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September 10, 2020

Oregon Tavern Age: Horny Rod

I know a retired log truck driver, let’s call him Rod, or horny Rod as he is better known in OTA country.

Rod drove a log truck through practically every state, federal, tribal and privately-owned forestland in the Pacific Northwest. His recall of these places is truly astonishing.

He is a walking, talking, drinking museum of all things logging in the region for almost half a century and claims the distinction of being one of the last log truck drivers alive who carried a single log on his rig. One. An old growth beauty that perhaps even he was sad to see cut.

Well, not just a museum of logging lore, but of the hard livin, lovin’, drinkin’, fightin’ ways of a logging man.

Sometimes I take notes after Rod recounts a particularly crazy story, like the recent one about going home one drunken night with half the team of the Forks female bowling team in the 70s. He just loved the Forks babes back in the day. Forks was goddamn wild.

He also told me how he heated a can of chili every day for lunch on the job. Just placed it on the engine block after a load to the mill or run back to the clearcut and it would be bubbling in minutes.

Rod and I got sideways one afternoon a while back. He dropped the n-word when we were discussing the NBA player protests. I cut into him right then and there and said I wouldn’t stand for that sort of thing and I got up and left.

We were a little cold to each other after that, but later, he gave me a token for a free beer without telling me the reason.

Maybe that counts for progress in OTA country. Who knows?

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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

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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.