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About Cottage Grove sentinel. (Cottage Grove, Or.) 1909-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 16, 2015)
4A COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL December 16, 2015 O PINION LETTERS TO THE EDITOR No incentive to conserve Carolers brought joy A couple years ago our water bills seemed quite high. The bill for August was the highest of the year, so I decided to really cut down on our water usage and see if I could lower the bill (and we never water our lawn, so it's not like we'd been using a lot of water anyway). The bill for September was still exorbi- tant, but I fi gured the lag time between the meter being read and the bill being sent must've accounted for such a high bill. By October, however, our usage had shrunk by 85 percent...yet our bill only shrunk by 15 percent. Think about that. I went down to City Hall and asked why this was so. The woman behind the coun- ter explained to me that the majority of our water bill has "nothing to do with wa- ter usage." Think about that, too. Instead, she said, most of the bill was generated by fees. What does all this mean? It means there is absolutely zero incentive to conserve water here in Cottage Grove. In an era of repeti- tive droughts, this is simply irresponsible. It also means the City has an unfair monopoly on this particular utility and, like monopo- lists everywhere, they can raise their prices as much as they like. It's time to de-regulate the city's monop- oly. My husband and I want to thank the City of Cottage Grove and whoever was involved with the "Roving Bus of Carolers" that were driving and singing past our house on Sat- urday, Dec. 5!!! They were so fun and gave us so much joy and good spirits! We just moved here in July, and we couldn't be more welcomed or thankful for our new neighbors and friends here in Cot- tage Grove. There have been many events and festi- vals downtown and each one is better than the previous one. The carolers were spec- tacualr! Thanks so very much to all the lo- cal volunteers and civic and corporate and faith-based good souls in our lovely little town of Cottage Grove. We tip our hats to you all! Bless you! Judy and Steve Palmer Cottage Grove P.S. The Sentinel is such a lovely newspa- per as well. Very well done. Editor's Note: A block party organized by the CG Faith Center drew dozens of carolers downtown on Dec. 5. Matt Emrich Cottage Grove Offbeat Oregon History Cockiness, incompetence and a labor strike led to deadly shipwreck BY FINN J.D. JOHN For the Sentinel B ack in the 1920s, labor action on the waterfront was a notoriously violent thing. Strikers and strikebreak- ers, goon squads and “Special Police- men,” hard-punching union longshore- men and hard-charging shipping magnates, all made for plenty of black eyes, bloody noses and even whizzing bullets when the two sides locked horns on the decks and wharfs. By those standards, the International Seamen’s Union strike of 1921 was a mild affair. It kicked off on May 1 and barely lasted two months. In retrospect, the union was crazy for picking that particular time to strike. The market was fl ooded with unemployed seamen laid off after the First World War, and there was a recession on, so many of them were desperate for work. Break- ing the strike was easy: The owners simply opened a new non-union hiring hall, staffed all the vacant positions, and were back up and running in a week or two. After that, the union was broken, and it was simply a matter of waiting for them to give up and admit defeat. The strike may have generated a few fi stfi ghts, but no strikers or strikebreak- ers were killed or even badly hurt. But if you asked certain people in early August, a few weeks after the strike was settled, they’d tell you there were people killed as a result of it. There were, they’d assure you, at least 42 of them, drowned or burned or blown apart as a direct result of that strike — although they’d admit they couldn’t prove anything. You see, when the strike broke out, the companies had hired whoever was available for open positions as strike- breakers. These strikebreakers were rewarded by being kept on in their po- sitions after the union was broken — as seemed only fair; after all, no union would hire them after they’d been “scabs.” But all of them were rookies; many may have been crewmembers on ships during the war, but all were brand-new to the ships they were on now, and there were no seasoned veterans to help them get acclimated. Some of them had served on sailing ships during the war and didn’t know their way around a steamer. Others had been longshoremen or coal-heavers and were now trying to learn more complex jobs. And still oth- ers of them were just not very compe- tent at anything, and would never have been considered for their jobs had the companies not been desperate to break the strike. Together they made for ship crews that were barely adequate at the best of times — and worse than inad- equate at the worst. The evidence for this viewpoint is circumstantial, but pretty strong none- theless. And it has a name: The S.S. Alaska. The Alaska was a 3,700-ton iron pas- senger liner, 327 feet long, built in 1889 in Pennsylvania. She had been reliably making the Portland-San Francisco- Los Angeles run for about a decade for the San Francisco and Portland Steam- ship Company. But until the strike, she had always been operated by a compe- tent crew of veteran seamen. On her fi nal run, the Alaska left Port- land on Aug. 5, 1921, just a week or two after the strike was settled. Accord- ing to passenger Edgar Horner, it be- came clear pretty early on that her crew was green as grass. “It seemed to me at the time that they had a lot of inexperienced men aboard, young kids who couldn’t handle the ropes, etc., and they had a diffi cult time trying to dock the ship at Astoria to take on more passengers and freight,” Horner wrote in a long letter to his fam- ily a week or so later. “When they cast loose to leave, they tore away several feet of the bulwarks on the forward part of the portside boat deck, and the ship swung in on the stern and struck the dock, tearing off some planking and piles.” It wasn’t exactly a good omen for the voyage. But Horner thought little of it at the time. He recalled it vividly about 24 hours later, though, when — while charging blindly along through a thick fog at her maximum speed of 15 knots — the Alaska abruptly slammed into one of the rocks that extend out from Cape Mendocino in northern California. When this happened, Horner was in the social hall on the main deck. “I could feel the plates being ripped off the bottom,” he wrote. “It left no ques- tion in my mind what was the matter.” Immediately the steward raced out of the room, leaving the passengers there in shocked confusion. Horner and other male passengers then ran out onto the already-tilting deck to help the youthful, bumbling crewmembers struggling with the ob- viously unfamiliar mechanisms of the lifeboats. By the time they were ready to launch them, the ship was listing hard, and the boats were dangling way out from the sides of the ship as they were lowered away. Two of them cap- sized when they hit the water, spilling the passengers into the sea. Horner worked to get as many others off the boat as he could in the half-hour it took for the ship to fi ll and sink. When the water hit the boiler, he was startled by a massive explosion; the greenhorn engineering crew had neglected to re- lease the boiler pressure, and the ther- mal shock of the icy seawater on the superheated boiler had caused it to rup- ture, killing several people outright and hurling others into the sea. The ship soon sank out from beneath Horner’s feet, and he spent the entire night shivering in the water, clinging to wreckage. Every few minutes he’d hear a foghorn ring out from the lightship whose warnings the Alaska’s offi cers had apparently ignored as they charged along, supremely confi dent that they were safely three miles off shore. The next day, the Portland Morning Oregonian carried a front-page account of the wreck. Reporters followed their usual routine in reporting such stories, looking for the inspiring tales of hero- ism to balance out the tragedy and in- terviewing the ship’s offi cers to learn what happened. Second Offi cer E.D. Dupree must have raised more than one old salt’s eyebrows when he blamed the wreck on an “uncharted current” which had supposedly drifted the ship three miles farther shoreward than had been thought. When the fi rst offi cer praised the engineering crew for keeping steam Please see OFFBEAT, Page 5A Celery, peppers and parsley fi ght colon cancer BY JOEL FUHRMAN, MD For the Sentinel F lavo- noids are a class of anti- oxidant molecules found ubiq- uitously in plant foods, with certain classes of fl avonoids concen- trated in certain foods. For ex- ample anthocyanins in berries, isofl avones in soybeans, fl avo- nones in citrus fruits, and cate- chins in tea, grapes and berries; fl avanols are the most common fl avonoids found many plant foods. Fruits and vegetables are known to be protective against colon cancer, and these effects are thought to be due in part to fl avonoids; in addition to their antioxidant activities, fl avo- noids have additional protective $ PUUBHF ( SPWF 4 FOUJOFM 116 N. Sixth Street · P.O. Box 35 · Cottage Grove, OR 97424 ADMINISTRATION: JOHN BARTLETT, Regional Publisher.............................. GARY MANLY, General Manager................942-3325 Ext. 207 • publisher@cgsentinel.com ROBIN REISER, Sales Repersentative...............942-3325 Ext. 203 • robin@cgsentinel.com NEWS DEPARTMENT: JON STINNETT, Editor......................................942-3325 Ext. 212 • cgnews@cgsentinel.com SPORTS DEPARTMENT: SAM WRIGHT, Sports Editor...................942-3325 Ext. 204 • sports@cgsentinel.com CUSTOMER SERVICE CARLA WILLIAMS, Office Manager.................942-3325 Ext. 201 • billing@cgsentinel.com LEGALS.............................................................942-3325 Ext. 200 • legals@cgsentinel.com GRAPHICS: RON ANNIS, Graphics Manager (USP 133880) Subscription Mail Rates in Lane and Portions of Douglas Counties: Ten Weeks ............................................. $9.10 One year ..............................................$36.15 e-Edition year .......................................$36.00 Rates in all other areas of United States: Ten Weeks $11.70; one year, $46.35, e-Edition $43.00. In foreign countries, postage extra. No subscription for less than Ten Weeks. Subscription rates are subject to change upon 30 days’ notice. All subscritptions must be paid prior to beginning the subscription and are non-refundable. Periodicals postage paid at Cottage Grove, Oregon. Postmaster: Send address changes to P.O. Box 35, Cottage Grove, OR 97424. Local Mail Service: If you don’t receive your Cottage Grove Sentinel on the Wednesday of publication, please let us know. Call 942-3325 between 8:30 a.m. and 5 p.m. Advertising ownership: All advertising copy and illustrations prepared by the Cottage Grove Sentinel become the property of the Cottage Grove Sentinel and may not be reproduced for any other use without explicit written prior approval. Copyright Notice: Entire contents ©2015 Cottage Grove Sentinel. effects in the cell. Because of insuffi cient fruit and vegetable intake in Western societies, di- etary fl avonoid intake is low and most people are unfortunately not reaping the valuable health benefi ts of fl avonoids. Luteolin is a fl avonoid that is abundant in celery, peppers, kohlrabi, and culinary herbs like oregano and parsley. Luteolin has documented anti-infl amma- tory and antioxidant properties. Luteolin has also been shown to interfere with various stages of carcinogenesis in a number of different types of cancer cells. One study has found that luteo- lin blocks the growth of human colon cancer cells by interfering with a growth-stimulating hor- mone called insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1). IGF-1 is one of the body’s important growth promoters early in life, but ex- cess IGF-1 promotes cancer and aging later in life. When human colon cancer cells were treated with luteolin, the cancer cells no longer responded to IGF-1’s growth signals. IGF-1 is increased in several cancers, circulating in the blood and in affected tissues. In fact, cancer drugs targeting IGF-1 have been developed. Elevated IGF-1 is associated with elevat- ed risk of several cancers, and stimulates the rampant growth that is characteristic of cancer. The major determinant of IGF-1 levels is dietary protein, especially animal protein; a diet heavy in meat and dairy products strongly elevates IGF-1, and re- fi ned carbohydrates like sugar and white fl our also contribute. Essentially, the standard Ameri- can diet is an IGF-1-raising diet. One important message here is that eating more whole plant foods and fewer animal products and processed foods tips the bal- ance toward lower IGF-1 levels, and therefore protection against cancers. Additionally, eating a variety of plant foods provides us with a variety of phytochemi- cals, for which more and more health benefi ts are revealed as time goes on. Celery, parsley, and peppers are rich sources of luteolin plus hundreds of other phytochemicals. For example, celery contains aromatase in- hibitors, which protect against breast cancer by suppressing the production of estrogen. Other plant foods are rich in additional fl avonoids and other phytochemicals; when we eat a variety of colorful plant foods, these thousands of phytochemi- cals work synergistically in our bodies to protect our health. This simple, refreshing salad recipe combines the three rich- est sources of luteolin plus cru- ciferous leafy green kale and red onion for a big boost of anti- cancer compounds. Chopped vegetable salad with orange sesame dressing Salad: 2 carrots, chopped 3 organic celery stalks, chopped 1 bunch of parsley 1 red pepper, chopped 3 kale leaves, chopped 1 red onion, chopped 1 15-ounce can no-salt garban- zo beans, drained Dressing: 1/4 cup unhulled sesame seeds, divided 1/4 cup raw cashew nuts or 1/8 cup raw cashew butter 1/2 cup orange juice 2 tablespoons Dr. Fuhrman’s Riesling Reserve Vinegar or balsamic vinegar 2 oranges, peeled and diced Instructions: Combine the salad ingredi- ents in a large bowl and toss. Toast the sesame seeds in a dry skillet over medium-high heat for 3 minutes, shaking the pan frequently. In a high-powered blender, combine 2 tablespoons of the sesame seeds, cashews, orange juice, and vinegar. Toss salad with dressing and diced oranges. Sprinkle the remaining sesame seeds on top. Dr. Fuhrman is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and board certifi ed family physician specializing in lifestyle and nu- tritional medicine. His newest book Super Immunity discusses how to naturally strengthen the immune system against every- thing from the common cold to cancer. Visit his informative website at DrFuhrman.com. Submit your questions and com- ments about this column directly to newsquestions@drfuhrman. com. Letters to the Editor policy The Cottage Grove Sentinel receives many letters to the editor. In order to ensure that your letter will be printed, letters must be under 300 words and submitted by Friday at 5 p.m. Letters must be signed and must include an address, city and phone number or e-mail address for verifi cation purposes. No anonymous letters will be printed. Letters must be of interest to local readers. Personal attacks and name calling in response to letters are uncalled for and unnecessary. If you would like to submit an opinion piece, Another View must be no longer than 600 words. 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