The Elder Statesman

By BILL DUNCAN
The Elder Statesman

My mother said she believed Gabriel Heater, a radio newscaster in the 1940s was partially responsible for my father’s death at age 59 during World War II.

My father had six sons, all within the age of military service. Nightly, he would be glued to the radio for news of the war effort. Each broadcast, Gabriel Heater began with “…there’s bad news tonight.”

The likes of Gabriel Heater, Edward R. Murrow and other famous radio commentators are only memories today, but negative news, whether in print or dispatched electronically by images and voices are equal to “…there’s bad news tonight.”

With all the bad news about war, terrorism, violence, and the economy it is hard to maintain a positive attitude. Of all times, this is a time when we need positive thinking.

Positive thinkers, according to medical science live seven and a half years longer than the population who only see gloom and doom. Optimists are healthier and recover faster from illness, solve problems easier and generally succeed in life. Yet they are surrounded by the same worries as everyone else.

My long time friend, the late Page Smith, who wrote a column called “Time to Live,” I used as an editor, said after “some years of observing the human comedy/tragedy,” that he came to the conclusion that enthusiasm is the most “essential element in whatever progress the race has made since the days we lived in caves.”

If you think what is happening on the stock market today and unemployment is doom in itself, think again. This has happened before and the economy has recovered from far worse. It is merely a bump in the road.

The Duncans clan’s motto is “Learn to Suffer.” Suffering is the most intense when it serves no purpose, but from my clan’s viewpoint suffering in pursuit of a worthwhile goal is a necessary part of achieving a dream. As a young boy during the Great Depression, I worked for a grocer who was undoubtedly the meanest employer in town. One day, I felt my teenage independence and quit. When my father inquired why I was not at work and heard my explanation he sent me back to the grocery store to ask for my job back. I think the last of the mean old grocers was frightened of my dad, who stood off in the distance watching my humbling experience. I was rehired but my employer was no kinder during the months I continued to work for him.

One Saturday when I dragged in after a particularly hard day’s work, my father called me aside and told me on Monday I could give my notice. I was puzzled over his turn around. Then in parable form he told me that one day I would have a family and he wanted me to learn the concept early that some day I would work for a meaner boss and but I couldn’t quit because I didn’t like the boss or the job. He was right.

Bernie Marcus was an executive of a chain of home improvement stores in the Midwest, until the corporate raiders swallowed the company in 1978 and fired him. Rather than bemoan the injustice of corporate America, in 1979 he founded Home Depot, Inc., now the world’s largest home improvement retailer.

If you are unemployed, there are jobs available, so long as you don’t think it is beneath you to do scud work. My older brother, Rignal, had a substantial job with Union Oil Co. in California. His wife hated California and wanted to return to the South. He moved to Florida where no jobs in the oil field were available. He took a job gauging petroleum tanks for an oil distributor of a national company. The company owners eventually realized his knowledge was several pay grades about of the minimum wage he was earning and promoted him. He eventually became vice president of the oil company.

In spite of all the bad news and naysayers, if we can maintain a positive outlook we can overcome.

(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)

By BILL DUNCAN
The Elder Statesman

If today, my feet were not planted on this earth, I’d like to just have a peek on heaven’s scenes to witness Liz Carpenter greeting Viola Jane Wilborn Lewis for a rousing howl at the moon. Liz Carpenter is the godmother of the Bay-at-the-Moon Clubs of America. Liz an earthy, tart-tongued Texan and Vi were a perfect match. Liz died of pneumonia on March 20, 2010 in Austin, Texas, at age 89.

Vi died last week at age 91 from pneumonia and other causes. She was a charter member of the Roseburg chapter of Carpenter’s Bay-at-the-Moon Club. Her death leaves alive only three of the original members, who still greet the full moon with a howl. I am certain Liz called the roll up yonder for a grand reunion of the Roseburg howlers with Vi among them.

The Bay-at-the-Moon Club was just one of the activities on which Vi left her imprint in Douglas County. You can hardly name a committee with which you would not find Vi’s name connected. However, it had to be a working committee that got things accomplished. In 1997 when she was living in Winston, she was awarded the coveted First Citizen.

Age never really caught up with Vi and up until the end, she was still active in her church community and in one of her favorite groups, the Pen & Ink writers critique group that meets once a week during the fall, winter and spring months. One of the stories she shared was about her son, Tom, who was a teenager when Vi and her husband, Ted Wilborn moved from urban San Fernando Valley, Calif. to rural Melrose. Tom was 17, and not happy about leaving his friends to begin a new life in Oregon. The one friend Tom refused to leave was his concrete bear, all 50 pounds, representing the state symbol of California. Bear came with him.

When Tom graduated from high school and enrolled at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Bear went with him and stood guard on the deck of his student housing. It was stolen from the deck and in the bearnapping lost his right ear. Tom was devastated at the loss and posted a plea around the campus for Bear’s return, to no avail. Tom kept the severed ear as a precious reminder of Bear, who had been part of his life for 20 years.

Tom became ill in 1991 and died on July 23, 1993 at the age of 37. He is buried in St. Joseph Cemetery. “I placed Bear’s ear on the headstone,” Vi wrote in her story.

“I always visited his grave on the anniversary of his death, so on July 23, 2000, I drove to the cemetery and could not believe my eyes. Standing guard alongside the grave was Bear, still missing his right ear and now with a cracked snout and paw, but it was Tom’s Bear. I sobbed at the very sight of his miraculous return, but then questions raced through my mind as to how this could have happened.”

She was so elated, she telephoned Tom’s best friends, Pat and Sarah O’Grady of Eugene to share the news. Sarah answered the phone and greeted her with: “You found Bear!” She explained she and her husband were driving through their Eugene neighborhood and spotted Bear on a front porch. Bear was again bearnapped and this time driven to Roseburg and placed beside Tom’s grave.

Vi had a cement block installed next to Tom’s grave with Bear’s legs firmly planted next to his master. “I’ve always had a strong belief in Angels and how they work silently among us to bring peace to our hearts,” she said ending her story. “This event reinforced that belief.”

Vi couldn’t take Bear with her on heaven’s mission, but I am certain the two of them joined Liz in howling at the moon to rejoice at Bear’s place in their hearts.

(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)

By BILL DUNCAN
The Elder Statesman

I have to eat crow. Ever since I lost my favorite writing tool – the Underwood #5 typewriter – I have cursed computers and every attached electronic marvel that has made my life miserable. But, on this occasion, I have to eat crow. Saturday as I was about to write a column on a different subject until I checked my email. There was a message from the son of my newspaper mentor, Bob Geivet.

I had not seen Gary Geivet since he was a teenager living with his parents in Santa Ana, Calif. I had written a column years ago about Geivet, While surfing the net Gary found the column and my email address. He said the information I shared about his Dad was not surprising “as it was exactly what I would have thought him to do.”

On my first newspaper job, I was assigned to work with Geivet covering a murder in which the police had in custody a suspect, Henry Ford McCracken. He was being questioned about the kidnapping of ten-year-old Patty Jean Hull from a Saturday movie matinee in Buena Park, Calif. on May 19, 1951. I was given instructions by my editor to do everything Geivet did, but not to get in his way. Days of investigation into the crime brought newspaper reporters and television news crews to the small town.

On May 24, Patty Jean Hull’s body was found wrapped in a yellow chenille bedspread in a shallow grave in a mountainous area in an orange grove in Live Oak Canyon, 35 miles from Buena Park.. The press corps was held at the edge of the road while the sheriff homicide personnel processed the crime scene.

Geivet called me aside and instructed me to go to the only general store in the canyon and to telephone the newspaper. He cautioned me not to relinquish the phone to anyone until he got there. Reporters began coming into the store to use the phone. I took much verbal abuse that day, but did not give up the phone until Geivet arrived. The other news reporters had to drive miles to find another telephone.

That was one of my first lessons in enterprising reporting one of many I learned from the master. He said he would never retire, but finally did after 50 years in the news business. He turned down promotion after promotion because as he said; “I am a reporter. Editors just put in the commas.”

He was also a genius at black and white photography and maintained his own darkroom to print his prize-winning photographs. Gary noted in his message to me yhat when his Dad died he had to deal with file cabinets filled with negatives of news photos Geivet had taken during those 50 years.

“I could not bring myself to dispose of them, so I donated them to the Orange County Courthouse Museum, which was formed to preserve the old historic courthouse structure,” Gary said. “My Dad’s photo collection became the core of the photography history of the county. Several Orange County writers have used his pictures to illustrate their books about Orange County history.”

I checked the web to refresh my memory on the Buena Park murder case where I first met my mentor and there was a photo Geivet had taken of Henry Ford McCracken consulting with his attorney, George Chula. That was one of many famous trials Geivet covered in his career.

Thanks for the memories, Gary, even if I have to eat crow about the electronic miracle that made it possible. But I still prefer my Underwood #5 typewriter.

(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)

By BILL DUNCAN
The Elder Statesman

The child’s play in Washington over the debt ceiling has brought silence to another great debate – the immigration law. It has been over a year since any solution has been on the lips of lawmakers. Yet America’s porous southern border is still an issue. Only recently, The Associated Press had a story for new illegal aliens that are being smuggled across the border in greater numbers than Mexicans or South Americans. This new wave is from India.

Looking back on the history of imported farm labor, it began in 1942 during World War II when a shortage of manpower demanded laborers in the fields to harvest food necessary for the war effort. It was called the “Bracero Program” in which millions of Mexicans were imported to the U.S to work temporarily under contract with American growers and ranchers. In Spanish the word “bracero” means manual labor.

The program abruptly ended in 1964 with claims that unemployed Americans were put out of work by the imported foreign labor. I am well aware of the ending of that program, because as a reporter, my editor agreed with the decision and to test it he clandestinely sent me to the strawberry fields as a day laborer in Garden Grove, Calif.. The inexperienced farm laborers, like me, joined the regular migrant worker crews. My first job was hoeing weeds with a short handled hoe and the work was from sunup to sundown. By the end of one day, I knew my editor was wrong. I continued to work for a week before I quit.

I wrote a Sunday feature story explaining the backbreaking work for less than minimum wage after my food and lodging were deducted. I truly believe if the United States reinstated the Bracero Program and had better control over the assignment of workers and their fair wages, then insured their return to their homeland after the harvest, we would resolve the so-called immigration crisis.

I recently read a book by Presbyterian minister, Ben Daniels, entitled “Neighbors: Christian Encounters with Illegal Immigration,” in which he said he wanted to ease the fears of people who are afraid the American face in the future will look more like Mexico and Central America than that of northern Europe or New England.

“In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus teaches his disciples that the neighbor is the Samaritan, an object of prejudice and scorn among Jesus’ followers,” he said. “I believe God calls us to think of undocumented migrants not with scorn, but with kindness, hospitality, and even gratitude.”

If is often claimed that the undocumented drain financial resources of states. Daniel disputes this, saying that undocumented immigrants contribute to our economy in several ways. “Without undocumented labor our food would be a lot more expensive because something like 70 percent of American agricultural workers are undocumented laborers, working at or below minimum wage,” he said. “Americans pay less for food, per capita, than anyone else in the developed world. If those workers were deported, it would cause a food crisis in America, and the cost of eating would skyrocket.”

He noted that many undocumented workers use false Social Security numbers to obtain jobs. Employers deduct payroll taxes from their paychecks, which means that the federal government garners income tax and Social Security withholdings from these workers. He said according to the New York Times, undocumented workers paid something like seven billion dollars into the Social Security program that they will never collect.

I think since my day as a bracero, the short handled hoe has been eliminated, but frankly not even a long handled hoe fits well in my hand. I would say, the government should reconsider the Bracero Program as a way of providing farm labor and as Daniels states providing a valuable resource that over the years has been the foundation for the development of the rich American agricultural industry.

(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)

By BILL DUNCAN
The Elderstatesman

You just never know what you will find in the library discard pile. Actually, I didn’t, but Dorothy Lamoureaux did. She is a colleague as a Hospice volunteer at the Roseburg VA Health Care System and knowing my newspaper background figured I would be interested in the editorial sketches and essays compiled in a book by Ben Hur Lampman, who was an editor for the Oregonian in Portland. The book, copyrighted in 1942, is titled “At The End of the Car Line.”

It took me only long enough to read the introduction for me to decide Lampman, who died in 1954 at a time my own newspaper career was just beginning, was my kind of journalist. He left all the analysis and pontificating to others and concentrated on writing about people, gardening, farming and nature. Philip Parrish, editor of the Editorial Page of The Oregonian where Lampman’s column appeared, described his writing style as “highly distinctive and richly beautiful” that gave a “flavor to The Oregonian.”

Lampman got his taste for printer’s ink in his father’s print shop at age 11, earning an apprenticeship in lieu of formal education, and almost following in the footprints of another great writer, Samuel L. Clemens, whose education was also on a printer’s stool.

Lampman started his own Michigan City newspaper at 19. A year later he married Lena Sheldon and in 1912, the couple moved to Gold Hill, Ore. where he edited the local newspaper, only to be lured to the Oregonian four years later.

The book Dorothy gave me was a discarded library copy and contained a collection of essays he wrote. His stories and essays appeared in national magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post. In 1943, he won an O. Henry Award for his short story, “Blinker Was a Good Dog,” which had originally appeared in the Atlantic Monthly.

His work included prose, poetry, editorials, short stories, nature pieces, and a novel. He was published in school textbooks, Reader’s Digest, Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, Saturday Evening Post, and Nature Magazine. His works include the book Dorothy gave me as well as these books, “How Could I be Forgetting?” published in 1933. “Tramp Printer,” published in 1934, Here Comes Somebody,” published in 1934 and “The Wild Swan and Other Sketches,” published in 1947.

One of his columns titled “Where to Bury a Dog,” is frequently cited at pet memorials. The column actually resulted from a reader’s question asking about the proper place to bury his pet dog. His reply was classic Lampman: “The one best place to bury a good dog is in the heart of its master.”

His gift at writing was about ordinary things in everyday life, using word play and humor to tell a story, such as an entire column on how people act when a pedestrian’s hat is blown off during a sudden gust of wind. He was a noted poet and used all the techniques of poetry writing his columns, to wit a column about a garden spider busily weaving its web as fine as any expensive lace.

The Oregon legislature recognized his talent and in 1951 named him the state poet laureate, a title he held until his death in 1954 at age 67. He is buried in Lincoln Memorial Cemetery in Portland. His papers and manuscripts are now in a collection at the University of Oregon.

All of his works are now out of print, but still available through several websites that sell literary collector’s items.

(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)

Cardboard Gods
An American Tale
By Josh Wilker
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Trade Paperback Reprint $15.95

By BILL DUNCAN
The News-Review

Josh Wilker’s “Cardboard Gods,” was first published by Seven Footer Press and as some books do, received phenomenal attention as a hard to describe genre. I would consider it a memoir told through a baseball card collection. On the other hand, it might be described as a coming of age story of growing up in the turbulent 60s, all uniquely told through the collection of cardboard baseball cards.

Oddly, Wilker didn’t originally start out to write a book. He created a blog to spin yarns about his baseball card collection. He admits his is not a big collection, just large enough to store inside an oversized shoebox.

Of my own four sons, only Jeffrey, was a serious baseball card collector, but his collection wouldn’t fit in an oversized shoebox. It took a steamer trunk and dozens of shoeboxes. He would haunt Toby Notenboom at Paul Jackson Wholesale to buy the latest box of Topps baseball cards. He said the collection someday was going to pay for his college education.

Wilker’s collection may have been small enough to store in a shoebox, but it is baseball history of the 1970s. In his book, he weaves a story around each card. The names are familiar, the uniforms are different and the stories he tells about each play featured on the cards are delightfully entertaining.

Baseball fans have an obsession with the national pastime. Wilker is no different, he allows the reader to relive every exciting moment in the player’s career.

His writing is reminiscent of Jim Murray, the Los Angeles Times Pulitzer Prize winning sports writer, who wrote about sports in an unconventional style. Wilker’s lists reads like a roll call of the Cooperstown Baseball Hall of Fame — names like Tom Seaver, Reggie Jackson, Hank Aaron, Ricky Henderson, Wade Boggs and some lesser cardboard gods.

In almost a sportscaster voice, Wilker describes Jim Rice of the Red Sox in an October 1978 game:

“In the bottom of the ninth, the Red Sox had the tying run on second and the winning run on first and only one out. Jim Rice is at the plate. He had crushed more pitches in one season than anyone in decades as evidenced by his 406. All he had to do was crush one more. But he got a little under Goose Gossage’s heater and flied out to right. The runner on second moved up to third. Ninety feet away. One chance left…”

Each card featured has a story behind the card and the player. Wilker describes the first professional baseball game he attended in person in which Reggie Jackson was the outfielder playing just beneath his seat at the ball field. Wilker and his brother tried to get his attention, but Jackson seemed to ignore his pleas.

He paints his parents as hippies, who were always broke and not too caring for their two sons. But he doesn’t dwell on the family dynamics and writes mostly about baseball.

Indeed, “Cardboard Gods,” is the All-American tale, well told by a writer of 11 young adult non-fiction books. He makes the reader feel young again.

(Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR. 97470.)

Founding Gardens
Andrea Wulf

By BILL DUNCAN
The News-Review

Strange as it may seem, Andrea Wulf, a British citizen, in her book “Founding Gardeners,” writes about her belief that what led our fledging nation to economic independence was agriculture. The first four presidents, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were all farmers and planters. Their gardens became the laboratories for the American agrarian future.

While Washington was leading the colonial army in battles against a superior enemy force, he was writing detailed instructions to the caretakers of his beloved Mount Vernon estate.

All four of the founding fathers had a deep agricultural passion and left a legacy in their written botanical descriptions, garden layouts, crop yields plus copious notes on their botanical experiments.

This oddity of American history has been mostly ignored by scholars who concentrated mostly on the political struggles of the new republic. Wulf discovered this unique slant on American history when she traveled to America for the first time in 1987, with a preconceived vision of large urban areas, giant shopping mall and a continent covered in concrete. However during her seven-week road trip across America she saw a different America, an agrarian landscape.

Digging into the agrarian beginnings of a rebellious colony, she literally lived in the founding father’s homes, reading their correspondence and notes on how they kept their gardens.

Although he was not among the four first presidents, she notes that Benjamin Franklin was in London on a trade mission prior to the outbreak of the Revolution and was sending packages of seeds to his wife in Philadelphia, not only for his own gardens, but with instructions to provide the seeds to other planters. He believed, Wulf said, that agricultural self-sufficiency would be the key to a successful revolution.

Adams, the first president to live in the White House, then surrounded by mud flats, began the landscaping of the grounds. That tradition continues today, including Michelle Obama’s organic vegetable garden on the White House grounds.

Wulf even details Adam’s obsession with improving the soil around the White House grounds by using manure. When President Harry Truman was in office, he spoke publicly about using manure to fertilize the White House grounds. An aide pleaded with his wife, Bess, to get the president to say fertilizer rather than manure. Her reply was: “It took me this long just to get him to say manure.”

Jefferson followed Adams in the White House, but seemed was disinterested in the grounds, despite his obsession with his gardens at Monticello. Yet he was the president who made the Louisiana Purchase expanding America’s land holding and he sent Merriweather Lewis and William Clark to the far west with instructions to collect fauna from the wilderness along the way to the Pacific Ocean.

Madison, as president, is known as the father of ecology and after retiring as president continued his crusade to preserve fertile land.

Jefferson’s Monticello gardens exist today much as they were when he was alive. The Monticello Foundation sells heirloom seeds, some dating back to Jefferson’s era, to help support the gardens. For more information go to www.monticellocatalog .org to order heirloom seeds of flowers and vegetables.

With all the hybrid and genetically engineered seeds for sale today, Jefferson may someday save agriculture from a man-made disaster.

(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)

By BILL DUNCAN
The Elder Statesman

Recently I reviewed a book for Currents using a Kindle reader. I may be an electronic dinosaur, but reading with finger swipes rather than physically turning a page is not my cup of tea. I want to hold, fondle and savor the words on a printed page. Over the years I have developed my own system of reviewing books by slipping thin pieces of paper at the point of reading to note a quote, a statement or a fact I want to highlight in my review.

Oh, I know the Kindle has the capability of allowing the reader to “bookmark” those sections, but I like to refresh my memory by re-reading that portion for the review. It is my own dinosaur method of “bookmarking.”

But from what I read, the pundits are already shoveling dirt into the grave of public libraries and librarians who may become obsolete in this highly technical 21st Century. Don’t forget folks, those same naysayers said television had doomed radio, and that blogs drove the nail into the newspaper coffin. That theory proposes that public libraries will soon resort to electronic readers for its patrons and that all books will be digitized for those electronic readers.

That’s the bad news. The good news, at least in my opinion, is that a complete digitalized library is years away from reality.

Since 2004, Google Book Search has only been capable of digitizing a fraction of the 100 million books in print. If that trend continues, it will be 2092 before a full library could exist. I’m not planning to stick around to see that happen.

It is obvious that libraries, including the Douglas County Library System, are in a funding crisis. Thus the cut back on library hours in the county system. There is no doubt that the technology available today, could eliminate expensive structures and book storage facilities, but what about librarians?

A library is more than just row upon row of bookshelves. Librarians are not just employees there to reshelve those books. They are the information specialists in a world so complex that it needs the human touch to navigate in cyberspace world. It is my belief that librarians are needed more today than ever.

Arthur Herman in his book “How the Scots Invented the Modern World,” states that one of Scot philanthropist Andrew Carnegie’s greatest contributions to the American society was his gift of building public libraries. “By the time of his death, the total number of readers in the United States using his free public libraries every day was an estimated 35 million.” Ruth A. Wooden, president of Public Agenda wrote in an article on the future of public libraries in an internet age that Carnegie’s gift over a hundred years ago helped educate generations of Americans. A century later, she wrote “nearly 90 percent of library funding comes from local public dollars, which can be seen as either a curse or a blessing.”

In today’s economy, it would appear tax dollars funding libraries is more of a curse than a blessing. A study found that despite the mind boggling useful information on the web, it is simple not true that all information can be found online. Nor is there an assurance yhat the information that is online is factual.

As a writer, I would have to agree that authors and publishers are not going to allow their works to be freely accessible on the internet. Someone has to pay the royalties to the authors. Copyright laws already protect against plagiarism, although in this online age people seem to ignore those protections.

Current copyright laws protect literary works for a period of 70 years beyond the author’s death, and there have been court test about public domain works being off limits when prefaces, introductions or appendices are still under copyright.

Even if libraries have the electronic reader book, available, someone has to pay the piper.

The library user will probably have to pay for each checkout. There are no free lunches and I don’t see another Andrew Carnegie standing in the wings.

(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)

Wicked Bugs
By Amy Stewart
Illustrated by Briony Morrow-Cribbs
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Hardcover $18.95

By BILL DUNCAN
The News-Review

Since the beginning of human existence on Earth, we humans have been bugged by bugs of all shapes and sizes, some harmless nuisances, others carrying disease and death in their poisonous venom. For example, according to Amy Stewart in “Wicked Bugs,” the malaria-infected mosquito has killed more people than all the wars combined and continues to kill a million people a year.

Stewart’s latest book comes after her successful earlier book, “Wicked Plants,” revealing dangers to humans lurking in the foliage of ordinary looking plants. “Wicked Plants,” was reviewed in Currents in 2009. The author lives in Arcada, Calif. Both volume come from Stewart’s insatiable appetite for facts about the natural world. She writes from exacting research with wit and style, as she has done in all four of her previous books.

The recent infestation of bed bugs in the United States proved that bugs can become immune to pesticides, but Stewart reveals these blood sucking bugs can be more of a danger to health than just a nightly battle with their bite. In Toronto, Canada, a 60-year-old man suffered from severe anemia after blood loss from an infestation of bed bugs. Prior to World War II, bed bugs were prevalent in the United States. Pesticides all but eliminated the nuisance. What frightens scientists is that bugs have built a resistance to chemical controls.

Not only are bed bugs a renewed threat, the attic of a North Carolina family’s home was invaded by bats that carried bat bugs, closely related to bed bugs but feed on the blood of warm-blooded animals.

Stewart has tracked down more than 100 entomological horror stories of creatures that infest, infect and wreak havoc on humans. The forests that surround Douglas County are vulnerable to destructive beetles and termites. The Mountain Pine Beetle devoured 35 million acres of forest in British Columbia. Hunters in Douglas County should be aware of the deadly deer tick, the carrier of Lyme disease, named for Lyme, Conn. where it was first isolated and its source identified.

As Douglas County develops its new wine industry, it should be noted that a minuscule American insect called phylloxera, an aphid, destroyed the French wine industry in the 1800s. The only way the French vineyards were saved was by grafting plants onto American rootstock, which resist the pests.

Stewart’s research discovered many anecdotes connected to the hideous bugs that have plagued mankind for centuries. In that regard Stewart cites an infestation of typhus-infected body lice as helping to bring down Napoleon’s army during the failed 1812 war with Russia. A century later, Lenin declared during the Russian Civil War that “either socialism will defeat the louse, or the louse will defeat socialism.” Carole Hargis was arrested for attempted murder of her husband by slipping a tarantula’s venom sac into a blackberry pie.

Entomologists have become part of crime solving forensic science by identifying bugs found in the remains of a body. Stewart includes travel tips to foreign countries and says don’t walk barefoot in Brazil, don’t sleep on the floor in the Congo and check the midge forecast before planning a golf trip to Scotland.

She lists the “Gardener’s Dirty Dozen,” but qualifies that with “generally speaking, a bug that eats plants in the garden is not really wicked enough for me, after all most bugs eat plants.” The dirty dozen she lists, is actually 11 in number and includes the whitefly, snails and slugs, cutworms, earwigs, Japanese beetles, cucumber beetles, tomato hornworms, flea beetles, codling months, scale, and tent caterpillars.

“I made my choices of the bugs I selected for the book on the impact these creatures have on humans,” she said. “I found bugs that spread disease, inflict pain and suffering, cause destruction on a large scale, or otherwise change the course of civilization.”

(Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)

By BILL DUNCAN
The Elder Statesman

My son, Barry, died on Friday, July 1 from malignant melanoma, the same cancer I survived more than 30 years ago after being told it was terminal. Why this vital, young father of five lost the battle and an old wretch like me lives on is one of life’s imponderables.

At age 19, he moved with my family to Roseburg and at that young age designed and remodeled the old farmhouse we bought on acreage in Garden Valley. There isn’t a room in the house that doesn’t have his fingerprint. He was a genius at woodworking and returned to California and opened a woodworking shop, building screen doors for architects. He called his business Knock on Wood.

But he showed other talents too. He penned a column in the Willows, Calif. “Sacramento Valley Mirror” each week, using the words “The Carpenter,” as part of his byline. As a tribute to that skill and as a memorial, I am reprinting my favorite of among his columns:

REQUIEM FOR A FRIEND
By W. Barry Duncan

I’ll never forget the first day I saw her. She was black as night, little and cute, calling to me subtly as she stood there, in her not quite all together.

I was in a strange neighborhood, searching for something other than the friendship I was soon to find. She beckoned me in a way that I found hard to resist. I approached cautiously not knowing what to expect, after a brief survey, I made my move.

That night she wouldn’t leave my mind. I saw her in my dreams, thinking of all the ways we might possibly consummate our soon to be relationship. A couple of days later I found myself back in that neighborhood. She was still there. We flirted unabashedly.

I was hooked. We exchanged pleasantries, and she came home with me that night.

We made a bed and have been enjoying each other’s company ever since. People laughed when they saw us together. I was always proud of the way we worked together though. Our love for each other was as unique as it was loyal. She has been a most faithful companion. I relied on her for almost everything. Even when she had had enough of me and blew off steam on the way to Sacramento, Calif. Half way across the causeway she decided this was it, blew her stack, and I’m tellin’ you when that girl lets off steam you don’t want to be anywhere around.

We argued there on the side of the road, freeway traffic whizzing by, and, after a while, I managed to cajole her into sticking with me a little while longer. That was five or six years ago. I never again pushed her so hard. Promising as I did that day to treat her with the respect that she deserved.

I kept my promise.

My friend abandoned me the other day, perhaps she was jealous. She left me beside Walker Creek, in the shade of the Blue Gum forest. She’s gone for good. I begged her not to leave me, to stay with me just a little further, promised her better times were just around the next bend. I tried to breathe just a little more life into our friendship but alas it was too little, too late.

She left me there by the side of the road, this time for good.

I’m gonna miss that old farm truck.