Pots n pans a king & j mattheus

Analysis Papers

how would you characterize her approach to business, from a theoretical perspective (consider the theories about the social responsibility we learned in class earlier this semester)?

Why do you think so?

How does Judy view business's responsibilities to each of the various stakeholders (employees, government, consumers, community, natural environment, etc.), in terms of the concepts/readings/films we covered in class?

What ethical principles, in your opinion, seem to capture Judy's behaviors during the course of her business career?

Give examples and direct quotes from Judy's book to illustrate your points.

Finally, how does Judy see the local living economy movement solving some of our social problems? Do you agree or disagree with her, and why or why not?

Praise for Good Morning, Beautiful Business

“Judy Wicks’s brilliance redefines what a business can be. The White Dog Café models what commerce will become if we are to create a livable future. This is business as spiritual practice, business as kindness, business as community, business as justice, joy, transformation, leadership, and generosity. There is nothing here you will learn in business school, because the White Dog Café is not in the business of selling life; it’s in the business of creating life. How blessed is Philadelphia and the world for her presence and prescience.”

—P AUL H AWKEN , author of Blessed Unrest

“Judy Wicks is one of the most amazing women I have ever met. She ran the legendary White Dog Café with passion, heart, common sense, and financial success. And she continues to blaze new paths on the road to a truly sustainable people-centered economy. This is a must-read book.”

—B EN C OHEN , cofounder of Ben & Jerry’s

“Wow. What a woman, what a book. In it, you enter the life of someone who, even as a child, learned that she could create—that she could make things and make things happen. We need Wicks’s confidence and courage now more than ever. So read it and you’ll get some. Her spunk is contagious.”

—F RANCES M OORE L APPÉ , author of EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think, to Create the World We Want

“Judy Wicks set out to create a business that expressed her values, served her community, and fed her family. She ended up leading a national movement to build local economies that are inclusive and resilient, provide green job opportunities, and conduct business sustainably and responsibly. Good Morning, Beautiful Business is an inspiration—a living, breathing tale of the new American dream in action.”

—V AN J ONES , author of Rebuild the Dream

“Guided by her own powerful activist sensibility, Judy Wicks beautifully conveys the important influences that a restaurant, or any business, can have within a community—politically, economically, and socially.”

—A LICE W ATERS , owner of Chez Panisse and author of The Art of Simple Food

“Beware. This is a business book like no other. It will change how you see the world, America, business, and the economy and should be required reading in every school of business and department of economics. Judy Wicks teaches us how to succeed at business while managing from the heart, having an outrageously good time, and measuring success as contribution to healthy communities and a world that works for all. Those who take Wicks and the White Dog as their model change the world one beautiful business at a time.”

—D AVID K ORTEN , cofounder of YES! Magazine and author of Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth and The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community

“Judy Wicks is one of our great leaders and visionaries, and this book makes clear why. She thinks about traditional subjects—‘business,’ ‘economics’—in fresh, practical, real, and powerful ways. Read it and then live it yourself !”

—B ILL M C K IBBEN , author of Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future

“If there ever is a Nobel Prize in planet-saving, Judy Wicks deserves to be the first recipient. Besides creating one of Philadelphia’s most popular restaurants (the White Dog Café), her legacy includes Pennsylvania’s local food movement, America’s fastest growing network of independent businesses, and entrepreneurs worldwide—especially women—whom she has inspired to make business the leading edge of social change. In this riveting, funny, and moving autobiography, Judy also reveals herself as a superb storyteller and a sharp policy critic. Her life story, which unfolds from the Arctic to Chiapas, shows how one passionate person really can bend the arc of history toward justice.”

—M ICHAEL S HUMAN , author of Local Dollars, Local Sense: How to Shift Your Money from Wall Street to Main Street and Achieve Real Prosperity

“Judy Wicks’s journey is potent medicine for a culture that falsely separates personal life and work, self and community, business and environment, and entrepreneurship and activism. Anyone who wants to engage their full entrepreneurial vision, and find their own unique path that may combine seemingly disparate goals, can take heart: this remarkable story is a visionary beacon and joyful read.”

—N INA S IMONS , cofounder of Bioneers

“Judy Wicks is something rare, invaluable, and essential in our time: a visionary artisan of cultural renaissance. Read this book. Learn what she’s done and, even more important, how she became who she is. Let her story inspire you more fully into your own cultural artistry.”

—B ILL P LOTKIN , author of Soulcraft

Good Morning, Beautiful Business

The Unexpected Journey of an Activist

Entrepreneur and Local Economy Pioneer

JUDY WICKS Chelsea Green Publishing

White River Junction, Vermont

Copyright © 2013 by Judy Wicks.

All rights reserved.

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs copyright © 2013 by Judy Wicks.

No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Editor: Joni Praded

Project Manager: Patricia Stone

Copy Editor: Eric Raetz

Proofreader: Eileen Clawson

Indexer: Shana Milkie

Designer: Melissa Jacobson

Printed in the United States of America.

First printing February, 2013.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 13 14 15 16 17

Our Commitment to Green Publishing

Chelsea Green sees publishing as a tool for cultural change and ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book manufacturing practices with our editorial mission and to reduce the impact of our business enterprise in the environment. We print our books and catalogs on chlorine-free recycled paper, using vegetable-based inks whenever possible. This book may cost slightly more because it was printed on paper that contains recycled fiber, and we hope you’ll agree that it’s worth it. Chelsea Green is a member of the Green Press Initiative ( www.greenpressinitiative.org ), a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Good Morning, Beautiful Business was printed on FSC ® -certified paper supplied by Maple Press that contains at least 30% postconsumer recycled fiber.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wicks, Judy.

Good morning, beautiful business : the unexpected journey of an activist entrepreneur and local economy pioneer / Judy Wicks.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-933392-24-0 (pbk.)—ISBN 978-1-60358-499-9 (ebook)— ISBN 978-1-60358-505-7 (hardcover)

1. Wicks, Judy. 2. Restaurateurs—Pennsylvania—Philadephia. 3. White Dog Cafe (Philadelphia, Pa.) 4. Community development—Pennsylvania —Philadephia. I. Title.

TX910.5.W47A3 2013

647.95092—dc23

[B]

2012043523

Chelsea Green Publishing

85 North Main Street, Suite 120

White River Junction, VT 05001

http://www.greenpressinitiative.org
(802) 295-6300

www.chelseagreen.com

http://www.chelseagreen.com/
For my children, Grace and Lawrence

And in memory of their father, Neil Schlosser

Contents Preface

1. My First Place: Growing up in Ingomar

2. A Culture of Sharing: Life with the Eskimos

3. My First Business: The Story of Free People’s Store

4. It’s Not the Coin that Counts: Learning to Do Business My Way

5. The Blooming of the White Dog Café

6. A Table for Six Billion: Finding an International Perspective

7. Living above the Shop: Lessons of Place and Community

8. Basta! We Have Had Enough: Coffee and the World Revolution

9. What I Learned from Animals: Building a Caring Economy

10. Pursuing Small Scale on a Large Scale: The Founding of BALLE

11. Setting the Table for Six Billion

12. Good Night, Beautiful Business

Acknowledgments

About the Author

When the power of love overcomes the love of power, then we’ll have peace.

—Jimi Hendrix

Preface IT WAS 1983 when I first opened the doors to the White Dog Café on Philadelphia’s Sansom Street, then a collection of somewhat run-down row houses that had just been saved from demolition by its residents, including me. From the first time I saw the Street, some ten years earlier, it had captured my imagination. Its lively sidewalks and graceful if neglected buildings invited me. Its characters fascinated me. It was a place that I had found myself lying down in front of a bulldozer to save. Yet even as I lay spread-eagle on the pavement and wondered just how close the huge earthmoving machine would come, I hadn’t remotely suspected that Sansom Street would become the epicenter of my life. Or that the act of saving our community from destruction to make way for a mall of chain stores would become a lifelong passion.

I would have been as surprised as anyone to learn that I would someday start a restaurant there and raise my family in a home above it. And I would have been even more surprised to learn that the restaurant would gain international acclaim as a socially responsible business serving farm- fresh local food, take me to political hot spots around the world, and play a powerful role in building what has come to be known as the local living economy movement.

Even by the time I was adjusting the blue-and-white checkered curtains and welcoming my first customer, I felt like a more-or-less accidental restaurateur. As a girl, I had vowed never to cook, and as a young college grad I had eschewed the concept of profit. But I was absorbed by the challenge of creating an outstanding restaurant on the block I had helped to save and intrigued at the prospect that it could be used as a meeting place for the community and a vehicle for good works.

Perhaps that’s why, several years after I opened my restaurant, I hung a sign in my bedroom closet in my home above the White Dog Café—right where I would see it each morning. GOOD MORNING, BEAUTIFUL BUSINESS , it read, reminding me daily of just how beautiful business can be when we put our creativity, care, and energy into producing a product or service that our community needs. I was just beginning my journey. I didn’t know then what I do now: that when you connect head and heart in business, you can transform not just business as usual, but the economy in general. You can find a way to make economic exchange one of the most satisfying, meaningful, and loving of human interactions.

The sign would stay there for the next fifteen years and would often make me think of my own business, and how the farmers were already out in the fields harvesting fresh organic fruits and vegetables to bring into the restaurant that day. I would think of Judy Dornstreich picking rose geraniums at Branch Creek Farm and how she once told me that when she picked it, she would imagine our pastry chef James Barrett making rose geranium pound cake for our dessert menu. I would think of the farm animals out in the pastures—pigs, cows, goats, chickens—enjoying each other’s company in the warm morning sun and fresh air. And I would think of Dougie Newbold, the goat herder, who claimed that when she kissed her goats’ ears it made their cheese better. And I’m sure that’s true.

I would think of our bakers coming in early in the morning to put bread and pastries into the oven for our customers to enjoy that day, and of our property manager, Long Pham, who for over twenty years arrived before daybreak to make repairs and oversee cleaning before our guests arrived. And I would remember the Zapatistas down in Chiapas, Mexico, growing the organic coffee beans for my morning cup.

Business, I learned, is about relationships. Money is simply a tool. What matters most are the relationships with everyone we buy from, sell to, and work with—and our relationship with Earth itself. My business was the way I expressed my love of life, and that’s what made it a thing of beauty.

The world, though, isn’t always a beautiful place. Not yet, anyway. There is a news photo of a little girl that not only proves that point, but also still haunts me. Though I saw it years ago, I vividly recall how vulnerable she looked in a tattered pink dress, standing on a garbage dump in Haiti, looking for food. The image hovered above a front-page New York Times article telling of a global food crisis, and speculating about the causes for the rise in food prices that had left this little girl and millions like her hungry. Was it the drought in Australia? Or the diversion of corn to ethanol in the United States? Or the increase in meat eating in China? I read the whole article and found no mention whatsoever about the failure of the industrial global food system itself.

The year was 2007, and by then it had become clear to me that to rescue that vulnerable little girl from hunger or, worse yet, abuse and exploitation, we would need to do far more than examine a few episodic causes here and there. We would need to change our failed economic system from one dominated by transnational corporations to one based on local self-reliance—one in which the inevitable fluctuation of prices in the global marketplace would have little effect.

Ideas like that were still far from making it to the front pages of major dailies. But a growing network of people around the world were showing how building strong local economies—rather than relying on transnational ones—could empower communities to feed, clothe, and care for their children and meet the basic needs of all their people. And the effort wasn’t just to end hunger or rein in poverty or challenge corporate power. No, ultimately, building local food, water, and energy security provides the foundation for lasting world peace.

This book is the story of how I arrived at that conclusion—from growing up in a small town, to a short but unforgettable experience living with indigenous people, and most of all to creating, over the course of twenty-five years, the White Dog Café. It’s also the story of where that café led

me as I worked with others to build a local food system and then a whole new local economy for our community. It’s about how I finally joined with my colleagues across North America in an effort to help relocalize economies and enliven communities across the nation and around the world.

But it is also the story of my own awakening from a girl who denied all things feminine, and refused to wear pink, to a businesswoman who found strength in her feminine energy— a quality that’s available to both men and women. I used that energy to build caring business relationships, make heart-based decisions, cooperate with my competitors, and ultimately work collaboratively to build a compassionate and caring economy.

I started my work to build that new economy in the year 2000 with the simple premise that an environmentally, socially, and financially sustainable global economy must be comprised of sustainable local economies. Rather than a global economy dominated by mammoth, and often unnecessary, transnational corporations, I envisioned a global economy as an intricate network of small-to-small, win-win business relationships connecting communities that were self-reliant for their basic needs.

A year later, I cofounded the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, known as BALLE. If you are wondering just what a “living” economy is, it’s one that supports three areas of life—healthy natural life, vibrant and culturally unique community life, and long-term and just economic life. Examine a thriving local living economy and you’ll find a multitude of locally owned, human-scale businesses committed to the health of their community and their ecosystem. They produce basic needs locally, export the surplus, import—through fair-trade practices—goods not available locally, and develop products unique to their region for exchange in the global marketplace—be it a fashion design, fine wine or cheese, artwork, entrepreneurial innovation or any of the many other things that celebrate what it is to be human.

This book is more than a memoir. It is a survival manual. It is certainly not about a utopian dream. Rather it is about solving deep problems unique to our time—and the need is urgent. Today, we are confronted with crises the world has never faced before: a depleted natural environment no longer able to sustain our materialistic society; increasingly severe and erratic weather brought on by global warming; a declining oil supply that will likely, in time, make global transport prohibitively expensive—if burning the oil does not destroy us first. There is growing wealth inequity; an American political system increasingly controlled by corporate interests; and escalating global violence, social upheaval, and environmental destruction over control and extraction of the remaining oil, freshwater, and other natural resources. It doesn’t have to be this way.

I imagine a future where the little girl in the pink dress is in a different photograph. She’s smiling over an abundant meal of organic locally grown food seated along with the rest of the world’s happy people at what I’ve come to call the Table for Six Billion (or maybe seven or eight). And where are the transnationals who claim we need their mono-crops, fossil-fuel-based pesticides and fertilizers, genetically modified seeds, cruel animal factories, and long-distance transport to feed the world? They are not in the photograph. Turns out we didn’t need them after all.

This book is both a love story and a business book. It’s about a love of life, nature, animals, community, and unique local culture, a love of good food and family farms, and a love of democracy—all being threatened by a global economic system driven by profit. It’s also about a deep love of business, and how we can embrace a way of doing business that is beautiful, that nurtures all that we cherish, and that furthers the creation of a whole new economic system based on caring relationships.

Though this new economy is global in vision, my story and the story for each of us begins right at home in our own community—and with our own capacity to recognize and protect what we truly care about.

I have always loved a window, especially an open one.

—Wendell Berry

1 My First Place: Growing up in Ingomar

I BUILT MY FIRST FORT when I was nine. I called it a fort because I made it from upright logs like a Western fort in the cowboy movies. Each spring I dismantled the last year’s fort and built a more elaborate version, a process that went on every year until I went off to college. I continued to call them my forts even though I abandoned logs as a building material and began using discarded boards salvaged from around the neighborhood, often scraps left over from the new houses popping up in the open fields at the outskirts of Ingomar, the small town where I grew up in western Pennsylvania. Every year for my birthday in May, beginning when I turned ten, I asked for a bag of nails and a roll of tar paper, then headed for the woods with my new supplies, along with a hammer and saw, to begin a new fort.

I have always had a strong sense of place. Much of this book, though not all of it, is about a place in Philadelphia—the 3400 block of Sansom Street where I lived, worked, created a business, and helped build and maintain a community. I cared for that place for almost forty years. But other places came first.

I chose my first place in the woods behind the house I grew up in, where we moved in 1953 when I was six. Walking across our sunny yard and stepping into the shady woods that bordered it was like entering a magical world—one of adventure and imagination where anything was possible. When my father, Jack Wicks, cleared a field for our family’s house to be built, he stacked the small trees he had cut down, largely slender sassafras and sapling oaks a few inches in diameter, into a big pile on the edge of the woods. One day, while playing on the stack of wood, I thought what a good fort the logs would make.

I found a place in the woods where there were four medium-sized trees growing about six feet apart in a square. Then I sawed four saplings into seven-foot lengths and lashed them to the trees horizontally to form a square outline of the fort about five feet high.

As my pet beagle, Peppy, looked on, I began sawing more saplings for the walls. My light brown hair pulled back from my freckled face was braided into pigtails hanging down my back just past my shoulders. Sawing the saplings was slow going, especially with the thicker pieces, so I recruited my first employee, a neighborhood boy about eight years old, to take the other side of a two-man saw I found in Dad’s toolshed. With much effort, we cut the saplings for the sides and lashed them upright to the horizontal bars, first digging a trench in the ground to hold the bases in place. After that, I found discarded lumber in my neighbor’s backyard and built a roof, leaving a hole for a hatch door on the top.

One reason I had chosen this spot for my fort was that there was an oak tree nearby that had cracked in the middle—perhaps struck by lightning or snapped by a windstorm—so that the top, still partially attached to the trunk, had fallen over to form a giant arch. It was under the arch that I built my fort. While I was just finishing the roof, some boys came by who lived behind our woods and teased me, telling me how they had built a far better playhouse in their woods with large windows on all four sides made with real glass, while my fort had no windows at all.

When I came up to the woods the next day, I was crushed to find that the large broken tree branch that arched over my fort had been pushed over onto the roof, smashing it in. I knew right away that the boys had done this and raced through our woods and into theirs, my sneakers pounding along the dirt path with Peppy and my pigtails flying behind. I found the playhouse they had bragged about, picked up a big stick, and smashed all the windows to smithereens. I ran home and never heard from them again.

As my forts developed, I would add more touches, laying a brick path leading up to the entrance and planting flowers along it. Occasionally, I found a treasure to add amenities to my forts—linoleum flooring left over from kitchen remodeling and large metal pulleys from a junkyard that I used to raise a sliding door. Inside, I took great care in making comfortable places to sit, and hanging pictures and curtains—just the sort of thing, it turned out, one might do in a restaurant. When it rained for the first time, I would sit in my finished fort and feel very proud if the roof didn’t leak.

But once the fort was built and weather tight, I didn’t actually spend much time playing inside. It was much more fun to ride bikes or hike down to the creek to hunt salamanders and crayfish. What was fascinating to me was the process of building—imagining something in my head and then making it happen.

One day, while working on what must have been my third or fourth fort, when I was twelve or thirteen years old, I felt a strange wetness “down

there.” I went to the house and in the bathroom was astonished to find a bright red stain on my underpants. At first I was in denial that I had gotten my period—that I was really a girl, something I always tried to forget—and went back up to the woods to keep building. Finally, I gave in and went back down to the house to tell my mom. She patiently fitted me with an elastic “sanitary belt” that held up a big white sanitary pad on metal hooks in the front and back. The pad felt so bulky and awkward between my legs, and it was humiliating to wear this contraption under my jeans. I went back up to the woods hoping that no one would come along and somehow know. I hammered the boards on my fort all the harder.

When I was twenty and a sophomore in college, it was in my fort that I made love for the first time with a young man who had been my boyfriend in fifth and sixth grade. Many years later, when I told a girlfriend about losing my virginity, she clarified: “You didn’t lose anything, Judy. You invited him into your fort!”

After our college graduation, when my childhood sweetheart and I were married, I created a place for the ceremony where a favorite fort had once stood. I even had the organ from our church hauled up to the woods, where the organist complained of his fear of spiders, and the minister read a passage I had chosen from Midsummer Night’s Dream. Dressed in a traditional white wedding gown, with our parents and family gathered around us, I married my first love in the place I loved most in the world.

Beyond the woods was a larger place I grew to know well—my hometown of Ingomar. Growing up in a small town was a great exposure to the way local businesses wove through community life. Across the street from Ingomar Elementary School, Marie’s candy store was the favorite after- school destination, where we would stock up on treats like root beer barrels and cherry pop-cycles, my favorites. Marie didn’t just sell candy. Peering through her thick glasses with eyes slightly cockeyed, she made sure each of us was polite, waited our turn, and threw our wrappers in the trash can.

In the same one-story building was the Ingomar post office, where Benny, the dad of the Benscoter kids, was the town post-master. Next to the post office, along Ingomar Road, was Steve’s Meat Market, where my mother and grandmother claimed they got the best cuts of steak, and where they always let Steve know how our Thanksgiving turkey compared with last year’s.

Many of my friends’ parents owned or worked in local businesses. I met Greg Otto in first grade, and his father’s business, Otto Milk Company, delivered milk to our house in glass returnable bottles. Ray, our milkman, came right into our kitchen and checked our refrigerator to see how much milk and cream we needed, making sure Mom got the quart of buttermilk he knew she enjoyed. To make friends with family pets, Ray kept a pocketful of dog biscuits. My second dog, Pooie, also a beagle and a bit overweight, would be sure to get hers, and then follow Ray around the neighborhood, begging for more at every stop. Sometimes she would go hunting for treats on her own, and I once found her dragging a whole ham up our driveway—her stolen loot from an unsuspecting neighbor.

Small businesses were scattered through town, and one way or another I had a connection to all of them. My friend Peggy’s dad was the town doctor, and the dad of my sister’s friend owned Thomas’s Service Station, the town’s only filling station in the early years, where my parents had a charge account before the time of credit cards. The Steigerwald kids grew up on a farm on the outskirts of Ingomar raising pigs and chickens. Another close friend, Gail, who lived in a rural area farther away, had a summer job every year at her uncle’s roadside farm stand selling fresh fruit from their orchard, starting the season with strawberries. Of course, we had no cell phones to keep up with the latest news about boyfriends and goings-on at the local swimming pool, so I would get newsy letters from Gail handwritten from the stand and covered with strawberry stains.

I had my first cherry coke, not the bottled version of today, but one mixed at the soda fountain, at Richie’s Pharmacy on Harmony Drive near the intersection with Ingomar Road, our busiest corner—though not busy enough for a traffic light. Another close friend, Barb, got a job from Mr. Richie in high school. I thought it was so cool that she got to make the sodas, mixing the cherry and cola syrups and adding carbonated water. Barb could even get a peek at the adult magazines Mr. Richie kept behind the counter, so the younger kids couldn’t get into them. After his retirement, Dad walked down to Richie’s every morning and sat at the counter for a cup of coffee to talk sports and trout fishing with other retirees, who each had a mug hanging with their own name on it.

Across Harmony Drive from Richie’s was the Ingomar Fire Hall where the dads who worked in the town’s small businesses made up the volunteer fire department. On special occasions, the fire engine was moved out and the hall was used for square dances, Halloween costume parties, wedding receptions, and Ingomar’s very first rock ’n’ roll dance. Next to the fire hall was the beer distributor, where the favorites were Iron City from Pittsburgh and Rolling Rock from nearby Latrobe. Down Harmony Drive on the other side of Ingomar Road was Joe Heinregle’s grocery store where I often went with my mom to do the weekly shopping. Mr. Heinregle knew all his customers by name and threw an annual Christmas party for the whole town.

Like most women in my hometown, my mom, Betty Wicks, was a homemaker during my growing-up years, though when I went off to college she returned to teaching third grade to help with my tuition. It was through her work in community service that Mom became my role model for what came later in my career. A great outdoorswoman, she was leader of our town’s Girl Scout troop and the director of our summer day camp. She led us on camping and white-water canoe trips into the wilds, teaching us how to build a fire and pitch a tent, how to fend for ourselves and how to work in a group. I watched as she conducted the morning program at camp and organized work assignments for each unit, always with fairness and enthusiasm.

Mom and Dad were nature lovers and enjoyed the out-of-doors. They took our family on many camping trips, including expeditions to a remote Canadian island they had first discovered before I was born. Using a map and compass, Dad navigated the motorboat with a chain of canoes strung behind carrying our gear and family members, including my younger siblings, Diane and John, as well as my aunt, uncle, and six cousins. Mom did the planning for our trips, packing supplies for two weeks and cooking meals for thirteen people over the campfire.

When it came to cooking, campfire cooking was the only form I would take part in because it was not sissy stuff. While growing up, I much preferred to play in the woods than cook in the kitchen. Even though I would not be caught dead showing an interest in homemaking, I learned the importance of good food from my mother and grandmothers.

Bringing people together around food was a tradition for the whole family. As far back as I can remember Mom and Dad entertained with summer picnics on the patio, campfire sings up in the woods, and their monthly Friday night Hungry Club, a potluck dinner tradition they formed with close friends the year I was born, 1947. Visiting my maternal grandmother Grace Scott, in Winter Haven, Florida, I remember her most in the kitchen, cooking up big meals for our family, sometimes of fresh fish she had caught in the lake and always with the favorite home-baked sticky buns that she constantly nibbled. By comparison, my paternal grandmother, Eleanor Wicks, whom I called Nana, was much more formal though no less social. She set the perfect table at the many elegant dinner parties she hosted in her big house in Pittsburgh, where she would ring a small crystal bell to summon the maid. It was from Nana that I learned to appreciate the details of fine service.

My mother took interest not only in creating tasty meals, but also in providing the maximum nutritional value, using books like Let’s Cook It Right by the popular nutritionist Adelle Davis. Mom and Dad planted a good-sized family garden every year, which they tended faithfully, while I always managed to take off on my bike rather than help with the weeding—though I did enjoy picking tomatoes, beans, squash, and corn from the garden, which Mom would use for dinner that very night throughout the season.

On special occasions, Mom made her namesake dish, Betty’s shish kebabs—skewers of marinated beef, fresh tomatoes, peppers, and onions that Dad grilled over charcoal. Nana was an excellent pie baker, with flakey crusts holding a fresh fruit filling—strawberry, cherry, peach, blueberry, or apple—as each came into season. When she arrived at our house with her pie basket, I could not wait to find out what kind of pie was inside. Her strawberry pie, made every June, was a recipe Mom and later my cousins all kept in their recipe boxes. I got a kick out of whipping the cream and plopping big snow-white spoonfuls onto the bright red fruit of the open-faced pie.

Even in winter we enjoyed frozen and jarred homegrown vegetables. I remember how Mom and Nana spent the hottest days of summer in the kitchen jarring applesauce and stewed tomatoes and making jams and jellies. I was curious to watch as they lifted large sacks of cheesecloth dripping with dark juice from big pots, straining preserves all made from fresh fruits bought at the local farmers markets. A special treat at the market was ice cream made from seasonal fruits. I longed for peaches to ripen, so I could have my favorite—fresh peach ice cream.

By the time cold weather came, our freezer was chock-full of vegetables from the family garden and frozen fruit pies that we hadn’t already gobbled up during the summer. Glass Mason jars of canned foods lined the shelves in our storage room and would last us through the winter season, until Nana made the first pie of the spring—fresh rhubarb—and Mom would serve fresh local asparagus, which usually arrived in time for Easter dinner.

Back then, it came naturally to enjoy fresh produce just when it was in season rather than eating the same fruits and vegetables all year shipped in from South America. Except for cold-stored apples, fresh fruit was mostly citrus in the winter when it came into season in Florida. I can remember my excitement as a child when we returned home from the train station carrying a big crate my maternal grandfather, Armor Scott, the vice president of a citrus nursery, had shipped from Florida. On the floor in the kitchen we would open the crate, and the smell of Florida oranges filled our house as though the warm air of the South had blown our way.

Many of the fathers in Ingomar commuted the fifteen miles into Pittsburgh to work each day, including my dad, who was a lawyer, like his father before him. Dad picked up things in the city that we couldn’t find in Ingomar, and I remember jumping for joy at age eleven when he arrived home with my very first record, one I had asked him to find for me—a single 45 called “I Got Stung by a Sweet Honey Bee” by Elvis Presley.

Twice a year, in the spring and fall, Mom and Nana would take my sister Diane and me into Pittsburgh to shop for clothes at two family-owned department stores, Horne’s and Kaufmann’s. These stores were almost an extension of Ingomar to us because of the personal relationships we

had there. Nana knew all the saleswomen by name, and they guided us to the style of clothes they knew we preferred. If something didn’t fit exactly right, Nana had alterations made, and I stood up on a riser and turned slowly around while the seamstress at the department store pinned my hem to the right length.

Mom was an excellent seamstress herself, and each fall made a few new school outfits for Diane and me. When I couldn’t find the dress of my dreams for the senior prom, she made me a gown just as I described to her with a blue satin top and a layered white lace skirt.

I was raised a patriotic American by my parents and by Ingomar. On the Fourth of July, I woke up to the sound of Dad playing John Philip Sousa marches, which he blasted out through the front door for the whole neighborhood to hear. Leaping out of bed, I dressed up in red, white, and blue clothes and hurried outside. With the American flag held high, I marched around the yard to “The Stars and Stripes Forever” while Diane and John followed along, banging on pots and pans.

My father had been a naval officer during World War II, serving as captain of a patrol boat in the Pacific, where he rescued downed pilots. Like most kids growing up in the 1950s, I thought the United States was the best and bravest country in the whole world. I believed that ever since defeating the Nazis and Japanese, our government had been defending the world from the communists. During air raid drills in elementary school, we students were instructed to hide under our desks in case of a nuclear attack by the Soviets, which gave us the clear impression that the communist nation, and anyone who sided with them, was our enemy. I was proud to be anticommie like the rest of Ingomar and was convinced that my country was a generous one that went around the world bringing democracy and providing aid to help other peoples.

Like many small towns, the Ingomar of my childhood changed over time, swallowed up by suburban sprawl. When I was in high school, shopping centers began to spring up along the highway between Ingomar and Pittsburgh. The Northway Mall opened up with great fanfare as one of the first malls in the country, and next door our first McDonald’s soon appeared. I was excited by the new developments and was drawn to fast-food and chain stores at the mall where we teenagers began to hang out. At the time, like most others in Ingomar, I saw all this as an improvement over small town life. After all, I could find the latest fashions and buy my own records without relying on a trip to the city with my parents.

As the farms, woods, and fields surrounding Ingomar, where I hiked and rode my girlfriend’s horse, gave way to housing plans, the stores in town gave way to malls. The first to go was the hardware store on Ingomar Road with a big front porch and wide wooden steps, where the men used to gather on Saturday afternoons. Before the malls arrived, I thought of business owners as neighbors and parents, who helped keep an eye on us kids, and who sponsored the scout troops, the Little League, and the annual fireman’s parade and carnival. Those days lasted long enough for me to become aware of the many ways that local businesses helped create a sense of place, local identity, and a feeling of belonging for all the townspeople. Though I lived in a typical small town, I was a kid from Ingomar—and that was a place like no other.

During the time I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, a career in business was not even considered for girls, at least not in the small towns where I attended high school and college. I certainly never gave a thought to being a businessperson. Yet from a young age, I continually created primitive forms of business to attract and entertain the other kids in the neighborhood.

I had just turned six when my family moved into our new house with a big front lawn on Woodland Road, a quiet lane on the edge of town. On the first day in my new community, I collected all the extension cords I could find and connected them down the driveway where I set up my little child-sized dining table with two chairs and plugged in my toy record player. Turning the volume up full blast to play “How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?” I sat down at the table to see who might come along. At last I spotted a neighborhood boy about my age walking up the road and watched expectantly as he neared our house. I still remember the glee I felt when Johnny Baker stopped, hesitated, and finally turned up our driveway, walking slowly toward me in his pigeon-toed oversize sneakers to take a seat at my table. Though I hadn’t yet any food to serve, he was my first restaurant customer.

Another early “start-up” involved making paintings on scraps of wood I’d collected, and selling them from my wagon along Ingomar Road. My first store! Making money was not always part of the plan. I simply enjoyed using whatever resources I could find to create something of value and have some fun doing it.

Each summer I converted our garage into a theatre, making stage curtains with the matching twin bedspreads from the room I shared with Diane. My younger siblings and the other neighborhood kids were the actors in the skits I wrote and directed, with silly titles like The Day Dirty Dan Bumped Off Grandma. We invited the mothers in the neighborhood, all stay-at-home moms, and sat them in chairs we dragged from the house

out onto the driveway. Between the chairs, I set up folding tray stands to hold their glasses of ice tea and ashtrays (yes, in those dark days, most moms and dads smoked).

When I was in junior high, I built a five-hole miniature golf course in the woods near my fort, with a maze of ramps, tunnels, and hills, using emptied frozen orange juice cans to line the tunnels and holes. I so enjoyed being in the woods, working with the moist soil hidden under layers of fallen leaves on the forest floor. I breathed in the rich earthy smell as I formed the soil into valleys and hills, packing it flat so the balls would roll smoothly on its dark surface. I was so excited to witness the fun the miniature golf course provided the neighborhood kids—the same excitement I would relish years later in creating events for the customers and employees in my restaurant.

The freedom my parents gave me growing up allowed me the opportunity to do my own thing—to concoct a plan in my mind and make it happen without the help of adults. I have no doubt that this freedom to create at an early age has carried through my whole life, and as I grew older actualizing my ideas into real life led to larger and larger projects.

There was nothing I enjoyed more than creating a charming place where people liked to gather—from the miniature golf course, to the summer plays, to the forts I continued to build in the woods.

The older I got, the more often I ran into disappointments because I was a girl who had interests and abilities that presumably were only fit for boys. I longed to take wood shop in school to learn how to use different building tools to improve my forts and design new projects, but to my dismay girls were not permitted. I’m sure there were boys in my class who would have rather cooked than hammer nails, while I was required to take home economics. Stubbornly, I swore I would never learn to cook.

My passion for baseball brought my biggest disappointment. Growing up in western Pennsylvania, I was a Pittsburgh Pirates fan, and I decorated my room with pictures of the players and kept their batting averages posted on my wall. Dad played on his college baseball team, and though I was a girl, he taught me to play. I earned money selling greeting cards door-to-door to buy my very own baseball mitt, signed by Dick Groat, shortstop for the Pirates and my favorite player.

One eventful morning in fifth grade, our gym teacher announced, “It’s the first warm day of spring—time to start softball practice.” I jumped out of my chair with great excitement, ready to go. Then I heard, “Boys, down to the field. Girls, go over there somewhere and practice cheerleading.” I couldn’t believe my ears! How could this be? I was dumbfounded, but too shy to object. Of course, nowadays the teacher would be sued, but back then it was the way things were.

I refused to cheerlead and just stood dejectedly behind the backstop watching the boys play, and looking down on myself and the other girls simply for being female. I thought to myself, Girls are losers. Boys play the important roles, and girls just stand by to cheer them on. My sense of self seemed to evaporate. The experience hit me hard but was an important lesson in understanding the destructive effects of discrimination. It also taught me how the whole community loses when some are left out. After all, I really was a good ballplayer, and the team would have been better, I was sure, if I had been allowed to play.

There was one person who saw the importance of allowing girls to play—the janitor at Ingomar Elementary School, Joe Bullick. At recess, he organized a softball game that included the girls. Though it did not make up for the gym class exclusion, it helped me see that there were possibilities, that other men along with my own father saw things differently, and that I was important to them. When I graduated from grade school, I collected money from the kids in my class. At the jewelry store at the mall, I dumped a jar of coins onto the glass counter and bought Joe a watch. On graduation day, I told my teacher that I wanted to present a gift on behalf of our class. She assumed it was for the school principal, but when I got up on the stage I asked Joe the janitor to come up and gave him the watch and a big hug.

Joe went on to become the supervisor of maintenance for the whole school district and started the first girl’s softball team at Ingomar Junior High, and later a girl’s golf team. In time, under Joe’s coaching, the Ingomar girl’s softball team became state champions. ( Joe came to my sixtieth birthday party, and around the campfire we told our intertwined life stories of being an inspiration to each other. And he still has the watch!)

But unfortunately, there were other times that confirmed the treatment I received from the gym teacher on the softball field. In seventh grade I won a second prize in the Ingomar Junior High Science Fair. I had always enjoyed mechanical things and was good at putting them together. I invented a device using my little brother’s Erector Set. A series of pulleys attached to an electric motor in the back of my display made several arrows move around in circles to demonstrate the process of evaporation and precipitation in a papier-mâché landscape that I had molded from newspaper. It had not occurred to me that girls did not play with Erector Sets, nor that we were thought to be clueless when it came to mechanical things, so I was taken aback when my science teacher questioned me about whether my father or brother had helped me with my project. I explained that my brother was only seven years old and that while it was his Erector Set, he had not yet used it, and that I had done the project without anyone’s

help.

The story doesn’t end there. During the science fair, when all the parents came to view the exhibits and celebrate the winners, a classmate came running to find me, saying that my teacher had sent for me because my science project was broken. I went straight there. A crowd had gathered around my project with its big red ribbon, where my teacher stood with a “gotcha” sneer on his face. I opened up the back of my exhibit to find that someone had taken the bands off the pulleys. I quickly put them back into place and started the motor again. My teacher looked stunned and then very sheepish. I could just tell from his face that he had done it and what he had been thinking—that because I was a girl, he couldn’t believe I had built the project myself and assumed I must have been lying.

Even before these disappointments, I shunned things feminine as sissy stuff. I even ran away in third grade because my mother wanted me to wear a dress one day a week instead of my favorite flannel-lined jeans with suspenders, leather fringe jacket, and cowgirl boots. But after the experience of being excluded from softball, my negative feelings grew stronger and I developed contempt for girls—I’d even go so far as to say self-contempt. I looked down on what I considered weakness in myself, in other girls, and also in boys—leading to an incident that I later came to regret.

I had a childhood friend, a boy around my age, maybe a year younger, who liked to dress up like a girl in our summer plays. I had enjoyed casting him as a comic ballerina dressed in a pink tutu and red wig. We had fun playing together with my sister, Diane—not only with the skits, but also with board games on rainy days and pestering his mother in the house across the street for a glass of punch they called Kick-a-Poo Joy Juice. One day when we were about twelve or thirteen, for no reason that I can remember, I started picking on him—punching him in the upper arm and taunting him, “What’s the matter, sissy, you afraid to fight?” He moved across our lawn toward his house as I followed along, continuing my taunts and occasional jabs to his arm. He disappeared into his house and never came back to play.

I missed him. I felt ashamed of hurting someone I had perceived as less powerful. From that experience, I became conscious of how and when I used my power, careful not to take advantage of my size or age, and fascinated to observe how various people used power constructively or abused it.

As I grew older, I was able to see that my abusive behavior on that day was about scorning the part of myself that is vulnerable and soft. I didn’t want to be a sissy. At the time, I didn’t even want to be a girl because I saw girls as less worthy. To attack my friend was to attack that part of me. Today I understand that men or women who reject their feminine side, just as I had rejected mine, can be potent bullies—lashing out against women, children, animals, or boys and men who reveal their vulnerability—for the very same reason: a self-hatred of the softness within.

Age brought me other insights about power, as well, that would play out in the worldview that came to shape my business. One of those was that power comes with an obligation to protect and support those with less of it. That is a lesson I learned, as many do, by falling in love with an animal.

From the days when I played “How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?” on my toy record player as a six-year-old, I begged my parents for a dog. Three years later, perhaps as a substitute for the buckets and tubs of snakes, crayfish, and salamanders I kept in my bedroom, my parents consented to getting a dog and we picked out Peppy from a litter of beagles. He followed me everywhere while I built my forts and explored the woods, and I learned to feed and care for him. When ants got into his dog food dish, I made a moat by pouring water in a pie pan placed under his dish. Unfortunately, unlike most beagles and likely caused by a birth defect that caused him pain, Peppy had a short temper at times, usually when kids I didn’t like much were around. After he bit a few of them, the police told my parents we had to have him put to sleep. I cried for him almost every night until I grew up and left for college, even after my parents brought home a second beagle puppy.

In sixth grade, I wrote a story about the last time I saw Peppy. When the teacher asked me to read it to the class, I was astonished that my story made the kids cry. Some time around then, I received a solicitation in the mail. I still don’t know how they got the name of a ten-year-old, but it was a powerful message that has lasted to this day. The solicitation was from an antivivisection society, and it showed a photograph of a beagle, just like Peppy, strapped down on an operating table. I sent in my allowance and have been a contributor ever since after learning that beagles are the most commonly used dog in medical research and consumer product testing, where they suffer needlessly.

After being kept off the softball team because I was a girl, it really took me till my thirties to begin recognizing and honoring the nurturing qualities in others and myself, and to stop buying into the “stiff upper lip” approach to success in the business world. Eventually, I came to realize that the feminine qualities I often tried not to reveal as a child and youth were the very qualities most needed in building a more caring economy in today’s world. But first I had to learn to value those qualities in myself.

Most of us have had the experience of being left out of something we wanted to do, feeling separated and marginalized because of our class, race, age, gender, sexual orientation, or cultural background—or for our lack of knowledge or money. Overcoming such experiences to value our gifts, to find our true purposes, and to believe in ourselves can take a long time—as it did for me. Later in life, I came to see how important diversity

was to the strength of any group of people, as it is in nature. Society is weakened when feminine energy is repressed in men and women both, and when people, whoever they are, are excluded for their differences rather than given the opportunity to contribute their unique gifts. Finding a way for everyone to play the game became an important part of my business philosophy.

But back in fifth grade, when I was rejected on the softball field, I accepted my fate. Like most other girls raised in the 1950s, it became clear to me that since girls couldn’t play ball, the next best thing was to marry the best ballplayer. I picked my future husband that day in fifth grade. Dick Hayne was the pitcher and a great hitter, too—an unusual combination of skills. From the ball field, I went back to my desk in the classroom, crossed Judy Wicks off my tablet, and wrote Mrs. Richard Hayne all over the cover.

Twelve years later, my childhood fantasy became reality—I married my fifth-grade sweetheart and became Mrs. Richard Hayne.

Jensen: Does the universe then have a purpose?

Berry: The purpose is simply existence. And the glory of existence. That’s the ultimate purpose of everything—existence and self-delight in existence.

—Derrick Jensen interviewing Thomas Berry in Listening to The Land

2 A Culture of Sharing: Life with the Eskimos

THE WAR IN VIETNAM was raging when Dick and I graduated from college in the spring of 1969 and married that summer in the woods behind my house in our hometown of Ingomar. I had lost my John Philip Sousa patriotism. No longer did I believe that the United States was always right. Dick’s college deferment from the draft ended on graduation day. If we didn’t find a draft deferrable job, he could end up in Vietnam, a war we both strongly opposed.

We thought of joining the Peace Corps, which would have solved the problem, but the admissions process was lengthy, so we signed up for the domestic alternative—Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA)—and requested an assignment to a large eastern city. I had long dreamed of living in a big city, after growing up in Ingomar. But the government assigned us to an Indian reservation in the Midwest instead and sent us for training in Oregon. During our orientation, our class of several hundred volunteers was asked if a married couple among us was willing to serve in a remote Eskimo village in Alaska for a year. Why not? we thought. It turned out that Dick and I were the only ones to raise our hands. So after our training—which included a grueling three-day wilderness backpacking trip to weed out the fainthearted, with one night when we were each left on a chilly mountaintop alone without a tent, sleeping bag, or any supplies other than one pack of matches—we were sent to Chefornak, Alaska, population 120. Not exactly the big city I had dreamed of.

There were no roads leading to this isolated village perched on the bank of the Kinia River not far from the Bering Sea, a town far smaller and more remote than Ingomar ever was. The nearest airport, hospital, and phone were all a hundred miles away in a town to the northeast—Bethel, population 1,600. In summer, boats could navigate the rivers, and in winter the dogsleds made the hazardous journey across the unmarked, frozen tundra. We traveled as passengers on the mail plane that carried supplies and letters from Bethel to the scattered Eskimo villages of southwestern Alaska. The river served as the runway, where the planes used pontoons in the summer and skis after freeze-up.

Our ride to Chefornak in the mail plane began with a harrowing takeoff from the river in Bethel, still unfrozen on an early September day. I sat next to the bush pilot with Dick behind me amid boxes and mailbags piled to the ceiling. As we roared across the water on pontoons, the plane struggled to lift off, its doors rattling as though they might fall away any minute. From the front seat, I watched the shore come closer and closer, and just as I thought we would surely run smack into the trees looming up ahead, the pilot suddenly cut the engine and headed back to the dock. He nonchalantly threw some boxes off the plane and tried again, this time with success as we lifted from the water and soared over the trees into the sky.

There was an air of the Old West about the rugged bush pilot. Just as the stagecoaches of frontier days served the scattered Western settlements, mail planes were the primary contact with the outside world for the remote Eskimo villagers, bringing a letter from a child in the Indian high schools of Oklahoma or Oregon, a sister who had married into another village, a son in California for National Guard training, or a spouse being treated in an Anchorage hospital.

As we looked down from the air, Chefornak was easy to miss. A wooden boardwalk running the length of the village from the schoolhouse at one end to a church at the other connected less than two dozen small houses. As we landed on the river and taxied to the dock, it seemed the whole village of 120 people came out to meet us. A new neighbor greeted us and showed us to our tiny one-room cabin, which was not much bigger than my childhood forts. Like all the other cabins, it was pieced together with old scraps of wood wrapped in tar paper and heated with an oil stove. The furnishings were as sparse as the landscape: a kitchen sink, a bed, and a little table with several chairs. There was no bathroom, no shower or bathtub, only an outhouse—a frightening thought considering the subzero temperatures to come. But I soon learned that it was only a place to dump what was called a “honey bucket” after it was used indoors.

The cabin’s real surprise, though, was the thirty or so empty, giant-sized peanut butter jars stacked on the shelves lining the walls, apparently left by the volunteers that had spent the previous year there. I remember wondering just how anyone could eat so much peanut butter in one year. But I would soon feel the same craving for fat once the cold weather set in. At twenty-two, I still held to my home economics class rejection of cooking, but in Chefornak I made my first exception, quickly learning how to make bread in the oven of our iron-topped stove. Then Dick and I smeared thick slices with lots of peanut butter, jar after jar.

Following our active college days, the pace of village life initially felt painfully slow. Our VISTA projects teaching preschool and adult education took up only about twelve hours a week, and Dick ’s main project to help the men assemble new pre-fab housing did not begin until the spring.

There was so little stimulus that I sometimes found myself sitting still and watching reruns of my life in my mind. The biggest diversion was the mail plane. In our first weeks, I was surprised to see how all the villagers dropped what they were doing and ran excitedly down to the river at the first sound of the motor’s hum, rushing to be the first to point out the distant spot of the approaching plane in the sky. It was not long, though, before I joined the stampede down to the river and across the frozen ice to greet the plane along with them, eager for news from home.

Another diversion came in early fall, when most everyone would head to the river again, but for a different reason. For just a few days, the river ice was strong enough to hold people, but not too thick to cut through, so it was perfect for ice fishing. Dick and I tagged along and learned to fish with a circular rod that looked more like a mobile than a fishing implement, with strings to hold it from the top and several hooked lines dangling off it. The idea was to take the rod in one hand, lower it down through a hole cut just to its size, then yank it up. In the other hand we held a round net, also the size of the hole in the ice, waiting to scoop up the snagged fish. At that time of year, shad ran so thick under the ice that it was hard not to get any snagged on the hooks. We were amazed to see the piles of fish grow bigger and bigger next to the Eskimos as they snagged more and more, until each had caught hundreds, enough to last through the winter after drying over smoke. Struggling to get the hang of it, Dick and I finally caught a dozen or so shad before heading in out of the near-zero-degree cold.

Except for the ice fishing, where some of the best catches were made by women, most of the activities of the village were largely segregated during the day, with the men outside hunting, fishing, making repairs, taking steam baths, or hanging out someplace where the women weren’t. The women stayed indoors visiting each other in groups, tending babies and young children while doing beadwork, sewing clothes, and weaving baskets from field grass. Naturally, I hung out with the women, especially Jane, who was my age and spoke English. Every day at her house we would talk over hot tea served with large soda crackers called “pilot bread” spread with jam as we kept our eye on her two young children. When I managed to weave a small basket, Jane teased me that it looked like a whiskey bottle.

One of my favorite times of the week was gathering in the house of Leon, the jolly postmaster, who was among the few adults who spoke English, which he learned while he was in California for tuberculosis treatment. A representative of each family sat on the floor of Leon’s house while he passed out the mail, making jokes about what each letter or package contained. Joking was an art form among the Eskimos, and Leon was a master. I only wished I could have spoken the language to understand the roars of laughter as each letter was distributed, but I began to realize that most of his jokes were about sex.

He also found great humor in the little golden puppy that Dick and I had taken in and named Augeyak, the Eskimo word for star. Though most families had sled dogs, pets were rare. Every once in a while, thanks to a lone short-haired dog someone had brought to Chefornak long ago, a dog would be born without the thick coat needed to survive the harsh, often subzero winters chained outside—as the dogs in the village were. Augie, as we came to call him, was one of those, and we had taken him in to make the place seem a little more like home. When I brought him out to the mail gatherings, I kept him nestled in the front of my parka. Leon thought it hysterical that a dog would be held against the breast and took great delight in calling Augie my “baby.” “Won’t your husband provide you with a real baby?” he would tease me.

It snowed almost daily, and the strong winds blew drifts that covered our little house. When we opened our door in the morning we were greeted by a wall of white. We dug ourselves out each day and cleared our one window to let in the scarce light. I gradually adjusted to the pace and spent hours examining patterns of frost on the window and sitting outside in my down parka stirring a container of condensed milk and sugar, delighted that it would turn into ice cream in the frigid temperature. Sometimes it was so cold that Augie’s water bowl on the floor of our cabin would freeze. Our bed was up on stilts to bring us as close to the ceiling as possible, the warmest place in the cabin.

But I couldn’t quite leave the world I knew behind me. During the long, dark days of the Arctic winter, when daylight was only a dusklike gray haze at noontime, I recognized my attachment to technology. For only two hours a day we had something wonderful called electricity. I had never realized my dependence on electricity until I went twenty-two hours a day without it. Despite my pleasant times drinking tea with the women, I found myself waiting in eager anticipation for those two gleeful hours.

In the late afternoons, I prepared for the moment in early evening when the electricity would come on. I found a toy record player among the preschool supplies and each day set it up on the table and plugged it in. There was only one record, left by past volunteers. I placed it on the tiny, motionless turntable, set the needle on the edge, and turned the volume knob to high. A little radio sitting silently on the shelf above me was set on the only station we could pick up—a Soviet one from across the Bering Sea. That volume knob also was set to high. In the stillness, I sat at my table by candlelight, staring at the bare lightbulb hanging above me, waiting for it to go on and listening intently for a distant sound.

At last I heard it—the faint sputter of a motor on the other side of the village, then a growling hum rising and falling, growing louder and faster, faster and louder as the generator picked up speed. The lightbulb began to flicker, the radio crackled, and the turntable slowly began to move. As the hum in the distance became a roar, the turntable gained speed, and Russian voices came from the radio. The distorted moaning from the record player grew into a voice I knew well. “Everybody, let’s rock . . . dancin’ to the Jailhouse Rock,” belted the King. I jumped to my feet and danced about the cabin. If you’re living in a remote Arctic village and you only have one record, Elvis Presley’s Greatest Hits was the best I could imagine. I could hear the washing machine of my next-door neighbor, Maria, cranking up to wash the clothes of her six children. At that point in my life, I didn’t think about where electricity came from—oil, nuclear power, hydroelectric dams. I wasn’t aware and wouldn’t have cared. I just wanted to enjoy it.

My family sent care packages on a regular basis, and a group of teenage girls would inevitably follow me home from the postman’s house to see what had come. I opened a mild Swiss cheese my mother had sent, and the girls were repulsed, feeling nauseous at the smell and the very idea of aged milk. That was strange to me until the situation was reversed one day when the girls came into my cabin holding their hands over their mouths and giggling. “Whatever is the problem?” I asked. “Stink heads,” they replied sheepishly. They had been eating stink heads, and knowing how the smell would offend me, were covering their mouths. “Stink heads” were made by stuffing the heads of raw fish into the extracted stomach of a seal, and then burying the tied bundle in the ground. After a few weeks, when the stink heads had become stinky enough, the delicacy was ready to eat. Rancid seal oil, a source of fat that was also aged in buried stomachs, was squirted on dried fish and on everything else, too. Much like catsup in

the lower forty-eight, it was the favorite condiment in Chefornak.

“Seal party, seal party!” came the invitation, along with an eager knocking. Opening my cabin door, I was greeted by a wide grin encircled with fur. Maria, our next-door neighbor, had on her dress-up kospok , a colorful cotton dress worn over a long fur parka with a hood trimmed in fox fur. She beckoned me to follow, as she turned to join the other village women hurrying across the snow in sealskin boots (called mukluks ) with pails swinging from mittened hands. Their festive kospoks were bright swatches of color against the pure white landscape, stretching flat and treeless to the distant horizon in all directions. I pulled on my mukluks , slipped on my kospok that Maria had made for me out of bright green corduroy sent by my mother, and joined the party.

A blue, cloudless sky domed over this speck of a village in early spring with the temperature barely above freezing. After winter temperatures as low as thirty-five below, the spring air felt warm and inviting. The Eskimo women gathered outside the doorway of a simple wooden cabin almost buried in snow, the home of Florence and George Billy, parents of my friend Jane. George had just caught his first seal of the season, a time for celebration. Tradition called for the wife to divide the meat among the families in the village, who in olden times would have had little left to eat at winter’s end. Florence dropped a large slice of dark red seal meat and a chunk of blubber (another source of fat) into each of the women’s pails. After the meat was distributed, the tradition was to hand out things the family had accumulated during the year that were not needed for survival, such as furs, fabrics, buttons, and canned goods. As a grand finale, small items like hard candies were tossed into the air. Laughing and cheering, moon-shaped faces shining up toward the sun, the women caught the prizes in the outstretched skirts of their kospoks . It was a form of wealth redistribution served out in buttons and bubble gum. I joined right in, hoping for my favorite—root beer barrels—and eager for merrymaking in the sunshine after the long, dark winter.

I had never seen anything like this kind of sharing. Ingomar was a warm and caring place. But in my society, what one earned belonged to the earner. Here, in Chefornak ’s indigenous culture, what was caught from nature’s bounty belonged to everyone. Chefornak ’s subsistence economy was based on sharing, cooperation, and frugality.

If you admired something an Eskimo had, the person would give it to you. This meant I had to be careful with compliments. Once I said, “I really like your necklace,” and an Eskimo woman took it off and handed it to me. The Eskimos of Chefornak had no concept of envy or ownership, giving freely what was desired—a dramatic contrast to the competitive consumer economy I had grown up with, one where advertising created envy in order to increase spending. Ads made women feel they had to buy another dress, or yet another shade of lipstick, to be attractive. Men had to have a new car or smoke a certain brand of cigarette, or they were made to feel inadequate. In this faraway land, free of television and the advertisements and billboards that proliferated in my environment at home, I began to understand more about how the values of my society were shaped. Along with other girls of my generation, the first to grow up watching television, I had been programmed to be a good consumer, moving on from my tomboy days to desire the clothes, body shape, and lifestyles of glamorous models. Here with the Eskimos, none of that mattered.

The Eskimos viewed hoarding as deviant, which by contrast made me realize how my own society rewarded greed. Rather than seeing it as destructive behavior, we actually admire those who hoard the most—those who use up the most natural resources on big houses, big cars, big wardrobes, and other accumulations of material wealth. The Chefornak Eskimos, on the other hand, valued people and nature more than possessions. That lesson was one that I would try to carry with me as I crafted my own life and business in later years. But other lessons that would shape my life still awaited me in Alaska, and one of those was about the power of community.

At the time we first arrived, Eskimo village life was still largely communal, with concern focused on the well-being of the group rather than on individual achievement. Traditionally nomadic, the Eskimos were lured by the government to settle in one place by a promise that the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) would provide a school in each village to educate their children. Cultural differences became apparent when children shrank from the praise of white schoolteachers who rewarded good work with the proverbial star on the forehead to single out superior students, an embarrassment in the cooperative Eskimo society.

But just as I had seen change come to Ingomar, I saw it come to Chefornak even more starkly.

The Eskimos have a long oral tradition, and their history and culture had been passed down through storytelling in the Yupik language. But ever since the village had settled around the BIA schoolhouse some years ago, the younger generation from my age down now spoke English. Every Friday night an American movie was shown, and through these movies the Eskimos were educated in the lifestyles of Western culture. Already, one family had put in a wooden floor covered with linoleum, which they kept clean with Spic and Span, replacing the bare dirt floors that had provided the warmth of the earth. Rubber boots from Sears catalogs were replacing the cozy and warmer sealskin mukluks with inner soles of coiled field grass.

Cultural change was also creeping in as young Eskimo men joined the National Guard, as nearly all of them did, believing that they were protecting our shores from the Soviets across the sea. Returning to the village after basic training, they brought new habits that conflicted with village life— drinking; chain-smoking; swearing; and loud, boisterous talk, all of which were frightening to the girls. Like many indigenous people, Eskimos have a low physiological tolerance for alcohol. After some incidents when alcohol turned normally loving and peaceful people into abusers, the village voted to become “dry.” But alcohol was still an occasional problem.

This hit me personally when a drunk driving a snowmobile purposely ran down Augie, snapping the tendon of a back leg so that it hung limp and useless. The closest veterinarian was in Anchorage, way too far to travel, so I took the mail plane back to Bethel and walked to the hospital, where I pleaded with a doctor to operate on my dog. A young physician about my age, stationed in Alaska to do community service, kindly agreed. I’ll never forget the sight of Augie being wheeled down the hall to the operating room, unconscious under a white sheet. The operation was a success, and we left with a big cast on Augie’s leg and instructions for how I would remove it back in the village, along with the stitches, when the leg healed.

Although there were different opinions in the village, the group now leading the village council felt their future lay in adapting to the white man’s ways and forgetting about the culture of their ancestors. This was never clearer to me than when I was helping a group of teenage girls plan some events and educational projects. I suggested that they document the stories of the village elders in English and hold traditional Eskimo dances, but the village council denied permission to publish the stories and to hold traditional dances.

While some villagers were embarrassed about being Eskimo, there were still some who remained proud of their culture. But the tide was shifting to the West. With the money from jobs on fishing boats and canneries, an increasing number of village men were showing off the latest models of snowmobiles. When we arrived in the village only two families had snowmobiles, while the other eighteen families had dogsleds. When we left close to a year later, only one family still had a dogsled, and the rest were now dependent on gasoline-driven snowmobiles.

So much was changing so fast—dependency on gasoline, rubber boots and coats from the Sears catalogs, jobs in the global economy: Western culture had come to Chefornak right before my eyes. It seemed to me that as people began accumulating possessions, the feelings of competition and envy, once virtually unknown, became more common.

During the ten months I spent in the village, I witnessed the disintegration of a culturally beautiful, environmentally sustainable society that had lasted for thousands of years. For some of the villagers, this was welcomed progress, while others felt sadness and a loss of a way of life they cherished. One man, whose five children were among our favorite visitors, refused the Western ways and continued to live simply and cooperatively. When he went hunting or fishing, he would often share his catch with us, stopping by our cabin to drop off a duck or fish. During our stay, he became ill and lay on the table in his house, surrounded by his wife and children until he eventually died. I can’t help but think that his death was in some way a refusal to live in a changing society that no longer practiced the values he upheld.

One day as the Eskimo girls watched me unpacking a box from home, I unwrapped a pair of pink satin slippers, a gift from Nana (who had not yet given up on making me a lady). I’ll never forget how strange and out of place those slippers looked in my primitive cabin in Alaska. The shiny pink shimmered and glowed like the magical slippers of a princess from a faraway land. The girls ooh ed and aww ed over them. Because the slippers weren’t appropriate for the weather and conditions, I told the girls I was putting them away. They looked disappointed and perhaps ashamed, and I suddenly realized they thought I was saying that their village was not good enough for the delicate pink slippers, where most of the houses still had dirt floors.

What could I say to explain to the girls how much more I appreciated the warm sealskin mukluks trimmed in beaver and beads that Maria had made for me than the silly pink slippers? How the simple earth floors in their homes were actually cleaner than white linoleum washed with cleaning products full of chemicals? How could I explain to them, as I felt even then, that the “pink slipper society” was destroying the earth and that we had to become more like them, not they like us? Yet I could not blame them for wanting to have things they saw in magazines and movies, things they admired and had never experienced. How could we deny them what we ourselves continued to use? I soon gave the pink slippers to one of the girls when she got engaged to be married, and she was tickled to have them.

Changes were also coming back home. While we were trudging through snowstorms in subzero temperatures halfway around the world, others of our generation were fighting and dying as soldiers in the tropical jungles of Vietnam. By this time, the draft system had ended the unfair deferment for college students and volunteers in community service programs such as ours and began a lottery system based on birthdays that treated all young men equally, whether or not they had the money to go to college or the connections to find deferments. Luckily for us, Dick’s birthday drew a high number, but other volunteers, along with college students, suddenly became eligible for the draft.