Rose Festival

Portland's Rose Festival begins today, a week early, with the opening of the fun center on the waterfront. In a couple weeks, the fleet comes in, only 10 ships this year, but before I was born my dad came to Portland with the Navy, a kid who had joined to escape working in a mill in New Jersey, and he was so impressed with the city that he ended up retiring in Oregon decades later. There's a photo in the Oregonian, 1938 I believe it is, of my dad and a group of sailors raising their beer mugs in a Portland bar. Just a kid, out to see the world. He'd end up seeing a lot. Pre-communist China impressed him so much with its poverty that he once told me, "If I were a Chinaman, I'd probably be a communist."