The Earthen Joy
This was a hippy kind of place in Tempe, Arizona. We went there quite often with my aunt and cousins after moving to Arizona in 1972. The alfalfa burgers were awesome!
I found very few references to the restaurant, but I have some great memories of it. Here's just about all I could find on it:
More than just a place to score organic produce or bag some mung, Gentle Strength served as a general store for the granola gang. Along with such bygone gathering places as the Casa Loma bar, underground movies at the Valley Art and the Earthen Joy restaurant, the cooperative helped define the Mill Avenue Zeitgeist of the early Seventies. Unofficial scout headquarters for many of the subculture causes that have swept the campus town over the past two decades, the co-op was genuinely community property.
Copyright, New Times Weekly
Three years later I was seventeen, living in Tempe, Arizona, going to school, wearing sandals, flowered shirts and cutoffs, and I had a friend named Jane who was a waitress at Earthen Joy, the extremely wonderful natural food restaurant next door to Gentle Strength Coop and across the street from Changing Hands Books and the Buffalo Exchange. One day I met Jane on the ASU campus and she told me she was going to see this cool guy speak, so I went with Jane. It was Ram Dass, the guy who wrote the purple book, that frankly I hadn’t thought about in quite some time. It must’ve been hosted by the Yogi Bhajan crew, because they had the front-circle position, and seemed to know what they were doing. I was a young kid far more interested in girls than God, and yet, there was something about his voice that I really liked. After an hour or so, Ram Dass said it was time for some of us to go, and that’s when Jane and I parted company, she staying, me going.
Copyright, Ashland Free Press
I found very few references to the restaurant, but I have some great memories of it. Here's just about all I could find on it:
More than just a place to score organic produce or bag some mung, Gentle Strength served as a general store for the granola gang. Along with such bygone gathering places as the Casa Loma bar, underground movies at the Valley Art and the Earthen Joy restaurant, the cooperative helped define the Mill Avenue Zeitgeist of the early Seventies. Unofficial scout headquarters for many of the subculture causes that have swept the campus town over the past two decades, the co-op was genuinely community property.
Copyright, New Times Weekly
Three years later I was seventeen, living in Tempe, Arizona, going to school, wearing sandals, flowered shirts and cutoffs, and I had a friend named Jane who was a waitress at Earthen Joy, the extremely wonderful natural food restaurant next door to Gentle Strength Coop and across the street from Changing Hands Books and the Buffalo Exchange. One day I met Jane on the ASU campus and she told me she was going to see this cool guy speak, so I went with Jane. It was Ram Dass, the guy who wrote the purple book, that frankly I hadn’t thought about in quite some time. It must’ve been hosted by the Yogi Bhajan crew, because they had the front-circle position, and seemed to know what they were doing. I was a young kid far more interested in girls than God, and yet, there was something about his voice that I really liked. After an hour or so, Ram Dass said it was time for some of us to go, and that’s when Jane and I parted company, she staying, me going.
Copyright, Ashland Free Press
