Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 17, 2014)
Street roots Jan. 17, 2014 i For th e :i x<i»iïu A com pilation o f facts, targe and small, about o u r com m unity • Pounds of coffee donated by Stumptown in 2013:14,000 7 i f U Summer of loving BY KATHERINE LUCK • Number of nonprofits Stumptown supported in 2013, including Street Roots: 160 • Units of carbon dioxide emission reduced by Stumptown in 2013:9,300 • Number of cars removed from the road to equal 9,300 units of carbon dioxide emissions: 109 • Estimated cost of disconnecting Mt. Tabor’s reservoirs and relocating the water: $2.9 million • Miles of sewer pipe in Portland: 2,500 • Rough percentage of sewer pipes in Portland over 80 years old: 33 • Number of units of affordable housing Portland Housing Bureau rehabilitated and preserved in 2013:600 • Number of households Portland Housing Bureau prevented or ended homelessness for through shortterm rent assistance in 2013:2,231 • Percentage of households receiving short-term rent assistance and eviction prevention that retain their housing at six months after receiving assistance: 90 • Median annual cost of child care in Multnomah County in 2012: $12,180 • Care of a toddler as a percent of the annual income of a minimum wage > worker in Multnomah County: 67 • Percentage increase of child care costs between 2004-2012 in Oregon; 13 • Percentage decrease of household income in the same period: 9 • Number of domestic workers in Oregon: 9,700 • Percentage of domestic workers in Oregon that are women : 95 • Percentage of Oregon’s private-sector workers that don’t have paid sick days: 40 - • Percentage of food-service workers in Portland area that don’t have paid sick days: 81 • Number of cities that have enacted minimum standards for paid sick days: 3 (San Francisco, Seattle, Washington D.C.) • Number of deaths throughout the U.S. associated with snowstorm and Arctic air in first weeks of January: 20 Sources: Stumptown Coffee Roasters; Portland Bureau o f Internal Business Practices; Bureau o f Environmental Services; Portland Housing Bureau; Oregon State University “Child Care and Education in Oregon and Its Counties: 2012” Study; Family Forward Oregon Education Fund; USA Today; The World (Coos County) C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R ill Bryson — bestselling author, American Anglophile and assembler of fascinating minutiae — noticed something remarkable about a single summer that took place in this country back in 1927. “An extraordinary number of important things happened that summer,” he writes in “Óne Summer: America, 1927.” “You could make a good case ... that it was the most eventful summer in modern American history. Yét nobody seems to have noticed that all these things happened at the same time and influenced each other.” As Bryson deftly elucidates in his characteristic rambling, eclectic and charming style, “all these things” included Babe Ruth’s record-setting season of 60 home runs, Charles Lindbergh’s historic flight from New York to Paris, the advent of “talking” motion pictures and a nascent form of television, the official appearance of Mount Rushmore on the American landscape and the discovery that all of a ; sudden and “peacefully, by accident, and almost unnoticed, America had just taken over the world.” Who knew the summer of 1927 was so eventful It was the summer that Americans discovered that their country was now dominant in nearly every field imaginable, including technological innovation, military prowess, finaUcial power, cultural influence and overall optimism. And yet, the U.S. also had the second highest divorce rate in the world, rampant and overtclassism, sexism and racism, and murder rates in major metropolitan areas that are astonishing even today: 13.3 violent deaths per 100,000 people in Chicago, 16.8 in Detroit, and a nearly unfathomable 69.3 in Memphis (by comparison, 21st century cities average six murders per 100,000 people). The summer of 1927 that Bryson unfolds was a season (technically May to September) filled with political maneuvering, inexplicable national crazes and a public obsession with violent crime. B One Summer: America, 1927 By Bill Bryson Flagpole sitting, consisting simply of perching atop a flagpole for days at a time, became wildly popular. President Calvin Coolidge unexpectedly announced that he would not seek a second term of office, while Herbert Hoover, future eponym of the Great Depression’s Hoovervilles, plotted his own candidacy. He became a hero for organizing relief efforts for flood- stricken residents of the Mississippi River basin. The period also ushered in-the eighth year of Prohibition, a reduction in the average yardage of women’s dresses from . nearly 20 yards to just 7 and mass media coverage of a now-forgotten “murder of the century” involving a corset salesman, his married lover and a deadly sash weight that must be filed under “improbable and archaic murder weapons.” “One Summer: America, 1927” is, at its core, a highly readable love letter to Bryson’s native country. The long-gone period that he deftly evokes feels familiar yet foreign. People called each other on the phone, took their families on summer vacations in their cars, went to the movies and followed the latest scandals in the tabloids. At the same time, the population of the United States was far smaller than it is today and remarkably rural, with half of all Americans living on farms or in small towns. Baseball was a satisfyingly speedy game, often clocking in at 90 minutes or less. And in Seattle, attachment to home and hearth was aggressively promoted by the Clean Books League, which tried to ban a series of travel books for inciting unnecessary “wanderlust” Though thé text is steeped in a cozy nostalgia that is seductive, Bryson never allows himself to indulge in a revisionary “good ol’ days” interpretation of history. As he notes, “of all the labels that were applied to the 1920s ... one that wasn’t used but perhaps should have been was the Age of Loathing. There may never have been another time in the nàtion’s history when more people disliked more other people from more directions and for less reason.” Amid the cheerful anecdotes about celebrities of yesteryear * and faètoids about Ford’s popular Model T, Bryson does not neglect to include details about the still-controversial execution of Italian anarchists-cum-fall-guys Sacco and Vanzetti, starkly contrasted with the Bath Massacre, a school bombing that Bryson unflinchingly observes “was the largest and ihost cold-blooded slaughter of children in the history of the United States, yet it was quickly forgotten.” Though there is an easy flippancy inherent in “One Summer: America, 1927” and the Roaring Twenties it describes, both the book and the era offer guideposts as well as warning signs for the 21st century, often at the most unexpected moments. Reprinted from Real Change Newspapér, Seattle, Wash. Coffee in Antartica by A ve n d o r Can joy come, to me... At this coffee shop table in the sun In a harsh sun, frozen still in the wintertime sky • couldn’t sortie sweet girl arrive to talk with me, and kindle some joy in me Here, now, I feel some kind of loneliness some degree of fear some aspect of unease... longing, yearning And to think what a pleasant morning I had and to realize how unpredictable life can be But I believe things will get better again matter of fact, all I really got to do, is hop on a bus and head home thankful I have one to go to. c r e a t in g c o m m u n ity , c r e a t in g change^ t o g e t h e r SISTERS OFTHE ROAD We Î 1 } Hospitality & Friendship Community change through the Homeless Bill of Bights Campaign Working together for nonviolence & justice And don’t forget fun! Ill ore welcome * m n w a «.¡« m m w w w .s is t e r s o f t h e r o a d .o r g Thank you Street Roots readers for all your support.
