Offbeat Oregon: 'Bonus Army' populist uprising started in Portland
The state of Oregon had a remarkably outsized impact on the life and career of President Herbert Hoover. It gave him his start, from age 9 until he went away to college at Stanford; and, 40 years later, ...
Offbeat Oregon: High-stepping in Portland
For most modern Oregonians, the most intriguing part of the old stories of the 1894 Portland and Willamette Valley flood is how undaunted people were by it. Today, most Willamette Valley residents expect ...
Offbeat Oregon: Lighthouse finished 18 days too late
The third of January, 1881, was a typical winter day for the construction crew working on the Tillamook Rock Lighthouse. That is to say, it was awful. A terrific gale was blowing out of the southwest, ...
Offbeat Oregon: Bowmer set the stage for Shakespeare
In 1931, at the height of the Great Depression, a young, charismatic drama teacher named Angus Bowmer got a job at Southern Oregon Normal School in Ashland. Bowmer, a fresh graduate of Washington State ...
Offbeat Oregon: Even as a boy, toy inventor seemed larger than life
From about 1913 on, every small boy in America knew who A.C. Gilbert was. Somewhere on an advertising page in practically every youth-oriented magazine, his cheerful, immaculately dressed image could ...
Offbeat Oregon: Saloon a souvenir of the age of shanghaiing
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 ...
Offbeat Oregon: Pirate, jailbird, swindler, tycoon
Next time you’re heading over Santiam Pass from the Willamette Valley, you might take a second to glance over at the side of the big potato-shaped promontory around which the highway bends ...
Offbeat Oregon: 'Anti-Grinch' saved Christmas
It was late in the afternoon, on a late autumn day in 1918, when Oregon native Alfred Carlton Gilbert, president and CEO of the toy company Mysto Manufacturing Company, was shown in for his scheduled ...
Offbeat Oregon: Lonely Newberg orphan grew up to be president
One wintry November day in 1885, a passenger train pulled into the depot in Newberg, and a lone little plain-dressed Quaker boy stepped onto the platform. He was 10 years old, this boy, with a serious, ...
Offbeat Oregon: California Gold Rush sparked by a failed Oregon farmer
Most residents of Western Oregon complain about the rain — especially this time of year. But arguably nobody has ever had more cause to complain about the soggy Willamette Valley climate than James ...
Offbeat Oregon: Did video game control kids' minds?
It’s a scenario that would have chilled the blood of any parent of a teenager in the early 1980s: One day when the Beaverton Mall opens for business, there’s a new coin-op videogame cabinet ...
Offbeat Oregon: Quest for mine led 'suckers' to riches
Oregon, like other states, has an official state bird (Western Meadowlark), animal (beaver), tree (Douglas Fir), gemstone (Sunstone) and so forth. But if the state were going to designate an official ...
Offbeat Oregon: Small, salty lakes hint at network of inland seas
Westward bound on the old Applegate Trail in the early 1850s, the party of settlers halted in confusion at the shore of a vast, placid lake. Its waters stretched nearly all the way to the horizon, with ...
Offbeat Oregon: Bungled train robbery-murder solved, CSI-style
University of California Professor Edward O. Heinrich had helped the Southern Pacific out with a few minor robbery investigations before. Now, in late autumn of 1923, SP had a big one on its hands. ...
Offbeat Oregon: Last 'great' train robbery was a brutal fiasco
Few people realize it, but modern forensic detective work — the kind showcased on the “CSI” series on television — was born in southern Oregon, back in October 1923. Before ...
