november3 2016
VERNONIA’S
volume10 issue21
www.vernoniasvoice.com
free
reflecting the spirit of our community
Roll Columbia Concerts a Success
Two concerts were a prelude
to the release of the album
featuring all 26 Woody
Guthrie BPA songs.
By Scott Laird
Joe Seamons, and his
many musician friends, held
two concerts on Saturday, Octo-
ber 22, 2016 at the Old Church
in Portland. The concerts were
in celebration of the 75 th an-
niversary of Woody Guthrie’s
Pacific Northwest Songs and
featured musician and Guthrie
historian Bill Murlin, Seamons’
band, and Vernonia favorites,
Timberbound, Seamons’ musi-
cal collaborator Ben Hunter,
and numerous other accom-
plished musicians.
The two concerts, one
at 2:00 pm and one at 8:00 pm,
were fundraisers for the up-
coming Roll Columbia album
that Seamons has put together,
and featured numerous musi-
cians from that long anticipated
album project. Seamons an-
nounced at the concert that the
album is scheduled for release
in January on the Smithsonian
Folkways record label.
The album will include
all 26 songs that Guthrie wrote
in a one month period while
employed by the Bonneville
Power Administration (BPA) in
1941. The album recording has
been completed and includes a
stunning array of musicians and
partnerships, including many
northwest and Portland based
musicians.
Guthrie was hired to
write songs for a film the BPA
planned to produce, that they
hoped would help promote elec-
tric power to the rural north-
west, and was paid $266.66 for
his 30 days of work. He record-
ed about a dozen of the songs
continued on page 11
Rebuilding a Life
Seven years ago, in a drunken
haze, Desmond Hines shot
and killed his good friend
Darrell Schoonover. Now,
recently released from prison
after serving his time, Hines
is attempting to restart his life
and learn to live with his past
mistakes. This is his story.
By Scott Laird
On March 18, 2009 Desmond
Hines, 31, an alcoholic who was angry
and despondent over the recent death of
his father and the revelation that he had
been cut out of his father’s will and left
with nothing, sat with his good friend
inside
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Darrell Schoonover at Hines’s
father’s house in Birkenfeld with
a half-gallon of rum and a hand
gun.
What happened in
the late hours of that dark and
disturbing night would end
Schoonover’s life and forever
change Hines’s.
Today, after serving
seven years for manslaughter in
the Oregon State prison system,
Hines is living in Vernonia, stay-
ing sober, trying to start a busi-
ness and become a productive
member of society. He’s also
trying to deal with the tragedy
that took the life of his friend,
along with everything that has
happened to him leading to
that fateful night.
***
Desmond Hines grew
up in the rural community of
Birkenfeld, living with his single fa-
ther, brother, and sister. He attended
Mist Grade School and the Vernonia
Middle School. When he was just
an infant, Hines says his mother kid-
napped the children when she split
up with their father and took them to
Texas. They lived there for several
months before the private investiga-
tor his father hired, located the kids
and brought them back to Oregon.
“I never saw my mother again,” says
Hines. His father told Hines she died
of an overdose when he was just eight;
he later learned from his lawyer at his
prison sentencing that his mother had
committed suicide because his father
would not let her see the children.
Life with his father, Dennis
in the basement of the BPA of-
fice in Portland. The originally
planned film never material-
ized, but three songs were even-
tually used in the documentary
film, Columbia, later produced
by the BPA in 1948. The rest of
the songs disappeared and were
thought to be lost.
Murlin, also an em-
ployee of the BPA in the 80s
and 90s, spent years tracking
down all 26 of Guthrie’s Pacific
Northwest Songs. It has been a
long-time dream of his to have
all 26 songs recorded and re-
leased together. He partnered
Hines, was hard, says Desmond. Den-
nis was a heavy equipment operator for
several different logging outfits over
the years, and also a heavy drinker and
hard core alcoholic who was extremely
critical and physically abusive. “He
was very particular about the way things
should be done,” says Hines. “It could
be a little thing like, you didn’t do your
dishes or your chores, and he would
just beat the crap out of you. My older
brother got it the worst and then it trick-
led down to me and my sister.”
For all of his anger issues and
the abuse, Hines says Dennis was still
a really good father. “We always had a
roof over our head, food in our bellies
and firewood. He taught me how to fish
and hunt and camp. A lot of the good
things outweighed the bad and
made me the person I am today.”
As an infant Hines contracted a
parasite called toxoplasmosis while
playing in a pile of sawdust. When
his father didn’t bother to take him
to the doctor he lost the vision in his
right eye, growing up blind in that
eye.
When he was 13 Hines got in
trouble with the Vernonia police
and told them he didn’t want to go
home because his father was going
to beat him. “My old man’s abuse
had got a little too heavy for me and
I just couldn’t take it anymore,”
says Hines.
Hines ended up being placed in
the foster care system. He bounced
around, living with several different
families, and even wound up back
with his father for a brief time. “But
it was just the same thing – he was
just drunk and angry all the time
and I didn’t like being around it.”
He eventually landed with
Betty and Dave Vaughan and worked at
their restaurant, The Country Kitchen
in Vernonia, before he found himself in
more trouble after stealing a large supply
of alcohol from the restaurant with some
of his teenage buddies. “That was when
my own alcoholism really started to de-
velop,” he says. He ended up working
off a $27,000 restitution at The Country
Kitchen over the next several years and
dropped out of high school.
***
“After that I just dove real hard
into the heavy drinking,” says Hines
about the next five years of his life. “I
did some drugs for a while. I was getting
continued on page 3
