Alice May Brock (February 28, 1941<!-- As published in the blurb on the dustjacket of the Alice's Restaurant Cookbook--> – November 21, 2024) was an American artist, author and restauranteur. A resident of Massachusetts for her entire adult life, Brock owned and operated three restaurants in the Berkshires—The Back Room, Take-Out Alice, and Alice's at Avaloch—in succession between 1965 and 1979. The first of these was the subject of Arlo Guthrie's 1967 song "Alice's Restaurant", which in turn inspired the 1969 film.
Early life
thumb|Brock lived with her husband at this former church from 1963 to 1971. Arlo Guthrie later purchased it.
Brock was born Alice May Pelkey in Brooklyn, New York City. Her mother, Mary (Dubrowski) Pelkey, was from a Jewish family in Brooklyn; her father, an Irish Catholic, She gave mixed opinions about her early life and parents, crediting her mother for a love of cooking and her father with encouraging her love of art and was registered with the Socialist Workers Party along with membership in the Students for a Democratic Society (as a founding member of that organization) and Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Ray Brock, a woodworker from Hartfield, Virginia who was over a decade older than Alice. Alarmed at the radicalized environment, both Ray Brock and Mary Pelkey urged Alice to leave the area, and the Brocks and Pelkeys moved to her father's hometown of Pittsfield, where Ray and Alice initially lived on Mary's property. She would later describe the choice of a church for the group as a form of sacrilege, using a symbol of tradition and established religion to further her counterculture values. During the summer of 1963, the Brocks worked at a hostel for youth in West Tisbury, Massachusetts, on Martha's Vineyard, before returning to the church in the fall for the school year and preparing the church to be livable. Brock was otherwise friendly with Obanhein, considering him "a very sweet man, and [...] a very good cop." The turning point in their relations came after they had made the film.
First restaurant
thumb|The location of Brock's first restaurant
Brock was persuaded to open a restaurant by her mother, who saw the purchase as an opportunity for her daughter to become financially independent. She had already been doing a significant amount of cooking and housekeeping for her friends at the church, which frustrated her. Alice said of the finished product: "The song is great, and it's very funny. Arlo is very clever. It's a lot of fun and it has a message of all the right things: of hope and music."
Brock would reflect on this restaurant's opening as the breaking point in her marriage. According to her, because she was now living her life as an independent woman and needed her own transportation to work the restaurant, Ray no longer had financial control over her—prior to this he had only allotted her a small allowance—which increased tension between the two. Guthrie also asserts that Alice was faithful to Ray in the final chorus of the song, noting a customer could "get anything you want...excepting Alice" at the restaurant, and his co-defendant, Richard Robbins, described the notion of Alice having affairs as being "complete bull." She did become a godmother to Richard Robbins's son Jesse. Penn, who lived in Stockbridge, had heard of the story from Brock's father, who was on the board of directors at The Berkshire Playhouse, when the song was already out. Penn and co-writer Venable Herndon finished the screenplay in 1967 and the film was released in 1969. As of June 1970, Brock was living alone in a rented house in Lenox, Massachusetts, with plans to stay there long-term. The book proved to be a moderate success and went through four printings. The location proved to be a major headache for Brock, as its infrastructure was not well-suited to an operation as large as the one she was running, at one point a severe snowstorm hit in the middle of spring, she had an admittedly "picky, petty" way of micromanaging the restaurant (continuing to make all the food from scratch even as the restaurant served hundreds of customers a day Smoking and alcohol dependency were Brock's two substantial vices; she was often visibly drunk during her time operating Alice's at Avaloch and would regularly down a pint of whiskey every evening during that era, commenting to The Washington Post that she never took hard drugs because "I can (dr)ink and (function normally) but I can't be stoned(.)"
In 2014, Brock made a one-time appearance at the Dream Away Lodge in Becket, Massachusetts, where she and other chefs inspired by her prepared some of her old recipes. what came to be known as The Kindness Rocks Project after another Cape Cod resident came up with a similar idea. Her home art gallery was located on Commercial Street overlooking Cape Cod. She and Guthrie had remained friends throughout the rest of her life, with the two regularly reuniting for the "occasional meal" when his schedule allowed.
Brock initially bristled at the fame that the song and (in particular) film had brought upon her—recalling that she had an "inherent aversion" to nostalgia and fearing that her fame had proverbially frozen her in time NPR reported on Brock's medical and financial problems in a feature on Thanksgiving Day 2020, prompting $180,000 in donations. That same year, Brock recorded a custom series of introductions to "Alice's Restaurant" for stations that regularly play the song on Thanksgiving.
Brock died at a hospice facility in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, on November 21, 2024, of "heart-related problems" at the age of 83.
Other/imitator
The Alice's Restaurant of Sky Londa, California, has no association with Alice Brock. It was founded by Alice Taylor at the same time Brock opened up The Back Room, then converted into a tourist trap by subsequent owners capitalizing on the similarity in name (eventually adding a "Group W bench" in homage to the Guthrie song).