In the Spring of 1979 I was the Director of State Parks in California. One of the responsibilities assigned to Parks was the installation and care of historical markers. A debate took place in the office of my boss Huey Johnson, Secretary of Natural Resources. A marker was scheduled to be installed to commemorate the internment of Japanese Americans at Tule Lake California. The State Historical Society was protesting the script which named Tule Lake as an American Concentration Camp. The debate raged back and forth until Huey called in Jane Matsuoka, my Executive Secretary. When she entered the room he asked her, "Was Tule Lake a relocation camp or was it a concentration camp? Without blinking an eye, she said, "It was a concentration camp." She knew, first hand, what it was.

On a weekend in late May, I traveled to Modoc County, the farthest corner of Northern California, for the dedication of the marker. In the car with me were George and Jane Matsuoka and Jero Enomoto, Director of the California Department of Corrections. All of them had been interned at Tule Lake during World War 2.

Jane told of being yanked from her classes at Salinas High School and transported with her family to this isolated place. Director Enomoto told me that he was in law school when he was plucked from his life. He said that Loyola University in Chicago agreed to bring detainees to Chicago to continue their educations. He said the young men selected were bused into Alturas to await a train ride which would send them East to Chicago. At the town, they were greeted with signs saying, "No Japs Allowed," and were made to wait in the brushy area outside the town limits until the train arrived.

Tule Lake, like Manzanar, Poston, and Gila River, (where my sister's husband spent his childhood) are all situated in bleak landscapes. Some have beautiful views. All have severe weather and were intentionally sited in places of isolation.The ceremony we came for was the unveiling of a stone monument, designed and built by the Japanese American Citizen's League. The speeches were well thought out and delivered, and we all went back to Alturas where the accommodations for most of us was sleeping bags on the floor of the high school gymnasium. Rumors circulated that unhappy local residents were going to cause trouble, but nothing transpired at the gym.

In the morning, an anxious State Park Ranger came to get me. I drove him to the marker site and he showed me the one day old marker. The words "concentration camp" had been chiseled off and someone had scribed into the bronze, "Fuck all Japs." The ranger was dismayed until I opened the trunk of the car and pulled out an identical bronze marker. The casting had been expensive, but the second marker was inexpensive and we had anticipated trouble.

I have checked the marker four times in the last forty years. It's still intact.
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A 1936 Shooting  Russell Cahill © 12/2019

Corvallis, Oregon – December 6, 2019

The rooming house at 128 - 9th St. S.W. where my father was shot, was torn down a year or so ago, leaving the entire 100 block bare and ready for a development advertised on one of those big blue Planning Department signs. Whatever is to replace the building that housed Oregon State College students in 1936 will find the old basements filled in with gravel.

It was from the basement of the building owned by Mr. and Mrs. Moss King that at around 6:30 P.M. on December 17th, 1936, Clyde Ellis, Mrs. King’s 14-year-old son from a previous marriage, obtained a 12-gauge double gun, returned to the first floor, shot Bill Cahill twice, set the gun by the door and ran off.

Classes had ended and finals taken. Bill Cahill, a native Hawaiian who had emigrated from the Territory at age 5, had transferred from San Mateo Junior College during the summer, and according to The Oregon State Monthly Magazine, he was considered the most valuable transfer player on the Beaver varsity football team. His dream was to study pre-medicine and to attend medical school and become a physician. His ticket for the train ride home to San Francisco for the holidays sat on the dresser in his room.​

Bill’s dream of becoming a physician was not to be. According to articles in the Corvallis Gazette-Times and the Daily Barometer, the shooting allegedly resulted from an argument. During dinner, Mrs. King scolded Clyde for coming to dinner in a filthy and smelly sweatshirt. The boy was said to have cursed out his mother, and Bill asked him to calm down and come upstairs to talk it over. The talk turned ugly and, according to Bill, he slapped the boy. They returned to the table. Clyde said he was going downtown and left by the front door.

Instead of downtown, the boy entered the basement, loaded a shotgun and returned to the dining room where he fired the first barrel at Bill. That blast tore through Bill’s back, ribs and hip area, opening a large wound and knocked him to the floor. Although bleeding profusely, Bill was able to run to another room and Clyde followed. As the boy prepared to shoot again, Bill grabbed a large chair and threw it at him. The second shot went through the bottom of the chair and hit Bill in his right arm.

Chief of Police Earl Humphrey was first on the scene of the shooting and a search was begun to find Clyde while an ambulance took Bill Cahill to Corvallis General Hospital where his wounds were cleaned and stitched. According to Bill, he was loaded into a Pullman car on a gurney and shipped to San Francisco where he was able to heal up over a period of weeks. His grant-in-aid for playing football disappeared as did his chance at a college education.

At around six feet tall, Clyde Ellis looked older than he was. He took Bill Cahill’s train ticket and disappeared. After travelling south, Clyde Ellis hitchhiked around the country. According to newspaper accounts, he believed he had killed Bill Cahill and 10 months later surrendered himself to authorities in New York. Upon his return to Oregon, he was tried and convicted of assault with intent to commit murder and sentenced to 6 years in the state penitentiary. Considering his age, the judge paroled him to his birth father in Portland for the 6-year term. The last known record of him was an obituary of his death in Yuma Arizona in 2000.

Bill Cahill got well, married my mother Dorothy Hutchinson and raised a family of 6 children. He became a seaman, served as a Lieutenant in the Merchant Marine during World War II, tried to make it in a couple of business ventures and returned to sea as a chief engineer on American President Lines ships. During my youth, I recall seeing the big 6 inch by 3 inch scar on his lower back and the scar in the triceps of his right arm. On occasion, a piece of lead shot would work its way to the surface of his body after migrating a couple of feet from its origin and he would have it removed and cleaned up. His chest X-rays were spectacular.

One of the points proffered by advocates for gun control is that firearms should be secured; particularly in homes with children. From Columbine to Sandy Hook, terrible events have occurred when unstable teen boys get it in their head to exercise their aggression through the barrel of a gun. It was as true in 1936 as it is today.

Source Material
Corvallis Gazette-Times Dec. 18,1936
Corvallis Gazette-Times Oct. 16, 1937
The Barometer Dec. 1936
Oregon State Yearbook 1936- 1937
Recollections of conversations with my father
With thanks to the Archivists at Valley Library, Oregon State University
 

If I had my old Grumman Sport Canoe here I could row for the rest of my life and never see more than ten percent of the shoreline of these canals and inland seas or bays. We travelled north to Texel Island and hiked the shoreline on Saturday. Got to see many new birds and ride some excellent ferries and bus routes. The island is popular in Summer, and even on a cold February Friday the boat was loaded with weekenders.

All along the train and bus routes were canals and drainages filled with ducks, geese and other water birds. Hundreds of greylag geese and a few Canadas were joined by herons and swans in the fields. North Holland is wet and birds love it. The farms are all well tended and occasional small villages pop up as you travel through the greenest landscape ever. 

Yesterday we took another trip north to a place called Marken. It sticks out on the end of a dike, (here spelled dijk), like an island that was connected at the end of a rope. On Sunday, everyone is out walking on a two or three mile circle of connected dikes with a brick trail on top. We noted the dozens of bicycles crowding the church yard. People even exercise while going to church. They are also avoiding high petrol prices.

Conservation is assumed in this place with solar panels on many roofs and big wind generators sticking up all over the cities and countryside. My impression of this place is that people crowded into this land have organized themselves pretty well with the best transportation system I've seen anywhere, and food grown and raised within proximity to the consumer. Fish may be the exception because of travel to the North Sea. 

One reason our country and Canada are so popular with folks from this region is the wide open spaces that still exist. I've run into Danes and others who rent Harleys in San Francisco and head for Death Valley just to experience freedom of the open road. Our National Parks draw the Dutch and Germans  like magnets. When they are home, everything is organized. It's not bad, just different. That's why we travel. I like this place.

The Delta flight wasn't bad, although my joints don't care much for the confinement in the seats designed for average sized Asian people. But a shuttle to our hotel in Hoofdorpp was right on time and we left our luggage and took the sprinter train to Amsterdam and bucked a stiff wind to the library. The seventh floor bistro in the public library, with it's fabulous view of Amsterdam is one of our favorite places. We wanted to go sightseeing, perhaps to the maritime musem, but the 0 deg C and high wind outside added to our jet-lag sent us scurrying back to the hotel and our room for the next week

After a night's sleep we awoke to a light snow which melted off before we hit the trainsit to Schipol Airport. We boarded a bus that took us directly to the Rijksmuseum. Last time we were here it was under renovation but now we got to spend the whole day wandering the halls of this huge old building. Paintings are organized by century but the meat of the museum is the 15 and 1600s collection. And the star of the show is the "Night Watch" by Rembrandt van Rijn. A big crowd was gathered in the exhibition room where a dozen huge paintings were displayed. Most portrayed vain men posing with their fellow town militia members in what was some kind of combination of a rotary club and N.R.A. meeting. For a good time, look on the internet for a flash mob of the Night Watch. It was put together by the museum to let people know that the renovation was over.

There were a few crowded areas but we were lucky to be here on a cold February weekday and got to see everything. There is one remarkable tryptoch of the Last Judgement by Lucas van Leyden. It's the centerpiece of the Leiden musem and is on loan while renovations take place. It's a huge vision of Christ sitting on a cloud directing traffic. On the left are people being carried to heaven by angels. On the right are people being thrust into the fire by demons and deformed figures. Everyone except Jesus and the angels is naked. It's common to see women's breasts and bums as well as men's hardware exposed in most of these religious paintings. Parishioners got to be titillated (pun ntended) while having the hell scared out of them. One other thing of note is that no black people were portrayed for the first 100 or so years. The first was a portrait of a favored bodyguard of a wealthy man. Everyone else was white including an alabaster Cleopatra, breasts rampant, who is dissolving a pearl in vinegar in order to drink it. Oh what party tricks. But wait, I thought she was Egyptian not Swedish. Everyone is white in these pictures.

There is a lot of personal vanity and, just as in our country, nationalistic memory here. People had their portraits done posing as biblical figures adoring the Christchild or just standing in the crowd at some tale from the gospels. And the big scenes of naval battles indicate that the Dutch never lost. Most were commissioned by the winning captain or his family. Still, they have a point. The Brits, French and others were constantly after rhe Dutch. Why? Well I recall the words of the famous bank robber Willy Sutton who was asked, "Why do you rob so many banks Willy?". His answer serves as the answer to this historical question: "Because that's were they keep the money."

Narda and I are off to Tanzania later this year.. 

My friend Adair Dammann contacted me about some young park rangers in Tanzania who were starting a conservation education program and needed a little help. This all led to a facebook connection with Alaitetei Lataika Lataika, a Maasai man who was a senior student at the Wildlife University at Maweka. I sent some equipment along with my niece Corina who was in Africa with a Whitworth College group. I sent a little support money and then spent some time editing grant proposals.

The upshot of all this is that we are finally making the long desired trip to see some of Africa. Ngorongoro Crater, Olduvai Gorge and the southern end of the Serengeti are all on the list of the Overseas Adventure Travel agenda and we'll have a couple of days to visit with people we only know from the laptop. 

One of the strange and wonderful upshots of all this is a painting some Tanzanian artist made from a facebook photo. It came back with Corina along with other gifts. It's a good portrait of me and a great look at the connection between electronic communication and art. Who knew that someone would reverse the process of recording paintings electronically and make a painting from the screen image. 

I'll be reporting from Europe and Africa on this site, so stay tuned.

The Geography of Writing.
John Steinbeck made me do it. During the mid-1950s, while a Junior at Campbell High School, I drove my ’40 Chevy all over the hills south and east of Salinas looking for the setting he might have envisioned for The Red Pony. Another high school buddy and I would go to Monterey and look for the whore houses from Cannery Row. All of those places where the lettuce was loaded onto iced rail cars in East of Eden and the migrant camps from Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath were out there somewhere and I was determined to find them.

Descriptions of places were part of what gave me the love of literature. Perhaps my desire to work in the unspoiled landscapes of the national parks had its genesis in those searches as well. There seemed a longing to get out from between four walls and to see.

In the 1960s in Alaska I was fortunate to know Jack Calvin, co-author of Between Pacific Tides. Jack had travelled with John Steinbeck and Ed Rickets, (the man who was the model for the character “Doc” in Cannery Row), on the voyage that inspired The Log from the Sea of Cortez. On a magical evening aboard the M.V. Nunatak, anchored in Sandy Cove in Glacier Bay, Jack told us wonderful stories of their trip through the Gulf of Baja California.

Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of Little House on the Prairie may have been responsible for the love affair we have with old farm houses. And how many over-the-hill men have pulled hamstring muscles running from Pamplona’s bulls because Ernest Hemingway wrote about it in The Sun Also Rises? Getting these things right is an important part of my writing. Some very good writers can make this stuff up from their vivid imaginations. Some of us need to actually be there. My writing buddy Suzanne Shaw has gone to London to research what people ate in the eighteenth century just so she can get it right in her new novel. 

My first books, Kolea and Tales from the Parks are filled with descriptions of landscapes. I’ve tried to make the places real enough so some teenager or septuagenarian might want to seek out the places and give life to the words on the page. While writing history or pre-history in fiction, one must often reconstruct a landscape that has been built over or otherwise changed. Finding old journals in the library can return me to another time and place and the stack of atlases and gazetteers in my writing room are a big help but there is no substitute for walking or paddling across the places I want to portray.

At my age and physical condition I’m no longer scaling the cliffs and backpacking across the passes of the world. Memory, for better or for worse, has to suffice for much of it. But even John Steinbeck had to slow down. In Travels with Charley he drove a pickup and camper around the country with his dog and enraptured us with the story of his dog peeing with great admiration on a huge redwood tree. I think it’s time for another trip.
 
 

It was early in 2015 when I was attending a writers workshop in Tokeland, Washington and discovered Booktrope. Jen Gilbert, one of the partners in that publishing house listened to my pitch and agreed to publish Kolea, my first novel. Booktrope was a remarkable idea in which authors were teamed up with managers, editors, proofreaders, and cover artists. Each member of the team was paid out of a percentage of the royalties and had great incentives to make the project work. The publishing business is brutal, and this startup managed to produce more than nine hundred books in it's short existence and was a godsend to many of us who had the experience of not even a polite e-mail or postcard of rejection from the publishers we wrote to.

Many of the Booktrope family were devastated at the announcement at the end of April, 2016 that the house was closing its operation June first. The complicated contracts between team members had to be renegotiated or bought out, and a flurry of correspondence between them took place. People hinted at litigation, the national pastime of the United States, and there was a lot of internet sobbing going on. But some of us have looked at it differently.

My team and I negotiated buy outs of our contracts accompanied by releases that allowed me to republish Kolea through a small house in Red Deer, Alberta called Dragon Moon. It is owned by Gwen Gades, the person who designed the cover for Kolea. Several other of her clients did the same. Other small publishing ventures are gladly taking on the work from other Booktrope authors.

My new book, Tales from the Parks, an autobiography of my adventures in National and State Parks. was in the final stages after edits and proofreading and was submitted for formatting and design a week before the closure notice. I pulled it back and decided to self-publish the book. Elizabeth Flynn, an excellent editor from Seattle has agreed to format the book and coach me through the process. Gwen Gades is designing the covers and I am learning more than I ever wanted to know about publishing books. There is a flurry of creativity going on among the survivors of this publishing demise.

I am not angry with Booktrope. I'm disappointed for them that it didn't pan-out. That is the destiny of most start up ventures. In fact I am very grateful for the chance they took on me when I couldn't even get a turn-down notice from publishers in Hawai'i. As soon as the new book is launched I will begin work on another book of fiction. Hele on, (get moving), as they say in Hawai'i.
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1978 - The author at Big Basin State Park With Governor Jerry Brown at the celebration of the 50th birthday of the State Parks Commission and park system.