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
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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.