“Running a restaurant isn’t really satisfying,” wrote Alice Brock. “In fact, next to running a hospital emergency ward, I think this is the worst thing you can do.”
But her time running a restaurant gave Brock a measure of pop immortality: Her eatery in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, inspired Arlo Guthrie’s classic 1960s anti-war song and movie “Alice’s Restaurant,” a rambling tale that begins on Thanksgiving at the deconsecrated church that Brock called home and ends with Guthrie avoiding the military draft.
Alice May Pelkey was born in Brooklyn to a Jewish mother and a Catholic father, and identified as Jewish. In addition to running restaurants, she was a painter and author of several books for adults and children, including a memoir, “My Life as a Restaurant.”
She died Nov. 21 in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. She was 83.
