Li’l Abner | HYPERCOMMON

American youth dissatisfied with mainstream values in the 1960s and ‘70s expressed their rebellion in a number of ways. Men grew long hair. They marched for women’s lib and Black civil rights. Protests against the Vietnam war led the nightly news. Free love, pot, LSD, and Bob Dylan were in. A counterculture fundamental was a belief that industrialization degraded the environment. Harmony with nature was soulful.

Hippies founded communes to grow their own food, enjoy clean air and water, and do as they pleased without the interference of squares and killjoys. A few of these idealistic, back-to-the-landers headed for the hills and hollers of the Ozarks, copies of The Mother Earth News and the Whole Earth Catalogue in their rucksacks.

In the 1970s author Thomas Michael Kersen’s 29-year-old father, Michael Kersen, quit his managerial job at a fast-food restaurant in El Paso, packed his family, and, with some friends, lit out for an 80-acre patch of property in the wilds of the Arkansas Ozarks. They wintered in a shack without electricity or running water. When it rained, he and his sister stuffed newspapers (unsuccessfully) in holes in the roof.

Like similar groups, the Kersens were unschooled in agriculture, underfunded, and oddly unaware of other colonies. The middle-class urban youth, many college-educated, respected the music, crafts and survival skills of old-timers and sometimes bonded with their backcountry neighbors. Conservative retirees, who were also attracted by the cheap land, were more likely to take exception to counterculture lifestyles.

Despite the vividly described hardships, the experience was stimulating for young Kersen. He is today an associate professor of sociology at Jackson State University, Mississippi. During the pursuit of his PhD from Mississippi State University he became aware of the complexities of Southern identities. Southern Missouri and northern Arkansas are not “Dixie” but have Southern components. Like Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis on the American frontier, Professor Kersen thinks the Ozarks is also a “transformational space”:

In the case of my research, I consider the Ozarks itself a liminal place; it is a “betwixt and between” region at the crossroads of various types of cultural heritages, and one in which isolation and independence spurred a diverging culture.

This “betwixt and between” state of the Ozarks often puts the region and its inhabitants in a situation of challenging normative structure of society at all levels. The region abounds with blurred boundaries such as southern/nonsouthern, past/future, and individualistic/communalistic. It also attracts people who live on the margins of society, sometimes known as tricksters, or “edgemen” as Turner called them. Last, when looking at the Ozarks, one is confronted with the question of whether the region “live(s) with and in the nation as a whole” and how the nation regards the region.

The liminal nature of the Ozarks fosters eccentricity and creativity. The Ozarks has also captured the imagination of people outside the region and motivated them to engage in alternative or countercultural activities. The region has lured all types of edgemen and women: folks that were part of counterculture groups, communards, cultists, and UFO enthusiasts. In addition to fringe groups, reporters, Hollywood personalities, and other key figures in popular culture have found the mythopoetic aspects of the region exciting to explore and exploit. Al Capp used Li’l Abner’s Dogpatch, a mythic Ozarks, to explore social problems. Even real towns, such as Eureka Springs, have a long history as places many people believe possess a mystical energy vortex. To a greater extent than in other regions, some Americans sought an idealized version of the Ozarks to found communes and follow back-to-the-land practices.

Moving past previous research that discusses the Ozarks as a unique region, I argue that the Ozarks is a liminal region, or a “thin place.” They are a place that defies conventional categorization and often attracts creative, often marginal people. The Ozarks are where the sacred and paranormal worlds are close by. Such places, like the town of Eureka Springs, foster inclusiveness, and creativity. This live-and-let-live attitude was attractive to communal folk who wanted to make their lives and the world a better place. It is also a region that appealed to the religious devout, LGBT individuals, alternative economic practitioners, and others as somewhere they could live more freely and openly than was the case in most other regions.

Wrote Kersen: “In the pages to follow, I use my sociological imagination as a scaffolding for the narrative about the Ozarks, modernity, and popular culture. Part of the sociological imagination depends on exploring the cultural and historical contexts that have shaped the lives of a number of different groups that have called the Ozarks home.”

Indeed, few books on the Ozarks mention Oswald Spengler, Soren Kierkegaard, Max Weber, or Paul Tillich. The book does evidence a familiarity with standard Ozark history and literature: “The Ozark Symposium has been the springboard from which much of what is in this book began. I will always be grateful that Brooks Blevins was the first to invite me to come and hear the various presenters. After that first visit, I was hooked and have faithfully attended every year.”

Some of Kersen’s interpretations are unorthodox, such as considering Li’l Abner a “trickster”—a mythic character known for his defeat of conventionality and disrespect for authority. Inserting a Jungian archetype in an Ozark book is an example of his “sociological imagination.” Al Capp’s hunky hillbilly hero is not usually considered devious or clever.

“Where misfits fit” is a phrase that has been applied to Eureka Springs, Arkansas for decades. Founded on a misconception that its numerous springs had medical benefits, the town attracted schemers and dreamers a century before the influx of counterculture youth. A haven for writers and artists, it was hip before there were hippies. Kersen describes the relative harmony the bohemian resort town achieved between its liberal constituents and the builders of a Christian theme park. Anti-Semite Gerald L. K. Smith never fully realized his dreams, but he did live long enough to create a 65-foot statue of Christ and found an outdoor drama, The Great Passion Play. Due to the financial benefits derived from these attractions, town fathers overlooked Smith’s bigoted past. So too have the newly arrived counter-culturalists. “Development and money making are very important,” wrote Kersen.

Eureka Springs Centennial mural by Louis Freund, 1979. This former Victorian spa in the hills of northwest Arkansas became a haven for folky bohemians when faith in spring-water cures died. It was a perfect habitat for counter-cultural idealists in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Eureka Springs Art Wall is a city and arts council project. The Plywood panels painted by local high school students often illustrate the hippie influence on the town’s image. A few miles north, Lothlorian Commune builds an impressive wood geodesic dome. Like many, back-to-the-land ventures, it folded after a decade. Many of its idealistic members went on to successful professional careers, several achieving doctorate degrees. Basically, the book advocates the idea that the countercultural invasion of the Ozarks has been overall beneficial.

The hippie era contributions to Ozark music are discussed. Several rock bands achieved, at least for a time, national recognition. Black Oak Arkansas, though from a small delta community of that name, did repair between tours to a 1,300-acre commune twenty miles from Mountain Home. Given that the trickster exhibits “unbridled sexuality” and Black Oak’s music was uninhibited, Kersen considers them, like Li’l Abner, tricksters.

Ozark Mountain Daredevils, the other regional group to achieve fame, wasn’t as “misfit” as the bad boys from Black Oak: “Many of the songs are set in dreams and mythic places that emphasize ambiguous or indeterminant facets of liminal space. Often, these fables focus on the wanderer, the homebody, modernity, and nostalgia.”

He met with members of a little-known band who personified, in his mind, the Ozark back-to-the-land movement:

…the Hot Mulch Band arose out of the region’s communal efforts, and thus, it emerged as the musical expression of alternative living in the Ozarks. Indeed, the band epitomized the cultural and creative matrix of the region and showed people that there was a third way to life rather than left or right. … Many back-to-landers in the Missouri Ozarks were focused on living harmoniously with nature, each other, and with their neighbors. Such living is a form of communitas that linked a reverence of nature and highlighted sustainable energy and food practices.

Indeed a 1981 song by the Hot Mulch Band, Ozark Mountain Mother Earth News Freak, is an anthem to the movement:

Well, I’m moving to the country where
Everything is fine, I’m
Gonna live in a dome and drink dandelion
Wine and
When the collapse comes I won’t get the
Blues
I’ll have all the back issues of the Mother
Earth News.

I’ll get my little sweetie and my
Volkswagon Van
See the real-estate man and buy me
Some land
A few acres cleared with lots of trees
A place
That we can fix up however we please

We’ll get our eggs from chickens and
Milk from a cow
A horse that plows and book that tells
How
An organic garden growin’ comfrey and
Peas
Getting honey from our bees and fruit
From our trees

Self-sufficient, well that’s the name of the
Game, I’m
Gonna get myself a system self contained
A wind mill to give me my electricity
No phone in my dome I’ll use ESP

No more Coca Cola, stop eating
Trash
Get into plantin’ gonna grow my own
Stash
Plant by the moon and talk to my plants
Consult the I Ching and learn to do a rain
Dance
Get into harmony with Nature and the Universe
I’ll do Yoga in the morning if my back
Don’t get worse

Red Zinger Tea and Vitamin B-6
One keeps me high the other keeps off
Ticks

Listen to Ozark Mountain Mother Earth News Freak,

If Kersen’s “sociological imagination” is occasionally professorial, overall, the book is thoughtful and original. His coverage of bands with a back-to-the-land tie-in and the fate of various communes is noteworthy. In the final three chapters, the author affirms his belief that the overall influence of these idealistic, neo-Romantic, often educated young rebels on the region has been positive.

Misfits fits nicely with an earlier book, Hipbillies: Deep Revolution in the Arkansas Ozarks by Jared M. Phillips whom Kersen references. Both college professors are in sympathy with the liberal beliefs and agendas of the young Ozark immigrants. They do realistically point out examples of their naïveté and agricultural inexperience. Persisting groups have overcome their initial ignorance and some have even prospered.

One might think the influx of pot-smoking, anti-establishment rebels would clash with conservative natives. For the most part, they were tolerated. Kersen’s book makes the point the Ozarks has historically been a refuge for those out-of-step with the dominant culture. Misfits and hipbillies fit in remarkably well and when their ventures flopped it was not due to the prejudice of locals. It’s a neat trick reconciling personal recollections with two distinct mythos—the old traditional history and newer hippie experiences, but Thomas Kersen has done an artful job.

Where Misfits Fit is available from the University Press of Mississippi for $25 (paperback) plus postage.

When life and art collide the result is not always explosive. When Al Capp’s cartoon hillbillies were played by real Arkansas youngsters in a Dogpatch built of abandoned log cabins and sawmill shacks in an Ozark hollow, the result was more of an implosion. The failure of Dogpatch U.S.A. had the hollow poetry of “not with a bang but a whimper.” The deflation of interest in hillbillies in mass media in the late 1970s and ‘80s, along with the disappearance of Li’l Abner from the funny papers, were not its only challenges. Developers’ fantasies collided with geographic reality. An amusement park is a very real, material thing that has environmental specificities. A comic strip is a paper-thin illusion. Dogpatch USA was located on a winding two-lane blacktop, miles from anywhere and years too late.

Given the history of Arkansans trying to disassociate themselves from the Arkansas Traveler legend and other rude, backwoods mythos, it’s surprising that it was a group of local businessmen who dreamed up the idea. While Li’l Abner often had satiric sequences with little or no mountaineer clichés, its central characters were indisputably hillbillies who lived in a southern mountain setting. Capp had been pitched on a theme park based on Li’l Abner before, but he bit when Harrison, Arkansas real estate agent O. J. Snow and some friends approached him with an ambitious scheme. They proposed developing Mill Creek Canyon, a scenic valley just off the Buffalo River with a fifty-five foot waterfall, a trout lake, and several caves, into a complex of rides, restaurants, lodging and the entire obligatory theme park infrastructure that would attract tourists.

There were some sensitive souls in the Publicity and Parks Commission in Little Rock with reservations about the hillbilly image thing. By and large, though, the business community and state government got behind creating a job-creating, make-believe hillbilly-land smack dab in a region with an unflattering primitive reputation. All the good timber had been cut out years ago and subsistence farming lost its charm. Ozarkers were desperate for employment. If dressing up in ragged old clothes and talking ungrammatically through your nose entertained outsiders, then so be it. The hillbilly personae had been created primarily for urban consumption. Capp, DeBeck and Webb were hardly southern country boys. Still Arkansas natives, Lum & Abner, and Bob Burns had cashed in playing rusticated naïves. People in rural and small town settings chuckled at Snuffy and Li’l Abner too, although they generally preferred folksier versions of the mountaineer. By this time in history, city and country sensibilities were converging.

Dogpatch USA actually got off to a promising start.

Li’l Abner’s creator gave a short speech to a crowd of eight thousand at the park’s opening on May 17, 1968. Capp and his wife also had been on site when ground was broken the preceding year. Then he said, “Of all the by-products of the strip, this is the one I’m most proud of.” Their adopted son, Colin Capp (Kim), came to Dogpatch in 1969 to help with sales and public relations. In an atypically harmonious blend of art and life, Kim fell in love with Moonbeam McSwine, or rather Vickie Cox, the local gal who played the sexy, but unhygienic temptress.

A million-three was spent on the park, and a big expansion was on the drawing boards. Four hundred thousand paying customers came; a million-two-hundred-thousand were projected for the next year. Alas, that first year was the high water mark. In the following twenty-five years attendance would never break two hundred thousand. An argument over whether to distribute the hundred thousand dollar profit from that happy first year among the nine local investors, or plow it back into improvements, created discontent. This riff led to Jess Odum, who had just sold his insurance company for millions, buying out the original group.

Bumpsticker. Dogpatch USA had Al Capp’s blessing, but he had little input into the actual park. That a group of native Ozarkers wanted to base an attraction on his characters flattered him. Doubtlessly he was somewhat sensitive to criticism that Li’L Abner reflected poorly on the intelligence, character and cleanliness of southern mountain folk.

Odum had ambitious plans that unfortunately collided with international geopolitical developments like the oil crisis, stratospheric interest rates, and flaws in the concept. When he hired disgraced segregationist, former governor Orval Faubus, to manage Dogpatch USA, he gave ammo to those who didn’t care for the park to start with. Faubus symbolized that “good old boy” type that, like the hillbilly caricature, was becoming a joke that no one laughed at.

Interior of a 1989 brochure. Near the end of its twenty -five year run, Dogpatch USA devolved from its Li’l Abner themes to an imitation Silver Dollar City craft village with a few carnival rides. The trout lake had been there before the park and it remained popular. Meager as its attractions were, there are a lot of comments on the Internet that reveal many warmly remember the hokey hillbilly hamlet.

The politically savvy hillbilly governor didn’t stay long at Dogpatch. Brooks Blevins works this into his summation of Dogpatch USA in his erudite book, Arkansas/Arkansaw:

We could debate the level of cultural degradation served up by Dogpatch, U.S.A., as well as the complicity of Harrison businessmen and locals and college kids who made a buck or two cavorting around as cartoon characters. But the fiscal health of the park seems rather more cut and dried…In the final estimation, it seems likely that a major reason for the park’s failure was location. Rugged and remote, Newton County might have seemed the ideal setting for a place like Dogpatch, but there is a fine line between rusticity and just plain old too far off the beaten path. Orval Faubus’s decision to jump off this wagon not long after jumping on it should have been a warning to the park’s ownership, for the old governor always had a good sniffer for trends and popular crusades.

Souvenirs from Dogpatch USA. (Click on any to start slideshow).