Story by Jim Crawford

In 2015, the Roanoke Natural Foods Co-op is celebrating its 40th anniversary. Many people were part of the birthing of the fledgling natural foods Co-op that was incorporated in 1975 to do business in the state of Virginia as “Roanoke Cooperative Association Ltd.”

In these stories, we consider the memories, character, and times of the founders and first board members. We will add to this record as our years continue to accumulate.

In 1971, Frank and Eva Jo Wu moved to Roanoke from Washington DC. They soon realized the area was lacking a natural foods store. They decided to buy bulk cornmeal, whole-wheat flour, and such things as peanut butter, and sell these items at cost to the group out of the basement of their suburban home on Cave Spring Lane. This genesis of the Co-op is enshrined in the historic narrative of the Roanoke Natural Foods Co-op and made even more compelling by the Wu’s continued shopping at the Co-op. For many of our staff, young and old, their presence is an inspiration.

The overlay of circumstance and character—the karma—leading the Wus to this place and role as “founders” of the Roanoke Natural Foods Co-op reveals a glimpse of their young lives shaped by the eventful years of the 1960’s and 70’s. The purposeful seeking and experimentation, the unfettered music, poetry, the back-to-the-earth awareness, a feeling of common bond—all of these qualities seem an appropriate wellspring for a natural food cooperative enterprise.

In fact, the 1960’s and 70’s, were fruitful times for the founding of natural food cooperatives across the country. This period is called the “Second Wave”. The first wave of Consumer Cooperatives, or the “Old Wave,” began during the depression of the 1930’s. Many were independent farmers’ cooperatives, and didn’t distinguish themselves from other stores. Few from the Old Wave survived.

The Second Wave of around 300 to 500 natural food cooperatives were conceived congruent with other movements of the time: civil rights, social justice, peace, women’s rights and environmental movements. Predictably, these second wave cooperatives have garnered some folksy characterizations, some of which border on the cynical, like “Hippies with a cash register.” Another notes that cleanliness was not necessarily a priority. There are only a couple dozen Second Wave natural-food cooperatives still in business.

Eva Jo’s father was a blue-collar worker, whose dream was to own a farm. In the early 1940s, her parents bought the “backside of a chicken farm” in rural Fairfax Virginia. Eva Jo was just a child. They modified a chicken house and lived in it while her dad spent years building a five bedroom, three-bath home on the property. Eva Jo never got to live in the house; it was finished after she went away to college.

Eva Joe, the oldest, and her four siblings grew up 4-H members, loving life in the country and learning animal husbandry caring for their own chickens, pigs, and cows. “I played in the band, that was my one thing I really loved in high school,” she says, “especially the marching band, I played alto saxophone. Basically, I kind of hated high school.”

At Radford College (now Radford University), she majored in English but found the campus ministry program extraordinary. She recalls traveling with a group of students to a conference in New York City to witness what the church was doing in the inner city. With the civil rights movement gaining momentum, “I got real excited about how the church could be relevant to society,” she says, and the idea of getting a degree in theology and going into campus ministry appealed to her.  This conference produced another fortuitous event: she met Frank’s sister, Annie, who then introduced Eva Jo to her younger brother Frank—her future husband.

Frank’s life journey was decidedly beyond the ordinary. Frank was born in China in 1935. His mother was a Methodist missionary nurse to China in the 1930’s and married Frank’s father, a Chinese physician. In 1937, Japan invaded China and his parents sent two-year-old Frank to Philadelphia to live with his aunt. He returned to China three years later and lived with his parents in Shanghai.

Frank was essentially a foreigner in China. He was home-schooled and spoke English primarily because he played with other foreigners’ kids. In 1950, China, under Mao Zedong, went to war with Korea. His parents were afraid Frank, who was fifteen, would be forced to join the Chinese army. So they sent him back to the United States to live with his aunt again.

His Aunt Miriam was unusual for a woman at this time: a Quaker with a PhD in Biology, working at the University of Pennsylvania. “She was going against the grain way back a long, long time,” Eva Jo says. Frank finished high school and attended Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana where he received a B. S. in Education and an M.A. in Counseling.  Afterwards, while working in poverty programs in New Jersey, at the age of 26, his sister introduced him to Eva Jo. They corresponded by mail and after a time, Frank began driving down to Radford on the weekends to be with her. They married in 1962 when Eva Jo was a junior at Radford.

The early 60’s were seminal times in their lives. The burgeoning Civil Rights movement galvanized Eva Jo, the daughter of parents whom she describes as, “very conservative and racist.” She still remembers the visceral impact she felt in hearing the famous question John F. Kennedy asked in his inaugural address: ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,’ along with his creation of the Peace Corps. “It was like, ‘Whoa’. The whole era was about mission,” she says.

In 1963, Eva Jo enrolled at Drew University in Madison, NJ to get a Master of Divinity degree. Almost immediately life changed. She recalls a Sunday she and Frank spent “watching the horror of that being replayed,” she says of Kennedy’s assassination. “It shifted things a lot, from that unbounded possibility, to ‘Oh my gosh, what do we do?’”

Her theology professor’s response to the question, ‘What’s it about?’ was helpful for both of them. “The keys have been turned over to man, like, we’ve got to be responsible, even for the horror, we’ve got to be responsible for what we can do to change what’s going on,” she recalls him saying, then explained, “We were pulled back a little bit, but still looking out towards, ‘What can we do?’”

Her perspective was altered further when this same professor, with whom she planned to get her PhD, was killed in a freak plane crash. “It shifted things again and the theology degree became a degree in looking at existential philosophy and less about how the church could be relevant, although we were still very active in the Civil Rights movement. It was an amazing time, totally an amazing time,” she says.

Frank and Eva Jo, with her Master of Divinity degree in hand, left Drew University, moving to Washington, D.C. where they did a group ministry with two other couples. They “positioned” themselves on California Street, which was mainly a ghetto at that time, and shared a “big old house.” One couple was involved with ghetto rent strikes; the other couple was involved in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the international student movement. Frank was a counselor at the United Planning Organization, an antipoverty program in Washington, and Eva Jo was a campus minister at George Washington University. “As a group we had a children’s program on the street, so that we worked with neighbors’ kids, educational type stuff, touring and whatever,” she says.

This lasted a year before the group split up. Eva Jo didn’t want to continue with campus ministry and she and Frank moved outside the city. They had their first child, their son Keelyn, and then two years later, their daughter Cybele. By then, Nixon was president. Under this administration, poverty programs were cut and consequently Frank lost his job. They wanted to stay in Northern Virginia but jobs were scarce. Frank eventually found a counseling job at Virginia Western Community College, in Roanoke, Virginia.

Northern Virginia’s loss was Roanoke’s gain. “So many things impacted us right in those years we came to Roanoke,” Eva Jo said. They participated in the first Werner Erhard “EST” training seminars, travelling to Northern Virginia. Eva Jo got involved with a local Women’s Rights group. Her papers at Drew had been on the woman as feminine and women’s rights. “Way before any of it was talked about nationally, it was talked about in intellectual circles,” she says.

Another fateful event occurred when Eva Jo attended a conference at the University of Maryland on Body-Mind therapies. She got turned on to Rolfing and returned the next day with Frank. “You’ve got to go,” she told him, “so we went back and he went through the same things that I did, had the same ‘Wow’ with Rolfing,” she says. They both realized this was their calling, “because it was instant change you could see, there was a difference in people as a result of what they were doing,” she said. They have both spent the better part of their working lives making real change in the region with their business, Rolfing Associates.

Sometimes seemingly insignificant moments, like attending a conference, contain the nucleus of big change. Asked what had prepared her, a self described “backward student from Virginia,” to be the person who started a natural food buying group in their basement, Eva Jo says it goes back to Frank’s care package he sent her at Radford.

“He got concerned about me so he sent me a care package. It was vitamins, I’d never taken vitamins before in my life, and whole-wheat biscuits, I’d never eaten whole-wheat before, it was white bread. That sounds like nothing now but back then it was a big thing. It was just like this little opening,” she says. Later, in New Jersey and Washington DC she and Frank continued to explore natural foods through health food stores and friends. “By the time we left northern Virginia and came to Roanoke, we were already quite oriented towards that,” she says.

It was in 1971 that they got together with a few like-minded folks and decided to buy sacks of cornmeal, flour, and other bulk natural food from Washington DC. Eva Jo and Frank were familiar with the natural food stores in Washington and also her parents still lived in northern Virginia so they could kill two birds with one stone. “You know it stayed in our basement for at least two years and every time we’d make an order it would be a bigger order and a bigger order. The basement was unfinished, so I remember just sacks of stuff all around the perimeter and then a table set up with scales for people to weigh out what they wanted. We just divided it, I don’t exactly have any depth to my thoughtfulness about it, but I always felt like it was a cool thing to see how much we could do together,” she recalls.

Interest rose and finally, the group became too large for the basement. Besides, Eva Jo and Frank were thinking of moving to the country. So the unnamed buying group, under the guidance of Fred Laplante and other volunteers, rented a garage sized space for a year or so. It moved to a small space on South Jefferson Street, then to a storefront at 5th Street and Elm Ave. where, in 1975, the Roanoke Natural Foods Co-op was incorporated in VA. And as they say, “The rest is history.”

“If we’d stayed in Northern Virginia would we have ever started a Co-op, would we have gone down that path, I don’t know. But when you move to an area where there is sort of a kind of openness and a kind of a pregnancy, it pulls you out into it.”

— Eva Jo Wu talking about moving to Roanoke.

Story by Jim Crawford

Fred Laplante enjoys talking about his experiences 40 years ago, occasionally chuckling at life’s twists and turns — its contextual landscape — as he references events, attitudes and norms of his past. In so doing, he seems to recognize the quirky nature of human endeavor; the shifts in cultural attitudes and the layered implications of historical events that his stories reveal. He chuckles, not only at humorous recollections, but from experience born of conviction and hard-won ingenuity. He is laughing at life’s riddles and you can’t help but enjoy this man.

According to Eva Jo Wu, whose basement housed the fledgling Co-op’s inception, Fred showed up at a pivotal meeting of the natural food buying group and was the one who took on the task of transforming the buying group into its next crucial incarnation: a natural foods store. Of course there were others that helped, contributing time and labor to the formation of the Roanoke Natural Foods Co-op, but as far as Eva Jo and many others are concerned, the Co-op survived in its infancy because of this one man—Fred Laplante.

Fred was born in New Hampshire in 1952 to a middle class family. “I decided to get out of there when I was about 20 years old, because I was looking for better weather and to be away from my family,” he says. At the core of his desire to leave was his father’s belief that the Vietnam War was a “glorious thing.” Fred, a conscientious objector, was on the opposite end of that spectrum.

Wanting to “live out in the boonies”, Fred picked up a copy of the United Country Realty catalog and found a listing for the least expensive land in the United States: Dry Pond, Virginia, near Stuart. Immediately he drove down, bought 25 acres for $3,600, and returned home to get his things organized for his move South. Soon, he and a friend headed south down Lee Highway in a “gigantic” 1957 mail truck, bound for this new land and a new chapter in his life.

They quickly built a cabin on the property and settled in, but not long after, the 1972 “Birthday Draft” lottery was conducted and Fred’s number came up for service. Because he was a conscientious objector, he was inducted into the Alternate Service, meaning he had to work two years at a qualifying non-profit organization. So Fred landed in Roanoke working for Goodwill Industries. “I got introduced to the other side of life, the side that’s not white. That was an eye opener,” he says.

In 1973, Fred heard about an upcoming meeting of the natural food buying club in Frank and Eva Jo Wu’s basement. He decided to attend. By chance, it was to be the last basement meeting. Fred recalls the Wus being burned out on all the work involved with their in-house food distribution center. “I guess they weren’t getting enough support from the members. So I happened to be there when she announced that she was closing up shop,” he says.

“This is something that needs to continue,” Fred thought, so he gathered his “few bucks” in savings and borrowed a few more bucks from his “eccentric psychiatrist” landlord. With this investment he bought “some basic food equipment and a bunch of food stuffs” and rented what had been a motel room in the Silver Gables Tourist Court (ca 1930-1945) on Lee Highway, just west of the intersection with Mudlick Rd.

The recycled tourist court was called Riverjack Crafts. “It was essentially a kind of hippy enterprise zone,” he chuckles. “There was a tattoo artist, a fabric artist and a woodworking shop and a bunch of other things.” He and a few other supporters of the new venture, Joe Klockner, his wife Linda and best friend Steve Drotus, figured an organic food co-op would fit pretty well there. “That is how the Co-op started, it was on eighteen hundred bucks and a bunch of volunteer labor,” he says.

Within six months they had outgrown the single-car garage-sized space. “It was just too many people coming to the store, we couldn’t fit all the food in there any more,” he says. So they found a little deli building on South Jefferson Street, near Elm Avenue. “The cheese case was still there and it was about two or three times the size of the motel room. So that was a lot more suitable for our purposes and we stayed there for a year and a half or so, right on the main street,” he says.

People kept joining and pouring in, all by word of mouth. “The thing was growing about 400% a year there for several years and it was exciting. It was a lot of fun. It was a great way to meet people, and I felt like I was doing something worthwhile and getting to know a bunch of people in my new home too,” he says.

“I was the manager from the beginning,” he says of his involvement, “because I’m the fellow who had nothing but spare time since I was not married, and no one else wanted to take on the responsibility of being there that much. Basically it was my money that funded the operation so I wanted to keep a hand in it and no one objected to that,” he says.

There was a core group of 15 or 20 working members and this number expanded as more people wanted to get involved. A year and a half after beginning the organic food co-op, Fred’s two-year Alternate Service job ended. At that point he started to take a “small salary” as the full time manager of the Co-op. It amounted to fifteen dollars a day. He continued to manage the store for “a couple years”. Around this time he started making trips to New York and New Jersey to purchase van-loads of food for the store.

The store on Jefferson Street outgrew the space in 1975 and the co-op moved to 813 Fifth Street, SW. This is the earliest Co-op storefront that still exists, the first two, on Lee Highway and Jefferson Street, have long since been demolished. Recently called the Water Heater, the Fifth Street building now houses “The Phoenix,” a small music venue promising “Music, Magic and Mayhem.”

At this location, on May 28, 1975, the group decidedly incorporated as the “Roanoke Cooperative Association Ltd”, authorized to do business in the state of Virginia—marking 2015 as the 40th anniversary of the Co-op. The first Board of Directors were Eva Jo Wu, Fred Laplante, Carol Waring, Joseph Klockner and Steve Drotus.

In 1976, Fred expanded food delivery to other Co-ops in the region. He made weekly trips up to the New York/New Jersey area to purchase bulk foods. “We’d get about 10 to 15 tons of food at a time on this ancient lumber truck, with plywood sides on it. I mean it was a real hippie hillbilly look,” he recalls. He delivered goods to two Co-ops in West Virginia, the Co-op in Roanoke and two Co-ops in North Carolina. “It was a Co-op warehouse, supposedly run by all the Co-ops in the Mid-Atlantic region,” Fred says. “But it wasn’t very well managed. It didn’t stay around more than two or three years.”

You can hear the pride and adventure in his recollections. “Yeah, I built it up, I think we were buying 30 to 40 thousand dollars of food at a whack, and using the same sources that we had used originally, places that I had researched and found. You know, New York and New Jersey were big food import centers, and so you could get just about anything you wanted there. And then there was also a cooperative organic food warehouse in Washington DC that had other things to fill in the list. And then I would make a few stops here and there in New York State to buy maple syrup and this and that, and Philadelphia to buy peanut butter. I was the gypsy whole foods trucker you know. It was called Wheels and Deals. I still have the rubber stamp for it,” he chuckles.

Quickly, the Co-op outgrew its 5th Street space and in March of 1977, Fred and his co-managers rented a “gigantic building” on Shenandoah Ave. Their new space of 4,000 square feet doubled their previous space and easily handled the membership of now nearly 1,200 families. Fred’s distribution operation moved to this location also for a year or so. In 1978 the Co-op was experiencing real growing pains both with the number of new members and the organizational issues that come with this growth. It moved again to a much smaller space but a better location at the corner of Westover Ave and Grandin Road SW.

This is when the food warehouse moved to Madison, NC where it faded from operation. Fred stayed on as a working member of the Co-op but his many hours and days on the road had burned him out. “I fell in with an old plumbing and heating man and found that interesting and could be home every night and I liked that,” he says. “So that’s when I started in the trades as a heating man.”

In 1989 Fred moved to Washington D.C. and worked with his Co-op friend Joe Klockner who had a contractor business in the area. In 2002 Fred and his wife moved to Seattle “for the environment basically and also because my daughter was going to college out here,” he says. Fred is still a happy plumbing contractor in Seattle.

Story by Jim Crawford

Joseph Klockner’s journey to Roanoke in the early 1970’s, like many of the Co-op’s founding group, followed similar pathways traced through the transformative times of the 1960’s and 70’s. Born in New Jersey in 1947, Joseph’s father was a third generation contractor, whose company built bridges, buildings, and highways in the New Jersey and New York area.

“I got a lot from my family,” says Joseph, who began working for the company at the age of 14. “One of the more important things that I learned,” he says, “was that my father and my grandfather had someone working for them that was their secretary bookkeeper. She taught me how the organization ran, how to do payroll, and how to keep track of the books.”

He still recalls the placard on her desk: ‘Why is there never enough time to do it right, but there is always enough time to do it over?’ “That’s pretty emblematic of the construction industry,” he says.

Joseph majored in psychology at Albright College and got a Masters teaching degree from Montclair State University in 1972. After graduating, he and his wife, Linda, got married and headed west, sharing the dream of starting an alternative school for children.

Joseph’s passion was psychology, and his combined interests of an alternative school and psychology, “just flowed together,” he says. “The most effective way to change the world is education of young children and changing the way that people perceive the world, what it can be, and what you have to do to try to make it be its best,” he says. “Instilling that in children is about the best thing that you can do in terms of trying to make a difference.”

This direction evolved from a combination of experiences. “I think what I got from my family, it’s kind of like tradition, but really it’s about entrepreneurship and independence and going your own way. That part of it, when you combine it with the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement of the late 1960s and the shift in consciousness towards greater good, that’s where it all sort of comes together,” he explains.

The newlyweds ended up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, but found it too expensive. In their search for an affordable place to relocate, they used the United Country Real Estate catalog to find cheap land in America. Bizarrely, this was the same catalog Fred Laplante, another Co-op founder, had used to move from New Hampshire to his new land in Stuart, Virginia. “We used the same catalog you know, and I bought 50 acres of land in Copper Hill, Virginia for $180 dollars an acre,” Joseph says. They settled in and built a small cabin in what he describes as, “God’s country.”

Joseph and Linda’s connection with the fledgling Co-op began when they attended a meeting of the natural foods buying group in Frank and Eva Jo Wu’s basement. “As it turns out, at this meeting they were announcing that they couldn’t do it anymore,” he recalls. “I forget why, but they had been doing it for a while and I think they were just burned out or it was just too much.”

As Joseph recalls, there were around 25 people present in the basement and Eva Jo asked if anybody wanted to take it on. Joseph was “excited about having found a place that we could actually buy the food that we wanted,” so he raised his hand. “And a fellow on the other side of the room raised his hand and that turned out to be Fred Laplante,” Joseph says, of this pivotal point in the Co-op’s history.

Joseph, Linda and Fred got together. They each were interested in having an “actual storefront where people could come and just buy their groceries and natural foods,” Joseph says. “Fred’s father was an accountant, he was quite skilled in those things, but I had a pretty strong business sense, so we made a really good symbiotic partnership,” he says.

Fred had a little bit of savings and borrowed some more money and rented a motel room-turned natural foods storefront at a former motel complex that was renamed Riverjack Crafts. With Fred and Joseph both working, they set up the store, “where Linda would watch the store during the day and Fred would come in the afternoon after he got off and I would come on the weekends or whenever I could,” Joseph recalls. There were also volunteers to help and Fred began driving to New Jersey and New York to buy food for the store. “It was hard to get people to deliver to Roanoke, it wasn’t much of a market there yet,” Joseph says.

This first space was quickly outgrown and a new space was rented on South Jefferson Street “for a brief time,” according to Eva Jo Wu. “Initially, Fred became the coordinator when he finished his conscientious objector service, basically full-time running the store,” Joseph recalls, “and Linda and I would be in and out and other people were volunteering. It was pretty much a volunteer-run operation. It took a lot of dedication for people to keep the store running and make it all happen, but it was really quite an undertaking that was vastly rewarding,” Joseph recalls.

In 1975 the Co-op moved to Elm and Fifth Street. It was here that Fred started a multi-state co-op delivery service. “Eventually we were supplying all the other co-ops that were in the Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carlolina area. So when Fred would go up which was about once a month, and make the pickups, he would wind his way back through West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina and make the final run into Roanoke,” Joseph says. “One of his last stops was Sweet Brier College,” Joseph says recalling these early days of volunteerism and improvisation, “because they had a dairy there and they made yogurt and they sold it retail. You know having not much capital to work with, it wasn’t a refrigerated truck, and so he would have 55 gallon trash cans filled with yogurt and ice to make that last run from Sweet Briar to Roanoke,” he says.

“We met a lot of people through the Co-op,” Joseph remembered, “it was really a major social center. As a matter of fact, I met a lot of people that lived in Floyd that I didn’t meet in Floyd because everything up there was so spread out, but I would meet them at the Co-op and pretty soon there was this whole kind of alternative culture growing up in Floyd and Roanoke, that was very exciting times to be involved in.” Joseph says.

Joseph, Fred and others worked with a network of small co-ops in the area, trying to network and develop the Co-op organization into something that could better serve its cooperative store members, by buying directly and not having to go through some of the large distribution warehouses.

“So we started this trucking company, Fred’s trucking company, it became known as Mountain Warehouse. It became his trucking company basically. And the Co-op started to be run at that point by a collective of folks because Fred was devoting more and more of his time to the actual organization of buying and delivering the goods, so to speak. So the management of the co-op fell to a sort of workers’ collective of which I was a part. I think there was five or six of us involved in that and we would meet at somebody’s apartment, have our meetings and share the responsibilities of managing the store along with other volunteers,” Joseph recalls.

On May 28, 1975, the group incorporated with the State Corporation Commission as the “Roanoke Cooperative Association Ltd.” According to the articles of incorporation, the Co-op’s first board of directors consisted of Eva Jo Wu, Fred Laplante, Carol L. Waring, Steve Drotos, and Joseph Klockner.

According to Joseph, “most of the fledgling co-op organizations were struggling with what is the best way to run this organization that straddles the line between efficiency and egalitarian management.” The Co-op had been run by a collective, but “at some point in one of our membership meetings, it was decided that there should be paid coordinators,” Joseph recalls, “and initially it was deemed that it would be better if it would be two people rather than one person.”

Joseph became one of the co-coordinators, along with Linda Swift. “That was during the transition between Fifth Street over to Shenandoah Avenue,” he says of the Co-op’s relocation. “But anyway, I worked at the Co-op and I do remember when they set up the coordinator system that my wage along with Linda who was my co-coordinator at that time, we were making $2.50 an hour. That’s kind of the scene,” he says.

Joseph decided to move on to other interests as the Co-op prepared to move to its first location on Grandin Road. “I was training someone who was going to take over my position, and her name was Edie Bush. She was a very savvy business person. She kind of took over a lot of the responsibilities and she was very much involved in engineering the move from Shenandoah to Grandin Avenue,” he says.

“I always felt that the move to Grandin was very significant, because it was the right kind of place, in the right kind of neighborhood. Shenandoah was off the beaten path and off in an industrial, commercial area. But the shift to the Grandin Road store firmly placed the Co-op in a residential area where a different kind of community could grow up around it. Edie was very much the spearhead of that and I think she did an excellent job,” Joseph says.

At this point Joseph focused his efforts out in Floyd where he and others were forming alcohol fuel co-ops. Significantly, he and Linda also fulfilled their dream of starting an Alternative School when they started Blue Mountain School in Floyd. “One of my proudest things was my part in starting the Blue Mountain School, just the fact that it is continuing to operate successfully and grows, and provides a great service,” Joseph says.

In the late 70’s, during the administration of President Carter, Joseph became a Vista volunteer, writing grants and running workshops on alternative energy in Floyd and through New River Community Action. When Ronald Reagan got elected in 1981, he eliminated a lot of jobs at Vista, including Joseph’s. “That was in the middle of the recession, so at that point in time I went up to Washington DC to look for work. Basically I intended to move up there and make some money for a while and come back. But there was work here (in Washington DC) and there was no work in Floyd or even in Roanoke, so I ended up staying and basically got stuck. And here we are, thirty-some years later and I’m still up here,” he says.

“I’ve credited my experience in my family business for that and of course I have been running my own business now for over thirty years and grew it up from nothing to, oh, we have about 25 people here now. Its called Klockner and Company,” he says.

Joseph plans to semi-retire in a few years and will move back to his home on 40 acres in Copper Hill. “Its really what I consider to be my home,” he says. Joseph is still an active lifetime member and shops at the Co-op whenever he can get back to Copper Hill for a long weekend or holiday. Interestingly, in 2012, Klockner and Company built a home for another Co-op member on 116 acres that was put into conservation by the owners. The land adjoins the Co-op’s newly acquired Heritage Point farm.

Story by Jim Crawford

Locating and communicating with Steve Drotos, member of the first Co-op board, is an interesting exercise in geographic spatial thinking. Steve has never been one to stay in one place for long. He was born in 1947 in Pennsylvania, his mother’s birthplace and where his parents met. His first move came at age 2, when his parents moved their family, Steve and his older sister, to White Plains, NY. Then they moved to Puerto Rico where his younger sister was born. They returned to Pennsylvania for a time then moved to Caldwell, NJ, his father’s birthplace. Finally, when Steve was in the 4th grade, the family settled in Mountain Lakes, New Jersey for the rest of Steve’s school years.

Mountain Lakes proved propitious for Steve. While in school there, he met Joseph Klockner and a life-long friendship was forged. Years later they would serve together on the first Roanoke Natural Foods Co-op board.

Joseph and his girlfriend (and future wife), Lynda Rizzio, introduced Steve to Beth Luippold and they married in 1969. Steve’s parents had moved to Los Altos, California and he decided to transfer to nearby San Jose State University from LaSalle College in Philadelphia, run by the Christian Brothers sect of the Catholic Church. “It was way cheaper and better weather, plus I’d been suspended for behavior unbecoming a Christian Brothers run College,” Steve says, outlining the wisdom of the move. They loaded up Beth’s 1964 Corvair and made the 3,000-mile trip to California. Despite admitting he’d “entered the hippy world of drugs and alternative thinking,” he finished school and Beth earned her dental hygiene license.

After graduating, Steve and Beth began a life of travel. They transformed a truck into a camper “spending time here and there, like Hawaii [not in camper], Colorado and San Diego. Along the way we spent a few months hear Boulder, CO and I got a job building an apartment complex,” Steve says of his intro to his life-long occupation: building construction.

In 1972, on the suggestion of a friend, they journeyed to the Roanoke area and “spent a few weeks in the woods and hills and the Shenandoah and loved it.” When they returned to San Diego, their friends, Joseph and Lynda happened to visit them. Steve convinced them to visit the Roanoke area, kindling the remarkable connection of these high school friends from New Jersey with the founding of Roanoke Natural Foods Co-op.

“Joe went to Roanoke a bit after that,” Steve says of their San Diego visit. “He bought land in Copper Hill and invited us to visit. In ’73 we visited Joe and Lynda in Copper Hill and decided to move there and form a commune. We went back to San Diego, loaded a U-Haul and drove back with two dogs and two cats.”

True to the times, Steve built an 8-sided log house topped by a geodesic dome with a 14’ diameter skylight and settled into life on the land. “Lots of hippies in Floyd were looking for whole grains, nuts, fruits and veggies, “ Steve explains, “and somehow we heard about the buying club.”

Steve recalls the eventful times after the legendary “Last Meeting” of the buying club in the Wus’ basement. “Potluck dinners, parties and get-togethers led to talk of opening a storefront or a warehouse so folks could shop more spontaneously rather than preordering and prepaying, which was logistically difficult given the distances, lack of phones and unreliable transportation,” Steve says.

“So Fred, Eva Jo, Joe, Beth, Lynda and I set about looking for a store, someone found Riverjack and we made the first store there,” Steve says of the Riverjack Crafts location. “Fred and I hit it off and did a lot of work on the first few stores.”

By 1975, 40 years ago, the Co-op was at its third location on Fifth Street SW, the site of incorporation of the Roanoke Natural Foods Co-op in Virginia. Steve and Beth separated, and he bought some land near Joe’s and built a cabin. “The Co-op became somewhat of a focus for me and I spent a lot of time there,” he says. “Since everyone there had to earn a living outside the organization, I also spent time as an auto mechanic, carpenter and handyman, as well as working on my cabin,” he says.

Several years “flew past” and Steve thought the Co-op was running “pretty smoothly.” He ended his active involvement with the Co-op and began a period of doing construction jobs in various locations, Floyd, Baltimore, Roanoke, and the Silicon Valley to name a few. Each location involved a year or two or three. One memorable project Steve was joined in Washington D.C. by his Roanoke co-op friends Joe, Fred and their wives.

“By 2010, I burned out on building and remodeling homes, having spent 40 years doing it and built a cabin in Jamaica and worked a bit there,” Steve says. He returned to California for a job or two but “closed business for good in 2012,” Steve says. His third marriage ended and he sold his California house and moved to his cabin in Jamaica. He contacted Beth, his first wife, “and surprisingly she responded positively,” he says, “after 37 years, we got back together.” They spend time in Jamaica and Spain where they have a house on the Costa Blanca, and visit Steve’s Mom in California “every once in a while,” he says.

Asked to explain this nomadic spirit, Steve explains, “My Dad was a machinist who worked in the metal trade, his father was too. He was a shop foreman/manager and being of Gypsy blood (Hungarian), he moved from company to company and place to place with an ease that drove my mom (Italian) crazy.  I guess I inherited that trait from him.” Truer words have not been spoken.

“I am waiting for inspiration on what to do next,” Steve says, having lost the urge to do business. “For now, I travel, teach construction to the local Jamaicans when there, learn Spanish when here, read history, read USA Today and the Economist on my IPad, watch the news and some old TV series like Mad Men and House of Elliott with Beth, who never saw them, work on the house, our R/V, and walk the dogs with Beth,” he says.

“The Roanoke area is still a special place to me and appears frequently in my memories, and I go back to visit several old friends occasionally,” he says, adding, “We bought an old R/V and are touring Europe little by little.”