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July 24, 2006

St. Johns Working Class History Museum

Here is an old picture of Jower's from this year's St. Johns Parade. I forget who the marching band was. Jower's has been owned by the same Chinese American family for like a 100 years or something, but is closing and changing hands soon. Jim had a great idea to turn Jowers into a museum of working class history. And the museum store would sell Carhartts, just like Jower's does now (it's a work clothes store). I thought that was a great idea (TM), but something else is going on with Jower's now. I forget what -- not a museum, though. Probably condos.

BTW, WTF is up with the Willamette Week? Maybe getting the ass-kicking their photographer got is exacerbating out their class prejudices? First the idiotic story on "the most dangerous 'hood in Portland" (two phrases I really hate are "'hood" and "NoPo" -- I read somewhere recently that "NoPo" means, "No Poor People" which kind of sums up my sense of it as part of the vocabulary of gentrification -- and when our neighborhood watch met, the cop who came to lecture us kept referring to our neighborhood as the "'hood" -- he was really eager to get home to Vancouver) and now this story on River Rats -- here's a choice selection from the latter:

"On rafts and drift boats, inner tubes and air mattresses, the great blue-collar tide washes up onto the beach (or hikes in from the Columbia River Highway). They come equipped with boom boxes, cell phones, coolers, deck chairs, beer, chips, dogs and barbecues—and leave behind a swath of broken bottles, plastic bags, cigarette butts and human waste."

Lygate does make the point somewhere in his article that not everyone who is blue collar (or immigrant, the other demographic he points out recreates on the Sandy) shits on the beach, and I'm not saying he shouldn't make references to class, but the overall message of the article is pretty offensive, especially on the heels of the other article. Almost as bad as the continuous references to "White Trash" in the Mercury, which I stopped reading last year for that reason (that, and it had no content to speak of).

I guess I'd better escape into some office AC -- I'm getting too het up.

BTW: One nice thing about the Sandy River article: there's a handy chart of good swimming holes attached!

Posted by mary at July 24, 2006 11:07 AM

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