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May 10, 2017

Maurice Lucas and Bob Straub: Two of My Oregon Heroes

There is something in this photograph that I can’t get out of my head. I’m not sure I can define it. I just know it’s there and makes me feel wonderful.

It was taken by ace news photographer Gerry Lewin in the summer of 1977. The photograph is of a legendary bad ass, Maurice Lucas, starting power forward on the 1977 Portland Trail Blazers NBA Championship team, and Oregon Governor Bob Straub (and his wife Pat). Straub hosted a celebration barbecue for the team at his home in Salem a short time after the Blazers defeated the Philadelphia 76ers to win the title but this is not that occasion. I don’t know what the event was.

Look at that three-piece suit and tie. Look at Luke’s facial hair. Look how lean he was. It was one the highlights of my writing life to interview Lucas and include his oral history of the championship season in my book, Red Hot and Rollin.’ He was always my favorite Blazer and during our two-hour conversation he told me things about the team he had never disclosed to other reporters. Some of them were off the record and I have always honored that journalistic tradition and kept silent, even after Lucas died in 2010.

Look at Straub in his pin stripe suit. Look at the Governor of Oregon smiling. This is the same politician who, as State Treasurer in the late 1960s, saved my beloved Nestucca Spit from the insane proposal to relocate Highway 101 down this pristine stretch of sand. I took the dogs there about a thousand times when I lived in the area for a decade. It’s where I got my adult life going in the right creative direction. Nestucca Spit is now part of Bob Straub State Park and I consider it holy conservation ground in Oregon.

Lucas and Straub, together in suits, celebrating a sporting victory, two winners in my life, whose winning inspired me to create unique personal and creative moments in my life. I find it no coincidence that they met, that I met them both in body and spirit, or that I later came upon this truly remarkable Oregon photograph.

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The Old Crow

Book Club

$11.99 + $3 Shipping

In December of 2020, author Matt Love moved to Portland to care for his elderly father.

Returning to the Rose City jolted Love after 23 years residing on the Oregon Coast. In the Sellwood neighborhood where he lived, Love met a homeless man named Mark. They formed a friendship over literature and the unforeseen magical discoveries in street libraries. They created The Old Crow Book Club, and yes, sometimes that involved drinking Old Crow on a sidewalk.

The club also included several other Sellwood homeless men and women cut from John Steinbeck's Cannery Row cloth.

In due course, Love learned the members' stories of homelessness and how they survived. He wondered what happened to his beloved state of Oregon and attempted to help Mark get off the streets only to run up against the seemingly futile policies to address the crisis.

Along the way, he had the best conversations about books in his life and wrote The Old Crow Book Club, where he recounts his interactions with the homeless people in his neighborhood and offers some suggestions how to alleviate what he considers the greatest man-made American humanitarian disaster of his adult life.

The Old Crow Book Club is available for purchase here and select independent bookstores in Oregon.

Choice Cuts

of Oregon Fiction

$22.99 + $3 Shipping

Choice Cuts of Oregon Fiction by Matt Love contains 20 stories, all set in Oregon. The cast of characters includes a depressed Santa Claus, Steve Prefontaine, Jack Ramsay's fast break offense, socialist squirrels, a clearcut, a dead deer, a junior high football team, a high school tennis player, a dissipated teacher, a man who evolves into a beaver, a homeless vet, a jilted preacher, a double date to a prom, rural degenerates, a wily caterer, and much more.

The publication of the collection culminates a quarter century of the author's writing about Oregon and rambling around the state.

Choice Cuts is available for purchase here, through Amazon, or select independent bookstores in Oregon.

The Savage

of State Street

Nestucca Spit Press is proud to present The Savage of State Street: The Thieving and Literary Lives of Smoky Epley. He is the greatest unheralded writer in Oregon history and also one of its more mediocre, colorful and persistent thieves.

$19.99 + $3 Shipping

In 1973, Oregon State University Press published Men in Exile: An Anthology of Creative Writing by Inmates of the Oregon State Penitentiary. Twenty-two of Smoky Epley's pieces appeared in the book.

Smoky spent most of his adult life in state and federal prisons for robbery. In 2008, during one of his brief stints of freedom, Smoky became friends with Matt Love, an Oregon author and publisher. They met after Love discovered Men in Exile and wrote a newspaper column about the landmark book. Smoky read the column and reached out.

He returned to prison in 2009 after forging a check. Upon his release in 2011, Love encouraged Smoky to write a memoir. He completed half of Auto before dying in February of 2013.