Where did Nancy's Yogurt get its name?

From Nancy Van Brasch Hamren, one of Springfield Creamery's long-time employees. "It was a combination of the right expertise, the right product for the times, and the right group of people," she says.

Born and raised in California, Texas and Iowa, Nancy's first introduction to yogurt and natural health was through her grandmother, Eileen Annette Ruddy. A pioneering natural health advocate, Eileen wrote a book about health and wellness in 1939 called Passport to Beauty. She also ran one of the first health food stores in the 1950s. "She was completely comfortable among the pioneers of early California's natural foods movement," says Nancy. "On Sundays before church we would eat yogurt, papaya, and scrambled eggs, sprinkled with wheat germ. She advocated yoga, breath work and exercise."

Shortly after high school, in 1966, Nancy moved to Haight Ashbury in San Francisco to attend college. "It was a wonderful, exciting time," she says. "The civil rights movement and Vietnam protests, and free speech movements were happening, and a big part of this consciousness-raising was a discussion of natural foods."

By 1969 she was living in Mill Valley with her sweetheart Gordon Adams. Gordon was a friend of Ken Kesey, counterculture leader and author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Ken owned a farm outside of Eugene, Ore., where many of his band of Merry Pranksters occasionally stayed. He asked Gordon and Nancy to come to Oregon to help take care of the farm while he was in London recording stories with the Beatles.

Post Woodstock, when Ken Kesey decided to close his farm to guests, Nancy needed a new home and a new job. "I heard Ken's brother, Chuck, had a little creamery in Springfield, Ore., and was looking for a bookkeeper," she says. At the creamery, Nancy soon found herself sharing her knowledge of making yogurt. "It was a time when we all were focused on taking our destiny into our own hands; the Whole Earth Catalogue was our beacon." she says. "We shared all kinds of things: how to build a cabin; how to make your own bread; how to get rid of ants the natural way. In San Francisco, I had had access to lots of good yogurts," she says. "But in Oregon, the majority of commercial yogurt was the over-sweetened variety."

Live cultures was an important topic around the farm. Chuck was using acidophilus to help baby calves at the farm recover from an intestinal problem called "scours." Nancy and Chuck began their experimenting using acidophilus in a sour cream-like yogurt.

"What we ended up with was the most wonderful yogurt in the world." she says. "It was traditional, creamy, full bodied, tangy and didn't use thickeners or sugar. My grandmother would have been proud. " Nancy brought her yogurt recipe to Chuck and together they amended it. Chuck's background in dairy technology and bacteriology from Oregon State University, combined with Nancy's curiosity, became the foundation that created the first acidophilus cultured yogurt available in the U.S.

In the beginning, Nancy would end her bookkeeping duties and put on her creamery boots. Leonard Kesey, a cousin, would pasteurize the milk, and Nancy would sterilize the jars, inoculate the milk, fill the jars, put a canning lid on them and place them in an egg incubator. The first batches of yogurt were only about 15 or 20 gallons in size. The creamery delivery would drop it off at the newly opened Willamette Peoples Coop.

One day an order came in over the phone requesting "some of that Nancy's yogurt." The name stuck, and from that day the creamery's products were called Nancy's.

Nancy's career at Springfield Creamery has supported the growth of her own family, including her husband, Jerry, and two daughters, Emily and Meredith. "The neat thing about this creamery is that it's not just work. We get to do fun things, like put on concerts" she says. "I'm the bookkeeper and the historian. I do research on new cultures, new ingredients; I taste every batch of yogurt we make. We are each deep banks of knowledge about many things, and what makes it so enjoyable is that we all fill in for each other in so many ways. People call Springfield Creamery just to ask us unrelated questions, and we do our best to answer them. It's a culture of sharing."