The Coach House Residents

The Coach House residents, the body builder and exotic dancer, represented the "physicality" of the scriptures of the Understanding Movement.  Dr. John W. Hopkins allowed them to stay on in their home for nearly as long as he did in his Great Home, even though Williams College was under assault in nearly direction from a variety of official agencies.  And, as I pointed out, long about 1971, it could sometimes seem the estate itself was spinning people away.  While residents usually moved in with the express idea and notions of remaining forever on a great estate in the hills with cheap rent, the new renters all vacated within a matter of months on their own accord, and most were not replaced, as I understand.

Dr. John W. Hopkins allowed the Coach House residents to remain because of his genuine compassionate nature.

The woman worked as an exotic dancer, and in late 1971 she responded to a request to perform for some college frat boys.  The boys had been drinking, and she started to perform for them, but they had other ideas in mind.  They locked her in a back room when she tried to leave.  She found a telephone and called her boyfriend for help, and he rushed there in his pick up truck and pushed through the front door, and the four or five frat boys jumped him and beat him over the head with a hammer.  The exotic dancer was held down while one of them raped her with a mushroom shaped candle that had an American Flag design printed on it.  Those were popular in Telegraph Avenue trinket shops at the time, they were called "cock" candles.

The boyfriend roused from his bloodied unconscious state (I'm guessing at the details there) and got his girlfriend out of the place after arguing with the drunk frat boys.  The exotic dancer and body builder stopped at the first available telephone and called the police.  There was a trial in the Berkeley courthouse eventually and the frat boys dressed properly to stand before the judge, and after receiving judgement and paying their official price of punishment, they all went on to their careers and live out their lives, likely with little thought of what they had participated in that evening as they were so conveniently drunk they likely couldn't remember too much of what happened.  Or if they thought of it, they secretly figured they got away with something.  Feminist researchers could look up this legal case and draw their own conclusions.  This became a famous local case for the Berkeley feminists of the time. 

The drunk frat boys probably have found ways to justify their horrific behaviors, but Dr. John W. Hopkins and all who knew the Coach House residents were rightly horrified and disgusted by what they had done, and sought or wished for everlasting punishment for the offenders.  This in my history of Williams College is my way of assuring those rat asses are never forgotten.  I should install their real names here, but I never met them and this did not take place on the grounds of Williams College.  This is an anecdote to show how the place was under assault from all sides at once, and to explain why the Coach House residents remained on the campus when everyone else was leaving.

Dr. John W. Hopkins, a compassionate man, allowed the Coach House residents to remain on the premises of Williams College for very nearly as long as he did.  He was not about to turn them out of their home.

So you know the continuing real true history, the frat boy who raped the exotic dancer continued on in his career and life.  And moved a number of times for his own reasons.  But for decades, his neighbors would find xerox articles of this old event and the trial and judgement in their mailboxes and under their windshield wipers.  And his employers would receive copies in the mail, too.  Under the new "stalking laws" in the 1990's, he filed some official complaint, but he was free to complain, as they never could figure out who was doing all this to him, "harrassing" or "stalking" him in that manner.  I don't know, either, but I don't feel too sorry for him and hope that information and xerox articles continue to travel along with him, trailing ahead of him and in front of him, wherever he happens to go in life all the way into the distant future.