The Buttercup, Scouts, and America’s only newspaper

January 19, 2025

By DELL FRANKLIN

Editor’s Note: The following series, “Life in Radically Gentrifying Cayucos by the Sea,” to be posted biweekly includes the notes, thoughts, and opinions of an original American voice: author Dell Franklin. 

Franklin’s memoir, “The ballplayer’s Son” and “Life on The Mississippi, 1969” are currently on Amazon.

In Morro Bay, after morning tennis with my friend Ethan, we usually have coffee and bakery snacks at the Buttercup, which is downtown and across from the health food store and a few doors down from the Bay Theater. There is a Parisian sidewalk cafe atmosphere at the tables and umbrellas on the Buttercup patio. An intimacy. Everything close together so you can almost listen to other conversations at the tables. A buzz. Not overwhelming.

Some of the younger folks sport tattoos and appear Bohemian in dress and hair. Older ladies meet, three and four and five at a table, and yak as they sip coffee or tea and nibble on pastries or quiche. They strike me as the kind of people who read books.

At almost a certain time on weekend mornings, a gaggle of middle aged and older ladies, all clad in formal cycling apparel, swing into the Buttercup on gorgeous 10-speed bikes with all the modern accouterments. From San Luis Obispo, they are courteous and friendly as they quickly commandeer tables which they shove together, and then wait in line for coffee and bakery goods.

There are many dogs accompanying patrons of all ages, and they settle in easy and lap up treats and accept coddling which sometimes leads strangers to find out they have much in common and something to talk about.

Usually, firm-bellied Fred is around to kibitz and unload fish stories from a life of commercial fishing. You can argue with Morgan and not get pissed off. There is an easiness to the Buttercup, and everything they produce is wonderful.

And, on a rack inside, is a stack of County Highways, a broadsheet magazine of 19th century vintage, hailing itself as “America’s only newspaper.”

Down the street, Scout Coffee has opened up. It used to be a Bank of America. The size of Scouts’ interior could swallow the Buttercup whole. Like the Buttercup, the aromas are impossible to resist and the coffee is great and the help is super efficient and friendly, but it is very noisy and crowded to bursting and, I’m sorry, kind of sterile.

It is a different crowd. Ethan and I went to Scouts for the first time because the Buttercup was packed outside and had a line ten-deep at the door. We received instant service and the muffins were spectacular. The hum of business and commingling was buoyant,  a good thing certainly, but who were these people?

Against one wall was a row of nerds glued to laptops. All around were mostly young couples that  reminded me of comely ex-Cal Poly sorority girls bred on Coors Light and now hauling infants on their chests while a toddler wobbled around at their knees. The husbands struck me as ex-fraternity boys and current techie geeks bred on regular Coors, holding the leashes of Goldendoodles or French bulldogs.

They were so in!

“Look at those people,” I told Ethan, after we secured coffee and muffins. “What are they?”

“You see them at the other Scouts in San Luis.”

“They’re too fucking happy for my taste. Life can’t be that easy.”

“It’s gentrification. Morro Bay, it’s no longer a fishing community. It’s yuppie land. In its own way, it’s even worse than Cayucos.”

“I thought I got away from the damn yuppies cocking up Manhattan Beach when I moved up here in 1986.”

Ethan peered around. “There’s some LA here. It’s even infiltrated Baywood. Lots and lots of money. We’re talking big money.”

“Too much money.”

We went outside to the small, narrow deck. Same action. We finished our muffins. Went back inside. I spotted no rack holding copies of County Highway.

So we returned to the Buttercup with our coffees and found an empty table now that the cyclists were gone and then I secured a copy of County Highway, a big thick broadsheet similar to what came out of the presses in the great Deadwood TV series of that era, a by-monthly slice of genuine high grade literature I would urge very strongly for people in this slumberous county and elsewhere to read—if you’re up to it.

If you can fucking take it. If you can face the dangers of having to think, feel, consider, doubt, and perhaps temper or change long-held opinions and heartfelt beliefs. If you can dislodge yourselves from ingesting pablum or garbage on the internet. If you can close your goddam phones for an hour and actually experience eloquent and often mesmerizing depictions of the truth, each piece very long (sorry folks!) and written with an irreverent verve oozing irony and satire in some places, or having you in tears by deeply personal reportage of the damage to human beings in the Appalachian region around and in Asheville in North Carolina from the great rain and flood a few months back.

County Highway, put together by a handful of skilled writers possibly sick of the state of newspapers and magazines today, is a throwback to the days of fearless reporting and creative journalism–artful, sometimes vicious and often humorous diatribes constructed by iron-boned rebels, a deep burrowing into the rock and soil of rural, forgotten America, owning no sacred cows, lampooning the smug corporate liberals right along with the cult-bludgeoned MAGA goons.

I think of Hunter S. Thompson and Rolling Stone of 50 years ago and on and on, all of which seem shut down in these days of fear and intimidation and rolling over by the major newspapers in America.

County Highway is a deliciously poisoned plum, a joyous and scabrous outcast, an intellectual hobo, so go and get it, folks, and if you have the time, find a table at the Buttercup and start reading it and don’t worry about Scouts, because they’re killing it in the good old-fashioned American capitalistic way, and good for them.