Juneteenth in the Portland area, 1944: three Oregonian articles

Three short articles about what were apparently the earliest organized celebrations of Juneteeth in the Portland/Vancouver area. Maybe the "Emancipation Marathon" could be a real thing again, someday. (There's a literary marathon in Phoenix, Arizona, connected with Juneteenth, which is called by that name.)

From the Oregonian newspaper, June 14, 1944, p. 8:

Negroes to Picnic on 'Juneteenth'

Negroes of the Portland-Vancouver area will celebrate "Juneteenth," Negro emancipation day, Monday [June 19] at Cedarville park, six miles east of S. E. 82d avenue on the Powell valley road. It will be the first time that the day has been observed with an outing in this vicinity.

Feature of the occasion will be a barbecue. There will be dancing day and night, jitterbug contests, boxing, wrestling, races and a program of other athletic events for which prizes will be given.

The outing will begin at 8 A. M. and continue until 1 A. M. Tuesday.

***

From the Oregonian, June 11, 1944, p. 13:

'Juneteenth' Day Coming

Negro Holiday To Be Celebrated

Five hundred dollars in war bond prizes will be given the winners of a 14-mile marathon to be held Sunday, June 18, between Camas and Vancouver, Wash., as a feature of "Juneteenth" — the celebration of the 80th anniversary of Lincoln's emancipation proclamation.

"A holiday of deep meaning and importance to Negro people," said a member of the committee in charge of arrangements, "it has previously hardly been known in the northwest. With the thousands of southwestern Negroes in war work in this area, the program is attracting high interest."

[...]

Following the race at noon there will be picknicking in Leverich park, with a softball double-header at 2 P. M., with two American Youth for Democracy teams opposing one all-star boys' team and one all-star girls' team. There will be a war bond rally at the games.

Evening Program, Too

In the evening there will be a program in the Vancouver high school auditorium, at which the prizes will be awarded, with a pageant of American culture at 8 P. M.

Admission to the ball games and the pageant will be $1, plus the purchase of a war bond or stamp.

Arrangements are under the direction of the emancipation celebration committee of Vancouver and the American Youth for Democracy of Vancouver and Portland.


***

From the Oregonian, June 19, 1944, p. 19:

Stroude Captures Marathon Event

VANCOUVER, Wash., June 18 (Special) — Kelly Stroude won the first running of the Emancipation marathon here Sunday, covering the distance from Camas to Vancouver, 16 miles, in a respectable hour and 58 minutes.

Walter MacAfkill, New York, was second, being the only other runner to finish.

The race war run in connection with the "Juneteenth," well known Negro celebration, being held in the northwest for the first time this year.

Parks G. Prevette: the story of a man on Portland's skid row in 1971

The Willamette Bridge was an "underground" (alternative) newspaper that began publishing in Portland, Oregon in 1968. I was given some old copies of the Bridge by my youngest uncle, many years ago; he got them from his older brothers, who were in their 20s when the Bridge was being published. (I was just a kid during the heyday of the Bridge, having been born in 1965.)

I have no connection with the man described below; I just came across the article recently and found it interesting. This gentleman was able to tell his story, almost 50 years ago, and I think it should be retold now.

An epilogue first: according to Oregon death records, Parks Prevette died on Apr. 16, 1971 in Multnomah County, Oregon, only about three months after this article appeared. He did have a funeral; the Oregonian for Apr. 23, 1971 had a notice for it, stating that Parks was the father of Wade and Hubbard O. Prevette, brother of Betty Meyers, Celia Thompson, Madeline Palsen, Roy and James Prevette. Services were at the chapel of the Mt. Scott Funeral Home at SE 59^th and Foster; “private internment [at] Lincoln Memorial Park” in Portland.

Prevette’s wife, Mary Alberta Webb, remarried, to Albert John McCrellis, and died in 1975.

***

THE OTHER SIDE OF BURNSIDE by Peggy and Dwight; photos by Jeff Bakely. From the Willamette Bridge [Portland, Oregon], Jan. 7-Jan. 13, 1971 issue.

“All my life I’ve been kind of reserved. The person who got acquainted with me had to try.” –Parks G. Prevette

Parks G. Prevette is 79 years old and has lived in the Burnside area for the past five years. He tries to leave skid row whenever he can get the money together—either to visit friends in Seattle or to rent a small apartment in a different part of town—but it gets harder and harder for him to save money. His $103 a month from social security and $31 a month from the state just don’t seem to go very far, especially because he’s been robbed a few times recently. Some Bridge friends working at Chamber’s Checking on Burnside met Parks, who comes in often to peruse the collection of paperback books there. After talking with him they, and the Bridge staff, thought it would be interesting to publish Parks’ account of his life, leading to his present existence, and some of his thoughts on the neighborhood he lives in. Perhaps Parks’ story is different from most, but I have a feeling there are few generalizations one could make about any of the men and women living around Burnside.

Parks has worked all his life, up until the last 8 or 9 years when a stomach operation and tuberculosis left him feeling pretty weak. His recollections are focused around the different kinds of employment he’s been engaged in.

The first job Parks recalls having was when he was a teenager in Park City, Utah. He worked with a Mormon shoveling rock and earth into a sluice box. In 1906 the Prevette family moved to Alberta, Canada—about 50 miles outside of Calgary—to homestead some land. Parks’ father held a quarter section of the land until his son turned 18, then it could be his own. There was hardly anybody around there at the time; it was really pioneer existence in Canada then. Parks remembers the winter, when 60 degrees below zero was not uncommonly cold. He learned a trick to keep from freezing when driving the team on the three day journey bringing wheat to the market: fix the horses’ rig so they could steer themselves for a while, say 2 or 3 miles, then run along beside them to keep the blood circulating. Parks would do this periodically on the way to or from market. The wheat business turned out to be unprofitable, so Parks’ dad started a freighting service for a local store, and the son worked there for about 3 years. This business soon became unprofitable too, and in 1912 Parks moved back to the states, to Spokane, Washington. There he homesteaded once again.

From Spokane Parks got a job in Pullman, 80 miles away. His family stayed in Spokane awhile, homesteading. In Pullman Parks worked as a veterinary helper at a college and “wasn’t important.” In 1914 the whole family moved to New Mexico, and then to Arizona, and Parks worked in mning as a machinist helper. July 15, 1915 he got married at the age of 25. He went to Phoenix and had a physical check by the army, which he passed.

Parks then heard of a job in Astoria, Oregon on a government contract, and went there ahead of his family. By this time the war was over, but he still got a job as a helper in a pipe shop. In April 1919 people were being laid off by the thousands and Parks was one of them. His dad had moved up to Elk, Washington in the meantime and got a job there as a Boss Swamper. Parks and his wife moved there too, and he worked on a log chain, dragging logs into the shoot [chute] that went down into the river. Then they moved to Sandpoint, Idaho where Parks’ second son was born in 1920. The first son had been born in 1918 in Phoenix. In 1921 he went to Black Diamond, Washington and worked as a helper in a coal mine, until 1924. In October of 1923 his wife left him and took the children, going to San Diego to her parents. He went to Aberdeen where his family was, and stayed there seven years, working as a longshoreman. In 1934 they all moved to San Francisco and Park got a job as a laborer on a pipe line job. In 1936 he joined the AFL and for 14 years was in Local 261 AFL. In 1947 he moved back to Seattle and worked in the local union there for 8 years.

Parks started getting ulcers 15 years ago and had an operation which resulted in the loss of 1/2 of his stomach. He worked at light work for three years, but started to get weak again. Six years ago he got TB and went to the sanitorium [sic] for four months. He has not been able to work since. He has been in Portland five years, and half of that time has been in one nursing home or another. The nursing homes he’s been in, Parks says, have been run “strictly for profit.” They all took his monthly income save $8, which he was allowed to keep. He’s been out of the last home for ten weeks. He is still on doctor’s care and has to take four TB pills every day. He gets the pills from the medical center on SW 5^th. The head nurse and the doctor there think he should go back to the sanitarium but he doesn’t want to go back because he “wants his freedom.” 

Parks doesn’t sleep so well these days—he gets up early and usually spends a couple of hours reading before breakfast. After breakfast he has to take it easy, because of his stomach. He loves to be outside and just can’t see “sitting in my room talking to myself like the other old men do.” So he walks around, slowly with his cane, whenever weather and health permit. He loves reading, but there’s no place where he really feels comfortable sitting with a book, and his eyes bother him (he can’t afford glasses now). He loves to go to the show but it’s hard to scrape together the money. Parks doesn’t have many friends on Burnside partly, he feels, because he can’t and doesn’t want to socialize with a bottle, and also because he is pretty much of a loner. Maybe he could move to Seattle, but the bureaucratic hassle of getting free pills and other services is too overwhelming for him to consider now.

Parks doesn’t feel there’s been much change in Burnside since he’s been living there, except perhaps that more people are there now. Most, he believes, are young men—under 40 and most are there because of the “hard time,” the inability to find jobs. The living conditions are deplorable, much over-crowding, disease and dirt. He sees little hope of change: “there’ll always be a skid row.”

Dorothy Gish and the Blue Mouse, among other things

A couple of years ago I bought a box of old newspapers at an estate sale. Most are from the year 1919, and most are copies of the Oregonian. Someone apparently decided to save all the wartime papers. Only hoarders do that now, as none of our wars seem to end anymore. (Maybe the drug war is winding down, we’ll see.)

So if you start to follow this blog, be warned that you’ll see quite a few 96-year-old articles and adverts, rather like this one, for the Oregonian (Nov. 29, 1919) for a Dorothy Gish feature. 

I love the tag line. It seems very modern.

Dorothy Gish was the younger sister of Lillian Gish. The sisters were introduced to D. W. Griffith by their friend Mary Pickford, and both became stars during the silent era, though Lillian had the longer career and received an honorary Academy Award in 1971; Lillian has been called “The First Lady of American Cinema.”

Dorothy appeared in numerous popular comedies during the late 1910s and the 1920s, many of which are now lost, but she only made five films in the sound era; the last was Otto Preminger’s “The Cardinal,” in 1963. Dorothy married a Canadian actor, James Rennie, in 1920, but they divorced in 1935, and Dorothy never remarried. She died in Italy in 1968, at the age of 70, and is interred in Saint Bartholomew's Episcopal Church in New York City.

The People’s Theater, at SW Park & Alder in Portland, Oregon opened in 1911, when the trade journal Moving Picture World quoted a printed program that made clear that this theater had a social conscience:

“On Sunday, at the People's Theater we will put on an Edison film entitled, ‘Children Who Labor,’ directed against those of the rich who grind down the children of the poor. It is a very strong plea for action against a great evil and ought to command the approval of the entire body of the people. It also shows the good that pictures are doing throughout the world, the Photo-play being always arrayed on the side of right and justice.”

(Always? Well, if true, that didn’t last long. “Birth of a Nation” was only three years away.)

According to Gary Lacher in his 2009 book “Theaters of Portland,” The People’s was named for the People’s Amusement Company, which had run the first chain of Portland Nickelodeon machines. By 1920 the People’s had been acquired by the Jensen-von Herberg theater chain, run by Seattle businessmen Claude S. Jensen and John von Herberg. (By 1932 the firm faced boycotts of their Seattle theaters for alleged union-busting activities.)

John von Herberg was born as Peter Coyle in Peru, Indiana, to a Franco-American mother and an Irish-American father, and probably deserves a blog post of his own, if not a book. For now I’ll just link to this article about von Herberg.

In the summer of 1929 the People’s Theater was renamed the Alder Theater. (According to Julia Park Tracey, the theater was called the Music Box at some point during the 1920s, a name that would be attached to a number of Portland theaters in later years.) The photo below shows the theater in 1930.

I’ll leave you with the fact that, in 1923, in addition to the People’s Theater, the Jensen-von Herberg firm owned a second-run theater in downtown Portland named the Blue Mouse. A quick search of Google Books reveals that there were Blue Mouse theaters in a number of U.S. cities in the 1920s, and at least one still survives, on Proctor Street in Tacoma, Washington; built in 1923, the small theater is considered the oldest neighborhood theater in the state of Washington. As part of a renovation in 1994, Dale Chihuly designed neon mice as decorations for the marquee.

Advert for the film "Cleopatra," playing at the Circle Theater, Portland (from the Aug. 25, 1918 issue of the Sunday Oregonian)

Theda Bara was the original "vamp," a silent movie actress who made more than 40 films, many of which are now lost. "Cleopatra" was released in October of 1917, and had been in theaters for more than ten months when this ad appeared. The film is now considered lost, with no prints surviving, only a few fragments. After the Hays Code came into effect in the 1930s, the film was declared too obscene to be exhibited. (Note that in 1918 the word "pretentious" did not always have a perjorative meaning!)

The Circle Theater held 650 people, and was located on the east side of 4th Street between Washington and Alder. For a photo of the theater, go to:

 http://portlandthenandnow.tumblr.com/post/51659147022/december-1963-the-circle-theater-and-other

According to THIS page, by the 1950s, the Circle Theater was a popular gay pickup spot, with the balcony basically divided in two, one side for hetero couples, the other side for gay men. (Where the lesbian couples sat is anyone's guess, apparently.)

Art car with Hulk fists, Portland, Oregon

This car is usually parked near SE 43rd a few blocks south of Belmont.

Photo © 2015 Todd Mecklem

Zip-tie art on a street-sign post, Portland, Oregon (near SE 45th & Belmont)

Photo © 2015 Todd Mecklem

How to lose your job in 1918 (sugar cube edition)

The Multnomah Hotel, at 319 SW Pine, opened in 1912, is now the Embassy Suites Portland. Carl, in his early 20s in 1918, had immigrated with his parents from Germany in 1913. After the war he again found work as a waiter. Personally, I think putting six cubes of sugar in your coffee for any reason deserves at least a short jail sentence.

Article is from the Morning Oregonian, July 17, 1918.

Cops in corsets? From the Morning Oregonian, Nov. 29, 1919

From the Morning Oregonian, Nov. 29, 1919, page 1.

When yogurt was exotic! (Buttermilk Corner ad, Portland, Oregon, 1951)

And just look at those happy faces!

Window heads, Portland, Oregon

       Photo © 2015 Todd Mecklem