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.

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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.”