Local News
Bridge
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game de rived from the 16th century game
“whist.”
For those who may not know, contract
bridge is played with a regular deck by two
teams of two players. As explained by
Wikipedia, “The game consists of several
deals each progressing through four phases:
dealing the cards, the auction (also referred
to as bidding), playing the hand, and scoring
the results.”
games at the Miracles Club.
“It’s like old home week,” Polk says. “We
have two national tournaments every
year—one in the spring and one in the sum-
mer, and it’s like a family reunion every
time we get together.”
That’s part of the reason the club wants to
invite more people, Polk says: It’s an impor-
tant opportunity to learn a stimulating
hobby that pushes players to learn more no
matter how good they already
are.
And everyone is welcome
despite their age, race or back-
ground – the only prerequisite to
playing bridge is a desire to learn.
“It’s a game that you can play
starting as a youngster all the way
until your senior years,” Polk
says. “Always something new to
learn.”
For more information about the American
Bridge Association call 253-365-4229 in
Washington; 503-703-7365 in Oregon; send
an e-mail to: aba-nws@comcast.net; or go
to www.ababridge.org.
In addition to playing bridge,
ABA members support
community events and
provide funds annually for
college scholarships
For people who have never played it,
watching a game is confusing; you have to
learn by doing it.
Polk says the Challengers group is already
a dynamic organization, playing weekly
Challengers Bridge Club is looking for new members. From lower left corner,
Karen Tillis, George Herold, Brenda Polk, Ray Giles, and Ernest Hill.
Sanctuary
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foreclosure.”
Umi should know. He worked in the
financial sector during the height of the sub-
prime lending frenzy, growing increasingly
disillusioned with what he says were com-
mon deceptive practices.
Homeowners trust loan officers to give
good advice, Umi says. But lenders make
more money from selling higher-risk loans.
So they ignored their responsibility to make
sure borrowers could repay. They could
make a loan, then turn around and sell it the
next day.
In Umi’s view the fraud perpetrated on
homeowners steered into high-risk loans
should have led to prosecutions. But faced
with the collapse of the U.S. financial sys-
tem, U.S. political leaders bailed out the
banks and took a pass on criminal prosecu-
tions, in exchange for a $25 billion
settlement.
If the big banks were too big to fail, indi-
vidual homeowners were too small to save.
“The court system is completely rigged
against us. The best we can get is that the
illegal foreclosure is rolled back, and then
the person has to pay a lot of money or go
back into foreclosure.”
That’s what’s facing Annette Steele and
Alicia Jackson, both longtime Northeast
residents whose homes are in foreclosure.
Steele is a 79-year-old grandmother who
was talked into taking a sub-prime loan in
order to do maintenance on her home. She
has lived in her home on Northeast 14th
Avenue for 26 years.
“I love my house and I’ll do everything I
can to keep it,” Steele says.
Jackson is a veteran of Desert Storm and
says.
Both women looked for help but found
none.
Steele says she paid $35 to the Bar Asso-
ciation on three occasions, in an
unsuccessful attempt to find a lawyer to
fight her corner. She also paid $2,158 to
American Homemakers, who promised to
help her refinance, but did not give her even
a receipt. She’s been going to court alone
and trying to represent herself for the last
If the banks were too big fail, were individual
homeowners too small to save?
Desert Shield. Her family has lived in its
Northeast Portland home since the 1970s. In
2008, when the windows needed repaired,
an unscrupulous lender steered Jackson into
a sub-prime loan that soon ballooned
beyond her ability to pay.
“If you look at these cases, they have paid
far more than the houses are worth,” Umi
three years. Now, out of fear of being evict-
ed, she naps during the day and tries to stay
awake all night.
“They told me, ‘You’re going to be living
in a cardboard box on the street,’” she says.
“I’m just not going to let them walk in and
take it away from me.”
Terrified when she got her first foreclo-
the decision makers in the publishing indus-
try,” he says. “If one of us doesn’t push
through we lose those stories.”
By coming to speak at places like SEI, he
hopes to inspire youth to continue pushing
through that door.
First and foremost, he encourages kids to
simply tell their stories.
If people don’t have a relationship with
language, it’s hard to communicate what
they’re going through, says Jackson.
He doesn’t remember anyone coming to
give him that talk when he was an SEI kid,
over 20 years ago.
“I wasn’t a reader,” says Jackson. “I had
the same dream as everyone else. I was at
the Salvation Army trying to work on my
three pointer, while everyone else, my con-
temporaries, were holed up their rooms
trying to write a short story.”
Despite his basketball focus, Jackson was
always a good student. His teachers would
tell him he was a talented writer but he did-
n’t consider how to apply that skill into a
career.
He moved around a number of schools in
the Portland area before going on to play
junior college basketball.
When the pro athlete dream ended, Jack-
son earned an academic scholarship to
attend Portland State University (PSU).
While at PSU, he got into petty drug deal-
ing. He got caught and served 16 months in
prison.
Jackson considers himself lucky. He says
he wasn’t a drug kingpin, but the amount he
got caught with could’ve landed him in
prison for 10 years.
The economy is now dependent on the
war on drugs, he says.
“The population of prisons keeps going
up and they’re getting all of this cheap
sure notice, Alicia Jackson moved out of her
home, and turned off the utilities. But after
talking to members of the Black Working
Group, she moved back home and decided
to fight. Part of her property already has
been sold to a developer, who has built two
row houses next to her home.
Jackson didn’t realize she’d have to take
on Portland City Council. The city refused
to turn her water on, citing a rule that they
can only turn on water for a homeowner
whose name is on the title. Jackson is dis-
puting the foreclosure, but Commissioner
Randy Leonard, who is in charge of the
Water Bureau, has refused to budge. The
City issued a vacate order to Alicia Jackson,
effective Oct. 25.
“They are hiding behind a rule that they’ll
only turn water on for a homeowner,” Umi
says. “The city is taking the side of the bank
and serving as an agent for the bank.
As things stand, Jackson expects police to
arrive with an eviction notice at any
moment. Armed with her phone, she plans
to call in the community activists to help her
resist.
Read the rest of this story online at
www.theskanner.com
Jackson
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Jackson felt the subjects covered in
“Oversoul,” such as friends who played
sports but didn’t make it to the pros, and
others who got caught up in gang life, were
underrepresented in literature.
Being a writer, he says, lets him tackle
these subjects with nuance in ways others
can’t.
“There’s no shortage of rappers who are
telling these kinds of stories,” says Jackson.
“However, there’s an immense pressure on
rappers to tell a hackneyed or, in some
ways, a clichéd story about the urban –I
hate that word urban – experience.
“Authenticity is important to me because
I don’t want those people I write about or
those stories to be underrepresented.”
This speaks to the larger issue of lack of
representation of people of color in the pub-
lishing industry, says Jackson.
“From a business level, we’re not really
labor,” says Jackson. “I don’t think the gov-
ernment is truly set on eradicating drugs
from the inner city. Too many businesses
are thriving and political structures are
thriving. And who are they losing? The
Black men. They don’t care.”
Jackson makes it clear that a drug convic-
tion can ruin someone. He wasn’t able to get
a number of jobs because of his criminal
record. In addition, he wasn’t given the
chance to have that record expunged.
Jackson hopes this message will get
through to SEI kids.
“We need to give our kids other avenues
and other things that they can emulate,” he
says. “It’s one thing to say don’t go sell
some dope. It’s another thing to say, ‘Don’t
go sell some dope and I’ve got this over
here for you.’”
October 31, 2012
The Portland Skanner Page 3