Click to Expand: Tye-dyed visitors to the Lane County Historical Museum's "Tie Dye and Tofu" exhibit, which opened Saturday, walk around a vintage Volkswagen bus painted by University of Oregon students. Photo: Brian Daves The Register-Guard

As far as guests and organizers at Saturday's opening of the Lane County Historical Museum's "Tie Dye and Tofu" exhibit can recall, there's never before been a large-scale effort to showcase a chapter of Eugene history that launched the city's enduring reputation as a bastion of counterculture.

Maybe it took an outsider's perspective to recognize its relevance.

"Really, there ought to be a permanent counterculture wing," said museum executive director Bob Hart, who has imagined such an exhibit since relocating from Santa Fe, N.M,, seven years ago for his current job. "People were warning me when I moved here, 'Oh, you're going to that hippie place.' Having been here seven years, I know that reputation is merited."

The afternoon opening drew a crowd of several hundred, many of whom experienced firsthand the transformational span between about 1968 and 1975.

Eugene in the late 1960s became an incubator for idealistic ventures, such as the White Bird Clinic, the Growers' Market and the Butler Green Commune, and a magnet for disillusioned city folk - yes, many of them from California - looking for a simpler, gentler and more natural way of life.

"I escaped L.A. in my first housetruck and headed north," recalled Roger Beck of the year 1969, when he began an itinerant journey in a converted 1950s Mercury sedan - his first of four progressively larger vehicles onto which he built customized wooden living quarters - that ultimately ended in Eugene.

Beck spent much of the next five years traveling to craft fairs throughout the Northwest, selling his signature, exquisitely simple wire jewelry.

But Eugene was his base - in part because he was obligated to report to his probation officer monthly, the result of stealing an 8-track cassette player from a logging truck near Albany.

Like many of his fellow transplants, Beck stayed, forging a successful career as a cabinet builder.

"Once it started, the momentum just kind of kept going," the 63-year-old said of the allure Eugene held for so many kindred spirits then.

Beck, who published a book about housetrucks - his and others' - in 2002, is featured in one of the displays in the exhibit, which takes up much of both floors of the museum.

The museum had essentially nothing in its collection for such a show, Hart explained.

To pull it off, organizers had to tap the community - and there they found a wealth of historical knowledge and more than enough "relics" of the time.

"People just kind of fell out of the trees, came out of the woodwork," said Hart, who wore a blue cotton shirt with embroidery, jeans and Birkenstocks for Saturday's event.

Among the treasures on display: A vintage Volkswagen bus, recently painted in flower-power spirit by students from a University of Oregon architecture class; a poster for the WOW-athon, a five-day music extravaganza staged in 1975 to raise funds to save the W.O.W. Hall; copies of the shortlived alternative paper The Augur; loads of vintage photographs, including one of iconic local author and "Merry Prankster" Ken Kesey holding forth at the Renaissance Faire (forerunner to the Oregon Country Fair); and select vintage clothing - including exhibits coordinator Mary Dole's own peasant-style white cotton wedding dress from 1973.

Dole, whom Hart called the "creative genius" behind the exhibit, was the point person for contributions.

"I think a lot of people who were around then are at a stage where they're reflecting a lot," said Dole, the daughter of a UO professor who returned to Eugene as a high school senior in 1968 after a year away and found it suddenly in the throes of the counterculture movement. "They all seemed sort of surprised and pleased to have this topic come up."

While a majority of Saturday's visitors looked to be in their 50s or older, the celebration - featuring live and lovingly appreciated music by the folk band Wheatfield, which played local coffeehouses in the early '70s - drew plenty of younger souls, something Hart hopes it will continue to do in coming months.

The museum benefited from youthful assistance in the exhibit, particularly from 23-year-old Kaley Sauer, a UO master's student who did the graphics and design for the impressive wall panels and put together the clothing displays.

Sauer, who circulated through Saturday's crowd in brilliantly patterned vintage culottes and a bright yellow sweater, said she knew little about the hippie lifestyle growing up in Rhode Island, but quickly gained an appreciation after moving to Eugene.

"Eugene is one of the first places I've really felt at home," she said.

"It's really special, and working on this exhibit has really solidified that conclusion for me."


COUNTERCULTURE EXHIBIT

"Tie Dye and Tofu: How Mainstream Eugene Became a Counterculture Haven" is on display through March 2011. The museum, at the Lane Events Center at 740 W. 13th Ave., is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is $3 for adults, $2 for seniors and 75 cents for teens 15 to 17.

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