Vanport City and the flood that washed it away

It seemed like everything was moving in America between 1940 and 1945.  Nearly a third of its 1940 population was headed somewhere else.  The military would recruit, train and position 15 million people, 11.5 million overseas.  Back in the USA, another 15 million civilians made a major move to other counties and states.  In those five years, the populations of California, Oregon and Washington grew by over 3,000,000 people as the country armed itself in the new defense industries built or expanded on the west coast.

People who lived in rural America found themselves crowding into urban America, making the kind of money they could never make at home.  Real income rose 40%.  In 1943 alone, 700,000 African Americans moved from the South and 120,000 of them settled in Los Angeles.  More than 160,000 workers came to Oregon during the war years, most of them landing in the shipyards built and owned by Henry J. Kaiser Corporation.  They were recruited from all over the country, brought by special 17 car trains known as Kaiser Karavans.

Vast sums of money were on the move as well.  In 1940, the federal government was spending nearly $10 billion/year and its defense spending was $1.66 billion.  In 1943, defense spending was $44 billion, nearly 70% of federal spending.  In 1945, 90% of federal revenues were going to defense, a total of $65 billion. 

The income tax was extended to nearly all American wage earners, bringing in $45 billion annually in 1945 compared to $8.5 billion in 1939 and the new payroll deduction brought the money in more quickly.  More than $185 billion dollars were raised in the form of War Bonds, purchased in a frenzy of events between 1940 and 1945.  They would fund more than half the total cost of the war.

Materials that were necessary for the war relentlessly changed hands.  Rubber, paper, aluminum, steel were used, returned, piled up and taken away for processing.  Shopping was often an exchange, people buying some things, handing back others.  At the butcher shop, for example, fats were collected and later processed into glycerin for use as high explosives.  Ten pounds of fat made one pound of glycerin.

The shipyards in Portland, abounding in Kaiser’s manufacturing process innovations, seemed like a motion picture speeded up – a ship coming out in 244 days, then 40, then 10, then four and a half.  Along with shipyards in California, Kaiser produced nearly 1,500 Liberty Ships in three years.

Where to put all these people when they weren’t working was a colossal problem.  Production fell off when a war worker could

not get a good night’s rest, could not find daycare for a child or did not have enough room for the family.  The problem in Portland was particularly acute since the Housing Authority of Portland and the city’s Realty Board were averse to building public housing within the city and the Portland Realty Board had drawn strict, red lines around areas where African Americans could either buy or rent.

Oregon had few African Americans because the constitution of the state originally forbade them to live there.  The constitution prohibited in-migration of African Americans, did not allow them ownership of real estate and denied them the right to sue in court.  While the 14^th and 15^th Amendments to the national constitution voided the language, it remained in Oregon’s constitution until 1927.

There was a small black community of about 2,000 people located mostly where Memorial Coliseum stands today and attitudes of many Portlanders wanted to keep the footprint of African Americans small.   

A petition from the people living in the north end community of Albina, where a handful of African Americans were moving in pre-war, let the City Council know how they felt:

"If it is necessary to bring in large numbers of Negro workers, locate them on the edge of the city.  If they are allowed to fan out through the city it soon will be necessary to station a policeman on every corner."

Kaiser  is second from left, Oregon Governor Charles
Sprague is with him in backseat on 1943 visit by FDR

Kaiser was a restless person who didn’t wait for others to solve the problems that got in the way of his contracts.  Concerned about lost time on the Hoover Dam project, he created a pre-paid health plan, Kaiser Permanente, that kept more of his workers healthy and on the job.  So, in Portland, his company purchased 650 acres along the Columbia River and began construction of a federally funded public housing project outside the city limits at a place called Vanport City.

Kaiser and his brother, Edgar, did most things on a big scale and always in a hurry.  Vanport would become the largest public housing project in the country, home to 40,000 people.  Built with products that were not essential to the war, it was flimsy.  It had wood foundations and only the sparest amenities.  The windows didn’t open.  There were ice boxes, not refrigerators

and ice was unavailable on site until 1943.  A hot plate provided the cooking and also some of the heating.  There was one clothes washing machine for every 28 units.  Construction of Vanport housing was a three shift, 24 hour job.  

Construction began in August of 1942 and people started moving in by December. The noise and lights of construction made sleep difficult for the first residents. The Oregonian newspaper took to calling it “Zoomtown.”  There were 6,000 kids from 46 states crammed into Zoomtown.  Both parents usually worked and the schools took on additional responsibilities for child care. 

There were many discomforts –the mud, the bugs, the vermin, the plastic hotplate knobs always melting off, the pervasive fear of fire – all led people to want to get out.  In 1944, 100 people a week were leaving as they found better housing, and not all were replaced.  

Manley Maben, the expert on daily life in Vanport, describes an additional sense of unease, life in a bowl, surrounded by dikes 15-25 feet high, blotting out the horizon for nearly everyone. When the war ended, Vanport took on another temporary function. 

“Welfare recipients were concentrated there; income-adjusted rents were adopted; large numbers of veterans moved into the area's only available housing (many as college students) and the proportion of black residents rose markedly. But it was still the same impermanent, concentrated project, only older. Its residents still regarded their stay there as temporary, although not as transitory as its wartime population did. Fewer women worked, and being cooped up in Vanport was particularly trying to them. To the very end, life in Vanport remained a unique, and for many, a distressing experience.”

Post war business in the Pacific Northwest turned its attentions and engineering know-how to the Columbia River, the great 1243 mile long river they shared with Canada.  Today, the Columbia River is the most dammed basin the world, home to over 400 dams.  But, as the war wound down, there were just three dams on the main stem of the Columbia River.  Rock Island Dam, the first, completed in 1933.   Bonneville, the second, in 1938.  Grand Coulee was completed in 1941.  Several others were in the pipeline on the US side, but none in British Columbia. 

The Columbia drains a region the size of France and falls rapidly into the sea, at two feet/mile, giving the river its hydroelectric punch.  Most of the land is on the US side, about 85%.  However, much of the water is stored in the form of snow in the high elevations of British Columbia.  In average water conditions, British Columbia provides 30% of Columbia’s flow.  However, in high water conditions, British Columbia provides nearly half the water in the river.  Water conditions are extremely variable. The natural or “virgin flow” of the Columbia can be as little as 30,000 cubic feet/second, about the average annual flow of the Willamette River, and as much as 1,240,000 cubic feet/second at its highest flow, the one that flooded downtown Portland in 1894.  

Post war, Canada and the US turned their attention to a basic business deal.  Create value upriver by storing and releasing water in Canada to provide flood control and electricity downstream.  The simple idea ran into difficult boundary politics, so a deal had to wait 15 years for attitudes to change enough to allow it.    

In the meantime, the 20,000 or so African Americans who came to Portland during the war soon shrunk to 10,000, about 5,000 now living in Vanport, its population now at 18,000 people.  To accommodate the many veterans living there, Oregon State College created an extension in Vanport that enrolled nearly 2,000 students in its first year, 1946.  Over time, it became today’s Portland State University.  Most of the remaining African American population was now moving into the Albina neighborhood in north Portland.  As they moved in, whites were moving out, including a unique immigrant population of

Trinity Lutheran Church

Volga River Germans who had fled the Russian Steppes in the early 1880s, 1890s and the beginning of the new 20^th century. They left their distinctive churches and bungalows.   Still surrounded by the red lines of the Portland Realty Board, 5,000 African Americans were living in Albina at war's end.

There was a heavy snow pack accumulating in 1948 throughout the mountains along the Columbia River and its tributaries.  Once the snow stopped, it remained cool in the watershed, delaying the gradual snow melt managers of the hydroelectric system like to see.   Then a warm spell settled in – 75 degrees on May 15.  The next Thursday it was 78, the following Sunday still 78, then 85 on Monday.  The whole next week was over 70 degrees and Spokane hit 84 in on both Saturday and Sunday.  When it wasn’t hot, there was a warm rain.

The snow pack fell off the mountains as never before.  Over a million cubic feet/second was streaming down the river as the Memorial Day holiday approached.  The engineers employed by the Housing Authority of Portland stepped up their inspections of the dikes surrounding the project, starting round-the-clock patrols on May 25, a day the river rose dramatically.  On the evening of May 29^th, the Housing Authority met to discuss options including evacuation.  Early the next morning, about 4 AM on Memorial Day, Housing Authority of Portland workers slipped a note under each door of the remaining residents.  After stating that the engineers had been keeping a constant watch on the dikes, the note concluded:

REMEMBER:

DIKES ARE SAFE AT PRESENT

YOU WILL BE WARNED IF NECESSARY

YOU WILL HAVE TIME TO LEAVE

DON’T GET EXCITED

There were several eyewitnesses to the breaking of the railroad dike, though none had a better view than the five railroad employees who were inspecting the dike when it broke.  That morning, they had noticed parts of the track slumping a bit and ordered trains going over the track to slow down.  A bit later, a housing authority employee noticed very muddy water in the Columbia River Slough on the Vanport side of the dike.

The dike was built over several years beginning in 1918.  It’s purpose was to carry trains, but people thought of it as a flood control structure.  It was owned by the Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway and looked its role.  It was 75 feet tall and had a much bigger base than other structures protecting Vanport.  Plus, people thought that the years of rail traffic had compacted the fills in the dike.  It had also stood up to major floods in 1921, 1928 and 1933. 

Suddenly, at 4:17 PM, the Columbia River was pouring through the center of the railroad bed, immediately opening a rip in the structure that rapidly grew.  An aircraft piloted by a man named Calvin Hubert saw a 50 foot gash in the structure that was growing by the second.  Felix Baranovich was in Vanport at his record shop and glanced up at the dike in time to see the break and he

began running through the town alerting residents.  He ran past cars careening through the streets crazily to the safety of Denver Avenue, the road atop a dike on the east side of Vanport.  He saw people on top of the railroad dike who didn’t seem particularly concerned, though they soon would be.  Back in the air, Hubert saw the rip in the dike extend to 500 feet in the first minute or so.  The railroad inspectors on the dike were now in the water.

Students and professors from the Vanport Extension were removing their research papers from the school when it happened.  They became the early warning system for residents.

Mostly, people tried to drive out, but the one road out was quickly clogged with others driving to safety.  A monster traffic jam developed when public safety vehicles, good samaritans and gawkers rushed to Denver Avenue just as residents were driving out.  After 15 minutes, the warning sirens began to blow.

It was fortunate that the water rushing through the broken dike encountered the Columbia River Slough on the Vanport side of the dike.  The sloughs and lakes inside the project slowed the water, absorbing its power and slowing its spread. 

The rescue was underway.  As their houses bobbed along in the water, people trapped inside could not find the exits and had to be chopped out by rescuers.  Others clung to roofs, pieces of wood, utility poles, mattresses.  By 9:00 PM, it seemed as if everyone was out and most headed for some kind of temporary shelter.  It seemed preposterous, but no bodies had been found. 

Five players from the Portland Beavers baseball team lived in Vanport.  The hapless Beavers were swept in a double header by Seattle the day of the flood, falling to 19-39 on the season.  Three of them hopped a plane to get home and be with their families, all of whom were safe.  Where they landed is unknown, as Portland’s International Airport was flooded and closed.  The train station was down as well.  One of the old Columbia River sternwheeler tugs was in the middle of the closed Interstate Bridge, pushing against a support beam engineers feared was becoming unstable.

Then the Denver Avenue dike began to give, first a small break, suddenly extending several hundred feet.  A utility worker on the dike was caught in the break and disappeared while seated in his car.  No longer impounded, the

houses began floating away, breaking up as they went, groaning and snapping in the current.  As the debris broke up further, bodies were found in ones, twos and threes.  Lorena Smith was stuck in a pile of debris under water.  Her husband, on top, struggled to get her out and failed.  Sally Butcher, 11 months and her brother, Michael, two years, were found underwater in a crazily tipped house.  Mrs. Florence Beadle, 44, was floating free.  Those were the first deaths reported by the Oregon Journal.  Fifteen dead and seven missing was the final count, though not a lot of people in Vanport that day believed the numbers.  Casualties seemed impossibly low.

In Rachel Dresbeck’s book, Oregon Disasters, she reports many rumors.  A number of people said that they had seen a bus full of kids knocked off the road and sinking in the first minutes of the flood.  Others believed that the kids in the movie theater never got out.  People feared hundreds had been washed out to sea.  Another rumor had it that officials were using the nearby Terminal Ice and Storage as a secret storage place for bodies.  The City Council voted 3-2 to hold the Rose Festival that year, though they had to move it to the eastside of town to avoid the flood damage in the downtown.   

Many people at the time felt that the flood brought out the best in people and was a good moment for the city’s race relations.  Thousands of homeless connected to people who took them in with little regard for their race.  The temporary school shelters set up by the Red Cross were not needed by mid-week.  Some went to tents in the backyards of relatives, others to homes in the wealthy West Hills. An older black woman who had spent the night walking, then sleeping, on the side of Denver Avenue with her three grandchildren went up to a taxi driver and asked for water.  He drove the family to his home, they would stay a month, and returned to Denver Avenue where he offered free rides to people who needed them.  

After the flood, nearly 18,000 people found temporary homes throughout Portland. A second round of temporary homes, this time in the form of small trailers, were controversial, as they were in Katrina, but finally there was something good to wait for -- Portland was building new public housing and putting black people in those houses – and they were in the city limits though the red lines around Albina, largely held firm.

Portland City Club has long been a consistent and honest voice about race in the city.  It has recognized that feeling good about an emergency response wasn't enough.  And, over many years, it pursued race in Portland with a restless energy, not yet getting to what it truly wanted, but always going back to the basic questions. The Club’s first effort was long before the flood, articulating the need to repeal the racist elements of the state constitution in 1926.   In 1945 the Club published its first comprehensive study, The Negro In Portland, outlining the failures of the banking, lending, real estate, education, employment and justice systems that had to be recognized and addressed.  In 1957 it offered a progress report that expressed some optimism but also disappointment at how some areas, particularly housing, were not working for African Americans.  In 1968, Martin Luther King’s assassination led to rioting and the Club studied race and the justice system, in 1980 the schools, in 1991 and 1992 it revisited housing, justice, health and welfare systems.

In its work, City Club has educated generations of young Portland leaders on what it means to think about and try to stir action on the one of the hardest problems facing any community. 

An agreement on joint US and Canadian action on the Columbia River was a direct result of the Vanport flood, though the complexities made for a long wait.  In 1964, Canada and the US signed a final version of the Columbia River Treaty.  The agreement purchased flood control for 60 years by paying for three dams built on the Columbia in British Columbia.  These dams also provided water storage that generated electricity in US dams downstream, the two countries splitting the value.  A group of utilities in the US purchased the Canadian share of electricity for 30 years and with it created the Pacific Northwest - California Electrical Intertie, a piece of infrastructure providing seasonal exchanges between the regions.  We grouse about sometimes, but it has provided tremendous value to the Pacific Northwest.

Flood control, in particular, has been extremely valuable to the region.  Several events approaching the size of the Vanport Flood have been averted because of the three Canadian dams built -- and Canadian citizens lived with.

Where Vanport stood is now a golf course, the Portland International Raceway and various parts of the Columbia River Slough.  Sixty five years after the flood it remains one of the powerful metaphors about race in Portland.  The Portland City Club, about every ten years or so, struggles against one or another of its complexities.

Agencies in Canada and the United States are negotiating today some kind of extension of the existing treaty, most of its provisions expiring in 2024.  The flood control provisions of the treaty will be different.  We don't know yet what the new flood control regime will be.

Portland City Club: The Negro in Portland, 1945

Portland City Club, The Negro in Portland, 1945-1957

American Sociological Review: Elements of Tenant Instability in a War Housing Project

History of Portland's African American Community, 1805-Present

US District Judge James Alger Fee's decision federal responsibility for Vanport damages

Bob Royer remarks on Columbia River Treaty, Northwest & Intermountain Power Producer's Conference

Columbia River Treaty Articles, Historylink.org

Long Live the Marionberry



Marionberry
Republic of Jam

My Mom and Dad were visiting friends or relatives who lived somewhere near Salem, Oregon and the woman we were visiting, perhaps because I was bored and fidgeting, ushered me out of the house and into a field of carefully cultivated blackberries. We walked along the well kept rows and she narrated as we walked.

She told me that these were brand new berries, called Marionberries, just invented and never before seen in the world outside of a few fields nearby.  The berries had been created over at the college and someone from there had asked to rent their field and let them come over and tend the berries in a certain way.  “Why don’t you try them out,” she said, “and let me know what you think.”  She then went back into the house and left me alone with these shiny new blackberries.  I ate a bunch of them and gave her my glowing report. 



George and Thelma Waldo Marriage Photo, 1938
Cathryn Bates Wilkinson

This is one of my more powerful memories about food.  There was something amazing about the idea of an invented fruit, a new food, something ridiculously rare and expensive.  I felt special, a basic premise of deriving pleasure from food.

George F.  Waldo, a U. S.  Department of Agriculture and Agricultural Research Service employee, was the man who had created this remarkable berry.  While he did many wonderful things for USDA-ARS, his particular talent was breeding blackberries and his career choice, in 1932, is one of the reasons that Oregon, in particular the Willamette Valley, is now the center of the blackberry universe. 

Caneberries -- blackberries, raspberries, black raspberries, loganberries –are fruit that grow on thick canes which are then pruned in a way so that the second cane can become the platform for fruit growth the next year.  Some are vertical, some grow in bushes, some have long, unruly canes.  They call the whole lot “brambles.”

After graduating from Oregon State College in 1922 and then getting his MS at Michigan State in 1924, Waldo was put in charge of berry breeding at the USDA-ARS in Glen Dale, Maryland.  He did not like the job.  A creative and very private person, he chaffed at overseeing researchers around the country, doling out money to them, guiding them through the creative process, squinting at their ponderous writing, challenging their berry breeding science and priorities.  Mostly growing up in the Northwest, he wasn’t too happy about the boarding house he lived in with eight other people.

George Darrow

George Darrow was across the country establishing a working a partnership between the USDA and Oregon State College while becoming a leader in strawberry breeding.  Waldo respected the organizational skills of Darrow, though he thought his berries were way too tart.  After a time, the two proposed they trade jobs in a move that would bring Waldo back to where he graduated from college and put Darrow into the national leadership role he sought.  The USDA accepted the arrangement and they switched in 1932 – Waldo’s sweetness in for Darrow’s tart.

At that time, the world of caneberries centered in the eastern part of the country where most of the red raspberry, loganberry and other commercial blackberry cultivars were found. 

The USDA – Oregon State University partnership is today the oldest continuing blackberry breeding program in the world.  It was the perfect place for Mr.  Waldo.  Free of the dulling administrative side of plant invention, Mr.  Waldo now let the creative juices flow.  He built a well-known strawberry, the Brightmore, and a raspberry, the Willamette, that are still players in world markets. 

But his real love was blackberries and he quickly got to work improving the breed.  One of the breeds he liked a lot was the Chehalem, a cross he had made of the Himalayan, introduced by plant genius Luther Burbank and with a mistaken heritage--it’s actually from Germany--and the Santiam, another Waldo creation using the only native blackberry species from the west coast, bred with a loganberry. 

To the Chehalem, he added the Olallie, a cross between a blackberry, a loganberry developed in Santa Cruz, California and the Youngberry, a Loganberry/Dewberry cross hailing from Louisiana. 



The announcement of the Marionberry
USDA

He named the result for the county in which he lived and worked, Marion County.  He released this berry to the world in 1957, perhaps three years after I was in that berry patch and eleven years since he selected the first plants from the cross.  The Chehalem was small, firm and held its flavor when processed.  The Olallie was bigger, sweeter and had great yields.  The Marionberry picked up the best of the two – size and yield – and also held its flavor when heated and yes, a mark of Mr. Waldo, it possessed a sweet and sophisticated taste. 



Backyard Gardener

Worldwide, over 50,000 acres of blackberries are in production and result in 155,000 tons of product annually while an estimated 20,000 acres of wild berries are foraged, producing 15,000 wild tons.  Europe and North America together account for nearly 80% of the world market with Serbia the dominant producer in Europe and Oregon the dominant producer in North America.  Blackberries have been a hot prospect for the last twenty years and there is a hefty growth rate in acreages and tons produced all around the world and in Oregon, where the annual crop is worth $40,000,000/year and supports 300 growers and 10 processors in Marion, Clackamas and Washington counties.

To give an idea of the significance of the blackberry to Oregon's fruit economy, its annual revenue is about two thirds the annual revenue of the robust wine grape industry in the state.

This giant of a berry, now the most planted blackberry cultivar in the world, rose out of the hands of a deeply religious man, a Gideon, who refused to eat in a restaurant where alcohol was served, something his assistant, John Martsching despaired of as they drove past restaurant after restaurant in search of a dry one.  Mostly, people referred to him as Mister Waldo.

The Marionberry has some downsides.  It doesn’t provide as much insurance against a cold year as other cultivars.  It has thorns.  Some producers find a thornless blackberry more desirable.  It is a bit softer than other varieties making it slightly harder to survive the stresses of the fast growing fresh markets and it doesn’t hold up as well to machine picking where a machine shakes the bush and the berries experience a fall of a foot or two. Taking all factors together, however, its great taste and overall flexibility make it the top dog still, despite an onslaught of new breeds coming out of Corvallis every year. 

The goals of the blackberry breeding program today are highly specific – a thornless, machine harvestable, cold hardy berry with Marion flavor.  But the new breeds have to also overcome 50 plus years of marketing supporting the Marionberry.  The Blackberry and Raspberry Commission in Oregon has worked the wine angle -- "The Cabernet Sauvignon of berries" -- as well as a football theme that might catch the attention of the National Collegiate Athletic Association athletic police.  A History of Salem website picks up a marketing assertion that the rise of the University of Oregon to regular BCS contention is due, in fact, to a secret sauce:

"Gifts of Marionberry jams and sauces have been offered to lure potential football players to the University of Oregon."

In 2009, the Oregon State Legislature attempted to name the Marionberry the official berry of the state.  These seemingly no-brainer resolutions are often surprisingly controversial.  For years, the Washington State Legislature struggled with an effort to name a state rock and thought the Beach Agate was just right.  But it ran up against a hornets' nest of opposition from the Petrified Wood interests in the eastern part of the state.  Sure enough, a grower in Washington County, whose berry was the Kutata cultivar -- firmer, hardier, slightly larger -- objected to the designation and, despite support of 90 members of the legislature, the Raspberry Blackberry Commission decided to reconsider.  Of course, it was international news. 

Mr.  Waldo retired in 1968 and spent time distributing Gideon Bibles. He died in 1985 at Marysville, Washington and his colleagues in Corvallis did for him what he never would have done for himself – they named a cultivar after him – the first thornless trailing blackberry, now known as “Waldo.”



"Waldo"
Privick Mill Nursery

General Francis Marion, the South Carolina “Swamp Fox” after whom Marion County is named, trails only George Washington among Revolutionary War generals for places named after him.  Today, however, Waldo's berry has clearly eclipsed the general.  A lot of people think that the berry is the reason their county is named Marion and there are even some who believe that Waldo has a nice ring to it.

Excellent glance at Oregon agriculture and the role of the blackberry in it.

George Darrow's book on the strawberry. All you want or can know.

George F. Waldo's original report on the Marionberry

Reunion

The most important tool at the 50^th High school reunion is the name tag – one with a thick, healthy font and good copy of the yearbook photo.  I recognized exactly two people by their faces out of the roughly 90 attendees at my reunion last month.

Oregon City has long been a paper mill town just south of Portland – with two large mills on the south end of the city, one on the Oregon City side and another on arch rival West Linn’s side.  Both had been there for over a hundred years and the one on the Oregon City side was supplied, in part, by a train that ran down the middle of Main Street around 1 AM.  It took a steady hand to maneuver a car between the parked cars and the train, its one headlight sweeping crazily from side to side and you with a couple of beers after playing pool in the basement of Jerry Carlson’s house.   

We lived in an apartment above the Bush Furniture Company on Main Street and there was no option but to drive by the train and the disconcerting headlamp, all this shrieking and clanking coming off an eerily slow speed. 

I’d been leery about going to the reunion because I hadn’t been to one since the 10^th year reunion and felt, when I left Oregon City after burying my mother next to my father, that I was done with the place.  My time there was happy, the education caring and good and the baseball teams in the school and in the Portland Industrial League consistent winners.  

But after some anxiety, there I was, at the High Rocks Steak House, immediately at ease, touching some wonderful, accomplished people in the meeting room, laughing and touching them again and doing the math of the Oregon City Pioneers of 1961. 

Of the 223 people who graduated, 33 were dead, one as early as 1962, most after 2000.  Twenty one of them were missing – simply unaccounted for – a somewhat ominous idea since the organizers of the Class of 1961 franchise were dogged investigators.  They had the mailing addresses of 167 people and the emails of 112 people.  Most, like me, had left.  Just 34 had stayed in the town while 48 remained in the greater Portland area.  The rest were elsewhere in Oregon – a bunch on the coast – and distributed fairly heavily in Washington and California and then randomly across the country.

We could only stay for the first event of the reunion and so made the most of it, leaving the bar with the last couples.  Next morning, I gave my wife the tour of Oregon City, which had just under 8,000 people when I graduated and now was home to 30,000 people. 

The place retained the prosperous blue collar look from our high school time, but it clearly had taken some hits.  The Bush Apartments, where I lived during high school, were gone, part of a conflagration that had vacated a very large part of the northern end of Main Street, leaving several ugly gaps where people had lived and worked. 

The goofy mascot was now replaced by a harder edged guy who meant business and was better-armed.

The Enterprise-Courier building was gone too.  It was the only daily newspaper in Clackamas County but it had purpose in the town beyond its circulation numbers.  It nurtured young people like me and forgave them their many miscues, like the headline that read:  “Nine Canby Students Get Straight Ones.”  

This little daily also fought to make the small but active downtown competitive with the inevitable shopping center that did come, two miles up the highway, and it had the effect on the downtown predicted by the editorial page.  The mill on the Oregon City side had closed recently, with a loss of 175 jobs.  Reading about it broke your heart.  Two years before, the employees purchased it from a paper company called Blue Heron, and their wage concessions, converted into stock in the new company, were now without value.

Taking this picture of the Willamette Falls and the West Linn paper mill, I looked across Highway 99 and noticed that the gas station and restaurant where Robin Tomlin worked was still there -- at least the restaurant part.  He’d pump gas, change oil and mash a big pot of potatoes when he was not out with the cars.  I’d visit and cash in a free lunch.  Robin was a hell of a baseball player who overcame a bizarre family to become an FBI agent.  Had he not left town after his sophomore year with a man who told him he would make him a major league baseball player, we would have played for the Oregon High School championship in 1961.  His shoulder went bad at San Jose State and he became a helicopter pilot in Vietnam.   I've always wondered if I ever flew in a helicopter he was piloting.  Robin is one of the 33. 

My heart, a bit heavy, sang when I saw Tony’s Fish Market at the foot of the Tenth Street hill.  Its neon sign was freshly painted, but it was the same one that was there when we’d bring a bag of carp we caught in the Willamette river and sold them to Tony Petrich for crab bait at 15 cents a pound.  Sometimes we would bring 50 pounds of the fish, who happily worked the outfall pipe behind the Clackamas County Courthouse in a then very polluted Willamette River.   It seemed like a lot of money.

I immediately noticed the crayfish at $5.95 a pound.  They were a staple at Tony’s and at one of the three ball fields or ball field remnants I showed my wife that morning.  Kelly Field, now re-branded as the End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center, was the best of the fields and there would often be a big pot of crayfish boiling for major events like when the House of David baseball team would barnstorm through or when the Portland fast pitch softball league had a big tournament. 

The crayfish were served in a big newspaper cone and many of the bodies found their way underneath the stands making up a fast food rubble that would feed the surrounding fields for a couple of days. 

I ordered crab, crawdads and a bottle of wine for lunch and set outside in the little patio next to the concrete crab boiler and baked in a warm sun.  That's the table right there. The crawdads were bigger than I remembered.

Oregon City has taken all the hits the country has taken since the financial collapse, but its unemployment is a bit better than the rest of the state.  However, because the Oregon economy is about half the size of Washington state’s economy, its hard times have a harder bite.  Oregon lacks the defense industry sector that Washington has and doesn’t get the counter-cyclical benefit military spending provides.  Washington state’s defense industry supports nearly 200,000 jobs, according to Berk, the Seattle economics firm.  Oregon ranks just 45^th in defense contracting and takes in about a third of what Washington gets from Pentagon contracts.  In addition, Oregon doesn’t have a defense giant like Boeing or huge military bases from all three services as does Washington.

Looking at the unemployment stats, you find another difference in the economy between the two states – rural communities in Oregon are significantly harder hit.  Washington’s farm economy is double the size of Oregon’s and farm commodity prices have been strong for some time.  Most of the farm counties in Washington have significantly lower unemployment rates than those in Oregon, even though the statewide unemployment rates are about the same.  In addition to farming, south central Washington has the Hanford clean-up, the project that never ends.  The southern tier of Oregon – the big empty counties like Malheur, Harney, Lake and Klamath, don’t have the kind of high value farm products produced in the Washington's Palouse wheatfields.  On the west side of the Oregon Cascades, the cluster of Jackson, Douglas and Josephine Counties is particularly disturbing -- two, three and four points above the state unemployment average.  Cutting Oregon in half east and west, only one county, Lane, the location of the University of Oregon, has no double digit unemployment.

According to Real Estate data collector Trulia, the median price of a home in Oregon City is now about $200,000, about where it was in mid-2003.  At the peak, the end of 2007, the median price was $315,000, which means a lot of the homes we drove by were underwater.  One in three homes sold in Oregon this past spring was a foreclosure sale.

After lunch, we drove around a bit more, looked at the home of John McLoughlin, Chief Factor of the British-owned Hudson’s Bay Company who moved to Oregon City in 1829 after he was forced out of the company for helping all those Americans who were coming to Oregon.  Then we took a ride on the Oregon City Municipal Elevator, which connects the lower and upper sections of the town and avoids the 722 stairway steps that scaled the steep bluff before 1915 when the first iteration of the elevator went up. 

At 1 PM on a sunny Saturday, Barbara and I were about all the traffic there was, so we drove home to Seattle.

Gearhart, Oregon. Memorial Day 2011

The first thing you need to know about Gearhart is that you don’t go there to persevere or be resilient.  That’s for up the road, in Astoria, where the coming and going of salmon, trees, tourists, ethnic groups, the economy, all require a lot of attention to detail and anxiety.

Gearhart was built so that perseverance and resilience would not have any particular role in daily life. Gearhart is a friends and family place with lots of cooking and wine and plenty of sleep.  The dog is always wet in Gearhart. 

That doesn’t mean Gearhart lacks a larger context.  The great sailors, Vancouver, Gray, Juan de Fuca, sailed by and the courageous explorers walked along its beaches, they just didn’t stop.  Lewis and Clark chose Seaside to get their salt, even though it was a couple of miles further down the beach.  A single Gearhart citizen died in a war, the one in Vietnam, and a small plane fell out of the sky on a foggy August morning in 2008 and killed three children as they slept and as others in their group were getting newspapers and lattes.  That’s partly why I am writing this on Memorial Day.



Today’s Gearhart owes its life to good times in Portland where the economy was throwing off a lot of cash at the close of the 19^th century.  State sponsored tourism followed this new wealth.  St. Louis first, then Portland, celebrated the centennials of Lewis and Clark at each end of journey and hoped the payout would be in recognition and tourism.   

All this cash made a broader cohort of people willing to invest in the interesting idea of leisure time and there were plenty of places along the Oregon coast where leisure was for sale. 

Just about all resorts at the turn of the century were destination resorts, so a hotel was an important necessity.  The first hotel in Gearhart was built in 1890 and stood just off the town's main streets.

A second hotel, far grander, rose about a mile away and closer to the ocean in 1910.  By 1915, both had burned to the ground.  Gearhart held its breath for eight years, but in 1923, a new hotel finally came out of the ground.  It was demolished in 1973 to make way for a concrete hulk for tourists Gearhart people soon began calling Attica. 

Early Gearhart was a place where many families spent the full summer.  Women and children stayed for weeks at a time and the men came back from Portland over the weekends.

This was a novel way of living, the world moving fast enough to make available this remarkable mobility to more people.  For five bucks and over five hours, the train would bring you to the Gearhart Park Station, in the center of a recent clear cut.   People called it the Daddy Train. 

A boardwalk near the station led to the hotels, the beach, the boarding houses, camp grounds or to the homes along Ocean Avenue, known as Gin Ridge.  One of those boarding houses was run by James Beard’s mom, who cooked the food while James waited tables or helped in the kitchen.  Beard’s ashes were spread over the Gearhart beach in 1985.  Their personal house still stands on E Street.  In fact, you can rent it out.  When the Beards were in town back in the 1920s, there were about 120 permanent residents, swelling to 1000 or so during the summer.  

The golf course opened in 1892 and was among the first in the western United States.

Comparing some of the old photographs with the new, you can see some of the old holes.  Today's 18th , for example, has been the last hole of one of the nines for at least 100 years and compares happily with the look and feel of today, from 120 yards out.  The new hotel, built in 2001 after another fire destroyed the Sand Trap Bar, the last remaining building from the grand hotel era, is about 145 yards out.

These lifeguards staffed the pool in 1936.  Look at those kids! This is a portrait of the greatest generation before the people in it knew what they would be asked to do.  That’s a second reason for writing this on Memorial Day. 

Unlike most in the country, this generation in Gearhart enjoyed mostly unfettered access to their coast.  The beaches in Oregon are public and it was the first state to make them so.

Governor Oswald West was a Democrat, a populist, a prohibitionist.  He also had a beach cabin down the road at Cannon Beach.  He took office in 1911 and knew in his heart that big business and big money would do their damndest to lock out the public from their beach birthright. 

So here, in his own words, is what he did.  “So, I came up with a bright idea.  I drafted a simple, short bill declaring the seashore from the Washington line to the California line a public highway.  I pointed out that the state would come into miles and miles of highway without cost to the taxpayer.   The legislature took the bait hook, line and sinker.  That’s how we made the beaches public.”

However, another generation had to do a bit more to make the beaches truly public.  West had protected the wet sand, but the dry sand portion was left vague in law.  That kind of adverse possession worked well, in part, because everyone knew there would be hell to pay for the first developer to claim the dry sand.  Finally, down in Cannon Beach, the owner of the Surfsand Motel put out his fence on the beach and said it was for the benefit his guests alone, and the fight was on.

Ancil Payne, who was then Station Manager at Portland's KGW-TV, lit a fire with a television editorial.  As he reached its conclusion, Haystack Rock, the Cannon Beach icon, came on screen.  Then a fence appeared across the beach in front of Haystack Rock and Ancil growled: 

"If you don't want this to happen to our beaches, then write the Highway Committee."

A whole bunch of people did.  Ancil is a third reason for writing this on Memorial Day.

Tom McCall was governor in 1967 and, along with his sidekick, State Treasurer Bob Straub, led the great fight for the beach.  A bill was drafted to give the state control over the dry sand, but there was was no consensus on how to actually set the line.  A further problem was that the Oregon State Highway Committee, which had the bill that would fix the Surfsand monstrosity, was heavily weighted with coastal legislators, a status quo lot, who were determined to bottle up the legislation.    

This portrait of Governor Tom McCall is a remarkable thing and guaranteed to bring tears to an Oregonian of a certain age.  It is in a Renaissance style but documents a very humble thing, an act of political salesmanship.  McCall went on a beach tour during the debate, telling beach residents that they had nothing to fear, that they could actually see where the line of public ownership would be drawn. 

Now hung, life size, in the state capitol building in Salem, the painting captures the symbols that framed the beach debate.

Look at the location of Tom’s right shoe, the water lapping at it, exactly at the high tide line, Oswald West’s previous line of public ownership.  Off his right shoulder is a steel rod, exactly 16 feet high, the developing consensus in Salem of how many feet above the high tide line public ownership should exist.  McCall would have a staffer stretch a string tied to the top of the pole eastward until it hit land.  That line was the where the public interest would prevail over the private.  Behind his left shoulder is a helicopter that he used on a dramatic beach tour, hop scotching along the entire coast to show what public ownership would be like – exactly where the line would fall, erasing fear and uncertainty in Cannon Beach, Newport, Brookings, Gearhart.

The artist, Portland's Henk Pander, has McCall's right hand reaching out toward you, as if he is saying,  “Welcome to Oregon.”

Gearhart Plane Crash

Oswald West

Ancil Payne Obituary

Tom McCall's Career

Governor Bob Straub