(no audio) (no audio) (graphics clattering) (bird chirps) (no audio) (no audio) (gentle music) - Hi.

This looks like a good bunch.

- [Crew 1] Who are they for?

- They're for Liz, my wife.

She'll be surprised to see Bouncing Bets and looks like a dandelion in there, with some blue vetch when she expected juncus.

(laughs) But it'd be nice to have something from the farm.

This was a working farm where the Kennedy's lived.

My grandfather and grandmother, their family.

And we would come up here from Tennessee when I was a boy.

We'd drive the last 10, 15 miles on dirt roads and go upstairs to the second floor bedroom carrying a kerosene lamp very carefully.

And we would look out on Stimson Mountain over there and feel about as far away from everywhere as you could possibly be.

This place was totally magical for a kid of eight, nine, 10 years old.

- They used to call Vermont the Last Stand of the Yankees.

You know, solid, independent people up here who were mainly Republicans.

- It was sort of like you were born to be Republican.

It was sort of like a religion.

And then, you know, the next generation comes along and starts to think a little bit differently.

- Things were changing.

The political mix was changing.

- It began to change in the '50s and the '60s, we sent a Democratic congressman down to Washington, Will Meyer, who was a real radical.

My God, he wanted to recognize Red China.

That got him in trouble.

And then lo and behold, we have Philip Henderson Hoff.

- There had been a gradual growth in the Democratic vote.

So in my early years, in addition to practicing law here, I worked at the polls.

I worked with the Democratic Party.

And ultimately, I was elected as the sole representative from Burlington.

This was before reapportionment.

- This was a time when one town had won vote in the legislature.

The tiny town of Victory was equal to the vote of Burlington.

- He had 246 representatives.

I mean, that was almost Greek in its democracy.

Well, let's take victory.

In 1960, Victory, Vermont representing 50 people, sent one person to the legislature.

Burlington had about 38,000.

Burlington sent one.

Burlington sent Phil Hoff.

- The Republican party in those days consisted of the so-called conservative Republicans, but there was a liberal component, so we coalesced with the liberal Republicans and were able to get an amazing amount of stuff through.

And then suddenly I found myself in the position of running for governor.

And I had no money.

The campaign consisted of Joan and me getting in a car and driving to a community.

- He was Kennedy-ish.

You know, he was an attractive young man, articulate as hell.

- [Phil] I would go through the shops and businesses, factories and Joan would do a lot of house to house.

- But the big change in Vermont's voting patterns in terms of Democrats, and Republicans, and liberals, and conservatives, actually happens with the rise of primarily French Canadian descended voters who vote Democrat.

(singer singing in foreign language) - And it culminated in my being elected.

No Democrat had been elected governor in this state for really to all intents and purposes ever.

- What happened to the Republican party was that the Democrats caught him sleeping, first of all.

But I think television had a lot to do with it.

You could see Democrats, they didn't have horns, they seemed like nice folks like everybody else had a lot to do with it.

And you know, a lot of it's luck.

I mean, he won with less than 2,500 votes.

It just squeaked by.

- And when you win, I remember that.

I went, "Eh, finally one of us is there."

(both laughing) - Young, dynamic, enthusiastic.

And he won with Winooski's vote.

- Winooski was a working town.

- Yeah.

- Working man's town.

And so yeah, I had a lot of support.

- [Yvan] A lot of French Canadian out there who supported you.

- Oh, yeah, absolutely.

(band singing in foreign language) - I never lived in Canada.

- None of us didn't.

- I grew up- None of us.

We were all born in Vermont.

My mother- - She was two when she moved from Canada to Vermont.

And that was to work with her parents.

Her father was gonna work the mills and the older sisters.

- I remember them voting for Phil Hoff.

- They had always voted most of the time Democrat.

- Democrat, yeah.

- I remember when I came up here and a lot of time the parent would come and the parent would run the farm.

And the kid, as soon as they were old enough, they'd work in the mill and the money, they'd come in, bring it home, and they would give it to their parent.

Everybody was poor in old day, you know.

Nobody was rich.

- A lot of the French people were ashamed of being French.

- They were persecuted.

All the dumb Frenchmen, they don't know how to do anything.

And so they worked double hard.

- A lot of them took jobs that no one else wanted.

- Yep.

- My uncle shoveled coal for... Well, back then it was GE.

- It was GE.

- [Nina] ll he did was shovel coal.

- He couldn't speak English.

- Couldn't speak English.

- My mother spoke English a little bit.

My father never learned.

And it was a big risk coming up here, not knowing if he was gonna make it or not, you know.

And four kids in the house, five that is, you know.

It was just 12, 14 hours a day, work, work, work.

Seven days a week.

You know, go to church and take a nap after church and get back from milking again.

(Yvan sobbing) - [Crew 2] It's hard back then.

It's hard, I know.

- No.

(clears throat) I remember, we work hard all our life.

And only one moment... We went fishing together one time in my lifetime.

Yeah.

We never had time to do anything like this, I remember.

He got one fish.

He was so proud of himself.

(laughs) (lively music) - [Lisa] We were really poor.

We didn't know it.

We never knew it.

- [Carmen] We now know it now, wouldn't we if we think back?

- We were poor financially.

- Financially, yes.

- [Louise] We always were a very tight family.

We're trying not to make that last too long.

- And if someone was down and out, or somebody really needed you, you were there.

- And we had the music.

(lively music) (feet tapping) - And so this break, the breath of fresh air swept through Vermont at a time when the state had become pretty stagnant.

- In a lot of ways, up until the 1960s, Vermont was a state that was run according to 19th century political models in which there's an extraordinarily large amount of local control.

And there are some really nice things about that, that decentralized model.

But there were also a lot of bad things about it.

- At the time that I became governor, poverty or welfare in Vermont was handled on a town by town basis.

In a number of places there were so-called Poor Farms.

And the treatment was really bad.

- Well, I'll be perfectly honest with you, I never heard it referred to as the poor farm until I was an adult.

It was always the farm or the town farm.

I guess I always thought it was just a farm that the town of Manchester owned and that my grandmother operated for the town.

And I can remember my father talking about sitting on the porch, rocking chairs, talking with some of the men.

In fact, that became a little bit of a contentious issue with one of my aunts when I confronted her with the fact that, "Aunt Helen, I didn't realize it was a poor farm."

"Oh, we never called it that.

No, it was the farm.

It was a town farm."

I just don't think she liked that stigma.

- I mean, the poor farm, you see, it has a terrible press.

Oh, look at the name, the poor farm.

- They were in very few cases quite effective but on the whole fairly barbaric and backward.

- [Frank] Did you force 'em to work?

Yeah, but everybody worked.

Do they only have a tiny little room to live in?

Yeah, but life wasn't very good for anybody in those days.

- And it varied from town to town.

Some overseers of the poor would be good, compassionate people.

Other overseers of the poor would skin flints, and cruel, and mean to people who are down on their luck.

- And trying to have the state take over was not easy, but was largely predicated on relieving the town of responsibility for welfare people in their community.

And that's what it is today.

- He was impatient with the small towns and he was part of that progressive centralization that the liberal Democrats were promoting for years.

But that's fine.

I mean, you know, we recovered from it.

- We were reformers.

We went after everything.

We brought a substantial number of youngsters, primarily from Harlem and some from the Bronx.

So were Black and coupled them with our own white kids around a variety of different projects.

- I spent quite a bit of time with some of these kids over the course of a few weeks.

Kids were great.

And then I took three carloads of kids with some high school kids from South Burlington up to Huntington Gorge to go swimming.

And I thought I was going to have to fight these three car loads of local folks who came and jumped out of their cars to go swimming too, 'cause they started screaming racial epithets at these kids and at us and essentially drove us right out of there.

- [Phil] No, it wasn't everybody, there was people who were just ecstatic about this program and they were wonderful.

But there was the backlash racist group.

- There is a strain of intolerance and xenophobia in Vermont that you just can't ignore.

There was an episode of the Ku Klux Klan organizing in Vermont in the '20s and '30s.

And since there were very few Black people, the Ku Klux Klan was anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish.

- [Phil] I think the danger is when you become myopic in your view, I think that you're just gonna run your little world like it is and let the rest of the world go by.

- The kind of small-mindedness when you have social experimentation in a rural area where people's experience is rather limited, that's the problem.

- [Howard] But there's also a strong human rights tradition here that was expressed when they wrote in an anti-slavery clause in the first Vermont constitution.

It was expressed in Vermont's heroic participation in the Civil War.

- When the state was founded in 1777, the goal of the founders was that Vermont would prove to the rest of the world that you could have freedom and unity, that Vermont would be able to reconcile the most fundamental contradictions of the human experience.

Everyone wants to be free, but everyone also wants restraints on other people's behavior so that they can live in a civil society.

It's never been perfectly accomplished.

There's always been social conflict.

- Vermont is a cold, lonely place to live.

It's a hard place to live.

In many ways, it's a miserable place to live.

But there's no state in the union on a per capita basis.

It's contributed more to the life, and manners, and culture, and economy and even industrialization.

And that's the irony then Vermont has.

I mean we had an industrial output in Vermont, but it was from small firms.

- This state is full of inventors.

They're kind of hidden away.

(birds chirping) Sometimes you don't always get to hear of 'em or see 'em, and a little shop or basement, a garage, an attic.

Who knows what, they're working on something.

(tool clanking) (gentle music) - Ira Allen called the Vermont's talented tinkerers.

And that's what we were.

- The latest project I'm working on, I can show you is my electric car.

We started with an Arctic Cat snowmobile frame just because I didn't want to have to build a whole frame.

And then I put Yamaha R6 wheels and tires on it off a motorcycle.

And the top is an airplane canopy off of an R8 experimental airplane.

But it's not like I have to go out and buy something new every single time.

I tend to hang on to tools, pieces of equipment, worn out this, this and that, 'cause there's usually a piece of something on it that you can reuse.

I'm hoping also that the power will come from my own solar panels here and I have a wind generator going in and another couple months.

So I'll be producing my own electricity right here.

And.

(machine rumbling) I need to pull this out and- - [Crew 2] Does it have a name?

- Electrike.

Electrike.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, Eman and I have a grand time sitting around and discussing the next great thing.

But if you think back to the industrial revolution, every attic seller garage had somebody that was gonna make their fortune on inventing something and there were tons of wonderful things that came out.

You could produce 'em locally.

Again, I'm back to this local notion.

They had the resources, they had the foundries near them, and a lot of it was done on a much smaller scale.

- So this building, 'cause it was right beside the water, was a water powered mill site.

It was originally built as a water powered factory to make machine tools and to make guns.

- Everybody knows the name Smith & Wesson.

And they worked here, before they were partners.

They didn't meet here, but this was where they formed their partnership.

- [Ann] And they were able to make their guns really, really quickly because they developed a system of making interchangeable parts.

(machine whirring) - So this is the turret lathe.

It was designed to enable the common worker who didn't have the skills of machinists to mass use parts.

And the way that it did that was by putting all the tools on one turret, which is this part up here.

(machine clicking) It can be easily rotated.

So I'll bring it for my first tool.

(machine whirring) And this is a shaping tool.

(machine whirring) And there we have it, a little goblet that was made just like that and could be made a thousand more times by destroying this machine over and over again.

- At Crystal Palace exhibition in London.

The story is that they brought something like 10 rifles with them and took them all apart, and threw all the parts into a great big pile on the floor.

And then were able to reassemble them really, really quickly into working rifles.

You know, really demonstrating that the concept of interchangeable parts they had developed really worked.

- Machine tools.

They were the computers of the mechanical second urban industrial revolution.

- I mean, I love computers, but it was precision machine that made that possible.

You had to have a machine that could hold a tight tolerance before you could make any form of product that had repeatable precision.

- Nice.

- There are two chips on the top surface and two chips on the bottom surface making 4,000 bits on the module.

- The British sent a parliamentary commission to visit New England and what really captured their interest was the gun making, and they visited this site.

They coined the term, American System of Manufacture because the innovations that were happening here, you know, had not occurred in the old world.

- My grandfather is an old machinist, so I've learned a lot of stuff from him and that's what has brought me partly into the world of machines.

I mean, I love them so much.

I look at a machine and can understand how it works.

This is the stock to be cut and this is the cutter.

As the machines, as it spins, the teeth feed in, and then feed out cutting the front side and then the backside as- - [Ann] What happened was the technology that was developed for gun making was then transferred to other industries.

And some of the other things that were made in this building include railroad cars, quarrying equipment.

- [John] Bandsaws, all sorts of hand tools.

- So they became a clearing house for the sharing of ideas up and down the Connecticut River corridor.

- People ask, "How come it it happened here?"

And my feeling is that it was mainly the people.

That people straight off the farm would start running these things and turning out tremendous volume of good, useful parts.

- [Ann] But when water power was succeeded by other means of producing electricity, you didn't have to have your building right beside the river.

In fact, it was a problem if it was right beside the river.

So when the industry shutdown in 1970s and '80s, it was pretty drastic because that community especially was pretty heavily invested in manufacturing, and there wasn't a lot of resilience when things went sour.

So this building did become, for a great many years, kind of a white elephant.

- [John] It's like Billie Holiday singing about lipstick traces on a cigarette, you know.

After the person's gone, there's still the traces of it's still there.

- [Ann] And it's not like it was anybody's fault here, really.

It sort of was a phenomenon that was happening around the country.

- Vermont's economy undergoes this enormous transition.

The traditional industries tended to go outta business and textiles are not only moving increasingly the Appalachian South, but now they're moving to Mexico, and Korea and Japan, eventually China and Indonesia.

And they were replaced by other things.

They were replaced by tourism.

Skiing.

IBM comes in.

General dynamics comes in.

- And the coming of IBM to Essex in the 1960s, Christ, I mean they loved Vermont because there were a lot of smart people that knew how to work and they came down from Fletcher or Fairfield or they come over from Roxbury and they worked at IBM, and they had that Vermont ethic about work and smarts and getting to work on time.

- [Speaker 1] When job interviews began, more than 300 people applied for work the very first day.

George Dunbar was determined to work for IBM and Essex when it opened, he came from Windsor, Vermont.

- Well I think they came up, it was at least six times and possibly seven.

Finally, they hired me.

And any case, I'm very happy.

- [Speaker 1] Eilene Durkee was born and raised on this family farm.

Getting away from the dairy a little bit, for her, is a full-time job at IBM.

- [Eileen] And the money is good, our benefits are fantastic.

- [Speaker 1] To get to IBM, Eileen drives an hour each way from Highgate Center near the Canadian border.

- Before the interstate was built in the '60s and '70s, Vermont was very isolated and quite impoverished.

Not all of it was poverty stricken, but there was plenty of poverty behind those pretty red barns.

- You could drive from Bethel all the way to Woodstock, on gravel road, most of route 100 throughout the state with gravel.

And a population of courses, there's more cows than people.

(cow mooing) And we actually located first seven miles from the mass line to Brattleboro.

- And when they first started putting the interstate through, companies then were just cut down the trees, bulldozed them and got this, and the big piles, putting crank case oil on them and burning 'em.

And you could look from South Newbury all the way down to Thetford, and see billows of smoke coming up over the green mountains as these guys burn it.

- Eisenhower was president.

And the feeling among the Americans at the time was anything that was expensive and big was better.

- This the state highway system was all on bridge and territory.

Of course, there were cases where we, for instance, had to split large farms.

In those cases, cattle passes were installed under each lane so that the farmers could get tractors, cattle, forage wagons and so forth from one side of the interstate to the other without long detours.

- [Crew 2] Do you hear the interstate from here?

- Oh yeah.

- Can you hear it right now?

- Yeah.

But that's, you know, that's probably partially my own dawns too, you know, by cutting the trees and opening it up more, it funnels right down the valley.

- Like in the evening, you'd be out there walking around the fields or something, looking at stuff and it's just constant.

Yeah, yeah, you know, a constant noise.

It's kind of tough.

- It also cut right through a number of towns, divided towns in half in some instances, and created a commercial district in the middle of a farm field.

- I went to research a story of a man who lived in Ascutney.

He lived in a farm that was right in the way of the bulldozers.

The interstate was gonna go right through his house.

- They'd made Mr. Tenney an offer that they would move all his equipment, his animals, wherever he wanted them, and he would have to relocate.

- [Howard] And he wouldn't move.

And the clock was ticking.

- And this went on for several months, or several weeks.

- [Howard] And he wouldn't move.

- When it became clear that he was going to have to move.

The sheriff was going to serve papers and stuff, and you know, we helped with the packing of odds and ends around the buildings, but I also offered him some nice cardboard boxes to put stuff in for moving.

He said, "Sure.

And if I don't use 'em, they'll burn well."

- And the night before the fire, I remember clearly looking up into Uncle Romaine's face and into his big, blue eyes and there were tears in his eyes.

So I think at that time he knew what he- - He'd made his choice.

- Had to do.

He had made his choice.

- We came that night, which was his supposedly his last day on his property.

And about 2:00 in the morning we got a fire alarm at the house was on fire.

(siren wailing) When I came out my front door, the sky was just one big red glow.

- That night we got the call from the fire station and we all headed over here, and as we crossed the big iron bridge, remember coming over here- - Yes, across the Connecticut.

- You could see the flames.

(siren wailing) - [Rolly] The doors were blocked or nails shut and we were able to gain entry into the hallway.

But smoke and heat drove us out.

- He apparently set all his animals free and laid down on a steel cot, and after the fire was all over and things had cooled down, people found the remains of the bed and some charred human bones and metal overall buttons and a rifle.

- The only living thing we saw around the house was Mr. Tenney's dog.

(dog barking) - Some people have thought that he was a hermit.

We did not get that impression at all.

He did live alone certainly, but he was very sociable.

He showed us his mother's dresses still hanging in the closet and she had died many years before.

And so, it seems that his refusal to move was not based so much on economics as with the emotional inability to give up the place he was so used to.

- There is a certain amount of irony here because where we are now is at the park and ride in Ascutney and it happens to be that his property was right here, right in this area.

His house was right there by the off ramp.

- A friend of mine who worked on the survey crew remembers vividly choosing the peak of the roof in the barn as sort of the center line for the highway.

If they'd gone five degrees one way or the other, it would've been a different story.

- Yes, I think it's emblematic of how people feel about eminent domain.

You're powerless.

- I'll never forget being assigned to get a picture of the opening of that stretch of the interstate.

They just took down the barricades and the cars started rolling on it and I went back to Ruland and wrote a brief story.

I guess probably I'd like to erect a monument down there where that man died.

- Well, the way we viewed it, it would improve our competitive position as far as farmers was concerned.

And, of course, the dairy industry was one thing we were trying to look out for.

- In addition, because of the interstate interchange, we began to see new areas where development was focused.

- [Leroy] Landscape that was formally dairy farms became motels and restaurants.

(helicopter whirring) - And when the highway is completed, it puts Vermont within a day's drive of 65 million people.

- It opened Vermont up for development.

It allowed IBM to open.

It paved the way for the ski areas.

All of these things happened because now you could get here from there and before you couldn't.

(gentle music) - I would stuff junk and everything.

Put a jacket on.

Look, put a sweater on, huh.

- Okay.

- You need a sweater?

It's cold.

(laughs) ♪ I'm blown away (door creaks) - Oh my God.

This place is such a fucking mess in here.

I really forgot.

I mean, I was late for the dentist, so I forgot everything.

(person whistles) Oh, I heard the patter of little feet.

- Did he drill?

- Yeah, uh-huh.

But I'm okay.

- [Speaker 2] Maybe you can't talk now.

- Oh, what?

- What I mean?

- He didn't drill my tongue.

- Please give a warm welcome to the Vermont State poet, Grace Paley.

(crowd cheering) - "Working in the Woods."

That's when I saw the old maple, a couple of its stick arms cracked.

I mean I always wrote poetry and I had a family and I lived in New York, and I was very active in the anti-war movement.

But I did come up mostly for the summers.

Mostly I use US '91, but for some reason I wrote this poem to US '89.

(crowd laughing) It's a Vermont poem.

My heart leaps up when I behold almost any valley or village in the embrace of US '89 from White River to Lake Champlain.

And then after I quit teaching, I began to really live here.

And that was another story altogether.

I mean I had to really, to live in a place and to be in it for four seasons is real.

(crowd cheering) - Grace is both an artist who is very well known and she's equally known as an activist.

- [Grace] And I was as much involved in the Vermont part of it as I was in the New York part of it.

- We went to all kinds of demonstrations and there was just a natural thing.

- Yeah, but one of the great things that happened really was the development of that younger group that came and formed those collectives, or communes, or whatever you wanted to call them.

But this was a place to come to.

It was like open country in a way, you know.

And that's when Marty came, and Marty could probably talk about that period much more richly than either of us.

- Came up here in '68 as a long haired hippie to start a commune.

- We didn't know that this was a commune.

We didn't move here with the idea of, "Oh, let's have a commune."

(laughs) It wasn't like that.

- I don't have hair anymore.

I'm recovering from cancer, but I still have the same radical politics that brought me up here in '68.

- We had been talking about leaving the country for a long time.

- [Crew 2] You mean leaving the city?

- Leaving the United States of America.

And this is a bunch of urban people who had never really been outdoors, that was always the joke.

- I think of hippies as coming to the country 'till they could live on the land.

And I think that's what they did for about five minutes but these were people who grew up in New Jersey or.

Someplace like that and didn't really have a background of using tools.

They were very well meaning and hardworking.

But mostly I was impressed with how trusting and generous they were.

You know, they were gonna share everything.

- [Verandah] We had lived together some of us in college and then later in Washington, DC doing political work.

And everybody had to bunk up with each other because we didn't have much money, so it didn't seem peculiar.

- I think Verandah put it perfectly when she said, when we moved up here, she said something along the lines of, we've been busy and activists and members of all these peace groups since we were in high school, and things just got consistently worse.

- We've got some difficult days ahead, but it really doesn't matter with me now because I've been to the mountaintop.

Like anybody I would like to live a long life longevity.

(gunshot booms) - I know that every American of goodwill joins me in mourning the death of this outstanding leader.

(siren wailing) - We were in Washington, DC during the riot after Martin Luther King's assassination.

The city was in flames.

(fire blazing) And we wanted to do something for our Black brothers and sisters.

I mean, it was so heart-wrenching and here we were wandering around the city and here were the National Guard and machine guns pointing out front of the capitol building.

And brothers and some sisters pushing racks of clothing down the street that they had looted from department stores and weeping.

I mean, there was no joy in all of the mayhem.

I remember asking Black colleagues that we had, like, "What can we do to help?"

And people said, "You could get us guns."

And I said, "I don't think so."

I mean, we don't have guns and that's not who we are.

Then somebody said, "Well why don't you go home?

And work in your own community?"

And we couldn't go back.

Ray wasn't gonna go back to Lawrence, Mass, and I wasn't going to go back to Palisades Park or Teaneck, New Jersey.

But in some ways the idea of home just stuck in my head.

And I can remember the day after Easter, I said to Ray, I woke him up 'cause he never woke up before noon.

And I said, "Ray, I wanna go home."

And he said, "Don't worry, I know the place."

Then he went back to sleep.

- Vermont did provide an oasis, a place of refuge.

People could come to Vermont and find solace.

- Vermont was created as a refuge.

I mean, Ethan Allen was tossed out of Connecticut for vaccinating himself, which was against church law.

I mean, Daniel Shea, when they drove him out of Massachusetts, where did he come?

He came to Vermont for god's sake because he knew he could do his own thing and live his own way.

- Those people were coming to Vermont because it had been labeled a place for renegades.

And after all it was fairly close to the city.

It was fairly close to very urbanized areas and fairly easy to get to.

(tires screeching) (people clamoring) - So we came here, we just knew, hey, this was 1968 Memorial Day weekend and the house was sort of pea yellow that we couldn't even get into because it was locked.

So we looked in the window, that was our inspection, and then we walked up the hill and there was a peach orchard, a whole grove of peach trees, all in bloom.

All pink.

(birds chirping) And it just had this feeling of such safety.

We said, "This is the place."

And I believe we went down that very day to meet Rosie Franklin, the widow, to put down a down payment on this farm.

- 5,000 down.

(audio boings) We all kicked in.

It was easy.

- It was our little Eden.

That's how I felt about it, sudden even.

(birds chirping) - We all got together after Dartmouth taking over the administration building and trying to stop the war in Vietnam.

And two thirds of the students, and probably more than that of the faculty were really against the war.

Of course, people were getting drafted too, so that certainly made people pay attention.

We rented a house in Hartland and there were 12 or 13 of us, something like that, men and women.

And our idealistic goal was to have this printing press and be able to print political pamphlets and bring 'em to the city.

And we were gonna try to set ourselves up as being sort of a retreat for people who were active in the movement in the cities.

It didn't work out as planned.

(lively music) - I remember stepping off the curb into a demonstration, but I remember the idea of, like, moving from the sidewalk to the street as this like really big decision.

I mean, to be out there with the demonstrators, you know, because I, as a rich, white kid, could do any thing I wanted.

It turned out I happened to want to go down to Mississippi and make a movie, and I had not a clue as to the history of this country.

So then a movie of this would be really important step.

But by the time the collective came together, that core was Newsreel.

- Nothing was being our side on the media.

When you turn television on, you only saw what the TV station showed and we know who owned the TV stations, the big corporations, you know, and the advertisers and all that.

So a group of people got together and decided to show our side, our extensive, believe me, there were many political opinions in this group.

- [John] '68 we were in Chicago, made a film called "Summer '68."

Then right after that we went to North Vietnam and made the first US film in north Vietnam in 1969.

- The Vietnamese were fighting and we wanted to fight, but we were fighting using cameras to fight with.

In fact, our logo on the opening of our films, and you see Newsreel is flickering and it's the sound of a machine gun.

(gunshots booming) Our films had a rough edge to them, and we showed stuff that nobody ever showed.

- I moved up here and put heat in a house and then a friend's, sculptor friend came, and started working here in a barn.

And then a number of Newsreel folks came up to really think about living together, organizing a tight political collective.

- And it wasn't Newsreel anymore.

John's house wasn't a Newsreel house, it was Red Clover Commune.

- And one friend said, "I don't want any dogs in my commune," you know that.

- And I've been in Newsreel for probably four years, since the beginning, so I called 'em up and said, "Can I come?"

Yes, there I was.

(lively music) (water sloshing) - And projector was set up in the other room.

So you had this beautiful little screening area.

Yeah, there were couches and {beep} here and a big here, big wood stove.

And then upstairs it was a room where we all slept in.

- Hey, hi.

- Yoohoo.

- Sorry.

- Oh.

- We've very rapidly found that our time was fully occupied in doing two things.

One was figuring out how to live together, which was new for all of us and we had to make a living.

So we formed what we call The Wooden Shoe Labor Force.

It was quite successful.

- I won't say we gave up, but I don't think we were activists anymore once we got here.

I think our activism was in an attempt to build a new world here, which we actually believed was gonna be a utopian society.

We called it the Democratic Republic in Vermont.

- [John] We took over a big field and declared it People's Farm, Free Farm, where we planted crops and met every weekend to cook, and dance, and play music and harvest veggies.

- People think of hippies a certain way, but we considered ourselves to be political activists.

- And we hooked up with a whole group of people up in the border, Franklin, which was a big farming commune.

- We worked together, we pulled our money, we started a people's bank.

So somebody needed eyeglasses, somebody needed dental work, somebody needed a warm coat, a tractor fixed or something, and there'd be money there to help pay for those things.

- We all realized that we were doing something different.

And it's hard for people to realize now, you could not buy whole grains, you couldn't buy whole wheat bread, you couldn't buy whole wheat flour.

So one of the things that happened was that we formed the New England People's co-op to buy food.

- There was also a woman's collective in Burlington called New Morning.

It was women doing various women's work and women's liberation work.

And we had a literature table, which we had all this political literature that we were giving out or selling.

35 cents.

- We would go visit communes, we'd show up with the newspaper we had just printed, "Free Vermont," you know.

And with a couple Newsreel films and the different communes that we found were just beyond the pale, man.

I mean, you couldn't...

It was- - I mean, we had no privacy, for instance, of the Wooden Shoe.

I mean none, no privacy.

All the rooms were open.

There was no doors.

Now we even had a latrine, it was open air latrine.

I mean, the only privacy anybody ever had was to go outside and off somewhere.

I mean, you know, think about it, let's say a family living in the 1700s in a one room cabin.

You grew up with your parents making love right next to you.

We got pretty used to it.

(kids laughing) - But everything of Johnson pastures for instance, I mean, here were people living in blankets in the snowstorm gathered literally around a fire with an open roof.

Or then there was the Rochester place with the Shakespearean professor, which was like this medieval experience.

- Irving had translated Hamlet into modern English and like Prospero, who was a Duke, he thought of himself as being an exiled person of great worth.

"I go to my Milan where my every third thought shall be my grave."

That's what Prospero says at the end of the tempest.

So what Irving did was he decided to create his own world in an essence, which was 140 acres of wild mountain land, an old hill farm.

And you know, this little world was for many years, really a realm unto itself.

- Came to the bottom of the driveway, looked up and thought, "That must be it."

It was just one of those magical days when everything fell into place.

(laughs) - And this house where the farmhouse used to be, that's my mother's room.

- I felt like was probably the world's most interesting place.

And especially the very fields that appealed to me.

- This is where the barn was, and this is the community building over here.

- Oh, it's a refuge in a sense for a lot of us.

And I think a lot of people who grew up here out in the world come back here.

It's a refuge for them.

- You know, I mean, I've had a kid here that has always been held by lots of people since she was very small, you know, and she has really close personal relationships with a lot of people of a lot of different ages.

And I don't think that could have happened in- - No, it's very different.

- A regular neighborhood.

- It's a very different way of growing up.

- [Ladybelle] My parents wanted people to come.

They were interested in the development of a human psyche.

So they were happy to have people live here.

- Did she tell you about the gallery that they had in New York City?

My grandfather used to give speeches on transcendental meditation and stuff.

I think it was on East third Street maybe down by Avenue A.

- It was the lower East side then, but it was at that moment becoming the East Village.

And on Thursday night, Irving would give a talk about tantra, the yoga of sex.

So a lot of people would show up and he would give them the brochure.

He would say, "Come up to our estate in Vermont, which was, you know, a farm with a falling in barn and a uninsulated farmhouse."

But he said, "Come up to our country estate and spend some time with us."

And so on Friday night, he would then drive to Vermont with whoever wanted to go.

- I was 19 years old, I was traveling up from South Carolina where I'd seen my parents and I stomped at a roadside park.

I'm leaning against my car and this gentleman walks by me, he kind of looked like Albert Einstein.

He had balding on top, long white hair, mustache and a couple of water jugs and flip flops on.

And he says, my name's Irving Fiske.

And he stuck his hand out.

And I said, I'm Sam Eller and he shook my hand.

And he said, "What's your sign?"

And I said, "I'm a Capricorn."

And he says, "I have just a girl for you."

And he brings over this beautiful, young woman, and a couple of other girls came over and paid attention to me.

Then Irving said, "We have to go now.

Why don't you just fall in line behind us and follow us to Vermont?

We'll take care of you."

(bird squawking) (gentle music) - [Ladybelle] I was 15 or 16 when we first began to do that.

It was a little startling.

One day that you have only a few people.

I mean, it was never no one, but we had never had a million people around.

- When I walked in the door, there was a three-year-old little boy named Tom James.

It was 2:00 in the morning.

And whenever he said something, everyone who was sitting next to him, turned and listened.

- My parents believed very, very strongly, my father, particularly that children should be honored.

- I guess it kind of got to the point where kids were kind of supposed to like run the place for a little while there.

We were all running around naked and wild.

- We had philosophy that no child must ever be struck or disciplined in any way, and that people had to do exactly what the kids said.

- [Ladybelle] Not always, but a lot.

- Well, when Ladybelle came along, we collapsed and did whatever she said okay.

- Here's a picture of my.

My mother actually had had a nervous breakdown in 1965 or six.

She just one day found herself unable to do anything anymore.

She just could not move.

I think she just couldn't handle it anymore.

You know, she wanted to have Irving be hers- - I couldn't.

- Her husband.

And he had a different point of view about relationships.

- He always had a crowd of people up at his house, and there was a lot of girls sitting on his bed and there was guys sitting there too.

I mean, he was always inviting, you know, girls and guys up to his cabin to talk to him.

- Obviously, he was a central person in everybody's life.

- Most utopian experiments, they're always walking this fine line between anarchy and autocracy.

Freedom and unity.

How to balance the two things.

- I mean, we had a real aversion to communes where there was some charismatic, strong male dominance.

Of course, in retrospect, the women who lived at the Wooden Shoe would probably say, yeah, well the guys were pretty pushy but we had weekly meetings and all the decisions were collective by consensus, which included everything from money to sex, to animals to kids.

- Actually, women had a lot of power here more than is realized.

There were quite a few single moms and they were on welfare.

Some of them or they received money to help support their children from their families perhaps.

So they had some control over what went on.

- You know, raising kids is the probably the biggest job, the most important job that you don't get paid for.

And when you have so many of them all at once, right?

- [Ladybelle] And this is the door to my bedroom, where many unusual and interesting twists took place.

- [Crew 2] Between you and other people?

- Me and many other people.

Because there was the feeling that sharing lovers was a way of sharing the most deep part of yourself so.

- Imagine all the people sharing all the world.

You may say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

I hope someday you'll join us and the world will live as one.

- We used to call 'em hippies on the farm and they could afford not to work.

Many of them.

And they didn't, which we envied.

- Some people had jobs, we all worked in one capacity or another here.

We logged this mountain over here 110 acres.

We were working.

- We thought the girls are the most beautiful girls we ever saw, and they never were a bit interested in us.

They come up to the farm and watch us milk, you know, and we could show off and things like that.

- Our style was dresses that we had scavenged from the attics of old houses, with our klutzy boots or bare feet.

The joke was trying to look like old farmers at the Agway.

(laughs) - [Jake] They came to Vermont, I think for all the right reasons.

They came to live small and maybe a lot of it was mythical.

- We were just playing around with living here, almost a parody.

(audio boings) You could have that hitch in your walk without a lifetime of grunt work.

(suspenseful music) - Oh my God.

- Yeah, yeah.

(suspenseful music) - Oddly enough, places that are cold for long periods of time and kind of isolated, seem to lead people to look for different kinds of thought and belief and idea.

- Vermont always had a space for people to do eccentric things and get away with it.

- This was a frontier.

And there was no accident that these little utopias and some of them quite noisy and influential, like John Humphrey Noyes and his perfectionists in Putney, that was all fertile ground for the invention of community.

- Perfectionism taught people that there was a real world which was very fallen, and then there was the ideal world that God wanted.

But John Humphrey Noyes decided that he actually was already perfect, and therefore he had to make the real world ideal.

And that means getting involved in other people's affairs.

- John Noyes arose out of the revival movement, out of a movement of social and economic turmoil.

- He was adamant about starting a new community here in Putney to live in what he called Bible Communism, where everybody was essentially equal sharing in all the goods and materials of the community.

- They had very different ideas about society and traditions, traditional institutions like marriage.

- [Chard] They lived here in this house as a kind of secret sect.

- Noyes wanted a different kind of social structure.

You know, he believed in what he called complex marriage, that some people would call it polygamy, but it's actually the opposite of polygamy.

He didn't want anybody to be married to anybody.

- [Chard] And since in heaven, he believed people aren't married.

It's perfectly fine for perfectionists to live like angels on earth.

- [Ladybelle] Something like the shakers, I think.

But Noyes, instead of believing in no sex, believed in sex.

- Like a swingers party today.

But they were a religious about it.

- [Chard] He called it free, I think, in the sense of religious freedom.

In fact, John Humphrey Noyes coined the term free love.

- He believed that marriage had become essentially slavery.

And what he wanted to do in the perfectionist community was have an equal distribution of labor.

- [Jake] From raising the children to publishing the newspaper.

It had the first daycare.

- [Paul] And so it was gonna be a very egalitarian community.

- One of the practices that grew out of complex marriage was something he called stirpiculture.

John Humphrey Noyes coined this term where the mother of the community, somebody John Humphrey Noyes appointed to this position would play matchmaker.

And decide on couples that would breed the most beautiful or the strongest, most intelligent children.

And this is just a form of selective breeding eugenics.

So there were many children in a short period of time, and John Humphrey Noyes was father of many of them, who were raised by the community rather than by their actual biological parents.

In fact, John Humphrey Noyes discouraged long-term relationships, but often folks fell in love actually, and would grow very frustrated and upset when they would then be forced apart by John Humphrey Noyes.

He ran this community with an iron fist.

He had enormous charisma, and it was as if he was creating his own new religion that had very little to do with scripture, except for this passage from the New Testament.

Matthew 5, it says, "Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect."

- Definitely believed in Christ.

And other believes as well.

- He felt that common work, and common ownership, and common marriage were ways of getting rid of the things that caused us to be sinful.

- So even though it was very hierarchical, a lot of it was very appealing to a lot of women and to women on the outside of the community wanted to belong for a long time.

But folks here in Putney felt that it was just a very thin excuse for licentiousness.

- It was too far out for the sober citizens of the village.

- He was arrested for statutory rape and other charges.

And rather than stay here and fight those charges, he took his brother-in-law's advice and fled to Oneida where there were other perfectionist sympathizers, bought some land there and moved to the community on mass to Oneida, New York.

- [Susan] That's kind of an interesting piece of memorabilia.

- Yeah.

- The townspeople have never quite recovered from the shock of having been the site of John Humphrey Noyes' Bible communism experiment.

It is only within the past few years that Putney Summer residents have been allowed to wear shorts.

(laughs) - So there's all that freedom.

But we could find extraordinary pressure against them too, because they're violating community standards and often they're violating the very kind of core of what American beliefs are.

- You know, people always just assume that we are a bunch of hippies having orgies.

But you know, I don't think our relationships were really much different than anyone else our age.

- Well, we actually had orgies, but the fact is very seldom- - We all did, Raymond.

- Raymond.

- For the most time, for the most part.

- Raymond, that is just- - At Packer Corners.

- There was orgy at Doug Packer's apartment in Boston one night.

And it was all people from this farm.

- You weren't there.

- I wasn't there.

I wasn't invited, you know.

- (laughs) No, I didn't tell you about it.

(laughs) - I always felt sorry if these people would go home to an empty house or to like one other person, we'd go home and it'd be like, like party, (laughs) it's great.

- And you know, they did bring to Vermont at that time a liveliness and us farm boys liked it.

We liked the newcomers.

- [Jake] We asked a lot of questions about how people used to do things.

And what happened was the older people in particular really could relate to it because that's how they grew up.

And here were these young people who actually cared about the way they used to live and really learned from it so it was great.

- I mean, there were drugs, there are all kinds of family, non-family arrangements, but there's an interesting kind of tolerance by and large.

- I feel as if I've earned my stripes as of the matter.

I'm no longer a Bronx-ite.

- In fact, it's sort of a joke because people would say, "Oh, I hear you have a bunch of hippies living up there or something."

And people would say well, there's a lot of hippies that are really drug crazed, dirty people, but not our hippies.

Our hippies are good hippies at the Wooden Shoe, you know?

- But at the end of the '60s, there was a definite hardness to the culture, and some boys drove by and fired a gun into the farmhouse.

It was getting scary.

- That was the sense.

I mean, you were worried about your safety and the safety of other people.

- Yeah, this is the door that the FBI came through.

When was the house was raided.

Yeah.

- Why was it raided?

- Oh, they said they were in pursuit of whether people Bernadine, I think probably like that.

- Well, I'll tell you what Bernadine told me that they had one rule.

You never go to Berkeley or Vermont.

Because that's where they're gonna be looking for you.

- And they rounded everybody out of the different outbuildings and stuff.

And state police were all backed up out here.

- I showed up at the farm about the time the Weathermen were coming into Prominence within SDS, Students for a Democratic Society.

And they took such extreme positions that they wound up destroying SDS and destroying themselves as well.

Including the kids who blew themselves up in the townhouse.

And I felt for strategic, as well as moral reasons, that the anti-war movement needed to stay religiously nonviolent.

But I lost the argument with the weathermen and was pushed out of SDS.

So the farm was certainly a refuge, a place to get away from what was happening in the movement.

- You must have been there in the fall, fall of '69.

And then hung in through the winter.

That was when we really sort of coalesced.

We'd all come in from our little chicken coops or barn room.

- [Carl] I'm not misremembering that somebody put a bullet through the window.

- I don't know of that no.

- You don't remember that.?

- No.

- And then there was that place where Brother Kramer set up his firing range.

You remember that?

I hope.

- [John] Well, I remember that.

But how many times do you think we actually went out and fired on the range?

- Well, nobody did it.

- Except when the women showed up from Boston, got out of their van armed.

- It's like people got caught up in certain things.

'cause what was happening in America and in Vietnam so horrible that people just, (explosion booms) they had to do something.

And some choices were good and some weren't good.

And you never knew - [Shoshanna] My given name was Patricia.

But when I went underground in 1969, I had to shed my name.

And I didn't seek to go back to using the name Patricia, because Shoshanna was so much nicer.

- I knew Soshanna from before when she had another name.

- I was living in New York, I was a teacher, I was a single mother, and I was very active in the political events of the time.

- [Speaker 2] And he wore demonstrators protest US involvement in the Vietnam War.

- In that year, in 1969, over 500 bombings.

You only know about a few of them.

- And the bombings were directed at corporations, but also some government buildings, including such things as the Whitehall Induction Center, which was a very well known place in New York City where young men were being drafted.

(explosion booms) (siren wailing) And the government alleged that I was part of this small group of people that were committing these acts.

- [Roz] In those days there was no metal detectors.

You could just walk in and out of any place.

And I mean, the nerve to think, I couldn't even get close to it doing anything like that.

'Cause I was suck a chicken.

- But these bombs went off in the middle of the night with phone calls beforehand to clear the buildings at that hour.

- So it wasn't meant to hurt people.

- Anyway, my daughter was visiting her father.

So I had one of my very few free evenings, an evening where I could just go out and do what I wanted.

So I was out at a friend's apartment and we were listening to the radio.

And every minute of every hour was about the FBI converging on this group that was alleged to be doing these bombings.

And the FBI had apparently had everybody under surveillance.

Anyway, I knew that I was on their list.

I just knew I was.

So, I never went home.

I left the city that night hidden under a mattress in a truck and was driven to an airport in another city because all the train stations, and bus stations, and airports were being watched in New York.

Got on a plane and then became part of this moving through the underground being a non-person.

And there was my daughter.

She had never been away from me for a weekend before, let alone anytime beyond that.

And I couldn't get back to her.

The FBI immediately surrounded the place where she was and they kept that surveillance on her for the next year thinking that that was where, you know, where they could catch me.

I can't even say I was heartbroken because I didn't accept for the longest time that that was gonna be how it was.

Plus, you know, I was also worried about being caught.

We'd watch so much blatant murder of African American activists, Black Panther party people but others as well.

Sam Melville, another friend who was in that supposed a group, did do serious jail time, in fact, was deliberately assassinated in Attica Prison.

So I ceased being Pat Swinton and became this wandering but well-cared for person.

And it worked this way, not just for me, but it was also a lot of draft Dodgers and AWOL soldiers.

The beauty of that network was that it had no structure, no organization, nothing was ever written down, any place.

People didn't know each other who were part of it.

So that by the time you get to point C, the people who sent you to point B, they no longer know where you are or who you're connected with.

And indeed, it was impossible for the FBI to crack it.

And then, I don't know, something in me, I didn't realize what a toll all of this wandering was putting on me.

How alone I was, and how my psychological strength was being sapped.

I was running outta steam.

And I had been through Brattleboro.

Something about Brattleboro that I thought, "What?

No, Brattleboro is a big enough town.

They'd have a bunch of jobs there."

And it looks like downtown, there's some apartment buildings.

I could get just some cheap, anonymous little place to live, and get a job that I could hold onto for a while.

And so I just took my little paper bags and came to Brattleboro.

And the first day, I got a job waitressing downtown and an apartment.

And I didn't know a soul in Brattleboro.

I hung out at the graveyard a lot.

And gradually, after living here a while, I started making friends, some of whom turned out to be the people at Packer Corner's Commune, where after about another year or two I was invited to live, which I did.

It became an easy place to settle down into.

You know, there was no group think, God, quite the opposite.

Sometimes we'd have the most roaring arguments and fights about stuff.

It was like a family in that you don't necessarily enjoy everybody, but you belong to each other.

I found it to be the most superior way I ever lived, and just very gradually came to feel at home here.

So that when I knew that the FBI was hot on my trail and were likely to catch up with me soon.

And I had ways of knowing that, I decided so that I just wasn't gonna run anymore.

That I didn't have it in me.

And that furthermore, I was even getting tired of lying all the time.

If hiding myself, even to these people that were becoming my friends, I knew it was gonna be trouble for them too.

And yeah, I wanted them to give them the choice of would they like me to be someplace else when the FBI came.

And so I recall after I told them in a brief five minute thing about who I really was, and what I was being sought for, there was a silence for a moment.

And then everybody broke out into spontaneous applause.

(laughs) It was one of the more lovely moments I can remember.

This is from that era or not.

And indeed, the FBI came.

Scooped me up.

Good God.

That was in March.

They picked me up, the trial wasn't until September.

I was in prison in Rikers Island.

The bail was very high.

There was no way the money was gonna be raised.

So the farm, Packer Corners put up Packer Corners.

Put the whole farm on the line as bail for me.

Not only that, but offers came in from people all over Brattleboro, from very unexpected places.

There were some small shopkeepers from Main Street and there were all these events to raise money to pay for the lawyers.

Paul Newman sent me $200.

(laughs) - [Crew 2] Grace Paley's mentioned.

- You want Grace and Dave Dellinger were the chairs of my defense committee.

Grace did a wonderful thing.

My daughter went to some event where Grace was the featured speaker, or reader, or whatever.

And afterward Jenny went up to Grace.

And when she said, when Jenny Swinton said her name, Grace said, "Are you Soshanna's daughter?"

And Jenny said yes.

And Grace just gave her a big bear hug and said nice things.

Things I would've wanted somebody to say to my daughter that I was a worthwhile person because she certainly had been hearing the exact opposite at home all those years.

I really...

It meant a lot to Jenny.

I think it's one of the things that helped her decide that she would look me up.

Because Grace knew how horrendous losing my daughter was to me.

Yeah, good woman, Grace.

She did so much good in the world.

Anyway, the trial was only a week, and so I was acquitted.

And then I had to decide where I was gonna live.

Was I gonna stay in New York?

Now, a lot of people I had known in New York, you know, had come out while I'm on trial and stuff.

But Vermont had gotten under my skin in a way that I hadn't realized.

I did try it and go back and live in New York for a while, a few years, and I couldn't take it.

(birds chirping) (gentle music) So I came back.

(chuckles) - Now there was a chicken coop, right?

- There was a chicken coop, absolutely.

See, you remember that.

But I don't remember what we ate particularly.

I mean, did you cook?

Did you shop for food?

- You know, I did my bit, but you know, I was cut off from the house itself by that 30 yard path out to the chicken coop.

- Through the nettles.

- Yeah.

- Well, Kramer and Erica were out in the chicken coop when FBI showed up.

(dog barking) I remember that in particular.

- [Carl] It became pretty clear that there were informants among us.

- I mean, Du Art was processing our film and giving them to the military, so they knew what was going on.

And then the state police shut down Free Farm when that was a big scene.

You know, so that was the end.

I mean, that was sort of near the end.

- [Carl] Mm, am I right?

Your father was an undersecretary of the Air Force, wasn't he?

- [John] He was Secretary of the Air Force.

- [Carl] Secretary.

- And Deputy Secretary of Defense.

Yeah, so it was really fascinating journey for me out of this ruling class trajectory.

- Hmm.

- I mean, certainly we hoped back in those days that things would get even more stirred up.

It's not a one of us that didn't wanna see a better society come about.

But when the country stopped being in ferment, and particularly young people didn't have the sword of the draft hanging over their heads anymore, things all went back to the way they were.

- [Jake] One of the things that happened is that relationships began to stabilize.

Over time, there were couples that formed.

- Now AIDS is in the picture.

And that was another thing that changed Quarry Hill.

People began to worry about AIDS.

- But you know, there was never a time when people said, this isn't working, or we have to change it.

It wasn't like a negative thing.

- You have your own house, that's shocking.

(laughs) Give it up at once and move here.

- [Crew 2] It's tempting.

The idea of living in a group setting is very appealing to me.

- Although- - I hope you find it as appealing after you try it for a while.

- [Crew 2] Would you call this a commune still or?

- Not at all, to be frank.

- Yeah.

- That fell apart years ago.

Yeah, no, it's just there's no community functions.

There's no community dinners, there's no community talking.

There's basically a little neighborhood where people live now, and that was just the way it is.

It's just something new, different.

The way it goes.

- I think that a lot of us in this age group are really trying to see a way to make something like this happen again.

But it's not really that realistic for a lot of people to live here.

- Because of work.

- Because of work and stuff.

- It's communal life's difficult.

- In a lot of instances, people decided that their marriages, or even if they weren't formal marriages, but their matings were put under too much stress in a group situation.

Or that raising children was too hard in a group situation.

- People were like, "Oh, wait, we need to have a job and we want health benefits, and what about our retirement?"

We don't own anything.

- It just seemed sort of natural.

It was actually a natural process that people...

I mean, we were all getting older, you know, and people had interests that's another thing.

People didn't wanna just work as common laborers for the rest of the lives.

I mean, I was the guy who was interested in farming.

That's what I ended up doing.

That's what I'm doing to this day.

Yeah, these are all organic tomatoes.

Oh, the bees are in here.

That's good.

To this day, all those people, I just have a different relationship with them than I have with anybody else.

I know them so well.

- That was the best time of my life.

And some people probably hated it.

But for me, I really loved it.

- I mean, I like my life the way it is.

I really, I love living with Liz, and I really enjoyed raising my two kids.

But there's a part of me that I love that experience.

That was important to me to be at the Wooden Shoe.

- Well, the commune days were never really over for me.

I mean, the commune days really aren't over for me.

That's just something that we should put on the table.

(people clamoring) - Marty, get the picture.

Marty.

- Oh, where's Todd, let's get in there.

- [Verandah] Many people went out to seek their fortune, but there's a reverse migration and farm was home base.

- What is it like being here?

You haven't been here?

- It's wonderful.

I can't tell you, it's so wonderful.

I had apprehensions when I left California.

I thought, "Oh, you know," I mean, "I'm so old and fat," and you know.

- Everybody went out to work in their different ways.

So I began working as a poet in the schools and that was, you know, a necessary thing.

I needed to earn a living.

And I did a lot of nursing home work and then went on to be a writing partner, and creating what we called what one of the old ladies called Toll Poetry.

Take that Lily over there, it runs down the stem and seems to back up where the petals flare out.

That was just exactly what you told me.

So I've connected with people from every different walk of life and the commune sort of stretched so that our entire hill now satisfies the sense of interdependence.

The sense of surprise in living with a group of people.

I also have my civic responsibilities, like I am a cemetery commissioner right here in Guilford.

And as we age, that's gotten to be an increasingly meaningful job.

And also this meeting that we're going to tonight about how to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our town.

It's like, I'm glad to be here.

Oh, Nora, this is Shirley.

She's at Clark, Clark.

- I was born on the farm right up here.

- I mean, it's not like we're perfection itself, but I appreciate the efforts that our town has made to be one town instead of a fractured place where those people live here and these people live here.

So we tried to share our skills, you know, and our pie.

(upbeat country music) - [Crew 2] Marty, are you as strong as you look?

- Used to be.

- No, kidding.

- [Marty] I used to be able to fly two bales of 56- - Close together.

- (imitates rocket whooshing) I can't even hold one anymore.

- [Speaker 2] You still got it?

You still got it, yeah.

(gentle music) ♪ I can still see the garden ♪ Goats and the pigs ♪ Door opened down ♪ I come running ♪ Bunch of naked kids ♪ Young mother ♪ Wearing cloth she wove on 'em ♪ ♪ Deputy Park just down the road ♪ ♪ Watch their every move ♪ They made their own apple sauce ♪ ♪ Can their peas and on the herbs along ♪ ♪ To dry in the long winter night ♪ ♪ Trying to keep the Old West alive ♪ ♪ Outside the world was turning ♪ ♪ Vietnam was burning ♪ There were just too far ahead of their time ♪ ♪ The hippies were right ♪ The hippies were right ♪ The hippies were right (gentle music) (gentle music continues) ♪ Come springtime ♪ Where it traveled so fast ♪ People showing up every day ♪ Just needing a place to crash ♪ ♪ Skinny dipping in the river ♪ Hoping for free love ♪ Oh, but love will always be free ♪