The celebrity edition: Jeff Bezos, Mike Royko, Bob Packwood. Being drunk with color.
Becoming compendium, November 7, 2022
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Don’t leave your breath behind. Try not to agonize over the election. It will all shake out, probably not the way you would want.
I kiss off Jeff Bezos and piss off Royko
~Then there’s Bob Packwood~
Bezos
It’s the early 90s. I can’t check the exact date because I didn’t write a story, but Amazon was launched in 1995.
I was covering “personal technology” on the business desk of The Oregonian in those days.
This guy comes down from Seattle, wants to tell me about his new web venture.
Remember, the Internet was just getting started. Everyone was excited about the World Wide Web, but Google didn’t roll out until later. The popular browser was Mosaic, developed with government funding. (One of the programmers at the NCSA —National Center for Supercomputing Applications—was Mark Andreessen, who helped Mosaic evolve into Netscape Navigator and then Mozilla Firefox.)
Jeff Bezos took me to coffee at a little shop on Southwest Sixth Avenue about a block from the newspaper’s headquarters on Southwest Broadway. He wanted to pitch his new idea: selling books on the Internet.
I wasn’t buying it. There was already a good site for buying books: Books. com. I used it all the time. Searching was easy, and I got one free book for every two ordered. I even had a sideline ordering books for less online-savvy friends so I could harvest the freebies.
Evidently, I wasn’t the only journalist who wasn’t receptive to the idea of a bookseller called Amazon. About that time, selling on the Internet was taking off, and books were, well, pretty mundane.
I paid for my coffee, thanked Jeff for his time and didn’t write a story.
Royko
I kissed off Jeff Bezos but I pissed off Mike Royko.
In the mid-80s I was for a time the op-ed (Forum) page editor for The Oregonian. Actually, I was in charge of two pages every day (five on Sunday), a holdover from the 1982 merger of The Oregonian and The Oregon Journal, in which none of either paper’s columns was canceled—that happened years later.
One day, I got a call from a reader.
That man wanted to know why he had’t seen a column by the Chicago journalist Mike Royko in a while. I blithely explained it was because I hadn’t seen one I thought was worth running. I thought the onetime Pulitzer laureate had gotten tired and repetitious. Some of the 7,500 columns he wrote over his career didn’t seem too fresh.
Well, the reader turned right around and called Royko, passing on what I had infeliticitously said. I was wrong to say anything, and boy, did Royko let me know it. He sent me a scathing letter, which I would love to quote here, but I can’t because I threw it away. I was so embarrassed by the whole situation.
In 1997, when Royko died—not an old man, he was only 64—the same reader gave his copy of the letter, kindly provided by Royko, to Willamette Week, our local “alternative” paper (and well-known for snatching a Pulitzer from the jaws of The Oregonian because its reporter, Nigel Jacques, broke the story about former Portland mayor, U.S. transportation secretary and Oregon Gov. Neil Goldscmidt’s “relationship” with his 14-year-old babysitter back in the 1970s. Our editor was furious when they won).
Anyway, WW published the letter. I was still embarrassed by it, but my colleagues at the paper were congratulatory. They seemed to think the affair reflected poorly on Royko, generating his intemperate tirade against me.
Packwood
One other brush with celebrity, then I’m moving on.
In 1974 or ’75, my then husband, Mark Gardner, and I attended the annual Oregon Republican Party’s confab, known as Dorchester because it met in the Dorchester House hotel in Lincoln City.*
Mark was then a cameraman for KOIN(6) television (he later became a news producer), and I was along for the ride.
I was sitting on the steps of the hotel, minding my own business, when Bob Packwood, the Oregon senator who had started the Dorchester conference a decade before, sat down next to me. Very close to me, actually. He chatted me up, but I wasn’t very interested.
Years later, I asked Mark if he had observed anything. “Oh, yes,” he recalled. “He was definitely hitting on you.” Mark told me this week that he mentioned the incident to KOIN’s political reporter, asking whether somebody should say something about the behavior he witnessed. But the reporter pointed out that the party and similar events where politicians and news people partied were off the record. So that was that.
Eventually, The Oregonian lost a really big scoop, when The Washington Post first shed light on Packwood’s serial attempts at womanizing. He even cornered my colleague Bobbie Ulrich, then The Oregonian’s Washington bureau reporter, and tried to kiss her. She reported the incident to her editor at The Oregonian, who did nothing. It was up to The Post to out Packwood, who ended up resigning from the Senate in 1995 under the threat of expulsion.
The Oregonian had an ad campaign at that time that said: “If it matters to Oregonians, it’s in The Oregonian.“ This generated a wry bumper sticker that read: “If it matters to Oregonians, it’s in The Washington Post.”
*The Dorchester House is now independent “senior living,” with stripped-down kitchens that include a bar refrigerator, a microwave and a two-burner cooktop. Wow. At least I have a regular, albeit small, fridge in my assisted living apartment.
Drunk With Color
When it comes to quilting, color is my super power.
But color matters in everyday life, too. Today at breakfast (remember, I’m in assisted living), I was overwhelmed with color. Several women were wearing versions of hot pink—shocking pink, fuchsia, pink-tinged deep plum—with contrasts of gray. Even the placemats were pink this morning.
By lunchtime, the placemats were teal and the people sitting there, when I looked in, were resplendent in blue and white.
In her song “Albatross,” Judy Collins sings of colors:
Even now by the gate with your long hair blowing And the colors of the day that lie along your arms You must barter your life to make sure you are living And the crowd that has come You give them the colors And the bells and wind and the dream
In my journal, long ago, I noted one day when the color was blue; even the green in the leaves of trees was blue-tinged. I found a special blue rock—polished, with a lighter blue seam running through it—at a toy store. I did not buy it.
Later, that blue of longing morphed to the red of remembrance: the red of blazers on college girls walking in the quad amid the yellow leaves of autumn. I used to dream going to college at the University of Minnesota in a red blazer and a pleated skirt and knee-high socks tucked into neat oxfords. By the time I got to Berkeley in 1969, though, the dress code was jeans and miniskirts.
Color sparks memory
I was entranced when I met a man on a Portland street wearing a shirt that was Hare Krishna orange. Or is it pink? An orange-yellow-pink sunrise color. So evocative of those guys with the smiles and the shaved heads who used to chant, over and over:
Hare Rama Hare Rama
Rama Rama Hare Hare
Hare Krishna Hare Krishna
Krishna Krishna Hare Hare
The Washington Post, in a 2016 story*, notes that these days the vast proportion of Hare Krishna adherents in the U.S. are Hindu immigrants from India. White hippies living in communes are long gone. The new worshippers live at home, hold down jobs, and visit temples to pray.
Yet my ear can still hear the familiar chi-chi-CHING of the finger cymbals that accompanied the Hare Krishna chanting, although the chanters long gone from the streets of Berkeley and Portland.
Fruit Defines Color
Yellow and orange lead finally to the mango. Forget the mottled green exterior. Nothing is more orange/yellow than mango flesh, not even papaya. Except maybe the interior of delicata squash. Or the hot orange of a persimmon.
More about the mystical place I call Mangoworld in another post.
For now, I’m drunk with color. It rocks my world.
*I’m not providing a link to the WAPO story because the paper has a firewall and you might not be allowed to read it. If you do have a WAPO subscription, you can search for “Hare Krishna.”
Homework check-in
Writing
Please, keep writing. It’s so good for you!
Silence
I’ll have a lot to share about silence in coming posts. But here’s a snippet from Sunday:
As we switched to daylight time, I awoke at a good hour, say 6:43, but gave myself permission to lie back in bed. There is no need, I told myself, to care about the structure of what Rosamu
I was finding it hard, as I have recently, to talk to the Universe. But it was very easy to just lie there with nothing in my mind. Really. Just a blank slate. I wasn’t making plans for my day or reliving the day just past or worrying about the state of democracy.
The background of my mind was a soft ivory, rather like the walls of my bedroom. Occasionally, a little item would appear, like an open, empty box. Maybe a scattering of pine needles. I just drifted in and out of light sleep without any real thought. I let the energy of the Universe pulse through me effortlessly.
I arose about two hours later, relaxed, revived, refreshed. (The link is to the iconic list of R-words in an earlier post.)
Colors
Start noticing colors, even more intensely than you do already.
Try this: Rather than stew in traffic congestion, observe the colors around you. Some combinations will surprise you. A red blanket draped over a brown balcony railing. Lime green pants on an old fellow with a dark green cane. An orange ball abandoned on a teal green tennis court.
Sometimes, bored with driving (back when I was driving), I’d play a color game: find each of the colors of the rainbow in order: red, orange, yellow, green (easy—trees and street signs), blue, indigo (the most difficult, although mailboxes count), and violet or purple. Then start over. Pretty soon, you’re home.