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4A COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL January 13, 2016 O PINION Offbeat Oregon History Governor Martin’s goons were dirty but incompetent fi ghters BY FINN J.D. JOHN For the Sentinel I n August of 1937 when Stanley Doyle called on her, Gwendolyn Ramsey can’t have been too happy to see him. Doyle had been the key fi gure behind framing her husband, Er- nest Doyle, and two of his fellow union leaders, for the murder of a ship’s offi cer the year before. And although Doyle had been work- ing undercover, chances are pretty good that she knew exactly who he was. But what he wanted to see her about — that interested her a great deal. He was there to offer her a special deal: All she needed to do, he told her, was “sign a statement that Harry Bridges was a Commu- nist and that she had seen him at Communist meetings.” “All you have to do is sign it,” Doyle told her, “and your husband will be released from San Quen- tin.” Ramsey wasn’t interested in perjuring herself to help Doyle take down Bridges, the controver- sial Australian-born labor-union leader whom the entire West Coast seemed to be trying to get deport- ed. But she was very interested in how he proposed to get her hus- band released. Ernest Ramsey’s conviction might have been a cor- rupt fraud, but a conviction was a conviction. So she played along a little, and asked him the ques- tion: How did he have the power to overturn a conviction and get Ernest sprung? It was because, he told her, he was “a secret service agent for the Immigration Service and the governors of California and Or- egon” — and he fl ashed a fancy gold badge that read, “SPECIAL AGENT — STATE OF OREGON — No. 280.” Stanley Doyle was essentially a personal undercover operative answering directly and personally to the governor of Oregon — the ramrod-straight, demonstrably paranoid, ferociously anti-com- munist Major General Charles H. Martin (USA-Ret.), Governor of Oregon. And although there was wide- spread consensus among the gov- ernors of all three West Coast states as well as the executives of every major shipping company on the subject, it was Martin who seemed to most hate Harry Bridges. At the very least, it was he who devoted the most taxpayer resources to the decades-long fi ght to have him de- ported — a goal that would have gotten a lot easier if he could be identifi ed as a “red.” Evidence today is pretty strong that Bridges had been a member of the Communist Party at one time, probably in the early 1930s. But in 1937, that evidence wasn’t yet known — but it was fervently wished for. And Stanley Doyle’s mission was clear: Either fi nd or fabricate that evidence. It was a mission he went about with a clumsy unsubtlety that would have shocked anyone who didn’t already know his methods. An attorney, he fi rst came to the governor’s attention in 1934 as the prosecutor in the case of a man named Dirk DeJonge, a newly en- rolled Communist Party member who, a few years earlier, had been prosecuted for making an anti- police speech at a Portland rally. This, of course, was an activity protected under the First Amend- ment, but the judge found him guilty and sentenced him to prison for it anyway. Along the way to that outcome, though, some rather startling things happened, all on the record and in open court. First, under- cover State Police agent Laurence Milner, who had provided the key information in the case, sought to preserve his cover by testify- ing in court that he didn’t know if DeJonge was a communist or not. Doyle, during a break in the case, tried to persuade him to change his mind and recant his testimony — basically, admitting to perjury — and when Milner refused, Doyle actually stated, in open court, that he had tried to get him to do so. So Milner had to get on the stand and perjure himself again to claim (with rather less believability this time) that he had not. Nonetheless, if any labor unionists ever trusted Milner again after that display, they surely deserved whatever they got as a result. His cover was effectively blown. (As for DeJonge, his conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court two years later on grounds that throwing somebody into the cooler for making a speech was conduct unbecoming an American court of law.) The following year, in his new role as “special agent,” Doyle blew the lid off another laboriously con- structed piece of anti-union James Bondery when he traveled to Cali- fornia to get heavy with a man named Charles Bancksy, a private undercover agent working for a San Francisco shipping company. Bancksy had a beach house in Carmel stocked with hidden cam- eras and microphones and with a secret fi ngerprint lab; he hosted parties in it, in which he essen- Please see OFFBEAT, Page 5A CONTACT YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS Cottage Grove City Hall: 942-5501. www.cottagegrove.org/ Cottage Grove Mayor Tom Munroe: 942-5501. Salem, OR 97301 Phone: (503) 986-1407 Fax: (503) 986-1130 Email: rep.cedrichayden@state.or.us Fax: (202) 225-0032 Email: http://www.house.gov/formde- fazio/contact.html United States Senate: Oregon State Senate: Cottage Grove City Councilors: Garland Burback, Ward 3: 942-4800 Sen. Floyd Prozanski (DEM) District: 004 900 Court Street NE Suite S-319 Salem, OR 97301-0001 Phone: (503) 986-1704 Fax: (503) 986-1080 Email: sen.fl oydprozanski@state.or.us Amy Slay, Ward 4: 942-5501 Governor: Lane County Commissioners: Kate Brown 160 State Capitol 900 Court Street Salem, Oregon 97301-4047 Phone: (503) 378-4582 Fax: (503) 378-6827 Mike Fleck, At Large: 942-7302 Jake Boone, Ward 1: 653-7413 Jeff Gowing, Ward 2: 942-1900 Faye Stewart, East Lane Commissioner Lane County Public Service Building 125 East 8th Street Eugene, OR 97401 Phone: (541) 682-4203 Fax: (541) 682-4616 Oregon State House of Representa- tives: Rep. Cedric Hayden (REP) District: 007 900 Court Street NE Suite H-379 Clarifi cation — owner of home lost to fi re sheds more light on its history Last week, the Sentinel relayed news of the historic United States House of Representatives: Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (DEM) District: 004 United States House of Representatives 2134 Rayburn House Offi ce Building Washington, DC 20515-0001 Phone: (202) 225-6416 nature of a home lost to fi re on Hillside Drive on Dec. 28. On Friday, the owner of the home, which was built in 1865 and originally belonged to early area farmer Alex Cooley, called to correct a bit of misinformation regard- ing the house. Sheila Barrong told the Sentinel that she wished to Sen. Ron Wyden (DEM) District: 0S1 United States Senate 230 Dirksen Senate Offi ce Building Washington, DC 20510-0001 Phone: (202) 224-5244 Fax: (202) 228-2717 Email: http://wyden.senate.gov/contact/ Sen. Jeff Merkley (DEM) District: 0S2 United States Senate 404 Russell Senate Offi ce Building Washington, DC 20510-0001 Phone: (202) 224-3753 Fax: (202) 228-3997 Email: http://jmerkley.senate.gov/web- form.htm $ PUUBHF ( SPWF 4 FOUJOFM Our Community Newspaper correct the assertion that the home was owned by Alexan- der Cooley until he died in 1921 and was then pur- chased by Virgil D. White. White did own a home on Hillside Drive, Barrong said, though the home he owned was once owned by John Cooley and is located up the road a ways. Barrong since 1889 said she purchased the Alex Cooley house herself from Ruth DeLong in the 1950s. DeLong reportedly inherited the home from her father, a former minister here. The Sentinel thanks Barrong for the clarifi cation and for helping illuminate one small piece of Cottage Grove's history. Vitamin D, hormones and breast cancer BY JOEL FUHRMAN, MD For the Sentinel N ew research suggests that Vitamin D could oppose estrogen’s breast cancer-pro- moting effects. Published in the American Journal of Clini- cal Nutrition, a study of over 57,000 postmenopausal women found that, among women who had ever used hormone therapy, those that were supplementing with vitamin D had a 26 percent reduced risk of breast cancer. Vitamin D is known to have $ 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 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 NEWS DEPARTMENT: JON STINNETT, Editor......................................942-3325 Ext. 212 • cgnews@cgsentinel.com GRAPHICS: RON ANNIS, Graphics Manager (USP 133880) cellular ef- fects that oppose the develop- ment of cancer, such as promoting cell adhe- sion, inhib- iting cancer cell proliferation and anti-infl ammatory effects. A Cochrane meta-analysis pub- lished in 2014 concluded that supplementation with vitamin D3 was associated with a 12 percent lower risk of death from cancer. There has been extensive research on vitamin D in rela- tion to breast cancer risk. Some meta-analyses have shown sig- nifi cantly reduced breast cancer risk with higher blood vitamin D, whereas others have shown only a weak association. The protec- tive effects of vitamin D appear to be quite strong in studies of breast cancer patients. In a 2014 meta-analysis of six studies, higher vitamin D blood levels (above 29.1 ng/ml) were associ- ated with a 42 percent reduction in the risk of death from breast cancer compared to lower levels (lower than 21 ng/ml). Another meta-analysis reported that breast cancer patients with low vitamin D levels had more than double the risk of recurrence of their cancer. Furthermore, stud- ies that have shown that an in- herited variation in the vitamin D receptor gene increases breast cancer risk. We know Vitamin D has overall anti-cancer effects, but interestingly the new research suggests that vitamin D may oppose some effects of female hormones, making vitamin D especially helpful for breast cancer prevention. Experiments carried out in vitro suggest that the active form of vitamin D sup- presses aromatase expression in breast cancer cells, resulting in lower production of estrogen. Vitamin D also downregulated the estrogen receptor in breast cancer cells, making the cells less responsive to estrogen’s cancer-promoting signals. This research makes it even more important for women to get their blood vitamin D levels (25(OH)D) tested and supple- ment to reach the sweet spot of 30-45 ng/ml. This favorable range has been suggested by much research on cancer, bone fractures and all-cause mortal- ity. I recommend taking vitamin D3, the more potent form of the vitamin, the form the skin pro- duces when it is exposed to sun- light. In my experience, 2000 IU is an appropriate dose to bring most people into the 30-45 ng/ ml range. However, there are always exceptions and for those whose blood results fall outside of this range taking more or less can be indicated. Of course, breast cancer pro- tection involves more than Vi- tamin D. A nutritarian diet has been designed to maximally protect against breast cancer, and exercise is important too. Dr. Fuhrman is a #1 New York Times best-selling author and a family physician special- izing in lifestyle and nutritional medicine. His newest book, The End of Dieting, debunks the fake “science” of popular fad diets and offers an alternative to dieting that leads to permanent weight loss and excellent health. Visit his informative website at DrFuhrman.com. Submit your questions and comments about this column directly to news- questions@drfuhrman.com. The full reference list for this article can be found at DrFuhrman. com. 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