 Good evening, thanks for coming. We're so excited to have such a great crowd, and it's a great event. It's such a fun book. We're here to celebrate the launch of Going Up the Country by Yvonne Daly. And I don't know if I'm going to do a fun historical read. And every time I say the title or look at the title, I've had that song in my head for about six months now. Yeah, and now it's a new insurance that, right, going to say that? Yeah. Yeah, that's right. I'll opt it at once again. Happens to the best of them. We're also honored to welcome the author, as well as the retired Vermont Historical Society curator, Jackie Calder, to my left, and journalist, Tom Slaton, who will come up to introduce Yvonne in just a moment. Tonight's talk will be about an hour. We will have Yvonne read and talk from the book. And then Jackie will talk about the work in the book, as well as the history event, the Vermont in the 1970s historical exhibit that was curated at the Vermont Historical Society. It ties in nicely with the book. We will have time for Q&A. And we have refreshments. Please help yourself to the table in the back. I'd like to remind everyone to please mute to return off your cell phones. And to let you know that the front door is locked. We will reopen it after the talk if you need to exit during the reading. The back door will remain open. We do have a bathroom. It's at the back of the store, to the right of the back door. I'd like to thank the Vermont Arts Council for featuring tonight's event as a Vermont Arts 2018 program. And I'd like to thank Orca Media. They're here tonight filming the event. And if you're interested in seeing the video of tonight's event, we will send it out in our newsletter. We do have a newsletter signup form being passed around. So please sign up for that. You can also learn about future events here at Bear Pond Books. Our next events will be in August. We will be hosting Kate Shatz, author of Rad Girls Ken, and the Muscle Girls Making Change. They'll be here on August 7th for a talk about Rad Girls Ken. And then we have author Steve Almond, author of the book Bad Stories. He'll be here with Jane Lindholm, Vermont edition host. We'll be having a conversation about Steve's new book, Bad Stories. That'll be August 14th. So save the date or sign up for the newsletter. Also, please like us on Facebook at Bear Pond Books. And other than that, I'd like to just welcome up Tom Slayton. Slayton, excuse me. They have a loud voice. Yvonne for more than 30 years. And we were journalists together at the Rutland Herald when the Rutland Herald had like 20 reporters and editors and a team of five covering the state house. And we had dinner together at night and I said, we had the best of it, Yvonne. And I really feel that. I gotta tell you though, another story about an interactive. Yvonne and I have been friends for a long, long time. And one time back in the 80s, I was in a ski race at Middlebury, at the Middlebury Snow Bowl, which is up in Ripton. And it began and ended at the writers, where they have the writers' conference, bread loaf school. It began and ended there and you ran through the woods, but the whole course was glare ice. I had the wrong legs. And so I kind of clattered my way around, flailing my way around this course. And as you came back onto the bread loaf campus, you went up about four feet and I was going, oh, you know. And trying to crank myself with my poles because I had no traction on my feet. And at the top of the hill was this pretty Irish girl looking down at me and laughing. But I forgave her while ago. We've been friends for a long, long time. Yvonne is the author of more than 5,000 news feature magazine stories that have appeared in Time, Life, People, The Boston Globe, The San Jose Mercury News, The Rutland Herald, Vermont Life, and dozens of other publications. She is the author of four books. An Independent Man with Senator Geffords. Vermont Writers, A State of Mind, which is a collection of portraits of people we both knew and liked who were happy to be professional writers. Octavia Boulevard. Octavia or Octavia? Octavia. Octavia Boulevard. A Tale of Homelessness, Excess and Conflict, Senate of San Francisco Neighborhood where Yvonne lived for 17 years. A Mighty Storm, Halbermoners rebuilt their state after Tropical Storm Irene. And The Band in the Road, a book about brain injury as told through one young man's injury and what was learned from his healing. So, Yvonne is a journalistic superstar in my opinion. There are some people who burn with a faint flame and some people who burn with a bright flame. But Yvonne is an acetylene torch. And I want to introduce Yvonne Daly. About six years ago, my friend Kathy Roberts sent me a little book about the hippie experience in Towson, New Mexico. And she put a little piece of paper in it that said, you should write this book about Vermont. And the seed was planted. So, the book was very disturbing because it was full of these violent encounters between the newcomers and the native kids that had come back from college or were letting me hear grow and the local people. There were fires, people were burnt out. There were shootings. It was really disturbing. And I kept thinking about my experience here in Vermont. Can you hear me up there? There, where did I come from? Boston. I don't know. I can't get rid of it. And so, the seed was planted for the book. And also, there's another book by David Talbot, the founder of Salon Magazine. He's a friend of mine from San Francisco. It's called The Season of the Witch. It's a fabulous book. And it tells the story of San Francisco from the summer of love to the AIDS epidemic. And again, violence. You've got the zebra killers, the zodiac killers, the people's temple, right? Just a lot of difficult stories. Meanwhile, you know, the people like my, what did Vermont need most in 1966, 67? Same thing we need now. Young people, right? Now, maybe it was the looks of the young people they were looking for, but we came. And my book, I think, makes the proposition that Vermont was changed by the counterculture more than any state in the union. But that the people that came here integrated into Vermont and were changed by the state itself. So, you don't have to read the book, that's what the book says. And I want to thank Tom so much for introducing me. As he says, we go back. Some of my favorite stories, he gave me to write for Vermont Life. And it's great to write for that publication because everybody loved it, right? And Jackie, what a great job you did with the Vermont Historic Society. And what a great bookstores it says, right? Yeah. When I was thrown up to Vermont College, you were in the other location. Yeah, it was one of my places to get my mental health because what is the sound of 200 writers in a room together? Me, me, me, me, me. So I would go to the bookstore. So I'm gonna read a little bit. I'm gonna read from the introduction just sort of to set the scene. And then because we're here, I'm gonna read a little bit from the guided chapter, I think. To have been a child at a time when words of wisdom and encouragement inspired one to think beyond one's own small needs and wants is a fortunate thing. While to have experienced the loss of one's champions, violently, suddenly is a mighty shock. One that leaves the bereaved in bewilderment and with a penetrating sorrow. My generation was not the first to have witnessed this kind of loss. But it was the first to do so from the safety of our living rooms. As the killings were broadcast again and again on the new American Marvel, the Color TV, the murders of our heroes, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the black preacher of non-violence have been rebroadcast so many times, you'd think they would no longer pain us, yet the sorrow is never diminished. And neither is the sense of lost possibility. I'd wager that our distrust of some aspects of government and our rejection of the status quo were born in those years in which these men were gunned down for despite the insularity and safety from suffering that our parents had tried so hard to provide us, we felt cheated of the dreams these men embodied. In other ways, there was a polarity to our lives that only began to reveal itself as our generation, the baby boomers, came of age. We walked to school in relative safety, played outdoors in any kind of weather, watched American bandstand after school. There was canasta and lemonade on the front porch, saw cops and football games, class trips to Washington, and for many, the opportunity to be the first in our families to go to college, especially if you were a girl. But these and other sweet aspects of the era, mask the darkest side of the country trying to ignore the horrors of war and poverty, a time when you were measured by your last name, your occupation, where you worshiped, the color of your skin, the cost of your car and home, from these contradictions, counterculture, black power, and the women's liberation movement were born. Like so many of my generations, born at the end of World War II, I had missed the deprivation, rationing, and closeness to the casualties of war that defined my older sibling's childhood. Until my mid-teens, life was defined by Catholic school and church, an Irish-Italian neighborhood, the comfort of the middle class and the suburbs of Boston. Out there somewhere, there were beatniks on American activities raids, racism, and deep misogyny, the Cold War and its fanaticisms, all of which I was fairly unaware of in the insulation of family, church, school, and neighborhood, and then seemingly overnight, right? The world changed. Suddenly, we were alive in it. As each morning, we woke to news of death, not just the deaths of our heroes, but soon the deaths of former classmates, of brothers and sisters, neighbors and strangers, dead in a foreign country, fighting an ill-defined enemy, and the deaths and beatings of black people, demanding the basic rights of citizenship and white college kids working for the black cause. So many adults and children, some much younger than us, murdered in church basements on back roads in the south at Kent State University in Oakland, California. And so, despite all our parents and our teachers and religious leaders had done to try to protect us, as with other generations before us, death came to define us and war as well. Our fathers rarely spoke of their war, but in retrospect, we see that it was always present, as present in their silence as it was in their sudden angers and nightly cocktails. We grew up on military parades and trips to monuments to war. On TV shows were the settlers were the good guys, and the American Indians, the savages. On movies that celebrated valor and martyrdom, movies in which Americans were always victorious and the hero came home. But the names on the plaques and our city halls and the memorials and the town park were all for fathers and brothers who did not come home, who died often young to make us safe. These were other generations' wars, not ours. And even though in school, we'd practiced how to survive a nuclear war, ducking and covering under our desks. By the time we'd read John Hershey's Hiroshima, required reading in many high school and college curricula. We knew survival after nuclear war would require more than acting like a turtle. We wouldn't putting all that effort into preventing war be a better approach for humankind. Thus when it came to our generation's war and our unprepared brothers and friends being sent to battle in faraway jungles, it seemed impossible, a bad dream, disconnected from our safe and pampered lives. I think that's enough for now. So, maybe I'll read this one. And so some of us said no. No to conformity to suburbia and the straight life. No to haircuts and ties and button down collars. No to permanence and rollers and bras. No to nine to five and church on Sunday. No to segregation and bigotry. But most of all, being human after all and spoiled and self-protective, we said no to war. First we raged against it demonstrating and getting arrested, burning draft cards and then for some taking more drastic measures. When all that failed, many simply chose to walk away from the whole mess. Moving to places alien to our parents. To communes in Vermont, ashrams in California, pueblos in New Mexico, wafts in Greenwich Village. This is one story about that time, the story of Vermont. A state most dramatically affected by the counterculture, by the ragged, ledo-less and divided assemblage of scruffy young people who came by the thousands to Vermont's hills and valley towns to try something else, not protest so much as rehabilitation of self, of a dream, of a future. If there was a commonality among us, it was love of the land. Vermont's emerald hills and sweet valleys were better than Oz. The place felt womb-like, nurturing, simultaneously old and pristine. Beyond that, there was the promise of cheap housing in remote locations, a place that provided, as Bob Dylan put it, shelter from the storm. I count myself among the thousands. I talked to about 300 people over the course of the research of this book, and there's about 150 people's stories in the book. The Christiansen, the Gottliebs here, let's see. Yann Saka is mentioned. Anyone else? Hi, how are you? Excellent. Goddard. If there ever was a college ready-made for the county, oh, I should say, thanks to Andy, there's two mistakes in this chapter. And you and my husband, Chuck, are the only ones that have pointed out mistakes. Hopefully there's only four mistakes in the book. What do you think the chances are that I can't see over there? That's why I'm not. I'm dead of time. I have a vision problem. I had a retina tear in the middle of writing this book. Life is great, isn't it? So it's Dennis, not Richard Murphy, and it's John Mosher, right now. Right. Sorry. And I don't know how that happened. If there ever was a college ready-made for the county culture, and a collection of young people ready-made for a particular institution, it was Vermont's Goddard College in Plainfield, located just 8.5 miles east of the state capital, Montpelier. Goddard describes itself as a one of a kind institution of higher education with a history of creativity and chaos, invention and experimentation, of growth, decline, and reemergence. Locals called it Little Moscow on the Hill, long before the hippies showed up. With their arrival, there you go. Imagine an accredited college where hundreds of young people, only some of whom were actually enrolled and paying tuition, could take a course in echo anarchist theory or the politics of food, or just take acid all day, and may second a poem, a sculpture, a theory, a song, and somehow manage to get credit for the experience. No grades, no curriculum, no dormitories in the way that most people understand what a dorm should operate like. Ginny Callan, the founder of Horn of the Moon Cafe in Montpelier, recalled that students, quote, in the political dorm had shooting practice on Saturday morning, preparing for the revolution. One of the things that I think the book does, it shows over time how people with values found ways to make those values become reality, okay? So I'm gonna read a little section about Lee Webb, who went to Goddard College. Yeah, okay. Anybody know him here? You all do. He taught it about her. Yeah. I thought she was on the board. I tried tracking him down. I did finally get an email from him saying, oh, thanks for putting me in your book. Lee Webb's, oh, and I should say, one other thing, and you're gonna say your little thing about that later, right? About what you wanna say about. Okay. So one of the things is that in 1972, People Magazine had an article called The Hippie Invasion of Vermont, and it warned that tens of thousands of hippies were coming to Vermont that were gonna take over the state. Guess how? By the tried and true method, by the ballot. Well, power to the people. Actually, that's what happened, right? Sort of, you know, because as I said, Vermont had its way and we got on rescue squads and volunteer fire departments and, yeah. Lee Webb's experience at Goddard and with the Vermont legislature illustrates how the presence of even one activist in a small state can have great impact. A Brookline, Massachusetts native, Webb was active in anti-war, anti-nuclear, and disarmament efforts at Boston University before becoming a national leader in students for a democratic society and the national conferences on churches. In Washington, he tried to create opportunities for these organizations to engage decision makers in broad dialogue. Frustrated, he welcomed an invitation to teach economics and public policy at Goddard in 1968. Not long after arriving, he organized a rally against the Vietnam War on the state house steps attended by several hundred protestors. Maybe some of you were there. He expected the police to clear them away when a stranger approached from the state house to ask, do you need a megaphone? The stranger was Vermont Sergeant at Arms, Reed B. Payne. Oh, Rutland, don't we all love him, those two? Within minutes, Webb was inside the state house asking the legislature to take a position on the war. In response, the state legislators held hearings on the issue that lasted several days. While the legislators voted to support the war, 77 to 52, Webb felt he had successfully raised important issues. The fact that 52 had voted against the war impressed him, so much so that he began working with the Vermont Public Interest Group to influence state policy. While still at Goddard, he got himself appointed to the Governor's Commission on Electric Energy, where he helped pass legislation that created a capital gains tax on land speculation, and the first in the nation, Lifeline Electric Rate Bill. His next effort was a successful campaign to institute a sliding scale program for dental care for children. Webb had learned that it wasn't just poor kids who had bad teeth due to the high cost of dental care in Vermont, but rather that it was not unusual for Vermont kids to receive false teeth as a graduation present, as a way to help them go forward in life. Vermont's two-fairy bill, the result of his efforts, passed 142-1. He said this to Pierre Clavel in an interview he did, not Peter Clavel, Pierre Clavel. He said, he learned the way to bring about change in Vermont, taught him how to bring change all over the country. He ended up doing this all over the country. He said, you did it by choosing issues that offered the wider scope of benefit for the people, to make it an economic issue, not a social or a class issue, but one in which 70, 80, or even 90% of the people in the state or the city are going to benefit. Logical, right? OK, I think that's enough, and we should have our conversation. OK, OK. And I'm thirsty. So my name is Jackie Calder, and I see some places I recognize here also. I used to be the curator at the Vermont Historical Society. And my final project there from 2014 to 2016 was called the 1970s project, where we interviewed over 60 people primarily involved with the counterculture, but some people also on the periphery who had opinions. And then we did some programs around that, a symposium and also an exhibition. And if you're interested, you can go online or just Google Vermont 1970s projects, and you'll have access to a lot of those oral history interviews. Some have transcriptions. And we also tried to collect as much as possible during that time period, and we're given some wonderful photographs. So you'll also see some photographs that you can click online from various communes or people who are involved in the counterculture movement. So that's, Yvonne and I talked a few times. She was working on this book, we're just starting to. And we were very encouraging to each other. And we had a hard time getting off the phone. There were so many stories. Anybody who was here, I'm sure, has lots of stories to talk about. So we were just trying to figure out how to do this. And we thought we'd more or less do it kind of as an interview where I could ask her questions, and then we could go on. And I don't know if people in the audience want to chime in too, since I'm sure many of you were there living through this too. One of the things that we always came back to when we talked was about what it was like in Vermont when people first came here in the 1960s and into the early 70s and how different it is from today. So what those outsiders first found here in Vermont. So you do talk about that in the book. Well, the first thing that happened when my first husband and I, we rented this house for $75 a month. And the way that I got the house and 75 acres, this beautiful 200-year-old house with a huge barn up the hill in the shadow of a hightback mountain in the town of Goshen. Goshen was a town of five old families that had been feuding since forever, which I discovered at my first town meeting when they got into a fight. But I got it into my head that I wanted to live in this town. So I started just driving around and stopping and asking people if they knew of a place to rent. And I saw this elderly man probably my age now standing and looking in reverie at this big white house right beneath the mountain. And I pulled in and I told him my story. I had my infant son with me. And then I was looking for a house and he said, well, you can rent this one. I'll try just $75 a month. He didn't ask, did I have a job? He didn't ask. He didn't know my husband. He didn't know anything about us. My hair was down the hair. I was probably wearing some long flowing something. And the deal was I had to leave two weeks of the year when he was on vacation there. Fine with me, we went camping. Yeah, one time I just had birth, given birth, but anyhow, the first day, we walk in, we drive in, and some young men, these teenage boys from down the road show up, the haze boys. And they just wanted to kind of look at us at first. And they had been in the barn and they had an ice odor and so they wanted to come in and I left the door open and it started getting cold. So one of them said, would you like me to build a fire? And I said, sure. So he said, well, I'll go up the barn and get the cedar shakes that are up there in the barn. He knew that there was a new roof so he'd been all through the property. He knew everything there, everything was. He went in, he got the cedar shakes, he built a fire and set the chimney on fire. I haven't even taken my stuff out of the car and the flames are coming out of the chimney and I'm in the main room and he's sitting there and he goes, whoa, that's a real homozoomah. But didn't you love that accent? I just did, I mean, but sometimes I need a translation. Yeah, but Mary Matthias tells the story about another young boy that rescued her at Frog Run commune up in the Northeast Kingdom. He showed, came over and he said, she said, you want to come in? And he said, no. And she said, okay. And he just sort of stood around and then he said, you know, you built that chimney all wrong. And so he showed Robert Horie, her husband at the time, how did he build it? And one day she was complaining that she didn't have an oven. Shows up the next day with the metal box, sticks it on top of a wood stove and says, there's your oven. And she said what I think is a beautiful quote, we were adopted. Vamana's adopted us. They didn't want you to burn down the house, right? And you learn pretty quick, right? If they're making fun of you because you built Burning Elm, okay, what should I, you know, and I wanted to know, and maybe lots of you did too. I wanted to know all about the wild food, not all about making Anna Dan the bread and all about needle point and all about weaving, all of that stuff. I was hungry for it. And I think many people were, and it was there, how rich it was, how beautiful. I mean, so much gratitude to Vamana's, right? And you kept pining that, didn't you? You had stories of that too. Well, what I found is a lot of people who came up here at first sort of stayed to themselves. You know, because they were told, you know, there's the cold New England Yankees and they're not gonna be very happy to have you here. And they were just as happy. They came here to escape themselves. So very often they stayed alone, but very quickly, they realized not only did they need to deal with their neighbors and get help from their neighbors, but their neighbors were, as you were saying, watching them. And, you know, winter certainly played a big part in I think people becoming part of their community. I think Vermonters, again, kept an eye on people. You were talking about the difference in New Mexico and San Francisco and the violence that happened there. And certainly there were incidents of violence here too. But for the most part, people who live in rural communities are used to helping people, even people they don't like. And they certainly were not gonna let, anybody die here in Vermont. And so there's many, many stories of people who were local farmers. Sometimes they were the odd people in town. Sometimes they were the souls of the community who helped them. And you write about many, Erie Thompson, I guess, from over in Plainfield is a regular that was talked about by many people. And I'm sure any of you that came here have stories. Perry, Perry Kasich, the superintendent and the principal, isn't it? They kept him from being drafted. They went down to Tartu's Draft Board to Cooper, yeah. All the way to Long Island. Really? That's generalistic. Long Island. So that was a common theme, I think, that people, probably people who stayed here. I mean, the thing I think that Vermonters were looking for for people who came here, especially was that they ended up taking care of themselves and they worked. They were a little suspicious of anybody, maybe they didn't have a job but certainly in a rural community and certainly farmers understood that if you could survive a winter, it meant you were working. I mean, you weren't sitting around not doing anything. So that, those things came to mean a lot in some of these rural communities and the sharing of ideas and of recipes and of food and how to take care of your animals and how to chop wood. Wood is a big theme. What is wonderful, right? Yeah, so those sorts of issues came up. They were very leery here, obviously, about something because they were worried about their kids. They were worried about sex and they were worried about drugs and they were worried about what I've often heard was called voluntary poverty. Where people came here with a mission to work within a community. With a mission to work within a community but they didn't hesitate to go on to a lot of the programs that were available in the 1970s. Food stamps in particular were sometimes an anathema to native Vermonters. So those sorts of things could give you a bad reputation very quickly if they thought you were able-bodied. But for the most part, people who stayed and were seen to be able to get along here through a couple winters were certainly welcomed into the community after a while. I'm really interested in that because you talk about thousands of radical streaks. There was also another invasion, but a quieter invasion. Does anybody ever remember the ad in the, that said in the New York Times, have you ever thought about living and working in Vermont? Does anybody remember that from the late 60s? And that was when snowing was ahead of, tick-selling was ahead of the economic. And all of a sudden a lot of people came to Vermont to work. Who were, I came up to work for state government and I know there were hundreds of people that came up here to work and with jobs and with families because we wanted to get away from the cities but we were certainly more in the mainstream than many of the people you're right about. So it's, I just wondered what. That's, when we were doing this project we didn't interview some of those people. Like Peter Smith, who helped found community college system and was later a congressman that was defeated by Bernie Sanders, but. But he's a native Romano. And he's a native Romano. But a lot of people who came here also that made a lot of changes, they maybe had a lot of the same values as hippies. But came here to work in state government which expanded vastly again because of 1970s. All the federal programs. Yeah, schools. Even under Nixon, I mean. Lots, lots of. That's how I got up here. Somebody called me in DC and said, hey, we got some money and I said, how can I live on this salary? But I came anyway. Yeah, with, you know, schools like U32 which was sort of an experimental high school. A lot of the teachers came there from away. You had a state education commissioner, Harvey Scribner, who was, you know, a leader in changes in education. A lot of people went to UVM or got these speed programs they had at UVM to get teachers into the schools which were not appreciated very often in a lot of the rural communities. So yes, it was an expansion of a lot of other people. We interviewed one man who was head of human, what would be called human resources today at the Brandon training school. And they hired a lot of these kids that were coming up. They weren't necessarily kids. They were finished with college who were looking for work and they totally transformed the way that school works. He was a man in his 80s and he was so emotional about it, talking about how involved they were. Who was this again? His name was Leon Moresco. And he's older, he's probably in his 80s but he thought it was so important to tell the story of that generation that came up here and participated in what was going on. Do you think the change was positive? Oh yes. Right. So Brandon training school is in the book quite a bit, well not quite a bit, but it was one of the places where you could do your conscientious objective status. So I was living in Brandon at the time and Gersh. And so a lot of young people came up there and got jobs there, native Vermonters as well as, and there was also a strong gay and lesbian community. We're talking in the 60s in Brandon, Vermont, which is a little bit like the Wild Wild West back in the but still having dolls at the Duke's bar. So it was a very colorful time to be living. And within no time, many of us became friends because you're working hand in hand, taking care of young people or your kids are going to school together or we had a community club in our town. And I started going around with my little reel-to-reel tape recorder to collect stories from the oldest people in town. And no one had ever asked them this story, you know? One of the people who came here was, who came to Lover was Chris Braithway, who became publisher of the Orleans Chronicle in Barton. And he went to his neighbor, he became friends with a man named Louden. I can't pull up the name, but it's in my forward to your book. Louden became his friend. He was kind of a humorous Vermont farmer. And he asked, he said, Louden, I think he tried farming and totally failed at it. And he said, I'm thinking, he had worked at the Toronto Star and he said, I'm thinking about starting a local newspaper. Do you think he'll go and Louden said, oh no, it'll never go. And Chris started it anyway and Louden came in after the first issue with a column form, a humor column, and it ran for like 20 years. Yeah. Yeah, and if you wanna hear more of Chris's stories, we did an oral history. Is that Louden Young? Yeah, so you were talking about Goddard and I'm sure a lot of you have stories, but I went back and to look and see some of the things that Goddard did at that time that I think really had an impact, not only in Vermont, but I think nationally and internationally, the first woman studies program, Marilyn Webb, who at the time was Lee Webb's wife. The design build program that was there, David Sellers, the third world studies program. Vermont's Little Woodstock, the alternative media conference in 1970, which almost bankrupted the school, that's my understanding. WGDR, they brought bread and puppet here to town. Jules Rabin, certainly an institution at the school who brought the Schumanns here and also great friends with David Dallinger. The Institute for Social Ecology with Murray Bookchin and David Chertikov and so many local community members. So you have lots of stories about Goddard and I'm sure we must have some Goddard to have stories to tell. I could tell you a friend in the early 50s who had a college or a high school friend whose brother went to Goddard in the early 50s and he went there for electrical engineering. He went there for electrical engineering. He went there for electrical engineering. I love Goddard, he's kind of such a nice little man. He's a very nice little man. Well, two members of FISH, the music group were going to UVM and they went to Goddard to do a performance but they were so wedged out on acid that they couldn't. But they got invited back and one of them got lost in the radical women's dormitory. But they decided to change schools and go there anyhow. Yes. So one of the early connections between University of Vermont and Goddard is right in your chapter. You mentioned the cake walk which happened at UVM year after year. I think the important point about cake walk isn't just it was a dance performance but it was white people performing in black face and that happened in fraternities all over the US and it happened at UVM and it took quite a few years for UVM to get rid of that custom and at some point for over two years people at UVM when they're no cell phones and few phones, no cars practically found a way to connect from one dorm at UVM to another dorm at Goddard and managed to recruit some people from Goddard to come to UVM and help them do demonstrations to get cake walk off the UVM comp. So there wasn't a lot of connection but that was one of the good things that happened. Yeah, that's the other thing that really amazed me is that I mean it shouldn't surprise you. Everybody makes all through history has found ways to connect with other people that have like ways of thinking but the interconnectivity between the colleges and certainly during the right after Kent State that just was very scary for the establishment here in Vermont. They'd been watching from the early 70s or 1971 very concerned about what was gonna happen here after the demonstrations at Kent State but also the communication between all the various communes too and I know you write about that in your book. Yeah, the Free Vermont Movement. So there was a commune called Red Clover in the Southern Vermont and those people were very connected to the weatherman underground and the black panthers and some of the people that were wanted by the government held it out there and then there was another commune called Earthworks up in Northern Vermont in Fairfield, right, Fairfield. And they got together and formed Free Vermont and that idea was that you would have free healthcare. You'd find healthcare providers that would work with you. You'd buy a bunch of forts and parts so that you could have a free garage where you could bring your car in and get it fixed and they had many of these things in place for a short period of time. It didn't last, right? But Barbara Noffy, who was part of the Earthworks group never gave up on the idea that you can save money and have a smaller impact on the environment through owning things together, living semi-communally and now they have the East Village in Burlington. Let's see, let's get another name that I'm not coming up with. Burlington Co-Housing. Burlington Co-Housing. So everyone has their own apartment so you have privacy that you have, not everybody needs a mix master, not everybody needs a vacuum cleaner, not everybody needs a washing machine, right? To share those things, a big kitchen that you can, if you're gonna have a family gathering, they have communal meals a couple of times a week and they do a lot of programs together, it's fabulous, I've stayed there. And there's another one now in Bristol just opened to Co-Housing, yeah. And some of those ideas continue to, there's good news garage over in Burlington right now and I think that probably connected the freedom of life. Right. The food co-ops, I was at a memorial service yesterday, looked into it, someone I hadn't seen in a long, long time and she said, do you remember how many hours we spent figuring out how, if I wanted almonds and you wanted flour, you'd spend about three hours every other month making deals with each other. Then we ended up another picking up all the food and then dividing it up into cheeses and flour and all that, you know, the beginning of the onion river co-op. Yeah, well the food chapter is really rich and the Vermont Historic Society did a lot on onion river and on Plainfield and I really wanted to tell a different story and I told it through a center, an environmental center that was established in Ripton, Vermont, with money from Rockefeller, go figure, where the people that ran it got their food from Erdogan in Boston and they wanted to have a buyer's club with more people so they started inviting people from Ripton and Goaching and Middlebury and all around. Good food is a good way to break down barriers, right? Okay, and when you can get it cheaply by ordering together. Out of this came first the storefront food co-op in Middlebury, a small one and then the bigger one. You know, these co-ops in Vermont are the most successful food co-ops in the nation, really. And you think about the longevity of it, just, yeah. First, I'd like to thank you for the exhibit you put on. Yeah, it was fabulous. Yeah. I was particularly pleased by the examples of the People's Voice, kind of the early newspaper on poverty issues in Vermont, that community actions all over the state got together and started. And I know that that paper, I think Ben Collins who was community action director here was the major force behind that. And that paper was also written by people who were impoverished, struggling with the issues, not necessarily people from the outside looking in and telling their stories, but actually they're telling their stories. I wish we had something like it again because I think we need it. Ivan, your first passage that you read, I think it was short, but I think it was a brilliant kind of summary, summation of what I experienced and what I'm sure many other people here in the room experienced in that period of what we witnessed, what we were involved with, the changes that we saw, and then what came out of that here in Vermont, but what was happening all over the country as well. For me, I wasn't in Vermont, I was in California at the time, but I'm wondering if we're going through something similar today. We didn't, we may have emotionally and we felt what we were going through, but I don't think we really intellectually grasped it at the time, at least I as a 20-year-old didn't, but are we more aware now? Are we more self-aware of what's happening? Well, we have a lot of division again in our country if that's what you're talking about, and we have similar problems. Vermont is the second world, aging, our country is aging, Vermont is the second oldest state in the union, so we're in that situation again. As far as the political situation, we're in a difficult time. And we know more about it because there's a 24-hour news cycle. Yeah, yeah. It's just bombarded. Yeah. Yeah. But you gotta wonder what to believe, and that's the other part of it. Well, that's the boy. You're talking about a free newspaper, a free newspaper, or the internet is a free newspaper, but the problem is what do you believe? But Chuck. That has credibility. That was true even to some degree then because if you think about the Liberation News Service, the folks that founded Total Lost Farm, why did they form the Liberation News Service? It was to bring news of the war and the anti-war movement from a different perspective, right? A different voice. Now, I mean, I do think, I mean, I'm a journalist, so I lament the loss of values in factual journalism from any standpoint. And how do we get it back? I mean, we could spend a lifetime on that issue, and I'd need a bunch of brick walls right now. But yeah, I mean, I do think there's always controlled media and uncontrolled media, yeah. I think another aspect of Goddard is on the political side, connecting with the local population. For example, in the early days, you had Goddard students leading anti-war demonstrations, but which may have been looked on with suspicion by some of the natives, but later that morphed into people like Anthony Polina who went to Goddard forming rural Vermont. And we went out to meet with dairy farmers and basically taught the farmers and others how to organize. And that had been very effective before. There's attempts to form dairy co-ops, but they're always broken by the Elkander deal here, so. And I was thinking that that led also to the anti-nuclear movement, which was very important. And I know my parents, grandparents were involved with that as well, so there were some sympathetic natives on board with some of these political objectives. Yvonne has been a good friend of mine for three years, and she mentioned, I pointed out a couple of mistakes. I figure probably it's my fault because she wanted to get the perspective of a native here looking at this invasion coming in. I might have slipped back into a Vermont accent. So, well, yeah. And so I figured it was the accent that created the problem. I wasn't the accent, and he told me that his family went back almost to the time of the Abenaki, only now I know I'm supposed to say Abenaki, right? Okay, so they've changed that, but he has a different, he says it differently, and now he's going to tell you the right way to say it. Well, I tell people, they ask me if I, I used to be in the legislature, and when I was campaigning, one of the questions I was asked was, are you a native? And I said, oh no, I'm not. They said, well, how long has your family been here? I said, only since around the 1740s. And I said, well, that sounds like a native. And I said, well, that's nothing compared to the Abenaki. We were here 10,000 years before we even thought of coming up here from a down country. So, that was my take on it. I see it as a relative newcomer. I don't know, since I had this discussion with Yvonne, and she doesn't know this yet, but I found some information that might suggest I have an Abenaki line, but I think it's undocumented, and I'm going to have to explore that a little bit more, but. And we've now discovered it's 11,000 years. Right. That they've been, Wow. Down in Pulton, they've discovered a site. And I also saw that in my historical society. I'm using it on here, so. Really? Yeah. One of the chapters that got cut from the book, Some People Are Glad, because it was very research-heavy, told about all of the various groups of people that have lived in Vermont and were odd in some way. They're like culture, culture. Whether it was religion or politics or business or the way they lived. The Oneida community, free love, right? Vermont, right? The Millerites, right over the border in New York, they dressed, they so believe that the end of the world war is coming, that they dressed their cows in ascension gowns so that they could rise up. You know, so it's been going on here in these hills for a long time. Someone. I just got your book and I'm fascinated just everything I've read it so far. I don't know, did you interview any African-Americans who came to Vermont during that time? Of course, 1968 was a time in Vermont when Phil Hoff and John Lindsay had their exchange project where black kids came to Vermont to be working in communities. There was a huge backlash at the time at the community level and it sort of precipitated the Irisburg affair, which was not really an isolated event and really grew out of a kind of tension there. I wrote quite a bit about the Irisburg affair and other venues. I did interview George Cook who lives in my area of Vermont and wanted history in the book, but it didn't quite fit. So he was African-American and his family were hippies that adopted kids from all over the country and brought them here. And he went on to be president of his class in Arlington, Vermont. You got a pretty fascinating story. But it didn't really, I couldn't get the whole story. But I think that's another aspect of the story that needs to be told, yeah. I mean, you think about David Budbill and Louis E.B. coming here after teaching at an all-black college and just thinking they were taking a year off to do their art and they never went back, you know? And David would say, well, Vermont had everything that I wanted except diversity. Yeah. Yes, and I think it would, if lots of African-Americans had come here, I think it would have been a different story. I think there definitely would have been much more of a backlash. We interviewed Ken Wiebekan, who was hired at Goddard to lead the third world studies program. And he was positive in some ways, but, you know, his experience in the long run wasn't the greatest. He didn't stay in Vermont, he ended up living on the other side of the lake. So, I mean, that's my opinion. But I mean- I know of a Howard Mosher who just needs to, who, and I know his name if I can't remember right now. Who's been in- I just figured out who you were. Yeah, you would have lived in Irisburg. It's a vision, it's a vision. It was the voice that I got it. I'm wearing glasses too, so. It's a giant cover. Anyway, I'm trying to remember his name. I have it in my computer, but anyway, a fellow, a black fellow who lived in Irisburg moved to Plainfield. Oh, Diane Derbys, yes. And- Oh, that's my Greg. No, it's a wish. Anyway, I could email it to you tomorrow morning, but anyway, went to Plainfield, lived there for a few months, felt tensions, came home from church, and his house was being torched, and his dog was killed. And some guys were vandalizing his car, and he went to a guy that was dismantling like his wheels off his car, and said, I'm gonna call the sheriff. And he looked at the guy, and it was the sheriff. That was the story he told, and he moved to Boston pretty much immediately. But he's retained some connections to Vermont, but it was a story because he lived in Irisburg also at the time of the Irisburg affair. I understand. I covered the Irisburg affair for the Herald, and in the course of that coverage, and then we did a 10 years after the story, I talked to the town clerk in Irisburg, and I said, why did those guys shoot up the black minister's house? And she said, oh, those guys weren't from here, from around here. They weren't local. They were from Orleans. All right. Well, I think that both of us got the story from Dan Chattacorp about the sort of settlement that was on abandoned railroad tracks. You rode back to the railroad. Yeah, and there was a mixed couple, interracial couple, and their house was the only one that was destroyed when some locals came in. And they kept trying to find out who had done it, but they thought it was a state police officer and someone from a wealthy family in town, but they could never prove who it was. Does anybody, did any of you know Bruce Taub from where? Yeah, sure. Franklin. Yeah, he had a commune over in Essex, right? Franklin. Franklin. Did I say? Yeah, Franklin. Franklin, that's what I said to you. Earthworks. Earthworks. Yeah, I think I knew him before he did Earthworks, but he was in the old 40s in Ellen. Along the people. Sort of along the same lines, too, there were several lesbian, separatist communes throughout the state. Never gay men, though. I think if gay men as a group had formed a community, they would have been run out of town now. In most communes, very often, there were gay men, but talking to some of them, they said there just was no way that they thought they would be safe in Vermont as a group coming in. Did you ever search out information of the circle of angels? What? It was a lesbian commune called the Circle of Angels, and they did. I don't know if there's still. This came up, and I'm wondering how long they lasted, but this was back in the 80s. I knew of them, but I couldn't find anything about it. They had all of these. They had services that the community needed. They had a daring farm babysitting service. If the farmer wanted to leave, they could take care of the whole dairy farm while they were gone. They had elderly housing. They owned a house, and they took turns taking care of the elderly people in the house. They had a cleaning service. They had a bunch of good crafts that they all did, because I co-owned their citizens' hands, and we had some of their work. I was just so impressed with them. And then they all decided that they wanted to have children. So there was a mass child-bearing. And they ended up all having babies at the same age, probably. And then they had a preschool. And I'm just curious what happened, like whether it all fizzled the way a lot of the communes fizzled. I'm going to have to do a little. I know people in the area have to ask. I don't know. I had never heard of that. We didn't go too much into the 80s, just like we started in the 60s. Maybe it was a little late. Yeah, we may not have. We did a couple other communes we focused on. Did you know something? I live in Walden, and I was there when that happened. And the circle arrived and did everything you said. They had many services that they provided to the community. And when they decided they wanted to procreate, they got some farm hands to help with the farm work, but also to procreate. And they had this policy where the children were the children of all of them. So they broke the bond between the mother and the child by having a child be raised by everyone. And then later on, it got pretty dark between the offspring and the buckos, child molesting. And it just sort of disintegrated. Oh, wow. Because there was no reason for that. It was just, I just always wondered because I just all of a sudden never heard of it. That kind of like did it. As the kids got older and were in high school age, events started to happen. So in the community? Yeah, well, in the circle of anxious. And it got out. Public services got aware of what was going on. Oh. It was not. It was not pretty. Yeah. Yeah. But the daughter of the founder now is the owner. And they call it full circle farm. And they've got probably 18 marsh ponies from Ireland and cows. Oh, so it survived in some. It still is a farm, yeah. Hey, Jay. You know what I'd like you to speak about? One of the things that I was just so interested in when I was writing about you was Kenwood Elmsley. Is that how you say his name? And all of those connections with artists and poets that were living really, really off the grid in various parts of Vermont. Yeah. One positive note to the circle of angels. One of their daughters actually is an actress who I've worked with a couple of times who's actually living a great life and performed at Lincoln Center in The War Horse on Broadway and a really fabulous young woman. So that's one positive thing, at least, I know about the circle of angels. Well, I mean, I knew Kenwood from my experience in New York City because I lived in New York City before I came here as sort of in the art world scene there. And Kenwood was a poet. He'd been very involved with Franco Harrow. He was very close to. And Ron Padgett and Kenneth Koch and, you know, John Ashbury and that sort of group of poets. And so the relationship I was having with Patti Oldenburg, we visited Kenwood a couple of times and sort of made our decision to move here, spending time with Kenwood. But, I mean, certainly there were people from the New York art scene. I mean, Madbrook Farm in particular. Right. Where Deborah Hay who was the dancer and David Bradshaw and Steve Paxton, of course, who's still there and a very revered figure in the dance world. I think that's the main connection I know of. I mean, there were, you know, there were some other poets. And, of course, Jim Dine, the painter, lived in Putney for a long time. But some of that New York art scene, you know, certainly settled in various ways. Of course, Grace Bailey lived in Thetford also. But, yeah, I mean, that was one, there was also that sort of ex-urbanites from New York, the New York sort of pop. Had they come up previously? They came up, I think probably late 60s, early 70s, yeah. Earlier than that. Kenwood still has a house in Calis, and Ron Patch still lives in Calis. And he comes every summer. And he knows a lot of people here. He knows Howard Dorman. He knows all of the poets. I mean, the New York poets are still around, and they love Bessie Drennan. There are a lot of stories about Bessie Drennan, her paintings. I mean, there's a whole subset. So if you talk to Janet Astle, whose mother was Mrs. Appleyard, she knows all about that, too. I mean, that's the thing in Vermont. You turn over a stone and they're up there. They know something about the person you're asking about. I mean, if you'd asked me about Lee Webb, I could have told you a year ago where he is. I'm down. It took a while. I didn't know you. So the Algonquin Club, back in the 20s, Bohemians out of New York would come up to Vermont. And my grandfather would row, Lake Balmazine would roll them across the island. That should be the island. That should be the island. So that was, you know, Dorothy Parker. Back in the 20s. Wow. Wow, that's amazing. Yeah. I was not here for any of this. But which is why I was so fascinated reading your book, and especially the chapter on the communes. And I think it was just so valuable to have it laid out that way because I think when we, you know, hear about the word commune, there's an immediate series of assumptions. And I just really like how you made it so clear that they were not of a piece, that they were all differently focused. I mean, that they were not, you know, there was the one, and I'm blanking on which one it was, who did have a kind of charismatic father figure leader, Cory Hill. And that didn't seem to be the case with any of the rest of them. You surprised me. So I was just wondering if you could speak to that a little bit. You know, did you have a sense looking back at it historically that we can point to one or two of them and say that these groups seem to function in a way that maybe the other is different? I mean, how do you see the fallout from all of that? What do you mean fallout? Well, not fallout, that's a poor choice of words. But how do you see... I mean, what did you take away from the research and the interviews that you did particularly about... Well, I mean, each had it... It began with a different set of people, right? And a different purpose. I think that Total Lost Farm continues to... They're having their 50th anniversary this weekend. I'll be going to it. And there's so much creativity still coming out of that group, but Brenda Porsche is really the only full-time resident there. But everybody else considers it home and they come back, right? Quarry Hill is still in existence. Now, I don't know today whether there's free love and all of that. I don't think so. It's very... Quarry Hill is very controversial. It was always controversial. I lived near it. Women would leave and they'd come to my house and I'd take care of them. They would need to be taken care of. They didn't have really good food. They weren't together. They were lucky. They were fortunate that they survived, in my opinion. You chose not to deal with them because of all of the controversy about the sex because they're abusive of underage children and... We don't know. Today there'd be a lot of meeting to a moment there. The new hamburger still exists and I would have had more about the new hamburger in the book and was planning to and had interviews when first one and then another of the founders died. I chose to approach that through a son of one of them asking the question of how do you keep it alive? If you were born there but you don't have financial stake in it, how do you get access to your own history? Earth Peoples Park was always the place for the renegades. I went there in the 80s with Roy Clark and I was going as a journalist but I wanted to go with him because I didn't feel confident going in and we made a deal. I would drive and we would stop at any bar on the way that he wanted to stop. Promoting his book, you've got to remember that. The guide to Park. Thank you for reminding me. So a baby was born the day before I got there so we got this big story and I'm trying to get back to the paper and I'm even going to get the story that day and we're pulling out of there and he reaches behind his back and he pulls a great big pistol out of his belt in the back and throws it in my lap. I said, you didn't tell me you had that and he said, why do you think I didn't tell you? I wasn't frightened to have her in there but he knew to have it. So that gave me a different flavor on the place. I wanted to use his piece because the writing in it was so beautiful. I think the two sites in Vermont that really got bad reps were Earth People's Park and Johnson's Pasture and certainly that's where violence took place and they also didn't have control over the land. They were just open for anybody that came and in both places hundreds of people came to those communes and a lot of very young people and just bad things happened there. It happens when there's unsupervised hundreds of people and in the case of Earth People's Park sometimes thousands of people for certain events but a lot of the other communes I think because the ones that survived for longer than a few months and if they survived for two years that was a long time for a commune to survive. It was mainly because the people finally said people can come and visit but they really can't stay unless they have something to contribute. That's also something we heard quite a few times because it just didn't work. I'm going back to this question I'm just curious because it wasn't like at Jim Jones, Vermont there were one or two but it wasn't like these communes that one person, male in charge I'm curious in your research, your research of why you think that was so different in Vermont of there not being gurus leading this group because there's one group that we knew about that started in San Francisco and ended up in Tennessee and Seabed Gatsby in the farm was one person and I'm curious about it. Mary Hill is another that's the closest to being sort of a guru. Cale of the Tiger which was a religious and they had someone there. What's your sense? I would get a sense that a lot of times communes were served by groups of people who knew each other even before they came here. A lot of times one person put an ad in the paper and asked a lot of people who they never even knew. It was this core group and it might grow and they would accept people in but usually there was a core of people who knew each other and felt safe with each other. Fry Brun did put advertisements they were the only one and they wanted workers they wanted people to come and work on the farm and they got them and they lasted a really long time and at the end it was mostly the women that were running it because Rotatorier and Mary Mathias split up and it was very successful and it was hard, hard work they farmed with horses. This is one up in Hardwick, one up in Hardwick. That's the one up in Hardwick, right? East Charleston. What was it called? Fry Brun. It was named Fry Brun because they finally got the maple syrup in when the peepers were coming out of their torpor and a farmer stopped by and said, oh, told it Rotatorier and that story. Yeah. We could do about one more question. Okay. Diane? I'm Diane Durby. I've worked with you on for many years at the Rutland Herald and I just want to thank her because I have no memory of things that I wrote ten years ago and the fact that you can recall I'm moving and I'm going through boxes and boxes of newspaper clippings from the 80s and the 90s and thinking I have no memory of any of the stuff I've written so I'm really impressed that you can pull this all together and capture it. Mistakes and all. Well, at that point I'd like to put a plug in again for the Vermont Historical Society because we try to put stuff up and online and there's a lot online but of course a lot of the stuff we collected we've cataloged it and it's available in the library and they still are interested in collecting. So if you have things that you think are illustrative of the point, contact the library there and I think they'd be happy you know they do have a collections policy they have to follow but I think they'd be very interested in still acquiring more materials. I'd like to see a lot of the paper copies that we've written in the dumpster when you say Oh, don't start. I'm brought with Harold. What happens to the girls who photographs? They send saves. And I wanted to say also about the value of the Vermont Historical Society what you get when you go online go on their site we hear it in your voices we hear your story in your voices and there's that authenticity of that and the sort of digging back for the fact it's unedited it's that authenticity and I love hearing the stories as people are remembering them looking them apart parsing over their words What's the name of the site again? If you just Google the Vermont 1970s project it'll go to the Vermont Historical or if you go to the Vermont Historical Society webpage and look under research in the library it comes up as one of their the main titles so thank you very much for hosting this we'll see you in the next video