Bill Miller has lived in the St. John��s area since 1924, and recalls events such as fishing, boating, the filling of ponds and lakes, and salmon travelling up the slough. Mr. Miller also has mapped the previously existing wetlands that were in place nearby the slough.
Oral History
Narrator: Bill Miller
Interviewer: Stacy Danaher
Date: August 19, 2000
Place: St. John’s, Oregon
Transcription: Josh Kline
Edited by Donna Sinclair
SD: OK, my name is Stacy Danaher, and I am a student at Portland State University. And today’s date is August 19, 2000. And I’m speaking with Bill Miller who is a resident of St John’s. And we are going to go over the informed consent form, and you’ve seen this. Donna Sinclair sent you a copy of this, and I’ll need to have you sign it.
BM: I think she did, yes.
SD: And basically what it’s going over is that this is a project being conducted by Portland State University and the Center for Columbia River History. Those two parties will be receiving the audiotapes, they will be public use, and they will be used as part of a web site on the history of the Columbia Slough. This portion of our interview could take up to an hour, but if you want to stop at any time, feel free to say that. To safeguard against any misrepresentations of your information or the interview, or anything you give me, we will give you a transcript [a written transcript] of the interview and, a copy of the tape, so you can go over it. And, any copies of the material we use on the web site, so you can go over it and make sure that it is correct. Make sure we didn’t misspell any names, and that we’re using your material correctly. This is voluntary, so if you choose not to do it any longer, or you don’t want to, you can withdraw at any time. And it will be public record, and may be used by a broad range of people, including teachers.
BM: Yes.
SD: OK, do you have any problems with that?
BM: No, I don’t have any problems with it.
SD: OK, why don’t I go ahead and have you sign and date that. And then after we talk I’m going to need to have you sign the legal release for the audio tapes to be housed at the Oregon Historical Society, and for the public to be able to use it. OK?
OK, now first I wanted to ask you, when did you move to the St John’s area?
BM: September 1924.
SD: What were the circumstances behind your family moving here?
BM: Well, it was bad times back in Idaho. Dad was a bridge carpenter, and a good carpenter of all trades, and�� a friend of his, a lawyer asked him to come here. He’s building three houses and they’d go to work. And so, we came back to Portland.
SD: You came back to Portland?
BM: Yes, we were here in Portland. I was born over in Idaho. You see I was born in Filer, Idaho. Then we come to Portland in 1924, and we stayed here ever since.
SD: OK, and, so you lived in Filer, Idaho?
BM: Yes.
SD: OK.
BM: That where I was born. I went to Kindergarten and part of first grade there.
SD: And what did your father do when you were there?
BM: He farmed back there.
SD: What did he do when you moved here?
BM: He was carpenter. He helped build these three houses right here. In fact we lived in that third white house over there, and he finished the cabinets in it. So we ate on nail kegs [laugh]. And had a board over them for a table until he got everything done. Yeah, that’s where we started. And it wasn’t long after that we moved into this house, because they wanted to sell it. And we had to get out. And the Parkers lived here; and so we moved over here, and $15 payment a month was all they paid on this house. . .
SD: And what year did you move to this house we’re in now?
BM: That’d be between 24 and 25. I’d say, put 25
SD: And what kind of work did your mother do?
BM: Well, when it come Depression time to where she had to go to work she worked for Alber’s Milling Company.
SD: And what did she do for them?
BM: She had charge of the sack room, where they printed and repaired burlap bags. And, she worked for the Alber’s brothers, she worked there. [Sigh] She wouldn’t retire when it come retirement age, she says, “You have to fire me.”
And they say, “Why do we have to fire you?”
And she says, “I want my unemployment,” she said “I’m going to get everything I can get.” [laughs] Oh she was a little spice I’ll tell you. And so when she become 75 years old they finally fired her, and she went down and drew her unemployment. [laugh]
SD: And where was that company?
BM: Alber’s Milling Company? Right by the Broadway Bridge there on Front Avenue. And in fact when the earthquake was there it leaned over against, the bridge.
SD: Which earthquake?
BM: When was that? �� I think 61 was when that earthquake hit. In fact, my house went like this through my house, and these windows went two feet this way and two feet this way. The daughter was screaming to get out. . . we was going out shopping. And my wife was in her rocking chair, and every time she would try to get out of here this wave would come through and roll her against the wall again. And she was screaming. And I was on the phone there talking to Gus Narrick down the street, and I heard two big bangs upstairs where it popped out the roof joist. And I told Gus I’d better hang up the phone — the house is falling down. So I went in and got them, and by that time the earthquake had stopped. But that’s when the Alber’s Milling Company, when it settled down and went over to touch the bridge. And it was a foot away from the bridge before it started. See I knew this because my mother worked there. [laugh]
SD: Now when you moved here? Can you describe to me what the neighborhood was like? In 1924?
BM: Well, it was just very few houses. These three houses here. There was one house across the street. One house on the corner down there, one there, and there was three houses up here. And this house across the street had an acre of ground and he farmed part of that. And the sidewalks were in, but the street wasn’t — it was just plain dirt street. Wintertime about the only thing that could get up through here was a Model T because it had a high wheelbase. And that’s the way it was. That’s how come I got my initials in the curb out there when they poured the [cement] for the street.
SD: And when did they pour it?
BM: Had to be in ’26, ’25-’26, because I put my initials in when they poured it. I’ll show it to you out there. Over by the horse ring.
SD: Now what year were you born?
BM: I was born in 1916.
SD: 1916. So how old were you when you moved here?
BM: I was seven years old when I moved here.
SD: Can you describe to me what your average day was like when you first moved here? What you did?
BM: Mine?
SD: For you.
BM: OK, just for me. Mainly we was looking to see what we could entertain ourselves with. That was it, because we had make-shift, times were tough. We couldn’t buy nothing. And so, [laugh], so anyway we played kick the can, four cornered tag, and ” Annie-Annie I over” throwing a ball over the house and on the other side. Different things like that, and then as we got older and bigger we could do more things we started digging caves and tunnels and stuff like that around on these vacant properties around here, where we’d climb down in and hide if we wanted to. But that was right here. Then later on, when we got up old enough to have a pair of roller-skates, and get out there, we played roller-skate hockey out on the streets here. We’d take an old tin can, Borden milk can, or Carnation milk can, and flatten it down and make a puck out of it. And we’d go down to the woods down here and cut us out a hockey stick, and that’s the way we played our hockey. Just like any other kid. And these kids have these skateboards; we had ours, but a little different way. We made ours. We took a board and took the front wheels off and nailed 2×4 wheels on across there, and a board back here and nailed across, and then we took an apple box and put it up here and nailed on it, and then put handles on it. And when we would use that one skate would make us be able to go. And so, it got us in trouble several times, but so what, every kid gets in trouble. We go down the Portland Mill Hill on our skates; and there was a thrill a minute, because, you see, it took a two-inch limb, at least that big around, and four feet long. And you start down this, what we called the Woolen Mill Hill. And it was reel steep. And you get up to about 30 mph, and you start to put it between your legs and you’d pull back on the stick to stop before you run into where the cars come. We got in trouble that way a lot of times. If Mom knew that she’d shoot me. [laughs] But that was our entertainment. Until we got to fishing.
SD: And where did you go fishing?
BM: All over, from the Willamette River clean around all the property that runs�� Ramsey Lake, Bybee Lake, Smith Lake, I mean not Smith Lake, but Five-Mile Lake. All around there, all them little lakes and Three-Cornered Lakes was good fishing early spring and everything like that, fished and everything. The Columbia Slough�� you caught a lot of good fish out of there. In fact when it was opened up at the top end up here where the water flows through, there was Salmon even went up there. And it was so clear and nice, you could practically drink it. And so that way it was real nice to fish on. And like I say, we had no way of getting there, only by foot. And as always — the fishing is better on the other side. . . We had to walk wherever we went. We got down on the county road and got up there. And we’d go up there to Arrowhead Bend in the Slough, and that’s where they got Indian artifacts there, and a lot of them. Our church would have picnics there in the summer time on Sundays, and people would pick up these Indian arrowheads and little bowls and stuff like that. Well anyway, we’d fish off the bank down there, and then there was the Ogden Slough — it went back, see? And so we thought it’d be better fishing on the other side, so we’d take off our clothes and roll them up and swim across, and put them on the bank, come back and get our fishing poles, put it back, and then swim back and get our bait, and go over there again and stop and put our clothes on and then fish. And then after we fished all day down there, then we turn around and have to do that all over again to get back, you see? And by that time you’re getting kind of tired, even us kids. And then we had to walk all the way back up here.
SD: And how far away is this?
BM: Oh, 5-6, 7 miles.
SD: And what kind of fish did you catch?
BM: Oh, Perch, Catfish, Sturgeon, Sunfish.
SD: Can you describe a typical fishing day?
BM: It was always fairly good, except when high water come. We didn’t understand that until we got older. But, when high water [came] it would wash food into the sloughs and the lakes and the fish would feed off them — they didn’t bite very good. So, that was poor fishing them days. One nice place to fish was down at the foot of Oswego there. Sewer line went straight out to the slough and before you got all the way out there they had backwaters. And in the backwater the slough pipe went through there and it was hard to even get across there was so many people fishing there for Perch and stuff like that. And so when it got too crowded Gordon and me would go out on the end of the sewer pipe and fish right off that and catch some Catfish and bring them home and eat them. Put them in fresh water and let them clear themselves out, and they were good eating. There wasn’t no pollution like we got now. [laugh] You might think so, but no, no, no there was a lot way down over there, but that’s way up at this end and way down at the other end. Oh, we fished year-round whenever we were able, or hunted when we got older. I hunted ducks, geese, stuff like that around all through there. Because there was nothing but just lakes, willows, and truck gardens. Well they called them truck garden farmers. They were just little farmlands — patches where they plant turnips or rutebegas or stuff like that, you know? And, there was a man called, we called him dad, that had a boathouse at the bend in the Arrowhead Slough, the Arrowhead Bend. And we’d always bring him down a few fruit. We’d stuff our shirt pockets full of peas, fresh garden peas as we go through the place, or turnips, whichever happened to be ripe. Or the apples, we’d pick them and take down to him. If we brought him a bunch of apples before we went home, he’d call us in and give us a piece of pie. And he was real nice to us. But that’s where we got to tie up our first boat that we got, right there. He wouldn’t charge us for it. So we were in high fishing gun then. We fished all over in that boat. We used to go up to Bybee Slough. The Bybee Slough to where the dam was — Five-Mile Lake — and the dam of Smith Lake. And that’s where the fish would collect because they’d try to get up over the water into the other lakes, and that’s where we’d catch a lot of good fish. And Bybee Lake drained into it here, and around the corner that’s where the Smith and Five-Mile Lakes were. They drained in there and they come back, and that made good fishing. And we’d get into good fishing places there. And we hunted too, that way. But that was our activity, all through there.
SD: Where did you go for elementary school?
BM: Sitton, right down here by Pier Park.
It was an old two-story wood building when I started. It was fired by cordwood. And we had a woman principal. And if the kids had correction like we got then, they wouldn’t be in the trouble they are now. You go in there and you act up too much, well, you get sent to the principal. And you never want to get sent to the principal because she had a fire hose about that wide and about yeah long, and you got over her knees and she laid it on you a couple of times, and then you went back to school. And you sat and you stayed after school at night, and you and the teacher had a talk. So you see it was not easy — you kept yourself in line.
SD: Can you describe a typical day the first few years you were there?
BM: The first few years? Getting acquainted with the kids, learning how to play good marbles, and learning my teachers, and how to understand. Because you see they taught me phonics over in Idaho, and over here they didn’t teach me phonics. And so I began to lose out. And over here they had what they called Wesco Writing. And I had to learn to write like Wesco did here because him and his wife had come to the schools out here all the time, a certain time of the year. And they’d go in and they’d write all across the top of the board, a line about five inches wide and they’d put all the capital letters of the alphabet there, then all the small letters there, and then all the figures — one to ten. Up there. Beautiful, boy it was just beautiful. And they’d stay there all day too. But then they’d teach you to go finger-finger-arm-finger-finger-arm in, arm-arm finger in order to write, and the proper way to hold your pen and that. And that was a chore right there, learning to do that — that was my biggest downfall. Other than that I didn’t have too much trouble only in, say, science. Maybe history, history I didn’t have too much trouble with. But I had good teachers who worked with me. My arithmetic teacher was the one who really set me off and got me going, Mrs. Hickman. Her husband was an airplane captain, and she taught the second grade there. And that was fractions, and that worked with me. And I’m telling you that’s where I learned my arithmetic. I’m telling you so. That was a basic. If it hadn’t have been for her I’d have probably been as dumb as the rest of them in arithmetic. [laugh] But I went from there, see the old school burnt down up here and we stood on our balcony and watched it burn.
SD: And what school was that?
BM: I think it was the Williams School. And then so after that new one was called James John. And so it was after the sixth grade we went up to James John, and I went and finished my schooling at James John. I was on, lets see sixth, seventh, and eighth, I was on three pennants for baseball championship of the city, for James John Grade School. Bob Sundstom was the pitcher and nobody could hit him so [laugh] we didn’t have much to do in a [game], just catch a ball out there.
SD: Can you describe a typical day at James John? How you got along with the children?
BM: Real good.
SD: The teachers?
BM: Teachers? Real good. I got along with every one of them real good. There was one room I hated to go in — Mrs. M. . . She used to make maps out of this paper [machet?] and it stunk like heck. That’s the reason why I hated to go in the room. But other than that I learned a lot of history from her. I was busy on every class and if I had a study period a lot of time I’d take music or something like that in there and I played a horn. Coronet, and so that way it was fun. I was busy. . . And actually I liked gym, I was real good at gym. I loved that too. And I was real good there. And then I went from there to Roosevelt. And at Roosevelt High School I got real interested in hunting and fishing. And that’s when I lost a grade. I wasn’t doing my homework. And so mom jumped on me, got after me, and so it wasn’t nothing, but I was lazy to be honest with you. [laugh] But I finished it out there. I fell in love, I met my wife, by the way. And I decided it’s about time to get out of school. We were getting awful close together. And that awful close together has lasted years. I got out of school. I got married, and I’ve been married 62 years with her.
SD: What year was that you got married?
BM: 1938.
SD: Where did you meet your wife?
BM: Blind date. Now, that’s no kidding. I had a ’29 Chevy and I was a teacher up at Dahony’s Dance Hall up there — teaching ballroom dancing. And so a friend of mine, he wanted to go out and dance, and his girlfriend’s mother wouldn’t let him take her daughter out unless somebody else went out with them. And so he worked at the Portland Woolen Mills down here, you see. So he come up to me and he says, “Bill” he says, “would you go out with me on a blind date next Saturday?”
And I said, “What about?” Well he explained it [his girlfriend] couldn’t go out, not unless she had a girlfriend to go with her, and Virginia was one of her girlfriends. And so I said OK. That Saturday we took off, and like I said I liked music and all that and we got out there.
They had a big circle drive-in out there and I drove out there and I got out and I went up to the door and I says, “Mrs. Smith, is Virginia here?”
She said, “No.”
I said, “I’d like to take her to a dance if possible.”
She looked me over and says, “Come in a minute.” And I went in a minute. And she says, “I’ll see what I can do.” And while she was doing that there was a piano sitting there and I sat there and run a few scales and whatnot.
Boy, she come in she says, “Will you take me? I think I can find her.” She put a shawl around her. All whiteheaded, beautiful lady. And then we took off.
And we went down to one house. “No, they went down to such and such house.” So we went down there and we crossed 82nd, by the cemetery on 82nd down there.
We got over there, and as we was setting there three girls come around the corner down there and Mrs. Smith says, “There they come.” And she didn’t do anything to [indistinguishable], but she let her out and that’s the first time I met her. And we went on a dance, and we’ve danced ever since. We’ve danced, and danced, and danced. We went to all the big dances at Jantzen Beach- Glen Miller, and Tommy Dorsey, and all of them. And you know they play usually three pieces at a dance. A step, or three pieces for a Waltz, or a Slow Drag, or whatnot. And a lot of times when we was out there dancing when the third piece was there, well the wife and me were the only ones on the dance floor. All of them were standing, watching. And I forget whether it was Tommy Dorsey or Miller that asked us to travel with him. But I was only 20 years old then. She was younger than that, and that was stupid to do something like that. We just loved dancing. But that’s the way I met her, and that’s the way I went with her.
SD: Were you there when they opened Jantzen Beach Amusement Park?
BM: No, I wasn’t there, no. I went there a lot, and I went Lotus Isle. You didn’t remember that did you? Yeah they had the Climb of the Alps at Lotus Isle, that was the scary one. Jantzen Beach was tame out there. That’s where I done all my dancing, at Jantzen Beach. I went there a lot, yes, but Lotus Isle was the one to go to if you wanted Climb of the Alps up there, because you went inside the thing and it come out inside of a mountain. And you looked like you were going right out through that wall, and you’d turn like this and drop another 20 feet, or 30 feet. And it was��
SD: And where is that?
BM: Well that was�� If you’re going towards Vancouver, now, and you cross that, the First is that small river, up the Columbia. And then there’s this island that goes up, and then here’s the Columbia — that was Lotus Island. And that’s where the Amusement Park was. And the streetcar went across to that. And it was something. That was a lot better than Jantzen Beach. [laughs]
SD: Can you describe a time going there?
BM: Oh, I went there any time I could earn enough money to go there, because . . . they didn’t make much money then. And we’d go Saturday. . . If it was just me and one of the kids here going or something we’d walk, because I walked wherever I went. We went over there, and we’d get on and we’d ride the Climb of the Alp or the bumper cars, just all that and get something to eat and turn around and come home. We couldn’t [go at] night cause we had a curfew put on us so we had to be home a certain time, and if we were walking it took time. And, well, I could walk from there home faster than you could take a streetcar. You had to go down to the Broadway Bridge and then come back out again. And by doing that I could do it faster by walking across because, you see, it was just from this point to this point. Here I had to go back down here and then out to here. . . Straight line between two points is the shortest distance.
SD: Can you tell me a little bit about dancing at the Jantzen Beach Ballroom?
BM: We went there every time a name brand was coming. And we danced every dance that they had. Every dance.
SD: What was it like?
BM: It was wonderful. When you had a wife that could dance like, oh she wasn’t my wife then. You had a girlfriend that could dance; she was a feather on my feet. And oh, it was just wonderful. Just out of this world. They’d clap for us and everything else when we’d get through. And you had your steps, you know just basically you got the Foxtrot, it’s just a certain step, but you can add steps to it. You can do several things once you learn the basics then you can do umpteen different things with it. And it is just out of this world when you got a lady that can float like the wife did. I’ll tell you — she was wonderful. It was just wonderful. That’s why we had a lot in common, the wife and me, and I guess that’s why we got along so good all our lives together. [laughs]
SD: Do you remember when a whale swam up the Columbia Slough?
BM: . . . Oh yeah, yeah.
SD: Can you tell me about that?
BM: Not much. It’s just the pictures that they took and they showed. And figuring out how to try to get it back turned around, get it back down out of here. Because, well they don’t know it, but you see that Columbia River is salty water too when the high tide, when the tides’ coming in. It becomes salty water also. Now a lot of people don’t know that. But it does. And it gets salty clean up to Alber’s Milling Company, Broadway Bridge. And [how much] it raises depends on how big a tide you got down there. But it affects the Willamette River clean up to the Broadway Bridge. And that’s the same way with the Columbia. That’s where if you come to the– it was salty. [laughs]
SD: Can you explain to me, or describe to me, what the neighborhood was like during the Depression, for you? What changes you saw.
BM: Well, everybody was trying to get along with everybody else, and you had your little Mom and Pop grocery stores there on the corner. Everybody left their houses open, toys out on the street, cars open, nobody stole anything because nobody had anything worthwhile to steal. They had what they called a five hundred club that they played, and they’d go from one house to another playing five hundred, or they go from one house to another doing Square Dancing — for entertainment — the older folks, my mom and dad.
You see, and I never will forget [Gus] helped put the floor down on this corner house over here. . . . After he got the floor down, they got out the accordion and the fiddle and they started in, and they Square-danced ?�til Midnight. [laughs] . . . But that’s the way it was. And it was just wonderful. Everybody knew one another. Everybody knew one another’s first name, the last name, and knew everything about everybody.
[End Side A, Tape 1 of 2] [Begin Side B, Tape 1 of 2]SD: Go ahead.
BM: The reason why you don’t know your neighbors is because you got television, you got air conditioning and your homes heated so nice, you don’t have to worry about going outside. You stay in there, and you see them at the store, and go “Hi neighbor,” and that’s about it. You may know their first name, but you don’t know their last. And so that’s why I’m glad to live here in this neighborhood, because we have a neighborhood get-together at least three times a year. I’m not kidding you. We have our Easter-egg hunt and we have our Christmas, women all have their Christmas deal here, and we have a Fourth of July deal here, and we have a summer time picnic here — a potluck. Everybody comes, like Jeanine over here had her birthday and all the neighborhood went over to Jeanine’s birthday. Everybody sat and yatted about the neighborhood. You see, so that’s this neighborhood now, but back then they knew everybody because they was either in their house playing five hundred, or Square Dancing, from one house to the other either one night or the other. And so that’s why the neighborhoods were more gelled together, I should say, than they are now.
SD: What�� you mentioned earlier about Arrowhead Bend.
BM: Yes, I’ll show you where that’s at.
SD: What can you tell me a little about your own personal experiences over there?
BM: Well that’s one of the favorite spots that we used to go there and fish. And not only that, we didn’t go down there for the arrowheads then, we was fishing there. But, our church would go down on a picnic in the summer time and play down there, and dig for artifacts. And that’s what we done right there [at] what they call Arrowhead Bend. Now you see that spot in the slough is where the Indians used to come. And they would catch their winter supply of fish. And that went from there clean across that neck of ground, I’ll show you, clean over to Sauvie’s Island. Because they find artifacts over there just as much as they do right through this area. But it starts from, right there over. It was just thick with them until they bulldozed it out. Yeah, oh they’ve had a big write up in the paper [about] how much Indian artifacts they found when they bulldozed that ground up. I could have told them that before they bulldozed it.
SD: What are your clearest memories of the slough, as a child?
BM: As a child? Well we was always scared of it. It was dangerous. We respected it. But it was always someplace we could go and fish or swim and have a good time. And it was clear and nice clean fun. That’s what I remember of it. From Union Avenue down the mouth of the Slough we used our boat to go back and forth through there. And if we got too tired of rowing, and the wind was blowing, we’d take our shirts off and run them through the oars and hold them up in the air, and the other guy would take the other oar down here until we had three oars, little short oar and then the one tiller oar back here, and hold it up in the air, and the wind would blow us up. We had good imagination as kids.
SD: Now why do you say it was dangerous?
BM: Well it had undercurrent, undertow to it. In fact we was down there one time on our church picnic. I was about 12 years old, or 13 years old then, and there was a thermos bottle floating down on the other side. One of the girls says, “Oh look there; I’d like to have that thermos bottle.” This young man was in a swimming suit anyway and he just dove in and swam over there, and as he reached over and grabbed the thermos bottle he went under. And I seen him come up twice, and he hit an undertow, and it took him down. And they got a man called Harry Herzog. He was working up there in the dairy, and he come down, and it was forty feet deep there. And he tried to locate him. And didn’t do it. But, nine days after a body goes down, if it ain’t hung up on something, it will come to the surface.
SD: Did that happen a lot when you were a child?
BM: No, no that’s the only time that is vivid in my mind. And that warned me about that slough. We treated it with respect, even if it was calm and looked nice, the underpart of it was what we respected. That’s what we really respected. But we learned to swim real good as kids. We swam like fishes. I’m not kidding.
SD: What are your first memories of when they were putting Vanport City in?
BM: That was not too much. Vanport City, that come up in a hurry because they done that during the War. And during the War, at that time, I was living near Laurelhearst Park. And I didn’t have too much awful to do with it. Just a city within a city, is what it amounted to. And it was something. See, they built dikes all around there. In 1932 on they built dikes all around, all the sloughs, and up there to protect the Airport. And all over, even on Sauvie’s Island, they built dikes over there to keep the farmlands from flooding. My brother-in-law helped build them dikes by hauling sand in with his dump truck.
SD: When was that?
BM: Back in the Depression, he got laid off. Depression hit in ’29, and he was the last to get laid off at the Union Pacific Depot. [He was one of] the ten people that were left and that took about a year. So that’d be ’29, ’30, ’31 say. He went to work for the WPA hauling that sand, and building the dikes around the Airport, and around where Denver Avenue is, and around the Columbia Slough. All down the Columbia Slough they built the dike on both sides to raise it up there, way up so that it couldn’t flood anymore. That’s what they were trying to protect from. And that’s the only recall that I know. My brother-in-law worked on it. Now, that’s as close as I got to it. Other than that, before the dike broke or anything, well two weeks prior to that, we were down seeing with my brother-in-law, seeing his new son that was born down there. Well we drove down there and parked. And I told the wife, I says, “Honny, I wished he’d get in there and get out as quick as he could,” because only one person could go in the hospital at a time. Because that water was ten inches from the top of the dike, and had been that way for three or four weeks. And I says, “I just don’t like it down here.”
And she says, “No and I have an uneasy feeling too Daddy.” And then as soon as we got through going in and seeing Daisy, then we took off and got out of there. Because [there was ] only one road out, and while I was setting there I looked over — I’ll bet there was fifty little kids playing from 3 years old, up to 10, 12 years old, on the playgrounds out there. It just turned my blood cold to thinking if that dike ever broke. And so we left, and got out of there. And there was only one way out. One way in, and one way out of that thing there. And that was a city within a city, a lot of people there. And later on today if she’s there, you can talk to a lady that was in the flood, and she waded out breast-deep. And her husband helped pull kids out. Now, they say only five people passed away, one other place said eleven people passed away. Well, maybe that’s true, maybe that’s all, but what about the people that was gone, that didn’t have a name to them. See they couldn’t list them, they didn’t say anything about them. That’s what got me, that’s what’s in the back of my mind. See, I sat down there in looked at them people in that hospital, 30 foot wall of water hit there what would it do? It just mind consuming. But this Corps of Engineer, right up to the day it broke, he says it is not going to break, it’s safe, you stay. Now I’ll let you talk to that lady who walked out because she knows different. She hasn’t seen any of her friends that was in the same building she was. Now you can talk to her yourself, if she’s up there yet, when we stop. She gave me that paper there, which is a copy of the flood.
SD: What’s her name?
BM: Fern. . .
SD: Fern Keels.
BM: Yeah, that’s her name, and you can talk to her. And since, we’re on this subject, my neighbor over here, he says “Bill,” he says “I think that Columbia Slough is man-made.”
I says, “Oh?”
He says, “Have you ever been through the Bybee-Howell House?”
And I says, “No.”
He says, “Go through it, there’s a picture on the wall showing all the swamplands down there because he built that house there to watch his sailing ships out in the Columbia.” And he says, “In that picture you don’t see no Slough. It’s all swampland.” He says, “They dug that Slough just to drain the swampland.” That’s his opinion, not mine. . . . Now his curiosity has got me to where I think I’ll go through it. [laughs] Because I like a little bit about history, you know. But I like to have the straight edge of it. I don’t like any of the doubts, now. Like five died, or six died, or eleven died, I don’t care about that?�that’s fine, that’s what they want to put in the paper, that’s fine. But Fern here told me different. So, if she was in it, she told me, I believe her. . .
SD: The dikes were built before the War?
BM: Oh yeah, built, they were built in the 30’s.
SD: What did you do during the Depression? For work?
BM: Well let’s see, I went to work in ’37. That’s the first time��
SD: So you were in school for most of it?
BM: I went to school. I was in school all the time, and then in 1937 I graduated and I went to work that fall in the St. John’s Garage. And I worked there until 8’oclock at night ?�til 8’oclock in the morning until I found a day job. And I went from there to Union and Stanton, one of the top service stations over there, and worked there until I got sick with scarlet fever, and when I come back I had no job. And so then I started looking for work, and I walked from one end of this town to the other. I walked from here to Vancouver one time, over to Marine Drive, and up and down. I walked on the north part of Portland, and then I walked down to the northwest part of Portland, and I walked all over. I could do five miles in 45 minutes, walking, and looking for work. Well I was laying out underneath the car here, replacing an axle, ’29 Chevrolet — always had either a bad brake or an axle. And I had my coveralls on, and I was laying underneath there fixing that, somebody kicked me on my feet.
I looked up, and I says, “Opah, what do you want?”
He says, “Well I got to have somebody go to work. Do you want the work?”
I says, “Boy do I!” I was married and it was hard time at that time getting work you see. And so I went down there and it was a part-time job. Lucky Lager had moved out and they wanted me tear up all the lumber and get it ready for sack materials to be stacked in there. . .
SD: Where was this?
BM: This was back in, when was it? I went to work for him in ’39.
SD: And who was it?
BM: Coast, let’s see, West Coast Concentrate was the name of the company at first, then we went down and it was White Star Concentrate later. But, I went down there and I stacked, pulled all the nails, stacked all the lumber up. . .
The boxcars started coming in, and he says, “Well do you want to stay here and work on the boxcars?” And from then on it was twenty-some-odd years I worked for that part-time job. I lost that when I had a heart attack in ’62. [laughs]
SD: And where was White Star Concentrate?
BM: Well Coast to Coast, Bob Suefer bought Johnny Todd out, and no not Johnny, bought the other fella out, and Johnny Todd and him then moved down to the old White Star Building, which was on 15th and Thurman. And that had had a fire that burnt the upper two stories off, and we had a story and a half. And so we took that. . . I stayed there; I drove a truck, I done everything. Got out of that as quick as I could because it was too hard on my back, driving that truck. So I got away from that. I was away from home too much, from my kids you know. Trucks didn’t travel fast back then. But I lost that one due to heart trouble, wouldn’t quit smoking soon enough. When I found a job again I went to work for Bingham-Willamette. I retired out of Bingham-Willamette. I worked out of maintenance out of Bingham-Willamette.
SD: And where was that?
BM: That was down on Front Street. I forget what year — I got a plaque in there that tells me. They got the largest collection of anybody for retired men to receive from JF Atkerson there. I received over a thousand dollars just from the collection the men put out around for me, to retire. [laughs] I run a check pool, and they give you a nice big plaque like that. And it says, the check pool.
SD: During the War years, what did you do?
BM: They took me in when I was five, and I had a broken bone in my foot down here, which I didn’t know, and I had perforated eardrums, so they wouldn’t take me. So Bob Seufert at White Star Concentrate Company, he says, “Bill, I’m going to get you a job someplace else.” “Because,” he says, “I’m going to go in and I’m going to shut the plant down.” So I went to work for Carnation Milk Company, and I worked there for four years. I was a pasturizer.
SD: Did you live here in St. John’s during the War years?
BM: Nope, I lived over in SE, on Morrison Street. I come here, see I moved out 1939 and I come back in 1960. So that period I was out of here, and back.
SD: Did you have family?
BM: Oh, my mother lived right here. Yeah, and my sister lived up on Richmond Street.
SD: What was the biggest change that you can remember in this neighborhood?
BM: The houses that went in. They built houses and built houses, and took the orchards out, and built houses instead of that. And what shocked me the most was right up here on Fessenden, what they call the Long Fir Park up there, all that property in there was donated to the Portland Traction Company for car barns only. And during the War they built houses on it. So I don’t know what happened there. . .But it changed. The building, the way they occupied the different vacant grounds, the farms, farmlands went into houses. And so businesses moved in and it started changing fast.
SD: What is your clearest recollection of the time before you moved out of this neighborhood in ’39? What is the one thing that stands out the most, of the neighborhood or the St. John’s area?
BM: Well that was . . . a very nice group of people here that. . . They were very friendly, and they were real nice. You know we didn’t have television then, to speak of, and so we were very popular. We talked to one another and went back and forth, and visited, and stuff like that. And so it was real nice. When I moved over there where I was at, I got street car coming home and started to walk up to the front of thecar, and the lady was there that lived next door to me, and she went up another block and got off. She didn’t want to stay and talk to me. It was two years before anybody talked to us, the wife and me. We were the youngest two in the neighborhood over there. So that’s what we moved into when we moved out of a very sociable neighborhood here.
SD: What were you doing when they built the St. John’s Bridge, and dedicated it?
BM: I was all over the St. John’s Bridge before they dedicated it. . . I was the second one across the St. John’s Bridge. When they cut the tape, I was the second one across. Boy Scout in the middle was the first one across. I couldn’t catch him, by the time we got to the other side.
SD: Were you running?
BM: Yes, run all the way. Yep, that’s a mile across.
SD: What type of changes do you think that made for the St. John’s area?
BM: It made a lot of good difference. It made this path of traffic more flowable, to get in and out of St. John’s, and this way it moved the businesses up to where the people would move in here. Because, you see, it was a ferry before. That’s the only access we had. And it was St. John’s Ferry. I used to sell papers on it for Bob Catrennace. And, you see, we had the largest Oregonian route in the city. On Sundays we always ordered 200 [papers] Sundays; and when we’d get through delivering our route, I’d go to the terminal 4 for the ships that were in down there and sell papers on the ships; and he’d go to the dry docks down here, which was this side of the railroad bridge down there. And he’d get on the ships, and then we’d meet on the St. John’s Ferry, and he’d work one side, and I’d work the other, selling the Sunday paper off of that. Because, you see, you got more for the paper when you were on the water, than you did on land. Yep, we got two-cents more a paper. [laughs] So, we weren’t no dummies. [laughs] That’s why we done it. [laughs] But it was a steady flow of traffic on that, full going, coming, going, and coming�� across there.
SD: What was your impression of the bridge?
BM: It was beautiful. I always thought that bridge was beautiful. And you know why we got the bridge, don’t you? That bridge was actually ordered for a Freemont, and the couldn’t find foundation solid enough to put that type of bridge on it, so St. John’s got it. Other than that, it’d been the Freemont Bridge. [laughs]
SD: Were you here in the area when they had the Convention, the Expo, in 1959?
BM: No, I was living on the other side of town. And one thing nice about that, our boy, carried the American Flag in and presented that at that Convention. Opening night our boy was chosen, out of all the Scouts in the city of Portland. Bud Dean was the Scoutmaster. He was, I think behind it. . . Our boy carried the American Flag in.
SD: Can you describe that event for me?
BM: Well it was just tears coming out of my eyes so much. [laughs] Seeing him carry that flag and it was something to see them little tykes, our whole troop was there. And it was really something. And that’s about all I remember there. That’s all I could see because that was my kid, our kid [laughs].
SD: Did you visit the Expo?
BM: Oh yes, I’ve been in it every time they had something out there, I’d go in the old place out there. In fact, our AARP used to have a booth out there every so often, at the latter part of it.
SD: Can you describe for me one of your visits to the Expo/Convention, in 1959? If you can remember?
BM: If I can think back that far, and get it straight. [laughs] Oh dear, I may have to have the wife help me there. I know we got in and they had quite a program in center stage, getting this grand-opening going, and the kids presented the colors. And, I think after that, I forget now. I just don’t remember now, just exactly what all went on. But that was the one thing that hit me so hard, was our kids. . . I always liked to go there to watch the rodeo, and watch the cows, and see the animals and stuff like that. Mom and me was so proud. We go to the kid afterwards and we just hug onto him for dear life. [laughs] Yeah, I’ll have to ask her about that.
SD: Can you talk to me a little bit about when you moved back to St. John’s?
BM: Oh, I moved back in 1960. That was right here, into this house. We moved here because my daughter graduated out of Glencoe, and she went to Roosevelt — graduated out the same school I graduated from. I was working at White Star then, and we just kept going. And I had a big garden, yard and garden. That time I had fifty hanging baskets of fuschias, fifty hanging baskets of begonias, and a big long string of fuschias — upright fuschias, and the yard was pretty all the way through, but a lot of work, but it was worth it. And it was nice here. We got reacquainted with some old friends. I joined the Oddfellows; gosh I forget when I joined the Oddfellows, in 1960-something. And then I got acquainted all over the state.
SD: What is the Oddfellows?
BM: The Oddfellows, they’re similar to the Masons.
SD: Can you tell me a little about what you did?
BM: Well, I started out just as a regular member. Went through and got my four degrees. And after I got that, I got appointed as Warden. And I was Warden for one year. Then I went in as Vice-Grand. And the next year I went in as Noble-Grand. And the next year I went in as a Color-Bearer for the Grand-Lodge of Oregon. And the next year after that I was a District Deputy GrandMaster that installed other lodges. And we done such a wonderful job, the Sovereign Grand-Master of the world asked us to go out of jurisdiction over in Longview, and install a lodge over there��two lodges over there. And we did it because we had that book about that thick, fifty-four pages, and we had it all memorized�� didn’t have to look at anything. And we done it right that way. That was the only one that’s been done that way since, I think.
It’s, they work with other people, they help other people. They don’t ask for recognition of it. For an instance, there was a woman, her light was turned off, and we went and paid up her back light bill, and stocked her shelves with food and stuff like that, and filled up her oil tank, and that was all — nobody knew anything about it. And at Woodlawn School, down there, we’d donate so much money every year for little kids who don’t have the money to buy little panties or little socks or something for themselves when they tear them, or get them wet, or something. Well, we’d donate that. And we donated an awful lot of money to these girls that were having problems straightening themselves off of alcohol and dope. And they’d bring them, to show what we had done, they brought these girls there and they would teach them how to dress, how to talk, and how to present themselves. And they had to be able to go out, before they got out of this place, and get themselves a job. And then they come in back and told us how much they appreciated it. And so that’s what we did. And we’d send young kids back to Washington D.C., and the United Nations, up into Canada. They’d have to, we’d send out a written essay first. And an oral essay, and we did not judge. The television stations, or somebody like that did the judging of it. And then we’d pay their way, all the way back there, and they’d go through all these different places — Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and everyplace. And they can go to the United Nations and they can stand in there, and sit in there, and they can be recognized to anyone who’s speaking down there, and ask them any questions they want. And then they have this place that they’d stay, with a big auditorium, and if they want one of them to come up and speak to them, they ask them, and they go up there and speak to the group. And they have groups from all over the world, up there. They were little kids, and when they come home, they were grown young men and ladies. . . from what they experienced. Like one fella said, he got on top of the Empire State Builings. . . Oh, he was impressed. And one young lady, the Oddfellows up there offered her room to where she’d go in and do her laundry, or whatever she wanted to do. And then they opened up the television set, and the kitchen, all the kitchen, for her, whatever she wanted while she was there that night see. So pretty soon they heard her just laughing in hysterics, and they went in there, and they said, “My god — what’s the matter?”
And she says, “Nothing.” She says, “Look, it says American Ale.” [laughs] She brought that home. Down here it’s Canadian Ale, up there it’s American Ale. [laughs] But that’s just part of what they do. They do so many things it’s pitiful. . . Gets me disgusted because they don’t get a lot of recognition for what they do. And I tell you, I’m glad I belong to the Order.
[End Side B, tape 1 of 2]Narrator: Bill Miller
Interviewer: Stacy Danaher
Date: August 19, 2000
Place: St. Johns, Oregon
Transcription: Keith Dobler
Edited by Donna Sinclair
Tape 2 of 2
[Begin Side A, Tape 2 of 2]Stacy Danaher: Ok, I’m going to back track a little bit��
Bill Miller: Alright.
SD: ��and ask you some questions about your experiences with the slough. Can you describe some of your personal experience with recreation on the slough? You’ve already talked a little bit about fishing and swimming as a child, and hunting. Can you describe what you’ve done with recreation on the slough as an adult?
BM: I’ve been on the slough a lot, I like to go down there. And you see the different birds. There used to be a lot of different birds down there, and different animals. You would see deer, and red fox and stuff like that down there, and it was interesting. If you were quiet as you would go it would be alright, but if you made a lot of noise you wouldn’t see nothing. But I enjoyed about being around the slough and on the slough.
SD: What type of changes did you see on the slough and the surrounding area after the Vanport flood?
BM: After the Vanport flood there wasn’t much changes in the slough. The only changes took place when they dammed it up, up above. It didn’t affect the slough down on this end at all. You see, Vanport was above the three-cornered lake that was on the other side. It went out the Columbia on the other side of the tracks, so the only effect we got [was] above there. I didn’t see that because we never went above that area at all. So, down here where we were, from North Bank highway which I’ll show you, on down this way, it hardly affected it at all. You see, there was (??) buildings down there, there was (??) sawmills down there, there was these other places down there. So the only thing that was probably moved was Tommy Luke sold his greenhouse down there to Riding Transfer, and that was it. That was the big change.
SD: When did you stop swimming in the slough?
BM: When somebody said I would get trouble with my ears. You see I got perforated eardrums. I got an infection in there, and that is what was causing it, getting that dirty water in there. [Laughing]
SD: So was it pollution that��
BM: No. It never got polluted until they shut it off up above. Then they started dumping everything in up above from them factories by the airport and down towards Union Avenue. They just threw everything in there that you could think of. That’s what I understand, ?�cause the city was after them, trying to get them to clean it up. All they have to do it open it up, up there and it would wash it right out into the ocean.
SD: Did you ever experience, personally experience any of the polluting of the slough?
BM: No, I never experienced that at all. I guess if I went down there now, I could sure tell it, stinking and that. And a lot of the pollution came in the slough too. You know, they took Bybee Lake and made a garbage dump out of it, and all that seepage from that garbage that went in there went into the Columbia Slough, I don’t care what you say. Now they got the methane gas coming out of it, and they are burning it. One of these days they will wake up to the fact all that water going in there is that way. But you see they got quite a collection of raccoons down there from the dump. And when they closed the dump, the raccoons had to find some place to go eat, so we got raccoons all over here, just thicker than the hair on a dog’s back. And they eat everything�� So that’s my bad part. Yeah��, you’ll see Five-Mile Lake in ten years they’ll be building on it, because they are already drying it up. I think that’s bad, because the fowl have to have some place to go, and something to do. And so the fish have to have something to eat, and the mosquitoes and the bugs in the small grass they come up and suck and catch them and eat. And if they knock off all these lakes and all these feeding places, we’re going to lose all the fish and stuff like that too, because they’ve got to have food the same as everybody else in order to live.
And they don’t look at it that way. The dollars and cents are more valuable to them in business than a lake being in there. . . I can’t tell you, but Roberts was his last name, he lived right straight up here. He was the one who figured out how to get rid of the mosquitoes on all the lakes down here by spraying them with oil. And that’s what he done, he went down and sprayed the edge of the lakes with oil, and that was the end of mosquitoes. Oh, and when the wind blew off of there, you couldn’t stay in this backyard, you would be eaten alive at night. Well, one nice thing about it, when you get bit by a mosquito and you scratch, you and the millionaires feel the same way. Well ain’t it true? Gotta put a little humor in this somewhere. [Laughing]
SD: Ok, well, um, you said you wanted to go take a tour��
BM: Yeah, we can take a tour��
SD: You could show me a few things��
BM: Yeah.
SD: Um, real quick before we change the subject on the audio tapes, do you have anything you personally want to [say], that hasn’t been touched on yet, that you want to talk about, about your growing up in this area, or��.
BM: I grew up right up here just like I said. We had hard times to figure out how to entertain ourselves, but we found ways to do it. We were sharp the way we did it, the way we played. We had big fields here that were empty, that we played in. We made a big circle in there and criss cross, and we played in that, and we played tag that way, and home base was in the middle or you had to get around to where you started from if your home base was over there. And, we played four corner tag out here. You had two of them. We made home base, and once you started one way you couldn’t turn around and come back until you got over to home base and started around there. The guy that was “it” could go anywhere so you had to be a fast runner. That was the way we entertained ourselves. It was fun — we had clean fun. . . We didn’t go around shooting and stealing or anything like that. We never had that problem.
Actually if we needed something we went out and earned it. Bob Katrinas(?) and me, you could say we had the first garbage route in the city of Portland. Right down here by Pier Park was a great big hole in the ground from a brick deal that the people were dumping garbage into. So we had a big St. Bernard, and we put a wagon and put an extension tongue out here, and put racks on it, and we would go around and haul garbage cans and bags down to the dump and dump them for $.10 a bag. And bring them back and give them back to them. And that’s how we made our money.
SD: And when was this?
BM: Oh gosh, this was back in the Twenties. And then we would take our wagons and go down to terminal four, and we would beat the grain cars, and get the grain out of there and put it in a sack and wheel ?�em up to the hardware here in St. Johns and sell them there to get money to go to the show.
SD: Terminal four?
BM: Yeah, terminal four, I’ll show you where it’s at when we get there.
SD: And what is it?
BM: Well, it consists of a sulfur dock, and a freight dock, and the grain elevators down there. The terminal flouring mill is down there. Ships load and unload down there.
SD: Where was the St. Johns Depot?
BM: I’ll show you, out on North Bank highway.
SD: What’s your recollections of that?
BM: Well, when you drove by there you could see it. It said “St. John’s Depot” right on the front of it. And, it’s still there. I took Opal Davis for a tour. “Oh there’s the St. Johns Station,” she said. She was about ninety years old. It said down there “St. Johns Railroad Station.” I’ll show it to you.
SD: Did you go over there as a child?
BM: Oh I had been over on it, I’d been in it and everything.
SD: Can you describe it for me, a typical day over there?
BM: Over there? We’d just walk — the North Bank highway was here, and here sits the railroad going from here to Vancouver, and here sits the station right here, and you could walk up here and park your car and go in and out of any part of it. Go in there and look at it and come back out, and go on. But now it’s the Section Hand gang staying in there. You’ll see it, then you’ll know.
SD: Did you ever use that depot to get on the train?
BM: No. No I never did. Like I said, when I was there you had to go downtown to the Union Depot to do that.
SD: Well, um that will be all for this portion�� of the interview, and thank you for answering my questions. And we are now going to go on a [driving] tour.
BM: Ok. So we’ll stop the tape for a minute.
ON TOUR
BM: [DRIVING] Yeah, this was all farmland in here, and a lot of fruit trees, because see, we had Star Cannery out here. That’s why so many people had fruit trees. Everybody had fruit trees. . .
They canned fruit of all kinds, and vegetables of all kinds, but mainly fruit, Star Cannery did. One house was right here.
SD: On Fezenden?
BM: That’s the only house that was here, one house.
SD: All the rest was orchards?
BM: Orchards. [Sound of the Turn Signal] This was supposed to have been all vacant property, because that property was all donated to the traction company for car barns.
SD: Here on Fezenden.
BM: All that property. Clean through to this block going up right here.
SD: Charleston.
BM: Charleston, all the way up, all the way to St. Louis over there. All that was supposed to be vacant property because it was donated to the traction company for car barns. See street cars used to run down here. Now, this is where we are going to start from.
SD: Ok, we’re on North Oswego.
BM: Oswego, now we’re going up, hit St. Johns when we get there but��then we’ll start there.
Bob had two paper [routes] at one time — Portland News Telegram route. And as I say Bob Katrinas and me had a Oregon Journal out here. We sold the last (????), Dempsy and Tuni fight, we had two hundred papers, and needed extras on the Dempsy and Tuni fight. He’d go ahead of me and holler, “Dempsy and Tuni, read all about it, Dempsy and Tuni fight read all about it!” I’d come along and I’d sell all the papers, and pretty soon I’d go ahead and holler that, and he would sell the papers, and we’d go sell until we got them all sold.
Ok, this is a Christian church I went to when I first come here.
SD: The “St. Johns Christian Church.”
BM: Yeah, that’s just a small church there. After I got married I became a Methodist. Now, right here is where Oswego ends.
SD: Ok, Oswego and Lombard.
BM: And Lombard ends. This is where Lombard ends, and this is where Oswego ends. Alright, let me turn here, and in comes Richmond, up here. This goes clean through the river as Richmond. Streetcar tracks used to come down here. And now you are on North Jersey street. This goes all the way through. Clark Furniture Store used to be right here, one of the old stores.
SD: Where the St. Johns Value Giant is.
BM: Yeah, that was Clark’s Furniture Store. . . By the way there is our church right down there, it’s 154 years old.
SD: And what’s the name of that church?
BM: Pioneer United Methodist Church. And if you want to talk to the minister Carl he will give you a lot of lowdown on the history that is in the books of that church. Now, [my wife’s] relative was the last Methodist circuit rider. He was the first territorial governor in the State of Oregon afterwards. The wife, she doesn’t say much about it anyway. But this street, the sidewalks were put in, in 1911.
SD: And this street is��
BM: This street is, you call it Lombard, but this is Jersey. Now, we’re back towards Jersey. The bank over there used to sit over here, and Mr. McChesney, a famous doctor use to be up there on the second floor, he was the head doctor of the Panama Canal and he moved out here to retire. This building has been here since 1908.
SD: That’s the St. Johns Hardware?
BM: St. Johns Hardware. Yeah, and there is our old show house out here, that’s what I went to when I was a kid. The old St. Johns garage used to be right in here where I worked. That’s torn down and gone. And, this is Jersey street that we’re going on you see. There was a couple of buildings here — McChesney Building was down here somewhere. It says “McChesney” right on the building because he was a famous doctor. He worked for Mayo(?) Brothers back east, and then went down to the Panama Canal as the head doctor on account of malaria. And then he retired and came out to St. Johns. Oh, that guy was a doctor. We had him for our kids. Anything went wrong with us, we had him.
And, this was nothing but a cranberry patch here. That’s the house that was there. This is vacant property there. There was a house set oh, about right here, and that was it.
SD: The terminal?
BM: One house was it, all the rest of it was vacant property. [Indistinguishable] We’re actually heading down towards the slough. I’ll get you lost I know that. But now see, Jersey goes straight ahead. And it jogs over here, this is John Avenue on the jog, and this becomes, was Bergard Avenue. This was Bergard Avenue right here. . . This was all farmland, all farmland except for one spot down here, and I’ll show it to you. That was Mr. Butnik, ��right here. This property belonged to him right there.
SD: On Weyerhauser and Lombard?
BM: They tore his house down and did away with it. But he used to go around the streets selling fresh vegetables and fresh fish, and he had a horse and he would go around in a buggy. He would say, “Fresh Fish!” and you didn’t have to go out and buy your vegetables either. This was all farmland, truck garden farms here. The Portland News Telegram paper went down here — this was all truck garden farms. Boy they grew the best peaches down here on the left that you have ever seen. A street car went down here, just went up there a couple of corners right down here to terminal four, and that was it. We can’t get down to terminal four now. Back in here is where I had my shag paper route to the houses. That one big house there burned, but this was all orchard in here.
SD: Roberts.
BM: Yeah, it was all orchards in here, and the best peaches. Oh we could just climb over the fence, and fill our shirt pockets full of them peaches. . . Now there was no road down there, and there was no road here. This turned and went right down where that white car is coming out you see.
SD: Ok, and that’s on, that’s North Terminal Road?
BM: That’s the Terminal Road, terminal four, and it went right down there, and they stopped and that’s where it was. And there was no road here at all, this was all empty fields. There was a farm that sat over here — Kalkenios(?). They sat there, you see. And there was no road from here down, and no road over that way. All railroad tracks and stuff like that. Now we’ll get down here a little farther, and there was no bridge here. This is a canyon that went through here, I used to get a pheasant every time going or coming through this canyon. And that was Kalkenios(?) farm that sat up in there. Right over there and it went through here. We walked down on that side, and there was a gate down there, and we’d open that gate and go through because they had cows pastured in there a lot of times, a lot of truck garden farmers over in there. And right down at the base of this thing was a big lake, about sixty feet wide, and about three blocks long and we’d call it the Wood Duck Lake. And a lot of wood ducks nested there and had their young there. And also, they was just loaded with turtles. Oh I tell you, I got more turtles with my name scratched on them than you could shake a stick at. And this has all been leveled off. It was a lot higher up in the air, and a big farmhouse here, and it tapered off over towards the railroad tracks back there you see. And this road was never here. This was farmland, and that was all, nothing down in there. . . .
SD: We’re going down into Borgard [?] and��
BM: We’re going down. See it used to be straight off here, and it used to be this height all the way through, and the lake was back in here. And there was nothing but lakes and sloughs down in here. . . .
Now you’re getting in to some of the older territorial part of it that hasn’t changed any, right down here where all this brush is. There’s a slough that goes back up in here, and it’s Gatt Slough. This was all willows down in here, just acres and acres of willows, or truck garden farm. In the evening the crows used to fly about twenty feet wide, and for a half hour steady from Sauvie Island over here to roost. That’s no kiddin’. You can see the cattails in there. That’s what is left of the slough. I hunted on these lakes. We didn’t know who it belonged to — we’d call it the City Lake.
SD: Where the Romar buildings are?
BM: Yeah, that was all lakes in there, and willows, that’s all they had. There was nothing down in here.
SD: Were these railroad tracks here?
BM: No, there was no railroad tracks, no nothing down in here, just nothing but willows, lakes, and truck garden farms in this whole area. That’s why I brought you in on this road, because it shows you the width of it. Because down here where Time Oil sits, they are sitting right on a lake, and that’s where we hunted, and we’d walk down there, and we’d go down to Nuthaven(?) this way. We’d walk down the Willamette River and down what we called Nuthaven where we fished. And that road goes down to Time Oil. You see where all that sits in there? That was all a big lake in there. This big high ground in here is all dredged. This has all been dredged in. This road wasn’t here. None of this stuff was here, and no railroad tracks, just sand and willows and truck garden farms. More truck garden farms over to the right over here pretty soon. Boy that was a good one. And so, this is all, and we would walk right down that way. There was a road over there. A dirt road would run right along this side of the Willamette River all the way past all these places. . . .
SD: We’re now on North Rivergate.
BM: Is that what they call it? I don’t know, because there was no roads down here. We just walked all the way. I’m not kidding, that was a lot of walking. . . We hunted when we walked this part because there was no fishing in here. This railroad wasn’t here. This road made it so you could go down to the iron company. In this part of town we get all the junk out here in North Portland. And I never will forget — I laughed, Linnton over there on the other side of the river — they didn’t want them gas turbines put out there to generate electricity. They made too much noise that close to the town. And this was all just flat land like a swampland. They just went ahead and done what they wanted to do, the powers that be, they just don’t care.
I was fishing down there on the Willamette Slough with my brother-in-law and he said, “They’ve done everything, they’ve put the turbines in, they got the gas, run a pipe down to them and everything.”
But I said “Yeah, but just wait because when they fire them things up,” I says, “and the west wind comes up it’s going to blow all that pollution right straight up into Portland.” That’s exactly what happened, and DEQ closed them down. Now they got nothing but a big flat slab out there, cement slab. But they wouldn’t listen to anybody.
So that’s why we get a lot of junk out here, because they don’t listen to us. Now this hill wasn’t here, it was all dredged in. It was all flat lake. Now Ramsey lake is over on your right side when we get to the top of this hill. It’s all filled in.
SD: So it’s not there any longer?
BM: No, it’s all filled in. The same way as Five-Mile Lake. You give them ten years and it will be filled in. I can guarantee you that. I can tell by what’s going on. Now this is all filled — it was flat like you see over here. That iron works was in there. That was one of the worst things ever put in here, for dust accumulation. Ramsey Lake property sat right out in here, to your right. There is where Ramsey Lake and the swamp used to sit. There was a slough that used to come up through there — Ogden Slough. Nuthaven used to sit over here where we used to fish, and that’s where Shaver Transportation used to keep their boom logs that they would put around the log tows, little smaller logs that they would put around the bigger tows. . .
We watched them build this grain elevator down there. Everyday it just kept raising it up. They kept pouring the whole thing, just sliding the cement, it would set that fast. Just put on one right after the other. Now this is another thing. This is why my car is all brown. They unload hundreds and hundreds of cars down here. They don’t care about the dust around here. They wait until midnight and then they start unloading, and this is what is all over the car. You breathe it. They can’t do nothing about it, they put that railroad track in over there just for these people here. But that was Nuthaven over there.
SD: What is that, Columbia Grain Incorporated?
BM: Yes, that’s CGI over there, but that’s where Nuthaven was — in there. They filled that in, and built these plants on it you see. . .
[END SIDE A, TAPE 2 OF 2, BEGIN SIDE B]BM: Ok, that’s Lando Lake, which used to be Alber’s Milling Company, Triangle Building Company went together and they built this, and they’re here.
SD: That’s that grain elevator.
BM: That’s the feed mill. The grain elevator is back on the other side. I don’t know what that is. Now this is the Columbia Slough coming up. You see there was no bridge here, and there was no sewer pipe over here, because they put that in too. Now wait a minute, way up there past that bend, see where the other railroad track is?
SD: Right.
BM: You go on up past that bend up there a little bit, and there was another lake in there on this side of the slough. And that was Frenchie Bozy’s Lake. Now the mouth of the slough is down that way.
SD: Right, near Kelly Point park.
BM: That’s right, that’s where the mouth of the slough is. I don’t like to go down there, because there is one road in, and they have a lot of dope transferring down there, and a lot of breaking and entering. I don’t like to get down in where there is one road out because somebody, being my age, they might jump us. But this was all flatland, and swamp and stuff. The first part of this as I told you was Frenchie Bozy’s.
SD: And who was Frenchie Bozy?
BM: He worked with my brother at the UP shops, down there building box cars at the Union Pacific car barns. And he bought that, and there’s a story with that. That’s my brother-in-law’s problem. We took him down there to shoot ducks one time. We didn’t know we weren’t supposed to. . . .
We went down there hunting ducks, and it was loaded with ducks. We get up the next morning and go down there to this lake, this city owned lake, and there wasn’t any ducks on it. We had my brother-in-law with me, and he said “You kids are crazy, there wasn’t any ducks down there. I don’t see a one of them.”
So, we took Bob home, and we took our car and went down to Dad’s boathouse and we got in our boat, and I said, “Kurt, I know there’s ducks in here somewhere. Let’s go find them.” So, we started in, now you’re into Smith property, see you’re getting into Smith’s property. All this property here clean until the slough, clean out to the river was Smith’s.
SD: Well, this is Willamette Industries right now.
BM: Now, this is all Willamette Industries now. This was all swampland, brush and willows. And so, we got down there and we found the lake. Oh my word, I’ve never seen so many ducks in my life.
SD: What lake was that?
BM: Frenchie Bozy’s lake, that’s all I could call it, because that was the name of the man who owned it. Well, we went out there and shot. We just held our guns up. They flew out over us and came back over this way. And we just threw the gun up, never asked anything else, we just started shooting. And, it just rained ducks. We would go around and slap their heads on the gun barrels and make sure they were dead, and we went to give them to my brother-in-law, give them to my dad, and give them to everybody. And he says “Where did you get that?” and I told him. And he says, “Well I’ll go with you tomorrow morning.”
“Ok go with us tomorrow morning.” Well he went with us the next morning, and Gordon and me went out and did the same thing we done before and the ducks went over. We looked over and Bob was still standing there with his gun on his shoulder, mouth open looking up in the air, and I said “Shoot Bob shoot!”
He forgot he even had a gun in his hand. He never seen so many ducks in his life. Then he says “You know you kids could get in trouble. This belongs to Frenchie Bozy.” So we got out of there as quick as we could then. We didn’t know we was poaching on Frenchie Bozy’s private property. There was no fences, so how could you tell? Yeah, this is all Smith land. All through in here — he had a lot of property.
SD: Now you said there is Smith Lake?
BM: Yeah, there’s what’s left of it here, on this end, but the other end is all covered up. You’ll see it right up here on the right. . . .
This divides Five-Mile and Smith’s property down across��..
SD: That little island down there?
BM: No, those high power lines going across. We used to poach, and we could stand on that line because it belonged to the electric company, and we could shoot ducks on either property and they couldn’t do nothing to us see. . . .
SD: And that’s at the edge of Smith Lake��..
BM: No, that’s Five-Mile Lake.
SD: ��that’s Five-Mile Lake.
BM: Smith Lake is back there where you see them telephone [poles?]. This is Five-Mile Lake property that belonged to Ledbetter. Now you’ll see what I mean about them letting it dry up. See there was no road down in here at all. I’ll show you the only road pretty soon that is down in here. I’ll go slow so you can look see how low the water is. Now, it’s five miles around that lake — see how low that is in there. It is really low.
SD: Isn’t this the time of year that it would be really low?
BM: No, it never did get that low, because see Bybee Slough kept that lake at one level.
SD: And that slough didn’t go��..
BM: They had a dam there for the Smith Lake see, and that little island was there, and that kept that full of water constantly. Now you wait another ten years and they’ll be building right there, because that why they are letting it drain down. When they filled Bybee Lake with garbage, they filled the slough with garbage. And there is no drainage for it, for either lake. So the property is going to go, like I told you, I bet in ten years you come out and they will be building on it. See, it’s pitiful, and we gotta have wildlife, and that is where they used to stay. Now that’s an island over there — that’s the island on the Columbia.
SD: It that where Lotus’s lie?
BM: No, it was on the other side.
. . . . Now we’ll get up here. This is all just brush and everything. When we get down here where we turn, there used to be a big sawmill, and they got their logs out of this river over here.
SD: Out of the Columbia?
BM: Out of the Columbia. They made shakes and shingles.
SD: And what is this road up here?
BM: That’s the North Bank Highway.
SD: So, there was a sawmill here by where North Bank Highway is now?
BM: Right there, yeah right where the highway sits. They got the logs right here, brought them up into the sawmill and they went clean up here to Suttle Road. You see. And Suttle Road is this first road right here.
SD: Ok.
BM: This was never here.
SD: Right here, right now we are on North Portland Road
BM: Yeah North Portland Road
SD: Which was not here before.
BM: No, because North Bank Highway road turned over that way toward Marine Drive, and this is the old North Portland Highway.
SD: And we just passed Suttle Road.
BM: We just passed Suttle Road. It goes back there just so far and that’s as far as it ever went. The rest of it was just dirt road. . . . This is all added. They built this especially for that, for taking cars down to that place that dumps them, that boat place.
SD: The railroad?
BM: Yes, the railroad built that special for them. And, this is the old one that they put in. There was none of this here when I was a kid. And, when you get down here to where Five-Mile Lake is, there was no road down here at all. This was all swampland. And willows, not cotton trees like we got here, but willows. This was called North Bank Railroad, and this was called North Bank Road. On the other side of this is what they called Three-Cornered Lake.
SD: That’s railroad tracks now. Was that there?
BM: Yes, that’s always been there.
SD: So on the other side of the tracks��[indishinguishable]
BM: On the other side there’s another track that comes from the tunnel out. You cross it when you come across the tunnel. . . And the other one comes from the gulch out, and it forms a triangle. Now this was all Five-Mile Lake, all sand, and all nice stuff.
SD: Where the cotton trees are?
BM: Yeah, no cotton trees, just nothing but sand, beautiful sand. And, we used to ice skate around there all the time.
SD: Ice skate��
BM: Right there. . . . That lake in the winter time, it froze over, and I could drive the car on it.
SD: And what was the name of that lake again?
BM: Five-Mile Lake.
SD: Five-Mile Lake. So you used to go ice skating on it?
BM: Yeah, yes that’s right. Now here, this bridge has always been here, and there was another sawmill. This is the Columbia Slough right here, and there was another big sawmill right here.
SD: Se we’re just going over the Columbia Slough on North Portland Highway.
BM: That’s right, and right here was the sawmill. And they had sawmills all the way up. And the only thing they had out here — Tommy Luke way back over there ?� [I] busted a couple of his windows shooting a pheasant one time. Caught myself. I think if he knew it I’d of had to pay for it. Anyway that was his green house over there. The fellow that sold out to Whiting Transfer got that. Now we’re coming up to St. Johns Depot.
SD: Right there at East St. Johns train tracks?
BM: Yeah, it used to say right across the face here: “St. Johns Depot.” That’s where you would get your ticket, and get your trains.
SD: Is that the same building?
BM: That’s the same building. They just rearranged some of the stuff see. It’s still sitting there, the same building.
SD: But that wasn’t in use when you were living here, is that correct?
BM: Well, no, we had to go downtown to buy our tickets. But it was��
SD: But you could get on here.
BM: You could get on here I presume, yes. So that’s the old St. Johns railroad station. Now we’ll take you back down and show you some more, go over this way. A lot of area, I’ve walked this all. In fact, two-thirds of this land down here was all owned by Calcanias(??). They owned virtually all that land from out where I showed you that first farm clean to Troutdale. They were shirt-tale relatives one up to another. In fact down here I’ll show you where two brothers lived. They had two houses, two brick houses exactly the same. Well, Augie(?) is retired now but I think Augie’s son is still in real estate up there in St. Johns yet. Now this was just a gravel road.
SD: We’re on — what road is this? Columbia Boulevard?
BM: This is actually what we call the county road. It was just two lanes. And it was all gravel. But I had a paper route out here. It was a big long shag for me, to go back in there to the farm. That was my telegram route. I gave that up on account of that shag and got another news telegram route. And got a big long shag on that.
SD: And what is a shag?
BM: A shag is where you have to go way back in four or five blocks and drive way back out without delivering papers, it takes time. You liked to deliver your papers, and get it over with and get home. So that’s what we called a shag.
And so down here a little ways, you’ll see some more of the changes that’s made. Now, up where them trees are, that’s Oswego and a sewer pipe runs straight through to the slough. We be sitting on a sewer pipe. . . we’d be sitting right smack dab on the top of the sewer pipe. It runs right straight down through here, clean out to the sewer. And that’s the one I told you that had back water. We’d fish off of it and catch the stuff and I went and fished off the end of it and caught croppy, and catfish. Well this is where it came from, right straight down here. This was all woods on this side, farmland over here, and they called it “St. Johns Woods” up here on this left here. This was called St. Johns Woods. And that’s all the way up to Pier Park, the St. Johns Woods. They tore most of it out and built homes with it, and they are building more homes up here.
Now this is all farmland, truck garden farms, all of them are Calcunios(?). Now on the left here, that was all farmland.
SD: Where Ridgecrest Timbers is right now?
BM: Yeah, all this was all farmland
SD: Up to that berm there?
BM: All up to the top of the hill there you see. And Calcunios(?) houses, the two houses I was telling you about used to sit right over here, right up at the top of this hill. They had two cement houses, and that hill went straight out, and then the farmland went down a little bit. There was no bridge here — we just went down and over and went across the railroad tracks. There was too many people that got killed, so they put the bridge in. And so, right here was an orchard . . . Now you see all that grass over there, way over there?
SD: Uh-huh.
BM: That’s Bybee Lake all filled by the dump.
SD: So that used to be a dump there?
BM: That was a dump. They filled that all in, yes. That was all landfill for years.
SD: And when did that happen?
BM: Well, it had to be when they had the Depression. My brother-in-law used to haul all the scrap iron from there, and he was laid off in ’35 from U.P. Railroad.
SD: That’s when they started it or they filled it in?
BM: . . . . They started in ’37. I’ll show you down here. We used to get our sleds and we’d go down here, and Wapato Lake went from here all the way around to the Columbia Slough in a semi-circle, and when it froze over we’d take our sleds and come down off of this hill and go on that lake and go way around. Well, that’s the “Black Woods,” we’d call it. We used to walk down through there and over here.
SD: Down across the River Gate Auto Wrecking you called the “Black Woods?”
BM: We’d call this the Black Woods over here because it was so thick you couldn’t hardly see out. We’d walk along the edge of that, and come down here to the county road. And that’s where they built our incinerator — right there you see. And they done away with the incinerator and started to fill this up.
SD: Is that what that building is?
BM: Yeah, well it’s archives now. [on Columbia Boulevard] You can go back in there now. They have a lot of records in there now. Now this was all farmland in here, and Wapato Lake went from here all the way around the slough. You see how it went there?
. . . . Now this was owned by Ledbetter here, now he owned this farm here, and my friend rented it from him.
SD: Where this auto wrecking is now?
BM: Yeah, where this auto wrecking is��
SD: There was a farm here?
BM: There was a farm here, and we would turn right here. It was uphill, you see. Now over here, this was all brush, this was all high ground here. See where them trees are on the left there? That ground used to come straight across, and straight out that way. And here is Ramsey’s graves, see them here, see the graveyard back in there?
SD: Yes.
BM: Alright.
SD: And who is that?
BM: Ramsey. Back up in here, Ledbetter owned this piece of property right up here. And this went up high. There was no road here. Like I said it come straight across, right in here it was real high, and there was a gate up there and you would walk down. . . This toArrowhead Bend slough right here.
SD: And where did you used to go in��
BM: Right there where that fence is.
SD: Right there where that fence is. So the ground was up higher��
BM: Oh yes.
SD: Than it was here.
BM: It was as high as this car or higher.
SD: It’s about six feet up, or six feet higher.
BM: At least six feet. You see, there were no railroad tracks in here. And then there is a bank over there that goes down quite a ways over there, and we fished right along there. And there is the Ogden Slough right over that way, and on the right hand side was the Bybee Slough. This were no roads here at all. So that gives you a pretty good perception of what it is doesn’t it?
SD: Uh huh.
BM: Well, that’s Ramsey Lake Wetlands. There’s not much more to show other than what you have seen right there. You can see how that land from up there comes straight across, and then down in here where Arrowhead Bend was in the slough��.
SD: Now they just have all this power��.
BM: Yeah, they built a power station in there. This was all much higher, higher than that station there, you see. [Silence] Yeah, see this land come straight across, right up there at them trees. They bulldozed it out. That’s the way that property was when I was a kid. . . .
SD: Ok, well thank you very much, and it is 2:30 (PM), we began at 12:45 (PM). The initial part of the interview and the tour, and today’s date is still August 19, 2000.
BM: Right.
[INTERVIEW ENDS]