Dynamiting the Siskiyou Pass: And Other Short Stories from Oregon and Beyond

Some of the political stories in this book appear to be unbelievable, but author Bill Meulemans, knows they're true because he was there! For starters, there were the four men who were going to save the Pacific Northwest from a Communist invasion by blowing up the Siskiyou Pass on Interstate 5. Then there was the rancher who sold off most of his cattle because he was afraid they would detonate the landmines he had set out to stop federal agents from coming after his guns. Early in his career, Bill was employed as a secondary-school teacher in a community where a fellow-teacher became a small-town dictator. To silence any opposition, the teacher hired a contract-killer to murder a member of the school board. Then there was the time when Bill interviewed Sonny Barger, the undisputed leader of Hells Angels, and got on the back of his "chopper" and rode around the freeways of Oakland. Getting off the beaten-path opened a lot of doors in life for Bill.: He was on the scene in eastern Oregon when a full-fledged commune of 7,000 people grew up spontaneously in a rural area; he invited himself to a John Birch Society Christmas Party; and he worked as a journalist covering an illegal rock concert (with public nudity and drug use) sponsored by the government to avoid an urban riot. All of this happened during a forty-seven-year career as a political scientist professor in the United States and Northern Ireland. And as you will see, nearly every one of his fascinating stories ends with a surprise that highlights the chaotic world of politics.