Non-Indian Residents of Stockbridge, MA: Arlo Guthire

[caption id="attachment_7237" align="aligncenter" width="426"] Arlo Guthrie, 1969[/caption]

Arlo Guthrie went to high school in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The Stockbridge School, a boarding school, was unique in its time because it promoted racial and ethnic diversity from its inception in the 1940's. Students were also "required to assemble after breakfast and listen to 20 minutes of recorded music...chosen by a very limited number of faculty, who provided brief commentary" according to Wikipedia.

Ray Brock, an architect by training, and his wife Alice, who had been thrown out of Sarah Lawrence College for 'supporting unpopular political causes,' started working at the Stockbridge School in 1962 (New York Times, July 30, 1969). Ray taught shop classes and Alice was the school librarian. Ray and Alice befriended some of the creative students at the school, one being Arlo Guthrie.

Arlo graduated from the Stockbridge School in 1965.  After a short attempt at college, Arlo returned to western Massachusetts and may have been one of the fifteen young friends of Ray and Alice's who were staying with them in an old church that had been purchased by Alice's mother. The series of events that would follow is well-known, having been made into an eighteen-and-a-half-minute song which was the basis of Alice's Restaurant, the movie.

If you haven't seen the movie or heard the song, the best place to get the gist of Alice's Restaurant is this npr interview from 2005.

Hollywood classified the movie as a comedy - and for good reason: it was funny.  But there was certainly something about Alice's Restaurant that spoke volumes against the Vietnam War. The song became a hippie anthem. (When Guthrie heard that President Richard Nixon owned a copy of his eighteen-and-a-half-minute song and remembered that Nixon's famous tapes had an eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap, he joked that there was silence on the Nixon tapes because the president was listening to his song.)

Using the internet, it isn't hard these days to find information about Alice Brock. But one thing that I read in a tribal newsletter (it was one of those papers I can no longer find, maybe I threw it away) is that the same Alice gave a tour to the Stockbridge Mohicans during one of their historical trips to the homeland in the 1970's.

 

So the musical artist who represented the young anti-establishment generation and the visual artist whose work most clearly represented the older generation were both living in the same small town: Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Norman Rockwell's most recent biographer, Deborah Solomon (American Mirror, 2013), tells us how the two men got along.

[Guthrie] and Rockwell met at least a few times. Guthrie said the introduction was made by his physician, Dr. Campbell...a longtime friend (and onetime model) of Rockwell. "All of the people Norman used as models were friends of mine," Guthrie remarked years later (396).

When touring as a solo act in either Norway or Sweden, Arlo Guthrie felt lonely. Solomon quotes his description of how he cheered up.

"I walk in to just get a beer and a sandwich somewhere and I'm sitting there and I look up on the wall and there was a picture of Dr. Campbell and the kid and a couple of other Rockwell paintings. I suddenly looked around and I thought, 'you know what, I know all of these people' and it made it so freaking nice"(397).

 

Arlo Guthrie's own site is Arlonet.

Alice Brock also has a website.

Read more about Arlo, Alice and Alice's Restaurant at The Food Timeline.