1.

WHAT:  Talk by candidate in the Aug. 19 6th Congressional District primary election
WHO:  Gary Murrell
WHEN:  Friday, August 15, 2008 -- 5:00-7:00 p.m.
WHERE:  King's Books, 218 St. Helens Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402

2.

CAMPAIGN BIOGRAPHY OF DR. GARY MURRELL

http://www.garymurrell2008.com/about_gary.php

Dr. Gary Murrell is a fourth-generation Oregonian who grew up in Portland. During the Great Depression his grandfather, Phil Brady, a Teamster's Union leader, headed the Portland Central Labor Council then served several terms in the Oregon state senate. His grandmother Nelle, organized women workers in the hotel industry.

Gary served in the U.S. Air Force for four years during the Vietnam Era, 1966-1970. Stationed first in England and then transferred to Germany in 1969, he traveled widely throughout Europe. He spent a few months at the University of Oregon after returning to the United States then left Oregon to pursue a career in theater. He made his living as an actor for a dozen years, traveling to every state in the union except Hawaii, then established a small business in the early 1980s but was forced out of business by the liability insurance industry. By 1984, after an unexpected four-month period of homelessness when he lived in a TP on an island in the Umpqua River in Southern Oregon with his partner Michael and their horses and dogs, he went back to school at Southern Oregon State College (now Southern Oregon University) where he graduated in 1987 with a Bachelor of Science Degree, majoring in history with a minor in political science. Accepted by the history department at the University of Oregon that fall, Gary earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. in U. S. history there with a specialty in 20th century United States and Black history from the period of Reconstruction to the 1970s. His minor field of study for both degrees focused on the modern period of Middle East history. He taught for a year at Southern Oregon University then accepted a teaching position in Aberdeen, Washington at Grays Harbor College in 1993 where he is finishing his 15th year teaching history and political science. For the past two years he has also taught a Black history course at the Stafford Creek Correctional Center as a volunteer.

Gary is the author of one book, Iron Pants: Oregon's Anti-New Deal Governor, Charles Henry Martin (Washington State University Press, 2000) and is working on a biography of Herbert Aptheker, a leading theoretician of the Communist Party, USA, tentatively titled, The Most Dangerous Communist in the United States. He has published numerous articles in journals, from Science & Society to Columbia Magazine, Radical History Review, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and the Oregon Historical Quarterly. He also wrote two articles for the book, History in Dispute: The Red Scare after 1945 (Manly, Inc., 2004). He received a Littleton-Griswold Grant from the American Historical Association in 2001 and over the years he has been awarded several grants to pursue his scholarly research.

Gary's political and community activism grew out of his experiences during the civil rights era, the prolonged criminal insanity of the disastrous, illegal war against the people of Vietnam and the discrimination he experienced as a gay person. He worked with the Gay Activist Alliance (GAA) in New York in the 1970s to promote gay rights. He has been protesting war his entire life -- participating in dozens or hundreds of street theater and anti-war demonstrations against the multiple Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush wars and the militarization of our republic. In 1989 he joined a delegation sponsored by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and spent six weeks in Occupied Palestine monitoring Israeli human rights abuses during the first Palestinian Intifada.

Gary is a committed civil libertarian. He has served on the state boards of both the Oregon and Washington American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and as a member and longtime chair of the Jackson County, Oregon ACLU and ACLU-Grays Harbor. He has received Civil Liberties Awards from both the Oregon and Washington chapters of the ACLU. Gary and his partner received their award from the Washington ACLU for the role they played as plaintiffs in the Washington Supreme Court case challenging the Washington Defense of Marriage Act. He is the president of The Grays Harbor Institute, a small non-profit organized that brings speakers to rural Grays Harbor County, prominent people who support the Institute's goals to end poverty and racism and promote human, civil, social, economic, and environmental rights. Since April 2007, Gary has hosted a daily program of news, talk and commentary on Northwest Indy Radio, a non-commercial radio station.

Gary served on the Hoquiam, Washington City Council, the Grays Harbor County Regional Planning Council, and held leadership positions in the Grays Harbor Human Right Coalition, the Grays Harbor Coalition Council/Hands Off Washington and several anti-war organizations in Grays Harbor.

Currently serving his third term as president of the Grays Harbor College Federation of Teachers, Local 4984, Gary has also served as a delegate to and member of the Executive Board of the Grays Harbor Central Labor Council. He has been a life-long union member. Beginning with the Boilermaker's Union right after high school he has also been a member of Actor's Equity Association, the Screen Actors Guild, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the Washington Education Association and the Washington Federation of Teachers.

Gary lives in Hoquiam, Washington with his partner of 29 years, Michael Gyde, and their two dogs, Frida and DD. Gary and Michael are both avid gardeners and work diligently to maintain their century-old, "American Four Square" house.