4A COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL January 20, 2016
O PINION
LETTERS TO THE
EDITOR
Goodbye, Pepper
I enjoyed another delightful column of
Pet Tips "N" Tales (Jan. 6, 2016), but on
the same page was the obituary of Pepper.
Pepper was my friend. I loved Pepper. She
was crushed by a car at Sixth and Main
on New Years Eve. She was on a leash
and was crossing on a green light. People
rushed to help. Compassionately and expe-
ditiously a member of the Cottage Grove
Police Department did all he could to save
Pepper, but Pepper is gone.
Too often, cars race carelessly along
Main Street and all over town. Cars can be
lethal weapons and too often are. Fortu-
nately Pepper's friend Steve did not meet
the same fate.
Goodbye, Pepper. Many will miss you.
Duane Raley
Cottage Grove
CORRECTION
An obituary in the Jan. 13,
2016 edition of the Cottage
Grove Sentinel listed Jim and
Sue Bailey and LaVina Spare-
hawk as the deceased grand-
parents of Kyle Ledford. The
Baileys and LaVina Sparehawk
have not, in fact, passed away.
The Sentinel regrets the error
and any consequences it has
caused.
Offbeat Oregon History
Portland’s Jitney Wars pitted entrepreneurs
against monopoly
BY FINN J.D. JOHN
For the Sentinel
T
he working stiffs, lunch pails in
hand, shiver in the chill of an
early January working morning. The
streetcar is late, again; and when it ar-
rives, they’ll pack aboard to be taken
slowly and uncomfortably to work.
When they get there, they’ll still have
to walk half a mile to their jobs from
the nearest station.
They’re not complaining; a working
man with a job in the slow 1915 econo-
my wasn’t in the habit of griping about
stuff. But still, all of them would ad-
mit that it would be nice if the streetcar
company, the ponderous local monop-
oly Portland Railway, Light and Power
Co., were a little more responsive to its
customers’ needs.
Then the sound of a crude four-cyl-
inder automobile engine breaks the
morning stillness.
It’s a man in a red driving-cap behind
the wheel of a shiny new Ford Model
T.
“Say, brothers,” he calls out. “Any
of you gents care to ride with me this
morning? Same 5 cents gets you there
quicker and I’ll drop you off at your
factory gate.”
Soon he’s puttering off with four
grateful pipefi tters crammed into his
car, and with another two standing on
the running boards. Ten minutes and
25 cents later, he’s coming back for
another load. He passes another couple
of horseless carriages on the way. All
of them are loaded with workers grate-
ful to skip the long lines, slow travel
and inconvenient routes of the monop-
oly streetcar operators; he exchanges
cheerful waves with each. He also
passes the streetcar itself, only half full
of passengers; the streetcar’s engineer,
his face a mask of fury, shakes his fi st.
“Damn you, you socialist Jitney cream-
skimmers!” he shouts as they pass.
It was just another morning in the
front lines of Portland’s Jitney Wars.
“Jitney” is a term most Oregonians
today know as a vague slang term for a
piece of logging equipment — if they
know it at all. But in the years just be-
fore the First World War, the term was
as familiar — and as controversial —
as the name “Uber” is today.
And indeed, there are some striking
similarities between the modern phe-
nomenon of ride-sharing services like
Uber and Lyft and the pre-First-World-
War phenomenon of jitneys. There are
some signifi cant differences, too — dif-
ferences that have been overlooked by
most of the authors of recent newspa-
per features about them.
The jitney phenomenon got started
in 1914. At the time, most major cit-
ies had streetcar services — many of
them still horse-drawn, but some with
fancy new electric systems. A streetcar
service is something of a natural mo-
nopoly; it’s hard to have competing
light-rail systems, so a city typically
gave a franchise to one private opera-
tor. The operator was protected from
competition; in exchange, it agreed to
be regulated as to rates and service by
the city.
Of course, that regulation typically
started out lax and got more so as the
big-shot businessmen in charge of the
streetcar companies got progressively
chummier with local political elites.
Certainly that was the case in Portland.
So, protected from either competition
or serious pressure from the city, the
streetcars in Stumptown delivered in-
creasingly desultory service even as
the city’s growing population taxed
their capacity to its limit and occasion-
ally beyond.
Meanwhile, the Ford Model T had
a few years before made private auto-
mobiles easy to afford. And it wasn’t
long before one of the new car owners
tumbled to a great scheme to make a
little extra money:
Troll the streetcar lines offering cus-
tomers personal service, for the same
nickel they’d pay to pack aboard a slow,
smelly, inconvenient streetcar.
Now, the fact that a private motorist
could make a worthwhile profi t selling
individual car rides for the same price
as streetcar fare clearly says something
about the state of the streetcar industry
at the time. Profi t margins for street-
car companies were enormous. And in
Portland, there was not much love lost
between streetcar riders and the Port-
land Railway, Light and Power Com-
pany — which, as most of them knew,
was backed largely by out-of-town
capital and had been created through
merger and consolidation specifi cally
to eliminate competition.
So when streetcar monopolies around
the nation found themselves compet-
ing with hundreds of private motorists
picking up a little extra drinking money
at their expense, they naturally turned
to their local city governments with de-
mands that this behavior be stopped.
Their case was a textbook argument
from a licensed monopoly: Their deal
with the city required them to run many
different lines, some of which lost
money and some of which made mon-
ey. The winners offset the losers. Now,
they cried, here came these jitney-driv-
ing jackals to “skim the cream” off
the lucrative routes, leaving them with
nothing but the losers. It wasn’t fair
— it was unfair competition. And if it
were allowed to stand, they claimed,
they’d have to cut back service.
In other cities around the west, this
claim resonated strongly. Cities like
San Francisco and Los Angeles laid
down expensive licensing laws and spe-
cious requirements. Then they put their
police forces on the job, performing
sting operations and writing fat tickets
to unlicensed jitney drivers.
In Portland, though, the jitney drivers
— who had wisely formed an AFL-af-
fi liated labor union just as soon as they
realized which way the wind was blow-
ing, much to the dismay and consterna-
tion of the streetcar company’s friends
at the Morning Oregonian — had a key
friend in Councilor Will Daly. Daly
was, unusually, a union offi cer who
had gone into business successfully for
Please see OFFBEAT, Page 5A
The three habits of health
BY JOEL FUHRMAN, MD
For the Sentinel
T
he way you take care of
yourself is a more crucial
determinant of your future hap-
piness as your savings account.
Many people invest in their fi -
nancial future, but they never
consider their health future. A
large nest egg is of no use to you
if you’re not there to spend it!
$ PUUBHF ( SPWF 4 FOUJOFM
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As you
plan
for
your health
future, you
must con-
sider
the
three im-
portant
compo-
nents that
pay the biggest dividends: nu-
trition, exercise and positive
mind-set.
Nutrition
Make every calorie count as
you strive for lifelong health.
Eat lots of foods that are
rich in nutrients and low in
calories—and remember my
health equation, H (Health) =
N (Nutrition) / C (Calories).
Also remember to regularly
include foods that have spe-
cial cancer-protective features,
notably the G-BOMBS, Greens,
Beans, Onions, Mushrooms,
Berries and Seeds.
Exercise
Exercise regularly. Make it
a part of your daily routine. A
gym membership is nice, but
there are plenty of other oppor-
tunities to work out your body
over the course of an average
day. Take the stairs, for instance,
instead of the elevator. Walk or
ride a bike instead of driving.
Take frequent exercise breaks
and do something active for just
three to fi ve minutes, then go
back to work.
Positive mind-set
A healthy mind-set is a pre-
requisite for a healthy lifestyle.
The best way to develop one is
to be optimistic and surround
yourself with people who en-
gage in and support your health.
Show people you care about
them with your actions, not just
with words. A positive mind-set
results from your goodwill to
others. It is like putting deposits
in your lifespan account.
These are the three essential
habits of health. The more you
practice them, the more routine
they become. You won’t want to
act any other way.
Many people—healthy and
unhealthy people alike—are of-
ten obsessed with food. The goal
is to live a fully balanced life
where people, food and exercise
are all in the right place. The
key to fi nding food’s place in
this delicate balance is by prac-
ticing the three habits of health
until they all become a natural
part of your life. Balancing your
diet style for optimal health is
part of, and most natural and
effective when it is connected
to, balancing your life between
exercise, rest, sleep, recreation,
work, family, friends and intel-
lectual pursuits.
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 di-
eting 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.
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