How I Came to Iowa City…
Anti-war protest on the University of Iowa Pentacrest, spilling out onto Clinton Street, May 1970
… And Found a Home
My family moved from Stow, Ohio, to Urbandale, Iowa, in 1974, while I was living in Western Kentucky. As I understood the story, my father, a liquor salesman for Seagram’s, took the fall for some company malfeasance involving the Ohio State Liquor Control Board. After he did this, the company got him out of Dodge and into Iowa, and to thank him for his loyalty, handed him a promotion – State Sales Manager. For me, the most salient point of this was I could claim Iowa residency and then pay in-state tuition at the University of Iowa.
While working on my high school senior project – an independent study of modern poetry – I had developed an interest in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. It kept popping up in bios in the back of the anthologies I was avidly perusing, books such as The New American Poetry (1945-1960) and An Anthology of New York Poets. Even though I’d never been to Iowa and had not applied to any colleges, in my yearbook questionnaire I listed the University of Iowa as my post–high school destination. I guess that was aspirational. But when my family moved to Iowa, I realized I could make that come true.
I moved in with my family in December 1974, camping out in the basement utility room, applied to Iowa, and proceeded to land three part-time jobs – working the grill at George’s Chili King on Hickman Road, clerking at an Iowa State Liquor Store on Douglas Avenue, and tending bar at Christopher’s, a family-owned Italian restaurant in the Beaverdale neighborhood. I worked until June, until I had enough money for my first year’s tuition, and then quit all three jobs and took off to Ann Arbor to find out what my good friend Jim “Prch” Prchlik was up to. He was sharing a rambling farmhouse on the edge of the city and making bank by working weekend shifts at the nearby Ford Truck plant. During the week we’d work in the garden and then roll into town to hang out with the street people living on and around The Diag and State Street.
Notable among this shifting lineup of characters were Tom and Whiskey Stone, members of a group of wandering souls who a few years earlier in an encampment outside Austin, Texas, had sworn an oath binding them as the Stone Family.[1] These folks helped me master the arts of panhandling and dumpster diving, not essential life skills for me but part of some socioeconomic experiment: Was it possible to live off the wastefulness and affluence of bourgeois America?
After a few weeks in Ann Arbor, I headed to Iowa City to scope out a place to live that fall. I have a distinct memory of coming into town on a sunny afternoon, walking down Iowa Avenue and noticing the C.O.D. Steam Laundry, a combination deli, bar, and music venue. When I heard The Grateful Dead’s “Truckin’” playing on the sound system, I knew I’d found a home. The inimitable and venerable Gerry Stevenson – in his usual garb of khaki shorts and long-sleeved Oxford shirt, glasses tipped on the end of his nose – served me a beer and a sandwich loaded with alfalfa sprouts.
I spent a couple days scouring the want ads, tracking down leads, knocking on doors, and returning to City Park each night to camp out. I’d found Stone Soup Restaurant and would wash dishes for a free lunch. One of the other dishwashers, Tom Leverett, invited me to a birthday party for Kevin Kelso, who worked at New Pioneer Co-op. Early that evening, I was panhandling spare change for, as I readily explained, a bottle of wine to take to a party. I was standing on the corner of Linn Street and Iowa Avenue, in front of Best Steak House, a restaurant run by two Greek brothers,[2] when my liquor store co-worker friend and his girlfriend Laura knocked on the restaurant window and gestured to come inside and join them. I ended up at a party at Laura’s house that night instead.
I did find a place that fit my budget of under $100 a month rent: a room above a Montessori pre-school on Reno Street with access to the kitchen used by the staff. I liked that it was a good twenty-minute walk from campus, and much closer to Hickory Hill, a large rambling urban park. I came to enjoy that walk home via the back alleys of the Goosetown neighborhood originally settled by Czech immigrants, admiring the tidy backyard gardens and grape arbors.
Across the hall lived the poet John Sjoberg and his cat Liz. John’s door was always open to me, and he became a valuable mentor. In the center of his room sat a typewriter with a roll of teletype paper cascading from it. I could always stop in and read where he had gone in his mind the night before. He was a poet of imagination and love. For example, here’s the opening stanza of his poem “Porch Window”:[3]
my head is green
the songs here, the bird songs
here & here & here
are my heart.
John introduced me to a group of poets, most of whom had graduated from the Writers’ Workshop and settled in the Iowa City area: Allen and Cinda Kornblum, Morty Sklar, Chuck Miller, Dave Morice, Jim Mulac. There was usually a reading on Friday or Saturday night at Alandoni’s Used Book Store at 610 South Dubuque Street,[4] and a party afterward. They called themselves Actualists, a name I always considered facetiously applied but one that recognized a supportive community of writers. The ambiguity of the name allowed room for anyone to fit in, including me, at least five to ten years younger than these other writers.
This decision, along with the decision, within a month after starting school, to take a job working part-time nights at the Stone Soup Restaurant’s bakery, established my roots in two Iowa City communities only loosely connected to the university, roots that made this start to feel like home, a place where I could “sit down and patch my bones.”
Having arranged to move into my place on Reno Street on the first of September, I took off for Madison, crashing a few days in an empty room in a large frat house reinvented as communal housing, and then looped back to Ann Arbor. A week later, Prch suggested I check out the Rainbow Gathering, an annual counterculture festival illegally held on some remote public lands the week of the Fourth of July. According to word on the street, it was happening near Hot Springs, Arkansas, that year. So I “got out of the door and lit out and looked all around.” In northern Arkansas I caught a ride from a NASCAR wannabe going 125 miles an hour down I-55, lakes becoming blurry blue visions, streaks of billboard boastings, flickering fenceposts and rows of cotton. Sporting a burning grin and waving his cigarette at me, he yelled above the noise, “Hot damn! Tomorrow’s our country’s birthday! Let’s torque it up in her honor!” I smiled weakly and held on.
When I got into Hot Springs, I could find no hint of the Gathering. I walked around, looking for anyone letting their freak flag fly who might be able to slip me the secret directions. Nothing. It turned out the Rainbow Gathering was in the Ozark National Forest[5] near Mountain Home, Arkansas, almost 200 miles due north, but I wouldn’t learn that until much later. I got dinner in town and spent the night on the outskirts of Hot Springs, near the road I came in on. Next morning, the Fourth of July, I got a ride from a couple of Arkansas Baptist College football players on their way to a party in Little Rock. They invited me to join their celebration.
When we got to the party, held in an apartment building owned by a team booster, I was goodnaturedly introduced to him and the other football players and their girlfriends as “Yankee.” There was a watermelon loaded with vodka and a tub of Budweisers on ice. Early afternoon, with only a breakfast in my belly, the drinking commenced. I somehow felt the need to defend the Union by keeping pace with these Little Rock secessionists. I lasted a couple of hours, eventually accepting defeat by diving into the apartment building’s pool with my clothes on. My friendly rivals fished me out and helped me to an empty apartment where I could sleep it off. They woke me in the morning, treated me to a hearty breakfast at a local diner, and sent me on my way.
Back on the road, I watched a long slow freight train pulling out of Little Rock. I decided to hop it, but by the time I got to the tracks, its speed had picked up. Running with a backpack on a rocky uneven railroad bed and trying to catch an open boxcar proved a failure. I picked myself up, washed off my scrapes, and proceeded to hitch to Bowling Green, Kentucky, where my friend Pat Berkowetz tended my wounds, physical and otherwise. I then stopped in Akron to see some high school chums before landing back in Ann Arbor. But I was soon back on the road, hitching to Minneapolis with Kelly, and continuing on my own, west to Seattle, down to Oregon and San Francisco, back up to Ashland, Oregon, east to Denver, and finally Iowa City by the end of August.[6]
1975 was a restless year. Like many young Americans, I was searching for something I could trust to be true.[7] When I moved into the room above the Montessori school and started classes that fall, it felt right, like the satisfying sound of a puzzle piece clicking into place. I began to see the possibilities of finding my niche in this Midwestern college town – among a group of poets collaborating, engaging with the world, and celebrating whatever felt real, and among a community of folks creating a cooperative network to offer food that was natural, organic, unspoiled by the corporate world. For all the miles of wandering still ahead of me, perhaps I’d found a fit, a home, a place and people I could return to when I needed a rest.
Footnotes:
[1] For a photo of the three of us, see my blog post Friends of the Devil, Part 2. The daughter of an oil millionaire from Odessa Texas, Whiskey was a high school cheerleader impregnated by the star football player. After her dad denounced her and got a court order granting him sole custody of the child, Whiskey hit the road.
[2] Who would respond to every order by asking, “You want fries with that?”
[3] From John’s book Hazel and Other Poems, published by Allan and Cinda Kornblum’s Toothpaste Press in 1976. His inscription in my copy: “To Dave & the House. May Kentucky always grow in your heart an’ help your head.”
[4] One of the 150-year-old cottages demolished in 2015 over the objections of historic preservationists.
[5] Video trigger warning: hippie nudity.
[6] I described some of the events of this part of the trip in my blog post The Art of Hitchhiking.
[7] The Pentagon Papers (1971) and the Watergate Scandal (1972-74) were just two manifestations of that sense of being betrayed.