The Carnival Café

I (S.Byron Gassaway) worked at the Carnival Café in the early ‘70s as a dish washer and food prep person. It was located at the former site of The Little Kitchen, a restaurant that had served sandwiches to businessmen from the banks and stores downtown. The Little Kitchen was from an era when people would get a peanut butter sandwich with potato chips for lunch because Boulder didn’t have any sophisticated deli’s or restaurants, so they’d settle for what they could get. The old woman who owned The Little Kitchen whom I had interviewed for this book but later changed her mind about being included in the final publication, sold The Little Kitchen, located across from the First National Bank at the intersection of Broadway and Canyon Blvd. to “a bunch of hippies,” in her words. This “bunch of hippies” started the cooperative , vegetarian restaurant called the Carnival Café.

I remember it as being exceedingly clean, which was unusual in the restaurant business. The produce was fresh and grown organically and mostly locally, which meant there were no pesticides, chemical fertilizers or herbicides used in the growing of the food. (This was a revolutionary concept at the time). Goat’s milk and eggs were on the menu for less hard core veggies. I liked the people who ran the Carnival Café and enjoyed working there. I was fortunate to interview Marc Weiss, who still lives in Boulder and started Playback Theater in Boulder. Marc remembers the Café better than I do.

Marc Weiss

I came to Boulder in 1973 to go to C.U. and be in the graduate school . . . do graduate work in the math department . . . mathematics. I was always interested in radical things and alternative ways of being together on the planet. I got involved with Vietnam Veterans Against the War, although I’m not myself a veteran, because they were the most radical thing left after SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) had evaporated. The real radical energy had evaporated in 1973, after I got there.

Vietnam Veterans Against the War died out when I was in it. In fact, I was the last person left in VVAW, and I wasn’t even a veteran. And there it was with all this student funding and nothing to do with it. (So) I looked around for food co-ops to get involved in and there was one that tried to get started on Arapahoe (Avenue).

Do you mean where the Green Mountain Grainery was on Ninth and Arapahoe?

No. The Grainery was a private business. There was a food co-op that tried to form for awhile in the back of an old coffee house called Bacharini’s, which didn’t last long. They had folk music. It was sort of one of the last vestiges of the folk movement . . . a coffee house kind of a place. They had a food co-op in the back of it, and somebody came over and visited once from the Carnival Café to our food co-op, and that’s when I first heard about it and decided I wanted to get over there, especially when the food co-op folded.

I went over to the Café one day and I talked to Billy. Actually, I talked to several people, and got the idea of working there. One day I talked to Wind and Cynthia. Cyn, she was called, and Wind said he didn’t think I really ought to come, unless I wanted to learn how to cook or something. And Cyn said I should just come if I felt like it, and not to worry about Wind. So I went to a Sunday morning meeting one day, and they were talking about how we were going to structure the Café so that people wouldn’t just walk in and start working, but that there would be some way in which people would have to be trained by somebody before they could work there.

The whole structure of the Café was very sensitive to authority, to formalism, because the heart of it was that it was really owned by the people and whoever walked in owned it. The thing that was really the heart of the Café was that everybody that worked there owned it, and knew it. You were working for yourself, and at the same time you were working cooperatively with other people. So that there was a real basic equality about it, and a feeling that this is a microcosm of what the ‘60s is all about, people learning to work together on the planet.

It was run by the Sunday morning meeting. Anybody who came to the Sunday morning meeting, if they had the balls to raise their hand on the issue, got counted. Anybody! Anybody! (Even) people from BPI (Boulder Psychiatric Institute) walked in and voted on things and got counted.

What actually ran the Café was the shift. The shift had the final say in whatever happened in the Café while the food was being served. They were the workers. They were the people who actually made the food, took orders, served, waited on tables, and this and that. So they were the authority while they were working. And the shift was chosen at the Sunday morning meetings by somebody . . . anybody that had the balls to pick up the materials that were put together to create the shift and sit down and do it.

I do know that while I was working there that they were making enough money that they completely paid off all the debts they had that were originally created to buy all the restaurant equipment to set it up. And it became free and clear . . . a place that was owned by the people. It was a really beautiful community center – something that Boulder doesn’t have any more. There’s no place you can go downtown and just hang out that has that kind of atmosphere and friendliness.

How do you think Boulder is different (in 1986) than it was then?

It has lost its heart. There are still a lot of good people around. I really feel that there’s been a change in the society from, say, the ‘50s. There’s a sense of counter-culture or Progressiveness that still permeates Boulder that you don’t find in Goshen. I just met somebody from Lincoln, Nebraska who says there’s still a good community there. But I don’t see it in a lot of towns myself. Now it has turned into things like Alfalfa’s where you can buy really wonderful health food, but it’s not that. The difference, the only really fundamental difference, was that the workers owned the Café and were people building cooperatives like that. It was a real liberating feeling. It’s like you stepped out of the entire structure of capitalist America and into a totally different world. Suddenly your were working, (yet) you were free. You were with people and friends and nobody was bossing you. You could eat and be fed. It was wonderful!

It was a really special thing because it actually worked. It was the one place I found where all these ideals that people were speaking were working. There were problems that were serious emotional problems between people, and financially sometimes the thing got pretty flat, but it still survived and completely paid off the debts. It was just a free standing, running restaurant.

Somebody would walk in, somebody that hadn’t delivered there before, and they’d walk in and say, “I’d like to see the manager.” They’d stand there and talk to some long-haired hippie, and he or she would ask, “OK, what can I do for you?” And he’d ask, “Well, are you the manager?” And they’d say, “Well, we all are.” And people just could not relate to that. They couldn’t figure out – is this a person of authority whom I’m talking to? And, of course, everybody was an authority.

We had three Michaels working there at one time. So the third one changed his name to God . . . We just called him God. The third Michael, when he got up there, one day he was being trained and was standing there cutting up vegetables, and Gene walked by and humiliated him. Gene was a fascist. He yelled, “LOOK WHAT HE’S DOING! LOOK WHAT HE’S DOING!” And everybody came over to see what he was doing and Gene said, “Look what he’s doing with that cauliflour!”

He was not cutting it into little flowerets. You know, breaking it from the inside. (He was) just chopping at it. Gene was just going, “My god!” Because Gene had this attitude that things had to be just so, and he really wanted to see things right. He would encourage people at the Sunday morning meetings to use peer pressure, that’s a real good thing. I agreed that it was a good thing to use peer pressure, but he was a fascist.

Betty Lou – she always wanted to be the center of attention. (Marc shows me pictures of the Café. He points at a photo of Betty Lou). In the fish-eye pictures she’s always the center of attention. In fact, in one of them she’s throwing a moon.

Were you like a community of people? Outside of the restaurant, did you all play together?

Yes and no. I was actually a graduate student in the math department, and I’d go down there and work a couple of shifts a week. In the summer, I would work all the time.

How much money did you make?

At the end of the shift they would divide up the tips and split them among the waiters, cooks and dishwashers. The shift would split the tips. The terms were that you got paid a dollar and hour, all the food you could eat while you were working, split the tips, and when you were not working, you could come in and eat at the Café for cost.

We always added up the cost of food, and put on a percentage for profit. And that was turned back to everybody in salaries, to pay off debts, and things like that. And so you could go in there when you weren’t working and eat there for cost . . . so you took a percentage off the menu.

 

How did the prices compare to other restaurants in Boulder?

They were the cheapest in town. So you could work there and then go in and eat at cost. And then you could go in and buy food from the restaurant like in a food co-op, and take it home at wholesale prices. At Thanksgiving, they always had a free Thanksgiving dinner for whoever walked in through the door.

Who were the people who started it?

It started as a semi-private cooperative venture called The Little Kitchen. One of the original people that put most of the energy into making that happen . . . I never met him, but a friend of mine named Tom Martin told me the story that he had this vision of this place where people could come and learn . . . a place to live out their ideals. His vision really came true, but the story I also hear is that he died in a bicycle accident. He was one of the first bicycle fatalities in Boulder.

What was their demise? Why did it end?

What I think ended it wasn’t (just) the tearing down of the building. I felt like it was going away for a couple of years before that. In ’75 it started to fade. What was really the heart of the Carnival Café was this sense of, “We’re all working on this together as equals.” That was what it was all about. It was a communal, freeing kind of quality (or) trip.

It just felt like people were getting kind of flakey, seeing it just as a spiritual trip, not seeing it as an important thing – (or) that the Café was a place to make some money, eat your food, and go about your life. That was when it started to die.

The incident that I remember that really made me feel that it had changed, was when I hadn’t been back to the Carnival Café for a long time, and I went to a meeting one night – it was like ’76, I believe, and everybody was sitting around talking. There was a guy that wanted to use the Café at night to make sandwiches. It was his own business, making sandwiches and selling them during the lunch hour. He was driving around town to places where people worked, selling sandwiches, and he wanted to use the Café in the early hours of the morning, when it wasn’t being used, as a space to assemble the sandwiches.

So people were debating whether they should let him do that. He would pay some money, and he used to be a Carney, one of the original Café people. And people were saying, “If he’s into being a businessman, why doesn’t he come and work with us in the Café as one of the Carnies? Why should he use this space and make a lot of money when everybody else is working here and making a dollar an hour?” – kind of trip. And someone said, “Well, he doesn’t really want to get into the scene here again. He’s a good brother and he’s into making vegetarian food, and that’s what we’re all about, isn’t it?”

And, somehow, the sense went around the room that we were into making vegetarian, wholesome food. People were saying, “So what’s the difference with his trip? He just wants to be a manager and hire some people and run his own business. It’s not really much different from what people are doing here.” And I saw a couple of old Carnies scratch their heads , kind of thinking it didn’t sound right. You know, something’s wrong here, but nobody could figure out what was wrong – what was different. I didn’t say anything. I’d been out of the scene for a long time. I felt like I wasn’t really part of it. But it seemed that people weren’t aware of the consciousness of why we were there, trying to live out ideals. That consciousness was gone. It was different ideals, but it wasn’t so human (anymore). Vegetarianism or spirituality, it wasn’t the kind of working class mentality – there was a kind of Marxist quality to it.

Marx?

Some people say that what we were doing there was practicing communism . . . where it’s a state of anarchy, where nobody is ruling anything and that everybody is working together and making money. What was the death of the Café wasn’t that they tore down the building . . . it’s that people lost that consciousness that bonded them as working together. At points, the Sunday morning meeting became a powerful financial and political institution. I mean, when the Café was making money and had money in the bank, then we could lend money to people to do things.

For example, one guy wanted to start a painting business, and wanted to somehow get money from the Café to start . . . buy ladders and paint and get equipment he needed to get started, but somehow make it a communal, family affair. The Carnival Café was a fellowship. (And) it was a family. The closest thing to it today is the Rainbow Family. The Café was really intimately connected with the gathering. Having a kitchen at the gatherings means that (it’s) a focal point for a community . . . People actually living together.

Changing the subject, do you remember the recall election in 1972?

Yes. It was the realtors trying to get control of the city council again. There were a certain number of years after SDS appeared when it was real powerful on the C.U. campus. They got a city council elected that was real different. I arrived on the downhill slump of that – the student power trip. I arrived when that was disappearing, so there were still people in office that had control of City Council who had held control of it for four years or something and there were two in particular who were fairly radical on the Council.

The realtor money market . . . the land, real estate people, money, power trip in the city wanted to get them off the Council ‘cause they wanted to do things with the zoning and make a lot of money off the town. And so they stuck on those two guys the fact that they voted for an ordinance allowing gay rights for Boulder employees, including teachers of grade school.

Was it a big problem? Were there . . .”

All these faggots running around? Nah! There were just as many gays as anywhere else, but they probably were more open about it – admitting they were gay because they didn’t get thrown away as quick. And the ordinance, as far as I could see, was about letting teachers who were already gay say it not get fired. It seems like a pretty natural thing to me.

But the realtors, that whole power there, publicized this thing as a , you know, “do you want your kids to be taught by homosexuals?” I mean . . . third grade, fourth grade. I talked to people who had kids who were sort of progressive thinking people who were saying, “No, I agree with people being able to be free and all that, but I don’t know if I want homosexuals teaching my kids.”

A model for little boys?

Right. Homophobia is just rampant. (There were) Tim Fuller and Pen Tate . . . Fuller owned Brillig Works bookstore. They got Fuller out – and he was the most radical of them. The mayor, Penn Tate, went out, anyway, a couple of years later in the election. They’ve had some good people on Council since, but it has never had that radical way of thinking about things (since).

What I said about the Café is in several parts. There’s the structure of the Café. The heart of it is the Sunday morning meeting. And at the Sunday morning meeting , somebody picks the shifts. And the shifts run the restaurant. At the meeting, everybody put their name on a piece of paper and the hours they wanted for that week, and they put them all in a basket.

Somebody would sit down and pull all the names out of the basket and arrange them and he or she set the priority, and usually it was such an important thing that a lot of people gathered around and it was done together. That was one of the most sensitive places. The older Carnies got priority in getting the shifts. Some people wanted job security and wanted to be sure that they got so many shifts a week.

But again, the person that is doing this is self-appointed. You’d just sit down and start doing it. But, it’s like it was such an important task that nobody would just walk up and do it. I mean, I would not have presumed to do it, because I never worked full-time there.

There was a real family-like intimacy to it. It was like you just wouldn’t do that to your relatives. The heart of it was that wonderful sense of working at the Carnival Café, that you’d somehow stepped out of the darkness and that you were standing in this clearing in the middle of the woods . . . it’s like people were working together. It made you feel really healthy . . . you just felt real different.

It tended in the summers to get real big, it would grow like crazy. We’d get up to eighty people working at the restaurant in the summers. And every week there’d be different people. Every week ten or twenty people would come and go.

In winter, it would get down to maybe fifteen or twenty people working there. Sometimes it would get so bleak in the winter in terms of financing that people would pay to work there. There were times when I put money in. But jeez, you know, just being able to buy wholesale food, it was worth it!

Copyright 2026 S. Byron Gassaway