SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2021
Baker City, Oregon
A4
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EDITORIAL
Your views
Pharmacy
problem
Advice: Live and let live
I just fi nished reading about a local
citizen’s recent trip to Hawaii. He said
it was like heaven over there includ-
ing the air travel. I had to do some soul
searching. Turns out that I am selfi sh,
whining, idiotic, disrespectful, noncom-
pliant, and mostly unhappy. I am also
prone to participate in meaningless
unfruitful rallies and overly obsessed
with fabricated constitutional and per-
sonal rights. Sadly, I even pump my fi sts
while shouting about things I don’t like
and am often even red-faced.
With some chagrin, I even admit to
thinking that Donald Trump had the
best interests of our country at heart
while sometimes being crass about it.
Wow, who knew? Having looked into
my behaviors, it’s clear some changes
are overdue. From now on, I will try to
better accept the culture and politics
of where I call home. I will not be so
condescending and quick to judge my
fellow men. Finally, I resolve to do as my
grandmother always told me ... live and
let live.
If I fail, and it turns out that I am
simply not a good fi t for my commu-
nity, I will just have to move to Hawaii.
Sounds like heaven. Anybody care to
join me?
Vic Cagie
Baker City
Picking up a prescription these days is primarily
an exercise in patience.
The three Baker City stores that include a phar-
macy — Rite Aid, Safeway and Albertsons — might
consider putting a line of comfortable chairs leading
from their pharmacy counters.
They’ll need a lot of chairs, though.
Lines stretching across the stores have been com-
mon over the past several weeks. Customers have
reported waiting for two or three hours.
Helen Loennig, pharmacist and pharmacy man-
ager at the Bi-Mart store in Baker City, which closed
its pharmacy this week, described the situation as
a crisis. Nancy Staten, director of the Baker County
Health Department, used the same word.
Their choice of that word is apt.
For some people, standing in a line for a couple
hours to pick up medications is merely annoying. For
others it’s much more problematic.
What about workers who can’t be away from their
job for that long?
What about people whose medical condition makes
it painful, if not impossible, for them to stand so long?
This crisis has multiple causes.
The closure of the Bi-Mart pharmacy, which
Loennig said processed about 1,500 prescriptions per
week, has moved much of that workload to the three
remaining pharmacies. Oregon Gov. Kate Brown’s
vaccination mandate, which includes pharmacy work-
ers, has led some employees to quit. Pharmacies, like
almost every type of business, are struggling to fi nd
workers. Offi cials from the companies that operate
Baker City’s three pharmacies haven’t responded to
multiple requests from the Herald about the primary
sources of the local problems.
The Pharmacy Workforce Center reported 11,356
pharmacist job postings nationally in the third quar-
ter of 2021 — up 13% for the same period last year.
Baker County offi cials have been talking with their
state counterparts about possible solutions, including
the state providing temporary pharmacy workers.
Any help would be benefi cial. Pharmacies are
always vital, but perhaps never so much as they
are now, with demand not only for medications
that keep people healthy but for COVID-19, fl u and
other vaccines.
— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor
with experience, history, and knowledge
of the community and fi nances? Is it
only become of his comments that you
are an inexperienced council? Well,
only being involved in the city manage-
ment for 10 months is inexperienced
in my opinion. With the current mayor
wanting to be involved in running for
governor of the state, and traveling a lot,
you will defi nitely be in need of someone
with experience, knowledge and history
of city government.
Your inability to come to an agree-
ment regarding Mr. Daugherty is very
discouraging. If you can’t come to an
agreement that will help the city of
Appoint Randy Daugherty
As former business owners, a former Baker City by putting in an experienced
member of the community then you will
budget board member and councilor
and lifetime residents of Baker County, not accomplish anything during your
my wife and myself are very concerned tenure.
Baker City councilors, please put
about the way the current city council is
aside your personal feelings and do
behaving in regards to performing the
necessary duties of running our beauti- what is right for the city by installing
Mr. Daugherty to take Ms. Perry’s place.
ful city.
Roger Coles
In light of recent activities, namely
Baker City
the process of trying to replace councilor
Lynette Perry, we would like to make
known our support of Mr. Daugherty to 3 lanes are safer than 4
take her place. We have known Randy
I live outside the Baker City limits
both personally and professionally for
but drive 10th Street fi ve days a week
many years and his integrity is unques- getting to and from work. For the last
tionable. He loves Baker City and the
12+ years I’ve considered Baker City my
surrounding county and only wants to
town. As a professional civil engineer
see Baker City to be at its best.
I’d like to offer my opinion on the 3-lane
Unfortunately, three members of the vs. 4-lane planning consideration for
council apparently do not feel the same 10th Street. Regarding local credentials
way or they would do what is best for
other than growing up in Baker County,
the community not their personal feel- prior to working for the Forest Service I
ings. My feelings are these: What is it
was a consulting engineer for 31 years.
that you are afraid of? What is your rea- Although based in Bend, I was on the
soning for not bringing in an individual team that prepared the transportation
master plan update for Baker City in
the 1990s and I was the design engineer
for the water and wastewater systems,
roads, and parking lots for the Oregon
Trail Interpretive Center, also in the
’90s.
It is my professional opinion that
a 3-lane section should be adopted for
10th Street for the reasons of safety
and effi ciency. A 4-lane confi guration is
dangerous because traffi c backs up in
the inside lanes waiting for vehicles to
make left turns. A waiting driver can
get frustrated, switch to the right-hand
lane to get past the waiting vehicle(s),
and get “T-boned” by a passing vehicle. A
3-lane layout eliminates this risk. With
fewer lanes, it is also safer for pedestri-
ans to cross. Because traffi c fl ows more
freely, it can be as effi cient, even with
half the number of active lanes. Aside
from Baker City’s Campbell Street
being switched from a 4-lane to 3-lane
section successfully, another example
involving a highway on a city street was
when the city of Prineville and ODOT
changed 3rd Street/Highway 26 from a
4-lane to 3-lane layout. Accidents were
greatly reduced and traffi c fl ow greatly
improved.
If there is a desire to maintain a
4-lane section but improve safety, an
alternative is to eliminate left turns.
This alternative is typically unpopular
because the out-of-direction travel to
go another block, turn right, and go
around the block adds driving time, fuel
consumption, and frustration. I do not
recommend it.
Jim Carnahan
Baker City
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Mail: To the Editor, Baker City Herald,
P.O. Box 807, Baker City, OR 97814
Email: news@bakercityherald.com
Stroll around home town provokes nostalgia
The man was stepping out the
front door of the home where I grew
up, and as I walked past on the
sidewalk I felt a twinge, a slightly
painful vestige of possessiveness.
I haven’t lived there for 33 years.
And my parents sold the place 29
years ago.
But nostalgia, like certain other
sensations, tends to temporarily
override the impersonal realities of
property deeds and names stenciled
on mailboxes.
And among emotions, the ones
provoked by the sight of your child-
hood home are apt to be unusually
powerful.
Particularly when, as is the case
for me, there is only one such home.
Technically there were two.
But since I hadn’t even celebrat-
ed my second birthday before we
moved into the house on North Fern
Avenue in Stayton, that ranch-style
home, where I lived until I went
to college just before I turned 18,
stands alone in my memories.
That I was strolling by just when
the man opened the door was pure
happenstance.
He noticed me looking and said
hello.
I returned the greeting.
I paused, mid-stride, and glanced
back.
The man was looking elsewhere.
If our eyes had again met I might
have spoken, although I’m not sure
what I would have said.
I don’t think I could have mus-
tered the courage to actually ask the
man if I might have a look around,
even though I don’t think, given the
circumstances, that such a request
would constitute an egregious
imposition.
I’m sure most of us have heard
of such a case, and even if some of
the stories are apocryphal a goodly
percentage, I suspect, are true.
I imagine most people wouldn’t
be offended by such a query.
Many probably would be pleased
to let someone relive his childhood,
this being a gift most of us will never
have a chance to bestow.
But even if I weren’t capable of
basically inviting myself in, I might
well have told the man why I came
to be walking by his house. I might
have told him that once it was my
house, and that I happened to be in
town and was curious to see what
changes a few decades had wrought.
Perhaps that would softened him
up, so to speak. Maybe he would
have extended the invitation to
come in, an offer I would have ac-
cepted with gratitude.
I thought about that brief encoun-
JAYSON
JACOBY
ter as I continued my hour-long walk
around Stayton on the late morning
of Oct. 16.
This stroll down many lanes, each
of them provoking memories, was
impromptu.
I didn’t drive most of the way
across the state to kick around in my
childhood, fi guratively speaking. I
made the trip to to watch my nephew,
Jon Pennick, play in his homecom-
ing football game at Santiam High
School in Mill City. My parents
moved to that town, up the North
Santiam River about 17 miles from
Stayton, in 2016, after they sold their
home in Salem.
As I turned the corner at the
south end of North Fern I was
chastising myself. I felt chagrined
at passing up what was, after all, a
coincidental chance.
Graced with the good fortune to
walk past my old home right when
the man was leaving, I had botched it
— had, with my instinctive tentative-
ness, squandered what might have
been a joyful experience.
Yet my attitude changed gradu-
ally as the blocks passed, and I took
in several other parts of Stayton,
all of them familiar in the slightly
less distinct way of places that you
once passed almost every day but
have seen just a few times since the
Reagan administration.
I convinced myself that walking
through the rooms and hallways of
my old house might not have been
quite the poignant tour I had at fi rst
believed.
It wouldn’t be the same place.
Not in the ways that matter most.
Just as the town had been altered,
with a supermarket standing where
once only stunted grass and Queen
Anne’s lace grew, and buildings hous-
ing businesses whose names I did
not know, so too would my childhood
home have been altered by the ac-
cumulation of years.
The shag carpet I once raked
surely would have been replaced by a
more contemporary style.
The furniture would be unfamil-
iar, the walls probably painted in a
color I didn’t recall, the art on the
walls and the other decorations hav-
ing backstories of which I am entirely
ignorant.
Even from outside I could see how
different the place is.
The strip of lawn on the shady
north side of the house, across which I
pushed dozens of wheelbarrow loads
of fi rewood and where I tossed many
baseballs, footballs and frisbees, is
gone, replaced by a concrete pad on
which was parked a motor home.
The basketball hoop in the drive-
way, the scene of many epic contests
between me and my much more
talented older brother, Michael, was
likewise eliminated from the scene.
The white siding had given way
to brown, the window shutters, once
black, now slathered in white.
I suspect that touring the inside,
however intriguing as a concept,
would have been both jarring and not
a little disappointing.
Perhaps it’s better that my memo-
ries of the place remain as they are,
protected, as though in amber, by the
distance of so many years.
To intrude on those memories
by actually standing in the rooms
where so much happened would have
reminded me, I think, that whatever
magic might have existed there left
the place when I did. The experience
might well have spurred in me not
the pleasant sort of nostalgia but its
opposite, the kind that leaves you
feeling hollow and bereft, mourning
a time, and a place, and people, who
can never be what they once were.
Jayson Jacoby is editor of the
Baker City Herald.