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Get in touch with our Roguemeister:
John Schrag
 jschrag@wweek.com
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Ace Hayes was one of the few Oregonians who would consider it an honor to be called a Rogue.

So this week we give him the posthumous honor. Hayes, who died last week from a brain aneurysm, carved out a reputation as Portland's leading critic of big media, secretive government and greedy business. A rumpled man with an untrimmed beard and a theory about everything, Hayes, 58, held monthly "Secret Government Seminars" at the Clinton Street Theater and published The Portland Free Press, a paper whose paranoiac pages made The X-Files look like Touched by an Angel.

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Photo: CHARLES GULLUNG

But Hayes wasn't just an armchair revolutionary. He practiced what he preached, working to organize migrant farm workers and living in Nicaragua, where he helped supply guns to the Sandinista rebels. A native Oregonian raised in Oak Ridge, he became a Portland icon. Hayes was guru to an assortment of anarchists and libertarians, gun nuts and pot smokers, aging flower children and youthful street punks.

In tribute to Hayes, we give the roguish rebel the last word, taken from a 1994 interview with WW: "We live in a kakistocracy--it's in the dictionary, look it up. Government by the worst. The only appropriate metaphor is a cesspool. The big ones go to the top. And the bigger they are, the faster they rise."

 

Originally published: Willamette Week - February 18, 1998

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