By: Caitlyn Tompkins, Content Specialist
Wondering why the eggplant has been our muse for so long? Meet Eggie, Willy Street Co-op’s original mascot, and Hawley, Eggie’s creator. I had the chance to ask Hawley a couple of questions about her stint as the Co-op’s resident illustrator from 1976 to the early 90s and she gave us this lovely little slice of eastside life.
HAWLEY: “Yes, indeed, I always did want to be an artist and only an artist–never went thru the famous ballerina or cowgirl or nuclear scientist period–where I had my first show in kindergarten at the Laguna Beach Art Festival and went straight thru all the art courses HS and UNI could offer (other than a short stint in New Mexico where my husband and I tried to raise goats and build our own house from adobe–that lasted approx 2 weeks) but it wasn’t ’til moving here and going to one year of MATC that I found someone to teach me the nuts and bolts of actually putting together a portfolio and how to find clients.
I worked at the coop when it was in the old veterinary office and served on the board of directors. We didn’t have a functioning cash register but did have a beautiful antique one that just stayed open with a cardboard box inside and a store cat named Winky who kept us mouse free pretty much but did lounge in the open bulk bags. We were very earnest–I remember the huge controversy over whether or not to carry ice cream with sugar in it and then, what to sell it in cups with plastic (!) spoons, wooden spoons (bamboo ones weren’t an option) or spoons hanging from twine.
I loved my time at the Co-op, both as a young twenty something, lugging my bulgur home across Orton Park to try and figure out how the hell to turn that into dinner and then as a thirty something, doing the ad art at 2AM with sleepless babies and then as a 40-50 something acting all professional with my own studio, then my sixties were in the Eastern Mediterranean, learning how to actually cook bulgur before coming back and enjoying just being a customer at a totally transformed Willy Street.
Y’know the original Eggie wasn’t an eggplant, it was a western-style carrot with chaps.
I found the old ad and will bring it along to the Retrospective but as soon as I did the eggplant, I was happy with his otherness (cartoon carrots are a dime a dozen but at that time eggplants were more their own guys) (and all eggplants have much cuter butts than carrots do). The name Eggie came from someone else but it fits a lot better than Edmund.
My favorite eggplant that I kept for years was on a toddlers’ size T- shirt of my son’s that I hung onto for almost 40 years but then in a fit of downsizing, apparently threw out (sound of head slap).”
See Hawley’s drawings (and Hawley!) at our Willy Street Co-op Retrospective Gallery Night on Friday, October 4 from 5–9 at Aubergine.
