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  • Droppers: America’s First Hippie Commune, Drop City
  • Erica Ando
Droppers: America’s First Hippie Commune, Drop City Mark Matthews Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010; 233 pages. $19.95, ISBN 0806140585

The past five years have brought us books, articles, and a documentary film about Drop City, the outrageous, original hippie commune of the 1960s. Judging from this recent attention, we are witnessing either a resurgent interest in communalism, a reaction to current neoconservative tendencies, or simply a desire to set the record straight about this wildly influential but misrepresented, ill-fated community. Mark Matthews’s Droppers: America’s First Hippie Commune, Drop City, the latest addition to the literature on Drop City, addresses all these concerns. Quoting long passages from his many interviews with founding member Gene Bernofsky, Matthews weaves a narrative of youthful, idealistic enthusiasm that ultimately goes sour and sets Drop City against a background of sixties sociopolitical unrest. Matthews supplements Bernofsky’s biographical tale with Time magazine excerpts and passages from books authored by other Droppers, along with extended discussions of Allen Ginsberg, early American [End Page 147] communal activity, Trinidad, Colorado (the site of Drop City), Buckminster Fuller, Ken Kesey, Ephrata Cloister, Thomas Morton, the Merry Pranksters, free love, LSD-concocting chemist Augustus Owsley Stanley III, and lengthy, verbatim quotes from texts by numerous scholars such as Hugh Gardner and Timothy Miller. The result is a well-rounded, if quirky, account of Drop City and its place in the histories of communalism and sixties counterculture.

Matthews discloses his original intention to write an extensive biography of Bernofsky, a child of New York Jewish socialists (his full name is Eugene Victor Debs Bernofsky), whose post-Drop City activities include making underground documentary films on such subjects as the corporate exploitation of public lands (but with lower budgets and less ego than Michael Moore). Matthews’s ambition to write a full biography is thwarted, however, by Bernofsky’s wife who adamantly refuses to contribute to the project, even objecting to the use of her name in the book. Although a founding member of the community, Drop Lady’s (her Drop City nickname) noncompliance forces Matthews to alter the project into “the real story” of Drop City.

The tone of Droppers is set by Bernofsky’s voice, alternately sarcastic, generous, elaborate, naughty, and sincere. As the first full account of the community by one of its founding members, Droppers reveals the group’s original ideals about self-sustaining, creative, and responsible communal living as a guiding force, ideals that were ultimately relinquished at Drop City. Throughout the book, the same stories told in other former Dropper’s versions are richly fleshed out by Bernofsky as if just having occurred; for example, details of building their first geodesic dome or descriptions of Dropper art works. Apparent is the excitement of dizzying creativity in the commune’s early days. Colorful and oddly shaped domes influenced by Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes dot Drop City’s five acres of desert, defining its characteristically hippie look, attracting national media attention, and even receiving an award that Fuller created for them. As Bernofsky makes clear, however, he was never interested in the media coverage, but, paralleling Todd Gitlin’s critique of the media, considers it the reason for the commune’s downfall: “our first big mistake was constructing those domes. If we had just put up regular shacks, no one ever would have taken any notice of us, and who knows, maybe I’d still be living at a place called Drop City” (207). [End Page 148]

Underlying Droppers is the story about who does and does not contribute to Matthews’s project, an interesting thread considering the author’s free-ranging search for ever more information to tell the true story of Drop City. As for the other founding members, Richard Kallweit is only somewhat interested in Matthews’s project, and Clark Richert’s initial enthusiasm turns suddenly and inexplicably silent, to Matthews’s dismay. In Droppers, the constant conflict between Bernofsky and former Dropper Peter Douthit (aka Peter Rabbit, who also wrote a book about Drop City) climaxes in the Bernofskys’ departure from the commune. In Bernofsky’s...

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