Offbeat Oregon: Lighthouse ghost greeted keeper on first night
One grim winter morning, near the end of the Second World War, a Coast Guard seaman named James A. Gibbs, Jr., was looking out apprehensively over an angry sea from the rail of the 52-foot motor lifeboat ...
Offbeat Oregon: Murder case wasn’t quite so clear cut, after all
For the average Oregon newspaper reader, the first inkling that something about Officer John Gittings’ murder was not as it appeared happened a few days before Christmas, when it became apparent ...
Offbeat Oregon: Policeman's murder turned Portland against Unwritten Law
UNWRITTEN LAW: This column is one of a series of case studies of the early 20th-century mania for honor killings. It was popularly known as “The Unwritten Law,” ...
Offbeat Oregon: Private manhunt ended in assassination
UNWRITTEN LAW: This column is one of a series of case studies of the early 20th-century mania for honor killings. It was popularly known as “The Unwritten Law,” ...
Offbeat Oregon: Man hailed as hero for killing sister's ex-lover
Early in November 1906, 21-year-old Orlando Murray paid a call on a 22-year-old acquaintance named Lincoln C. Whitney. The main subject of their conversation was to be Murray’s 16-year-old sister, ...
Offbeat Oregon: 'The Unwritten Law' was license to kill
A century ago, the entire country was in the grip of a sort of lethal mania. You can catch references to it in old novels by nonplussed Britons like P.G. Wodehouse — a sense that the U.S., unlike ...
Offbeat Oregon: Picnickers were sole victims of balloon bombs
One sunny Saturday morning, a few months before World War II ended, the Rev. Archie Mitchell and his wife Elyse filled their car up with children and headed into the woods for a picnic lunch. Archie was ...
Offbeat Oregon: Oregon's quest for uraniuim
When people talk about mining in Oregon, they’re usually thinking of gold — something the Beaver State still has plenty of, hidden away in high-country streambeds and quartzite ore deposits. But ...
Offbeat Oregon: Rosecrans rescue one of Coast Guard’s finest hours
In any great disaster, it’s always possible to find one or two pivot points at which a key decision made disaster all but inevitable. In the wreck of the tanker steamship S.S. Rosecrans, ...
Offbeat Oregon: Ship of misfortune
Cursed or not, the SS Rosecrans was unusually unlucky. The steamship Rosecrans didn’t have a witch’s curse laid upon her at launching, nor a colorful nickname like “The Ship of Romance ...
Offbeat Oregon: Sandy police chief was executed for murder
Back in 1948, the small Oregon town of Sandy had a problem. Its police chief, W.C. Stoneman, had resigned due to illness. And after a search, the city administrators had started to realize Stoneman had ...
Offbeat Oregon: Oregon city once had its jail stolen
One clear June morning in 1963, early risers in the historic Blue Mountains town of Canyon City were startled to see there had been an unscheduled addition to the Grant County Courthouse the previous night. Sitting ...
Offbeat Oregon: FBI's "Most Wanted" gangster was busted in Beaverton
The contractors were getting ready to wrap up work for the day when several visitors arrived at the job site, a house on Scholls Ferry Road near Beaverton. The newcomers, a small group of serious-looking ...
Offbeat Oregon: Mount Angel Abbey owes its grandeur to colorful Swiss monk
Adelhelm Odermatt is not, of course, an Irish name. And the portly, jovial Swiss monk who bore it had not a drop of Irish blood in him, so far as he knew. But he had come to visit this group of Irish ...
Offbeat Oregon: Doolittle raiders made history in startling ways
This is the final installment in a series about Oregon’s connection to the famous Doolittle bombing raid on Japan, conducted in 1942 just a few months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Offbeat ...
