Dr. George Von Hilsheimer in his own words:  

  You see me here, above, in my incarnation as Father Minister of the Religious Order of Humanitas, actually a descendant of  The Little Brothers of the Common Spirit. Green Valley was operated by volunteers, either members of the Order, or short timers Volunteers who came and went. In 1963 we were all paid $2.50 a week plus room and board and essential goods and services.

For some improvident escaping hippies, it was actually a better deal  than their life in the real world. At least they got their dental work done! $2.50 a week is not a typo, in 1964 we raised it to $5.00, and in 1969 to $7.50

When I was fairly young, about 14 or so, my Aunt Elizabeth put a copy of IN HIS STEPS: WHAT WOULD JESUS DO? in my hand and wrecked my life.

If you ask that question and take the answers seriously,  you live very differently from most folk. When I  was 20 and married to Joan,  A  lady at the 1st Unitarian Church in Miami told me about A.S. Neill and his school, Summerhill.  Her talk about the school filled my head with dreams. We actually almost started the school in Miami. But I went to school at the U of Chicago, took a wonderful job at the Ethical Society in St Louis, from which I was drafted and spent two years in involuntary servitude,  most of it at the 513th Military Intelligence Group in Oberurselam Taunus in Germany.

When I was in England on leave I found a copy of  THAT DREADFUL SCHOOL. Wow!  I was recovering from two years in the Army and a year working for the American Humanist Association (I would carry copies of Neill's books like HEARTS NOT HEADS IN THE SCHOOL; and sell them at meetings). I was having the worst year of my life, living in the Lower East Side, when Harold Hart published SUMMERHILL: A RADICAL APPROACH TO CHILD REARING, and he had a quote from me on the jacket. Hart, who had never published a regular trade book, had a fabulous success.

It took me a little while to get organized,  I spent a year as a Unitarian minister in Florida, then came back to New York to organize and carry out People, Inc. and a host of projects all publicized through THE  REALIST (which published its last issue in 2000). There was a fairly typical Summerhill Society in New York full of talkers and arguers but Paul Krasner was paying me $50 a week and kept me going so we started Summerlane, a camp in North Carolina, which was burned down the first summer.

We actually had a campus in New Jersey, one in North Carolina, one in Mileses New York, and before the year was out moved Summerlane to Buck Brook Farm in North Branch, New York. Four campuses in less than 18 months. Whew! The actor, Orson Bean, paid for a year's tuition for a six year old street girl in Mileses. That cash up front tuition actually saved us! Later Orson started a day school in Manhattan. Bob Hartley appeared after a letter I thought was sheer B.S. " I am a wealthy young man who.." . But he was real and enabled us not only to survive but to have a pleasant home by buying Buck Brook Farm and being very generous about the lease. Bob later started the Heart Consciousness Church at Harbin Hot Springs in California.
See their website-  http://www.harbin.org/harbin.htm )

Actually, Bob was such a generous boob that I was the owner of record for Buck Brook and two other farms,  but finally deeded it all back to him before we closed our doors. Bob didn't like cold so he bought the old Episcopal Franciscan Monastery just outside Orange City and we began to run two campuses. Later we consolidated in Florida and began to run Buck Brook Farm just as a summer camp.