Yachats, Oregon and Hazel Miller

My grandmother Hazel owned a restaurant on University of Oregon campus, where the bookstore is now. 

She went to college to become a school teacher.  She taught four years until she married.  Then the county made her resign in case she corrupted the children’s minds by becoming pregnant.  (Horrors!)  I suppose the inspiration for the restaurant came from the recipes she collected while she was a member of the college cooking club.

The cooking club was smitten with Crisco, which launched its first radio advertisements in 1923.  You can almost imagine them swooning over it.  Recipes written in 1922 had no Crisco.  In 1923 everything seemed to contain Crisco!  (I don’t understand.  Tasteless white fat made in a laboratory seems awfully unappetizing.  If I’m going to eat fat, I want every calorie of it to be delicious.   I suppose at that time, radio ads were new enough so they did not realize they were being manipulated.)   

I have Grandmother's recipes, all written in her lovely teacher’s longhand.  They are yellowed, torn and wrinkled, stuffed into a blackish leather book that is scuffed like an old man’s shoe.  I am afraid to lose any, so I keep the book in a plastic Zip-lock bag.  Once in a while I open the book up randomly to a page, just to think about what I find.

My mother, who waitressed in the restaurant, said the weekday meals were acceptable farmhouse fare.  Eugene was still a small town, not like Portland or Seattle, which were far more cosmopolitan.  Dairy, grass seed farms and homesteads surrounded the area.  The students probably expected hamburgers, white biscuits and meat loaf.  Every Sunday, Grandmother made international fare from far away places like Italy and Pakistan! 

My mother says Grandmother’s interests skipped a generation and settled on me.   I’m the one who wants to own a restaurant and likes canning, homesteading and putting by.  Both of us, however, inherited her interest in environmental politics.  


When my grandmother retired from the restaurant, she moved to Perch Street in Yachats, to a tiny cabin that she remodeled with interesting found materials.   She lived there until she died in her mid-80s after a long fight with assorted cancers and emphysema.  

Today I am looking out the window of a Yachats hotel room overlooking the beachfront 804 Indian trail, which is now on the National Historic register. 


In the 1970s, my grandmother and four other locals initiated a massive letter writing campaign to save this trail from being privatized by casinos and closed off to the public. I don’t remember the others involved.  I was just a child.  I remember only my grandmother, sitting in the little log church museum or in the odd green light of her plastic garage, writing out hundreds of letters longhand, addressing and licking hundreds of envelopes, licking hundreds of stamps she paid for herself although she was very poor.  She sent me to Washington, D.C. to talk to Senator Bob Packwood and someone else I don’t remember.  I was small, blonde and cute at the time (I am none of those now) and apparently we had an impact, because the trail was saved.  

There is a bench here – not her original bench, a replacement - with her name and that of another woman’s on it.  I remember her sitting in about that spot, looking a bit odd, wearing three shirts, a scarf, a baseball hat and dark sunglasses.  She fed the seagulls dry ends of bread.

My parents used to sit on that same bench when they lived not far from here.  I have a picture of my father hand feeding bread to a squirrel on that bench.  He is also deceased.

Grandmother’s friends are gone.  The fishermen with peeling faces and hands.  The stooped women seascape painters with puffy bodies like rising bread dough.  The gardeners who fiercely dominated this windy and gravelly land.  All gone, the 33 or so year-round residents I remember from the seventies.  Also gone are most of their  gray, wind-chipped single bedroom-bathroom-kitchen-mudroom cabins, all replaced with multi-colored-storied-bedroomed-bathroomed-windowed architectural wonders.

Today I realized Yachats is not our town anymore.  It is now “The gem of the Oregon Coast”, a beautiful little tourist destination, studded with restaurants, wine stores, crystal and cheese shops and bakeries that are open on weekends. If you Google this town, you will find articles in major newspapers from all over the United States - heck, even in the New York Times wrote about this place.  So Hazel won, did she not? 

But today, I feel heartsick and so I am going to get in the car and drive north, to a town I don’t know, to a town where I can sip a cup of coffee and walk on the beach and see beyond my own memories.