Cleaning up their act: Bateman, buddies ride to Woodstock in a laundry truck
Graduation had come and gone, and we residents of Skunk Acres — dozens of Grateful Dead concerts notwithstanding — had our diplomas.
Skunk was the rundown fourbedroom Portola Valley home we five Stanford seniors had rented for our final year of classes. You read that right: The now exclusive, high-end snooty San Francisco suburb back then had cheap rentals that students could actually afford.
And the five of us loved the place. It was out in the country, yet only a 10-minute walk to Rosotti’s — a burger-and-beer joint that had been a legendary Stanford hangout for decades.
We somehow survived on Zotburgers alone for nearly a month before a couple of us learned to cook.
Bottom line: Skunk was a wonderful place and, graduation or not, none of us wanted to leave. So we stayed for the summer of ‘69, scraping together enough cash to get by with odd jobs and occasional parental largesse.
And we also found a mission: Word had drifted from the East Coast that the most awesome rock concert of all time was going to happen near the upstate New York hamlet of Woodstock. The Dead, the Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Country Joe, The Band, Joe Cocker, Joan Baez, Richie Havens and many, many more bands were set to play.
And we decided one night in Skunk’s living room that we too were going to be there. So we ordered up tickets ($18 for all three days of nonstop rock ‘n’ roll in August).
So now all we had to do was get there. Our cars were too small, (and not nearly hip enough) for the job. So we decided to find wheels that
were both up to the task and would give us the bona fides to attend the coolest concert ever.
Our answer turned out to be an early 1950s GMC delivery truck that was being retired by its owner, Peninsula Laundry. The truck had untold hundreds of thousands of miles on the odometer, but its price was right — a few hundred bucks.
And, somehow, we had undying faith that this truck could somehow carry us from coast to coast.
That none of us Skunkers had summer jobs helped. Because our mission was to male this truck cool enough for Woodstock and comfortable enough to carry us wannabe hippies to music’s 1969 Mecca.
So we set to work: We carpeted the truck’s floor, and hung Indian-pattern bedspreads to cover its sheet-metal sides and ceiling. Then we installed an AC-DC converter and added a cassette player, an amp and a pair of huge speakers.
We next put bolts and hooks in the truck’s sides and hung a hammock that would sway from side to side on turns. Finally, we repainted the rig and, on its sides and back door, stenciled its name in bright yellow.
That name? Nurjis Glompum, of course.
“What??” you almost certainly may be asking.
If you grew up in the
Chicago area in the mid1960s, you might have a clue. That’s when a comical radio series entitled “Chickenman” aired on WCFL, a popular AM station.
I was raised on Chicago’s North Shore, as was my Skunk Acres housemate, Peter Oppenheimer, who had actually bought the truck. And somehow we both remembered an episode in which our feathered hero was stranded on Mars and made a call back to his cohorts on Earth seeking rescue.
“How are you even making this call?” asked one of Chickenman’s buddies. “From a payphone, of course.” he replied. “It says ‘Nurjis Glompum’ on the outside, and that’s Martian for phone booth.”
Thus our truck had a name, which by turns elicited laughter, anger and frustration during our upcoming Woodstock pilgrimage.
The “phone booth” answer got a few laughs, but a significant minority believed the words “Nurjis Glompum” had some secret, subversive meaning and became very angry at us for not coming clean.
Three of us, Peter, myself and our fellow Skunker, Roger, took off for Woodstock after catching a Dead concert at the Family Dog, a music hall on San Francisco’s Great Highway.
Aided by marginally legal “stimulants,” we remained wide awake crossing Nevada on the way to Louisville, where another of our housemates was getting married.
We made it to Kentucky, where between wedding festivities we cruised Louisville’s main street with Nurjis’s speakers blaring Neil Young’s “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.”
The city’s Chamber of Commerce did not thank us.
All dressed up for the rehearsal dinner, we Skunkers also posed in front of Nurjis for an oxymoronic photo.
And when the wedding and attendant events were over, Opp, Roger and I got back truckin’ and headed for the promised land — which was now Max Yasgur’s farm outside the tiny town of Bethel, N.Y.
But our headlong dash was interrupted in Front Royal, Virginia — where Nurjis broke down and we spent two days waiting for parts. And getting fleeced by two-bit conmen running a bait-and-switch game at the county fair.
We watched a guy quickly win 80 bucks, and the game looked easy. But it was not: The supposed winner was a shill, and we allegedly smart Stanford grads got skinned like rubes.
Still, we had barely enough to pay the repair bill and fill the tank a couple of times. And we thus made it to the mileslong traffic jam leading to Max’s farm. When we arrived, there were no fences, no ticket takers and, thus, free admission to all.
But there was a stage, so we parked Nurjis on a pasture and trudged about an hour to a several square-foot patch of damp turf nearly 100 yards away from it. And behind us, the crowds stretched out by at least a couple of more football fields.
Shortly thereafter, as opening act Richie Havens hit the stage, the rain started in earnest.
By the time Ravi Shankar, Melanie and Joan Baez had
played, our little spot of paradise was a sodden mud pit. Plus, answering nature’s call was an hour-long ordeal involving tramping through mud and over dozens of mudcovered fellow hippies to find a bank of port-a-potties.
The rain only fell harder, and overnight the three of us decided to bail on what would later be described as our generation’s defining event.
It took us two hours to get back to Nurjis. Then we were in an hours-long traffic jam of other Woodstock bailers going out and of thousands more inbound festival fanatics who had decided to make the pilgrimage after learning all the music was now free.
After a day in traffic, Nurjis was again on the open road and Californiabound.
We car guys on occasion confer personalities on our steeds, and I believe Nurjis had one.
After nearly two decades of stop-and-go laundry duty in the greater Palo Alto area, Nurjis led a singularly boring life. Mile after mile and day
after day, this then-unnamed truck did nothing but deliver pressed shirts and sheets on a route that seldom varied.
But, after logging untold hundreds of thousands of repetitious miles, Nurjis in her old age was suddenly liberated. The Grateful Dead roared from its speakers, its hammock swayed and its horizons were from sea to shining sea.
So was it gratitude that kept Nurjis — with the exception of the Front Royal breakdown — humming along without a care?
Who knows, but I’d like to think so.
So we made it back to Portola Valley in the wake of Woodstock, then we Skunkers reluctantly embarked on versions of real life that included jobs, grad school and hitches in the Peace Corps — but, alas, not Nurjis Glompum .
Thus we bade a fond farewell to Nurj, sold for a song to a buyer whose plans for her were unclear.
So yes, the old laundry truck’s final chapter remains a mystery. But I’m just happy I was part of the most epic and enjoyable journey of its lifetime.
(I was among Skunk Acres’ Peace Corps volunteers, serving in a pre-taliban Afghanistan. I taught high-school English in Kunduz, a provincial capital just south of the Russian border. Wheels? I got around in rickety trucks, crowded buses and sputtering taxis — and in 1955 Willys that took me on the trip of a lifetime. Read all about that journey in the next chapter of Autobiography.)
Chris Bateman worked as a reporter, editor and columnist at The Union Democrat for nearly 40 years. Now semi-retired, he still contributes columns on a variety of topics. His past columns can be found on The Union Democrat’s website at www.uniondemocrat.com. He can be reached at chrisbateman1908@ gmail.com.