Here's an article about Elmer Buehler, now age 96, who drove Woody Guthrie around the Northwest in May 1941. Rolling along the Columbia, driving for Woody Guthrie History - A Portland man recalls the month in 1941 that he spent showing the famed folk singer around the region Sunday, July 08, 2007 SPENCER HEINZ The Oregonian Staff Woody Guthrie is a name that rings a bell. Elmer Buehler's, not so much. Yet a bright vein of the legendary folk singer's works -- including "Roll On Columbia, Roll On" -- has ties to a month of Buehler's driving skills. Guthrie died 40 years ago at the age of 55. Buehler keeps moving at the age of 96. He works his parking-strip roses and potatoes. He wears a T-shirt. Most of his life, he has lived on Portland's Northeast Going Street. On a recent day, he revisits the mood of those long-ago times as stirred by the death of another friend. He seals a card of condolence and prepares to place it in the mail. "I have an address book," he says, "that's got hardly anybody in it that's alive anymore." The tone is matter-of-fact. He stays busy, has some fun: "They say I should be in a retirement home. I say, 'You mean an 'expirement' home!' " The rear of his kitchen stove amounts to a loading dock for breakfast grains and fruits and a flower from his garden. It goes next to the last photo of his wife. Olive died five years ago this month after 63 years of marriage, and the inscription near his flax and oats and daily rose says in loving memory of her. He wears slip-on, rubber-soled tan leather shoes, and in keeping with his years he steps with care, only the slightest pitch and roll as he navigates the walkway from his parking strip of onions to his day-lit living room. He eases into a rocking chair near a maroon piano stool, and from there he begins his story, a bounty of dates and names and moments that he feels like yesterday. “He'd be in the back seat," he says of Woody, "plunkin' on his gee-tar. That's what he called it -- his gee-tar." He recalls Guthrie as a slight, wiry, tired-looking man with a peppery wit and curly hair. Album-cover artwork shows the artist with strap-on guitar and a cap, tilted to his left, that reflected his political bent. Guthrie wrote and sang for the common man. He was 28 when he arrived in Portland in the spring of 1941 and met his driver, Buehler, then 30 and finally into a career after doing all sorts of everything. Born down the road from his house of today to parents of Swiss stock, Buehler grew up picking huckleberries, stocking variety-store shelves, selling women's magazines -- enough to win the Ranger bike he pedaled to school and work for years. He graduated from Jefferson High School, studied at Oregon College of Agriculture, ran a mimeograph machine for the federal Department of Agriculture and eventually toiled for the U.S. Forest Service as a messenger who one day approached his boss. "I'd like to make more money; I'm only making $50 a month," Buehler says he told him. "He pulled out a list of people willing to work for $50 a month, so I shut up." In early 1939, after eight years there, Buehler transferred into the Bonneville Power Administration, then a new federal agency formed with the bright idea of electrifying towns and farms, many still lit by kerosene lamps, with westward-ho jolts from giant dams soon coming online. He started in the mailroom, but he showed his aptitude for the film projector and soon was motoring as far as Montana with exhibits to sell Columbia River power to the people. One day his bosses had a brainstorm that seemed completely from left field: Try to hire Oklahoma-born folk singer and recording artist Woody Guthrie -- who documented the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression and whose career was going nowhere in L.A. -- to write songs for a planned documentary film promoting the power of the Columbia. Next thing you know, Buehler says, Guthrie submits to a 45-minute audition in front of the top brass, gets hired for a monthlong contract to travel the river and write as many songs as he can. The singer eventually parked his wife and children in a rental in Portland's Lents neighborhood, and with Elmer at the wheel, because he knows the territory, they're off for many days of touring in the BPA's new Hudson, black with a running board. What he remembers: The peaches of Yamhill County. The apples of Hood River. The fishing grounds of Celilo Falls before dammed-up water covered them. In eastern Oregon, people giving them the finger for tooting around in a federal car. Gratitude for impromptu shows that Guthrie gave along the way. Wheat fields. Grand Coulee rising. Lost Lake alone against Mount Hood's jagged glint. "And he just says to himself -- I'm standing five feet behind him -- 'This must be paradise. I've never seen anything that touched me as deeply as this.' And it was a beautiful day, a little bit of ripple in the lake, a little bit of wind." Back in the Hudson, Guthrie was so intent on getting it down that they shared no conversation. “Never. And he'd scribble on a piece of paper or whatever, or napkin. And then there'd be a lull. And then he'd repeat it again. And I remember the traffic coming this way from North Dakota and South Dakota, the Dust Bowl era, and people with stuff piled up on their car, and it was just pitiful. That's all I'm saying, you saw poverty on wheels, that's for sure." Guthrie emerged with 26 songs from their time on the road. He was paid and left town and they never saw each other again, though there is more. Seven months later, on Dec. 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor. World War II. End of the Great Depression, two years in the Army for Buehler. In 1952, films that featured Guthrie songs were ordered trashed, as Buehler recalls it, by a presidential administration at odds with Bonneville's public-power outreach and Guthrie's socialist sympathies during the McCarthy era. For 19 years Buehler kept a few such films and documents buried in his basement woodpile, resurrected them for historians after the old politics had passed. "Otherwise," he says, "everything would have been lost." In 1984, Bonneville Power announced an attempt to track down the scattered lyrics of Guthrie's Columbia River songs, some of which he had recorded onto acetate disks while in town. Global news reports picked up the plea. Within days, recalls then-BPA spokesman Bill Murlin, the agency was inundated with leads. Songbook in 1987 In 1987, the results: Publication of a songbook with lyrics from all 26 pieces that flowed from Guthrie's time behind Buehler in the Hudson; and release of the Woody Guthrie "Columbia River Collection" recording that presented, for the first time in one place, 17 of those songs. That same year, Washington designated "Roll On Columbia, Roll On," as its state folk song. In 2006, "Woody's Ghost," an album of original songs by Portland singer-songwriter Ken Vigil, featured four pieces with Buehler's voice telling stories about Guthrie's Columbia travels. And just the other day, Buehler opened a letter dated June 5, 2007. "Dear Elmer," blue ink began, "I am writing to let you know that Steve Kahn passed away peacefully at his home on April 27. . . . Steve remembered you and that time in his life so very fondly." As Bonneville's first public information officer, Kahn was the man who had hired Woody and called in Elmer as the driver. He mails his sympathies. Another chapter closed. Buehler remains one of the last -- if not the last -- with direct links to one of the agency's better deals. For a month of 26 songs, the BPA paid Guthrie $266.66. Buehler, about $200. "I feel OK, what we did," Buehler says. "We put in more than eight-hour days, and we were happy with what we were doing." Electric pride In 1972 he retired after 34 years with Bonneville Power. He stands proud of the part that electricity played in lighting the West and the music his passenger made. Guthrie's inscribed lyrics (Your power is turning/Darkness to dawn . . .) catch sunlight in The Woody Guthrie Circle outside Portland's BPA building headquarters near the Lloyd Center. Buehler remains what he describes as a proudly liberal activist -- "absolutely no apology" -- who attends regular meetings of the Beaumont Wilshire neighborhood association and the Sauvie Island Grange. He enjoys his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. He has a younger brother, Frank, whom he drives to appointments. He lives in a debt-free home, he says, that he helped build in 1939. He makes applesauce. Outdoors on the parking strip, he checks a soaker hose. At some point, he pulls out his complimentary copy of the "Columbia River Collection" phonograph record, still sealed after so many years. Woody strums on its cover by a dam's shuddering falls. Elmer leans it against a chair. He says his phonograph needs fixing, another step toward someday playing back the songs that still hold some part of him. Spencer Heinz: 503-221-8072; spencerheinz@news.oregonian.com