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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2017
Former Astoria wrestling Employers ask
for changes to
coach accused of rape
The Daily Astorian
A former Astoria High
School wrestling coach was
arrested Monday for allegedly
engaging in a sexual relation-
ship with an underage girl
who attended the school.
Astoria Police arrested
Greg S. Medina, 42, at Bea-
verton High School, where he
currently works as an instruc-
tional assistant and wrestling
coach. He was indicted by a
Clatsop County grand jury
last week for third-degree
rape.
Earlier this month, a
woman reported to police that
she had a sexual relationship
with Medina while he was
still working at the school in
February 2005, when she was
15 years old.
The report indicates the
relationship was not formed
on school grounds or as a
result of Medina’s employ-
ment, Deputy Chief Eric
Halverson said. Police have
no evidence to suggest that
Medina engaged in other
inappropriate relationships,
Halverson said.
Officers in plain clothes
took Medina into custody at
Beaverton High School on
Monday. They did not place
handcuffs on him until after
leaving the campus.
Medina was released this
morning on $50,000 bail. If
convicted, Medina faces up
to five years in prison and a
$125,000 fine. He is sched-
uled to appear in court on
March 28.
Anyone with information
relevant to the case can call
Detective Thomas Litwin at
503-325-4411 or email him at
tlitwin@astoria.or.us.
Le Guin voted into arts academy
Author calls
Cannon Beach
home part-time
By HILLEL ITALIE
Associated Press
NEW YORK — Not even
an honorary National Book
Award kept Ursula K. Le Guin
from being surprised by her lat-
est tribute: membership in the
American Academy of Arts and
Letters.
“My reputation was made
as a writer of fantasy and sci-
ence fiction, a literature that has
mostly gone without such hon-
ors,” she told The Associated
Press recently.
Known for such classics
as “The Left Hand of Dark-
ness” and “The Dispossessed,”
Le Guin has won numerous
science fiction and fantasy
awards, but only in recent years
has she received more literary
recognition, notably a National
Book Award medal in 2014.
The arts academy, an honor-
ary society with a core mem-
bership of 250 writers, artists,
composers and architects, once
shunned “genre” writers such
as Le Guin. Even such giants as
science fiction writer Ray Brad-
bury and crime novelist Elmore
Leonard never got in.
Academy member Michael
Ursula K. Le Guin
Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize-win-
ning novelist, advocated for Le
Guin.
“As a deviser of worlds, as a
literary stylist, as a social critic
and as a storyteller, Le Guin has
no peer,” he wrote in his recom-
mendation, shared with the AP,
that she be admitted. “From the
time of her first published work
in the mid-1960s, she began
to push against the confines
of science fiction, bringing to
bear an anthropologist’s acute
eye for large social textures and
mythic structures, a fierce egal-
itarianism and a remarkable
gift of language, without ever
renouncing the sense of wonder
and the spirit of play inherent in
her genre of origin.”
New core members
The 87-year-old Le Guin
is one of 14 new core mem-
bers, the academy told the AP.
Others include fiction writers
Junot Diaz, Ann Patchett, Amy
Hempel and Colum McCann,
former U.S. poet laureate Kay
Ryan and fellow poets Henri
Cole and Edward Hirsch. The
academy also voted in the art-
ists Mary Heilmann, Julie
Mehretu and Stanley Whitney,
architect Annabelle Selldorf
and composers Melinda Wag-
ner and Julia Wolfe.
Three foreign honorary
members were added: authors
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
and Zadie Smith and composer
Kaija Saariaho.
The arts academy was
founded in 1898, with mem-
bers since ranging from Henry
James and William Dean How-
ells to Chuck Close and Ste-
phen Sondheim. The new
inductees will be formally wel-
comed at a ceremony at the
New York-based academy in
May, where academy member
Joyce Carol Oates will deliver
the centennial Blashfield Foun-
dation keynote address. Pre-
vious speakers have included
Helen Keller, Robert Frost and
Robert Caro.
Patchett, author of the
acclaimed “Bel Canto” and
most recently “Common-
wealth,” said she had tears in
her eyes after learning she had
been selected. Years earlier, she
had been given a prize by the
academy, presented to her by
John Updike.
“They could have just given
me the Getting-To-Eat-Lunch-
With John-Updike award and
that would have been the big-
gest thrill of my life,” she told
the AP. “This is an institution
where all of my heroes gather.
I am very moved that they’ve
invited me in.”
Diaz, winner of the Pulit-
zer Prize for his novel “The
Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar
Wao,” told the AP that he was
surprised to get into the acad-
emy, in part because he was
informed in an old-fashioned
way — by letter.
“No one sends letters any-
more,” he wrote recently in a
more prevalent form of com-
munication, email.
Written invite
Le Guin lives in Portland
and Cannon Beach, and will
not be attending the May cer-
emony. For a time, she didn’t
even know she had been cho-
sen. Blame it on the risks of
sending paper letters.
“(T)he academy’s written
invitation never got to me,”
she said, adding that she feared
comparisons to Bob Dylan,
who took more than two weeks
to personally respond to win-
ning the Nobel Prize for liter-
ature. “I found out they’d been
waiting days or weeks for a
reply. I thought: ‘Oh, no, they’ll
think I’ve been pulling a Dylan
on them!’”
Author shares legacy of Oregon pioneer
Tibbets is topic
at History and
Hops event
By REBECCA HERREN
The Daily Astorian
SEASIDE — Portland
author Jerry Sutherland’s
research and discovery into
pioneer Calvin Tibbets is a
work in progress.
He first became fasci-
nated with Tibbets when his
father, Art Sutherland, saw the
name in a historical article and
decided to do a little geneal-
ogy research given that Jerry’s
mother’s maiden name was
Tibbetts. No relationship was
found, but Sutherland contin-
ued the research into Tibbets
as a man who traveled to Ore-
gon with a specific goal: to set-
tle here permanently and make
it part of the emerging United
States landscape.
Sutherland, who spoke at
the History and Hops speaker
series at the Seaside Brewing
Co. last week, explained how
sometimes the research was
challenging due to the many
ways the name is spelled —
most commonly, he said, is T-i-
b-b-e-t-t-s and T-i-b-b-i-t-s. “It
wasn’t until I found documents
signed by him that I knew what
the correct spelling was.”
Oregon in 1832
When Tibbets traveled to
Oregon in 1832, the area was
still contested between Great
Britain and the United States.
Hudson’s Bay Co. had prac-
tical control over the entire
region and its French-Cana-
dian employees were preparing
to develop farms along the Wil-
lamette River upon their retire-
ment. “The only Americans in
Oregon before Tibbets were
sailors, fur trappers, explorers
and scientists,” he said.
His book “Calvin Tibbets:
Oregon’s First Pioneer” begins
with Nathaniel Wyeth and 11
American men meeting Hud-
son’s Bay Co. chief factor John
McLoughlin, who realized he
Rebecca Herren/The Daily Astorian
Author Jerry Sutherland giving a presentation on Ore-
gon’s first pioneer Calvin Tibbets who built the first grist-
mill in Clatsop County.
had competition for the region,
if as he suspected, Wyeth along
with Hall Kelley would suc-
ceed in their plans to build a
colony in Oregon, a subject of
dispute with the British. “Many
early settlers came to Oregon to
get free land and they weren’t
going to get it if Britain took
over because at that point in
time it was all mutually owned
between Great Britain and the
United States,” said Sutherland.
Wyeth and Kelley would
fail in their ventures, but Tib-
bets, being one of the men
they brought to Oregon, would
become an Oregon’s pioneer
by forging good relationships
with his Canadian neighbors
and native tribes, even living
on an Native American diet in
order to pave the way for other
Americans to follow.
Fascination
Sutherland said the more he
learns about Tibbets, the more
fascinated he becomes, delv-
ing into the many layers of the
man. He discovered that Tib-
bets was part of a team to build
a gristmill in Clatsop County.
Ewing Young and Solomon
Smith had established a grist-
mill at Chehalem Creek around
1838. After moving back to
Clatsop Plains, it was “so obvi-
ously they wanted that here,”
said Sutherland, adding the
need was confirmed by docu-
mented evidence of early pio-
neers who traveled the Ore-
gon Trail had used coffee mills
and spring poles to grind their
grains. So, the need for a grist-
mill on the Clatsop Plains was
great in the eyes of Young,
Smith and Tibbets.
In 1845, Thomas Owens,
Edward Williams, Elbridge
Trask, William Perry and Tib-
bets, who had formed the
Wahoni Milling Co., built the
mill at the south end of Clat-
sop Plains near the mouth of
the Neawanna. The mill oper-
ated for only a couple of years.
According to Sutherland, the
gristmill failed because “Clat-
sop Plains wasn’t suitable to
grow crops,” adding it was then
converted to a lumber mill.
Finding the mill’s where-
abouts also proved to be a chal-
lenge for Sutherland, given that
the landscape had drastically
changed and landmarks, not
survey tools, were used to mea-
sure property boundaries as he
pointed out showing a land sur-
vey from 1856. For example,
the area known as the Necani-
cum Estuary, Necanicum River,
Neawanna Creek and Neacoxie
Creek were all known then as
Neacoxie; the former being
referred to as branches of the
Neacoxie.
Sutherland noted there had
been a dozen or more names
associated with the mills, and
upon further searching, had dis-
covered a connection between
the Tibbets gristmill and the
Gearhart family. Phillip Gear-
hart built a home and farm for
his family near the gristmill by
Mill Creek, in an area north and
east of the estuary. Gearhart’s
daughter Sarah married Frank
Byrd, who later built a mill at
what is now known as Thomp-
son Falls.
Tibbets died of cholera in
1849. From his book, Suther-
land wrote, “Tibbets would
have had no impact on Oregon
history if he had not first been
captivated by Kelly’s vision
of colonizing Oregon … He
endured hunger, illness and
other physical and emotional
hardships of life in the wild.”
Once his fellow settlers came in
sufficient numbers, they were
able to “wrest control of Ore-
gon from Great Britain.”
If any American were to be
named Oregon’s first pioneer,
Sutherland strongly believes
Tibbets deserves that honor.
scheduling law
By PARIS ACHEN
Capital Bureau
SALEM — Employ-
ers are asking for signifi-
cant revisions to a bill that
would mandate two weeks’
notice for employee schedule
changes and penalty pay for
changes without the required
notice.
The requirements would
apply only to retail, hospital-
ity and food services estab-
lishments with 100 or more
employees in the United
States and 25 or more in
Oregon.
If passed, the so-called
“predictive scheduling” leg-
islation would be the first
statewide law of its kind in
the nation. Only local juris-
dictions, such as San Fran-
cisco and Seattle, have
passed comparable policies.
Similar legislation stalled in
the Oregon Legislature in
2015.
A public hearing on the
new bill in the Senate Work-
force Committee went for-
ward Monday despite several
amendments in the works,
said Sen. Kathleen Taylor,
D-Portland.
Some of the amendments
give exemptions for weath-
er-related schedule changes,
said Taylor, the committee
chairwoman. A complete list
of the planned amendments
was not immediately avail-
able Monday night.
Opposition
Employers
described
the proposed regulations as
“onerous.”
Betsy Earls, a lobbyist
representing Associated Ore-
gon Industries, the Oregon
Retail Council and the Ore-
gon Business Council, said
the bill curtails employers’
ability to manage store oper-
ations and gives “too many
hard lines that employers
have to follow.”
While
the legisla-
tion gives
exemptions
for certain
circum-
stances,
Kathleen
it fails to
Taylor
account for
the many
different scenarios employ-
ers encounter, business own-
ers said.
Shawn Miller of the
Northwest Grocery Associa-
tion said the bill would pun-
ish employers and employees
by removing flexibility from
scheduling and put businesses
at a competitive disadvan-
tage with companies in other
states. The association com-
piled a chart comparing the
legislation to the Seattle ordi-
nance and noted that the Ore-
gon bill is more burdensome.
For instance, Miller
requested that lawmakers
give an exemption for collec-
tive bargaining agreements,
as the City of Seattle did in
its ordinance.
Support
Not all employers oppose
the bill. Representatives from
the Main Street Alliance of
about 3,500 small business
owners spoke in support of
the proposed regulations.
Sen. Michael Dembrow,
D-Portland, sponsored this
year’s legislation after con-
vening a work group on pre-
dictive scheduling last year.
Several members from the
business community boycot-
ted the work group meetings
because they said they felt
attempts to regulate and tax
businesses in Oregon have
become increasingly over-
reaching and anti-business.
At the time, they pointed to
Ballot Measure 97, which
sought to tax certain large
corporations on sales. Voters
defeated the measure over-
whelmingly in November.
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The Family of
Chris Causley
Would like to thank everyone for the wonderful
plants, flowers, and cards.
A special thanks to the Big O for a wonderful
celebration of life. All of you who brought food and
the memories of happiness with Chris.
A very special thanks to Pacific Coast Seafoods for
the best seafood on earth.
Thank you to Pastor Larry for helping the
family say goodbye.
Thanks to Hospice for the nice care in making
Chris comfortable and showing the family
how to care for him.
Th ank you ALL!
The Family of Chris Causley