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Putting Down Roots

Gray’s Garden Center grows with the community

This my first outing on Eugene Magazine's regular "That Was Then" history feature, and even if I'm not the world's most committed gardener, just writing about history in general is always fun. Despite my comment to the contrary in the below, unlike some cities, the footprint and street plan of downtown Eugene hasn't changed all that much from the the early 20th century, and, while window shopping on Willamette Street, it doesn't take a huge leap of imagination to project oneself back to that era.

Wendell Gray was a true joy to interview, and the sentence he provided that ends this article may be the single favorite interview quote I've ever received. True words, Wendell.

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Launching a new business is always a tricky proposition, doubly so during a financial recession. But imagine opening a business, one with lots of competition in town, at the tail end of history’s very worst economic downturn. 
That was the situation in 1940, when brothers Bob and Charlton Gray founded Gray’s Feed Store on West 6th Avenue between Madison and Monroe, at what was then the western extremity of metropolitan Eugene. Gray’s was just one of the businesses anchoring the very first shopping center on the West Coast, with an ice cream parlor, grocery store, and beauty salon, among other businesses, rounding out the block on West 7th between Madison and Monroe.

Downtown Eugene looked very different then than it does today. Willamette Street sported a public trolley car. Fifth Street Public Market was a poultry plant. And, recalls Wendell Gray, “back in those days, down Fifth Street there were as many as 15 different feed companies,” all between High and Madison. That made for stiff competition, even in a town at the epicenter of the Willamette Valley’s robust agricultural industry.

This year marks the 70th birthday of both Gray’s Garden Center and Wendell Gray, Charlton’s son. The fact that Wendell’s first engagement after leaving the hospital as a newborn was a stop at the six-month-old Gray’s Feed, as it was then known, demonstrates just how committed the family has been to the business that bears its name.

A Chicken in Every Pot, a Man Cave for Every Man

The digital cable box here in Inkville tends to be squarely pointed at HGTV much of the time, despite my protests. And until such time as I am able to wrest the box away and point it at The Venture Bros. or Treme or hell, anything else, I consider myself an unwilling conscript learning about recessed lighting and SoCal property values.

The program House Hunters offers viewers a ride-along as wealthy families decide amongst three megamansions to waste their money upon. I’ve decided to use the opportunity for a little armchair ethnographic fieldwork. And in the past couple of years, I have noticed a trend. Scratch that, make it a truism: every rich dude expects a Man Cave.

If you’re not familiar with the concept... congrats, you're probably not wasting you life on basic cable, as am I. Snark aside, essentially the Man Cave is a room in the megamansion in which the male half of a heterosexual couple goes to commune with his inner loutish being, a place for neon beer sign collections, framed Red Sox jerseys, and cardboard boxes full of early-70s issues of Playboy. 

I wrote for the Eugene Magazine megamansion beat for over two years, and let me tell you, I have seen my fair share of new construction Man Caves. Since when did this Man Cave idea become a man's inalienable right?

On one level, it seems sort of sad to me. Should a man really need to hide away from his better half? What does it say about a relationship if half the couple needs a space, with formal borders or passwords or whatever, in which to avoid the other? Sorry if I'm a turncoat, fellas, but I actually like my wife. The idea of an oasis is one thing; devoting real estate to it is another.

On another level, I guess I can understand the appeal. My wife shares my sense of design in many ways, but all the same, it might be cool to have a place for my rows of tiki mugs and action figures… rockabilly pouring from the speakers... the walls adorned with comic book art… a special tumbler reserved just for bourbon I pull out of the special cabinet reserved just for the bottle… and most of all, the TV would never linger on HGTV.

Hmm, maybe I can chalk my distaste for the Man Cave idea up to the fact I can’t afford one myself? Perhaps it's all just sour grapes on my part. Any corporate sponsors out there looking to burn through a few clams by financing a blogger's renovation? We can call HGTV to film it, honest...

Animal Instincts

Lane County’s quadruped competitors

From the the fall issue of Eugene Magazine. Okay, the restaurant and book reviews are fun, as I usually walk away with free eats or free swag, but there are definitely other perks to this lifestyle. Gotta love an interview in which I can ask someone about the strength of the average ferret and remain on-topic. I also love assignments that teach me new terms like dog fancy, or cattery. Expect both of those in all my writing from now on.

Special props to Eug Mag for the itty-bitty puppy hiking boots gracing the cover, a nice touch of whacked-out surreality for a magazine that's usually fairly restrained.

This article edited and endorsed by Velcro, my border collie.

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Caleb, a black and white border collie, corners and spins on his heels, jumping each of the 17 low, fencelike obstacles in turn, as his owner, Carolyn Hancock, indicates each challenge. A crowd is gathered in the Lane County Fairgrounds livestock pavilion on this Memorial Day for the Emerald Classic Cluster canine agility trials. Virtually all of them dog lovers, the onlookers cheer and applaud for Caleb, as they do for each of the competitors, even those dogs who simply bark and run around, ignoring the obstacles.

Around here, in “Track Town, U.S.A.,” Ducks aren’t the only animals with a competitive streak. Eugene
Celebration’s annual pet parade may be the area’s most well-known furry function, but it’s far from the only game in town.

Caleb’s not the fastest dog here at the trials, but Hancock, a petite, blonde woman sporting a pink sweatshirt, doesn’t seem to mind. She looks pleased as Caleb’s brief run concludes, snapping the lead to Caleb’s collar in a satisfied manner before retreating to a nearby folding chair to let the pooch cool down.

“He didn’t qualify,” she explains, but smiles as she says it. “He’s pretty smart, he’s easy to train. It’s his handler who isn’t easy to train.” Caleb, at 7 years old, has been competing for almost four years. The dog is in the Open class of agility categorizations recognized by the American Kennel Club.

No mistakes allowed

Hancock retired last year from human resources at the Good Samaritan Society, but recently returned to her position on a part-time basis, leaving her enough time to train with Caleb. This team is here to compete, but the trials also represent a chance to meet friends (both two- and four-legged) with a common interest. “It’s a great social event,” Hancock says of the trials. “You’re competing with your dog as a team,” and also fostering professional and personal connections.

One of those connections is Ronwin Ashton, Agility Trial Chairwoman for both the McKenzie Cascade Dog Fanciers and the Eugene Kennel Club, and the coordinator of today’s event. An unaffiliated club, Willamette Agility Group (WAG), also specializes in dog agility, but Ashton invests her energy in Kennel Club–sanctioned events like this one.

“Novice, Open, and Excellent are the respective levels of increasing difficulty,” explains Ashton. “Each increase in level has additional obstacles to perform, additional challenges, with less time and fewer allowed errors than the previous level. Three qualifying legs must be completed, at all levels, to advance to the next level.” If and when Hancock and Caleb do advance to the Excellent level, no mistakes whatsoever will be allowed in their performance.

Continue reading "Animal Instincts" at Eugene Magazine.

Deep-Fried Soul

"I have some bad news," my wife said as she climbed into the passenger seat. It's not what you want to hear when picking your wife up from work, especially in a week in which death has seemed to shadow us and our loved ones at every corner. News of the passing of Ted "Papa Soul" Lee, an institution in the Eugene music and culinary scenes, has left me saddened.

I interviewed Papa for a grad school writing project, hanging around his restaurant a few times over the course of a week in 2007, notebook in hand. Papa was wary of me at first. His star was on the rise, and he'd been interviewed a number of times by various news outlets. My brand of narrative writing, though, calls for some good old-fashioned depth reporting, and Papa couldn't quite seem to put his finger on why I'd want to bum around in his joint multiple nights in a row, and scribble down what his regulars were saying to one another. He was always hospitable, however, even when I'd only buy a single beer and nurse it over an hour. Papa loosened up after I'd questioned him a bit, once he realized I was an ex-pat Southerner who, like Papa himself, was trying to make sense of his own lineage and cultural inheritance.

And when the article appeared in Eugene Magazine, in much-truncated form, Papa framed it and hung it on his restaurant's wall. In a way, having the man memorialize my writing that way was significant for me, perhaps even more so than it was for him: having a respected businessman value my work enough to have it framed was a big mental boost for a young writer, and gave me the confidence to approach other interview subjects fearlessly. I guess I have always thought of the man as a sort of spiritual benefactor, even if he never knew it. In fact, that grinning photo of me you see above and to the right was taken on the sidewalk in front of his place.

And what's more, Papa never forgot me, and hailed me warmly each time he saw me. (A perk of being a reviewer, to be sure.) He was a man with an enormous appetite for life, for both its nurturing and destructive sides... including some rougher elements (drug use, response to racism, a deadbeat father) that were understandably scrubbed by my editor for publication in a lifestyle magazine. And while I understand why the piece had to be gutted, I've always felt something was lost in translation. This seems an appropriate occasion to recognize the life and the works of Ted Lee, to mark what the man stood for.

So I hope my readers will indulge me in this, perhaps the longest blog entry I've posted, the unexpurgated, original version of "Deep-Fried Soul."

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It’s past the dinner hour, and most of the restaurant’s dining customers are on their way out the door, bellies and doggie bags full. In less than an hour the regular Thursday night reggae jam will usher in a new clientele, and in one corner of the tiny Victorian bungalow’s front room, a couple of DJs are already pulling tables into a makeshift desk for their sound equipment. The sound system is cranking out the cream of Motown and soul, all African-American artists. From the kitchen, a cook’s voice wavers as he sings along with “Heat Wave” by Martha and the Vandellas. A young waitress joins in under her breath and she putters about behind the front counter.

Peering down at the waitress from the upper echelons of the liquor rack that crowns the front counter, a rubber ducky with James Brown’s distinctive locks mugs next to a peeved-looking Snoop Dogg action figure. They’re mirrored on the opposite side by a grinning Louis Armstrong figurine. The walls of the cottage are plastered with retro-styled posters and “outsider art” featuring black musicians, Robert Johnson and Lightnin’ Hopkins and Jimmy Hendrix and Stevie Wonder. An oil painting features a large, heavily-tattooed man wailing away on a harmonica.

Falling Into the Reflection

Over the past week I’ve been working on my publisher’s letter for the upcoming summer issue of Eugene Magazine.  It’s our Top Doctors of Eugene-Springfield issue, and, seeking to draw from my own experience, I open the letter with an anecdote about what it was like growing up with two psychotherapists as parents.  

In the letter, after I set the scene and (hopefully, presumably) draw the reader in with personal detail, I expand my theme and apply the anecdote’s simple lesson to the larger world. Lots of nonfiction is structured the same way… this blog post, as a matter of fact.

The publisher’s letter is a prime example of a frequent writer’s dilemma: How much of myself should I put into this thing?  Writers of fiction have to ask themselves the question, but it becomes even more pertinent to writers of poetry and nonfiction. 

Even writers who produce literary nonfiction have to gauge their involvement.  John Berendt is a central character, for example, in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.  But I’d argue that Erik Larson may communicate almost as much about himself in The Devil in the White City (perhaps my favorite book), a narrative that takes place a good six decades before Larson was born.

The writer wants his work to convey something about himself, his values, what matters to him.  But it can be difficult to tread the line between self-inclusion and self-absorption, between personal storyline and base narcissism.  (And no, I’m not ignoring the narcissistic overtones of writing about narcissism in a personal essay, appearing on a personal blog.)

Though in essence, the writer conjures only the illusion of personal connection. After reading this mini-essay, for example, you, the reader know that I wrote a publisher’s letter, but not what was going on at the same time, or whether I produced two drafts or twenty, or whether the writing took ten minutes or ten hours, or how I feel about it, or whether I even like the thing.  You can guess, based on clues I might include here or what you know of me outside this writing, but you can never know for sure.

So how about it, writers?  Or creatives in other fields?  How much of yourself do you insert into your work?  How do you avoid sharing too much?  How much of the “you” in your work is illusion, and how much is genuine contact with your readers or audience?  My comment corral is feeling snubbed…

The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick Maker, and the Writer who gets it all down on paper

After writing all day and then writing all night, I can’t believe I’m about to write just a wee bit more for the blog.  But Inkville needs its mayor.  (And, for that matter, its village idiot.)

I’m midway through my second week in two new part-time jobs, having finally chucked the ol’ desk jockeying, hopefully for good.  The first is the position of Publisher of Eugene Magazine, a glossy lifestyle quarterly for which I’ve been writing freelance for a few years now.  For some horrid, self-loathing reason, I decided to jump on the bandwagon just two weeks before we go to press on the Winter 2008-09 issue, so I’ve basically been behind the 8-ball from the get-go.

Fortuitously, my genial bosses Steve and Lanny have assembled a fantastic staff who are patiently guiding my transition, chief among them my colleague Vanessa, the mag’s Editor.  The magazine offices are delightfully devoid of the red tape and niceties that characterize university environment.  Until my office is ready, I’ve been parking my laptop a few feet from the Janus-like ad sales staff: honey-tongued and smooth on the phone with a client, foul-mouthed and raucous as soon as the receiver hits the cradle.

My second position is Web Content Editor for the University of Oregon’s Office of Admissions, my old stomping grounds, where my boss is my close friend Holly, an inventive thinker and creative leader.  One of the most exciting vistas of this new job will be experimenting with social media, recruiting kids where the kids already live.  The job also allows me to edit such lovely student quotes as “It's just the two of us working with bacteriorhodopsin, a protein that converts light energy into chemical energy.”  Well, of course it is.

So far, my new lifestyle is glorious and hectic and frightening in all the best ways, not the least of which is hoofing it across Eugene during lunchtime, with a laptop tucked under my arm.  I’m enrolled in parallel crash courses in two completely different careers, and honestly, I’m having the time of my life.

More to come.  I hope.

High Fidelity

I've been e-mailing with Molly Templeton, one of my editors at Eugene Weekly, about pros and cons of the film The Dark Knight.  As a long-time pop culture nerd, I found that most of my feedback centered on deviations, both positive and negative, from the comic books. 

I can’t think of a major superhero movie that more lovingly respects, and gives the nod to, its source material.  From the inclusion of Batman mythology bit players (Carmine Falcone! Salvatore Maroni!), to the thoughtful reinterpretation of Two-Face’s disfigurement, to the major parts for Detectives Stephens and Ramirez as obvious proxies of the comics’ Bullock and Montoya, I was in Easter egg heaven.  The film carefully categorizes the nearly 70 years’ worth of Batman and Joker material, cherry-picking what works, and excising what doesn’t.

In a way, this is what I try to do, too, as a writer of narrative nonfiction.  I sift through the layers of a person’s life, or of an incident, and try to find its essential truth.  This requires more reinterpretation and recontextualization of fact than it might seem at the outset.  Truth is malleable, and slippery.  With a little care, “What happened” can be reformatted to tell a better story, ethically, without sacrificing accuracy.