On Thanksgiving Day in 1965, two young guests visiting Alice Brock and her husband, Ray, repaid the hospitality by helping clean up an old church that the couple had converted into their home in western Massachusetts. They loaded up a red Volkswagen Microbus with discarded furniture, scraps of wood and other debris. But the dump was closed for the holiday. So they tossed the junk down a hill in Stockbridge. Someone told the police. And events were set in motion for what became folk singer Arlo Guthrie's autobiographical anthem of wartime protest, hippie fellowship and a belly-filling Thanksgiving feast. The 1967 album "Alice's Restaurant" also made Ms. Brock a reluctant counterculture doyenne as the purveyor of the place where "you can get anything you want."