by Eavin Moore

The call came in a couple of month’s ago to The Regular Joe offices. The note in my box just said “Hippy Museum,” with a local phone number and a question mark. I returned the call and was met with a voice mail greeting consisting of the first couple minutes of The Strawberry Alarmclock’s “Incense and Peppermints” followed by a confusing series of instructions. I left a message and hoped for the best. I didn’t hear back and had pretty much written it off, when this guy showed up at my office.

When I say show up, I mean I look up from my keyboard and he’s all of a sudden, like, right there. He must have been in Stealth Mode or something, because I never heard him come in.

I’m much better at describing interesting artifacts than I am at describing people, so I often employ the simple literary device of comparing them to their closest celebrity look-alike. You may not all get the reference, but the nearest I can come to this fellow was Cousin It from the Addams Family. We’re talking long, long, really seriously long hair, parted in the middle and hanging damn near to his knees. What face was left exposed was disguised with a huge pair of “Jacki-O” sunglasses. I really wasn’t sure whether it was a guy or a girl, till I heard his voice, which was way deeper than I expected.

He told me that he was the main dude behind the American Hippy Museum hoping to open in downtown St. Joe, sometime later in 2008. I picked up my legal pad, and started as I always do, by asking him to spell his name for me. He told me he wasn’t cool with “real” names, and that for now I could call him Darryl X.

He went on to explain that himself and a group of like-minded individuals were, after a long process, very nearly in possession of the building for the museum, and ready to start “leaking” information to the press. Despite his ridiculous appearance, he seemed to be taking himself pretty seriously, and I didn’t have anywhere to be for a while, so I played along.

I asked him why he thought a Hippy Museum would be a good idea. He said it was all in the numbers. All the Hippies of the 60’s and 70’s are reaching retirement age. A lot of them sold out along the way and bought in to the American Dream. They swapped tie-dye, for suits and ties. They quit smoking pot and started drinking martinis. They invested in IRA’s and 401K’s, but no matter what they looked like on the outside, they were still Hippies on the inside.

After the kids are gone and the pension has kicked in, that old Hippy guilt starts to creep up on them. It starts for the guys, with skipping that first haircut. A lot of the ladies, seem to start forgetting to wear intimate undergarments. Before you know it, they’re spending the summer following a Greatful Dead cover band around the country. But instead of a 69 VW Microbus, this new bunch travels in $100,000 motor homes.

Darryl and his communal pals want to cash in on the trend. They are at the tail end of a dream, seven years in the making. In fact the first seeds of the idea were formed during the last week of 1999. They decided to gather supplies, and wait out the Y2K situation in an old abandoned building downtown. They tapped into a neighboring building’s electricity and made themselves comfortable. When no one ever came to hassle them, they decided to exercise a little known quirk of the legal system known as squatter’s rights. In this state, anyone who can prove they have continually occupied a property for seven years uncontested, can claim it as their own. That seven years ends just before the issue in your hands goes to press.

Darryl offered to show me their progress, but they were worried about blowing the whole deal before they officially filed their claim. I had to agree to be blindfolded and driven around downtown awhile before they stopped in an alley and walked me into a large musty space. Once they took the blindfold off I looked around and realized they went to a lot of trouble for nothing. I recognized the interior of the former downtown department store from going there with my grandmother as a little boy, but I didn’t let on as they showed me around and explained their plans.

They’ll start with the museum. The group has spent the last years hoarding items to display. For instance the T-shirt room. They’ve got concert T’s from every significant band of the period, some preserved like new, some barely readable through the moth holes and puke stains.

The poster room has concert bills from venues across the country filled with tons of names you know, but also thousands you never heard of. The far end is all under black-light, and all the psychedelic images come alive in neon florescent glory.

I have some serious questions about the paraphernalia room. The whole thing is set up to look like a 1970’s head shop. They have rows of pipes, rows of bongs, rows of roach clips, and a big glass case filled with rolling papers from all over the world. I’ll be curious how local law enforcement handles this when the time comes.

The next empty room will eventually be a performance space. The plan is to bring in popular acts from back in the day, to perform in an intimate setting for up to a month at a time in an organic dinner theater. The old timers won’t survive touring anymore, but do ok as long as you can set them up where you can keep an eye on them and make sure they take their medication. The group firmly believes they can do the same thing here that Branson did with country music. Imagine old hippies coming from all over, to go see The Turtles one night, then maybe the surviving Mama and Papa the next.

I have to tell you, these guys have sure gone to a lot of trouble assembling things in a building they don’t own. At least not yet. Will the American Hippy Museum ever see the light of day, or is it just another pipe dream? (get it? Pipe dream!) Well who knows, but here’s hoping they pull it off, and maybe before long they’ll look at us with an illegal smile, and tell us, “Hey Man, Come Look At My Stuff!”.