{"id":2697,"date":"2017-04-24T07:33:09","date_gmt":"2017-04-24T14:33:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/?p=2697"},"modified":"2020-06-22T11:16:36","modified_gmt":"2020-06-22T18:16:36","slug":"nsp-correspondent-bill-hall-oswald-west-tom-mccall-meet-heaven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/meditations\/nsp-correspondent-bill-hall-oswald-west-tom-mccall-meet-heaven\/","title":{"rendered":"NSP Correspondent \/ Bill Hall \/ Oswald West and Tom McCall Meet in Heaven"},"content":{"rendered":"

(NSP Meditations features regular contributions from Correspondents. If you are interested in becoming one, contact Matt Love through the NSP web site for more details.)<\/p>\n

A hospital room in Portland. It\u2019s a grey, damp Saturday morning at the beginning of 1983. The man in the bed hooked up to the machinery is Thomas Lawson McCall, thirtieth governor of the State of Oregon. He\u2019s about to draw his last breath; his journey on earth is reaching its end after sixty-nine years.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s unconscious\u2014the blessing of painkillers\u2014but his restless mind is still active. He\u2019s going to be sad to leave this place he loves so much; sad to leave Audrey, Tad and Sam. But he\u2019s ready to go. The pain, oh, the pain is finally getting to be too much.<\/p>\n

Tom McCall spent the final Christmas and New Year\u2019s of his life in this room. It was the last battlefield in his decade-long war with cancer. Treatment had kept his prostate cancer in check for years, but it had come roaring back with a vengeance a couple of years earlier, and now wracked his bones. His sliver-gray hair was snow white. But when he was awake, his piercing blue eyes still burned with his love for his family and the special place called Oregon.<\/p>\n

Now all the battles had been fought; land use planning, the Bottle Bill, the Beach Bill and so many more. A strange thought flashed through his brain. He remembered a story about the film comic Stan Laurel. As he lay dying in a Los Angeles hospital bed a few years earlier, a nurse had asked him how he was doing. Laurel answered, \u201cI\u2019d rather be skiing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you ski, Mr. Laurel?\u201d she asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo!\u201d he said weakly. \u201cBut I\u2019d rather be there than here!\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Tom McCall wished he could be at his beach retreat at Road\u2019s End. Just one more time in his old Pendleton jacket, marching across the sand, feeling the wind and breathing the salt air. Another stab of pain\u2014damn! Were the drugs wearing off again?<\/p>\n

But then a bracing, familiar smell filled his nostrils. He also realized the pain that had been his constant companion for so long was no more. He opened his eyes and found himself standing on the bluff above the beach at Road\u2019s End. He inhaled the bracing salt air, felt the sun and wind against his face, the grass beneath his feet; all his senses told him where he was, yet it made no sense. How had he gone from his deathbed to paradise?<\/p>\n

Paradise? Did this mean \u2013<\/p>\n

Before he could follow the train of thought to its destination, he heard a hearty voice say, \u201cHello, Tom!\u201d He turned and found himself face to face with Governor Oswald West. McCall had met West a few times, and had once interviewed him for KGW, but he knew him as old man; this was a West he only knew from pictures, young and vital.<\/p>\n

\u201cGovernor West? But\u2014\u201c<\/p>\n

\u201cTom, let me save you some time. This is Heaven.\u201d West stuck out his hand to clasp McCall\u2019s. \u201cI want to thank you, Tom.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThank me? For what?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFor preserving my legacy. For saving these beaches for the people.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMy pleasure, Governor.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOs. Call me Os. That\u2019s what my friends call me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOK, Os.\u201d Tom McCall smiled. It was the first smile he had managed in a long time.<\/p>\n

\u201cI should thank you for quoting me when you signed your Beach Bill. You had a pretty fair way with words yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2019The great birthright?\u2019 That was too memorable a phrase to pass up, you know! \u2018No local selfish interest shall be permitted, through politics or otherwise, to destroy or impair this great birthright of our people.\u2019 I couldn\u2019t have said it better myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThanks, Tom, but I don\u2019t think I could top your warning about \u2018the grasping wastrels of the land.\u2019 Great stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOs, you crafty old son of a gun, that was brilliant\u2014the way you snuck your bill through the legislature. Making the beach a public highway. Sixty-six words. It passed without a peep. The legislature never knew what hit \u2018em.\u201d McCall made a fist with his right hand and smacked his left palm. \u201cBrilliant.\u201d<\/p>\n

West laughed. \u201cNo, they sure didn\u2019t. You didn\u2019t have it that easy. But your gift for political theater saved the day.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou mean my trip to the beach in the helicopter? Had the press eating out of my hand that day, I suppose. You know, I had been one of them, and they still thought of me that way. That always helped.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI saw the way you stared down that bastard who tried to fence off the beach in front of his motel\u2014well, stared down his motel, anyway?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou saw that?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can watch what\u2019s going on in the world, though we can\u2019t influence it in any way. Gets damn\u2014er, darn frustrating at times. But you learn to deal with it. That\u2019s why we knew you were coming. Some very special folks are waiting to greet you inside the house, including your dad and your grandfathers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tom McCall felt a lump forming in his throat. Hal McCall had died when his son was just thirty-three. This was going to be a joyous reunion.<\/p>\n

\u201cDad,\u201d he croaked, looking away from West and at the waves crashing below. \u201cIt\u2019s been a long time.\u201d Then, regaining his composure, he looked back at West. \u201cGrandpa Hal was in Congress and Governor of Massachusetts, you know,\u201d McCall said. \u201cGrandpa Tom Lawson\u2026I\u2019m sure you\u2019ve heard of the Copper King. He was worth forty million dollars at the turn of the century. That\u2019s still a lot of money. A heck of a legacy to live up to with those men\u2026.a heck of a legacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

West smiled and clasped his hand on Tom McCall\u2019s shoulder. \u201cDon\u2019t worry Tom, you served their memory well. They can\u2019t wait to see you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLead on, Os, then. Lead on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bill Hall is serving his fourth term as a Lincoln County Commissioner and is the author of the utopian Oregon novel, McCallandia. Like Tom McCall, he started as a journalist and then made the transition to politics\u2026but he says Tom did it better.<\/em><\/p>\n\n

\n <\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(NSP Meditations features regular contributions from Correspondents. If you are interested in becoming one, contact Matt Love through the NSP web site for more details.) A hospital room in Portland. It\u2019s a grey, damp Saturday morning at the beginning of 1983. The man in the bed hooked up to the machinery is Thomas Lawson McCall, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2698,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51,5,32,74],"tags":[52,48,13,53,133,54],"class_list":["post-2697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nsp-correspondents","category-meditations","category-oregon-beaches","category-oregon-coast_history","tag-oregon","tag-oregon-beaches","tag-oregon-coast","tag-oregon-history","tag-oswald-west","tag-tom-mccall","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2697"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2701,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2697\/revisions\/2701"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}