I met Stupid in the spring of 1977 while he was selling socialist newspapers at the Eugene Saturday Market and I was working as a sandwich board man to advertise for the venue.

One of my earliest gigs at the market was working as a human billboard, or a “sandwich board boy,” in my case, which earned me a dollar an hour plus a food voucher for a meal from any food vendor. It was quick cash for a twelve-year-old on a Saturday morning. All I had to do was wear a canvas sandwich board, like a 19th-century ad man from London or New York, and leisurely stroll around downtown Eugene for a few hours, luring other pedestrians to visit the top of the butterfly parking lot where the market was located.

So, naturally, my labor drew the attention of a man named Stupid, who was an old Wobbly. The Wobblies, a nickname for members of the Industrial Workers of the World, were a labor union founded in 1905. Their aim was to unite all workers into one big union to advocate for better working conditions and workers’ rights through militant tactics and a commitment to social and economic justice. I soon learned that Stupid was also something of a local celebrity who peddled handwritten photocopied pamphlets brimming with verse and meandering musings on street corners near the University of Oregon.

Stupid was a confirmed leftist and fervent advocate for societal change with a larger-than-life backstory. He was born in a Michigan logging camp in 1899 as Russell Dell, an heir to the Dell Publishing Company—an accident of birth that might have given him a life of wealth and privilege had he not been the black sheep of the family. He claimed to have worked as a logger, sailor, machinist, writer, and printer, among other professions, and he had old-duffer bushy eyebrows. Sometime before he moved to Eugene in 1973, he legally changed his name to Stupid to amaze his friends and confuse his enemies.

He was born Michael Mielnik but in the early 1970s most people that lived in Eugene, Oregon knew him as a fire eating, joke cracking, vaudeville performer who called himself the Flaming Zucchini. It was a character he would reprise over the years, even after he rebranded himself at the Oregon Country Faire as the tightrope walking comedic cult leader of the Church of the Incandescent Resurrection.

Ladles and gentimen, I present to you . . . Reverend Chumleigh!

Reverend Chumleigh (actually a trio of madcap-characters-in-one that included Michael and the Flaming Zucchini) was a counterculture vaudevillian that excelled in captivating audiences with his snappy patter, playfully plucked from the Groucho Marx playbook, while engaged in daring acts of derring-do—such as walking barefoot on the business edges of machetes, laying on his back on a bed of nails, and balancing between two chairs while an audience member used a sledgehammer to smash a cinder block on his stomach.

His signature stunt as the Flaming Zucchini was fire-eating, until one fateful summer in 1976, while performing his act in front of a crowd of a thousand peyote-stoned hippies during the midnight show at the Oregon Country Faire, his liver organized a protest march decrying the dangers of hydrocarbons in his body, and he vanished in a huge ball of flame before the amazed fairgoers.

This is Yeoman Janice Rand (aka Grace Lee Whitney), a character that appeared on the starship Enterprise, circa 1966.

She was sort of a glorified space secretary, assigned to Captain Kirk, that served on the bridge of the USS Enterprise. Not exactly a feminist icon but nerd boys like me thought she was the tribble’s pajamas. Alas, her tenure lasted only a year before she was replaced by Ensign Chekov in season two of the original series.

I met Ms Whitney in 1977, in Eugene, Oregon, when she was one of the guests of honor at Space Con Five, which was also billed as a Star Trek Festival. I also met George Takei, her co-guest-of-honor and Bob Wilkins (the creator and host of Creature Features), who was the master of ceremony.

But, the biggest thrill for thirteen-year-old me was being Ms Whitney’s assistant when she was signing posters for fans at Gandalf’s Den, a bookstore and role playing game shop in The Atrium, a building on 10th Avenue in downtown Eugene. My job was to roll and rubber band posters after she signed them and hand them off to the fans.

Afterward, she treated me to an ice cream at Prince Pückler’s, on the ground floor of The Atrium, and then kissed me chastely on the cheek before saying goodbye.

It was a half a day’s drive from Aberdeen to Eugene in the Grey Elephant and we arrived at around three o’clock in the afternoon, parking our 1956 International Harvester Metro Van in front of a large house at the corner of 12th & Ferry, several blocks from the University of Oregon campus.

The summer heat that day was awful and the van had overheated more than once during the drive. We’d soon learn that our arrival in Eugene coincided with the hottest day on record. August 7, 1972 recorded a blistering temperature of 106° Fahrenheit.

Relieved to be released from the belly of the Elephant, we walked toward East 13th Avenue—my dad and I shirtless while Linda followed behind in the sun dress her sister had given her in Los Angeles.

Turning left on 13th, and staying on the left side of the street, we headed east until we reached a corner store at Patterson Street called Bob’s Superette, where we stopped to buy soda pop, sunflower seeds, and beef jerky. Just after crossing Patterson we passed by a dry cleaners next to a bookstore called Koobdooga and the next house over (an orange and brown American Craftsman house with a yellow porch) was the Eggsnatchur Natural Foods Restaurant run by the guys that were selling honey ice cream at the Renaissance Fair in Veneta last month.

It’s raining today in my corner of California and rain always makes me think of the blues. And the blues plus the rain makes me think of Eugene, Oregon—where I lived from 1976-1988. Eugene is Bluesville in my memory, because that’s where I existentially felt the blues.

I was 13 in the summer of 1977 and still listening mostly to The Beatles and The Who, but I was getting tired of all the usual stuff I listened to and was primed for some new music. Billy Joel’s The Stranger had recently been released and it was fast becoming a favorite. I also really dug a trippy electronic music album called Oxygène, by Jean-Michel Jarre. Then I discovered Mississippi John Hurt and Lightning Hopkins and was instantly hooked.

Later that same year, John Belushi was in Eugene filming National Lampoon’s Animal House and he met and befriended a local blues artist named Curtis Salgado while he was playing a gig with his band, The Nighthawks. That meeting at the Eugene Hotel was the spark that inspired the first appearance of The Blues Brothers on Saturday Night Live. A couple of years later in 1980 the movie came out and the soundtrack for it became hugely popular, especially in Eugene, and it reinvigorated the careers of soul and blues legends such as James Brown, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin—to name just a few.

1980 was the year of the blues and it was also the year that Eagle Park Slim came to town. Slim’s motto was “ain’t no time to hate” and his mission was “peace through music.” He’s one of the many hard-working blues musicians in the country that never achieved fame and in my opinion it’s a damn shame.

Eagle Park Slim was thirty-eight years old when he moved from Colorado to Oregon and he got to work immediately as a blues busker. With just his guitar and a kazoo, Slim was the kind of seasoned professional that could immediately make himself at home playing his music on the street, and in coffeehouses, and in public markets, of any town or city.

Autry McNeace was born on January 11th, 1942, in Eagle Park, Illinois. He grew up with the blues and started playing at his mother’s club, The Village Tavern, in 1954. I don’t know when he took on the name Slim to go with the name of his city of birth but he was still in Eagle Park in the 1960s, working a regular gig on Sundays at Leo’s Tavern, playing guitar with Little Walter J. & His Hard Working Phantoms.

Slim expanded his territory to East St. Louis and across the river in St. Louis, playing with blues pianist, Johnnie Johnson. During his lifetime, Slim would also play along with Chuck Berry, James Brown, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, Sonny Boy Williamson, Percy Mayfield, Ike Turner, Little Walter, Joe Cocker, Keb Mo, and The Red Hot Chili Peppers. I’m sure I’ve left out many other famous and well-established artists.

In the 1970s, before he settled in Eugene, Slim moved to Colorado, and Eagle Park Slim & The Mile High Blues Band were the house band at an after hours club in Denver, with a regular gig Thursday to Saturday from 11pm to 3am.

I was fifteen when I first met Slim and heard him play the blues and I got to know him better after I graduated from high school, when I was working at Prince Pückler’s, an ice cream parlor with one shop at 8th & Willamette downtown and another on 13th Avenue, across the street from Poppi’s Greek Taverna and Lenny’s Nosh Bar. I worked at both locations and I always treated Slim to a cup of coffee whenever he came into the one of the shops.

The free coffee for Slim continued over the years and our conversations continued when I worked at the Coffee Corner kiosk at 5th Street Public Market in the mid-eighties. My jam on the boom box in the kiosk was usually blues (I was also obsessed with Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive) and I think he appreciated my musical taste when he sat at table in front of the kiosk. If it wasn’t Slim sitting there it was often Steve Ibach and Teddy “Honey Boy” Roy of The Soulsations, a new group they had formed with my pal Joe Lewis that was swiftly becoming the hottest band in town.

In those days you could go out almost any night and hear the blues played live for free or so cheap that it didn’t matter. There was a Monday night Blues Jam at Old Taylor’s on campus that you could see for fifty cents. I wasn’t hanging out with friends at Lenny’s Nosh Bar I was probably out somewhere else listening to the blues.

And Eagle Park Slim always seemed to be around—a warm presence that made everyone around him feel happy. It’s funny, blues has a rep for making people feel sad but hearing Slim play the blues was more like the antidote for sadness.

I recently called Slim’s long-time friend, Jan Brown, and asked her to share some recollections for this piece I’m writing. She told me she met Slim in 2002 at a bus stop and he was boldly flirtatious, singing a Lou Rawls song to her while they were waiting for the bus. Not knowing he was a professional, she complimented him on his singing voice, and he introduced himself and gave her a flyer advertising his next gig with The Vipers, a group he played with that also featured the aforementioned Steve Ibach from the defunct Soulsations.

Jan said she was a busy single mom at the time, and didn’t get out much to hear live music, but she recognized his talent immediately. They rode the bus together and before he got off at his stop he gave her his phone number and told her to give him a call sometime. Later that day, at the adult foster home where she was working as a caregiver, she showed the flyer to a couple of women and they both squealed with excitement. They were both Eagle Park Slim fan girls. So, at their urging. Jan called Slim and went out to see his show. It was the beginning a beautiful friendship and partnership that lasted for twelve years—until they parted amicably in 2014.

I also called Slim’s friend, Randy Layton, who released Slim’s first professionally produced album, Northwest Blues, a 1998 CD that had the appearance of a vinyl record from the 1960s. Randy wanted to give Slim an album to sell when he was busking—one that looked professional—and it was an album that Slim owned outright after the first pressing. The album has 22 tracks that Randy says “was pretty much a compilation of cassettes he gave out in the streets in the early days of busking.” Randy (also an accomplished writer) wrote the liner notes.

A few random things about Slim:

He frequently wore a fedora, like any self-respecting blues man, and quite often a tie-dyed shirt with dress pants. Like a true Eugenean, he loved his tie-dyed shirts and he had a multitude in his closet.

He usually arrived to his evening gigs by taxi. Often a friend would drop him off at a street corner when he was busking. If he was playing at a bar and you offered to buy him a drink he might accept a snifter of brandy.

At home, he had a poster of Jimi Hendrix on his wall and another picture of Jimi in the window near the recliner where he always sat. Jan says that Slim revered Hendrix.

One last thing of interest I should mention. Eagle Park Slim is remembered by many in Eugene as the first person they met when they arrived. And most of those people will tell you how much they loved him, and talk about the impact he made on their experience in Eugene. And Slim loved them back. And, most of all, he loved Eugene.

***

It’s a year later and I just found my notes from the January 2022 call I made to Jan Brown. I might roll some of this stuff into another revision of this piece but for now, here’s the raw material, if anyone is interested:

Slim mentored a young musician named Andy Strange who would later have a band called Andy Strange and the Strangetones. Slim was very proud of Andy.

Slim loved the ladies that danced at his shows.

Slim and Jan never lived together but they were in a relationship for awhile. Whenever she left after visiting him he sang “Hate to See You Go” or “Baby Don’t Leave.” Sometimes he called her his wife because he didn’t want to call her his manager, though she did a lot with helping him with booking shows. Jan learned how to use a computer from helping Slim put together flyers and book shows. Jan said it gave her a purpose. “He gave me a reason to learn to use a computer.”

Slim was cautious about playing in Springfield. Once, he and Jan were looking into booking a show in Springfield and they were walking through downtown and he said, “Don’t hold my hand.” He had experienced some racism in Springfield and was cautious about appearances.

He always liked to play with his band on his birthday.

Slim had one son, who lives in Denver.

He was always excited when he was on television. He’d bring over some black velvet cake to share and some chicken wings from Dairy Mart.

His influences: Sonny Boy Williamson, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Chuck Berry, Joe Cocker, Keb Mo, The Red Hot Chili Peppers.

He recorded “Baby Don’t Let Me Go Homeless” with Keb Mo and was payed in classic fashion through Western Union.

He didn’t like to fly, prefering travel by train.

He was a Rodney Dangerfield fan and memorized his jokes. He named Jan’s cats after ex-girlfriends and she named her chijuaja Rodney Dangerfield.

He had pocket bottles of brandy, loved fried chicken.

Slim died in his sleep suddenly during a heatwave in August 2016. He was under a lot of stress from moving and his heart just gave out on him. He’d had two heart surgeries that gave him an extra ten years than what he was expecting and had a pacemaker placed nine months before he died.

All of the songs he wrote came from his daily experiences and feelings and he made most of his money, just enough to get by, through busking.

He loved the rain but he loved the sunshine too because that’s when people came out and he loved to be around people and watch people. He loved to tell stories about the places he played.