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Tuesday, June 22, 2021
East Oregonian
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Juneteenth: ‘Our people meant something, and we should be recognized for it’
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the Emancipation Proclama-
tion. About seven months
later, the 13th Amendment,
which abolished slavery in
the final four states that had
yet to do so, was ratified.
Last week, President Joe
Biden signed a law that made
Juneteenth a federal holiday.
It was the first newly estab-
lished national holiday since
President Reagan added
Martin Luther King Jr. Day
in 1983, celebrating his role
in the civil rights movement.
“All Americans can feel
the power of this day,” Biden
said at a ceremony at the
White House, “and learn
from our history.”
That’s why the event in
Hermiston was so special
for several Black commu-
nity members. To them, it
was another small step in an
ongoing reckoning with the
nation’s past.
“At the first Juneteenth,
they didn’t have much,” said
John Carbage, president
of the Hermiston Cultural
Awareness Coalition, a
nonprofit group that hosted
Saturday’s event. “So they
took the little bit they had and
put it all together, and made
it into an event, a festival. So
that’s what this is all about.
Taking a little and making a
lot.”
The day began with a
speech from Carbage calling
on residents to remember
why they were they before
they bowed their heads in
Bryce Dole/East Oregonian
Teresa Denaloza, right, and Tina Thomas, center, talk with fellow attendees during a Saturday, June 19, 2021, Juneteenth
celebration at McKenzie Park in Hermiston.
prayer. For the rest of the day,
residents from across East-
ern Oregon and Washington
lounged in lawn chairs and
chatted at picnic tables as the
smell of grilling hamburgers
and hot dogs filled the air. A
DJ played rap, pop, soul, funk
and R&B as children played
games nearby.
It was the second time the
coalition held a Juneteenth
event. The first was two years
ago, before the pandemic
halted last year’s festivi-
ties. Carbage said he hopes
to make the event an annual
celebration in Hermiston.
Growing up in Arkan-
sas, Carbage has been cele-
brating Juneteenth for about
30 years. But none of those
celebrations, he said, were as
symbolic as this one.
“This means we’re not
going unnoticed,” Earl
Wilson, a product ion
manager at Lamb Weston,
said of Juneteenth becom-
ing a federal holiday. “Our
people meant something, and
we should be recognized for
it. We celebrate the Fourth of
July and Independence Day.
And we weren’t free during
that time. When we were
freed, we should recognize
that also.”
Though Juneteenth has
garnered increased national
attention during the past year
amid the protests against
racial injustice and police
brutality, many Americans
Lifeguards:
Rebound:
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ages that much more of a
burden.
“Staffing is tougher to
find and numbers have been
up,” Hughes said. “Summer
camp is bigger than last year
right now.”
In May, the pool offered
swim lessons and filled all
five instructors’ worth of
classes. Hughes estimates
they had enough interest to
fill twice as many classes.
Hamilton said learn-to-
swim classes are especially
important this year as many
youths may have spent the
last year out of the water and
moved from an age where
they were swimming with
their parents to spending
time at the pool more inde-
pendently.
“My fear was that that
age that came from hang-
ing out with your parents to
maybe swimming by your
own was going to be that
group that maybe missed a
year,” he said.
Hamilton drew compar-
isons to when the pool first
opened in the late 1990s and
lifeguards were plucking
kids out of the pool with a
much higher frequency than
today due to lack of experi-
ence with water.
community,” she said.
Hermiston has a few
more new developments
in the restaurant industry
coming up, “new and excit-
ing changes” promised by Ye
Olde Pizza Shoppe, a renova-
tion of the city’s food truck
pod and a move by Delish
Bistro from a space with
outdoor dining only to a new,
far larger location just south
of its current spot.
A smoothie shop called
Get Fit Nutrition will open
soon in the former Yo Coun-
try Yogurt building on the
corner of Hurlburt Avenue
and Southeast Third Street.
Owner Laura Davis said she
wanted to open it not only to
provide healthy options for
the community, but also to
provide a “cool place where
people can hang out, get
distracted and forget about
this pandemic that it’s affect-
ing all of us.”
She doesn’t yet know
exactly when she will be able
to open, because she is wait-
ing on an inspection from the
health department.
That’s a common refrain
from local restaurant owners
who aren’t ready to announce
an opening date yet.
Burt said OMG! Burgers
is hoping to open their Herm-
iston location in mid-July,
but that will all depend on
how quickly they are able
to hire enough staff, and
how quickly they can get the
green light from Umatilla
County Public Health. Every
day they can’t check off those
items is revenue lost, he said.
Ben Lonergan/East Oregonian
Lifeguard Paige Pitner walks through the pool Wednesday, June 16, 2021, at the Pendle-
ton Family Aquatic Center. The aquatic center faced difficulties with staffing early in the
season.
“There is going to be a
little bit of that gap so we
have to be prepared for it,”
he said.
In Hermiston, recreation
supervisor Brandon Artz
said he is finally feeling like
he has enough lifeguards to
operate the pool after telling
the Hermiston Herald just
more than a month ago that
he had about half of the 100
staff necessary to open the
Hermiston Family Aquatic
Center.
“It was a real struggle,
but we’ve had some good
kids get trained and apply
and come through,” he said
Monday. “I think we’re
pretty much set for the rest
of the season.”
Artz said he usually
starts recruiting lifeguards
in January so they can get
trained and hired before
summer starts.
“We were kind of
running down to the wire,”
he said.
Artz said about 86% of
the pool’s staff is new this
year compared to roughly
40% new staff members in
a traditional year.
“We have a lot of people
to train and not very much
time to do it,” he said.
Key in trying to fill those
spots was reaching out to
potential employees through
social media and offering
incentives to returning staff
to bring on their friends or
others, said Artz. Among
those incentives were items
such as sweatshirts or other
apparel to help encourage
returning staff to find new
hires.
“It’s kind of a sigh of
relief right now,” he said.
“We have the staff we need,
let’s get this season rolling.”
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shipments projected to reach
over 576,000, 18% higher
than the 2017 record.
However, not all dealer-
ships are seeing the same
sales trends.
“According to the national
trend, we should be seeing a
huge increase in sales, but
we’ve actually seen about
50% less sales this year than
normal years,” Thunder RV
owner Caleb Samson said.
“The demand is just far
bigger than the supply, and
we can’t replace them at the
same rate as we’re selling
them.”
According to Samson,
the company ordered 80
recreational vehicles several
weeks ago, but does not
know when they will arrive.
Northwood Manufactur-
ing, which produces most
of Thunder RV’s supply,
is based in La Grande and
works with 66 dealerships
in Oregon and surrounding
states, nearly all of which
also face a shortage.
“We would love to
increase the number of RVs
that we’re making, but there’s
Health department
inspections
Carlos Fuentes/The Observer
Thunder RV, the only RV dealer in La Grande, has seen an increase in demand over the last
year, but its supply has not been able to keep up.
several mitigating factors,”
said Lance Rinker, director
of purchasing and marketing
for Northwood Manufactur-
ing and Outdoors RV.
According to Rinker, the
two biggest factors of the
shortage are labor short-
ages and increased mate-
rial costs. Both Northwood
and Outdoors employ about
215 employees, 68% of the
315 employee capacity. This
number has not risen in
recent years.
Northwood and Outdoors
each manufacture roughly
230 recreational vehicles
every month, a number
that has not risen with the
increased demand. Rinker
estimates manufacturing
prices have risen nearly
20% since the onset of the
pandemic, partially due
to higher fuel prices and
lumber shortages.
Retail prices have risen
with increased manufac-
turing costs. Weinkauf said
Thunder RV prices have
risen 10% in the last year.
Prices range from $25,000
for a basic truck camper to
nearly $100,000 for high-end
fifth wheel.
With no end in sight,
Weinkauf said he is opti-
mistic that business will
continue to stay busy.
“Well, they’re building
them as fast as they can, and
we’re selling them just as
quickly,” he said. “It’s gonna
take some time to catch up.”
Umatilla County Public
Health Director Joe Fiumara
acknowledged that waits for
food service plan reviews
have been longer than usual
for the past year.
That hasn’t been because
of more requests from restau-
rants than normal, he said,
but rather that staff have been
far more busy with other
things, including vaccina-
tions and reviewing plans for
events to see if they meet the
criteria for COVID-19 proto-
cols.
“A lot of that fell to the
environmental health folks,”
Fiumara said.
While Umatilla County
was in what was first known
still know little about the
holiday, according to a new
Gallup survey.
The random sur vey,
released Tuesday, June 15,
showed more than 60% of
Americans know either
“nothing at all” or “a little
bit” about Juneteenth. It also
showed about 69% of Black
respondents said they knew
about Juneteenth, compared
to 31% of white respondents.
Even Carbage said he
knew little about Juneteenth
before he went to college.
He attributes that to grow-
ing up in Arkansas, where
his history classes refrained
from teaching about race.
That’s why it’s essential to
bring people together on days
such as Juneteenth, Carbage
said, to promote education.
“I understand people
would like to steer away
from that negative side of
America,” said Dexter Hall,
a student from Hermiston.
“But if we don’t say anything
about it, we lose part of our
history. That’s my culture,
you know?”
For Denise Colbray,
whose family has been
involved in organizing events
centered around Hermis-
ton’s Black community for
decades, the event exempli-
fied the city’s growing diver-
sity.
Colbray summed up what
Juneteenth meant to her in
one word: Freedom.
“This is just the begin-
ning,” she said. “This is the
beginning of a long process.”
as baseline and later changed
to extreme risk — for more
days than any other county
in the state, thanks to its
high spread of COVID-19
— the health department
wasn’t allowed by the state
to do on-site inspections
at all unless responding to
a complaint. That not only
hindered inspections, but
also made it difficult to get
a new environmental health
staff member trained.
“So many restaurants
were forced into new meth-
ods of operation, but at the
same time, we were not
allowed to do inspections,”
Fiumara said.
Requests for site plan
reviews for restaurants,
bars, food trucks and other
eating establishments actu-
ally stayed fairly steady year
over year, Fiumara said. In
the first half of 2019, there
were 21 requests. In the first
half of 2020, there were 20.
This year so far there have
been 22.
He said the number for
2020 might not show the
whole picture — several
of those were before the
pandemic began, and there
is no guarantee all of the
sites that submitted plans for
review actually opened. He
also noted that 2020 saw an
unusually high percentage of
reviews go to mobile units,
as some owners tried to pivot
away from indoor dining.
Fiumara said the health
department is advertising for
another environmental health
position and also has brought
back an environmental health
supervisor position previ-
ously cut, which, once every-
thing is in place, will boost
the number of people able to
handle site plan reviews and
inspections.
There is other good news
for restaurant owners open-
ing now, as well. When the
health department has been
using environmental health
staff for vaccination events
and other duties, they have
been paying them from a
different pool of money than
what the county sets aside for
environmental health. As a
result of those savings to that
department budget, Fiumara
said, they have temporarily
reduced all licensed facility
fees by 40%.
“We knew (the fees)
wouldn’t be something that
will make or break an opera-
tion over a year, but it’s some-
thing we could do, so we felt
we needed it,” he said.
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