SATURDAY, AUGUST 14, 2021
Baker City, Oregon
A4
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OUR VIEW
Brown
deal
leaves
bad taste
I
t is not a political scandal by any means,
but the recent news Gov. Kate Brown
spent a large chunk of taxpayer dollars
to pay one of her former advisers to serve
as a political consultant leaves a bitter
aftertaste.
The news barely broke above the col-
lective consciousness of the state and it
certainly gained little traction in portions
of the Willamette Valley, a traditional base
for the governor.
At its heart the news revolves around a
deal brokered in 2020 where the governor
hired her former communications director
Chris Pair through a no-bid state contract.
The deal provides Pair with a salary of
$6,500 a month to attend weekly meet-
ings of the Western Governors’ Association
regarding enlarging the effort to create
infrastructure for electric vehicles. So far,
the state has paid Pair $91,000.
Brown has also paid Pair money
through one of her political action commit-
tees.
When Pair — a longtime member of
Brown’s staff — departed in January 2020,
Brown made no mention he might be hired
back. A month later, the governor’s offi ce
asked state offi cials to prepare the no-bid
contract for Pair’s consulting company.
Now, on the face of it, none of this is
illegal. In fact, former government offi cials
turning around to work as independent
contractors for their former bosses or agen-
cies is commonplace. It just looks bad.
Transparency in government is essen-
tial for a democracy to function properly.
That means taxpayers have the right to
know what their elected leaders are doing
and why.
The money paid out to Pair so far is,
obviously, just a drop in the bucket of the
multibillion-dollar budget of the state.
But it is the principle that counts in this
situation. If the governor was going to hire
one of her former staffers and let him or
her be paid with tax dollars, she should
have disclosed it. State government — and
especially the governor’s offi ce — isn’t a
private company. It’s funded by taxpayers,
and taxpayers have a right to know — no
matter how low the sum — how their
money is being used.
The governor didn’t break the law, but
bankrolling one of her former staffers on
the taxpayers’ dime doesn’t sit well with us.
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A glimpse at Baker High School in 1926
I
opened the book’s cover and almost immedi-
ately became lost in a world which no longer
exists and, for me, never did.
This wasn’t a novel, though, nor any other
form of fi ction.
The people and the places in the book are
real.
The places are in Baker City, and they
persist.
But the people are, all of them, long since
gone to their graves.
The book, bound in brown imitation leather,
is the 1926 edition of The Nugget, the name
given to the Baker High School yearbook.
(Or annual, as we mostly called these publi-
cations when I was a teenager.)
The 1926 version of The Nugget was the
28th, which puts into perspective just now
venerable BHS is.
I fi nd it endlessly fascinating to briefl y in-
habit a world I can never experience in person,
to see the faces and read the words of people I
will never know.
Fascinating, but also a bit eerie.
I ponder the reality that the students and
the teachers who populate the pages of The
Nugget once strolled the same streets that I do
today, almost a quarter of the way through a
century they could scarcely have imagined, so
distant it was. For them the 19th century had
far more relevance than the 21st.
I think about how these people saw the
Elkhorns in the same seasonal guises that I
do, how they too awoke to below-zero Janu-
ary mornings (except more likely in a home
warmed by pine than by kilowatts or therms),
and endured August heat (except without the
comfort of artifi cially chilled air).
I understand that they did all this decades
before I — or my parents, come to that — had
been conceived, and when I consider this span
of time, this juxtaposition of time and plane, I
feel a queer mixture of nostalgia and melan-
choly and curiosity that is not a little discon-
certing.
Turning the pages of an artifact such as the
95-year-old Nugget is akin to visiting another
universe, one that’s simultaneously familiar but
also so different, and in noteworthy ways, that
in some senses I scarcely recognize it.
The fi rst thing I noticed about this antique
is the formality of much of its language. Al-
though the yearbook also is rich in the teenage
jargon of the Roaring 20s and the inside jokes
of a group of classmates in a small, rural school
— an essential purpose, then as now, of this sort
of document — I was surprised by the quality
and sophistication of some of the writing.
The foreword, for instance, which is attrib-
uted to The Nugget staff, is the work of a period
when, or so it seems to me, the proper and
disciplined use of written English was rather
more appreciated than it is today.
The foreword reads: “Although the memo-
JAYSON
JACOBY
ries of the past school year are still warm, and
its joys, its labors, and its companionships are
still fresh in mind, it is our sincere desire that
when memory has been dimmed, that this
1926 Nugget Annual will prove a reminder of
these happy days.”
That is a sentence written by teenagers who
understood not just the foundational principles
of good writing, but who also grasped such
nuances as cadences which ring pleasantly in
the ear.
(The eye, important organ though it is, gets
too much attention, in my estimation, when it
comes to reading and writing. I believe we rate
the quality of writing, however subconsciously,
by what we hear in our heads, not by what we
see.)
Perhaps I ought not be surprised by the
students’ acumen. The Nugget yearbook — I
was pleased to see it referred to as an “annual”
in a couple places — is not the only publica-
tion they produced. They also put out a weekly
school newspaper. The staff included seven
reporters and three editors, an embarrassment
of journalistic riches by today’s standards.
As I leafed through The Nugget’s 98 pages I
was entranced by the mixture of the contempo-
rary and the archaic.
The fi rst names of the students, for instance,
betrayed the age of the yearbook perhaps as
much as any other attribute.
There are Normas and Ethyls, Lelands and
Franks, Ediths and Mildreds, Normans and
Georges.
Conspicuously absent, at least to modern
expectations, are Jadens and Sydneys, Kaelis
and Ethans, Kadens and Makaylas, among
a handful of the names to which parents are
partial nowadays.
In the dozens of pictures of students there
is a noteworthy prevalence of neckties and
dresses. The boys have short hair, parted with
the same precision that The Nugget staff as-
sembled their paragraphs.
Some sections seem as foreign as fl appers or
the Charleston or the Great War.
The “13X Club,” for instance.
It has its own page, which describes the pur-
pose of this exclusively male organization as “to
develop and protect the ideals and traditions
of the school. The club holds regular jury trials
for all offenders of school rulings and deals out
punishment according to the seriousness of the
offense.”
Only one specifi c offense is mentioned.
“Smoking on the school ground has been
practically unknown since the 13X prohibited
it.”
I daresay the modern education system
would fi nd abhorrent the concept of a club that
was not only segregated by gender, but also was
apparently granted both judicial and punitive
powers.
But at least it got the smokers under
control.
Better than a dozen pages are devoted to
athletics. I learned, among much else, that the
1925 Baker football team was a juggernaut,
winning all eight games and not allowing a
point in six of the wins. Only Pendleton and
Wallowa managed to get on the scoreboard —
the Buckaroos losing 15-9, and the Cougars
going down 39-6.
More notably, it appears that Baker’s
mascot, the Bulldog, had its origin during that
stellar season. In the fi rst game, on Oct. 3 at
Halfway (this was decades before Halfway and
Eagle Valley high schools were combined into
Pine Eagle), Baker, and here I quote from The
Nugget, “returned with two assets, a 24-0 vic-
tory and a new title, ‘Bulldogs.’ The name stuck
and the team lived up to the principles of the
vicious canine.”
I was pleased in no small measure to know
this.
I will never again, I suspect, be able to see
the Bulldog mascot, painted on a gym fl oor
or a wall or on a jersey, and not think, at least
briefl y, of that impossibly distant early autumn
afternoon in the Pine Valley (no night games
in that less-illuminated era), when a group
of boys, clad in leather helmets, became the
Bulldogs.
Nor can I walk past what we today call
the Central Building without seeing that little
book, the 1926 Nugget. Back then that impos-
ing building was Baker High School. Indeed it
was only a decade old in 1926.
I walk that block of Washington Avenue a
few times each week. Since the school district
closed the building in 2009 (it was part of the
Baker Middle School campus) I have occasion-
ally thought the structure looked rather forlorn,
as only a building can which one bustled with
the inimitable energy of youth but which is now
empty and silent.
But it feels different to me now, when I walk
by.
I sense fragments of the past in the place. I
imagine, instead of the occasional cracked win-
dow or the weed-dotted grass that I see today,
groups of teenagers clambering up the stone
steps, unencumbered by bulging nylon back-
packs in eye-watering shades. I think of them,
in their ties and their dresses, sitting in their
wood-and-metal desks, teenagers who survived
a pandemic, who don’t know that a Depression
awaits, who surely would never have pondered
for a moment that, almost the whole of a cen-
tury in the future, someone would think their
lives were compelling.
Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker
City Herald.
Biden administration falls short on eviction crisis
Editorial from St. Louis
Post-Dispatch:
he Biden administra-
tion’s new moratorium
on evictions postpones
yet again the crisis of debt that
looms over millions of American
households where the rent or
mortgages are months overdue.
But instead of solving the main
problem of mounting indebted-
ness to landlords and banks,
the new moratorium seems
likely to make it worse. And the
threat of a federal court order
reversing President Joe Biden’s
two-month moratorium could
T
force the administration and
Congress to fi x the same basic
problem they should have been
working to fi x all along.
Congress imposed the origi-
nal moratorium in early 2020
as the coronavirus pandemic
began spreading rapidly and
much of the nation went into
shutdown mode. Tens of mil-
lions of workers were displaced
from their jobs, and even
with two big federal stimulus
payouts to individuals, many
used all available cash to buy
food and other essentials rather
than pay rent. Landlords effec-
tively got stuck with those bills
— even though they remained
on the hook for their own busi-
ness loans and other operating
expenses.
One estimate suggests the
outstanding bills owed by more
than 6 million renters could be
around $27.5 billion. A federal
aid package to landlords was
supposed to disburse around
$46 billion, but only a tiny frac-
tion has reached them so far.
Which means landlords are still
absorbing the costs unfairly.
When Biden considered
whether to impose a new
moratorium and extend the
burden on landlords, what
likely weighed most heavily on
his mind was the prospect of 6
million Americans facing poten-
tial homelessness. Nevertheless,
days of protest on the Capitol
steps by Rep. Cori Bush of St.
Louis certainly played a role
in focusing Biden’s thoughts
on the world of hurt about to
descend on those millions facing
eviction. Bush certainly can
tout that as at least a short-
term victory.
For the long term, however,
it’s clear that one moratorium
after another is not going to
solve the problem at hand. With
each successive month of rent
left unpaid, renters’ debts will
only get deeper. At some point,
the moratoriums will end, and
those debts will come due.
Mass bankruptcy and
homelessness certainly are an
option — resulting in a catas-
trophe not witnessed in this
country since the 1929 Great
Depression when shantytown
“Hoovervilles” were erected in
major cities.
The U.S. Supreme Court has
made clear it will not tolerate
more moratorium extensions
without congressional approval.
All it takes is one federal judge
issuing an injunction on Biden’s
new moratorium in coming
days, and a true crisis will be at
hand.
Congress can no longer
afford to kick this can down
the road. The path to avert this
crisis promises to be expensive
and politically complicated, but
it requires ensuring that land-
lords are made whole for their
mounting losses while helping
renters clear their debts and
stay in their homes.