Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate

We visited Portland, Oregon (the subject of chapter Four in the book) on June 5. We checked into a La Quinta motel in the industrial area in the northwest part of the city. The location was lousy; we got lost trying to find it. However, the room was large, and the internet connection was good. It was our oldest son’s thirty-first birthday, so we called him at his room in Alaska. He is working for a concessionaire in Denali National Park. He was excited that he had received a good promotion with a big raise in pay. He was worried that he would be offered a token increase for a lot more work as I describe was so for the “senior” clerks at Yellowstone. But he got a decent amount and for not much more work. He told us that there were workers at a nearby private bar who were living in a large army-type tent. That was the living quarters the employer provided! And we complained about our 10 by 10 room in Yellowstone. Read More

Our first stop in Oregon was Eugene, home to the University or Oregon, Monthly Review’s editor John Foster, MR editorial board member Brett Clark, and Peter Ogura’s amazingly compact but well-stocked Black Sun Books. We checked into the Campus Inn, a cheap but clean and comfortable motel close to campus and not too far from the Hilyard Community Center where the talk was held. Again the event was well-attended and books were signed and sold. I was pleased to meet a lot of young people, many of them graduate students. Sometimes a radical speaker attracts old radicals, but change cannot be made unless young people become radicals too. John Foster, Richard York, and some other professors are helping to train a new group of radical scholar/activists, and this is a good sign. Read More