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The Mid-county MEMO is your newspaper. We want to hear from you. Discuss an important issue or address a concern you want to call to the community’s attention. We prefer e-mailed letters to the editor e-mailed to Darlene Vinson at: editor@midcountymemo.com. Please put ‘letter to the editor’ in the subject line. You may also mail your letter to 3510 N.E. 134th Ave., Portland, OR 97230 or fax it to 503-249-7672. Our deadline for the November issue is Friday, Oct. 14.
Top cop job becomes revolving door
To the editor:
I see we recently got a new East Precinct commander (Mid-county Memo Pad item September 2005).
Has the position of commander of Portland Police Bureau’s East Precinct become a last, short stop before retirement?
If memory serves, the last three East Precinct commanders, Rick Rictor, Cliff Jensen and Greg Hendricks, collectively lasted just over three years. The last commander, Hendricks, didn’t even serve a full year.
For each of the last three commanders, it was their last stop before retirement.
Seems to me like a pattern is developing. Don’t the citizens who live in East Precinct, Portland’s largest, deserve better?
I am certain they all did fine jobs during their brief tenures, but don’t the citizens of East Portland deserve more continuity in a sensitive leadership position such as this?
We hear the media trumpet serious crime issues in East Portland, but they must not be serious enough for the powers that be at police headquarters to give us a commander that doesn’t stay longer than a year.
Doesn’t the job of East Precinct commander hold more importance than as a “reward” before retirement for long, faithful service to the PPB?
I have no doubt East Precinct’s new commander, Mark Crebs, is entirely competent and capable to run Portland’s largest police precinct. I am just asking downtown if we can keep him for more than a year this time.
A concerned citizen of East Portland
Name withheld on request
Citizen reacts to Gulf Coast tragedy
To the editor:
My morning walk to the bank took me along the parkway at the Russellville Apartments. The flowers of September are in full bloom. Red, yellow, orange and purple, the grass freshly mowed. Portland, Oregon is such a beautiful place.
When I got tot the parking lot for the Village Inn Restaurant, I saw a beautifully restored red Ford pick-up truck. The custom made license plate announced it was a 1936 model. I believed my dad had just such a truck. I was three years old that year. Perhaps this was an older model; I doubt my dad could have afforded a new truck even for $400.
Next I stopped at the bank to turn in $28 in coins from our garage sale for green backs. The teller was new. We did not know each other. “Do you have an account here,” she said. “Yes,” I replied. “May I have your account number?” Fortunately I had a check in my billfold. She put the coins in a plastic bag with my name and account number.
Was this gray haired old man turning in counterfeit coins in order to steal $28 in greenbacks? I miss those places where everybody knows my name.
Since hurricane Katrina has visited our shores, I have been thinking a lot about places once called home and loved ones now long gone.
Now I miss my dad. Somehow I feel closer to him than I do other family members. He was not burdened with material possessions. If he had been living on the Gulf Coast when Katrina hit, he would have been happy to leave with the clothes on his back, with no bitterness or regrets. That’s just the way he was. In his seventy-five years he was only married six years. He was past forty when he married. In six years he married, had a son, buried his father, mother and wife. Yet, he had no regrets, but only thanked God for the few years he had with my mother.
A few years ago I drove by the farm in Iowa where my dad worked as a hired hand for a widow lady. He received room and board and a dollar a day for his labor. He lived there, four miles from the town where I lived with my aunt and uncle, so he could be a part of my growing up.
The house where I spent weekends and summer vacation days with him and the widow lady is gone now. Just a bit of pastureland where the house once stood. I felt sad that the house I knew so well was gone.
I cry now for the people of New Orleans, Biloxi, Miss. and other towns and cities destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Anyone who has ever visited there, as I have twice, will have fallen in love with the fun, music, the historic buildings and the people.
As of last Christmas, I exchanged Christmas greetings with an elderly, retired history professor living in Biloxi. I wonder if he and his apartment complex survived the storm.
Things are not always as they appear. Those who entertained and served us in the bars and restaurants of New Orleans may have gone home at night to substandard housing. But whatever they had, it was home. And in the neighborhoods where they lived, everybody knew their names, and the smiles on their faces.
Oh, they may find jobs, and new houses to live in, a new community with schools and churches but oh how they will miss home. And now we all will miss New Orleans and the other cities on the Gulf Coast until they are rebuilt.
Robert D. McNeil
Russellville Park resident
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