Offbeat Oregon: The country’s deadliest natural flash flood happened in Heppner
On June 15, 1903, a strange little article appeared in the Portland Morning Oregonian. “It is reported that a tremendous cloudburst occurred at Heppner late in the afternoon,” the article ...
Offbeat Oregon: Bing cherries are a product of the Oregon Trail
When cherry season rolls around, there’s never much doubt about what varieties you’ll find in your local grocery store. They’ll usually have some white or blush cherries, typically Royal ...
Offbeat Oregon: Fiery, explosive shipwreck gave Boiler Bay its name
A mile or two north of the picturesque little Central Coast town of Depoe Bay, there’s a little unassuming wide spot at the side of Highway 101 where you can pull off the road and park. There are ...
Offbeat Oregon: The state’s oldest hotel was a hideaway for Hollywood stars
There were times, during Hollywood’s golden age, when Clark Gable simply couldn’t be found anywhere. Studio executives would search frantically for the top-shelf star, needing to talk to him ...
Offbeat Oregon: The summer Buster Keaton made Cottage Grove a mini-Hollywood
If a Cottage Grove logger had been bonked on the head in January 1926, and woke up six months later, he would have scarcely recognized his home town. There was a whole new Main Street built way out east ...
Offbeat Oregon: Snubbed by railroads, Prineville built its own
Oregon, and the rest of the American West, is full of the ghosts of cities and towns killed by a railroad. Central Oregon’s third largest city, Prineville, almost became one of them. Prineville ...
Offbeat Oregon: $2.6 million party highlighted Oregon’s ‘age of innocence’
One of the real privileges of being a lifelong Oregonian of a certain, er, vintage, is the opportunity to have seen this state in its golden age — roughly, 1946 through 1980 — through a child’s ...
Offbeat Oregon: Most famous Silverton resident wasn’t Clark Gable; it was a dog
Up until his untimely death from a fall in 1937, Rogue River Wilderness mountaineer and mule-train driver Hathaway Jones enjoyed a reputation as the “damnedest liar” in all the West Coast states ...
Offbeat Oregon: ‘Hoot Owls’ show changed radio history nationwide
In the decade and a half before the Second World War, the radio business was the hottest ticket in American business. It made vast fortunes for business moguls, and considerable wealth for performers and ...
Offbeat Oregon: 'The Rolls-Royce Guru’ came to Oregon / Part 4, Unraveling
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 ...
Offbeat Oregon: ‘The Rolls-Royce Guru’ came to Oregon / Part 3, Occupation
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 ...
Offbeat Oregon: Pioneering woman cop was Portland’s ‘municipal mother’
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 ...
Offbeat Oregon: Bloody 1925 prison break ended badly for everyone
It was a typical balmy August evening at the Oregon State Penitentiary. The bell had rung for supper, so inmates were streaming out of their cells and heading toward the dining hall for the evening meal, ...
Offbeat Oregon: Body-snatchers planned to hold ex-mayor’s corpse for ransom
The 19th 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 ...
