Commune holds 2-day yard sale: Love Israel family prepares to move

ARLINGTON, Snohomish County — In the end, it was a moving sale like many others.

The early birds showed up at 8 a.m., before the extended family had finished breakfast. A big-screen TV priced at $500 was quickly snatched up. A Joni Mitchell album lasted until about 2 p.m.

The Love Israel family’s sale, which began yesterday and will continue today on the family’s 300-acre ranch in rural Snohomish County, attracted both well-wishers and people curious about the ’60s-era commune and its longtime members, now graying.

Laura West, a Granite Falls resident, eyed an antique English harp valued at more than $10,000. She said she was visiting the ranch for the first time.

“I knew it was a commune, but not in the negative sense of the word,” she said. “I’ve never heard anything negative about them.”

For some family members, the sale meant losing a way of life.

Ease Israel Wiles, the grown daughter of Patience and Fortitude Israel, said she’d been crying all morning, “devastated” at losing a special place.

From outside her parents’ modest cabin, a four-room wooden building topped by a yurt, she pointed to a wooded knoll where the children she grew up with hunted Easter eggs, and to the pond, where her 3-year-old son now played.

“As humble as my mom’s place is, this is home,” she said. “This is where we all come together.”

In December, the Love Israel family staved off bankruptcy by selling the Arlington ranch for $4.3 million to a national Jewish organization that plans to build a retreat center and summer camp.

The 40-member family paid off accumulated debts and hoped to raise an additional $50,000 at the sale yesterday to help pay for its move to undeveloped land in remote northeastern Washington.

By late yesterday afternoon, many of the big-ticket items, including a baby grand piano and a 9-foot mahogany bar salvaged from a Seattle tavern, had not been sold. None of the family members would speculate on how much money the sale raised.

Love Israel, who was born Paul Erdman, founded the communal family in Seattle in 1968, stressing that all people are one with God and that everyone should love one another and live in the moment. He initially adopted the name “Love Is Real,” which evolved into Love Israel.

The other family members adopted the surname Israel and took first names from the Bible or that represented virtues.

The family, which at the time numbered about 300, broke up in 1982 amid accusations of drug use, sexual misconduct and financial mismanagement. Some former members sued Love Israel for money they’d handed over to the family when they joined.

For the past 20 years, the remaining family members have battled Snohomish County over plans to create a communal village on the 300-acre ranch. Yesterday, Love Israel said the county was afraid of attracting more fringe groups.

“They thought they’d get a bunch of Nazis,” he said.

As he passed a table of used books where a man had picked up a paperback titled “How to Avoid Lawyers,” the silver-haired Love Israel joked: “That’s something I was never able to do.”

In the sunny, glassed-in entry way to a converted barn that doubled as the family meeting area and living room, Siloam Israel answered questions and ran credit-card purchases. She said she’d known Love Israel since 1972, when they were part of another family that lived first in Los Angeles and then Hawaii.

She won’t be moving with the family to its new home. One of her sons is in college on the East Coast, studying engineering. Another hasn’t finished high school.

“You know families,” she said. “People grow, they change. You try to live life to the best of your ability and stay connected to the people you love.”

Lake Stevens resident Bill Scribner stopped by the moving sale to say goodbye to friends Serious and Beauty. He was wearing a tie-dyed shirt he had bought the day he met them, at the family’s annual summer garlic festival.

“We’ll stay in touch,” he said, “but it marks the end of an era, doesn’t it?”

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