In the spring of 1971, I participated in a little part of the life-style movement of the counter culture that began to emerge in a sleepy college town in the bucolic Willamette Valley of Oregon.
“House at Pooh Corner is a new kind of living arrangement with a new kind of name,” wrote Barbara Blaire of the Oregon State University Barometer, the student-run newspaper. “Finding seven students from Poling Hall who were seriously interested in communal living plus four other friends, two students from Poling went about finding a house large enough for this type of cooperative living situation.”
Since Pooh House was the first instance of its kind in Corvallis, a radical departure from conformist containment by the ruling authorities who in those days controlled how students were to be housed off campus, we were required to seek permission from the housing authority or at least to appease it.
“Robert Lawrence of the Geology Department, interested in the living group, gave his support and adult backing to the 13 students,” chronicled Blair.
I’m sure we didn’t appear to be radical young protestors and dropouts who needed a base of operations from which to promote insurrection. It was more likely that repressed sexuality lingering in the hinterlands far from Haight Ashbury and the East Village put visions in their heads of orgies and debaucheries stemming from unbridled permissiveness.
It certainly was a time during which many reconsidered dominant paradigms as participants of the post ‘60s counter culture. It was also a time during which many explored their sexuality unfettered by the constraints imposed by unseated moral authorities.
But we simply saw it as a chance for inexpensive housing within which to continue fostering solidarity with our student friends while pursuing our educations.
“Yoohoo, Eeyore!” she called to me, the surmised sullen one, that spring near the Quad. That’s how the Pooh name came about, from a fantasy of two of the Poling seven who sought to project A. A. Milne’s story, animated by his son Christopher Robin’s stuffed animals, onto their surroundings and their friends. They got the idea from the song House At Pooh Corner, penned by Kenny Loggins for the album Uncle Charlie and His Dog Teddy by Nitty Gritty Dirt Band in 1970.
So help me if you can I've got to get
Back to the house at Pooh Corner by one
You'd be surprised there's so much to be done
Count all the bees in the hive
Chase all the clouds from the sky
Back to the days of Christopher Robin
And Pooh
The song House at Pooh Corner was like a paean to the reexamination of priorities while conducting alternative life styles during the ‘70’s on the part of a disillusioned baby boom generation in retreat from the exhaustive ‘60’s decade of insurgencies and radical political protests. The 17 bedroom house once on the corner of 10th and Adams streets was selected to be the site for our experiment. Blair referred to it as “a new life style” conducted in a house “that was a former boarding house, fraternity, sorority, and now a coop (within which) lists are put up on the refrigerator doors saying what needs to be done, and everybody signs up for whatever they have time to do.”
Late Summer ‘71; The sign advertizing “Rooms” when a flophouse would be replaced by a homemade one, “House at Pooh Corner”
During the summer of its inception a few of us charter members managed rooms for summer school students in exchange for rent until the fall when the rest returned to start the living arrangement. Old, worn furniture filled the house. A WWII poster on the wall admonished that we provide “Bundles for Britain” to that country under siege. We'd sit on dilapidated couches in the living room in the stifling heat watching the matriarch played by Barbara Stanwyck undermine the intentions of the bad guys in The Big Valley, two back-to-back episodes of the original Star Trek, and Jack (“Just the facts, Ma’am”) Webb get to the bottom of the investigation in Dragnet, while flicking ashes into the vintage stand-alone trays, each on its own little stilt.
“Well, I bucked hay that summer,” my friend rejoined. “I’d come home to Mandolin Wind by Rod Stewart on the stereo, sweating like a pig and drinking beer with (you guys) and a few other occasional cast members. I don't remember what kind of beer it was but inside the caps were little puzzles with which to amuse ourselves. We listened to a lot of Santana, Cat Stevens, and Elton John. That job was the first hard manual labor that I loved. It didn't last long enough. As soon as the hay was in the barn we were unemployed again.”
Trips on weekends could be had for the price of a cup of coffee in the Hard Hat Lounge in Toledo over on the coast. We’d get there free by hitching rides atop the chip hoppers bound for the Georgia-Pacific kraft paper mill when the train slowed down on its way through town. We’d burrow snugly into the fragrant chips of Doug-fir to ward off the cold as the train lumbered into the night over the Coast Range.
The air in Toledo would be pungent with sulfur fumes while we waited to hitch back once the cars were emptied of their chips. The locals drinking late night coffee would eye us suspiciously. The timing had to be just right to meet up with the train. The thrill of “riding bronco” into the wind and the rising sun atop the lips of those things when the train picked up speed on the downhill into town was like Slim Pickens riding the bomb hurling toward Earth in the movie Dr. Strangelove.
Questioning priorities: Where Do the Children Play? by Cat Stevens
Well I think it's fine, building jumbo planes.
Or taking a ride on a cosmic train.
Switch on summer from a slot machine.
Yes, get what you want to if you want, 'cause you can get anything.
I know we've come a long way,
We're changing day to day,
But tell me, where do the children play?
Well you roll on roads over fresh green grass.
For your lorry loads pumping petrol gas.
And you make them long, and you make them tough.
But they just go on and on, and it seems that you can't get off.
(Refrain)
Well you've cracked the sky, scrapers fill the air.
But will you keep on building higher
'til there's no more room up there?
Will you make us laugh, will you make us cry?
Will you tell us when to live, will you tell us when to die?
(Refrain)
Bonding between members of a peer collective after each has left home is common for the biographies of individuals that make up western societies. Pooh House convened and celebrated a small, intimate, self-supervised “crowd” that served as a makeshift extended family or “clan.” I think the modern university helped to foster this sort of thing as a byproduct of the need to train a more sophisticated work force for the abstract and intricately technical economy and to keep from overwhelming the labor pool with too many unskilled workers. It has been instrumental in prolonging the developmental stages of adolescence and young adulthood. These include, strategic to the incident of the House at Pooh Corner, the need to resolve the conflict of identity formation, choosing an appropriate (occupational) identity, or suffering the consequence that Erick Erickson called “role confusion,” and the conflict of intimacy, finding it, or else suffering the consequence he called “isolation.”
Someone made a wire mobile that spelled out everybody’s name and hung it in the living room. Another wrote the names of all in phosphorescent poster paint on the basement wall in the area in which impromptu gatherings of Pooh people listened to Leon Russell, Leonard Cohen, and Van Morrison. One couple on the third floor entertained the others up there with proper “tea parties.” Fads came and went, such as ping pong competitions in the dining room.
Meanwhile, we roustabout semi-urban communists satisfied the need to eat cheaply by filling a freezer with half a cow of butchered meat and, in the days before food stamps, applying for government surplus that included bulk cheese, canned fish, flour, beans, and rice. Peanut butter and cheddar cheese sandwiches quickly became a favorite.
By this time, the hard beat of acid rock had given way to a softer sound more conducive to contemplation and self-examination. Top of the charts included Carol King’s Tapestry, and James Taylors’ Sweet Baby James. It accompanied numerous pathos-ridden mini-dramas as students coupled and uncoupled with much emotional intrigue and turmoil. Here one would sit for hours in a stuffed chair, secretly admiring and fantasizing about another to the plaintive sound of John Denver’s Poems, Prayers, and Promises. Meanwhile her object of affection shaved his beard to lament his unrequited love for yet a third who, instead, had chosen a fourth person to be her lover. All nighters were common, and not for the purpose of studying last minute before exams, rather, for the purpose of holding intensive discussions that explored and resolved disputes and misgivings regarding interpersonal relationships, or else, warmed by the glow of many lit candles, for the purpose of celebrating the sacred mysteries, aided by the plaints, offertories, and pining of Moody Blues’ On the Threshold of a Dream and To Our Children’s Children’s Children.
Sidemen come out first
John Stockfish base guitar
Looks at the world through the eyes of Nashville,
The Riverboat and Charlie McCoy
He's just a boy
The lead guitarist Red Shea who's really come a long, long way
since rhythm rocker jingle jangle
And go Red!
And Lightfoot
Edwardian, suddenly striped
His hair blondish and poetic
He is less than vinyl perfect
His foot is a precise anchor for the husk and vibrance of his voice
He is the image of Alberta
The side street near Chicago
The grim beauty of Toronto
He is an artist
He is an artist
He is an artist painting Sistine masterpieces of pine and fur and backwoods
Still echoes long ago the winter night of black July and then the outcome
Of an early Cleveland rainfall
I sit softly among the rest waiting there for him to paint his pictures
And as the go-go girl went round and our heads were in a spin I thought about
The Crossroads, In the Early Morning Rain and Rosanna
I'm not saying that I'm sorry
I'm just telling you this story
And when Lightfoot's magic calls
You can write it on your walls
'Cause that's what walls are for
These activities took place, of course, with a grave sense of urgency. Even more grave was a backdrop of unsettling reality in the greater world order. One student, not surprisingly, was letting the social experimentation usurp adequate academic progress. This was despite how his draft number, pulled at the start of the Pooh year, was eleven, guaranteeing a call up, were he to lose his student deferment.
“I got put on academic probation that fall,” he recounts. “The School of Forestry released me too. My parents in Virginia sent me back to OSU after the winter break with the tuition for one more term to get back into good standing before ‘joining the military branch of my choice.’ I secretly plotted the lofty plan to take 19 hours Winter Term and 18 hours Spring Term to regain my 2S student deferment status and avert being drafted and very likely shipped off to Viet Nam.
“One of those classes in the 19 hours was economics that convened at the ungodly hour of 7:30 am. I rarely got to it, even missing the two midterms. But I studied the book religiously. When I asked the professor the week before finals to take make up midterms, he asked, ‘OK. Which one?’ I will always remember what he said when I told him both, ‘Well, son, the monkey’s on your back.’
“I proceeded to write for three hours, took the final the following week, and got a C for the course. Made a 3 point on the 4 point scale that raised my GPA to above a 2 point and then got bussed to my AFEES (Armed Forces Entrance and Examination Station) physical in Portland that spring break, planning afterward to petition my draft board for a reinstatement of the 2S student deferment.
“On the bus ride up, I thought about a ride I got from some dudes on my way back from my solo expedition from Giant Forest to Yosemite in California’s Sierra Nevada just before the school year started. These guys picked me up in Petaluma and drove me to Pooh House’s doorstep. Then they headed on to their final destination: Canada in order to avoid the draft.
“To my surprise, I flunked the exam. When the line of immanent draftees was told to turn around and bend over, the staff physician noticed I had a benign cyst at the base of the spine. Can't bounce around on jeep seats or it's liable to become infected, and they don't want you on your stomach for two weeks while it heals after they remove it. My board sent me a 1H classification, temporary exemption from active status, with the message, ‘See you in a year.’”
Meanwhile, two other Pooh House companions petitioned for and successfully won Conscientious Objector status from their draft boards. They were assigned social work in a medical clinic and field labor in a work camp, respectively, as alternative service. Nightly news of the Viet Nam war effort on that old black and white TV had provided the ominous soundtrack to these sobering campaigns.
Certain special vehicles transported more than mere bodies from point A to point B in those days when gas was $0.32 a gallon. They transported adventurers. The Volkswagen Fastback shown above was such a magic carpet car. The following is taken from its travel log.
Trip #1 Mt. Rainier, above, summer '71
Trip #2 (above): Summer fog banks on the Livermore Hills after an all night drive down HW 101 to visit owner’s parents, summer ‘72.
Trip #3 Escape town for Livermore, broken-hearted over the loss of its owner’s girlfriend to another lover, winter ‘73 (I found him lying heart-sick on the couch the night I returned from the winter holiday in Virginia by getting a ride from a ride board with a guy who had his riders help him drive 85 mph round the clock to L.A., getting there in less that 48 hours, then hitching north, getting a ride with a dude who said he’d be selling his car for $100 in Seattle and going off to live on papaya in some Hawaiian cave. My fastback owner friend left that same night. He recounted later how he’d found this same ex girlfriend hitchhiking in northern California, picked her up, then, on second thought, dropped her back on the road and continued on to Livermore.)
Trip #4 Ride to eventual 4-week backpack solo in the Sierra by way of a shoplifting bust at an Albertson's over baggies for gorp and a 3-day stay in the Yolo County Jail during which hard timers tattooed themselves with needles in the melted ends of toothbrush handles and magazine page ashes mixed with water for ink, while the car’s owner headed on to a summer job at a casino in Reno, summer ‘73
Trip #5 Ride to owner’s folks for Thanksgiving '73, a wondrous meal made by his grandmother at her farm in the Livermore Valley, sold by means of immanent domain to the government, along with his parent's farm, when the federal Livermore Labs expanded their buffer zone
Trip #6 Ride as a summer emigrant to Sparks, NV to work the 2 am to 10 am shift at John Asguaga's Nugget where I suffered a serious infatuation for a married black jack dealer, summer ‘74
Trip #7 Its owner taking off for Reno forever in the early summer of '75, the summer two good friends (not Pooh House people) took off with “Bo and Peep’s” Heaven's Gate cult, only to commit suicide in '97 when their space ship, hiding behind the Hale Bopp comet, arrived to take them away from this decadent planet according to the tenants of a modern Gnostic hybrid they called Heaven's Gate
The House at Pooh Corner lasted only a year. But vividness of memories of that year is commensurate with the formative associations it fostered and the lasting values it instilled.
“It is remarkable to me how my experience at Pooh House has remained such a powerful touchstone for me all these forty years,” my best friend in those days said to me. “Somehow it seems that although there are so many details that I remember about that year, they all seem to be tied together by such a strong sense of yearning. And that sense of yearning has propelled me through the decades since: to live in a different world with different rules, for a world where we could all talk about how we loved each other in the light of day, a world where work had meaning and each of our intellectual and emotional capacities had a place to develop and be nurtured by our companions along the way, a world where our passions had a home in the small tasks of everyday life.”
