fulbright was here at the time, and opposed to it.

Joining VISTA was a result of my new feelings in college and wanting to serve, wanting to do something, make a difference. I had thought about Peace Corps, but my parents said, whoa, why not take care of the people at home first? And I thought about going into the convent, but they told me I would have to wait until I graduated, and they told me I was not ready to be a nun. I had already been accepted into the convent in Cleveland Ohio, and was supposed to go immediately upon high school graduation. But when I went to college and spent two years there, they made me go through all these psychological tests, and they said, you’re too close to your family, and you’re too rigid, and you don’t have a real comfortable relationship with God – well, of course not. So as a result, I couldn’t go to the convent, which is where I thought I was going, and I started looking around because I didn’t want to stay at that school, because it was really expensive. So I decided to take a break from college and come back later on, and go into VISTA and the parents said that was better. They ended up hating VISTA too.

I trained in Oregon and worked in Santa Monica. I worked in a Chicano area. I was supposed to work with preschoolers. VISTA allows you to pick your slot. In fact, we were at one of the new classes where there weren’t enough slots for all the trainees, so we went on strike up in Eugene Oregon while in VISTA training, and refused to leave for our slots until they made the promise that everybody who wanted to have a slot would have one. So I went to Santa Monica and was working with the preschoolers and the community agency I was working with down there decided they would hire somebody to work with the preschoolers – and mind you, I’m 20 years old – and that I could work with Chicano teenagers.

I didn’t know the word ‘fuck’ at that point. I mean, I’d never heard it. But I was beginning to hear it. I still didn’t drive. I was going to have to get my license. And they were going to have me work with Chicano teenagers. I had absolutely no ability and no confidence, and I said, this is crazy, and about that time, V. who had been one of the last people up in Oregon, said this is ridiculous, we’re asking people what kind of housing they want and we’re not able to give them what they’re asking for, so why are we asking them. So he got out, and came down to where I was. I stayed a couple more months, then talked to the director and said, I can’t do this. And they said, how about running the newspaper, and I said, I’m out of here. So V and I got married and came back to Arkansas.

Then I had about three years of being apolitical in Arkansas. We were living in the country with his parents. It was brand new. It was like I traded the cocoon of my parents for another cocoon. Except they talked about different things and they had different viewpoints. They were more Democrat, whereas my parents were more Republican. And then the time came when I realized V wasn’t ever going to want to leave there, and I might, and I left.

As far as drugs go, I couldn’t smoke. I understand Clinton completely. In high school and college, I tried to smoke cigarettes, and the way I would smoke a cigarette was just taking the smoke into my mouth. That was it. And I didn’t enjoy it. And I wanted to try marijuana, because V and his brother were very much into it, and they got their dad into it, and their mother had glaucoma. I don’t know if they ever gave her brownies or not. Anyway, I just couldn’t get it into my lungs and whenever I did, it just didn’t seem to help. V and I were working at the Yellow Brick Road, doing drug counseling for people who were doing heavier stuff.

V and his brother were upset that I couldn’t get high. They made brownies and that didn’t do anything for me. The only time I’ve ever done a drug was a few years later, when I went to Iowa and this guy told me for the second time that he was going to dump me, and here I am, stranded in Iowa, and I had to wait a couple of days to get out of there, and I did some speed. Just one tab, and I was amazed how it made me ignore all the pain I was feeling. So I never really got into drug stuff. My son’s making up for it, I think, with marijuana only, I hope.

K and I have talked about how to deal with this with the kids, and it’s like, that’s a real hard question. It doesn’t really matter how you feel about it, because then you’ve still got the police officers out there, so then my disgust with police officers comes through, and becomes a stereotype, especially now that I’m working at the newspaper. Every chance they get to bust somebody – I mean, they’re looking in cards illegally. And they’re doing it and it just irks the hell out of me, and then I tell [my son] that he has to pay attention to the police because the bottom line is that they can throw him in jail.

By the time I left V, I was reporting on politics. I was looking at a career in journalism. I had been studying that in college. I never went back to school, because after we moved here, I just kind of ... I took a proofreading job at the Times when one of the reporters never showed up for an interview – just walked off the job one day – then I lobbied my way into the job. I knew I could do it, I’d been reading other people’s stories for the last year. So I really knew I could do it. I covered Springdale, which was very conservative. Black people weren’t allowed into the town. The police beat up people. And I saw the police beating up people, just when they were irritated with them. So the justice thing – and of course in ‘74 Nixon resigned and I was at the newspaper when that came in, and we were very excited about that.

The environmental movement – that’s when I really started to push. I talked them into letting me have an environmental page and I covered all the environmental issues for the newspaper. I was against the highway, which is about to open. Against the airport, which is open now. All these things – but then, it is 30 years later so maybe it’s time for them now. And they did change some of the routing and do some things differently than they might have if we hadn’t been in there protesting.

Then Arkansas made this big change in county government that was going to take effect in January of ‘77 – so our newspaper had an editor who sat on the civil service commission and somebody else there was on the planning commission. I had run for the planning commission and no one had said anything. I was covering Springdale so I decided there would be nothing wrong with me running for justice of the peace for my district in Washington County, because the three years I had done Springdale stuff, it hadn’t involved any county stuff. But I had also brought the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission suit in against them during that three years. They watched me campaign and never said a word until I won the primary with 74% of the vote against three other candidates. They thought I had no shot at it – there were these three men. And I won it! Then I had this Republican opponent for the general election – and they let it get down to October and then they said, you know if you win this, you’ll be fired. And I said, what?! Can’t you put me on another job, like, a copy editor or something? And, no ... Then I realized they saw this as a way to get rid of me.

I started stringing for the Gazette, and I was on the quorum court, which took a tremendous amount of time, especially that first couple of years when they were putting everything into operation. And I was one of the really active ones that didn’t have a full time job, and I was married to N then, who was the assistant city manager. He actually helped a little in my campaign before I married him. We were living together by the time I started serving and then we got married in 1977. So I had so much politics in my life. I was still writing stories for the Gazette.

A lot of the rural quorum court members didn’t think it was right for the county to spend money on social service agencies, like the Economic Opportunity Agency, Abilities Unlimited, SCAN, the Battered Women’s Shelter. Those were things I fought long and hard for and chaired committees on it, and thought it was really important that we continue to use some county funds toward them. In the past, _ had been the county judge’s right hand man and had been good to these groups, so they were used to getting it. Now there was a quorum court of thirteen who they were going to have to deal with , and it was bad for awhile. But we were able to do it.

I’ve continued to do a lot of environmental writing. I was working for the Grapevine for awhile too – generally, just focusing on making government right. Making people responsible for their actions. I ended up on __’s case because he was taking money for travel, double dipping. He was getting double reimbursement, paying for it on a county credit card, and then turned in receipts for money. Eventually he resigned.

That was in the ‘70s and the Times came down pretty hard on me for doing that. It didn’t seem like they were treating me fairly – even people who campaigned for me – saying it was politics. I remember being so irritated, that they would say it was politics when it was just me doing the right thing. Of course, then things in my head were a lot more black and white than they are now. That’s what you go through. There comes a point in your early 20s when things are black and white and the grays don’t come until the 30s.

I feel like I did a lot of things but the question is, did we make a difference? I say yes, we made a difference, but it’s like you have to keep making a difference, or you have to have new people coming in making a difference. One of the reasons I finally quit writing for the newspapers was that it felt so public, and K and I were having such a hard time getting out of the public eye. I realized I’d been writing on wastewater treatment for nearly ten years. I’d been writing on solid waste problems for ten years. I’d been writing on all these issues for ten years. Ten years later, twenty five years later – the quorum court is still arguing about social service agencies, a piddling amount, and they spend all this energy wondering how they can divide it up so that everybody gets as little as possible, and it just made me upset. It made me feel like, what a waste, to still be doing all this stuff all these years later.

So – you make a difference, and I guess in the scheme of things you can see how things move forward, but it’s just so slow. And I think it’s so slow because of something Carolyn Myss said – she was talking about how the seven chakras in the body have counterpoints in Christianity – the seven sacraments – and in the Judaic tradition with the tree of knowledge, which actually has ten points, but only seven levels – and she was talking about the lowest chakra, the tribal chakra – she says we all start out at the tribal chakra, and the tribe tries very hard to keep everybody at the same place. It can move forward but it is glacially slow movement to get the tribe to see things in a little more enlightened manner. And that just really clicked for me. So she says if you can get out of that tribal chakra and get it up to your heart and throat and head chakra, to where you’re consciously not plugging in and not thinking you have to do everything the way everybody else is doing things, you can move more quickly. And the more people who are doing that, maybe we can get everyone out of the tribal chakra eventually.

That’s the hundredth monkey theory, that you reach a point where you have enough people behaving in a certain way that everybody sort of falls over and starts behaving that way. When I finally understood that, which really was in just the last couple of years, I began to realize that it’s OK that the world is the way it is, but I don’t have to be that slow. And if it takes forever, it takes forever. Everything is happening in the way it needs to, and my way is not necessarily the best way for the world, which is really hard for me to be OK with. I see things and I think that’s how it ought to be, by golly, and I have to catch myself a lot. So staying away from news really helped me a lot, letting go a lot of it. Now I’m back reading the news every night in my new job, and it’s like all night long, I have to remind myself to breathe, say this is all ok, this was all going on when I wasn’t paying attention to it, and all I can do is make sure that I’m as enlightened as I can be and as loving as I can be and that I try to have good contact with whoever is in my life and help raise them up into the light, so to speak. That’s all I can do about Israel, and Kosovo, AIDS in Africa, and all these things.

I used to laugh when I read about a hunger movement, where they didn’t do anything but think about it differently. They didn’t go out and raise money, and they didn’t do a gleaning from the fields, or anything like that. It was just an organization that did nothing more than agree to think about it. I used to think that was a real joke, but now I think there’s even more power in thought than there is in deeds, but I don’t think you can have that power in your thoughts without acting out some of it. I don’t think you can just think about it. I think when you have a chance to give somebody who’s on the street money for food, you do it. But it’s more important to hold it in thought the way you believe it needs to be. So instead of protesting, running to every rally, I go inside and say, what do I need to do in terms of this, and then I can act on it. If it’s just praying about it, or letting it go, realizing I’ve done everything I can do and letting it go, that’s now OK.

I went through a period where I couldn’t find anything spiritual and I kind of developed some thoughts on my own, like – there can’t possibly be a hell because I could never send anybody to hell, so how could God? Things like that. When I saw that the Catholic church – I went to see the priest here and he said you need to involve your husband, he’s the head of your household, the head of your spiritual family – that was the end for me. I thought, there’s no place for women in the church. I’m sorry, I don’t think nuns and all that – it’s so chauvinistic. I know women do a lot more, but it still seems chauvinistic – I didn’t have any use for that. I really thought that everybody had divinity within them. Then – somebody told me about Unity – I went a couple of times and liked what they said, that God was inside, and you followed your inner God, and that everything is as it needs to be. All these things rang true with what I had come to believe.

But it wasn’t until 1992 that I became involved [in Unity]. I did the newsletter and I was on the board for five years. I just got off the board when I got this night job. Reaching a palce where I could be spiritual in a way that fit me – because obviously I felt that way in the ‘60s if I was thinking about becoming a nun – reaching that place has been really joyous. I went through a period where there wasn’t very much joy in my life, and I still go through those periods. But there’s a lot of joy in my life right now, but it has to come from the inside and go out. It’s just a matter of how you think about it, because nothing has changed. You know, nothing on the outside has really changed for me in the last few years. Time is one of my issues – I never seem to have enough time.

I started doing a monthly column in the church newsletter, about how I could take everyday events in my life and show how I could see these in terms of lessons. I would start with a problem and come through. I started doing that, which made me realize that the writing I’d turned my back on was an important talent that I had. It was a way I could express God, or divine ideas, or whatever, and that I should be doing that. But then here I was needing to make money, so there was not a lot of time for it. But I did do that and this year I decided to try to write a little more, and it’s almost like the tribal chakra. I did get a little more output and I did get accepted in a couple of places, all spiritual stuff, and I decided what I would like to do now, if I could find the time to do it. I have a column idea and I’m working on three or four columns that I want to do, called ‘working ethics’ which would run in the business section, which would talk about spiritual principles in the work place, in nondenominational terms. So that’s where I see me headed, and I keep asking God to show me how I’m supposed to get there a little more quickly.

I wish I’d known in the ‘70s that I had so much time. I felt desperate then, doing the writing, doing the wifing, on the quorum court. My days were so full and I was feeling like I didn’t have time. I didn’t even have kids then, or a full time job.

#34

2007-09-18T06:18:00.000-07:00

T talked at her rural work place following a lunch break. Born 1953 Louisiana, then Texas.

I remember Woodstock, but I was too young. I wanted to be involved. I had two brothers, a brother-in-law, and a cousin who all went to Vietnam. That’s when I really became aware, because my mother was real present with that, conscious of telling us all the time, we have brothers, we have family there, we have to watch this, we have to be aware. She wasn’t anti-war until they started shooting students, then she was like, I don’t know what is going on in this country, but those are our children. We shouldn’t be shooting them. I remember her walking, wringing her hands, saying, this ain’t right. Up until then, you support your government, that’s what she was taught, you known. Everybody came home. We were really blessed. Everybody. And they’re still well. They didn’t talk about the experience. You could see the visible change in all of them.

When I was a junior or senior in high school is when I started realizing that for one, there was nothing for the girls in school to do – no sporting events, no organized sports at all for girls. That’s when I started recognizing that there was nothing going on if you’re not a foo-foo girl – cheerleaders or drum and bugle. There were no outlets. The women’s movement seemed kind of vague and put-on-ish to me, because my mama and aunts and everybody just did it because they had to. So I’m looking at these women getting all this press, thinking, bring your cameras, ok? I could show you some women that have been doing it raising children, doing everything alone.

We moved from being sharecroppers in northern Louisiana to the refineries in Texas. The oil boom was going on. I was 3 or 4. By the time I was six, my father was in the hospital with terminal illnesses by heavy metals in his system. There was no EPA. There was nothing. I remember thinking why would they let somebody work where it would hurt them. And I was little. Yet, my mother was one of the most optimistic people in the world. She’d say, “Now you hold your head up, girl. Nobody knows your situation. You’re not any less or any more than any other individual because of this.” All the men were gone. They died from lack of environmental protection laws that allowed them to work in places that killed them in a very short time. My father never came home except on weekend passes and died when I was ten.

So my aunts and my mother just did it. We lived in town when he got sick, and then moved out to a farm because my mom knew that. We had milk cows and chickens; we sold milk and butter; we raised a huge garden. We never went without. But we knew we were poor. One pair of shoes. Lots of kids. My mother was uneducated, too, so she harped on us getting an education. But then we get in school and there’s no support for that. Even though I had good grades, there was no counselor once suggesting that I should apply for scholarships. They just were not available. They told me, get married, have some kids. So that’s what I did.

By the time I had children, I looked up and found myself in the mountains in North Carolina. That was my first experience with anything, and that’s when I decided, you know what, I can live in the woods. I was raising gardens, I can do this. My husband was a Marine. That’s why I was in North Carolina. Lived there for six years. That didn’t last. The 60s helped me see a way out of putting up with a situation that you married into because that’s what you were taught to do. My mother would tell me, “Look your daddy died real young and I was stuck with all these kids. Don’t you leave this man.” We were taught it’s until death do you part, quite literally. I believed that, until I looked around and said to heck with this. There’s only so much any individual ought to have to take.

I had to tell my mother that she taught me that I didn’t need that fool dragging me down. She said I never taught any such thing, and I said, yes, you did, by example. I cannot stay when I can obviously see I’d be better off if I came home and lived with my sister – you know, whatever it took.

I’ve always been kind of different from my family. I have really different views. Maybe it was just the times. Being raised in a huge southern city, a big sprawling ugly nasty greasy oil dripping from the sky. It’s the armpit of the world. Then getting out in the mountains, it was like, I will not raise my children in Baytown, Texas. That put me on the path. I started gathering books, how-to books, survival books, and taught myself just from books about herbs and flowers and plants you could eat if you had to. It wasn’t until I got to Arkansas that I actually practiced that.

I had a three year old and an infant when we moved to Arkansas. He came with me. I gave him a choice, you can stay or come with me, I don’t care, this is what I’m doing. I had written a bunch of letters to addresses I got out of Mother Earth News, kind of a yuppie thing at the time, everybody had Mother Earth News, you had your Foxfire books, you know. The big Whole Earth Catalog. I still have one. I have the Last Whole Earth Catalog. I wrote to places in Australia and New Zealand. I wanted a caretaker’s job. I just wanted to leave Baytown and I was broke. Anywhere. That’s how I ended up in Arkansas. He came with me.

My mother was such a worrier, she made me feel guilty, so I wouldn’t do things with other kids my age because I knew it would upset my mother if I got caught. I didn’t start smoking pot or drinking until I was already 18 and living out of her house. I was always the one who was the designated driver. So I was a poor kid but I got to drive other people’s cars. That worked out real well. When everybody else was tripping and everything, I was thinking, yeah, well, you don’t have my mother. The last thing I would do was lay a burden on her. That’s what I had seen my whole life, that she had done nothing but struggle.

But after I was 18 and left home was when I did all the experimenting. I’ve always been kind of an oddball. I only did LSD one time, and I was gone. It scared me. I said I’ll never do that again. All I’ve done is peyote and mushrooms since. Well, I was about 30 before I did any of that, because I was a big chicken. I was married to an alcoholic who did any drug possible, so I was kind of anti- for quite awhile, because if I joined in then, see, I couldn’t badmouth him. So I kind of had an attitude – it wasn’t until I got to Arkansas, around 24 or 25, when I started relaxing and realizing that I could smoke a little bit. I’m such a moderate person, I don’t do anything except maybe eat too much. I’ve never felt like drugs altered my lifestyle much.

I really and truly believe that the back to the land thing – you know, I’d been raised in that and I saw that as easy. I didn’t have a good education, but could grow some vegetables, you know. It was a way of keeping my kids safe, raising them with proper food. I couldn’t do that in the city. I had a tiny little yard and every inch of that yard was food. My neighbors thought I was some kind of quack. My house didn’t look like other people’s houses. I knew that if I just lived out where I didn’t have nosy neighbors and people judging me all the time, I’d probably be more comfortable and I could focus more on what it is I might could do. Because I didn’t know.

I’ve lived in so many places, under a bluff, in a tent, and this is with children. I’ve done it all. I’ve had an adventure. Somebody answered a letter that I had written inquiring about caretaking an old farmhouse. He ended up being a kook. I lived in the farmhouse with his wife and children and me and my kids, then it turned into this big – they were trying to build some kind of commune or something. Well, when you’ve been raised in a large family and you know how it works, I got real impatient with them. It’s like, this isn’t going to work, people. It’s not practical. It’s some idea they had, some idealistic lifestyle, and I’m a pretty take-charge person. This guy wanted to be some kind of guru or something, but I was there because I could see there were gardens already established, different little dwellings, you know. I’m not into a lot of peripheral stuff. I’m real tolerant. I’ll put up with everybody’s stuff, until they want to dictate my stuff.

I learned so much, just be being able to meet the locals. I’ve been around her now for twenty years. My daughter just turned 20 and she was 18 months old when I came to Arkansas. My husband would go on binges and end up being gone for days at a time, and I’d call every hospital and police department. Never could depend on him at all. As poor as we were when I was raised, we were never once on welfare or public assistance. My mother taught me to be so ashamed of it that I was willing to live under a bluff with my children with what little I could do, and then finally I said, this is nuts. I went into human services. It was only about a month or six weeks in the summer time. It was a party to the kids. They thought we were camping. I just let them believe that mama was fine. I had learned by then to have lots of dried grains, and we’d cook everything from scratch, and I grew a little garden patch. But I went to the DHS and they got me lined out and I got some really good friends here and stayed with them for awhile, then I decided to go tree planting.

So I took my kids back to Texas to stay with my sister and my mom. So that’s how I got up out of the dirt, just deciding. Tree planting, that’s slave labor. The irony is, of all the years my mother told me I had to stay with that fool, he’s the one who ended up just leaving. He was gone once for a year, and that’s when I said, I’m done. I’m not calling anywhere, I don’t care where he is, I’m done. And that’s when I went tree planting.

I truly believe that the universe prepares us – you can call it “God,” name it, whatever. The universe prepares us for what we need to do. Once you are grown and an enlightened individual, all the stuff can fall into place, all the things you didn’t understand. Like, no wonder I had to do that because I’d be messed up right now if I hadn’t done that. I went tree planting. I’ve been a laborer all my life, my parents were laborers. It was easy for me, and people were out there struggling. It was like, for once in my life, I’ve got something going on, you know. It felt so good to come home with thousands of dollars – had a bank account, you know. But knowing that all my aunts and mother, you know, they worked right alongside men and got paid less than the men their entire lives and here I was right up there with the men, beating them sometimes, planting more than they did.

I’ve married a man who already had a piece of property, and we’ve added to it so we own forty acres, and it’s completely self-sufficient. We have all solar power and produce our own electricity in the wintertime from a waterfall. We try to grow all our own food, but that is a struggle. That was my goal, I see that now. All those how-to books, books on root-cellaring, all the stuff I dreamed 20 years ago, really, I know it now. I know it as a fact that I can do it. Without all those struggles, I’m sure would not appreciate it. We have not chosen an easy lifestyle.

I’d always wanted to live close to the land. My mother would say, “Honey why do you have to do something so hard? I worked all those years to get you up out of that dirt.” To her, being a laborer is something she didn’t want for her kids. I’ve got a brother who’s a millionaire, a big executive. If she had to count each one of us and our professions, she’s got pretty much everything. She did a good job. Nobody’s in jail. Nobody’s a drug addict.

The land is my religion, it’s what I believe. You’ll see some real high society lady and she’s looking at something she’s going to purchase, something real earthy, that doesn’t even look like something she’s want. I think people desire to have earthy things near them, on them. We are part of the earth. So your spirit is diminished if you don’t have that in your life. That’s why we decorate, we make our surroundings reflect what we need in our lives. If you could come to my house, which is this incredibly tiny little house, it’s in this beautiful spot. We don’t need beautiful floors and all that, because we have the surroundings. I truly believe that the reason I live where I live is because my spirit needed it. When I was in Baytown, I was so tired of living like I was living, living with an alcoholic, I literally got on my knees and said, ok, God, I’m done, ok? I’m going to give these kids away and I’m going to go jump off in front of the nearest train, because I can’t live like this anymore. When is it going to be my turn, and I can relax? I’m not a Bible scholar, or even a student, but the words Ecclesiastes 3:11 popped into my head, so I run and look it up. This verse says, there is a time for everything under the sun, a time to reap and a time to sow. So when I read that, I said, ok, that’s pretty blunt. If you don’t know the Bible and this comes right into your head, then you’re thinking, ok, I’ll look it up. And then I realized it was my turn.

I’m not rich but I’m comfortable. I own my own land, I’m self sufficient. The world could fall apart and yes, we’d struggle, but we’d be ok. We have gone that far. The thing that’s inside me is that the rewards are finally coming. My mother did not come to see me for 11 years. She would not come to Arkansas. What she thought was, it was the Beverly Hillbillies or something. She’d seen poverty and degradation her whole life and she thought that’s what I was doing. But she’s living in an ugly horrible place and I live in something that’s beautiful. Then she came and was so amazed. I’ve got a flush toilet in my house, all the comforts of home. It’s just hard to get to. All my sisters came too.

Somebody told me I must have an old soul. I like to be with the earth and with people who appreciate it. I didn’t come here knowing about solar energy and all that, but I wanted to stay in harmony with it. I went 18 years without a phone. I just got a phone this last year. I didn’t want them running a line down through there, it was too destructive. We live on the creek – it’s very fragile. I’m a woman warrior for the creek. I’ve stood in front of the road grader and said, “No, get out of here. You can run me down but you’re not doing this.” They come to grade the road and they have this one method that doesn’t work. I’ve watched the road for 20 years now. I know what that road needs, and if they’re not going to do it, I’d rather maintain it ourselves. We’ve maintained it for years. If we let them come down into the holler – it’s so fragile – you change it just a little bit and it’s changed for years. It’s the Felkins Creek, and it enters into the Kings River. We’ve in the headwaters. It’s pretty wild and wooly. There’s times we have to hike out. We have a highwater trail, and we park our car on the bluff and it takes about a 15-minute walk to get down to the house, because the creek’s roaring and we can’t get in or out.

T has a sawmill. He cuts lumber for people. He’s a wonderful artist and carpenter. A handyman. He can do anything somebody tells him to do. He’s making a lot of money now, building staircases and really nice things in houses, not furniture. He’s so much older than me in spirit that he calms me down.

My son’s 23 and he’s studying to be a doctor. I have a 20-year-old daughter M who goes to the university in Fayetteville and then a 12-year-old C. These two girls have been raised in these mountains and they take it so for granted. I’ll see them out there and think, God I would have given anything if somebody had brought me out here when I was 11 years old. C thinks nothing of it, she just takes off, she’ll be gone 2-3 hours. She’s building a fairy house or just doing her thing, totally unafraid. Now the bear in the area got her scared. He was really big. She knew if her dogs ran from him, she probably needed to be afraid of it. Otherwise it wouldn’t have occurred to her to be afraid if the dogs hadn’t signaled her to run. And when I look at them and think you know, this is exactly what I wanted, they’ll walk out there barefooted at night and not even think about how some people would be terrified. So I raised the little earth mothers that I hoped to raise.

I’m proud to say that all three of my kids were straight-As – these kids are really smart. And I attribute that to being able to grow without that fear. The impact on society as a whole is that I’ve improved it. I smoked around my kids. I asked my son when he was a teenager, what do you think? I was concerned – I love my kids and would never do anything detrimental to them. My thought was, I had some cousins who snuck around, be all up in the room, you know, hiding from their kids to get high. Anyway, I asked my son – I wanted to make sure – I said, “What would be the difference that you could point out to me how I was different after I smoked?” and he said, “You didn’t say ‘no’ as often. You said ‘yes’ more often.”

My bigger kids were raised around alcoholic behavior and that’s what M told me. She said, “Mama, I saw grown-ups be really stupid on beer and whisky and I never saw you do anything on pot.” She said, “I see you and your girlfriends – there is no difference.” And C, with the new programs – Just Say No – and the drug day and all that, her papa and I sat her down and asked her, and she said, “Well one thing they tell us is that pot’s for losers. Y’all don’t look like losers to me.” See she’s coming home with information that’s not applying. I de-program her regularly. She would say, “Well, mom, it’s illegal.” And I said, “There are things that are legal in this world that shouldn’t be, like tobacco – millions and millions are dying from it. They are making people addicted to it. There’s millions to be made from it. The illegality is like a political thing that’s in our time.” I said, “When my mama was a young woman, alcohol was illegal. So she grew up thinking that her uncles were these horrible sinners and really it was just beer, just a little corn squeezin’s they were drinking down there. They weren’t doing anything wrong on a Saturday night. They went to church Sunday morning with straight faces.” It is illegal and I have discussed that with C because it worries her.

She has a little friend who has two lesbian moms, you know. This little girl is so thrilled that she can come to our house and be herself and talk about Jay – now Jay is a woman, so quit pretending that Jay is a man, like she does at school. I want her to not feel embarrassed, to relax. She’s a little girl. She shouldn’t have to create subterfuge to cover for her parents. I want to be able to help her – because I believe it takes a village to raise children – so she can see somebody stand up and say, “You know what, B, – it’s OK.” As a matter of fact, this last weekend, we confided to her that my oldest son is a gay man. She was so relieved.

My 20-year-old daughter appears to be heterosexual, but she took a girl to the prom. I was so proud of Kingston [school], because I was ready to go to bat for the girls. I was ready to give the school a hard time, but they didn’t bat an eye. I went in the office and told those ladies how really proud I was of them because they could have made an issue of it.

Once, as an activist we met the foresters up in the woods. See when Newton County Wildlife Association was doing their whole big thing – they’re over on the Buffalo, see, and we’re on the Edgmon side. We didn’t have any group. There was nine of us standing up in the woods, no support whatsoever. We read that poor park ranger, I mean, we read him the riot act. We had him up against a tree for awhile. He was really good, gave me his personal number and everything, because I told him, “Number one, I didn’t even get notified. My property borders this land, but because I only have forty little acres and friends of ours own 196 – they didn’t even live here and they got it in the mail.” I said, “I know we’re just a small little group, and it’s going to happen, it’s after the fact. It’s happening right now. We should have been notified.” I said, “Where did you read that, that you can cut the woods and it doesn’t affect the waterways? You don’t live here,” is what I told him. “Obviously you don’t live here, because the truth of it is, it does. It’s truly foolish, and I’m not going to argue the point with you.” I told him, “You have your college degree, but I live here and I know.”

I know that my grandfather cut timber, but he cut timber with mules and would have never considered it proper to do what they do today. And he didn’t have chainsaws or anything. And then, my mother and father were sharecroppers, and their concept of working hard on something that wasn’t theirs was passed down to me. It stems from the fact that that’s what they had to do to survive. My mother took that after my father was gone and made it an issue in our lives. She said, “I want you to get an education, but I also want you to know how to live off the land in case you have to.” So my whole focus of getting on the land wasn’t just from one point of view. It was presented to me in a way, like when I bought all my books and I was all excited that you can learn things from books. But there’s some things you just have to do. And without the experience of my upbringing making me more confident, I might not have found the connection. I never knew how rewarding it would be. Even when I was living under the bluff, camping out at night, feeling like, you know, this must be what my ancestors were doing thousands of years ago, they were sitting up by a campfire guarding their children. At least, I don’t have to do that. There’s no wolf going to jump out and eat my kids. I might have this drunkard up on the main road down here after awhile, but that would be the only thing, you know. It wasn’t a frightful thing to me. Concerned maybe. I’m not much of a scaredy cat.

#31

2007-09-09T05:32:00.000-07:00

B-- piled up in an overstuffed chair in the small den of his home in an older part of Fayetteville. Born 1951, Texas.

My first awareness of the 60s was underground radio 1968, music of great rock n rollers: Hendrix, The Doors, The Band, It’s a Beautiful Day, and on and on, Beatles -- midnight to six in the morning. I stayed up late to listen to it. It was my introduction to anything alternative. I was in high school. It made me aware that there was life out there beyond the Church of Christ and the South, beyond the swimming pool. My time was mostly consumed by swimming team and athletic training, which was sometimes three times a day, so my time was filled with swimming, school, homework, and sleep.

I had always had a crew cut. In ‘68, I started to let my hair grow. I flipped over to the other extreme, quit going to church, started listening to rock and roll. My mother blames me for her nervous breakdown. I was offered a partial athletic scholarship to the University of Texas, but I was not ready to go to college. I got into the job market. Pasadena is an industrial town, petroleum, and there were easy jobs. I was making good money for a 17-yr-old, paying for a car, driving 2000 miles a month for fun. It was Toyota -- ‘69 model, one of the first in the country. I was in hog heaven in a way, had a girlfriend, new car, and I started buying music.

I had quit watching television in the 10th grade. The rest of the family would sit around in the evenings, watching TV, and I would go out and lie on a blanket in the backyard and watch the stars. That’s when I started noticing satellites going over. Then one night one started making right angle turns in the sky and you know it wasn’t a satellite. I don’t know what it was. My whole family saw this thing. It wasn’t one of those deals where it went into the shadow of the earth because it was moving toward the sun. I have no other experience with UFOs. But we all saw it. We weren’t hallucinating.

In ’70 I discovered a book by a writer named Jess Stern, called Yoga, Youth, and Reincarnation. I bought it a convenience store across the street from this business where I worked and started doing yoga. I read the whole book and started doing yoga. I’ve been doing it ever since.

Once I got off into doing yoga, I began to experiment with changing diet, doing different kinds of exercises, messed around a little with martial arts, swam periodically just to keep in touch with how the water feels and how the stroke feels, and that set me on a new course of an inner path. Instead of looking for the answers outside of me, I began to look for a peace of soul on the inside of me. It made my parents really wonder about me. I was considered the black sheep of the family for many years.

I was having metaphysical experiences. I was getting real high. After several months of doing very intense yoga, I was having these experiences where I was very aware of being in my body but I didn’t know where I was, who I was -- it was totally mind blowing. I was afraid someone would find me and ask me who I was and I wouldn’t be able to tell them. Those experiences would only last about five minutes and then I would regain my normal consciousness.

I never had any big ambition. In the 30 years I’ve been out of high school, I’ve not done many things more than two years. Any more, it’s just that I want to be present in my moment. I want to be a decent dad to my kids. That’s the first long-term thing that I took on, when D-- and I got pregnant in ‘84 and I decided this is what I’m going to do. I’m going be a dad, regardless of what else I do. I’ve had a variety of jobs and small businesses.

I had visions when I was 15 -- about the time I quit watching television. I had a vision that we live on the electron of an atom. Our solar system is an atom, and we live inside some organ or tissue of a molecule, a cell, organic, in the body of God, which I call Fred, to be familiar. As the years went by, especially once I got into these other metaphysical experiences, this idea began to more clearly evolve for me. As it evolved, I ran into a most remarkable book that described the universe as organic. It’s a psychic channeling that came through an Iowa dentist in 1879, or something like that. It’s still in print, as a matter of fact. It fit in with my own ideas. It described the movement of this electron on this atom of this molecule -- it made me think, gosh, we’re in the bloodstream. Then that film came along, “Fantastic Voyage,” which was originally an Isaac Asimov book, and these ideas came together that wow, what if we’re part of chlorophyll, and we’ve come into the body through the mouth of the cow, we’re in the digestive tract, or we’re in the blood, maybe we’re hemoglobin carrying oxygen and the brain will give off oxygen and that will be part of thought, and that will be God realization. There are all kinds of interesting ideas about the spirituality of biology, or the biology of spirit. I’ve carried that idea most of life now, that everything is organic. The possibilities then exist that within this human body there are infinite worlds, and I should take care of it because I may be God for all the beings that are in there looking up at me like I’m looking up at Fred. If infinity is real, then everyone is right in the middle.

I had met P---- in ‘75 -- it was like he was my brother, and we still feel that way. We came to Arkansas on a visit and had an immediate affinity for the land. I found out later my grandmother had been raised in West Fork. I decided right then that I wanted to live here. I was introduced to T-- who was the yoga lady, and I asked if I could hang out, and she said please come. I had done a little yoga teaching at a YMCA in Texas. My philosophy was a sound mind in a sound body. I embraced the whole philosophy of non-violence, turn the other cheek. I held onto the golden rule, the ideas of Jesus and Ghandi, that non-violence is the best example.

When the race riots were going on in the 60s, the Houston police basically said “niggers don’t show your face on the street, because we’ll machine gun you.” They shot some guy who came in from Chicago to lead a demonstration, and he was there a couple of days and was standing on the front steps of a church and a sniper on the roof of a building across the street shot him down. That was how the Houston police dealt with the blacks.

I would have protested the war. I had a sense about it. My religion taught me that I shouldn’t kill, and I would have done any amount of brown-nosing, office work, driving, you name it -- to avoid having to carry a rifle to go kill or be killed. I know I could have gotten away with it, being a conscientious objector, on religious grounds. I would have stuck to my convictions. I was very fortunate that I was in the lottery and my number came up so high that I was never drafted. I was 1-A for three years with no student deferment. It was scary. But I never burned my draft card; I was too afraid. I still have a lot of respect for authority. I didn’t have respect for the Nixon administration, but I respected him as a man, and after all he was the president of the United States. I don’t necessarily like every thing that Bill Clinton does but he’s the president and I feel a certain respect -- and at least, he’s getting laid. I definitely respect him for that.

I feel like I’m guided along by the fates. I’m one of those drivers who will be driving along and have a sense that just over the next hill there’s something, so I’ll slow way down, and sure enough, I top the hill and somebody will be stopped, or somebody turning out of a driveway -- I pick up on that stuff. I cultivate that ability through meditation. Knowing that there is an awareness that reaches beyond the five senses and that it comes in stillness and just being aware. I don’t always know how I know.

Like The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle’s book -- there’s a character in there named Schmindrik, and he fashions himself after Merlin the magician. Schmindrik is this wannabe who tries in vain to make things happen. Anytime any of his comrades are in danger, there’s this bolt and it knocks him on his butt, knocks him out. He gets up and everything is ok, and he has no recall of anything happening, except everybody is ok and safe, and they all think he’s a wonderful wizard, but he never witnesses it because it always knocks him out. It’s a great image. That magic happens around us not because we can do it but perhaps because we need it. That’s kind of the way I feel about this ability. I’ve been a kind of counterculture person, not because I wanted to be, but just because these were my needs.

In ‘73 and ‘74, I worked around the biggest health food store in Houston, called Ye Seekers Horizon, run by a guy and his wife. He used a pendulum to guide his business decision making. There were all these great groovy wonderful marvelous people learning to do yoga there – meditation, tai chi – and eat well. We had positive visions of ourselves and our future. We knew that someday we’d have to get our little skinny asses out of the city and back to the land. There were books like the First Time Farmers Guide, The Farm, bunches of great stuff. We knew there would be place for us, and we had visions of moving out to the country in east Texas-- a bunch of us going en masse and starting our own little community, growing our own food, raising children to be close to the earth, all this wonderful, idyllic stuff.
But then by ‘77 when this still hadn’t happened and we wondered if it ever would, I moved to Tyler, which was closer to east Texas and away from Houston. I had a dream in Tyler that I was sitting on a football bench, about 5000 feet up, looking down at this beautiful dark green -- so green it almost looked blue -- forest, through which ran this really beautiful super blue-green river -- and I was so thrilled by this beautiful picture below me ... I leaned over to get a closer look, and when I did, the bench tilted, and I slid off the bench and fell, and of course, I’ve long had the ability to stop falling in dreams, because I used to get the shit scared out of me several times a year in falling dreams, and I would end up crying and sweating in my room, and I learned to stop myself with will power. So I landed, rather than crashed, and then later, when I got to the Ozarks, I realized that where I’d fallen in my dreams was the Buffalo River. So here I am.

Then I realized too that this is the kind of country that would have been best for that little group of people in Houston. I thought maybe I could eventually bring all those people up here to these beautiful woods and rivers -- but they’re running businesses in Houston. Yuppies. Beautiful yuppies. I don’t envy them.

Have you ever wondered what would be the best thing to do if we had some kind of economic apocalypse in this country? Most people think, let’s run away to the woods. I don’t. I think, let’s stick tight to this town where all our buddies are, because it will be safer to stick together than to run off in a thousand different directions, split up, be easy prey for the predators, if it ever comes to that. Stay close to town -- and that’s not what people will expect to do. We’re walking distance to large open fields that haven’t been covered with apartment buildings and parking lots. Water is a problem, but we’re walking distance to the White River.

I think part of my vision is, what if it’s never violent? What if it’s totally peaceful, what if something snaps in everyone’s brain and all tendency toward violence is gone from them. What is the rapture, the Biblical thing? It’s from the Latin “rapt” -- to seize -- the word rape comes from the same word, as does raptor the bird. They’re all the same word. That seizing of the soul may be a seizing of the body, where some event occurs -- and let me say, here is where the metaphysical comes in -- an electromagnetic change on this planet, a change in the sun, or something from space -- suddenly -- and as one old man described this to me, someone who knows that word -- said that everyone just lies down and goes to sleep -- that’s what the rapture is. It may not be painful. It may be that a small percentage of us would not go totally to sleep.

There is a certain frustration with the status quo, with the way things are going on this planet, and to me it’s funny -- now, if they kill me, they make me stronger. I do not listen to radio, watch TV, I do not read newspapers. I pay no attention to the news. I cannot tell you what the stock market has done since it went over 4800. I don’t care any more. I’ve totally let go of all that. I live in my own world. I make my own news. I catch glimpses and pieces of this and that, and most of it is violent, absurd, empirical.

I used to write a column poking fun at corporations and bureaucracies, my favorite targets. Now, what little of that kind of thing I do is pointed at corporate consumerism. I mean, the national religion is consumerism. When I read back on material I wrote in the 80s, the very first one I wrote is still probably the best of all -- “Are you illiterate? Send for a free, one dollar brochure.” It’s like, corporate haiku. Yes, I dream of getting published. I mean, if I do have a dream, it’s that someone will discover this material and help me get rich. I had a major literary agent in New York in the late 80s show my work for a year, and she couldn’t get anybody to buy it. Now, it’s out there on the Internet.

If a man doesn’t have a good sense of himself, then he’s not going to get a good sense of that woman who’s the mother of his children. It’s really difficult sometimes to come to peace with my own expectations and desires, and to keep coming back in to me, asking who am I, what am I doing, what did I decide to do -- I wanted to be not only the good dad, but it means also the good husband. Whatever that means. Here’s the key word: sacrifice. There’s this image that a sacrifice is like being nailed to a stick, when in reality, the word means ‘work made holy.’ (Sacre: sacred; and fice, is from the Latin, ficare, which means, work or to work.) So, a work made holy comes back around to, what is it I can do that serves the greater good and not me personally, selfishly.

In the me-generation, a lot of people decided to go out there and get what they could for themselves. I did that early, and I retreated hard from it. In fact, I missed the meat crisis because I didn’t eat meat, and I missed the gasoline crisis because I didn’t buy much gas, and the real estate land prices and oil prices [crises] -- I missed all those because I wasn’t buying or selling any of that stuff. I was just living, on my own, for myself, not having a committed relationship, and finding out who I am and what are my capabilities -- what do I want to do.

I feel a great sense of satisfaction in being a dad and partners with D--. She’s absolutely the best at what she does. I’m real proud of her. And I can support her by helping be the handyman here, with the many skills I have. I learned to do carpentry, plumbing, electrical stuff, small engine repairs, I do the cars, the roof, the foundation, I do my own human body. I even do my own hair. I don’t do my own teeth, though. I don’t have the right bit for my Black and Decker. With all these skills I can help make the yoga center possible, because we don’t have to spend lots of money for maintenance and upkeep. I do all that and that’s part of my contribution to D--’s business and the family.

I think there’s a tremendous amount of pressure on men to have the ‘right woman.’ I mean, it’s one of those weird ironies. All on television and Madison Avenue tells you that the woman you want has this really great shape, you know, nice boobs and this really beautiful body. But then, when she’s pregnant, she doesn’t fit that mold anymore, you know -- her butt’s going to spread, and her belly is going to drop after she’s a mom -- so are her boobs. And then she’s not going to look like that model anymore and that disappoints men, because we’re not taught that this is going to change when the woman has children. Guys need some education.

I think the 60s generation was a wake-up call to the military-industrial complex, which Eisenhower warned us about in ‘53 -- and we didn’t get it. It took the Vietnam war and a whole other consciousness. I think it was the music more than anything that changed the generation’s consciousness. “There’s something happenin’ here, what it is ain’t exactly clear..” My kids listen to that, too. Somehow we decided it wasn’t necessary for all our brothers to go to Vietnam and die.

It seems like we’re all part of a change, and we’re just swept along by it, like flotsam in a wave is pushed toward shore. It’s some greater thing than we. I don’t know why I’ve been so different all my life, but I have been. It wasn’t because of the 60s. The music of the 60s certainly changed me, but here’s this interesting thought. I got so totally into the music that I quit listening to the news and watching television. I love the music. That’s all I listened to and ignored the rest of it because I was so thrilled by the music. We’d buy the LPs, read the words as we listened, and smoke dope. Cool, man. So what was happening to us? It seems as if something got lost there, a tendency away from the desire to go to war.

I have a greater sense of well, that’s cool, let’s just let it be, peace, dude, you know. I don’t want to argue over any point, anything -- recycle, alternative medicine -- let’s look at it first. Seems like that once upon a time we were truly opinionated and it was easy to sway public opinion against the Nazis. Everybody hated the Nazis. But then, in the 60s and 70s, we became a more global people and people from all over the world were being all over the world. I mean, the University of Houston was an incredible school. There were kids from every continent. It was hard to sit next to your Chinese friend -- your Asian friend -- and support the war in southeast Asia, where her brother would be shot in the name of democracy and oil. Somewhere, a conscience got turned on. We began to get a sense of it, that it’s not right to go kill those people because they’re different. What are they protecting? Their homes. What are we protecting? Some ideal called democracy -- and capitalism. Ambrose Spear said: Christianity is a good idea. Too bad nobody practices it. Maybe it was George Bernard Shaw. I forget.

It seems that the technology of war is what made the Gulf War so desirable. Because there’s this idea that with computers and technology, I can remain removed from it, like it’s a video game, like the enemy is just a dot. This device shows me a target. Not a human being. Not a father, brother. Not a man with feelings or a life of his own, who’s only struggling to feed his children and love his wife, and he’s protecting his home. He’s just a target on a computer monitor and I can go, boom, and, target eradicated, heh heh heh, I hit the target. Why the hell don’t we just have more video games for these guys, instead of sending them over there?

Why do we seek this blood sport? What is that we really want? I think the 60s began to show us that there’s an end to this ancient desire to kill and to risk being killed, and that’s another way of getting along. It’s almost like they are the symptoms of an evolution of some kind in our consciousness.

#35

2007-09-02T14:36:00.000-07:00

M-- interviewed in a friend’s home in the woods near her workplace. Born 1950, Arizona, middle class.

We were down here [in Arkansas when I was 16] on vacation visiting my aunt and my mother had a heart attack. She was in real estate and under a lot of pressure. I totally fell in love with the Ozarks, and I’ve been here ever since. And I was a real desert rat, city girl. Our family was very dysfunctional. Of course, when I was growing up I thought it was typical. I actually moved here from Phoenix as a teenage girl totally unaware that there was any other type of culture or attitude about anything except what I grew up with.

I ended up pregnant from a date rape situation with a man I did not even especially care for. I was 16 and a half. It’s a good thing I loved the Ozarks so much, because it was like one night I went to bed and I was this little girl in some kind of sheltered life in a perfect scenario, and then all of a sudden this whole scene happens. Fortunately, it was right there in the 60s, on that cusp of where -- when I broke free from childhood, I also broke free into a cultural time and atmosphere of ok, go for it, which wouldn’t have been possible for [women in other times]. So instead of having the effect of oh my god my life is over, it’s like ok now in what way does this limit my choices and we’ll go from there. Anything’s possible.

I think the 60s had a great impact on me, so much so that I unplugged from something at that point. Even though I did all the traditional things, I realized that somehow I don’t fit into this picture very well. I began to think, I don’t know if I’m just not ‘good, respectable,’ or if I just don’t want to go there, or why this doesn’t make sense to me. When I was going to have a baby, it was like, well, this is my first experience and there’s a lot about this I want to know. Then I met that glass wall of professional specialists that didn’t want to be questioned, didn’t want to take the time to explain to a 16 year old girl who’s going to have a baby against everybody’s advice including the doctor’s to have an abortion. It was like, hey wait a minute this is my life after all, and maybe I am too young to have a baby, but if God can make a baby in nine months, maybe he can make a mother in nine months too. I wanted to play this out my way.

I was always against the flow of most of my family, most of my friends, most of the circle I was in -- I was in a real traditional small town mentality. There was no freedom for being different. I was dressing different. I came from a modeling background, too -- and it was like, no, I don’t think I need to be one more of your fashion drones.

It wasn’t so much that I was suspicious as that I didn’t want it crammed down my throat. The women’s movement in Arkansas at that time was pretty weak, and in fact, I was probably at the cutting edge of it because I had had a baby and I was so horrified at the whole way they handled it, the medical world, that was my first protest. I said, now wait a minute. I went in there, I had no ax to grind. I was just a woman who happened to be pregnant, very young. I ended up at the end of this experience feeling like nobody gave me a fair deal. They didn’t prepare me for it. I was treated like some kind of cattle. Interns came in because they were training and got to examine me -- it was handled so insensitively. And people trusted this. I thought, there’s a lot that needs to be investigated and changed. I believed in change, not only for me but for women who might not be so confident to say, I don’t care that I’m 16, I don’t want to be put out, and I want to nurse my baby. Stop this. I know what’s happening here. Sure enough, they knocked me out anyway. I had taken the [labor] pain, all the way through transition, then [they sedated me] because it’s a lot easier for the doctor to do whatever he has to do if you’re not going to resist. That’s when I became a radical. I became real involved in home birth.

I chose my battles wisely. I wasn’t someone who was into a lot of protests. They weren’t real common here in Arkansas. [Mine were] private protests, in childbirth, home delivery, better preparation. Those were issues where I was victimized by the system. I wasn’t prepared for the real world. I did believe that the only thing that could account for it being that way was that people just let it. It couldn’t have gotten there overnight. I decided I didn’t want to just let it. I probably couldn’t stop it, but I could definitely disconnect from it. My husband and I have six children -- he had a child by a previous marriage too, and then we had four together -- but all four were born at home. Wonderful birthing experiences, it totally changed my life. The first three I had an African woman -- midwifery was her ministry and she was a wonderful experience. She did her own lab work. That woman, who probably couldn’t get a license in the U.S. -- she was totally there. She would come and stay with the couple for a week before the due date, just so she could pick up on anything that needed to be corrected. Very holistic birthing.

So I became holistic, because my experiences were so rich and so deep. At every twist, I found myself getting further from the [mainstream]. I also did stints that I would call -- well, I went to work in a great big company, high pressure, male dominated company -- in sales. It was because my husband’s attitude toward money was that a better job, more money, was always the answer. I always knew that wasn’t true. My husband is much older than I am and I’ve been good for him, that’s all I can say. We moved quite a bit and he was a very talented, educated person, so he could go from job to job, which I didn’t especially like, but it never dealt with the root problems, which were, how come no matter how much money we make, it’s never quite enough?

I did go to work, and in my mind, I was building a bridge toward financial independence. I was very good at what I did. I made a whole lot of money. Made more money than my husband did doing the exact same job. I got to see that little chapter in life, which was big corporate America, the way they operate, the way they work. I was there ten years, and I would have liked to be there only five years, but that’s how deep those trenches get real quick. I thought, you know, ok, there were a few things I wasn’t totally positive about when I was younger, but I am totally positive now.

If you start thinking, this whole culture is designed around [the idea] that life is about economic profit, economic gain, and if you think about it, they want to manufacture -- produce en masse -- employees who make them a profit. Post those time cards. All you have to do is offer people a pretty good security package because they’ve already been hypnotized to think that you have to have security, retirement plans, medical -- health insurance -- and the way you get to have all these things is that you show up everyday and punch this clock and then we’ll take care of your future.

I used to think, these people believe that. I don’t belong here, because I don’t believe that. It’s real hard for me to take money out of my paycheck and put it in something I don’t even believe in. These companies, they would have specialists come in and do workshops on 401(K)s and big investment programs. I mean, I was in a field where I was making over $100,000 a year, but to me, the whole time I was there it felt like a game. I thought, I could not do this very long. I think it has a real bad psychological effect on people. They start believing this nonsense. They get into it, and when they get into it so hard their being just kind of goes to sleep, to punch the clock and pursue the carrot, because otherwise it would be too painful. I didn’t want to be that desensitized.

I also realized that the reason I kept bouncing between here and there was financial insecurity. That’s why we’re not all back to the land and do your own thing, is that there is this fine line you’ve got to walk. You’ve got to reach a balance in there. When we moved out here -- I finally pursuaded my husband that it was time -- I wanted to do this when we first got married and we couldn’t for various reasons, and then with six kids, there were that many times more reasons multiplied. And finally I said, now how old do you think we could be and still do this? I’m ready. No matter what. It’s like, if I don’t do it now, I’m never going to do it. That was three years ago. We had one child at home by then. The rest are in college. And in some ways I can see that’s why we didn’t do it earlier.

I thought my children should be able to chose what kind of lives they wanted too, and that’s what I felt I valued the most, was the period of life I got to chose. There is sacrifice. I always felt like I had to get back and connect, and connecting is being real close to the source. I can’t live too far away from natural connections. For the sake of family harmony, I tried. The revolution is so consistent, there’s no sense in me trying to deny it. I just had to get out of there.

People who come out here always have this typical reaction and they express it verbally -- ahh, I feel such relief here. There is a relief. The land is a great healing thing, but I’ve also seen that you can get just as entrenched here in the busy-ness of things that you don’t feel the land any more. It’s more of a consciousness. You have to be open to it, available to it. It took me -- probably just now am I getting unwound. You get wound up so tight that you can’t really not feel guilty about blowing a half a day and maybe not doing anything of value to anybody else, except what you process during that day. People don’t afford themselves that kind of time. That’s why they have to have a therapist they pay every once in awhile. Part of it is taking the time to be in a healing, holistic environment where you can flow with it. You have to build into your life some time.

I did go to college some, but I never pursued a particular degree. In fact, my advisor said I had to declare a major, that there was no market in today’s world for philosophers, but I said, I’m interested in philosophy. I ended up going into early childhood education, because I had a child, but I was interested in philosophy. So I did not finish my degree, although I did decide to major in sociology. I was stuck in a small town. An opportunity came up with the early anti-poverty programs. I got in on that on the ground floor. I started in Head Start and became a community organizer, which was right up my alley because I got to rally everybody into worthwhile causes, which is what I was doing for a hobby anyway. And then I started doing grant writing for them -- I wrote the Meals on Wheels and some other things, like making seeds available to people and give advice on how to do backyard gardens, organic gardening. I loved that program, and everybody got real excited about it, saving seeds, but that program went by the wayside.

I did that long enough to see that those social avenues were not going to change the real picture. I still think the big picture needs to change. Out of my six children, I have one son who would say, this is my mother, she was a flower child, and be proud of it. Another son would say, please mother don’t tell anyone you were a flower child. Their programming -- I mean, I’d say, what do you think a flower child is, exactly? I lived in some communes. But I had a child, so I was always the responsible one with a job. People were far more likely to come to my house, which they would, come to crash. I had broken with religion, tradition, the whole nine yards. It was like, ok, I will go to the edge if necessary, but I’m going to find out what works for me.

I experimented with a lot of drugs. I think because I had a child I was never reckless with anything. There was a little voice that said watch it. I could never afford to get in any condition where I couldn’t go to work the next day or take care of my child. That was my safeguard. I was intellectually exploring, and spiritually too. To this day, that exploration continues -- I’ve never found a place where a Christian witch might fit real nicely. I’ve been looking for that for a long time, and all of that is here. The reason -- I started telling my own children -- is that somebody’s not telling this story right. You guys have some real crazy ideas about what went on. It wasn’t all acid and drugs and free sex and promiscuity and irresponsibility and recklessness and abandonment. I’ve even sat down and said, “Just so there’s no misunderstanding, I was there, I lived it and there were as many different ways to live as there are ways for you to go through these years you’re going through.”

I said, “Even the drugs originally were part of a spiritual quest, not just entertainment. You guys don’t know what drugs are for. The reason I can’t talk to you about it is this ridiculous brainwashing you’ve been under all the time you’ve been in public school. I mean, on the one hand, I did want you to say no to drugs -- kids in the third grade should say no to drugs. But on the other hand, I knew we were going to have to sit down and have a talk about this, because you’ve got some really strange ideas.” I said, “I never had a bad experience on drugs.” I don’t want to be one more voice that parrots this mindless unthinking uninvestigating narrow tunnel vision drug education that kids are being handed. I’m real opposed to it. I think [the world] needs to know the people who were able to raise healthy children and have good families and pay their bills and function normally, have coping skills, and still get high.

Of course, who’s going to say that? If you get anywhere that you’ve got a voice, and they ask if you inhaled, you say no. I mean, if [political figures] would say, yeah, we got high, and I don’t know what all this hype is about, they’ve got the political process that could change things. That irritates me. When I was doing the anti-poverty programs, and especially when I was doing a lot grant writing, going to regional meetings in Dallas, Washington DC, with these government people who were involved in all the programs and the money, I was young and I wasn’t married and I got invited to all kinds of parties. I used to think, you hypocrites, you know? I’d say, how come if you all do this, this is illegal? Why are we doing this in the dark in very private circles behind closed doors, and the people doing it have the ability to open these doors? That’s when I lost confidence in politics. They don’t have the ability to open the doors, or if they do, they don’t think they do. Or they think it would shut the door on their political future, but I really see now that politics is not where change is going to happen. What a bunch of wimps. They just know how to cooperate with the puppeteer.

I do feel hopeful but not in the direction we’re going. Women will be the ones who change it, because we get to hold and imprint and bond with the citizens of the future. That’s why in industrial societies where they take babies away from mothers and clean them up before they’re even nursed or snuggled is so idiotic. Mothers will change it. That’s our power. Because of that I feel very hopeful, talking to young women all the time about, if you don’t like the way men act right now, change it in your boys. They’re going to learn that somewhere. But we forgot that. We were encouraged to forget it. Nobody would have forgot it if we had known we’d have the teen suicide rate we have now, the gangs, the troubled children.

We have women who have the careers now, and they’re saying, ok, now what? What did this cost me? Who’s raised the children? If we had the right to work and the right to equal pay, if we had women’s rights and we could do all those things that men got to do and we didn’t, our lives would be better and we would feel better about it. In fact, now, women are saying, I don’t want to have to work, you know. I don’t want to leave my baby at the babysitters. They do that because they feel like it’s necessary, but it’s not. They’re raising employees for profit. We don’t have to give them our babies. We will have to suffer some financial compromise. All the new trends and new toys. Advertising has convinced us that if we don’t provide those things to our family, we are failing.

[My husband] has struggled with this new lifestyle. He’s a professional man. He’s very intelligent. He was suffering healthwise. Doing that for so many years really broke his health. After we moved out here, he had a major heart attack. Then we had a fire and lost the home completely. It wasn’t a little change. It was like, wham, if life was going to hit you with the worst possible things, that’s what [our youngest child] walked through. But we never did anything without a lot of thought and prayer and felt like there was a reason when we did it, why all of this had happened. And I told him, someday you’ll have incredible campfire stories to tell. I tell him, I know so many people who are so specialized in some particular field of life, but the circumstances could change just a little bit and they are useless. Then they have to specialize in something else again. And they could never find water or generate their own power or probably even build a campfire.

Our electricity is only what we get from solar. We have water because it rains, which is supplied to the house from our cistern. When we moved out here, we had a little security blanket, but it went real quick, between the fire and the medical. It was down to nothing real quick. But I feel like -- I don’t know if you’re familiar with experiential learning -- it’s learning through metaphor, basically. I guess I see my life as some kind of experiential initiative that I’m supposed to do and learn and grow from, as opposed to having value judgment whether this is good or this is bad, defeat or success. The fire was a learning experience and also a liberating experience. It wasn’t necessarily bad. People say, god, your stuff burned up, and I say, yeah, and I felt amazingly detached from the pain of it. I didn’t know I was so detached.

There are universal life principles everywhere. I don’t like a lot of what I’ve seen in the church, and I don’t like hardly any of how I’ve seen Christianity practiced, but when I think of wisdom, when I think of love, when I think of a role model, certainly when I think of needing help, I immediately am drawn to Christ. In that way, I think I’m a real strong Christian. On the other hand, I probably don’t fit most Christian circles. I’m too mystical. I’ve been called a witch as often as I’ve been called a Christian, because I really am into herbal healing and even psychic gifts, prophetic dreams, things that are hard to put into little denominations. I don’t need a traditional, organized church. The reason I started experimenting with drugs is because of a real mystical experience I had. I tried to talk to people in the church about it, and they just -- well, they said you have to be careful because you can be seduced by deceiving spirits and devils -- and I’m thinking, no, there was nothing devilish about this -- this was the most Godly thing I have ever experienced.

That’s why I did acid, and why I like pot. I’m not a pothead, but I do like that sense of all of a sudden being able to look at things and see it for what it is instead of just this busy consciousness we get into sometimes. I like the heightened sense of color because when I have this whole mystical experience, all of a sudden I realize that everything around me is much more intense than I had realized. And that’s the same thing that happens to me on pot. I’ll look around and think, oh my god, the trees are glowing and I had not even noticed. Five minutes ago I didn’t notice that glow.

Now I think people who don’t know that glow is there need to be reminded somehow. It would be nice if we could all be in such a spiritual state of mind that we could see the essence all the time. Or at least, once in awhile. But we don’t. We could take a much lighter view of circumstances in our lives and laugh at it. My attraction to drugs was always for very spiritual reasons and looking for something that had bigger connections than what I once realized, the universal connectedness of all things. That came to me on acid.

The structured church thing just fits with the manufacturing of employee drones. Mystical experiences don’t. All of that [corporate world] looks pretty silly in the light of “what will it profit you if you lose your own soul?”, you know? And I think there are a lot of us who felt our souls kind of being stolen a little at a time. The real key to it is this kind of mystical life, operating in such a way that it guides you through that without being totally stuck in it. The quest [is] ... not to get where everything is mystical, anymore than to get to where everything is practical. But to where you can move in and out of those and eventually braid them in such a way that there isn’t any practical without the mystical and no mystical without the practical, and you’re an expert at combining those forces.

#40

2007-08-27T06:00:00.001-07:00

Subject was interviewed at a rural residence near his land. Born 1950 in Wichita KS. Then at age 6, in AR

The combination of being in Arkansas and being from a middle-class family with a self-employed father and a semi-farm situation sort of insulated us from the ‘60s, so it hit me a little late. I suppose, probably in college in connection with ROTC, really, where at some point along in there ROTC became emblematic of the military and Vietnam and the establishment. At that time, the University of Arkansas was a land grant college and you had to do your two years of ROTC so all males got it for two years, at that time. You had a choice of Army or Air Force at the U of A. Mine was Army, I guess because I didn’t have good enough eyes to fly. I guess that’s what I decided. I didn’t decide much at that time. I just went along. Following my nose.

I always knew I would go to college. I was fairly good in school and my parents promoted education, which was fine with me. Now, I stayed in ROTC to stay in college, because after two years you didn’t have to be in ROTC. But along about that time you could have a low draft number and go to Vietnam and interrupt your education. But if you stayed in ROTC, you could defer that and finish your education. So that looked like a good enough idea to me, so I stayed in.

I was mostly oblivious of the issue [of war protests], in spite of ROTC. AR was fairly insulated even for more up to date people than myself. For example, we kept hearing that -- on the one day a week when we would march out on the quad, or whatever, that we were going to be protested -- well, the protests always tended to be four or five students who sat in little circles and talked to each other. It was vastly disappointing because then we didn’t get interrupted from marching, which was a real pain. So it wasn’t the sort of thing that jumped in front of your consciousness like it did at a lot of major universities. I was largely oblivious,, quite content to believe that those older and wiser than I were actually wiser. It wasn’t until later that I started maybe questioning what my contemporaries did earlier.

It took awhile. I was out of school and in my first job. Like ‘74. After going through four years of ROTC, you have a military commitment. But by that time you’re an officer, so I was looking for a commitment as an officer. But I wanted my master’s, plus that kept me out of Vietnam longer. So I went ahead and got my master’s, and by that time, Vietnam was winding down. I guess I was taking in information during those last couple of years, because I was listening to what was going on in Vietnam and definitely did not want to go there.

By that time, in one of the strange bits of the way societies work, the warrior class was shrinking, I guess might be kind of the generic way to say it, and they didn’t want half hearted warriors taking up the good slots. It was the only war we had, and there were plenty of what they called ‘regular army’ people --those who are career path, that wanted to be over there. So I got the opportunity to get out early, not go there, not go anywhere, really. Get out early into the inactive reserves just because of the way it was winding down and the machinery was running vast numbers of people into it and there wasn’t a place for them to go. So that all worked out very nicely for me.

But somewhere along in there, I guess the information I was taking in finally got processed. Sort of belatedly I started thinking about what was going on here. I got my head up a little bit once I was out of school. About 22 or 23, then I discovered I had a lot of information I had been taking in, and I just felt, I don’t know, unwilling, or unable to decide I had an opinion about it. I’ve always been distrustful of forming opinions too soon.

Part of the popular media was advising me to be outraged, you know, that part which you might say my parents would be listening to. So I naturally assumed I was not outraged and that there must be something good about it. But it didn’t really connect with me very much. I didn’t feel a great need to rail against my parents, who I basically got along well with. The establishment, since I was middle class, was taking care of my creature needs and seemed to provide a path for my life. It wasn’t like you were facing a depression or something. So it was kind of an academic thing. Plenty of friends in high school and college were smoking pot and using some various other drugs, but it didn’t really attract me because they were using it basically like, say, I like alcohol. Sort of as a way to be different and I guess I was happy the way I was. And so I was only mildly curious as to what the drug culture was.

It wasn’t until my early 20s that I got any kind of curiosity that would lead me to find those people who considered themselves in the drug culture. Before that, if they wanted to come into my world -- I guess I got interested in oriental religions a little bit, psychology a little bit, that sort of thing, wondering how people thought and why they did the things they did. Not like as a college study, just as a personal interest. So I got interested in reading about oriental religions and practices and that sort of thing, and that led me over a little bit, because another one of the areas -- at the time, I was very idealistic about just about everything, so I assumed that we knew better how to incorporate sex into our lives and how to experiment and find our own way in those areas, we meaning our generation.

Whereas in school I hadn’t experimented sexually, once I was out this began to look pretty fascinating. It was definitely all going into my head as possibilities Those who blaze a trail make it easier for the rest to choose what part of the trail we want to follow. I read about the eastern religions and as much was possible in the dreadfully white bread areas where I was living, tried to find those people and be around them some. But I guess kind of to my surprise, I found that, say, orthodox or practicing Buddhism was not any more attractive to me than practicing Catholicism. Or any of the others. I was finding out that in my own way I was an independent thinker, but not in a way that held up well at cocktail conversations. I didn’t really feel like I was ready to convert someone else to my way of thinking, much less badger them or expound on it, although I always felt like I was going to sometime. Haven’t got around to it yet, but -- pretty soon.

I began to pick and choose among everything about what was my track, since my track at that time was very focused around having a job, being able to accumulate enough money to drive out West and go camping, things like that. There was only so much of it I could incorporate into that framework, as opposed to, say, running off for weeks or months at a time to go experiment here or there. So that limited how much of that I could incorporate.

I was on the farm for the six years of my college life, very much a part of the farm there, at least, sort of the Arkansas hill farm/ranch sort of life. Not to be confused with say, Illinois farm country or something. The West was part of my ideal. The West was God’s country. West the right direction. East was the old place. West was the new place. We’re talking the Rockies, the Cascades, kind of scene. Big mountains, clean water. Tall trees. Space. Space to grow. And then, just a fascination with the awesome aspect of nature. I gravitated toward the biggest mountains, the biggest trees, the bluest water. You’d pack in the Rockies, pack in the Cascades, find the Oregon coast, that sort of thing.

My first exposure to any drugs was when was in my mid-twenties, well into my first job, which was mostly just curiosity. That was pot only at that time. I didn’t see that it fit into my life much, which was a personal kind of thing for me. I didn’t like being drunk. My experiences of being drunk weren’t particularly fun. Getting high didn’t make me as ill as getting drunk, but it put me out of control, and I didn’t like that. It wasn’t what I was comfortable with.

It was years later when I relaxed enough to enjoy and appreciate that aspect of it. I was trying to fit the world into my control at that time. I thought I had the world by the tail. Internally, in terms of ‘60s culture, the distillation hadn’t happened yet. The chaff was still in there. I saw so much of the chaff. I’m going, what are you trying to prove? Or , don’t talk so loud or get in my face quite so much. You’re working too hard at this. If you’ve got the answer, you know, it seems that you’d be quiet and not pushy and make me come to you. So it took awhile for the chaff to come out.

The attitudes towards sex, on the other hand, I thought had more promise. That appealed to my idealism. That sex did not have to be the way our parents did it, or the way any particular other group did it and coped with it. That since I had the world by the tail, I was competent to figure out an all new way to live life and do it better. In practical application, coming from where I did, to have sex before marriage was enough of a practical application right there. To feel that you could have a relationship that was a loving relationship, that you had more than one of in a year, was another step beyond that. So just in that sense, that was a leap for me.

I was fascinated by communes, by the possibility that a marriage could involve three people. I couldn’t see much practical way once you got past four, but it seemed like three might work. In spite of absolutely no personal experience to support that, I held onto that for the longest time, either in my own experience or in anybody else I ever observed, it seemed like a good idealistic ‘60s kind of thing.

It was an ideal, generally, in my experience, to less success, which did not affect my feeling that the ideal was sound. It was just the evidence I had been able to run across hadn’t made it yet. Of course, I put a different criteria for success. It was pretty high standards for happiness and harmony. That sort of thing was equated with success at that time. You were pretty much supposed to be happy 24 hours a day, as far as I was concerned. Tough to do that any time.

My two experiences with one night stands left me feeling like I had been dishonest or at least had not really taken the feelings and situation of the other person into account. At least, in a way that would make me feel good. Whether that’s what they were feeling, or if that’s a carryover of me not being totally ‘60s -- I don’t know.

I think partly the rude shocks that life brings along, when it reminds you that you’re just a little part of it, and that control is an illusion -- when you’re young, you can preserve it a little better, because you have more experience with self-imposed deception than you do later on when it all starts to be familiar. Probably, when I got divorced, was when I figured out that I couldn’t deny that I didn’t really have this thing figured out.

At one point we agreed to have lovers outside of the marriage, and tried that for less than two years and found that was too scary in spite of like, we can do this, we’re ‘60s folks. It still messed us up. Our first effort was with another couple. That was early on, when the marriage was working.

I was definitely affected by what I was taking in from the ‘60s -- all the years when I wasn’t acting any of it out. It was all going in. So when my time, on my own internal development came to do things, that was all inside. My possibilities were those that came with the ‘60s, and then when my time in my own way came to something, I knew there was free love, there was drugs, there was rock and roll -- all these things that were totally possible for me because there were really radical people who were doing them in such uncontrolled ways that anything I wanted to do was well within the bounds of possibility. I didn’t have to forge any new paths, due to my own sort-of ‘process it first and then do it’ approach. There was always somebody out in front of me, forging the new areas, marching against this, or demonstrating against that, or trying this substance or that substance. My possibilities were very large, I thought.

I think it’s wonderful that there are those radical people who do have to act out and rebel and live large and be extreme and climb on soap boxes. They do a wonderful service in forging new territory for the rest of us who don’t have an internal need to do that. We profit from their hard knocks.

Without the ‘60s, I probably would have tried to live the life my parents lived, but generations being what they are, it probably wouldn’t have fit and I could easily imagine being in one of those situations where you talk about lives of quiet desperation. Given who I am, I probably would not have made the large leap, or at least not soon enough, to save myself a lot of that desperation. Now I have a large set of possibilities to move through.

Making music and dancing joyfully were always things I thought would be particularly wonderful, although a way to do it did not come out of my childhood. I watched the media, other people, other musicians, other people who could dance -- I had to watch those things from the outside until it came time to make a place for it. I was still married when I decided I had to learn to dance. I went to an Arthur Murray’s, as a couple, which was a social experience unto itself. I don’t think that would be considered part of the ‘60s. I think we’re talking the ‘50s -- not the ‘40s, because I think then people did still dance. It was part of the culture. In the ‘50s, I think they were losing it, along with just about everything else they lost, in suburbia and all that. So you had to have Arthur Murray’s and that sort of thing to learn what is it you might have done as part of your life before. Very strange. Neither of us could tolerate it. It was extremely contrived and alcohol-dependent and with some very strange people teaching ballroom dancing, with a mirrored ball in strip shopping malls at five in the afternoon.

So that didn’t fit, but the need was still there. We kept looking and found the traditional dancing -- I was living in Little Rock at the time -- early ‘80s -- we looked in the paper. I went to one place they were dancing and put my nose in, and I distinctly remember what I saw, which saw a bunch of people who weren’t drunk, who were very joyfully dancing and did it without a mirrored ball and dark light. In fact, it looked just terribly normal. I thought, this is pretty great. [describes “Brigadoon” as an example.]

I didn’t get to this point all on my own. I grew up with my father telling stories about dancing when he was a boy, when they danced in the front room, literally pushed the furniture back and rolled up the carpet. In their German community, they did shadishes, waltzes, live music of course at that time. So I had that in the back of my mind trying to find expression. It sounded to great. He would reminisce about it.

My experience with disco, which I did because that was the way you met women and got to find sex, and that sort of thing -- I never felt like it was an expression of the joy. It touched on it but never really got there. There was too much other stuff going on. The thing that’s nice about traditional dancing is that it’s not complicated and you can get there. Folk dancing is for folks. Not professionals. I mean, on a scale of one to ten, with jitterbug and swing dancing being a ten, folk dancing is a one. It’s basically walking, hopefully in rhythm to the music, but not absolutely necessary. It’s that simple. And that’s why it felt accessible to me. I didn’t know that. I had it idealized from my father’s description. I didn’t have to deal with ‘could I do this’ or not. It was just something my father talked about and it sounded neat. But then I saw these people doing it and they were basically having a good time and I could tell by looking that I could sort of get by there. The first few times I was pretty embarrassed, but everybody else was smiling and laughing and didn’t seem to notice. I did have to kick myself to go, but I really thought I could do that.

It’s moved now to where for me dancing is making music. It is being part of the music. Musicians would be scornful of the term I use -- making music -- since that’s done by musicians. But for dancers, once you get into it, you’re definitely part of the music. So that’s just where you take it. But then, that happens when you do anything for ten years. No -- fourteen or fifteen. You know, time passes.

I think [our sense of civic responsibility] is in a degree different from that of some other generations. I think Al Capp maybe hit upon it in his comic strip of the time, where he was sort of making fun of ‘60s students and invented the student organization wildly indignant about nearly everything (SWINE). Sometimes cartoonists really hit on the kernel of what’s going on, in the same way that myths, legends, and scary stories do. Well, sure you should make fun of students wildly indignant about nearly everything, but that’s still telling you something, that it’s not students who are wildly apathetic about nearly everything, or students on a career track with nothing else in mind, or you name it anything else. There were those people out there opening possibilities by being wildly indignant, by experimenting, by being outrageous, by destroying theirs lives for periods of time, or maybe forever. Or by dying --

All the effects of those things on everyone else adds together in the world we have now. The whole world I’m living in has been changed by the ‘60s. If you look at what the ‘50s were, sort of the combination of the last gasp of an outmoded social system overlaid with an unreal experiment in all kinds of things --- the last gasp of male chauvinism and all that goes with that, world domination by the standards of WWII -- the world desperately needed the ‘60s. With all we’ve done to the world -- even with the ‘60s -- it pales in comparison to what we would have done to the world without the ‘60s. The military industrial complex, the power structure, the press -- the weak press, we didn’t know it was weak at the time, but by the standards of nowadays, we know the non-questioning or not questioning anything, whether its liaisons of the president in the white house, or the machinations of the head of the FBI, you name it -- we didn’t question it. Wise people, the same ones who almost led me to Vietnam, wise people were going to handle things. A patriarchal society, there. The ‘60s started the questioning of that, and with the questioning comes the end. Unless we blow it. We’ve got a chance.

They went to great efforts to preserve that. It’s now disrupted. It’s a state of affairs that you recede to through lack of effort, lack of energy. Inertia brings you that. It’s like gravity. As you get more tired, gravity is still there. It’ll push you right back down. Someone once said, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance -- something like that.

We’ve got a chance. You could say we made our chance. Pretty soon it’s going to be how well we hand it off. That’s a scary thought.

We’re extremely impatient. We knew we were the smartest people who ever came along. Consequently we should be in there at 18. We could invent new ways to live, we could have multi-partner marriages -- surely we could run the country. But by the standards of the previous generation, it’s just now getting to be our turn. Clinton and Gore are considered young.

In my case, the dancing is an expression of idealism. People who are happy, people who have community, people who have village that I’ve never been able to experience in the rest of life -- people who like to do that are sometimes separated geographically but [come together to dance] have such a basic expression, a basic human expression in terms of movement, joy, music, something that touches on such a basic human chord, it keys into all that idealism. And actually, the whole resurgence of traditional folk dancing started in the ‘60s, I just missed. Like everything else, I caught up to it later. The resurgence started on the campuses during the ‘60s.

Long-haired girls in hip huggers. Volkswagens. That sort of mobile, we-don’t-have-to ask somebody permission kind of thing. That’s still part of our times. Of course, the media has taken this and corrupted it to where it’s all around you all the time. I quit watching network television a long time ago. The last I remember of it -- I reacted against the commercials. The price of the entertainment was too high, to be periodically have something that you don’t want. I’m extremely rigid in that I keep trying to control what comes into my head. Commercials -- I had no control over them. There were right there and you had to listen to them. Even if you turned the sound off, the mute button is one of the better inventions of all time -- but it’s still flickering. You’re talking to someone and you keep going like this -- (looking back and forth)

Health food. Organic farming. Very much an outgrowth of the ‘60s. Pretty successful, on the scale of things that came out of the ‘60s. Continuing to grow. As we die and they figure out what we’re dying from, it may get more successful yet. It generally takes a generation or two to know. Some of the answers take awhile. It would be ironic if we all die from DDT residue or too much sugar or something instead of from pot or LSD or cocaine or something. Or more likely even than that, we’ll die from rayon fibers, or something else that we have no idea about.

[As far as the future goes] Part of the time I feel like the genie is out of the bottle and you won’t get it back in. That’s the optimistic side. The other side is that there’s always inertia. You get older, more tired, you lose your idealism. We didn’t do the best job of parenting as a generation. I’m not sure how well we handed it off. That’s the other side. It seems to me, for some reason or another, I have no idea what it was -- but looking at it, there was a lot of low energy, non-involvement parenting going on, among our generation. And I don’t mean because we were too busy making communes or anything like that. I mean, we went out and got jobs and decided to be middle class and we put our kids in daycare. You could say we began to look like ‘them’ if you wanted to. I saw ‘we decided’ -- we probably didn’t decide. We probably just decided we wanted what we wanted and let everything else take the course. You could be a parttime parent instead of being like our grandparents generation, where you did have a spouse at home -- we didn’t quite make it to full time dad, we just got rid of full time mom -- and I really feel one of [a parent’s] job is to pass your culture along. If you pass along a crappy culture, you deserve it. But if you don’t pass along anything, all you’ve done is abdicate. That is on the pessimistic side.

With all those ideals we had, who knows, maybe if we tried to pass them along, there are those who say that generations have to differ. [Interviewer comments about her kids not going as far as she’d like w/ education] Maybe -- if you think about education more in the traditional earmarks of success, we should lighten up on that. The world is not really hurting for more widgets right now. It doesn’t really need a faster growing species of corn, in spite of people who think that’s the answer to everything. Maybe it doesn’t need more concert pianists. Maybe these aren’t the earmarks for success in the world we’re looking at . We don’t have to populate the earth anymore.

If you chose to hide, say, for example, hide from your children the fact that you smoke pot, that’s just one easily identifiable thing to talk about that you’ve hidden from your children, that you haven’t shared with your children. It’s just the tip of the iceberg, I think. You can’t just hide one thing like that from your kids.

#23

2007-08-19T09:32:00.000-07:00

Subject D and I sat in the small, paper-strewn office of her home, just off her large work room where she conducts her business.

When I was 12 or 13, my uncle was in the Vietnam war, and my mother was vehemently opposed. She began to say things like -- I had two younger brothers -- if this crap is still going on when they get to be draft age, I’m moving to Canada. She was serious. The irony of it is that she worked -- until she retired -- at Offit Air Force Base. She said there is so much bullshit going on you wouldn’t believe it. She said, I won’t have my children be part of this. So I was aware at that level. I heard her talk a lot and I watched TV quite a bit. I began to see what was occurring. And then there was the music – the Beatles, Rolling Stone, Woodstock and all that. I began to consciously choose a lifestyle then. I graduated high school in 1970, experimented with various mind altering substances -- although I didn’t try anything until I was out of high school. In fact I had a pretty strong opinion that it was the wrong thing to do. My father was alcoholic, and I was concerned about control.

After high school, I began to work immediately, got my own apartment, and met a man who became my first husband. We lived together in Iowa where he was going to school, and I became more aware of not only the political aspect of what was happening in our country, but I was involved in a whole lifestyle change. We lived together -- we partied, experimented with different drugs -- and all that for me was pretty spiritual. Like with LSD, I made sure the situation was just right. I was pretty controlled in my use of stuff -- I was a control freak in that sense. I wouldn’t put myself in a vulnerable position. I wouldn’t go out in public. I didn’t do a lot of LSD. I smoked a lot of pot. Everywhere you went, people were smoking pot. I really feel like it was very mind opening. It altered our consciousness to the point where we were able -- we were already seeing a different point of view, but it really propelled us into an expansion.

My first husband and I both had real mainstream jobs. I worked for attorneys, and he was an accountant. We were living two lives, mainstream jobs, then we were with the counterculture in the evenings and weekends. I got introduced to yoga then. It would be accurate to say, in retrospect, that the use of the mind expanding drugs gave me a different point of view of the world, and therefore I began to choose a more alternative lifestyle, got involved in yoga, changed my diet. I decided I didn’t want to be in a real stressed out lifestyle, totally jerked around by being employed by somebody else, etc. Made a conscious choice not to have kids at that time. And actually lived ten years, throughout my 20s, with that being my lifestyle. And then we split up, exactly on my 30th birthday. We had been growing in different directions, and made a mutual choice to divorce. I had already met S.

At that point, I knew that I had swung far left, and I knew that wasn’t working exactly. And I didn’t want to go all the way back to the right, so I’ve spent the last ten or fifteen years trying to find the balance between the two, realizing that the way to make change is to work on myself and have as much integrity and honesty as I can. If I detach and depart from society, what effect? None, as far as I can tell. So I’ve settled now into a point of view that the best contribution I can give is to continue to do my own internal personal growth. But then my work is very much in the world, working with people -- through the yoga. I’m counseling, too. I don’t have a technical counseling degree, but it becomes very much counseling and encouraging people to not be afraid to change and take a look at their strengths, as well as what we consider our challenges.

And just now are we coming to terms with the financial end of things. We’ve lived very scantily over the last ten years, and when the kids were little it was ok, but now we’re making some major shifts, so that we can deal with what we need to do. It’s ok. About five years ago I knew -- actually, even when the kids were still little – that the lifestyle -- we had to make a strong decision, either go all the way into the woods, or get with the program. S was not of that mind. He rode the fence for quite awhile, couldn’t come to terms with how to make peace with all that. We’ve had several conversations -- I remember saying to him one day that I was choosing a lifestyle that was different from what we’d been doing. I know what I want and I no longer feel guilty, because there was all that guilt piled up -- oh my god I’m selling out and all that crap. It was like, look, it’s going to take a certain amount of money to do this, and I said, we both had the benefits -- we had everything we needed and a lot of what we wanted, and our parents were there 100% for us in all those ways -- and then we shifted more, taking on yoga as a full time job. That’s how I make my money now. Yoga, reika, dreamweaving -- healing arts. I have slow financial times, and then good financial times.

Basic material comforts, and then M hit junior high school last year, and just activities -- N started riding horses two years ago -- a huge financial commitment. In fact, we had to stop for awhile because we just couldn’t keep going, and that really made me feel bad. It’s something she’s really good at, really natural at, and I want to be able to encourage and provide at that level. Being a good parent involves providing what’s necessary in our society, materially. And I believe part of that is installing an ethic to not be quite to consumer oriented. I encourage them to try different things.

In the last couple of years, I’ve been a cycle of really getting in there and looking at all the negative thinking. All of a sudden I’ll find myself in a spiral of negativity, and then I have to ask, how does that manifest around me? Then I explore, taking responsibility for my own negative thinking, realizing that negative thinking is nonproductive, non-life promoting, things that lead toward more destructive behavior. I really believe now, after looking at all this in myself and other people, that if we stay in a spiral of depressed or negative thinking, that’s exactly what makes us ill. There’s no doubt in my mind anymore. That negative thinking or depression leads to real strong downward emotions, and then all that hits the body like an impact at the cellular level, and then the body goes, well, ok, this is the message you’re giving me -- or the body becomes a direct reflection of all our thoughts and emotions.

The good news is, once you realize this, you can begin to change it. You change the patterns, the ways of relating. That’s what a lot of my work is now. You deal with the core issues that brought it on, and change it. In using myself as an example, feeling inadequate in whatever level as a parent/provider, knowing that I’m giving a lot of emotional support, but because I was unable on a material level to do all the things that I thought was important to do, then it made me feel inadequate. So I’ve been spending myself, using my energy in ways that are nonproductive. It caused a lot of worry. What I realize now -- and you read this in any of the self help books -- when you worry worry worry all your energy is sucked off in the worry and you’re not really focusing on what we need to be doing. And it makes me really understand what happens to people when they get in a depression cycle. It’s terrible. Somewhere there you see where you want to be, what you want to do, but to break out of it can be quite challenging.

Some kind of spiritual belief is necessary. It’s our connection. When I’m out of sorts, I feel disconnected, to the rest of life, basically. I feel disconnected from everyone else and what I’ll call my self, and now, when I realize I feel disconnected, I know there are things I can do to reestablish the memory of what it’s like being connected to God and life, and with that experience of connection, then I know that anything’s possible. I learned this through yoga. It has been the foundation for me, a path that has worked extremely well. I’ve had a lot of different teachers. At the beginning, I got a strong balance of the physical posturing as well as meditation. There was as much dogma in some of those practices as in any religion, and so I began to plow through the dogma to find the core of it. I’ve never had a guru. All my teachers have been hatha yoga teachers (posture) -- some meditation teachers. None of them ever presented themselves as a guru. I never put myself in that position. And then a lot of self study through reading, going to different workshops, bringing in information and utilizing it on my own.

Yoga is a science that has been adopted by a lot of different philosophies and religions. It’s its own practice, deriving from the Indus valley five or six thousand years ago, from what we can tell. There’s yoga in Tibet, in India -- when you get into reading about the lost years of Jesus, they all talk about Jesus knowing all these different practices. What they are, are practices of learning the energetics and the interactions between body, mind, and spirit.. We’ve got all the words for it in the West, and people are experiencing through yoga and meditation and acupuncture and eastern thought -- I think it’s good that it’s being brought into the western experience and western mind. If we really want to know it, we have to go back to the pure teachings. They are written down very clearly. There’s no dogma around the teachings. It’s the whole cause and effect teaching. Current books written, like The Holographic Universe -- all that is explained in those real old philosophies and ancient texts. It’s there. The language is a little different, but it basically says you have this relationship between what is manifest and not manifest aspects of energy, and you have different vibrational rates of energy, and out of that you have sound and light and color and dense material form and multiple realms of existence going on at once, and basically, it’s no big deal.

We’re in these physical bodies, and from the physical body’s point of view, things look a certain way. As we expand our consciousness or heighten our awareness, we begin to incorporate more spirit into our everyday lives and have a greater understanding of everything that’s going on. My passion is to be able to look at all these philosophies. There’s a thread that runs through them all. There’s no difference. There are a lot of different pathways to the same place. It’s just to allow each other to have the variances and nuances on how we’re here and not interfere with each other in a harmful way, to encourage each other to explore life and be our full potential.

With my daughters, I’ve found it extremely refreshing to be able to talk to them openly about sex, the pros and cons -- I ended up telling them both the other day that I feel it’s really awkward to talk to you about some of this, because on the one hand, sexuality is a very wonderful part of who we are, and when it’s in the right place with the right person it’s ecstatic, marvelous, but if it’s in the wrong place with the wrong person, it can be a terrible experience. It’s confusing now because in the media where sexuality is combined with advertising, with violence -- it’s totally mixed up with a lot of other things that it was never intended to be mixed up with. M especially -- she’s 13 ½ -- I said, you’ve got all these things out there saying to you be sexy, but you go to school and they say you can’t dress this way, you have to keep yourself, hold yourself in a certain attitude and energetics so that you have the right behavior, and I said, I know it’s a very mixed up message, a total tradeoff, so just talk to me. Same with drugs. When the opportunity is presented to you, come and talk to me some more, because we’ll do whatever we need to do so that you are making responsible choices that are right for you.

#38

2007-08-05T13:13:00.001-07:00

Subject talked in the office of one of his retail establishments. Born 1951, Missouri.

At the time, let’s face it – I was pretty young [in the 60s], and I was less concerned with my place in time than I was just with my place. I finished high school not really knowing what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn’t want to go to Vietnam. When I first registered for the draft, I registered as a conscientious objector. That never came to any kind of fruition because my college deferment superseded it. I can remember when I turned 18 and had to register. I went through a lot of turmoil knowing I was not going to go to Vietnam, and I didn’t know if that meant fleeing to Canada. I stayed in school until the lottery came out, and then I got a high number, so I really lucked out. Most of the middle class kids managed to stay out, one way or another, either by joining the reserves or getting a psychological deferment from a sympathetic psychiatrist. Not a lot of the guys I grew up with went to ‘Nam because most of them went to school. But then I met people after I started college who were getting back, and the reality of it struck home. That is when I did some protesting.

I got into pot my sophomore year in high school. I didn’t stop and identify it, but it was part of the culture I was moving toward, which was the counterculture. It was apparent in music, style, fashion, and pot was definitely a part of it. And even acid. I was able to get through high school and keep Bs and Cs without really participating too much; smart enough to figure out that system. It wasn’t like I was wild, running crazy, and abusive. I kept things under control. Before pot, I was drinking in junior high. My mother would like to have thought that everybody was a bad influence on me, but I have to confess it was the other way around. I just didn’t want to do things the way people wanted me to do them. Rebellion more than anything. I survived it all. I’ve come full circle to being a pretty moderate person, although even then, all these activities that I took part in, it may be ironic to say, I did it in moderation. If you’re 15, drinking taking acid stuff like that, you could say – where does moderation fit in? And yet I look at guys that really went over the edge. I worked all through high school, kept a job, put myself through college. Part of my rebellion was that when I finished high school, I was out the door. I didn’t want anything from my parents in terms of support because that would mean strings.

I did three years of college not really knowing what I was going to do, and after I got my high lottery number, I quit college. I was studying philosophy and religion primarily, and I realized I didn’t really want to go to school for that. A year later I went back to school and got a bachelor’s in science, an experimental program that included engineering courses, statistics, math, art courses, art history courses, and design (architecture).

So I started being a building contractor. I mean, I say being a building contractor. I started out painting porches. I had this background in design and structure, and that’s what I really wanted to do. That’s the main reason I moved to Fayetteville – the School of Architecture. But the work that I was doing was exactly the opposite of what I said about school, that I was never a student. Building was completely opposite. I mean, you could study that – you could study what it is to be a carpenter. But doing it is instant gratification, instant cause and effect. If you miss the head of the nail, the nail doesn’t go into the board. If you build something wrong, it falls apart. That always seemed to be the way I learned.
This is ironic, because I had studied philosophy. I mean, I was fascinated with philosophy and religion, but then, that was part of the ‘60s too, the existentialist stuff. I had a good friend who was very much involved in Hatha yoga and Swami Satchedenanda – a character who was an Indian businessman, smoked cigarettes and lived a life of desire. I had the opportunity to meet him and he was really cool. I liked the guy. This friend of mine was a monk in Swami Satch’s yoga movement, and I helped him. They got some property here. Somebody donated 350 acres to Swami Satch just outside Eureka Springs, by Hogscald Hollow. They also got the old schoolhouse up there. This friend of mine who was a monk got assigned to come here and develop this ashram. I worked with him for a few weeks, but it was an effort. I dug hanging out with him and I dug the yoga exercises. But sitting and meditating (whistles), boy, I never could do that. My mind – I was never able to turn off the chatter.

There was the back to the land thing, too, when we came to Arkansas. We bought some property out by Devil’s Den, and we were going to move there, and there was a community of people that we knew there. It was the whole apocalyptic vision, without any real specific prophesies involved. I must say that in some ways, although my lifestyle now has gotten very middle class, you would never know it probably to see how I live or what I do.
There is an interesting concept in my mind that still prevails and hearkens back to that time. I’ve observed that in the natural world, there is nothing that maintains continuous growth. There is always a process of growth, death, decay, and regeneration. In my naive mind, I look at everything our culture is promoting, and it appears to be based on continuous growth. Our whole economy is based on growth. So I still have in my mind somewhat of an apocalyptic vision that it just can’t go on. Now I’ve been saying that for 30 years, but I truly believe it.

On the other hand, now, because of the business I’m in and the people I’m exposed to, I see the people that adhere to this as a religious dogma, the Y2k’ers, and I’ve come full circle to realize that death is inevitable and if that’s the worst thing that can happen to us, well, so be it. Quite honestly, if the only people who survive some kind of major catastrophe are the wackos I’ve met who are really into this – they can have it. I don’t want to survive with them. These people with semi-automatic rifles that have hoarded grains and foods, totally paranoid, and yo-yos to begin with. They’re getting prepared.

I’m still trying to earn a living and I’m more successful now than I’ve ever been, and yet my means are so simple. I’m not extravagant. I spend my money on the things that give me the greatest pleasure, which are music and food and some travel. I don’t care about having a fancy car. I live more comfortably than I ever have but it’s not extravagant. I don’t want to make the buck at any cost. The way I handle my employees, I mean, when I train an employee, I tell them their first job is to help the customers. And the way to do that is to identify what their means are, what it is they need, and how much they can afford. Then plug them into the appropriate technology. If we don’t have it, I send them to the competition, somebody who does. Or if they are trying to buy something that you know is not really appropriate, but they’ve been sold this idea, then show them the alternatives, even if they’re cheaper. I feel like, in my heart, that’s the way it should be done. And now having been in business for quite awhile, I also believe that’s the best way to do business. Because you convey that ethic to people and they come back to you and they trust you. I’ve got to live with myself. Making money is a weird thing. I mean, the whole concept of being in retail, buying something for one price and selling it to somebody for more – it’s a little bit foreign to me. With carpentry, I was selling labor, skills and knowledge. To some degree, I think you still do that in retail, if you incorporate the ideals I was just talking about.

I think that a lot of things that were part of the counterculture and spawned in the ‘60s were things that were always part of the American motif. Repackaged, given different trim. Essentially, it was self-dependence, thinking for yourself, not being afraid to strike out into new ground. Each generation thinks they’re discovering it for the first time. And they are, in fact. But I guess that’s the value of history; we might look back and avoid some mistakes, although mistakes are just as important. Learn something from it and survive the mistakes. I may be a person who knows more from my mistakes than from successes. I expect things to go well, and if they do, I take them in and keep moving without relishing them. But when something doesn’t go well, that’s when I tend to analyze more.

Part of my ‘60s consciousness was to be the Renaissance Man, being able to do everything, whether it be fix my car, build my house, and I was really into that, big time. It was part of the back to the land thing. That fit in well with my psyche. It’s one of the reasons it has taken me four years to do a room addition on my house. Because, oh, I can do that – well, when are you going to do it? – well, I’ll do it, but I’ve got these other things I have to do first. Now I’m coming to the realization, just with maturity, that time is not a bottomless jar.

We heated with wood exclusively in an old 1920s house that had a central chimney with flues hooked up from all the rooms, so we had a wood cook stove and a wood heat stove. My wife did most of the gardening, and we had goats which we raised for butchering. I did the slaughtering, although that was pushing the envelope for me. I had never really done that and I wasn’t into doing it. The times that I did it, actually rendering the meat, skinning, none of that bothered me. But it was that instant of pulling the trigger, seeing the animal alive and then dead, that had a real profound affect on me. I was bound and determined to do it, as long as I was eating meat. I felt I should be willing to take responsibility for killing the animal. Even now, I like to eat meat but I don’t like to hunt, so I’ve gotten around that by knowing people who are obsessed with hunting. They just want to hunt, and they’ve got ricks of deer meat put up that they’re never going to eat, and I just get deer meat from them. And I’m not down on hunters, but it’s a whole other mentality. It’s not one that appeals to me.

I’ve reached this level of comfort that works just fine for me and quite honestly, it’s more important to me to have the music thing be part of my life than to earn any more money. I do have this missionary zeal about jazz. I feel like I’m not politically informed, although I will align myself with certain issues. I think recycling is good, using less is important. In my heart I’m convinced that there’s enough in this world to go around and everybody could be pretty comfortable, but it’s just not going around. I think – this may be a utopian vision, but not necessarily – the wealth of the world is so unevenly distributed and so exploited and so wasted. That disturbs me. Yet I’m not someone who will march on city hall to try to get a better recycling program. I will go to the merchants within my immediate influence and get a recycling program going for this shopping center. I’ve done that. Particularly when I can piggy-back it with something that hits deep in everyone’s consciousness. For example, I got a cardboard thing going here when the city changed over their garbage policy. You had to buy a container and you were charged by how many times they emptied it. I knew that for 95% of the merchants in this area, 80% of their garbage was cardboard. Cardboard is not garbage. It’s traded on the commodities market. So all I had to do was find some way to contain it and somebody who wanted it, and I could go the merchants and say, look, this is not going to cost you anything. This is going to save you money. You’re not going to have to buy as big a waste container and have the city come put this in the landfill, which they’ve screwed up on anyway. So those things, when they’re right there in front of me, I can get pretty involved.

I think that ultimately, almost everything that people do – almost everything that everybody does – is for themselves. It’s good if in your life you can identify that and accept it, and then realize that the best way to make yourself happy is to make the people around you happy. Maybe that comes off as being generous. But I still feel that most of our drives and ambitions have to do with our own survival and well-being.

Music has always been an underlying element in my life. I used to play the piano when I was very young, but again, my inability to stay focused and disciplined and to glean from a teacher and books and what not led me astray. That probably will always be one of my regrets. My mother tried to get me to study piano when I was young, and I didn’t. I love music. I’ve approached the abyss several times, thinking, OK, maybe I’ll study it again, but then realize that it’s a really formidable thing. I feel like my ears are way ahead of my discipline and skills, and the demands I would put on myself – it’s an avoidance thing. Rather than approach and fail and not achieve the level I want, I just have never made the commitment to be a musician. I’ve always been around musicians, music, and in some ways, I have some friends who have said to me, that I shouldn’t regret it because quite probably through my work as a [radio jazz show] producer, I’m bringing more music to more people doing what I’m doing than I would if I was a musician. When they say that, it’s like, you know, they’re right. In that respect, there is a lot of gratification.

I think music and the business of music are a good metaphor for a lot of things in life and a lot of things that have to do with the ‘60s: The real essence of what we believe in or love or seek is often lost by the pursuit of it. In music, the business of music is probably one of the most bullshit-wrought professions anybody can be in. It’s really just a lot of crap. It has absolutely nothing to do with the music. But you have to go through it to get there. I think the 60s in a lot of ways is like that too. There was a lot of bullshit. I look back at the ideals that I had and some of the bullshit I was involved in that was counterproductive to those ideals, to where those ideals would ultimately lead you. I think the same is true with religion, anything that becomes organized, quantified, turned into a bureaucracy, or a committee. It immediately starts diluting the essence of it. The purity of anything, I think, happens within a person’s own experience, whether it be music or religion.

Music is more than comfort. Sometimes it’s a discomfort. It’s probably the closest thing I’ve come to that has, like religious significance to me. Absolutely. It also reflects back on the skills that I have and the skills that I don’t have, which have to do with comprehension. There is a level of comprehension that I feel through the sequencing of certain notes that create certain chords, which create certain chord changes. That level of experience has more meaning to me than words. It’s cosmic. It’s beyond understanding.

I can tell the difference in my comprehension of music and how the music moves me, how it works mechanically, and that’s another level of joy, when you can understand relationships and things like that, on that level. Part of the joy that people get out of music is the familiarity, their recognizing it, being comfortable with it. That’s popular music. What sets jazz apart is that which is unfamiliar, that which leads you to new levels of appreciation. It pushes you to the edge and you go, “What is that? That’s not comfortable.” And then you listen to it again, recognize it, then listen again, and you see some inner beauty in it, and then it’s part of your repertoire, part of your understanding.

It’s tied in to spirituality, but even into politics. To me, music is so political. It’s such a reflection of culture and what people are thinking. Talk about Jung and analyzing people’s dreams. Just look at what people listen to. Look at the music that really means something to them, granted it might not always be a real straightforward connection in terms of – there might be seemingly opposite personalities attracted to the same kind of music. But I still think that it’s very political. In fact, I know it is. There’s a musician in Brazil who played instrumental music during one of the particularly right wing regimes in Brazil. His music was outlawed. There were no words. And yet the government outlawed his music. This guy – Hermeto Pasqual – they decided his music was too politically radical even though there were no words. The fact that they felt they had to outlaw his music is quite a statement, quite a testimony to the importance of his music. I mean, what could make you want to hear it more than to find that out?

#29

2007-07-29T05:30:00.000-07:00

K-- spoke with me between grocery shopping and making connections with her sixteen-year-old daughter. Born 1944, Boston area.

My father was professor. When I was in college, after I graduated, I went to Berkeley, and bam! I had grown up with the understanding that when you finished high school, you went to college. I didn’t know what I was doing. After two years, I questioned what I was doing seriously, but then I thought, well, I’m halfway through, I might as well finish, so I did. I had a roommate who had finished six months earlier and went to finish up at Stanford, and she was out there, living at Berkeley, so that’s where I headed the day I graduated.

I found a whole different world -- it was ‘66. The free speech movement had been underway for a year -- it was pretty interesting. My friend and roommate got involved with the Communist party - she was real political so I was becoming familiar with what was going on real fast. What with barricades in the streets and the army there, holding it under curfew for awhile, it was pretty intense, and I got a dose of what front line politics could erupt into. I felt real confused by it, torn in a couple of different directions, one to be out there and march in the streets, but at the same time I knew that those people were getting dragged off to Santa Rosa prison, having to lay on the pavement face down in the hot sun all day -- it didn’t matter how old they were. That was pretty scary.

And at the same time, I started reading books that were more spiritually oriented and being outdoors, started smoking marijuana. So a lot of things were starting to open in my brain, new places I’d never been before. In that confused state, Ram Dass came to town, right in the middle of -- the place was under siege -- and he showed up and spoke at the high school, and said some things that made my choice clear. I found that I couldn’t participate in the confrontational situation, that that wasn’t the path -- it didn’t seem right to me to be doing that. There were ways to participate but to actually get out there and confront the police in the streets felt like it was just creating more conflict.

I was working at a business I had started there. I had started working at a copy service first, Xerox copy services which was pretty new then, and the man who owned it had a side business using the machines doing library reference research for a lot of laboratories and things, R&D labs. At some point the next year, he decided to leave town -- so I bought the business from him and did that for a number of years. That was kind of fun, the library research aspect of it. I applied to grad school at Berkeley and got into library science, took a few courses -- I didn’t really want the degree -- I just wanted the information to help me do what I was doing.

I had access to all the libraries there -- the library system there is pretty amazing. I had access to all the stacks. Basically, I was locating material for people. R&D labs in medicine, physics, NASA -- all kinds of sciences around -- the Bay area was incredibly loaded with that kind of stuff. Their librarians would send requests for material -- and my business was literally right across the street from the campus -- that was fun. To locate it, especially when things were some obscure paper from someone in Poland, and the paper was in Polish -- I had to learn to transliterate the alphabet and figure things out.

Then, I figured out I didn’t have to be in Berkeley to do that. I could live out in the country, come to town once a week -- so I started to move out. I wanted to get out to the country, that back to the land kind of feeling. I wanted something more quiet. I moved out in ‘70 -- it wasn’t as intense by then in the city. A country life appealed to me -- all my summers had been spent in rural Wisconsin, where my family came from.

I had been involved in women’s consciousness raising groups at Berkeley. That was not an issue thing, but more a personal pursuit.

When I first moved out, I moved to Sonoma County -- before I met H -- I lived there until late ‘72, and then briefly moved back to town and started apprenticing with a man there who was doing commercial plumbing. I began to learn the plumbing trade. Then in ‘73, I met H--, moved north, did some plumbing jobs -- I plumbed the fire department.

I loved living primitively. It was real nice. Even now sometimes I think about it -- I’ve gotten used to air conditioning and electricity. When we moved to Arkansas, we lived for a long time without electricity or plumbing. When we bought a house in ‘80, it was really different -- there was electricity in the house. I knew there was electricity in the house, it was almost like I could feel it or sense it or something. Having lived for ten years without it -- it was real strange. It wasn’t something you could hear -- but I could feel it. It passed eventually, I got used to it. Having it was nice, turning lights on.

All those years out of the mainstream I was doing something different because I liked it better. It was an adventure, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I gained that knowledge that we can survive, and I could do it again if I had to. We could certainly all get along with a whole lot less and still be happy. A lot of peace, and yet there was always this little tickling --- I remember sitting on the hill in front of our cabin in California overlooking the valley, and thinking, jeez, this is nice, and there would be this little voice saying, yeah, but what else, what next? There’s a world going on out there -- I never felt like I’d be there until I was 80 years old. I didn’t know what would come next, but somehow I just didn’t feel like it would go on forever.

I’ve never had a career -- I’m not working right now. I’ve worked as a secretary, done a lot of waitressing over the years. I’ve been involved in natural foods on and off a lot -- my whole diet started to change when I was in San Francisco. I started paying attention to what I was eating. I didn’t eat meat for a long time, but it wasn’t a religious thing.

As a parent, I tend to wait until she asks. I haven’t told her about drugs yet -- she hasn’t asked. I’ve talked to her about it in terms of her making wise choices, but she’s never turned it around and asked, did you ever? Until she does, I don’t think I’ll bring it up. We talk about smoking -- she knows I smoked cigarettes. She wants to get our reaction before she does something, but sometimes I think she’s already done it. I know she’s already smoked. Just the other day she was asking about drugs -- I said, well, I guess I’d be a little disappointed because I think you know better. When I was growing up, we didn’t know as much about how harmful it could be -- and she said, you wouldn’t be angry, ground me, put me in Charter [a treatment facility]? And I said, baby are you kidding? Give me a break. Then she said, well, I couldn’t smoke at home, could I? And I said, no. I try to be honest with her.

Both of us have quit -- I had no choice -- I got pneumonia. I smoked cigarettes from the time I was 15 until I discovered marijuana. Then I developed a kind of chronic bronchitis. Whenever I’d get a cold, bam, it would go to my lungs, and I would always have these horrible chest infection things. But I kept smoking marijuana until around ‘76, when I got pneumonia real bad, ended up in the hospital with an IV in my arm -- they didn’t tell me this, but H said for awhile they didn’t know. I mean, I was in the cabin with a fever of 103 for three days, dehydrating real bad -- anyway, while I was there in my delirium, I thought, oh, smoking -- this is not good. I got the message, thank you very much. I quit. That was a lot of years -- I smoked a lot.

I think we’ve made a difference, but I don’t know if it’s all real great. I think a lot of change for the good has resulted, particularly in environmental issues. That battle, that consciousness has changed. In general tolerance. There’s still a long way to go. It’s a process. But we started the process with an intensity that has kept it alive.

The whole drug thing was kind of negative. It was so much easier then, and it wasn’t quite so scary. I think that the whole drug thing has gotten so out of hand and there are so many scary drugs out there, things that are real dangerous. I mean, the drugs we used -- marijuana, acid, mescaline -- I don’t think they were scary. Now all kinds of things can really destroy people. And I think that was a path we opened. And the use is different. Recreational.

The sexual thing -- I think it needed some breaking down. I was pretty promiscuous, a lot of sex without much else. It seemed just fine. We didn’t have AIDS to deal with, a major difference. From my perspective now, I’m not so sure. It’s not like I’ve become a prude or anything, but I question it more. I was in my 20s -- my daughter is 14. I’m hoping to hold her off for a few more years. She has not asked me about my sexual background. I’m not quite sure how I’ll talk to her about it. She’s quite sure she can do anything at her age that I did in my 20s. I’ve felt real lucky that she’s been at school with H. She likes having him there because he’s a popular teacher, and that helps. One more year, and then we’ll have to turn her loose at the high school. At her age, I was a pretty straight and narrow kid right through high school, played on the basketball team, went to my church youth group, did the whole honor student thing.

#47

2007-07-23T06:56:00.000-07:00

K talked in the living room of his home, looking out through large windows over a steep hillside caught up in a natural tangle of urban woodland. Born 1946, New York.

When I was 13 or 14, my older brother was involved in the rock and roll movement. He wrote Elvis Presley’s first big hit, and he did some records himself. So as his younger brother, I was sort of peripherally involved in that stuff, and it wasn’t exactly the flower power aspect, but it was counter the standard culture. He would come back to the house and Bobby Darin would be there, Sal Mineo would be there, and they’d be playing poker downstairs. They weren’t as cool as James Dean, but they were on that type of path. It showed me that there was something different out there from what the parents were telling you.

I was the first of the baby boomers. Nowadays they start smoking pot when they’re 13 or 14. In those days, we didn’t. I didn’t do it til I got to college, probably 18. And I don’t recall my brother doing it at all. They did do alcohol. I don’t remember them doing any drugs. Later on, they must have, because Sal Mineo died of a drug overdose and Bobby Darin did some too. Anyway, I don’t know that it did for me as much as I would have liked it to, in retrospect.

There was always this tension because I was the third of four children. My older brother and older sister didn’t do anything in the way of education, and both of my parents were very strong into getting your education, the college degree. There’s seven years of difference between my older sister and myself, so it’s almost like two sets of children. I always to a certain extent stayed the course by staying in college and getting my degree. I guess I felt that getting an education would benefit me, so to not get it just because they said to get it would have been self-destructive. However, I worked my way through college by playing in a rock and roll band. I started out at Cornell University, and I played a band there. And that, at that time, early ‘60s, that was pretty radical. Strangely enough, it didn’t bother my parents. Maybe they were more liberal than others. My mother was actually sort of happy that I was going into music because that’s what she was in. She was an opera singer.

I was pre-med when I went to school, because that’s what I thought I should be. That didn’t work out, and I decided I was going to do what I wanted to do. Still within an educational venue, but I was going to do it.

At Cornell, we did marches for individual freedom in general – the right to speak your mind on whatever you wanted to speak your mind on, not be censured in certain areas from saying things. Still, at that point in time, you couldn’t go to the dean or sit in the dean’s office or do a protest or something like that and talk about things, except according to their agenda. So it was fairly tight. Myself and some of the people I hung out with – we protested things we felt affected our personal freedom, freedom to move around, freedom to speak, or whatever.

And when I moved to Illinois in ‘66 and went to school there, I had changed totally. I went into creative writing. That was more a personal expression. I was still doing the college thing, but doing it in a way I wanted to do it. And it’s like – in the ‘50s there were beatniks and stuff doing all sorts of different things, but I mean, for our generation, we were the first who started experimenting with these various means of self expression, drugs, whatever you want to call them. We didn’t take what would now seem to be giant steps. Then, even just smoking marijuana seemed like a real giant step.

I was probably a little bit slower to develop. I was in Washington D. C. two or three times. I was there for the Martin Luther King rally, the march of Washington. And I was there a couple of times for various types of protest against the war, and I remember, we marched in the streets toward the White House, and the police started throwing tear gas. I was at the very end of that, so I didn’t get affected that greatly. It stunk, but I didn’t get that much because I was further removed in the area I was marching in from the area where the tear gas was being thrown. We just scattered. There was nobody who rushed the police, nobody was throwing rocks – it wasn’t violent. All the ones I was part of were like that. It was more of a moral statement.

If you had to draw a journey, I would say it started out as an individual expression, but then there were certain things that seemed like it was more than an individual expression. It was more like a national expression. We were doing it as individuals, but it seemed like there was this moral imperative out there that had to be changed.

I don’t think that I was outraged per se. I wasn’t happy with things. I felt more frustration than anything. It was like, here we are exposing this great truth, and you’re not listening. I’m not a violent person. I would never have retaliated. I never felt that. That’s one of the reasons I went to the Martin Luther King rally, because I felt so strongly about the approach he was taking. Here’s a guy who was getting jailed and getting rocks thrown at him and he didn’t retaliate with a fist. He retaliated with words. To be honest about it, I mean, maybe my upbringing was different from a lot of people, but those ideas were not foreign to me. I was raised with those ideas. And I’m Jewish, so being raised in a Jewish household, those ideas are part of that ethic.

Getting into doing marijuana and other things, really for me, it was more – I mean, it was nice, everybody was doing it – it dissolved these artificial barriers that society sets up for you, if you buy into it, they can get you uptight. And of course, one of the things was sexuality – everybody was exploring that. But there were other things also. For me, probably in graduate school, I did more experimentation – that was when I came to Arkansas. And that was more of a spiritual quest. Something was missing, and I tried to find it. That’s not the answer, you don’t find it in that, but sometimes doing some of those things, it breaks down some of your inhibitions and – I’ve even talking about self-inhibitions – it allows you to explore inner parts of yourself that maybe you would not have had the courage to do if that hadn’t been available.

I experimented with psychedelics, and I don’t know if I realized it at the time, but looking back, I know that part of my life was a spiritual exploration. And I continue to do that now. I think, once you’re on a spiritual path, you don’t stop. But it changed. The purpose of taking it, the object of taking it, the results of taking it changed from the mid ‘60s to the early ‘70s. For me, it was spiritual, which is obviously individual. And at a certain point in time, I just stopped. It was like, boom. Don’t need this anymore. I don’t know whether that’s because what happened was that there was a door unlocked and once it’s unlocked and you start down that road, you don’t need to unlock the door anymore – but to me, that’s sort of what it was. There was a time when I didn’t need it, didn’t want it. I think it was part of a journey of self discovery and spirituality.

I stayed here in the Ozarks because I liked the life. I’ve told people many times, you can live a very fast-paced hectic life right here in Fayetteville, but if you do it, you do it because you choose to do it, whereas back in New York, if you didn’t live a mile a minute, people right behind you would be running you over. And I didn’t need that. I never did. It’s interesting, because when I say I was brought up in New York, most people assume that’s a very fast-paced life. But when I was raised on Long Island growing up, six to eight, that age range, I only had two houses in a half-mile radius. When I came down here – a lot of time, when people move from big cities, at least in the past, it’s really tough to adjust. I didn’t have any problem adjusting. I always thought I was a country kid anyway. I always thought the place I would want to live would be a small town with a university. And it didn’t occur to me until a couple of years ago that that’s where I was.

There are wonderful people here and you can find wonderful people anywhere, you can find nasty people anywhere. That’s a part of it, but more than that, there’s the university, there’s continual intellectual stimulus of a university-type nature. But there’s these marvelous rivers and acres and acres of woods, nature surrounds you. I don’t like the development. It’s necessary, but.

As a kid, when I was upset, I would go for walks in the woods, and I would talk to the trees. I mean, I didn’t go up and shake hands, but I talked to whatever was out there. That was my way of communing with God. As a kid, before all the societal expectations and all the norms and parameters and strait jackets it puts on you, before that happens, as a kid, you’re much more pure, more innocent in your thought processes. You don’t think anything about going into the woods and talking because you think that’s where God is. For me, that’s where it always was. And I think the whole journey, taking the drugs – and I was never heavily into any of that scene – It’s funny, but what it does is it winds up putting you back into a state of mind that you’d been in when you were a kid. Kids know that God exists and kids’ lives are not empty, at least from my perspective. I mean, they may not have friends, there’s other things, but that’s not an emptiness they have to search for. Later, they start searching, in their late teens or early twenties, because it’s been beaten out of them. I think that all of the stuff our generation went through was an attempt to get back to more innocence, and all those things we used were just instruments to get it back.

I had never thought about politics until a friend of mine said they thought I would be a good candidate for serving on the __. I gave it some thought and thought, well, I think I’d like to do that. It was a way for me to have my voice heard and the ideas that I have heard. And you know, government is pretty simple. We may make it seem complicated, but it’s pretty simple. The people cast their ballot, elect who they’re going to elect, the people who are elected then go and try to represent their constituency as much as possible. But people are electing officials because of the ideas they espouse, at least, if they’re espousing any ideas. I understand that may be a little idealistic. Certainly, on a local level, you have the opportunity to ask people what they feel about various ideas. If you like his ideas, you vote for him.

I thought my ideas in general, my views of the world, the things I thought were important, I felt they should be represented. So I ran and was lucky enough to get elected. But I think what happens is – I was in real estate at the time, so a lot of the real estate community knew me. My ideas hadn’t changed, in terms of the environment, in terms of – I built this house here. When you build a house, you have to a least clear a space where the house goes. So there’s always this juggling act that you’re performing. But I never went in and bulldozed. As a matter of fact, we changed the position of the house in order to save trees. That’s my orientation. So like, you’re going to build – fine, build. But build in the context of nature and situate your house – no big deal to change a house a foot or two, so you’re protecting nature as much as possible. And I only say that because I was on the __ for one term, and of course during that term we had the incinerator debacle, and as strange as it may seem, as an environmentalist, I thought, from the info I had gathered, that that actually would be the better environmental alternative than what we were doing then and what we continue to do now. It may have been the lesser of many evils.

I’m very much in favor of helping the less fortunate, and I did start a program, with the help of R., called "You Can," where the city was funding scholarships for less fortunate individuals. And I tried to get them to commit to a five-year, fifty-thousand dollar program. They did commit to the idea but they only committed the funds for one year. After I was off the board, that fell apart. And I proposed the tree ordinance, which got really watered down by the time it got passed. And the reason I’m mentioning these things is that there’s no reason you can’t have economic development and build houses and still do it with regard to the natural surroundings. And the reason I mention those specific things is that when I ran for re-election, which I thought about not doing because of the political climate, because of the incinerator, and I knew it would be real tough. But I also felt that for all those people who voted for me, it would be unfair for me not to try. I had some of the people who elected me initially probably voted against me because they didn’t like the fact that I wrote the tree ordinance, that I was environmental. There were some people who didn’t like the fact that I wanted to try to create a fund to help poor people in the community.

I can even look back on that experience now and realize that everybody should serve in a political situation for a year or two. Once you’ve done it, you realize – when you sit in that seat, the power gets corrupting. If you don’t have that spiritual center – I mean, even just at a local level, you can find yourself not sticking to your convictions. You don’t want to lose your position of power.

I was not in favor of term limits because that’s what the voting public is supposed to do. So we’ve essentially said that we’re not intelligent enough to vote for the right people or get people out of office. So we’ve called ourselves dummies, essentially. However, the one thing that it does do is, if you know you’re only going to be there for six or eight years, or whatever, certainly at least in the last few years, you don’t have to worry about being re-elected. You don’t have to worry about losing a position of power. You would hope that would mean it would be easier to stand on your principles. But I think, probably, I fear, that people in the state house, when their time comes, they’ll try to move up to the state senate, because those people will be moving on as well. It may not be that way. Part of all this is that I don’t think that we as a population want to hear people who stick strongly to their convictions.

The ‘60s was an ‘other person’ orientation. It wasn’t a ‘me’ orientation. The times I grew up with all the counterculture stuff, it was like, our generation took a stance. The interesting thing is that it was generational, and that to me was really interesting. It was like we were all saying, here’s this idea – the idea is that you don’t care about just yourself, you care about other people as well. That might seem to be not a radical idea, but it was the way our society was behaving at the time. I’m not blaming society for that behavior. Most of my generation’s parents were hard working people who were trying to recover from the Depression, World War II, and the Korean War, and they wanted a better life for their children. They thought the best way to do that was to go out and work your buns off and make as much money as you can and not worry about other things. Worry about that first. And I think that’s good.

Our generation was an ‘other person’ generation, how can I help my fellow person, how can I go out into the world and help make the world a better place. So for me, those are the characteristics that I carry with me still. I went through that and I still try and do that. There obviously have been many generations that have come after us. They call them the X generation, the ‘me’ generation, or the ‘this’ generation. I don’t know why this is, but somehow, our generation created a stamp that is a recognizable, lasting stamp. These other generations haven’t really done that. It’s more of a temporary fad. And maybe they couldn’t after what we’ve done. I don’t know. It’s an interesting thing to me.

Our generation – I guess part of the reason was – it said look, these moral positions are not right. They should be this way. Maybe that’s judgmental on our part; obviously, it is. But if it didn’t strike a chord with the general populace, then we wouldn’t be talking today. Whatever assessment we said, whatever moral values we said were bad, whatever ones we espoused that were good, made a lasting impression. And I don’t see any generation take a big moral stance like that. Maybe that’s the difference. They wear nose rings, tongue rings, whatever, color their hair. And that’s fine. I’m not judging that negatively whatsoever. Whatever gets you through. Whatever allows you to find yourself.

There were world shaking events that happened during our generation, between ‘60 and ‘70. Both Kennedy assassinations, Martin Luther King’s assassination, the Vietnam war – it made it easier for us to express moral outrage and stay coalesced in that expression. There were events around which we could gather substance. We weren’t as cynical then. There were more wrongs that needed to be righted. There don’t seem to be as many wrongs that need to be righted. And that’s good. That’s wonderful. That’s what you work for. You can’t complain about that. But our generation – it filled our lives with purpose. For the generations that follow – I look at my kids – I have a 22-year-old girl and a 19-year-old boy. The girl – it seems she knows what she wants. The 19-year-old has no clue. For us that emptiness was filled in by this expression of outrage.
They know I experimented with drugs. They’re old enough now, so that if they asked me and wanted to know greater details, I would tell them. I don’t know that they’re aware of my work to right social wrongs. I’m not even sure they even care. Not that they don’t care. It’s just, all of those past experiences are who I am today. And who I was as their father. They look at me as who I am. They know I’m a staunch environmentalist. They know I care about trying to help other people. They know that if you’re totally in it for yourself, then that’s not a right attitude. They know I’m spiritual. All these things they know about me and see, and I think they accept – and accept for themselves as well. I see them as people who care about other people, people who are concerned about the environment.

My daughter hasn’t done drugs – maybe once. My son – yeah, he’s smoked marijuana probably since he was 14. I don’t think he does it very much anymore. At that age, recreational use is all it can be. In my opinion. Now over the next couple of years he may do what I did and use it to help in a spiritual quest and then all of a sudden, just boom, stop. But I don’t know that.

The world obviously still has problems. The problems change from generation to generation, and while the problems may not be as much with morality – there’s always going to be some of that. It may not be the moral abyss we felt we were going through in the ‘60s. I think you want your children to understand, at least from your perspective, to understand what you feel needs to be done. The environment still needs to be protected. I mean, we’re doing better, but for me the bottom line has always been, if you’ve got no environment, you got no business. So, it’s like, it’s not business comes first and then try to work the environment within a business and economic framework. I understand people have to make a living, and the economic engine has to continue to run. But the bottom line to me is that if you have no environment, there is no business, there’s no economic engine, there’s nothing.

The way our society works is, you instill it in your children. I instill it in my children, hopefully they instill it in their children and at some point in time, there are enough people who have that as a consciousness that – it’s like the hundredth monkey. Then the general consciousness is of that ilk. Then it gets done.

My kids are good kids. I think most people are good. You know, you wake up in the morning, you can frown or smile, be negative or positive. I chose to be positive. I don’t see the sense of being negative. That’s not to say I’m not negative at times and don’t have negative moments. We all do. But my general sense is positive.

#17

2007-07-15T11:57:00.000-07:00

Subject B and I sat in the study area of her modest home on a lushly gardened hillside.
Born 1947, mostly raised in CA.

I was at college in Ohio -- there was an SDS chapter forming, and I really didn’t know what that was, but I was interested. Someone I knew from class was involved in it. I just watched it, and there started to be some demonstrations against the Vietnam war - I went to them, but I wasn’t real active. I had been very conservative, from my family, but I thought it was interesting even tho I didn’t know quite what to think of it yet. That was my first awareness. It wasn’t until a few years later that I really became more involved. Any kind of protesting was something I’d never seen anyone do, or paid any attention, or thought about doing. I had never been anti- anything. It seemed like they might have a good point -- it took me awhile.

It was not until I moved back to California after I graduated from college that I started getting involved, going to demonstrations, getting information, helping with draft counseling. I helped by doing clerical work for a draft counseling group -- a local group in San Francisco. I attended some rallies, signed petitions, wrote letters. I was working full time in a regular job, so I didn’t have a whole lot of time to do that -- mostly weekends. It felt good to be working with people who had strong feelings, who believed in it. I can’t remember feeling totally outraged at that time, but I got more so as I got more information. I took their word for it. This is a dumb war and we shouldn’t be doing it. It wasn’t real personal -- I knew some people who got killed -- friends from my past. I heard about someone who had lived down the street getting killed, and that certainly was hard to imagine, these young guys that I remembered, thinking they had been killed. I participated in some of the giant marches in San Francisco. I was starting to change, trying to find my own way, but I was pretty used to just going along with everybody else. So I switched to going along with somebody who didn’t agree with the establishment, but it still wasn’t any big personal thing.

I went to graduate school and moved to Seattle, still thinking career. I was in social work - I was real frustrated with that. So I was going into planning, thinking that it would get more to the roots of things, although now I don’t think urban planning gets at the root. I didn’t stay very long in that school because I was very disillusioned by what I was being told. They were talking about things like citizen participation -- you have a meeting and you let people talk, and then you go ahead and do what you know is best. That was written out in journals -- I decided I didn’t want to be part of that. I was starting to see that the establishment was not so great in many ways. I also read a book at that time called the Greening of America, and it had a major impact on my life. I ended up moving to the country with a fellow dropout and a bunch of friends -- we bought some land in eastern Washington where it was cheaper, and where a lot of people were relocating because it was cheaper, and did a kind of communal farm thing. Still, drugs were not a major part, just a little here and there. I had been living in a house with a bunch of people, and a lot of them were very counter-cultural, a lot more than I was -- but then when I dropped out, they thought that was great.

About seven people were involved, although not all seven ever lived there together but for a few weeks at a time. There were about five of us who were more steady, and I was the more steady of those. Others were going back and forth to Seattle, getting jobs and that sort of thing. We lived in a line shack that had been there for cattle, for a guy to live in sometimes to watch the cattle - it was very rudimentary house. No electricity, no running water. No electricity in sight. You could live there the rest of your life and never get electricity there. No where near the line. Not that we cared. It was a very small, very funky house -- but comfortable. We liked it. We had a big garden, picked apples for extra money if we went down into the valley a little -- we learned a lot of things. I still feel it was one of the best times of my life, really, because I learned how to do a lot of things, chopped wood, I learned a lot about gardening, carpentry -- we did everything. We had a great spring nearby just a walk up the path -- we had a viable place, but very far out. Eventually I thought, well, it’s great to live out here, but I’m not doing anything for anybody else. I wanted to be involved in some of the political things that were going on, and I felt like that although from a personal standpoint I could have existed out there for quite a while, I felt I wasn’t connected or doing anything except for myself. I stayed out there about two and a half years. We had a cow, chickens, I had some sheep because I had been weaving -- I learned how to milk, how to take care of animals in cold weather -- one of the women who lived in the valley taught us what to do. I had always lived in huge cities, so it was a very different life. I found it very fulfilling -- canning, so forth. Home was life -- and I think that’s the kind of person I really was, so it really fit in well with my type of personality. I really got into it -- worked hard, but I enjoyed it. I felt like I was growing, but once I had grown to know how to do everything, it wasn’t enough.

From there I went back to Seattle and was still thinking about having a small farm or something, so I got a job to make money, saved money, lived in a wonderful household with seven adults - you cooked once a week, and you had the greatest meals, because if you only cook once a week, you have a lot of energy for what you cook. It was a very nice setting, and I worked for about a year and a half, and then moved to Arkansas because this guy I was kind of living with had been thru here a lot and kept saying, let’s move to Arkansas -- I was thinking in term of a land-based life --

So we moved here but never did buy any land as it worked out. We looked a lot. We stayed in town, and ended getting involved in lots of politics -- environmental, peace, anti-nuclear. I wasn’t sure I wanted to grow things for a living, because I’d become aware of how much work it is. As I became more aware, I didn’t know if I was really cut out for that. What I really got involved with first was women’s issues -- there was the women’s center at the university - -they had a house -- and I worked at the food coop, so I met people through that. And so I got involved in the woman’s health, self-help group, pregnancy counseling, abortion rights -- I worked on that a lot. Got involved in a health collective that worked out of the women’s center -- we tried to educate women to do their own exams, monitor their cervical health, breast exams -- tried to help with doctor referrals so people would know who was a good doctor who would be respectful and competent. We wanted to start a woman’s run clinic. I spent three months in Iowa learning from an Emma Goldman clinic there -- we hoped to start that here but we never quite pulled that off. There was no funding. Somehow the group didn’t have the right mix to make it happen. We really didn’t have a doctor who would work with us. Anyway, that whole women’s movement was my first big involvement. Then the university gradually moved away from sponsoring this radical group of women who mostly weren’t even students.

Then I got involved when they wanted to build that nuclear plant just across the border in Oklahoma -- Black Fox -- probably my first environmental thing. I was really involved in that a lot. I called the first meeting, helped run it. Somehow we had been in contact with Carrie Dickerson, who had started the protest in Oklahoma -- and we were a support group here to try to get help for her. There were lots of people involved in that, it was something that hit, that people were interested in stopping -- and it did get stopped, which was rewarding. This was a proposed nuclear power plant that was close enough and with the wind pattern, it would have impacted our area. We had petitions, had meetings, tried to get more people, we did demonstrations and attended hearings, government hearings, and a lot of time, we just tried to raise money to send to Carrie, because she was doing the legal stuff, fighting the hearings battles, getting expert witnesses. A lot of what we did was benefits to raise money for whatever was needed.

We also got involved in Arkansas Nuclear I then -- the whole nuclear energy thing, the more you read about it, the more scary it was and is -- so we also went down and demonstrated at Russellville at Arkansas Nuclear I. There was a group that we helped get going that had local people from around that plant, and they were very interested in trying to shut it down, which of course never happened, but it raised the awareness level -- the ongoing health problems of low level emissions -- there was information from a farmer who lived near there. He had cows born with two heads or things missing. Their land was being affected by it -- their peach trees were dying, things like that. And the water -- the storage of waste is still a big problem. That particular reactor has a big crack -- it’s a certain kind that’s been proven to be a very bad design - very dangerous, not so much that it would explode, but that it could leak a lot of stuff out. It’s had a lot of violations -- it’s a pretty bad reactor, but it’s still going.

Those things -- you get to an energy level and you fight for awhile, but then when nothing happens, it’s really hard to sustain forever. The local people in that area were getting a lot of flack, and this one man had a store and he was told -- we’ll shut you down, we’ll boycott you if you don’t stop being against this thing. And he backed off because he couldn’t afford to lose his livelihood. And the man who had the cows and peach trees was found dead in a canal -- in a discharge canal where they said he was fishing, but his wife said he couldn’t fish there, he wouldn’t touch that water with a ten foot pole. He supposedly slipped into this canal and was killed -- very suspicious. There were big stakes there, and I’m quite sure he was murdered. Some national people looked into it, but I guess they could never prove it. It was like a Karen Silkwood thing.

Then I got involved in the Kerr-McGee plant in Oklahoma, and it was eventually shut down. The things they were doing were so horrible -- they had a big leak that was affecting groundwater and they were spraying stuff on fields and then cutting the hay and shipping it out to the Navaho reservation -- they were very anti-Native American or at least they didn’t care -- it was like, oh well, we can do whatever we want, it doesn’t matter - almost like, nobody lives here. It was dangerous to feed that to cows -- it was radioactive. Apparently, some nuclear wastes do make things grow -- maybe things grow better than normal, but a lot of it’s abnormal growth.

The Black Fox thing was the beginning of our local peace and justice center -- we needed a place to do stuff. We started the center to have a place to meet, a place to work, type a newsletter, fold it, etc. The environmental work was ongoing, although it was getting harder. It became obvious that we weren’t going to be able to close down Arkansas Nuclear I, especially from here, and the group down there was having too many problems.

We got involved in the Central American -- Nicaragua, Sandinista -- that was probably the most locally colorful thing. We had a lot of demonstrations at the federal building about that, had processions with caskets, tried to make a public statement, get publicity -- so that people would be aware that there were people who didn’t agree with this policy. The Sandinistas were trying to overthrow a US-backed regime that had been in place a long time. Samosa was the dictator. More people were getting poorer, and a few were getting richer -- the classic central american dictatorship model. And the US government had pretty much installed it and supported it, and the government was sending weapons to fight the Sandinistas. We thought we should be supporting the Sandinistas, that if you have to have a war, they were the ones who needed our help. Or at least, they needed us to not be providing guns to the other side. They wanted to do land reform. The government view was that the Sandinistas were communists -- and I’m sure some of them were, but it wasn’t a communist thing. It was more a socialist thing, trying to turn the land back to people and develop cooperatives and help provide government services for the people, like raise the literacy rate. And here our government was sending guns and lots of them, and some troops -- to help the Samosa government. Our government was actively doing exactly the opposite of what we thought they should be doing. Some of us got involved in tax evasion to protest - I personally didn’t make enough money, but then that was one approach -- to not make enough money so that you didn’t contribute support to the war.

Reagan illegally channeled guns to Samosa -- the money hadn’t been approved -- he did what he could and used discretionary money. The story I’ve heard is that Reagan aides brought drugs from Central America, sold them in the US, bought guns with the money, and sent guns back on the same planes. The Iran-Contra affair also grew out of this situation. There were a lot of those ‘things you wouldn’t expect your government to be doing’ type things going on. I’ve always been basically a naive person, thinking oh, it can’t be that bad, and then you find out, like the more you dig, the more you find out -- it can be incredible what the government will stoop to. Like that urban planning thing -- yeah, let them say what they want -- we’ll go do what we think is right. Even the congress which represents the people, even that, they don’t honor, flawed as that is. I mean, I certainly don’t think they represent me. CIA and all those agencies do a lot of stuff we never know about.

I became more skeptical, although I still vote and think it’s important to try to do what you can with the system, and then do what you can about the system. I feel right now I’m not doing anything much that way -- kind of a lull. I gave a lot of time. I was doing stuff for the community -world, whatever -- plus I had kids along the way, kind of packed them along and did things.
But then, the money thing is always there. I needed to get a ‘real’ job again. Right now, although my new job is like a social [reform] thing, because I’m a teacher and I feel like I’m doing good work with that. So I don’t feel totally guilty about doing it. Sometimes I get involved -- I’ve been involved in the city garbage thing lately, where you pay by the bag. I remember thinking we should have been doing that all along -- I couldn’t believe they were having trouble doing it. So I started going to the meetings and applied for a seat on the environmental concerns committee, although I don’t know yet if I’m going to be on it or not. Just to say, if you need me, I’ll do it. If you don’t that fine. Anything that affects the local area, I think I’d get involved. I’m less likely to get involved in international scene -- it seemed after awhile that mainly all you do is call attention to it. And that’s good, but it’s not very rewarding -- you don’t know if it made any difference or not. You do that, have the demonstration, hold the press conference -- same old thing after you do it a hundred times. I like the idea of a local issue better. Hopefully, you’re trying to get something to happen or stop something from happening, see it through, keep on working at it -- it’s within your grasp. There are so many things happening all over the world that are so awful, it’s like I’m sorry, I can’t do anything to help. I do a little with Ox-Fam America, a pledge amount each month that comes out of my bank account.

My children have seen that I care about these issues, and that’s about all I can do, I guess. Later on, I believe they’ll tend to get involved in things that affect them, at least. They’re both young -- kind of unconnected to any of that right now. But then, I never did much until I was out of college, so I feel hopeful for them. One time when I was in college -- and I was a ‘good’ girl, never caused any trouble, always went along with everybody’s program -- but there was one time when I got really mad. They wanted to have a house floor meeting, and they were going to have it really late because some people were going to a play. I wanted to go to bed, and I really got outraged that you had to come to this thing and it was going to be so late, and I decided I wasn’t going to do it. I went to bed. They woke me, and I said I wasn’t going. So they had this whole thing, where I had to go see this lady because I had done something ‘bad’ and I remember another woman who had done the same thing, and we both had to go there, and we had meetings to go to for punishment -- I wrote in my dairy -- ‘maybe I’m becoming a rebel.’ That was my little stand, that this was dumb, this doesn’t make sense, and I’m not going to do, I don’t care what you say, I’m not going to do it -- and that was very new for me, it’s not how I was raised, and not how I conducted my life. That was a little beginning of the anti-establishment for me. I discovered you could rebel and still live.

When I lived in San Francisco, a year after college, I moved into an apartment with a woman and there was some whole wheat flour left over from her last roommate and I made bread, which was the first time I ever had whole wheat bread, handmade, and it was good! Then after I moved to Seattle, I traveled to see my parents in Florida, hitchhiking, taking buses -- I was in a bus station in Florida waiting to go my parents’ house, and I didn’t have anything to read, and I looked through the paperback rack, and Diet for a Small Planet was on there. For some reason, I looked at that and thought it looked interesting. I think it was the front part that interested me, talking about how if we all ate lower on the food chain, the whole economic problem could be solved -- not only would be healthier, there would be more to go around. So I read it and became very interested in what it had to say about eating less meat so that -- not so much a health thing as a political thing -- that you could just eat the grain that the cows eat and have a lot left -- I liked the idea. When I went back to Seattle, I convinced a friend to eat like that, even tho she had a freezer full of meat. We started making some of the recipes, and we loved it. We liked how it tasted.

At that point, it wasn’t so much organic as it was just not so much meat. I kept on enjoying eating that way -- I’m not a vegetarian. But I’ve been basically a vegetarian for 25 years. People ask me why I am, and my reason is always the Diet for a Small Planet idea -- that we’re consuming to much. All the fertilizers, all the things that go into it -- we’re such hogs on so many things. But then, further down the road, I became aware of the organic idea, certainly better not to have pesticides on the food if you can help it. I have a garden and a greenhouse, so I was able to feed my kids very well. My daughter didn’t have any meat for a long time -- I remember when she was playing softball, and the team was having a cookout, and we didn’t want her to have hotdogs, so we had these tofu hotdogs and the cook worked with us, and we got them on the grill and got them to her and nobody had to know the difference. I used to use this baby food grinder and grind up all these good things together to feed them -- I nursed them a long time. They don’t have any allergies. They never had dairy products until much later. We got raw milk -- we were always trying to get good stuff. But then of course when they got older they rejected all that, they wanted the stuff from the store in the carton.

I don’t practice anything, but I have gone to a couple of silent meditation retreats. I wouldn’t say I have a Buddhist leaning, but I enjoy the idea of silence and nature and quieting the mind. I have meditated at various points in my life, but it’s not something I ever did every day. I see the value of it. I walk four miles a day, and I think of that as meditation. I don’t listen to the little tapes -- I’m just out there, go to the park -- take the dogs -- it’s my own type of meditation, a real break in the day, a physical thing -- and it’s in nature. I love to hike, sit by water, a creek - a feel like I have a nature based religion, but it’s not like a real religion. Nature is where I feel close to what made all this -- and what I value. When I look around at a city or town, I’m often repulsed at what I see. I mean, I appreciate a beautiful house or garden or flower, but the strips, it’s like, what have we done. It seems so ugly, if I actually pause to think about it, which I try not to do, since I don’t want to get depressed about it. But when I’m out in nature, it’s like, this is what it’s all about, really. It makes sense to me. It puts me into a calm state. It’s like, ok, it’s all worth it, this is all here, still going. It’s more a pervasive consciousness rather than a thing I do. I know there has to be a higher power up there somewhere, but I don’t have a picture or a name for it. The ‘what is’ is there.

I want to protect nature, make sure some of it is still there, that we don’t just ruin everything. We’ve ruined so many things. Sometimes I do get very out of sorts about the whole thing -- I mean, what is the point? What have we done? We’ve built up all this stuff that -- and yes, I get a certain amount of satisfaction out of it like most people do, but I think I could live without it -- all the stuff that we think we need -- I have a lot of stuff, and I like my stuff, but when I think about what all the manufacturing and everything has done to the earth, sometimes I think we’d be better off to go back. I’m very resistant to the new things that come along - maybe I’m stubborn about it as a way to be, but it seems like well, you didn’t have to have it before, but suddenly now everybody has to have it. I’ve been told I should have air conditioning, and it’s like, why do I need that? I’ve lived this long without it, why do it need it now? I mean, yes, I see the convenience, the benefit, the reason it’s been created -- they provide a service. But it’s another monthly payment. And that’s why everyone is working like crazy, because they’re all caught up in these things they think they have to have to survive. Survival got lost a long time ago, we’re way way past survival. It’s like you have all things you have to maintain, they break, I can only deal with so much of that. I want as little of that as possible. I recently bought another ceiling fan, and I was thinking, now I’ll have to pay someone to put this up because I’ve never put up a ceiling fan, and I started looking at the instructions, and in the end, I was able to put it up, no problem. I had taken a class on electricity in the past, in a time when I wanted to learn every single thing that I could.

#43

2007-07-08T09:29:00.000-07:00

Interviewed on a lunch break at his work place where he was setting up a Saturday job.

I can remember seeing Elvis Presley on Ed Sullivan. He had a presence about him that was from ‘somewhere else.’ It was certainly my first inoculation into rock and roll, which I think was kind of an accelerant to the ‘60s culture. The Beatles – I still to this day blame the Beatles for everything. Without question. I believe I was in 5th grade when they came out. Me and [some other guys] put on Beatle wigs and makeup and did a concert at Washington Elementary and girls faked like they were fainting. We were really singing into a mike, singing along with the record player, and the drummer was really drumming. He said you couldn’t fake the drums. And I started guitar lessons as soon as the Beatles hit. I was in a rock and roll band by the time I was in 7th grade, and continued that all the way through college.

I’ve got to say that the music scene was where it hit for me. I mean, I was attracted to music early, but as far as the 60s go, I was neck deep in the music side of it. I honestly believe the music drove that culture pretty heavily. People gathered to hear music, people put the 8-track cartridges in their cars, bought albums as soon as they came out. It was a measure of where you were in the culture. There were different flavors of music, different veins, and the rock and roll thing and the psychedelic things and later on the pop thing, it all started pretty much with the Beatles.

First of all, the look was there. The Beatle haircut determined where you were, I mean, the length of your hair. There was a huge crisis about bangs. Yeah, I blame the Beatles. It’s their fault. I still have a Beatle mania. I’ve never recovered. I’ve been to many recovery programs. You can’t help me.

Of course [as far as politics go] I’ve been involved personally in a family way with politics since junior high school. Actually going door to door, putting bumper stickers on cars, handing out literature and propaganda, doing barbeques and catfish fries and town hall meetings, stuff on the courthouse steps all over the state. I rarely did any protests. I was in the middle of politics and fortunately I felt like we were all on the right side of the fence. We were all pretty liberal. My entire family was very tolerant of the ‘60s culture.

I worried about getting drafted for a few months before the lottery. I was naive enough to believe that good things would happen to me because I was basically a good guy. So I didn’t worry about it too much. And then when my number was like 250 or 275, it was off the scale as far as there being any danger, so it was the luck of the draw for me on that, that I didn’t have to face it.

The drug culture was intertwined with the music business pretty heavily, so I was aware of it early. Some of the more famous acts at the local clubs were known to have brought some stuff that they were traveling with – mini-whites, truck driver stuff. One of the guys that I worked with – a rock and roll star – claimed that back then even in the early ‘60s that cocaine was $100 for a kilo and nobody really cared that much about it, even though it was available. I don’t know about the pot.

I say this to my children, and I honestly believe it – I probably wasted a lot of time I didn’t need to waste messing around with drugs. I was a funny guy, a good guy, a typical young hellion, but I often think that if I had to do it over again, I probably wouldn’t have engaged as heavily as I did in the drug world. Then again, I was young and didn’t have responsibilities. It was something that was going on, and it was exciting because it did change the way you look at things. It mostly made you excited in a cerebral way. It would depend on the drug at hand, and the time and the circumstances that you had chosen to place yourself in. For the most part, it was something to look forward to and there was a kind of ‘getting away with it’ mystique about it.

I do think that it was pretty much a negative. I can’t say that I wouldn’t have evolved in my line of thought any differently. I’m not sure that I would have. I look at what I could have been doing, what I could have been working on, what I could have been excited about, and I find many more things to be excited about now than drugs. I feel like at the 45 mark you start feeling an urgency about the amount of time that you have to do things, and you’re a little more particular about what you do with your time. For me, I feel much more uncomfortable not getting something done with my time. Back in my teenage years and early twenties, even into my thirties, a waste of time was not a waste of time [to me]. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

There’s no question that there was an alteration of reality in every instance, with everything I ever ingested. And there was an excitement about it. But as far as it being really illuminating, I’m not sure it really did that for me. I felt unquestionably illuminated during the experience, but being able to maintain that and to rechart the path that one experienced while under the influence was [not possible]. It just slipped away. It was kind of a window, a window that you hadn’t seen out of before, but once the experience was over, that beautiful window was a little more drab and not nearly as spectacular. I’ve thought that it just cranks up the watts of what’s going on inside you anyway. I mean, we all determine what we think is a clear thing for us to do, and we live that without thinking about it every day. The drugs were kind of a detour that involved higher wattage. A long way around to where you were to begin with.

I saw people hurt and crippled and dead from drug experiences. As the revolution continued, there were martyrs and sacrifices made by people that we all looked up to or followed. There was a point at which it was no longer beneficial. That's because it is its own entity, less of you, and less help to you.

I think we were very lucky to get away with it. Most of us. I don’t think you could do the same sort of things that we did back then, now. I think, first of all, you’d probably die of AIDS. Promiscuity, needles, all that. It was pretty prolific for me. Cocaine, heroin. Heroin is the best drug, by far, of any of them. It’s such a fine drug. Just a little tiny bit was a wonderful thing. I know many people who feel the same way about that, that of all the drugs, it’s by far the choice. With any of these drugs, if you allow it, they become the entity, rather than you experiencing the drug, the drug is experiencing you.

I enjoyed the drugs more than I did the alcohol. Cocaine is probably the worst for grabbing hold of people and me included. I saw a lot of people go away or ruin themselves because of it. These were people who were intelligent, beautiful, wonderful in company, conversationalists, contributing to the community. Now they’re not there anymore. They’re gone. And even those who survived are damaged. It’s real hard for me to recommend to anyone to go to drugs to get a broader view and a more rounded education of life.

Where back in late high school and college, one of the pluses on this thing was the mind expanding thing and taking a ‘trip.’ It was an experience thing. Now I don’t see that with people who are involved in the drug culture. It seems to be more of a six-pack attitude. It’s not a spiritual thing. I don’t know if reality made it that, where it’s no longer an enlightening thing, or what. I just don’t see that spirit. I think people acknowledge that there is something else going on, yeah, you could probably get glimpses of [spiritual enlightenment] through drug use, but I think the universe, the default sophistication now, is that all this [spiritual enlightenment] is available to us at any time at any moment that we chose to tap into it and it doesn’t take anyone or anything else to get you there. And I’m not so sure that wouldn’t have happened anyway.
I suspect that I’d be just as funny and just as smart and just as knowledgeable as I am now had I not gone through that. If nothing else, it may have dulled my capacities. It definitely cost me physical capabilities.

On the other hand, even though I couldn’t recommend any of what I’ve done to anyone else, I believe that all this shit should be decriminalized. I do think it’s a stupid waste of time, it’s left over from who knows when – prohibition stuff. I think part of the problem with the drug scene is the environment it’s been placed in. I do still believe that the pot thing is better than the alcohol thing. I don’t know that it really is, but I still prefer that. I’ve seen so many people hurt other people and get out of control and lose it and not know where they are on alcohol. You don’t get that fucked up on marijuana. If pot smoking was as widespread as alcohol is, openly, I may feel differently about it. There may be something about the pot thing, because it is suppressed, that it remains relatively hidden and a very private thing that makes it more attractive, because it’s not out there and you don’t have to deal with it. It’s rare when someone gets busted for driving under the influence of marijuana.

As far as my professional life goes, I’m still in the thick of all this stuff. I’m still heavily involved in the music business. I’m basically in the production business, and I produce many things now, not just music things – broadcast and theater. I like my job. I love this stuff. I wear many different hats. People bring things to me and I make their productions sound and look better. The audience is able to enjoy themselves more. I’ve gotten to a point where at times it’s for millions of people. At other times it’s for a few dozen. Really, I enjoy both extremes. It’s pretty rewarding. I do travel quite a bit.

I think the quality of life here is as fine as anywhere on the planet. Without question. I am a river guy. I like all the rivers that are around here. The air is still relatively clear here. I mean, compared to other places I’ve gone to work, other places I’ve traveled to, this is just a beautiful spot. There’s not much that I don’t like about it. I can remember when Fayetteville had 15,000 people. I don’t like the population explosion or any of that, but it’s really happening everywhere. It’s not just a local issue, it’s a global issue. Every community is experiencing this stuff. Maybe ours is a bit accelerated over others. I think also that the reason Fayetteville and this corridor is growing so fast is because people hear about it, come and see it, and sense it too, sense that there’s still pockets and hollers here you can set yourself up in, and be yourself.

Getting out on the river for me is probably my therapy. I prefer to be in the river. Usually, I’m in a tube that has a seat in it and I move with the water. I will canoe and boat and all that stuff, if I need to, but usually I like to actually physically be in the river, letting it carry me at its own pace. I generally try to do it where I don’t see anyone up or down river. It’s kind of a solitude thing. I am into sound, so I’m enthralled with the sounds that are silent. I fish. It’s not so much that I like fish. I certainly don’t eat much fish. I never keep anything I catch. But there is something about interacting with the fish that I like. It’s neat. We were in the country every weekend all through my life [as a child]. We had a cabin on the river by the time I was in junior high and I probably learned most of my river abilities there. Since that time, I go to the river whenever possible. It’s not very possible very much any more. I work a lot on weekends and it’s hard to get away in the middle of the week.

I suspect that will change. I suspect that I will probably buy a piece of the river and move to it soon. I’ve gotten to a point now where I have enough responsibility to really do whatever it is I really want to do. I have been tied to a nine-to-five for a decade now. There are deadlines. Excellence is expected.

Now I’m even more heavily involved with design. I do a lot of collaboration with architects and engineers now. We send blueprints back and forth. I’m getting into the building of things now, sound systems for theaters, auditoriums. I consult on acoustic design. That stuff is pretty rewarding. I’m going to start teaching next semester, sound design for theater, which I think is the most exciting sound field there is, really. It’s quite tricky, quite sophisticated and hard to do well. It’s the most challenging sound that I do.

What’s great is that my children listen to the same music I listened to when I was their age, which is different. The music that grabbed me in our young days was different from our parents. I find that all that music stuff is still valid, still listened to, still commercialized, and my children prefer it. It tells me there was substance to what was going on, that there is longevity there, and it was not just a stupid thing. It was a smart thing, we were tuned into it. Some of the culture has definitely stood the test of time, and there’s no way I can say that I went through that culture and didn’t carry some of it with me to this day.

Maybe tolerance is probably the greatest lesson from that culture. Being able to accommodate all different kinds of people and things. It was a personal thing. As long as you weren’t hurting anything else, it was an OK thing. Even my mother would tell me, as long as you’re not hurting someone else. She would add things like, never do anything you wouldn’t want everyone in the world to know you were doing, you know, which was hard to get around. Tolerance, and a sensitivity to the welfare of others. I was never vicious or malicious or anything to begin with – I do think maybe the culture challenged that in that it offered many opportunities for me to apply that tolerance. I was very heavily involved with nature, and anything that messed it up, I was quick to say, no, you don’t want to do that. But never an activist. Just recognized early the value of a healthy environment. I’d seen where people had clear cut, or dumped trash – even out here in these pristine ancient mountains you would find trash. No roads or anything. People have been everywhere. Being the Boy Scout I was, I bought the program to believe that you should leave the place in better shape than you found it.

I think the counterculture thing – it happened at a time in my life where I was going to be enlightened anyway. I was leaving home, growing up, becoming a man. I was going to make my own decisions anyway. It just happened to coincide with that change in my life. There was shit going on. I was an unusual case I think. I was in a rock and roll band, my hair long, I was captain of the football team, manager for the debate squad. I could talk around an issue. I bought the football team program. I was a head hunter. I enjoyed the contact, I hurt people. At the time, football was king. We had a great team. We were undefeated going into our senior year. We just ate it up. It was fun. I’m sure there was a macho thing about it.

The drug thing entered in football season during my senior year. My first experience was with Yellow Submarine at a drive-in theater, and the next morning I was on a bus going to Missouri to play a football game that afternoon. It was great. We always graded films [of our game] after a game, and the theory was that if you get your job done fifty percent of the time, fifty percent is a C. After that game, I scored like 96%. I led the team in return average yardage for the rest of the year, because I returned the opening kickoff and was still high as a kite. I was young. I could do that kind of stuff.

#11

2007-07-01T05:13:00.000-07:00

The subject K. and I sat at her kitchen table, a breeze redolent of ripe tomatoes and new hay wafting through her open windows on a late afternoon June breeze. Outside, her rooster crowed and hens clucked, and a newly adopted kitten soon appeared for a treat of half-and-half. Born 1943, raised in Iowa.

I hadn’t thought about the Sixties as being a particular mind set or period of revolution. I didn’t get involved in a lot of the protests, but I was in the Peace Corps. A few years ago I was in this Extensive Service leadership training class for serving the rural community, and they showed a video about paradigm shifts, and I think people who were in the ‘60s were on one of the films we saw. It showed how different time periods affected people’s life view, or world view. The ‘60s, at least part of it -- the early part -- was a bridge between the ‘50s and earlier, where women especially saw their roles as the housewife, and then beyond that, it’s different. That period of time when I was in college, and a young adult, was that transition period.

My mom’s family put a very high value on education. My parents weren’t active on issues, but they talked. Dad talked about soil and water conservation. He had a farm, and then about the time I got into high school, my mom and dad decided they needed more money, so he got a job in town in social services as a caseworker. And my mom, because she grew up in such poverty, she was sensitive to social issues, like people treating each other fairly. She was real concerned about that.

My dad was born in the house that I grew up in. His father had immigrated from Switzerland and bought that farm. Dad was the only surviving son, and it was expected that he take care of that farm, and I don’t think he was ever happy farming. It was hard to make a living. We changed from Methodist to Presbyterian sometime when I was in grade school, junior high or something. The churches were in the same block. Dad was easily pissed off by all sorts of people. He was critical of everybody, including us kids. He was never dedicated to the church -- it was something that was expected. I think one of the reasons he didn’t enjoy going to church was because we weren’t well dressed. Later, when he was working in town and had good clothes, he didn’t seem to mind going to church. Anyway, somewhere along in junior high I decided I was going to be a missionary. I felt called, saw some clouds form that looked like the continent of Africa. Sometime in high school, I was sitting next to a guy who said, well, what do you really believe? And I started thinking about it, and a lot of things I’d been taught I didn’t feel very comfortable about, and from then on, I sort of tapered off about church stuff and other traditional Christian thought and beliefs. But I still felt like I should do something that was good for the world.

I started college in fall ‘61, which I think was the year the Peace Corps started. A group was training for it on campus and they were so enthusiastic, the idea of going to live in some other part of the world was interesting, and I knew it would be helping somebody which felt right, so I applied and was accepted, and that experience more than anything changed my world. I went to a Turkish village. Our project was community development. You stick a pair of people in their 20s that can barely speak the language into a traditional village and tell them to work on the social and economic development, and it was like, duh... [laugh] -- so I had a degree in home economics -- a Turkish girls’ course teacher came in and I helped her a little bit, taught a little sewing and things like that. Mainly we – just by being there – changed people’s attitudes a little bit, and were sort of a catalyst for things coming into the village because we were Americans. There were a couple of Turkish agricultural engineers who came in to visit the village who had been in the states for a short time and spoke a little English -- and they said, hey look there’s wild strawberries growing along this road -- this would be a great place to introduce domesticated strawberries as a cash crop. This one family that was real close to us said, ok, you can plant some in our garden here. After the strawberries started bearing, and they were eating them, this one young man in the family said, well, that was a good idea. We thought it was a silly idea, but we did it just because we wanted to help you, because you wanted to do it, you’re our friends. I went back to visit about eight years later, and there were people all over that village growing strawberries and selling them, and they were also growing poplar trees, or some fast growing soft wood trees that they could use to make boxes, strawberry boxes. The other thing that changed was -- when I went in there, I was advised to buy a small bottled gas stove, which was handy and quick and clean, but all the other women in the village were using wood fires, either in a fire place or in a little metal stove. But when I went back, almost all the women had the little gas stoves.

When I came back from Turkey, it was miniskirt time, and I looked at those bare legs and gasped, because the women in Turkey are all covered up -- not like in Iran or anything, but skirts that came below the knee, stockings, and they covered their hair. So I was surprised by the short skirts. But the other thing was all the waste, and that still stays with me. In the Turkish village, people didn’t waste anything. At the little general store, they had groceries and matches and school notebooks, oil, flour, sugar, things like that. And the baker made bread that most people would just stick under their arm, no wrap or anything, and walk home. (That was a real treat, to buy white bread -- many people couldn't afford to buy it.) But when I went to the bakery, he would wrap it in newspaper, because I was a special person. They didn’t waste anything. But when I came back to the U. S., it was toss, toss -- all the stuff we tossed, they would have found a use for. It made me angry, and frustrated.

I came back to Iowa and looked for a job, and got a job at the welfare office. After six months, they said you’re not the person we want, bye -- I wasn’t good at it -- I couldn’t see what the problem was with all these folks. I’d go visit them, and they had a television, a car, electricity, running water -- what’s your problem? And I just wasn’t trained for the job, and they didn’t work with me to train me, and I never was good at writing reports, and that was probably the worst thing, having to write up the stuff in a timely way.

I lived in Canada for awhile. One of my jobs there was testing water, doing an analysis to see if it was clean enough -- a university lab -- and so when I got back to Iowa, I found a job at a packing plant doing wastewater analysis.

I never lived any way but the straight life. While I was in Turkey, at the capitol city at some kind of Peace Corps gathering -- we had an office party, with a big water cooler full of vodka and orange juice -- big party, lots of fun. The group I worked with in social services enjoyed drinking, but I never experienced marijuana until I was in graduate school in the early ‘80s.

During Vietnam, I thought draft dodging was right. I never thought the war was right. Women’s issues - the ERA -- I was sympathetic. I joined the American Association of University Women -- some were real pushers for change. One of our study topics was women as agents of change --- in 1973, I was fed up with working in the packing plant. They hired young men to work the same job in the laboratory. I had learned everything I needed to know about the chemical analysis of the water, the meat products and the by-products, and they hired young fellows to work in there, and I helped train them, but they paid them more than they paid me. So I got fed up with that, and decided to quit, and so they asked on the exit interview, well, why are you quitting, so I told the personnel manager, I’m not getting equal pay for equal work. I should be getting more -- I’m training these guys. He says, "Well, we can’t pay women as much as we pay men -- like Rita out there, she’s doing accounting, but we can’t pay her like an accountant, because she might get pregnant and quit." I did file suit and won some back pay. It was the principle of it.

So I told the man I was dating that I was quitting, and that I had saved up enough to go back to college or buy a piece of land and try market gardening, and that was what I’d really like to do, and he didn’t want me to leave. We had been friends for five years. We bought an 8-acre place and started remodeling the house, and I planted a garden, and we had chickens, a couple of calves, some bottle fed lambs, various stuff. I felt like it was silly for him to be doing all this work on the place and not living there too, so I pushed the issue and we got married. Then he sold a property in town and had some money he needed to invest, so we bought a 100-acre farm and sold the 8 acres. By that time I was feeling like we couldn’t talk about issues, because whatever we didn’t agree on, he’d say I was getting a little carried away and would hide behind a newspaper. So I started looking for other companions.

Before we married, we were pretty spontaneous about our sex life, but as soon as we were married, he would say, like, we shouldn’t do that now, somebody might stop by. It was like I became a mother figure or something. Our sexual relationship tapered off. I was just 30, still interested. I started looking for intellectual, emotional, and physical companionship. I made me sort of deceitful. I decided that wasn’t what I wanted, so I left.

Going back to college was a graceful excuse. I still appreciated him as a good person and friend. I moved into the older student graduate dorm. In a lot of ways it felt wonderful. I was so unencumbered, and there were all kinds of people to talk to. At first, I thought I’d go into nutrition, with the idea of helping the world somehow. Working on malnutrition in the developing world. But then I decided I’d probably end up being a dietician in a hospital or something which wasn’t appealing to me. I wanted to be out in the field. I was concerned with doing something that would help people.

I went to a mid-life career changes workshop and the person who put it on had us do this visioning thing, and so then I changed to horticulture. My interest was in fruit and vegetable production as a small farm opportunity. It seemed like there was a possibility of making a good income from that. That’s what I’m trying now. It’s a lot of hard work for the hours a person puts in -- and pays at minus a dollar an hour? I think that as a person works through and becomes more efficient and works out the marketing, there are possibilities to make a fair income. I like it, it’s outside.

I think my folks had something to do with the fact that I don’t buy into the mainstream materialism. They didn’t have the means to spend. They had an old car, and they said it -- dad had a term for it -- rather than having a new car as a status symbol, an old car is a symbol that we don’t have to have a new car -- like an anti-status symbol. Truth was they wouldn’t have been able to buy a new car.

After I finished my master’s I worked in Iowa for USDA doing field research for a few years -- I was living like a student, sharing a house with four other people -- I rode a bike. I might have stayed, but my supervisor had harassed me -- in fact, someone else filed suit for sexual harassment -- the working situation wasn’t good at all. I got a call about an opening with an Indian tribe in Kansas for a project manager there -- they had a grant to start vegetable production on tribal land. They offered me a big increase in salary and it was just exactly what I wanted to do -- so I took the job -- fall of ‘85. I worked with them for a little over a year -- the grant was for one year. During that time, there was a new tribal council elected, which led to a lot of upheaval. They had no idea that vegetable production and marketing takes a lot more labor than growing soybeans. We had started with 10 acres, and it was all mapped out what we were supposed to plant - this many tomatoes, this many watermelon. We didn’t plant it all, and we couldn’t pick and market all that we did have planted. But we set up a roadside stand and sold to some restaurants, and we were coming along, learning how to operate the equipment. But in order to do this another year, they would need another grant, but in order to get another grant, we needed to expand. The council said they wanted me to write a proposal and show that we would expand to 30 acres -- and I thought, oh god -- but I wrote up the proposal and made all the plans, and we got funding for another year, but I didn’t want to stay. I knew it was doomed. We couldn’t manage ten. I thought we should go down to 5 acres. And they said, couldn’t I just stay until things were planted -- so that’s the easy part, so I stayed until the end of June and then I left.

I learned about this project down in Fox, Arkansas, at Meadowcreek. There was a 10-week internship in sustainable agriculture and farm design ---- and I had enough saved. I had been earning a lot of money, and it was easy to start slipping into a lifestyle that I didn’t feel comfortable with, and I saw Meadowcreek as a way to get my mind back where I wanted it to be. There were seven of us interns. We had discussions and lectures and projects we worked on.

I must have been somehow biased against chemical use to begin with, and then the Meadowcreek experience -- I knew people should be careful with chemicals, but there were times when I used them. I knew there were people involved with the environmental movement. And dad always talked about it, like soil erosion was catastrophic. I grew up in a bridge time, when things were making a big shift. I still got involved in traditional stuff, but nontraditional is very comfortable. I may wear purple one of these days. Bit by bit, and even the classes at Iowa State -- the weed science class, for example, I knew 2,4-D was bad stuff. It wiped out the grape industry in southwest Iowa which at one time was a big grape producer. When farmers started raising corn and using 2,4-D, the grapes were so sensitive it just wiped them out, even the wild grapes. When I was a kid, we could go out to the back fence row with a wagon and pick grapes, and mom would make grape jelly, it was a family outing. And then, entomology classes were moving toward integrated pest management, using biological controls, cultural controls before we hit with chemicals, because resistance was developing and there were side effects. I was paying attention to other environmental issues, too. Thru AAUW I got involved in some educational projects. Iowa at that time had started putting environmental education in the public schools.

So, I needed to find a job, and OOGA [Ozarks Organic Growers Association] had a grant to start some chapters and increase their technical assistance, and I applied for that, even though it was real low pay. They wanted somebody to start a chapter in Fayetteville, so I came here for about 4 months and got another parttime job to help support myself working for a sprouts growing place. But while I had the position with OOGA somebody with the Rodale Institute who had met R. while he had been a farmer in Kansas contacted him about an open position, and he showed it to me -- it was halftime as an ATTRA technical specialist, half Rodale staff person to work in Arkansas, networking to get people involved in sustainable agriculture. The job description suited me, so I called the Rodale person -- I could have gone full time at ATTRA after a year, but in order to get the Rodale stuff off the ground, it needed to be full time, so the supervisor said fine.

I worked on this project for six years. I liked the program. I traveled in Arkansas and other southern states, getting acquainted with farmers who were doing innovative things, including alternative crops. Originally, I was supposed to pick farmers who were growing vegetables, either in part or on their whole farm. They didn’t have to be organic farmers, but they had to be doing something to reduce their chemical use. I would meet these people, get acquainted, and get them to do on-farm research, like trials. Most of them were pleased with field days, so I started setting up more of these, where farmers would come and see what they were doing. In the winters, we would have workshops that would have speakers, farmers, extension, researchers that were doing sustainable ag. I officed at home, writing letters and grant proposals and reports, and I traveled a lot.

I am working through a regional organizer for the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture, to develop a network of people we can call on to write letters, make phone calls, go to Washington DC or lobby their government reps locally on sustainable ag issues, legislation we need to get funded or passed. They needed somebody to organize the southern region, working 10 or 15 hours a week, so it’s housed at the Fayetteville office of ATTRA and I do it. It turned out to be more time than that, but a young man who likes to write is helping. I know a lot of the people, because I was previously involved with the southern sustainable ag group, which makes it easier to makes contacts. Programs involved are like various conservation projects, like Conservation Reserve programs, wetlands programs, funding for sustainable ag research and education program and for socially disadvantaged farmers.

For the last four years, I’ve been gardening for market, and selling up at the farmer’s market. I like what I’m doing, but then I help out part time at ATTRA, doing intake, answering questions -- I worked last winter. Anyway, market gardening is hard work, and I’m not in the black yet -- I grow all the vegetables -- lettuce, spinach, onions, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, sweet corn, potatoes - squash & pumpkin, flowers, strawberries -- I need to expand the strawberries, everybody wants them. We were selling them for $2 a pint.

I believe that things have spiritual connections. At one point, I might have thought it was coincidence, but I believe if we really want to connect with somebody, like an old friend or something, it will happen. My ethic is to live simply so that others may simply live, caring about nature, appreciating the beauty of nature.