COURTESY OF SPRINGFIELD CREAMERY Nancy Hamren, the namesake of Nancy’s Yogurt, cuts cottage cheese with co-worker Phil Dietz. Hamren’s grandmother, an early advocate of natural foods, was the source of Nancy’s original recipes.

WHEN CHUCK KESEY and his brother, Ken, were boys, they often worked for their dad, who ran a dairy in Springfield, Ore. "Ken liked to work the boiler because that gave him a lot of time to write," Chuck says of his famous kid brother. "But I was more involved in the hands-on activities."

While Chuck studied dairy technology at Oregon State University, the younger Kesey eloped with his sweetheart, Faye, and enrolled at the University of Oregon. There, he won a scholarship to the creative-writing program at Stanford. To earn extra money, he worked as an orderly in a psychiatric ward and offered himself to the university psychology department as a guinea pig in experiments with psilocybin, mescaline and LSD.

The writing program, the hallucinogens and the psychiatric ward provided raw materials for Kesey's first novel, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," published in 1962. Almost immediately, he went to work on "Sometimes a Great Notion," a book about a pair of brothers from a logging family.

Meanwhile, Chuck Kesey and his wife, Sue, had purchased the Springfield Creamery. While Kesey the younger and his "band of Merry Pranksters" were challenging cultural norms with "acid tests," the dairyman brother was quietly influencing another wing of the counterculture: the health-food movement.

But by 1969, the dairy business was becoming centralized. To remain independent, Sue recalls, "we needed to create a brand of our own." As fate would have it, inspiration for that brand had just moved to town.

Nancy Hamren had come to Oregon from the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco to help watch over Ken and Faye Kesey's farm, and when other pranksters took off for the legendary Woodstock festival, Hamren stayed behind. "I was not interested in piling into a Volkswagen van with the other hippies and their babies," she confides. Before long, she was working as the dairy bookkeeper.

"I had always loved yogurt, because my grandmother was a natural-foods enthusiast, and she had introduced me to it," says Hamren. "With all that milk around, it seemed natural to try to make some." So she shared her yogurt recipe with the Keseys. At Oregon State, Chuck had seen firsthand the results of feeding active cultures to animals. "I thought, why not put these things in our food?"

The time was right, says Hamren. "Everyone was open to new ideas and changing their eating habits, and the demand for natural food and yogurt had started to grow."

Nancy's Honey Yogurt was the first yogurt commercially made with live acidophilus and bifidum cultures. "It's tangier than most yogurts on the market," says Hamren, "but we don't test for pH or use timers to see when the yogurt's ready; we simply go in and sacrifice a pint and taste it." In fact, Chuck Kesey and Hamren taste virtually every batch of yogurt that comes out of the plant. When Kesey deems it ready, he adjusts the thermostats to transform the warming rooms into coolers, thus checking the growth of the yogurt-making microbes and chilling the product before shipment.

The result is a yogurt with character — not sour, but sharp with the kind of snap you'd find in a vintage cheddar. This makes it the perfect foil for the mellow fruit preserves that come in a separate container affixed to the top of the 8-ounce cups. It also makes the plain yogurt a versatile ingredient in salad dressings, dips and such. Lots of cooks keep Nancy's yogurt on hand, and I often use it instead of buttermilk in baking. Perhaps this combination of character and versatility is what has earned Nancy's a national following.

The family has come a long way since 1972. That year the dairy was having such a hard time financially that Chuck Kesey was forced to get creative. "I decided to drive down to Marin County and ask Jerry Garcia if he and the band would come up to Eugene and do a benefit concert." Why turn to a rock band for help? "Well, you think about it," says Kesey, "where else would I go?"

The performance was the first of 10 legendary Grateful Dead concerts held at the creamery. And while no traditional marketing ploys were used, people spontaneously made connections between Ken Kesey, The Grateful Dead and Nancy's Yogurt.

"It's kind of amazing that any natural-food companies survived through that time," says Sue Kesey today. "We were all just shoestring to shoestring." Still, demand for natural foods did grow. "We had a lot of conversations with our smaller natural-food customers in the late '70s, not wanting us to sell to mass-market stores," she recalls. "But when the Safeways and Fred Meyers of the world came knocking on our door and said we'd really like to stock your product, it completely blew us away — of course we said yes."

By 1987, Springfield Creamery had outgrown its old home and moved to a larger plant on 10 acres in Eugene. Then in 1994, an electrical malfunction caused a fire, which destroyed most of the building. Kit Kesey, son of Chuck and Sue, and now operations manager, recalls the night of the fire. "I was so upset," he says, "the building was burning and the firemen looked like they were just going to let it burn down and try to keep it from spreading."

"Then Uncle Ken showed up in his soccer coach's shirt, with the whistle and all. He got up on the roof over there and started directing the firemen.

" 'Point the hoses over there!' he shouted. Thanks to him, we saved a lot of the most valuable equipment, and we were able to rebuild in a much shorter time than we would have." In fact, the creamery was back in production in just three weeks.

Now, in its latest incarnation, Springfield Creamery produces more than 80 cultured dairy and soy products. It could be said that, like his brother, Chuck Kesey has made the transformation from iconoclast to icon.

Greg Atkinson is a contributing editor for Food Arts magazine and a culinary consultant. He can be reached at greg@northwestessentials.com.