SUMMER 2005

RUSSEL
WONG, STAR PERSPECTIVE UNIVERSITY
HOTOGRAPHER
LATIN PASSION
HUMAN
PHYSIOLOGY
RISING
ESSAY CONTEST
WINNER

XQ^P I to/*

UNIVERSITY OF OREGON

COUPLE GIVES $1 MILL!
FOR SCHOLARSHIPS
Remembering the financial struggles
they faced in their college years, Joel
and Colleen McCloud of Torrance,
California, have dedicated a $1 mil-
lion pledge to scholarships for needy
UO students. "We believe that every
kid deserves the opportunity to get a
good education," says Joel McCloud
MBA '67. He and Colleen '67 both hail
from working-class Oregon families that
made sacrifices to help their children
obtain a university education.
'AMAZING' VICTORY
Uchenna Agu '87, 1986 Pac-10 triple-
jump champion and a former UO
cheerleader (who gained national
notoriety in an infamous gum-throw-
ing incident with OSU's Gary Payton),
and his wife, Joyce, have won the CBS
reality-TV program The Amazing Race.
The Agus' luck has changed dramati-
cally: from losing jobs in the debacles at
Enron and WorldCom to winning $1 mil-
lion in Amazing Race prize money. Last
year, UO student Karli French and her
twin sister Kami (featured in OQ Spring
2005) took fifth place in the competition.
JUNE EVENT MINGLES ALUMNI
AND RECRUITERS
On the heels of the successful January
Career Networking Event, the Portland
Center, Career Center, and the UO
Alumni Association will be among the
sponsors hosting a UO alumni career
networking opportunity on Tuesday,
June 28, at the Portland Center in
Downtown Portland. The UO Alumni
Networking and Career Connection
event will be held from 5:30 P.M. until
8:00 P.M. and will provide an exclusive
opportunity for alumni to meet recruit-
ers from top companies and to network
with fellow Ducks. More information at
uoalumni.com.
FOOTBALL FESTIVITIES
While the team finishes up spring foot-
ball practices, the Alumni Association
is gearing up for the fall's football
pregame parties. Look for the Alumni
Association tent at Stanford (October
1), Arizona State (October 8), and
Arizona (October 22). Join the Duck
spirit and party with your fellow alumni
and friends.
40 OREGON QUARTERLY SUMMER 2005
OLD OREGON
Civil War games
engraved, leaving
room for the next
108."
But adopting
any Civil War tro-
phy requires agree-
ment between the
two university ath-
letic departments,
says a circumspect
U O Athletic Direc-
Warren Spady tor Bill Moos. Yet he
admits T h e Platy-
pus "has a history now that it has been
rediscovered," and "could definitely be
an option." He hopes for a decision
before next fall.
Spady hopes he can finally sign his
work. And Williams, who retires this
June but has agreed to continue athletic
department oversight responsibilities for
two more years, may play a role in re-
establishing The Platypus as part of the
great Civil War tradition.
He'd like that: "Most of the rivalry
is very good natured. . . . It generates a
lot of conversation between people; it
brings attention to the two schools. And
it's kind of fun." But he'd like it even
better if next fall the U O could reclaim
bragging rights to the Civil War — and
The Platypus.
— PETE PETERSON '68 MS '77
Hunter S. Thompson, at a card game on the Kesey Farm, February 28, 1991
MEMORY
GOING, GOING, GONZO
SIX-THIRTY CAME AND GAVE WAY TO 7
o'clock as I anxiously paced the hallway
of the University's Sweetser dormitory.
Five friends were coming down to Eugene
from Corvallis, and they were appallingly
late. The date was February 28, 1991,
and we had to get to the ballroom at
the Eugene Hilton by 7:30 in order to
get seats at a lecture given by the outlaw
journalist Hunter S. Thompson.
I shouldn't have worried about run-
ning late. Just as we sat down, a woman,
presumably with the U O Cultural Forum,
which had invited Thompson, took
the microphone and apologized for the
speaker's tardiness. Last seen at the hotel
bar, he had disappeared.
Thompson was governed by his own
twisted version of the circadian rhythm.
If his daily routine, as described by his
biographer E. Jean Carroll is accurate,
Thompson would typically lunch around
7 P.M. on cheeseburgers and fries, several
bottles of Heineken, followed by carrot
cake or ice cream, a snort of cocaine, and
a "snow cone" — a glass of shaved ice
flavored with a generous pour of Chivas
Regal. No wonder he was late.
A n hour late. Ken Kesey '57 and Ken
Babbs made a brief and disastrous effort to
sate the increasingly impatient audience
by telling a few choice anecdotes about
their friend. The effort was cut short by a
surly heckler. Right about then Thomp-
son emerged from wherever he had been
Thanks to You! Ij
hiding and sat down at the table from These freshmen are 'if •'
which he'd speak. In his hand, he held a attending the University

f i||jL ? f JLiM
yellow plastic cup filled with Chivas and of Oregon this year, thanks
ice — perhaps the remnants of a "snow to members of the UO
cone." He opened by mumbling incom-
prehensibly into the microphone.
Alumni Association.
mis * Ki
Drunk and likely stoned, and with no
prepared remarks, he rambled for about
ten minutes. This changed when some-
Members support
scholarships that make the
difference between the
Brjl i|H iJ
one in the audience called out a question.
Thompson perked up. His voice became
clearer. He seemed to draw strength from
brightest students
attending Oregon or going
somewhere else. 1
HI
R& -i-'lHL'.
T
HMH N
two-way dialogue. University of Oregon
There was much in the news to
talk about. Operation Desert Storm was If you would like to help Alumni Association
winding down, Kuwait having just been students choose the UO, join
recaptured by U.S. forces the day before. your Alumni Association 1
"I have the tape machine running back today. Call (541) 346-5656
Your Lifelong Connection
home recording the whole war," he said. or visit us online at 1
I piped in with a strangely prescient ques-
http://alumni.uoregon.edu 1
tion of my own: Should we go in and
• • UNIVERSITY OF OREGON
get Saddam? Answer: "I don't see what
difference that would make." Ever the
political junkie, he described then-Presi-
dent George H. W. Bush as "the meanest
yuppie who ever lived." He predicted
that the 1990s would be "like the 80s but
without the money."
Hitting the Streets!
So much for Objective
Show your University of Oregon pride with the new "O" license
Journalism. Don't bother plate! Funds from the plates support merit scholarships for
to look for it here — not University of Oregon students. I J|
under any byline of Now available from the Department of Motor Vehicles. Apply
mine; or anyone else I using Form 268 from the DMV office. Get rolling today, and make
can think of With the the road a little smoother for the university's best students.
possible exception of
things like box scores, Oreeoti
race results, and stock
market tabulations,
there is no such thing as
Objective Journalism. The
phrase itself is a pompous
contradiction in terms.
— Hunter S. T h o m p s o n
Fear and Loathing:
On the Campaign Trail '72

SUMMER 2005 OREGON QUARTERLY 41

 o OLD OREGON

WEBSITES OF INTEREST TO OQ READERS

ULU At one point, one of my friends
approached the stage and casually tossed
a small plastic bag of marijuana into
Thompson's lap. This started a stream of
other ever more interesting tossed gifts:
More grass, several sheets of LSD, and a
mysterious paperback book offered by an
agitated long-haired chap who insisted it
was "extremely important" that Thomp-
son read it.
Later Thompson received a strange
visit from a local homeless woman known
popularly around campus as Hatoon (see
sidebar, p. 44). Entertained, Thompson
let her try to make a speech on the peril
of water in campus drinking fountains,
but she struggled and sputtered. Seem-
ingly frustrated, she said, "If you could
catenng.uoregon conferences.uoregon.ed point a laser beam at my brain, you might
understand." Thompson smirked, and
pulled a laser sight — the kind used on
rifles — from a pocket and pointed it at
DUCK Q SHOP her as she had described. She didn't like
A branch of the University of Oregon Bookstore
this and fled the stage.
Throughout the course of his vari-
ously incoherent and eloquent ramblings
UOBookstore.com emerged the kernel of the message that
runs through his published work: that
the American Dream is nothing if not
Show your pride with the latest fashions ambiguous, uncertain, and for far too
while supporting the University of Oregon many elusive. Chronicling "the death of
the American Dream" was his journalis-
tic mission, despite the inconvenient fact
Your purchases support current UO students, faculty and classified staff
that through his own success he proved
his entire premise false.
As Thompson's talk wrapped up, the
crowd — including me — rushed forward
in search of his autograph. Someone
standing next to me reached through
the scrum and swiped Thompson's cup
of Chivas, still about a third full. While
he wanted the cup as a memento, he was
kind enough to let me drain its remain-
ing few ounces of watery Scotch. Perhaps
ERB MEMORIAL UNION I hoped it to be an elixir that might mys-
tically convey a touch of Thompson's gift
for powerful prose.

"...virtually without equal in America"

. — Los Angeles Times
www.oregonbachrestival.com
Concert details
Online ordering
• Helmuth Rilling, conductor
June 23—July 10 in Eugene

U N I V E R S I T Y OF OREGON
 I wasn't the least bit surprised to hear
that Thompson had turned a gun on
himself on February 20, 2005. Watching
his father die after lingering powerlessly
in a Louisville Veterans Administra-
tion hospital in 1952 would have left an
indelible scar upon Thompson's then
fourteen-year-old psyche.
A piece he wrote in 1964 for The
National Observer on the 1961 suicide of
Ernest Hemingway in Ketchum, Idaho,
is about the closest thing one can find
EVENTS
28 Portland
Networking and
Career Connection
UO Portland Center
:
29 Boise
jcks in the Hawk's Nest
Baseball Picnic
3 Hollywood
Hollywood Bowl
9 San Diego
"A Taste of Oregon"
Featuring Silvan Ridge/
Hinman Vineyards
2 0 Portland
Moss Adams
Networking Event
Lundquist Alumni Ne1
1 Houston
Football vs. Houston
Duck Pregame Party
4 Eugene
Homecoming
Football vs. Cal
For more information
and complete details on
all UOAA events, check out
uoalumni.com
in the Thompson oeuvre to the kind of He knew the clock was running out.
self-reflection his readers hungered for, Approaching his sixty-eighth year, various
particularly in his later years. And it's health problems had started to mount. He
also easy to see it as a blueprint for the sometimes used a wheelchair after break-
exit Thompson would choose for himself ing a leg last year, had recently acquired
forty-one years later. an artificial hip, and was at the time of his
It opens with a quote from a neighbor death recovering from spinal surgery.
describing Hemingway in his final days He was far from the man who a little
as "That poor old man. . . . He was so over three decades earlier had written his
frail and thin and old-looking that it was last great book, the one Frank Mankie-
embarrassing to see him." wicz, George McGovern's campaign
"Frail" was no adjective for Thompson. manager in the 1972 presidential race,
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SUMMER 2005 OREGON QUARTERLY 43
 OLD OREGON

often described as "the most accurate
and least factual book" about the elec-
tion. Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign
Trail '72 is a dazzling and disturbing
indictment of the dirty business of presi-
dential politics. In it, we see Thompson
at the height of his power, flexing his
strange muscles for the polemic and
inventing fictitious anecdotes that in
fallacy contain more truth than most
meticulously fact-checked news reports.
This made the terse reporting that
first revealed his death that cold Sun-
day night all the more unbearable to
read. They unflinchingly called it a
"self-inflicted gunshot wound," roboti-
cally reciting the unforgiving clinical
facts, with neither texture nor style. How
might Hunter Thompson have described
the scene of his own last exit?
The indignities of human age had
launched their final, unshakable assault
upon his body, and he would deny them
their prize. Seated at his kitchen "com-
mand post" before his typewriter — the
word "counselor" cryptically typed on
the center of the page — he paused mid-
conversation to set down the telephone
receiver, his wife Anita on the other end of
the line. Then he wrapped his lips around
the barrel of a .45 caliber pistol, and fig-
ured he'd see what happened next.
— ARIK HESSELDAHL '93

Books for all Oregonians

Atlas of Oregon
Second Edition
WILLIAM G. LOY, STUART
ALLAN, AILEEN R. BUCKLEY,
AND JAMES E.MEACHAM
The standard reference book
on the state
UO Press/hardcover O R i <; o \ • S I' K O \ l I M

Oregon's Promise
An Interpretive History
DAVID PETERSON DEL MAR
A concise, compelling history 1, FOURTEEN YEARS
OSU Press / paperback day after her encoun-
th Hunter S. Thompson,
atoon, a colorful campus
Oregon Coastal figure for more than three
Oregon Coastal decades, died after being struck
Access Guide
Access G u i d e by a motorist while riding her
A Mile-by-Mile Guide to Scenic bicycle across Franklin Bou-
and Recreational A ttractions levard. Hatoon, whose given
KENN OBERRECHT name was Victoria Adkins,
The most comprehensive and
ived on a bench near
useful guide to the Oregon Coast
OSU Press / paperback 'O bookstore since early
• and before that kept her
possessions in front of the

Trask
DON BERRY
The great Oregon novel
ght Library. News of
ing rippled across cam
an impromptu memori
ng up outside the book-
5
rial
OSU Press / paperback store, followed days later by
an on-campus memorial ser-
UNWUIITYOl
vice attended by many friends
OREGON University of Oregon Press and acquaintances. Her death
followed Thompson's by only
Oregon State University Press

OSU
nine days. Both were sixty-
seven years old.
The OSU Press now distributes a selection of books published by the
UO Press. Available in bookstores or by calling 1-800-426-3797. Oregon State
PRESS Email OSU.Press@oregonstate.edu to receive a free catalog. UNIVERSITY PRESS

44 OREGON QUARTERLY SUMMER 2005