Moss-Backed Apple Knocker I

We are where we came from. Some of us have a rich background, a stew of the many places we lived growing up. I was raised in a monoculture. It has its upsides and downsides.

I am from Oregon, whose residents in the 60s proudly referred to themselves as moss-backed apple-knockers. Not just anywhere in Oregon, of course, a state which encompasses rain forest on the coast, Mediterranean climate in The Valley (Willamette) and desert in the east. I was raised on a single block in the state’s only city, Portland.

I might be forgiven for thinking the world all looks a lot like me, a Swiss-Irish Protestant working-class white kid. Of the 120 students in Beaumont grade school’s class of 1966, there were two Jews, one Catholic, one black student, a chiropractor’s son and a CPA’s son. Otherwise, no professionals: all white, Northern European working class.

Portland was a minor-league town in every sense of the word. Until I was 7, major league baseball was 2,000 miles away (the same distance my great-grandmother covered on foot when she emigrated to Oregon in the 19^th century). The Giants brought it within 600 miles; the Blazers didn’t arrive until I’d left for college.

The Portland Beavers were a Cleveland farm club. Portland had a farm club mentality in all things, not just baseball. In entertainment or the professions, the sometimes unspoken question was, “If you were any good, wouldn’t you be in the majors? (San Francisco, LA, New York). When people from the “big leagues” moved in, they were instantly accorded superior status. We were wowed by those who were “sent down.”

I was raised in a colonial state―from its admission in 1859 until the arrival of Tektronix and Intel, Oregon was a colony of the financial capital in the East, valued only for its natural resources, first beavers, then lumber and eventually filberts/hazelnuts.

That brings up one upside: residents of the Imperial capital are raised with the hubris of assumed superiority, while colonials are humble and feel they must earn their status. That’s worked out well.

I was third-generation Oregonian. No one my age could be more than fifth-generation.

(Next Week: Part II: So Why Did I Leave ?)