Eccentric Tickles Cannon Beach

CANNON BEACH, Ore. - "Sometimes he'd take perfectly good electric appliances, washing machines, portable fans, vacuum cleaners - that kind of thing - and just drop them off in the middle of Main Street. He'd walk off a ways, and turn around and watch them. I don't know what he expected them to do. But that was John."

- Possible eulogy at the funeral of John Fraser, who is still alive.

Such a remembrance might please Fraser, part-time businessman and civic leader, and full-time practitioner of impractical jokes and the art of Dada.

Around the north coast, Fraser is perhaps most widely known as the driver of THE VAN - a piece of modern art in progress, festooned as it is with plastic cows, stenciled Elvis mugs, lacquer-covered French fries, and the tail-end of a surf board.

In Cannon Beach, his home of 15 years, Fraser is also known as the owner of Once Upon A Breeze Kite Shop; publisher of the sarcastic newsletter, "The Rocker;" perpetrator of innumerable weird pranks; and, at least a little incongruously, the former holder of two elected local offices.

"I don't know what you're going to make of this," Fraser says with a laugh.

Hard enough to make sense of someone who acts with apparent purpose. But what do you make of a guy who once blanketed the town with a fine layer of plastic tree frogs? And then was awarded a handsome, wooden plaque for his years of dedicated community service?

To be sure, such eccentricity would be more conspicuous if Fraser lived anywhere but Cannon Beach. After all, this is the same town where women can be seen strolling the boardwalk wearing nose rings and ankle-length ponchos, and where a sign in a certain coffee shop warns customers that java there is served strictly "black."

"The first few years I was here, I was a mime," notes Fraser. "So people knew I had a little wackiness in me" before the election.

Tending business at his kite shop in an out-of-sight mall just behind the boutiques that front Main Street, Fraser looks the part of a less-serious businessman.

He wears sweat pants and an un-tucked rugby shirt. On his feet are canvas sneakers - one black, one white. His hair, graying at the temples, hangs well below the collar line.

In the sunlit back room of the kite shop, Fraser sits back in a director's chair and prepares for an interview. About him is a mass of unconnected do-dads. A white diamond-shaped kite featuring the mug of Mad Magazine's Alfred E. Neuman hangs in front of a window.

A cartoon greeting card featuring two people inspecting a cadaver is tacked to a filing cabinet. A wide-eyed Mattel doll wearing a nun's habit sits on a shelf.

Fraser points out an item sitting on the window sill - a piece of art he's been working on.

It's a pink plastic flower pot with a rock in it. A sheet of black cardboard bisects the pot vertically, and on this are two black and white photos of a girl's face. The one on top shows her with a frog in her mouth. The one below features a normal, smiling pose. A broken, ceramic flute lies across the pot, beneath the pictures, and a plastic travel alarm clock is taped to the pot's brim.

The piece is an example of the kind of art Fraser likes best - nonsense art.

Fraser picked it up from a "terrific art professor" when he attended Willamette University.

He had studied all the major genres, but the one that captivated him was Dada, a French movement earlier this century.

"There were things that just didn't make any sense at all - things like baby dolls impaled with carrots," Fraser says.

In Cannon Beach, Fraser takes the theory of Dada to the streets once every two or three months.

His art-in-the-crosswalk series involves nothing but leaving an occasional electrical appliance in the middle of the street in front of Osborne's Grocery Store.

Last Cinco de Mayo - the Mexican celebration May 5 - Fraser lined up five jars of mayonnaise along the road's median. He was pleased to find out that a few people got the joke.

All the kidding aside, Fraser does have that serious, civic-leader side. From 1989 to 1992, he represented Cannon Beach's residential constituency at City Hall as a member of the town planning commission, and later as a city council member.

He resigned with his popularity still intact, evidently. Witness the handsome, engraved plaque that he got for it.

"This thing," Fraser says, "is going on the van real soon."