Five days after the last remaining Oat Willie's location closed up for good, 83-year-old Doug Brown is inside the shop, cheerfully unstocking a shelf of incense.
"We've had some pretty good sales," the owner smiles. "I mean, it was 75% off."
Brown and his daughter, Rosemary Wynn, plus a handful of employees, are boxing up the store's remaining merchandise while tending to knocks on the door from people interested in buying the shelves and display cases. This is the final phase of existence for Austin's first head shop and one of the longest-running stores of its kind in the U.S., having been in business since 1968. Under the circumstances, it would seem like Brown would be in a less upbeat mood.
"Well, we've been closing for a few years," he explains. "It was time."
Soon I've completely distracted Brown from his work, asking him if he remembers what the very first product ever ordered for Oat Willie's had been.
"Oh, cigarette papers," he says, recalling that he had ordered them from an importer in New York. "I think we sold packages of 10 assorted papers for a dollar."
Incense was also a popular product for the hippie customers of Oat Willie's early days. Brown first acquired it from a person who made it locally and then Indian incense caught on, soon becoming available with professional and consistent packaging. The shop was also the go-to place for the emergent decor of blacklight posters.
"That was a biggie," remembers Brown. "You got to sell the blacklight ... and then the posters."
Brown and original partner George Majewski opened the first of what would ultimately be eight Oat Willie's locations in a storefront on the 1600 block of Lavaca that was passed on to them from a group of artists. Joe Brown, Tony Bell, and Gilbert Shelton (famous for creating The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Fat Freddy's Cat, and the Grateful Dead's Shakedown Street album cover) had been operating a seminal countercultural business there called the Underground City Hall, which focused on disseminating the alternative newspapers of the day.
Brown and Majewski took the name Oat Willie's from one of Shelton's comics, titled The Adventures of Oat Willie: The Most Thoughtful Guy in the World. It depicted a scrawny nincompoop with an enormous nose wearing only polka-dot boxers and a leather helmet, riding in a giant bowl of oatmeal. In promotional materials for the head shop over the next 56 years, Oat Willie's catchphrase would be "Onward, through the fog!" I ask Brown what that means.
"Onward through the fog? ... Well, it's about getting through it all. You don't know what's on the other side, but you gotta get from here to there and you get help along the way," he laughs.
As we talk, Brown pulls out a cardboard folio of old prints - works by Austin art heroes like Guy Juke, Jaxon, Micael Priest, and Jim Franklin - plus several lovingly signed records and posters from the late, great Doug Sahm, who had his mail delivered to Oat Willie's and would come over in the mornings to use the phone. Brown unearths a copy of the shop's first commissioned advertisement, a beautiful Franklin rendering of Oat Willie rolling through a foggy Texas landscape.
Along with pipes, papers, bedspreads, and beaded curtains, art and media maintained a central role at Oat Willie's. They gave away concert posters from shows at the Vulcan, Soap Creek, and Armadillo that are now valuable, while underground newspapers remained a fixture for the business. Brown says it was through those hippie rags that he connected with sellers to get stock for the store before head shop fare was easy to acquire.
These days, there's probably a hundred smoke shops in Austin. Brown admits that market oversaturation is one factor in Oat Willie's extinguishing its proverbial torch (the plaza on Oltorf and Burleson has been sold with plans for a remodel).
"Part of the reason it was time is because we had a lot of competition from other people with CBD and those kinds of things," says Brown, who has now closed four Oat Willie's locations since the beginning of 2022. "But we were a one-stop shop and they're a one-item shop. They're focused here," he says, miming a narrow motion with his hands. "And we were focused here," he adds, opening his arms as wide as he can to highlight the gifts, decor, clothing, and art books around him.
The head shop, which at one point offered health insurance and retirement funds to its employees, had also been a family affair. His daughter Rosemary, a travel agent who has maintained an administrative role at her dad's business for the last 18 years, says she and her brother Tim basically grew up in Oat Willie's.
"We were always around the store as kids. My mom worked for the Department of Veterans Affairs so dad was the one who picked us up from school. When we had snow days, we were at Oat Willie's."
Wynn laughs recalling the family business being in the crosshairs of an anti-paraphernalia crusade of the Eighties that culminated in a riled-up PTA group descending upon the San Antonio Street location. To make light of the situation, her dad and the employees at the shop donned old police riot gear.
Brown smiles broadly, "Oh, I had forgotten about the PTA!"
When I ask Brown to consider the legacy of Oat Willie's and what the closing means to Austin, he becomes self-effacing.
"I think I got tired," he says. "You know what happens with a lot of restaurants here: You put your ass into it for 10 or 15 years then sell it out and suddenly it's no longer what it was. We tried to keep it the way it was. It didn't work."