When Tom McCall turned out the lights

Russell Sadler

August, 2005. Katrina has just slammed into the Gulf Coast. The stories from New Orleans and Mississippi are filled with terror and tragedy.

As if Hurricane Katrina’s damage isn’t tragedy enough, the media melodrama surround gasoline supplies is very likely talking the country into lining up at the gasoline pumps again A crippled transportation system is understandably creating shortages in the hurricane-stricken area. The Bush administration is displaying the same incompetence it has displayed in nearly everything they have touched for five years, bungling their way through the hurricane’s aftermath.

If Americans panic over gasoline prices and swarm to the pumps to fill their tanks, the transfer of stored gasoline from the distribution network to vehicle tanks will produce spot shortages that will trigger panic buying and lines at the gas pumps far from the area affected by the hurricane, where shortages understandably exist.

Oregon has more experience successfully coping with panic buying and gasoline lines than most states.

Let’s go to the videotape. Rewind to 1973, aka “The Winter Gov. Tom McCall Turned Out The Lights.”

Even before the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo, a prolonged drought threatened the West Coast with an hydroelectricity shortage. In Oregon, Gov. Tom McCall urged everyone to conserve electricity since most homes and business were heated with electricity, and the approaching winter was the season of peak electrical usage. McCall issued a constitutionally dubious, but very effective executive order prohibiting the use of electricity for “nonessential” purposes. This included very visible uses like billboards and electric signs.

The Oregon Department of Transportation dimmed some street lights at freeway interchanges. Stores and gas stations pull the knobs off the hot water faucets in public restrooms -- a dubious strategy from a public health standpoint, but very effective publicity. The public responded in their own homes and places of business. Oregon darkened as the lights dimmed. Utilities reported significant drops in electricity consumption.

In late October, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries prohibited sale of crude oil to countries that sided with Israel in the Yom Kippur War. This boycott quadrupled the price of crude oil from $3 a barrel in 1972 to $12 a barrel in 1973. The Arabs’ action triggered panic buying in the United States. The shift of stored gasoline from tank farms and gas station storage tanks to vehicle tanks triggered spot shortages that triggered more panic buying and long lines at the gas pumps.

While the Nixon administration dithered over whether to impose national gasoline rationing, Oregon’s impulsive, decisive Gov. Tom McCall acted. Following a meeting with dozens of angry, bewildered gasoline dealers at the Capitol, McCall held a meeting with his staff to come up with an plan to control and contain the long lines at the pumps. The staff erupted with ideas -- including flying green flags when the station had gasoline to sell, red flags when their tanks were dry and yellow flags announcing sales only to regular commercial customers. But it was a young staffer from the Oregon Department of Energy who came up with the idea McCall finally announced to the public. “We could cut the lines in half overnight,” the staffer assured McCall. “People whose license plates end in an even number can buy gas today, people with odd numbers can buy tomorrow.”

McCall had as much visibility in the National Governors Association in 1973 as did California Gov. Ronald Reagan. McCall’s odd-even plan was so simple to administer, so free of bureaucracy that a number of governors adopted it in their states and the need for national gas rationing just melted away. The Arabs ended their embargo in March, 1974.

Fast forward to late August, 2005. The media, -- especially the cable “news” channels -- with their 24/7 “news cycle,” bilge-blathering talking heads, and melodramatic coverage of “crippled oil production” that is creating the climate that will once again trigger panic buying and the return of the long lines at the gasoline pumps.

Outside the Gulf Coast, there is just as much gasoline available today as there was before Katrina hit. It is in transit from refineries to oil distributors’ tank farms to the underground tanks where you fill up.

Most Americans let their gas tanks get close to empty before they fill up, so most gasoline is stored in the distribution network, not in vehicle gasoline tanks. But if the melodramatic media convinces enough people shortages are imminent, Americans will line up to top off their tanks. This will shift much of the nation’s stored gasoline from the distribution network to vehicle tanks, triggering spot shortages that will produce media coverage that will trigger more panic buying and the long lines will reappear at the pumps as it did in 1973.

If that happens, Gov. Ted Kulongoski and other state governors can simply impose McCall’s odd-even plan and reduce the number of drivers bellying up to the bar to fill up by half. There is no need to trouble the incompetents in the White House and on Capitol Hill.

  • Tenskwatawa (unverified)
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    I remember the odd-even plate & day policy swept across the country 'overnight,' to us in Boston It was just the obviousness of it. Although I remain surprised to this day that as many people as do, all know what 'odd-' and 'even-numbered' plates, means, (but then, I'm also surprised at as many as don't). Surely 'odd' and 'even' is the most widespread single understanding school ever taught.

    Gov. McCall's staffer's name is Ed Day, I believe. 'Day' is right, but I'm vague on the 'Ed.' I met him some years later, when he was working for Regis McKenna PR, (unless it was Hill & Knowlton PR, each had an office in Portland). And as a P(ublic) R(elations) man, his odd-even formulation is the very epitome, the acme of that craft. In that: his name's not on the idea. (Anyone know where J Isaacs is? He's another master of the PR touch, elusive, and my favorite personality type: honkin'-on genius.) The feat of composing a solution in words so strong and simple that the idea spreads itself, faster than anyone can think to ask where it came from -- 'it just seemed to be hanging in the air' -- and nevermind who wrote it, that is the ultimate wordsmithing, in the regard of some. This particular odd-even case might be an example to study, for whoever it was who asked about memes.

    And here's an example to study of PR -- Edward Bernays, whom I met many times when we lived in the same 'hood.

    Russ, I challenge for documentation of this statement:

    Outside the Gulf Coast, there is just as much gasoline available today as there was before Katrina hit. It is in transit from refineries to oil distributors’ tank farms to the underground tanks where you fill up. [Emphasis added.]

    Mike Ruppert, FromTheWilderness, says otherwise, You Bet Your Life (excerpt below), and in the same breath introduces many readers to the 'new' idea that things are never going to get 'back to normal.' There is going to be less gas every day for the rest of our lives, and none at all within five years. Sometimes to deny themselves seeing their denial of grasping the idea, people raise hew and cry to argue over the "five" number. Whatever.

    What is new — but is now dying — is our enshrined belief that there were to be no consequences of our reckless consumption and destruction of the ecosystem. What is now dying a horrible death is America’s grotesque global arrogance, brutality and cupidity.

    What is not being discussed rationally by the mainstream media is Katrina’s impact on energy production. They don’t dare. By my calculations and those of oil energy expert Jan Lundberg, the United States has just lost between 20% and 25% of its energy supply. My projection is that it’s not coming back — at least not most of it.

    As a result of Katrina, Saudi Arabia has finally admitted that it cannot increase production. Many of us knew they’ve been lying for at least two years. The Energy Information Administration has just admitted that global demand has been outstripping supply for several months before Katrina. Nice time to start telling the truth. Nature is finally calling everybody’s bluff.

    We live at the end of oil, Russell, and the old world is new.

    Lastly, since the topic is so close, some may want to know the timeline coming out of the '73 OPEC embargo, (recall that then, it had been only 6 years since Israel had invaded the Sinai, Gaza and Palestine, confiscating lands, creating hundreds of thousands of refugees set in detention camp(s), and began illegal occupation -- OPEC's motive was, for that recent issue, seeking recourse for the violation of international charter). The quadrupled price caused inflation, which caused confiscatory interest, (Oregon had to repeal its usury law in '76 with the biblical limit of 7%), and interest rate surge,(over 20% by 1980, begun from Nixon's crippled incapacity to deal with OPEC, and immediately rightwing liars foamed to blame rates on Carter), which caught mortgage lenders, mainly Savings & Loan's (S&L's) with 20-year papers out paying 5% while it went to costing them 14% to borrow, which caused the S & L crisis, ($1 trillion default) during Reagan, which led to Packwood's '86 rewrite of The Tax Code, and also caused the raid over the firewall into the Social Security Trust, (Reagan/Bush), which caused the fraudulence Bush Jughead is trying to hide today. If you suspect your Soc.Sec. fiduciary integrity today, the failing goes back to Reagan's raid on the Trust, to cash out the S & L's, which were mismanaged in disrespect of OPEC.

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  • Tenskwatawa (unverified)
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    Oh, and Russ, if you cancel your cable subscription -- BOYCOTT 'bundled-package' TV, cable or satellite -- then you take away their power, (your dollars), that makes "media coverage that will trigger more panic."

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    russell, i am grateful that we have you here at blueoregon. your knowledge of oregon's history is something i value. i lived in montana in '73, so don't have any real knoweledge of tom mccall. i always enjoy learning more about him. thanks for bringing these lessons back to us.

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    For some reason, my mom talked about the odd/even plan quite often. Often enough that I remember it and I wasn't even born yet. But for some reason I didn't realize Tom McCall started it. Fascinating.

    Anyway, just because I get caught up in details, now that Oregon plates have run out of the AAA 111 format and are now in the 111 AAA format (for the standard tree plates), how would we impose it? Beginning number? Or just cut the alphabet in half? And what about vanity plates?

    I know, it's a silly detail, but it's one that'll come up if it comes to that so why the heck not help the powers that be out by solving the problem before they figure out there is one. ;-)

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    In 1973, vanity plates were treated as an odd number. There were comparatively few then and it did make much of a difference in the numbers of people who showed uip at the pumps.

    The rationing system just has to reduce the number of cars eligible by about half on any given day. Then it works.

    <h2>Russell</h2>

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