RIP Bud Clark

NSP Meditations, Oregon Coast_History , , , ,

The great Bud Clark passed away February 1. The former Portland Mayor, a certifiable Oregon legend, died from congestive heart failure at the age of 90.

It was my sincere pleasure to have met Bud Clark on multiple occasions over the past decade. It all began when he came up to me in a brewery in Astoria and introduced himself. We had an impromptu beer together and talked about his extraordinary career as mayor and my connection to it. I was living in Portland during most of his tenure and recalled all the major events, including the staging of the inaugural Mayor’s Ball, a one day rock festival held at the Memorial Coliseum to retire his campaign debt! To my knowledge, it was the only event of its kind in American history. I was there and it was wild.

Several years after meeting Bud, he participated in a Zen Buddhist-themed writing workshop I held and it was pure joy to have him in attendance and to hear him read some of his writing. I encouraged him to write his memoir and that I would assist in any way possible. I told him it would be an important book for Oregon history and to have his thoughts and insights on many of Portland’s seemingly hopeless problems.

Later, I met him and a friend at the Goose Hollow Inn, the semi-famous tavern he once owned and operated (his daughter took it over). Again, I urged him to write his memoir. He seemed enthusiastic about the idea and told me his family was in possession of his memorabilia including a lot of film footage.

The last time we corresponded was by email and he thanked me for recommending a book, The Snow Leopard. He thought it was an incredible read.

That was almost four years ago and I have no idea if Bud started the project.

What follows is the story of the inaugural Mayor’s Ball. It was one of the original essays in my 2009 Oregon sesquicentennial anthology, Citadel of the Spirit. It was written by the late, great Billy Hults. You talk about a helluva weird and glorious tale!

RIP Bud. You made my life in Portland better, and so much more interesting. It almost feels like Portland needs another kind of Bud Clark to address the various crises engulfing the city because whatever the current mayor and city council are doing by the progressive book, isn’t cutting it. It’s time for something entirely new, unconventional. Portland and Oregon used to do that sort of thing.

The Mayor’s Ball / Billy Hults

It was Christmas Day 1983 and I sat alone in the Goose Hollow Inn in Southwest Portland. I’d just finished a shift as janitor of the place and had made coffee. I waited for Bud Clark, the Inn’s owner, who was coming down to get some beer for the open house he held for employees, friends and family every Christmas and Thanksgiving.

I’d known Bud for years and recently moved into the Goose Hollow neighborhood, into a small trailer I parked at the end of Southwest Eighteenth, right below the painter Henk Pander’s house in the shell of a former garage. I’d covered the trailer with tarps and draped blackberry vines over it because it was illegal to live in a trailer within the city limits. Bud had given me work as a part-time janitor, so John Moses, the regular janitor could take some days off. John was a Reed College graduate with a Masters in history. I was the first janitor at the Goose who didn’t have at least a BA.

When Bud showed up he was with Peter, one of the bartenders, and they were in a heated discussion about the upcoming mayoral race. Frank Ivancie was the incumbent and so feared by all the professional politicians, that he was running unopposed. Ivancie was be remembered by most of us for sending the Portland Police into the downtown Portland park blocks to beat up demonstrators in the aftermath of the Kent State shootings. He called himself Democrat and was the head of Democrats for Reagan.

Bud was a registered Republican, but he was more of a Tom McCall Republican than a Reagan Republican. Bud loved Portland and had been involved with community service for years. Every Thursday for over ten years he would disappear for a few hours and no one knew where he went, until someone learned he was volunteering to deliver Meals on Wheels to the elderly. He’d attended Reed College, was a former Marine, and had been running one of Portland’s favorite taverns for decades.

I don’t remember exactly what Bud said, but I gathered from the conversation that he’s decided to run himself. Everyone thought he was kidding, until they looked him in the eye. He was serious; his city was too important to him to leave it in the hands of Frank Ivancie.

Bud had no political experience, no organization, and hardly any money of his own. But he was serious. He took out a loan on his house and filed to run for Mayor. People thought it was some kind of stunt, but the regulars at the Goose knew better. They knew from experience that when Bud said he was going to do something, it got done. Overnight, the Goose became a campaign headquarters. We all got out our address books and Rolodexes and created a mailing list of possible supporters. Phil Thompson, a local architect, was put in charge of fundraising events and he came to me looking for help with bands. Most of the musicians in town already hated Ivancie, and a lot of them occasionally hung out at the Goose. Bud’s wife, Sigrid, was also violinist with the Oregon Symphony, so getting bands to perform benefits was easy.

The volunteers turned the Goose into a hotbed of activity. They called themselves the “sweaty four hundred” a reference to the “Charge of the Light Brigade” riding into the valley of death. We staged the first event at the Horse Brass Pub in Southeast Portland and threw together a band. The media showed up and Bud officially declared his candidacy. He wore a rose in his lapel because Portland is the Rose City, and he proclaimed “Bud Clark is Serious,” which became the slogan for the campaign. He also greeted folks with “Whoop Whoop,” his trademark phrase.

The sweaty four hundred were tireless. Every day a new idea would come up and be implemented. People came out of the wood work. One of the regulars at the Goose had a flower shop and the day after Valentine’s Day she brought over all of the unsold roses. We tied little tags on them in the back room at the Goose and took them to the Blazer game and gave them away to people waiting in line. The tags said “A bud from Bud” or something like that. The media took notice of all the unconventional events and we started getting coverage.

People started to come around the Goose to see what this was all about. Many ended up volunteering and we set up an office in the building behind the Goose that housed a phone bank and volunteer staff. We put up billboards saying “Bud Clark, the People’s Choice.” Bud decided to visit every bar and tavern in the city, and talk to folks. I think he actually did it.

I think it was during the St. John’s Parade that really started us thinking we could win. Ivancie and Bud were both in the parade, and when Ivancie’s car drove past people applauded politely or even booed. But when Bud’s car went by, folks yelled “Whoop Whoop!” and waved and cheered.

Ivancie finally began to grasp that the attention Bud was receiving was getting out of hand. He took out an ad saying that Bud had no experience and was an embarrassment to the city. He said that it was all very well to run in the primary when no one was really paying attention, but that in November, in the general election, people would realize that Bud couldn’t compete with his experience and his organization.

Ivancie never had a chance to find out if any of that was true. The primary was scheduled for May and if no candidate received over fifty-percent of the vote, a runoff between the top two finishers would be held in November. To the delight and amazement of almost everyone, Bud beat Ivancie in the primary! The media went crazy and the calls poured in. People from all over flocked to the Goose the morning after the election and Portland would never be the same. It seemed like the whole country knew about the Goose now and wanted to meet the bartender who became Mayor.

One day Phil Thompson took me aside and explained that Bud had gone seventy-five thousand dollars in debt and that we needed a fundraiser to pay it off. We decided to throw an Inaugural Ball and I was going to be in charge of the music. We felt that since Bud wouldn’t officially become Mayor until January 1, we would hold the Ball January 4 at the biggest room in town, the Memorial Coliseum. It could hold fourteen thousand people. Phil said we could charge ten dollars each and maybe draw seven thousand and pay down part of the debt.

Well, Bud agreed to the idea, even when I told him there were thirty-three bands that had helped during the campaign and they would all probably play, plus the Portland Jr. Symphony, and I wanted a professional sound system. If we were going to do it, it had to be done right. Phil Thompson gave me a check for a deposit and I took the bus to the Coliseum, and booked the date.

January is a pretty risky month in Oregon to throw a gig. We’d been experiencing ice storms and all sorts of bad weather in December. The manager of the Coliseum, Carl, a tough old German guy, was used to dealing with professional promoters, and when I told him my idea for the gig he almost laughed in my face. He listed all the things that could go wrong. He said things weren’t done the way I’d envisioned, and that he would not be held responsible for what was surely was going to be a fiasco.

My plan called for two stages on the main floor, each with a full sound system, and the manager said there wasn’t a sound company in town with enough equipment to do two stages. I also planned to have four stages on the concourse that surrounds the main room, each with a small sound system and a sound man. Each of the thirty-three acts would do a thirty-minute set, which figured out to five and a half hours of music on six different stages, leaving five minutes leeway for the bands to set up and tear down between acts. It was a schedule no one could be expected to keep, especially musicians. The bands on the main stages would have a half an hour to set up and tear down because one stage would be dark while the other was playing.

Gary Keiski and John Miller, regulars at the Goose who had helped on the campaign, joined me in the former campaign office behind the Goose, and with three-by-five cards with the various acts names on them, we went about making up a schedule. We found out that Carl was right: no sound company in town had enough equipment to outfit two stages at once in such a large venue.

Dave Cutter at Sundown Sound had volunteered during the campaign and said he would run one stage. For the other stage, I got in touch with Jody, a tall redhead who had been there for me before. She happened to be married to the owner of GreatNorthwest Sound, one of the biggest sound companies on the West Coast. She helped me out and we now had enough equipment for the main stages.

There was always something more to do. We called the stagehands union and negotiated for a better rate and the right to use non-union roadies. The Jr. Symphony agreed to play but we needed chairs and music stands for seventy musicians. I think it was Gary who called Lincoln High School and got them to loan us the chairs and music stands.

Phil was the overall boss of the operation and was to serve as Master of Ceremonies at the Ball. We needed a honcho to coordinate the roadies and security and enlisted Buck Munger, who also arranged for a Marine color guard to parade the colors at the Ball. We talked James DePriest, the conductor of the Oregon Symphony Orchestra, into introducing Bud. The Imperial Brass wrote a special introductory piece to herald Bud’s entrance. My plan was to have something like I had seen at the Oregon Country Fair, where you would walk from one stage to another and each would have a different kind of music. The experts told me that it would end up as a cacophony, but I didn’t think that was as important as the fact that you had so many choices.

The local professional promoters like Double T and John Bauer Concerts told me to forget about all this stuff and just get the name bands and forget about all the little bands that had volunteered during the campaign. After all the object was to raise money, wasn’t it? Well, yes, I agreed, but I said it was also important how you raised the money.

As we got closer to the date, the politics of the event began to surface. Lobbyists who wanted the Mayor’s ear came to the Goose to pitch. I found myself talking to a guy from a fireworks company who wanted Portland to allow fireworks to be loaded and unloaded at the Portland docks. He also happened to volunteer to stage a fireworks display for the Ball so we talked. The Steel Bridge just south of the Coliseum was being repaired and the on-ramp was closed off. We received permission to set up the display there so it could be seen through the glass walls of the Coliseum. It would be our grand finale at midnight.

More and more people were saying the event was getting out of hand: the Jr. Symphony, a twelve-piece jazz all-star band, my own twenty-two-piece Billy Foodstamp and the Welfare Ranch Rodeo, The Kingsmen of “Louie Louie” fame, a Marine color guard and now fireworks! They were right. It was getting out of hand but I’d forgotten bagpipes. We found a piper from the Clan MC or something like that. Toward the end, we got Pander to do the poster and enlisted Michael Burgess to write the copy and the introduction in the program. Once it was all laid out on paper, it didn’t look quite so crazy.

Early sales weren’t encouraging. All of this activity was going on during the Christmas holidays and people were often out of town or at least not at their desks when we called for help. But it didn’t matter, we’d reached a point of no return.

Somehow the day arrived clear and dry. We gathered at the Coliseum at 10 A.M. The sound guys had already loaded in and Gary Ewing was setting up his light show. As the day rushed on the chaos slowly became order. The mix of enthusiastic volunteers and seasoned professionals worked well together. When the sun started to go down the lines outside started to grow. We opened the doors at 5 P.M. and it seemed like everyone in Portland streamed in. I must have walked fifty miles that day trying to find and solve problems.

It was the largest gathering of musicians under one roof in the history of Oregon.

The first big moment of the night was Bud’s entrance. I had to fight very hard for my idea. Most people just wanted Bud to appear on stage and say a few words. I wanted him to walk from one end of the room to the other, through the crowd, greeting the people. Security went nuts! They said they would need a flying wedge to get him through and he’d still be mobbed. That’s where the Marine color guard and the bagpiper came in. Maestro James DePriest was on the north stage in the main room and was introduced by Phil Thompson, who stood on the south stage. DePriest said some kind word about Bud, and as the Imperial Brass played its special piece, he directed the now capacity crowd’s attention to his right, where a spotlight was focused on the flags of the United States, Oregon and the Marine Corps.

Then, behind the color guard the piper began. Security was trying to move the crowd, but when the Sergeant of the Guard barked his command, “Forward, march,” and moved out in a slow, measured pace, the crowd just parted on its own. Bud and Sigrid followed the piper and waved and shook hands as the procession move toward the south stage. When they reached the south stage, Bud made a short speech thanking almost everyone in the world.

I was on the north stage with my band, and when Bud was done ‘whooping,’ he introduced us. At 11:30 P.M. the Kingsmen came on the south stage, and after playing some of their hits, finally told the crowd that this was the last song of the evening, and yes, it was going to be “Louie Louie.” We lit up the north stage and as many musicians as possible plugged in or grabbed microphones and the whole place went wild in an orgy of “Louie Louie, oh, we gotta’ go now.”

Phil Thompson finally called a halt to the madness and directed everyone’s attention to the south windows. The fireworks went off, sending up huge flowers of light blazing away in the darkness. People rushed to the south windows, and then outside to watch. At 12:30 A.M. the Coliseum was almost empty and I was standing on the floor of the main room with Carl. He was supervising his crew who were getting ready to freeze the floor for a hockey game the next day. He shook his head and said, “I don’t believe it.” Then he smiled for the first time since I’d met him.

We grossed over seventy-eight thousand dollars but because of expenses, another fundraiser was needed. Overall, the Ball netted forty grand in six hours. People started talking about making the Ball an annual event. It had been so successful that we got national press, and the word was out that Portland had a great music scene. I agreed to coordinate a second ball with the proceeds going to local charities and a group of folks in the music scene got together in my office and formed the Portland Music Association. Eventually there were eight Mayor’s Balls, one of which made the Guinness Book of World Records for the most bands under one roof in one night: eighty-eight bands on eight stages in eight hours. Billboard Magazine did a major article on the Balls and several bands were scouted and signed for national labels at the Ball.

Bud was reelected for a second term and brought Portland national and international attention with his lederhosen, bicycle riding, the rose in his lapel, his “whoop whoop!” and “Expose Yourself to Art” poster. Once he left office after two terms he went back to the Goose. When Vera Katz was elected mayor, she declined to lend the name of her office to the Mayor’s Ball and it ended.

Journals

NSP Meditations, Writing , , ,

Readers: this is a recent essay about the homeless that first appeared on my Substack newsletter. I occasionally post these pieces on the blog in hope of persuading readers to subscribe to that newsletter and support this project. You can find the newsletter at https://mattlove.substack.com/

I toured the Rhododendron Garden for the first time and reveled in its immediate soothing effect on the various American disturbances unsettling my mind. After the tour, I bought an annual pass and knew I would return on a regular basis and sit on a bench under a 30-foot rhododendron and write or do nothing at all except gaze upon a lake and waterfowl.

What a fine morning and different walk, meaning not through my local homeless encampment, to begin it. Sometimes, I force myself to take a break from observing the New American Diaspora. You have to make a conscious effort to to avoid it and I was doing exactly that.

Out in the parking lot, I decided to keep walking down the boulevard and meet up with a creek that I suspected was laden with beaverwood.

The boulevard ran along a socialist golf course and I passed a kid teeing off on the 14th hole, a par four, dogleg left. He smacked it down the middle. I saw a concrete path to my left that paralleled the 14th hole and took it, while watching the kid hit his second shot. It faded to the right and hit some branches of an oak tree. He had 50 yards to the green to get up and down for par. Something down the path arrested my attention: a lone tent pitched off to the side near the creek. If I kept on my present course I would walk within inches of it. I wasn’t really in the mood to observe, let alone interact with something related to the New American Diaspora, but this is how it always unfolds.

I stopped for a moment to watch the kid hit a wedge to within eight feet of the hole. I could watch him putt and then turn around. Or I could keep going to down the path. I kept going and soon found myself standing in front of the tent. I peered inside. How could I not? I had never seen the inside of a tent of a member of the New American Diaspora.

It was an expensive three-person model. The flap was wide open. No one was inside. There was water pooled on the floor. I saw a cot with an expensive sleeping bag strewn across it. I saw ear buds, a flashlight, a tiny propane stove, various toiletries, empty bottles of booze, cans of beans and other items I associated with someone living on the streets. The contents inside the tent exuded a definite male occupant and the condition of the interior and surrounding disarray of other items, including a bong, barbecue and bicycle parts, suggested strongly to me the tent had been abandoned. That’s certainly nothing new. Tents, shanties, RVs and other makeshift domiciles are abandoned all the time.

I made a second visual inspection. I saw something else resting on the cot: two journals, a hard back Dickens-like red and black ledger and a pink softcover composition book with silver glitter encrusted into stars adoring the front.

Journals! A writer resided in this tent and kept a journal, possibly two! They were abandoned like the rest of gear. I had to read them. I had to know what was going on inside the mind of the writer. This was like finding gold and you weren’t even looking for it. And these were nuggets gleaming in the crystalline stream, not flakes in the black sand.

There they were, five feet away. I could grab them and only put one foot inside. I was saving something important human from human ruination.

It all added up to an excellent rationalization for a writer who always remembers Joan Didion’s priceless and true line: “Writers are always selling somebody out.”

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t step inside. It felt like an obvious violation. I resumed walking down the path, and my rationalizations resumed as well.

The kid walked off the green. I didn’t know if he saved par or not.

My mind raced:

The tent had been obviously been abandoned. How long is something abandoned before it can be claimed? I once taught a one-period high school writing workshop on such an ethical dilemma It was about a bike chained to a power pole that no one came back to unlock.

Okay, I would come back the next day and see if the journals were still there. That would make it more ethical?

What is my duty here as a caring person? If that tent and the journals end up in a landfill,what good does that serve?

I kept walking down the path. It ended just past the 14th green onto a dead end street. I wheeled right and beheld the remains of a homeless encampment of seven or so dilapidated vehicles, including a milk delivery truck that appeared as if it had taken a direct hit from a bazooka. In fact, the whole encampment looked bombed out or fought through, like Stalingrad. No one appeared to be still living there. I thought about exploring it and then decided otherwise.

The unsettling of my mind began again. I simply can’t escape it, even when I purposely try to find refuge in nature. There I encounter members of the New American Diaspora, on a logging road in the Coast Range, along a river outside Drain, in the willows along a lake near Klamath Falls, in a national forest surrounding Sisters. Everywhere in Oregon. Yes, even on a holiday egg nog and cider stroll at the port in Bandon where a homeless joins carolers and sings “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.”

I turned around and headed back to the tent. I was taking the journals. If I had established one rule in my ongoing mission or adventure or observation or documentation or whatever I am doing with this story it was this: when an opportunity help or learn more arises, and they always do, you must ACT RIGHT THEN. You cannot wait for tomorrow when you’ve mustered courage or better reflected or developed a strategy. ACT RIGHT NOW. I’d blown so many incredible opportunities the past year by not sensing the moment to care or learn and I was done with that feckless approach.

Move! Got to move! I walked up to the tent. I looked around. No one was in sight. I found an oak branch on the ground, one with a kind of claw at the end. I extend the claw into into the tent. I grabbed the edge of both journals. I yanked the claw toward me with all my might and the journals flew into my hands in almost balletic fashion. (I’m not making this up.) I cradled them under my arm like a football and headed back toward the Rhododendron Garden. I had never stepped inside the tent.

Was I a thief? I’d wrestle it with that question later. Perhaps I’d saved a masterpiece of a memoir, illustrations, comics, a fantasy novel, a collection of Bukowski-like tales of depravity or something totally new to American literature because what was going in was totally new in American history.

As I walked, I noticed the journals were damp. I wanted to read them right along the golf course but I forced myself to wait.

Just a peek. I stopped. I thumbed the Dickens ledger. Nothing! Nothing except a first name and a phone number on the inside front cover.

I opened the pink journal. I scanned its pages and found mostly blank pages, but also stray words, a list and doodles in different colored ink written/drawn in a scratchy script that to me felt like a female’s. One the very last page was a page of prose written in orange and pink ink. At first glance, I couldn’t read it.

Why write on the last page of a journal before filling the rest of it? Over my long career as an English teacher who required students to keep journals, I had come across a few writers who inexplicably skipped pages and jumped around, but the one I now held was the most extreme in this oddity.

I hustled to the car and drove to my favorite dive bar to better scrutinize the journals. Since there was only one page of prose, I doubted any chance for discovering a major literary revelation, but then again the Gettysburg Address is only 272 words and Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” is a mere 14 lines.

The bartender poured me an ale and took I took it to a table near a window for extra light to decipher the handwriting, which on first inspection, was nothing like I had ever seen and I’d seen thousands of samples.

The last page of the journal read:

Don’t fuck with

I just got my phone last night. I miss you too and also want to let you know I’ve been holding the spot I cleaned up a lot. I think things look and feel more comfortable.

Your homie Rich came to see you but you weren’t here obviously.

(unintelligible words) …you get this note. I also got a phone for you. You need one. I gotcha.

I am going to get some (unintelligible words). Just call you and make sure you’re good. Like you’ve been gone for days. I love you.

It wasn’t what I had initially hoped for, but as I read the passage over and over and constructed an interpretation, it occurred to me that I had discovered something much richer and encouraging than a literary diamond in the squalor: a message of caring, of helping, of nuts and bolts survival, and at the end, of love.

Ted Williams and Dad

NSP Meditations

Dad and I were watching Perry Mason when somehow the the subject of Ted Williams, the legendary Red Sox hitter, came up. Dad said he’d met him once, in 1952, at a Marine base in California. Williams was returning from duty as an aviator in the Korean War. He’d also served a stint in WW II at the beginning of his career.

After surviving combat, Dad was winding down his Marine hitch by helping office move their families and possessions from Japan, the Philippines, even Hawaii, back to the mainland. It’s where he learned how to expertly pack a moving van, a skill he taught me well in my 20s when he helped me move into at least a dozen apartments in Portland. Christ, we must have hauled that piece-of-shit hide-a-bed up a hundred flights of stairs because it never fit in an elevator.

In turn, I became an expert mover, and never underestimate that skill. Most people who move themselves have no idea how to do it right.

So there Ted Williams was one day, heading east and back to the Red Sox, and the base commander introduced Dad to him. They shook hands. Dad remembered him as tall and lean and a very nice man.

I asked if he got an autograph.

Dad roared. “I don’t get someone’s autograph!”

I laughed and said I wished he had. I’d love to own Ted Williams signature, especially on a baseball.

We then started talking about the bizarre story of what happened to Ted Williams after his death in 2002. Two of his children wanted him cryogenically frozen for resuscitation later. The other sibling didn’t want it. That sibling ran out of money contesting the decision. As a result, Ted Williams was decapitated. Apparently, when someone is cryogenically frozen, the head is severed from the body and stored separately.

So, the Splendid Splinter is headless and frozen somewhere in Arizona.

I asked Dad if he wanted to be cryogenically frozen in hope of resuscitation when there are procedures to increase human longevity.

He laughed. “Are you kidding me?”

Seven Bald Eagles

NSP Meditations

A dog and I played ball along a river beach. Fog hovered. It was morning and a light rain fell. A red and white freighter moved silently upriver. No one was around. I hurled the ball and the dog took off. I looked left up toward the dunes and saw three bald eagles some 30 yards away perched on pieces of driftwood. They were staring at two other bald eagles ripping apart and eating something at the wrack line. Then I beheld another pair of bald eagles also perched on pieces of driftwood and staring at the two feeders. Seven eagles! None of them in the air. That was a first for me and I ranked it as my second best bald eagle experience of my life. Nothing will ever top hiking Cascade Head and emerging into a clearing overlooking the Salmon River Estuary and having a bald eagle fly below me. How many people can say they’ve seen a bald eagle fly below them?

The dog came up to me with the ball. I turned my back to the bald eagle menagerie and hurled the ball toward the river. I turned back around to watch the eagles. I performed this routine for several minutes. Then one time, I turned around and the eagles were all in flight, heading for the tree line.

It is a fine thing to start your morning with bald eagles.

Reading

NSP Meditations

I took a couple days off from caring for my father and made a trip to the coast. There, I did little else except play on the beach with a kooky dog, drink high end whiskey, and read, read, read.

I read three issues of a World War II magazines and learned many new interesting facts about a subject I know a lot about. My memory was also refreshed about the existence of the isolationist America First, led by Charles Lindbergh. This popular organization lobbied to keep America out of World War II and was distinctly pro Nazi, not so subtlety anti-Semitic, and included many members of Congress. They held rallies all over the country and could put 20,000 people inside an arena. They pretty much disappeared after Pearl Harbor, but represented a significant presence of fascism that occasionally talked of open revolt against FDR’s “socialism.” Sound familiar?

I read a magazine called Noir City.

I read three issues of the Economist and relished their takes on American politics from a foreign viewpoint. Their obituary column is one of the best reads in the English language.

I read five chapters of a crime thriller called Choke Hold, narrated by a female protagonist that started off with a gun battle in a diner, an exploding propane tank, and car chase. Nothing like getting right into it, which is a good way to write anything, I think, or solve a problem.

I read a collection of interviews with Ernest Hemingway late in his career and learned he wrote standing up, both in long hand (first draft) and typing (second draft). Hemingway was a morning writer, as I am, and began at dawn. He also believed a writer can talk a story out of him, meaning he discusses it too much with friends or colleagues and then can’t write it. I think exactly the opposite. I think the more the person talks about a project, the more excited they become. It’s a fun part of the process to share an original idea and very important, at least in my working with aspiring authors.

I read Ursula Le Guin’s short book about writing, Steering the Craft. It feels a bit dated to me even thought it was updated back in 2015. She rails against what she felt was a glaring lack of teaching grammar in schools. It’s a familiar rant with many older people. I have found the argument overblown. Yes, I diagrammed sentences in high school and there was no way I was teaching that to my English students. That doesn’t make you a better writer. It makes you never want to write! Just like filling out multiple choice questions about The Color Purple kills all interest in reading the novel, or any other novels. And yet English teachers keep requiring it.

I did like the one section where Le Guin derided the language of academics and bureaucracies. It is so true. When I read the various op ed and mission statements from the organizations and advocates tasked with solving the homeless crisis or addressing racial injustices, the writing is mostly gobbledygook and entirely absent of voice or passion. Words matter in causes. Words that connect to people, for good or ill, motivate people. The Republican propaganda machines have always known this better than their Democratic counterparts. That has to change. I hope the language I employ writing about the homeless issue reflects that necessity, although as of yet I have no idea what my writing hopes to accomplish. There is no conscious style, only curiosity. observation and caring.

The Case of the Savage Spam

NSP Meditations

Dad and I spend almost every weekday morning watching episodes of Perry Mason and marvel at the clothes, cars, cigarettes, booze, furnishings, vocabulary (peculations anyone?) and of course, convoluted plots of murder and well, peculations.

One of the regularly occurring plots is the callow and conniving younger male relative who masterminds a murder of a rich older (male or female) ornery relative to cash in on the inheritance.

Okay, here’s my idea for a Perry Mason: a greedy layabout and step son caring for his rich,arrogant invalid uncle wants the geezer to croak so he can raid the bank account before the will goes to probate. The geezer is on a strict diet but craves only one food, Spam, a staple from his days in the Army and mucking about in the jungles overthrowing various elected socialist governments.

His doctor has forbidden the geezer to eat Spam. The step son decided he can’t wait for the old timer to die so he starts feeding him Spam three times a day, in eggs, sandwiches, in mac and cheeses, on pizza, whatever. Two months later the geezer kicks the bucket and the coroner rules it a heart attach. But his long lost daughter who lives in a far flung city comes for the funeral and notices all the Spam cans in the garbage. She calls Perry Mason, the geezer’s lawyer, and he investigates, and well, Paul and Della get into action, as does, Burger and Tragg, who don’t think there’s any reason to suspect the step son. In one scene, Perry takes them all to a fancy restaurant for dinner, and the waiter serve them slices of Spam with sprigs of sage on a white plate. They look on with utter horror and Perry dares Burger and Tragg to try it. They do…gag, wash down the vile taste with a triple scotch and…

Okay, it’s all a little rough. But the idea came to me when I was sizzling up some Spam for Dad the other day because he requested it. I thought: Jesus, I am killing him by serving this shit! It’s murder.

But he made it to 90, so he gets to eat what he wants dammit!

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