Jon Batiste episode: No, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., it was not Willa METT, it was Will AM et

In chapters of ORNERY PEOPLE I've been writing about the Kaiser trains of 1942, mixed trains mainly from the South, military men and civilians, white and black families. I've written about the 1850s attempt to ban all blacks from Oregon and the racism that flourished for a century and how white Southerners reacted to wartime integration. I've told about three neighborhood boys who dug a little cave into the soft berm by the Columbia River (I remember it as about 15 feet high) only to have it collapse and kill one of them. I remember a survivor as looking greenish in the face. I think it is a real memory, not a later recasting. Maybe oxygen had been cut off a while before he was pulled out. From East Vanport Jantzen Beach in Vancouver was an easy walk across the bridge. Larry King has been almost everywhere and knows everyone but he slaughtered the pronunciation of Atascadero. "At a SHAD ar row." In the Jon Batiste episode, Gates intones "Willa METT." No. And don't even try Multnomah, Skip. So when Gates first said Oregon, I said, "Kaiser train, Vanport," as it proved to be. So in May 1948 it was all washed away, Vanport and East Vanport and a lot more, and Jon had never heard of Vanport.