“We want you to visit our state of excitement often. Come again and again. But for heaven’s sake, don’t move here to live. Or if you do have to move in to live, don’t tell any of your neighbors where you are going.” . . . . . Former Governor, Tom McCall (1971 Interview)
Portland’s trees and flowers detonate with the first sun in early May so anxious are they to make their appearance after weeks hiding under the grey Oregon canopy and gentle rain. It’s difficult to keep the grass mowed and one thinks of the water. The trees, flowers and plants love our abundant rain.
Portland’s Japanese Garden
The rain water falls (aprox. 130 inches/year) flows, sometimes floods, collects in the Bull Run River watershed and courses down through its many byways. We drink it ourselves. And therein lies the precious prize, the gift we’ve alternately treasured and despoiled, but always devoured–the prize we’ve now preserved politically, all 10 billion gallons of it–our Bull Run Watershed,, and our Powell Butte, Mt. Tabor and Washington Park reservoirs of clean water!
Bull Run Watershed (Photo by Briggy Thomas)
Douglas Larson describes the fascinating political history of the Bull Run Watershed, Oregon’s “Battle of Bull Run”, in a long article in The American Scientist . Larson’s story has all the elements of a modern Grisham novel: suspense, greed, political maneuvering, scientific foresight, courage and heroism (Dr. Joseph Smith Jr., Bob Packwood?). as well as near environmental suicide.
When I was a very young boy in Baton Rouge, Louisiana growing up in the 1950s, my father would take us down to New Orleans on the weekend. One of the pleasures of those rare trips was a ride on the St. Charles Street Car, a Trolley which ran from downtown Canal Street out along St. Charles Avenue to Tulane and Loyola University and beyond to its terminus at South Carrollton and Claibourne Avenues.
Our trip usually began with some turtle soup and some seafood gumbo at Kolbs, a famous Bavarian Restaurant established by German immigrants to New Orleans in the 1890s. Then from near Kolbs at 125 St. Charles Ave, we’d ride out to Audubon Park to the zoo to feed the seals or ride the famous Dentzell family’s carousel constructed in 1910.
The joy of riding “open air” on those old wooden trolleys has come back to me now in Portland. We actually are likely to see the construction by United Streetcar Company of Clackamas the first streetcar built in America in 57 years.
The mahoghany seats, brass fittings and exposed lamps inside the St. Charles cars always intrigued me and today as I ride the Portland trolley system and the ‘vintage versions’ in the Lloyd Center going downtown that ’slower’ era returns to me. I remember that I always wanted to ride and ride and ride–then and now. The St. Charles line was the oldest continuously operating rail car system in America and in May of 2008 was finally restored to full service after the devastation of katrina in 2005. It was part of a slower way of life there and it can be here in portland.
Let’s hope that the prototype streetcars planned to be built for Portland (the first built in 57 years in America) by United Streetcar Company will invite a ’slower pace’ along both MLK Blvd and Grand on the East Side between OMSI and the Rose Quarter and finally bring Portland deserved praise for starting a rail-volution here and nationally. Perhaps families will make the trolleys their first choice of transportation because they wish to visit a restaurant alongMLK Boulevard (South) or Grand Avenue (North), or take their kids to an exhibit at OMSI or visit the Rose Quarter for any number of entertainment events.
Portland’s deserved but ’stalled reputation’ as a “model” for the nation in its mixed use of light rail, trolleys and bicycles can now be on a more sound footing and may usher in a rail-volution nationwide before Boston or other cities make the claim stick that they started it all. Moreover, we can be justly proud of having NOT been a party to arguments that took for granted that U.S. urban rail transit systems, particularly those opened after 1945, provided few if any financial benefits to transit operators.
“Many authorities believe that the same or better performance could be obtained with non-rail alternatives. However, the 12 postwar rail systems considered in a published study online provide combined annual operating cost savings of about $800 million.” There is no evidence for the huge net losses claimed by some critics. If the social cost were calculable, savings would exceed those to operators alone. And the rail-volution?
Portland is the only Metropolitan Region in the US where transit ridership outpaces the increase in auto use. If we find the scholarship of Richard Florida persuasive, Portland may well be on it’s way to becoming a place critical to the nascent national discussion about what makes cities ‘livable”. My guess is Jane Jacobs, one of Florida’s intellectual mentors and herself a lucid economics writer about cities–my guess is she would have loved Portland’s present love of light rail and trolleys and many of it’s other ‘traditions’ as well–like bicycles!
Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood’s announcement awarding $75 million in federal money Thursday (4/30) to expand Portland’s streetcar system advances the Oregon Business Plan’s transportation initiatives yet another long awaited notch. And it helps bring attention to other measures of transportation success in the greater Portland area that were showcased along with other metrics in last year’s 2008 Prosperity Index and related Economic Summit–an index maintained by Greenlight Greater Portland, the region’s only private-sector economic development group.
President Obama named an Oregonian, Maria Eitel, Vice President of Nike and President of it’s Foundation to serve as CEO of his newly funded ($5.7 billion) Corporation for National and Community Service
Early in her career, she was a reporter and producer in commercial and public broadcasting. She holds degrees from McGill University (BS) and Georgetown University (MSFS), and Stanford University (SEP). She serves on a variety of boards, committees and advisory councils both nationally and in the Northwest.
The president praised Ms. Eitel as the perfect person to guide the new corporation, because he said she “. . is a smart and innovative thinker, and a leader who shares my belief in the power of service.”
Her appointment ushers to the foreground a robust tradition of volunteerism in the City of Portland, where 36% of Portlanders (and 30% of Oregonians) donate their time to others in a burgeoning array of nonprofits.
Among other programs recently capturing the attention of Washington policy makers and highlighting the power of volunteer efforts among students, consider Experience Corps, a program for Americans 55+ years or older nationwide and in Portland. Fifty-four Portland 55+ year old volunteers served approximately 1,335 students in 2007-2008 in Experience Corps which is administered by Metropolitan Family Service of Portland along with an array of volunteer programs for citizens older adults.
In past surveys and in a more recent study completed at Washington University in St. Louis, researchers found ” . . that the EC program had statistically significant and substantively important effects on reading outcomes.” A helpful summary online highlights the efficacy of the findings.
Click here for a recent “Nightly News” blurb on Experience Corps on MSNBC or at the top of this blog’s video podcast list.
During our extended stay in Taiwan from 1989 onwards, I’m quite certain we didn’t see all of the approximately 5,000 temples on the island, but I find now among the burgeoning boxes of Carol’s photo collection countless temple shots overflowing. On almost any weekend afoot in Tien Mu or biking along the brackish Danshui River with a camera, we would stumble upon another Taipei temple and a ‘35mm moment’ would capture Carol.
Carol’s intuitive photographic eye and camera skills fancied the visual syncretism of the temples which itself still typifies the amalgam of Buddhist, Taoist and folk religious belief and behavior among the people themselves.
In Taiwan’s Hsinchu county among culturally conservative Hakkas, friends work at dawn to dress a pig carcass for a “shenzhu” contest–an annual festival featuring a much criticized competition in Beipu village to force-feed and then offer pigs at a midnight sacrifice (Yimin temple). These Taiwanese Hakkas, threaded together linguistically by a common Chinese dialect (50 million in diaspora worldwide), commemorate their former kinmen’s role in the suppression of a rebellion against China’s Qing authorities in 1785.
Eventually the facades, furniture and other features of temple life came to influence Carol’s choice of subject matter for own evolving water color painting style.
The food markets, squares, shops, street peddlers and buyers flanking the temple areas invited a large share of her attention as well. Rightly so! Rural life in Taiwan centered around temples–a locus for political discussion (gongting) schools, martial arts, music and puppetry as well as worship––in short, community life.
A wider ranging expedition transported us back to a ‘heyday’ period (1785-1845) in the life of the Dutch Port, Lu Gang (Northwest part of Taiwan). Lu Gang eventually lost its ascendancy as Taiwan’s ‘gateway’ port to the island in its refusal to embrace railroads, but in doing so, it’s temples and the city remain a “living museum”for that era.
Portland, Oregon’s trade relations reach deeply into the Chinese continent and the most widely reported example of that reach in recent years has been Intel’s decision to build a Feb 68 wafer plant on 60,000 square meters of land in Dalian, China in what will be Asia’s largest IC chip production base. The plant will be capable of producing its newest 300-millimetre (12-inch) wafers. On one wafer the size of a postage stamp sit 300 million transistors. The reporting about this revolutionary transistor won a Pulitzer finalist nod for the Oregonian reporters Mike Rogoway and Richard Read, artist Steve Cowden and multimedia editor Judy Siviglia.
This arresting graphic by Steve Cowden gives us a glimpse of the transistor:
The beauty of the transistor parallels the beauty of the city, an intricate blend of Russian and Japanese architecture with an international feel. I found Dalian to be a fascinating seaside city of 6 million people that shares with Qingdao, in Shandong Province, a European history.
I taught business English to Dalian’s intelligent and ‘upwardly mobile’ middle class Chinese–part of the “college graduate glut” that by 2007 found approximately 5 million college graduates flooding the job market. Intel will reduce that number by hiring 1,700 Chinese who are anxious to be employed in the semiconductor manufactoring sector of the China’s economy. Intel also recruited expatriate Phd. candidates for the plant and expected to eventually relocate 300 Oregon employees to Dalian.
Intel will fund also a Semiconductor Technology Institute, the first semiconductor-talent-training-base funded in China and the most advanced base in China in terms of training integrated circuit talents.
2007 was a bumper year for Oregon business and the burgeoning $2.8 billion in exports to China eclipsed Canada as our largest trading partner in 2008, but it’s back to the drawing board for many joint venture businesses in our our tanked 2009 economy. Notwithstanding an approximate 10% cut (10,000 jobs)) in Intel’s overall operations and some significant downsizing of its Pudong, Shanghai operations, the Dalian investment may actually be expanded and it draws the attention of other related industries like LED manufacturers from Taiwan.
I could’t afford to fly to Paris this Spring Break with the Euro trading so dear, so I decided to steep in the literature of the Paris on the Pacific. I drove to the Oregon Coast and joined friends after only a two hour ride along Highways 26 and then 20 West of Portland. I stayed at the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport, Oregon. The Hemingway and Joyce rooms were booked, so I settled for the Virginia Woolf room over the phone and made our way To the Lighthouse and a Room of [Our] Own there.
Walking up toward the hotel, and finally through the front door I seemed to enter the remembered and recreated life of Sylvia Beach herself as well as the wonderful Shakespeare and Company lending library she started in rue de ‘Odéon on the West Bank of Paris in 1913 with her eventual lover Adrienne Monnier. It was in that store that Beach, a post war enthusiast for all things literary, met and befriended James Joyce and eventually became instrumental in the editing and publication of Ulyyses .
Famous writers too numerous to mention (Hemingway among others) visited the store, languished there, posted mail there, lived and talked books there and in Paris generally in what Noel Riley Fitch has called a “second literary Renaissance” in her thoroughly researched book about Sylvia Beach, the store, the writers and the era.
Both the store and the hotel evoke in their respective way, the life of Sylvia Beach against the moving landscape of literary Paris between the world wars. Jeanette Winterson describes today’s Sylvia Whitman as she manages Shakespeare Books with her 90 year old father (Walt Whitman III) in a recent article in the Guardian.
The long standing traditions and culture of the store continues. Brandon Kahn also captures Sylvia’s enthusiasm for the store, her father’s eccentricities, the enduring traditions of the store and the atmosphere of its Paris surroundings.
Correspondingly, the hotel in Newport that Sally Ford and Goody Cable founded in 1987 and have successfully managed for 20 years creates in its own way the same Paris atmosphere inside–it’s cozy rooms each evoke in decor, style and choice of books, a different literary figure. We stayed in the Virginia Woolf room, a discordant Doomsbury note, but we might have wrested the minor dissonance back to a Paris major key with a successful reservation for a stay in the Hemingway room–regrettably we waited too late.
In the Hotel and and store, books and conversation inhabit the foreground. Absent smoke, a pool and a public phone and television, one can sip a touch of spiced wine at 10 p.m. and converse in the Hotel’s ‘Tables of Content Restaurant’ where in the evening I ate a succulent family-style seafood dinner and followed a well worn tradition of playing their famous fibbing game, “Two Truths and a Lie. I sat next to vacationing teachers, eight of us total. We all told three stories and let the rest guess away–the stranger truths randomly winning out over the strange fiction depending on the storyteller. Several of us proved to be able liars.
All experiences I had in Newport notwithstanding its distance from the Seine and the West Bank transported us to Paris and Shakespeare and Company. A few crusty old dodgers feeding the pigeons along Nye Beach outside the hotel remind one of Walt Whitman III, the eccentric present owner of Shalespeare & Company in Paris who delegaes the management of the store to his daughter Sylvia Whitman–yet another Sylvia. Walt the III once told me he had no idea where the book was that I asked his assistance in finding–”..somewhere back over there”, he said without embarassment.
I did find the books, the post cards, the photos, the warm coffee, the beach walks, the management, chef and housekeepers as well as the the seals on the docks of Newport good company and we transported ourselves bsck to Paris where Carol and I made our own trip in 2004. See what you think and have a go at a visit.
In Oregon’s own back yard, there lives a man who inspired me and many other teachers and instructional designers to consider the professional and scientific questions of: “What would it take to teach anything and how would you know if you had taught it?” Or put another way: “What tests would a communication between a teacher and student(s) have to satisfy both a) logically and b) empirically for us to agree that the student had learned–that the communication had been “faultless”.
Zig’s career, his questions, the hypotheses he advanced to explore them (in countless experiments, the practical field and controlled studies he and the late Wesley Becker and Doug Carnine orchestrated as program sponsors in our nation’s largest educational experiment, the published programs he has authored and the efficacy studies they spawned, the Direct Instruction trademark that came to describe his pedagogy–in short his approximately forty plus years of work in education constitutes a major achievement too long ignored.
Faithful implementations of Direct Instruction programs in years past continue in selected districts and lend further weight to the efficacy of Engelmann’s thought and achievements during the Follow-Through era even as the ‘nothing much works’ philosophy coming out of the “What Works Clearinghouse” tends to enmesh Direct Instruction in controversy.
Zig’s professional life’s work can be summed up in two sentences for the purposes of this post; a) all students can learn and b) the countless details of instruction (the variables) necessary to invite/insure student(s’) learning prove to be within the control of all who aspire to teach if we but pay attention to them and orchestrate them intelligently.
One school district that has paid attention to the critical variables of instruction and their own data has managed a very successful implementation of the Direct Instruction programs with detailed guidance from the National Institute for Direct Instruction in Eugene, Oregon.
A trademark issue for Oregon resurfaced in the past week when the 38 year old bottle bill (House Bill 2184) came up for discussion in the legislature last week. Among the suggestions for overhaul of the bill adopted 38 years ago was language which would double the nickel deposit, and require deposits on more containers: sports drinks, juice drinks and bottled coffees and teas.
Richard Chambers became disgusted with the littering on Oregon beaches and in wild areas back in 1968 and led a one man campaign to initiate an outright ban on nonreturnable bottles and cans but eventually the bill required Oregon consumers to return cans for cash–it worked rather well with championing from Tom McCall, Oregon Governor. What followed was the nation’s first bottle bill (House Bill 1036) which with McCall’s eventual support, passed into law in 1971. Chambers saw the bill’s passage before lost his personal battle with cancer.
Eleven states have passed bottle bills similar to the one that is expected to pass in Tennessee shortly. Bottle bills will cover aluminum cans, glass bottles and plastic bottles of up to two liters, excluding milk, liquor and wine.
John Chadwick ended a 25+ year international teaching career in 2007 in Taiwan and mainland China to return to Portland at age 65. A flood of feelings emerged.
Chapter I: Excitement Mixed With Nostalgia.
“I really felt excited to reintroduce myself to family and grandchildren. I could hardly wait to smell my summer barbeque wafting over my old Alameda neighborhood.”
A lingering smile shoots across his face.
“I literally burst down Burnside only hours out of the airport for what became a weekly trip to Powell’s Books. What an island! My wife would pick me up hours later.”
He reported sleeping through the alarm on weekday mornings–the Oregonian in hand eating with his wife at breakfast or munching a pecan roll over coffee at the Pearl Bakery. As we talked, John walked briskly down the streets with me in Alameda/Irvington on a crisp Fall day. I shopped with him for clothes that actually fit both his body and pocketbook at Marshall’s in the Lloyd Center.
“I didn’t have much in the way of clothing on returning from China.”
Reliving the litany of pleasures a life in Portland brings, he obviously takes pride in his family’s 1979 move from Chicago to Portland. It’s a city he loves. A Greek Captain’s hat sits askew over his right ear, a Christmas gift from his wife to commemorate their first international assignment in Athens, Greece in 1987.
“I congratulate myself for moving us out here in 1979 from Oak Park, Illinois. We’ve found so much here for ourselves and our kids. Our international life was exciting and productive, but we came back always to Portland holidays and summers. We never considered anywhere else to retire–to call home.”
Chapter II: Fear
It streams out of him–fear! He speaks of it honestly in a rapid fire way that astonishes both of us with its intensity.
“Initially I felt this surge of excitement. But fear and doubt followed.” The questions poured out of him:
“What do I do on Monday? Must I take up a hobby like gardening? Will golf, or even tennis be it?”
He looks a bit embarrassed now to bring the next series of questions? “Is it possible to find part-time work in teaching again? Should I teach at all? Why not relax and forget the kids? Don’t I deserve a break from the deadening routine of full time work?”
He turns a practical page. “But if I work, how shall I handle the reduction of earnings from Social Security?”
Recursively, and walking past the Irvington School, he recalls his Tuesday after Labor Day weekend. “I actually cried wondering what the first day in one of my old school haunts had been like. I could taste it.”
The Hands On Greater Portland’s website eventually helped greatly . He worked several days in succession at Free Geek, a community computer/technology rebuilding and recycling center. He sat endless hours in coffee shops reading want ads and remained perplexed.
Chapter III: Loneliness!
“The worst part was my wife found part-time work in her French teaching field right away, and sitting at home musing about my own prospects proved unbearable.”
His foray into part-time freelance writing perfectly coincided with the nationwide layoff of 17,000 print journalists–a minefield of unwanted competition. His teaching certifications had lapsed in both Oregon and Washington and would take months, possibly a year to renew. His credentials invited few responses from would be tutoring agencies.
Chapter IV: Desperation!
“I wandered down to the Hollywood library and stumbled onto a book by Marc Freedman:Encore: Finding Work That Matters In the Second Half of Life (Perseus, Public Affairs, 2007).
“I carried the book around for weeks the same way we did in the sixties with Salinger’s Catcher In the Rye. It became my Bible” What John found laid out in Freedman’s book, not an expected analysis of a boomer generation’s transition from work to retirement, but the outlines of a new stage of life, what Freedman called a “encore career.” In accepting a 2006 Purpose Prize, Former President Bill Clinton spoke about the seminal role John Gardiner played in creating Civic Ventures in his 80s:
Such a career could (would?) precede retirement. He learned he would live, on average, approximately 15+ years beyond sixty-five. He learned that, assuming good health, he could (would?) expect to work another decade, for which he might pursue additional education and training, possibly in an entirely new field of endeavor.
A visit to a web site mentioned in Freedman’s book took him to the Experience Corps , an award-winning national program in Portland and 22 other cities engaging people over 55 in meeting their communities biggest challenges: “. .providing literacy coaching, homework help, consistent role models and committed, [and] caring attention.” Administered by the Metropolitan Family Service of Portland, John made initial inquiries.
Chapter V: A Light Shines!
“After some weeks of formal application I found myself working in a local David Douglas Elementary School. I couldn’t have found a better service opportunity. It’s a truly international school with over a dozen spoken languages and a School Report Card worthy of praise.”
Though it’s a logical extension of all the work he has done in his career, the concepts, opportunities and stage of life issues Freedman addresses in his book have also opened up for John even further possibilities for a career change he had not considered to date.
John, ever the reader and explorer, sums up recent weeks and months of exploration by directing me to Marc Freedman’s book which he pulls from an aged brown leather briefcase: “The encore career is not a retirement job, It’s not a transitional phase. It’s not a bridge between the end of real work and the beginning of real leisure. It’s not leftover time to be killed. It’s an entire stage of life and work–a destination and a category of work unto itself.” (p. 148).
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