In 1945, a pro baseball relief pitcher who also played first base earned $29 a month — if that player was a woman.
“I made money to go to college,” Dorothy Roth said. “I was the youngest one on the team.”
At 86, Roth now lives at Grandview Village, a Marysville retirement community. On Wednesday, she shared long-ago memories of her one season with the National Girls Baseball League. She also has a fun new memory.
On a whirlwind trip to Olympia Tuesday, Roth met Gov. Jay Inslee, and even sat in the governor’s chair. During a surprise presentation, she was awarded the Washington Health Care Association’s first-ever Silver Spotlight Award. The agency is an advocacy group for the state’s assisted-living facilities.
She was Dorothy Wright, fresh out of high school, when in 1945 she joined a team called the Bloomer Girls. Emery Parichy, co-founder of the National Girls Baseball League, bought the Boston Bloomer Girls in the 1930s and built Parichy Stadium in the Chicago suburb of Forest Park, Ill. That’s where Roth played.
“We wore big satin bloomers, and satin shirts,” she said Wednesday. “It was hot, standing out in that field.”
Presenting the award, Inslee noted Roth’s “outstanding contributions as an athlete and as an educator for 30 years in public schools.”
“You look to me like you’ve still got game,” Inslee told Roth, a retired schoolteacher. After Roth autographed a bat Inslee had once used in a congressional baseball game, the governor quipped that “the value of this bat just went up 100 times.”
Inslee proclaimed Jan. 7, 2014, to be “Dorothy Roth Day.”
“The award was a surprise. It was awesome,” Roth said at Grandview Village, where on Wednesday state Sen. John McCoy, D-Tulalip, stopped by to congratulate her.
“It’s great that the state is recognizing our elders,” McCoy said. “I enjoyed the movie ‘A League of Their Own.’ When Dorothy came into baseball, those girls were ahead of their time. They began paving the way for Title IX.
It was Title IX, part of the Education Amendment of 1972, that opened doors for girls to have equal opportunities in school sports programs. “A League of Their Own,” the 1992 movie about women’s baseball teams during World War II, depicts the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, a league similar to Roth’s.
Herald readers were introduced to Roth in July. Andrea Brown’s article in the Vitality section featured the former ballplayer. It told how Grandview Village residents, wearing “Team Dorothy” shirts, were going to see Roth throw out a ceremonial first pitch at a Seattle Mariners game.
Did she get it over the plate? “Close to it,” Roth said Wednesday.
In her long life, baseball was just one season. Roth did spend her baseball earnings on college. She attended Cornell College, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Northern Illinois University. She earned a master’s degree and met her future husband, Al Roth. He would go on to be a city manager in Crystal Lake, Ill., and North Bend, Ore. Roth, who was widowed about three years ago, has a daughter and a son.
Her daughter, Holly Leach, is superintendent of Northshore Christian Academy in south Everett. Leach joked Wednesday that her parents were the first reality TV stars. They were married Sept. 1, 1952, on a TV show in New York called “Bride and Groom.” They applied out of financial need, and were amazed to be chosen, Roth said. Prizes included a free wedding and a honeymoon in the Pocono Mountains.
Brenda Orffer, the Washington Health Care Association’s senior director of member services, said the organization will give Silver Spotlight awards monthly through 2014. The agency represents 450 assisted-living facilities around Washington.
The new award program is aimed at honoring seniors who have made contributions in many walks of life. It’s also meant to highlight positive aspects of long-term care. “How many other elders are out there like Dorothy?” McCoy asked.
Is Roth still a baseball fan?
“I used to root for the Chicago Cubs,” she said. “I’m into the Seahawks now.”
Credit Austin Jenkins / Northwest News Network Initiative promoter Tim Eyman has a plan to resurrect the two-thirds vote requirement for tax increases in Washington
It’s designed to resurrect the requirement that tax hikes get a two-thirds majority in the legislature or be referred to the people. This time Eyman has designed a hammer to get the legislature to act.
Last year, the Washington Supreme Court tossed out Eyman’s two-thirds requirement for tax increases as unconstitutional – something Washington voters had repeatedly approved. Now Eyman’s back with a creative proposal: he would cut the state sales tax by one cent if the legislature doesn’t approve and send to voters a constitutional amendment to bring back the super majority rule.
“Either they let us vote, which costs them nothing, or we get the largest tax cut in Washington state history,” says Eyman.
A one penny cut in the sales tax would amount to about $1 billion a year in lost revenue to the state. Eyman would need to gather nearly 250,000 valid voter signatures to put his measure on this fall’s ballot.
The 2014 initiative season is also underway in Oregon. Measures on same-sex marriage, marijuana legalization and liquor privatization are all expected to qualify for the ballot.
In Idaho, there are proposed ballot initiatives to raise the minimum wage and allow medical marijuana.
The first Indian Education Parent Committee Meeting of 2014 will be held January 15th in the Totem Middle School library. Dinner will be at 5pm and the meeting will start at 5:30pm
All parents of Native children in grades K-12th are encouraged to attend!
Some items to be discussed:
– Liaison/Advocate updates
– Current/upcoming youth programs
– Totem Middle School report, Principal Tarra Patrick
– Upcoming Events
– Information on the upcoming IEPC Board Elections that will be held at the next IEPC meeting on April 23, 2014.
Four disasters in the past six months have demonstrated the risks of crude-oil trains, which carry 11 percent of the nation’s oil, up 40-fold in five years.
MINNEAPOLIS — Oil-train explosions like the one last week near Casselton, N.D., or the one in Canada late Tuesday have revived longstanding worries that older railroad tank cars aren’t sturdy enough.
Four derailments in the past six months have demonstrated the risks of crude-oil trains, which carry 11 percent of the nation’s oil, up 40-fold in five years, according to the Association of American Railroads.
“There is an increased interest … to look at tank cars and whether we can do more to remove the risk,” said Thomas Simpson, president of the Railway Supply Institute, a trade group for tank-car builders and owners.
North Dakota, lacking sufficient pipelines, sends more than two-thirds of its crude down the tracks, typically on 100-car unit trains. Many travel on BNSF Railway and Canadian Pacific tracks through Minnesota. Minnesota’s 20 ethanol plants also rely heavily on tank cars because current pipelines are unsuitable for that fuel.
Yet most of the nation’s 94,000 rail tankers carrying oil, ethanol and other flammable liquids don’t meet puncture-resistance and other standards that apply to new tank cars. Railcar and shipping-industry officials say it could take a decade and cost billions to retrofit up to 64,000 older tankers that carry flammable liquids.
Federal regulators are considering whether to require it.
“It is a challenge, but it is doable,” said Larry Mann, a Washington-based rail-safety attorney.
In 2011, railroads and shippers voluntarily established tougher standards for new tank cars, and more than 14,000 are on the rails today. That’s about 15 percent of the tankers carrying oil, ethanol and other flammable liquids. Most of the remainder are older models with a record of tank failures in accidents since 1991, according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).
The safety of railcars, among other things, is playing a role in the continuing debate about the proposal to build more oil terminals in Washington state.
Railroad groups said in November they support upgrading the old tanker fleet, but the cost would fall on shippers because they own or lease the tank cars. Oil and ethanol shippers haven’t warmed to that idea, and say railroads need to do more to prevent derailments.
“The ethanol industry takes safety very seriously, but we don’t re-engineer vehicles already on the road with new, expensive suspension systems to combat any potential damage from hitting a pothole on the interstate. No, we fix the pothole. The same should be true with rail transportation,” Bob Dinneen, chief executive of the Renewable Fuels Association, an ethanol-trade group, said via email.
The American Petroleum Institute, an oil-industry trade group, told regulators in December that the retrofits only would be costly and take years, and would add weight to trains. It urged regulators to study the costs and benefits before imposing a regulation and to order railroads to improve tracks and take other steps to reduce derailments.
BNSF Railway, whose train crashed Dec. 30 in North Dakota, declined to comment for this article. Canadian Pacific, a crude-oil hauler whose U.S. headquarters is in Minneapolis, said it is always working with federal regulators and others to promote safety, but would not comment in detail.
Bruce Crummy / The Associated Press, 2013 A train carrying crude oil derailed and exploded in Casselton, N.D., on Dec. 30 and sent a great fireball and plumes of black smoke skyward. The fire continued to burn the next day.
Logistics of retrofitting
Even if federal regulators order tank-car upgrades or other measures, the new rules likely wouldn’t take effect for at least a year. “It is just a complicated issue that has taken time,” said Gordon Delcambre Jr., a spokesman for the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, which is considering new regulations.
Train-car repair shops probably would need 10 years to retrofit every tank car. “There’s a finite number of facilities that can do the work,” said Simpson, of the Railway Supply Institute, which supports improving older tank cars, but questions whether all proposed modifications are feasible.
Some tank cars might be retired or shifted to carry nonflammable products. So the potential cost of upgrading the nation’s tanker fleet could range from $1.7 billion to more than $5 billion.
After the recent oil-train wrecks, more people are demanding action in the United States and Canada.
In July, 47 people died in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, in the first disaster involving a North Dakota oil train. Four months later, in Aliceville, Ala., another oil train exploded and burned, but nobody was hurt. In 2009, a deadly ethanol-train derailment and fire in Cherry Valley, Ill., prompted the NTSB to issue specific recommendations to upgrade the nation’s tanker fleet.
Mann, who represents unions and others on rail-safety issues, said all the recent oil-train explosions involved tank cars built before 2011, a model known in the industry as the DOT-111.
In Coon Rapids, Minn., which is crossed by two rail lines, city leaders in December petitioned federal regulators to get started on the tank-car upgrades. The city’s resolution stemmed from a National League of Cities conference last year in which cities, especially Chicago suburbs, discussed railcar safety.
“The concern is the integrity of the tank cars — are they inspected and structurally sound?” said Coon Rapids City Manager Steve Gatlin.
The older DOT-111 cars have a steel shell that is too thin to resist punctures in accidents, and the ends of the car are vulnerable to ruptures. Valves used for unloading and other exposed fittings on the tops of the tankers can also break during rollovers, the NTSB said.
Tank cars built since Oct. 1, 2011, are required to comply with tougher standards, including shells with thicker steel.
U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has called for retrofitting the nation’s tanker fleet. In Minnesota, Rep. Tim Walz, a member of the House Transportation Committee, said he hopes the committee will examine the issue.
“It was incredibly lucky that no one was harmed in the accident in Casselton,” Walz said in an email. “It is clear there is still more we can and should do to enhance safety when shipping hazardous materials to market.”
Emergency measures
A Web-based petition last fall by the progressive group Credo Action collected 58,000 supporters of banning the “dangerous DOT-111 tanker cars in our communities.”
“They are basically bombs running through the middle of cities,” said Elijah Zarlin, of the San Francisco-based group. “Each one of these accidents … shows that this isn’t just a potential threat, it is an actual, real threat.”
Railroad towns are re-examining emergency plans. Last summer, the Minnesota hazmat teams got extra training on crude oil.
Soon after the Quebec disaster, Canadian and U.S. regulators ordered rail carriers not to leave trains unattended, a key factor in that accident. Regulators in both countries also have told North Dakota shippers to accurately classify their crude oil’s hazard level, which partly hinges on the amount of potentially explosive dissolved gas it contains.
U.S. agencies announced a “Bakken blitz” to test crude-oil shipments in August. Based on preliminary results of that effort, regulators warned shippers last week that light crude from that region may be more flammable than heavy oil. But regulators stopped short of saying that Bakken crude poses a special danger and said sample testing is still under way.
Mark Winfield, an associate professor at York University in Toronto, has called on Canadian authorities to begin a judicial inquiry into regulatory lapses before the Lac-Mégantic disaster. Among the questions to arise after the disaster is whether Bakken oil is more explosive.
“It is hard to believe that nobody on the inside, among the regulators, didn’t realize there was a potential problem here,” Winfield said.
In Perham, Minn., which is also on the BNSF line and has witnessed two minor derailments in the past 21 years, Mayor Tim Meehl questions whether regulators can limit the number of oil tankers going through towns or make rail cars safer.
“I guess we just pray it doesn’t happen in our town,” he said. “It’s a very scary situation.”
Material from the Chicago Tribune is included in this report.
Tulalip rapper ‘Komplex Kai’ is set to perform with a live band at the Tulalip Resort Casino’s Canoes Cabaret Room on Jan. 15. — image credit: Courtesy photo.
TULALIP — Kisar Jones-Fryberg’s musical alter ego has been largely dormant since the passing of his aunt in 2010, but on Wednesday, Jan. 15, “Komplex Kai” will take another step toward his revival at the Tulalip Resort Casino’s Canoes Cabaret Room, where he’s slated to perform a free show with a half-dozen-member live band from 10 p.m. to midnight.
“I started producing albums when I was 15, but I was already writing lyrics and putting them to beats when I was 10 or 11,” said Kai, a Tulalip rap artist who’s produced six albums over the course of the past decade. “I’m an MC, but my work is drawn from a Native perspective. I’m guided by Native traditions, but they’ve been modernized, because between the resettlement and the segregation of our people, we lost so much.”
This complex dichotomy between the history of his people’s culture and the world in which he now lives drives much of Kai’s output, as does his desire to leave behind a worthy legacy.
“Every album is something that my great-grandkids will be able to look back on and say that I did,” said Kai, who has four children already, with one more on the way. “I don’t want to downplay the importance of our traditions, but by the same token, my culture is rooted in the present day, and what it means to be Native here and now. This is my way of expressing my own existence in 2014, and it doesn’t make me any less Native or Tulalip.”
Kai recalled an exchange with an older man, who had asserted that he shouldn’t be proud of having grown up on a reservation, and explained his own mixed feelings in response.
“He pointed out that our people had been placed in reservations as prisons, and I understand that, but that’s still where we come from,” Kai said. “You can’t downplay or dismiss where we’ve come from, or what we’ve lived. It’s where tradition meets experience. I’ve got to be proud of where I’m from.”
To that end, the Komplex Kai band will be playing a mix of original songs and covers, following an 8-10 p.m. comedy show in the Canoes Cabaret Room, and those who are interested in checking out his music need look no further than Facebook and iTunes under “Komplex Kai” to find all of his albums and songs online.
“My grandma was my first manager,” Kai said. “I wasn’t even going to pursue music as a career, but now, I’m all for positivity and creating opportunity.”
The Quinault Indian Nation is cooperating with the U.S. Corps of Engineers, which has placed more than 800 tons of rock since 8 a.m. this morning, creating a secondary seawall in preparation for heavy rains and high winds, with gusts anticipated as high as 65-70 m.p.h. over the weekend. The seawall has already been breached in several locations, jeopardizing homes on the Reservation. Swells of 20-35 feet are anticipated. Dump trucks have lined up to dump their loads all day, building a four foot berm so far, all along the sea wall, and work is expected to continue through the night, according to John Preston, Quinault Tribal Emergency Services Coordinator.
“Our first priority is the safety of our people, their property and our natural resources. We will do all in our power to support this project and see that this work gets done,” said Fawn Sharp, Quinault Tribal President.
SEATTLE — A Tulalip man has been upgraded to serious condition after being hit by a car on Tuesday night. Joseph Harvey, 35, remains in intensive care at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, according to his family and hospital officials. His condition was considered critical until Friday.
Harvey is a tribal member and attended Arlington High School.
He was struck about 6:45 p.m. Tuesday along 35th Avenue NE, just west of I-5, on the Tulalip Indian Reservation.
Police say they don’t expect to seek criminal charges against the driver.
Emergency responders initially reported that Harvey was riding a bicycle at the time of the crash. Detectives did not find a bicycle and believe he was walking, not riding, according to investigators.
The National Park Service announced Thursday that the annual Tribal Historic Preservation Office fund will distribute partial grant awards to 135 tribes.
“Tribal historic preservation offices are the fastest growing preservation partnerships within the national historic preservation program, showing the value that tribes place on preserving historic places and protecting tribal cultural traditions,” National Park Service Director Jonathan B. Jarvis said in a statement. “These grants allow tribes to focus on what they are most concerned with protecting – Native language, oral history, plant and animal species important in traditions, sacred and historic places, and the establishment of tribal historic preservation offices.”
The grants range from around copy3,000 to $22,000. Tribes need to submit applications for this part of their grant and then apply again for the final portion of the award when that amount has been determined.
The annual appropriations were established in 1992 when Congress amended the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. The amendment put Tribal Historic Preservation Officers (THPO) on par with State Historic Preservation Officers (SHPO) with respect to tribal land, including conducting Section 106 reviews of federal agency projects on tribal lands. Tribes can use the grants to fund projects such as nominations to the National Register of Historic Places, preservation education, architectural planning, community preservation plans, and bricks-and-mortar repair to buildings. Examples of recent projects funded by Historic Preservation Fund grants include:
— historic preservation surveys of approximately 195,982 acres of tribal land resulting in 7,043 archeological sites and 1,307 historic properties being added to tribal inventories. Additionally, tribal historic preservation offices prepared nominations of 64 sites for the National Register of Historic Places;
— a summer cultural forum hosted by the tribal historic preservation office of the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony. “Reawakening Traditional Science – Exploring the Ways of our Great Basin Culture,” brought community and tribal members of all ages together for presentations on local rock art and archeology, ancient traditional art forms such as basketry and tule duck making, tribal language, oral history, and the use and care of traditional plants. The forum showed how knowledge based both on tribal traditions and contemporary science can complement each other.
John Brown, the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer of the Narragansett Indian Tribe said the grant goes into his office’s operating budget and is used to fund all programs.
Revenue for the Historic Preservation Fund comes from federal oil leases on the Outer Continental Shelf. The grants act as catalysts for private and other non-federal investment in historic preservation efforts nationwide. The National Park Service administers the fund and distributes annual matching grants to state and tribal historic preservation officers from money made available in Congressional appropriations.
Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA The caption reads: Graduating Class, 1892. Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, Pa. Thomas Metoxen (Oneida.) Hattie Long Wolf (Sioux.) Reuben Wolfe (Omaha.) Luzena Choteau (Wyandotte.) William Baird (Oneida.) Albert Bishop, (Seneca.) Benajah Miles (Arapahoe.) Joseph Hamilton (Piegan.) Benjamin Caswell (Chippewa.) Frank Everett (Wichita.) Lydia Flint (Shawnee.) Fred Peake (Chippewa.) Photographer: John N. Choate, Carlisle, PA
Want to know more about students who attended Carlisle Indian Industrial School? Now doing just that is far easier.
Stories of Sioux children like Elsie Robertson, or Pueblo children like Bruce Fisher can now be read online, as can parts of the lives of the many thousands of students who attended Carlisle between the years of 1879 and 1918.
Readers can find this information on the Carlisle Indian Industrial School Project page of Dickinson College of Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The college’s Community Studies Center (CSC) and its Archives and Special Collections Department put the project together in 2013 and since August of last year they have been sending teams of researchers to the National Archives to scan and digitize information relating to CIIS.
This week, project directors sent another team to the Archives to continue with the process. One of the directors, College Archivist Jim Gerencser, noted that they had already digitized 1,250 files, comprising about 11,000 pages of text.
“We think that within three years we should be able to capture all the information from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) files,” Gerencser said.
He also said that they had been in contact with a group of CIIS descendants on Facebook and were hoping to inspire other people with connections to the school to come forward. The first page of the project’s website extends an invitation also.
“Desiring to add to the school’s history beyond the official documentation, we will seek partners among those institutions that hold additional records regarding the school, its many students, and its instructors. Subsequent phases of this project will develop the capability for user interactivity, so that individuals may contribute their own digitized photos, documents, oral histories, and other personal materials to the online collection. The website will also host teaching and learning materials utilizing the digitized content and database, and will support the addition of original scholarly and popular works based on the Carlisle Indian Industrial School Project resources.
Launch media viewer “A lot of people out here don’t even know that they have an allotment,” said Ervin Chavez, one of the settlement recipients. Paul McPherson for The New York Times
DENVER — Ervin Chavez remembers hearing talk around the Navajo reservation when he was young of money owed to American Indian families by the federal government for land debts.
Now 60, Mr. Chavez is one of the recipients of a $3.4 billion settlement that is being paid to Indians across the West, over royalties for land that was held in trust by the government and never reimbursed in full.
But as the payments are being made, more than 100 years after the trust program began, tens of thousands of Indians who are owed money cannot be located.
For months now, lawyers, specialized settlement administrators and volunteers like Mr. Chavez have fanned out across reservations, trying to track down those who are owed money.
“A lot of people out here don’t even know that they have an allotment,” said Mr. Chavez, who lives on the Navajo reservation’s edge in New Mexico. “It was something their grandparents or parents had always taken care of, and they had no idea they had ownership of land.”
About half a million Indians are eligible for payments, which vary in amount from hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars, depending on how much income their land generated. More than 30,000 tribal members have not yet been located. Some may have moved or died or are unaware they are eligible. The government has simply lost track of others.
All are owed at least $800, and in many cases, thousands more. The total owed to missing beneficiaries is approximately $32 million, according to Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton, a law firm that worked on the settlement and is involved in locating tribal members.
David Smith, a lawyer with the firm, said the large number of missing beneficiaries illustrated how the Indian land trust program, administered by the Interior Department, was mishandled.
“Historically, there is no question that the government mismanaged these accounts and should have known where these people were,” Mr. Smith said.
“Individual Indians are sometimes some of the poorest people in this country,” he said. “The absence of that money has caused significant hardship.”
The dispute over the trust program dates to 1887, when Congress carved tribal lands, mostly across the West, into small plots, and assigned them to individual Indians. The land was leased for grazing, mining and other uses, and royalties were supposed to be paid into accounts set up for tribal members.
But a 1996 lawsuit filed against the Interior Department by Elouise Cobell, a Native American businesswoman from Montana, accused the government of mismanaging the royalties through poor accounting practices.
In 2009, the Cobell settlement, as it has become known, was reached, and it was eventually approved by Congress and President Obama.
Ken Salazar, the secretary of the interior at the time, hailed the settlement as a milestone for Indians, stating that it “honorably and responsibly turns the page on an unfortunate chapter in the department’s history.”
Since last year, when the first checks were distributed, 293,000 tribal members have received at least a portion of what they are owed. A second payment is expected to be made early this year.
The Interior Department initially identified 65,000 beneficiaries whose whereabouts were unknown, prompting a sweeping effort to find them.
Public service announcements have been broadcast on local television and radio stations, and reservation post offices peppered with notices. Dozens of public meetings have been held across tribal lands. Interior Department employees have set up information booths at powwows and other gatherings. Tribal governments have also been involved, poring over membership rolls.
So far, about half of the missing beneficiaries have been found, according to the Garden City Group, a firm appointed by a federal judge in the case to administer the settlement payments.
Many were surprisingly easy to locate, Mr. Smith said. Some were even federal employees or tribal officials.
Watch Now: Vintage style in Brooklyn Heights
But rural life on sprawling reservations has complicated outreach efforts.
The Garden City Group said one member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma is owed about $121,000. A member of the Quechan Tribe at the Fort Yuma Reservation in California is due more than $81,000.
“These are folks who have not been able to be found by the government for a long, long time,” said Jennifer Keough, Garden City’s chief operating officer. “They live in very far-reaching places.”
Michele Singer, principal deputy of the Office of the Special Trustee for American Indians, part of the Interior Department, said her office was committed to reaching recipients of the settlement, and responded to an “overwhelming” number of requests for information.
For Mr. Chavez, the need to find those who are owed money is paramount.
“This is money that should be rightfully paid to the landowners,” he said. “It is something that has been going on for many, many years.”
