Summerlane and Green Valley Schools

Lee Lady

Buck Brook Farm actually was a farm and they actually did grow a few crops, and collected crop-support payments for not growing a few others. The students and faculty all lived on the campus. The nearest town was called North Branch and was nothing except a crossroad, a gas station, a post office, a general store, and (so it was rumoured among the students) a whorehouse. Two or three miles further south was Roscoe, which actually had a main street and a dozen stores. Ten or twenty miles still further south were Liberty and Monticello. In other words, this was in the Catskills.

Summerlane was allegedly a pure democracy, where everyone, staff and students (including my three-year old daughter) had one vote.

It had been started by a guy named George von Hilsheimer, a rather authoritarian anarchist who was a friend of Paul Goodman and for a while had run an organization/anarchist syndicate in New York City called People Incorporated, whose purpose was to enable its members to live in a moneyless economy by establishing a barter system for goods and services. By the time I met George (with a very capital G), People Incorporated was long since defunct.

I had learned about Summerlane through Paul Krassner's outrageous magazine called The Realist. Summerlane was supposed to be modeled on A.S. Neil's famous school Summerhill, and also incorporate the ideas of Homer Lane, who believed that children should be involved in labor to contribute to their own support, or something of that sort. I never did learn very much about Homer Lane.

All considerations of democracy aside, when George made a major policy decision it was law and no other opinions were relevant. (In fairness, I should mention that this was rare, and most decisions were in fact made by the General Meeting.)

Staff were paid $2 per week. Of course we were given a room to live in (after some argument, my three-year-old daughter was actually given a room of her own) and all our meals. The $2 was for luxuries. Since getting to Northbranch usually involved an hour's walk, and getting to Roscoe, much less Liberty or Monticello, was a rare treat, there wasn't that much to spend the money on in any case.

Although I didn't know it when I left San Francisco and my job in the aerospace industry (Sylvania Electronic Systems West, in Mountain View) in June, 1965, "The Sixties" were just about to begin in earnest, and within a year or two going out into the country to live on communes would be very trendy for many urban types like myself.

But in June of 1965 I didn't know about the Sixties. It was at Summerlane that I heard music by the Rolling Stones for the first time. A few months later I head some students discussing colleges and one was said to be a real "hippie campus." I'd never heard the word "hippie," but of course I knew the words "hip" and "hipster" from the jazz scene.

George had decided to start another campus in a much less rural setting in Orange City Florida (central Florida, about half way between Orlando and Deland). This was called Green Valley School, and I went there with my wife (Betsy) and daughter (Gretchen) in the fall, along with all the adolescent students from Summerlane. (The younger kids stayed in New York State.) To round out the student body, we also got a new bunch of teen-agers from Florida homes.

About half the kids at Summerlane had been sent there by idealistic liberal parents from New York City, and the other half were there because they'd been kicked out of every other school they'd ever attended. But for the new kids in Florida, there were no idealistic parents. Either their parents had sent them to Green Valley because they'd totally given up on their kids, or (the majority case, I believe) they'd been remanded to our custody by various probation authorities.

By the time I realized that living in an anarchist community was not what I wanted out of life, it was not clear that I had many options left. It was hard to believe that I could get a job again in the aerospace industry, even if I'd been willing to do that. (The worst part of Vietnam was just about starting. The marines had gone ashore at Danang and we were no longer just advisors. And I definitely didn't want to be doing anything that would support the military in any way.)

The one place I knew I would be welcome was at my mother's. I forget who it is who said, ``Home is where they have to take you in.'' But in my case, I knew that my mother would be more than happy to have me show up on her doorstep (with advance warning, of course) with my wife and daughter, neither of whom she'd ever met. And I could go to graduate school at the University of Maryland, which was nearby.

Going to graduate school is the other thing people do when they can't figure out where their life is going. When you look at the professors on a university campus, figure that the reason at least 75% of them are there is simple lack of imagination. They could never figure out what else to do with their life.

Fortunately I wasn't destitute. I had a few thousand dollars in the bank. And the Math Department immediately gave me a teaching assistantship, even though I hadn't asked for one.

Addendum: Names.  October, 2000: Since I originally wrote this, I've received a few inquiries from former Summerlane and Green Valley students. It occurs to me that it might be useful to list the few names I remember from those days.

For a much longer list, more information, and photos, see Julia Day's Summerlane/Green Valley web site.

• George and Dianne von Hilsheimer. Later divorced, I've been told, and then Dianne died of cancer.
• Skip and Prudence. Skip was in charge of the Summerlane campus, at least when George wasn't there. Prudence taught the little kids readin' and writin' and stuff in the one-room schoolhouse.
• Lenore Rule. A long-time staff member. She had an apartment in Greenwich Village and perhaps was only living at Summerlane for the summer. Her son David was about five years old when I was there.
• Peter Strong. Big, cheerful, bearded. I remember him as being in charge of the "office" at Summerlane.
• Zeff. I remember his doing a lot of carpentry at Summerlane. He had donated the Jeep to the school.
• Phil Brougham and Marietta. They lived together and I thought they were married. Marietta was in charge of the Farmhouse at the dairy farm at Summerlane about half a mile up the road from the main campus. It was where many of the staff members lived, especially the temporary ones like myself and my wife. (Students lived in a house on the main campus.) I don't remember exactly what Phil's function was. Marietta had a five-year-old bi-racial daughter named April. I've been told that Marietta was murdered in 1974 or 1975 in San Francisco by a Black extremist group.
• Howard Craft. A staff member at Green Valley with a military background and fairly conservative views, which everybody put him down for.
• Sharkey. A student at Summerlane and briefly at Green Valley.
• Bill Burroughs. I knew him at Green Valley. I've been told he later died through abuse of drugs and alcohol. (More precisely, someone has told me that he died after a liver transplant.)
• Russell G. A student at Green Valley. Junior high school age. Hated the place and didn't really have any friends.
• Margaret. Maybe 13 or 14 years old. Used to write "Green Valley sucks" and "George sucks" everywhere.
• Norma. Student at Green Valley. She had serious psychotic episodes. We tried taking care of her ourselves for a while, and a doctor in town was prescribing heavy tranquillizers for her. Eventually we had to commit her to a mental hospital.
• Judy and Jerry. Temporary staff members who came up to Summerlane for the summer of 1965. They had a room together up at the farm house, dressed very much alike (jeans and sweat shirts) and did almost everything together. I automatically assumed that they were married, but just before I left I learned that they had in fact only met on the bus coming up to Summerlane. Marietta had assigned them a room together since they had arrived together and she had assumed that they were a couple. Apparently that was fine with both of them. At the end of the summer, Jerry very much wanted to continue the relationship but as far as Judy was concerned, it had only been a summer romance.

Addendum (May, 2001): A number of articles taken from SKOLE: The Journal of Alternative Education, mostly by Mary M. Leue, can be found on her web site. Mary M. Leue runs The Free School in Albany New York.

In particular, there is an article about Summerhill which makes some interesting comments about schools such as Summerhill and Summerlane and the Sudbury Valley School. (Unfortunately, her brief comments about Summerlane, which are, as she acknowledges, not based on any real information, are at best highly misleading and perpetuate an old apocryphal story about students voting to bury one of their fellow classmates up to his neck.)

Since I was only at Summerhill and Green Valley School for a few months, I'm certainly not in any position to make any definitive judgements about them. And in fact I'm fairly convinced that no one else, whether former students or former staff, is qualified to make definitive judgements either. Many students gained a great deal of value from Summerhill and have no regrets about not having attended a more conventional school. Others, far fewer as far as I can tell, now look back at Summerlane as a negative experience. My belief is that for the most part it did a quite poor job of preparing students for the conventional world of universities and corporations. But it's hard to say whether in the end this should be counted as a plus or a minus, and I believe that that is the source of a lot of the disagreement about Summerlane.

In her article, Mary M. Leue suggests that the sort of democracy prevailing at Summerlane and similar schools can easily lead to the group ganging up on particular students in way somewhat like The Lord of the Flies. I believe that this is in fact a real and serious concern. However I did not see it happening at Summerlane and Green Valley. What I did see was kids struggling to come to terms with the problem of being fair and at the same time protecting themselves from students who in a few rare cases were serious dangers to the community. The point of the democracy, in my opinion, was not so much that it always worked well and led to good decisions (although it usually worked a lot better than one would have expected), but that it did force students to come to terms with fundamental questions about right and wrong and justice and with all the problems involved in managing to live with other people on a basis of self-respect.

I agree with the comments made by Mary M. Leue that the leadership provided by the adults is absolutely crucial in making this sort of democracy work, and I think that the fact that Summerlane and Green Valley did work (although often far from perfectly) is primarily due to the character of George von Hilsheimer. There is a lot of good and a lot of bad that could be said about George. There was often an arrogance about him that offended many people, and despite his avowed belief in democracy, he could be obnoxiously authoritarian. But the thing that really made Summerlane work, in my opinion, is that George always deeply cared about his students.

A large collection of Green Valley photos from the mid 70's by Randy Skillin.

Some brief autobiographical information from George. "We actually had a campus in New Jersey, one in North Carolina, one in Mileses New York, and before the year was out moved Summerlane to Buck Brook Farm in North Branch, New York. Four campuses in less than 18 months. Whew! The actor, Orson Bean, paid for a year's tuition for a six year old street girl in Mileses. That cash up front tuition actually saved us! Later Orson started a day school in Manhattan."

Further Addendum (September, 2007): There is another discussion group for former Summerlane and Green Valley students where one can find a lot of information and photographs. For quite a while, I have been wary of giving a link to this group, because a number of claims are made there of extreme abuse of students by George von Hilsheimer. I have no way of knowing whether these claims are true or not, but they don't seem very consistent with the situation at Summerlane and Green Valley as I knew it during the brief time I spent there. But now, after communicating with one of the people in this group, I have decided that there is some content there that many former students may find worthwhile.