Isaac Laquedem

Eight years (two terms?) of blogging

It's been eight years since my first post on this blog. In that time I've been fortunate to have at least three Portland councilors stop by to comment, to have broken one piece of local news in advance of any of the regular media outlets, and to have had a few of my ideas show up in public debate.  The high point of this alternate life is not, however, any of my blog posts, but having my submission to a Willamette Week limerick contest read onstage by Storm Large.

If 1300 posts later my blogging pace is slowing down a bit, it's not because I'm running low on stories to tell -- the good citizens brave (or foolish) enough to become public servants create raw material faster than I can retell them -- but because I'm discovering that I'm rapidly becoming part of The Good Old Days myself.

Boxing Day (United States version)

I've always liked Boxing Day (December 26), because it exemplifies how the New World has adapted a tradition from the Old.  In England, householders mark Boxing Day by giving small boxed presents to the people who have served them through the year: originally to their household servants (back from the days when households had live-in servants) and then to the dustman, mail carrier, and so on.

We've adapted that tradition in the United States, with our own mercantile twist: on Boxing Day we do not give boxed presents to our servants (for most of us have none); rather, we box up our unliked Christmas presents and take them back to the mall to exchange for something that we do like.  Or, in verse:

On Yule, the English eat and drink their fill,
Next morn, they give to those who do their will.
They think our Stateside customs rather strange,
One day we give; the next we all exchange.

The Multnomah County Commission sends a "gotcha" to the taxpayers -- in 1915

When the Multnomah County Commission straightened and smoothed out parts of Capitol Highway in the summer of 1915, it appointed (as was customary then) a Board of County Road Viewers to lay out the new road and assess the damages (compensation) that the county should pay to the landowners whose property was being taken.  John B. Yeon, the county roadmaster, chaired the board.  The board identified a route that reduced the maximum grade from 11% to 6% and straightened some tortuous curves.  The board also estimated the damages to the owners from whom land would be required.   Though the amounts seem laughably small in today's inflated currency, some of them were substantial in the dollars of 95 years ago.  The 6966 square feet from the heirs of Andrew Mercer were valued at $625, the 5200 square feet from the estate of John M. Cress were valued at $300, and the 2925 square feet from George W. Owens were valued at $175.  On the other hand, some of the figures seem oddly low: the 880 feet from "Andrew Sills" (who was really named John C. Bills) were valued at $1.  The 17,424 square feet from Rosa H. Webber were valued at $100.  The more than half an acre from Hosea and Edith Wood that included portions of thirty separate lots was valued at $900.

Not surprisingly, some of the owners asked for more.  Rosa Webber wanted $600 instead of $100.  John Bills wanted $40 instead of $1.  The heirs of Andrew Mercer wanted $4500 instead of $625.  Ninety-six years ago today, on September 13, 1915, the county commission denied their demand for more and approved the report of the road viewers.  Mr. Bills apparently had to be content with his $1.  Rosa Webber took her case to court, with what result I do not know.

But the county commission wasn't satisfied with rejecting the landowners' claims for compensation; it included in its final order the following sentence:  "ORDERED, further, that the values claimed by each of the claimants herein as the proper value of their property, be transmitted to the County Assessor for his information."  In other words, we're happy to tax your property at the value that you've just claimed for it, even if we're not willing to pay you that much for it ourselves.  Gotcha!

Carlo Piacentini (1896-1976), the Piacentini brothers, and the American dream

When the teenaged Carlo Piacentini stepped off of the S.S. France at New York on August 16, 1913, he was on his way to join his brother Angelo in Portland.  A decade later, working in Portland as a stonemason and laborer, he proposed marriage to Margaret Colistro (1904-1999).  She turned him down because he didn't own his own home.  In 1926 he bought a small house on SE 42nd Avenue north of Division Street, and a month or two later they were married.  They lived there the rest of their lives.  Along the way they had three sons, naming one for family (Carl, in 1928), one for the church (John Baptist, in 1930) and one for the state (Franklin Delano Roosevelt, born on his namesake's 52nd birthday, in 1934).  Carlo had little formal education, and wanted more for his children.  He and Margaret sent each to college, and to different parts of the American dream: one in public education, one in business, and one in the professions.  Carl taught in the public schools (universal free public education was one of the forces behind the American dream), becoming a Portland school principal.  John worked his way up to become a Safeway store manager before he was 30, then went into business for himself, starting the Plaid Pantry chain of convenience stores.  (His mother worked there as a bookkeeper well into her 80s.)  Frank went to dental school, earned a graduate degree in orthodontics, and became one of the city's two leading orthodontists as well as a prominent real estate developer.  All three sons also offered themselves to community service: Carl on the school board and Portland planning commission, and as an unsuccessful candidate for the city council; John as an early proponent of Oregon's bottle bill and (more quirkily) as the Republican nominee against Robert B. Duncan for the heavily Democratic seat now held by Earl Blumenauer; and Frank as a board member and volunteer for St. Mary's Academy, St. Vincent Hospital, and the Portland Japanese Garden. 

John Piacentini died in 1988, a few months after he sold the Plaid Pantry chain to a group of venture capitalists.  Carl Piacentini, already ill himself when John died, succumbed a few months later.  This past Tuesday, the legacy of Carlo Piacentini's American dream closed when Frank Piacentini died, ninety-eight years to the day after his father set foot on Ellis Island.

May 6, 1911: Congressman Lafferty (R-Oregon) reads, writes, and grovels

The recent obituaries for Robert B. Duncan mentioned that in his long career of public service, he accomplished the unusual (and unique for Oregon) feat of being elected to the United States House from two different parts of the state: first from southern Oregon in 1962, representing the 4th District, and later from Gresham in 1974, representing the 3rd District.

Although Mr. Duncan is the only Oregonian, so far, to have represented the state in Congress from two distinctly different parts of the state, he is not the only Oregonian to have been elected to the House from two different districts, something two other congressmen have accomplished as a result of decennial redistricting.  Denny Smith is one; he served a term for the 2nd District and was redistricted to the new 5th District for the 1982 election.

The other is Abraham Walter Lafferty, who was elected from the 1st District in 1910 and then became the first representative from the 3rd District when it was created for the 1912 election.  One part of Mr. Lafferty's colorful political career stemmed from a photograph in the Washington Times, published 100 years ago today.  It was on May 6, 1911 that Mr. Lafferty, then 35 years old, saw a photograph of Florence Kubel in the newspaper, which inspired him to write to her on May 17 as follows: "Dear Miss Kubel: Your picture in the paper so impressed me that I hope I will get to meet you some time.  Please overlook the unconventionality of the request if you can.  I inclose a card to the members' family gallery, which I hope you use if you have occasion to visit the House.  I havppen to be a bachelor without any family of my own.  Very truly yours, A.W. Lafferty."

Though his sentiments are bland by today's standards, such a letter was scandalous in 1911.  Miss Kubel's father went to Congressman Lafferty's office and, as the author of the blog The Hill Is Home says, "Finding Lafferty to be much smaller than himself, he contented himself with extracting a letter of apology."  Mr. Lafferty apologized.  He also put the blame on his office staff.

Though Mr. Lafferty lost the Republican primary in 1914 and never served in Congress again, he didn't give up.  Even as late as the 1950s he was entering and losing primaries, by then having to remind the voters of who he had been, without talking much about what he had done.

Roger Ash (1918-2011) and the American dream

In 1918, when Roger Ash was born in Elk City, Oklahoma,  his native state was still a place where people went to, rather than from.  The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl changed that when his father's oil distribution business failed.  By 1930 they were living on a farm in Washita County.  A few years later his parents packed the family and headed west to California, where they settled in Pomona.

The Ash family arrived to California's rich mix of agriculture in its valleys, technology in its airplane factories, and diversion in its motion pictures, a heady combination for the people who came there in search of the American dream.

Roger Ash's older brother went to work in a Los Angeles aircraft factory.  Roger himself, who died in Portland last week, found his particular slice of the American dream as an auctioneer, starting as an employee of Milton Wershow (1910-1980), who had married Roger's sister.  Mr. Wershow (who deserves a post of his own for his connections to one of the Beach Boys, the Sportsways brand of diving gear, a famous gold mine, and Bob Hope) had come from Michigan to California, where he established his auctioneering firm, Milton J. Wershow & Co. (later Wershow-Ash-Lewis Auctioneers), becoming prominent in industrial auctions first in California, then along the west coast, then then eastward as far as South Carolina.

Mr. Ash also developed a special expertise in auctioning sawmills, for which he traveled to so many small towns that he bought an airplane (he had learned to fly in college).  He gave up his license in his mid-sixties, telling friends that he didn't want to discover the hard way that he'd lost his flying touch.

On one of his trips to Oregon nearly fifty years ago he came across a struggling mobile home park in Wilsonville that the developer needed to sell.  He bought the park, upgraded it,and made it a sort of gem in the mobile home park industry, with so many trees that it was one of the few for which the word "park" was an accurate description.  The park, called Thunderbird, was rural when it opened, but the city has grown up around it. A few years ago the demand for industrial land was so high that Mr. Ash announced that he would close the park and offer the land for sale for redevelopment.  A court battle between Mr. Ash and the City of Wilsonville ensued (and is still going on), the residents left, the land became vacant, and the market for industrial land evaporated.  Today the park looks as if the residents abandoned it for greener pastures, rather like the farms that Oklahomans abandoned eighty years ago when they went to California to search for their pieces of the American dream.

R. Lee Johnson: legislator, attorney general, judge, and admiral of the Oregon Navy (1930-2009)

During World War I, the federal government formed a corporation to log and mill spruce for the war effort, calling it the United States Spruce Production Corporation.  In 1920, a transplanted New Yorker named Clarence D. Johnson, who had done well in the timber business in Louisiana, came to Toledo, Oregon, bought the Lincoln County holdings of the federal business, and started doing business as C.D. Johnson Lumber Corporation.  The new company prospered.  When C.D. Johnson died, the business was successfully carried on by his three sons, C.D. (called Dean), Ernest, and Robert.

On August 24, 1951, a United Airlines plane crashed on approach to Oakland Municipal Airport, killing all aboard, including the brothers Dean and Ernest Johnson, who were returning from a business trip east.  A few months later the surviving family members sold the enterprise to Georgia-Pacific.  The surviving brother became a director of Georgia-Pacific and the other family members retired from the timber business.

This left Dean Johnson's sons without a family business to join.  Dean's son Lee, a college senior at the time of the tragedy, finished college and went to law school.  He returned to Oregon, practiced law for a few years, and as other men of means have done, decided to enter public service, winning election to the Oregon House as a Republican in 1966.

Lee Johnson, who died this Sunday at 79, wanted to accomplish more than he could as one of the 60 house members.  A staunch Republican, in 1968 he challenged the longtime incumbent Democratic attorney general, Robert Y. Thornton, in a campaign that set an Oregon record for spending in a statewide race.  A bitter election resulted in a solid victory for Mr. Johnson, but Mr. Thornton challenged the election on the ground that Mr. Johnson had spent too much of his own funds on the campaign and had filed a false report of his campaign expenses.  A trial panel barred Mr. Johnson from taking office, but the Oregon supreme court reversed the decision and allowed Mr. Johnson to take office in May 1969, five months after his term was to have started.

Despite this awkward start, he easily won re-election four years later.  In his two terms as attorney general, he modernized the office and reworked it to operate it much like a private law firm.  His staff started to keep time records and to bill other state agencies for their advice.  He played an active part in implementing Oregon's early public records laws and in general made the office more efficient and responsive to the state agencies that were its clients.  He also had the confidence to keep his address and home telephone listed and available to the public, at least to that portion of the public who knew that the "R." in his name stood for Robertson.

At the end of his second term as attorney general, he was elected to the Oregon court of appeals.  He served part of a term, resigning to become Governor Atiyeh's chief of staff.  Governor Atiyeh later appointed him to the Multnomah County Circuit Court, where he served until retiring in 1995.

He occupied his offices in an unconventional order, and this led to some unexpected rulings.  One day he was hearing a matter involving the public records law, with the contestants arguing about what the legislature intended the law to mean.  His ruling was swift:  "When I drafted that law, this is what I meant."  Later the chief judge assigned him to the probate court, which to that time had been mostly a dreary procession of attorneys coming to the courthouse with routine procedural motions, each of which required a courtroom, a hearing, and a court reporter.  He saw no reason to sit in court for hours to listen to this, and he didn't see why probate lawyers should have to take every motion to court in person, wait for a turn, and then drone into the record, all with their meters running.  So he instituted probate-by-mail, directing lawyers to mail uncontested motions and orders to the court, for him to read and approve or reject.  Other county courts quickly adopted the Johnson system, and it's a rare probate lawyer in Oregon today who actually goes to the courthouse.

His most interesting public office was awarded as a sort of jest.  In 1974 Governor McCall looked into buying a destroyer to enforce the exclusive fishing zone off of Oregon's coast.  When the news broke, Mr. Johnson (then the attorney general) wrote to the governor, asking to become an admiral of the Oregon navy.  (I think he had in mind something like the military duties of a Kentucky colonel.)  "I am frankly tired of being called general," he wrote, "but Oh, to be an admiral of the Oregon navy!" he wrote.  Two months later, at the Republican party's Dorchester Conference in Seaside, he was -- to his surprise and great delight -- informally commissioned as an admiral of the Oregon navy, the first and so far the only.

Lee Johnson didn't get enough credit for what he accomplished, but then he didn't ask for any.  Somewhere among the icons of that lost era of bipartisanship -- McCall, Straub, Hatfield, Redden (and in an impish way, E.D. Potts) -- there should be a little room to remember Lee Johnson also.

Commissioner Alice Corbett orders chicken salad, and tests her guest's composure

Thirty-five years ago, a vacancy opened up on the Multnomah County Commission when Don Clark, then a commissioner, was elected chairman of the commission.  It was up to Mr. Clark and the other three commissioners to fill the vacancy.

The hot issue of the day was whether to build the Mt. Hood Freeway.  It would have run from the stubby ramps on the east end of the Marquam Bridge southeast to a corridor more or less along Division Street, then then roughly parallel to and north of Powell Boulevard until it got to the place southeast of Gresham where Highway 26 turns into an expressway. 

Two members of the commission supported the Mt. Hood Freeway and two opposed it.  They ran through a great number of candidates for the fifth seat, in each case splitting on a two-to-two vote.  Commissioners Don Clark and Mel Gordon voted against the pro-freeway candidates, and Commissioners Alice Corbett and Dan Mosee voted against the anti-freeway candidates.

One day someone suggested appointing Dennis Buchanan to the post.  Mr. Buchanan had been a Portland newspaper and television journalist from 1962 to 1973.  When his name came up for consideration, Commissioner Corbett invited him to lunch, presumably, he thought, to sound out his views on the controversial freeway.  In some panic, because he opposed the freeway and knew that Mrs. Corbett would vote against him if she knew that, he asked a political friend to tell him something about Mrs. Corbett.  "She's very much a lady, and will act that way," said the friend, pungently adding, "But don't be misled -- she knows the difference between chicken salad and chicken****."

They went to lunch. Mrs. Corbett didn't ask about the Mt. Hood Freeway.  She agreed to support Mr. Buchanan, and he was in due course appointed to the vacant seat.  The only hitch, Mr. Buchanan recalls, was when the waiter took their orders.  He doesn't remember what he himself ordered, but he recalls to this day that Commissioner Corbett ordered the chicken salad.  It was all he could do to keep a straight face through the meal.

I like Frank, who is smart enough not to want his old job back

This latest Oregonian story on Mayor Adams's troubles gave me a certain nostalgia for the Frank Ivancie years, though he's unlikely to head north from his home in sunny southern California to reenter our political scene.  During Hizzoner's four years as Mayor, as I recall, the police bureau was quiet, snowy arterials were sanded, and construction on the area's first light rail line started.  Despite the recession that plagued most of his term, he helped recruit overseas businesses to come to the area (NEC, for example).  The City's main public works project of the time, the Portland Building, came in pretty much on time and on budget.  Not a bad legacy.

Schmalz on the slopes; or, Dr. H. Clagett Harding didn't just walk his dog

Whenever it snows in Portland, I recall the late Dr. H. Clagett Harding (known more pronounceably to his friends as Larry) and his family's dog. 

Dr. and Mrs. Harding and their children liked to ski.  They owned a cabin near Mount Hood.  They also owned a dachshund, which they named Schmalz.

If you own a dog, and you ski, what do you do with your dog when you go skiing?  You can leave Fido at home, or at your cabin, or you can do what the Hardings did:  teach Fido, or in this case Schmalz, to ski.  Schmalz learned to ski at age 1-1/2 and remained a skier for most of the rest of his 15 years, heading down the slopes in Oregon, California, and even in Europe.  No snowy winter in Portland was complete without a photograph in the Oregonian of Dr. Harding and his skiing dog Schmalz, schussing down a street in the West Hills. 

Dr. Harding died in 1979, and Schmalz went to the Big Slope in 1981.  Since then I haven't read of any other skiing dogs in the area.  The famous St. Bernards at Timberline Lodge don't ski.  Portland could use another skiing dog, even if only to show our commitment to multimodal transportation.