Tom McCall

Playing what they wanted, with great taste

I loved profiling this independent radio station.

continued below, then to right column.

Bigotry: Oregon's sad history

After a rash of swastika graffiti swept the Oregon town where I was working, I dug into the history of the state. And I found that it was no accident that Oregon was about 98 percent white and Christian. The easy-going, eco-friendly image of the state belied a xenophobic past.

This account of that past was news to many people who read it, when it filled an entire issue of the Statesman-Journal's Sunday magazine, Oregon Territory.

I heard from many teachers afterward that they intended to use it in their social studies classrooms.

Here it is, in two PDFs.

Part one.

Part two.

RIP, Tim Hardin

Tim Hardin, the great singer-songwriter who wrote "If I Were A Carpenter," died with little notice in 1981 and happened to be buried in a small town near Salem, Oregon.

I believe I was the only journalist to attend his funeral.

Dylan finds Jesus, loses the rest of us

I've been a huge Bob Dylan fan my entire life, and in 1980 he came to Salem to play a show at the Oregon State Fairgrounds.  A year earlier he had taken a radical detour off the super-star track by declaring himself born-again and revamping his songwriting to declare his new-found allegiance to fire-and-brimstone Christianity. To most of us listeners, this was disconcerting, to say the least.

I tried to make sense of it all in an essay that appeared in the Statesman-Journal the morning of his show.

It had the most amazing impact.  On the day it appeared, Dylan's road manager called the newspaper with the message that "Bob wants to see you -- he read your piece and was knocked out by it."  The star was appearing in Portland, 40 miles north, that night, and I should meet him backstage after his show.

I did, with my then-wife Katie.

That's a story for another day.  For now, here's the article I wrote.

 

Edward Abbey

A profile of an early hero of the environmental movement.

Goodbye, 1970s!

On the last Sunday of the 1970s, I had a story on the front page of the Statesman Journal that attempted to sum up the decade we'd just lived through. My tactic was to look back at all the predictions I could find at the beginning of the decade and see how they'd turned out.

The answer: Not very well.

The story was a hit. To my surprise, Sen. Mark Hatfield had it placed in the Congressional Record, prefaced by some very complimentary words.

It starts in the third column of the first page below, under the headline A Decade of Transition. (In the sixth paragraph, "recon" should be "reckon.")

(Click on images below to enlarge.)

William Appleman Williams

Nazis in Skokie

The Chicago suburb where I grew up turned locus of national news in 1978 when a group of neo-Nazis decided to celebrate Hitler's birthday by provoking the sizable Jewish population with a march through town. The ethical and ethnic complexities multiplied when the ACLU, with a heavy Jewish membership, fought efforts to prevent the Nazis from marching, on free-speech grounds.

I was a thousand mile away, in Salem, Ore., where you might find all of 30 Jewish families among the 80,000 people. I was definitely an exotic. I realized that in writing about the event I could explain the emotional stakes to people far removed from my life experience. And it would help me sort out the issues for myself.

The paper ran my first-person story on the front page, as you see here (note the typewriter; this was still the day of hot type). It drew a great reception. For a little while I was a local celebrity out there.

I was thrilled when the story got more exposure in the Miami Herald, which ran it several weeks later.

(Click on an image to enlarge it. Hit 'previous page' to reduce it.)