Having excuses on my mind (vide the previous post) recalled Nate Zusman, whose use of an excuse earned him the nickname “the mark of Stark Street” back in the 1950s.
Mr. Zusman owned a nightclub on Stark Street. On occasion the authorities had some questions about the degree to which the club followed licensing hours, and whether it was a home for gambling and other activities not officially permitted. As a sidelight to the racketeering investigations of the 1956-57, Zusman was charged with paying money to some of Portland’s finest. (He was separately called before the Senate Racketeering Committee, item 25, but that’s another story.)
On the witness stand, Zusman admitted paying money to Portland policemen, but he said that the payments were loans. I won’t claim to recall his exact words, but his explanation went something like this: “I like the police. They work hard at a dangerous job. Sometimes I hear that a policeman needs some money to take care of his family, or for the doctor, and I lend him some. The word has gotten around that I’m an easy mark for a hard luck story, and now they all come around and want to borrow money. ‘The mark of Stark Street,’ they call me.”
I met him some years later, when he and his wife were living in a pleasant, well-laid-out house in Dunthorpe, built on a wooded part of the former estate of Ira Powers, of Powers Furniture Company. A builder now owns it and wants to tear down ithe house and cut down the trees to build one of those $1.5 million spec houses of no particular charm or merit. The builder’s looking for a buyer, whom I’ll think of as the mark of Palatine Hill.
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Looking for info on Powers Furniture as I have inherited several pieces from my grandmother.
I can’t tell you anything about the furniture that Mr. Powers’ company made, but you might be interested to know that Powers Marine Park, the long thin park sandwiched between SW Riverside Drive and the Willamette River south of the Sellwood Bridge, is named after him. Around the time of the Depression, he and other real estate associates gave the land to the government for the extension of Terwilliger Boulevard past what is now Tryon Creek State Park, connecting Lake Oswego with where Lewis & Clark Law School now stands. And his house in Dunthorpe is still standing also, having survived (so far) the speculative mania that’s causing others to tear down the fine old homes on that wooded hillside.
How fun! I just googled my uncle nate’s name and found this blog. Who knew people even remembered 01905 SW Palatine Hill Rd and all of the intrigue of the past. While I have many things from the desert room, we are low on photos. I’d love some photos from the old place. Since that posting a year ago, a chateau has now been built where the house once sat – and was on the market for $2.1 million.
I’m so glad you found my blog. I recall the house your uncle and aunt lived in, on the corner of Summerville and Palatine Hill Road. It had some wonderful old-growth trees in the front yard. Late one night a neighbor (not me) came down Palatine Hill Road and didn’t (as the police now delicately say) “negotiate” the turn — his car went through the guardrail, down the slope, and landed between two of the tall trees (I think they were Douglas firs). The car was smashed; the driver, as it turned out, was also smashed, in a different sense of the word, but survived almost unscratched.