Editor's Notebooks 1991-2002: Pacific Northwest history

Here is another set of my Editor’s Notebook columns published in the Chinook Observer between about 1994 and 2002. These are about Pacific Northwest history.     



Collecting salmon labels
     It’s got to be one of the sillier hobbies an adult can have, the sort of thing a person hates to mention in front of strangers for fear of patronizing laughter, or worse, sympathy.
     Oh, all right, I admit it. I collect old salmon labels. Actually, “collect” is probably not strong enough. I covet old salmon labels. My passion for the silly damn things would be described as idolatry by a straight-laced preacher.
     It all started only a year ago. The kind owner of an old Columbia River cannery gave me a Boss Brand label as a souvenir. A yellowed piece of fragile paper, it had a engraving of the old cannery boss on the left, finely detailed like the portrait on a fifty dollar bill. On the right-hand side of the 4” by 8” label was a sailing ship named “Salmon Hunter” on the Columbia in sight of Cape Disappointment. I later learned the label dated from about 1890. It was addictive as cheeseburgers.
     There was something about it that evoked the proud history of the Pacific Northwest. In a small way, it was as if I had been handed a historical artifact by which a mysterious and forgotten chapter of our past might be deciphered. Besides that, I figured it’d look great framed on my living room wall.
     Being a confirmed and righteous believer in the power of newspaper advertising, I set out to find more through the classifieds. Needless to say, it worked, and I now have many labels, though only a few different good old ones.
     The not-so-secret temple of label collectors is the Columbia River Maritime Museum in Astoria where mounted in a display case are several hundred of the rarest and oldest of specimens, many dating from the turn of the century and before. Locked away in a back room are one-of-a-kind examples from the 1870s and 1880s that any true fanatic would swim across the river in a storm to possess. Rumor has it that the selfish devils of curators have crates upon crates of rare old labels warehoused away that everyone yearns to have and hopes nobody else succeeds in getting first.
     There have been canneries on the river almost as long as there have been white settlers here, with canning going at full steam by 1880 or so. The Klondike had its gold rush but we had something less colorful but just as lucrative — the salmon boom that for awhile made the town of Chinook the richest place in the nation on a per-person basis. This area was settled on the basis of salmon and timber and it’s pitiful to think there’s so little left of the fishing industry.
     In fact, since so many of the canneries have burned or blown down, labels are in some cases almost all that remains to remind us of places where hundreds of men and women once toiled, dreamed and died. And in most cases, there aren’t many labels either, since they were commonly tossed into the river or burned as trash when canneries closed or were bought out. In a year of frenzied searching, I’ve been unable to find so much as a single label from Altoona, the cannery nearest my house.
     As a boy in Bellingham, my dad worked in a cannery one summer, perhaps explaining his life-long aversion to canned fish of any kind. But never having had that experience, I gaze at labels and imagine a romantic past when hard working people made a living from our waters that were once alive with a dozen different runs of splashing salmon.
     I admire, too, the artistry and workmanship that went into the labels, the pride and pleasure that was spent in decorating such an ordinary object. Some of my favorites: Clifton Brand, showing butterfly boats on a sunny Columbia River day, and Wild Rose Brand, with its almost impressionist lithograph of this common wildflower.
     So there you have it: One more dumb thing that people collect. But hey, isn’t it just about the perfect Northwest hobby? Lord knows there’s no glory in collecting Mariners baseball cards.          



Quarantine Station
     Scientists and philosophers are debating whether to kill off the last acknowledged samples of smallpox. (I say “acknowledged” because I’ll bet there’s more than we know about stocked away in secret Army vaults in at least half a dozen nations.)
     Skepticism aside, it’s a wonderful thing to think this awful disease that killed millions and scarred tens of millions is now imprisoned inside one or more glass vials.
     It still was a real issue when I was a boy in the 1960s. It was our parents’ civic duty to make certain we all got poked in the upper arm, where a weakened strain of the disease tattooed three or four generations of humanity with a telltale pockmark. I’m very happy my pretty little daughter won’t have to carry around that ugly scar.
     On the debate on smallpox’s fate, I say keep it alive. In these days of genetic engineering, researchers may someday discover that smallpox is the perfect way to deliver some form of livesaving therapy to sick patients. That would be the ultimate victory over smallpox, turning it to our own use.               Smallpox probably seems like an esoteric subject for this Friday column, but it was forcefully brought to mind by my recent reading of the logbook of the Columbia River Quarantine Station, established 100 years ago this coming May 9.
     The quarantine station was set up at a time when commerce flourished between disease-infested tropical ports and the Pacific Northwest. Though they lobbied hard in Congress for a quarantine station, Oregonians in general and Astorians in particular were anxious to keep it at a distance from their homes.
     Hence, when Congress finally ponied up the money, the station was placed at Knappton Cove, about three miles east of the Washington end of the present-day Astoria-Megler Bridge, at the site of an old Eureka and Epicure Pkg. Co. cannery owned by the fabled Hume brothers, who started the salmon canning business.
     So far as I know, the station logbook has been unknown to historians and I’ll probably eventually pass it along to one of the local museums. It’s full of fascinating detail about the ships that came and went on the Columbia from the turn of the last century until 1939, when the station was phased out.
     Smallpox was a serious concern for quarantine doctors, along with the cholera, malaria, bubonic plague and yellow fever. It wasn’t quite routine for incoming ships to carry disease, but it wasn’t all that uncommon, either.
     One of the most interesting entries in the log has to do with the U.S. Army transport ship “Sherman,” which arrived from Manila in June 1908 with smallpox aboard.
     Believing the entire crew to have been exposed, the station’s surgeon, John Holt, stood his ground against U.S. Secretary of War William Howard Taft, who was elected president later that same year.
     “Commanding officer of troops aboard objects to having troops from tropics go ashore in tents and believes station area not large enough to accommodate 1,200 or 1,300. Necessary to disembark before vessel can be disinfected. No housing facilities ashore. Vaccination of all hands begun,” Holt wrote on June 15.
     On June 17, he continued “Secy. of War Taft ordered ‘Sherman’ to San Francisco. P.A. Surg. Holt refused to release ‘Sherman’ as Secy. of Was has no authority over her, while in quarantine.” Finally, on the 19th, satisfied he had protected the mainland from infection, Holt let all but five of the weary soldiers continue on their way.
     Somewhat amazingly, despite his direct defiance of a soon-to-be president, Holt stayed on his job until 1913. (Then again, maybe it was considered punishment enough to be left in a job commuting between Knappton and his home in Astoria.)
     My personal experience of smallpox, however slight, will always stay with me. I had just had the vaccination when I was sent to stay with Grandpa and Grandma Bell while my parents stood by my little brother, who was a risk of dying in the hospital from a kidney infection.
     I was a little sick myself from the shot, my arm itched like the devil and the sore produced a peculiar, indescribable sort of odor that combined with the closed-in old person smell in my grandparents’ house to leave an indelible impression. Just to top off the evening, we watched “Phantom of the Opera,” the scary old black-and-white version, on the single channel that emerged from the static on their TV set.
     If I were at all inclined to write like Stephen King, that night would find its way onto the pages of a horror novel. As it is, let’s just say I’m very happy smallpox is nightmare of the past.



A fisherman
     Working 51 days from April 24 to Aug. 6, 1900, Astoria seine fisherman Theodore Kalin caught just shy of two tons of Chinook salmon, 3,911 pounds, to be exact. And he counted that as a lousy season, in fact ending up $69.45 in the hole to the Columbia River Packers Association after paying for net and other supplies.
     “I send my fish book yesterday. I not call at the Office because I know is nothing coming to me.
     “I intend to fish again next summer but I will try to build me bigger boat. Boat I had last summer is to small and that is partly the cause of my poor fishing. I not need twine this winter both my nets is in good condition,” Kalin wrote CRPA’s echo-named corporate secretary, Mr. George, on Oct. 2, 1900 from Portland.
***
     This little snippet of Mr. Kalin’s life story, interesting though sad, probably isn’t representative of Columbia fishermen a century ago. The early company files of the CRPA — which of course went on to become Astoria’s great Bumblebee Co. — also contain copies of letters to fishermen courting them as if they were star college quarterbacks sought by some NFL expansion team.
     My research for a book marking the centennial of CRPA’s founding in 1899 is turning up quite a lot of what, ironically, is the rarest and most precious of history: What life was like for ordinary working people. There are a thousand pages of solid history about presidents and generals for every one that tells a meaningful story about a foot soldier, and so it is in every other walk of life.
     In this day and age when good Young’s Bay salmon goes for $7.49 a pound downtown, it’s hard (at least for the non-fishermen among us) to imagine a scale of life in which men worked months for what seems like a pittance.
     Fishermen with names like Mateo Stanovich, Antone Radich, Marco Gisdovich, John Inkila, Nels Sankala, Sam Sweeney, Otto Nelson and Andrew Eskola knitted their own nets and sailed the river in search of salmon with horse and purse seines, gillnets and traps.
     At a time when men still made their own boats from materials readily available on shore, net was a huge investment for poor people, with even a good used one going for $125 in 1900. Companies like CRPA in effect loaned men the materials for making net in the early spring and let them charge groceries at the store all summer in return for an agreement to sell all fish caught to the company at a fixed price.
     Depending on the species of salmon and market conditions, turn-of-the-century fishermen could expect to be paid 3 to 5 cents a pound for good spring Chinook, with a penny bonus for big fish that were more desirable for the lucrative European and fresh-frozen markets.
     Salmon was a hot commodity, much more so than now, with Eastern grocers positively clamoring for cases of canned Columbia River fish. All the same, hard cash filtered its way back to Astoria at about the speed of cold tar. This led to a tug-of-war between packing companies and their fishermen, some of whom sold fish on the sly to the competition.
     Reporting to CRPA President Sam Elmore in May 1907, Hammond-based foreman Alex Sutton wrote “I have to state that I have had frequent inquiries from our own men (men who confide in me) as to whether I have cash to buy fish. Such men tell me they would like to have a few dollars. They do not like to go to the office, as they are in debt, and to speak of one case, Hansen (Trap), this man last year I have seen him selling fish to the Cold Storage, but now as he is particularly to be seen by me every tide, I think is a check on him, and he cannot sell. This man asked me about money.”
***
     Many living in Astoria today wouldn’t be here if their ancestors hadn’t been employed by CRPA and Bumblebee. They can take great pride in the generally honest and incredibly hard-working men who toiled on the ground floor of what I think can fairly be described as a kind of gold rush, the pursuit of Columbia River salmon.



Ice cream and gold
     In 1929 the Great Depression settled over the Northwest like the kind of half-frozen, bone-chilling fog that sometimes warns of a January snowstorm. Ordinary people without much financial cushion suddenly found themselves slammed face-first into the wall, as if by a mugger.
     My grandparents and their four kids lived in Fairhaven, Wash., then a working class cannery town but now absorbed into Bellingham and jammed with art galleries and college students. Back in ‘29, it was hard to imagine the place had much of a future. There was no money and little prospect of any. People turned to their gardens and the still-abundant waters of Puget Sound for food. High school boys shipped off to the salmon-packing plants of southwest Alaska to work for Pacific American Fisheries, Columbia River Packers Association and others, sending their dollars home to mom and pop.
     It was not a good time to be in the grocery business, as Grandpa Winters was. There wasn’t much available to sell and few customers for what there was. Today we hear about grim times in Russia, old people selling their clothes in the street and families sending some of their kids to the orphanage, where at least they may find food. Times for us in the Depression weren’t much better.
     My dad, Elmer Clyde Winters, was the oldest boy still at home, a junior at Fairhaven High. His life was transformed in ‘29. He was shipped off to live with his Grandpa and Grandma Giles in Grants Pass. Anybody with a teen-ager or who remembers that time in their own lives can well imagine what this must have been like. In my dad’s case, he ultimately seemed to forgive his mother when she reached her 80s, but he and his dad, so far as I know, never truly reconciled.
     For all the shock of being uprooted, life in Grants Pass set the stage for the rest of Dad’s life. Grandpa Giles was a gold miner, and infected his grandson with the crazy passion folks have for that pretty yellow metal. The hard immutable value represented by lump of gold he dug out of the earth himself and refined in his grandparents’ kitchen was a magic talisman that shimmered in Dad’s subconscious throughout his careers in the Army and as an attorney.
     The news this week of gold reaching a 20-year record low, of the Bank of England leading a worldwide sell-off of the metal as it devolves into something more like just another depressed commodity, would have shocked my father. Some of the skills he taught me: panning, sluicing, preparing samples for assay and testing specific gravities, are as arcane now as knowing how to build a buggy wheel.
     Besides Grandpa Giles’ gold scales and the last little pill of gold pulled from the Josephine County hills before he shut down the mine, one thing I have from that era is my Grandma Giles’ 1873 copy of “Dr. Chase’s Family Physician, Farrier, Beekeeper, and Second Receipt Book,” which I presume she received from her mother, a pioneer in Nevada and Washington territories. With summer perhaps finally here, I thought I’d share a recipe from her book that I’ve tried myself and found good.
     “Morning’s milk 3 qts.; nice sweet Cram, 1 qt.; nice, fresh-laid eggs, 1 doz.; No. 1 coffee sugar, 1 lb.; fl. ex. of lemon, vanilla, or peach, to suit your taste.
     “Bring the milk and cream to a scalding heat and remove from the fire; and having beaten the eggs to a perfect froth, stir them in quickly, adding the sugar and flavoring it, it is ready to freeze.”
     Dr. Chase cautions, however, that “Ice-Cream reduces the temperature of the stomach below that at which food will digest.”               Homemade ice cream is, in my opinion, the best thing. Not just the best compensation for hard work, or the best childhood treat, but the best thing, period. When I was small my mother’s parents gave us their hand-crank ice cream freezer, a leaky old antique that survived 50 years of use and another 20 of storage out in the cobwebs of the milkhouse on their old dairy farm.
     Cracked ice and rock salt, sweet cream and honey (which I substitute for Dr. Chase’s No. 1 coffee sugar), fresh eggs and real vanilla: that is a recipe from heaven. As a little kid you feel like your arm’s going to fall off as you crank and crank, adding layer after layer of ice and salt, before finally the mixture becomes too stiff to crank any longer. Then you wrap the freezer all around with old blankets and gunny sacks and let it season for an endless half hour before pulling a shiny cylinder of ice cream from out of the cold brine. Licking beater’s wooden slates was the purest form of goodness, a treat of near biblical proportions.
     Somewhere along the way in my travels to where I am, some parts to grandpa and grandma’s ice cream freezer were left behind, and I think I shall always mourn their loss. But I found a replacement in one of those places that passes itself off as an antique store — not a new-fangled electric model but an old-fashioned hand-crank one. Later this summer or on one of those hot days we sometimes have in early fall, I’ll sit in the shade, make honey-vanilla ice cream and dream of cooler days ahead. I’ll send some time thinking about, and thanking, the ancestors whose hard choices created the life I enjoy today.



Observer centennial
     In some ways, 100 years doesn’t seem that long. Quite a few people and even some sturgeon in the river live to be that old. There are a sprinkling of century-old houses and other buildings in these parts, while Back East and in Europe even the dandelions and spider webs seem to have been around since Adam.
     But out here in the Northwest where most folks move around and the climate rots anything that hasn’t been slathered with Weather Seal, lasting a century is a moderately big deal.
     This week the Chinook Observer marks its 100th anniversary in business. Printing in what was described as a “funny little shed” in the rear of J.E. Dalton’s residence in Chinook, founding publisher George Hibbert rolled Volume 1, No.1 off the presses on Dec. 14, 1900, “the only paper published between South Bend and Skamokawa.”
     Hibbert, a pioneer newspaperman whose grandson visited our offices last week, went on to say “The Observer will discuss politics from a Republican standpoint. It will allow anybody to discuss them from any other standpoint in its columns. Nobody is barred. It makes no difference whether a correspondent agrees with the editor or not. Everybody is entitled to a hearing on public questions. The Observer will play fair.”
     Although times have changed and newspapers no longer forthrightly announce their politics on the front page, I believe we’ve lived up to the rest of Hibbert’s policy statement. (And yes, I know there are those who will disagree, and I’ll continue to be genuinely happy to print your letters saying so.)
     Within weeks after it was founded, the Observer was joined by Charles Angus “Jack” Payne, who wrote many of the paper’s colorful early reports about pioneer life on the Columbia River. He arrived on the Peninsula in a very unusual way, as the survivor of a famous shipwreck.
     The Strathblane, a three-masted British ship, wrecked four miles south of Ocean Park on Nov. 3, 1891, with a loss of seven lives, including her captain. The wreck of the Strathblane led directly to construction of North Head Lighthouse, which celebrated its centennial in 1998. An etching based on the original architectural drawing of the lighthouse now is the front-page logo of the Chinook Observer.
     Payne and Hibbert built a handsome two-story building for the Observer in 1905, the only one of its kind in the area. That building still stands and is used as a gallery.
     Townsmen said “The printing presses and office were located on the ground floor and his living quarters were above. [Payne’s] bedroom was a small ship’s stateroom, complete to built-in bunk, a port hole and ship’s clock.”
     In about 1923, Hibbert sold the newspaper to John and Margaret Durkee. They operated the paper through most of the Depression years. With the outlawing of fishtraps in 1933, Chinook went into a sharp decline. Bill Clancey of Chinook bought the paper, and in 1937 James O’Neil became co-owner. O’Neil moved the paper to Long Beach in 1938, but retained the original name because of its historic connotations.
     Much of the newspaper’s printing equipment from its earliest days — including its press — may be seen at Fort Columbia State Park, which has a building dedicated to the old Chinook town newspaper. The Observer now is printed at The Daily Astorian each Tuesday night and all pre-printing work is done entirely with computers.
     O’Neil’s son Wayne and his wife Frances took over the paper in August 1963 and operated it until July 1, 1984, when it was sold to Craig and Geri Dennis, the son and daughter-in-law of the owner of Dennis Company hardware stores in Raymond and Long Beach.
     On Feb. 16, 1988, the East Oregonian Publishing Co. of Pendleton, Ore., bought the paper from the Dennis family. East Oregonian is one of the oldest newspaper publishing firms in the West, and also owns papers in Astoria, John Day, Enterprise and Salem, in addition to Pendleton and Long Beach.
     I became editor in August 1991. I’m pleased and proud to be here, the latest in a line of more or less humble stewards of a small but meaningful institution on the Washington coast. Thank you for letting us into your lives, and for supporting us all these interesting years.