OPINION
4A
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
Has Merkley’s sixth
sense failed him?
yndon Johnson said that
when a man enters a room,
he should know within a mat-
ter of seconds who’s an ally
and who’s not.
L
If he lacks that radar, he doesn’t
belong in politics.
Water
under
the bridge
Compiled by Bob Duke
From the pages of Astoria’s daily newspapers
10 years ago this week — 2006
The civil trial against local contractor Jim Wilkins came to an unex-
pected end this morning with a settlement agreement between all the
parties.
The remaining 13 plaintiffs agreed to the settlement as the jury trial
entered its fourth week in Clatsop County Circuit Court in front of visit-
ing Judge Paul Crowley.
“All the claims are resolved between all the plaintiffs and Mr.
Wilkins,” said attorney Julie Vacura, who represented 11 of the plain-
tiffs. “There is nothing left to litigate.”
Renowned artist Maya Lin has learned what havoc a North
Coast winter can wreak on construction plans.
“We’re a little behind schedule, or as someone said, ‘What
do you expect? It’s called Cape Disappointment,’” she told the
assembled crowd Saturday afternoon at the oficial unveiling
of the Conluence Project public art installation overlooking
Baker Bay in Paciic County, Wash.
The key pieces of the project are in place, but Lin, who
gained fame in the early 1980s for her design of the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., said there’s another
two or three years of work before the project at Washington’s
Cape Disappointment State Park is completed.
Federal agents swooped on Washington’s Long Beach Peninsula
Tuesday, taking away more than a dozen suspected immigrants in
handcuffs.
“I don’t want to go to Mexico!” said one young woman who was led
away in handcuffs and ankle chains after a raid on Bell Buoy Crab Co
in Chinook.
Agents had spent the night before in Astoria and rumors lew around
the North Coast Tuesday afternoon about possible raids elsewhere. Few
additional details were available, in part because of the change in sta-
tus placing the Immigration Service under the umbrella of Homeland
Security.
50 years ago — 1966
The State Highway
Commission Monday
adopted a basic $1.50
toll for passenger car
and driver for the $24
million Astoria-Megler
bridge near the mouth
of the Columbia River.
The present basic
ferry toll is $1.25
for a car and driver.
The commission also
announced that the
bridge would be opened
to trafic as soon as it is
inished. This probably
will be before the ofi-
cial dedication set for
Aug. 27.
It will be time for a change Sunday
and city Hall was prepared to set an
example. Lucille Bandel of the city
office staff sets municipal cuckoo
clock ahead one hour in a practice
run for start of daylight saving time
at 2 a.m. Sunday. Clock was a gift
from Astoria’s sister city Walldorf,
Germany. (Gordon Clark Photo)
One of the major tasks in constructing the Astoria bridge was out of
the way this week as American Bridge Division ironworkers completed
riveting on the steel superstructure.
ILWACO – Oficials of the Washington Minerals Proit
Corporation told The Daily Astorian at a meeting Tuesday
that they hoped to have their minerals extraction plant in full
operation by July 1. The big plant located at the mouth of the
Chinook River, where it lows into Baker Bay, is already under
construction and could be completed as early as the irst part
of June.
The concrete slab which will serve as poured early last
week by Oman & Son’s of Long Beach and company oficials
have purchased a large dredge which will be used to remove
the ore mineral rich sands of Baker Bay from the water in
order that it can be processed by the plant.
75 years ago — 1941
Sixty-seven years ago nine girls gathered to have their pictures taken
in Astoria.
This week, according to Portland newspapers, three of them, all over
80 years old, gathered in Portland for their irst reunion since then.
From the Olympics to the Bitterroots and from British
Columbia to the Siskiyous of Oregon, the Paciic Northwest
today was apparently headed into the driest early summer on
record.
A crew of 130 laborers entered the week’s work on the $638,000 Clat-
sop airport improvement and reconstruction defense project today and
plans call for assignment of 200 men to the job by the end of the week.
WASHINGTON — General George C. Marshall, Army
Chief of Staff, told the senate committee investigating national
defense today that the army has “gotten over the hump” in the
tremendous task it faced of mobilizing from peacetime status
to wartime strength.
The big 15.5-foot diameter ir tree found in Clastop County, Ore-
gon, is a mere sapling as compared to a Douglas ir in the Queets valley,
George Northup, former Jefferson County legislator, declared here Mon-
day, showing a photo and statistics from a recent department of interior
booklet to back his statement.
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • WEDNESDAY, APRIL 27, 2016
There is another sixth sense that
a politician requires. It is the abil-
ity to know when another politi-
cian is fatally wounded. In 1979 it
was clear to many in Washington,
D.C., that President Jimmy Carter
was toast. But late that year, in Sep-
tember, Neil Goldschmidt, mayor
of Portland, joined the president’s
Cabinet — at the very moment
when the ship of state was listing.
I thought about that misjudg-
ment when I saw U.S. Sen. Jeff
Merkley’s endorsement of Bernie
Sanders’ campaign for president. I
do hope that Merkley has a secret
scheme the rest of us are missing.
Eight Months after Gold-
schmidt’s conirmation as secre-
tary of transportation, the statue of
Mother Joseph was unveiled in the
Capitol Rotunda. She was Wash-
ington state’s contribution to Stat-
uary Hall. The Catholic nun was
only the seventh woman in the Cap-
itol. It was a signiicant event for
women, for Catholics, and for the
chairman of the Senate Appropria-
tions Committee, Warren G. Mag-
nuson of Washington. But Jimmy
Carter declined the invitation to
speak at this event.
Carter could not see the most
basic sort of opportunity. Can you
imagine how Ronald Reagan or
Bill Clinton would have extolled
the virtues of the phenomenal
Mother Joseph?
▼▼▼
As I inished college at Port-
land State, my father was on the
state Board of Higher Education.
One spring day I rode with him to
Corvallis, where he represented the
board at Oregon State University’s
graduation.
As the long ceremony pro-
gressed, I scanned the program that
contained names, departments and
thesis topics. I knew a lot about
the College of Agriculture — my
maternal grandfather was one of its
graduates in 1900. But that after-
noon in Gill Coliseum, I realized
that in its production of educators
and engineers, OSU was Oregon’s
backbone.
‘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
President
Jimmy Carter
lacked the
ability to see
the most
basic political
opportunity.
▼▼▼
AP Photo
President Jimmy Carter beams
as he sits in the White House
Oval Office in Washington on
Jan. 20, 1977. Carter walked from
the Capitol where he was sworn
in to the Executive Mansion
down Pennsylvania Avenue.
OSU’s alumni magazine, the
Oregon Stater, arrived last week.
One of its stories proclaimed:
“Three of every 10 Beavers is an
ENGINEER.”
My economics professor at
PSU, John Walker, once advised
us that, “If you want to change the
world, you’re wasting your time
here. Go to Corvallis.” Prof. Walk-
er’s reference was to agriculture.
But it could have been to some
other studies.
The Oregon Stater reports that
researchers in the College of Sci-
ence have developed a therapy that
halts the progression of Lou Geh-
rig’s disease in mice. The details of
this discovery have been published
in Neurobiology of Disease.
Water is a big topic in our fam-
ily. Most Westerners are talking
about it. Our discussion is height-
ened, because our son has worked
in hydrology at Yosemite National
Park for the past seven years. He
inishes his graduate education in
two weeks.
In Monday’s edition, The Wall
Street Journal published a report
on new ways cities are reckoning
with water shortage in the face of
drought and population growth. It
mentioned that by lining portions of
irrigation canals, San Diego saved
about 80,000 acre-feet of water,
which is “approximately 15% of its
supply.”
How many desalination plans
do you think there are globally?
I was surprised to learn there are
18,426.
— S.A.F.
‘Getting to zero:’ Hemingway’s rebirth
By DAVID BROOKS
New York Times News Service
When you see how he
that work “is a place you
did it, three things leap
can lose yourself more eas-
ily perhaps than inding
out. The irst is the most
mundane — the daily dis-
AVANA
—
Ernest yourself ... losing all sense
of
our
own
voice,
our
own
ciplines
of the job. In the
Hemingway’s house in
contribution and conversa-
house, there is a small bed
Cuba seems like such a healthy tion.” Hemingway seems
where he laid out his notes
place.
to have lost track of his
and a narrow shelf where
he stood, stared at a blank
It is light, welcoming and beau- own authentic voice in the
midst
of
the
public
persona
wall and churned out his
tifully situated. There are hundreds
he’d
created.
daily word count. Some-
David
of his books lining the shelves, testi-
His misogyny was also
times it seems to have been
Brooks
mony to all the reading he did there. like a cancer that ate out
the structure of concrete
There’s a baseball diamond nearby his insides. He was an extremely sen- behavior — the professional routines
where he used to pitch to local boys. sitive man, who suffered much from — that served as a lifeline when all
Yet Hemingway was not a healthy the merest slights, but was also an else was crumbling.
man during the latter phases in his extremely dominating, cruel and
Second, there seem to have been
life. He was drunk much of the time; self-indulgent one, who judged his moments of self-forgetting. Doro-
he often began drinking at breakfast wives harshly, slapped them when thy Sayers has an essay in which she
and his brother counted 17 Scotch- angry and forced them to bear all the notes it’s fashionable to say you do
and-sodas in a day. His wives com- known forms of disloyalty.
your work to serve the community.
plained that he was sporadic about
By this time, much of his writing But if you do any line of work for the
bathing. He was obsessed with his rang false. Reviewer after reviewer community, she argues, you’ll end up
weight and recorded it on the wall of said he had destroyed his own tal- falsifying your work, because you’ll
his house.
ent. His former men- be angling it for applause. You’ll feel
He
could
be
tor Gertrude Stein said people owe you something for your
lively and funny, the Hemingway he was a coward.
work. But if you just try to serve the
organizer of excit-
Yet there were work — focusing on each concrete
was a
ing adventures. But
moments, even amid task and doing it the way it’s sup-
he could also be
the wreckage, when posed to be done — then you’ll end
prisoner
depressed, combat-
he could rediscover up, obliquely, serving the community
ive and demoralized.
of his own something authen- more. Sometimes the only way to be
His ego overlowed. F.
tic. Even at these good at a job is to lose the self-con-
celebrity. late phases, he could sciousness embedded in the question,
Scott Fitzgerald, who
endured a psycholog-
write books like “For “How’m I doing?”
ical crisis at about the same time, Whom the Bell Tolls” and “The Old
Finally, there was the act of cutting
observed that Hemingway “is quite as Man and the Sea” and passages like out. When Hemingway was success-
nervously broken down as I am, but it some in “To Have and Have Not” and ful, he cut out his mannerisms and
manifests itself in different ways. His “Islands in the Stream” that remain self-pity. Then in middle age, out of
inclination is toward megalomania loved and celebrated today.
softness, laziness and self-approval,
and mine toward melancholy.”
This is a process that we might he indulged himself. But even then,
Even as a young man Hemingway call “getting to zero,” when an artist even amid all the corruption, he had
exaggerated his (already prodigious) — or anyone, really — digs through lashes when he could distinguish his
exploits in order to establish his man- all the sap that gets encrusted around own bluster from the good, true notes.
liness. When he was older his prima a career or relationship and retouches
There is something heroic that
donna proclivities could make him, the intrinsic impulse that got him or happened in this house. Heming-
as one visiting photographer put it, her into it in the irst place. Hem- way was a man who embraced every
“crazy,” “drunk” and “berserk.”
ingway’s career got overlayered by self-indulgence that can aflict a
He was a prisoner of his own money, persona and fame, but some- successful person. But at moments
celebrity. He’d become famous at 25 times even at this late stage he was he shed all that he had earned and
and by middle age he was often just able to reconnect with the young received, and rediscovered the hard-
playing at being Ernest Hemingway. man’s directness that produced his working, clear-seeing and unadorned
The poet David Whyte has written early best work.
man he used to be.
H