When Tom McCall was elected Oregon's governor in 1966, Floyd McKay had a front-row seat.

As a journalist, McKay was there when Oregon approved its Beach Bill, preserving public recreational access to the state's beaches. McKay was there when Oregon approved its Bottle Bill, reducing litter by requiring refundable deposits. And McKay was there when Oregon decided to head off anticipated anti-war protests during a 1970 American Legion convention in Portland by sponsoring a rock festival, Vortex I.

Vortex gets its own chapter in McKay's new historical memoir, "Reporting the Oregon Story: How Activists and Visionaries Transformed a State" (Oregon State University Press, 288 pages, $21.95). McKay was news analyst at KGW-TV from 1970 to 1986; before that he reported politics for The Oregon Statesman, now the Statesman Journal, from 1960 to 1970. He retired in 2004 from teaching journalism at Western Washington University in Bellingham, where he lives. He'll read from the book and sign copies at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 14, at Powell's Books on Hawthorne, 3723 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd. Here's an excerpt.

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"Conventional wisdom holds that the state-sponsored Vortex rock festival and drug free-for-all in August 1970 was the turning point for governor Tom McCall and his legacy. ...

Students descended on the capitol and the governor walked out to meet them; he defused their anger but yielded no ground in his support for the war. He also toyed with various proposals to get tough with campus protesters; Portland State and the University of Oregon were seething and political pressure was building. I registered concern when a group calling itself Citizens Coalition for Social Responsibility announced it would be monitoring campus activities and names would be taken.

Greater danger was on the way, however, as Portland prepared to host the annual convention of the uber-patriotic American Legion, where President Nixon was to speak. War protesters swung into action, raising fears of Chicago 1968 re-dux. On August 6 an incongruous consortium of the hip and the clean-shaven announced, with Ed Westerdahl speaking for the governor, that the state would sponsor a rock festival during the convention to divert the expected throngs of youth. ...

Tom's decision to sponsor a rock festival at McIver Park in rural Clackamas County put his political career on the line. Serious violence at the park, a death from a drug overdose, or a deadly accident would have fallen on his shoulders only weeks before voting took place.

More about Vortex I

The overwhelming majority of the thousands of young people at Vortex took no notice of its political ramifications; they were there to have a good time. Drug laws were blatantly violated, as was the societal rejection of public nudity. Uniformed police were kept away, although a few undercover officers were on site to help calm things down if needed. It really wasn't. It wasn't my generation at McIver, and when I made the obligatory tour with several colleagues, I felt more voyeur than reporter, but I saw nothing that made me think Vortex was a mistake. Somewhere around thirty-five thousand revelers were at McIver at one point.

Portland reporters and editors resisted the temptation to sensationalize the carryings-on at Vortex and, by and large, reporting was balanced and fair. No reader or viewer doubted that drugs were ingested and smoked and that nudity was widespread. Broadcastcodes and common sense dictated that photos of nudity--at least that of the frontal variety--would not be shown to scandalize or titillate our viewers, although that didn't prevent a good crowd around our film-editing benches. Most of our younger photographers and reporters were not strangers to marijuana and older hands had long since learned to tolerate the practice. The fact that media were not scandalized went a long way toward calming the waters. The governor had lots of friends in Portland's newsrooms, and most of us gave him slack that another governor might not have been granted. ...

We were all pragmatists with Vortex; we allowed the law and ordinary codes of public decency to be broken and the drug use and nudity to be flaunted as well. I thought the occasion would soon lead to legalization of marijuana, just as we had ended prohibition. In a post-Vortex commentary I noted the irony: "An individual caught with marijuana on his person can wind up in jail. But put twenty thousand individuals together and much more serious drug use is freely allowed. Not because society condones its use, but because society is all but powerless to enforce the law against a mass of violators."

I predicted that legalization of marijuana was just around the corner; the corner took forty-four years!"

Excerpts from "Reporting the Oregon Story: How Activists and Visionaries Transformed a State" by Floyd McKay, copyright (c) 2016. Reprinted with the permission of Oregon State University Press.

An earlier version of this post misstated the year Tom McCall was elected governor and the time of Floyd McKay's reading at Powell's.