Bob Welch brings his unique voice to Lookout, tells stories of hope, life in Oregon

Every time I’ve started a new column — this is my seventh since 1976 — the setting and circumstances have been vastly different.

Nearly 50 years ago, the challenge was overcoming my youth to convince readers I should be taken seriously. At 22, I was the freshly minted sports editor of The Bulletin newspaper in Bend. Wanting to get to know Bend High’s football coach, I set up an interview a week in advance, then, at the appointed time, showed up on the doorstep of the 60-something man.

I was feeling a bit full of myself. I was no longer a wet-behind-the-ears sports editor of the University of Oregon student paper; I was the real deal. A professional. A columnist. Head of a burgeoning sports staff of two at a daily paper.

I cinched up my clip-on tie, stood up straight and knocked on the door.

“Hello,” I said when the coach appeared. “I’m here from The Bulletin.”

He looked at me, then at my notebook, his face dabbled in doubt or confusion; I couldn’t tell which.

“Thanks for coming by,” he said, “but the other newspaper carrier came by to collect last night. I paid him.”

If I was humbled by this welcome-to-the real-world moment, I am humbled by this welcome-to-Lookout-Eugene-Springfield moment nearly half a century later.

Here I stand, knocking at the digital doors of what I assume is a decidedly diverse group of Lane County readers. Some of you may remember me from my days as a columnist at The Register-Guard; some of you won’t know me at all. But let me set you all at ease: I begin with the highest of expectations — I want to always give you your time and money’s worth — and the lowest of expectations.

I am a 71-year-old grandfather of five who accidentally set himself on fire while lying on his back on our kitchen’s stove while trying to replace the microwave above it. I am a hiker who fell flat on his face a handful of times while completing the Pacific Crest Trail. And I am an author who, in the Acknowledgements of “52 Little Lessons from Les Misérables,” managed to thank an editor — my niece, the French history major — while misspelling her first name.

I am a flawed human being. As such, my concern isn’t that, like the Bend High coach, you won’t take me seriously enough. My concern is that you might take me too seriously. That, in my two columns a month, you might, for example, expect me to solve the Rubik’s cube of U.S. political and social discombobulation.

Sorry, not my circus, not my monkeys. I am a personal columnist with a local focus.

In the spirit of Lord Byron, who called laughter “cheap medicine,” I may tell you a story simply to lighten your load. Shine a spotlight on someone in our community who inspires me. Tug at your heartstrings. Call us to think bigger. Or explain what makes Eugene-Springfield different from, say, Minneapolis-St. Paul or Dallas-Fort Worth or Czerwionka-Leszczny in southern Poland. (Hint: we have fewer consonants.)

Alas, 12 years after leaving The R-G for a semi-retirement that has been more “semi” than “retirement,” I enter this new venture with a Rip Van Winkle sense of missing time. The Eugene-Springfield of now does not seem like the same Eugene-Springfield when I left the paper in 2013 — and not because of the trivial-by-comparison replacements of our three iconic sports venues in that time span: McArthur Court, Hayward Field and Civic Stadium. And not because I’m still trying to figure out what other 17 teams beyond the Ducks comprise the Big 10 Conference and for whom former Oregon and Oregon State women’s hoopers now play in the new go-where-you-will transfer portal.

On a deeper level, our community has been unsettled by at least three things: the loss of our family-owned, primarily local newspaper that once galvanized us as a community; the supersizing of political loathing for one’s “enemy”; and the lingering suspicion spawned by Covid and its vaccines.

For whatever reason — the political divide, obsession with social media, depression — Americans in 2019, before Covid, spent nearly 40 percent less time with friends than they did in 2013. Between 1990 and 2020, the percentage of Americans who said they have no close friends quadrupled. Between 1999 and 2019, the American suicide rate increased by a third.

Our community is a microcosm of an increasingly lonely country. In the past decade, I’ve sensed us lost in a fog, our definition as a place blurred by the gutting of our daily paper, by political loyalties and by masks that went away but didn’t really go away.

We’ve lost definition, nuance, distinctiveness. It’s as if we might as well be those cardboard cutouts they stuck in Autzen Stadium during the 2020 Covid season to make it appear we had football fans. Generic. Flat. Lifeless.

Since 2018 when the Baker Family sold its paper to GateHouse Media and local news withered like late-August blackberries, I’ve had little sense of who’s who in our community and what’s what. Of what local issues matter and how citizens — remember letters to the editor? — think about them. Of who has died.

We’ve become a more brittle community. I give a talk on something as uncontroversial as hiking the PCT and afterward someone will unload their political baggage at my feet. Some people now wear their bitterness like a badge.

I stand in a drugstore line, awaiting a prescription, and feel little sense of the camaraderie I once knew; the other day at the Gateway post office, an older woman in line bent down to coochy coo the baby of a Hispanic mother and it was such an anomaly that I melted in silent joy.

Talking to others, I don’t believe I’m alone in feeling a certain disconnect within the community. This is why I believe the launch of Lookout Eugene-Springfield is one of two positive forces that can help the revival.

I’m not naïve; a single newspaper isn’t going to save us. And our weekly papers and KLCC are making Lane County better. But for seven years, we’ve been without a true public square that gives the community a sense of place. Any hope that the new corporately owned daily was going to invest in our community and not just its shareholders died in 2022 when the paper dropped its editorial section.

Now, Lookout has the potential to restore some of the identity we’ve lost. To give people somewhere to voice opinions. To offer the community context, nuance, analysis. And to hold local public officials accountable. I’m honored to have a small role in this effort.

But the paper is only a community mirror that says, for better or worse, this is who we are. Not to go all Dr. Seuss on you, but we are the we, you and me. The other positive force that can help revive us. The folks who comprise this community. Who make it what it is — and isn’t.

We need to be better with one another. We need to rediscover the virtue of virtue — “high moral standards.” We need to treat each other as we’d want to be treated.

For all that divides us, we share at least one thing in common: this is the place we all call home, mine for 35 years. This is where we live — not by ourselves, but in community with each other: neighbors, grocers, baristas, waiters, mechanics, teachers, poets, police officers and school-crossing guards and the like, people we need and people who need us.

I recently found hope at the airport, of all places. In the hour before my 6 a.m. flight, I ran into the neighbors across the street, the couple who used to live next door and a kid — now in his early 40s — who I used to coach in Kidsports baseball. And when I thanked Tez Johnson, my favorite Duck football player from last fall, for his efforts, he didn’t blow me off. He thanked me and asked me my name.

It all felt affirming, a reminder of the old community I once knew, a community that still feels more like a big town than a small city. And that “feel” begins with caring, the kind of caring that marked a World War II nurse I wrote a book about, Frances Slanger.

In a 1944 letter to GIs, she honored them, saying it was a privilege to patch America’s wounded. After she died in a shelling and her letter appeared in Stars and Stripes, one soldier honored her with one of the most beautiful assessments of hope and the human spirit I’ve read:

“During this war, as both civilian and soldier, I’ve seen ideals trampled in the mud by those who most profess to uphold them. I have seen this too often to have much faith left. And I have seen, as all who make an honest effort must, a thousand forms of betrayal and stupidity. And in weariness I have told myself a thousand times nothing remained to believe in — that the ancient enemies of mankind, greed and ignorance, were too great for our moral strength to conquer. But now I know that this is not altogether right. For somewhere in the sordid, selfish, shameful business that makes up most of our petty lives there is a nobility that will not perish.”

This is the stuff that’s gotten lost in our Rip Van Winkle years. The stuff in which a young GI found hope — in the words of a Polish Jewish immigrant, a nurse who gave her life for her country, who put others above herself and who believed with earnestness that virtue was as American as apple pie.

The stuff our community has lost but desperately needs back, one small act of nobility at a time.

Welch is the author of Heart, Humor & Hope, a weekly subscription-based Substack column. Information on it is available at bobwelchwriter.com.