At Auburn's Long Trout Winery, the Swingin' '60s never ended. PHOTO BY LINDSEY SHUEY
Originally appeared in the Pottsville Republican-Herald on August 18, 2019.
AUBURN - The precarious wooden staircase spills down the hill into the Art Nouveau, Hobbit-hole doors of the Long Trout Winery. Behind the doors is a pleasure palace of Baby Boomer nostalgia, a place where the free-loving, psychedelic-rocking Age of Aquarius never ended - though it certainly has ended.
“One word: groovy,” said Tom Leibensperger, 66, about life in 1969, the year of Woodstock, already half a century ago. A self-taught winemaker, Leibensperger founded Long Trout with his wife Kim in 2001. Wearing sandals, his white hair in a ponytail, he’s a tie-dyed-in-the-wool hippie. On Sunday, the 50th anniversary of Woodstock’s last day, Leibensperger has opened up his Xanadu, carved into the hillside and overlooking a blue-green lake, to a celebration.
“It’s cool, it’s peace,” Leibensperger said, “Peace and cool.” To him, that’s why the hippie movement is worth keeping alive.
Looking around, Long Trout clearly lives up to Leibensperger’s mission statement; to be totally different from any other winery. The standee in front of the doors was just the beginning. There are practically more “Wizard of Oz” collectibles than there were wines - bobbleheads, dolls, Jack-in-the-boxes and a disturbingly realistic life-size replica of the Wicked Witch of the West looked down on the sea of tie dye shirts, headbands and fringe jackets swarmed the bar, eating fistful of pretzels on the trippy tabletop, which had a picket sign on it reading “Draft beer, not people.” Above the Oz hodgepodge, medieval weapons hung on the walls. The cobwebbed claws of a skeletal dragon held a great silver sword. He also has every piece of erotic kitsch and classic-rock memorabilia that you can imagine, dredged up from rock festivals and antique markets across the country.
“I’ve collected my whole life,” Leibensperger said. “I’ve collected stuff since I was a kid.”
Born in Reading, he was a drummer and organist in a rock band called the Nation Dwellers. In a glass case inside the secondary fermentation chamber, along with gleaming metal vats and action figures of his favorite rock stars, was the Beatles wig that he got in 1964, the height of Beatlemania (“Wore it for two weeks straight. It smelled really bad.”)
The feeling of freedom made him gravitate towards the hippie movement, but his grandparents wouldn’t let him go to Woodstock. To Leibensperger, it’s “the hippie way” to be unconventional, and that includes the winemaking process, from putting elderflowers into chardonnay to filtering with his bare hands.
The Long Trout selection includes names like Dirty Dees, Flower Power and Burnin’ Bra. Speaking of which, a couple of rotting bras tied to a tree marks the first hole of the disc golf (a game founded by hippies, he says) course on his property, which he is proud to announce is completely free.
“It ain’t about the money, it’s about the friends,” he said. “You can quote me on that!”
Among all of the naughty, punning bumper stickers that Leibensperger has collected over the years (“Still pissed at Yoko;” Bigfoot: “I believe,”) there’s one he almost takes seriously: “Buckle up!” it reads. “It makes it harder for the aliens to suck you out of your car.”
“I believe they’re real,” Leibensperger said about aliens. “I believe they’re already here on they’re already here on Earth. I believe that everything you see here is real.”
What he means by “that” is a real trip indeed. Even in a place like this, where African sculptures, Santa Clauses, California Raisins and a corkscrew that comes out from between the legs of a Bill Clinton doll (“Who better to pop your cork?”), a place that is at once spiritual and sacrilegious, the crown jewel of Leibensperger’s collection is a masterpiece of outsider art. All across a wall is a series of extremely detailed pencil drawings that Leibensperger purchased along with another winery. Made by the previous owner’s son, Larry, they depict aliens, UFOs and secret codes. Larry believed that he cracked the code of the aliens’ speech and could translate it into English, and had a sort of Rosetta stone to prove it.
“I don’t know whether he thinks the aliens caused it, didn’t like it, or were just watching,” Leibensperger said, gesturing towards a drawing of UFOs circling over the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant during the 1979 accident. He continues moving through the tapestry of UFO design schematics and language charts. “Now this chick has the alien symbol.”
Larry also believed that aliens built the pyramids to use as nuclear reactors, and he made diagrams to prove it.
“I’m assuming the guy was on the ship and they fed this to his brain,” Leibensperger said. “How could one guy come up with all this stuff? This guy has too much to just be a regular guy, you know what I’m saying? People come to see the alien wall, they love the alien wall.”
Outside the fermentation chamber, far removed from Larry’s close encounters, the latter-day hippies were mostly chill, except for one woman who shrieked and kicked up her legs as she tried to blow a wasp away from her table. Inside the bar, people shimmied and shook to the guitar and harmonica stylings of Walter Petrachonis, 66, who played counterculture songs of the era.
In the middle of one of his sets, he had to interrupt with a special announcement.
“It’s just like the rest of the Nazis who own this township,” he said. “God forbid someone does something does something good to improve this area. If you have a car parked on the road, you gotta move it or you’re gonna be ticketed. Obviously, the people who run this township have no concept of what happened at Woodstock 50 years ago.” While some of the crowd shouted in approval, flower-crowned, wine-toting revelers shuffled to the parking lot.
Petrachonis performs under the stage name Fortunate Son.
“I’d like to say [it was] very liberating,” he said about the hippie era, when he was in high school. “If I went to Woodstock I wouldn’t have a home to come back to.”
He remembered it as a very uncertain era.
“No one knew their future. You watched the TV at night, looking for your draft number.”
“It stood for something, it made a statement.” He said about the music. “It was about something. Protest. Inequality. If you don’t remember it, you are destined to repeat it. And the Vietnam War is something that should never be repeated. But it will be, because our politicians are aching for another one.”
After shaking hands with a guy named Darryl, who claimed that his great-uncle was the sheriff on “The Rifleman,” Fortunate Son continued his set.
“Do any of you remember a band called Country Joe and the Fish?” He asked the crowd to cheers. “If you don’t, then get out.”
He led the crowd in a rendition of Country Joe’s “Vietnam Song,” which begins with a chant that cannot be printed in this newspaper (but the crowd was eager to participate in). Suddenly it was 1969 again, but a lot had changed. Wine was the drug of choice. The only person smoking marijuana was a painting of the Mona Lisa that hung in the bar. However, the spirit was still there.
“Thank you,” said a man driving away from the party, leaving the hippie life for another 50 years. “See you next trip.”