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.
To avoid transcription errors, the Sentinel would prefer editorial and news content be sent
electronically via email or electronic media. Hand written submissions will be accepted, but we may need to call to verify
spelling, which could delay the publishing of the submission.