EUGENE -- A legendary day in a home-grown company's history dawned warm and grew wickedly hot, to a skin scalding 107 degrees. And boy, oh boy, was there skin to scald.

"The Grateful Dead said it was the stark nakedest scene they'd ever attended," remembers Chuck Kesey, who asked his friends in the band if they'd truck on up to Oregon and play a benefit for his struggling little company,

.

Unlikely as the deal seems today, the Dead did just that on Aug. 27, 1972. They set up west of Eugene, in Veneta, where the

encamps each summer. Funky, hand-drawn posters advertised the pot-luck picnic and Dead concert for $3 in advance or $3.50 at the gate -- "cheap," as the posters noted. The creamery transformed its Nancy's Honey Yogurt labels into concert tickets, and more than 20,000 Dead devotees, some clad in little more than their own fur, spilled in.

The result: one of those quintessential Oregon events that fueled the state's happy hippie reputation and cemented its place in the budding natural foods movement. Springfield Creamery, whose practices and products epitomized the pure, healthy goodness the movement yearned to spread, survived, thanks in part to the $12,000 to $13,000 raised that day.

Without it, the business that grew to symbolize a nation's evolving food tastes might not have stuck around long enough to celebrate its 50th anniversary this year.

**



Chuck Kesey comes across as quirky

-- a 71-year-old mad scientist in a milkman's cap. A charismatic, anti-establishment entrepreneur whose frothy white mutton chops nearly meet mid-chin. A fellow who launched his career in 1960 with the help of two great loves, his new bride, Sue, and that biological trickster, bacteria.

The stuff fascinated him. It had ever since he studied live cultures as a dairy science student at Oregon State University in the 1950s. Sue Kesey, a secretarial science major in OSU's business administration school, remembers typing his term papers extolling the virtues of

, one of those good microorganisms that lives naturally in the human gut, and the bacteria commonly used to ferment yogurt.

But that would come later.

The Keseys graduated in 1960 and moved to Springfield, where Chuck and his brother, celebrated author Ken Kesey, grew up as "creamery rats," working alongside their father, Fred, who managed the

.

With $350 in the bank, Chuck and Sue leased the defunct Springfield Creamery for $150 a month, and began packaging milk in gallon glass jugs for other creameries. They delivered milk to stores, homes and Springfield's schools.

But by the end of that decade, the milk business changed, and not in the little guys' favor. Production consolidated and industrialized. Rather than having it delivered to their doorsteps, consumers stocked up on milk at increasingly prolific supermarkets.

If the Keseys wanted to stay in business for themselves, they needed a niche product -- one that suited the back-to-nature sensibility they shared with so many in their generation and those that followed.

Chuck Kesey's great notion: yogurt, infused with his beloved bacteria.

**



Nancy Van Brasch Hamren had a recipe.

Her health-conscious grandmother made yogurt, and so did she during the months she lived on

s farm near Eugene.

Hamren, a lanky, soft-spoken Californian, ran in circles simply psychedelic with history. She lived in

district from 1966 to 1968, the bookends to 1967's Summer of Love. Her boyfriend's sister was married to Jerry Garcia, the

s shaggy-haired lead guitarist. And they all knew Ken Kesey -- from his books, "

and "Sometimes a Great Notion," and from the infamous, drug-juiced parties known as Acid Tests, which he hosted and promoted.

When Ken Kesey traveled to Britain to work with the Beatles in 1969, Hamren and her boyfriend moved to Oregon to look after his farm. When Kesey and his family returned, she needed a new pad and a job. Down at the creamery, his brother, Chuck, needed a bookkeeper. He and Sue hired Hamren, and they started talking yogurt.

The time was right. The place, too.

Eugene and Springfield brimmed with hippie bakeries, granola makers, co-ops and natural-food stores. College kids and others living there moved beyond white bread long before the mainstream pondered crafting diets around fresh, local, organic food.

"It was a very fertile place for an alternative vision, particularly in the natural foods world," says Cameron Healy, who in 1972 paid $1,000 for a little bakery next to the Keseys' creamery. "People had a real sense of mission."

Healy went on to found

of Salem, a leading natural and organic snack manufacturer, which had estimated annual sales of $150 million when he sold it in 2006. Today he and his son, Spoon Khalsa, run Kona Brewing Co., which makes, among other brews, Hawaii's only certified organic beer.

Hamren and Chuck Kesey started cooking yogurt, experimenting with various bacteria, natural sweeteners and fruit from nearby farms and orchards. They think Springfield was the first U.S. creamery to use live acidophilus cultures in its yogurt. It's among the bacteria known as probiotics, believed to aid in digestion and perhaps stimulate the immune system and help prevent infection.

Willamette People's Co-op bought the first commercially available batches of the creamery's yogurt, and when the stock ran out, a caller from the co-op asked, "Can you bring us some more of that Nancy's yogurt?"

It had a nice ring -- more palatable, Sue Kesey says, than a yogurt called Chuck's.

The Nancy's Yogurt brand was born.

**



The year was 1970 and next door to the creamery,

the Keseys opened the Health Food and Pool Store. A mural outside depicted a fun-filled utopia, complete with a rainbow, a man in the moon, a smiling sun and dancing milk jugs. Inside, not far from the pool table, bulk foods, whole grains, herbs, candles and, of course, Nancy's Yogurt, filled the shelves.

Chuck Kesey smiles slyly and his eyes glint as he describes the store as "a real culture shock to Springfield."

Healy, the fellow who bought the bakery next door, remembers that the place lit up whenever Ken Kesey, who died in 2001, rolled up in his Cadillac. He and a few of the Merry Pranksters, as those in his entourage were known, would hop out, shoot pool and raise the sort of high-energy ruckus that fueled their radical reputation.

That reputation and the impact Ken Kesey had on 1970s youth culture gave Nancy's Yogurt a nudge, or, as Gilbert Rosborne puts it, "The Kesey name gave it hippie star power."

Rosborne was a University of Oregon graduate student who delivered Rolling Stone magazine in Portland and Seattle. He recalls sitting outside the creamery chatting with Chuck Kesey when he wondered aloud: Why not drive a truckload of Nancy's Yogurt to that long-hair haven, the San Francisco Bay Area, and try to sell it?

He needed a partner and asked a Mill Valley, Calif., acquaintance -- a guy as sharp at auto mechanics as he was with a harmonica -- to join him. Rosborne and his new partner, Huey Lewis, called their venture Natural Foods Express.

They bought old delivery trucks and Lewis tuned them until they purred. The two men took turns driving the long slog between Springfield and the Bay Area, Lewis blowing tunes on the harmonica as they traveled. And the Bay Area devoured Nancy's Yogurt.

"Rock'n'roll, natural foods, pot. We were gonna create a whole new world," says Rosborne, who lives north of San Francisco, in a Larkspur, Calif., home he and Lewis once co-owned.

The men dissolved their business partnership around the time Lewis' band, Huey Lewis and the News, hit it big in the 1980s.

These days, Rosborne delivers wine for a living, but he still fills his fridge with Nancy's Yogurt.

"The main thing I got out of it," he says, "was good digestion."

**



The brand grew, and not because the Keseys were superior salesmen.

They admit they weren't. But their customers spread the probiotic gospel. Over time, Nancy's Yogurt, made with milk from nearby dairies, found its way into grocery coolers in every U.S. state and across Canada. Today, the company's annual sales exceed $20 million and Nancy's is among the top-selling natural yogurts, especially in the Northwest.

"Word-of-mouth marketing," says Stan Amy, co-founder of the New Seasons Market chain, "is more powerful than any other form."

Customers like more than the yogurt's tangy flavor and the opportunity to mix in as much fruit, which comes packaged separately, as their taste buds desire. Amy says Nancy's buyers groove to what it symbolizes: using top-notch ingredients, live cultures and traditional methods instead of white sugar, chemicals and industrialized processes. They admire that the creamery remains independent instead of selling out to a big company. And they appreciate, Amy says, that the yogurt's flavor, logos and recyclable plastic cartons -- fondly known as "Eugene Tupperware" or "Nancyware" -- have changed little over time.

"Not only was the product symbolic," he says, "but the people in the company are, too."

Stroll through the Springfield Creamery today -- the company kept the name but moved into a larger facility in Eugene in 1987 -- and many of the 55 or so employees are Kesey children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, cousins or spouses. Seven have worked there 30 years or longer, and Nancy Hamren still manages the office more than 40 years after taking the creamery job.

Sue Kesey, 71, handles the business end, as she has from Day 1. Sue and Chuck's son, Kit, 45, is in charge of operations. Their daughter, Sheryl Kesey Thompson, 48, markets the line, which now numbers more than 80 products, if each size and flavor of everything from yogurt and kefir to cottage cheese and cultured soy is tallied separately. Chuck remains the scientist and chief taster, personally testing each yogurt batch.

The creamery has struggled some.

One evening in 1994, an employee called Sue and Chuck's home, a little more than three miles from the plant, to tell them a fire had started upstairs and firefighters were on their way. Sue recalls seeing flames and billowing smoke as soon as she pulled out of her driveway, headed for the creamery.

Investigators determined the fire, which spread fast and destroyed most of the plant, likely started with a faulty fan switch in a storage area.

The company had been debt-free until that night. Insurance didn't cover the cost of rebuilding, but Sue Kesey says there was no question that's what they'd do. "There were so many people working there," she says, "and we loved what we were doing. We wanted to keep doing it."

The next morning, their entire crew arrived to scrub soot off the walls and begin to patch together a temporary plant from what was left.

Customers, distributors and store owners wrote letters promising they wouldn't defect to other brands. They'd wait for Nancy's to return.

About three weeks later, the company was back in the yogurt business.

The Keseys turned the disaster into opportunity. They rebuilt a permanent plant three times bigger and far more efficient than the old one. That move, Kit Kesey says, positioned the company well for the growth of natural and organic foods in the last decade plus.

"How," Sue Kesey asks, "could it have been any neater?"

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