Lafayette, Ore. – We pull into Our Lady of Guadalupe Trappist Abbey at 6 a.m., the modest grounds emerging from a thick fog at the edge of the long and desolate Abbey Road in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.
It is a black morning, but Father Martinus greets us with a cheery shake of the hands; we find […]

Portland, Ore. – Stanley Waters was struggling to teach himself how to play the piano when I met him in August 2005. I recognized his unique talent immediately, and wrote a story for Willamette Week the very next month.
Stanley was raised in a broken home. For years his mother struggled with an addiction to crack […]

Salinas, Calif. – By the time Thomas Steinbeck was 20, his father John Steinbeck had won both the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize, and his works had been translated into dozens of languages around the world.
Over the years, many interviews with Thom have revolved around his relationship with his father more than his own […]

Portland, Ore. – As we travel the country, we hope to make many stops at retirement centers to get down the oral histories of what has been called the Greatest Generation.
Our first stop was at the Rose Schnitzer Manor in Portland, and our first interview was with long-time attorney Sy Barrack, best known for putting […]

Portland, Ore. – Murray Kaufman has a fire in his belly. Dressed in gym shorts and tennis shoes, the retired science teacher graciously sat down with us at the Rose Schnitzer Manor in mid-September, but had to run 20 minutes into the conversation to his physical therapy class.
At 88, Murray Kaufman remains an ardent activist. […]

Portland, Ore. – Classical pianist and instructor Susan Chan began to learn the instrument as a toddler in Hong Kong. Since then she has won numerous competitions, and much of her talent she attributes to her mother - who was her first teacher.
I met Susan Chan in 2005 when I went looking for someone to […]

Salinas, Calif. – Thom Steinbeck was only 18 when his father John set out to see the country. In what came to be called Travels with Charley In Search of America, the Nobel Prize winner admitted that he wasn’t sure he knew his own country anymore. So he set out to rediscover it, with nothing […]

Salinas, Calif. – When we first began brainstorming a trip across the country, we thought a lot about John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley and Charles Kuralt’s On the Road, two works that inspired and are shaping our trip.
Little did we know the men were friends and the projects were linked.
The moment I asked Thom Steinbeck […]

Salinas, Calif. – Joe and Doris Bragdon have lived in the same house in Salinas, Calif., for five decades. Joe, whose family spent six weeks crossing the country from Pennsylvania in covered trailers in the 1920s, settled down in Monterey. He eventually worked on what came to be known as “Cannery Row,” which John Steinbeck […]

Portland, Ore. – I first met Helen Weigel six months ago. She was sitting on her front porch, which is four doors down from my own in Portland’s quiet Belmont neighborhood. Helen was bent over some needlepoint, and I had just learned to knit; she invited me to take her spare chair.
After a matter of […]