11-24-14 - Strawberries and Soap

Richard Baker credits Silas Hoadley with the idea of having a guest season at Tassajara starting late spring our first year, 1967. We'd need the money and it would be good for us to have the grounding of interacting with the public and the public could know who we were in that way. It seemed like a healthy idea all the way around. There were of course people who came as guests because the SFZC had bought the place, but many former guests came. I think that the Zen Center or the prior owners, the Becks, or a combination, sent out a letter to the Becks mailing list. We did continue serving meat and fish to the guests at first, and continued for a couple of years, but did not serve or sell alcohol or tobacco. Some students smoked tobacco but they couldn't buy it there. The Becks had had a full bar. Still, guests were free to bring their own booze in same as today. Some of the very first guests that came were a group of farmers and businessmen from Watsonville a couple of hours away. We called them the Watsonville Domino Club. I think they called themselves that. They'd get the best Pine and Stone Rooms and drink whiskey and beer and, at least sometimes, charcoal broil steaks on the back porches. At first of course they were apprehensive about the new owners wondering how cultish and weird we'd be and so forth, but after a day or two of the first visit I could see they felt comfortable. The students were not nosy or judgmental, were busy working and too tired to whoop it up at night with all the zazen and other obligations. And we weren't proselytizers. Suzuki would occasionally chide us not to sell Buddhism as one interpretation of the precept not to sell alcohol. The Watsonville Domino Club came early in the guest season every year I was there, my last being 1975. I'd run the dinning room the first four years and had administrative jobs the others and would always visit with them, sometimes allowing them to bend my arm enough to sample their whiskey. They liked that but couldn't understand why I had no interest in their steaks. We liked them too. I remember Bud who owned Topless Vegetables and Burt whose family co-owned globally active Granite Construction with another family (he said they were one of the five biggest construction companies in the world and talked to me about the evils of the inheritance tax). And I remember Mr. Porter. He was the oldest, had a pot belly, spindly legs, and a reddish face. One year they had an 80th birthday dinner for him. He grew strawberries, lots of them. He'd always bring in a bunch of boxes for us when he came. At his birthday dinner we brought out a desert we'd made for them from his strawberries - there was enough to make that desert for all sixty guests that evening. There were about eight men at the Watsonville Domino Club table, all fairly plastered by the time the desert came out. Mr. Porter blew out the candles. There were calls of "Speech! Speech!" He stood up. The whole dining room crowd was quiet. The staff stood by politely.

Mr. Porter picked up a large red strawberry from off his desert. "This is one of my strawberries," he said. "I'm very grateful to these strawberries. We grow fields of them that are covered in plastic so they don't get dirty and are easy to harvest. Then we burn the plastic and prepare for the next planting. Safeway can't get enough of them. They ship all the way to the East Coast and are still big and red and firm when they hit the stores there. These strawberries have made me a rich man." He paused. "And they taste like cardboard!"

With that line Mr. Porter brought the house down. There was enough for the dinning room crew to share.