Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings just before Thanksgiving, but you can’t get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant. The restaurant is long gone, and now, so is Alice.
WBUR has a remembrance, and so does The New York Times. Arlo Guthrie, of course, weighed in as well, on Facebook.
Extra Special Bonus Fact: Did you know Alice was a Pelkey? Neither did I. I’ll consult the Counselor, see if he was aware that he was related to criminal and culinary royalty.
We’ll give a thought (and an ear) to Alice and Arlo on Thursday as we have another Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat.
Mad Blog Media 
oh, man, just less than a week from Thanksgiving. This actually brought a tear to my eye.
Sad news to be sure. I think I first listened to “Alice’s Restaurant” in 1969, in Bibleburg. Alice and Arlo have been a part of my life ever since.
Not sure when I first heard it. Probably in Buffalo, where we had a free form FM station, WPHD, affiliated with their AM station, WYSL. The FM folks played all the good counter-culture stuff.
http://blog.buffalostories.com/tag/wphd/
I think you and I caught the tail end of Vietnam, although they pretty much stopped drafting people for cannon fodder when we turned 18. Still, what I recall about that was I pulled something like a 300 in the draft lottery. My cousin Ralph, a couple years older, had pulled a 12 and suddenly got real serious about keeping his college deferment. My high school once brought in an alum who had served and lost his legs Over There to talk about the war. Was a real freakish assembly.
I always knew people in the military — you can’t grow up in an Air Force family without meeting a bunch of people in uniform — but I was not eager to join them. Vietnam seemed nothing like Dad’s war to me, and among my various childhood ailments was a powerful allergy to jungle combat with people I wasn’t mad at.
Obviously I was registered with Selective Service, but they’d stopped acquiring fresh meat by the time I was on the market.
I dropped out in 1973, before I could flunk out, and moved to Bibleburg for a series of dead-end jobs before enlisting as a copy boy for a tour of duty with the Colorado Springs Sun. Oddly, though I was in the B-burg with all its military installations I don’t recall meeting many Vietnam vets until I got to my second college, in Greeley.
Some were just regular beer-guzzling stoners like the rest of my crowd. Others had had their equilibrium disrupted. Those guys made me glad I didn’t get called up. I’d flunked enough tests in college, where the worst that could happen was getting kicked out.
I had one close friend in college who came back from the war with a very serious alcohol problem. His job was photoreconnaissance for B-52 raids, so we could better bomb dem gooks. He eventually dropped out of college and left Rochester for the Southwest, where he dried out and started over. Led a long life before finally dying of cancer (prostate, not something related to the war). My better half volunteered at a facility that dealt with Vietnam war veterans who came back with their “equilibrium disrupted” including one who eventually murdered someone.
Lots of my parent’s generation came back from WW II with stuff they rarely talked about but I would occasionally see surface in extreme reactions to weird things. One of my best kid friends’ dad once told me about watching one of the other troopships in his convoy get torpedoed and sunk with heavy loss of life. Imagine seeing that. We shouldn’t put folks in that kind of harm’s way without good goddamn reason. Lately, I think we forgot that part.
On to Thanksgiving, I guess.
The turkey breast get roasted on Wednesday, to be eaten with Texmati wild rice, salad, and, of course, mashed rutabags. Then Thursday is a hike by the BLM San Pedro River riparian area, no van involved, followed by a turkey sandwich picnic by the old San Pedro ranch house. No crowds, no cooking, no worries, and no crazy uncles talking shit.
I didn’t know Alice was a real person. Peace to her.
We were talking turkey a couple days ago, but I’ve gotten so out of step with standard Thanksgiving practice that I don’t think it’s gonna happen.
Herself suggested Emeril’s chicken cacciatore, which I haven’t made in a long time — uh, since last Thanksgiving. It’s your basic two-potter, one for the cacciatore, the other for the pasta. A side salad, maybe some bread, and Bob’s your uncle. We should get two, maybe three meals out of it.
Speaking of uncles, none of them, crazy or otherwise. But a hike sounds good.
I’ve done run out of uncles, at least this side of the turf. Just a few crazy cousins.
Damn, that sounds good. When should we be there? And what wine does Herself like?
Good lord, remember the song from 69 or 70, watching the news with Walter Cronkite. I remember a residence hall at Colorado State with 550 other guys watching the lottery numbers come and hearing a cheer or a string of words you can’t say on television when the numbers were called. I went to the local 3.2 watering hole and pounded a couple of pitchers of $1.25 Coors. as my number was in the mid-200’s. The dude on the floor below me got # 7 and he was gone the next week. My WWII Navy veteran father was pushing me to try for the Coast Guard Academy or the Merchant Marine Academy. That failed as my armed services test should an unhealthy lack of respect for authority
Thanksgiving was the best holiday in my family, The clan could get together and not rehash old times and grievances. In honor of that, I cook a small turkey with a black-and-white dressing recipe courtesy of Emeril Lagasse. Sage and cumin are thrown in for that southern Colorado flavor. Spuds and asparagus round out the meal. The turkey carcass makes about 10 pints of stock for the next six months.
Thanksgiving at the O’Gradys’ was good until it wasn’t. We had some real blowouts around the table when I was being a pretend hippie. After a major meltdown in 1971 I started spending my turkey time elsewhere.
And once I was out of college and into the journalism racket, changing newspapers more often than most folks change their underwear, I usually ate a plateful of turkage at the copy desk, if some softhearted type was into feeding The Weirdo. I didn’t mind working holidays. Let the family types do it hand to hand over politics and/or drumsticks, I thought.
“….was going to hang myself for littering.” What an all time hoot. And the…. “twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one.” This song got me through high school, my draft card/Selective Service days and college. Lucky for me my Selective Service lottery number was 241. That put the Vietnam War draft in the rear-view mirror for me. Luck of the draw. Never had to go, but a few classmates did. Again, just luck of the draw.
I loved the singalong, when Arlo remarks mildly, “That was horrible. If you wanna end war and stuff, you gotta sing loud.”
Another fave was when one of the Group W dudes asks, “Kid, what’d you get?” And Arlo replies, “I didn’t get nothin’, I had to pay $50 and pick up the garbage.”
Good night, Alice. Man, that’s a bummer. Reading the obit, it looks like she lived a long, thorough and good life. I appreciated Guthrie’s song for decades, then about 15 years ago was lucky enough to visit the Guthrie Center in Great Barrington, which of course is THE church in the song. No pews (like in the song). Chairs and tables for their weekly musical gathering, which we attended. Up the stairs is a real-life hippie pad which included lava lamps and flower power accessories – to this day! Years ago I posted the story here in the (old) blog, that the local newspaper describing the “masacre” garbage incident. That is framed and up on the wall of the Center. The song is all 100% true, with little or few embellishments.
My number was 320, so I didn’t have to move to Canada.
I remember that story. That was a fun read. Alice sounded like a character, and not just the kind you find in a song, either. One of the occasional diamonds one spies whilst trudging through the turds.