Associated Articles
Where are they now?
Author tracks life, times in area communal farms
By JON POTTER, Reformer Staff
Friday, September 26
BRATTLEBORO -- What were they doing at Packer Corners back then? And what does it all mean today?
Those questions are at the heart of a new book, "Farm Friends," by North Bennington writer Tom Fels.
In 1969, Fels joined a growing movement of young people who came to rural New England to live on communal farms. Born of, what Fels calls, "a unique wedding of dissatisfaction and ingenuity," this New Age movement brought people together to live self-sufficiently on old farms throughout New England.
What happened to these people while they were there -- and afterward -- is the story Fels writes in "Farm Friends" -- a beguiling mix of biography, memoir, oral history, sociology and human behavior.
Fels will give two readings in the area in the next two days. Tonight, he will be at The Book Cellar in Brattleboro at 5 p.m.
On Saturday, he will be at the Bartleby's Books booth during the Vermont Life Wine and Harvest Festival in Wilmington.
Fels himself lived on one of these farms from 1969-73, though not the one at Packer Corners in Guilford. His was in nearby Montague, Mass., and the main characters are from there. Still, the lives of the people on all the communal farms intersected -- and there are references to people who should be familiar to us here -- Verandah Porche, Peter Gould, Marty Jezer. Thus, "Farm Friends" is a good source for people wanting to understand this chapter in local
history.
Though he lives separated from the Brattleboro area by the Green Mountains, Fels knows the area well -- he attended the Putney School -- and he believes the farm families still have an influence on Brattleboro and its surrounding towns.
"Absolutely, the farms and the influx of people in the '60s have had a huge effect," Fels said. "Brattleboro is definitely a recipient of that energy. ... It started out be political, but it turned out to be cultural."
"Farm Friends" is something more than a chronicle of the times. Though Fels approaches that time with a historian's sensibility -- he is the founder of the Famous Long Ago Archive of photographs, newspapers, writing and more now housed at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst -- "Farm Friends" is something different from straight history.
"I started out just thinking I would write a little memoir. Some of my personal mission was just: What was this?" he said. "I wanted to write it because I felt that the era and the farms were always spoken for by other people."
Fels was there. He joined many friends from college, a brilliant, eclectic cadre that included many writers and journalists, some of whom had founded the Liberation News Service, an alternative news wire for the times.
For Fels and his friends, their activism, their response to the times took the form of deciding to live their lives deliberately on communal farms.
"This is stuff people thought we should be doing. It's one thing to make signs, it's another thing to do it," Fels said.
The opening pages in Fels' book reveal much about life on the farm. What stands out is how much they were a collection of very different people, just trying to figure out who they were and how they would live their lives.
"It looked like everybody was the same. It looked like everybody had long hair and head bands. Underneath, all the people were coming from one place and went to some place. ... There were all different kinds of people."
Eventually Fels left the farm and most of his friends did, too. And that's where "Farm Friends" really begins.
Beginning in the late-'70s, on the eve of Ronald Reagan's election as president, and continuing at various times through the mid-1990s, Fels tracked down former friends from the farm and asked them to tell their stories.
The first surprise was where he found them -- most of them now lived in cities, especially New York. Equally intriguing was what they were doing. Fels tracked down friends who were lawyers, friends who were teachers, some who held nameless, faceless roles in corporations, one who was a drug dealer. Some seemed to have used the spirit of the '60s as a springboard -- many became active in the anti-nuke movement or in grassroots movements to tackle challenging environment, economic and social problems. Others seemed to have moved far away from the ethos of those earlier times, devoting their energies to the pursuit of money. Many remained writers, some successful as novelists, some as journalists, others in the worlds of television and Hollywood, now courting a world they had once looked down on.
"What had happened is that people largely turned out to be who they were all along," Fels said. "The world loosened up a lot after World War II, and these were kids who were just trying to figure out: What's next?"
Together, they form a mosaic of a group which spent an influential time together and then moved on. As such, "Farm Friends," while not a complete work of social history, sheds some light on a whole generation.
"One of the big questions coming out of this era is: What happened? I would have to say, we were not as effective as we wanted to be," said Fels. "One of the things that comes out (in the book) is how much time or effort it takes to change things or even maintain things. ... Being a groundbreaker or a pioneer ... is always going to be hard. That's a risky role, but it's a good one."
With those halcyon days of the farm now nearly 40 years in the past, Fels and his mates are now grappling with other big questions, chief among them, how they are going to get old. Already some of the people in the book -- Steve Diamond, Marty Jezer, among them -- are dead. Questions of legacy and lasting impact are weighing on Fels' generation.
"This generation has been 'the news' for the last 50 years, and now the news is about aging," Fels said. "These people are going to change the way people get older."
Which leads to some remarkable, or at least ironic, thoughts.
"I've heard people say, 'Hey, let's get a farm,'" Fels said with a wry smile. "It's a very anti-institutional group."
For information on Fels' reading at The Book Cellar in Brattleboro, call 802-254-6810. For information on his reading at Bartleby's Books in Wilmington, call 802-464-5425.
Jon Potter can be reached at jpotter@reformer.com or 802-254-2311, ext. 149.
View Cart
View Wishlist
Print this page.
