Turn Left at the Trojan Horse (3 page)

My Homer-saturated mind conjures up images of gigantic cannibals—the Laestrygonians, who welcome three envoys sent by Odysseus by grabbing one of them and preparing him for dinner. When the other two men race back to the harbor, the Laestrygonians rush in from every direction and toss massive boulders at Odysseus's ships, smashing them to pieces. Then they spear the men like fish, carrying them home for supper. The confrontation amounts to all of a dozen lines in Homer's epic, but in an instant Odysseus loses eleven of his twelve ships—all but his own.

This is typical of Homer, by the way. He spends only a few lines describing horrific scenes: sinking ships, terrifying maelstroms, ghastly deaths. But he uses dozens of lines to explain how Odysseus's old wet nurse recognizes him upon his return to Ithaka by a scar he received while hunting a wild boar as a young man. It is a strange imbalance of event and exposition, but it isn't necessarily inconsistent with Homer's intent. The
Odyssey
is a story about a man's journey home, rather than simply a man's journey.

Regardless, the all-too-brief encounter with the cannibals begins with an encounter with a sturdy girl who is drawing water from a spring. She points the men toward her home, where they expect to be welcomed as traveling strangers.
Beware your friends
, the scene seems to suggest—which, it turns out, well describes the tale of the green giant.

The hillside giant is the logo of the Green Giant label, which was long represented here in Columbia County by the Seneca Foods asparagus cannery. For seven decades, the cannery reigned as one of the major employers in the region—until 2004, when Seneca announced it would shift its operations to Peru, where workers earn in a day what Americans make in an hour. The Dayton facility, touted as the largest in the world, had been the last remaining asparagus cannery in the state, and the move left a huge void in Columbia County's economy, eliminating thousands of full-time and seasonal jobs in a region with a total population of only 4,100 people. But the green giant is still there, decorating the hillside, only now it must seem like a massive chalk body outline at a crime scene.

For the time being, Dayton remains a charming little community, the kind of nineteenth-century hamlet—with the oldest continuously operating courthouse in the state and the oldest train depot—that clings to the significance of its past amid a modern world that has rendered the place largely insignificant. It has been the Columbia County seat since 1875. I head for the public library, where a woman named Liz assists me in my exploration; we go through old newspapers, census records, deed records, history books. And a story begins to emerge.

There were no Rough Riders in my family. I come from a long line of Dry Cleaners and Insurance Brokers. If old Teddy Roosevelt wanted his shirts pressed or his claims paid, we were of heroic stock. Adolph Roth made it to America first, emigrating from Austria-Hungary to New York City in 1873 at the age of eighteen. How and why he found his way to the southeastern corner of Washington remains a mystery, but he did so less than a decade later, well before the Spanish-American War. He was the first of three Roth brothers to arrive.

By 1883, the Adolph Roth Mercantile Company was advertising in the
Columbia Chronicle
. Adolph married a woman from New York a few years later, and they raised three daughters and a son in Dayton. The son died suddenly at the age of five in February 1906 and was buried in Dayton Cemetery. Almost immediately thereafter, Adolph must have moved his family to San Francisco, just in time for the city's infamous earthquake. Records show that Adolph wrote to his brother to tell him about the unfortunate timing.

Henry Roth, the oldest Roth brother, was the second to come over, following his brother to Dayton in 1895 and lasting about fifteen years there, before moving to Chicago, where he and his sons ran a dry cleaning business. Henry was my great-great-grandfather. The story I always heard about his second son, my great-grandfather, was that he was originally called Otto. However, for some reason he despised the fact that his name could be spelled the same forward as backward. So he renamed himself after his uncle—Adolph. History will record that as lousy timing, too.

Of the original immigrants, there was also a third son. His name was Joseph. My grandmother, Celia Roth, is in her nineties now but still as sharp as the spear of Achilles. She lived across the street from her grandfather in Chicago and heard tales of his brother, the elder Adolph. But she had never heard of the other brother, Joseph. Apparently, the family was keen on keeping him a secret.

This I know: Joe Roth was born in Hungary in 1862. He lived in Dayton for a dozen years, and he is buried in Dayton. In between, he lived in Hermiston, Oregon, for four years, and he died there, violently. After a good deal of digging, I discover the family secret on the front page of the
Columbia Chronicle
, dated June 3, 1916, which reprinted a report of a few days earlier from the
Hermiston Herald
:

It seems that both Joe Roth and James Ralph had worked at the Dayton Electric and Power Company, which brought the first electric lights to the town. In 1912, both sold out and moved about one hundred miles southwest to Hermiston, where they purchased interests in the Hermiston Power and Light Company. At the time of the shooting, Joe was the company's president; James was the vice president and general manager. Again,
beware your friends
.

Apparently, that night Joe came home from work and sat for a while with the evening paper. Then he left, telling his wife and two daughters that he was going to the office. That is the last they saw him alive. Joe seems to have gained entry to the garage through a side door. He left through a rear door and was found behind the building with a bullet in his head. A revolver with the spent bullets was found next to his body; another revolver with one exploded shell was found in his coat pocket.

Records indicate that in 1909, at least, Joe Roth lived at 703 South Third Street in Dayton. But there is no 703 South Third Street; it is an absent address, although it would have been located across the street from what is now the high school gymnasium. So instead, I trudge to Dayton Cemetery, where Adolph Roth bought a dozen plots 115 years earlier. The city clerk informs me that, had I arrived only a few years earlier—before the city changed its policy on such things—I could have sold nine plots back to the city for $800 each. Again, bad timing.

In section A, I find a trio of gravestones in a neat row. Two belong to Adolph Roth's children—ten-week-old May and five-year-old Sammie. The third, a square slab of granite, smaller and less adorned, is Joseph Roth's. He was fifty-four.

The final resting place of Joe Roth in Dayton, Washington

I stand there, listening to the birds chirp blissfully, and I think back to the last words of the
Hermiston Herald
's account of the tragedy: “Mr. Roth was a kind, loving husband and father.” So what caused Joe Roth's descent into madness? Did he discover that Ralph had embezzled money? Was he trying to cover up his own thievery? Had he found Ralph in bed with his wife? Had the stress of business led him to snap? Or was he a man destroyed by miscommunication? Did he simply think Ralph was a burglar trying to enter the garage? Then again, why was Joe in the garage in the first place?

There are no real answers, only clues, as gleaned from the newspapers: “Mr. Roth was in Dayton several weeks ago, and it was noted at that time that he was worried about something, but no one knew what it was…. It is also learned that for the past two years Mr. Roth has wanted to buy the electric plant and own it all to himself, but Mr. Ralph did not want to sell…. Mr. Roth had a bruise on the back of his head which cannot be accounted for unless it was caused from falling.”

Most intriguing to me is the third bullet. Why did he kill himself? Was he distraught over his place in life? Or was he remorseful over his involvement in death?

Among the myriad tales of suicide in the ancient Greek myths, several are directly tied to Odysseus himself, including the death of his mother, whom Odysseus had thought very much alive. But when he encounters her spirit during his trip to the underworld, she tells him, “It was no disease that made me pine away, but I missed you so much, and your clever wit and your gay merry ways, and life was sweet no longer, so I died.”

Still if I were to guess at what might have driven Joe Roth to murder-suicide, I might point to Odysseus's experiences in Troy. The legendary Ajax, tallest and strongest of all the Achaeans and second only to Achilles as a warrior, is the only main character in the
Iliad
whose prowess on the battlefield is absent any help from the gods. With the death of Achilles at Troy, Ajax and Odysseus both claim his armor for themselves. Both men deliver speeches, and Odysseus, far more eloquent, takes the prize. Ajax then goes into a narcissistic rage, vowing to kill the Greek leaders who deprived him of what he considers his rightful inheritance. It is a tale of unmet expectations.

To stop Ajax, Athena makes him temporarily insane, and so he slaughters a flock of sheep instead, mistaking them for his former comrades-in-arms. It has been described as vengeance against the social order, a rebellion against the notion of honoring a negotiator over a true warrior. When his madness leaves him, blood on his hands, his honor diminished, he sees death as the only way to reestablish his heroic stature. He fastens a sword to the ground and falls on it.

So maybe Joe Roth was equally enraged by the order of things. Perhaps he, too, considered himself worthy of sole ownership and went mad when his ambitions were thwarted. It could be that he came to his senses in time to see the blood on his hands and did what he considered to be the only honorable thing.

I can only hope that my great-great-great uncle was humbled by his grave error in judgment, perhaps understanding—as I am beginning to—that obsessing about unrealized life goals might only serve to undermine a life entirely. Ajax? He never learned. When Odysseus visits the underworld, all his fallen comrades-in-arms are there. He speaks with Achilles and Agamemnon and Patroclus…but Ajax simply walks away in silence.

“Should I call you Mr. President?”

The man loosens his grip on the lawn mower and offers a smile and a handshake. “Bill would be fine.”

I am in Oregon now, some fifty miles southwest of Dayton, having enjoyed a gorgeous drive that took me through quintessential rolling hills to a hamlet called Athena, home to about 1,200 God-fearing souls. It wasn't always Athena. When a New Yorker named Darwin Richards settled the area in 1866, the stagecoach operators who stopped there called it Richards' Station. Later, the town that sprang up was known as Centerville, as it was halfway between Pendleton and Walla Walla, which must have seemed like metropolises back in the day. But, predictably, there were already a few Centervilles in the region. So a local school superintendent, a classical scholar, suggested a name change. He claimed the hills of what is now called Umatilla County were similar to those around Athens, Greece. So Athena it became.

And why not? There is no harm in aiming high when christening a settlement. You can harbor big-city dreams, and since a community far outlasts its original settlers, you don't have to deal with the angst of unrealized expectations. So it seems sensible enough to name a burgeoning hamlet after an immortal, especially one who ranked among the most feared and revered of the Olympians. Particularly in Athena, though, birth seems to have been accompanied by lofty aspirations. Among the town's early settlers was a fellow named Isaac Newton Richardson, a minister and dentist. His relatives included George Washington Richardson, Thomas Jefferson Richardson, Benjamin Franklin Richardson, Andrew Jackson Richardson, and Lewis Clark Richardson. To be sure, living up to such names seems an unenviable challenge, but it is significant that more than a few Americans choose to saddle their offspring with such historical burdens. The Leader of Men is a hero for all time.

I suppose I am here in Athena to explore exactly what that makes the rest of us.

“I'm a fifth-generation Athenian,” Bill Hansell begins. He is sixty years old, with a head of white hair that is thinning but hanging on gamely and glasses set in rectangular frames that rest slightly askew on his face. He leads me into his living room and hands me a soda, and for the next twenty minutes I hear a family history like something out of a James Michener novel.

The paternal side of Bill's family reached the West Coast via the Oregon Trail, settling in the Willamette Valley. Two sets of families made the trek together, each with teenaged children. Two of these teenagers fell in love and, as many pioneers did, returned to land that they passed through along the way—back to Umatilla County. They raised a daughter, who married a carpenter named George Hansell, a fellow who had come out from the Midwest on the train.

One of George's children, M. W. Hansell, used his eighth-grade education to become a horse trader—literally, rounding up strays and selling them in the Athena area. He had a business partner whose family boarded a schoolteacher assigned to a one-room schoolhouse out in the country. She and M. W. fell in love, but she told him, “I don't want to be the gypsy wife of an itinerant horse trader. If you're serious about marriage, then I want roots.” So they bought a 640-acre farm just north of Athena, raising wheat and peas. The family eventually got into ranching, too, primarily a cattle and hog operation. But M. W. never quite lost his horse trader's instincts, which paid off considerably during the Great Depression when he purchased another 640 acres, much of it covered by forest, for $640. When he died nearly a half-century later, the family sold the timber from that section of land to Boise Cascade for nearly three quarters of a million dollars.

“That money paid the inheritance tax and saved the ranch,” Bill says with a grin.

Bill's mother, Joyce, was a pharmacist. His father, also named Bill, was a veterinarian who was shipped over to China during World War II, where he doctored animals as they came over the Himalayas. When he came back home, he decided to return to farming, which is all he ever desired in the first place.

“So my dad is one of the few people who, for his entire adult life, did exactly what he wanted to do more than anything else in the world,” says Bill, and he says it with great pride in his voice, as if it represents the pinnacle of existence. Which, come to think of it, it damn well might.

The younger Bill, on the other hand, didn't much care for farming. He had been born when his father was overseas, and it may be impossible to have a more enviable birth date than his: He arrived on 01/23/45. Bill lived in Athena until the third grade, then moved to the family ranch and was raised on the farm. At the University of Oregon, he met his wife, Margaret. They were married during their senior year.

“When I enrolled, John Kennedy was in the White House. Everybody had a crew cut. I remember an article about what a unique thing it was on campus that one of the professors had a beard. As far as I know, the only drug on campus was alcohol. And I couldn't have found Vietnam on a world map if my life depended on it,” says Bill. “By the time I graduated four years later, we had Vietnam, Berkeley, the Summer of Love, the riots, just a cauldron of turmoil.”

Bill was the furthest thing from a radical. In fact, after he graduated with a degree in political science, he and Margaret joined the staff of Campus Crusade for Christ, an interdenominational ministry dedicated to spreading the gospel of Jesus.

“I knew a lot about God, but I never recall feeling that I had a personal relationship with Him. I remember hearing how many of my peers made decisions. They were telling me they heard God's call, and I was envious because I wasn't hearing any voices or seeing any direction. I remember praying and saying, ‘God, I'm willing to do anything you want me to do, but I need to know it's Your call on my life. I don't want to just respond to something emotionally. And unless You lead, I'm going to law school.”

Instead, Bill was assigned to minister in Berkeley, of all places, in the summer of 1967—quite a revelation, if you will, to a straitlaced Oregon farm boy. Apparently, God has a sense of humor.

There is a touch of Odysseus in Bill's account. Early in the
Odyssey
, Aeolus, king of the winds, takes measure of our protagonist's run of misfortune and suspects that he must be hated by the gods. Odysseus himself is tempted to agree. But over the course of his adventure, he learns to trust in the gods, specifically Athena, who becomes to him the voice of the Olympians. In Joseph Campbell's monomyth, Athena is the model of supernatural aid—“a protective figure…who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass.” So Odysseus's spiritual journey is much the same one Bill has made (and I have not)—passage from uncertainty to faith.

“I was born again,” Bill announces. “I know at times that has a negative connotation, but that was the experience I had.”

After Berkeley, Bill and Margaret ministered for six years in Sacramento and for another five in Sydney, Australia, before returning to Athena to raise their children in the kind of rural environment they preferred. For a few years, Bill worked on the family farm. But, he says, “Farming's pretty isolated. I'm more of a people person.”

So he ran for public office instead, becoming Umatilla County commissioner in 1983. His is the kind of family history—intrepid pioneers, soldiers shipped to war, generations of farmers, and a country teacher and horse trader thrown in for good measure—that makes for a solid politician's backstory. But don't call him a politician.

“The word I've used is servant leader. You serve the people you lead, if you will. That's sort of the philosophy,” says Bill. “My time in the ministry prepared me in a whole lot of ways for public office. I've never been a Christian candidate. I happen to be a Christian who's running for office. But I'm not part of the Religious Right or this or that. I am who I am. I pray for guidance. I pray for understanding of the issues. But that's not all I do. I study. I do the research. I get the background.”

Umatilla County commissioner Bill Hansell in Athena, Oregon

Here again, Athena is a suitable reference. She is a remarkable figure in Greek mythology, because she seems to represent two opposing concepts. On the one hand, Athena is boldness personified—from the very beginning. Her birth consists of splitting open the head of Zeus and climbing out fully formed and clad in armor with shield and spear at the ready (which is something I will have to remember the next time I hear one of my wife's friends claim that males could never endure the pain of childbirth). She is the goddess of war, who descends from Olympus and strides between the two armies at the battle of Troy.

But Athena is also unlike the other Olympians in that she has found a harmonious equilibrium between extremes. She is said to be the immortal who walks most often with the mortals, frequently taking human form, as if approximating humanity herself. While the other gods are rather one-dimensional in their behavior—Aphrodite the lustful, Ares the wrathful, Hermes the rogue—Athena seems more complex. She is belligerent in battle but benevolent in peace. Although she is the archetype of the invincible warrior and is credited with inventing the war chariot, she is also the goddess of intellect, a model of measured judgment, inventor of the flute and the potter's wheel.

Sometimes bold, sometimes conciliatory, appealing to various interests—of the twelve Olympians, Athena would seem to have made the best politician. She values cleverness above all, and what is Mount Olympus if not a jumble of faith and politics and concealed trickery?

Over two decades, Bill has been reelected county commissioner five times, usually going unopposed. He has served as president of the Association of Oregon Counties. About ten months before my arrival in Athena, he discovered that his most recent campaign had been fruitful and had multiplied his influence exponentially. He had been elected president of the National Association of Counties, an organization giving voice to the nation's 3,066 counties, nearly two-thirds of which are members, including most of the nation's largest.

Bill offers the usual motives for pursuing a career in public service—the joy of helping people, whether that means creating dozens of jobs by relocating a big business to the area or assisting an elderly lady on Cabbage Hill whose chickens won't come down from the rafters of her barn.

“In the county, I can help seventy-two thousand people,” he explains. “When I was president of the state association, I could help several million people, most of whom had no idea who I was. All running for the national association did was expand my base.”

But it seems to me that with this last campaign he also has entered the maelstrom of politics. He has testified before Congress and has visited the White House, shaking hands with the man who lives there. Bill's schedule in the weeks after my visit includes trips to Washington, Montana, Mississippi, Florida, New Mexico, even Germany. He is the face of a national organization, a sort of mega lobbyist.

More than that, he is a man in charge. And that is why I wanted to meet Bill Hansell. Because I most certainly am not.

 

Leadership is not a prerequisite for a heroic legacy, and it certainly doesn't guarantee one. But it is a fine start. The minions may do the dirty work, but the managers get the credit. History has never recorded the names of the frostbitten fellows who paddled Washington across the icy Delaware, imploring him to please sit down; or the brave Carthaginians who followed Hannibal over the Alps, dodging mountains of elephant crap—just as Homer never bothered with the names of Odysseus's men who were snatched by the jaws of the monstrous Scylla or turned into swine by Circe. General, commander, emperor, king…those are the titles that allow access to immortality.

My driving buddy Emerson defined heroism as “a self-trust which slights the restraints of prudence.” I don't seem to possess the fearlessness, the ambition, or the self-belief to strive for a position of leadership—and by that I mean management of any sort. I have pals from my days in Ithaca, old buddies whose juvenile antics are seared into my collegiate memory, and now they have titles like vice president for acquisitions and development. My close friend and neighbor since the age of four, a guy who was so terrified of junior high that he puked on the first day of school, is now president and CEO of a real estate development corporation. They have accepted the notion that much of professional life is predicated on hierarchy, and they have impressed their way toward the top. They have underlings and personal assistants—people who actually answer the phone on their behalf.