Rollin’ in Woody’s shadow

Folk singer Woody Guthrie, who spent a month in Lents, could lend his name to I-205 bike path.

By Steve Law

The Portland Tribune, Jul 30, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

JONATHAN HOUSE / Portland Tribune

Nick Sauvie, director of ROSE Community Development, bicycles along the I-205 bike path. Sauvie is spearheading an effort to name the pathway after Woody Guthrie.

Back in June 1941, Woody Guthrie slung his guitar on his shoulder, strolled out the front door of his rented house in Portland’s Lents neighborhood, stuck out his thumb and hitchhiked to New York.

The 28-year-old folk singer only lived in Lents one month, but created a musical heritage for the Columbia River and Pacific Northwest that’s arguably second to none.

Hired by Bonneville Power Administration to write songs promoting Columbia River dams and public power, Guthrie penned 26 tunes in 30 days. For $266.66 pay – $10 a song – Guthrie completed such folk classics as “Roll on, Columbia,” “Pastures of Plenty” and “Grand Coulee Dam,” plus lesser-known tunes such as “Portland Town” and “Talkin’ Columbia Blues.”

Nick Sauvie, who has long toiled to improve the hardscrabble Lents community and nearby east Portland neighborhoods, has an idea to honor Guthrie’s local ties and preserve some important history.

Sauvie is rallying community support to name the foot and bike path along Interstate 205, which passes through Lents and leads north to the Columbia River, after the famous onetime resident.

“People are interested in building a history of the neighborhood,” said Sauvie, executive director of ROSE Community Development. “East Portland doesn’t have the strong identity and cohesion that a lot of other parts of Portland have. I just got to thinking about that and said, ‘Hey, why don’t we name that the Woody Guthrie Trail?’ ”

Guthrie’s brief but productive stint in Lents “is something that’s a source of pride for people that have known about that history,” Sauvie said.

After coming up with the idea, Sauvie sent a note to neighborhood leaders in March to gauge their interest. Lents Neighborhood Association liked the idea. So did some organized labor leaders and Justin Douglas, a Portland Development Commission senior project manager spearheading redevelopment of a Lents parcel alongside the bike path. Peter Yarrow of the folk group Peter, Paul and Mary also offered to lend his support.

Portland City Commissioner Randy Leonard, a blue-collar champion for east Portland, told Sauvie he liked his idea. But Leonard urged a go-slow approach, in light of community agitation over the renaming of 39th Avenue for farmworker leader César Chávez.

Sauvie’s campaign hasn’t progressed much beyond the trial balloon stage, but he’s not yet encountered the type of opposition the Chávez initiative provoked.

“One obvious difference is people don’t have any kind of sentimental attachment to the I-205 Multi-use Path” name, Sauvie said. “And nobody has an address on the path.”

Guthrie also had more of a personal connection to Portland than Chávez, though it’s not well-known.

In 1941, the BPA wanted to build popular support for the then-radical notion of publicly owned dams and hydro power. The agency concocted a plan to get a ballad singer to narrate a film and sing songs about Columbia River dams. Steve Kahn, BPA’s acting information division chief,asked Alan Lomax, a musicologist at the Library of Congress, for ideas, and Lomax suggested Woody Guthrie.

The BPA contacted Guthrie, then unemployed in Los Angeles, about taking a one-year job for $3,200.

He hopped in his Pontiac and drove north to Portland with his wife Mary and three children.

Second thoughts

Kahn had second thoughts when Guthrie arrived, worried the bearded radical wouldn’t pass muster with the higher-ups in Washington, D.C., according to biographer Ed Clay in the book “Ramblin’ Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie.”

Washington bureaucrats had to approve Guthrie’s appointment for a one-year contract, but Portland BPA staff could hire him for a 30-day gig on their own.

Kahn directed Guthrie to be on good behavior and pick his songs carefully when he visited with Kahn’s politically conservative boss, Paul Raver, Clay wrote.

After a 45-minute audition, Raver hired Guthrie on the spot. Before the day was done, Guthrie penned one verse for “Roll on, Columbia.”

Guthrie’s family rented a house split into four units on Southeast 92nd Avenue in Lents, a few blocks south of Foster Road and a couple blocks from the present-day I-205 bike path.

After going to work one day at BPA headquarters in the Lloyd District, Guthrie told Kahn his Pontiac had been stolen, said Michael O’Rourke, who produced a radio documentary on Guthrie’s stint in Portland. They later realized, however, that the car had been repossessed – Guthrie was behind on making car payments.

Guthrie didn’t need a car to get around, because BPA asked employee Elmer Buehler to play chauffeur, showing Guthrie the sights from Portland to the Hood River Valley and out into the Columbia River Gorge.

Their first stop, Clay wrote, was a homeless encampment, known as a Hooverville, in Sullivan’s Gulch, five blocks from BPA headquarters and next to the present-day Banfield Freeway.

Guthrie was awed by the scenery and farms he saw while touring the area with Buehler. “I can’t believe it; I’m in paradise,” he said.

After his one-month stint, Guthrie pined to hit the road, but his wife wanted to stay in Portland a while, according to Clay. Folk singer Pete Seeger had invited Guthrie to join a new band called The Almanac Singers.

So Guthrie left his family and headed out on the road.

Portland lawyer Gus Solomon picked up the hitchhiker on the edge of town and drove Guthrie as far as The Dalles, O’Rourke said. Solomon, namesake of Portland’s federal courthouse, later became a prominent federal judge.

Film project delayed

The BPA never needed the original film it intended to promote public power. The war effort was popular, and the dams provided electricity for Portland shipyards, Northwest aluminum plants, and the Hanford nuclear complex.

But after a 1948 flood leveled Vanport, a hastily assembled town for wartime production workers, Kahn recast the film, Clay wrote, to advocate for public power, flood control and land reclamation.

In 1953, the heyday of McCarthyism, there was pressure from Washington, D.C., to destroy the relics of Guthrie’s stay here. Buehler, Guthrie’s former driver, was asked to gather the materials and chuck them in the furnace, said Bill Murlin, a former BPA media specialist.He tossed most of the material, but secretly saved a master copy of the documentary.

When the BPA was planning its 50th anniversary in 1984, Murlin suggested the agency resurrect the songs that had been lost. “I said, ‘Let’s use the Woody Guthrie songs; they were written for us,’ ” Murlin recalled.

He wound up locating many of the lost recordings and lyrics, including the only known recording of Guthrie singing “Roll on, Columbia.” An album of 17 songs, nine of them recorded in Portland, “Woody Guthrie, Columbia River Collection,” was released on Rounder Records.

Naming hurdle

Naming the I-205 bike path after Guthrie is up to the Oregon Transportation Commission. But the state has a high hurdle for naming transportation features after people, and hasn’t done it for a decade, according to Patrick Cooney, Oregon Department of Transportation spokesman. There has to be demonstrated statewide support, and the person must have made a lasting and significant contribution to Oregon, Cooney told Sauvie.

Sauvie reasons that the bike path leads to the river so closely associated with Guthrie’s music. Many argue that Guthrie, inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, had the most creative month of his songwriting career here.

“Portland can claim to be part of the Guthrie legacy,” said O’Rourke, an oral historian who recently produced a video about Guthrie’s local stay for the Pacific Northwest History Conference.

“It’s a really colorful chapter of Portland’s history,” O’Rourke said, “and it really infused his work in a really big way.”

stevelaw@portlandtribune.com

Here are samplings of song lyrics that Woody Guthrie penned during his short, but productive stay in Portland’s Lents neighborhood.

Roll On Columbia

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