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Meantime, the acceptance of psychiatry has taught Americans to be more tolerant than before of unusual behavior. Eccentricity means, literally, to be off-center. But in the permissive society, where almost anything goes, eccentricity no longer stands out against any dominant "center." Since eccentricity is also relative to its place and time, rapid change now often turns it into conventional behavior. Only a few years ago, Longshoreman-Philosopher Eric Hoffer seemed eccentric indeed; now the young scorn him as an Establishmentarian. Conceivably, some current student radicals may go the same way—as some black leaders already have. In short, real eccentricity is probably harder to achieve than ever.
Still, the connoisseur can find a few true American eccentrics—people who consistently follow their own' seemingly exotic standards. Eugene McCarthy, who now disappoints many of his former disciples, marches to his own one-man band. So, for that matter, does Harold Stassen. While Timothy Leary preaches drug salvation, Vince Lombardi has mystical visions of football and Howard Hughes eludes the world behind moats of money.
The country has plenty of less famous eccentrics too. Terrified of driving, a Kansas scion solves the problem by packing his Rolls-Royce aboard a railroad flatcar, sitting behind the wheel and riding wherever he pleases. An Oregon sportswriter is so hung up on streetcars that he roams the U.S. to find and ride them. An Arkansas housewife fills her house with flocks of birds that swirl through the rooms; she spends $200 a month to feed them—not to mention the cleaning bills. For ten years, a 52-year-old man named Clint Wescott camped in a weed-choked field in Los Angeles. Last year, when a New York lawyer tried to give him nearly $20,000 for the sale of the gas station that he had owned and abandoned, Wescott refused the money.
On the other hand, Sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski needs whatever income he can collect from cattle breeding and tourists to pursue his passion: personally blasting a larger-than-Rushmore likeness of Chief Crazy Horse out of a South Dakota mountain. A fortune from manufacturing has liberated Oklahoma's John Zink, a Hemingwayesque character who thrives in feudal splendor on a 10,000-acre ranch near Tulsa. Zink used to greet guests by firing a revolver into the beams of his baronial office, but stopped doing so when a ricochet almost hit his secretary. One night, when a Supreme Court Justice came to visit, Zink released a coon and a pack of hounds in the middle of dinner. Another original is Seattle's Lorenzo Milam, who lives on a houseboat, runs the Jean-Paul Sartre Memorial No Exit Roominghouse, teaches literature in a reformatory and currently hopes to become Seattle's "existentialist" mayor by "abolishing the environment" so that "there would be nothing to pollute."
Patterns and Possibilities