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 59th 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 5th. 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.”
