Our move to Oregon proved to be a love affair from the very beginning for me. Coming from the desert to this green, beautiful treed state, and live in a small town like Cave Juntion(350 population)in 1971--was certainly a high point in my life. There were about twenty of us, family and friends, who moved from Phoenix to CJ, with us. We bought five acres with a semi-house--no running water, no elctricity, except in the kitchen and we cooked on a woodstove, to name a few of the differences in our life-style. My love-affair with 'EATON ACRES' began, and thirty two years later, we are still here!!
In the early seventies, there were a few stores in CJ that had THE SIGN 'we do not solicit Hippy patronage'. I peronally wore my Hippy status like a badge. Still Do!! Being a Hippy is a mindset--love of nature, trying not to be consumers wastefully, knowing what is in all the foods we buy, certainly no chemicals of any kind on our gardens or inside our dwellings, and to me, a great love of Family and an overall love of Community. Today, the Hippies of yesterday, are the life-blood of Cave Junction. So the early seventies was definitely a learning and growing experience. In the last of the seventies, most of the communes either became ghostlike or vanished all together. My beloved commune called Sunnyridge, died by 1980. I was truly saddened by that, but I knew it was time to move on to another experience!! So the Eaton family welcomed yet another decade.
The eighties burst upon this decade with a bang!! Mount St Helens had been rumbling and spewing smoke for a few months before she actually erupted in May 1980. The nearby cities were all covered with ash--Cave Junction had just a little dusting--I called it "Magic Dirt". It truly was--all the plants and Vegetables were healthier and bigger that summer!! And the early eighties also introduced this family to the US Court System. We grew marijuana on our land for our own personal use--we were 'busted' on July 31, 1981--five of us from this household were all arrested and charged with possession of a controlled substance. I will not go into depth about the ridiculous marijuana laws that were on the books and still are to this very day. Suffice to say, we were all charged for the same plants. Pat and Jim got off with probation--I spent a month in jail, but Mike did the most, 90 days in JoCo jail. KUDOS to you, Michael!! Those stupid laws should be overturned!! Lefty suffered from Emphysema all through the 80's. By 1987, he was housebound--he died on December 11, 1989. We all miss him terribly to this day. He was my 'Rock of Gibralta'. The family entered the nineties a little shaky and uncertain!!