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About Baker City herald. (Baker City, Or.) 1990-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 27, 2019)
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2019 Baker City, Oregon 4A Write a letter news@bakercityherald.com EDITORIAL Revising the GOL Baker High School’s football team shouldn’t have to drive most of the way to the Pacifi c Ocean to play a nonleague game. And if the Oregon School Activities Association approves a proposed new athletic league of which Baker would be a member, the Bulldogs shouldn’t have to resort, as they did this October, to driving about 400 miles to Pe Ell, Washington, or taking a similar trip to round out their football schedule. The problem is that Baker’s conference, the Greater Oregon League, had just three teams this past football season. Ontario and La Grande were members, but former GOL school Mac-Hi, in Milton- Freewater, opted last summer to play an indepen- dent schedule. The Pioneers’ defection left Baker scrambling for opponents, and resulted in the 7-hour drive to Washington. The proposed solution, which the OSAA’s execu- tive board could consider in February, is to create a 7-team league that, unlike the Class 4A-only GOL, includes three Class 3A schools — Nyssa, Burns and Vale. They would join Baker, La Grande and Ontario, with Mac-Hi rejoining the league for football in 2020. The idea, which Baker athletic director Buell Gonzales Jr. was involved in formulating, is sensible, and better refl ects the geographic reality of Eastern Oregon than the current leagues. Baker and the other Class 4A schools have frequently scheduled nonleague games with the 3A schools. And despite their smaller enrollments, those schools have been competitive. Just this month, Nyssa’s boys basketball team beat both Ontario and La Grande, and lost by 9 points to Baker. The Burns girls have beaten Baker twice in a row — the Bulldogs’ only losses in a 34- game span. Although the league would be a hybrid, with 4A and 3A schools, the top two teams from each level, as decided by school offi cials, would advance to the state playoffs. — Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor OTHER VIEWS Drug costs shouldn’t be partisan issue Editorial from The Tampa Bay Times: Virtually ignored in the impeach- ment haze, the U.S. House has passed common-sense legislation that fi nally would give the federal government the power to negotiate lower prescription drug prices with pharmaceutical compa- nies for Medicare patients. Yet President Donald Trump has threatened to veto the bill and the Senate is expected to ignore it. The rising cost of prescription drugs is a key issue nationwide, and at least the House’s action should put pressure on the Senate to pursue its own solution. It’s diffi cult to fathom why allow- ing Medicare to negotiate for better drug prices is a partisan issue. Trump campaigned on the issue in 2016. Yet the legislation passed the House last week along partisan lines, with every Democrat voting for it and all but two Republicans opposing it. There are plenty of good provisions in the House bill that would benefi t Medicare recipients beyond allowing the government to negotiate for better prices for up to 250 commonly used drugs. For example, there would be a new limit on out-of-pocket drug costs of $2,000. Drug manufacturers also would be required to pay rebates back to Medicare if drug prices rise faster than infl ation. But the legislation also would benefi t everyone else, because it would require drugmak- ers to offer the negotiated Medicare price to private insurers. What would be the practical impact? More than 19,000 Florida women are expected to be diagnosed with breast cancer this year, and the House legisla- tion is projected to lower the average cost of the breast cancer medication Ibrance by 65%, from $69,000 to $23,900 per year. More than 21% of Floridians have arthritis, and the House legislation is projected to lower the cost of most arthri- tis drugs from about $40,000 a year to $10,000 a year. That’s real money. The Republican-controlled Senate is where good legislation passed by the Democrat-controlled House goes to die, regardless of whether it is reforming campaign fi nance laws, raising the mini- mum wage or banning offshore drilling. The least Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell should do is start moving a bipartisan Senate bill that includes provisions in the House legislation such as a limit on out-of-pocket expenses on prescription drugs for Medicare recipients and the rebate requirements for drug companies. The Senate bill unfortunately does not include the key provision that would allow the federal government to negotiate lower drug prices, but that could be an issue to negotiate later. The high cost of prescription drugs affects everyone, and it should not be a partisan issue. Now that the U.S. House has passed its legislation, the Senate should take up the issue and work toward a compromise that both Republi- cans and Democrats can embrace. Two Rose Bowls, and 25 years of technology On Nov. 5, 1994, I guided my slightly decrepit but always dogged International Scout II through the drifts of an early blizzard, at the risk of getting mired and possibly having to set the seat cushions ablaze to stay alive, just to fi nd out if my beloved Oregon Ducks would beat Arizona State and stay in contention for the Rose Bowl. I did not get stuck. I did not have to set fi re to any- thing. And the Ducks trounced the Sun Devils, 34-10. I think occasionally about that magical and distant autumn when Oregon, my alma mater, shrugged off embarrassing nonleague losses to Hawaii and Utah to win six straight Pac-10 games and advance to the Rose Bowl for the fi rst time in 37 years. I drove to Pasadena with my dad and my brother. On Jan. 2, 1995, we watched the Ducks lose 38-20 to Penn State, a game, I feel almost contractually obligated to point out, that was tied at 14 late in the third quarter. Oregon playing in the Grandaddy of Them All hasn’t been exactly routine since then. But neither has it again been quite such an epochal achievement as it was in 1994. The Ducks played in the Rose Bowl in 2010, 2012 and 2015, winning the latter two. They’ll return to the famed sta- dium this New Year’s Day to play Wisconsin. This has prompted me to revisit that season a quarter century ago, and in particular to ponder the dramatic changes that technology has wrought on a rabid fan’s access to his favorite team’s exploits. JAYSON JACOBY This might seem passing strange; it did to me initially. After all, 1994 hardly qualifi es as ancient. We had cable TV and compact discs and much else that still seems familiar, albeit rather outdated in some cases. CDs, for instance, likely would befuddle many people born after 1994, since the shiny discs obviously won’t fi t into any of the ports on a smartphone. But it’s what we didn’t have back then that makes the otherwise modest interval of 25 years such a chasm — and explains why I was busting my Scout’s front bumper through snow to reach Elkhorn Summit, elevation 7,396 feet, near Anthony Lakes. The fi rst of these is ubiquitous television coverage of college foot- ball. Today, of course, fans are ac- customed to being able to see pretty much any contest, even if they have to take out a second mortgage to cover the platinum package. And in the rare case when there’s no live TV coverage, we can of course engage the internet at our leisure. But that Oregon-Arizona State game, in common with the major- ity of college games in 1994, wasn’t aired live on any of the major networks or cable channels. And the second factor — the internet — for all intents and pur- poses did not exist in 1994. Most computer owners who ac- cessed the internet — and very few of us in fact did — used a dial-up subscription service such as AOL. A study by the Pew Research Center in October 1995 found that in 1994 just 11 million American house- holds even had a modem-equipped computer, and fewer than half of those used a subscription service to access the internet. I wasn’t among those. But even if I had been, the web- site that would have appealed most to a football fan — ESPN’s — didn’t exist. The all-sports cable channel debuted its website in April 1995. Notwithstanding the compara- tively crude options available in 1994, you might reasonably wonder why I didn’t just listen to the Oregon-Arizona State game on the radio. That medium had of course been readily available for decades before 1994. The problem, at least for me, is that in 1994 Oregon Ducks foot- ball games weren’t carried on any local stations. (I vividly remember sitting in my Ford Escort station wagon, parked in the carport on the night of Sept. 10, 1994, and getting an occasional 10- or 15-second burst of clear reception on a Portland AM station as the Ducks lost to Hawaii, 36-16. This ersatz experience was pos- sible only due to the atmospheric vagaries of AM radio signals after dark, when the reduction in solar radiation allows signals to “bounce” along, sometimes for hundreds of miles, rather than being absorbed.) The Arizona State game on Nov. 5, however, was an afternoon contest. As peculiar as it might seem today, had I stayed in Baker City that day, the only way I could have tracked the game would have been to phone someone who was either listening to the game or was actually at Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe. In retrospect I suppose I could have prevailed on my dad to phone me occasionally. But I’m certain that this option, even had it occurred to me then, would have seemed an unsatisfying substitute for actually listening myself. And so I climbed into my vener- able Scout and headed toward the Elkhorns. It was my fi rst four-wheel drive and although I sold it more than a decade ago my affection for the rig lingers. The Scout was painted a shade of dirt-brown that no automaker would dare slather on a ve- hicle these days. I thought it ideal, though, for a model designed to plunge through mud bogs and similarly torturous terrain — splat- ters of grime were rather effectively camoufl aged. The Scout lacked the off-road capability of the Toyota FJ Cruiser that replaced it, falling short in ground clearance and low-range gearing and boasting a less-effective positraction rear differential rather than a mechanically locking type. But on that November day the Scout bested the snow, which was rather more than a foot deep above Anthony Lakes. Elkhorn Summit was my destination because, based on past experience, I knew it to be the closest place where I could reli- ably pull in a Pendleton AM station that broadcast Duck football. I remember the day clearly but some of the details are fuzzy, as they tend to be at a distance of 25 years. I don’t recall, for instance, wheth- er I stayed until the fi nal buzzer or whether, given the Ducks’ large lead, I headed down the mountain early as the autumn dusk fell. Nor do I remember whether it snowed while I was there. Weather records from the Baker City Airport that day show a high of 41 with one-tenth of an inch of snow falling, so like as not there were at least a few snow showers at Elkhorn Summit. When the Rose Bowl kicks off Wednesday afternoon I expect to be sitting on my sofa, the impeccably manicured grass fi eld looking lush in high-defi nition and the murmur of the 100,000-plus fans echoing through the 5.1-channel hi-fi . I will not have to worry about the prospect of shoveling for half an hour to extricate a rig high-cen- tered in the implacable snow. The furnace, softly exhaling through its grates, will keep me more reliably warm than a 345-cubic-inch V8 engine, and with no risk of carbon monoxide accumulating. A frosty beverage will be just a few strides away. But I expect that at some point during the game I will briefl y remi- nisce about that wintry afternoon high in the Elkhorns, when my only link to the game was the tinny, de- cidedly low-fi voice of play-by-play announcer Jerry Allen, beaming to my antenna from a transmitter beyond the snow-draped shoulders of the Blue Mountains. Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.
