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.

And Now For Something Completely Irreverent: Loftus puns and wordplay, 2015 edition

2015 was a pretty good year for original puns and wordplay. Here's a list of the best I reported on my Facebook page….

Jan. 10: He shipped out on a whaler that boasted a four-seater latrine. They called it the Pequod.

Feb. 27: It was a dogwood, a very sick dogwood. And sadly, its bark was worse than its blight.

Feb. 27: Every time my bladder fills, I suffer the effects of peer pressure.

March 18: It was as if the building was cursed. Renters kept expiring on the premises. Simply put, the address had suicidal tenancies.

March 31: Having cleverly disguised himself as an ermine wrap, Jethro headed up the road a fur piece.

May 22: We support the Thirst Amendment right to freedom of espresso.

June 17: The idea of acting in a stage production on cocaine was highly appealing to him, but he kept forgetting his lines.

July 10: Under questioning, the suspect claimed he had assaulted the woman because the sight of her made his heart stop.

So he was charged with a myocardial infraction.

How to Fill That Empty Seat on the U.S. Supreme Court

President Obama’s nominee to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court bench is a solid, moderate choice. It’s also a canny political one.

When Merrick Garland was nominated to serve on the D.C. Court of Appeals 19 years ago, eminent conservative Republicans from Orrin Hatch and Chuck Grassley to the late Strom Thurmond praised him in the highest terms.

Obama could have picked a groundbreaking candidate such as Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who would have been the first black woman to serve on the highest court; or Garland’s colleague on the D.C. Circuit, judge Sri Srinivasan, a South Asian American. The President could have nominated an in-your-face liberal such as Elizabeth Warren.

Looking Back at a Quarter Century in My Beloved City

Twenty-five years ago last month, I moved to Portland. As the character played by Marilyn Monroe in one of my favorite movies says, “That’s a quarter century. Makes a girl think.”

I had been a reporter for the daily paper in Roseburg, Oregon for more than three years, but I left town at the close of 1990 in what I like to call “a hail of bullets.” Before that, I had grown up in southern Oregon, traveled Europe for two years with my folks, and done a ten-year layover in Boston, where I went to school and started my adult working life.

Portland seemed like a good temporary landing place after Roseburg because I had two friends from my high school I could stay with while I searched for another newspaper job. I didn’t find one, though I interviewed with a number of papers up and down the Pacific Coast, from Bellingham to Albany.

But I never left Portland, either.

Twenty-five years ago this week I responded to a classified in the local alternative paper, Willamette Week, which read: “SFs seeking globally conscious SMs who are interested in reviving the endangered art of conversation for Sunday Salons at The Heathman. Send self description, telephone, thought provoking topics. We’re lively, healthy, over 21, professional, eclectic and ready for conversation. Are you?”

The 2015 Reading Report

A year ago, after nearly a lifetime of reading more than a hundred books every year, I resolved to cut back.

Generally, reading is a respected activity—friends often speak admiringly of my reading load—but for me it has sometimes resembled an addiction. I read to forget, I read to escape, I read to avoid my more challenging responsibilities, I read to pass the time. It’s comparatively harmless if you place it against smoking, heroin, compulsive shopping, or sugar cravings, but anything pursued to an obsessive degree will inevitably crowd out more potentially rewarding pursuits.

Ultimately, We’ll Just Have to See Who Votes for Bernie Sanders

From the day Bernie Sanders declared his candidacy on April 30, 2015, we have heard repeated variations of: “I like what he stands for, but I don’t think he can win.”

This seems to be offered as a rationale for choosing not to vote or campaign for Sanders, but if you think about it hard, it makes no sense.

Before we break it down, let’s remind ourselves of the end game. If Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic nominee this summer, most current Sanders supporters will (or should) vote for her against anyone the Republicans are likely to nominate.

We must, if for no other reason than to keep a reasonable balance of justices on the Supreme Court bench. Plus, many foreign nations will be accustomed to dealing with Clinton from her four-year tenure as Secretary of State, which is another advantage. (Can you imagine Germany or Jordan or China trying to conduct talks with Trump or Cruz with a straight face?) And “most” Sanders supporters, if they don’t fall prey to disgust and choose not to vote at all in November, should be enough to keep the GOP from winning the White House.

I seriously doubt Sanders will choose to run as a third-party candidate in the fall if he doesn’t win the Democratic nomination. I predict he’ll throw his support to Clinton. He knows the stakes as well as anybody, and I don’t think he would risk playing the kind of spoiler Ralph Nader did in 2000, which may have put George W. Bush in the White House. (The surprising news in the wake of that debacle is how much effort Karl Rove and the Koch brothers put into encouraging Nader’s campaign in order to hurt Al Gore.)

Coughing in the New Year

Happy New Year.

When 2016 opened, I was already a couple days into a powerful cold virus that had been making the rounds. Earlier in December, my wife had a round of sneezes and runny nose, and I seem to recall another small cold of my own before that, but neither was anything like this.

For at least five days, I’ve had a very wet cough, unlike any I can recall in my life, that makes me sound like a lifelong tobacco smoker (which I’ve never been). I’m constantly having to blow my nose, and the coughing regularly brings up “stuff” out of my lungs, or at least my throat.

This is hardly the sort of thing I would have preferred to write about for my first post of the year (anything from Bernie Sanders and gun control to new year’s resolutions and the takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by a couple of young Nevada Bundys and their crowd the day before yesterday would have done), but this is where I find myself.

When I was younger, I used to have a notion—I can’t really call it a fantasy or a daydream, since it was not an appealing thought—of a day in the future when the human cold would be permanent. It seemed possible: viruses fight to survive as much as any living thing, and the better they got at it, the longer they’d be likely to hang on.

I thought of attempting to write a science fiction novel (or a short story, at least) in which such a cold would feature—every human being on the planet had it, and it never went away—but it didn’t seem much of a hook for a thrilling tale. In fact, it’d be downright dreary. Where could you go with it?

For much of 2015, though, my fantasy seemed to have become reality for me. Not that I had a cough, sneezes, or runny nose, but I heard my lungs a lot more than I used to. Especially when I lay down to sleep, and everything was quiet, I picked up tiny clicks, whistles, and/or wheezes in my throat; sounds I wasn’t accustomed to hearing, as my breaths went in and out.

Unlike in the past, my sinuses weren’t plugged, let alone infected. Whatever was going on inside didn’t adversely affect my acting work: this year I shot several web ads for Intel, a couple of short indie films, and training videos for the Oregon Lottery and Friends of Trees; and I participated in staged readings and table reads of plays in progress. I also did voiceover narrations for a series of eight training videos on aging and elder health issues produced by the PSU Institute on Aging and Oregon Health Authority.

Although I sort of sounded as if I had asthma when I breathed deeply, I have no history of that condition, and I never felt as if I wasn’t getting enough air. It was very peculiar. When I went for a general health checkup late in the fall, my doctor listened and looked me over, but didn’t find anything specifically wrong. Yet the unusual sounds went on. And they’ve been especially prominent the past week.

What could it be? A semi-permanent allergy to growing air pollution, perhaps? Who knows. Perhaps it may never go away. But once I’m over this awful cold, I have nowhere to go in 2016 but up.

How It Played (When You Become the Lead Story, part 8)

After our Wednesday morning outing for the KXL interview, Carole was pretty wiped out. There was nothing else but to wait and see what the media would do, so I chose to put in a few hours with one of my part-time employers, the Portland Streetcar.

In a coincidence much like the one that had put me near the scene when Carole was hit a week and a half before, I was on duty and riding across the Tilikum Crossing bridge from the west to the east side shortly after 5:00 p.m., when I looked out at the collision site and noticed someone standing there in a yellow slicker with a video camera close by. I surmised that one of the TV stations might be doing a live feed about Carole’s story, so I called her immediately on my cell phone and told her to switch on the TV.

Why Our Tale Struck Gold (When You Become the Lead Story, part 7)

As we rode a Portland Streetcar train home from the radio interview and video shoot at the PSU Urban Center late on the morning of Wednesday, Oct. 21, I glanced idly over at the collision site and noticed several Trimet trucks gathered there. That was probably a signal that the story was about to break publicly, but I didn’t realize it at the time.

When Carole and I got home, there were messages on Facebook and in my emailer that my post to BikePortland.org four nights before had borne fruit. A commentary uploaded by Jonathan Maus on his blog that Wednesday morning was the first notice on public media that something had happened at the Tilikum Crossing bridge a week and a half before. Maus reprinted most of my nearly five-day-old email to him, as well as his comments, which opened with: “It has happened. And I hate to say that I’m not surprised.”

Going to the Media (When You Become the Lead Story, part 6)

On the evening of Saturday, Oct. 17, a little less than a week after the collision, I posted the following comment on Facebook: “So my wife has the dubious honor of being the first (so far as we know) to be struck and injured by a vehicle on the new Tilikum Crossing bridge, just under a month after it opened. Now that I’ve completed my personal, preliminary site investigation (since Portland Police did not respond to -- and probably were not notified of -- the 911 call last Sunday morning), I am surprised that it took that long. I predict there will be many more….”

Within ten minutes, a friend who works at a local radio station asked, “Want to talk to me about it for a news story?” I’d occasionally looked askance at the people who took their sob story about a dispute with a landlord, an obnoxious neighbor, or a government agency to the news media instead of “going through proper channels,” but in this case, the proper channels had utterly overlooked us.

The Search for Official Evidence (When You Become the Lead Story, part 5)

I began to think about the long-term implications of the incident. Carole told me she had pressed the button for the pedestrian crossing signal and waited until the light was with her. That suggested the cyclist might have run a red light, assuming the month-old traffic signals were working and properly synchronized.

But what if the cyclist’s insurer refused to reimburse any portion of our medical bills? What did we have if it came down to their word against Carole’s? One of the first questions an insurance company would surely ask was “What is the police report number?” There wasn’t one, of course. Did that mean we had nothing?

On Wednesday morning I started to make phone inquiries into what sort of official record this incident had generated, if any. Portland Fire & Rescue had responded to the scene, obviously; when I called them, a representative told me that AMR Ambulance would have taken the lead in filing an incident report. I looked up the ambulance company’s website and found a form I had to print out and mail to request a copy of whatever they had recorded.

Two-Plus Days in the Hospital (When You Become the Lead Story, part 4)

Carole spent most of Sunday afternoon in the Emergency department. She underwent a CT scan and at least two rounds of X-rays before being formally admitted to the hospital roughly six hours later and given a bed in the Emergency General Surgery department.

Late that afternoon we learned that she apparently had four cracked ribs on the left side (the side the cyclist hit as she was crossing his path from right to left), a separated left shoulder (the representative X-ray at right is not hers), and a chipped “wing” of the first or second thoracic vertebra. That last should be of no concern, the trauma physician told us, because it would either float in place or be reabsorbed by the body.

The thing to remember with the ribs, she was told several times, was to keep breathing deeply and filling the lower end of her lungs, even if it hurt a bit, to prevent infection. Health-care professionals no longer brace or bind cracked ribs for healing because people would breathe shallowly for fear of the pain and contracted pneumonia in their lower lungs.

When You Become the Lead Story, part 3

A little earlier that morning, Carole had started to cross Tilikum Crossing bridge with Pixie to the other side of the river as part of their daily hour-long walk. She had ridden across the bridge on the streetcar and MAX light-rail preview rides with me in August, but had not yet traveled the brand-new span on foot.

As the pair climbed the west slope of the bridge, however, Carole became concerned that the fairly lively pedestrian and bicycle traffic was making the dog nervous, and that a panicked Pixie might slip between the horizontal spars below the railing and fall into the river.

So Carole decided to turn back and continue their walk north along the west bank of the Willamette instead. To do this, she and Pixie would have to cross the road and rails that lead up to the center span of Tilikum from the west bank, and travel the breadth of the bridge instead of its length. The first pedestrian crossing Carole encountered came at the east end of the lengthy platform where Orange Line MAX trains and Trimet bus lines pick up and drop passengers, toward the western terminus of the bridge.

When You Become the Lead Story, part 2

Now that you know the catastrophe Carole suffered on Sunday, Oct. 11, 2015, and have a basic sense of how it came across on the local news, we can start to take a look behind the scenes.

Things to keep in mind:

•        Carole would spend more than two days in the hospital, getting her injuries assessed and receiving medications to get her through the coming weeks.

•        I took off roughly a week from my various jobs to stay with her in the hospital most of Sunday and Monday, and then bring her home and care for her after she was discharged the afternoon of Tuesday, Oct. 13 … helping her get out of bed and walking her to the bathroom, administering her ice pack and heating pad and medications, cooking the meals, walking the dog alone three or four times a day, answering the phone, and retrieving packages and mail.

•        Ten days (Oct. 11-Oct. 21) passed between the morning of the collision and the day it made the news.

Let’s go back to the morning of the incident.

It was a Sunday. Carole had established a routine of taking the dog -- our six-pound toy fox terrier named Pixie -- for an hour-long walk every morning. It was a great way to exercise herself and our girl, as well as explore the new neighborhood to which we had just moved a little more than four weeks before.

We had lived ten years in an apartment in the heart of downtown Portland. Our new locale, known as South Waterfront, is undergoing rapid change. It’s a former brownfield industrial strip on the west bank of the Willamette River just south of downtown. Seven apartment and condo towers, and a health-care structure, all between 20 and 32 stories, have been constructed here within just the last ten years. According to Wikipedia, South Waterfront “is one of the largest urban redevelopment projects in the United States.”

When You Become the Lead Story

We are closing in on the sixth anniversary of the debut of this blog. I posted my first “American Currents” commentary on Nov. 6, 2009.

At that point, it was the brainchild of Jeff Weiss -- though I coined the name -- and the shared production of an array of writers. Jeff wanted to establish a forum for voices across the political and social spectra to comment on breaking news and issues of the day.

For six months, half a dozen of us traded off posting on topics Jeff assigned to us: everything from charging children for adult crimes (here’s the news story to which I was responding), to a sexting tragedy (background), a tweeting Mom who posted online updates about her two-year-old son’s drowning, and my initial reaction to the blockbuster movie “Avatar.”

Over the ensuing months, some bloggers dropped away, and others came on to replace them. But aside from myself, nobody could keep up the steady pace, and the endeavor petered out in April 2010. I picked it up again in May, and have mostly had the space to myself ever since.

Though with regular months-long breaks, I’ve talked about everything from a purported near-bombing by a supposed Muslim terrorist here in Portland to my budding acting career. I’ve inveighed against the overuse of mobile devices (repeatedly), celebrated the legalization of same-sex marriage in Oregon, and offered my advice to high school students on how to choose a college.

Songs That Are Like Old Friends, pt. 3

To continue the task suggested by a friend:

"Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to post five cool songs in as many days. Each day, I'm tagging three friends, in the hopes they'll do the same. Expanding horizons, facilitating the tapping of toes, providing distractions from the looming void, etc."

I’ve chosen my five songs for their significance in my life, their illustration of larger musical currents of their era, and to some extent (I hope) their relative obscurity.

If I had stuck to my personal favorites, I might have chosen the Hollies’ “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress,” Creedence’s “Fortunate Son,” the Moody Blues “Story In Your Eyes,” Thin Lizzy’s “Jailbreak,” the Monkees’ “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” half a dozen Beatles tunes (from “Nowhere Man” and “Paperback Writer” to “Eleanor Rigby” and “She’s Leaving Home”) or even some really great cover songs, such as Devo’s version of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” Santana’s killer cover of “She’s Not There,” and Dave Edmunds’s “I Hear You Knockin’ ” -- nearly all of which I would imagine most of my friends have heard.

Walking the Talk

Just like I suspect you have, I’ve fallen short on some of my resolutions this year. I stopped getting over to the gym every week (despite a running start -- literally -- toward the end of November), and I’m still inhaling sugary pastries and syrupy lattes at Starbucks.

As I’ve written here in the past, I try to avoid making classic, hard-and-fast new year’s resolutions. My strategy has been not to be too precise, because that’s mostly setting yourself up to fail. Instead, I think about general directions in which I’d like to move over the coming year.

In some ways, my 2015 plan is working. Tiramisu and Caramel Flan lattes and my absence from 24-Hour Fitness aside, on a grander scale I’m accomplishing at least some of what I’d hoped to this year.

Giving up pleasure reading, as I described on Feb. 13, turned out not to be that difficult. I simply don’t take stuff out of the library and have it lying around, if it isn’t a title chosen by one of my book discussion groups. And of course I don’t shop for books to own. Although I’ve felt the occasional jones to reach for a book whenever a quiet moment strikes, it hasn’t been too hard to fight.