This rambling tale is meant to entertain you, in your long-determined hours. You lift up my spirits, and so I would like to return the favor.
Walnut Hill
In January of 1971 I hitchhiked into Omaha, Nebraska. I had gotten out of the army a few months earlier. I was wandering. I had been a combat medic for a year in Vietnam. Back in the states, I had gone AWOL, done stockade time, got a bad conduct discharge which I was proud of. I was proud to have been there for my fellows. I was not proud of being part of the war machine.
I was kind of a disturbed but functional mess, shall we say, with blood on my hands, and young, standing on the highway outside Omaha. I was broke, hungry and underdressed for a cold northern plains winter, but in that strange way known to the poor and disconnected... I was free.
A young woman rescued me from the highway late at night and took me to an old house where she and several others with fairly serious drug dependencies were more or less squatting. We huddled around an electric kitchen stove that, along with the lightbulbs, provided the only heat. The next day I got a casual labor job and had a bit of money for food. Low paying jobs were plentiful in Omaha then, and after a week or two of getting work by the day, I landed a full-time, minimum-wage job in the Walnut Hill district at the New Market Wooden Toy Company. The first day on the job one of my new coworkers invited me to his house for dinner. It turned out he lived in a small urban commune on the second floor of a big old house just down the street from the toy shop. I met the other members that evening and moved in the next day.
At twenty-one, I was the oldest person in the house and the only one who had been in the military. The commune had been started by a native Omaha woman and was very informal-- somewhere between commune and just a bunch of people sharing a house. Several of the residents were from Chicago. They had arrived as immigrants often do—one had found his way there, established a foothold, written home about it, and soon another would arrive. There were six members when I arrived. We ate together, hung out together, planted a garden and occasionally smoked a little dope. My room was a closet under the slanted roof. It had a door about waist high and just enough space for sleeping and keeping a few personal items. As winter turned to spring we pitched in and bought a car, a 1953 Cadillac with white side-wall tires that needed air frequently. A couple of members used the caddy to get to their own low paying jobs. Once a week we raided supermarket dumpsters for fruits and vegetables.
We read and talked about books by Alan Watts and Carlos Castaneda. Tom Wolfe and Kurt Vonnegut, Back to Eden and Black Elk Speaks. In the midst of the Cold War and social discontent, we were looking for an alternative way to understand our place in the world. It was peaceful and calm in that house on Hamilton Street. One time when the landlord came to collect the rent he asked me "What are you guys doing here?" I said "Living." He said, "You know, I asked Gary that question and he said exactly the same thing." I do not recall a single instance of real anger or arguments that resulted even in raised voices. We had occasional visitors and over-night guests, but the main group was our matriarch Diana, and five young men, our little Neolithic family on Walnut Hill.
At the top of Walnut Hill, on the corner of 40th and Hamilton, was a donut and coffee shop. Next door was the toy company and farther down the street was a small diner open for breakfast and lunch. In between our house and the top of the hill was a park with big beautiful trees and luscious grass in the summer. Once I had been introduced by tribe member Andrew, a truly lovable and disarming fellow, both the donut shop and the diner would extend me credit for a meal, or a coffee and donut, or a pack of cigarettes. There was some small but real sense of community there on the hill that reached beyond our house.
The toy company was owned by Herby and was equipped with a drill press, two wood lathes, a band saw, a jig saw, a table saw, two or three small power sanders, a collection of clamps and some jugs of Elmer's glue. For our raw materials we tore up wooden pallets and other pieces of wood scrap from wherever. We made wooden cars and trucks of various sizes, a series of circus vehicles and animals, a string operated dancing man, a block set with numbers or the alphabet engraved with a wood-burning tool, and a hammer and peg set. I never really knew how Herby marketed these toys, but a crew of five or six worked full time to produce them.
Herby had a big head of frizzy hair. He talked and dressed like a sort of conservative hippy. I myself wore a red necktie from the thrift store as a belt to hold up my baggy dungarees, and cleaned the sawdust out of my nose at the end of the day by snorting Golden Seal tea. Sometimes I played the harmonica while I walked down the street. I had no ambitions whatsoever for material success. I wanted calm.
Herby sat at his desk and talked on the phone and did paperwork and issued orders. He saw to it there were cardboard boxes to put the toy orders in, and that they got shipped. His was the final word in toy design and manufacturing technique, though he clearly had no real background in woodworking either, just like the rest of us. Herby wanted to make money. In terms of counterculture, Herby and I were not even in the same universe, but he didn't care and neither did I. We were both pretty content with our roles, I'd say. I had a peaceful sanctuary and he had an avenue for his ambition.
In retrospect, the name Herby chose for his business was far more revealing than I understood at the time... The New Market Wooden Toy Company. I suspect now that Herby thought his work force of hippies was a bit foolish and feebleminded but—as we were willing to work for minimum wage, and were a relatively docile and happy group who made no demands on him beyond getting our $1.60 an hour, and we were not addled by drugs—it was labor relations paradise for him. He let us fantasize whatever we liked about how far-out and Aquarian Age the toy company was. I can remember times when someone would talk to him about this better, cooler world stuff, and I'd see Herby smiling slightly behind his mustache and saying nothing. I don't think Herby had anything against utopian dreams... they amused him.
Herby was of the new generation of niche market entrepreneurs and did not have a socialist bone in his body. He was obviously hip to the corporate concept of externalization, because somebody was paying for those pallets, though it usually wasn't him. It seemed to me that some of them were being retired and recycled sooner than they ought to be. Wood was being harvested somewhat informally from warehouses and construction sites... being liberated from the establishment, so to speak. Some of it arrived on a small, beat-up stakebed truck, driven by a long-haired guy in boots and overalls who didn't talk much, but smiled and nodded a lot. Some of it was just there, in the alley behind the shop, when we came to work in the morning.
By late summer 1971 Herby had found some investment capital and was making plans to move his operation to the Old Market in downtown Omaha. At that time the Old Market was in the early stage of the urban renewal that began turning it into what it is today. Old Market now has its own website and like old downtowns across the nation, it is the home of restaurants, pubs, boutiques and specialty shops whose target market is middle class and above. In the process of making this move we all lost our jobs. Herby said he had to let us go for business reasons he could not discuss with us. He was immovable. It took some nagging to get the back wages he owed us, but he paid up in the end.
The loss of the toy shop changed the character of Walnut Hill in a small but significant way. Even if it was partially an illusion, the presence of the toy company on Hamilton Street had made it a livelier, friendlier and more hopeful neighborhood. It gave Walnut hill a more vibrant sense of identity and community. It left an empty storefront.
