A Knight To Remember

 I met Phil Knight (you know, the shoe guy) in 1975 after my adventures in working with the World Football League's Portland Storm which got called for permanent delay of game.  Knowing I was out of a job, my good friend Bill Bowerman arranged a lunch date for me with his partner Phil Knight in the startup shoe company, Nike.  Phil told me of the company's plan to make a major move upward by signing top athletes in professional football and basketball as Nike endorsers.  He offered me the job of recruiting the athletes. I had agreed to go to work for another company two days before our lunch and I thanked Phil for the offer but didn't accept it.  I should have.

We remained friends over the years and when I suggested to Bowerman that a book should be written about his amazing life, Phil underwrote my expenses for the research (I accrued 24 hours of taped interviews with Bowerman) on the biography that onetime track star and Sports Illustrated journalist Kenny Moore wrote: BOWERMAN AND THE MEN OF OREGON.

The last few days I've been viewing the NCAA Track & Field Championships and the US Olympic Trials in the magnificent stadium Knight had constructed on Oregon's Hayward Field and it occured to me that a case could be made for citizen Knight being recognized as the state of Oregon's Most Valuable Player (MVP).  Phil, by the way, is a skilled writer and I attended a breakfast on the University of Oregon campus where he was being honored for his book, Shoe Dog.  I told him that morning it was unfortunate he got distracted making sneakers when he could have been celebrated as a famous author.

As a history major at Oregon I did a lot of reading related to our state and Phil would rank with just a few other men and women for that MVP award.  From selling shoes out of the trunk of his car to building the most powerful sports marketing Goliath in the world is in itself an incredible story. But even more than that achievement and the charities he and his wife, Penny, have funded in both academic and medical gifts, it is the projection world wide of the Oregon mystique that is worthy of celebration.  Phil Knight absorbed that spiritual essence that Bowerman taught as coming from the pioneers who blazed the Oregon Trail.  The cowards stayed home, Bowerman said, the weak ones died on the trail and the survivors became the men of Oregon (and, of course, the pioneer women of Oregon).

I'm proud of our friendship.

Save A City

Portland , Oregon was more than a pleasant city to visit or to call your home.  It was a cultural attitude, layers of unwritten beliefs laid down by generations of citizens who reflected a sort of spiritual understanding of how civilized people should treat each other. Tolerance of human strangeness. Compassion for those in need.  Respect for courageous strivers like those brave pioneers who blazed the Oregon trail.  

As a native Oregonian I find the destruction of that place of civic mystique a terrible loss that cannot be allowed to continue.  I have an idea that might work to heal this open wound.  First, identify the elements that have created the problem:  (1) Thuggish behavior of people who have infiltrated legitimate groups of protestors and vandalized buildings.  (2) Encampments of people who have been labeled "homeless" and have trashed the city with their irresponsible squatting.

 Citizens Protesting:The Constitution protects the rights of citizen to protest in the streets.  It does not protect a right to vandalize and loot.  Using legitimate protests as cover for vandalizing and looting must be made a federal crime with severe penalties.  Hard time in federal prisons.  In the event of protests public officials must give heavy publicity to the severe penalties for those offenses.  Because of its connection to protected protesting, new federal legislation must be drafted to make this happen.

Public encampments:  Squatters must be registered with civic authorities and classified as to their reason for not complying with municipal regulations.  Welfare class citizens must be provided with public assisted shelter in an organized location.  People with mental disabilities must be referred to appropriate authorities.  Who pays for this?  Portland Fund Me on line.  Focus on Portland citizens as well as citizens all across America who will be told Portland's need, like Phoenix, to arise from the ashes of its predecessor.

Take down the freaking plywood.  Rout the squatters.  Let Stumptown live again.

Living The Dream

 My friend Jim Grelle lived one segment of his life as an international celebrity who could run one mile faster than all but three or four other young men on planet Earth.  At one time he held the world record for breaking four minutes in the mile more times than any other runner.  He was not only swift of foot but swift with spotting what was funny in this field of dreams we all share.

While in college he often raced in shoes his coach Bill Bowerman had constructed, searching for a perfect blend of lightness and durability. Bowerman's experimental creations would never win a blue ribbon for sleek beauty and in fact some of them were laughingly ugly with odd ends of material sticking out and glue smears leaving strange birthmarks.  Once in a race the runner next to Jim at the starting line looked down at jim's shoes and said to him, "What the (expletive) are those things?"  "Those things," Jim replied, "are what will get me back here before you do."

Jim's racing years were the adventures we lesser mortals fantasize about. Performing before thousands in cities around the world.  He and his Oregon teammate Bill Dellinger were entered in a meet in Rio de Janeiro and the day after their events they went to the beach before their evening flight home.  As will happen on a sunny beach in Rio the two athletes encountered the girls from Ipanema who invited them to chat and in the course of the afternoon one of the girls asked the boys which of them was fastest.  Both claimed that honor and so the girls said there must be a race to determine the truth.  One of them drew a line in the sand and said they should race to the water where the first runner in would be declared champion.

One of the girls had a scarf with which she started the race and off they went.  Now these two Olympians raced all over the world for fan approval (and some discreet folding currency), but this was for the approval of the girls from Ipanema.  As they neared the water Dellinger saw Grelle was a step ahead and he made a mighty leap for the water.  Don't look.  His speed propelled him skidding stomach-first on the wet, hard packed sand, well short of the water, and it removed skin.

End of the sand castle with the girls from Ipanema.  All the way home on the airplane, Dellinger rode with both hands pulling his shirt away from his body. Grelle's compassionate commiseration didn't help the second placer.

New York, New York

 My first job after graduating from the University of Oregon in 1954 was at the newly opened Bon Marche department store in Eugene, Oregon.  After a few years I had become a department manager and would fly into New York  every three months for seasonal buying, working with market agents in the chain's national resource center.  I became friends with one of the agents (can't remember his name but let's call him Al) who told me about a department manager from Texas who had never been to the big city before and inquired about places to eat.

Al said, "I took Tex to a place where he could get a taste of some traditional New York cuisine and told him to order the bagel and lox.  He did and he loved it.  So much so that all the time he was here he kept going back for more."   On Tex's last day he thanked Al for introducing him to bagel and lox but he had one question, Al said.  "He asked me to clear something up for him.  He wanted to know, which was the bagel and which was the lox?" 

Shead A Tear

 Life is about acquiring and losing.  Early on we learn the lessons of acquiring: the nippled bottle, the largest piece of pie, the affections of someone special, tokens for trading, the elements of knowledge.

Acquisition's binary twin is loss.  The lessons of loss are hard to forget:  innocence, overreaching, pride, ignorance, dereliction, cowardice, bad timing, dumb luck.

And now perhaps our most profound collective loss is Portland, Oregon, my home town -- pulled down from the penthouse to the outhouse by the curse of those binary twins. From its western pioneer days, Portland enjoyed the reputation for being a special home of the mystical spirit of the Oregon Trail that embodied courage, robust adventurism, freedom, and creative determination.  It attracted people to its borders from across the nation (more than some Oregonians were comfortable with) and Portland, its major metropolis, over the decades acquired the characteristics of the proverbial shining city on the hill. One admirer called it First Cabin on Spaceship Earth.

It's all gone.  The crashing loss appeared to occur almost overnight, but the first warning signs of trouble were the uncontrolled encampment the homeless (an unfortunate name for a multi-layered combination of people who are mentally ill, drug users, criminals and those who are just plain broke).  The city leaders never dealt with the issue and the problem exploded into what is now a major disaster.

The criminal element who vandalized downtown Portland were not harshly dealt with and taken off the streets. The hideous jungle of plywood covered storefronts in Portland's core has brought commercial activity to its knees.  One jewelry  store closed its doors after 46 years downtown.

It's past time for some tough action against the perpetrators who have destroyed our city. I'm too old to lead the charge and I've seen no evidence of any courageous man (or woman) with a plan rising up to save Stumptown.  Where have you gone, Tom McCall?  We badly need you.

So, Where's My Pulitzer?

 When any element of the media is awarded a Pulitzer Prize, they waste no time letting you know about it.  I plan to have The Methuselah Report do the same.

Loyal readers may recall my posting on December 13, 2020, titled What's The Thing With The Ring?  It had to do with an interview I saw of Bill Gates on TV.  I noticed whenever Bill answered a question he would cross his right hand over to his left and start fiddling with his wedding ring,

Sometime later I saw Gates again on the CNN Jake Tapper show and he was not wearing a ring.  I speculated in my posting why that would be and my last option was perhaps not all was well in the Gates family relationship.  I further wrote that if Jake Tapper was doing his usual highly professional job he would have asked Gates, "So Bill, what's up with you're not wearing the wedding ring?"

He might have broken a major news story about splitzville in the home of the world's fourth (for awhile anyway) richest man.  In the meantime, seeing as how this blog is distributed to a global audience, and that I raised the speculation way back when, I've got a legitimate reason to wonder: where's my Pulitzer? 

We Don't Get Overs

 When you're running life's marathon and you still can't see the finish line, you try to take your mind off how tired you are by thinking of other things.  Such as what you would have done differently at particular times in your life.  Some anthropologists believe your earliest behavioral patterns chart the course you will follow for the rest of your life.  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Would you name your kid "Wolfgang"?) was reportedly playing Turkey In The Straw on his little violin when he was just 3 years old.  And he did OK in music for the rest of his life.

In the exciting hours of another fun-filled day in this Russellville commune, I think back to an event that took place in Cove, Oregon on my Aunt Helen's ranch when I was probably 4 or 5 years old. I had wandered down to where pigs were kept in an enclosed area and I remember thinking it might be fun to ride a pig.  Picking out one big porker as a prospective mount I eased up beside him and jumped on his back and grabbed for his ears to hold on.  The pig took off as if shot from a cannon and I went flying.

Instead of figuring out a better way to ride a pig, I wrote it off as not worth doing.  And I think of other times in the years that went by when I gave up a failed mission when I should have kept riding the pig. I'll try to remember that in another lifetime.