Another time, another merger ballot

The Coos Bay Harbor and the Coos Bay Times are in firm agreement, not on the necessity of one great city on Coos Bay but on a more important question: the quality of poetry. It is the recent work of W.K. Brownlow of Marshfield which has elicited the Harbor's praise, in which The Times concurs. "Pearl of the special articles on the labor convention's souvenir booklet" is the way the Harbor terms Brownlow's "Analogy" which is printed under a lovely picture of the Coos Bay bridge.

For those who do not know "Bill" Brownlow, there may be surprise that this modest master of the linotype at the Southwestern Oregon News is a poet. You see him turning out neat slugs from the machine, justifying a form on the imposing stone, and little guess that this printer of ability is also a poet of distinction. He is and more: visit his garden and see his handicraft, talk some time about astronomy and learn that here is another arrow of learning in his quiver. Just a fortnight ago, "Bill" told us that he was going to straighten out a batch of mistakes in Dodge's "History of Coos county" if ever he could find time.

So it's printer, astronomer, gardener, historian and poet, when you meet "Bill" Brownlow. For this writing he's poet; read "Analogy" below and you will agree:

"Here where the tide runs deep and swift,

They set their piers and spun a web of steel,

To fling a giant span across the rift,

And make a way for plodding foot and wheel.

"And here among the rubble at its base,

Are useless shards and tangled broken wire,

Discarded when the workers put in place

This symphony of girders, ropes and spires.

"Impossible, you say, that threads like these

Should have the strength to bear this weight immense?

Yet such as they form cables underseas,

To link the world's remotest continents.

"Each in itself a fragile, tensile strand,

Is woven with its fellow 'til at length,

What may be snapped with ease by human hands

Is shaped into this thing which sings of strength.

"And in this massive pile which spans the tide.

All ye who work should read analogy -

Alone, ye are the rubble, cast aside;

Conjoined, ye wield the strength of unity."

- The Coos Bay Times, 1943

(Contributed by Gordon Ross.)