Thanksgiving dinner. As a favor to the couple, Guthrie and his friend Richard Robbins agreed to dispose of the large amount of garbage that had accumulated in the church, not realizing that the local dump was closed for the holiday. Guthrie and his friend dumped their load over a cliff on private property. When Stockbridge chief of police William "Obie" Obanhein was made aware of the illegal dumping, he arrested Guthrie and his friend, and held them in the town jail. Alice bailed them out several hours later; her anger at the incident nearly prompted Obanhein to arrest her as well. (Brock was otherwise friendly with Obanhein, considering him "a very sweet man, and (...) a very good cop.") In the end, Guthrie and Robbins were levied a small fine and picked up the garbage that weekend. First restaurant Brock was persuaded to open a restaurant by her mother, who saw the purchase as an opportunity for her daughter to become financially independent. She had already been doing a significant amount of cooking and housekeeping for her friends at the church, which frustrated her. Alice purchased an empty business space in the back of a row of stores on US 7 in Stockbridge and converted it into The Back Room in 1965, shortly before the Guthrie visit. There is some dispute over exactly when The Back Room opened; Brock would claim in 2008 that it was not until after the littering incident, but Guthrie's song about it implies the restaurant was already open by that time. At a jam session Guthrie had with the Brocks during his visit, he, Ray and Alice began formulating the basis for what would become the first half of "Alice's Restaurant". (The second half of the song would come later.) Brock would reflect on this restaurant's opening as the start of strained relations between her and her husband. According to her, because she was now living her life as an independent woman and needed her own transportation to work the restaurant, Ray no longer had financial control over her—prior to this he had only allotted her a small allowance—which increased tension between the two. Alice also admitted to not knowing much about either cooking at a professional level or business. Contrary to an implication made in the film about The Back Room, Alice says that she was faithful to Ray throughout the marriage and was