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Image: Ted Barber##Pioneer Central Oregon aviator Ted Barber in the pilot’s seat of his trusty Waco 9.

Offbeat Oregon: Pioneering aviators were undeterred by danger

Part of the problem with owning and operating the only flight school in town in the 1920s and 1930s was, every time one of your students slapped together some home-built piece of kit, you’d ...

Image: Greg Shine/BLM##The entrance to one of the Redmond Caves, formed when a large lava tube collapsed.

Offbeat Oregon: Lost Crystal Cave: Real or folklore?

Central Oregon is cave country. There may be more caves, discovered and undiscovered, within a 100-mile radius of Bend than anywhere else in the country — ranging in size from tiny, dangerous lava ...

Image: Wikimedia Commons##The elevation drawing from the original blueprints for the Dalles City Mint show what the building would have looked like had it been finished. The project was abandoned before the roof was finalized, so the outline of the building looks different today.

Offbeat Oregon: Portland’s play to beat The Dalles cost state its branch of U.S. Mint

Portland’s play to beat The Dalles cost Oregon its branch of the federal mint When hardcore coin collectors examine a promising piece of numismatic history, the first place their eyes usually go ...

Image: Oregon Historical Society##Gov. Tom McCall talks about the bottle bill with Mrs. J. Rand, leader of a community organization against throwaway beverage containers.

Offbeat Oregon: Stubborn citizen teamed up with Tom McCall on first bottle bill

Longtime Oregonians may remember 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 ...

Image: Saturday Evening Post##The front cover of the Feb. 14, 1959, issue of The Saturday Evening Post was this famous painting by Norman Rockwell (who, incidentally, appears in this painting; he’s the second juror from the left). It depicts a scene that could only happen in Oregon if the defendant were on trial for first-degree murder.

Offbeat Oregon: Because of notorious murder case, jury verdicts need not be unanimous

It’s ironic that Norman Rockwell’s famous painting “The Holdout” appeared on the front cover of the Saturday Evening Post on, of all days, Feb. 14, 1959. That date was Oregon’s ...

Image: Bryce Buchanan/ODOT##An aerial shot of Whale Cove shows the location of Bootlegger Rock and the beach on which the booze was buried.

Offbeat Oregon: Smugglers buddies staged audacious midnight jailbreak

Around 10 p.m. on the night of Saturday, March 19, 1932 — just a few months before Prohibition was ended — four vehicles rolled furtively into the little Coast Range town of Toledo. A ...

Image: Offbeat Oregon##The entrance to Whale Cove, as seen from the headland at its southern end. This photo was taken at high tide, so the rocky reef — Bootlegger Rock — is mostly covered.

Offbeat Oregon: Liquor smugglers’ luck ran dry in Whale Cove

In the pitchy darkness after midnight on a blustery February morning just off the Oregon Coast, the 36-foot powerboat Sea Island was in big trouble. The Sea Island was a Canadian rumrunner out ...

Omark Industries##A timber faller watches from a safe distance as the fir tree he was working on goes down.

Offbeat Oregon: Watching bugs led to invention of the modern chainsaw

Sometime shortly after the end of the Second World War, a logger named Joseph Buford Cox was out in the woods — probably doing some informal timber cruising on a patch of salvage timber, one of the ...

Image: Washington Historical Society##The five-foot Wolf Electric Chainsaw is demonstrated on a small Douglas Fir tree in what is obviously a publicity photo. The generator powering the electric motor is somewhere out of sight and the photographer seems to have taken some pains to hide the cable.

Offbeat Oregon: Early portable chainsaws didn't cut it with loggers

For most people not intimately familiar with the logging industry, it’s easy to forget how new an invention the chainsaw is. Offbeat Oregon Finn J.D. John, an instructor at OSU, writes ...

Image: American Medical Association##A political cartoon published by the American Medical Liberty League, Lora Little’s organization, sometime in the late 1910s or early 1920s.

Offbeat Oregon: Determined activist stopped state plan for forced sterilizations

In 1913, the Oregon state legislature passed a eugenic-sterilization law that had been written for it by one of the state’s most prominent citizens. The law’s author was Bethenia Owens-Adair, ...

Image: Superior Publishing##This photograph from shortly after the ship was built shows the Caoba — then named the Coastal — underway. When the Caoba came to grief, the low area amidships was piled high with a deck load of lumber and there were, fortunately, far fewer passengers on board.

Offbeat Oregon: Despite rescue, rumrunners went to prison

Capt. Robert Pamphlet and his crew were sailing south in a heavy sea when they heard the distress calls. The 579-ton steam schooner Caoba, slugging it out with the gale off the mouth of the Columbia, had ...

Image: F.J.D. John/Offbeat Oregon##The historic Soap Creek Schoolhouse, in the Coast Range west of Adair Village, is architecturally very similar to the one-room Josephine County schoolhouse in which Caroline Briggs and her son David assaulted and killed the schoolteacher in front of a full classroom of students in June 1874.

Offbeat Oregon: ‘Temporary insanity’ didn’t save bereaved woman from murder rap

In the late 1800s, the standard courtroom defense of murderers who wanted to claim the protection of the “unwritten law” was “temporary insanity.” The idea was, one tried to convince ...

Image: Ben Maxwell/Salem Public Library##An unidentified man poses with a chunk of beeswax he found on the beach in 1955.

Offbeat Oregon: Scientists, historians solve mystery of 17th century ‘Beeswax Wreck’

Since the beginning of European settlement along the Oregon Coast, people have wondered about the source of the mysterious chunks of beeswax that were continually turning up there. It seemed there was ...

Image: Debunker.com##One of two images taken by Paul Trent, showing what appears to be a flying saucer near his farm, located between McMinnville and Sheridan. The area around the UFO has been darkened to enhance its clarity.

Offbeat Oregon: Fierce debate over McMinnville UFO sighting continues today

Evelyn and Paul Trent lived on a farm between Sheridan and McMinnville in the years just after the Second World War. They were, by all accounts, just-plain-folks — good neighbors, solid citizens ...

Image: flickr.com/ hollywoodplace##This image from an advertisement for America’s Independent Electric Light and Power Companies in the April 1957 issue of Newsweek Magazine shows how flying-saucer stories were being incorporated into people’s visions of the future.

Offbeat Oregon: Flying saucer stories got start in Pendleton

If you were getting ready to take a UFO-themed road trip around the western U.S., there are several places that would naturally be at the top of the list. There’s Roswell, New Mexico, of course. ...

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