PowellsBooks.Blog

On Monday October 26, at the Oregon Book Awards ceremony, I accepted the Stewart L. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award from Oregon Literary Arts.

The annual award is given for significant contributions to Oregon literature — in my case, digging up some pretty cool lost Oregon stories like Vortex 1, the Red Hot and Rollin' Portland Trail Blazers of 1977, and some of the players who never received any credit for saving Oregon's ocean beaches from private raping.

I nearly collapsed when I heard the news at my teaching job at Newport High School. It was an unexpected honor for a writer who has self-published all his books about Oregon history.

As I gave my acceptance speech, I looked out to the audience and wondered how many people in attendance had actually read Holbrook, who died in 1964 before modern Oregon existed, and unquestionably wrote more words for publication than any other Oregonian. I doubt any writer will ever surpass ...

I don't remember a word we said to each other that night. But I remember everything important.

Looking out a window, I saw Tricia's car turn into the driveway. I ran out of the house past two Jack-O-Lanterns glowing on the front porch, climbed in her brown Pinto hatchback, and gave her a kiss. As she drove us to a Halloween party hosted by her older brother, we noticed costumed trick or treaters unaccompanied by parents, roaming the streets of Oregon City in a light rain.

It was 1981, my senior year and Tricia, a junior, had appeared out of nowhere the first week of school. She asked me out in Journalism, and a few weeks later, had comfortably established herself as my first real girlfriend. My mom absolutely loved her. Tricia knitted me a sweater, cooked special dinners and once surprised me with a gift of her hand-made stained-glass. We saw each other almost every night and I always let her drive us around town because I hated driving and preferred watching her instead of traffic.

For the party, I wore a gray double breasted suit, blue fedora ...

Fast Break, a film documentary about Bill Walton and the Portland Trail Blazers winning the 1976-77 NBA title and the aftermath of their accomplishment, is the greatest movie I have ever seen on the subject of professional team sports, basketball as a metaphor for life, and the perfect practice of Zen Buddhism in American society.

It also might be the best movie ever made in Oregon and about Oregon. It certainly is the best stoner movie in Oregon history.

If you call yourself a real Oregonian, you simply must see Fast Break, even if you don't care the least for pro sports or give a damn about the current version of the Trail Blazers, meaning you're just like me.

On October 24-26 at the Clinton Street Theater in SE Portland, true Oregonians will have a chance to see this incredible documentary and relive one the greatest cultural moments in the state's history. If you were living in Oregon during the championship season and were halfway sentient, then you know exactly what I mean. The feeling was called Blazermania and it was a good kind of ...

Want to know the genesis of the whole "Keep Portland Weird" thing?

It was called The Mayor's Ball, and one fantastically weird and beautiful Portland man helped make it happen a quarter century ago.

His name was Billy Hults, the Reverend Billy Hults, and he died of cancer this summer in Cannon Beach at the age of 65. If there was a groovier man of letters in Oregon history, I have yet to meet or read about him.

I counted him a good friend and we collaborated on many activist and literary projects together, including my two anthologies related to Oregon history, Red Hot and Rollin' and Citadel of the Spirit. The better I got to know Billy, the more astonished I was to know of his range of talents and people he inspired.

According to an obituary in the Daily Astorian, "Mr. Hults' career included working as a musician, a writer for newspapers and a used book store owner and operator. In 1990, he moved from Portland to Cannon Beach, where he founded and co-directed the Tolovana Arts Colony."

This doesn't begin to tell the half of it.

I first met Billy in 2001 when we both protested the Oregon Department of Clearcutting (I mean Forestry's) insane but typical decision to thin a naturally-seeded, second growth stand of the Tillamook State Forest known as Acey Line. Tre Arrow and his merry band of tree sitters were also involved and Arrow nearly lost his life when he fell 60 feet to the ground after a redneck worker chainsawed a limb holding him up. Billy helped organize a music benefit for the protest and invited some stellar acts down to the Oregon Coast.

Billy had a long and storied career in the Portland music scene back in the 1970s and was a washboard player extraordinaire who gigged with about a million people in his lifetime. He is best known as a musician for his stint in Billy Foodstamp and the Welfare Ranch Rodeo. (Click here to see a clip of him playing.)

Perhaps Billy was most renown for his monthly newspaper The Upper Left Edge, published out of Cannon Beach from 1992-2002. It was without a doubt one of the more eccentric and wonderful newspapers I've ever read and contained some truly passionate writing about baseball, namely the Chicago Cubs, and the Oregon Coast. When ULE ceased publication, its loss was keenly felt and nothing comparable has come along to replace it, probably because it was irreplaceable. It might be the most quintessential Oregon publication of all time and if you never read it, well, you missed something special holding this extra large, cut and paste broadsheet in your hands. It was a work of art and a work of spirit. Billy's spirit.

As I said, Billy and I collaborated on Red Hot and Rollin' and Citadel of the Spirit. For the former, he contributed an engaging essay about naming his son after Maurice Lucas, the star, bad ass and vegetarian power forward from the Portland Trail Blazers' 1977 NBA championship team. When the book came out in 2007, Billy and I gigged together to promote it and I loved how he read his essay — he didn't read it — he told a story instead. And Billy Hults was one helluva storyteller.

When Oregon's 150th birthday loomed in 2009, I wanted Billy on board for my massive anthology, Citadel of the Spirit, and I commissioned him to write up the history of The Mayor's Ball, inarguably one of the funkiest and weirdest and far out! stories in Oregon history. Below is Billy's fantastic personal history of this seminal Portland event. Here is where the WEIRD begins:

It was an early foggy morning a while back and the dogs and I took the path to the beach.

In the distance, the ocean rolled a greenish gray and in the foreground I saw several people walking their dogs on the extreme low tide.

I felt absolutely wonderful, almost giddy. Praise be to the Oregon gods! Praise be to former Oregon Governor Oswald West for saying, "No local selfish interest should be permitted, through politics or otherwise, to impair this great birthright of our people," with the birthright defined as Oregon's publicly owned beaches. Praise be that two score and two years ago, in 1967, this state passed the Beach Bill with Tom McCall's signature, and protected its ocean beaches by placing the dry sands areas in the public trust forever.

I really feel sorry for other coastal states that didn't protect their ocean beaches like Oregon did. I'll bet everybody reading this feels the same way. We've probably had the shared misfortune of visiting a beach that was privately held or garishly exploited.

We descended the path and reached the sand. I looked left... stopped... and... beheld — the ...

I can't recall the exact year I first caught Walt Curtis "read" his poetry but I do recall the venue — the Satyricon rock club in Portland. It may have been '86 or '87. I was probably drunk and leaning against the stage. Walt may or may not have been wearing a diaper. He came on between bands and performed a manic 15-minute set rich in sexual and Pacific Northwest imagery, sometimes within the same poem. One title may have been "KY Jelly and Mt. Hood." Another one was about beavers. Walt was my first poetry reading and at the time I didn't know who he was. I do now. He was then, and he is now, the Stone Oregon Bard.

For 40 years, Walt Curtis, often described as the "unofficial poet laureate of Portland," has produced a Columbia River torrent of poems, reports, performances, stories, essays, articles, drawings, ideas, visions, rants, delusions and all around cultural mischief and upheaval. Sometimes his stuff found publishers; sometimes he did it himself. All told, I think he's got something like 16-17 books out.

Walt's shared a billing with William Burroughs, ...

How did we discover the books that changed our lives?

Through the years, as I became a high school teacher, then a writer, now both, I have pondered this question. I especially think hard on it when the summer fades and I begin preparations to return to the classroom.

My answer is a teacher named Doug Winn. He taught 22 years at Grant High School in Portland before retiring in 2008. He must have influenced hundreds of students in his career, but I may have been the first and it wasn't at Grant.

In 1980, my junior year at Oregon City High School, I landed in a creative writing course taught by Doug Winn. I suspect now it was his first teaching job, and he must have been in his mid 20s, reedy, with wavy hair and a bushy mustache.

It was a small class, maybe 15 students. He required us to keep journals and often made observations in the margins. He also dictated a commentary on cassette tape about our writing twice during the semester. Each one of my tapes runs to nearly 45 minutes. Some of Winn's commentaries were made in public places such as a Laundromat, ...

Not long after Ken Kesey died in 2001, I found myself drinking beer in the Bayhaven, an ancient tavern on Newport's Bayfront. There, I noticed hanging on a wall a framed poster of promotional stills from Sometimes a Great Notion the movie. It was filmed in and around Lincoln County in 1970 and includes scenes shot in the Bayhaven, which stood in for The Snag saloon from the novel.

On sheer journalistic whim, I asked the Bayhaven's bartender if she had seen the movie. I asked a few other patrons the same question. They all had. In fact, several had also read the novel, which bulges over 600 pages in the most recent paperback edition. We talked about that book, about Kesey's first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and the movie adaptations of each, one a classic, the other not.

As I drank in the Bayhaven, asking patrons their opinions on Sometimes a Great Notion, the novel and movie, a thickly bearded man wearing a red baseball cap emerged ...

[Editor's Note: Don't miss Matt Love's reading at Powell's Books on Hawthorne on Thursday, August 13, at 7:30pm.]

Nothing captures my attention like seeing a large vehicle with California license plates parked in front of a real estate office in Oregon. It makes me wonder: do these potential newcomers know anything about the state other than it generally being considered one of the most desirable places to live in the country?

In recent years, I have met what seems to me an astonishing number of people who did not grow up in Oregon, like I did. This hardly bothers me. All places need fresh blood. What has bothered me is learning that virtually none of these new residents have much curiosity about the state, particularly how it ended up a promised land for their migration. They are here, they like it, and that seems to satisfy.

That does not satisfy me. Any person moving to a new place should study thoroughly that place; I believe it is owed. The study should be diverse, ranging from botany to literature, but, if I wielded the power to make just one subject ...

A couple of years ago, near a town called Veneta about 15 miles west of Eugene, I attended the Oregon Country Fair. I was there presenting my book The Far Out Story of Vortex 1.

I'll be blunt: the morning gig sucked and not because most of the audience seemed, well, a little "unprepared" to hear the tale of the only state-sponsored rock festival in American history, an event staged in 1970, a year after OCF began (it was called the Renaissance Fair back then).

No, my presentation didn't soar because 18,000 visitors and 18,000 fair volunteers/ vendors grooving in a glade on an Oregon summer day does not make for a great literary venue.

Who cares? It does make for something else much cooler and quintessential Oregon.

At the fair's gate, a woman clad in a pink boa barked out greetings to the steady stream of visitors who paid approximately $20 a head to park and attend the event. What that adds up to is an impressive $1 million annual gross for an official non-profit counterculture venture that has given away almost $350,000 through its charitable foundation in the ...