For a few years in the mid-70s, a bunch of us lived in, and/or hung out at the Oak Street House. It was a ramshackle little place, built in the 1890s on a wooden piers over a low spot in the terrain; a combination which—by the time we lived there—meant lots of foundational dry-rot, and a precarious lack of structural integrity.
We were about halfway between the U of O campus and downtown; far enough off-campus that the neighborhood wasn’t totally defined by college culture, but close enough that many of the neighbors were students sharing a place.
It was the ideal place for that stage in our lives – in our first years out of our parents’ houses. A mixture of college and downtown foot traffic made the front porch a great place to socialize with each other, and any passers-by who cared to stop in; and Brownie’s relaxed approach to compliance with Oregon’s arbitrarily defined drinking age meant that the L&L Grocery was our bulwark against dehydration – even on the hottest summer day.
Among the passers-by who availed themselves of our open-door policy were an Australian on a walk-about, who stopped by one day, then made our house his home base for a couple months, as he day-tripped and week-tripped around our area; and ‘Mystery’ – a black man, who made our front porch a randomly visited stop on his daily wanderings. We looked forward to his lessons in how to be a black guy in lillly-white Eugene, and he looked forward to drinking our beer, and coaching us in how to harass the honkies.
