Dorothy Roth Loftus, a Fairbanks pioneer

My biggest writing project over the past year has been a bio-memoir of my grandmother, Dorothy Roth Loftus. She was a year old when her father dragged the family from Visalia, in the San Joaquin Valley of California, to Fairbanks, Alaska -- a gold-rush boomtown that was barely three years old.

Rinehart Roth (he hated his name, and always went by “R.F.”) was a lawyer who would serve as district attorney in Fairbanks from 1916 to 1921 -- during the Woodrow Wilson administration -- but he sank everything he earned into worthless gold and coal mines. (That’s him, to the right.) Dorothy would grow up in Fairbanks, attend the brand-new local college starting on the day it opened its doors in 1922, and marry and raise her family before coming “Outside,” as Alaskans put it, in 1947 for retirement in Oregon: first in the upper Willamette Valley, and eventually Coos Bay. My family lived next door to her and grandfather when I was in my teens.

I refer to the book as a bio-“memoir” because the bulk of it is based on at least 13 hours of interviews I conducted with Dorothy next to a cassette tape recorder in 1984. The past year, I fashioned the transcripts of those tapes into a narrative that comes to about 140 pages in first draft.

The next step is to do the research necessary to incorporate supporting information from other sources that will fill out the narrative: newspaper reports, books about frontier Fairbanks and Alaska, tapes of interviews with other people who knew my grandparents, and so on.

The Choices of Hillary Rodham Clinton

  

My wife has an interesting theory about the career of Hillary Clinton. Carole believes young Hillary Rodham had the intelligence and drive that would have gotten her where she is today no matter what course she had taken . . . but she was born just a few years too early to believe she could do it on her own.

Instead, Clinton chose the route taken by most of the women of her era, and it cost her more than it would have if she had gone it alone . . . or if she had been born 10 years later and grown up enjoying the full benefits of second-wave feminism.

Carole’s theory comes partly out of her reading of a 1996 biography that was written by an initially hostile conservative journalist, David Brock. Brock had already done a hatchet job on Anita Hill, and broken the story of Bill Clinton’s “Troopergate” scandal, but in the course of writing the new book, for which the Free Press gave him a $1 million advance and a tight, one-year deadline, he came to admire Hillary Clinton and wrote a largely sympathetic volume that did not sell well, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham. He had disappointed his conservative fans but carried a history that made liberals distrust him.

Six years later, Brock published Blinded by the Right, his Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus account of his disaffection with conservatism and huge swing to the left. (The book was subtitled “Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man,” and Brock has since been a consultant on Hillary Clinton’s campaigns. He also called his book on Anita Hill “character assassination,” in which he “consciously lied,” and apologized to her.)

Ridin’ the (Downtown) Rails

For the past 20 months I’ve had a part-time job as a customer service representative on the Portland Streetcar. I regard it as my second “ambassador of the city” position alongside Portland Walking Tours, for which I’ve been a guide more than four years.

On the streetcar, I answer riders’ questions, help them purchase fares and figure out where they’re going, perform fare and transit surveys, do ridership counts, and just generally present a friendly face for the streetcar organization as well as the city as a whole.

My new year’s resolution last year was to do more writing, which would necessitate cutting back on my pleasure reading. The biggest project was working on a book -- a sort of bio-memoir about my grandmother, which grew to a first draft of about 140 pages last month -- although I did a few good pieces for this blog as well, particularly the series about my wife’s unfortunate collision with a cyclist in Tilikum Crossing in October.

But it occurred on me recently that I’ve been doing a lot of creative writing on my Facebook page as well. I collected up my best puns and wordplay from that venue for this blog last month; now I present some of the best stories from my work shifts on the streetcar. Some are just observations of other people and events; others relate incidents in which I took some initiative, or illustrate the wit and good humor that help me get through a day, and (I hope) make the ride a little more pleasurable for the riders.

What Sanders Fans Don't Get About Bernie

There are two things that Bernie Sanders fans, far too many of them, are not getting. And if they’re not getting it, you can be sure most other Americans -- most critically, the ones whose support is necessary for Sanders to win the nomination and the White House -- don’t get them either.

The first is tactical:

1.    If you’re knocking Hillary Clinton as a person (or any other candidate, really), you’re not doing what Bernie does or wants.

Sanders has run the most gracious campaign for national office in modern memory. He has complimented his opponent, sincerely and without sarcasm or snark, multiple times over the campaign. As he told NBC’s “This Week” back on Nov. 8, “…on her worst day, Hillary Clinton will be a better candidate and President than the Republican candidate on his best day.” He has repeated this in subsequent debates with her.

Mostly, he focuses on where we’ve gone wrong as a nation, his goals, and the job to be done, both in terms of winning the nomination and the November vote, but mostly where this country needs to go to become stronger and better. He has a vision and sticks to it.

The common wisdom -- handed down by highly paid election consultants -- has been that to win, you have to go dirty. The trick of course is not to appear to be going dirty; you get your supporters, ostensibly independent contributors, and strategists, to do the work while you, the candidate, pretend to be above the fray.