This article – a two-color cover story no less – appeared on the front of The Northwest Examiner (October 1991). Obviously, Allan Classen, the Editor & Publisher and author of the piece, had an enormous hardon for me. One way or another. Luckily, I was somewhere far away when I read this curious profile. Wrote an angry, anguished response. Didn’t send it.
Most of this is true, except for the parts that are wrong.
But I am pretty much over it twenty-seven years later. Not everybody has a hit piece written about him on his way out of town. – JDW
Photo used on Front Cover of the Northwest Examiner
Jack Welch has had it with Portland. He can’t get his column published, the political scene is nothing but hypocrisy,
he can’t afford the rent on his Northwest Glisan apartment and last month a vagrant took a dump in his basement.
He’s heading for Florida. He sold his car, his computer and his stereo, and with Hiawatha Moscowitz, the new woman in his life, bought a van.
He knows some will say he is running away, but he doesn’t care. He says he feels happier than he has in decades. He’s finally free of Portland.
He plans to write a book, exposing corruption, deceit and all the things he couldn’t get printed when he lived here. The hero will be a tall, dark, good-looking guy with a moustache, bearing an intriguing resemblance to Jack himself. There’s a metaphor here plain enough for a college freshman. “I’m creating the hero and it’s me.”
“What would you do if you had your life to live over again?” he asks rhetorically, contemplating a question he has thought about a lot lately.
“Well, I do have my life to live over again and I’m not going to fail,” he says determinedly. He didn’t have to add the phrase “this time.”
Welch admits he has made a few mistakes in his forty-four (44) years. Things came easy for him. Maybe too easy. Besides being a rangy 6-foot-3, dark-featured and strikingly handsome, he is intelligent, athletic and witty. He’s had a degree of fame, a once-promising corporate career and more than his share of young, beautiful women. Now they’re gone, for reasons he now admits were his own doing.
“I think I have something to say and there are times I drink too much and I’m telling the truth and no one wants to hear it.”
He’ll confess to a lot of things, but not to hypocrisy. “I’ve done a lot of bad things, but I don’t claim that I haven’t.”
Welch finds hope in knowing that his potential has largely gone untapped. “The good thing about it is I’ve never really tried.”
He didn’t always have to. As a 150-pound fifth grader, he was recruited by every coach in Carmel, New York. Mothers pulled their children off the field at the sight of him. He wasn’t a mean kid, just big. His parents took him to a Lutheran church, where he dutifully performed as an altar boy and usher. When girls began to interest him, he switched to a Methodist church where the prettiest girls went. He sang in the choir and was active in the church youth group. His high school year book declared his life goal: to be a U.S. Senator. “I just wanted to make things better for more people,” he recalls. Such promise.
Still shy on discipline, he quickly flunked out of college. After a military hitch and with a better sense of where he was going, he returned to school and earned a degree in political philosophy from Northern Arizona. He also got married.
He even entered Willamette University law school but dropped out, finding it a “total charade” ethically. Students decried the immorality o=in high office of the Watergate era, then talked openly of intending to divorce their wives as soon as they graduated.
Welch took off a year and concentrated on running. He routinely covered one hundred (100) miles a week, ran marathons from here to Greece and shared victory stands with Olympians. He also blew out his knee.
So he poured his energies into writing about running. He and a friend were putting out a running newsletter, and Jack made it his full-time work. Running was a magazine for people who could think as well as run, and it got positive reviews in the national press. Welch became a “celebrity of sorts,” getting paid to travel to races and collecting a scrapbook of news clippings.
Running magazine grew and after five years he was making $10,000 a year, a modest but adequate living for the pair, living in Salem at the time. Nike saw promotional potential in the magazine and bought it in 1980, turning it into a slick, big-budget monthly. Nike kept him as editor briefly, then made him its director of public relations. He had an office across from the president. He got a big BMW. He bought a condo in Patricia Court, a charming courtyard building at Northwest 22nd and Hoyt. Finally on top of things financially, he divorced his wife – “a slob of a move for which I still feel poorly. She’s happier without me, though,” he says.
For Welch, things went the other way. In 1984 Nike fired him. He admits he wasn’t the easiest person to work with. It took a year before he found another job, doing PR for Fred Meyer. That deal ended the day after he was quoted in The Oregonian supporting candidate Jim Davis for mayor. Just like that, Fred Meyer dumped him, too.
So, how did this liberal-hearted idealist, a man who still criticizes local columnists for ignoring the plight of the homeless, become the campaign manager for a law-and-order, former police chief? Welch insists Davis’ right-wing image was unfairly created by the media. To him, Davis was a “problem solver” and a man with integrity. It also reflected the fact that crime had become Jack’s burning issue.
Davis barely made a dent in the voting, as Bud Clark swept to his second term. Welch was indignant that the media didn’t blame Clark for the rising crime level, and didn’t take Davis seriously.
Welch’s cynicism grew. Every conversation about Portland journalism dwelt on who sold out to whom, and how truth was being mangled.
Bitter but free, Welch survived on free lance writing for the next years. He did a column for This Week, writing about circuses and obligatory trivia as well as his personal views on life and politics. It didn’t pay the mortgage. He had to sell his condominium and move into an apartment. Then This Week dropped his column. He felt like he belonged with the Steve Duins and Phil Stanfords, but no one wanted his column. He wrote features for The Examiner and other smaller local papers, sometimes for sums as small as forty dollars. $40.
He blames his inability to find a niche on the fear of Portland publishers to upset power brokers. “I can’t be trusted not to tell the truth,” he says.
He found cosmic forces at work against him, noting that his “dissent into depression and middle age” paralleled the Reagan years and the Bud Clark administration.
Turning himself around has had a lot to do with the new woman in his life, Hiawatha Moscowitz, whom he describes as a “middle-aged Jewish mother with white hair.” Moscowitz, a writer/photographer who works mainly for corporate clients, hardly fits Jack’s description, but she does represent a maturity lacking in his past relationships.
Moscowitz has brought him a new understanding of a term he admits to having trouble with – commitment. After a series of younger women seeking marriage and eternal fidelity, he said Moscowitz only insisted that he be the one woman in his life now. That sounded like something he could handle.
“If you can quit smoking and drinking, then you can quit beautiful, young women,” he says.
Truths even more profound than that are rolling off his silver tongue these days: “The key to a good relationship isn’t love. It’s about wanting to have a good relationship.
“I want to have a good relationship.”
Welch is also working on acceptance. “I was doing something people didn’t want done and I wasn’t doing it well…. This town’s not going to change, so I better. Tilting at windmills is a characteristic that often serves me poorly.”
Being near his family, all of whom are in Florida, has become more important to him than he realized. His father, the man who once advised him sagely, “Son, you don’t have to tell the truth all the time,” has terminal cancer. His father and mother, “the world’s most honest woman,” live by the beach in Tampa Bay.
Jack and Hiawatha are taking her dog and most of their possessions in their camper, the Merry Miler, on the southern route to Florida. He’s also taking his new twelve-gauge shotgun. It’s a signature of the heroic columnist in his book: the sound of the pump action is enough to scare off any evil that may confront him.
Barker Ajax about to hit the road. Photo by Carla Perry.
A gleam fills Jack’s eyes as he makes an imaginary pump of his gun. He swears he doesn’t want to kill anything – he even veers out of his way to avoid running over slugs – but the thought of commanding instant respect is exhilarating. And if anybody gets the idea of relieving themselves on his corner of the beach, Jack Welch will be ready for them.
-30-
Epilogue. Mayor Bud Clark appointed Portland police Capt. Penny Harrington as the first female chief in city history. But Clark dismissed her in June 1986 after her husband, Officer Gary Harrington, was accused of compromising a drug investigation.
Clark appointed Jim Davis to replace Harrington, but fired him in April 1987 during a meeting at the Fat City cafe in Multnomah Village after squabbling about the bureau’s budget.
The squabble was the cop needed tools to fight the Bloods & the Crips and the Crack Epidemic. The Mayor had become Instant Politician – just add beer. But not new police.
During his tenure with the Portland Police, Jim Davis had enrolled at University of Portland graduating cum laude in 1974 at the age of 43. An honors degree in the humanities.
And he was running a Tough On Drugs policy, supported by everybody, while his own son was in jail on a drug charge.
One more thing. Objects in the rearview mirror are closer than they appear. But okay. Whatever.
“I can’t be trusted not to tell the truth” is a quote from the publisher of This Week as he explained my forced departure. It’s true, but I was just relating the explanation given to me at the time.