Ch. 3 - The Hippie-Dippy Window: My Sixties Collective
Below is chapter 3 from Ken’s forthcoming book, How Did I Get Here? A Memoir of the Baby Boom Generation.
I still call it “the hippie-dippy window.” But almost everyone from that battle is gone. Today, I have to explain this history to younger members of our collective.
Larry
We blamed Larry Frantz for that barn window.
Larry was the son of two partners. In his mid-20s, at loose ends after dropping out of college, Larry became caretaker of the property, 67 acres, for three years. He lived in a corner room of our rambling ranch house, while we members visited weekends and vacations.
Larry effortlessly provoked our members. With his hidden marijuana crops, Larry had risked the narcs seizing our land, triggering a community storm. Another storm followed when he removed a structural beam from the barn hayloft to make room for a basketball hoop. He had butchered a hog on our missing kitchen cutting boards, we discovered, irritating everyone after months of mystery. We complained about his goats butting through our fences and groused that his goat ice cream was too sharp. Some members, and not just the vegetarians, disliked his bloody business raising rabbits for fresh meat.
Larry quit as our caretaker in 1978. He moved out of our ranch house. As the son of partners, Larry had no ownership of our land, but he still could irritate us.
Our community gossip mill roared into overdrive the next day, when Larry reappeared as our tenant. He had moved in with Barbara O’Gara, the lovely potter who rented one of our tenant houses. Larry was there as our tenant when Barbara arranged for that new window in the potting studio, her improvised workroom in the old barn on the property.
We treasured that barn. It was a stately canary yellow behemoth. Twenty yards back from the road, the barn nestled into our lower pasture, surrounded by fruit trees, blackberry bushes, patched fences, and rusting farm equipment we liked to keep in the pastures as remnants of the former working ranch.
Downstairs, along with the potting studio, was a functioning barn with animal pens, lumber scraps, fence posts, spools of barbed wire, and construction supplies, together with Larry’s half dozen goats. The upper floor was a massive hayloft, where we played ping-pong and staged our community anniversary shows. We had installed a glaring aluminum roof on the barn, rather than expensive wood shakes, following soul-searching discussions about preserving the building at a cost we could afford, even with a sacrifice of its rustic character.
In the spirit of the Sixties, we had named our 67 acres “Chamokome,” after a Pomo Indian settlement that once inhabited those parts. We were ninety miles north of San Francisco, atop Sea View Road on the first ridge over the ocean.
Everyone up there knew us: the Commies from Berkeley with the yellow barn. Our barn was a landmark on Sea View Ridge, and a gathering spot for locals. We opened the hayloft to neighbors for their shamanic drumming, indoor basketball, and community dances. As absentee property owners, we wanted to be contributing local citizens.
I was our unlikely Work Chair that year of the clash over the window, my second year as a member. I had joined in 1976 while completing my Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. I knew nothing about operating country property. I was shy about participating in our Chamokome collective my first year. To coax me along the partners chose me as Work Chair, the rotating community leader.
At 33, I was unattached in all ways. A long, troubled relationship with a hippie girlfriend had just ended. I had moved back to Berkeley after two solitary years writing my dissertation, hunkered down in a remote cottage where the Russian River meets the ocean, 15 miles south of Chamokome. After years of toil for a Ph.D., I refused to leave the Bay Area to become a professor in some lonely Midwestern university outpost. I remained in Berkeley, doing research for a book on a left-wing Jewish chicken ranching community, while living on the margins as a part-time migrant history teacher at any local university that would hire me. The rebellion of the 1960s and 1970s was ending. I had no plan for work except the book on those chicken ranchers. My future was up for grabs.
Chamokome membership was my biggest ever commitment. I had to amass a huge down payment, $2900, which they allowed me to pay over two years, and promise 20 more years of payments to buy my share of the partnership. I had done the unimaginable by entering this community, forever it seemed, joining these talkative partners with big lives. This membership was my leap forward, but I did not know to what.
The new barn window was built on my watch as the Work Chair, but I didn’t know until it suddenly appeared, done. Barbara had wanted more light in her potting studio. Bruce Johnson, a locally famous sculptor with carpentry skill, had acquired a large sheet of glass he could barter for Barbara’s pottery. He would do the installation. Larry, now living with Barbara in our tenant house, knew the plan.
But no one told us, the Chamokome owners of the yellow barn. We had authorized their remodel of the potting studio, but they never mentioned the window.
Everyone on Sea View Ridge acclaimed Bruce’s monumental field sculptures, and Barbara and Larry decided Chamokome members would value this new window, a small masterpiece, a “Bruce Johnson original.” By keeping quiet about the new barn window, Barbara and Larry avoided months of debate by the collective. And, besides, they thought, in the end who would oppose a window for lovely Barbara to gaze out while she threw her graceful pots in our yellow barn?
Larry had a reputation for dawdling with his Chamokome duties when he was our caretaker. But this new barn window went in fast. Lightning fast. They completed it in two weeks, before any Chamokome partner noticed construction.
The window sent an electric jolt through our community. It was enormous, seven feet high and four feet wide, dwarfing the other barn windows. It was modern, a huge sheet of glass in an elephantine rectangular frame. It was weirdly rustic, too, once installed, with a thick structural wood post standing like a lone sentry in front of the great glass pane.
From the potting wheel inside, the new window afforded a sweeping view of our lower orchard with gnarled old apple trees, a delightful vista for Barbara at work in the barn studio. But from the outside, it was a giant gash misplaced in the wall, a monster alongside the other barn windows. With this bulky off-center out-of-kilter intruder window, our sturdy yellow barn appeared to tilt, cockeyed.
Sylvia Powell, one of our founding partners, pronounced the window an affront to the design integrity of the historic rural structure. She denounced it as unnecessary development, a violation of our environmental stewardship over the property. More significant, with no approval by our Chamokome community, installation of the window was a unilateral act that violated our consensus decision-making procedure. Rather than every partner agreeing to this change, no one had agreed. No one had known.
Outraged, Sylvia accused Larry of betraying community trust. Gentle Barbara, we discovered, was not all sweetness and light. She had a willful streak. But more disturbing, Larry, one of our own, the son of Chamokome partners, had stood by silently as his girlfriend authorized Bruce to carve open our barn wall.
Sylvia
Sylvia Powell was a China Hand, an experienced China expert, who, with her husband and our partner Bill, had been charged with sedition by the Eisenhower Department of Justice. In their Shanghai English language magazine, they had reported on Chinese Communist government claims of American bacteriological warfare during the Korean War. As American supporters of the Chinese Communist revolution, they were targets of McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee.
After being blacklisted as journalists on their return from China in 1953, while the legal proceedings raged on, Bill and Sylvia had made a living by restoring San Francisco Victorians, and then operating “Homes of Charm,” a “junktique” store we all loved. Bill led our Chamokome construction projects, and Sylvia dispensed decisive opinions on ranch house wallpaper, sofas, throw pillows, and our junktique kitchenware.
The Powells were tough resilient people with uncompromising political principles, and they fought the sedition charges until government acquittal after five years of prosecution. Bill, fearless, went back after the U.S. government in the 1980s by resuming his investigative journalism on postwar American bacteriological warfare programs, and he provoked another international controversy with a new round of published disclosures.
Sylvia could fool you with her sturdy plaid shirts and dowdy loose collar pants, steel gray hair and sparkling eyes, as if she was someone’s benign New England aunt. Sylvia had a sharp tongue, a fondness for wine and raucous talk in the evenings, a rollicking horselaugh, and no patience for evasion. “For crying in the beer…” she’d say, when exasperated by weak arguments, like Larry’s defense of the new window: the sunlight, the expansive view, the fine craftsmanship, the free work and materials. And more “crying in the beer” from Sylvia when Larry tried to exonerate himself by reminding us that Bruce Johnson, not he, had built the window. As she mounted her campaign against this architectural desecration, in a brilliant tactic, Sylvia dubbed it “the hippie-dippy window.”
You didn’t want to be called a hippie at Chamokome. We were political radicals, Old Left from the 1930s and 1940s, and New Left from the 1960s: all socialists who questioned private property and capitalism, supported trade unions and civil rights movements, opposed the Vietnam War, advocated for a more egalitarian society. No hippie individualism, escape from society, or cult of the personal. Culture, for our members, was opera, literature, and films. Not acid rock or psychedelic art. Not flower power or transcendental consciousness. Not even marijuana grows, at least none that we knew about on Chamokome land, though some suspected Larry had a secret agricultural project, yet another marijuana grow, in a rumored clearing deep in our forest.
We were not a commune, hippie or otherwise, where members lived and worked together. We had no lineage from the rich tradition of American utopian communities, dating back to the pious Shakers or Brook Farm intellectuals or the socialist Kaweah Colony in the California Sierra Nevada. Indeed, we had no intention of living together on our Chamokome property longer than a weekend at a time, each quarter, when all our partners would gather at our ranch for a weekend of collective work.
I called Chamokome a utopian collective, our own unique cooperative enterprise, carved out from our everyday lives in the competitive capitalist world. Our purpose with Chamokome was a rural retreat for comrades, good stewardship over our wonderful land with minimal development, and the pleasure of participating in our group. Our members were professionals and intellectuals, many connected to Bay Area universities, with ambitious urban lives. We were not tuned in, turned on, or dropped out.
We called Chamokome “the ranch.” But we had just a few cattle to eat down the pasture grasses, some chickens for fresh eggs, and a large vegetable garden. No herds, vineyards, or timber harvests. No commercial enterprise on this ranch. We were early environmentalists with a Sixties ethic of minimizing development and preserving the land.
As socialists, we faced challenges owning rural property. We had to defend our land, just like the country neighbors we negotiated with about boundaries, easements, and water rights. We were landlords who occasionally raised the rents of our tenants, though only after tortuous discussions about their ability to pay, our income need, and, inevitably, capitalism.
We also had passionate debates over limiting development of our property: resisting additional structures, restoring but not expanding buildings, preserving the spring-fed water system for limited water needs, maintaining the forest, raising just a few animals for food, and whether to develop the barn. The hippie-dippy window was a spark for this smoldering community tinder over future growth at Chamokome.
We dismissed hippie countercultural institutions as self-indulgent and apolitical, but we actually were similar to many 1960s and 1970s countercultural institutions: communes, free schools, food collectives, carpentry collectives, cooperative health clinics, and alternative newspapers. After the collapse of the Sixties upheaval, among thousands of back-to-the-land utopian experiments, we too had settled in for the long haul with our Chamokome community based on counter capitalist values. Our members remained urban, but our land was in the country. We were small and collective. We had no plan to transform America through Chamokome, but we practiced our own socialism on one country property: group owned in equal shares, worked according to members’ ability and inclination, used together, no profits, and no land speculation. We ran it democratically with truckloads of discussion about obscure rural problems like how to stop the thistles invading the pastures, how to move water from our springs up to the ranch house, and what trees to take down for firewood.
I was deliriously happy in my new collective. As Work Chair, I plunged into Chamokome my second year. Visiting often with other partners and their friends, I felt like I’d been admitted into an extraordinary network of fascinating people, like the Powells with their China pals and China debates, at my own rural salon.
Each visit, I inspected the property with an owner’s eye for what needed to be done. I tramped across our spring pastures dense with wildflowers, climbed our big hill that overlooks the Pacific, and explored our towering second growth redwood forest sprinkled with oaks, madrones, and Douglas firs, sloping down to the Gualala River. The rolling hills of Sonoma County beckoned to the east, and I rambled through the backcountry, hours exploring, anchored by my comrades and their nonstop discussions awaiting me back at the ranch house.
In those days we brought gangs of friends for ambitious group work projects to whip down thistles invading our pastures, rebuild a decrepit cowshed into a cozy cottage, squeeze out gallons of cider with the Sea View Ridge apple press, or cut, haul, and stack the winter firewood. We swam in the pond we had created from an old mud hole for cows, one of our heroic early water system feats, and organized hikes down to the river to swim. People occupied the big kitchen for hours, gabbing as they concocted vats of dense vegetarian soups. In the evenings, after pot luck feasts and a walk up the hill to see blazing sunsets, we ferociously debated politics, played Scrabble, drank, and sometimes just read silently together in the living room, warmed by the wood stove.
I began inviting my own friends to weekends at Chamokome. I liked giving tours of the grounds, telling tales of our Chamokome history I already had made my own. I found work projects for those who wanted to contribute, and offered fruit they could pick from our orchards: apples, pears, cherries, plums, and apricots. I saw my pals mix in the heady political and cultural discussions and join the new friendships forged by each weekend’s new cast of visitors.
I even gained construction experience with Bill Powell. I marveled at Bill’s ability to plan a job, acquire materials from hardware stores and lumber yards, supplement our motley ranch tools with his own precision instruments, scavenge the barn for make-do parts, measure correctly, saw exactly, and nail truly. With a bone-dry Missouri wit, as we worked Bill would provide a stream of observations on everything from Chinese history to bent ranch tools. And he was encouraging with a clumsy workmate, me. I’d leave those projects feeling like I was a contributor, developing construction competence for my Chamokome future.
Legally, we were partners of the Sonoma County Land Company, a California partnership. A canny Communist lawyer member had prepared our unusual partnership agreement that fostered comradely ownership in a capitalist legal system. It prevented partners from profiting off our ever more valuable coastal acreage. The agreement reflected our early environmentalism, born in the Sixties, and if we dissolved entirely, everything would go to a land protection organization, The Nature Conservancy. The sole benefits of Chamokome membership were enjoyment of the land and pleasure of participation in our collective. That suited me, a Berkeley radical living hand-to-mouth, enjoying my fascinating partners and our unusual collective more than dollars.
We were socialists, not anarchists, and we had plenty of rules, including one against sleeping overnight on the living room couches if our many bedrooms were filled. It was a matter of decorum and respecting a community social room.
Sylvia, who grew up with firm propriety in an Oregon business family that had pioneer roots, enforced this no-sleeping-in-the-living-room rule. On crowded week ends she patrolled the living room, banishing young violators to sleep on extra mattresses in the barn loft. You didn’t want to mess with Sylvia and the rules.
Marge
When our Sea View Ridge neighbors – longtime country people and recently arrived hippies – called us a bunch of Commies, they were right. Our partner Marge Frantz was a veteran of trade union and social justice struggles, through the Communist Party, like others in our community. Marge also was Larry’s mother. She rose to Larry’s defense over the window. Marge was every bit as formidable as Sylvia.
Marge had been a child soapbox orator in the 1930s for the Young Communist League of Alabama. She’d become a Communist trade union organizer of steel workers and electrical workers, and a fighter for racial justice, across the South, Midwest, and California. Like all our Old Left members, she’d been a leading supporter of Sylvia and Bill in their 1950s prosecution for sedition.
Marge left the Party in 1956, after Khrushchev’s speech denouncing Stalin’s murderous reign, and returned to school at UC Berkeley. She fought McCarthyism in the 1950s, joined the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and became an older campus activist. Later, at UC Santa Cruz where she received a Ph.D. in political theory, she was an adored teacher who taught inspiring courses on American radicalism and women’s history.
Marge became a feminist and emerged as a lesbian who parted with her husband (another of our original partners, that Communist attorney who prepared our anti-capitalist partnership agreement). She took up with our Quaker member, Eleanor. With glee, Marge once told me the tangled tale of social disturbance with their early romance: “Once we fell in love it was hell.” I thought their story was worthy of my generation’s relationship upheavals in the 1960s and 1970s, though Marge fared well in a lasting partnership with Eleanor and a continued bond with her former husband, all three comfortably Chamokome members.
At 43, Marge had been an elder leftist presence in UC Berkeley’s 1965 Free Speech Movement, one of the great Sixties student upheavals. There she encountered the rising generation of New Left student radicals, including our future partner Henry Mayer. Marge and Henry met as members of a campus commission to examine UC Berkeley governance. That’s where Chamokome was born.
Marge and Henry formed the nucleus of the Old Left and New Left radicals who founded our Chamokome collective. The New Left members were graduate students launching academic careers. They were brainy ambitious scholars. Henry, who later left academia to become an award-winning popular historian, was our man of letters: brilliant, omnivorously literate, a gifted writer, an inspiring teacher, a generous spirit, and a fabulous talker, whether the topic was university politics or Baroque choral music or the mysteries of our Rube Goldberg water system.
With comrades from both generations, they searched for rural property, just ahead of the coming curve of 1970s communes and counterculture retreat to the country. Our founders bought the place in 1969, with its pastures and orchards and woods, a ramshackle ranch house that Bill Powell once described as “five shacks glued together,” half a dozen battered outbuildings, and of course the magnificent yellow barn.
I joined seven years later, through Marge and Eleanor. I met them when I rented Eleanor’s funky ocean-side Jenner cottage, where I lived for two years and completed my Ph.D. dissertation on nineteenth century Chicago anarchists. Marge and Eleanor introduced me to nearby Chamokome.
As I quickly learned who Marge was – lifelong radical organizer, groundbreaking feminist, political sage, friend to everyone in the Bay Area left, and an irrepressible raconteur too – I was flattered to realize I too had entered her vast rolodex. And then I marveled when Chamokome selected me as a new young member in this collective of titans.
Marge was a striking figure with her shock of white hair, girlish tomboy face, sturdy body and dense presence. She presided over our ranch house kitchen with contagious stories of struggles for justice by her people, Communist organizers and radical feminists, all told with a disarming Alabama drawl.
Marge was not one to dodge a fight. She swung into action when Sylvia began the assault on Larry and the hippie-dippy window. Marge defended the new window as a welcome innovation from dull rural architecture. She reminded us that the barn was a dilapidated sinking dinosaur, fated to collapse into an eternal supply of kindling with the next earthquake. She argued that Sylvia’s attacks on Larry were too sharp, not justified by Larry’s sideline role in the new window, and lacked appreciation for his significant contributions as our caretaker.
While acknowledging that Larry could be exasperating, she insisted that all of us at Chamokome had been exasperating at times as we attempted to share our property. She noted past instances of unilateral actions, like the removal of the front porch railing, which still rankled her. She urged the members to change our “landlord mentality,” with references to Proudhon (“property is theft”) and Marx (on money and the “icy waters of egotistical calculation”). She proclaimed her belief in personal relationships over collective ideology, quoting E.M. Forster: “If I have to choose between betraying my friend or my country, I hope I have the courage to betray my country.”
This was decades before instant communication on the Internet. No matter. We all were in feverish contact about the window through our own Chamokome tribal drum network of visits, dinners, telephone calls, and letters. Marge was an avid correspondent about all things Chamokome and she established her own written record of this fight.
Marge, confident that our collective was historically important, was saving those letters in her Chamokome archive. That archive includes our earliest member reports, from 1969, typed on onionskin carbons. In rapturous detail, they chronicled our pioneer beginnings on Sea View Ridge: elaborate country neighbor gossip, unimaginable tenant dramas, Biblical scale rainstorms and roof leaks, water system flood crises, giant zucchinis from our fabulous garden, the case for a new living room wood stove, neighbors scheming to excavate a gravel quarry, other neighbors scheming to install a trailer park, and how the local school board snookered us out of a claim to more Chamokome land at the adjacent Fort Ross School.
I became the keeper of Marge’s ancient archive. I added Henry’s collection of photos and my own saved musical scripts from our five-year anniversary celebrations. I didn’t know what to do with this collection. But I liked to rummage through the old documents, my own Chamokome history collection that I preserved for its significance in an unknown future.
I have located in the archive the written statements that began arriving by mail with positions on the barn window dispute. Reading those documents during the battle in 1978, I thought they were my own time portal back to the heroic history of Old Left radicalism, the great labor organizing drives of the 1930s, with the mimeograph machines in nonstop operation spewing out manifestos and calls to action.
With the barn window fight turning white hot, Marge sent a personal letter to all partners: she was withdrawing from further communications about the window dispute and announced her intention not to attend the next Chamokome work weekend “to avoid ugly confrontations in person.” She said she found the assaults on her son too painful.
Silence suddenly descended on our noisy collective.
Me
I was embarrassed. Although I was not named in these broadsides, I felt responsible. As the Work Chair, I had presented Larry and Barbara’s barn studio remodel project to the ranch community. They never told me about the window while I advocated for them. I had persuaded the community to approve their remodel and pay for the construction materials.
From my first viewing, I knew the new window was undeniably hippie-dippy. I saw it as outsized, brash, and zany, aching to leap off the barn wall into a psychedelic swirl. It defaced our historic barn, I concluded. And, worse, it left me looking incompetent, asleep on the job, an easy mark for Larry and Barbara.
“I trusted you,” I accused Larry. “You betrayed me.”
It was strong language. We argued.
Larry and I were friends. I admired his lanky shaggy country look and indifference to the intellectual pyrotechnics of our brainy collective. I envied his know-how with our chainsaw, stringing fence, and making sourdough bread. We had worked together for hours taking down trees with the chainsaw, bucking rounds, and hand splitting those rounds with axes, mauls, and wedges. I was determined to master that chainsaw, with its gleaming teeth and bright orange casing, its sweet idling purr and the mighty roar as it bit into hardwood. Larry welcomed me into the fraternity of young men who muscled trees into firewood.
But I was irate over Larry’s silence about the hippie-dippy window scheme, never warning me, leaving me duped as their community sponsor for the barn room remodel project. I instigated that spat. He said it was a misunderstanding. No, I insisted, this was deliberate evasion.
But as we quarreled, Larry told me he thought they would be thrown off the property for their transgression. Yes, Barbara and Larry, banished, kicked out of Chamokome. Unimaginable. That worried me.
I also was alarmed by the incendiary flare-up of community anger: the dueling charges and counter-charges, the inflamed pronouncements on the craftsmanship of the window and the aesthetics of the barn, the dredging up of ancient community grievances, the drift to ideological pronouncements over rural development and capitalism, the outraged assertions of flouting the community, the demand for accountability of misbehaving children. I feared the nutty volatility of the dispute. I thought someone – Marge – might actually quit.
Chamokome without Marge? Impossible.
I worried. My wonderful new community could implode. Over this barn window.
After weeks of these polemics, the time came for a showdown. It was at our next quarterly “work weekend,” when all members would gather. This usually was a two-day festival with group labor, heady discourse, lavish gossip, and serious cooking. But this weekend all present members, some 15 of us, convened Saturday afternoon around the big table in the ranch house kitchen, where everything significant took place. It was somber, like titans assembling for an epic battle.
Strangely for me, my father also was at the table for this Chamokome reckoning. He was visiting with me in Berkeley, concerned about my lack of life direction, and trying to repair our long estrangement. I brought him to the ranch for a weekend of work. My father could build anything, but he never had passed those skills on to me, and this was a sore point.
I wanted my father to appreciate my new friends and this weighty collective I had joined, a collective where I was learning construction skills he should have taught me. I hoped my comrades would recognize my dad’s construction skills, entirely on a par with Bill Powell, I thought, somehow reflecting well on skill-less me, if only for my potential.
That weekend my father and I worked with Sylvia and Bill on sheet rocking on old garage converted into a ranch study, shelves packed with Marxist texts from the Sixties, mine now among them. We were an effective team, the Powells and the Kanns, and we completed the job. I later wrote much of my first book in that familiar room. More important, that work project, at my ranch, was a success for my father and me, collaborating. It fortified me for the showdown meeting about the window.
As the Work Chair, I sat at the head of the long kitchen table and presided over the assembly. Trying to rise to the occasion, I opened the meeting with a speech: “A lot has been said about the window in past weeks. This is a crucial gathering. Before speaking, everyone should measure their words by their commitment to our community.”
By then I understood my position. My job, in my opinion, was to see that all views were aired, friendships preserved, and the dispute contained. I didn’t like that window, but I didn’t care whether it stayed or went. I didn’t want Larry and Barbara evicted. I wanted to save our collective.
Larry and Barbara already had sent all ranch members a letter of apology, and Larry began the meeting with another apology for not requesting approval of the window. He explained their belief that everyone would admire the new window as a beautiful, well-built, inexpensive improvement, creating an attractive barn space long after the room would be used as a potting studio. He explained their need to make a quick decision when the new window was proposed, and how well it turned out. But they had made an error of judgment with our community, he acknowledged, and they were very sorry.
Larry, just a few years younger than me, had grown up with the Old Left adults at the ranch. In those days at Chamokome, adults ruled over children, and adults were not shy about it. They had long bossed Larry as a kid. And Larry had become a country guy, not political, not academic, his brainpower absorbed with rural life on Sea View Ridge, nothing with high value in our collective.
As Larry tried to explain the window that afternoon, I felt for him. It was a deft apology. But, I realized Larry could not possibly establish himself as a Chamokome adult with these familiar elders, particularly with his own self sabotage.
This was where my solidarity with Larry ended. Just a few years older than Larry, I was relieved to be treated as an equal partner in this hothouse collective.
Sylvia began her critique of the window with reflections on the historic value of the barn and our sacred commitment to limited development. She described her shock on first seeing it, this new window that violated our stately old barn, without any community discussion or decision. We listened in silence, apprehensive, awaiting an inflammatory salvo. But this was a toned-down assertion of her position, without hippie-dippy name-calling, nor crying in anyone’s beer, nor a charge of community betrayal. She was solemn and to the point.
Sylvia also insisted on her right to criticize another member’s child for community misconduct, but she did not call for eviction. She knew about Chamokome’s problems with the next generation, because she had three adventurous boys who had stopped coming, despite their formidable construction skills. The youngest had an unhappy ranch reputation, well deserved, for falling out of our trees. Another, an original artist, liked smoking marijuana in public, frowned on at Chamokome. And the oldest was unalterably independent, a difficult fit in our orderly collective. For the Powell boys, I thought, Chamokome was all rules and talk. We lost them.
Marge, who decided to attend this work weekend at the urgings of other members, spoke about the sorry condition of the barn, dilapidated beyond ruin by any window. Anyhow, she liked the window, and thought it was a healthy aesthetic innovation. She discussed maintaining civility between members of a collective, with comradely criticism for disagreeable issues. She recounted Larry’s many contributions as our emissary to the rural community on Sea View Road, and Barbara’s contributions to our community as a resident potter. She did not raise irritating past unauthorized actions by others, nor did she condemn our behavior as landlord owners of private property.
Surprisingly to me, Marge owned up to her difficulty tolerating community criticism of her son. Years later, raising my own daughter in my New Left generation’s child-centered Chamokome, where children were celebrated center stage, I could not have abided such community criticism of Julia.
Marge’s partner Eleanor, who usually was reserved at our talkative meetings, also spoke that afternoon. She reminded us of our Quaker principle of consensus decision-making. It was a gentle criticism of Larry, who had not disclosed the information we needed: his girlfriend’s plan to carve out the barn wall for the new window.
Our consensus decision-making was a process of reaching unanimous agreement to important decisions. The group needed complete information, full participatory discussion, and confidence in everyone’s dedication to the community. Reaching consensus could be slow and laborious, I would learn, sometimes requiring years of discussion before an important decision was reached, but all views were aired and it did not leave dissatisfied minorities. Consensus decision-making, I understand now, was one reason why our Chamokome collective has endured for over 50 years.
Quakers, I learned from Eleanor, were reflective and patient, and did not take the easy way. And Eleanor, I later learned, was a “heavy Quaker,” a wise leader among Quakers. Over the years ahead, beginning with that meeting about the window, I came to think of Eleanor as Chamokome’s moral center.
I tried to referee that afternoon’s discussion. I urged everyone to weigh in on the window and our community, and they did. We heard many views, mostly admiring the window’s craftsmanship, mostly criticizing it as a unilateral action not authorized by the community. I encouraged comradely exchanges. Everyone minded my admonition about what they said and how they said it. And Eleanor’s reminder of consensus decision-making won unanimous affirmation.
My New Left generation did not say much, except Henry, who was close to Marge. He had been disturbed by the breach of community trust and Marge’s protection of Larry from accountability. But most younger members saw the barn window as just a barn window, even if a thunderous community issue. I wondered at the time. Were we less committed to the collective? Less political? More reasonable? Or just not much interested in the barn?
The meeting ended with closing statements by Sylvia and Marge. Each embarked on a self-criticism for how she had fought the battle. Was Sylvia performing some Maoist Cultural Revolution criticism/self-criticism ritual? Or Marge a feminist end-of-meeting exploration of feelings? No. I thought they were agreeing to end the dispute for the benefit of the community, with no winner and mutual respect.
Everyone walked away satisfied. Particularly me.
My father took me aside after the meeting. He told me he was impressed by my principled partners, the powerful bonds of our collective, and how we thrashed out our dispute with respect for each other.
And he had seen something new in me. He said, “They look to you as a leader.”
Later, as we worked together on the water tanks in the upper pasture, Henry praised my meeting leadership: “You did well.”
Henry, a few years older than me, was the heart of Chamokome, with Marge. He had a burly physical presence, a melodic North Carolina lilt, brains by the pound, and sly humor. He’d recently married his high school sweetheart Betsy. Writing his first great biography on Patrick Henry, he also was establishing himself as a discerning literary critic and a gifted editor. He had begun editing my book on the radical Jewish chicken ranchers of Petaluma, what morphed into a 19-years collaboration that he saw through to publication. Henry was one of my dearest friends and a model for how I might live my life.
After we reviewed that afternoon’s meeting, Henry lifted his thick eyebrows and rolled his eyes, a final statement that this window episode was nuts, but what else would you expect from our contentious Old Left partners, with their long histories of political struggle and stubborn memories of prior clashes? We smiled with appreciation, for ourselves, the cool heads of the New Left generation.
Chamokome Today
The new window remained, as did Barbara and Larry. Sylvia talked about it for years after, rueful and amused, but never reconciled to it. And Larry, I think, never again felt entirely comfortable at Chamokome, where the window dispute marked him as a child of members, not an adult.
The hippie-dippy name for the window stuck with me. I still believe it’s the wrong window for our yellow barn. We never were hippie-dippy.
But I always held one other belief about that clash: through it, we became a stronger community. Other disputes followed in future years. Should we install a hot tub? (Larry, still without membership, for it.) Who left the newfangled microwave on the kitchen counter? (Henry’s Luddite opposition; he feared a television would follow.) And, more recently, wi-fi (newer younger members yanking us into the twenty-first century). All were resolved, eventually, through our consensus principles, hardened in the barn window battle.
For much of the 1990s, I thought Chamokome might disappear as an eccentric relic of the radical Sixties. Where friends once had clamored to join our exciting social experiment, we fell out of rhythm with the times, an odd aging left-wing collective in an ever more conservative society of private lives, wealth accumulation, personal consumption, and property development.
But we changed too. We did take in new members, some young, some from our member families, drawn to our rural retreat and communitarian ways. Our membership shifted from historians and literature professors to attorneys (a transformation I made) and psychologists, and now techies too. We’re only vaguely progressive today, or just liberal do-gooders, and now we all work comfortably inside America’s institutions rather than fighting them. The big personalities of the Old Left are gone with their radical politics from the 1930s. My New Left generation, with our own history of radical politics from the 1960s, is aging.
Today we use Chamokome more like a timeshare, with fewer overlapping member visits, and I no longer know everyone’s friends. We hire out more maintenance work, and some years we even buy firewood. Our most animated discussions now are about food, not politics. We no longer add documents to the old archives, because, I think, we no longer regard our collective as historically significant.
We still resist developing Chamokome. The ranch looks much like it did when I joined in 1976 but with unseen improvements to our buildings and water system. Older former members are impressed by the fresh paint and efficient operations. But I wonder if they privately think we lack politics and soul.
We’ve improved the yellow barn. After Barbara left to become a social worker and Larry’s goats were gone, we converted the old potting studio into a bedroom, with good light from that window (just as Larry had prophesized), and then built another barn bedroom and a barn bathroom too.
Remarkably, with everyone’s approval, Bill Powell installed graceful panels of multi-paned windows in the barn hayloft, over three times the size of Larry’s and Barbara’s creation. These huge windows provide a big bright vista out to the lower pasture, attractive for community gatherings and overflow sleeping and just reading in an old armchair on a rainy afternoon.
We no longer open the barn for use by our Sea View Ridge neighbors, the old-time country people and the hippies newcomers who long ago blended in with them. Our attorney members, myself included, can’t tolerate the liability risks. We support the local community through donations to the volunteer fire department and the school on the adjacent land that should have been ours in an ancient land dispute now largely forgotten. We’re in the local fight to resist new development by wineries. Passing half a century on Sea View Ridge, our collective remains good local citizens on Sea View Road. But we continue to be seen as urban outsiders, now known by our rural neighbors as affluent outsiders rather than Commies.
Every year some debate erupts over preservation of the barn: its incomplete foundation, questionable structural soundness, shaky loft floor, leaking roof, resident owls, and uncertain readiness for the inevitable earthquake. But now we have a plan for rehabilitation of the entire structure and we have done recent work to strengthen the foundation.
And the window? It’s right there in the first barn bedroom, Barbara’s former potting studio. Now it seems natural to everyone else.
Today, when I show the grounds to visiting friends, I always tell the story. Most visitors don’t recognize the great incongruence of the hippie-dippy window, so I make them look at that barn wall from the outside, from the old apple orchard, while I try to explain the old-time sixties collective I joined as a young man. But sometimes, as I speak, that window appears almost normal to me, weathered into the barn wall as if it belongs, and I wonder why we had that fiery battle.
Over 40 years later, I’m among the few remaining partners who were at that momentous 1978 meeting. During those years, I met my wife Stephanie at Chamokome, skinny dipping in the pond with a group of visitors on a work project to restore one of our old buildings. Stephanie and I married at Chamokome, in the clearing under the stand of majestic oaks, amid the golden grasses of the summer pastures, a country wedding hosted by my collective.
Our daughter Julia grew up in the ranch community, and later she wrote an essay about it for her college applications. She still returns for Chamokome weddings and community anniversary celebrations. She’s told her East Coast friends about the collective where she grew up. But no matter how much she explained this community born out of political friendships and struggles in the Sixties, her friends refer to it only one way: “that hippie commune where everyone walks around naked.”
After I completed law school, I began handling Chamokome business affairs. And then I became a continuing Work Chair in 2000, when Henry died at 59, a terrible loss. Henry had been our Work Chair then, and I thought it was my time to step up. Now Henry’s daughter Eleanor (named after our older partner Eleanor) has become a member, and I see her among our new generation of Chamokome leaders. I recently gave Eleanor Marge’s old archive of Chamokome historical documents, to preserve them for the future, a future in which we will know our Chamokome history and continue to make new history too.
Until a few months ago, I still presided over our talkative business meetings, tedious as ever with abundant information and strong opinions about obscure rural issues. I never did master the chainsaw, despite Larry’s guidance, and at 80 I no longer touch it. And my construction skills, even after years of collaborations with Bill Powell, are not much developed since I joined Chamokome at 32. But with other partners I managed our ranch operations: hired caretaker, buildings, tenants, pasture maintenance, animals, water supply, plumbing and septic systems, fallen trees and firewood, fire roads and fire prevention, friendly and encroaching neighbors.
For anything important, we still rely on decision by consensus: extensive information and thorough discussion, often mind-numbing, sometimes at a glacial pace, as long as it takes to reach unanimity. That’s our Chamokome collective democracy, a Sixties legacy from our remarkable founders.
Sylvia died in 2004, and Bill in 2008. Marge passed away in 2015. Eleanor followed us at a distance through her grandson Ryan, who we approved to assume her former share. Ryan, a young environmentalist, is our premier voice of caution against development, and I can hear Eleanor when he states his positions against fumigations to eliminate pests from buildings or opposing purchase of a new kitchen stove for our foodie members.
Larry left Chamokome and Sea View Ridge to find his way. He once told me that for many years he lived in Vancouver, atop a high-rise he told me, laughing at his unlikely turn to a different life. He is long inactive in Chamokome, although years ago we accepted him as a member on Marge’s former share. He pays the partner fees every year. He returned for our fiftieth anniversary celebration in 2019, and he occasionally shows up at our on-line business meetings where he makes real contributions to the discussion. I’ve not given up hope he’ll resume active membership.
Before she died, I asked the older Eleanor her views on the fight over the hippie-dippy window. Visiting Eleanor at 108 years old was like an audience with a saint: her every word was weighty and required consideration.
Eleanor remembered that window. And she was decisive: “It’s not important.”
Instead, Eleanor wanted to discuss the momentous early decision, before my time, when the founding members purchased the property: they decided to use it together rather than everyone build separate houses. “We don’t have to break up the land,” was the epiphany of a wise early member. “We could use it cooperatively.”
Our founders preferred each other’s company in the old ranch house. They wanted a life together through Chamokome as friends, comrades, and partners. This was their vision in 1969: an egalitarian community that transcends individual lives, all important decisions made democratically and by consensus, on magnificent land they would share and preserve.
This was the legacy of our founders from the Sixties. That vision guides us today. It guides me.
I still marvel that those Chamokome founders invited me into their extraordinary community in 1976. These were the titans, with their big histories and big politics, who sat around our kitchen table in 1978 at that mighty discussion of the hippie dippy window and the guiding principles of our community.
And I still marvel that I had the courage to accept their invitation, when I didn’t have much direction in my life, and no money to pay for my share. At Chamokome I made lifetime friendships. I met Stephanie and married her at Chamokome, and we raised our daughter Julia as part of that community.
At Chamokome I had a lifetime opportunity to preserve this Sixties collective, including defending it in the battle over the hippie dippy window. That battle, which makes little sense today, seemed critically important for our collective that Saturday afternoon in 1978 when we all gathered in the ranch house kitchen, me at the head of the table, ready to deliver my opening speech that I hoped would set the tone for a comradely discussion that would follow. Nothing was more important.
At Chamokome I found my place in a Sixties community that endures. I stayed with it all the way.