Welcome back to Thebeerchaser. If you are seeing this post through an e-mail, please visit the blog by clicking on the title at the top to see all of the photos so the narrative is not clipped or shortened.  (External photo attribution at the end of the post.)

While many people would suggest that September is not technically summer, I’m going to finish my four-part “Summer Simmers” series – after Labor Day. 

Besides, with the temperatures being experienced all over – at least in the US, “simmers” is still appropriate.  We’ve witnessed a new paradigm with aberrant weather and atmospheric events, which  besides being alarming, make one rethink a lot of past assumptions – even lyrics to songs….

I was listening to my YouTube favorites and did a mental double-take, of sorts, when I heard the following lyrics to the James Taylor and Karli Simon favorite “Devoted to You.”  (#1)

“Darlin’ you can count on me
Till the sun dries up the sea
Until then I’ll always be devoted to you”

The dynamic vocal duo above, thought their marriage would last “forever” rather than just eleven years – until James became too vain….

And obviously the words in bold above, are exaggerated to make a point, but I also never thought we would see a tropical storm in California, draught to flood whiplash and record wildfires in 2021 on three continents.

And given my concern for the future of my four precious granddaughters – shown in the photos at the beginning of this post – I’m going to rely on the studies and evidence from scientists.

This is in lieu of the blather evidenced in a recent political debate by, among others, a self-admitted “skinny guy with a funny last name” who majored in biology and stated:

“And so the reality is more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change,” 

Another Outstanding Lawyer

In my last post, I chronicled my long friendship with Portland lawyer Mark O’Donnell and why I admire his skill as a lawyer, his values and Mark’s civic contributions. 

Last week, I attended a Celebration-of-Life for my college Oregon State Fraternity brother, Charlie “Buck” Adams.  Charlie was of the same ilk and leaves a lasting legacy.

After completing law school at the distinguished University of California at Berkeley – Boalt Hall Law School, where he was inducted into the prestigious Order of the Coif, he served as a law clerk to the Honorable Alfred T Goodwin, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. 

This was followed by a long career at Northwest Regional Law Firm Stoel Rives, where after joining the firm in 1976, he became a partner.  He was ranked among the top 5% of Oregon’s appellate lawyers in 2006.

The Legacy

But while Charlie’s legal career was outstanding and will be part of his legacy, his life will be celebrated more so based on his family values, his life-time friendships, his diverse interests and his perseverance though physical hardship.

He became significantly disabled from a spinal cord injury and peripheral nerve damage sustained initially working in a sawmill the summer of 1969.

He had two beautiful and accomplished daughters (Ashley and Joliene) during his forty-five year marriage to Carol, who he met at an holiday open-house after college.  And Charlie cherished his two grandsons.

Notwithstanding the limitations from his back injury which caused him to work both in a prone position and a stand-up desk during his law practice, he also participated in drag racing, snow shoeing, building snow caves, dog mushing in Denali and the Yukon (40 below) and he resumed hunting.  (#2)

Buck was also a man of faith and active in his church – St Luke Lutheran.

But I’m going to focus on the times when I first met Charlie – the SAE House where he was a member of the class of 1969 – one year ahead of me. 

This “cowboy” from Prineville who wore his ten-gallon hat (which he also would periodically don at the law office) would entertain us with his acapella version of “I have a dog and his name is Jake.”

It was not fair that Charlie was so smart and while the rest of us were cramming during Dead Week right before finals, Charlie was raising mugs at our favorite bar – Prices’ Tavern. 

And he would usually end up with the highest GPA in the House during many quarters. (#3 – #4)

And Charlie developed life-long bonds with his fraternity brothers.

The picture on the left below is at an SAE Beerchasing event at the Gemini Bar and Grill In Lake Oswego in 2019..  (Charlie is on the left)  At the Celebration-of-Life, seventeen of us sang the SAE Song “Violet” to his family and friends.

Cheers and Phi Alpha Brother Buck! (#5)

There’s Nothing Better than Baseball in the Fall

Both are excellent and are essentially vignettes – “a collection of personal memories.  With over 1250 tales collected from around the world, memorable experiences with Major League Baseball.:”    (#6 – #8)

Check out these books, you’ll enjoy them.

And Finally

In honor of Buck Adams, I’ll finish with this clip from the July 16th Morning Brew Newsletter. It’s the kind of discussion that Charlie would have over a beer at Prices Tavern with his SAE brothers, given his love of the wilderness.

Besides, his mind was sharp enough to conceptualize the thesis.  It also makes one wonder who funds these academic studies (besides students with their tuition) and what practical value they have.

“The hills are alive with the sound of silence. If a tree doesn’t fall in the woods, new research suggests that we’d still consider its lack of sound to be…a sound.  A Johns Hopkins study has found that people hear silence as a kind of sound rather than an absence of noise.  (#9)

Researchers discovered this by running ‘sonic illusions,’ which typically compare one moment of noise to two shorter moments of noise that together last the same amount of time.

Listeners tend to wrongly perceive the uninterrupted moment as lasting longer, and the same thing happened when the single moment of noise was subbed out for silence. 

This might not have happened if our brains didn’t consider silence to be a sound, scientists say.”

Of course the guys from the SAE house at Prices were less erudite than the Johns Hopkins’ researchers and would have advanced a corollary question:

“If a lone backpacker in the forest expels gas, does it smell?”

The Johns Hopkins’s study was published.  The SAE inquiry never was.

Happy Labor Day

External Photo Attribution

#1. Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:James_Taylor_and_Carly_Simon,_1975.jpg)  Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.  Source: Kathleen Ballard, Los Angeles Times – 1 August 1975.

#2. Oregon Live Obituaries (https://obits.oregonlive.com/us/obituaries/oregon/name/charles-adams-obituary?id=52446999#:~:text=His%20laughter%20was%20contagious%2C%20his,is%20now%20in%20eternal%20wilderness).

#3. – #4.  (http://saeoregonstate.com/)

#5.  Illustration courtesy of Pam Williams.

#6. – #8. (https://basestobleachers.com/)  Website of author, Eric Gray.

#9.  Public Domain – Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gfp-wisconsin-new-glarius-woods-tree-falling-over-on-trail.jpg) This file has been released explicitly into the public domain by its author, using the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication.  Yinan Chen  – 15 June 2013.