OPINIONS, SERVED OFTEN.

Byline: Mark Baker The Register-Guard

Got a topic?

George Beres has an opinion.

The environment ... "is what is so meaningful to anyone who lives in the Northwest."

Donald Rumsfeld ... "is one of the tyrants of my lifetime."

Oregon football ... "has done wonderful things. (Head coach Mike) Bellotti has done wonderful things. Tragically, they are too much accountable to Phil Knight."

Eugene police ... "I respect them ... but I think it's essential that we have a public review committee to be sure they honor their commitments to the public in terms of being honest and fair."

Top 2008 presidential candidates ... "(Dennis) Kucinich and (Mike) Gravel."

If his name is familiar, maybe you saw it in this, or another, newspaper. Beres (pronounced "Barris") is one of the most prolific letter-to-the-editor writers in Register-Guard history. Whether it's writing about politics on the editorial page, his beloved Oregon Ducks on the sports page, or the Eugene Symphony on the arts page, Beres has been unabashedly expressing his opinion since moving to Eugene from Chicago in 1976.

He was hired that year as the sports information director at the University of Oregon after serving in the same position at Northwestern University from 1968 to 1973. His stint as SID for the UO ended in 1982 after he suffered a severe head injury and almost died in a bicycle accident the year before.

Beres was hit by a car crossing the intersection at East 30th Avenue and Harris Street on his way to work on May 26, 1981. He was not wearing a helmet, and suffered a fractured skull and several blood clots. Beres proudly points out, though, that local bicycle shops sold out of helmets in the two days after his accident. The scar on the right side of his head still clearly visible under his longish gray-white hair, Beres surely wears a helmet now. Especially because he has an acrylic plate in his head.

He is one of those letter writers whose point of view often results in a few more letters - from those who disagree with him. Not that this bothers him.

"I like the flak," he says. "I like the letters that are written in response to me."

A longtime free-lance writer, the 74-year-old Beres is what you might call a civic watchdog. He is informed and ubiquitous. He spends much of his time on the UO campus, attending lectures, visiting classes and taking part in discussion groups. He also hosts a television program, "In the Public Interest," on local cable access TV with attorney and Catholic Community Services director Ed Monks, and writes a weekly column for the Pekin (Ill.) Daily Times, where he was raised, a couple of hours southwest of the Windy City.

Since writing his first letter to the Daily Times' sports editor when he was 14 in 1947, Beres says, he has had 302 letters published.

"I kid people," Beres says. "I say, `I've had three letters in three days in the Guard.' And they look at me with resentment. `You can only get one a month,' they say.

"Well," Beres says, "one of them was in sports, one was in vox populi (arts), and one was in the (editorial) section."

But why does he do it? Why so much writing when you don't make a dime for it?

"It's fundamental to the democratic process in our country," says Beres, a 1955 journalism graduate of Northwestern University who lives in Eugene's south hills with his wife, Sylvia.

One issue that has gotten Beres in some hot water recently is his views on Zionism. He's a Palestinian sympathizer in the vein of former President Jimmy Carter. And he was a longtime member of the Pacifica Forum before recently distancing himself somewhat from the Eugene discussion group after it brought in a speaker last fall who said Jews were largely responsible for the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

"His talk bothered me," Beres says of Valdas Anelaukas, a self-described "white separatist and racialist."

In the fall of 2005, Beres wrote a letter to The Register-Guard titled, "Programs skewed toward Israel." Beres, whose parents emigrated from Greece to Illinois in the 1920s, suggested that the UO needed to balance its offering of Judaic studies with those of "Islam, Arabic nations and the conflict between Israel and Palestine."

His letter resulted in several responses, some from UO professors, accusing Beres of being anti-Semitic.

"I am not, and I know I'm not," Beres says of the charges. Criticism does not equal prejudice, he says.

He cites an opinion piece published in The Oregonian in 2000 in which he criticized the Oregon Bach Festival for planning a performance of "The St. John Passion" because "it demonized Jews," and another he wrote for the Oregon Daily Emerald in 2004 saying Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" was anti-Semitic.

Beres is considering writing a book on the "crucial role" of letters to the editor in a democratic society. "I'm sure I could write it and get it published. My book will have a very significant role in society ... in encouraging people to express themselves at a time in our society when our self-expression is being increasingly diminished by the government."

He writes his letters from a second-floor room in his home that still has the original dark-green shag carpet from when he and his wife bought the house in the mid-1970s.

Hanging on the wall is a poster of Carter that says, "End Israeli Apartheid," and others of Steve Prefontaine and Kucinich.

No matter what anyone thinks of him and his views, Beres says Eugene was a great place to raise his two sons, Nick and Roland - both South Eugene High School graduates and now both local morning TV anchors in Nashville, Tenn., and Madison, Wis., respectively - and a place that has been good for his family.

"It's the people I've been involved with that have made a difference and made my life exciting," he says.

GEORGE BERES

Age: 74

Last book read: "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" by John Perkins

Favorite movie: 1953's "Lili," starring Leslie Caron

Family: Wife, Sylvia; sons, Nick, 44, of Nashville, Tenn., and Roland, 40, of Madison, Wis.; three grandchildren

Bet you didn't know: His favorite sport is baseball, and he's a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan who wants to lift the infamous "Billy Goat" curse placed on the team during its last trip to the World Series in 1945. His plan? Perform a ceremony with actor and comedian Don Novello, he of "Saturday Night Live" Father Guido Sarducci fame. Beres met Novello when he performed at the Britt Festival in Jacksonville a few years ago. "He has agreed to perform an exorcism," Beres says.

Radio voice: A state speech champion in high school, Beres could be heard on U.S. Armed Forces Radio in Seoul when he was stationed in Korea in 1956-57. He later covered Northwestern University football and basketball games as a broadcaster in the 1960s.

Replaced: Former "M*A*S*H actor, the late McLean Stevenson, as assistant sports information director at Northwestern University in the 1960s. Stevenson, to the skepticism of most, said he was going to New York to become an actor.