Yes! I lived there, too. We refurbished a beautiful big house on Squirrel Hill that's probably worth a fortune now. It had been inhabited by counter-culture types of some unknown flavor and was really trashed. It might have been a motorcycle clubhouse, now that I think of it.A group from Harrisburg, State College (did you know about that one?) and Philadelphia went as "missionaries" to the wild west(ern Pa.) I was one of the pioneers, LOL.
After the house was finished, my enthusiam waned considerably. I had no desire to scrape paint for the rest of my life. The house "father" (it was still a coed ashram at the time) put an ad in the local paper offering the services of young men from a "spiritual home." The guy who hired me thought we were mainline christians and wasn't very happy to find out about the guru. Just a small deception for the Lord.
It was in Pittsburg that I decided to take the leap and don the red nighty made famous in CORN, (snicker!) I met up with some ashram pals in Houston at the Coca Cola plant and they told me how freaked out they were at finding my meditation sheet and baragon on the ground behind the garage next to the fence in a narrow space rarely visited. They thought maybe I'd been beamed up (RIP, Scotty, btw.)
That was the end of my ashram daze, but I lived in Castro Astro premie house for several weeks and spent months in Kings Beach at Lake Tahoe in a premie house. That was the absolute best, but I foolishly left to do service at the Greatest Event in the History of Mankind, Millennium, '73.
Jai satchitanand, Joe!
