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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Dec. 5, 1978)
opinion Paying off old debts: the Senator and I Dear Glen, Now that the 1978 election is over and the voters have made their de cisions at the polls, I wanted to write and thank you for the Daily Emerald’s support for my candi dacy. I feel very fortunate and honored to be allowed to again represent the people of Oregon for a third term in the Senate and to have held a measure of their confidence for more than twenty-eight years in pub lic office. I also feel fortunate to have enjoyed the support of newspapers throughout the State during the past election. The new Congress will offer many challenging issues of vital impor tance to our State, region and na tion. Please know that I will continue to do everything I can in the years ahead to represent the people of Oregon with vigor and fairness. Thank you again for your kind words and support. If I can be of assistance, please let me know. With best regards. Mark 0. Hatfield United States Senator Where do child prodigies go when they grow old? In the goofy days, while I used to be a political science undergrad hoping to be aU.S. Senator when I grew up, I pledged Beta Theta Pi fraternity at Willamette University. Since everybody seemed pretty much schizophrenic then — caught as we were dead center between Eisenhower and LBJ (it appeared all roads led to Nam then) — I suppose I shouldn't grump too much about the violent turns that mad House took. Besides, I’m rambling. What I wanted to say about the Frat House was that Mark O. Hatfield and some cronies had organized that chap ter back in 1947 or so. There we were: two generations of aspiring Senator pledges. Yes, ole Mark O., presently of the U S. Senate (I guess he grew up, finally) and everybody's graying boy wonder. (I have a co-worker who, in a weak moment admitted to me that during a campaign interview this year with the charming Mr. H., she had gushed out, “You were my governor, senator!” He does that to people. So, anyway, at the giddy, barely post-pubescent age of 18, I joined this social organization that had some peculiar questions about rhyming the then-governor’s middle name, usually during a stint of push-ups on Hell Week. What?! Rambling again, am I? Ahhhwwlll! ft’s term-paper week and I’m on the blind side of 34 sleepless hours. So, back there in whatever we called the late Sixties, I had already estab lished this distinctive, if distant, relation ship with the by-now U.S. Senator. Then, suddenly, our lopsided com mon ground lurched into a bizarre, new configuration. I was snatched from my ivy tower in the former Salem Post Of fice, former WU Law School, present Polly Sigh Bars and Grill, and whisked to The Nation's Capitol: dragooned as a college intern for Mark Hatfield Well, thanks for the applause, but it wasn't all that big a deal. I got to go to the National Gallery of Art whenvever I wanted and read the Washington Post every morning. I even got to see Eugene McCarthy (remember?) up real close and once watched Ted Kennedy give a news con ference outside a committee hearing room Once in a while, the Senator H. would ask me to write a letter to some elderly woman in Redmond answering her in quiry about how he had witnessed for Christ most recently. To be fair to the Senator, he usually would explain carefully to me what his fundamentalist Christianity meant to him; then, I would just as carefully go out and overlook the letter until it disap peared completely. But what I most liked to do was steal down to the letter-answering room in the Old Senate Office Building basement and watch them turn out the form re sponses to all the constituents’ outrages and "alarms, view with.” In those early days of “personal response" image-making, they had pretty crude machinery, but basically all the Vietnam letters went in one pile, the sustained-timber-yield letters in another and the weekly note from the Brooklyn lady whose “super was building a bowl ing alley on my head” in the wastepaper basket. Then the names and addresses of the letter writers were typed out on punch tape, inserted in the automatic typewri ter — the “robo-letter” machine — al ready programmed with the appropriate form response; a button got pushed and — presto! — another one cent boost in postal rates. The continuous roll of typed letter ar ranged itself into a neat block of paper; the edges were trimmed and the sepa rate sheets taken to the autopen — the Senator's automatic signature machine — personally signed by myself or who ever else was there, stuffed into en velopes and dispatched. After a few desultory months of this, I sort of checked back into Oregon. The Senator and I got back into our remote relationship again; only I quit reading his news stories and he quit remembering my name whenever we ran across each other in that inevitable and embarras sing way. So, why — I hope you're asking by now—am I stretching your eyeballs with this droll recitation? Well, come last Oct. 31, we printed an editorial endorsing the Senator for a third term Over his opponent State Senator Vem Cook. We started by say ing this was our last installment on the political debt we'd been paying off for Hatfield’s stand on Viet Nam. We also noted his opponent wasn't lucid enough to get himself out of a microwave oven without half baking. So, the Senator and I have got our little thing going again. I got a letter — yeah, I think one of those kind — from him yesterday. It starts out “Dear Glen,” which is the first time he's remembered for years. (Nah, I'm not fooled. It’s just the machine and good intelligence work by his state staff.) He thanked us for our endorsement. But the letter's on bonded paper any way, with just a few suggestive numbers to indicate the letter series and the good, old felt-pen signature — a must for smooth autopen operation. So, I thought we’d share it with you; a real — well, almost real — message from our man in Washington. (No, I didn’t write the editorial myself. You see, we’ve got this machine ...) Glen Gibbons Editorial page editor Clean up own act I am writing in regards to a peti tion which was signed by the stu dents at the University Inn. The students who signed the petition had these complaints: 1.) Bad & Cold food 2.) dirty salad tsar, con diment bar, ketchup bottles etc. 3.) dirty tables and floors, etc. These are to name only a few gripes. They also stated that all the women who work there, do no thing but stand around, and drink coffee all day. First of all, my mother is an em ployee at the Inn, and works very hard for the little pay she receives. She is there to serve the kids not be their slave. Having seen the kitchen before a meal, I can con greg wosson tabled indefinitely An unfortunate by-product of the realization that bigger isn't always better was the romantidzation of country life. Trading sidewalks for silos and getting milk from a cow instead of the store became the goal of many urban dwellers. Small-town provincialism was hip and the redis covery of the land fit very well with the “we-they" syndrome that plagued the counterculture move ment of the late 60s and early 70s. “I used to be fucked-up like them, but since I’ve returned to my roots, I’ve seen the way." And that whimsical affection for a lifestyle not requiring large amounts of concrete wasn’t confined to the counterculture. A recent piece by Chicago columnist Gregory Favre shows it invaded the Old Guard too. Writing about his vacation in Waldport, Favre gushes that ‘people live here because they want to. They are doing things they want to do.” Highlighted is the individualistic ruralite who will “put up the ‘Closed’ sign in the middle of the after noon or take the day off to celebrate the opening of deer season or head north to attend an antique show." Not mentioned is the immense social pressure on kids to be good athletes, the inherent bigotry that made it so during my 13 years in Harrisburg — I never went to school with a black — or the closed minded moral system that stifles change and slows social advancement. Which is all pretty heavy and sounds like rural living has nothing to offer. Not true. Honesty and trustworthiness are values sometimes lost in anonymity as populations grow from hundreds to thousands. But living in Waldport, Deadwood or Swiss home doesn’t make a person three or four points groovier than his or her cohorts in Eugene. Life in small towns offers different challenges and rewards than life in the city, but it's not intrinsically better. Virtue is de pendent on the person more than the environment. • • • • Ten years ago, American life was marked by rallies, marches and demonstrations aimed at forc ing a re-evaluation of this country’s values. Often the target was a government 3,000 miles away and the statements were loud. Today, those promoting alterations are speak ing much more quietly — so quietly that re volutionaries used to the brashness of the 60s don’t hear. Many dismiss the 70s as a decade when no thing happened and reminisce about the activism of the 60s. But the 60s are gone, separatism is no longer a legitimate political tod, and the issues are different Smashing glass and blowing up bathrooms was a legitimate way to bring’ the war back home,’’ but they’re not efficient tactics when the goal is to stop nuclear power. True, there have been no mass uprisings in the 70s. But to say gdng to law school, passing petitions or working at the Legislature isn't as legitimate as leading a game of hide-and-seek with armed pdice in downtown Eugene, is wrong. test it is spotless, not a big mess as they say. The only time it is dirty is when the students go through the line slopping and dumping food right and left. Certainly the help cannot go after the supposed well mannered students with a doth, deaning up mess after mess. On the average there are 2 to 3 women working on a shift, these are to name a few of their duties: washing dirty pans; running the dish machine, mopping all the floors, deaning tables, prepanng meals, dishing up each entree, fil ling salad bar and condiment bar Now tell me how a person could do all those things after each meal and drink coffee all day! When the help do get a break, believe me after a nine hour day they deserve one. Also if the food is so terrible why do the students (most of them) fill their plates to the maximum and go back for seconds and thirds? If any of my mother's kids aded wilth the ill manners of some at the Inn, she would be ashamed of us. We were brought up to respect others and be grateful for the things we have, not complain about things we don’t know enough about. I think if the students respect the dining room area a little more, a lot of the above problems will elimi nate themselves. Debbie Nelson Lane Community College No return address? I received a message pur ported to be from God the other day. It came in the guise of a chain letter. It started with a prayer that was rather soothing, but then quickly degenerated into various threats of what would befall me if I failed to mail this bullying piece of trash to 20 other people. Although no money was in volved (except for postage and copying costs) the writer inferred my state of health, career, and family would be endangered if I ignored the letter. It amazes me that someone had the gall to start this perverted prayer letter, and that people have complied after reading their tirades. If you receive this letter, I urge you to trash it. It cannot serve any decent purpose. Ann Treneman senior, journalism letters poficy The Emerald will accept and try to print all letters and opinion columns containing fair comment on ideas and topics of concern or interest to the Univer sity community. Letters and opinions will be run on a first-come, first-served basis. Both letters and opin ion columns must be typewritten, using 65 character margins, and should be triple-spaced. Letters and opinions must be signed and the author's field of study (or faculty status) noted.
