David Sees Jerry Rubin

                                                 David Sees Jerry Rubin

 In 1968, protestors (or rioters, depending on how you saw them) gathered at the Republican National nominating convention in Chicago. Eight were arrested and brought to trial in federal court. The eighth, Bobby Seale, separated his trial from the others. Judge Julius Hoffman ordered him bound and gagged because he wouldn't restrain himself in the courtroom. The remainder became known as the Chicago Seven. Radical Jerry Rubin was among them. 

During a hiatus in legal proceedings,Rubin came to Buffalo, NY, where David was teaching political science, to give a speech. The hall where he was to speak was packed to the gills. At the head of the hall was a stage with a coffin on it, and the coffin was topped with the freshly butchered head of a pig at each end (reflecting common disparagement of police as "pigs.") An announcer reported Rubin's progress toward the hall:  "He's at the airport. He's arriving on campus. He is approaching the hall." David couldn't see how he could squeeze in. Then, "Here's Jerry!" The coffin popped open, and Rubin stood up, drenched in sweat. He'd been waiting inside for two hours. He proceeded to give a radical speech.

 David said the event was pure theater, that Rubin was an outstanding showman.

 Eventually, according to the internet, Rubin modified his radical belief in protests and became a successful stockbroker and investor who believed that money talked. He died after being struck by a car while he attempted to cross a 4-lane road near his home in California.

David's Lobster Dinner

 David's high school classmate was Big Bob Cottell. In high school, he was 6'3" and about 130 pounds, but he kept on growing. When he hit 6'6.25", he was too tall for uniforms so was not drafted into the Army. He became a longshoreman and became as strong as he was big. Another friend, Tom Knutsen of a tugboat family wanted to throw a dinner--maybe this was when Dave came home from the Army--and got lobster from a friend who had a business distributing fresh lobster. Sometime the lobsters were too big to use in commerce, weighing five pounds and up. David tried to crack it with a cracker. He couldn't crack it open, so Big Bob picked it up with his big longshoreman hands, and opened it bare-handed.

Big Bob Cottell married Jan Bunell whose family had Brookmade Dairy. When David's father, Gene Sampson, wanted to build a railroad spur to serve the warehouse he used for his beer and wine distribution business in downtown Coos Bay, he couldn't get railroad ties because they were appropriated by the U.S. Government as an essential defense material during WW II. The Bunells had a supply of ties they had cut for the government, but some did not fit the government's specification exactly enough to sell, so they gave the lot to Gene, for free.

David and the Big Chipper

 David had a summer job during his college years, working at the Weyerhaeuser lumber mill  on the waterfront in Coos Bay, Oregon. One of the operations there used a "chipper," a disc six feet in diameter spinning a 1,000 RPM, moved a toothed ege with more than a 100 blades on it. It disposed of wood that couldn't go down a regular sawmill line. An employee used an air compressor to keep it clean of grease and chips. The guy who kept it clean was good at it. He wore a safety belt that kept him from getting too close to the machine. Unfortunately, one day he overlooked a 15-pound wedge stuck in a piece of wood he threw into the chipper. It sent shards of the wedge 15 feet to the ceiling and sent some pieces through the wooden floor. He operator ran, but was jerked back by his safety harness, and fainted. He had no physical injury but developed such sudden and severe PTSD that he never recovered.

David didn't see the incident because he was in the hospital, recovering from injuries he sustained in a car wreck.  

The Weyerhaeuser building was so long that a relative of Patty Sampson, a kid our age whose family came to visit Patty, commented, wondering what in the world it was. The building stood on Indian land under a long-term lease that ran out. The Indians repossessed the land and it is now all Indian casino.

Six-foot-six Bob Jacobson, "Jake," was an Oregon State University basketball player who also had a sawmill job. He lost two fingers on his shooting hand, and was out of basketball for a year, but returned and started for two years afterward.

David's Last Fracas

 David says his last fracas occurred in 1980 or 1981. He was working at his nightclub business, the University Bistro. A man came in angry at a couple sitting at the bar and pulled a gun. He aimed it up. David took the guy's gun arm and lifted the man completely off the ground, grabbed the gun, and threw the man down. A bouncer caught the man and walked him out. Twice during the Bistro years, he had to deal with knives. He felt the business wasn't safe--it wasn't a matter of if, but when, the next dangerous incident would occur.

David hoped and believed he could make the business thrive because he held a liquor license, but he met a man who also had a shop on University Avenue (in Seattle). The man sold coffee, and was able to work just daytimes, and able to hire employees to run the shop when he stepped out for a drink at the Bistro. It was a telling contrast.

Ted Louden Saves David's Life

 Ted Louden was an OSU football player, a semi-finalist in a smoker in California, "a grifter" and a lean 6', 260 pounds. David shilled for him in their beer-drinking contests. Ted's trick was to throw back a pilsner like a shot in about a tenth of a second, spilling none from his big head and big mouth. After everybody had had a few, Dave suckered people into betting against Louden's ability to do one more, and the betters always lost.

On Mother's Day weekend at OSU in about 1959 or 1960, David used his mother's car to drive to Albany, OR, to a country and western bar that offered beer and loose women. There was sports talk until  David told some guy, "You're the dumbest MF I ever met." But then David committed a fatal error. He turned his back to the guy. He woke up in the car.

The guy had knocked David out with a whiskey bottle. Before the guy could kill him, Louden picked up David, who is not tiny, and carried him out to the car.

David's Experience With Fake News

                   Thjis is what David told me:

              In the 1970s, leaving his teaching position, David started up a marketing consulting firm with David Concannon  (and for a short time, a third partner.)  Some investors bought a weekly newspaper, the Niagra Observer, putting in $20K to $30K each. They immediately ran into some difficulties.  An issue announced "this is the last issue," and the staff, editor, and publisher quit. A story arose that the sale of the newspaper was a pay-off to Republicans.

                In fact, the staff of the newspaper consisted of a 60-year-old man doing sports reporting, a 54-year-old man who was the photographer, and "twelve blondes." The newspaper ran from a house that had a sauna in the basement. The seller had provided a subscriber list of 12 thousand names; only 1,000 were active. Ads were run to make the newspaper look viable, but they were unpaid. 

            David and his colleague kept the newspaper running for a couple of months, but then a year-end story ran at the local ABC affiliate. A reporter said that a favorite story of the year was that the newspaper was delivered to David and his colleague as a payoff. "Wait a minute!" he protested. "I'm just a paid consultant with a contract!" However, he was ignored and no correction ever ran. He figures that because Nixon has just resigned and he was working for Republicans, he was guilty by association. And he has maintained a healthy skepticism of mainstream news media, let alone the outliers, ever since. 

    Concannon, by the way, had been a Pulitzer Prize nominee for the Buffalo Evening News. David found himself helping him financially and incurring a debt that took him two years to pay off. Eventually their partnership ended and Concannon relocated to Mexico, where he picked up the name "Diable Loco Rojo." Some years later he reappeared in San Francisco where he applied for bankruptcy and the debt to David was discharged by the bankruptcy court. David had never tried to collect, but was angered at his former friend's decision to be excused from paying the debt, without discussion.                

 

David and the Madrona Tree

 

MADRONA TREE STORY  

Circa 1952 

My brothers and I put 2-3 doctor’s kids through college by our various antics and escapades.  The Madrona Tree experience was one of them. 

I was the oldest of 3 brothers.  We lived in the Englewood section of Coos Bay, Oregon and my parents property extended down to a body of water called Coalbank Slough, equivalent to a Southern Bayous.  The backyard – where my brothers and I played – was about 150 feet or so from the back of the house itself. 

One day we invented a new, but dangerous, game.  The first half of the yard travelling down to the Slough was sloped at about a 15-20 degree angle.  This led to the first half of the game which was to ride standing up in a kids wagon, down the slope of about 30 feet to a bank midway between the house and the slough.  At that point my brother would release a rope tied to the limb of a large MADRONA TREE; I was to catch it and sail out into the air above the lower part of the lot which was flat and ended at the sloughs edge.  I would then let go of the rope and drop back down to earth, a drop (If done correctly) of about 6-8 feet and land safely on the ground, and then the next brother would ride the wagon down the slope. 

In this particular instance, however, this did not occur. 

Instead, I had what turns out to be a bad practice of sticking my tongue out when engaged in athletic activities.  As a result, when I landed my chin came down on my knee, nearly severing my tongue in half.  This was highly disconcerting to say nothing of enormously painful; the blood from the severely bitten tongue gushed out of my mouth scaring my brothers half to death and terrifying me. 

My brother Arnold and I raced into the house where he called my parents who were both at the family owned business my dad had started prior to WWII.  I just screamed and bled standing over in a corner of the living room.  Dad got there shortly thereafter and off we went to the hospital where I was stitched up and the Doctor informed my dad that I wouldn’t lose my tongue and my speech patterns would not be impacted.  As I recall, my dad then stated to the doctor words to the effect that “well, there goes the upside to this hospital trip.”  My dad was joking referring to my propensity to talk too loudly and too much.  Not funny, Dad, was my thought and it still is. 

Tongue saved and stitched up, the next day I went to school as usual.  At our first bathroom break, A fellow student asked about my injury and asked to see the stitches; I complied by sticking my tongue out for him to observe.  The bloody stitches filled much of my mouth and horrified my friend so much that he puked on the spot.  That was even worse than my injury!