Why I Couldn't Stay

 

Portland, Oregon, may have been the nicest place I ever lived. That’s why I had to leave.

Sure, the scenery was great, people were wonderful and the crime rate was low.

But as an up and coming journalist in the 1960s, I wanted some hard-breaking news. You wouldn’t find it then in Portland.

The big story once a year was the selection of the queen of the Portland Rose Festival, rating a highly urgent “Bulletin” on the Associated Press’ Oregon broadcast wire.

Every day, on the phone, I had to take the Columbia River fish count of salmon going past Bonneville Dam: 130 chinook, 74 chad, 22 coho. Zzzzz. You could get through a full weekend on the AP broadcast wire with one traffic fatality, one drowning, a forest fire and a legislature preview.

I loved sports, but: seven-man high school football? Writing about former Oregon stars’ play each day in the pros? Once I had to settle a dispute among coaches about who was in first place in the Northwest League in pro baseball: Pendleton or Yakima? Since I wrote the standings for the Pacific Northwest papers, I got to say. Power!

Then two weeks before I left for Las Vegas in 1968, I was involved in probably the most exciting news story of my 46-year career: a prison riot!

Smoke billowed out of the Oregon State Penitentiary after inmates took over the prison, set it on fire and captured 50 guards as hostages. As I arrived to relieve the Salem AP correspondent, a prison official summoned reporters to tour parts of the prison to show that they were safe.  But as smoke poured down the hallways, we came across prisoners who had raided the pharmacy and were getting high on anything they could find. Others ran through the halls unimpeded. One of them even talked to us. The situation was out of control, and I was lucky I wasn’t taken hostage myself.

To end the riot, the prison officials met some of the prisoners’ demands and got help from an Oregonian reporter, who had written sympathetically about problems in the prison. Just like in the movies, she held a megaphone and shouted outdoors to the prisoners to give themselves up. As the pool reporter, I was one of the few outsiders to see this. When the prisoners yielded, I rushed to a private residence nearby to phone the story in after the prisoners surrendered. I learned years later that the prison reneged on all of the promises made.

 

So Oregon wasn’t so boring after all!