by Kenny Moore
“I’m outraged beyond words,” Sheela wrote in a press release. “The attorney general’s statement is in the long tradition of bigotry which this state has exhibited since birth.” She concluded that Frohnmayer needed psychiatric help at a Rajneeshee clinic.
Bowerman felt vindicated by the attorney general’s opinion, but nothing changed immediately. Frohnmayer sued in state court to disincorporate the city. The Rajneeshee delayed, dragging the case from state to federal court. But because of Sheela’s ascending paranoia, the commune took all kinds of other measures. Once, after Otto and MarAbel Frohnmayer had visited Bill and Barbara at Jon’s house and driven home to Medford, MarAbel picked up the phone and a questioner demanded to know if they owned the make, model, and license number of the car that had been visiting the Bowermans. When MarAbel said yes, she realized the call was to let them know they were being watched. The voice then began asking all kinds of questions about whether Dave had ever fallen on his head as a baby. “Anything at all to account for this insanity now?” MarAbel hung up, white.
Bill and Barbara began to get spooky envelopes in the mail, stuffed with dark poems describing how they would soon die of poison. “Horrible letters came all the time,” Barbara would recall. “Ones telling me about all the women Bill was with. It was just crazy.”
Crazy was the word. In November 1983, Sheela, suspicious of everyone, ordered listening devices be placed in the cabins where journalists and other visitors stayed. A few months later, eavesdropping was expanded to the Hotel Rajneesh, her rival Laxmi’s quarters, and the entire ranch telephone system. Although the sannyasins said it was for the protection of the guru, Sheela had her own reasons: She was vulnerable to charges of immigration fraud and also worried about an internal revolt.
Her solution was to have a close aide, Puja, drug and poison those who knew too much. Puja had created a secret lab on the ranch and experimented with poisoning mice. Soon sannyasins who opposed Sheela were falling ill and almost dying. That September, three Wasco County commissioners who had angered Sheela by voting to repeal the city’s land-use plan visited Rajneeshpuram. Sheela gave them glasses of water. The commissioner nearly died of poisoning. The second got mildly sick. The third remained healthy.
That fall, in an effort to win two judgeships and the sheriff’s office, Sheela had some 4,000 homeless people imported to pack voter registration, bringing the ranch’s total to about 7,000 voters. The county seat, The Dalles, had 12,000 voters, so Sheela planned to infect the town’s water supply on election day to keep people from voting. As a rehearsal, she and aides put salmonella in ten restaurant salad bars in The Dalles. Seven hundred and fifty people got sick, 400 at Shakey’s Pizza alone. Fortunately, all lived. It remains the largest germwarfare attack in the history of the United States.
And it spurred a record election turnout that November. To prevent fraud, the Oregon Secretary of State had the state assume control of voter registration in Wasco County. “All new voters,” wrote author Garrett Epps, “would be required to register in The Dalles, where state attorneys would interview them to decide whether they intended to remain in Oregon after the election, a requirement under the state’s voting laws. Perhaps realizing that their street people could never pass such an interview, Sheela denounced the plan as more religious bigotry and announced a boycott of the election.” The Rajneeshee elected no friendly sheriff or commissioners.
On February 28, 1985, Congressman Jim Weaver gave a speech on the House floor describing why he was convinced that the salmonella poisoning in The Dalles had been the handiwork of the Rajneeshee. At the time, all health authorities were equally convinced that the blame lay with restaurant food handlers, and Weaver took some heat in the press.
Weaver had been following Rajneeshee developments closely ever since a visit from Bill Bowerman the year before. Bowerman had come to Weaver to ask him to stop the Bureau of Land Management from going through with a proposed swap with the Rajneeshee. (The Big Muddy region was a checkerboard of sections owned by the BLM and the Rajneeshee.) As chairman of the subcommittee with oversight of such deals, Weaver had kept the proposal on hold for several months, but the BLM still wanted to go through with it.
Meanwhile, matters were coming to a head. “By June 1985,” wrote FitzGerald, “Sheela had come to believe that the authorities would soon be coming to arrest her and Rajneesh.” She and her inner circle drew up a hit list of Rajneeshpuram enemies, a list that included US Attorney Charles Turner, David Frohnmayer, Portland Oregonian reporter Leslie Zaitz, and Helen Byron, a former sannyasin, who’d just won a big judgment against Sheela. Sheela and three others obtained false IDs, bought handguns in Texas, and staked out Charles Turner’s house in Portland, planning to shoot him in his car. Somehow, he avoided them.
With the BLM still pushing hard to conclude the land swap, Weaver surveyed the Big Muddy by helicopter and jeep in the company of the two Prineville BLM chiefs. “One thing struck me with force,” Weaver would remember later for the Eugene Register-Guard. “The two BLM officials were fervently for the land swap, arguing all the way for the benefits the land swap would hold for the BLM. Why were they so enthusiastic? Had they made personal arrangements with the Rajneesh?”
For a week Weaver sat in the Bowerman house across from the Big Muddy, poring over maps. One day he and Bill went out on the river with Jon, rowing a boat along the banks and even swimming to shore, where the sannyasin guards patrolled with AK-47s.
The next morning, Weaver suddenly realized why the Rajneeshee wanted the land swap: they wanted to build a large resort and housing development along the river, but a promontory of BLM land that went right into the river blocked access to the planned resort area. “I saw how the land swap would give them a road route from their ranch land to the resort location,” Weaver would recall. “The value of the land would increase enormously.”
It was only a matter of days before the papers were to be signed, but Weaver prevailed upon the regional director to kill the deal, “or I will raise so much hell you’ll wish you never heard of the Rajneeshees.” The director said he would look into it. “Apparently, what he found did not smell so sweet,” Weaver would write, “for the next day he called me and said the swap was terminated.”
Two days later, in mid-September, Sheela and fifteen other disciples left the ranch and fled to Europe. The two Prineville BLM chiefs announced their resignations the same day. “One of the most prized mementos of my congressional career,” Weaver would say, “is a handwritten note from Bill Bowerman, received a few days after the Rajneesh debouched, saying, ‘Thanks, Jim.’”
The guru, rather than cover for his fleeing secretary, opened the ranch up to investigators and even accused her of crimes himself. Sheela and Puja were caught in Germany and extradited back to Portland.
Once on the ranch, federal agents found evidence of Bhagwan’s immigration fraud—holding mass weddings for green cards. They presented it to state and federal grand juries. Word reached Rajneesh through his lawyers that he was about to be charged, so he ran for it. On October 27, 1985, he boarded one of two rented Lear jets and took off, headed for Bermuda.
An informant in the commune alerted the Feds, saying the Bhagwan was to switch planes in Charlotte, North Carolina. As Garrett Epps told the story, “At home, Frohnmayer awoke next morning to a call from a gravelly Southern voice that introduced itself as Robert Morgan, a former US Senator who was now the head of the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation. “Did you get Bhagwan?’ Frohnmayer asked.
“‘I don’t know anything about that,’ Morgan drawled, ‘but there’s a guy here who’s some kind of maharajah.’”
Once Rajneesh was back in Portland, his attorneys posted bond so he could return to Rajneeshpuram. He left the United States less than two weeks later, after filing no contest pleas to two counts of immigration fraud and paying prosecution costs of $400,000. He went to India, Nepal, and Crete, unsuccessfully seeking asylum. Eventually he resettled in Pune. In 1989, he
changed his name to Osho, and on January 19, 1990, he died.
Sheela, Puja, and Shanti Bhadea pleaded guilty to the attempted murder of Deveraj, the guru’s doctor, with an injection of adrenaline; the poisoning of William Hulse and his colleague; causing the outbreak of salmonella poisoning in The Dalles; immigration fraud; and setting fire to the Wasco County planning offices. Sheela and Puja received twenty-year sentences. Sheela paid a half-million dollars in fines and served almost three years in a federal medium-security prison, then departed for Europe.
By the end of December 1985, most of the sannyasins had left the ranch. That same month, Dave Frohnmayer won Oregon’s suit against the incorporation of Rajneeshpuram. After the ranch was already up for sale, the federal district court enjoined the city from exercising governmental power because there was no effective separation of church and state. In the intervening years, if one wanted to see a special gleam enter the eye of David Frohnmayer, all one had to do was lift a glass and toast that miracle given to us by the founding fathers, the Establishment Clause.
Bill Bowerman, in coming home do battle, had been reacquainted not only with the vistas of his childhood, but with present-day Antelope and Fossil and their people. Bill decided to spend more time in Wheeler County. He looked across to the Big Muddy Ranch, unfurled a yellow pad, and made some notes for an essay on its natural history: “The south end is a geologic treasure. Numerous pre- and post-Columbian Indian pictographs are in the area. The desert highland ridges are habitat of deer, chukars, pheasant, and a few antelope. Yes, and rattlesnakes, but no more cobras.”
CHAPTER 29
Builderman
SEVERAL YEARS OF CONCENTRATING ON RAJNEESHPURAM DIDN’T DISTRACT Bowerman from advising selected athletes and pledging more gifts to his university. In some cases, he was gratified by the results, in others exasperated. Judging from his correspondence, Bill was most frustrated by the way his American dream was coming true. Nike was growing so fast it felt less and less like his own creation.
Bowerman’s letters on the subject during the 1980s all describe some point in a cycle. First he lists his hopes for projects he’s developing in his Eugene lab. Then he writes of finding some resistance to them in the company, either by the Exeter R&D lab or by a bunch of midlevel managers in the Beaverton headquarters he’d never dealt with before. He complains to Knight, Bob Woodell, and the board of directors. He feels this does no good. He asks to be removed from the board. Knight, John Jaqua, and other board members plead that doing so would be a terrible blow to the company. One, former Deputy Secretary of State (and Robin Jaqua’s brother) Chuck Robinson, wrote him, “You are a symbol of integrity to the entire athletic world.” Bill relents and morosely pursues other ideas, recording his dissatisfactions in detailed memos.
One such document in 1982 listed twenty-three projects he and his Eugene lab people were working on, including racing shoes for Duck middle-distance star Joachim Cruz of Brazil and Kenyan 3:49.4-miler Mike Boit, who was taking his PhD from Oregon. Bill was customizing shoes for thirteen Athletics West runners and also tailoring them for children with braces at a Portland hospital. He was developing an aerobics shoe, a gymnastics shoe, a children’s shoe, a shoe for nurses, a boat shoe, a system of straps for Oregon women javelin-throwers’ boots (to prevent toe bruising), and, with Dr. Bill McHolick consulting, a “mature women’s” shoe. (Designed to accommodate painful bunions, this shoe was so ugly, John Jaqua would say, “that my Robin wouldn’t even test it in the privacy of her bedroom.”)
Another McHolick idea was a Velcro-strapped shoe to accommodate the swelling feet of diabetes patients. Bowerman was also devising an interval training flat with an intriguing “horseshoe-type spike plate to enable training with cushion and yet prevent slippage.” He was working on a prototype high-jump shoe for women and, with Geoff Hollister, a windsurfing aqua sock. With wheelchair-mile world record holder Craig Blanchette, who lived in Springfield, Bill was designing racing suits and the critical pushing gloves used to transfer muscle power to the rubber-coated rings connected to the wheelchair’s axle.
Most of these had little mass-market appeal, but even those that did rarely made it into production in the shape or with the alacrity that Bill wanted. In early 1984 he had a host of complaints. His children’s and infants’ shoe had been researched four years before, but current production models were “dogs.” The company had termed Velcro “a passing fad,” but it hadn’t passed. His gymnastic and aerobic shoes were experiencing “roadblocks.”
The Bowerman mind was less and less suited to shrugging off such impediments. Bill felt stymied as the company grew because his nature was so opposite to the corporate. Conflict was inevitable.
Phil Knight had seen this coming, of course. Early on he had vowed to himself never to lose Bill Bowerman, a vow that would define the culture of his company. Knight would make keeping Bowerman a mark of keeping Nike’s soul, of defeating the competition with quality. Knight worked to retain Bill’s sensitivity to the individual—even as Bill was moaning that the company was losing faith in it—by hiring, training, and promoting employees who didn’t mind Bowerman’s driven perfectionism. When Knight got notes from Bill wanting to resign (such as one in 1984 saying, “My effectiveness as a Nike employee is somewhere between zero and fifty percent”), he could only hope that one day Bowerman would fully comprehend the effort needed to make the transition from boutique to behemoth.
Knight would lose count of Bill’s attempted resignations. “It was a bunch,” he’d say in 2005. Each time it happened, Knight would grit his teeth, count to fifteen, and go on. He never let the resignations take effect. “I had been trained by him,” said Knight. “I knew him. I loved him. I simply never took it personally. If I had anything to say about it, he was not going to leave.”
Time would clarify the best role for Bill in the company. About the so-called power struggle between Exeter R&D and Eugene R&D, Jeff Johnson would have this to say in 2005: “We did different things, and it was a good division of labor. Bowerman was supposed to do his Bowerman thing, which was to be a genius, a process which knows no supervision or deadlines. Exeter was supposed to produce new models and entire lines in a timely fashion.”
In the late 1970s, as growth in the athletic-shoe industry shot upward, Exeter set up a dedicated research lab staffed with exercise physiologists, biomechanists, and computer-assisted design and manufacturing equipment. They began foot morphology studies on thousands of athletes to guide the design of shoe lasts. “Exeter had an entirely different charge than Eugene,” Johnson would say, “and it would not only have been stupid of us, but silly and enormously petty to think we were in some kind of ‘war’ for power with Eugene.” Although Jeff clearly did not feel his lab was competing with Bill’s, Bill was just as clearly inclined to feel the opposite—or at least that was true for several years.
Into all this trotted a tall, lean, observant distance runner. Mark Parker had gone to Penn State and run vast training mileage for Harry Groves, a coach almost as acerbic as Bowerman. He graduated in 1975 and Jeff Johnson hired him to work at Exeter, where he would have eight different jobs in two years. “I did design for Jeff, and I became an all-purpose product guy,” Parker recalled.
Johnson was his mentor, but Parker was also deeply affected and inspired by both Pre and Bowerman. In 1980 Parker was sent to Eugene during the week of the Olympic Trials. His primary mission was to meet with author and wrestler Ken Kesey at his farm, to talk wrestling shoes. He then went to call at Bill’s Eugene lab.
“When I met Bill he was wearing a green cowboy hat,” Parker would recall. “I introduced myself and he said, ‘Oh, from Exeter,’ as if that was from the devil. A sign above his workbench said, ‘Russia has its Siberia. Nike has its Exeter.’”
Parker was about to work a little détente, or at least glasnost. “Bill had a way of coming up and testing you to see what you were made of,” Parker would say. “He’d tell you what he thought—this is crap, this is terrific�
��in order to get your opinion.” Parker’s conditioning under Harry Groves kept him from being intimidated. Bill especially cared how someone felt about a product’s weight, being solidly of the “form must be driven by function” school, a philosophy that Parker also believed in. But Parker told Bowerman that the company had to sell shoes to average folks, not just the most elite athletes. Bill—who might have gagged at hearing this from a salesman—deemed it reasonable coming from a runner. He accepted Parker as a colleague.
“What I eventually came to love about Bill,” Parker would say, “was how opinionated he was, and how he applied that brutal candor to our delicate creations.” Parker felt Bowerman’s constant testing to be at some level deeply enjoyable for both of them. “It got so predictable that I looked forward to it,” he would recall. “In the formal setting of a board meeting, you’d be an R&D dog, showing off your sample shoe, and he’d let you go, explaining, explaining, while he’d swivel away and rock in his chair, and finally he’d swivel back, clear the table—it was a ceremony—open his briefcase and pull out a postage scale. You’d feel this eruption building. . . . It made everyone go quiet. Then he’d say, ‘Lemme see that.’” Bowerman would weigh the shoe and then ask a barrage of penetrating questions “way beyond the rest of the board.” That every Nike designer could picture Bill waiting, rocking, coiled to administer his final exam, kept a lot of half-baked ideas off the table.
Partial to eccentrics, Parker found Bowerman’s personality invigorating. “If you let him—if you turned to mush when he was trying to see if you were chopping-block maple—he’d roll right over you,” Parker would say. “Bill was a pure person in many respects, and driven to his death to do better surfaces and shoes. To this day, his critical examination is what I subject new products to.”
