Make the McKenzie Connection!
Make the McKenzie Connection!
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On the evening of Sept. 28, 1995, Woney and Laurie Peters, of Lava Hot Springs, Idaho, were driving back to their home behind the local elementary school when they noticed something wasn’t right. The first thing Woney noticed was the horses. They were confined in a corral in front of the house, next to the trampoline, which his teenage kids were playing on. The kids seemed fine — but the horses seemed terrified. They kept staring up at the hillside that ran along behind the house and the sch...
Sometime in 1943, during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, a group of more than 40 officers of the Imperial Japanese Navy strolled into Club Tsubaki, an exclusive gentlemen’s club in the heart of downtown Manila. They were there for one last evening of fun while they were still in port. That very evening, they were scheduled to climb back into their submarines and set out on an extended cruise. The private party had been arranged by one of the subs’ commanders, who had struck up a fri...
After the election, the new formerly homeless residents of Rajneeshpuram were the most pressing problem for Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his followers. They cost a lot of money to feed and house, and they started fights and made trouble. Rajneeshee leaders started out giving them bus tickets home, but that got very expensive very fast. After all, it had cost $1 million to bring them in by busloads; sending them home one or two at a time would be many times more than that. So finally, the...
In the courtyard at the Antelope Post Office today, there stands a large bronze plaque attached to the base of a flagpole. It reads, “Dedicated to those of this community who throughout the Rajneesh invasion and occupation of 1981-1985 remained, resisted and remembered.” Most visitors probably roll their eyes at this, thinking it a bit melodramatic. Invasion? Occupation? Puh-leeze, they might mutter. But the Rajneeshee takeover of Antelope was not an anodyne bureaucratic exercise. To those who...
Part Two: Arrival On June 1, 1981, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh boarded a Boeing 747 for a flight from Mumbai to New York City. Officially the trip was for medical treatment, and authorities were told he’d be heading back home to India afterward. But Rajneesh was not planning on returning. His movement, which had already become an international octopus with meditation centers in dozens of different countries around the world, had outgrown the Pune campus. He needed a new World Headquarters. And his ne...
It was getting toward the end of the summer of 1902, and West Linn resident Ellis Hughes was getting worried. His neighbor, William Dale, had traveled back to Eastern Oregon to sell some land he owned there. With the proceeds, Dale and Hughes planned to buy a piece of property next to the Hughes farm. The property belonged to the Oregon Iron and Steel Co., which wasn’t really doing anything with it and which Hughes was pretty sure would be happy to sell … unless, of course, they found out why...
Continued From Last Week So right away, Baldwin was hearing the stories. Most likely there were some terrible ones; they obviously touched her heart. Over the next several decades she would dedicate her life to doing something about them. Time went by. The Baldwins left Lincoln. Eventually, in 1904, they moved to Portland; LeGrand had taken a job for a chain of dimestores, and was tasked with opening one in Oregon. So Lola went forth and plugged into the Portland aid-society scene. She found an...
By the time Walt Disney Productions released “The Rescuers” in 1977, the idea of a “Rescue Aid Society” dedicated to the eradication of kidnapping felt quaint, old-fashioned, and fun. But not many years earlier, when memories of the Progressive Era were fresher, it would not have scanned that way. In fact, “The Rescuers” was first pitched in 1962, at which time Walt Disney himself killed it. And that was probably a good call: members of the real Aid Societies were still alive and had matured...
If you ask most Oregonians who the first woman governor in state history was, they’ll have an immediate answer … but they’ll be wrong. Conventional wisdom holds that the first woman to take the gubernatorial purple in the Beaver State was Barbara Roberts, who was elected to the job in 1990. In fact, that’s almost true … but, of course, “almost” doesn’t work very well as an answer to a true-or-false question. The truth is, Barbara Roberts was the first elected woman governor in Oregon history....
If you ask most Oregonians who the first woman governor in state history was, they’ll have an immediate answer … but they’ll be wrong. Conventional wisdom holds that the first woman to take the gubernatorial purple in the Beaver State was Barbara Roberts, who was elected to the job in 1990. In fact, that’s almost true … but, of course, “almost” doesn’t work very well as an answer to a true-or-false question. The truth is, Barbara Roberts was the first elected woman governor in Oregon history....
IT WAS APRIL FOOLS' DAY of 1874 when saloonkeeper Walter Moffett, proprietor of the Webfoot Saloon and sworn antagonist of the ladies of the Women’s Temperance Prayer League, escalated the conflict to the levels that would lead, within a week or two, to street riots. The “Temperance Crusade” ladies had visited his saloon the day before, and for the first time, rather than leaving when he refused to let them in, they’d arranged themselves like a hymn-singing picket line outside of the place....
“It is very clear that the purpose of the robbers is to conceal the remains, in the hopes that a reward will ultimately be offered for them,” the Portland Morning Oregonian’s reporter wrote, in the next day’s edition. “They are undoubtedly men who are aware of the wealth of the heirs of the man whose remains they have stolen. There is no doubt that they are men of experience, for there is every evidence of a thoroughly matured plan to carry out the crime. The fact that the headboard and one s...
The nineteenth century was a kind of golden age of body snatching. Digging up the freshly dead to cash the corpses in at the back door of a nearby medical school was — well, not common exactly, but far from unheard-of. So when, around the middle of May 1897, Daniel Magone and Charles Montgomery asked a 20-year-old wood hauler named William Rector to help them steal a corpse out of River View Cemetery, Rector didn’t react the way you or I would. A job was a job, and Rector needed the work, and...
If you’d been lucky enough to live in Portland in July of 1848, you would have been able to say, literally, that your ship had come in. The ship in question was the sailing ship Honolulu. And, funny thing: she arrived in port in ballast, with her cargo holds empty. That raised some eyebrows. At the time, Oregon was not even part of the U.S.A. yet — just a vast extranational territory jointly claimed by the U.S. and Britain. There was no national government authority to issue money, nor was the...
On the morning of Dec. 7, 1904, Stephen A.D. Puter had just arrived at the office of U.S. Marshal Jack Matthews. He was expecting some friends to come by … and bail him out of jail. Puter had just been convicted of masterminding a plan to swindle the U.S. government out of thousands of acres of prime timberlands. He had not yet been sentenced. Like all convicts, he had the option of either staying in jail until sentencing or posting bail. In his case, bail was set at $4,000. He figured his frien...
As you will have gathered, it didn't exactly take brilliant detective work to figure out what was going on over at Dunbar Produce and Grocery. By November of 1893, word of what they were up to had been filtering up from the waterfront for at least a year and a half. So, in late November 1893, a grand jury returned indictments against 15 people - including Blum, Dunbar, and Lotan. The charges involved smuggling more than two tons of opium and running a human-trafficking operation smuggling...
It's not clear when William Dunbar and Nat Blum, owners of the Merchant Steamship Co. in Portland, started smuggling opium on their steamships, the Wilmington and the Haytian Republic. They may have been smuggling opium all along; but the astonishing rate at which opium-related disasters started piling up after mid-1892 following at least 18 months of smooth operations suggests that before that, they were only smuggling people. Smuggling opium was not only much more lucrative than smuggling...
NOTE: In last month's Offbeat Oregon column, we explored the unlikely origins and career of Yosuke Matsuoka, the foreign minister of Imperial Japan who was responsible for Japan's military alliance with Nazi Germany. Matsuoka, you'll remember, spent most of his teenage years in Portland as a sort of adopted son of a prominent merchant and smuggler named William Dunbar. In this month's article, we're going to go into detail on the story of the smuggling ring that William Dunbar operated with his...
When Yosuke Matsuoka accepted his appointment as Imperial Japan's foreign minister, it was the fulfillment of a dream for him. The gregarious 13-year-old boy who had been informally adopted into Portland opium smuggler William Dunbar's household back in 1893 had come a long way in the following 47 years. He had become a national hero in Japan, and was by far the single most famous Japanese person in the world internationally and almost certainly the most famous University of Oregon alumnus. It...
Yosuke Matsuoka left his Oregon home for the last time in 1902 when he was 22 years old; he'd lived in Oregon and, briefly, California, since age 13. His Oregon years had been happy ones, and he would remember them fondly for the rest of his life. Oregon would remember him fondly, too (until Pearl Harbor Day, of course). Within 25 years of his graduation, he would be probably the most famous University of Oregon alumnus in the world; within 50, it's most notorious. That, of course, was all far i...
Part 1 - The opium smuggler's foster son It may be true that the movement of a butterfly's wings on one side of the world can seed a tornado on the other. But whether that's literally true or not, it certainly is figuratively true, and nowhere is it better demonstrated than in the case of 1890s businessman and opium smuggler William Dunbar of Portland, Oregon. If we could take Dunbar out of the stream of history before about 1890, we would derail events that led directly to Imperial Japan's...
The "Golden Age of Outlaws" had a good run - almost 40 years. It kicked off just after the Civil War when thousands of battle-hardened Confederate veterans with nothing to lose spread out across the Western frontier; and it ended in a field in eastern Washington on Aug. 5, 1902. That was the date when the last Golden Age outlaw, Harry Tracy, went out in a blaze of gunfire following the bloodiest prison break in Oregon history, followed by a two-month-long, even bloodier manhunt. Harry Tracy was...
To the average Oregon City resident, there wasn't much to celebrate in the vacant, dilapidated old house by the foot of Willamette Falls. The house had, until a few years before, been known as the Phoenix Hotel, and it had been a very flagrant bordello. Conveniently located right in the heart of what was then Oregon City's industrial core, it had been a handy place for workers in the woolen mills, paper manufacturies, sawmills, and other operations that took advantage of the plentiful water...
In this third and final part of a 3-part series on iconic Hollywood films shot in Oregon, we'll talk about six films rather than five. Our survey ends, rather arbitrarily, with the end of the 1980s, at the dawning of the Gus Van Sant era of filmmaking in Oregon (and particularly in the Portland area). But first: 11. The Apple Dumpling Gang (1975) Walt Disney Productions. Starring Bill Bixby, Susan Clark, Don Knotts, and Tim Conway. Oregon connection: Deschutes County. This lightweight, feel-good...
This is part 2 of a 3-part series on iconic Hollywood movies shot in Oregon. Last week, we looked at the era from the dawn of filmmaking through the 1950s. Today, we'll talk about movies made between 1960 and 1975. Of course, this is not an article about popular cinema as a mirror of popular culture. But it's hard to miss the social changes these pictures showcase. The nation that produced Shenandoah, with its faint stirrings of uneasy anti-war sentiment still wrapped up in classic...
