Make the McKenzie Connection!
Make the McKenzie Connection!
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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...
In the past 25 years or so, Oregon has come into its own as a place to make movies. The iconic projects have come thick and fast, especially in the last 25 years or so. The last 15 years of the century saw The Goonies, Stand By Me, Drugstore Cowboy, Point Break, Free Willy (twice), Mr. Holland's Opus, The Postman, Ricochet River, and Men of Honor filmed here - along with dozens of others. And the 21st century so far has brought us Pay It Forward, Elephant, The Ring (twice), Fahrenheit 9/11,...
In the first month of 1852, everyone in the frontier community of Cynthian was talking about the big crime wave. Well, it was big by frontier Oregon standards. Although it was (and still is) the seat of Polk County, Cynthian - which was renamed Dallas later that same year - was a tiny place, with no more than a few hundred residents. But, it seemed, one of those few hundred people was a burglar and had hit three different homes over the previous few months. Folks around Cynthian had a suspect...
Crime, they say, does not pay. Yet it's pretty easy to look back through history and find examples of a certain kind of criminal for whom it did, handsomely, and for decades. With charisma, moxie and a seemingly endless supply of good luck, these characters sometimes even manage to cheat karma and die a natural death. And somehow, after these criminals are gone, people remember them with a kind of fascinated fondness, and say things like, "well, we'll never see another like that again." The...
George L. Baker, the big, bluff, hail-fellow-well-met owner of Portland's Baker Theater, was flabbergasted. As he and his fellow Portland Rosarians were getting ready to march in the 1917 Rose Festival parade, a courier had run up to him with a cryptic message: "The grand marshal's car awaits," the messenger puffed. "Hurry and get in and don't delay the parade." "Why, I'm not grand marshal," Baker replied, puzzled. Just then his friend Gus Moser, who was in charge of the parade that year, hustle...
Late on the evening of June 2, 1917, the Portland Morning Oregonian sprang a trap – a cunning and dirty trap. The always-formidable daily newspaper, owned and edited by Henry Pittock following the death of the legendary Harvey Scott, had thrown its weight behind a big, boisterous City Council member named George Baker in the race for Portland city mayor. But in a fierce race with Union man and small-business owner Will Daly, Baker was clearly on track to lose. For Pittock, that was simply not a...
During the first year of the Second World War, the conflict in the Pacific was all about aircraft carriers. With a carrier, one could take the fight to the enemy. Without one, one could only huddle on an island as a passive target, waiting for an enemy carrier's aircraft to arrive and attack. When the war broke out, the U.S. had seven of these precious warships, but only three were in the Pacific. They were the actual targets of the attack on Pearl Harbor - the Japanese knew if they could get...
Nobody remembers it today, because it was so long ago. But the outbreak of the First World War changed Oregon – and the rest of the United States – a great deal. News of America's entry into the fight was greeted with excitement, eagerness and dread. But there was one particular group of Oregonians for whom the dread was particularly pronounced: The German-American community. The German-born cohort of Oregon residents was bigger than any other foreign-born group, totaling 18,000 in the 1910 cen...
In November 1892 in downtown Portland, a "fast" young man named J.P. Cochran stepped off a passenger train from St. Louis, Missouri. J.P. was the dashing 22-year-old son of a railroad executive. In St. Louis, he'd been running amok in the saloons and "faro banks," getting into lots of high-spirited trouble with fast women and irresponsible friends. His father, wanting to get him away from the company he was keeping, had come up with a scheme to send him off to what he no doubt considered the...
It was a peaceful, happy spring morning in the little river town of Canemah, situated just above Willamette Falls - or, rather, it started out that way. It was April 8, 1854 - the very dawn of the steamboat era on the upper Willamette. Steamboats had been working the lower Willamette and Columbia for some time, but they'd only come to the upper Willamette three years before. The result, for Canemah, had been an explosion of growth. In those pre-railroad days, the rivers were the only way to get...
On the evening of March 23, 1964, Seaside resident Margaret Gammon hadn't been asleep more than an hour or two when she was awakened by howling. It was the community fire siren, blaring at full blast without stopping. She looked at the clock. It was 11:30 p.m. "I lay in bed thinking to myself, 'Why doesn't that fellow at the fire station get his big thumb off the siren button so we can all go back to sleep, and let the firemen take care of the fire?'" she recalled later, in an article for...
In 1853, a French-Canadian gambler, fighter, and all-around rascal by the name of Edouard Chambreau arrived in the brand-new town of Portland, ready to go into business. Chambreau had just come from the gold fields in northern California and southern Oregon, where he'd been wandering from town to town, fleecing miners and other gamblers and running from the occasional angry mob. But the previous year, he had met a woman – a nice, respectable girl by the name of Barbara Ann McBee. Despite his f...
In its early years, Oregon was at the outer limits of the known world, and that remoteness attracted all sorts of interesting characters. There were Joe Meek types, driven by a spirit of adventure; there were guys like William Ladd, who came hoping to get in on the ground floor and become the next generation of business barons; and, of course, there were the Marcus Whitmans and Jason Lees, the state's spiritual forefathers, come into the wilderness to save souls. But there was another kind of...
If you'd taken a nationwide poll in 1939, asking people from outside Oregon to name as many Oregon towns as they could, the top three would probably be Portland, Salem - and Valsetz. Portland, because it's the biggest, of course. Salem, because it's the state capitol. And Valsetz, because of its newspaper, the Valsetz Star, and the Star's editor, 11-year-old Dorothy Anne Hobson. The 9-year-old editor Dorothy Anne was the daughter of Henry and Ruby Hobson, the cookhouse managers for the tiny...
Most people know Prohibition in the United States started in 1920 when the Volstead Act went into effect. But in Oregon, Prohibition started quite a bit earlier than that. Actually, it started before Oregon was even a state. In 1844, the Oregon Territorial Government became the first in the United States to outlaw the use, manufacture or sale of booze. The full story of Oregon Territory's first experiment with Prohibition will probably never be known; not a lot of written history has come down...
Imagine you’re a gold prospector from the Willamette Valley, on your way to the California gold fields in the first year of the 1848 gold rush. You’re a little late to the party, and you’ve chosen to try to reach the gold fields in a somewhat unusual way: By going over the Coast Range to the beach, and traveling south along the coast. As you make your way southward by the great ocean, you reach a broad expanse of black sand. And when the sun hits it just right, you can see it’s actually glitter...
This is the story of Portland's coldest cold-case file - a suspicious death in the worst neighborhood of the old Stumptown waterfront, almost lost in the mists of time, 135 years ago. Was it an accident? Or a murder? We'll never know for sure. But there are good reasons to be suspicious. The Night Before Our story begins in a smoky, lamp-lit saloon in the rough part of Portland, back in early February of 1878. W.H. Harrigan, one of the tough, hardworking longshoremen who worked the docks in earl...
The U.S. Post Office inspector was puzzled. He'd just arrived at the tiny logging-company town of Shevlin, deep in the ponderosa pine woods south of Bend - and found it gone. Shade trees still towered over manicured home sites. A stray whiff drifted in the wind from an open pit where an outhouse once had stood. And on the spot where he'd expected to find the Shevlin Post Office, there was nothing but the bare outline of a building. The entire town of 600 was gone as if abducted by aliens. But...
On June 20, 1907, a retired military man named Charles Reynolds was hurrying home as fast as he could - with a .38-caliber revolver in his pocket. Charles was an old U.S. Cavalryman in his 50s who had moved to Portland with his wife, Lulu, and his two grown children from a previous marriage. Charles had married Lulu in Colorado five years before when she was just 25 years old. In Portland, the Reynoldses were part owners of a bathhouse on the corner of Second and Washington and lived in a large...
During the go-go years of the uranium-mining rush of the early 1950s, the character of the uranium prospector became iconic. He was basically the gold-seeking "miner 49er" updated for the atomic age: in lieu of a mule, he rode an Army-surplus Jeep; in place of pick and gold pan, he carried a Geiger counter and ultraviolet flashlight. For the better part of a decade seekers of "A-metal" deposits (the "A" stood for "Atomic") prowled all over the public lands of all the Western states, waving...
If you were a fan of the classic ABC television sitcom "Happy Days," you know The Fonz had a special relationship with two particular machines: His trusty '49 Triumph motorcycle, and the pinball machine in Al's diner. But it may surprise you to know that when Fonzie was playing that pinball machine, in 1950s Milwaukee, Wisc., he was breaking the law - and so was Al. It's a bit hard for younger Oregonians to believe, but just a few dozen years ago pinball was illegal in most large American...
Many historians, when asked to cite the single biggest and most far-reaching government misstep in American history, will immediately start talking about the First World War. By getting involved with that conflict - subtly at first, by lending money to the Allies, and later directly with American boots on French soil - we made it possible for one side to crush the other and impose its will, rather than simply fighting to an impasse and being forced to negotiate peace. The world is still trying...
The Oregonian summarized the whole movement as "a great university whose students are scattered in homes, on farms, in shops and factories ... wherever a human soul carries the love of learning." A typical day at Chautauqua, circa 1899, started at 8 a.m. with prayers, calisthenics, and classes. Roughly 3,000 people attended on an average day, including some who camped there and many others who simply rode the trolley or electric railway from their nearby homes. At 11 a.m. would come the morning...
In the decades before the First World War, an organization called Chautauqua arose that was something like a summer camp for grown-ups. People would take vacation time and travel to the Chautauqua center and stay there in tents, either brought from home or rented on-site, for a week, or two weeks, or even longer. There, they'd take classes, attend lectures, listen to band concerts, play baseball, and generally try to make up for the previous year's intellectual deprivation. In Chautauqua's...
Imagine yourself as a television network executive at NBC in 1973. The bright, happy Western classic "Bonanza" is about to be canceled. In a last-ditch effort to save it from the ax, you've been asked to put a fresh, "western-noir" spin on the show so that it can compete with the darker TV fare that's now in fashion - like "All in the Family" and "M*A*S*H." Here's something you might come up with: Old Ben Cartwright, now that he's built the Bonanza Ranch to prominence, moves to Oregon with son...
