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Hindsight is 20/20. Looking into the future? That’s 50/50.
To celebrate Willamette Week’s 50th anniversary, we decided to highlight 50 people, places, and things from the past 50 years that made Portland a better place—and ask how we can build on their legacy going forward.
This is, of course, an impossible project. To distill 50 years of this city’s challenges, creativity, activism and successes, well, we realize this list is going to make some readers mad. When you only have room for 50 things, you leave a lot of great stuff out.
But that’s OK. For the past 50 years, WW’s role in Portland has been to shake things up, tell the truth, and raise hell. To expose hypocrisy, question authority, and ask tough questions. Journalism is not a popularity contest. A prominent journalist once told us the five best words you can put in a story are: “This is how it works.”
With that idea in mind, we took a hard look at the city we’ve explored, enraged, and delighted for the past 50 years to understand how some of those things work.
You won’t find scandals and failures in the pages that follow, although WW broke many of those open. Instead, we looked for what’s worth carrying with us into the next half-century. How creativity is fostered. How ideas flourish. How people—some of them extraordinary, some of them regular folks—can take charge of their destiny and work to make Portland and the world a better place.
Sometimes that means taking a risk and maxing out your credit cards. Sometimes it means sticking to your guns and scrubbing the toilets if that’s what it takes to keep the doors open. Sometimes it means reaching out and building a coalition. And often it means daring to think big.
Read through these 50 stories, and you’ll see some enduring threads. Ask for help and advice when you need it; offer guidance and support when you can. Our community only works if it is a community. Where everyone believes that we’re all trying to do our best.
Nobody is perfect. People stumble. Many great ideas never get off the ground. But after 50 years, we wanted to take a moment to show why this is a city to feel proud of. You’ve done great things. But get busy. The best is yet to come.
