4A COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL MARCH 1, 2017
O PINION
Stepping away for
the Better
A farewell from sports editor
Sam Wright
H
is name was Andrew. He was 22 years old and had aspi-
rations of becoming a Michelin-star chef and completed
his culinary education at Pacifi c Culinary Institute in
Vancouver, BC. Andrew and I both struggled with our similar and
various mental health issues, and on March 1, at about 2:30 a.m.,
he was pronounced dead.
Broken. That’s the only word I can think of for how I felt when
his older sister called me that night.
Andrew and I grew up in the tiny island-state of Singapore. He
lived there for about 17 years and I lived there for about 11. We
were misfi ts: drinking and smoking from a very young age, living
overseas allowed us to drink at bars and nightclubs since we were
14. That was probably how our depression and anxiety developed
over the years.
Andrew developed a substance abuse problem while living in
Canada. He was a victim of a city-wide epidemic in Vancouver
where drug dealers were putting Fentanyl in cocaine. This claimed
the lives of over 900 kids in 2016 in Canada alone. Chemically
and economically speaking, it doesn’t make sense for Fentanyl to
be cut into cocaine; the word “narcoterrorism” has been thrown
around since I heard of Andrew’s death.
But that’s neither here nor there. I am writing this now to say
farewell to my readers and colleagues. The death of my best friend
has awoken me to the realization of my own mental health issues
and I will have to take a medical leave of absence for a few months.
I graduated high school from the Singapore American School
in 2011 and immediately enrolled at the University of Oregon that
fall. I suffered through a huge amount of culture shock. Coming
to the United States, even though I’m American, was a big change
for me.
I originally came to the UO for being accepted into the architec-
ture school. But after realizing I couldn’t draw, I decided to pursue
my passion for writing at the School of Journalism and Commu-
nication.
I fi nished in the standard four years and graduated in 2015. That’s
when I came across the opening at the Cottage Grove Sentinel.
To be honest, I’ve never liked small-town America. I spent 11
years of my most important developing years living in Singapore,
a nation at the forefront of the global conversation of culture and
economics. I had traveled to over 30 countries before I turned 18.
The happenings of a small town in Oregon seem so trivial after
growing up with an international perspective.
But I must commend you, the readers and citizens of Cottage
Grove. You were, more or less, very welcoming, very kind and
very accommodating.
My employers at the Sentinel have been fantastic. They respond-
ed with compassion and understanding when I told them I needed
to take a medical leave. It has been very uplifting.
But now I am stepping away. I need to take some time to get
back on track towards my international aspirations. Andrew and I
had the goal of opening up a restaurant in Chiang Rai, Thailand.
Now that that dream has departed with the passing of my friend, I
must regroup and move on in search of something that will be as
fulfi lling and that will be appropriate in his memory.
I would like to thank all of the readers that hung with me despite
several shortcomings over the last 1.5 years. This job has been a
great fi rst step in a career, and hopefully it will launch me into a
fruitful life. Perhaps I will return to Oregon, but for now, farewell
and thank you for your reads.
C ottage G rove
S entinel
Offbeat Oregon History
From about 1913 on, every
small
boy in America knew who
For The Sentinel
A.C. Gilbert was.
Somewhere on an advertising
page in practically every youth-oriented magazine, his cheerful,
immaculately dressed image could be seen, beaming over a neat
bow tie and pointing proudly at a steam shovel, Ferris wheel,
rocket launcher or some other motorized contraption built with
the product he’d invented: Erector.
“Hello boys!” he’d be “saying,” in a distinctive informal-look-
ing italic type. “Make lots of toys!”
And, in their millions, boys did. (Girls, too, although in that era
of more rigidly defi ned gender roles far fewer girls were encour-
aged to take an interest in such things.)
You might think a man who made a large fortune building what
had to be the iconic toy of mid-century maker culture must have
had a pretty interesting boyhood himself.
You’d be right.
Alfred Carlton Gilbert was born in 1884 in Salem, Oregon,
and within six years of the event nearly everyone in the city was
aware of the fact. There was clearly something special about this
chipper-faced youth.
He came of a family of very strict Congregationalists, so Sun-
days were for worship and contemplation only. But every oth-
er day of the week, young A.C. and his friends were setting the
neighborhood on fi re.
Literally, that is. One of Gilbert’s childhood memories, as he
recalled in the memoir he wrote when he was 70 years old, was
building a fi re department in the family barn. He cut a hole in the
fl oor of the haymow and installed a wooden pole to slide down
and cots to pretend to sleep on. He also engineered and rigged a
self-opening apparatus for the barn door.
Young Alfred and the other little “fi remen” would all then lie
down and pretend to be sleeping on the cots, like real fi remen did
when waiting for a call. Meanwhile, one of their number would
run out and set a brush fi re for them to extinguish (luckily, none
of these ever actually got out of control; if they had, Salem would
remember A.C. Gilbert rather differently than it does today!)
Then the young arsonist would return and ring the alarm bell,
and the boys would all leap out of their cots, slide down the pole,
take the “fi re engine” — a boy’s wagon with a 100-foot garden
hose coiled up on it and a bell rigged to clang as it went — and
race for the door. One of them would pull the lever, the door
would open and out they’d go to save the day.
Young Alfred used the fi re station as inducement to get the oth-
er neighborhood boys to help him with his chores. After all, many
hands made light work, and they all wanted to play. The price of
getting to play with Alfred’s fi re station was 10 or 15 minutes
of helping him stack wood — and thus an hour-long chore was
reduced to a few minutes, after which everyone got to play. It was
truly win-win.
The kind of salesmanship shown by this gambit was not a
fl uke. Young Alfred was a salesman born — which is, indirectly,
how he became a magician. In those days, around 1890, there
was a magazine called the Youth’s Companion. Boys and girls
who sold lots of subscriptions to it earned credits that they could
redeem from a catalog. Alfred enthusiastically dove into this, and
after selling subscriptions to practically every other kid in Salem,
redeemed his credits for a real magician’s magic set.
It must have been a pretty good magic set. Soon Alfred was the
By Finn JD John
neighborhood magician. But what he learned from that magic set
was, more than anything, the power of practice.
“I worked at my tricks hour after hour, day after day,” Gilbert
recalled in his memoirs. “Of course, I wasn’t very good, but in
time it was good enough to astound and delight my family and
friends.”
It was a lesson he took to heart. From that time on, Gilbert’s
life would follow a pattern: Find something worth doing, practice
it relentlessly for thousands of hours, look up and realize you’ve
become one of the world’s best.
Of course, with magic shows, it wasn’t nearly as simple as that
sounds. But the young illusionist got good enough to impress pro-
fessional traveling magician Hermann the Great during a Salem
show in 1891. Alfred was called upon as an audience volunteer.
After having rabbits pulled out of his pockets and an egg he’d
carefully placed in a box transformed into a full-sized chicken, he
got his chance when Hermann the Great asked him, “Now, son,
don’t you wish you could do things like that?”
“I can,” returned the bold youth, and proceeded to show Her-
mann his best trick: he made a card disappear. Hermann’s sur-
prise, hammed up for the audience’s benefi t, was probably
genuine: back-palming a card was a professional-grade trick,
something he surely didn’t expect to see from a 7-year-old boy in
a remote rural outpost like 1890s Salem.
“You’re very good, son,” he told the youth. “You’ll be a great
success. Come back to my dressing room after the show, I’d like
to talk to you.”
Sometime after that, the Gilbert family moved to Moscow, Ida-
ho. But Alfred came back to Oregon in 1900 to attend Pacifi c
University in Forest Grove for his undergraduate degree.
At Pacifi c, he forged a reputation for mild mischief — stealing
chickens to roast and eat over campfi res in the woods, setting an
outhouse on fi re, that sort of thing.
He also forged a reputation as a world-class athlete — in no
small part due to the fact that he was one of the few athletes in
1900 who recognized the value of constant practice. While a stu-
dent at Pacifi c, Alfred set the world’s record in chin-ups and the
running long dive.
He met his wife, Mary Thompson Gilbert, at Pacifi c. “Alfred
used to court me with one arm around my waist, and the other
hand in his pocket — (practicing) back-palming a half-dollar,”
Mary recalled, years later.
Magic would be a huge part of A.C. Gilbert’s life story. Oregon
would, too. But, ironically, he would have to move decisively (if
regretfully) away from both to achieve his biggest successes.
He left Oregon more or less for good when he graduated from
Pacifi c and enrolled at Yale for medical school. While at Yale, he
broke several more world records, including the pole vault and
the rope climb, and founded a company with a friend: The Mysto
Manufacturing Company, specializing in magic sets for profes-
sional and aspiring magicians.
And he left magic, more or less, in 1913 when he created the
iconic Erector Set — the toy that would make him truly rich and
famous.
But by then, he was well settled in on the East Coast, and his
old neighbors and classmates in Oregon (and Idaho) could only
look on from afar, taking pride in his success and remembering
the old days when the bow-tied magnate was still a scruffy, like-
able lad of 10 or 12, busily lighting brush fi res and pulling rabbits
out of an old hat.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Excited for Faye
We're going to have administrative savings of well over
$100,000 a year, every year Faye comes home to his family and
balances out city staff in beautiful Cottage Grove. A valuable
and respected liaison too no less, with Lane County Government
itself.
As we grow as a community, our burdens will actually de-
crease!
We are all so lucky to have Faye join our community in a full
time way. Welcome aboard Mr. Stewart. Hip Hip Hooray!
Mark Simeone
(541) 942-3325 • 116 N. SIXTH ST.
WWW.CGSENTINEL.COM
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