Sometimes a Great Notion

The late Roy Paul Nelson taught journalism at the University of Oregon where I met him during my association with that institution in the 1960s and '70s. Roy Paul was an authority on print typefaces  and taught classes on the subject. Writers, he instructed, should select a type face that is appropriate to the subject of their narrative. He was also a cartoonist and his editorial cartoons were used by the local Eugene Register Guard newspaper. I once told him I had observed that his distaste for smoking often showed up in his cartoons by his drawing any negative character with a cigarette held in his fingers. A book he wrote for his cartooning class was titled, "How To Draw a Straight Line".

We became friends and I take a modicum of pride in having something I wrote included in a textbook Roy Paul used for a class he taught in satirical writing. Imagine that; a wannabe famous author getting something he wrote included in a real college textbook.

My contribution was titled, "The Passing of Gas".  It made the case that new advances in the automobile industry had created energy generating technology that would eliminate petroleum as a necessary ingredient for the internal combustion engine.  The revolutionary result included parts that would create a vacuum that would suck air into a pipe protruding from the rear of the vehicle and send it into a chamber where multiple jets of high pressure air programmed with alternating blasts would move pistons up and down causing the drive shaft to turn which would make the wheels go around. All of the technical jargon, of course,  was strung together as a means of supporting the title.

Someday when my time comes to depart this mortal coil, one line in my obit must read, "His published writing included manuscripts for college text books. Also he predicted electric cars."

Chop Sticks For One

AUTHOR'S NOTE: All prestigious journals must have a restaurant review from time to time and for this publication that time is now. Full disclosure:  It is my favorite Portland restaurant without cloth napkins and Greorgann would never go there with me because of something she called, "ambiance" (they don't serve wine).

                                                      Chen's Good Taste Restaurant

Chen chose the spot to open his restaurant in a section of Portland where tour groups do not visit.  If you go by train, as I do,  get off at the Skidmore Fountain under the Burnside Bridge and climb two flights of metal stairs to street level on West Burnside, then walk three blocks to 4th Ave.  It will be necessary to walk around various citizens who are sleeping, some face up, on the sidewalk but your passing will not disturb them.  Chen's window to the street is covered with pictures of various offerings along with a menu and a favorable newspaper review that is starting to yellow with age.

The room seats 35 or 40 people and if you arrive around noon you"ll find it filled with diners,  90% of whom are of the Asian persuasion  --  a good sign you've made a wise choice.  It'll be best if you avoid visiting the restrooms, which are through a door that leads to a long hallway. Turning left you pass a view of the kitchen where deceased poultry hang from hooks. Then you pass small rooms filled with disorderly stuff.  The restrooms are, well...  Finally, as you try to re-enter the dining room, a sign reads, PUSH DOOR.  If you pull instead of push, the handle comes off in your hand and you must reinsert it to get back into the room.

Now about my favorite dish, which is the only item I've ever ordered over the years: Dumpling noodle soup.  $7.50. Four large dumplings in a delicious broth with those tiny Chinese noodles and one small sprig of boc choy.  The dumplings are stuffed with something I could never identify but consist of black lines intermingled with something white and kind of puffy.  To quote Chen, "good taste."  Really, really good taste.  I suppose I might have asked what exactly the filling was but, hey --
what's the difference?

Over the years I've watched other menu items being served and they all looked terrific.  From time to time I've been tempted to order some of them,  but those dumpling kept drawing me in.

Chen wouldn't lie to you.  Good taste.  $9.50 with tip and endless tea.

Be Still My Heart

When is the last time you had an experience that made your heart race?  OK, some things are best kept private but life gives us plenty of opportunities to make that personal pump surge into motion and sound the alert to all the valves and switches to get ready for some serious action.

Let me share a recent event that got my heart pumping in moon-shot velocity.

Three or four months ago when I moved into my lodging at Russellville Park I was issued a small name tag that I was told to wear whenever I was moving about in the public areas.  It would help the servers at the restaurants to charge my account for meals and also help fellow residents to get to know me.  I always tried to remember to wear my name tag.  It was an attractive gold plate that attached to whatever I was wearing by a magnetic bar lined up with the name bar from inside the garment.

After doing my alternate day workout at the gym and returning home I discovered I had forgotten to remove the name tag from my shirt before leaving home and as I took the tag off I noticed the magnet bar bore this inscription: "DO NOT USE WITH PACEMAKER".

YIKES!

I have been wearing that thing directly over my implanted pacemaker ever since moving into this place.  So I called Dr. Davies, who implanted the pacemaker, and his nurse told me he thought no harm had been done to the device or to me but to definitely keep it away from the pacemaker.  He said he would contact the pacemaker company and they would call me, which they did.  They reviewed my data records and found definite signs of the magnet affecting the device and sending my pulse rate well over 100 many times.  God knows what it did this morning after my pulse-raising workout and then slapping the magnet on top of the pacemaker when I donned my shirt.

The Russellville office apologized for not telling me about the pacemaker issue.  Thanks.

I think I'll light up my Sonos and see if I can find some Lawrence Welk music.

Lights, Camera, Action

Did you ever wake up one morning and after wobbling into the bathroom to brush your teeth you discover from the mirror-messenger that you have become old?  Yeah, bummer.  Then, after denial and the other steps to acceptance, you start composing your obit, and as the years drift by, you do many, many revisions. One line in mine might read, "...he was one break short of becoming a giant star of the silver screen."

A verse in the Rubaiyat of Omar Kahyyam reads:

"The moving finger writes and having writ,
 Moves on; nor all thy Piety nor Wit
 Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it."

Yeah, Omar, no do-overs, right?

In the early 1970s Hollywood came to the University of Oregon in Eugene with a plan to make a movie about basketball using the university's iconic MacArthur Court as its principal location for the shoot. After the huge success of the movie, "Easy Rider," one of the emerging stars of that film, Jack Nicholson, got the go-ahead to direct a movie about his favorite sport: basketball.  The movie  titled, "Drive He Said." would use well known actors Bruce Dern  and Karen Black.  As the associate athletic director at the time, I became the liaison between the movie company and the university.

It was the first day of my contact with the movie's production manager. After introductions and make nice chats he said, "So, Bill, have you ever done any acting? You look like our man to play the coaching assistant to our head coach, Bruce Dern."  Bill:{nervously modest) "Well, I did have one of the leads in a high school production of, 'My sister Eileen'".

PM:  "I think you're our man."

Bill:(to himself "YeeHawww")

How to grease the skids for future production needs.

First day on the set I'm seated on the bench next to Bruce Dern. I ask, " Is this going to be a good movie, Bruce?"

Dern: "Bill, this is a piece of shit."

I had one close up scene where I delivered the line, "Nice shooting Bloom!"  Bloom was the young star of the movie who's only future roles would be standing in food lines).  With Nicholson behind the camera, flood lights on me, I delivered the line (without forgetting the words.)

One take. Time is not wasted on scenes that will never make it past the cutting room.

Bruce was not wrong about the movie.  In the Time magazine review of "Drive He Said" the critic summarized, "When future bad movies are made, this may well be the model they choose."

I could'a been a contender, but Jack Nicholson didn't give me the break I needed.

Drill Me a Butterfly

OK, enough of that Oregon lesson stuff.  You all got an A on the pop quiz. Now we will move to what is intimately important to each of us as we contemplate the life-changing decision we each must make at some point: tattoo, yes?  Tattoo, no?

Don't move impetuously to your decision because tattoos are forever and once in place they are like a bad habit you can't break. Full disclosure: I'm not a fan of skin art.  But, apparently, there are a few billion people who don't give a hoot what I think and keep those injection needles drilling.  It is estimated that one in five Americans has at least one tattoo.

In the gym where I work out I marvel at some of the body modifications on display by both men and women.  And they are often on body parts you wouldn't necessarily want to call attention to.  Some of the guys have both arms completely drilled with black, wavy, thick lines with jagged edges that look like nothing in particular.  Seeing that, my mind says "What the F were you thinking?"

The oldest known tattoo was on a chap named Otzi who lived in the Alps around 3,300 BCE.  Not sure what form his tat took but its my guess a female was involved even if formal names had yet to be invented.  Which is a cautionary note for young men today:  Tattooing the name of a female anywhere on your body is the least good idea you will ever have.  The bumpy road of romance is strewn with cooled and cast aside one-time hot understandings and finding another arrangement with the same name dramatically narrows the availabilities.

Gregory Paul McLaren would catch your eye with his record-holding array of tats covering 100% of his body.  Tattoo artist: "So, Greg, what'll you have, my brother?"  Greg: "One of everything".  George C. Reiger Jr. comes in second with only 99% of his body covered with art Disney gave him permission to use. His 1,000 tattoos of the Disney characters include all 101 Dalmatians.

Maybe I'll change my mind.  Maybe I'll honor my father's long life working on the railroad by having a 50-car classic railroad train (with graffiti on the sides of the box cars) tattooed with the caboose over my heart connected to the box cars going across my chest and under my right arm. Then around my back coming out from under my left arm and so on until the train goes into the tunnel around back with black smoke from the engine bellowing out of the tunnel entrance.

Cry your eyes out, Gregory Paul.

Maybe I better think about this.

The Contenders

A friend of mine, the late Ken Metzler, was a Journalism professor at the University of Oregon when I was associated with that institution in the 1960s and '70s. He was a native born Oregonian and in 1986 wrote a book about his home state.  Ken tells his readers that Oregon exports more than lumber, filberts (a.k.a., hazelnuts) and oscilloscopes.  It exports mystique. He explains while Oregon will never be the financial, industrial, intellectual, or entertainment capital of the nation, it does have something most of the others do not: its beneficent nature has made it, in the words of Portland artist Byron Ferris, the first-class cabin of Spaceship Earth.
                                                                                                                                                              The question before us today is which citizen, through his/her individual efforts, made the most significant contribution to that beneficent nature? Let's review the contenders for The Most Valuable Player award in order of their appearance on the big stage.

First up: Abigail Scott Duniway.

The Scott family with, 17-year-old Abigail, left Illinois to follow the Oregon Trail in 1851. It was a terrible journey with drownings and deaths from Cholera that took her mother and younger brother. That crossing of the continent was a formative experience for the young woman and it surfaced time and again in her writing and her involvement in the battle for women's rights.

Abigail became a school teacher and a pioneer farm wife wedded to Ben Duniway.  When Ben suffered financial setbacks and then injury in an accident, Abigail assumed the support responsibility for their family that included six children.  She built a successful millinery business but then discovered her real gifts as a relentless campaigner for women's equal rights.  In 1871 she began publishing a weekly newspaper, The New Northwest, devoted to promoting not just suffrage but an entire agenda of women's issues. She benefited from the mentorship of the far more experienced Susan B. Anthony who visited the West Coast and traveled with Duniway throughout the Northwest.

You can imagine the fierce opposition women in the movement faced at that time.  Married women did not even have ownership of their own wardrobes. Despite staunch opposition from some of the most influential men in Oregon,  including her own brother and long-time editor of the Portland Oregonian, Harvey Scott, her victories ultimately came to pass.

Governor Oswald West asked Abigail to write the proclamation announcing Oregon's opening of the ballot box to women in 1912, eight years before the passage of the national amendment. Abigail Duniway had become one of the nation's most famous leaders of the Women's Suffrage movement.

And, she was the first woman to register to vote in Oregon.

Next up: Oswald West

The Union Forever

Between 1836 and 1884 about 12,000 immigrants made the 2000 mile journey from Independence, Missouri on the Oregon Trail. William Jay Bowerman, the University of Oregon's iconic one-time  coach of Track & Field and whose forebears came to Oregon in that migration, would tell his team members, "The cowards never started, the weak died along the way and that leaves us.  The men of Oregon."

Those were the men and women who, on February 14, 1859, brought Oregon into the Union. Those courageous women who survived that incredibly arduous experience were, of course, not allowed to vote as citizens of the new state.  Nor were African-Americans, Chinamen or Mulattos. But as America drifted toward the bitter, bloody chaos of the Civil War, Oregon joined the Union forbidding slavery.  It wasn't until August 26, 1920 that the 19th amendment to the Constitution finally gave women the right to vote and Oregon Suffragettes had played a leading role in that movement.

The Chinese, Mulattos, and African-Americans had to wait until 1927 for their deliverance to the ballot box.

Bowerman identified a culture in the state of Oregon that was shaped by those pioneers who crossed the plains and the mountains, forging rivers and, in some cases, resisting the welcoming committees of hostile Native-Americans.  That gritty code of the trail is evident in the way, from the beginning,  Oregonians vote on issues.  On the Trail, no person was an island.  Everyone was dependent for survival on the others in their party and that spirit of interdependence became an element of the Oregon culture.  In those early family farms surrounding the settlements, doors were left unlocked so a neighbor could get something needed if the owner was away.  This willingness to help a neighbor also became a part of the culture.

Why did Oregon voters time after time vote against allowing gas stations to put in self-service pumps?  The principal reason was to save jobs for their fellow citizens.  Oregon and New Jersey remain the only states to forbid self-service.

It would be an interesting study to discover what percentage of today's Oregonians are native-born compared to arrivals on the now friendly Oregon Trail. Whatever that number might be, the reality is there are lots more coming than there are going.  Coming soon: Who wins the Most Valuable Player trophy for the state's high achievers from 1859 to 2020?