Scott Mac Adam:  

I came home from grad night and slept for 28 hours. I awoke to be told my mother had terminal cancer...something that totally changed my plans...and life. I decided to go to college at Chapman College, in Orange County, (closer to home) where I spent the next year and a half meeting my future wife, studying and visiting my mother in City of Hope Hospital until she died. Before dying she asked my future wife and I to take care of my sisters and brother because she know dad would fall apart. Of course we did...we knew she was right. We relocated my sisters, brother, father and his mother to Orange County. A year and a half later, he died-the day after my 21st birthday (significant because, only then was I "legal" and could keep the kids together. After graduating from Chapman, Judy and I took the kids and my grandmother to Claremont for grad school. After two years there, I enrolled in a PhD program in Social Ethics at USC. Meanwhile, our home was becoming the center of a small group of friends and in 1972 we decided to move to Takilma, Or. together. Takilma came together in the late 60s and early 70s as part of the back-to-the-land movement-alternative lifestyles/values/institutions. It is right across the Cal/Or border along the beautiful Illinois River in the mountains of sw Oregon. It has been written up in a few books and, at the time, Takilma ...Expand for more