What price Wacker? by M.G. Horowitz In 1946, Reedie Howard Vollum and five pals opened up a small oscilloscope shop on Hawthorne Boulevard. Eventually, that small shop became Tektronix of Beaverton, a burgeoning electronics giant challenging the Portland industrial stereotype. Move over chain saws, make room for software... Thirty-two years later I ’m talking with a spokesman for the state’s largest bank on the eighteenth floor of Portland’s drabbest skyscraper. (“ I’m in the Tower,’’ he’d told me on the phone. Great, man, I live in a basement.) “Diversification is a strong point with us,” he opens. “ Forest products have been a dependable industry for this state and have served it well. But it’s good to have something else. Like electronics.” Then, in hushed tones: “Tektronix. ..Intel...Hewlett-Packard... Floating Point Systems . . . Vacker.” He pronounces it Vacker — correct but chilling. I remember Mr. Robinson whispering in the G raduate’s ear: “ Plastics.” Now the First National Bank is whispering “ Electronics.” Electronics: clean, technical, profitable. And supportive of that Cybernetic Paradise where automation reigns, the Fortune 500 gets more fortunate, and the rest of us get to drive Winnebagos day after day. Yippee! We talk about the enviable record of Wacker’s soccer team and its alleged harmony with German labor. “You know, those articles in the Journal weren’t bullshit.” Suddenly I realize how high the stakes have become these days: bankers get high, listen to Kiss, and jive street talk. Now not only are they more powerful than us, they’re just as interesting. Is Wacker interesting? Who knows? All we know is that not only do their workers play good soccer, but their negotiators play good poker. The Germans drove a hard bargain with the Rose City last summer: to lure the corporation, Stumptown was obliged to initiate over $4 million in road improvements, nearly $54 million in administrative costs, and over $7 million in land acquisition; the chemists, for their part, were invited to purchase 84 acres of prime waterfront at less than a third of market value. Oh to be a business in Portland! Or is it, Oh to be that business in Portland? The weather turns grey as I descend into the bowels of Portland’s Northwest Industrial District. Here there are no soccer teams, no silicon wafers, no workers sitting on the Board. There’s just, among others, Esco Steel, Reed Electric, and, since 1889, J.A. Freeman and Son, manufacturers of agricultural implements. Kevin Freeman, a great grandson of J.A ., describes to me what Vaughan Street looked like nearly 90 years ago. “The farmers would come to shop at Montgomery Ward, see, and then come across the street for their seeds and tools.” Over the years, J.A. Freeman evolved from spades and hoes to complex machinery, supported by a team of talented designers. Now they ’re a $7-10 million operation, employing over 200 people. But, as luck would have it, Freeman’s hoped-for expansion conflicts with a contiguous housing project proposed by the Portland Development Commission. And if Freeman can’t expand, the company plans to move to Wilsonville. Goodbye, Portland. Goodbye, 200 jobs. I ask the Portland Development Commission whether there might be a compromise. “ The issue is still open,” they tell me “Kevin Freeman is preparing to move out of the city.” “A lot of people think Kevin Freeman is wringing his own neck,” they reply. And then they say a few other things: “The area isn’t all that good for industrial development anyway.” (No mention of the fact that the Freeman family might be emotionally attached to the property they’ve owned for 90 years.) And “There’s other land in Northwest Portland that would be more attractive.” (Would they talk to Wacker that way?) “Wacker looks good on paper,” Freeman allows. “ But I don’t see how the city can subsidize it: I t ’s not a Portland company, it’s not an Oregon company, it’s not even an American company. We’re a nonpolluting local firm, we’ve never laid off, we buy our castings and tires locally, we’re loyal to the Portland area. Training employees, building roads, who’s doing that for us? Wacker may turn out to be good for Portland. But they’re coming at the expense of local firms: those PDC bonds could have gone to alleviate local firms. ’’ A similar feeling can be found along Macadam Avenue where a highway project is compelling two local stalwarts to vacate the area, Huntington Rubber and Rodda Paint; Huntington has manufactured auto parts in Portland since 1913. President Jack du Vai, a 32-year veteran with the company and, for many years, an enthusiastic member of the Corbett-Terwilliger Neighborhood Association, speaks with disappointment about fruitless negotiations with city planners. “ The city,” he sighs, “wanted us to dry up and go away.” The result? A wide Macadam Avenue...and half of a Portland rubber company in Missouri. Casualties: half of a 200- person payroll. “Funny,” I admit, “how the city was willing to spend so much on road work to get jobs and unwilling to not spend on road work to save jobs.” “ I don’t understand it,” du Vai confesses. “Wacker’s an exotic in-: dustry with a lot of growth potential. But we wouldn’t expect a free ride and neither should th ey .” “Over 14 million dollars worth, to be exact.” “Well, the city’s worried about! jobs. But they should have worried about them two or three years ago. They could have had them for a lot cheaper.” By the time I get out to Atlas Wrecking in St. John’s, I know the tone is goine to turn more strident. Owner Walter Lowe is an active Republican and an outspoken critic of “bureaucratic meddling.” “I ’m always shooting my mouth off and giving everybody hell,” Lowe warns me at the s tart of the interview. “ Reminds me of a writer I know,” I rejoinder, and we sit down to drink his coffee. Lowe, as it happens, is about to be displaced by the UDAG housing project. “ It’s the stupidest thing I ever heard of in my life, building housing along two railroad lines. This is industrial land, anyone can see that. That’s what it is.” I look out at the site. I see industrial property intersected by two railroad lines. “We’re just going to have to move,” he says sorrowfully. “Out of the city?” I ask. “ It’s possible. We’ve been looking at land in Scappoose. You can blame the attitude of the damn city. They just d idn’t give a dam n .” “They seem to care about Wacker.’ Lowe winces. ‘‘Tha t’s really a strange one!” he complains. “ Here they pay someone to come in and jerk the rug out from under people who’ve been here for years. Jeez, it’s a crime!” Is it a crime? When the Wacker proposal came before City Council, only one Commissioner, Frank Ivancie opposed it. For his pains, the Commissioner received a critical phone call from the First National Bank and was publicly denounced as a “jackass” by the Mayor. To anger the Mayor and the state’s leading bank in one day is militant politics but a look at Ivancie’s press release reveals why he felt he had to do it. “ Before we act on the Wacker Project,” he wrote on the Fourth of July, “we should take the time to thoroughly explore this proposal, to think things out, ask the hard questions, get straight answers, and then make our decision. This is not our only chance to get new payrolls and a new business for Portland. “ I want Wacker for Portland as much as anybody else. But I want them on a basis that is fair to Wacker and to Portland, without apoligies to the taxpayers or to other businesses of Portland.” Because of the wonders of tax-increment financing (where future taxes are applied to lowering the price of the land), taxpayers will not directly-and may never-feel the crunch of the municipal subsidy for Wacker. But small and mediumsized businesses feel the slight, because, as Kevin Freeman argues, the money could conceivably have gone to local firms. But could the local firms have offered as many jobs as Wacker? Well, certainly for the moment. Wacker expects to hire 600 people by 1981. Had compromises been reached with Huntington Rubber and Rodda Paint, 170 jobs would have been saved; had Freeman been accomodated, over 200 jobs would have been saved. St. John’s may lose half : dozen firms, forfeiting perhaps 50 100 jobs. And these jobs are right now —not paper promises for 1981. It’s difficult to say whether these firms could have stayed at their sites or, like Steinfeld’s Products Company, been offered attractive terms at Rivergate Industrial Park. In any case, the cost would surely have been far less than subsidizing Wacker. As Ivancie’s office points out, $14 million is a lot to pay for 600 jobs: “ that’s $25 grand a job!” exclaims Executive Assistant Jim Kuffner. Except we’re not really paying it, according to the First National Bank, (i.e. the wonders of tax-increment Continued on next page Bruce Lee Slain By Iron Fist According to Aaron Bank, the head of the New York Karate Academy, several of the elder Manchu Dynasty martial arts teachers were worried about Bruce Lee. Having watched several of his films, they decreed Lee — who was no fake, but rather a kung fu genius who developed his own style of Jeet Kune Do — was giving away too many of the ancient Oriental secrets. The Masters acquired some box office figures from Variety and saw that Lee’s movies were cleaning up in America. This was terrible, the Masters decided, since Americans are inferior, potentially mindlessly violent people, and thus not to be trusted with these secrets to ultimate power. Then, according to Banks, the Masters dispatched an emissary to reason with Lee. Bruce, however, was already as big as Valentino in Hong Kong and arrogant to boot. He would not agree to stop making films. So the emissary, a Great Master, simply laid his hand on Bruce’s shoulder for a moment. This, Banks said, was The Iron Fist, a martial arts technique only the Great Masters, with their consummate knowledge of brain-and-body-waves, can apply. Weeks later, as if a slow-working poison was pushing through him, Lee’s body functions began to ebb. Eventually they stopped dead. That was why, Banks said, the doctors could never successfully determine the cause of Lee’s death. A check of martial arts students around New York City indicated that, almost to a man, they believed in the Great Masters’Theory. —Mark Jacobson The Village Voice, Dec. 4,1978 3
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