MURMURS

[October 8th, 2003] * Last week, WW broke the news that a Portland cop and a district attorney's file clerk, in their younger days, allegedly used to drive around Portland listening to Hitler speeches and yelling racist, anti-gay hate speech ("The Badge and the Swastika"). This week, Portland Tribune columnist Phil Stanford did us one better, revealing that the clerk, Bob Seaver, is the same guy who plotted to bust notorious child-killer Diane Downs out of prison before getting cold feet. And, as Stanford noted, that juicy fact was sitting in our dusty archives. A 1989 WW article by Jim Redden , now at the Trib, detailed how Downs corresponded with Seaver from prison, asking him to hijack a helicopter, fly it to her and kill her guards. Redden's article also revealed that Seaver was active with local skinhead neo-Nazis as recently as 1988, when he was 25.

* The Portland Trail Blazers recently became the latest prospective buyer of Portland Family Entertainment to say "thanks, but no thanks." PFE, which owns the Portland Beavers AAA baseball team and the Portland Timbers soccer team, is in deep financial trouble . The limited partnership also operates PGE Park and has missed six quarterly rent payments totaling $1.76 million to the City of Portland, which owns the stadium. Talks between the new Blazers management, led by Steve Patterson and John Nash , and PFE's main lender, the New York pension fund TIAA-CREF, broke down over price.

* Here come the 'hoods! Recent battles with City Commissioner Randy Leonard have spurred neighborhood activists to put their money where their mouths are. Neighborhood association leaders from around the city were scheduled Monday night to begin working out the details of a brawnier version of the neighborhoods' political action committee, which spent about $3,000 in the last local elections. Job one, some say, is to find an opponent to face Leonard in next year's City Council race.

* If you've gone into Powell's Books lately, you might notice some employees are grumpier than usual and might even be wearing tags stating that they are "currently working without a contract." Their union rep, Ryan Van Winkle, says his group is now in negotiations with the company, which essentially proposed freezing wages and more than doubling the cost of their monthly healthcare payments. "This would basically mean a 6 percent cut in pay," he says, adding that his members "were more than shocked." If the two sides can't cut a deal by Friday night, when they next meet, the union vows to picket the store.

* The recent deaths of Hollywood legends Donald O'Connor and Elia Kazan overshadowed another film loss: On Sept. 30, actor Cork Hubbert died in his sleep from complications due to diabetes. The outspoken political activist got his show-biz start in Portland, in filmmaker Penny Allen's locally produced Property (1978), and went on to make numerous film and television appearances, including Under the Rainbow (1981), Legend (1985) and the upcoming Knee High P.I. Hubbert visited Portland periodically after he moved to Los Angeles in the late 1970s, where he worked as an actor and stand-up comedian.