Jam on the Ceiling

By J. Wesley Sullivan

As a columnist for the Oregon Statesman and the Statesman Journal for many years, Wes talked about writing a book, but he didn't realize he'd already written one until his sons went through more than 700 of his columns and compiled the best ones into Jam On The Ceiling. In this book, Wes talks about Oregon history and politics, the changing times and technology, traveling the world and hiking in Oregon, and the time he spent with his son Bill (William L. Sullivan) working to build and then enjoy a log cabin in the wilderness along the Siletz.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mary E. Lowd
• Release date: Jun 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310781254

J. Wesley Sullivan

J. Wesley Sullivan (1921-2007) was a newspaper editor and columnist for Salem's Oregon Statesman and the Statesman-Journal. He went straight from piloting B-17s in WWII to the newsroom, and he continued working with newspapers, writing a weekly personal column, until his death. He has been inducted into the Oregon Newspaper Hall of Fame and the UO Journalism School's Hall of Achievement. J. Wesley Sullivan is the author of three books: Jam on the Ceiling, To Elsie with Love, and My Wife Has Alzheimer's.

Book preview

Jam on the Ceiling

by

J. Wesley Sullivan

* * *

Also by J. Wesley Sullivan:

To Elsie With Love

My Wife Has Alzheimer's

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Smashwords Edition

Edited by David Sullivan and Willam L. Sullivan

Copyright © 1987 Mary E. Lowd

(www.marylowd.com)

* * *

Table of Contents

Introduction by the Editors

Chapter 1: Backwards Into the Future

Chapter 2: The Siletz - A Log

Chapter 3: This Mad World

Chapter 4: Over My Shoulder

Chapter 5: The Great Outdoors

Chapter 6: Great Debates

Chapter 7: The Siletz - Another Log

Chapter 8: New Friends

Chapter 9: Jam on the Ceiling

Chapter 10: Footloose

Chapter 11: Leave Politics To...

Chapter 12: The Siletz: The Top Log

Note by the Author

About the Author

Introduction:

This is an unauthorized collection of Wes Sullivan’s columns from Salem’s Oregon Statesman and Statesman-Journal.

As the two younger sons of the eminent thinker and writer, we urged our father to do the book himself. He refused. He pointed to a definition in one of his columns:

Newspaper Columnist: Someone who, having once had something worthwhile to say, is now assigned to say it on a regular basis whether he has anything worthwhile to say or not.

Humility is all very good in its place. But this kind of wisdom deserves to be paraded through the streets. We resolved to publish a book of his writings secretly and put it under the family Christmas tree.

Our task proved trickier than we had thought. First, how does one get copies of all those weekly columns? An inspiration sent us to the microfilm room at Oregon State University’s library. Sure enough, they had copies of The Oregon Statesman dating to its founding in 1851 -- all stored on thousands and thousands of little reels of film. The columns could only be found by cranking the film through a projector, reel by reel. But a machine would photocopy any page we chose for a dime.

After two-and-a-half days of eye strain and $70 in dimes, we had a six-inch stack of copies that covered just the past eleven years. To our surprise and relief, he’d only written unsigned editorials and headlines prior to that, from 1945 to 1975. We figured the book could do without earlier gems like MEN TROD DUSTY MOON.

Back home, we set up a dozen labels on the bed and started sorting columns by topic. We expected to fill Hiking, Reflections, and Politics without any trouble. But we kept coming across columns that demanded new classifications: Exercise. Marriage. The Siletz. Computers. Had Dad really railed so often against the system? We made a category for The System and ended up with twenty-four columns there.

Sorting done, we needed a grading system. We had both been teachers, but opted against using the standard essay-grading method -- throwing the papers down a flight of stairs to see which is weightiest. This would confuse our prior sorting. Instead we devised a rating scale starting with ten (All-Time Great), and going right down to two (Transitory Junk) and one (Burn).

Some of the ratings on Dad’s great crusades had slipped with age. In a much-heralded series in 1980, he reported from a trip to Moscow that the Russians would do nothing to jeopardize their elaborate preparations for the Olympic Games. How was he to know they would invade Afghanistan the following month? Sometimes the headlines tell the story. 1977: Solar energy’s time is now. 1979: Maybe now is the right time to fully support solar power.

Of twenty columns under Taxes, we didn’t choose to reprint a single one. However, we OK’d sixteen of twenty-six columns in the Family/Personal stack. Writers who want objective sorting of their works shouldn’t leave the job to their sons.

Finally we started piecing the whole mess together on our home computers. We smirked conspiratorially when it proved possible, by chopping and pasting from twenty-six different columns, to compile a chapter with Dad’s own autobiography-- something he swore he’d never write. (I really don’t have a very good memory, he’d say).

But the title?

It was Dad’s idea. After almost everyone in the family but Dad had published a book of their own, we recall him musing, Oh, I’ll never write a book of my old columns. I’m still writing new ones. I’m just too busy looking forward to look backward. But if I did, I’d call it Jam on the Ceiling."

All right, then -- how did he get Jam on the Ceiling?

Our mother Elsie asked the same thing when she came home from a weekend convention in June of 1981 and found the strawberry stains overhead in her kitchen. And as Dad wrote in his column the next week, What could I tell her? I couldn’t expect anyone who hadn’t been through it to understand.

William L. Sullivan, Eugene, 1987

David Sullivan, Corvallis,1987

Chapter 1:

Backwards Into the Future

My 85-year-old Aunt Vera may have arthritis so severe that she must rely upon her cane (which she calls Able), but she’s sharp as a tack mentally. The other night, after listening to complaints on a San Francisco radio talk show about the lack of job opportunities, she began listing service jobs that were available when she was young, but that no longer exist.

The implication of her list was that work is available for those with enough initiative to go out and do it.

Her description of life in Portland is much as I remember it from my youth. Delivery trucks were everywhere. Every big department store made home deliveries, of even relatively small parcels. When a woman went shopping for a dress, she didn’t take her purchase home with her on the streetcar. She had it delivered the next day.

My grandmother took it for granted she could call her grocer any morning, order whatever she wanted and hold him personally responsible if the foodstuffs weren’t delivered by noon and up to her demanding standards. The fish wagon and the fresh vegetable and fruit truck called at her home twice a week. She was a queen, courted in her humble castle by the local deliverymen.

I remember the popcorn wagon as a frequent neighborhood visitor. And, of course, the Good Humor ice cream man with his jingling bell. I still have a photograph of myself atop a Shetland pony that was led around by a photographer who knew that youngsters like me were suckers for the opportunity to wear chaps and a cowboy vest and hat.

The demise of the home-delivery grocery system began in the deepest part of the Great Depression. A new store called Fred Meyer opened somewhere up on Morrison Street in Portland, selling cans of vegetables and other food in cases lots cheaper than we could buy them at that nearby, home-delivery grocery store. I remember carrying home a case of cans on the streetcar. I didn’t realize I was participating in an economic revolution that would reach its culmination in the virtual elimination of neighborhood grocery stores.

Magazines were sold and delivered by hand, from a magazine bag hung over the shoulder. The prestigious delivery boys sold the Saturday Evening Post in the days when it really was delivered on Saturdays, at a nickel a copy.

I had a Delineator magazine route, again at a nickel a copy. It was a women’s magazine. During the Depression it took a lot of house calls to find enough sympathetic housewives to empty that bag. At a nickel apiece, how could such a system have paid? All I remember is the promise of premiums if I increased sales.

Perhaps the most amazing of all the daily and weekly callers was the Metropolitan Life Insurance man. My aunt says he rode the old Richmond streetcar line out to my grandmother’s house every week at a nickel a ride to collect the 10-cent premium on the $50 life insurance policy on each one of her six children.

It is hard to imagine a time when it would be profitable to collect those few pennies, by hand. But those were the days when we knew each other, when we saw the insurance man and the rest, daily or weekly, instead of seeing computerized bills.

Those were desperate times financially, during the 1930s. The patina of nostalgia mustn’t be allowed to disguise them.

But what of the contention that such opportunities for personalized, neighborhood delivery service are available today? Even if it were financially feasible, to whom would they deliver? In a society that requires two wage-earners to make the monthly payments on affluence, no one would be home to accept the goods.

* * *

In 1927, as a boy of 6, my parents took me camping for the first time -- to the Cove Palisades in Central Oregon.

Today there is still a tremendous sense of awe and excitement, standing on the brink of the rimrock, looking over that vast chasm, where the Deschutes, Metolius and Crooked Rivers join. Seeing down through the millions of years of geologic layering, and understanding how the slow, steady erosive pressure of the water has conquered the hard basalt rock, adds a dimension to the beauty of the scene.

But for excitement, nothing can recapture the thrill, in 1927, of descending, in a Model-T Ford, the one-lane dirt and rock road carved from that wall. That chilling descent was matched in concern only by the thought that the car had to make it back up those steep slopes.

The journey from Portland was made possible by the recently opened Wapanitia cutoff to Central Oregon where, before the days of irrigation, farmers desperately battled the hazards of dry-land farming. I remember the weathered, abandoned farmhouses that told of their failures. The same weathered-wood effect and style of architecture is used today in many of the luxurious summer homes along the top of the Deschutes canyon rim.

In 1927 we spent the night under the shadow of a great natural formation called Steamboat Rock. The modern campground is not far from the spot.

But there are several differences. The lake behind Round Butte Dam now covers the spot where we originally camped. And today’s down sleeping bags and double-walled nylon tents are in sharp contrast to the bedroll of blankets we used then. Instead of a foam pad, a hip hole dug into the dirt helped cushion our bones from the hard soil.

The R.V. of 50 years ago was a Model-T driven at 35 miles per hour. It became a touring car with the attaching of a tall black box to one running board and the placing of an accordionlike rack on the other.

The rack held the luggage and the box was fitted out with shelves covered with oil cloth. They contained the dishes and the food for the trip. When the lid folded down, it became a table.

That night in what was to be Cove Palisades Park marked my first night of sleeping under the stars. My second was at the headwaters of the Metolius River where we marveled at the stream which came cold and crystal clear from under Black Butte. I remember my father read a newspaper by the light of a full moon that night. What a way to be introduced to the wonders of Oregon’s outdoors.

I suppose I know more about the Cove Palisades area now than I did when I first saw it. And yet, as I think back to a small boy’s discovery of the treasures hidden in that great gap in the seemingly flat Central Oregon plain, how much has been lost that can never be captured again?

* * *

I started writing for a newspaper at the age of 13.

It’s true.

In the 1930s, The Oregonian was published in an old, red building at 5th and Alder Streets in Portland. Youth clubs were a feature of newspapers back then. The Oregonian sponsored the Young Oregonians and the Oregon Journal sponsored the Journal Juniors.

A great variety of club activities, including tumbling, music and hobby groups, took place in large rooms on the mezzanine floor of the Oregonian building. The whole program was headed by Amby Amburn, a genial former circus clown.

The club news was chronicled by members of a Reporters Club, with a quarter page of each day’s Oregonian devoted to the stories.

I was managing editor of the Reporters Club one year.

Each week one of those larger-than-life people who worked in the newsroom on the top floor would be sent down to tell us about one phase or another of covering and writing news. To us, they were straight out of The Front Page. As I look back, however, I’m sure most of them were novices themselves, on the police beat, making $18 a week.

But we were entertained by the superstars as well. I recall Sports Editor L. H. Gregory talking with us, bouncing a baseball in his hand. Greg never told us a word about journalism, but we came away with some memorable stories about sports.

The banter and camaraderie of those years reflected more youthful enthusiasm than great wit, and the stories we wrote were not particularly praiseworthy.

But was it any wonder that I never had a doubt, from that time on, my career would be in newspapering?

It took me a year after high school to get enough money to start at the University of Oregon School of Journalism. There I became a member of that legendary institution, the 3 O’clock Club, which convened in the wee hours after the student newspaper, The Daily Emerald, had been put to bed. There were one or two all-night restaurants in Eugene which put up with us and our raucous songs about the merits of O’Reilly’s daughter.

Those were golden years in college, disrupted all too soon by World War II.

* * *

There is nothing like setting out to buy your wife a wedding ring to make a husband’s thoughts turn to marriage.

A few days ago I took Elsie to the jewelers to buy her a wedding ring. It was over thirty-three years since I did this the first time. If, in 1943, we had settled on a sturdy gold band, instead of that beautifully thin little ring which got thinner with the years, we wouldn’t have had to do the whole thing over again.

We were college students at the University of Oregon. It was wartime. Only three weeks after we were married, I was called into the service.

The marital objectives of our generation were so clear no one even bothered to define them. We and all the others around us wanted to survive the war, get a job and raise a family.

Today’s young people appear to be brighter, more knowledgeable than we were at the same age, but society gives them conflicting sets of instructions about the future. The result is the highest divorce rate in history.

The throwaway marriage has become the disastrous end product of a throwaway society. All too often the marriage contract becomes an agreement allowing one or both partners to use the services of the other as long as it meets his or her needs or pleasures. Society has given up trying to sort out blame for the dissolution of the marriage contract, settling for no-fault divorce.

It is time the institution of marriage took the offensive. There are countless generations of proof that, allowed to work its full magic, marriage can lead to true fulfillment and personal actualization.

Marriage is more than being in love or out of love. It is an obligation for the partners to attempt to grow together as a team, rather than to outgrow one another.

As millions of people now are picking themselves up from the debris of their shattered marriages and personal relationships, they are assessing what went wrong and asking how they can find that enduring, maturing partnership in love that they sought in the first place.

The challenge is learning to love unconditionally. That’s a scary concept, isn’t it? Unconditional love. This is the kind of love Christians are told they must bring to God.

In a sense, it is even more difficult to give unconditional love to the person you live with every day, who refuses to roll up the toothpaste tube properly, who misplaces the checkbook and whose hang-ups overlap and interfere with one’s own.

To give unconditional love to this other person requires a degree of risk-taking so frightening many people today just won’t accept the challenge. Many, perhaps most, marriages draw the line short of that total risk-taking, with a common agreement, often unstated, that certain areas of discussion, certain parts of the past, certain feelings are off limits.

Hand-in-hand with risk-taking must go communication. The willingness and the ability to talk with one another, unfettered, is essential. Long practice and training usually are necessary.

Only through a willingness to open ourselves fully to another can we release our own full potential. Only through sharing unconditional love can we find it within ourselves and discover the peace that goes with genuine self-acceptance.

What a wonderful and fulfilling secret lies behind the door of marriage, for those who are willing to take the risk of unlocking it.

What a terrible waste of achievement and fulfillment exists in a society of throwaway human relationships.

Ah, yes. About the wedding ring transaction. It had an unexpected twist. After due consideration, we decided that the gold wedding band which Elsie gave me in 1943 was the one that fitted her needs best.

My hand had grown too large for it. So we had my ring cut down for her, and I’m the one with a new one -- although it bears the same inscription inside as the one she gave to me.

So, I wore the ring for the first thirty-three years of our marriage.

Now, she can wear it for the next thirty-three.

I don’t feel guilty about her wearing a second-hand wedding ring, as long as the first hand was mine.

* * *

I’ve been comparing scrapbooks with other American World War II servicemen. They look surprisingly similar. The men all sent home their first pictures in uniform. There are silly photographs of soldiers and their wives clowning with other couples. Then there are those last pictures taken just before leaving for overseas service.

There were plenty of hardships in a wartime marriage. I recall traveling for days on trains without a place to sit. I remember cadging ration stamps to get enough gasoline for the final trip home from training camp, before going overseas.

Trying to find a place to stay for the night when all the soldiers were let off base was a chronic complaint. I was in pilot training at Fort Sumner, N.M., for a time, a place distinguished only for being the home of Billy the Kid. The entire town rented out its bedrooms when the cadets were allowed off base. I have no idea where the townspeople slept. Things were so desperate that one night Elsie and I rented a room in the hospital.

People went out of their way to accommodate servicemen and their wives. I recall the time we were taking a carload of couples from Oklahoma toward Oregon, with only a week to make the trip and visit our homes. As we got to the outskirts of Oklahoma City late on a Saturday afternoon, a rear tire gave out. We had no replacement and no authorization to buy another tire. From a service station operator, I got the name of the man who was in charge of tire rationing for Oklahoma City. I called him and explained our plight. He drove out to the station to authorize a tire purchase. It turned out I had caught him on his way to the hospital where his wife was having an operation, but he took time to send us on our way home.

When we finally flew to England and the war, the time for photographs was over. The scenes remain, unfaded, only in the scrapbook of the mind.

* * *

The lives of the members of a combat bomber crew are fused by the intensity of the experience. Once joined, it is not possible to become completely separate again.

Bill Whitehead and I flew almost all of our thirty-five missions on a B-17 together in World War II -- he as first pilot and I as co-pilot. For as many as ten hours at a time on missions over Germany we shared the controls, fifteen minutes on, fifteen minutes off. We monitored one hundred and fifty instruments and control mechanisms. We became extensions of one another, acting and reacting as one.

We, in turn, were dependent upon our navigator, Gene Hackney, to set an accurate course for home base regardless of weather or flying conditions.

One time the entire electrical system aboard the plane failed. Nothing would work but the engines. Hackney had to find our way home for us above the maze of little towns and railroad lines that covered England.

My most poignant memory of Hackney was on our last mission. We were deputy lead plane most of our tour. That meant Hack attended the early briefing. I could tell by the expression on his face when he left the briefing room whether we had a hard mission or a milk run ahead. On the day of the final mission he was as glum as I’d ever seen him. We were to finish up over Berlin.

The assembly of 1,200 B-17s in the first light of dawn over England was an unforgettable spectacle. Multicolored flares filled the sky as lead planes signaled to the rest of the squadron where to join the formation.

The planes stretched in groups of thirty-six, one minute apart, in a giant line from England clear to Berlin. We faced 360 anti-aircraft guns, the heaviest concentration in Germany, plus those new jet fighter planes.

The lead plane of our squadron peeled off in a cloud of black smoke over Berlin. Shells burst around our plane, shattering the windshield, sending glass into our eyes. The third engine began losing power, and suddenly we were