With the exception of the South Side Presbyterian Church crash pad, these are all of the coffeehouses I visited or was part of the operation of in the late 1960s.They represent a time of my life that was and is very special to me. I met my first serious girlfriend as a result of the coffeehouses and in fact met my wife, who was involved in the operation of 2 of these. I am not attempting to chronicle the coffeehouse movement of that era. I will leave that to those who have a wider interest in the genre. I only seek to show them as I personally experienced all the above. It will be a loving memoir of a very special time of my life, one that contributed to me being the person I am today.
I had heard of the coffeehouses in NYC of course, of Greenwich Village and all that went on there, but I had no idea that coffeehouses were closer to me than that. In the summer of 1966 I was visiting my friend Clark, my oldest and dearest friend, whom I have known since high school. I was between times at Lafayette College, working at GAF Corporation in South Easton, and generally, aside from weekend forays to the local racetracks, not doing a hell of a lot in my life. While I was at Clark and Janie’s trailer on Mitman Road another mutual friend from high school, Charlie, stopped in to visit and in the course of the conversations asked if I wanted to help make coffee at a coffeehouse he had gotten involved with.
Charlie was dating Sue Miller at the time. Sue was a student nurse at Easton Hospital and the student nurses had been asked by the local YWCA to contribute ideas and efforts into the coffeehouse they were thinking of opening in the basement of the building next to the old mansion on North 3rd Street that served as their headquarters in those days. I don’t remember why I agreed to do it, but I guess the fact that I had little else going on in my free time may have had something to do with that decision. Getting involved was something my parents had usually counseled against.
The basement where the coffeehouse was to be located needed a lot of work to be usable for anything. We had to build a wall around a pressure vessel for the heating system that was in the main room we sought to use, obtain money or in kind gifts for the expenses we could not avoid, and secure suppliers for the coffee, doughnuts and soda machine we knew we would need. Charlie, Sue, our other friend Gene and his first girlfriend Nancy, who was a student nurse with Sue and who had graduated with me, along with several other student nurses, including Mitzi Tornese who I dated for a number of months, all helped to get the coffeehouse ready for its grand opening.
I could not write these words without having kind words for our YWCA advisors and other adults who helped to make it possible for us to eventually keep 100 young people off the streets and out of trouble every night we were open in the early days. Mrs. Genther and Mrs. Benz were the main advisors and they served to keep us on track and give the coffeehouse a direction that would be acceptable to the young people and to the board of the YWCA. Blanche Wester was the desk clerk who was usually on duty when we had to obtain the key for the steps that led to the basement from the main building. She was an aunt to Dave Ealer, who I knew from my days at St. John's Lutheran Church on Ferry St. Dave was a driver in our wedding and died a few years later (thankfully not as a result of serving in our wedding).
The basement where we had the coffeehouse actually consisted of 5 separate areas, not all of which we used at first. There were two sections to the hall area, one where the steps entered from the main building, where we had the coffee pot, sink, soda machine and anything else we needed, the back hall where steps led to the outside. This was where the patrons came in from the back around the swimming pool building of the main Y. There was a rear room that was really the laundry room for the folks who lived in the Y, a middle room that we used for storage, and the front room where we actually had the coffeehouse.
The building we were in had a dentist’s office on the first floor and that was the source of our ability to make phone calls. The Y had given us an extension, but we could only call the switchboard with it. They couldn’t even give us an outside line on that phone. But the dentist’s phone connections were in the basement and Gene had a phone linesman’s clip phone, so we always could make outside calls anyway. We weren’t ballsy enough to tell our friends to call the dentist’s number if they wanted to get hold of us while we were open, but we never abused the clip phone either. I doubt we could have heard the ring, but I’m sure Gene would have had a ringer to put on the line if we had wanted to receive calls. He is a genius in that sort of endeavor.
The front room, where we had our gatherings, didn’t need much in the way of lighting but it needed a lot of other touches to make it coffeehouse. Our tables were empty wire spools and our seats were nail kegs promoted from a locals barrel maker and covered by a local craftsman as a contribution. The only problem was nail kegs have a bottom and a top, designed to be opened, and he did a bunch of the seats on the removable top rather than the bottom, which was sturdier. The walls were painted mostly to keep the dust and dirt down. One small wall was painted white to be our free style painting wall. It was initially decorated by a dripping sink stopper, drawn by the art director of the Easton Express (now the ExpressTimes). We allowed anyone to paint whatever they liked on the walls, reasoning that if it seemed not appropriate we could always paint it over. Since I attended a lot of drag races at the time, my contribution consisted of a speeding dragster, probably the best drawn artwork I have ever done.
Gene had made a small wooden sign with routered letters spelling out The Outlet to hang on the light at the top of the outside steps in the back. The letters were white on a black board and Jeanie DiMarco, one of the girls who lived at the Y, made the letters more colorful. I still have the sign after 40 years. Jeanie was still in high school at that time. I believe the Y was actually her legal guardian but I don't remember the circumstances.
I had a rather strange experience when we were putting the original incarnation of the coffeehouse together. I was making a frame to put a cover around the water meter for the house and offices upstairs from our rooms, and I smashed my thumb with the hammer. Cursing to myself, I let the pain subside and then went on about my work, not letting the throbbing in my thumb affect me too much. When I would get home late like I would that night, I wouldn’t turn the lights on in the house. My parents and brother would already be in bed and I knew my way thru the darkened house. My usual procedure would be to put my wallet and keys on the refrigerator and walk thru the downstairs and up the steps in the dark. As I walked into the darkened dining room I heard my mother’s sleepy voice call down the steps "Did you hurt your finger?" It caught me completely off guard, but I told her I had indeed hurt my thumb and asked her how she knew. "I must have been dreaming." Was her reply. I don’t know how but SHE KNEW!
We opened sometime in the late fall of 1966 and the coffeehouse at that time was an unqualified success. There were nights we kept on average 100 people total off the streets and out of trouble. All we had was coffee, some free entertainment, and conversation, but it was enough to show me that what we were doing was needed. I have always felt very good about my involvement in the coffeehouse and I still do to this day when I am 60 and 40 years removed from those days.
We had very little of substance to offer but what we had was very popular. We had Cokes, coffee, and donuts that we got at cost from Nancy’s father, who was a baker for the Mohican Market, which used to be on South 4th St. Those who showed up with instruments would play them and sing. The coffeehouse movement would partly inspire me to learn the guitar, but by the time I was good enough to have played there, The Outlet was long gone and I was married and out of college.
I knew we had gained a measure of respect in the community the night Joe Peake paid us a visit. Joe was a city police officer who usually had a night shift in the downtown area. He preferred to walk the downtown beat as I suppose it gave him a better handle on what was happening. He had a reputation of being a hardass and when I saw him coming thru the back entrance I thought we were in for a problem. The noise from our room never really carried that far outside and there were no residences of any kind in the neighborhood, save for the rooms the Y rented out to women, but with a police officer with a rep as a hardass, one never knows. It turned out he had heard the sounds coming from the basement, and not knowing what it was, decided to investigate out of curiosity. After seeing that there wasn’t any problem, he left pleasantly and was never a bother to us. He wouldn’t even accept the cup of coffee I offered him. Joe, if you are reading this, thanks for being a fair police officer to us. I'm sure you had a good career as a police officer.
Some of those early involved people included me, of course, Bill Blixenderfer, a divinity student at Moravian College, Charlie James, Nancy James (no relation), Sue Miller, Mitzi Tornese, Jackie Riddicks, Gene Kenerup, Marty Veres, Missy Benz, and I’m sure many others whose names are lost to me now. Later on, after St. John’s Lutheran had gotten theirs started, we added some others. Leon Bonam became a regular when several of the college guys would come down from Lafayette College. There were quite a few young people from the community who appreciated having a place to hang out with their friends and soak up the folk scene of the 60s, as best we could present it.
I would like to digress from the main story of the coffeehouses for a moment to give a few thoughts on the above group of people. The ones mentioned, along with the ones not mentioned became close friends at the time, some from before these days. I knew Charlie James, Gene Kenerup, Clark Kehley (eventually my best man), and Ken Varley from my high school days, because they hung around and maintained the electronic equipment at the school. Today they would be computer geeks, and may very well be just that. My father was on the maintenance staff at the school in those years and as such I got into most events for free. I never had to pay to get into athletic events, school dances, or anything like that. As some combination of the above 4 was always there to set up the PA or other electronic gear, I got to know them quite well. Kenerup was also in our wedding, as an usher, when my brother refused. Later on, Pete Zelinsky, who cared for electronic equipment at Wilson High, would hang with us sometimes too. Charlie James and Kenerup knew him from serving on the Suburban Rescue Squad on Freemansburg Highway in Palmer Township.
St. John’s Lutheran Church, on Ferry Street in the downtown, started up a coffeehouse around the same time as we got the Outlet going. Their's was in the small room that was behind the auditorium in the basement, under the sacristy, which is the place behind the altar on the main floor where the pastor dons his robes and prepares for the Sunday service. I had attended there in the late 50s and early 60s and had been a part of their Luther League, a youth fellowship group, in those days, so I was familiar with the pastor, John Steinbruck, although his assistant, Holmes Beausang, was more involved with the coffeehouse. I don’t remember too much about it, but I know I had given them a huge poster of W.C. Fields as the gambler in Mississippi that I had mail ordered and then found was too big for the wall in my bedroom at home. They had to put it on the ceiling as it was even too big for their walls. As I recall it, the room was very small.
The Gourd was the coffeehouse in Hogg Hall on the east side of the quadrangle on the campus of Lafayette College. It was in the left front corner room of the first floor and featured a more structured program than our coffeehouse. They had a lot of poetry readings and folk groups from the campus, but I remember little else beyond that, except that they had way too many chairs and tables for the size of the room. Hogg Hall has since been replaced by the Farinon Student Center.
The South Side Presbyterian Church was on the southwest corner of Valley and WilkesBarre Sts on South Side in Easton. At a time in the 60s they were too small a congregation to afford a pastor, so they opened their parsonage to young people who had no place to stay, of whom there seemed like there was an oversupply in those days. They were free to come and go as they pleased and as far as I can remember, were expected to contribute what they could to its operation. I was there a few times to catch up with Leon, who stayed in Easton after leaving Lafayette College, I can’t say it was disorderly or trashy. I don’t remember much about it and I believe the parsonage and possibly the church have been torn down.
The Hub, in East Bangor, later renamed Purple Haze when it was moved to the basement of the Realty Building in Bangor, was the first coffeehouse I visited after we had gotten the Outlet going. In those days, if you heard of a coffeehouse, you went to check it out, if for no other reason then to gain ideas and insights for your own coffeehouse. The Hub was operated by the Slate Belt Ministerium, an organization of churches in that area. I would just buy a cup of coffee and perhaps a snack and sit in the corner to the right of the sales counter and observe everyone in the room. It was in an old storefront, since torn down, and the walls were already beginning to be painted in the most colorful, (dare I say psychedelic?) manner. They were open Friday and Saturday nights, but I rarely drove to East Bangor Saturdays.
My future exwife was helping out there and that is how I met her. I can remember before we ever dated looking at her and thinking that she would make someone a good wife. This was a statement that would ultimately prove to be prophetic. This is how we came to have our first date. At the point where I started to hangout at the Hub, I was actually dating Mitzi Tornese but we sort of were drifting apart, things like this happening all the time to people for no real reason. John Bartlett was planning a Christmas party at his parents house on Totts Gap Road, and I wasn't really thinking of going. JoAnne Weidlich sat down at my table one night and told me Jean, my future ex, wanted to go to John's party but did not want to go alone and would I ask her so she would go? So I did and we did. What transpired that night, nothing out of the ordinary, will be the subject of a different remembrance. I didn't find out until years later that JoAnne told Jean essentially the same story about me. She tricked us into our first date!
The Illick's Mill Coffeehouse was in Illick's Mill, a Revolutionary War era gristmill on the grounds of Monacacy Park in the Northeast part of Bethlehem. The coffeehouse was on the main floor of the mill, and very little of the mill workings had been removed. The only real changes were addition of rest rooms. The operator who tended it was a brother of a fellow I knew in college before I flunked out. Sometimes there was an advertised program and sometimes just whatever showed up. Two acts stand out in my mind. There was a group of young people from the Bethlehem area, 5 I believe, who played music that was at least 400 years old. Four played recorders of differing ranges and one played a harpsichord. But the best of all was Nehemiah "Skip" James, who billed himself as the last of the great Mississippi Delta blues singers. He was an old black man who appeared with his wife. One played clarinet and one played piano. I was not into blues at the time, but I could have listened to him for hours. I have come to regard that show as a very special opportunity that I had, because Skip James was a musical contemporary of Robert Johnson in the 30s.
The hyperlink above for Illick's Mill will take you to a website of the organization which is sponsoring projects and fundraisers to renovate and stabilize the historic Illick's Mill structure. Please check it out and volunteer or make a donation if you care to.
The Nazareth coffeehouse was located in basement of a building that housed a furniture store on the first floor and apartments on the upper floors. It was on the Northeast corner of the main intersection in town, one block south of the square. Leon Bonam and I had gone there to check it out when who walks in but Father Roger Yurko. Father Roger used to come to The Outlet and sing folk songs with a singing partner, a student from Lehigh. To our surprise he entered in the company of a young lady. After taking this in for a moment, I realized that what she was wearing was a very modern nun's habit, like a parochial school jumper for adults. After exchanging pleasantries with Father Roger and the young nun, whose name I don't remember, I asked him if he was out on a date. It took Father Roger about 5 minutes to explain that it wasn't a date. I enjoyed watching him squirm a little. In reality, Father Roger lived at the Franciscan friary on Chipman Road in Bethlehem Township and taught at Notre Dame High School near there at Green Pond.
We were at the Lycoming College coffeehouse because a bunch of us went to Williamsport to give Liz Woodruff a birthday party and we all went to the coffeehouse afterwards. I remember it being in a storefront and very dark inside. Liz and her sister Sandy were from the section of Phillipsburg somewhat east of Chambers St. I would give them a ride home sometimes. As I recall at that time Liz had just graduated from Philipsburg High and Sandy was still in school, I think she was about 15. Anyhow, Gene had been dating her, as far as I could tell it was not serious, but when we found out her birthday was in November of 1966 (I think. I know it was 1966 because I had my 66 Falcon and the next year I had a Corvair by the time it came to her birthday again. we decided to go to Williamsport and have a birthday party for her.
The gang had always gone to either Anderson's Diner in Allentown or the Key City Diner in Phillipsburg after the coffeehouse closed on Saturday nights for a late night snack, and Liz had taken a liking to the cherry crumb pie they served there. We decided we would have a birthday party for her with a pie instead of a cake. So I went to the Key City and bought a cherry crumb pie, complete with the pan, because I knew we wouldn't get it back there, and we had kid's birthday hats and a paper tablecloth.
I have to digress back to the Key City for a moment. We used to have a lot of fun there because we usually ran into the same waitress every Saturday night. (No we didn't injure her. LOL) This one night I took all the trash from about 5 of us and carefully placed it and all the plates, etc. on one plate by carefully stacking everything. When the waitress came to bus our table, she looked at the stack and must have instantly thought 1) It won't pay me to take this conglomeration apart. and 2) I don't think I can get it all back to the kitchen without dumping it. She looked at us, laughed, and said "Thanks a hell of a lot!"
Dave Ealer was with us one time when we all came outside before him and started bouncing his VW Beetle up and down until we had it bouncing completely off the parking lot on one end. Another time when we went to Anderson's, he had the car locked when we came out, but about 3 of us drove. The six of us who came out ahead of Dave ( he seems to have been slow exiting restaurants. I think it took a long time to load his pockets with all the sugar envelopes from the tables.) picked up his locked Beetle and carried it around the corner. When he finally exited the diner we were nowhere to be seen and neither was his car .
Anywho, back to the birthday party. Gene and I drove to Williamsport with 4 of our friends to do this party for Liz, who was expecting us. What Gene didn't know was that Liz was dating or at least seeing a guy she met on campus, perfectly normal to expect, but Gene was devastated. (Gene, if you are reading this, I felt for you that night. You were hurting.) Anyway we had the party with candles in this cherry crumb pie and went to the coffeehouse that was in a small storefront just off the main campus quad. Coming back was a real zoo because we had slushy snow from White Haven into Wind Gap. Gene was in the lead and I could see very little past the hood ornament of my car. I was surprised after the intensity of driving like that, I only slept for 2 hours and woke up with no trace of being tired. As I write this 2 months into my 61st year, I could never do that now.