I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

MLC IN ITS EARLY DAYS had a sunny vibe, reflected in posts on this website. It had a kind of genteel political consciousness, centered on protest against the war and the establishment, rejection of coercive education. Its existence was a gentle political statement—as it has remained to this day.

Any dark realities early MLC harbored were tucked away in corners. Some make appearances, here or in other outlets such as the MLC Alumni Facebook page—bullying, sexual predation, drug use, criminality—but happiness reigned.

Early graduates missed MLC in the Reagan years.

That's when "[e]xtreme ideas and radical ideologies cropped up among the student body. The lack of adult supervision ... meant that budding nazis [such as] Ken Mieske and Steve Strasser could be overlooked."

In November 1988, the pair, along with Grant High homecoming king Kyle Brewster, murdered Mulugeta Seraw in the explosive culmination of a sequence of events understandable as a sort of white supremacist public emergence. Strasser was an MLC student, and Mieske—known as "Ken Death," or "Batman" for his murder weapon of choice—a regular visitor.

The cover of Mannie Murphy's 2021 graphic novel.

In 2021, Mannie Murphy, an MLC student from 1985 to 1997, published their debut graphic novel, titled I Never Promised you a Rose Garden as a remark on the pervasive darkness underlying their Rose City hometown's bloomy surface. The 220-page work—source of the quote above—made a small national splash, delving as it did not only into the Seraw murder and the resulting local civil trial but into an intense and shocking web of circumstance linking youth susceptibility, Oregon's history of racism and elite obliviousness, street kids, the life and death of Madras boy River Phoenix, the community coalesced around Gus Van Sant's filmmaking—and MLC.

The darkness is part of our history and must not be shied away from. Mannie's viewpoints are very personal, closely researched, astute, riveting, and essential. They express anger and anguish, reflecting politically violent times that followed MLC's quiet seventies. The book is available here; a 2021 interview with the author/artist is here; and perceptive reviews are here, here, here, and here.

In February 2026, partly in response to surging hate and racism in the current political moment, Oregon Public Broadcasting released a new documentary about Seraw's murder, Remember Mulugeta. A 2003 book by Elinor Langer, A Hundred Little Hitlers, also covered the murder, and the trial, for which prosecutors had traded reduced charges for Strasser and Brewster—not Mieske—for testimony against national supremacist leader Tom Metzger.

Excerpted pages from I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.