A10
STATE
Blue Mountain Eagle
Wednesday, April 6, 2022
The ’Bow gets new bosses
By ANTONIO SIERRA
East Oregonian
PENDLETON — Pendle-
ton’s most famous bar is under
new ownership.
Business partners Tanner
Hawkins and Chris Zimmer-
man bought the historic Rain-
bow Cafe late last year, tak-
ing over for the McGee family.
Hawkins, a farmer north of
Pendleton, and Zimmerman, an
offi ce manager for his father’s
chiropractic offi ce, offi cially
bought the Rainbow on Dec.
28, the Rainbow’s New Years
celebration acting as an unof-
fi cial coming out party for the
bar’s new owners.
Hawkins and Zimmerman
view themselves as stewards
of one of Pendleton’s oldest
businesses, and are looking
to maintain the spirit of the
Rainbow that’s been estab-
lished over the decades.
“It’s more than just a bar
and cafe,” Hawkins said.
“It’s an iconic little piece
(of) downtown Pendleton. If
it was any other business, I
don’t know that Chris and I
ever would have pulled the
trigger.”
The Rainbow, the old-
est continuously operating
bar in Oregon, began its life
in 1883 as The State Saloon
and Banquet, its business
including both a brothel and
opium den. After operating as
a cigar shop during the Pro-
hibition years, the business
relaunched as the Rainbow,
gaining its iconic neon sign
and Irish themes in the early
1940s.
An accomplished drag car
racer and longtime auto shop
owner, Steve McGee moved
from Lake Oswego back to
his hometown of Pendleton
in 1999 and bought the Rain-
bow with his wife, Joanne.
McGee died in 2017, but
Joanne continued to run the
bar until selling it to Hawkins
and Zimmerman.
The pair said they didn’t
buy the Rainbow looking to
make money. They’re keep-
ing their day jobs and plan to
reinvest any profi ts they make
from operating the Rainbow
back into the business. Haw-
kins said the new owners plan
to renovate the Rainbow’s
bathrooms and are looking
into converting the building’s
second story space into a
vacation rental. But otherwise
the core look and service that
the Rainbow has been off er-
ing for decades will remain.
“We’re not going to turn it
into an Applebee’s,” Hawkins
said. “It’s gonna stay what it
is. We’re going to upgrade the
bathrooms. (They) really need
it. There’s a lot of wear and
tear that can be upgraded. But
the Rainbow itself is not is not
going to change.”
The Rainbow is open from
6 a.m. to 2 a.m. six days per
week (it closes at midnight on
Sundays), meaning it serves
both the early-morning coff ee
klatches and the late-night bar
crowds. Zimmerman and Haw-
kins said they’ve been on both
sides of the customer spec-
trum and wanted to respect the
views of long standing patrons.
Hawkins said the pair con-
sulted with regulars and staff
to make sure they got the tra-
ditions and decorations right
during St. Patrick’s Day, one
of the Rainbow’s biggest days
of the year. Following two
years of COVID-19, Haw-
kins said they were happy with
the packed house they saw on
March 17.
The partners credited staff
for ensuring the business
stayed open during the owner-
ship transition. Hawkins com-
pared the learning curve of
operating a restaurant and bar
to “drinking out of a fi re hose,”
but he and Zimmerman have
been able to lean on the Rain-
bow’s workers to help teach
them the ropes, from work-
ing with vendors to contact-
ing temporary employees who
help out during busy times.
Hawkins and Zimmerman
said their workforce ranges
from 12-15 employees, but they
would like to hire more perma-
nent workers to help keep their
staff from getting stretched too
thin. When a dishwasher called
in sick one day, Zimmerman
said he washed dishes for fi ve
hours at the Rainbow to help
keep things moving.
While the new own-
ers’ fi rst St. Patrick’s Day is
already in the books, summer
event season is right around
the corner. Hawkins said the
Rainbow made a deal with
Jackalope Jamboree to become
the June music festival’s offi -
cial afterparty.
The Rainbow also is keep-
ing an eye on the culmina-
tion of Pendleton’s event sea-
son: the Round-Up. In the eyes
of the Rainbow, Round-Up
is “three or four St. Patrick’s
Days” put together.
Senate passes shipping reform bill
By CAROL RYAN DUMAS
Capital Press
WASHINGTON — Agri-
cultural exporters are closer to
getting some relief from signif-
icant supply-chain disruptions
with the Senate’s unanimous
passage of the Ocean Shipping
Reform Act.
The legislation to help fi x
the supply chain and ease ship-
ping backlogs passed by voice
vote on Thursday, March 31.
It was introduced by Sens.
Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and
John Thune, R-S.D., with 29
cosponsors. Companion legis-
lation led in the House by Reps.
John Garamendi, D-Calif., and
Dusty Johnson, R-S.D., passed
the House in December by a
vote of 364-60.
“Congestion at ports and
increased shipping costs pose
unique challenges for U.S.
exporters, who have seen the
price of shipping containers
increase four-fold in just two
years,” Klobuchar said.
“Meanwhile, ocean carriers
that are mostly foreign-owned
have reported record prof-
its. This legislation will help
American exporters get their
goods to market in a timely
manner for a fair price,” she
said.
The bill will make it harder
for ocean carriers to unrea-
sonably refuse goods that are
ready to export at U.S. ports,
Thune said.
The Ocean Shipping
Reform Act will:
• Require ocean carriers to
certify that late fees — known
as “detention and demurrage”
charges — comply with federal
regulations or face penalties.
• Shift the burden of proof
regarding the reasonableness
of “detention or demurrage”
charges from the invoiced
party to the ocean carrier.
• Prohibit ocean carriers
from unreasonably declining
shipping opportunities for U.S.
exports, as determined by the
Federal Maritime Commission
in new required rulemaking.
• Require ocean common
carriers to report to the com-
mission each calendar quarter
on total import-export tonnage
and loaded and empty 20-foot
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that makes port in the United
States.
• Authorize the commis-
sion to initiate investigations
of a ocean common carrier’s
business practices and apply
enforcement measures, as
appropriate.
• Establish new authority
for the commission to register
shipping exchanges.
The legislation is endorsed
by more than 100 organiza-
tions, including the American
Association of Port Authorities
and the Agriculture Transporta-
tion Coalition.
Once implemented, the bill
will provide urgently needed
relief to all exporters and
importers, in particular agri-
culture exporters, the coalition
said in a press release.
“The transportation crisis
for U.S. agriculture products
has become increasingly dire.
Many agriculture products pro-
duced in the U.S. experience
signifi cant competition from
other countries. If we cannot
deliver our products depend-
ably, our foreign customers will
fi nd alternatives to our exports,”
the coalition said.
A recent coalition survey
found that, on average, 22% of
U.S. agriculture foreign sales
could not be completed due
to ocean shipping disruption,
higher costs and carrier practices.
The reform act “specifi cally
addresses these practices, which
are causing so much hardship
to U.S. agriculture and threaten
our global competitiveness,”
the coalition said.
Dean Guernsey/The Bulletin
Librarian Pia Alliende in the Elton Gregory Middle School library Thursday, March 24, in Redmond.
Alliende is one of three librarians in the country recently nominated for School Librarian of the
Year by the School Library Journal.
A life full of stories
Redmond librarian
amplifi es culture,
diversity in schools
By BRYCE DOLE
The Bulletin
REDMOND
—
Pia
Alliende says her passion for
storytelling stems from her
parents.
Libraries in her hometown
of Santiago, Chile, were “piti-
ful,” she said. Being a librar-
ian in the capital city, which
sits in a valley at the foot of
the Andes mountains, was
not a popular career choice.
Books were expensive. Her
family was relatively well-
off , but her parents were stern,
urging the family to be cau-
tious with money.
Books and reading became
a family treat, delivered on
Sundays by Alliende’s father,
a lawyer with high standards
and a “strong but soft heart.”
Alliende’s father would read
to the family from books he
crafted with pieces of card-
board and kept in a basket in
the closet.
This was how books
became a guiding force for
Alliende, a librarian whose life
and career have spanned mul-
tiple countries and impacted
students, teachers and libraries
around the world.
While school districts
across the country are ban-
ning books about gender and
race amid a national reckon-
ing over equitable education,
Alliende is stocking shelves
in Redmond School District
libraries with books that illu-
minate the experiences of
people from underserved and
marginalized communities.
The 60-year-old Alliende
has played a major role in
revamping libraries in the dis-
trict, replacing withered old
books with new ones and get-
ting rid of literature that per-
petuates racist stereotypes.
“I want to have books that
represent them, not misrepre-
sent them,” said Alliende, who
serves as part of the Redmond
School District Equity Task
Force and is co-chair of the
Oregon Library Association’s
(Equity, Diversity and Inclu-
sion) and Antiracism Commit-
tee. She added: “I feel that it’s
really, really sad that we, as
school librarians, need to fi ght
for kids to read.”
Alliende’s work has not
gone unnoticed. She is one of
three librarians in the country
recently nominated for School
Librarian of the Year by the
School Library Journal.
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Alliende’s goal is to pro-
vide students with the option
to explore the stories of peo-
ple from backgrounds and cul-
tures diff erent from theirs. She
wants to use storytelling to
instill empathy and compas-
sion, particularly for those stu-
dents whose experiences have
historically been ignored. She
said, “Sometimes, the kids are
invisible.”
Recently, Alliende helped
the district obtain four grants
amounting to more than
$25,000 to improve pro-
grams at libraries in Redmond
schools that have higher con-
centrations of Hispanic and
Spanish-speaking students.
Those include Elton Gregory
Middle School, where more
than one in fi ve students iden-
tify as Hispanic and one in 10
speak Spanish as their fi rst
language.
In addition, she raised
more than $2,500 by com-
pleting a 347-mile bike-pack-
ing trip through Oregon, just
before her 60th birthday. The
funds went to libraries across
the district, she said.
Alliende uses part of the
grant funds to bring in Span-
ish-speaking authors and hold
monthly bilingual family
engagement nights where stu-
dents and their families hear
stories and play Latin Ameri-
can games. She said she wants
to “foster the idea that their
Spanish is good, that their
culture is good, that what-
ever they do is good, and feel
proud.”
It was through her par-
ent’s storytelling that Alliende
found an interest in his-
tory. She attended a Catho-
lic high school and university
in Chile, but she grew bored.
She wanted to go to America.
She applied, and received a
scholarship through the U.S.
Fulbright Program, the fl ag-
ship international academic
exchange program meant to
foster relationships between
countries. With the grant,
Alliende traveled to New York
in 1990 to study history at
Stony Brook University.
The move was hard on her
relationship with her parents,
she said. But Alliende fell in
love with big city nightlife
— and with a Spaniard from
the Montana farmlands. After
college, she struggled to fi nd
work because of language
barriers. With her new hus-
band and a child on the way,
Alliende moved back to Chile
and to her childhood home.
“We had nothing,” she said.
After having children,
Alliende and her husband
moved their family to a town
south of Santiago. She worked
at a private school, but Chile
still wasn’t where she wanted
to raise her kids. The fam-
ily headed back to the United
States after obtaining work
visas. She landed a job as
an interpreter at a school in
Arlington, Virginia, where she
became an advocate for fami-
lies from Latin America.
There, she found a love for
libraries.
Her commute to work near
Washington, D.C. was long,
requiring the family to leave
their kids in day care for hours.
So she proceeded to look for
jobs elsewhere in the coun-
try. She eventually landed a
job as a media library special-
ist at Redmond High School in
2006. Three years later, amid
the nationwide housing crisis
and ensuing economic melt-
down, Alliende was laid off .
Fortunately, she found a
job as the head librarian at the
International School of Seville
San Francisco de Paula in
Spain. Her family moved to
Seville, where they remained
for a decade. Alliende helped
modernize libraries and led
workshops for librarians and
teachers in places like Dubai,
Budapest, Thessaloniki, Paris
and Madrid. Meanwhile, her
children, who had lost some
of their knowledge of Span-
ish while living in the U.S.,
became bilingual, she said.
“That was pretty neat,” she
said of her kids. “I couldn’t
have done it.”
In 2019, after Alliende’s
children fi nished high school,
the family returned to Red-
mond and moved back into
their home on the Crooked
River Ranch. After applying to
nearly every school district in
Central Oregon, she accepted
a job as a library technician
at a local elementary school
in Redmond. Alliende looked
toward schools with more eco-
nomically disadvantaged fam-
ilies and saw that many of the
schools had outdated books.
She wanted to help.
The
pandemic
only
strengthened
Alliende’s
resolve to help struggling stu-
dents. She made weekly vid-
eos for children and helped
them engage with their school-
ing as they navigated online
learning. She purchased a
reading app for district stu-
dents to have access to digital
materials and pushed for bilin-
gual videos. As one of the few
Spanish-speaking teachers at
the school, she wanted to fos-
ter the idea in students that
“their countries, their cultures,
matter.”
She’s moved to help them
by a book she has in her home,
a book written by a friend and
mentor who once told her:
“Everyone has a story to tell
and if you don’t write it, it
doesn’t exist.”
But it’s more than that.
“Literature and its power,”
Alliende said her mentor
argues in the book, “are the
only weapon capable of sav-
ing lives.”
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