Alice Brock

Alice May Brock (born 1941) is an American artist, occasional author and former restaurateur. A resident of Massachusetts for her entire adult life, Brock owned and operated three restaurants in the Berkshires—The Back Room, Take-Out Alice and Alice's at Avaloch—in succession between 1965 and 1979. The first of these served as the inspiration for Arlo Guthrie's song "Alice's Restaurant", which in turn inspired a 1969 film of the same name.

Brock was born in Brooklyn, New York City, to a Jewish mother and a Gentile father. Her family was relatively well-to-do and often spent summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts. After a stint in reform school, she attended Sarah Lawrence College and described herself as politically active as early as her teen years.

After graduating college, Brock relocated to Massachusetts and began working at the as a librarian. She married Ray Brock, a woodworker, shop teacher and real estate flipper from Virginia, who was working at the same school; together, with a loan from her mother, they purchased a deconsecrated church in Great Barrington, which the couple converted into a residence for themselves and a gathering place for friends and like-minded bohemians. She would later describe the choice of a church for the group as a form of sacrilege, using a symbol of tradition and established religion to further her counterculture values.

One of the Brocks' students at the Stockbridge School had been Arlo Guthrie, at the time an aspiring forester, himself a half-Jewish transplanted New Yorker, and the son of then-ailing folk icon Woody Guthrie. When Arlo Guthrie left Rocky Mountain College in Montana for Thanksgiving break in November 1965, he stayed at the Brocks' residence for their annual Thanksgiving dinner. As a favor to the couple, Guthrie and his friend agreed to dispose of the large amount of refuse that had accumulated in the church, forgetting that Thanksgiving is a national holiday, and not realizing the local dump was closed. Guthrie and his friend dumped the waste over a cliff on private property. When Stockbridge chief of police William "Obie" Obanhein was made aware of the illegal dumping, he arrested Guthrie and his friend, and held them in the town jail. It was Alice who bailed them out; her fury at the incident nearly prompted Obanhein to arrest her as well. In the end, Guthrie and his friends were levied a small fine and picked up the garbage that weekend.

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