 My name's Annette Pugh and I'm sitting here with Maureen and Lethia Park at the Lower Duck Pond surrounded by the beautiful trees and the Shakespeare Festival. I came to Ashland for the first time in 1971 and I was on my way to Canada to get my husband out of the draft. We stopped here in Ashland because my brother was going to a sock Southern Oregon College at that time. He had come here from Switzerland and he wanted to go to school here so that he could ski every day. We stopped and we were down on Oak Street at his rental house. It was a dirt road at that time. Lance and I, my husband had moved from Los Angeles right after the earthquake in the early 70s and we were looking for a new life. So we stopped in Ashland and that morning the sun came out. There was a lace curtain and there was a bird in the tree singing and I thought, wow, this is not Los Angeles. This is where I want to be. So we walked down to the plaza. We had both had an extensive retail background working for the May Company as buyers for 22 department stores and so we were retail people and we walked on to the plaza and a lot of the shops were boarded up. You could tell it was poor. There were no restaurants. There was a little grocery store. It was pretty pitiful. It was very quiet. Very intriguing. To me it looked like a gold mine in the future and Lance and I discussed it quite a bit about how this town had everything, the makings of a beautiful tourist place and we could see shops thriving, restaurants thriving, so on and so forth. So we went back to LA. We quit our jobs with the May Company and Lance and his mother came up while I was still working and closing out the house and they bought an old grocery store on the plaza called Lithia Grocery and I thought, what the heck am I going to do with the grocery store? But we moved up here, moved into my brother's rental with him for a while and soon we had a few of Lance's fraternity brothers come and stay with us. They were looking for a way out of LA too and they began to work on the grocery store with us. We remodeled, I got creative and displayed popsicles by color, Campbell soup cans by pyramids, you know. But we realized that the grocery store was running on homebound people that ordered food to be delivered to their house, but that the grocery store did not carry those foods themselves so they had to go to Safeway and get the food to deliver to the people. It was a losing proposition. The whole plaza was a losing proposition. So as we got into it a little bit more, we realized there's no restaurants here. Shakespeare at that time only was open for about a month and a half. They only performed for a month and a half and you had to make all your money in that time. So we decided to make sandwiches and salads to sell to the tourists so they could bring it to the park and have picnics. And that kind of began our restaurant experience. We did all cold lunch foods at that time. Sooner than later we had another group of people come and talk to us. Oh excuse me I'm jumping ahead too far. So we were we were kind of struggling along with Lethia Grocery deciding who we were going to be, what we needed to do. When on January 1st New Year's Day there was a flood. I believe it was in 1973 and we were sitting in the log cabin tavern which was now run by a motorcycle guy and Caviglio. It was the popular biker bar. It was a lot of fun. And we were sitting there late at night on New Year's Eve and we could hear the creek rising and the boulders rolling tumbling sounded like thunder. And we didn't realize at that time but that indicated that the plaza was going to flood. So we went home it was you know maybe midnight one o'clock and we got a call from the police at about 2.33 in the morning that the plaza was flooding you need to get downtown to your business. So we packed up ran downtown from our home with backpacks on with some supplies in there and we got into the restaurant and sure enough the water was rising all around us. The basement was beginning to fill up with water. We tied a big rope from the front door out to something on the plaza and that was the only way people could get across the flood was just rushing water. We had a potbelly stove in in lethia grocery and that's how we heated the place. And we went through 27 cords of wood a winter and so Lance and his fraternity brothers spent a lot of time cutting wood and gathering wood for our business. But because of the heat and the ability to cook I made big pots of soup and all the people from the plaza got to work together. And when we first moved to town we were from California we were californicating Oregon. People didn't like us. The people in town were old timers, lived here all their life and a bunch of people from California mostly hippies were coming. Not really hippies but let's say entrepreneurs who look like hippies came to town. There was Brooks Hodape, started Nimbus, Matt Fry did Rare Earth, Jack and Tarelli did the log cabin tavern. We were here doing lethia grocery. The people did not like us. They didn't want to know us. They didn't want to have anything to do with us. But when the flood happened we we found out that all the basements were linked together. So we had shoes from Perine's department store. There was a big department store on the corner now where I work at Gateway Real Estate. It's called the I can't think of the name of it but we'll find out what the name of the department store was. Anyway their merchandise was flowing back and forth so we all had to work together and because we fed them we all worked together for days and days we got to know one another and it changed the whole dynamics of the newcomers and the old timers on the plaza. We became friendly. We said hello. We understood each other's problems. We got together to work to make the plaza better. So that was the beginning of a friendship where there had been a lot of divisiveness and it was really good. In 73 they pretty much left it to the building owners to take care of things. I don't remember. They didn't do the changes that they did in 97 on that flood. You know they rebuilt the waterway and everything so it's not supposed to flood as easily. The city really didn't do that much that I remember. I think Lance wrote about it in his book about the dam. They worked on the dam. Him and a group of hippies went up there to work with the I think they had the National Guard up there. You'd have to review that story but that was their involvement. They weren't so involved with the actual plaza. They were much more up in the dam area and the parks department of course cleaned up a lot of the trees that came down. So after the flood you know there's a lot of FEMA money came in. Every time there's a flood the stores on the plaza get nicer because they get money from the government. Because of the FEMA money at Lethea Grocery we were able to put in a full kitchen and do more with the food preparation. So we had one group in the morning who did breakfast. We still did lunch and we had another group of people who did a Mexican restaurant at night. So we had three different operations and at one time we even had a late coffee pastry time for people coming out of the theater. We tried anything we could to get people in there and we did very well. We had at lunchtime we would have all the doctors in town all the legal people come in for lunch because it was kind of cool to go to a hippie place and have fabulous organic food fresh baked bread. Our best-selling sandwich was a super deluxe avocado and cheese sandwich which I patterned after a Big Mac. I figured people were eating a lot of those and they needed a good way to get that food. So it had rennetless cheese on it, fresh avocados, sprouts and roasted soybeans on whole wheat, mana bread and we sold a million of those things. They were the hot item. So that's how our business progressed. Were they separate businesses all in the same? They were all separate businesses and we had like three boxes of tomatoes in the walk-in. We always ripened our avocados because we had to stay ahead of that. The avocados we learned that if we put them up high on a shelf in a black plastic bag with a bunch of bananas they would ripen. So we were able to stay ahead of because we went through cases of avocados a week and so we learned how to ripen them and keep them going. Where did you get your products? There were a couple of produce places went out of Medford. Organic? Well there wasn't much organic at that time. The word organic really hadn't come around. We used the word natural food, fresh natural food. There were no family farms here in those days. There was no wine in the state of Oregon. We didn't even have a wine or beer license. We didn't want to deal with it because the log cabin was right next door to us. People could take their sandwich over there and eat because they didn't serve food. So we never really saw any to do wine or beer which saved us a lot of heartache I think. But the wine industry did not exist. There were no beer makers here in that time. There were no family farms. Organic hadn't even started yet. So I saw a change in that whole thing. Now our valley is full of wineries, beer makers, the best food grown in the world here. It was kind of like a preview to what was coming. What did you wear? What did you look like? I had hair as long as mine is now but it was red and wore long skirts, Birkenstocks. At Lithuagrochery we served food at the front of the store. We had no co-op. We had no none of the natural products we have now. But I was able to order Tom's toothpaste and Dr. Bronner's soap, Dr. Bronner's chips. So I had that in the front like a grocery store and people could come in and get products that they couldn't get anywhere else. And they were natural. And then we served the food and we also had the license to sell Birkenstocks. So we sold sandwiches and Birkenstocks and groceries. It was pretty interesting. But it worked very well after we became even more popular. I mean the place was packed. We had a lot of musicians play there. Sunday brunch was packed. People loved coming in there. We served Muti which we sell gallons of that every day. Muti was from Chico, California. Chico San. It was one of the earliest organic companies. And they had a truck that would ship up to us from Chico. So people have talked about your store from all over. People from Salmon River. Oh yeah. So there's far people from Black Bear out out down. People would come in from the communes. We had this one guy that was called Earthworm who would come to the place. And he always wore a little leather G strap. And he smelled like an earthworm. And it was funny. I mean we had some real characters that came in from all over. It was a fascinating time. We did a lot of fresh juice. Matter of fact we started making our own carrot juice. And we realized we couldn't keep up with the production. We'd go through it so quickly. So we gave Lenny Friedman our juicer and said why don't you make carrot juice for us. And that was the beginning of Pyramid Juice Company which was a fabulous big company here. He made all kinds of juices, supplied all the restaurants, grocery stores, so on and so forth. But that's how his business started. So we worked at restaurant and finally a couple years before we sold the business we bought out the breakfast people and the dinner people. And everybody was under one ownership which was a lot easier. We could control the waitresses, make better service agreements with people and do a better job of serving people. So we consolidated that, ended up with breakfast, lunch, and dinner six days a week with about 55 employees. Was it still the Lithium Grocery? It was still Lithium Grocery. We never changed the name. Just, I don't know, for sentimental reasons I guess we never wanted to change the name so we left it Lithium Grocery. In 79 I sold the business to Tom Manahan and it became Tommy's. And I've actually sold that business six times so I made more money selling the business than I ever did in running the restaurant. But it was a fabulous experience to be in that restaurant and get to know people and people were very vulnerable when they're hungry so it was nice to work with them and take care of them and we were very popular. That was about the time that Geppettos was opening and Brothers was opening and more restaurants were coming in. And by 1979 Lance and I had really it's hard work running a restaurant. We wanted to sell and we did sell it to Tommy. What else can I tell you? There's so many stories. What did Lance do? Lance, well he was my fry cook. He did a lot of the cooking. He did a lot of the wood shopping with his fraternity brothers. Jim Sims worked with us while he was getting his law degree and Terri Offedal who's now an author who comes through Ashland every once in a while work with us. And we had another man named Zabriel who helped us with our produce. And we were a pretty happy bunch of people. There wasn't much to do in Ashland. We were usually closed on Monday and in the evenings we would go to our little rental house and maybe do yoga. We didn't have a television and there weren't the activities going on in town that that we have now. The college was the college then and it slowly progressed from Southern Oregon College to Southern Oregon State College and then to SOU, the university. So that changed and the city and the Chamber of Commerce started doing more things. Shakespeare was expanding, building up their shoulder seasons. Finally, one of the projects, Lance and I did a lot of thinking about the city. He was the head of the planning department for many years and so he was involved in politics. Lance was pretty much a genius ahead of his time. He was a crazy and wild guy but very intelligent and so he did a lot with planning. One of our big problems on the plaza at that time was the alley behind the plaza. Every business had its own trash can and if you were in a restaurant business you had oil and food smells. There were a lot of feral cats living back there, a lot of rats from the creek and it was, you know, we had to scrub the the alley behind our restaurant every week to get the grease and everything done. So Lance and I kind of studied the trash situation. We took a couple trips to Europe while we were doing the restaurant to see my family who was there and we would go into all these little European towns to see how those people handled their trash because it was a real problem here and so we noticed that the best places had a central area for trash and not everybody having their own trash containers. So that's one thing we learned in Europe. The other thing, well I'm going to get into the other thing later because that involves another building, but so we came back after that trip to Europe and we talked to the city about putting in a central trash area, which we have now, and all the restaurants and all the businesses take their cardboard and trash there and you don't have the oil, you don't have the food smells, it stays so much cleaner in the back. About that time Lance was talking to the lady who owned the Oddfellas building and she and he came to agreement and we were able to purchase that building. The upstairs was condemned, but I went up there and I looked at it and there was a beautiful old Chinese wool rug and I lifted it up and there was a virgin oak flooring and that was where the Oddfellas had always done their meetings. So I put in a dance studio and that became the Plaza Dance Studio and we just did everything we could to stay in town because so many people in the late 70s, early 80s, all through the 80s, were having to leave Ashland and go to the cities to find a job. So we did everything we could to stay here. I am up up in the space where the black sheep is now in the Oddfellas building after we did, well actually before we did a lot of the renovation to the historic building and and it wasn't recognized as historic before that. I went in there and I ran a modeling agency, we had an answering service, I did the dance studio. I mean you just did anything you could. I did a lot of the fashion shows for Seroptimus for years, advertising the clothes of different shops in town, we did tea room modeling up at the Winchester Inn and it was so much fun at lunchtime having all these ladies sit there and have the models move around through them you know. So yeah we did a lot of things. Can you talk about how the Ashland Daily Tidings kind of functioned in the community at that time? Well the Daily Tidings was everything. In those days the Daily Tidings was a real business. I mean you know we had first they were on Main Street where Ashland Homes is and then they moved out to the southern part of town out by the university in that big building and the Daily Tidings was very influential. They had local writers, a lot of people contributing to the paper, a lot of letters to the editor from controversial characters in town and there were a lot of them always have been probably always will be but the Daily Tidings was a big part of Ashland and it's been slowly but surely you know changed. Yeah as the newspaper business has changed a lot. When did Lance start writing? Lance started writing probably in the mid to late 80s and it surprised me because he had never been a writer before but he was very involved in politics he got to know a lot of people he heard a lot of the stories that were going on in town and he loved the history so he did a lot of historic writing. He was very funny guy that's why I married him he made me laugh and so he also liked writing humor pieces so and a great imagination much more out there than I was I was kind of like everyday person doing the work but he was coming up with all the fantasies and the stories of the raccoons playing poker in our backyard and all the different little tangents he got off on so he became he he started writing in the late 80s and all through the 90s and did he write in the Daily Tidings? Yes he wrote he wrote a lot for the tidings doing historic pieces and he wrote for some travel magazines a matter of fact he wrote about Ashland's big Halloween that we used to do at night not the children's parade this was for adults in the evening and closed off the main street and he publicized that in the travel magazines and a lot of people came to town for that but the last year the police were in costume instead of in uniforms and a bunch of wild and crazy guys from Klamath I think came over with their baseball bats and guns and it got a little out of hand so the city said no more and they didn't allow the street to be closed off anymore and now it's transitioned into the children's parade and more children and adults during the day than in the evening Can you talk about drugs over that period of time? Drugs well you know cannabis we were all hippies and we were smoking pot in a hidden way you know we'd climb under the bridge on the creek and smoke down there and the communes of course had had pot some pot growing but it was pretty low-key I mean we weren't doing heavy drugs was mostly pot it was really quite an innocent time very innocent time when you hear about what's going on now I do remember one winter that we found out that a homeless man had passed away in the back off the alley there was a bridge going up to Granite Street and they had found his body in there and he had died of heroin and that was kind of shocking to me this was probably the late 70s you know I wasn't used to that we were really kind of in La La Land in our perfect little world and the homeless population was not as large as it is now we weren't used to hearing about heroin and that just didn't touch us The war was going on this whole time the whole Vietnam War was going on impacting the community and the culture well you know as I as I watch history now from those days I realized that I was kind of in a dreamy little land I we were very unaffected here I mean we did our thing and we had a beautiful life and I don't think that we were as conscious I didn't read the newspaper didn't watch the news on TV we just went day to day cooking cleaning you know living our lives here and I don't think that we really thought about it that much Lance of course had gotten out of the draft by then the draft was over we knew what was going on in the world around us but we weren't as conscious it wasn't 24-hour news like it is now and we weren't connected to it we were in our little idyllic place doing our work working hard I met a man in Portland who came to our restaurant who came to let's you grocery he was going to the university or to sock at that time and he was one of our customers I didn't know anything about him but I met him 30 years later and he he laughed he says I remember you from the restaurant I was surprised that hippies were working so hard and making money but of course we were very well educated business trained people we weren't just you know people living on economy and we were actually we came from a bunch of training to this point so he was surprised to see that some hippies could pull that off because we were dressing that way in the restaurant you know we'd wear our bikinis and go and lay in the creek and then put our skirt on and come back to work because we didn't have air conditioning in those days so that's how we would work you know and it was a lot of fun it was a lot of fun but the country was definitely changing the vietnam vets were coming back to the country and not being appreciated and there was just a lot of problems I mean you know the politics of the time and so we just kind of turned it off we didn't think about it that much yeah so time went on and different businesses came on the plaza and it just got better and better and better I became a real estate agent in 1979 interest rates were about 20 percent then and one of our banks in town had just gone out of business had gone bankrupt or something they closed the doors they called all their loans and they had made most of the local loans for people and so everybody had to rewrite their loans at 20 percent they just called all the loans and that's when I got into real estate it was boot camp we didn't sell anything for years it was tough so that's when I was still doing fashion shows doing all kinds of little things so I could keep going stay here and not have to move to San Diego or LA or Portland to get a job it was really important to us that we stay here we had bought a house in the railroad district in the mid-70s for $12,000 and you didn't tell people you live below the boulevard in those days and it was mostly older homes above the boulevard some newer but not like now I mean we've gone up into the forest interchange now and a lot of big homes up there big views it was more in the 90s and 2000 that people started flocking here from California a lot of retired people with money build the big homes you know the McMansions all through the hills it wasn't like that the railroad district was in real bad shape the state came through and gave the owners of property there money to insulate and put foundations under the homes so the railroad district started building up and it still was the bad part of town we had 20 trains a day and there was a turntable at the end of 8th street my home's on the corner of 8th and B I still live in the same home 45 years later it's changed quite a bit now it's kind of the groovy place to be although I see another change now I see so many changes I I've always sold a lot of businesses most realtors don't sell businesses because I sold my own business I am a business person so I take on that challenge and it used to be that somebody had buy a business on the plaza just to get a place on the plaza but now downtown is spread all the way up to the library and you see a lot of vacancies now so people don't have to buy a business on the plaza to get a location so that's changed it Amazon and the online ordering has changed the retail business completely although Ashland is still special because we have boutique like shops and people want to come here to spend time and buy things so it's a little bit different but still it's affecting retail a lot so I see a real difference in the business environment downtown Ashland and I'm hoping that we won't end up with a lot of franchises in our retail spaces because that'll make us like everybody else if we have a lot of things that are everywhere else in the world so I see that difference and then the housing now the railroad districts all built up everybody likes to be able to walk to town but I'm seeing a change in the demands of a buyer they don't want old houses anymore they want the new houses with all the bills and whistles and so Ashland's trying to keep up with the building we've got several newer developments that have come up and selling the old house is a lot more difficult than it used to be I'd say in the 80s 90s you saw a lot of people coming here working on the older homes getting them on the historic register when we did the oddfellows building and put it on the historic register there were tax credits for doing that some of the homes people got tax credits for fixing them up it was really important to people about the history of things I see I see that kind of slipping away I don't see people spending as much time or having as much interest in the historic aspects they're all for the new quick and easy consume consume consume it's a very different time I feel there's a loss and it might be the influence of people coming from big towns where they don't pay attention to the history of the location the town's gotten very big we still have a historic commission but they really don't have many teeth you know all they can do is protect a facade of a house but I don't see a lot of people taking that those projects on like we did in the 80s a lot of people came here and they just loved having an old home and bringing it back and we would have historic tours you know if you're on the historic commission you have to have your house open one day a year for the public to come through and it was a big occasion here when we do that and you don't hear about that so much anymore can you can you talk about any scandals or scandals well um interesting stories maybe oh there's a lot of stories in the naked city let me see which one I can think of I may have to get back to you on it and write some notes for you because I there's so many of them um why did you call it the naked city well there's just so many stories here and there's so many bones buried in this you know town and the family dramas and the scandals I mean you know the man who wanted to develop Ashland Creek Drive who had the lawsuit against everybody in town all the city counselors everybody and he fought I think he was a German man I can't remember his name but that's something worth looking up there's a big to-do about developing up into the hills that was not going to be allowed and now we've got mansions going all the way up to the top there you know it just like oh there's so many big things um couple realtors got killed in Medford and uh that affected all the real estate agents right now a matter of fact they've got a new safety app that they're trying to get everybody to use because real estate agents are sitting ducks you know so that was a big thing that shook the whole valley uh the two little girls who were killed in Ashland um at that time Lance and I were working on the armory and uh we had the car wash there and the grocery store and uh in the car wash they found the blanket that had wrapped up the little girl who was killed and they found the guy who did it as a waiter in a restaurant right by the university that was a biggie things like that they come through of course in Ashland everything's a big deal i don't know you just think about little things that have just happened lately like the senior center and the recall and all these things everything's always a big deal here and there's so many watchdogs people who've come from other bigger cities who've seen them disappear that are here now watching everything you know and trying to protect it i don't know it may be out of hand i don't know if they can ever get control of everything now but it's always been a controversial place and the people who come here are always a little different and uh they're well traveled well educated in general and it makes for a very vibrant and interesting town now you didn't talk about the armory before well the armory was an interesting issue lance and i just loved taking on these big projects we did the earth building in jacksonville we redid that building and then we we saw that the armory was coming up for sale because the army wanted to build the new armory that's out on east main street so we went up to Salem and we talked to the army and we had a partner tim kuzik tim and susanne kuzik were our partners on the building and we went up and met all the army guys and i i'm not sure but i think we bought the armory for 325 000 and now what are we going to do with it you know what are we going to do so we decided we'd make it into a venue and use it for different concerts things like that and we started trying to develop the downstairs worked on all the offices got the offices rented out and uh lance who was a political creature he and tim um went to the state and they were able to get a $500 000 grant that we would match if everybody approved of it and meanwhile we had converted the car wash into four little shops you know where they are now the flower shop good all et cetera baking that was the car wash and uh so we were trying all kinds of things to get things going and here this $500 000 grant would have really helped us but we felt that the powers to be in town were threatened by having another venue that they did not control and it turned out to be true gordon madera's at that time was the mayor of ashland he was on the board of directors for the shakesperian theater and uh he wrote a letter to Salem saying we don't think these people need the money we don't need that kind of investment in another venue in ashland so we lost out on that and actually the armory project was the albatross that took us down we had to go into bankruptcy we lost everything because of the armory and because of that vote so that was kind of disappointing and it's still a little bit difficult for me to go in there when i see that shakespeare uses that building when they do the martin luther king thing there when they have all kinds of parties and everything and of course the deborers own it and uh money is no issue to them the other thing that the army didn't tell us when we bought the building was that the huge beams in the armory were failing and that took all the money we had up front to fix that so that's why we were in such desperate straits with that building so it was a great project i felt like we did a real benefit um the grocery store had been raised market and raised sold the market and we put in camp wells and camp wells was a great natural restaurant they overextended themselves and went to medford and they lost everything too so it was a time of real risk taking risk taking and that risk definitely took us down so it must have been a period where economy was sort of inching back and yeah and we jumped ahead we were always a little bit ahead of the curve and that's always dangerous when you're doing things like that so that was the lesson we learned on that one yeah yeah uh florins florins and bill schneider were incredible people i met her through aau w i've been a member of aau w since i graduated at ucla in 1970 and i came here and became a member right away and florins was kind of every she was a mentor to young women who were go-getters and i was one of them and um she was an incredible woman she was she had great stories you know she knew elinor roosevelt and she would talk to us about her and her life in those days and um she would just train us to become the president or vice president or secretary of aau w and and she was always such a joyful person such an up person such a smart woman uh very well educated we had a book club uh and we would often meet at florins's house and she was just quite a woman quite a woman and uh an old-fashioned woman and yet very progressive she's very involved in the university very much so um for the town-to-town relations would be an interesting idea yeah um you know at that time they were building the art gallery at the university and uh she talked to us a lot about that about the architect that they had chosen will somebody i can't remember and he died in an airplane crash as soon as the building was built and uh she mourned his loss um but that was one of the things she also uh did the uh senior residents at the end of maple street there they they donated that land to the hospital maybe i can't remember who they donated the land to but she she built that senior residents and she was actually in there at the end of her life she stayed there herself and she is i think of her often beautiful white hair and a french twist and bright sweaters and just such such an incredible woman such an incredible person and she and her husband had run the school for children in arizona and uh so she she was always thinking about education and uh helping people women especially she was she was very much of a feminist yeah she she was she was a very neat lady i miss her a lot and uh yeah she and her husband were were very big parts of ashland probably in the 90s i think that's about their their heyday here they had a home over near green meadows and they had an indoor swimming pool and they would get their exercise they're swimming every day and you know uh lance and i went with the radars and the athletic club the the supporters of the team to japan and it was kind of an interesting time because it was when southern oregon state college that's what it was at that time and uh but they were all on the trip so we we got to know them on a real social personal basis and uh that's right when the the school was going to become a university and join the state system and that was a big change was a big change for indirectly for the town and directly for the the college but these people who made those changes there were reno steve reno was the president and then the other guy i can see him and his wife perfectly was the one who went back up to portland or wherever the head school is but he and he became the head of the whole state system these were the people who made those changes and i and i knew them personally and it was it was really neat to see that happen because the university became much more powerful i think did the students come to town the students come to town uh definitely there's um there's more interchange between the students in town now than i think there used to be well there's more of them for one thing i don't know if they still have the american language academy on campus no they don't and that was such a powerful thing in the um eighties and nineties because we had a lot of exchange students from japan from asia from south america mexico of course has always been a big partner and we did go down to wanawato and see the university and visit with all those people so that was really neat but um yeah i think the university plays a bigger part in in ashland than it used to shake spear well they do an incredible job it's been kind of an interesting uh transition because when i first came i was a seroptimist for 20 years you know and we did the pillow booth there and uh that's when uh the green show was a little shakespearian dancers you know and the little costumes and um the theater had not been enclosed yet and all the seroptimists were worried because we thought they were going to completely enclose the place and then they wouldn't have needed our pillows and blankets so that was you know a big deal for us um lance once wrote a story about willy world how ashland is just a company town that survives by their their good will you know and i i see that to a certain extent um i don't know it might might still be my old hippie ways of thinking about big establishments taking too much power but um they're very good neighbors they do an incredible job they bring a lot of people to town i love going to the theater i'm i'm thrilled about it uh in my restaurant at lethia grocery we had charge accounts for all the actors and all the tech people and of course we sold bagels and cream cheese for 35 cents we lost money on every one of those things but we had a lot of people come in and and the actors always paid their bills they're we never got stuck with any any bills from any of the actors and in those days it just seemed like they were more downtown it was such a small community that you really got to know the actors and all the people working at Shakespeare now it's kind of like a monster business you know there's so many people working there and and the actors that you still see them in the restaurants and things but it's not as close and as friendly as it used to be people when i was doing my restaurant that are still coming back every year and they come in to visit me at the real estate office and a lot of people don't like the gender fluidity the racial fluidity a lot of the new stuff that's been brought in through the last couple different artistic directors but i realized that the theater has to be progressive to attract the younger population so a lot of the older group people are just going to grumble and not get used to the change or else they will get used to the change and appreciate it you know but oh yeah there's there's been a lot of grumbling well they say 45 of this town is seniors people over 55 well they brought a lot of money with them there's a very uh well i think it's all over america though the top one percent you know the classes you know upper class and then the lower class the poorer people the homeless people how can people come into town and buy a house for a million two million but that's happening all over the country it's really separating us instead of bringing us closer together yeah change i don't i don't know how long this change can keep going on for i mean these many people are rich and all these people are poor i mean how long does that happen i mean the french revolution happened you know i wonder how it's going to straighten itself out or if it ever will i don't know i don't know but um it's all over now you know it's so many people it's hard to go back to a place and see it changed here i've i've been here all along as the change happened so kind of you know you don't notice it as much but i went back to the philippines about five years ago with my brother and i loved that place when i was growing up and i was so shocked at the violence and the number of people just the population i couldn't recognize anything in the whole town where i'd lived for eight years you know so in ashland i i i don't focus on the change as much but it's changed a lot well there is a protective quality about ashland you know people have always come here to be healed the nespiers indians used to come out to where the lake is for their festivals for healing uh people came here at the turn of the century for the waters and when i first moved here in the 70s there were several indian women that would come down to town and they were healers um the jessal healing cancer healing camp you know there there's a whole feeling of healing here and there's also a feeling of being protected here i've always felt it i know we're surrounded by volcanoes and stuff but i've always felt safe here um and just uh the other thing is a lot of people want to be here and they can't come here for some reason or not some people just cannot make it here and it's almost like i feel like they don't belong here and so they they have to move on it used to be people couldn't come here because there weren't any jobs now we've got a lot more jobs the medical field the university the city itself uh there's a lot more jobs here now but still people who don't have that same feeling don't seem to survive here for very long i see people who come and buy a house and they're gone in a year they can't make it here they don't like it here this is something's not right and i just don't think they belong here i've seen it for years i don't know what it is it's a protective layer yeah oh i couldn't live anywhere else i i grew up all over the world and came back to the states to go to ucla and ashland's always been a little part of argentina where i went to high school and the philippines and belgium where my mother was from and it's all right here and it's still all right here it's changed a lot i've had to really be at peace with change and allow things to go near my house used to be all apple orchards now it's all condos you know uh they're packing us in tightly because they don't want to well they can't really expand ashland too much so letting go of my fear of change has been a big eat but i've kind of pulled away from politics because i don't agree with some of the stuff that goes on here and i just do my business and work in my garden and walk my dog yeah i had to talk about it it is fun yeah