The Joyfully Curious Linnaea Phillips

By Randy Murray

She signed on as a member of SLO Village in 2020 just as the pandemic forced participants to scatter and shelter at home.

So, when attendees of the Wednesday morning coffee group relocated to Zoom from their regular table in the backroom of Coastal Peaks in San Luis Obispo, Linnaea Phillips was right there, relishing the many ways she could engage the gathered members and volunteers in much the same way she had done for years in the cafe that she founded on Garden Street in San Luis Obispo that still bears her name today.

She confesses to loving to learn new ideas, and she exhibits a joyful curiosity in asking questions, in sharing information from her bountiful life experience and in suggesting topics for discussion.

In short, Linnaea presides.

But that means also lending a keen ear to other voices in the room. She loves “the science guy,” referring to the periodic presentations of volunteer Joel Sheets, and she was intrigued recently by member Nancy Grant’s account of her Christmas flight to visit grandchildren in Seattle during these challenging times.

Many but perhaps not all of our members and volunteers know that Linnaea created San Luis Obispo’s first classic coffee house on a shoestring at age 50. She had been recently divorced, the mother of three. It was modeled after the cafes she had seen years before in Europe where, alone, fresh out of the University of Puget Sound with a degree in art and literature, she went to work as a librarian. Only later would she earn a library science degree from the University of Washington.

Former county Poet Laureate Rosemary Wilvert recalled first meeting Linnaea in the 1970s. “In her graciousness, I knew I’d met someone genuine. Linnaea’s Cafe has symbolized for decades that authenticity, the most welcoming venue in town to poets, musicians, artists, students, families.”

Linnaea credits her strength, independence and intellectual curiosity to a maternal grandmother and to her father.

She described her grandmother’s challenge-filled journey from Sweden to join her husband, a custom tailor who had come ahead to establish a shop in Puyallup, WA. Speaking no English and pregnant with Linnaea’s mother, she arrived first in Canada, getting off the boat at the wrong place on the St. Lawrence.

“She was totally lost,” Linnaea recalled.

But, Linnaea added, her grandmother was one of those people who got into these situations and was determined to overcome the difficulty. And indeed, she finally found her way to Puyallup.

“She was a superior vest maker,” Linnaea said, and she inspired Linnaea to become a skilled seamstress.

Linnaea described her father, Harold Churchward, as a principled man, a committed Socialist with only an eighth-grade education that destined him for a variety of jobs, as a newspaper advertising representative, park ranger, and hotel services worker.

“My father wished to be a writer, a naturalist, a changer of the world,” she said. “Instead, he was a humanist: all people equal.”

“He was hugely curious, and we were so close,” Linnaea recalled.

Growing up in Tacoma, she was 8 or 9 when she campaigned for him as he ran for governor. “People loved him even though he was a Socialist.”

“We would walk almost every night, and we would invent stories,” Linnaea said. “We would turn over rocks and ask endless questions and have endless answers.”

Along about this time, her father bought a Bausch & Lomb microscope, and she recalled frequently going to the swamp, taking jars to collect creepy crawler samples from which to make slides. She still has that microscope and all of those slides, with her name on them, in a walnut case in her home.

On her 11th birthday, one of her gifts was a copy of American poet Carl Sandburg’s book, “Rootabaga Stories.” It was born of Sandburg’s desire to inspire intellectual freedom and curiosity within children’s lives.

On the fly leaf was inscribed this note:

“To Linnaea on her eleventh birthday from her parents. May you always make the good, the true, and the beautiful the basis of your philosophy.” What parents were these who drew on Plato and dreamed of a young girl’s philosophy?

A few years ago, at a public reading on the sidewalk in front of HumanKind Fair Trade in San Luis Obispo, Linnaea shared with gathered children selected passages from that book.

It was her father’s custom to write notes or poetry to Linnaea on her birthday and on holiday occasions. At Christmas 1950, when Linnaea was 17, he wrote:

To Linnaea,

Beyond your dream horizons
Oer the hills of future years
adventure on glad youth & strong
And make a better world abound
Build well the mansion of your mind
‘Ere tempestuous seasons roll
Leave well done your deeds of service
For men to follow thru Endless Time

Linnaea turned 18 in April of the new year. Her father died in June. He was only 51, but he had left his creative, indelible and encouraging mark on his only child.

The grit, the gall, the gumption that propelled Linnaea – her grandmother’s legacy – came critically to bear in some lean years here in San Luis Obispo.

“How am I going to get out?” became a useful mantra for Linnaea as she would later endure “desperate” straits, financially and emotionally.

While she worked for 25 years as a librarian at Cuesta College, for a decade or more she also practiced the art of batik. Her seamstress skills - again, her grandmother’s influence - led her into the art. Linnaea designed and created a batik dress that she often wore as she taught. In demand, she wrote and traveled extensively to share her art.

Newly divorced, her first bootstrap effort as an entrepreneur might have been the house on Broad Street, a rundown 5-bedroom $69-a-month rental that she slowly renovated so she could in turn rent out rooms. It was here where the musicians gathered, among them a collection of folk artists who called themselves SLOfolks. As one local writer reported, “Before the café opened, Phillips’ own house was perpetually overrun by musicians from around the world.”

“It was hard times, like ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’ ” she said, referring to a widely acclaimed book by J.D. Vance.

She even called up the city. “Do you have any jobs?” The city did, and for two years Linnaea drove a city truck and picked up trash at the golf course and along Los Osos Valley Road. She recalled recently during a SLO Village coffee hour how she marveled at the number of discarded diapers she wrangled from the low-lying bottlebrush that lined the road.

Linnaea’s Café opened in 1984 and its reputation spread far and wide. SLO Village Executive Director Kerry Sheets remembers hearing about it while living in Indiana.

“I was working in a suburb of Indianapolis,” Kerry wrote. “A young co-worker of mine heard that I was moving to San Luis Obispo and shared that she was a Cal Poly graduate. She said I had to check out Linnaea’s Café and report back to her with photos and an update. About a year after reporting back to my co-worker, I learned that she’d had a baby and named her Linnaea. Talk about creating a legacy.”

About Linnaea herself, Kerry said, “I continue to be amazed by all the people, places and causes she has influenced.”

David Gurney, a ceramicist and painter, has known Linnaea for most of the 31 years he has lived in the area. “She’s like a jewel,” he said.

“I had a show there and she would come in every night to introduce me to people she thought I should know. She is truly one of my favorites. She finds everybody interesting. She remembers them. It’s pretty amazing.”

“She likes knowing about everything,” he added. “She likes to convey information. To tell it.”

Linnaea reigned as the city’s leading impresario until 2007 when she sold the café.

And since then, on most Sunday mornings before Covid, Linnaea could be found at her namesake coffee house, exploring the world with those who gathered at her table. These days, she is confined to the Zoom platform, which, for her, is only a tepid substitute for face-to-face human exchange.

“We are longing for connection,” she said. “We need to invite people into our midst. All of our lives are different, and we need to reference what their information brings to our own experience.”