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you're government is still not doing anything about it. so these wise finally start organizing all across the country before the enough, before they had cell phones. they would spend hours and days on the telephone talking with one another. virginia beach, in san diego, in jacksonville, organizing and starting to put pressure on the politicians honor government, on the press to talk about this issue to bring their husbands home. they created an obsolete extraordinarily that we still recognize today, and i expect a bunch of you all wore pow/mia bracelets at one point. there were over 5 million of these things printed or amended. and people from all sides of the political spectrum or them. remember, vietnam was a tremendously divisive or. but because of these women and this pow/mia movement, the country came together around the pow. and around the men that were fighting. for the first time our nation was in a position where we had to differentiate between the political goals of the war and the men who were fighting it. these brave women helped our country do that. three of the founders of the national league of pow/mia family where the wives of this group of pows known as the alcatraz eleven. sybil stockdale, jane denton, louise mulligan. and because of their work, goes of all they did, in 1973, the pows finally were able to come home. and after eight years, bob shumaker was reunited with his family. the last time he saw his son, grant, grant is eight in this picture, the last time he saw grant, grant was two months old. can you imagine that? but there has never been a situation like this before, and i hope there will never be one again, but their shared experience there in alcatraz prison brought this group together. they state a very cohesive group, and to this day they still keep up with one another. one of the biggest, selfishly, one of the biggest gifts that this book has given me is the kind of chance to be the grandson and get to know these people. i never thought some of my good friends would be 80 year old pows. but that's what's happened throughout this journey for me. that event has been so special. when you look at this, i think it's important to remember that this story is not just about the alcatraz eleven. and it's not just about all the pows. it's about the values and virtues of the american military and about the values and virtues that make america what it is. but when you think about this group of servicemen and women, prisoners of war in vietnam, you have to realize that there has never been another group of american military servicemen and families that has endured more for longer effort in american history. and we should never forget that. and the other thing to take away from this is that any day, if you can open your door and walk outside, not a bad day. so everyone, thank you for coming. and once again, pows, thank you so much for being here for your service. [applause] >> thank you so very much. he has graciously accepted some time to answer your questions, if you have been. spend a few minutes with q. and a. if you have a question, please stand that. because this is being recorded i will repeat the question so that it's in the recording. but do you have any questions in the audience? spent for those of you don't know, this is being taped on c-span. so check back with them and they will let you know when it will air. >> yes, sir? [inaudible] >> i do -- >> excuse me. so the question was, what happened to harry jenkins? [inaudible] >> so this gentleman flew long easy which is an experimental homemade aircraft with harry jenkins. harry jenkins was 65 but my. they kind of called him the ichabod krane of all the pow. somehow six by of human and a scott huff. we're not sure how we did that what he did. he always loved flying. he came home and built his own airplane in a garage in the house in coronado. sadly he was killed in 1999 in a small plane accident. his family has said -- wonderfully supportive of this. it kills me i didn't get to meet them because everybody says he always had a laugh and he was just very extraordinary. [inaudible] >> every other year up to oshkosh and his long easy. he told me about this. he never told me much about his pow experience but he told me that, you know, every year he connected with his sons, he would buy one of them in front. you apply this long easy from the back seat. he went up to oshkosh in 99 and i flew with him a couple months earlier. on his way back he landed at a hot desert in arizona in phoenix summer, and it was a hot day, very hot day in phoenix, late july, people. he was overloaded in his long easy it is taking off in the early evening and is going down the runway and they couldn't airborne, kept going, kept going and that's the couldn't stop the airplane. he went through a chain-link fence and the crossbar of a chain-link fence hit them in the head and that's where he met his demise. >> the great thing about these guys is they were all fighter pilots. they stay that way throughout their lives. thank you for sharing that. >> thank you. another question? yes, sir. >> can you speak about doug had no at all? >> george coker, amanda carr over what is going to be the youngest the adobe because he was, he just turned 2 23 we got shut down practices a former wrestler that escaped. but he wasn't the youngest pow because there was an 18 year old seaman that got washed overboard. and actually when he showed up at hennepin everyone thought he was a plant because he thought surely there's no way someone is going to get washed overboard and end up in hanoi hilton. well, that's what happened. so doug hegnal was there. for a couple of reasons they thought he might get a chance to go home early. so dick stratton and couple of other commanders had him memorize the names of all the pows. so he did, over 200 names in his mind, but he couldn't say them soldier to basically have them to the tune of old macdonald had a farm, and would say this so fast they had to debrief them over several days so they could forget who all he was saying in his presentation. but it's an amazing story. for some families like the johnson family, the jenkins them and the rutledge family, they still didn't know if sam or how we for terri were a live. when doug got home in 1969, he brought the first word to those families that their husbands and fathers were still alive. good question. spent a question right behind you and then we will get to you. >> you talked about survival and how they survived in isolation. i'm sure you've heard about fred brinton and his way of survival was playing music in his mind spent a great story. bob shumaker in addition to being a ph.d in aeronautics and a brilliant man, was also a musician. so he got some toilet paper and some burnt matches and basically laid out a piano keyboard. so they would roll this thing out during the day, and bob also would write music using burnt matches and for the paper -- toilet paper. >> there's a little more, hold on. between him and his cellmate, they played music all day long. and ed alvarez, the first pow, was in a neighboring cell. sabbagh said, hey, listen up to more going to play you a tune. and so they proceeded to play on their pianos. after couple of minutes he tapped the back not bad for ragtime. cities got to be tremendously creative. >> the picture that you showed a bob of being captured, was that a true picture of him being captured or was that the one that they tortured him for in august 1967 to go out and we take propaganda picture of his capture? >> good question. that was i believe the one that ran, ran in 1965 in the paper after they were released. he still had his flight suit. i think that's it. as the torture, i think he played a different part in the torture scene. there was an east german film crew and they were trying to find folks to play the part of american vw's and they tried to convince bob to do this, and bob didn't want to do so they worked him over. they beat him up pretty badly, and so he ended up not having to play the part of the american aviator. but they did need the part played of a wounded american aviator, and so with bob's face all black and blue, he fit the part so he still had to go play the wounded aviator. the vietnamese had counted on the makeup job for him, unfortunately. >> i was in a cell next to them when they worked him over -- [inaudible] >> i'm going to doublecheck that. that's very interesting. before, i want to make sure all the pows, if you all could come up her afterwards, please. >> where can i get a copy of the book? >> i get e-mails from people that i got e-mail from new zealand this morning. honest to god, a pilot in new zealand would read this book and had been moved by it. some people had more pow bracelets. .. >> so that our country never forges what these men did. >> yes, ma'am, just a second. let me get you the mic. >> [inaudible] be. >> i know he doesn't want me to say anything, but i know this is about alcatraz, but my husband was shot down and carried into china and held in iron basket prison for five and a half years in solitary confine bement. i just -- confinement. i just want that to be known. [applause] >> there are so many stories about the vietnam war, about the vietnam period that we need to know and, sadly, we don't know. i hope that other people will come along and share their stories and that america understands what so many people sacrificed in a very difficult war, you know, for their country and, ultimately, for each other. and, you know, what the families went through. one of my big lessons from this whole experience has been learning how important the military families are. to the old enterprise of military aviation or armed services generally. and i think it's something we're always going to remember what the families go through and how we can support them. so thank you for sharing that and thank you for doing that. that's incredible. >> think other questions? any other questions? ladies and gentlemen, let me add one more endorsement to the book. i have personally read, arguably, three different accounts, three different books on the p.o.w., the american p.o.w. experience in vietnam. this is by far the most readable, the most easily understood and the best account that i have personally ever read, and i encourage you to pick up a copy. i encourage you to pick up a copy and read it. you also have the opportunity to have him autograph it today, and i encourage you to do that. i want us all to give alvin another round of applause for taking the time and writing such a wonderful book and such a wonderful account. [applause] >> thank you. >> the autographs will actually occur up by the bookstore over here at flight deck shop behind you up against the wall. he'll be with there to sign the autographs, and you can pick up a book with. ladies and gentlemen, thanks for coming today. >> thank you, all. [applause] >> is there a nonfiction author or book you'd like to see featured on booktv? send us an e-mail at book to the c-span.org -- booktv booktv@cspg or tweet us at twitter twitter.com/booktv. [background sounds] >> welcome to bend, oregon, weekend on booktv. located in the high desert of central oregon, bend is known for its outdoor recreation and independent craft breweries. >> book art is handmade books creating and books that are made that are not just the traditional book, and so it's more than just the words that are in the book, it is also the structure of the book is also the art, part of the art; the paper that's used, how the, whether there is text or no text. so it's, it's all of that, and it's an unending world to discover and to create in. so it's pretty amazing. >> people talk about racism and it's so big and it permeates so much of what happens in daily life everywhere in this country whether people understand or acknowledge it or not. the challenges of race. what if two people tried to understand better issues of race from the perspective of the other? >> the help of our bend broadband cable partners, over the next hour, we'll visit with some of bend's local authors beginning with james foster on his book about morse v. frederick, the supreme court issue that tackled free speech in high school. >> dozens of students demonstrated outside the supreme court as inside the justices questioned attorneys in what legal experts call the biggest student speech case that's been argued in two decades. freedom of speech writers for every single school child in public schools across america. >> january of 2002 was a big day in the history of juneau in that it was the first time in alaska's history that to olympic torch run was going to come through town. it was the runup to the salt lake city olympics, and it was a very, very big civic event and popular event in town. it was also an interesting event in the sense that there was only one way in and out of juneau. you can get there by boat or plane, but when you get to the city, this is only one road going into juneau, and that's glacier avenue. it runs from the airport to downtown juneau, and that was the route that the torch was going to take. well, that morning it was snowing, it was cold, and there was a huge turnout. the school district this juneau had -- in juneau had excused almost all the kids from elementary school up through high school to line the pathway of the torch run. and as the torch runners came down glacier avenue surrounded by camera cars and pepsi bottling companies happening out pepsis and throwing frisbees, a kid named joe frederick and 13 of his friends held up a 14-foot banner that said "bong hits for jesus." they did this just as the runner with the torch and the camera cars came by. standing across the street was the principal of juneau douglas high school, derek rah morse, and when she saw this banner go up, she immediately crossed the road with an assistant principal and custodian and asked the kids, told the kids to take the banner down. 13 of them immediately dropped the banner and ran off. joe frederick, who was the instigator of this affair, stood there and argued with principal morse about his first amendment rights saying he was across the street, he was on a public sidewalk, he had the right to hold the banner up and wasn't going to take it down. so the principal gathered up the banner with the help of the two colleagues, order toed joe to meet her -- ordered joe to meet her in the office, and the whole controversy essentially develops from there. what happens is really a matter of debate. [laughter] it's a subject of serious disagreement. at one point sort of a sidebar with, but it fits in with the timeline, all right? in an early chapter of my book i call it rash man referring to the the famous movie in the late '50s which is the story about a samurai who is killed in a bamboo glade, but then there are five different versions of the story. you never know exactly what happened. it's presented from different points of view and different per peckives as individuals. well, that's exactly what happened in the principal's office. so it's very difficult for me to tell you definitively what happened in the principal's us a. from joe's point of view, he was interrogating principal morse about why she was intruding upon his first amendment rights. he was quoting thomas jefferson, he was making the case that he and his friends had this right to hold up the banner during the torch run. of principal morse, seeing joe frederick through the lens of sort of a difficult troublemaker in high school, at juneau douglas high school, started going to what's called a friday. now, a grid matches student behaviors with student penalties, and she end up suspending joe for 30 days, and as he continued to argue with her, morse said he actually went around the desk and looked over her shoulder at the computer that she was working on. he felt intimidated. -- she felt intimidated. she had left her door open so her administrative staff could watch because she didn't trust joe. she ratcheted up the penalty and literally banned joe from campus for the duration of his suspension. so joe a couple of days after in this the encounter -- by the way, going back to after principal morse imposed the penalties, she asked joe to leave the building, and he refused to, so she and vice principal staley had to literally walk joe out of the building to begin his suspension. a couple of days later joe was in the municipal swimming pool parking lot which is immediately adjacent to the high school, about maybe 10 feet from the property from which he was banned, literally in the face of the administrators. staley, the vice principal, came out and called the police on joe. i mean, all of this is by way of indicating this is a very adversarial, very contentious relationship between the principal and joe frederick. juneau is isolated. it's fairly remote. a lot of kids grow up this juneau, and they're sort of at loose ends and don't have a lot to do. joe was sort of one of those kids. he was a little more enterprising and started sponsoring concerts and other sorts of activities. but a lot of kids run into dead ends and brick walls in juneau, and unfortunately end up doing serious damage to themselves with drugs. at the time we were there and at the time this whole situation unfolded, there was a serious oxycontin epidemic in juneau. and so drugs were on the minds be of a lot of the residents of juneau, and this banner could be interpreted as drug speech, "bong hits" were the first two words. so a lot of the community said, look, we've got an oxycontin end dem ing, this kid's -- epidemic, this kid's holding up a sign during national investigation in an event -- national event. deborah ors morse was a hero for a lot of the members of the city. on the other hand, a lot of people saw joe as sort of a hero of first amendment rights, standing his ground for the rights of students to say their speech, and they would say things like so what does bong hits for jesus mean? frederick wasn't a whole lot of help because he insisted it meant nothing, that it was a prank designed to get tv time, right? their 15 seconds of fame or whatever. so frederick was deliberately opaque about the meaning of the banner. but a lot of people then just held joe up, as i say, an icon of first amendment speech. another part of the story is that deborah morse is something of a recluse, i use that word advisedly. she's not really social bl. she spent a lot of time in her office. she didn't walk the halls and press the flesh with the students. she was seen as kind of remote. and the way that played out is that here is deborah morse, sort of antisocial, not having any sense of humor, not seeing the kind of irony in the prank. she should have just let it, she should have just let it go. joe appealed his suspension and criminal trespass order, first of all, to the superintendent of schools, and the superintendent upheld the penalties. then he appealed to the entire school board, and the school board unanimously upheld the penalties. third stop was the u.s. district court for the district of alaska, and joe sued saying that principal morse had violated his first amendment rights, and he also asked for damages, monetary damages for the injury inflicted on him by the principal. john fedwick was the judge who heard the case, and he basically sided with the principal op all the counts -- on all the counts. he said that the principal had the authority to tell joe to take the banner down. he did not uphold the suit for damages, and he did it in what's called a summary judgment which is also part of, another problematical part of the story because if we're looking at a story that is dividing not only frederick and morse, but divided juneau, choosing up sides as to which side was the one they believed or agreed with, john sedwick did not help the situation because he never heard a trial on the facts. he simply agreed with the principal that as a matter of law, she had the authority to tell joe frederick to take the banner down. next stop was the ninth circuit court of appeals. and typically, courts of appeals hear cases in the first instance with a panel of three judges. they don't hear them as an entire court, that's called enbank, so three judges overturned judge sedwick's summary judgment, sided with joe frederick saying that he did have a first amendment right to uphold the banner, and then it went up to the supreme court, and that's how we ended up with morse v. frederick. morse v. frederick is such an important case because the last student rights case was heard in the '80s, and so it was like a 20-year hiatus between the last case involving student speech rights and school authority. the landmark case comes out of the vietnam war. it's called tinker v. des moines and involves some kids who wore black armbands to school, and the des moines public schools protesting the war in vietnam and mourning the assassination of john kennedy. school district told them to take the armbands off or they'd be suspended. long story short, they didn't take them off, they were suspended. it went all the way to the court, and the court famously held that students do not shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate, all right? so that was sort of the baseline. however, as i say in the book, the tinker decision is tentative in that it was not a broad-president bushed, unequivocal endorsement of student rights because what the court said is all those students do not shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate, they have to exercise those rights in a way that does not cause the disruption or violate the rights of other students. every supreme court decision has all these ambiguities, right? they're not black and white. there are several shades of gray and am by giewty. so tinker stood for student rights, but stood for be student rights exercised in nondisruptive ways. well, then along come a whole series of other cases. i won't necessarily go into it, but to answer your question, by the time morse v. frederick got to the court, it was very clear that in this wransing between students' rights and school authorities that the balance had tipped in the direction of school authorities being able to maintain discipline, pursue the educational mission of the school and, essentially, as we were talking earlier, student rights were put in the context of the school that had other responsibilities and other obligations. and so in the trade-off, often times student rights took a second place to school authorities and school responsibility. and when joe sued the school district, the aclu joined in the litigation, and they hired one of their advising attorneys named doug mertz who's a very well respected attorney in juneau to represent joe. doug represented joe at the district court level and all the way up to the supreme court. mertz is a member of the supreme court bar and actually argued joe's case before the supreme court. the school district originally hired a guy named david crosby to be deborah morse's attorney, but when it was clear that they had lost at the nineth circuit court of appeals and the stakes were getting really high, they went out and tried to find a high-powered attorney, and they found one in kenneth starr. the lewinsky prosecuting torn, right? the whitewater prosecuting attorney. so ken starr was up against doug mertz before the supreme court. he's former solicitor general of the united states. he had hired john roberts, the current supreme court justice, not only once, but twice. so it was, in a way it was sort of like david v. goliath before the supreme court. and the way the court saw it, by a vote of 5-4, was that bong hits for jesus could reasonably be interpreted as drug speech, and as drug speech, the principal -- deborah morse -- had the responsibility to make sure that it was taken down. because it was disruptive. back to tinker, right? students have rights, but those rights have to be exercised in a way that doesn't disrupt other students' education or the educational mission. the court basically qualified tinker and said that there's now a drug speech exception. if speech can be reasonably interpreted by a relevant administrator, then it's not protected speech, and it can be prescribed. the court said this was an extended assembly. what they meant by that was despite the fact that school was technically out, the students had been dismissed, they were still on school property and off school property that the event itself was a school-sponsored event which extended the authority of the principal and others to the event and across the street on a public sidewalk. so they saw it, essentially, as a school of sponsored event -- school-sponsored event along which went the responsibility of the principal to determine if this was disruptive speech or not. deborah morse was feeling snake bit. that's not my word, that's david cross by's description of his client -- crosby's description of his client. after all was said and done, she somehow wishes that she'd never even gotten involved in this, because people would come up to her in the grocery store, for instance, and read her the riot act, or friends -- she thought were friends -- would suddenly drop out of her life. and she was getting a lot of criticism in the press. and she found herself very, very much unhappy and regretting her whole role in the well situation. i mean, you think about being sued for damages. the school ticket has an insurance -- district has an insurance company. if she had lost, and there was, were damages assessed, she would have been indemnified by the insurance company, but there would have been a judgment against her. now, judgments against you, legal judgments against you, echo out. it affects your credit rating, your ability to get a mortgage, a whole lot of consequences. plus, it's a huge stigma. and i think in a word, that's exactly how she felt, was stigmatized by the whole affair. she thought she'd done the right thing by going across the street and interrupting this disruptive event. but a lot of people didn't see it that way. she thought that joe would, that joe was, essentially, if a way -- in a way what's the word with i want? intimidating is not exactly the right word, but was, essentially, had a vendetta against her. both sides took this very personally. [laughter] and she saw joe as, essentially, carrying out this vendetta against her, and she never really understood why he just didn't let the matter drop. joe, unlike deborah morse is not an introvert, nor shy. he's a very articulate kid. he sees himself on this moral crusade to defend the rights of students to exercise their first amendment rights. he, on the other hand, saw deborah morse and dale staley, the vice principal, and others in the administration at the high school carrying out a vendetta against him, that they just didn't like him because he was an outsider, he was outspoken, he was aroundic the late -- articulate, and they were essentially out to get joe frederick. so it was like this clash. that's why title of one of the first chapters this the book, it's like everybody had their version of the story which became capital t truth, and they became sort of a crusade. so joe saw deborah morse as out to get him, deborah morse saw joe as out to make her life difficult, and we were off to the races. what it says is the same thing that a lot of other student rights cases say, and that is that student rights are qualified and dependent upon the educational context within which they take place. and necessarily then, student rights are limited. they are not the same as adult first amendment rights. which is sort of a difficult pill for a lot of people to swallow because the language of the first amendment so absolutist, tiffany. congress, i call it ten little words. congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. well, what part of "no law" don't you understand? well, the court understands that no law can be, must be interpreted contextually. so it differs from context to context. and in the educational context, student rights are dependent upon those rights being exercised in ways that don't disrupt the educational mission. that means drug speech in joe frederick's case, that means lewd and obscene speech in matt frazier's case, that means that if school newspapers are publishing controversial articles, they can be censored by the teacher and the principal. that means that if a kid goes out for sports, they can be subjected to random, nonsuspicion drug tests. all of those cases which figure in joe and frederick -- morse v. frederick, all those cases add up to the principle that in the context of a school environment, students' first amendment and fourth amendment rights occupy a lower level, a second tier. >> this weekend booktv is in bend, oregon, with the help of our local cable partner, bend broadband. up next, we sit down with author jane kirkpatrick, author of "homestead: modern pioneers pursuing the edge of possibility." >> so this is a reptile road, actually. it kind of has all these little grades that twist on around here and go on like this, and this is a 16% grade. we actually made that road because this was so steep. and 16% is about the angle of a cow's face. and we would go down that road. and one of the stories i wrote about in the book was my husband in a truck, and four of us were in a truck, our friends, and i'm bracing myself. and i said just go slow, just go slow. and so he starts out, ask he's like going like crazy, he's going, like 50 miles an hour. it's bouncing off the side, or it's careening, and i'm worried about going into that, and we get to the bottom of this and he says to me -- i said how come you did that? why did you go so fast? he said take your foot off the accelerator. and so in my, you know, bracing myself, my foot had slipped off, and it had jammed his foot onto the accelerator. and so the very thing that i was accusing him of, i was causing. so to he had to turn the key off to get the truck stopped. i just, anyway -- >> where is starvation point? >> well, it's not as far away as you'd think. [laughter] it's about two and a half hours north of bend and about two and a half hours east of portland and on a very remote at the end of a 11-mile dirt road along the john day river. >> and where did the idea come from for you and your husband to move out there? >> he had been hooking for a piece of property -- looking for a piece of property. he always thought he was born a hundred years too late. i guess there are a lot of men like that around, i don't think. and he always wondered if he could make it, you know, build a home, have a life that far away where he could fish and hunt, you know, whatever. and i sort of put that off. it was a dream for him. and eventually, he showed me an ad in one of those little nickel ad magazines where people sell their used washing machines and their cars. there was a sale, 300 some acres, and i was like, well, we can't -- we don't need 300 acres. and he said, no, maybe we can split it, get 'em to split it. so that's what happened is we fought this acreage in 1979 -- we bought this acreage in 1979. it was shortly after we'd been married, and it was also shortly after his oldest son had been killed. and i think that really -- not until after we did this did we really look back and think that was one way, i think, that we were trying to grieve a great loss and to sort of honor his life by living fully. by not just deferring dreams that you might have, because life is short. we actually came in august with all of our stuff. the shop and the barn had been built in april. so by august we were ready to go, and that's when i quit my job, and we moved up there in the trailers. and we started the house on october 26th. and we moved in on memorial day. so we were building through the winterer. and it was the wettest winter they had ever had up to that point. so we had to do it through all of the kinds of things that you wouldn't imagine. the road got really soft because there was so much rain, and the cement company didn't want to come down the road and deliver cement for the foundation of the house or the shop. actually, that was even earlier. and so we had to put the cement in the back of a dump truck and drive the dump truck down and then dump et out. i mean -- it out. i mean, everything we did there was three times more complicated than we ever would have imagined. first, of course, we had to design the plans, and we had to get permits, many permits to actually build there because we had to live, we had to build a quarter of a mile back from the river because it's on a wild and scenic river, so there were state and county agencies that we had to sort of work through to get the permits. and then we began with building the shop where he would be able to build cabinets and other things later. so the first structure was a hangar shop that was built with a generator. we didn't have any power. so he and his brother and another man went down there to build that building. and then we brought trailers, you know, sort of a, you know, motor home trailer-like structure down there, and that's what we lived in. and the first thing we wanted to do was get power. we didn't want to have to build that house with a generator. so then we had to work with the local power company the bring power across the river and bury it, you know, take it up to the shop and up the where the house would be. and then we wanted to get running water. we were getting tired of hauling water there town, 30 miles away. and these, of course, not sequential. all this stuff has to be done at once, and this is what when i read old diaries about homesteaders, that is the sort of surprise of everybody's life is there's so much that has to be done, and you to have to get with it done right before the weather change or before, you know, something freezes up or whatever it might be. and so then we had to figure out how to get water, and we were using, my husband had said there was a spring there, and i went and looked at this spring because there'd been an old man who had summered out there, basically, and he had a hand pump in an area. so he thought there was a spring there. .. used john deere tractor that became the vehicle. we use that vehicle so much. we bought it in the end and hauled it up there and it did everything and it held carry things around when we moved from the shop where we stored everything into the house. we moved the piano in the bucket of the john deere so became a part of the family. so we contacted the company and said we want to get power out to this place, what did they say? >> well, in 1964 there had been power to that property. it had once been farmed but there were big floods in 1964 with most of the people in the west remember, they lived through. the ranch who owned it never wanted it because it had been flooded or to empower their and they gave us permission basically to restore it. so that helped with all the permits. the phone company was another sort of surprise, because i had contacted hi them before we movd and they said, when you have the ditch is open for the power, just call us and we'll come in and drop the phone lines and that will be fine. well, it didn't happen and we couldn't get the phone company to come out. finally, months later i contacted the public utility commission to find out what had happened, because we really wanted a phone. so they called back after a few weeks and asked me to sit down and said, the estimate that a been given to them by the phone company was 64 thoughts and dollars for a phone. and, of course, i just laughed and she said, i am not kidding you. so anyway, but they sent an engineer out from the phone company, so we came up with some other options. one was that we could bury the line i suspect it would provide the line and we could bury it, dig a ditch of seven miles long and come down over the ridge so they delivered the wire. and before we could get the big cat that we had hired to do this, the ground froze up so then we couldn't do it. we had to wait until spring. so in the spring the guy with big cat came and had a river case on the back. we are so excited. we put uphold the honor. so he dug this ditch and the line came off and went into the ditch, came down over the site of this ridge, a phenomenal ridge. and then we had to bury the wire because it would hit rocks and bounce up. it had to be 18 inches deep. anyway, after all that work it didn't work. there were little cuts in the wire all the way alone. we don't know if the wireless defect or whatever, but we had to do it again. and i call the internet after the first disaster and i said, what's going on? what are we going to do? and he said, common sense will prevail. and i thought that meant they would get it fixed. but to him it meant you will do it over. >> you mentioned one of the things that was built was a hanger. why was there a hanger built on the property? >> after we found this property in 1979, and we went down that road, and i'm thinking, what happens if the weather is with that? i didn't want to be on the road. those rights were made by water running, you know, digging those rights out. so my husband said why don't we get our pilots license, we'll get our pilots license and building and we can -- if the weather is really bad, we will just fly out of that. so we bought this airplane, and we initially can't get not in anger at all because we didn't have an airstrip yet. we kept it in a little town about 20 miles away from the ranch. had an airport there and we just hide it down there. i took a couple times to work and we did some other things with it but we didn't ever actually have to use it to get out because we didn't have a way to get out. anyway, the friends who helped us with the phone line the second time, they came up in the spring of 1987, i think it was, to celebrate basically, and we decided to go do our biannual. we have a pilots license, every two years you had to go with the instructor to make sure. they were passengers in the back of the plane. we were coming back from legrand oregon amber going to land, and as we came in over the town, it was an uphill strip so it was considered somewhat a hash to strip but it was paid and yet ago over the town and land until. i told my friend in the back seat who was seven and half months pregnant, we're going to go over the trees, right after that will be fun. we are right at the end of the runway. the bottom of the expedition point is where we were for the strip. and suddenly the sounds all changed. the engine was still going but something had changed. my husband was doing things frantically over here and we are sorting to trick the there was a series of trees over here, and then i heard the locust trees, branches underneath on the fuselage. it was like being on a boat where you had read to undertake but i still thought we could make it. but then the wind clip the first tree and pitched us forward. i don't remember coming toward the ground. i just remember like. i thought this is a. and after all this work, this is it, we are going to die. my husband didn't think it. he was still trying to fly it, and i think he did the best that we could do, but we did crash. we missed three houses in the middle of the town. we missed all the power lines, and there was no fire. so all of these things were a gift to the two of us had a lot of broken bones, but our friends in the back, she doesn't have any memory of it, which is wonderful. she went into labor but they were able to stop the labor. and the baby was born full term six or seven weeks later. we recovered, but the airplane never did recover. all the local people came up and help us out. then afterwards they came out and they did work on the ranch for us, had a big harvest they were the women brought food and the men were put in the irrigation system that we've been trying to get set a. of. we hadn't been on the property very long when this thing happened. one of the rangers came up, we're sitting on the deck with our legs in casts and this is what we looked like. we were sitting on the deck and he said, how are you doing? and i said, not so good. we didn't expect other people to get caught up in our adventure here, you know? and i said, here are all these people, half of them we don't know and will never be able to pay this back. and he said, jane, you missed the point. he said, we love doing this, and you give to us when you let us. he said, we will never let them pay this back. they were killing rattlesnakes in the ditches and all the stuff. he said the best you could help to do is pass it on. on. >> other health scares? >> through the years, yes. my husband had got bladder cancer and we had some complications with it. everything, we had, he had some problems. he was getting sicker and sicker and he didn't want to go to the doctor. finally, he just had a lot of pain, abdominal pain. and so i just went, we got the indolence and then they said they will air live -- air lift impact bend. bend was her home base. we kept our doctors entered in this year. there are a lot of people in that region who would travel to portland or trial south of bend. but anyway, he was airlifted that any action had come his colon had burst so we have an emergency surgery to it seem like every of the youth of a something major going on, and so in 2010 when it was getting close to the odd and be one of always really bad for him, that's when i started pushing for, know what? i think the time has come for us to maybe be a little bit closer than 45 minutes or an hour by air. i'd rather that we could drive to the hospital in 20 minutes, or something like that. so that's when we moved and we made the decision to leave the ranch. >> how long have you been at the ranch at this particular point? >> twenty-seven years. one of the insights over this time period that come with is that if you think about intelligence as being a clock face, digital. with 12:00 being really was part and in 3:00 would be kind of smart and 6:00 would be average intelligence, and 9:00 would be kind of dumb, and 11:59 would be really, really done. but it's right next a really, really smart. and sometimes in life you can't tell whether it's the smartest thing you've ever done or the stupidest thing you've ever done. you can't tell it until after you have gone through it. and after you survived it. and for us, for me personally i think it was the smartest thing i ever did. i would do it again. i think, would like to believe i would've been less upsets of about one thing. it seem like it took me a lot of maturing time to let go and not be so anxious about whatever is going to be the next trial. in some ways it was come in writing the book and looking back that i sort of thought, do know what? that was a terrible time at the got through it. that was a terrible time and i got through it. but yes, i remember there was a day, this was after the airplane accident and probably a year or so after it, and my husband and i used to like to go to dance. my foot had been pretty badly damaged in the accident and had lots of pain in it. he had broken his ankle and is it any we have been a wreck with gas and so on. so this was about maybe seven or eight months afterwards. it was a gorgeous day and the sun was out. i was testing and he was sitting in the chair with his blue coveralls on end there was a song by linda ronstadt and -- all, i don't know much but i know i love you. he said to me hey, when you finish dusting the stuff i might like to dance with the. i said well, if i finish dusting that song will be over. he said i thought you might say that the saudi stood up and he took my lemon pledge bad and we started dancing and 11 where the dogs were spread around looking at what's going on here and we had to readjust because my foot didn't work right. his hip wouldn't work right. it was the way we danced before. i thought to myself, that's what living is about. you make adjustments. you change what you were doing and that's part of what living looks like. as we sort of moved around the living room floor and i looked out and we didn't have any -- we had no neighbors, and i saw the vineyard that we planted, and i saw the river and i thought to myself, and i said to him, i could not be happier in my life that i am at this moment. and i almost passed it up. almost didn't do because i was so afraid. and so for the moment alone, i am grateful and i would do it again. >> while visiting bend, oregon with the help of local cable partner, booktv talks with tom wolfe, author of "gather at the table: the healing journey of a daughter of slavery and a son of the slave trade." >> people talk about racism and it's so big and it permeates so much of what happens in daily life everywhere in this country, whether people understand it or acknowledge it or not. the challenges of race, what w.e.b. dubois talked about the challenge of the twin center, the color line, which is still the case today, what if two people tried to understand better issues of race from the perspective of the other? so here you've got kumbaya white guy from rural oregon, central oregon, and you know, this african-american woman from urban south side chicago, what if the two of us lived this model of being together. that's a weekend to do. how can we be together for such opposite sides him from somebody whose were slaves and services ancestors did the enslaving, can we find piece together? can we find healing? can we grow together through this process? >> when did you first learn about this? >> late 2000 early 2001. i was in my late '40s before i learned any of this history. he was the patriarch i guess, are the most successful of the slave traders in the family, three generations over about 50 years of this town was involved in the slave trade, and he was the most successful. they brought something like 10,000 people out of west africa, forcing them into slavery. and they say something like half a million of their descendents could be a life living here today. and he owned more ships than the u.s. navy at a time. and the navy wasn't that big, but he was quite successful in the slave trade. the most successful slave trading family in u.s. history. in the most involved state and slave trading, which is rhode island, responsible for more than half of all slave trading from these shores. >> did you have any idea that this was in your family background? >> zero. zero. it wasn't something that i knew, nothing that my dad knew. his father died when my dad was two years old. so there were stores to be passed down, there was no one around to do that. so no, it's nothing that i knew, literally at all until my late '40s. and then discovered not doing this family history but just a tremendous amount of u.s. history that was never taught in any school i went to. and as i've traveled the country, it's not taught at most schools. the first book was filled with so much poorer -- o poor assets america should not only was i not aware of, but was understandable why i wasn't aware of. i mean, you know about slavery. you know of these terrible things that can affect learning about my direct connection to. the north direct connection to, or against direct connection to it, to issues of abuse, the kkk in bend, oregon, some downtown here. the big question for me is what to do with this information? what's next? and found them learn about an organization, got invited in fact to the first gathering of a group called coming to the table, which is the descendents of the enslaved and descendents of the enslavers coming together to understand and acknowledge the full history of this nation. and it was through coming to the table that i met sharon morgan in the spring of 2008. we did really hit it off. it was speeded why didn't you hit it off? >> you know, it's funny. she said that i stared at her with his piercing blue paul newman eyes, and that of just impolite or intimidating or something. and i've found for intimidating and maybe a little standoffish, and we just didn't -- it wasn't anything antagonistic for route. we just didn't hit it off. but about five months after that, i was speaking at the retention of recent conference at the university of chicago, which is where she lived, and she came to the conference just to greet me to her hometown, give me a hug. and she would say she wanted to touch this person and see if i was serious about this work. she read my book and really liked what i was doing. and was really intrigued by coming to the table. so that was the moment things began to blossom. we spent three years. it's still ongoing, but for the book we spent three years visiting each other's families, getting to know each of his kids and grandkids, you know, parents, aunt and uncles. and really diving deeper into each other's lives. i showed her around where i grew up in southern california in pomona where i grew up close to the watts riots, and she took me through the south side chicago showing all the place of her childhood. we then visited, we've been to 27 different states, visiting sites of racial terror as well as important sites in the civil rights movement. we've been to court houses doing genealogical research with each other's families. been to plantations and homes, spent the house in the night -- spent the night in the house that wasn't gone with the wind. went to minister the word emmett till was so brutally terrorized and murdered. went to lawrence, kansas, to the site of john brown, the battle of blackjack that was the first real battle between free state and proslavery forces. so wanting to understand this history from th the perspectivef each other, we spent three weeks in tobago in the caribbean in the last of the great houses that at one time was a 600-acre sugar plantation, and wanting to kind of visit these scenes and understand history from the perspective that most people don't seek out. >> what sharon and i committed to do is just to be really open and really honest, and really equal in this discussion. and, you know, we both abroad a lot of life experience, and because of the previous eight or 10 years in working and greeting the film, writing my first book and being involved with coming to the table, my awareness shifted a lot, and grew a lot. so we both abroad a lot to the table in beginning our conversation with each other. you know, a few surprises along the way. we're driving to my sisters house for thanksgiving dinner, and in southern california, and she lives out in rural, its agricultural area, avocado trees and orange trees. and when we get off the freeway, we are driving hi and we get on this road and it's wrong, it's kirby, mayor, tree canopy's. she says to me, what is that creek floods that we just went over? is there another way out of your? and i'm like, what? it's a dry bed. there's a bridge over a dry bed and completely blue skies. southern california. and i said, are you being paranoid? she's like, i don't think that's funny but she said when you're around white people, you have to be. and she explains to me how she had been taught from childhood about how to act around white people. and here she is driving into the territory of the enemy from the way she's been raised. because in her childhood, the arlie 1950s, prior to the civil rights movement, you could die -- emmett till died, died for his interaction with a white woman. sharon has ancestors who have been lynched. just ancestors who have been horribly abused, who are part of the great migration of mississippi and alabama into chicago because of the fear of not just brutality and abuse and discrimination and prejudice, but the potential to die. because of the color of her skin. you know, i'm thinking, this is my family, everything is going to be cool, you know? she will be warmly welcomed, which she was. and i would never never think that way. and then i remembered lend an eye on her honeymoon. we are big bruce springsteen fans. we're going to new jersey to see if we could hunt down bruce. on our way there, between bristol and new jersey is new york city. we are driving along and i take an exit that it think is the right one. and the next thing i know we are in harlem. and we are driving along a street looking up at the elevated freeway far above. and my heart starts pounding because it seems like every single building has got, is surrounded by cyclone fences with razor wire, bars in the window. people standing or walking around the none of them white. some of them are staring at us and i'm like, without looking at her, treachery, don't make it obvious that make sure your door is locked and we're not stopping to ask for direction. just keep driving, driving, block after block after block. i have no idea we got back on the through and made our way to asbury park, which we did. i just remembered the fear. and those are the things which sharon and i have in common is that they're from the opposite side. and she will say maybe now tom will understand why i was nervous driving in california. and that was part of, i don't know, the craziness of this adventure that we agreed to go one. but we also agreed that each other's back. we agreed to make this happen together. >> you said that you understood where sharon's fear came from. do you know where your fear came from in that situation? >> to be honest with you, i think it's part of our dna as white people. i think it's part of our dna and black people that there is a distrust that it rooted in the wounds that have been inflicted. the oppression that white people visited upon black people in this country. there's wounds on both sides. i think white people, it may take on many, many forms. it may take on an unconscious form where we are not aware of why it is that if i see a big black guy walking down the street i'm going to move to the other side of the street, even in raw daylight. where if i'm a store owner, why is it that i'm keeping an eye on the black lady down the aisle and not the white lady down the aisle? why is it that black kids are getting dropped in cars off the charts more often than white kids who get stopped in cars driving down the street? i think that with white people, what we have been aired it is a sense of distance, a sense of unease built sometimes on shame, sometimes on fear, sometimes on discomfort that is rooted in traumatic separation based on wounds that have inflicted, and that when you study trauma, which is part of this whole model of healing is understanding trauma as a wounded vet if it's not healed, he continues to fester. and we tend to go back and forth through these cycles of violence, and they may be psychological or physical or sociological, but there's a cycle of acting out aggressively against others and a cycle of hiking in towards oneself. it may be drugs and alcohol. it may be abusing one's spouse or abusing someone who is the other physically and psychologically or just the separation. and we get caught up in these cycles come and if we don't find a way to break out and move into a healing journey, then we're stuck there and we pass that onto our kids. i absolutely know that it's a topic that people can talk about, but we don't because we don't deal with it in the way that we deal with most subjects that impact us. but if, in fact, we will make the effort to understand issues of race and work together on them, this coming to the table model that sharon and i lived and wrote about in our book is one that exists because people are doing this work together. and its understanding the impact of this historic trauma on us today, and present-day circumstances, present-day consequences that we can have and should have. it's like when attorney general eric holder a few years back said when it comes to issues of race, we are largely a nation of cowards. but until we start having these conversations with each other and accepting that we won't always say the right things, but we need to work on these things together, until we do that we are never going to become the nation that we were supposed to be founded on, the ideals that were founded on. and eric holder was taking to task by people on the right and the left, and by his boss, president obama. but he's exactly right, and through coming to the table, this conversation is happening. and it's happening in many other contexts as well. this just happens to be the group that sharon and i are connected with, and that we wrote about, and people find out through our book which we are really grateful for when it shows up, we'll show up at a college classroom and summer has brought the book and it's filled with sticky notes but we know that it's making an impact and people are recognizing that we are hungry for the conversation, and we're willing to have it. >> for more information on booktv's recent visit to bend oregon and to many of the cities visited by our local content vehicles, go to c-span.org/localcontent. .. you've written this book we are going to discuss today. the four-week event about, i would like to start with who you are. we've met at conferences and talk programs. i don't know much about your background and i would guess others do as well. how did you come to the subject? >> guest: thank you for being my chat companion today on
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