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History in the Making

A Springfield café connects past and future

Photo by Kai Hayashi

With this article, which appeared in Eugene's Weekly's January 26 winter Chow! guide, I sadly bid a fond adieu to able editrix Molly Templeton, who has fled the charms of the Le Eug for trendy, trendy Brooklyn. Molly has been a consistent advocate for my writing, and was even supportive of me in what bordered on a quixotic campaign to interview Gail Simone. As usual, I tried sneaking some local history stuff into this non-history article.

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Downtown Springfield’s Main Street strip continues to tread the line between gentrified and generally sketchy. And the permanent closure of Ruthie B’s Antiques in a couple of weeks marks the end of one of the neighborhood’s anchoring storefronts.

But last May saw the addition of the Washburne Café, a homey breakfast and lunch place just down the street. 

“I wanted to create a place that I’d like to go, that was comfortable and welcoming,” says café owner Karen Hageman. Originally from New Jersey, Hageman says the Washburne is her first foray into restaurant ownership after stints in construction, real estate and retail. 

At breakfast time, Hageman’s new venture serves various egg dishes with cibatta toast, including a “Washburne bowl” with eggs, meat and potatoes. Lunchtime fare includes paninis on locally-baked focaccia, as well as house-made soups. The chicken salad wrap is especially tasty and includes cucumbers and cranberries in the mix. Fluffy, house-made baked goods include tropical fruit scones and peach muffins, complemented by a coffee bar ... and free Wi-Fi.

“It’s getting busier all the time as word gets out,” says Hageman.

And she seems to be right. During a recent visit at almost 2 pm on a weekday afternoon, the lunch rush had yet to abate. The crowd proved eclectic, too. Some patrons read while dining alone. A couple of parents had children in tow. A group of college students, laptops and calculators spread across a round table by the window, discussed APR and interest rates.

Continue reading "History in the Making" at Eugene Weekly.

Celebrating Hard Times

Local craft distillery gives Eugene a buzz

My able editrix for this piece asked that, if I was going to write for a second time about my buddy James and his bootleggin', I'd have to identify myself as his friend, make it clear we have a personal connection. That was a good idea. The line between business reporting and nepotism can grow mighty thin when covering local folks. One thing that made it simpler was the fact that I honest-to-God find James' and Dudley's efforts fascinating. The boys, James in particular, have been striving for so long to reach this level, that it's really gratifying seeing them hit the mark. Cheers, gents!

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The last time I wrote in these pages about the liquor-distilling ventures of my friend James Stegall (“Money Where the Mouth Is,” 3/13/08), he had a different business partner, a different company name and a different plan for his product line. 

He also had 100,000 fewer miles on his car’s odometer, now the legacy of commuting among a day job in Albany, his home base in Eugene and the clean and earthy refurbished granary in Monroe he shares with business partner Dudley Clark and two stills composed of copper tubing and stainless steel.

They make an unlikely pair, smooth-headed, thirtysomething Stegall, and Clark with his longish silver hair and swashbuckler’s goatee. “We don’t always see eye to eye,” says Clark, “but James and I have figured how to be partners in a very deep sense. Almost like brothers.”

It’s been a busy fall season for these almost-brothers and their business, now christened Hard Times Distillery. After more than two years of work fueled by a loan and training courses courtesy of Lane County’s Entrepreneurial Development Services (eDev), their product finally hit liquor store shelves in early October.

Continue reading "Celebrating Hard Times" at Eugene Weekly.

"These Guns are Fully Loaded"

If the fever dream scene from last night's episode of Glee had aired in the 1980s...

 

...a spinoff Glee Babies Saturday morning cartoon would be immediately rushed into production.

 

That is all.

Summer Vacation: Getting Animated

This blog post is horribly overdue, I'll admit. The First lady of Inkville had a work conference in Los Angeles back in August, and I tagged along. Besides visiting to Disneyland, eating Brazilian food, and  hitting numerous tiki locales, I flew solo for one day and visited the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, where I saw two fantastic museum exhibitions, both of which were ending that very day.

The AMPAS Ray Harryhausen exhibition was an incredible collection of photographs, film clips, and, most excitingly, scale models. Many non-geeks are sadly unaware of Harryhausen and his legacy. The man was a genius of stop motion animation, animating fantasy sequences in films like Mighty Joe Young, The Seven Voyages of Sinbad, and, most excitingly for this 7th grade Greek Mythology fanatic, the original Clash of the Titans.

 

Photography wasn't allowed in the galleries, and a dude behind a desk was glowering at me a bit, so I hope you'll forgive these grainy, through-the-lucite iPhone photos, one of the models for Perseus and the Pegasus, the other of the monstrous Kraken. Seeing these models up close reminded me of the amazing level of fear and anticipation Harryhausen inspired in my middle school self with his Medusa sequence, and how the CGI effects of the recent Clash remake fail to deliver in terms of visceral fright... even with the requisite mental adjustment to account for nostalgia.

The second exhibition was even more amazing, and the real reason I mastered aggro Los Angeles traffic to make the commute to AMPAS. The exhibition featured materials and ephemera from the career of Chuck Jones, the amazing director of a number of your favorite Looney Tunes shorts from midcentury ("What's Opera, Doc?," anyone? "One Froggy Evening"?), including animation cells, cartoon scripts, personal correspondence, video clips, and even the man's Oscar statuette.

  

Chuck Jones was a bit (okay, a lot) of a personal hero of mine in the 80s and early 90s. I read the man's autobiography, as well as several other tomes on animation history. I watched Looney Tunes incessantly. I still think that the two-part Elmer Fudd hunting series cartoons Jones directed stand as some of the best-timed and funniest animated films in the medium.

Again, no photos were allowed, so I grabbed these images of the Internet. In fact, security was so tight at this thing, I halfway expected to see Foghorn Leghorn with a baseball bat whacking weasels on the head. When a couple of confused museum-goers confusedly attempted to stray into the AMPAS screening theatre, they were escorted back out again, quite definitively. A far cry from laid-back Oregon.

Amazing exhibitions, amazing trip. That's all, folks!

Summer Vacation: Tiki Travelogue

A couple of weeks ago, the First Lady of Inkville attended a work conference in her professional capacity. I tagged along to Los Angeles in a decidedly un-professional capacity. Still addled on the rum-soaked fumes of the Northwest TikiKon earlier this month, I decided to cram as much Polynesian pop as possible into my visit, with one goal in mind: Tiki pilgrimage.

And what Los Angeles Tiki travel would be complete without a visit to the Enchanted Tiki Room in Disneyland? The entirety of the Adventureland portion of the park is pretty Tiki-tastic, but the Tiki room (complete with its delicious and overpriced pineapple Dole whip) remains the Genesis moment for many Tikiphiles' obsession, including that of your intrepid guide.

Spoiler alert: those Tikis totally come to life.

After working up a sweat escaping the Haunted Mansion and whining about the insertion of Johnny Depp mannequins into the original Pirates of the Caribbean, we adjourned to downtown L.A. to quench our thirst at the Trader Vic's:

Orgeat in Oregon

Thatch Tiki Bar weaves a tasty cocktail in Portland

Photos by Jennifer Ragan-Fore

You know, when it comes down to it, this is really what it's all about. This article ran in the Summer 2010 issue of Tiki Magazine. There are more lucrative freelance opportunities out there, sure. But what beats writing about one's passion? And what can I say? It is a true honor to see my byline in a publication just a few pages away from that of Tiki-riffic author and critic James Teitelbaum, and both Blair Reynolds and Robert Voltz were responsive and engaging interview subjects.

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It might be easy to overlook the unassuming exterior of Thatch Tiki Bar, nestled as it is among row shops and the craftsman-style homes of Portland’s trendy northeast side. But a number of mature live palm trees line a parking lot across the street, even here in the soggy northwest. Consider it a promising omen from the gods.

Besides, isn’t that what the Polynesian Pop lifestyle is all about… savage passions and animal instincts, tucked away under cover of a civilized urban veneer? Thatch’s husband-and-wife owners Robert and Theresa Voltz understand, and have even employed the Tiki bar tradition of creating a sort of entryway grotto separating the “real world” from Thatch’s friendly, cave-like confines: to enter, bargoers must cross a short bridge over a shallow pool ornamented with giant shells and Maori-style weaponry. That’s right: just a few feet from the traffic of Northeast Broadway lies a moat.

Entering the tidily cluttered 1400-square foot space, visitors are greeted by a midcentury modern Mecca: the ironwood bar is accentuated by cheerful orange chairs--“all genuine Herman Miller,” Voltz says proudly--and booths that hail from a Denny’s. The décor is fabulously tropikitschy, as may be expected, with velvet paintings by the Pander Brothers, one even featuring pop culture patron saint Michael Jackson.

Better Read than Dead: Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans

Inkville's "mostly New Orleans, much of the time" coverage continues with this installment. And by the way, the images after the jump sort of stray into NSFW territory. And definitely stray into "Ewww" territory.

The book pitch I have been kicking around for a few years now centers on ghost stories of old New Orleans. So what better research item than, well, Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans, Jeanne deLavigne's 1946 treatise on supernatural hauntings throughout the French Quarter and other NOLA neighborhoods?

The book is sadly out of print and going for around $125 online, so I'm indebted to the University of Oregon's interlibrary loan program, and to the libraries of the University of Texas at Austin and Brigham Young University.

Here's a photo of deLavigne, which she has signed as a gift for another favorite New Orleans author, Robert Tallant. Seem slike a nice older lady, doesn't she? You'd never expect she was a macabre freak.

deLavigne was part of the early-to-mid-20th century New Orleans artistic and literary renaissance as fueled by the Works Progress Administration, a contemporary of Lyle Saxon and a sort of spiritual inheritor of George Washington Cable. I haven't read an awful lot about this period of NOLA history, but on the surface, some of the relationships, artistic output, and activist bent of the whole thing seem reminiscent of the Irish Literary Revival's Yeats/Synge/Lady Gregory complex across the pond, just a few decades later.  It's temptingly easy, in fact, to cast deLavigne as a sort of Southern Lady Gregory, gathering the spooky tales of the common American.

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.

The Strange Tale of Bobbie the Wonder Dog

During a recent and rare sunny springtime day in the northwest, the residents of Inkville, human and canine alike, road tripped to Silverton, Oregon, an hour south of Portland, to pay their respects at the memorial devoted to Bobbie the Wonder Dog:

   

Silverton is a cool little town, with a lot going for it. Besides the requisite antique shops and the fact that the town sports the nation's first transgender mayor, Silverton also offers the amazing natural beauty of Oregon's lush Willamette Valley. Dig:

 

I can tell you from personal experience that border collies grow very nervous while crossing this covered footbridge. Pfft. Dogs. No appreciation for charm.

But wait, there's more! Speaking of collies, Bobbie the Wonder Dog and his family took a little Oregon-to-Indiana road trip in 1923 to visit relatives. Silverton's interpretive materials note that, weirdly, Bobbie traveled on the car's running board(!). Unsurprisingly considering this undignified mode of transport, Bobbie somehow disappeared in transit. The family returned to Oregon, sad and dogless.

Amazingly, stunningly, heroically, Bobbie showed up six months later on his owners' doorstep in Silverton, beat half to hell and wearing a strange collar. That's right: Bobbie the collie walked and navigated 2,800 miles out of his devotion to his humans.

Treme Flow Chart

Continuing what is evidently Inkville's new focus on wall-to-wall Treme coverage... Okay, is two episodes in too early for Treme fan art?

I made this flow chart and submitted it to GraphJam. Thus far, no response. Like other stuff I've done in a humorous (or is that "humorous"?) vein, you kind of have to be in love with the same things I am, to find this funny. And we all know that making arcane references to newly-premiered cable programming is the secret to good comedy, right?

Okay, here's the source material, the opening credits of Treme, featuring John Boutté wailin' on vocals:

Nevah be de' same, eh, cher? How's ya mama and 'em?