Where Skateboarding isn’t a Crime

In the beginning Tom Jennings’ admonition that ’skateboarding is not a crime’ was the part of the documentation that I understood best of all. All of the technical descriptions of Fido-Net and electronic mail (netmail), scheduling and batch file error levels went straight over my head at first, but eventually, I found myself writing those [...]

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The Braceros, Oregon’s Latino Community, and Illegal Immigration

California, Arizona, I harvest your crops
Then its North up to Oregon to gather your hops
Dig the beets from your ground, cut the grapes from your vine
To set on your table your light sparkling wine
Woody Guthrie, from ‘Pastures of Plenty’
Come labor for your mother, your father and your brother
For your sister and your lover, bracero
Come pick [...]

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Driving Miss Dazey

As the price of oil rises, and the gouging goes into uncharted territory seeing the profits of the oil companies soar into reaches unknown and undreamed of in the past, its hard to believe that at one time the automobile economy was the nearly unquestioned wave of the future. Thinking people realized that fossil fuel [...]

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Duck and Cover

Grant Elementary was a typical late fifties school, shaped in an ‘L’ ,long and low, with windows along its belt-line that opened out with the twist of a handle and a little push. The hallways were inside, the playground on one side, city streets on the other.
In the late fifties, and into the early sixties [...]

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Where I was when….

They say that when some things happen, we never forget where we are in that moment.. The one that everyone who lived through it, thinks of immediately, is the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and I certainly do… eighth grade US History, presided over by Mr. Saxon at Parrish Junior High, in Salem. The announcement [...]

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People in motion

The trip to San Francisco in the spring of 1967 was eventful, there’s no doubt about that. We bought a 1954 Plymouth Belvedere, amazingly rough and we did a little fixup with some sandpaper and primer. Unfortunately, we didn’t do any mechanical updating or even troubleshooting, and so, it got us as far as [...]

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