10 years ago this week – 2012
Knappa School District is identifying all its maintenance needs for the next decade, trying to avoid internal shocks to its thin budget. When it came time to take stock of the Loggers’ timber and natural resources around campus, it only seemed natural to do the work in-house.
Students from art and forestry teacher Jeff Skirvin’s Future Farmers of America forestry classes, in partnership with the Oregon Department of Forestry, are creating a forest stewardship plan, which will help the district understand its resources and potentially secure state or federal funding for future capital projects.
“It’s important to know what you own and how much you have,” said 16-year-old junior Keith Barber about the most basic goal of the project: learning to be a knowledgeable property owner.
Superintendent Jeff Leo said the school board, creating its district goals, has been looking at an overview of maintenance needs for a while. The overview included a forest plan, which Leo said sparked the idea of involving students.
“We’re just going to use it in our big plan,” he said. “Budgets are tight and we want to make sure we’re planning ahead.
“We can’t have anything sneaking up on us in the next five to 10 years.”
WARRENTON — Emotions were high and the Warrenton Community Center was packed to the seams Monday with supporters and opponents of Oregon LNG’s proposed liquefied natural gas import-export terminal on the Skipanon Peninsula.
The public’s first chance to respond at a meeting about an upcoming environmental impact statement being worked on by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for the terminal project quickly turned into a public comment period, lasting more than four hours and never losing its bluster.
Over the years, there have been many memorable football moments at John Warren Field, but it hasn’t always been a place to play football.
John Warren Field was once a part of an area known as Scow Bay. This bay stretched from 18th Street to about 23rd Street, and almost up to Grand Avenue.
In 1878, a road on pilings was built across Scow Bay to connect Astoria’s business center with the east end of Astoria. The railroad was constructed over the bay with the first trains traveling over them in 1898.
With the construction of the sea wall, the former tidal area presented a wide, flat space with great possibilities for a downtown athletic field. In 1890, the Astoria Football Club was formed and then the Scow Bay Football Club. High school teams followed.
50 years ago – 1972
With Thanksgiving not far away, the place to be for Ron Kaino, his son Todd, and the handful of other local cranberry growers is down in the bogs.
Harvesting has been going on for more than two weeks, with all of the berries being trucked across the Columbia River to the Ocean Spray processing plant in Markham, Washington.
Across the river, where cranberry growing is a bigger business, vacuum machines suck the berries off plants in hard-to-reach areas, and human-powered cutters dump the red fruit into sacks behind the picking machine.
In the smaller operations like Kaino’s, after the berries have been thrashed off the vines and are floating freely in 18 inches of water, they are pumped into a waiting truck with a gate which allows excess water to drain. To get the berries to the pump hole requires back-bending work in knee-deep water, shoving the floating fruit with broad boards and specially designed wooden brooms.
Three decades have gone by since the last great Benson logged raft slipped out of the Columbia River on its 1,100 mile voyage to San Diego, but these unique Columbia River exports still live vividly in old-timers’ memories along the lower river.
The Benson rafts were huge, cigar-shaped bundles of logs, up to 1,000 feet long, 40 feet thick at the middle, and each containing up to 6 million board feet of logs.
The Benson rafts were named for their designer, Simon Benson, a prominent lumberman at the turn of the century – for whom Portland’s Benson Hotel also is named, also the water fountains on downtown Portland corners that for year dispensed “Benson cocktails” to the thirsty.
The story is told that a startled fisherman ran into an Astoria saloon in August 1906 with a wild tale that he had seen an enormous whale chasing a tugboat down the river.
It was the first Benson raft.
Clamming season on the Long Beach Peninsula reopens Nov. 1 and the Long Beach Chamber of Commerce wanted to stage a publicity stunt to advertise the fact. Enter Clara Tinker. It wasn’t the most obvious choice. The Chamber members at first wanted a local bathing beauty.
Clara, who is 77 and the daughter-in-law of H.H. Tinker, who founded Long Beach, had something different to offer — 50 years of clamming experience. And, Clara was willing to cooperate by donning her turn-of-the-century bathing attire, complete with bumbershoot, which quickly blew inside out as soon as she bounded from the car onto the beach.
“Shall I go in the water?” she coyly asked photographers present. “Oh look! I found a clam hole,” she squealed. The stunt completed, Clara bounded back in the car, her energy still intact. “Just drop me off at Mary Lou’s (a local tavern), I might as well go shopping and give them a bad time as long as I’m dressed up,” she said. The clam beds may never be the same.
Astoria Mayor Harry Steinbock and Finance Director Ron Caton must feel something like the school boys who did something wrong and had to write their names 100 times as punishment.
They didn’t do anything wrong, but they will have to sign their names 733 times.
The two officials got saddled with that mammoth writing job Wednesday when the Astoria City Council accepted the state Department of Environmental Quality’s bid to buy $3,665,000 worth of sewer bonds.
The bonds will be sold in $5,000 denominations and that means 733 bonds.
“It will probably take the better part of a whole day,” Caton moaned. “By the time you get writer’s cramp and shake it out a few times a lot of time has gone by.”
75 years ago — 1947
ILWACO, Wash. – The unveiling and dedication Sunday afternoon of a World War II memorial monument and tablet on the shore of Black Lake, near Ilwaco, marked the culmination of two years of effort by Narcissa Garden Club sponsors.
The exercises were attended by several hundred people, and were centered around the monument and Gold Star mothers of the 20 peninsula men who gave their lives in World War II.
Southwest storm warnings were hoisted Saturday along a wide front of the coast from Cape Blanco to Tatoosh Island in the path of a new storm working its way toward the Oregon Coast and scheduled to hit Saturday afternoon.
The sudden storm Friday kicked up a bad chop in the river quickly, endangering gillnetters fishing in the lower area of the Columbia.
At least one fisherman lost his net and two others cut their nets to escape from founderingin rough seas cuffed up by the southerly blasts. Later, when the wind slackened, the fishermen who cut their nets were able to pick them up.
A residential construction project costing between $288,000 and $324,000 and providing 72 new dwelling units for Astoria by the middle of next summer was announced Monday by Orin and Jesse Byers, contractors.
The Byers brothers said they will start work as soon as weather permits on construction of 18 fourplex type buildings to be located in the hilltop area in the center of town, in the general vicinity of Eighth and Niagara streets.
The Franklin Avenue bridge over 38th Street was the subject of a lively discussion at the second consecutive City Council meeting Monday night when Carl Kvistad, resident of the area above the bridge, appeared with photographs to substantiate his claim, made at the previous meeting, that it is possible to stick a fist through one of the 12-by-12-foot upright posts supporting the span. “I will say that bridge is not safe,” Kvistad declared.
H.C. McCallister, city public works superintendent, denied the bridge is unsafe, even though some of the posts may be rotted in spots. “I helped kick out that hole you took a picture of,” declared McCallister, answering an allegation by Kvistad that city officials had not made a suitable inspection of the bridge.
One of the establishments which will be open to public inspection at Tongue Point Naval Station during Navy Day observance Sunday and Monday will be a newly-completed hobby shop in which the station expressed great pride.
This hobby shop has been designed to provide occupation for the 1,500 men of the station during off-duty hours and an inspection of the facilities there would make many a civilian hobbyist or would-be hobbyist itch to be turned loose in the place.
A sailor can there do almost anything, from painting or repairing his automobile to developing photographs.
Fishing boats and other vessels, which were kicked around by the storm for a week off the Oregon Coast, are now in port. After three days at sea in the rough weather with a makeshift rudder, the 80-foot California clipper Conquest, with 10 men aboard, is safe in Astoria. It entered the river Saturday, escorted over the Columbia River Bar by the U.S. Coast Guard.
