Roseburg Oregon is a hard ass, redneck town set in gorgeous surroundings. There is no prettier sight in the world than the broad Umpqua River rushing through the a rock and sagebrush strewn high desert and no uglier sight than a Roseburg saloon fight on a drunken Saturday night.
Roseburg didn’t eliminate Sundown laws until sometime in the 1950s. For those who don’t know what a Sundown town was, and there were fifteen or so such towns in Oregon..it was a town where people of color couldn’t spend the night in town, meaning get out of town before sundown if you are black, brown yellow or any color but swarthy white. DEI was simply the name of another logging outfit.
Roseburg didn’t like blacks, and they didn’t like Indians, and loggers didn’t like cowboys, and cowboys didn’t like loggers. The fights between loggers and Indians and cowboys were legendary with the loggers using their “cork” (boots with hob nails on the sole) to rake their opponent’s face when they were down on the filthy wood floors. The cowboys used their pointed toe boots to good advantage and could break a rib even when the kicker was dead drunk as those kickers tended to be.
Roseburg was just that kind of place.
Now before you leap ahead, no I didn’t get in a barroom fight, at least not on that night and truthfully not on any night but I just wanted to throw in a bit of local color to explain the setting where I found myself in trouble.
It was just after midnight when I got a message that I was supposed to take a Job Corps van into Roseburg to pick up two job corpsmen who had just arrived at the bus station. This was not an unusual situation since Wolf Creek Job Corps camp which was 30 some miles outside of Roseburg often didn’t know when Job Corpsman would be arriving.
During the summer before the start of my Sophomore year (1965) I landed a job as a dorm counselor in this newly created government program, part of Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty. “At risk” young men and women—age sixteen to twenty two would be shipped out of their home environments around the country to training camps where they would learn job related skills. Wolf Creek Job Corps was a Conservation Camp which was operated by the US Forest Service which meant that rudimentary work skills would be honed by helping maintain the forest
The Corpsmen may have had minor brushes with the law but weren’t incorrigible kids. The thought was that by taking them out of their home environments, teaching them basic work skills and some vocational training they could be made into productive citizens. The program by the way was in my opinion, a unmitigated success and continues to this day.
I was a 21 year old counselor who had never been responsible for leading any group of anybody. Here I was in charge of young men 16—22 years old. I remember standing in front of them and feeling scared to death.
While I think that my political skills started by going to four different high schools, a new high school every year, I think I picked up some rudimentary political skills in the Wolfe Creek Job Corps Camp.
I was undoubtedly guilty of profiling. About two thirds of my charges were black. On my first day I can remember looking around this group of young men, a little anxious to say the least and thinking that I needed to make some friends fast. I’m sure it was an accident but I picked the biggest meanest looking black kid in my cabin to try to befriend. James was 22, muscular, and as it turned out soft spoken and after a short time extremely well respected. I had the idea that he might be my enforcer…but with James I really didn’t need an enforcer. He was just that respected.
Our day would start at 6:00 AM when I would roll the boys out of bed and lead them in calisthenics. We would then go to the cafeteria where they would be fed a hearty breakfast and the corpsmen would pack their lunches for the day.
For many of the corpsmen the idea that you had to get out of bed and the idea that you had to plan ahead and pack a lunch were pretty radical as in “what the hell you talking about its not noon yet is it?”. They might never have seen anyone up at such an ungodly hour and probably hadn’t seen anyone pack a lunch. Behaviors that they had never seen modeled. However both both were pretty necessary for maintaining a job.
After breakfast Corpsmen would then get on a small crew bus and be driven to a remote forested location where they would spend the day building trails. Not many were going to end up building trails as part of their skills but they did learn some basic work skills and that sweat wasn’t a four letter word.
I did one thing that other counselors didn’t do and that was go out and work with the Corpsmen all day. The other counselors after getting their charges up in the morning didn’t go on duty until five in the afternoon. I’d always liked hard physical labor and for me it worked to help bond with these guys.
But back to my mission to pick up the new corpsmen. I grabbed the keys to a Forest Service van and headed the 30 plus miles to Roseburg, These vans were notoriously underpowered so I wasn’t going much past 65, barreling through the dark and passing miles and miles of sagebrush and slipping past the Roseburg city limit sign…which to be honest was really a couple of miles outside of anything that looked like a town. It was dark and I’m sure that I didn’t see a lot of things but one thing I really didn’t see was the speed limit sign at the city limit sign. 30 mph was the posted speed limit. I didn’t ignore it since you can’t ignore something you can’t see, can you?
The local Roseburg City policeman didn’t ignore me. The first I saw of him was the red flashing lights in my rear view mirror. After I’d pulled over and he approached my window we had a short conversation. According to this cop not seeing the sign was no excuse for not slowing down. Me mumbling about a speed trap didn’t seem to help my case. The conversation ended to my shock with him asking me to post $50 bail. I was shocked but not too concerned since I knew that we could work something out: some type of promise to pay..anything. When I informed him I didn’t have $50 but did have a check book he said that the City didn’t take checks. WTF. No checks? Didn’t he know that as white as I was that I would make good on my promise to pay?
The cop however had a solution. Sir, get in my car and we are going into City Hall. Oh and what do we do there? You sir are going to jail until you can come up with the $50. I was sure that he wasn’t serious. I explained the dilemma of having to meet the new job corpsmen at the bus depot and asked what would happen to the van. His elegant solution was to let me call the job corps camp.
As we walked into the courthouse the cop was as good as his word: he handed me a phone and let me call the camp where I reached the duty officer. The duty officer commiserated with my bad luck, told me that he thought he could get someone else to drive to town and pick up the newly arriving corpsmen. “And what about bail” I asked. His answer was that the Fed Government wasn’t allowed to post bail. ‘You mean I’m on my own” ? “That about the size of it” he replied.
As the all too short and unsatisfactory conversation ended the cop escorted me to the desk where I understood I was too be booked into jail. They emptied my pockets, carefully itemized my wallet and my $2.35 and my pocket knife. They took each hand, and then each finger, placed them on a ink pad and rolled the finger over a small square on a official form. They then took me behind the counter and had me stand for a photo.
At that point I was allowed to make a call. I called my mom in Salem. Since it was 3:00 AM the first thing I had to do was convince my mother that I was alright and not lying in a ditch beside the road. Then I had to listen to the explosion about what was I doing in jail. Who had I robbed? I must have been drunk (a grievous offense in the eyes of my teetotaling mother)
Even after convincing her that I wasn’t dead and had never been more sober she was still less than mollified. She did allow that either she or my brother would drive down from Salem (about 150 miles) sometime the next day. Next day. You mean I have to sleep in jail? “Listen here, Joseph Edwin King I wasn’t the one speeding.” Thank God, I had the presence of mind, between sniffles, to emphasize that she would have to bring cash since they wouldn’t accept checks or credit cards.
Up until this point I had kind of thought of this experience as a lark; it was vaguely amusing and something that I could tell my friends about. They lead me down a hall back to the jail cells. They issued me a mattress and blanket and apologized that they were out of coveralls. All still vaguely amusing. I thought their apology for not having overalls was funny.
It was all a little funny until we reached the cells, opened the sliding cell door, and had me step in. They closed the door with a sharp metallic bang. Suddenly nothing was funny any longer. The clang of the door took all the humor out of the situation.
I found myself in a four man cell—two bunk beds to sleep four inmates. And a bare toilet and sink at one side of the cell. The cell was lit by a low watt light bulb which allowed me to see that two of the bunks were occupied leaving a upper bunk. I had no idea who my room mates were and feared the worst. I threw my mattress on a top bunk and carefully climbed into bed, getting a scary bark from the inhabitant from the lower bunk.
Although my feet hung over the end of the bunk bed the blanket kept me warm enough and by about 4AM I drifted into a restless sleep. The sleep was interrupted at 5:30 when a “trustee” ran a frying pan down the length of the iron bars of the cell. Roseburg’s version of an alarm clock. It was our signal to roll out.
I then met my cell mates: a older guy who was serving a 30 day sentence for public drunkeneness and a guy about my age who was doing 30 days for vagrancy. Vagrancy? In Roseburg it was a crime to be broke. I am not making this up. The guy about my age had been hitchhiking through Roseburg, picked up by the police and sentenced to 30 days for being broke. He had done two weeks of a 30 day sentence and too put it mildly was going stir crazy.
After we’d been awake for about an hour, suffered the ignominy of tending to our our physical needs in the exposed a toilet, the same trustee who served as our alarm clock rolled a cart next to the cell. He passed us our breakfast through a small cutout in the cell. In came three plates. The plates were round tin plates, kind of like in which you’d feed your dog.
Breakfast was pancakes with cold syrup, not butter and a cold greasy egg. I was hungry. I ate it.
By then I’d got a little acquainted with my cell mate who was doing time for being broke. He was very anxious because it was about the time that a couple of inmates (I have no idea how many were housed in the jail then) would be selected to go out on work crews. My new friend was desperate to be selected to go on the work crew because it got him outside the cell for the rest of the day. Mostly they would pick up garbage beside the road but he thought that was a major improvement on being locked up all day. I thought he had a point.
I commenced to wait for my mom or brother to drive down from Salem to bail me out. I had no idea when to expect them but thought they would be down early. Ten o’clock came and went, 11:00 o’clock…The worst part of the wait was that their was nothing to read in the cell. I would have been glad of a Gideon bible. My vagrant friend who didn’t get out to work on a work crew paced the cell tirelessly.
Finally about 1:30 a jailor came back to my cell and announced that I had been bailed out. I was pretty damned glad to get the news.
Often I’m able to derive some message from these reminisces
but I’m not to sure what I learned from this one. Maybe this. When someone is sentenced to a six month jail term for what the public sees as a grievous offense many will opine that it is a ridiculously short sentence. If my ten hours in the Roseburg city Jail is any indiction I’d say that six months could feel like a life sentence.
That explains why she didn't come reaching down to bail me out!
Thank you. An enjoyable and humorous piece. The detail and apt descriptions throughout the piece were a hoot!