“ UPPER LEFT EDGE. VOLUME g R L E ! MUMBLR P tfuuy m UPPER LEFT COAST PRODUCTIONS > p o BOX 4 2 2 2 CANNON BEACH 0 « W O * S 0 3 * 3 6 2145* bhulh t pxifitr. cm a W W W .U p p trk fU y .co w Chance favors the prepared mind. Love, Truth and Videotape ♦Note: This installmennt o f your Professor's column is another in his "Historical Series." In his lazy way, he feeds two sparrows with one crust o f bread. I expect its time to take a whack at those hardy souls who cart and siphon off our unspeakables: the nightsoil engineers and garbage toters. In pioneer times, all the world was a dumping ground. Homesteaders simply located a convenient depression or stream bed close to their cabins and whucked the trash into the undergrowth. A tangle o f blackberries and salal quickly healed over any clutter or ickiness, and that was that! Once the bottles and bones disappeared in the shrubbery, slipping indecorously from view, they sloughed out o f mind as well. In the village o f Cannon Beach, a burgeoning population and civic pride dictated some loftier end, an exclusive repository for cast- offs. A dump was established in the hills northeast o f town. The men who trundled waste from homes and cabins were a colorful lot. In my youth, the Elsasser family had locked up the garbage trade. Chris Elsasser owned the franchise and drove truck. His assistant was a young lanky chap named Cliff Hickle. The locals all called him "Dirty Knees Hickle," an endearing jibe, not malicious, because the incessant drip o f putrefying garbage scourged his canvas pant legs, indelibly staining the coarse material. Cliff wore the stains and nickname amiably, a badge o f his public service and tribulations. Our garbagemcn served proudly. In what became a village tradition, our garbagemcn always possessed a good measure o f savoir faire, a philosophical nature, jocularity as a specific against disgust. The men who move garbage form a unique guild. Like the members o f Masonic Lodges, they have special knowledge. Imagine your garbageman picking through the weekly discards! Oooh,La! The secrets they discover! A keen garbageman can read trash like a book. Overdue bills, diapers, old love letters, padded undergarments, girlie magazines, cheap wine bottles, soiled sheets, all reveal volumes. Like high priests they interpret these auguries as commentaries on the nature o f life. Dickie Walsbom took over the route from his stepfather, Chris. Dickie ushered in the Golden Age o f garbage collection in Camion Beach. Dick loved a joke, especially a practical joke, and he revelled in trash collection. He called his crew "the G-Men." A long succession o f red, hand-me- down vehicles bore the calligraphed title "Miss Cannon Beach." If we were working at some job site, Dickie's arrival signalled a pause in the action. He always shared with us the latest collection o f blue stories, jokes, and bits o f gossip. As he drove by, he'd yell at us and make a gesture like someone milking a cow. "How long are you boys going to milk that job?" he'd ask. Dick also initiated the dog treat program. Dick rounded up all the stale loaves o f bread he could scrounge from village bakeries and distributed them to the neighborhood dogs on his route. Dogs harbor some sort o f innate disgruntlement with garbagemen, and the bread handouts soothed their beastliness. My favorite garbage story involves Dick and a failed batch o f bread dough. Dick got an emergency call late one night from a local baker, Mr. Berger. Dick had neglected to empty the dumpster at the bakery. "Dick," Mr. Berger's voice spoke excitedly on the phone, "could you come down here quick. I've got a problem in my dumpster." Dickie drove down to the bakery grudgingly. "When I got there, you wouldn't believe it. A huge mass o f fermenting bread dough had filled up the dumpster and was moving down the street! It looked like the Blob that ate Cannon Beach. If we hadn't hauled it o ff right then, I don't know what might have happened." When Dick hung up the route, his son Rich, Jim Malo, and Tommy Misner took over. In their hands collection became high art and high jinks. The men festooned the garbage vehicle with found objects. When it rumbled down a gravelled side street, the truck looked like some tinker Gypsy's wagon bound for a fair. During one period, the old red truck sported an enormous red lobster on the left front bumper and a large naked doll on the right. Life-size cut­ outs o f Larry, Moe, Curly, and Rodney Dangerfield shared the driver's cab. Rodney's head stated a plaint common to garbage guys "I don't get no respect!" A huge green dragon affixed to the truck licked the air menacingly. These guys wore short pants year round. No can drips on short pants. To lighten the task, the boys would stunt around with your garbage can. "Better check your can," they'd tell me. "We were by today. That fish you left in there must have been two weeks old! Whew! Paybacks are a bitch." I'd rush home to find my can hanging high up in a pine tree, with, maybe, some discarded underwear dangling there too. Sadly, those times have passed. Some firm in McMinnville quietly and officiously drags off the ruck these days. They appear to lack significant imagination. (Everything I know I learned from Video Rodeo) or, H ow the V C R Saved W estern Civilization by Sarah Vowel 1 Bill M urray was on stage at C hicago's Goodm an Theater last week. It w as a hom etow n thing, one o f those arm chair conversations. H e was prom oting his new book "Cinderella Story: M y Life in G olf." As for why on earth Iris publishers w ould ask for such a tom e, he said, "You could write a really bad book about g o lf and it w ould sell a lot of copies. And they thought 1 had that talent." O ne o f the m ost curious m om ents o f the evening — aside from playful ja b s at the late G ene Siskel ("H e got his") — w as w hen M urray's interlocutor, the host o f a local TV m orning show , asked him about the enduring appeal o f the 1980 g o lf m ovie ‘Caddyshack.’ M urray, who fam ously played the dem ented, gopher-hunting groundskeeper Carl in that film , attributed its continued cultural presence to tw o things: first, its clever social com m entary, the way it pits the blue collar caddies against the w ealthy yahoos o f the B ushw ood C ountry Club. 'T a k e away die candy bar in the sw im m ing pool," asserts MuiTay, "and it's a class story." Second, he credits cable television. "You can see ‘C add y sh ack ’ six times this m onth som ewhere," he said. "These things have a life." It was a beautiful tiling to say, really, the idea that a w ork o f art could keep on w orking. Not to m ention that M urray's w ords w ould have been unim aginable as recently as 20 years ago. Before cable and then satellite television becam e household norm s, before video, seeing a m ovie again was a random event. A side from revival houses or, on television, the late show and — rem em ber this? — tilings like the "ABC Sunday N ight M ovie," the average citizen had no say w hatsoever in picking and choosing w hich m ovies to get (re)acquainted with. M urray's w ords might have struck a chord in me because "Caddyshack" ju st so happens to be the first m ovie 1 ever saw on video. That was the featured entertainm ent at L aura Seitz's 13th birthday party circa 1982. 1 had never seen a V C R before, and now I hope for their sake that the S eitz fam ily w ent w ith VHS instead o f Beta. I rem em ber being extrem ely distracted from the m ovie — even though it was m y first R rating, too - because I couldn't get over the sheer fact tliat Laura had decided she wanted to usher in her adolescence w ith an ensem ble cast including Chevy C hase and T ed K night, and she and her m other went to a store and brought it home. I was there to celebrate Laura's rite of passage, b ut 1 co uldn't help but get llie feeling I was moving on to som ething better myself. Just as our parents were the last generation to rem em ber a tim e before the fam ily TV , we w ould be the last generation to rem em ber the first tim e w e saw a VCR. It w ould have enorm ous consequences - personally and educationally. T elevision in general and video in particular have m osdy deserved bad reps. B ut before the V CR, an inform al film education, especially aw ay from the cities, was im possible. A nd because my hom etow n had a w ildly intelligent, revered video store called "Video Rodeo," which featured sections broken dow n by director or country o f origin, my tw in sister and I w orked our way through H itchcock and Scorsese and, for o u r 16th birthday, the scant four films o f one Jam es Dean. F or obvious and tragic reasons, electronic m edia arc under fire for their undue influence over diildren. I understand concerns over the depiction o f sex and violence, but 1 feel obliged to say that in m y youth, cable TV and video were a good tiling, a saving force. Even a moral one. 1 didn't realize how m uch until the other day. I was flipping channels and got sucked in to "Reds" on Show tim e. I had seen the film only once, on H BO w hen I was m aybe 13, around the lim e o f my friend L aura Seitz's birthday. It all cam e rushing back. I had forgotten, m aybe never know n, how much influence this m ovie had o ver me. A nd not the political plot, when W arren B eatty's John Reed q uits jo u rn alism to jo in the Russian R evolution. I was enorm ously sw ayed by the small stuff, how D iane K eaton's L ouise Bryant m ade her way in the world T here is a series o f vignettes in w hich Louise, a libertine in her native O regon but John Reed's blushing shadow in New Y ork, is asked her o p inion but doesn't have one, and says she's a w riter bu, doesn't really write. I ler constant em barrassment and frustration galvanized me. A t 13,1 resolved to never be like that, to always have an op in io n , to stick up for m yself w hen a bully like E m m a G oldm an isn't taking m e seriously. I didn't w ant to go through that, and I didn't w ant to be in some m an's shadow , even a man as appealing as W arren Beatty T hat w as Fem inism 101 But the deeper lesson I learned from "Reds" was more traditional, and more profound I have never forgotten K eaton's scenes with Jack N icholson as Eugene O 'N eill. Louise and G ene, as he's called, have an affair w hile (C ontinued on back page) I ^ O O M S W A S H IN G TO N ft OREGON COASTS 199 9 Corrected for PACIFIC BEACHES HIGH JULY W Dili------ DAT GUIDE - - n FT 2:02 8.4 2:42 8.2 3:25 8,0 4:15 7.5 5:14 7.0 6:26 6.5 7:47 6.2 9:07 6.2 10:18 64 11:22 6.7 TIME 1 Thur ■ 2 Fri • 3 Sat • 4 SUN • 5 Mon • 6 lues • 7 Wed • 8 Thur • 9 Fn • 10 Sat • 11 SUN• 12:20 12 M o n * 13 Tues • 0:31 14 Wed • 1:22 15 Thur • 2:12 16 Fri • 3:02 17 Sat • 3:52 18 SUN • 4:46 19 Mon# 5:44 20 Tues • 6:50 21 Wed • 8:01 22 Thur • 9:11 23 Fri • 10:15 24 Sat • 11:10 25 SUN • 11:58 26 Mon • 12:42 27 Tues • 28 Wed ■ 0:31 29 Thur • 1:11 30 Fn • 1:52 31 Sat • 2:34 A M TIDES UTE TYPE 7.1 9.5 9.3 8.9 8.5 7.9 7.2 6.5 6.0 5.7 5.7 5.9 6.2 64 6.7 8.3 8.3 8.3 8.2 rT nt THE 3:43 4:20 4:58 5:39 6:25 7:15 8:08 9:02 9:55 1048 11:40 1:14 2:04 2:52 3:37 4:21 504 5:48 6:32 7:19 8:07 8:55 9:42 10:26 1109 11:51 1:23 201 2:36 3:10 3:44 FT 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.6 7.7 8.0 8.4 8.7 9.1 9.3 9.5 7.4 7.6 7.7 7.8 7.8 7.8 7.7 7.6 7.6 7.6 7.7 7.8 7.9 8.1 8.2 6.9 7.1 7.2 7.4 7.6 LOW JULY HUE 9:09 9:43 10:18 10:58 1143 0:41 1:51 3:01 4:07 5:06 6:01 6:53 7:42 8:28 9:13 9:55 10:36 11:18 0:00 1:01 2:05 3:08 4:06 4:57 542 6:24 7:02 7:38 8:12 8:45 9:19 H. ---------n 1■ TIME FI 0.8 9:09 2.7 0.7 9:52 2.6 0.5 10:40 2.5 0.1 11:36 2.3 0.3 1.9 1.4 0.7 0.1 0.9 •1.5 •1.8 ■2.0 ■1.9 •1.6 ■1.1 12:36 1:35 2:39 3:42 4:44 5:43 6:39 7:33 8:26 9.18 10:10 0.5 11:03 0.1 1.7 1.6 1.4 1.0 0.5 0.0 04 0.6 0.8 ■1.0 ■10 0.9 0.8 ' BIGGER THE DOT - BETTER THE FISHING * DAYLIGHT TIME 12.-01 12:49 1:42 2:39 3:35 4:29 5:19 6:05 6:49 7:30 8:11 8:52 9:35 0.8 1.3 1.7 2.0 2.1 2.1 2.1 2.0 1.9 1.8 1.8 1.8 0.8 1.5 2.0 2.4 2.6 2.7 2.7 2.6 2.4 2.3 2.1 1.9 1.6 PM TIDES BOLD TYPE It is every citizen ’s duty to support his governm ent, but not necessarily in the style to which it has been accustom ed. Dr. L aw rence Peters D18Laiie