Last Tuesday, Larry Eaton dug a gaping hole in his front yard, upended a school bus, and planted it in the ground nose first. Since October, Eaton has been staging an odd protest in the bedroom community of Sherwood, a hamlet twenty miles southwest of Portland. With their back wheels suspended and the underbellies exposed, so far Eaton has buried five buses.
Eaton began his protest after a women's prison, Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, moved into a 100-acre plot across the street from his property. Along with neighbors and the owner of an excavation company (conveniently, it gives him access to backhoes), Eaton lobbied local and state officials not to move the prison into his neighborhood. After that prison was opened anyway, Eaton brainstormed his peculiar protest: Burying the buses represents the values the government buried when they destroyed his neighborhood, he claims.
Eaton wants local officials to re-zone his property so that he can sell his house and move. In the meantime, he has vowed to bury one bus each month. Sympathetic neighbors have donated their front yards so that Eaton can extend his protest. PHIL BUSSE
Homeless Marathon
On February 5th and 6th, KBOO will be hosting the fifth annual radio Homeless Marathon, from 4 pm on Tuesday until Wednesday at 6 am. The Marathon is a radio show which features guest speakers who are homeless, as well as a number of nationally and locally known homeless advocates.
Keith Bernhardt, an employee at Sisters of the Road Café, is among the slated panelists. His discussion topic--employing the homeless--will center around informing the public about ways in which homeless people are successfully reintroduced into the work environment. "Job-trainees in our Work-Force Development Program set many of their own goals toward reaching the root of what keeps people in a cycle of homelessness or unemployment," explains Bernhardt of the program he helps to run at Sisters of the Road Café.
The marathon will take place at the KBOO studios, on 20 SE 8th Avenue. KATIA DUNN
