I Love History

 I'm the kind of person who has bits of research on little slips of paper on my desk, notebooks filled with careful notes, and piles of documents and files of things I am working on. I researched my house and neighborhood and all of the people whose names came up, and do plan to put that in better order someday for the next owners of my house and the History Museum. I have several side projects connected with that, maps and research on historic houses in our city and region, copies of newspaper articles, and many details that are only tangentially related to my actual house and property. I have always planned to write two books about it, one about my remodeling project that uncovered the provenance, and one about the people and events that formed this little neighborhood in the West side, which includes the Fairgrounds, and the early white settlers who came in the 1840s and 50s and left their stamp on where I live now.

That's a drawer and I always want to get back to it, but it's a project. I have another drawer of just personal mementos and artifacts that won't mean much to anyone. I have boxes and boxes of journals as I write every day and a lot is in there that could be written about, and some was. I have boxes of short stories two novels, and memoir that probably will not see the light of day. Some of it is hard for me to read now but I don't really want to destroy it. 

Another drawer is my history with the Radar Angels and Jell-O Art, which is historically and culturally significant at this point of almost 40 years...plus I have a lot of Jell-O pieces I made and am keeping in my "project room." I have a tub of all the t-shirts I made for the show. Maybe a book there, though the history of the Angels is not quite believable and lots of the stories can't be told publicly without hurting some of us. We were in our 20s and 30s when that history started, and you know, mistakes have been made. But it's a rich history. Careful editing might be the key to sharing that someday.

I have another drawer that is full of OCF stuff, and several boxes of the shirts I made for that over the years, posters, and little things. OCF has a great archive of its own but I do plan to hand over the shirts at some point, once I catalogue them with years they were made, anecdotes related to them, and so on. Probably not a book, for me, but a project that needs to be done so those things can find their new homes or be discarded.

I have t-shirts and art from many customers and I have started to give them to those people and groups, to do whatever they want to do. It's so many shirts...they will have to go. The art is just going to get junked, most likely, unless I decide to catalogue or compile some of it. The past is interesting to a lot of people and I've been a screenprinter for more than 40 years now. Who knows where all that will go.

There's more. Family of origin history, photos, letters, mysteries to be solved. Fortunately my sisters and now one of my nephews are doing that research and writing. I still look for it. I'm reading a book that mentions one of my cousins, "Free Frank" McWhorter who founded a town in what was a frontier at one point, in Illinois. Yes that branch came from the formerly enslaved members of my Dad's family. There's a lot I could learn about it. 

The biggest piles, and the project I am actively working on still, takes up half my living room and it is way more than a book. I used to think I would write that book, and still might, but my relationship with Saturday Market has changed so much in the last few years I am not sure how to do it. I never expected that market would be a hostile and dangerous place for me and my skills. Almost all of my 50 years there were as a highly supportive member who pitched in on everything. I served in nearly every way I could, beginning in the 80s and extending into now, although the nature of my service right now is...complicated. I took on the archives project in the 20-teens I guess, not sure when, as the many boxes got to be a storage problem in the "new" office once Beth got us moved out of the Broadway location where we had a basement filled with stuff that had been saved. I tried to help pack it up and made myself not attend the garage sale, as I knew how painful it would be to watch things go away. Kim assured me she would not let anything go that needed to be in the archive, and I trusted her. I started bringing things home to sort, preserve, and put in order for the future. 

I met with Lotte's family after she died and they gave me what she had saved, which was amazing and so valuable. She was a good saver. They also gave me things from her personal life that they thought should be saved, but the UO didn't want them at the time, and they weren't organized. I think at some point, a museum will want them, but some of it would only be useful to someone who wanted to research her life, and that's not all that likely to happen. There were some things that I thought would be inspiring for our members, so I put together some displays for Founder's Day and for a few years I took it down to market so people could come and talk about her and the other people involved in those early years. That's all in the market office where I thought it would be safe for the future and people could access it and appreciate her. Some of it was not organized, but just in boxes. I took it because Renee had an interest in it and I was sure she would treat it as the treasure it is. I don't know who is keeping that interest in the archives alive in the market staff...they don't really have time. It takes volunteer energy.

I worked hard to finish up the 70s and 80s but kept finding things in random boxes that needed to be included, and it was frustrating to have to go down to the office, see if the thing had already been included, and redo the portfolios which can't just have pages put in that need to be in chronological order. A writer in our membership pressured me to make that accessible to him and I did the best I could to do that, and still honor the need for it to be done well. I'm an amateur archivist but I think I did a pretty good job. He wanted the rest, and didn't seem to understand what the project involved, and got demanding and rude about his right to it. I wanted to finish it, but not for him, just to avoid doing it over or doing it badly. He wrote one book about it but included me after I asked him not to, in order to make a derogatory remark about my craft, so we're not working together at this point. 

I took the time to  put together the archive of the LCFM history that we had also saved, as they were part of us for the first 15 years or so, and not fully separated from us for longer. I went in to meet with them to give them a summary so at least they would know that they are not really 100 years old as they had been saying. They really began in their present form in 1979. Still supported by us. But that's another story.

I also put together all of the materials from the process we went through with the city regarding the future of the Park Blocks, which actually happened at least three times, the last one being in 2016 to 2020, more or less, resulting in the Farmers Pavilion. Our part of the project was derailed for several reasons, one being the City not having the money to do it all, so deciding to do the most pressing, which was creating a better site for the farmers, who had been asking for decades. Our site was working for us and we were pretty happy to keep it intact, though we did still need them to address the deferred maintenance and a few other things, like a food court that is too small. But it's a complex issue and needs careful and skilled management so we don't lose what we've built. I could talk about that for hours and if you are interested, I recommend asking to see that archive, which is about six volumes of research and documents and newspaper articles in the archives room. Most of it is still going to be relevant if the project resumes, which I have heard is maybe going to happen. I don't expect to be involved.

And the rest of the archives, up to the present, are in my living room, my project room, and my head, most of the time. I have notes that I can refer to when I am asked, such as the history of Holiday Market, the ins and outs of particular issues, and so much more. I wrote several essays on things like the 70s, whatever. I have the digital archive going back to 2009 that, as Secretary, I knew to keep as things stopped being always on paper that could be saved. I print a lot of it out, like the member emails we all get, as historically, those will be relevant to anyone who wants to know what all happened. I keep a box for every year of newsletters, Board packets, and so on, though since I resigned as Secretary in 2024, it is generally woefully incomplete. I trust staff is still saving everything, but Renee was my connection for that stuff and it stopped coming my way. 

I wouldn't say the project is blocked, as I hope it isn't, but it's stalled. When I stopped being welcome in the office I stopped going in to get it and it's no one's job to get it to me. Every time I try to engage with anyone about it I experience gatekeeping, control tactics, and even derision. I put together 2019, as well as I could, as that was our last really successful year and I thought the Board would value what they could learn from it. They took the opportunity to be disrespectful to me and I haven't heard from anyone who looked though it. It got tucked away under lock and key so I don't know if anyone will. There is a lot in there that would be useful to the current Board, but they have made it clear they don't want to hear from me.

Except I did occasionally get asked for things, the last one being the history of fees, a little scrap of paper I found today. So here is what I sent back to them:

The membership fee started in 1984, as a way to make money when we were $25,000 in the red and needed income. It was $5. Here's how it progressed:

1984  $5

1985 $7.50

1987 $10

1993 $15

1998  $25

1999  $30  (There is a gap in my notes until 2014 but I guess it went up to $40 in there)

2014 $50 

2023 $60

2026  $85

That's just the membership fee. The space fee started at a dollar in the beginning, went to $2 in the first two years, and when I joined in 1976 it was $3.50. I would need to look back for the percentage but what this scrap says is:

1984 $5 plus 10% with no reserve fee. We had just moved to the Park blocks in late 1982 and there was plenty of space, so we didn't need them, and I didn't fully research that part, but I know that in

1987 it was $7 plus 10% with a $10 reserve fee. Annual.

1993 4x4s were added at $3.50 plus 10%

1996 $8 plus 10%  It was raised to $10 plus 10% sometime between then and the next note I had

2016 $13 plus 10%  and $8 for a 4x4. At some point strollers started paying $5.  

I need to go look again, but it got to $15 plus 10% sometime around 2019-2020, not sure.

Now as you know in 2024 it went to $20 plus $10% 

I didn't research the progress of the reserve fee, but I do know in 2022 it was $150. It went to $200 in late 2023. This is incomplete, obviously, but it does show that we always tried to keep costs as low as possible. There was no culture of regular increases...it was based on the actual budgetary needs. Which some would argue it still is, but that would be an argument we won't be having. The excuse for raising fees is "inflation" but even at it's highest point post-pandemic, inflation was 8% and normally it is around 3%. So that was meant to be a "it's not our doing" kind of excuse. 

We do have increasing costs, all of us, and the market does too, but it is the job of the management and Board to contain those by cutting expenditures. There is some effort to do that, but we have been told a lot about so many "fixed costs." It's deceptive. The $70,000 deficit in 2024 was from overspending and not sticking to the budget. There will be another from 2025 which is not yet disclosed. We haven't heard about any cost-cutting measures, like changing staff insurance from a fully 100% paid Gold plan to some other arrangement. I know members of the Budget Committee tried to make that happen. 

I'm not here to have a full discussion of what I think could be cut. I have my opinions, but of course it is a complicated tricky process to craft a budget that will work, pay the bills, and honor our commitments. It's not my job to figure that out, but I've been in the room many times when things were weighed and calculated and hard decisions were made. That's the job of the Board, the administrator, and the members who are in the room. I'm just here to share the history. It is relevant.