Make the McKenzie Connection!
Make the McKenzie Connection!
Sorted by date Results 201 - 225 of 414
McCall By Finn J.D. John Longtime Oregonians may re-member a time, in the mid-1970s, when the “Welcome to Oregon” signs at the state’s southern border were superfluous. One could tell the difference between Oregon and California by the amount of litter on the side of the road. The difference had mostly vanished by the mid-1980s; by then California litter levels had dropped to match. But during the time it existed, the phenomenon was — according to those old enough to remember it — stark and startling. Social scientists never studi...
Satan By Finn J.D. John The editors and writers of Anarchist-Communist newspaper The Firebrand, published in Portland and distributed nation-wide from 1895 to 1897, surely expected to get some resistance from the establishment. They may even have expected to be arrested, possibly even charged with sedition or treason. But they surely didn’t expect that when their publication was shut down, it would be for criticizing the institution of matri-mony. That’s what happened, though. The wide-open town of Portland reacted to their strident adv...
The Drift Page 2 Page 3 Page 4...
Lafayette from river By Finn J.D. John On November 11, 1887, a 28-year-old convicted murderer named Richard Marple stood on the scaffold in the town of Lafayette and shouted his defiance at the crowd below. “Murder!” he yelled, as the black hood was fitted over his head. “May God judge you all!” Marple had maintained his innocence until the bitter end. But his alibi story had changed several times, and he’d further damaged his credibility severely by claiming that the real killer of storekeeper David Corker twelve months before was the Yamhi...
Lakeside hotel & seaplane By Finn J.D. John For people like Bing Crosby, Lily Pons and Clark Gable, success in show business came with some distinct drawbacks ... millions of them: the fans. Screaming, pointing, asking for autographs and sending mash notes, they were a great inconvenience — yet it was their attention that had made the movie-star lifestyle possible. On most days, the big stars handled it OK. But everyone needs a break now and then. Sometimes they wanted to go (with apologies to the classic sitcom Cheers) where absolutely...
High-water mark of Oregon’s postwar-timber-era culture Pixie kitchen By Finn J.D. John It goes without saying that Oregon has changed in the 50 years that have gone by since the Tom McCall era. People who remember Oregon in 1967 look back on a sort of Edenic place, comfortably conservative in some ways and progressive in others; a place with plentiful good-paying jobs and high levels of public services and low taxes and excellent roads, all paid for by a booming timber industry. It went away, of course, when the mills started mechanizing and t...
“Young adventurers” laid groundwork for tourism Hand up VIDA: “About 1914 something kind of magical happened,” according to Randy Dersham, president of the McKenzie River Drift Boat Museum. The magic came about when log trucks replaced river drives as the most economical way of getting timber to sawmills combined with the creation of a graded road that drew recreationists up from Eugene who wanted to fish a pristine river. “The young men that were log drivers in the homesteads around here at the time started to guide around 1920,” Randy told th...
mona bell-snake By Finn J.D. John In the summer of 1936, when Edith Mona Bell Hill moved into her cozy hunting cabin on the shore of Dunbar Lake in north-central Minnesota, the neighbors didn’t really know what to make of her. In fact, they didn’t really know who she was — although she’d owned and occasionally visited the cabin off and on for a decade or so. It was said that she was a distant relative of railroad baron James J. Hill. She certainly had money; although she dressed very simply, she drove a great expensive beast of a luxur...
Bike ad By Finn J.D. John In recent years, bicycle com-muting has had something of a resurgence in Oregon. That’s especially true in urban areas, where you’ll see these hard-bodied, Lycra-clad road warriors out in all kinds of crazy weather, jockeying for position with larger vehicles in traffic and trying not to get run over by inattentive motorists. Proud of their weekly mileage though these hard-core commuters are, few of them can hold a candle to the ninth governor of the state of Oregon – who bested all but an elite handful of the...
Great Nothern Blue River - named in 1863, the year in which gold was discovered in the area. No doubt the name was used in a descriptive sense, as the clear water of the stream appears blue-green due to the color of the rock formations of the river channel. The first Blue River post office was established on January 18, 1886. Jim Davis was the first postmaster, with the office being located on his property 1/2 mile west of the present community. From Changing Times By Manena Schwering in the Wednesday, December 1, 1999, edition of McKenzie Rive...
Travel tips from the Willamette Valley led to 1853 tragedy S Meek & Elliott RAINBOW: Emigrants who’d been sent for help were themselves rescued in the Eastern McKenzie Valley over 150 years ago. What they endured and the ground they traveled over were brought to life last Friday at the Upper McKenzie Community Center. Telling their story was Daniel Owen, great-grandson of Benjamin Franklin Owen. As part of the eight-man advance party from the Lost Wagon Train of 1853, Owens crossed the Cascades, passed through the Three Sisters Wilderness and e...
4th annual program will highlight tourist industry’s base Log Cabin Guides EUGENE: This year’s McKenzie Memories event will celebrate the history of the River with storytelling, rare historic photos, artifacts, and more. This year’s program ranges from a picture view of historic McKenzie River lodges like the Log Cabin Inn and the lodge at Foley Hot Springs to local storytellers Steve Schaefers, Don Wouda, and Dana Burwell from the McKenzie River Guides Association, founded in 1931. People attending the event can expect to hear stories about...
By Finn J.D. John White Eagle Low on the east bank of the river, in the shadow of the Fremont Bridge, stands a narrow brick building that looks like it’s right out of the 19th Century. It’s not — almost, but not quite. The White Eagle Saloon was actually built in 1905. But it’s one of a tiny handful of watering holes still open today that people were almost certainly shanghaied out of back in the age of sail. Now owned by the McMenamins brew-pub-and-restaurant chain, it also regularly tops the lists of “most haunted places in Portlan...
Inside hatchery " For the Old McKenzie Fish Hatchery, the historic period of significance is correctly drawn from 1907, the date of earliest site development (the pond qualifies as a development of that date) to 1945, the latest development. The present hatchery is the third hatchery building on the site. It replaced a building of 1928, which burned in 1944. The original hatchery was built 1907. The McKenzie River site was selected for its proximity to a natural spawning area for Royal Chinook salmon, where the spawn, or eggs, could be collecte...
Water, Fish and Boats The McKenzie River is unique. Dr. Gordon Grant, a Forest Service Research Hydrologist in Corvallis, Oregon has noted that H. T. Stearns in 1929 documented that springs flowing from deep volcanic aquifers make up the base flow of the McKenzie River. High (“new” or “young”) Cascades lava flows such as those on McKenzie Pass are less than 1,500 years old and function as great hydrologic sponges. Snowmelt penetrates the lava and is stored in underground aquifers for as much as 20 years before emerging in large springs (Tamoli...
New book about Camp Creek community to print soon Small log truck CAMP CREEK: Compiling a hundred years of local history has been a task Susan Thomas hopes to wrap up soon. “This whole project,” she recalls, “goes back to 1999 when I was teaching at Camp Creek Elementary, preparing for the school’s 50th anniversary. I started talking to a lot of people and visited with community member Betty Miller.” Miller, Susan learned, had always wanted to put together some kind of community book that would include some of the photos and facts she’d alr...
Doyle Hawks EUGENE: “It was a wonderful place to live,” Billie Ruth Rose had to say about the community of logger’s families that once thrived near Quartz Creek on the McKenzie River. “My folks lived there for 20 years. There were probably 100 kids in the area and the mothers mainly stayed home to raise families. It was a good place - like Mayberry without Barney and Andy.” Rose and Doyle Hawks, also a fellow kid from “Arkyville,” as the camp was called locally, were featured last weekend at the McKenzie Memories presentation in Eugene. Hawks...
Dave Quillan 1 - Dave Quillin, McKenzie "Redsides" Ca. 1956. Don & Gene 2 - Don & Gene Scott. McKenzie "Bums" Finn Rock Ca. 1955 Town team 3. McKenzie Bridge "Town Team" Ca 1954 (I can ID about half of them if you wish. A few are still alive. Many people have probably forgotten there used to be a pretty fair baseball field at Vida. It was located on the north side of the highway; a block or two west of the Vida Cafe. Dave Quillan's father on the right. He and the guy on the left (Vance Coombs) were the managers. Redsides '58"...
Finn Rock Camp FINN ROCK: “I always wondered why they called it a camp,” Billie Rose recalls. “Our folks lived there for almost 20 years. I guess ‘camp’ sort of gave the impression we were transients but we weren’t.” Billie, her sister Nancy and brother Joe, were part of a gathering of old friends last Saturday who grew up in a community that many of today’s McKenzie Valley residents might never know existed. Their home, the Finn Rock Camp has long roots, stretching back to 1890, when Thomas “Whit” Whitaker Rosborough built a sawmill in Rosbor...
Gov Martin speech By Finn J.D. John It was the morning of Oct. 1, 1938, at the ceremonial dedication of the new Oregon state capitol building. Following several dedicatory speeches (including one by President Franklin D. Roosevelt), the ribbon was cut and the crowd outside invited to come inside and have a look. But as the crowd moved forward, those at the front found themselves up against a door stuck shut. The crowd of Oregonians found itself packed tightly against the door. Then a voice rang out, strident and harsh and full of authority. It...
Charles Martin By Finn J.D. John Remember General Jack D. Ripper, the character from the 1964 movie “Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”? Can you imagine what might have happened if General Ripper had been elected governor? For Oregonians, just a few years ago, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch. In 1934, voters elected a retired major general named Charles Henry Martin — known to the soldiers assigned to his care during the First World War as “Old Iron Pants.” And although Martin isn’t known to ha...
Hawthorne asylum By Finn J.D. John For many years, the case of Charity Lamb was looked at like a crime-fiction yarn from a pulp magazine like Spicy Detective. It seemed to have it all: illicit sex, a mother-daughter love triangle, conspiracy — and, of course, a brutal ax murder committed by a woman with the most ironically innocuous name imaginable. “Charity Lamb and her seventeen-year-old daughter shared a passion for a drifter named Collins,” pop-historian Malcolm Clark Jr. explains breezily, in his 1981 book Eden Seekers. “When (Nath...
Thomson bridge VIDA: The Thomson “swinging bridge” came down with a splash on Monday. Originally built in the 1930’s the bridge connected south bank residents with the outside world. Crews from Stayton Construction used cable cutters, chainsaws and an excavator to remove the privately owned structure around 10:15 a.m. in response to safety concerns. From the November 29, 1985 issue of McKenzie River Reflections - “GOODPASTURE ROAD in 1940’s” Courtesy Vida-McKenzie Neighborhood Watch Newsletter. When the Goodpasture Bridge was built in 1938 the...
Linn Cty mugshots By Finn J.D. John By 1908, most Oregonians’ views on the Unwritten Law were hardening into suspicious disapproval. Just one year earlier, citizens had burst into spontaneous applause in the courtroom when Orlando Murray was acquitted of murdering his sister’s ex-boyfriend. Since that time, though, suspicions had been growing that things were getting out of hand. The newspapers found the trend rather frightening, and didn’t hesitate to say so. Defendants were still getting acquitted because of the Unwritten Law — but i...
Headlines By Finn J.D. John When the story first hit the newspapers, it all seemed very clear and simple: An Albina man got drunk and beat up his wife. Her brother went looking for him to teach him a lesson, and brought along a friend who happened to be a police officer. The wifebeater, tracked down at a local saloon, came out shooting, and moments later the innocent, luckless policeman lay dying on the sidewalk as the wife-beating murderer fled into the night. For newspaper readers on the morning of Dec. 19, 1907, it was like a Vaudeville...
