Celebrating a Long Association with JPR on the 4th of July

       Ashland has had a Fourth-of-July parade for as long as I've lived in the area and for at lest fifty years before that. I haven't been to Ashland for the Fourth of July for many years, but when my son was growing up, we did sometimes go to see the parade. Once he even rode in the parade, doing tricks on his BMX bicycle. Other years I helped at the food booth of Headwaters, an environmental organization in the Applegate that morphed into the Geo Institute, now in Ashland.     

        Gradually, though, I stopped making the trip into Ashland for the Fourth of July. Although I love my homeland (my house, the Applegate, Oregon, and even sometimes the USA, maybe its landscape and people more than its politics), I'm not too proud of our country at the moment and don't feel much like tooting its horn.

        So I was going to let this Fourth of July pass as that day has been passing for me for years – at home, unaware of celebration except for distant fireworks, which always make me so nervous because of the fire danger that I get grumpy hearing them – until Jefferson Public Radio invited me to accompany their fiftieth anniversary float as one of their alums (former JPR volunteers and employees).

        I am a proud JPR alum. My association with the station started in 1981, when I approached their producer, Tom Olbrich, asking if they would like to carry my commentaries. Although he was leery (not every good writer is a good reader, he told me later), he agreed to listen to me read.

        So I auditioned with the first of a ten-part series of short essays I had written about building, and living in, my little house on the mountain, without electricity, without a telephone, without a driveway (which didn't matter, since I didn't have a car, either). I called the series "Ten Rules for One-room Cabin Living." I talked about living there with my young son, emphasizing not what we didn't have but what we did have: an endless forest to play in, wild animals and birds at our doorstep, a moon that shone full through the skylights, and time that was our own. Tom thought listeners would be interested (as indeed they were) and said I had a good voice for radio, which many listeners since then have also told me. I wrote and broadcast essay after essay for JPR, one a week for seven years, then, after a hiatus of several years, one a week again until 2008, when the station stopped carrying commentaries altogether.

        I'll be glad to walk in Ashland's Fourth-of-July parade this year to toot JPR's horn. After all, Jefferson Public Radio launched my career. My first three books were compilations of selected JPR commentaries (the first was a finalist for the Oregon Literary Awards), and my next three books followed the same short-essay format. When JPR stopped carrying  commentaries, I started this blog. My writing, even my Ph.D. dissertation, has focused on the short, personal-essay format.

        JPR has invited its alums to march in the parade as a sort of thank-you for their part in the success of the station, but I'll be walking in recognition of what JPR has done for me as well. Come to think of it, I'll be in the parade to toot JPR's horn on behalf of all it has done for all of us for these fifty years. We would be the poorer in southern Oregon and Northern California without Jefferson Public Radio.