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About Applegater. (Jacksonville, OR) 2008-current | View Entire Issue (July 1, 2013)
18 Summer 2013 Applegater Are the Robber Baron days back or what? Oh, Jay Gould (1836 to 1892) would be as proud today as when he put the screws to everyone with his Union Pacific Railroad in the last half of the 1800s, along with his other railroad cronies. Jay Gould is the man who set the high bar for predatory industrial capitalism. Railroad, coal companies and steel companies ran the country. They handpicked who was going to be president—they couldn’t lose with partying in 1920s Chicago (incidentally, either side of our one-party system. They the mayor of Chicago attended a cousin’s even controlled the Supreme Court—the wedding in 1949). Whiskey, Chicago and court never ruled against them for many politics—this was some interesting stuff. decades. One of their chosen ones, President Then there was great-grandma Rutherford B. Hayes, wrote in his post- Hendricks, a Nazarene preacher, riding around on a mule and proselytizing in the presidential diary about America, “It is a government by the back hills of Kentucky. corporation, of the Maybe she was trying corporation and for the to make up for all corporation.” I think the above-mentioned When’s the we’re on the same road Chicago shenanigans. last time you today. Why? We have The tales continued a supreme court that into the 1930s and read about a says you can’t curb the Great Depression, court sending a the amount of money when the family ate lots t h a t’s d o n a t e d f o r of navy beans. I was corporation to political races—it’s a also told about killer death row? First Amendment right. blizzards that blew snow Mega corporations and through the cracks in unions love this ruling. the house, followed by The court also has mummifying summer ruled that corporations droughts in Nelson, are the same as people. You bet. When’s Nebraska, where my father’s family lived. the last time you read about a court sending In the 1940s, my Aunt Joan was a corporation to death row? Or sentencing a dance instructor for the Fred Astaire Dance Studio in Indianapolis, Indiana. a corporation to life in prison? So while we clamor up and down the Apparently my father didn’t have the right or left leg of the one-party system— dancing gene (it skipped me, too), because my mother had to ask him out twice to for abortion, against abortion; for prayer in high school dances before he accepted. school, against prayer in school; cut capital gains tax, leave capital gains tax—these Lucky me! While we were reminiscing, my types of issues don’t create jobs, don’t put father confessed that he’d always wanted money in your pocket and do not have any to be a train engineer, especially on the bearing on your financial future. But they do keep us from issues such as the “parting old steamers. Our talks about trains and politics out” of America, downsizing the American brought us to the current depression that dream, and a tax on most everything you we’re in. All were in agreement that it really do, need or pursue. So while we’ve been biting each other is a depression, no matter what the talking on the ankles over these social/moral issues, heads dribble on about. Wall Street and the likes have cleaned out Of course, not everyone has suffered in this latest depression. I recently read our bank vaults. that for every 90 cents us bottom-feeders on the money train earn, the top .01 percent pocket a cool $18,000. From 1950 to 1970, that top .01 percent only pocketed a measly $162 to every 90 cents us bottom-feeders made. TALL TALES FROM THE EDITOR Family tales or Biting ankles This past spring I flew out to Arkansas to visit some family who live around the little burg of Shirley. My trip there took a day longer than planned as my flight from San Francisco was delayed by five hours. I bet you can’t guess why we suffered through this long delay. Actually, you couldn’t guess in a million years. Really. Well, the reason was that the flight attendant had discovered a broken megaphone. FAA rules state that a plane can’t fly without a working megaphone. How else could the flight attendant announce “Cover your heads” to all passengers as their lips are pulled over their foreheads while the plane drops from 30,000 feet to 1,000 feet in a few seconds as it nosedives into the ground. Or she might announce “No pushing from the back of the line. You’ll all get your chance to jump before …” or “Drop those box cutters now.” Anyway, it took five hours to locate a working megaphone, so I missed connecting flights. Thus continued another adventure in flying and communing with the ever so diligent, orifice-probing Transportation Security Administration (TSA) folks. (Did you know that the TSA is the largest government bureaucracy since the creation of the defense department?) A couple of days after my arrival in Arkansas, my sister Paula drove me and my parents, who are approaching their mid- 80s, to Crossville, Tennessee. We traveled there to see my dad’s sister, Aunt Joan, and two of my cousins, Steve and Rick Porter. I hadn’t seen any of them in a few decades. We had a wonderful two-day visit filled with family stories. Steve and I reminisced about our glory days in the Hand-Me-Downs rock band. This was my first rock band and Steve had been the original lead singer. Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones had to have copied Steve’s stage moves. There were many other family tales from way before my time—about speakeasies; whiskey-running; all-night Advertisers ~ Contact: Jackson County— Sally Buttshaw 541-646-8418 sallybuttshaw@ymail.com Josephine County— Shawn Zimmerman 541-414-7301 thezsfamily@gmail.com Like us on Facebook! 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