OPINION
6A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2015
Stickel lived to see his prize ruined
Founded in 1873
STEPHEN A. FORRESTER, Editor & Publisher
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
HEATHER RAMSDELL, Circulation Manager
Water
under
the bridge
Compiled by Bob Duke
From the pages of Astoria’s daily newspapers
10 years ago this week — 2005
Problems with the pump station that’s part of the Skyline Water Improve-
ment Project just go on and on, Astoria Mayor Willis Van Dusen lamented
after Monday’s Astoria City Council meeting.
Irregularities in locating and constructing the pump station led to an in-
vestigation that resulted in the city manger ¿ring Mitch Mitchum, the city’s
public works director, an action Mitchum intends to appeal.
1ow, ¿ve months after the council became aware of the problem, and a
month and a half after the council voted to demolish the pump station and
construct it farther from the street, little progress has been made.
And .evin Dunn, one of the neighbors who ¿rst brought the situation to
the council’s attention, complained again Monday night.
Dunn, who lives next door to the water tower and pump station, said
recent rain and a small hailstorm caused bare dirt at the site to turn to mud
and wash down the hill.
“I’m just curious when somebody’s going to do something,” Dunn said.
“My yard’s starting to go down.”
Concrete slabs, black gravel and sparse landscaping. The
Ninth Street River Park, one of the last projects by the late archi-
tect Robert Murase, turned out to be too industrial-looking for
many Astoria residents, including Mayor Willis Van Dusen and
the City Council.
At a council meeting in January, the mayor described the
park as “extremely homely and not up to our standards.”
Astoria resident Don Webb agreed, calling it a “concrete mon-
ument with gravel around it,” and a “waste of taxpayers’ mon-
ey.”
A month later, Van Dusen announced that the tiny plot on As-
tor Street overlooking the Riverwalk would be transformed into
a Chinese interpretive park.
50 years ago — 1965
The new Lewis and Clark Festival Association established itself as a
permanent organization Sunday, following a successful 40-vehicle caravan
from Astoria to Seaside.
The caravan, carrying more than 100 people over the route followed by
Lewis and Clark’s party on the way to the beach to boil salt.
Purpose of the journey Sunday was to publicize the new association’s
proposals to conduct an annual arts festival in the Clatsop Beach area.
A $250,000 improvement project that includes purchase of
new “up to date” equipment is under way at Astoria Plywood
Corporation.
The company recently installed a new 30 opening hot press
and a new3 larger Sumner chipper to increase production ap-
proximately 25 percent, according to a company spokesman.
“It is just general expansion to keep up with the times,” the
spokesman said.
City Engineer
Homer Tunks looks
a bit bafÀed as he
puzzles the prob-
lem of how to move
Shark Rock and
where to move it.
Shark Rock must
give way to city
council plans for
improving Niaga-
ra Avenue that in-
volves eliminating
the island in mid-
street which con-
tains the relic. Cost
of moving the rock
Daily Astorian/File Photo
plus concrete will
run high and there is
no decision yet where it will go. The rock was carved by survivors of the
U.S. Sloop of War Peacock, wrecked in September, 1846, and later by survi-
vors of the wreck of the bark Industry. It lay buried in sand at the foot of the
hill near 13th Street, close to Exchange, for half a century. Discovered after
the 1 ¿re, the .iwanis Club hacked off the carved portion of the rock and
moved it to the Niagara Street site in 1926.
75 years ago — 1940
Clatsop County’s 1940 population is 24,248, an increase of 3124 or 14.8
percent over the 1930 ¿gure of 21,124, according to a survey just released
by Oregon Business and Tax Research, Inc.
The population increase in this county for the past decade reverses a
downward trend for the preceding 1920-30 decade when Clatsop population
fell from 23,030 to 21,124, a reduction of 1,906 or 8.3 percent.
Maj, Ben Howell, director of the manpower division of se-
lective service headquarters, said today that the national draft
lottery probably would be held here between October 21 and
October 26.
The lottery will determine the sequence in which registrants
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armed services.
A second diver to interest himself in diving into the wreck of the States
Steamship company freighter Iowa, wrecked on Peacock spit January 12,
1936, is making arrangement here today to look over the ¿nal resting place
of the freighter Monday.
His name was reported to be Wood. He contacted the coast guard and the
Arrow Tug & Barge company. Wood is reported to be diver in San Francis-
co. It is surmised that he is acting independently in the venture to remove the
safe from the wreck which lost the lives of 35 seamen.
I
T IS A CURSE TO LIVE
into an era you do not under-
stand. That seems to have hap-
pened to Fred Stickel.
The Oregonian’s story on Stick-
el’s death last Sunday was all the
more poignant, because the writer,
Bryan Denson, was describing a by-
gone era. The Oregonian over which
Stickel presided is gone. The news-
paper he operated as president and
publisher has vanished — its pha-
lanx of reporters decimated by or-
ders from Steve Newhouse in New
York City.
If you met Stickel in his prime,
you immediately noticed his Jersey
accent. Those were his beginnings.
In the parlance of England and its
colonies, Stickel was the Newhouse
family’s viceroy in Portland. In that
capacity, he did a hell of a job.
I encountered Stickel when we
started Willamette Week 41 years ago.
After we had been publishing our
alternative weekly for a number of
months, I picked up word that Stickel
was telling people WW was forced to
retract a story in every issue.
To respond to that smear, I put to-
gether a bundle of every edition we
had published, tied it with twine and
had it delivered directly to Stickel’s
desk.
źźź
TO STICKEL’S CREDIT, HE
invested in journalistic talent. Some
of us quibbled about his editor Sandra
Mims Rowe. But when Rowe’s
accomplishments are set next to the
desolation of today’s Oregonian, one
is nostalgic.
The great irony is that the week-
ly upstart that Stickel bad-mouthed
some 40 years ago has endured and
gained a large audience, while The
Oregonian has deteriorated and lost
audience. In a nutshell, it is no lon-
ger a David and Goliath relationship.
In audience size, WW has become a
close competitor.
źźź
BEFORE THE OREGONIAN’S
misadventure, there was New
Orleans, where the Newhouses own
the city’s legendary Times Picayune.
‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,
‘To talk of many things;
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing wax —
Of cabbages —and kings —’
Through the Looking-glass
of Cabbages and Kings
this one. And they made a decision
not to be a viable newspaper.”
źźź
Henny Ray Abrams/AP Photo
Stephen Sondheim listens to
Nathan Lane before the light-
ing of the marquee of the Ste-
phen Sondheim Theatre on
West 43rd St. in Times Square
in 2010 in New York.
Stephen
Sondheim’s
generosity
to a young
musician was
striking.
Paul Farhl described that newspaper’s
decline in an August Washington
Post article. The Picayune’s days of
publication were reduced, and two
news staffs were created — a large
one for the website and a smaller staff
for the print newspaper.
The response of one New Orleans
reader would be echoed by thousands
of Oregon readers. “They chose to
decimate their publication,” says
Tom Lowenburg, a local bookstore
owner who grew up here. “News is
important to a community, especially
THE MOST INTERESTING
detail in Farhl’s story is that local
New Orleans investors tried to buy
the Times Picayune. No sale, said the
Newhouses. That’s too bad. One of
the best remedies in a market econ-
omy is sale of a troubled property to
a new owner.
The Newhouses are no longer
useful to New Orleans, because they
clearly don’t care about the place,
just as they do not care about Ore-
gon. When that day arrives, an owner
should sell.
źźź
AFTER WRITING ABOUT
Stephen Sondheim last week, I re-
membered a young Portlander’s en-
counter with the great composer and
lyricist. Bob Lindstrom wrote about
classical music for Willamette Week
in its ¿rst years. He was a violinist in
the Portland Opera orchestra.
While he was pondering his fu-
ture, Lindstrom wrote Sondheim for
advice. Sondheim sent Lindstrom a
handwritten response. He showed me
the notecard with Sondheim’s name
embossed at the top. I was amazed at
the generosity of this man who was
becoming a legend in the musical
theater.
— S.A.F.
Malala Yousafzai’s battle continues
By NICHOLAS KRISTOF
New York Times News Service
W
hen the deputy head
mistress pulled Malala
Yousafzai out of high school
chemistry class one morning
a year ago, Malala nervously
searched her mind for recent of-
fenses.
“You usu-
ally get a bit
scared if your
head teacher
comes,
be-
cause you think
you are being
caught doing
something,”
Nicholas
Malala
re-
Kristof
called.
“But she told me: ‘I need to tell you
something. You have won the Nobel
Peace Prize.’”
After a brief celebration, Malala re-
turned to class for the rest of the school
day; as the world’s news organizations
clamored for interviews, she wrestled
with physics. She’s a champion of
girls’ education worldwide, she ex-
plains, and that must include her own.
Malala, now a high school junior,
was in New York this past week to
address the United Nations, attend the
premiere of a full-length documentary
movie about her life and hound world
leaders to pay attention to girls’ edu-
cation.
She hopes the movie, He Named
Me Malala, will galvanize a push to
provide 12 years of quality education
to all children worldwide.
The movie relates Malala’s extraor-
dinary story: How she grew up in rural
Pakistan, became an advocate for girls’
education and spoke out against the
Taliban. Then when she was 15 years
old, Taliban gunmen retaliated: They
stopped her school bus and shot her in
the head.
As she hovered between life and
death, supporters held candlelight vig-
ils, and a plane rushed her to a hospital
in Birmingham, England, that special-
izes in brain injuries. Today the left side
of her face is still partly paralyzed, and
she is somewhat deaf in that ear, but
she’s as outspoken as ever. And the Tal-
iban is still determined to kill her, so she
and her family remain in Birmingham.
The movie offers a revealing por-
trait of a global icon — who’s also a
teenager giggling about sports heroes,
Bebeto Matthews/AP Photo
Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, center, hold a press confer-
ence with her friends and youth activists Shazia Ramzan, far left, and Ka-
inat Riaz, second from left, both from Pakistan, Amina Yusuf from Nigeria,
second from right, and Salam Masri from Syria, Friday, at United Nations
headquarters. Malala addressed the U.N. General Assembly and urged
global leaders to do more to protect and empower young people.
worrying about acceptance by peers world is with teachers), and when
teachers do show up, they sometimes
and rolling her eyes at siblings.
“People think she is, like, very kind, prey on girls.
A 2007 U.N. study in Pakistan
and she speaks for people’s rights,” her
younger brother Khushal grumbles at found that 24 percent of primary
the breakfast table, needling her. “But schools don’t have any textbooks for
that’s not true, I think. At home she is students, and 46 percent lack desks for
them.
so violent!”
Yet education is still the best hope
Malala squeals with outrage. “I’m
to transform countries as well as indi-
not violent!”
It’s clearly awkward to be a teen- viduals. Malala’s father, Ziauddin, told
ager and have your sibling rivalries, me that when he was a teenager he
your skirt length (long) and your was brainwashed into praying for war
boyfriend history (none) explored on between Muslims and non-Muslims,
hoping to become a
the big screen, along
martyr. The antidote
with your painstak-
The antidote to such extremism, he
ing physical therapy
says, is education.
to recover from brain
to such
Malala is deter-
damage. But Malala
extremism mined not to be used
embraces the ¿lm as
as window dress-
a way to highlight the
transformative power is education. ing by world lead-
ers, and her advice
of education.
Her own mother is deeply conser- to presidents and prime ministers is
vative — she has discouraged Malala to focus not on elementary school or
from shaking hands with men or look- middle school but on 12 full years of
ing them in the eye — but is moder- education. “Your dreams were too
ating her views and now also learning small,” she tells U.N. members. “Your
to read for the ¿rst time. The mother achievements are too small. Now it is
also takes the global fuss about her time that you dream bigger.”
She scolded Nigeria’s president at
daughter in stride, and has no problem
ordering a Nobel laureate to clean up the time for not helping girls abduct-
ed by Boko Haram. She told President
her room.
Malala’s main message is that all Barack Obama at the White House that
children should get 12 years of free, drones were counterproductive and
safe, quality education, and that girls that he should invest in education. Just
are too often left behind. Some 63 mil- eight days of global military spending,
lion girls between the age of 6 and 15 she notes, would pay to get all remain-
ing kids in school worldwide.
are not in school.
“No world leader would want nine
Millions of others attend but sit in
classes of 100 students, taught in a lan- years of education for their children,”
guage they don’t understand, without she told me. “Every world leader wants
so much as a pencil, and learn nothing. quality education for their children.
Teachers often don’t show up (the big They need to think of the rest of the
truancy problem in the developing world’s children as their own children.”