George Mitchoff grew up recreating on the Columbia Slough and recalls fishing and hunting in the area. As an adult, Mr. Mitchoff has been active in educating people about the Columbia Slough.

Oral History

Narrator: George Mitchoff
Date of birth: December 19, 1928
Interviewer: Josh Kline
Date: August 18, 2000
Location: Portland, Oregon
Transcription: Stacey Lambach
Edited by Donna Sinclair

GM: Mount Angel was a German community. ��still is for that matter. My dad grew up in, young adult life, in Northwest Portland, and my mother stayed and was educated in Mount Angel, then came to Northwest Portland to work. That was how they met. They’ve been in Portland since right after World War One; they were married in 1924. They lived most of the time in Northwest Portland.

My mother’s mother lived in Mount Angel, owned a lot of property there. Not a lot, but more than a city lot. They raised grapes and whatnot there. Her brothers and my mother decided that they had to take care of her. They made an agreement, and my mother’s family traded the property in Mount Angel for property here in North Portland in 1932. That’s where I grew up and went to grade school and high school. Alice’s family lived too far away; I didn’t know them at that time.

JK: What kind of work did your parents do?

GM: Well, my dad, most of his life, was a foundry worker. He was a pattern maker and a core maker in Columbia Steel Casting Co. My mother was just a homemaker until the war. She went to work in St. Johns. I can’t remember the technical name, but it was a box factory where they made wooden boxes for fruit and berries and that kind of stuff. In fact, Alice’s mother worked there at the same time. We found out many years later [laughs]. My mother only worked 1938 or ‘9 to maybe 1944, or something like that. Maybe not even that long.

JK: Did you have any brothers or sisters?

GM: One sister, a couple years younger.

JK: Is she still living?

GM: She lived in Portland all her life until out of high school and worked around for a few years and eventually wound up– her husband was a doctor– and they wound up in Los Angeles. She’s been down there ever since. Her name is Virginia Griffith.

JK: What can you tell me about your childhood in this area?

GM: [Laughing] Well, I lived on kind of a farm. We had half an acre, something like that. We moved there in ’32. There was no work, the Depression. My dad always had a job, but he didn’t have work, there was nothing to do. We just lived off the land. In those years, even though it was in the city limits, it was right on the border of city limits, a mile from here or less. Where I lived there were no streets or sidewalks, the house just sat out there where there should have been a street, but there was just a dirt track.

The people raised chickens, which we did also, and rabbit. We always had a great big garden and fruit trees and berries, and for a short time about 1935 we bought a cow. We had a little barn or shed, we called it a shed. We used to take the cow out in the front yard and bring it water and milk it, and we probably had that cow or another. We only had one cow, but we changed it. I would guess until after the war started ’43 or ’44, and then we never had a cow after that. But it was part of sustaining life here.

My dad didn’t work. There was no work in the foundry, but he developed black lung from the foundry. After about 1939 or ’40 he had to quit. He never really went back after that. Although he lived until he was about 84, the cancer in the lung eventually killed him. He had a pretty good life. When the war broke out he went to work as a wood worker in a casket factory. And he did that until he retired, so quite few years later.

I went to Peninsula Grade School until third grade. We were Catholic and went to St. Cecilia, which is now Queen of Peace, I was there about three and a half years. I was a half-termer in those years. If you weren’t a perfect age you couldn’t start in September, they got to wait until January, so classes started in September and January. Those were always half-termers. That was all over this city. Eventually, I don’t know when it was, I must have been about 6th or 7th grade, the city quit that and allowed younger kids to start in September. My parents decided my sister and I should have a Catholic education. They [Kenton area Catholics] didn’t have a school, so all the children at the church in the Kenton area were bussed to Portsmouth to Holy Cross, Portsmouth District. The school there was Holy Cross District, but the parochial school system did not have a halfterm. They wouldn’t put me in the fourth grade, I would have missed half a year, so they made the first half of the third year over. I was always half a year older than everybody else even in high school, until I eventually got out. And after I graduated from Holy Cross I went to Columbia Prep. The only reason I went there was the whole class, about ten or fifteen boys, in the eighth grade went there, so I went along.

It was very expensive; my parents couldn’t really afford it. But I always was kind of an energetic guy, even all through grade school, I had some kind of job. I worked at a paper route. I worked for the church. So I saved my own money and went to Columbia Prep. I went there for several years and I was kind of a bad boy [laughing]. They didn’t tolerate things like smoking, especially in those years. I was eventually expelled and went over to Central [High School] for my junior year and I wound up with the same problem, they didn’t tolerate the smoking. It was a spell from there. I went to Roosevelt [High School] my senior year. I actually lost my entire junior year as far as credit goes. Roosevelt actually gave me some credit for the religious classes I had taken in my first two years, which was a gyp. They didn’t have to do that, but because parochial schools had such a high level of education they would accept things like that. When it came time for graduating I was a couple credits short, so I went to summer school and they gave me my diploma. So, actually, I got out in three years and one summer school because I didn’t really go to school much in my junior year [laughing]. So I worked and was eventually drafted in the Korean War, came back and went to a couple years of college. I ended up at Tektronix; I ended up spending most of my life working out there. So that’s basically my education.

JK: Good enough. So you grew up in that same house?

GM: Oh yeah, lived there the whole tine until I was married.

JK: Can you describe the house? Did you guys have plumbing and everything?

GM: Oh yeah, everything. It was a farmhouse, two-story– one bedroom down, two up. The only bad thing about it was the heating. Even though it had the plumbing and was a very adequate place to live, it was a long narrow house and the living room was in the middle. We had an oil burning stove, that was the only heat in the house other than the wood stove in the kitchen. The kitchen was rather large, like the area here. There was no heat upstairs. So we just heated with wood and oil, but the oil, we had to carry it in. We had a little shed and we had oil drums and the oil company would come and fill those oil drums. Everyday we would have to go out with a small bucket and pump the oil and put it in a tank behind the stove, there was no automatic flow to it or tank for it. This was pretty common. A lot of homes had a system like that.

My mother lived there until about ten, eleven years ago, when she moved in here with me. My sister and I sold the house, and at that time the people who moved in were still using that system of heat. The woman who bought the place eventually put in gas, but for a few years, we sold that in about 1990, she was still using the oil. She would have trouble with the stove and would call me up to tell me to come down there and tell her what was wrong with it and things of that nature. I eventually quit doing that. She didn’t appreciate it anyway, so I quit [laughs]. But it was a shake house, just one bath; it did have a fruit cellar under the kitchen. When we moved there was just a hole, a dirt hole, it had steps going down into it, we dug it out. You know these concrete bricks you buy for building? Well, years and years ago they made a brick similar to that, about this big [gestures] with holes in it; it was made out of clay and some kind of sand or concrete because there would be streaks of white in it. Anyway, that was very common thing to use for foundations in houses that didn’t have a basement, and we bricked that cellar underneath the kitchen, and we stored our vegetables and fruit down there when they dug it out.

My parents knew the people we traded that property from, the guy was a moonshiner. In the kitchen there were hot water/cold water pipes going up into the bedroom from the kitchen; they had tanks and pots up there where they made their liquor. Underneath the living room, when you rolled the rug back, there was a trapdoor and a crawl space down eighteen inches or so and they would hide their liquor down there [laughs]. Oh man, he was like a hound dog. When we dug the basement out some of my dad’s brothers came over and they hand carried the dirt up the steps, through the kitchen, and out the back door one bucket at a time. Every now and then I would hear cussing. They would run into a bottle of liquor and it would break while they were digging [laughs]. This guy named Fisher, he was making moonshine and giving it or selling it to the neighbors, who in turn were distributing it. The FBI, or whoever it was, caught them and he went to jail. One of the neighbors, an Italian family by the name of Lassetto, the old man there, he spent some jail time too for selling that stuff. But there were probably some old maids drinking as much as they were selling [laughs], they never were caught. If the FBI, or whoever, was investigating that liquor they didn’t press charges against these women. There was quite a few family out there who were living off that booze [laughs].

JK: Could you describe your neighborhood?

GM: Well, it was just all white and very, very poor. Just a block from our house there were paved streets and a sewer, but our house and any other house west of us in that vicinity had no sewer, no streets, no sidewalk, and cesspools. A cesspool is a hole, generally four to six feet across, very deep in the ground, then they brick it and they overlap, that is how the liquid drains into the soil. We had a cesspool and it filled up on us in a year. I don’t know exactly the year, ’37 or ’38 and we had to dig a new one and it was deep. I don’t know how deep, but as a little boy I would look down there and I just thought, my word, it was half way to Hell.

The rest of the neighborhood, just about everybody had chickens and everybody made a garden and had fruit trees. Most people didn’t have jobs; if they did they only worked very little in the ’30s. The war just changed absolutely everything. There was a couple of families, one in particular, the Schmitz family, had a dairy farm right down here a couple of blocks on Baird Street. They had maybe a dozen cows, a very immaculate setup, a barn, concrete floor, not like ours, and they milked these cows and sold milk to everyone in the neighborhood. We did that too, but she was such a big cow it gave way more milk than we could use, in fact that was how I met the group of guys that I started hanging around the slough with. I delivered milk to this one particular family and started hanging around these guys who went down on the slough and played. That family’s name was Swiberg. I don’t know what else you want to know about the neighborhood. There was one black family a block and a half away that was there for maybe less than a year. They had two little children. Just kind of an old community. A lot of people spoke their own tongue. There were Scandinavians and Germans, and even though my parents were Hungarian they spoke German. There was an English family I’d go fishing with. Other than that just a plain old neighborhood, never seems to have any trouble or that kind of stuff.

JK: What about the stores and buildings?

GM: Well, we lived a long way away from stores or anything. There was a big grocery on Lombard that was eight or ten blocks from where I lived. Over on Peninsula there were two little “mom and pop” stores, but they did not sell anything fresh, it was all canned stuff, and candy and that kind of stuff. If you had to get meat or that kind of stuff, or fresh bread, you had to go all the way up to Lombard Street. There were also three little stores, a service station on Columbia and the other two were on Peninsula Avenue, but they did sell pop, and beer, and wine, and a lot of canned goods and candy. I remember if we ever had a couple of pennies we would run over to the store and buy some candy. The real stores were up here on Lombard Street, it was a long ways away and most of the time we couldn’t even afford gas, so we walked up there. I had a little red wagon I would pull and my sisters, and mother, and I would walk up to the store and put the groceries in that and haul it back [laughs]. Eveyone had bicycles, even my dad would ride one quite a bit, other than that we walked. We walked to church many times because we couldn’t afford the gasoline in the ’30s.

JK: Tell me about a typical day as a fourteen-year-old.

GM: A fourteen-year-old? Well, let me see, where will I be? I’d be freshman or sophomore in high school or something like that. I walked to school many times. I went to Columbia Prep., it was at University of Portland. It was kind of a unique school because there were no college students there during the war, there were some, at the very, very most maybe fifty, probably less than that. So the prep school used the same facilities as the college and the priests and the brothers that taught the college taught the preps too. In the spring or the fall when the weather was nice I walked to and from school most of the time, which was a hell of a long ways really [laughs]. I played a lot of sports, so in the fall I was playing a lot of football, and in the spring of the year I was running track, so I ran most of the time, all the way up there and all the way back. I was a nut about running. I could run and run. In fact, I called myself the original jogger. I was running long before they ever started that fad of running.

JK: What did you do on the weekends?

GM: Well, fifteen or sixteen was when I stopped coming down here on the slough. From when I was about eight until I was fifteen or sixteen, especially in the summer time, we spent most of the time down there fishing; just playing around on the log rafts, and we did a lot of swimming, but not in the slough. We would ride our bikes down to Jantzen Beach where the malls are now. The east end of the island was undeveloped, in fact, the whole island was undeveloped. The only development there was Jantzen Beach Amusement Center… the swimming pool, the dance hall, and all the rides. Well, that was about the only thing really down there. The midget car race track. In the summertime we’d ride our bikes down there and hide them in the brush, then walk down to the east end and swim in the Columbia River; did that a lot in the spring and summer months of our teenage years. There was a lot of fishing on the slough.

One guy I ran around a lot with in those years, he built a kayak. It had ribs in it like building a model airplane, then you’d cover it with canvas and paint it with dope(?), and that stretches it tight. I had one, in fact I still have the remnants in the garage. The canvas is all rotten. His was a two-man, mine was only a one-man. He lived on Hunt Street, we would carry that thing over to the slough. We would paddle up and down the slough and fish from it.

The slough at one time was a complete waterway, it had openings on both ends of it. A little ways past Vancouver Avenue the slough bend went to the Cloumbia River and this didn’t go any further, except all these golf courses– Colewood, Broadmore, Riverside, and Columbia Edgewater. All these golf courses have remnants of this, little sections of water that run east and west. Well, at one time this was all a flood plain. So, these are remnants of people diking in certain areas forming little lagoons. This system of waterways runs all the way to the water between the lake and the river, that area was all part of the flood plainof the slough. But over the years they diked it here and diked it there, eventually the only thing that was left that was a waterway was this system where Columbia Edgewater is, this side of 33rd Avenue, maybe half a mile, and that is where Columbia Slough enters into the river.

There were, on the slough, several sawmills during the ’20s and the ’30s. There was one right down here at the foot of Denver Avenue. The tugboats would come up the slough with logs and leave them at the sawmills up and down the slough. I can only remember one sawmill, but I can remember many many set of piling that were still remnants of a sawmill that was there that stretches all the way of to Willamette river at Kelly Point Park. There were quite a few of them along the way; this one operated until about 1960. They were still bringing logs, not from this end, but up from Willamette River from this end of the slough. This was a cedar mill up here, so they would bring cedar logs up.

The cedar has a swell, as it goes down into ground, the butt swells away. The root system, they call the butt end of a log, unless you go up on boards and cut it high up– what they did in old days when they hand cut, because it was easier. But the powersaw cut it down very close to the ground so that part of the tree was not useable. When the log comes up in the mill they would cut that off and it would be as thick around as the table, and maybe two feet thick. We called them dollar logs and the slough was loaded with them. They just threw those things back in the water, they never used them for anything. They never ground them up for sawdust or anything. Nowadays that would never happen, they would make particle board out of them or something. The slough was loaded with these dollar logs. I’ve been on some that were so big you could sit on them as a little boy and take a stick and it would spin around; you could cross the slough on them.

When the flood came in ’48 they filled this in, so the slough now ends right there; there is no more access to the Columbia River. Even when I was a young kid down there, no tugboats came in down there, but long before my time tugboats could go all the way up and down. What they did, they left the water there before the flood of ’48, but they built a barrier of timber across, great big logs like this on both sides and then they run boards across and space them, so water could go through, but nothing else. When we got older we had kayaks we would carry down to the slough and paddle down to the Columbia River, then carry them over this [timber barrier] and put them in the Columbia River and paddle on down to Hayden Island and swim. We had the kayaks down there to play in.

In fact, one time, we tried to it do a couple of times, but only one time did we succeed because it was such a long ride. The guy who owned the two-man kayak, we carried it down to the slough, put it in and paddled this way to the Columbia River, carried it over the barrier there, and into the Columbia River all the way to Kelly Point Park, up the Willamette River and into the slough and all the way back to Kenton in one day. [Laughs] It would be that way today if they would open that thing up down there. You’d only be paddling against the current for about three-quarters of a mile, because there is very little current, it goes back and forth with the tide, but that is so minute it [was] hardly noticeable. You would be paddling in the slough, that would be considered still water. You get into the Columbia River, to the Willamette, then go up the Willamette against current for about three-fourths of a mile or one half mile into the slough then back, see? We tried it several times, but didn’t make it because we started too late. One time we did go all the way around. It was a long day [laughs].

JK: Did you spend much time with your family?

GM: Well�� actually no. I was kind of a loner, when it comes to the family. I did a lot of stuff around as a boy, you know I used to cut the grass and stake the cow. I never learned how to milk the cow. I worked in the garden and picked blueberries, go to church. Once in a while picnics in the summertime with my dad’s family. There was no animosity or anything of that nature, but it just wasn’t like Little League families or soccer families today, it was nothing like that you know. I played so many sports and so many ball games all my life, my parents saw me play one sofball game in my entire lifetime. We loved everybody, we were a decent family and all that, but I don’t know… my dad’s brothers, their families, his siters were almost the same way. I guess it was the strain of the ancestry or something. I don’t know [laughs].

JK: Did you go shopping in Kenton at all?

GM: Oh yeah. We used to go up to Kenton, my parents would go up there. There was a restaurant in Kenton, it was a Chinese restaurant. We would go up there on Saturday evenings and get Chinese food; that was really a treat, that didn’t happen until almost the war years. I guess. There were grocery stores and bars, a lot of bars, a liquor store, and there was a Safeway store that came there during the war. Then there were a couple of “ma and pa” type stores. Safeway was a big thing when it moved in, but that didn’t last; as soon as the war was over they were gone.

When the war came, that’s when they built Vanport City and that changed everything absolutely everything. You just cannot believe how things changed when the war came. Where I lived was Endicott Street, it was not paved, it was just a path. West of there they built a housing project called Columbia University Homes. These were nonpermanent homes that were all built on stilts and one level. They were all built in an “L” shape with three units to an “L” shape. It was just like a military complex. Every one was alike only they would just position them different, and it was just huge. They came right up one block from where we lived and that’s where they stopped.

The remnants of the streets are all still there with the names that refer to islands in the Aleutian Islands. A lot of names after islands in the war, street names. After that they built another project called the Columbia Villa, these are brick. These were excellent , excellent homes. They were brick halfway up then wood, two-story. The only people allowed to rent there were shipyard workers, managers, supervisors, or foreman, people like that. The average shipyard worker, like welder or riveter, they had to live in University Homes. Very, very discriminating when you look back on it [laughs].

JK: So, you remember them building Vanport?

GM: Oh yeah, it became the second largest city in Oregon. It was bigger than Salem. I never spent too much time down there, even though I played down in the slough a lot. There were a lot of minorities, but just everyone of them were shipyard workers and then the flood came. Vanport was built after University Homes and Columbia Villa were built. Those were built first then they started on Vanport City. The city must have lasted six years or so until the flood wiped it out. Then it was just barren. After the flood we did go down there to play, actually I was older, you couldn’t call it play because we would take twenty-twos out there to hunt rabbits, squirrels, and muskrats. I was almost out of high school, actually I was out of high school in ’47 and the flood came in ’48. A lot of my friends worked down there after the flood dismantling the houses for a construction company.

They salvaged a lot of lumber, which is kind of surprising. Nowadays it would not be surprising, but back then, why save all that lumber when you have millions of trees growing around the corner? I know because after high school I went to work in the woods for about three and a half years. To me a log was nothing. In fact, I’ve seen logs going down the highway on trucks nowadays that we wouldn’t even pick up to burn. Terrible waste, the kind of logging for companies I worked with. Not just of timber, but the land. They just cut it and haul it, and if you broke things down or disrupted the countryside or the hillside it didn’t matter. Just get the log out and sell it.

JK: No, that’s ok.

GM: [Laughs].

JK: Did you enjoy your childhood in the area?

GM: Yeah. I think back about it all the time, especially going down there on the slough fishing and playing on the water. I always loved playing on the water. I must have been about eleven and this family we used to sell milk to had a boy, that family lived on the slough, Getz family was their name. Some of the boy’s grandchildren still own a lot of land there. Have you ever been down to the Portland race track? Well, when you get to the main building on the right side going east there is a great big yellow house that sits a long ways back from the road, that was the Getz family farmhouse. They had a great big barn in the back and a shed alongside and their property was right on the slough. The boy’s name was Frank and he was kind of a chubby little guy so we called him Porky. We’d go down to Porky’s and climb over the dike and fish on the other side.

JK: Do you feel that children today have the same opportunity?

GM: No. Heck no. When we first moved here years ago, we’ve been here about fory years, once in a great while I’d see a kid with a fishing pole walking down the street. You never see that any more. You don’t even see kids with a baseball and glove going up here with a bat hitting the ball around Kenton school. [Now] it’s all so organized; they either go into Little League or they don’t play. There was a group of kids I was with and finished in grade school. When those kids grew up to be teenagers that group of kids lived up on Portland Boulevard and Greeley Avenue. There’s a park up there, but there wasn’t in those years. These kids and their parents actually built a Little League softball diamond there. They put up a backstop out of their own money on city property. You could do that in those years. Like we did down at my place, we got a permit to use the two city lots next to us to grow vegetables and berries. You could get a permit and it would be like your property. That’s what these parents and their kids did, they built a softball diamond there for themselves and they had a neighborhood team. It was all unorganized. Of course there is no place for them to do that anymore really. Even if they did, I do not think they would do it. I don’t see that any more. No, I don’t think kids do anything like our childhood, but everything changes, you know?

JK: What would you like your children and great-grandchildren to see in this area?

GM: Well, first of all we only have two little grandchildren. I don’t know. The slough has such a reputaion for being a polluted body of water I don’t think my daughter who has the two grandchilderen would even let her children anywhere near that place. It was pretty bad. You could paddle along in your kayak or on a dollar log or once in a while we would find a dilapildated old rowboat and it would hardly get you across the slough before it sank. If you went by any of those discharge pipes you wouldn’t believe it. It was just as if every toilet in north Portland emptied into that thing. Just like down the pipe in the toilet and out in the slough. No kidding. The slaughterhouses, there must have been at least three here in the Kenton area. They butchered the animals, skinned and cut the meat away and the intestines and the blood and all of that would just wash down the trough and into the water. It was bad. The human waste and the animal waste, eventually if it was open water, would clean itself out over the long haul. But they claim that there is a lot of chemicals. Evidently there was a pottery company down here. I guess there must have been some other stuff that probably dumped chemicals because they say it’s highly toxic. Not to eat any fish that come out of it, but we did in those years. Everything I ever caught I’d bring home. I didn’t eat it, I didn’t like any fish, but my parents ate it and my grandmother who lived with us ate them. She lived to be about eighty, so [laughs]. My mother died when she was 98 or 99 and my dad died at 85. They couldn’t have got too polluted out of the water.

JK: . . . . Rafting or boating on the slough. Did you do any camping or picnicing or��.?

GM: Oh yeah, we used to take food down to Porky’s and build a bonfire and cook hot dogs and stuff of that nature. But other than that, no. My family never did. Nobody’s family ever did that. You’d find men up and down spend the whole day. There was a place way down there by the dike, by the railroad bridge goes north to Vancouver. Adjoining the slough in Vanport there was a lake called Triangle Lake. It was almost pristine water compared to the slough and I think it was kind of like a hobo camp. As kids we would ride our bikes down there and fish in that little Triangle Lake. There were evidence of canned goods laying around and campfires. I never did actually see anybody sleeping there, but I used to take food down there to Porky’s all the time. We’d be there all day long and get hungry. In the fall of the year sometimes though we’d go out across Schmeer Road. There was a cabin that used to grow commercially beans and cabbage and we’d go pick a nice small cabbage and peel away and have a salt shaker and just eat the raw cabbage. You’d get hungry when you’re a little boy and a long way from home. [laughs] There were pear trees and cherry trees — we’d go climb in a cherry tree or something, stealing fruit. That was common. That wasn’t considered stealing.

JK: What kind of fish did you guys catch?

GM: There were all kinds of stuff in there. Some of the real old-timers I’ve talked to that were down there in the twenties and teens say they caught trout or salmon, but I never saw any. We used to catch panfish, catfish, perch, crappy, bluegill, and bass. Just about everything. And in different parts of the slough it varied. The farther you got towards the Willamette River the more you really got the panfish kind of thing, like the crappy and the bluegill. But up on this end it was mostly percha and catfish, and the bass. The water was cleaner down there than this end.

One guy told me one time — he was about ten years older than I was — he said he caught two dozen trout one time. Well maybe he did, maybe he didn’t, I don’t know. [laughs]

JK: What other kind of wildlife did you see?

GM: A lot of muskrat and a beaver now and then, especially down in that far end. And all the birds you can imagine, especially herons. You’d see signs of beaver on that end down there, especially the Smith and Bybee Lake area. And the muskrath — in fact we used to trap the muskrat. We’d go over where Portland Meadows is. That was a game refuge over there. A rolling little ground, lot of little potholes of water and we put the traps in there and try to catch muskrat. We’d catch a few. Porky would take em. I don’t know if he sold the pelts. I don’t know if he ever did or not, but we’d give them to Porky. Once in a while we’d catch a duck. They’d step into the trap, we’d have to cut their leg off. Most of the time we cut the leg off. We caught a few. I brought a couple of them home. We would hunt down there too, but we didn’t do that too often. We were older, and it was strictly illegal because it was a game reserve, you know��if you ever got caught. The ducks were so thick down there — you can’t believe how thick they would be in the fall. Once in a while you’d see a state patrolman coming down Schmeer road looking for guys like us. But we never got in any trouble. We did shoot down there on occasion when we were older. And also in the Vanport area.

JK: What was the landscape like?

GM: ��..The side of the slough was very disturbing. It was mud. Especially in late summer or fall, when the water would be low. You could, in very, very few places get near the water because of the mud. It just wasn’t pleasant at all. I used to like to go up and down in a kayak, which we did have. But there was no grass, nothing. It was just mud when the water would go down. It was nice in the Springtime because the water would come way up to the grass area. And it was steep. It seemed like it always washed away and there would be tree trunks sticking out there and ratholes going back. Just mud, mud, mud, mud, mud. . . And that’s the way it is all the way down. To the end. To make it a pleasant area, besides cleaning up the water, they’d have to do a lot to the bank. A terrible amount of work to the bank.

I noticed down here just a few years ago, we did this where Denver Avenue crosses as far up as you can see, they took out that real sharp stone the size of a softball. From the high water mark down about four or five, six feet, they dumped a lot of water in there. So long as there is no strong current, that rock will probably stay there. That looks pretty damn decent, but that’s the only thing they’ve ever done. They intend to use the top of the dike, which runs a hell of a long ways out there, as part of their forty mile loop. You know, the jogging path that they’ve got planned. That was supposed to be part of it, the top of the dike.

In fact if you are going to do research on the slough you ought to go back to some of the older issues of the Oregonian. . . There was an article in the Oregonian three or four years ago — over twenty years they’ve been analyzing this water. Over 20 million dollars a year to analyze the water and yet it’s still as bad as it was twenty years ago. The only thing different is that raw sewage doesn’t go in there now except when it rains real heavy. Then it overflows. There is no animal waste because the slaughterhouses are gone. So it is cleaner.

But they keep analyzing. . . There is only one way it is ever going to get cleaned up without spending a lot of money, and that is opening this end up. And I seriously doubt that is ever going to happen because when the flood came Columbia Edgewater owned a lot of the property on the north side of Columbia Blvd. That’s where their golf couse is. It almost came up to where the slough is. Their clubhouse is on the other side of the highway and it burnt down. So they got the city or the corp of engineers to fill in next to the slough. That’s where they built their new clubhouse, so they’re going to be bucking all that big money down there that those country club people have. Which they never will allow, I am sure of that. It just won’t happen. And until that time the slough is going to stay just the way it is. It will get cleaner because less and less and less raw sewage goes in there. And rainwater. So eventually, maybe in another fifty years it will clean itself out, but before that time I seriously doubt it.

JK: Have you noticed any period of rapid development here in the area?

GM: In the Kenton area?

JK: – in Kenton or along the slough?

GM: Well, one big thing has been theDelta Park complex. First of all came the racetrack. The racetrack changed a lot. People sold their property that were farming and they made. . . In fact the Ditch [?] family owned a big portion of the land there. The city wanted to buy that for a parking lot — they wouldn’t sell it to them. They built their parking lot right around that land. Now it’s worthless, see?

I don’t know if there is any development because of the waterway. I just think some of the has stuff developed because people own property along it so it is a chance to make some money. You know. That’s the way the Ditch [?] family was. They did sell some of their’s, just not all of it.

The reason I know some of this stuff about the D? family is because there is a young man who lives next door over here and he runs around with one of the grandchildren of the guy I used to go down there and play with, Porky. You know what he eventually did? He got married. He became a pretty good softball player here in the city. He moved to eastern Oregon and he bought the whole town of Fields. Have you ever heard of Fields? You ought to go out there sometime. The Steens Mountains. It’s a motel, about a six-unit motel, a gas station and a cafeteria with about ten barstools. It was his town.

No there’s not much you can do, especially on the south side. That dike belongs to the Corp of Engineers. You can’t build on it. On the south side that property has been privately owned for years and years and years. That’s where the slaughterhouses were, and the sawmill, and M and M Woodworking company was down there. Up on the far end there’s an oil company, but that’s been there for decades and decades. Morrison Oil. And a few farmers. In fact a very good friend of mine had property right up to it and they raised garlic.

JK: When did you notice the biggest change in the pollution level?

GM: Well, I’d say when the slaughter houses were gone. The human waste would probably sink pretty fast, so that wasn’t always visible except if you were right by a discharge pipe. But the animal waste, the blood, that floated on the water. They were still doing that after I was going down there, when I was an eighteen or nineteen year old kid I wasn’t going down there any more. There were still the slaughterhouses. There was still one operating when we moved here in 1960. You smell it when they slaughtered. So probably when they quit the slaughterhouses was the biggest physical evidence, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a lot of environmental damage to the thing because of the human waste.

JK: When did you stop fishing there?

GM: Oh, probably when I was a senior in high school, I wasn’t going down there any more. And then by that time it would be only once or twice in the summertime. But when I was younger — 11,12,13,14 years old, we were down there every day. A lot of times in the evenings we’d go down there to fish.

JK: Would you fish down there today?

GM: If there were any fish in it. I haven’t seen any fish get caught in it for years. This friend and I went down to Kelly Point Park, must have been 6, 7, 8 years ago. We hiked into the slough area and there was a lot of evidence of people fishing. We fished down there right at the end where it went into the Willamette, but we didn’t catch anything. There was a lot of evidence of people fishing, but whether they were catching fish, I don’t know . . . Probably there are some fish, but up in this end there is nothing.

JK: Did you notice when the warning signs went up about the pollution in the water?

GM: No, In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one to be honest. I’ve heard about them in the last several years, but I’ve never seen one.

JK: What ethnic groups or populations do you think are most affected by the slough?

GM: Well, I think everybody is effected because it’s polluted. If it wasn’t polluted it would be a real recreational area. There area lot of Asians that go down there to fish, and Blacks, but you can’t say they are affected by the pollution. They’re there because they want to catch the fish. It doesn’t seem to matter to them or not whether it’s got mercury in the water or whatever it is.

There’s a lot of freshwater that’s polluted and the Oregon State Game Commision, Fish and Wildlife will tell you that there’s gonna be chemicals in the water, not to eat the fish on a regular basis. That doesn’t mean you can’t have a couple of croppy out of there every two months in the summertime or something like that. I go down here��a friend of mine has a small boat moored out at Scapoose and we go down and fish in Multnomah Channel and Scapoose Bay a lot. They say that’s polluted! You would have to eat a lot of those fish for that to affect you over a lifetime. . . . If they ever did what I said for them to do here, that would be a fantastic thing to paddle around in that area. And it would clean the waterway up, to let the Columbia flow through there.

JK: Do you think there could be a balance between industry and recreation?

GM: Heck yeah.There’s a company down here. Alta interviewed some of them for her work. They make wood products, but they only sell commercially. They are very very enthusiatic about cleaning the slough up. They donate money and cleaning parties. Down here at the end of Denver Ave there have been a couple of hobo camps on the slough. The police have been kicking them out. Six months later they’re back. There is old plastic tents, and tires, and what not. The company does a heck of a lot towards helping keep the slough clean. I don’t think you have any trouble talking the people into helping clean the place up.

JK: Do you ever think that will happen?

GM: Well, I don’t know, not the way things go. . . It might happen, but I’ll never see the day.

JK: Do you see any other solution?

GM: Other than opening it up like that? Well the big pipe that they’re putting in will help. It’s a discharge pipe, so that when they get a heavy rain, that’s going to help. They claim the base of of the riverbottom in the Willamette and the Columbia, the mud’s contaminated. If that’s contaminated as much as they say it is, they can clean up the water, but the mud is still going to be contaminated. The only way to clean it out is to dredge it out.

JK: Do you remember when Swift shut down, made some of the mills shut down?

GM: The exact date when Swift Company shut down?

JK: Just around that time, do you remember it effecting the community?

GM: Yes, because I knew some guys who used to drive trucks for meat packing companies. They’d go down there and get meat for Swift & Company. One of them still lives up here a ways. I suppose that when that shut down it affected a lot of people. I don’t know if they are involved in Kenton any more. It was a place people worked that shut down. You lost jobs. The mills, they never really employ a tremendous lot of men. The mill down here only had maybe a dozen men working for them. That kind of operation was very sporadic. When they got logs in, they would work. And when they were low on logs they didn’t work. That kind of situation. I don’t know if there was much of an impact.

The biggest effect on the economy, jobs, was when the war ended. [laughs] When the shipyards shut down. That did put a lot of people out of work. Not for long, because the war was over, we went on to other industries. But there was a short period of time when people were not working because the shipyards were not building any more. The war was very, very big, although I was too young to go until the Korean War.

The war in my life had a very big impact. I guess I was rather patriotic as a little boy. When they built the airport, that was something as far as I was concerned. I guess I didn’t mention that. That was one of the things I did as a teenager. Ride my bike over there to watch the military airplanes. Just absolutely facinated me to no end. They had four kinds of airplanes out there: the B-25, with the b? missile, that’s the airplane that bombed Tokyo; the Liberator, four engine bomber they used in Africa; and the P-39 was a single engine fighter plane, tricycle gear, the first tricycle gear the US Army/Air force ever had. We really used that very much. They sold a lot to the Russians during the war��.and then the P-38, which is a twin engine, twin boom airplane. Do you remember seeing pictures of that? Twin airplane, single-seated fighter. That was used all over the theaters, Africa, Europe, especially in the South Pacific.Those four kinds of airplanes were stationed down here. As a young man, fifteen, sixteen years old, too young to go to war, I would go down there and just be facinated by those airplanes. I spent a lot of time sitting on that dike down there watching airplanes.

JK: Have you been involved in the slough politics at all?

GM: No, I did for a time. I was taking part in the Smith annd Bybee Lake restoration. And I did that for probably a year/ a year and a half. It was so much involvement, so many people, and so many ideas thrown around in the first couple of months and it was all very interesting and exciting. Then after that you’d go to the meetings and well what happened? “Nothin’, nothin’��oh I talked to this guy, that commisioner. Nothin’, nothin'” And there it sits. It’s been fifteen years since they started that. I still see in the paper, meeting notices��Smith and Bybee Lake Restoration Program. [laughs] It got no place.

JK: Why?

GM: Well, I don’t really know. . . .

I worked for the Corp of Engineers for about a year one time when I was a kid. From all I could see then as a young man and read in the paper is that in an organization like the Port of Portland everything is appointed. There is no elected officers and ��they do things their own way and they do not give a damn. The airport is a very good example of the Port of Portland. They just run everything. They do what they want . They don’t care. To me it’s just a very, very damaging organization as far as the environment goes. They talk a lot, but they don’t give a damn, I don’t think.

It’s like dredging the Columbia River. The Corp of Engineers wants to dredge the Columbia River. Can you imagine going down and taking the mud out of that thing going down for three more feet? Where are they going to put that stuff? What’s going to happen to the fishing during that time they’re diggin up the river? It’s just stupid. All because some big industry wants to bring a bigger boat up the Columbia River. They might get a bigger boat that’s deeper�� pretty soon it’s gonna be wider and they won’t be able to get through the bridge. They already had to remodel that railroad bridge to get some of these boats up the river because it wasn’t wide enough.

JK: Do you have a vision for the future of the slough?

GM: Well, yeah. There’s no access to it. Even though the mud part’s still polluted, when there’s no sewer drainage, no industrial dumping, it could be used. They have a canoe regatta every year started by one of the Kenton neighborhood guys. The first one they had went from where the dump used to be down to Kelly Point Park and back. Now the recent ones, they go up here by Blue Lake and have a regatta up there. Have you ever been on one of those? It don’t amount to much, the slough up there, hell, you could probably jump across in some places. In fact you can’t even turn the canoe around. It’s just another area up there that has these little streches of water, but there is this one section on Airport Way that runs from a little ways away on Airport Way to almost the boat landing, Chinook Boat Landing by Blue Lake Park. It’s quite a stretch of water that doesn’t have any dikes across it, but it isn’t very wide and that’s were thay’ve been holding this regatta these last few years.

Like I say�� [the slough needs] access. The county did build a dock up there, but not a ramp. You have to be able to carry your canoe or kayak and be able to set it down on the water. You can’t slide it in. Like the Tualatin River — they’ve got some ramps for the canoeist. Younger children that probably couldn’t carry a canoe could drag it off the back of a truck or trailer and push it into the water and get into it. Or a handicapped person like myself, you know? There is no access. That is the same with Smith and Bybee Lake — there is no access. At Smith and Bybee Lake there is a small body of water, and then you have to portage your canoe maybe a hundred yards or less, maybe fifty yards, I think it is. That’s the only access, and there is no access to the slough around this area. So how do they expect people to use it and get interested in cleaning the damn thing up when they can’t get to it? [laughs]

JK: Now, I heard that you wanted to have your ashes put on the slough.

GM: [laughs] Yeah. I think I really will, to be honest with you. Did she tell you that? [laughing]

JK: Yeah.

GM: The more I think about it, the more I think I will. [laughs]

JK: Why is that?

GM: I don’t know. I tell my golfing buddies, hell, it ain’t gonna pollute it more than it is. [laughs] I think it would be kind of funny, you know? I would have my grandchildren talk about their grandfather’s ashes are floating in that water down there. ��no wonder it’s so bad. [laughs]

JK: Is there anything else you would like to have people know about this area before I stop this interview?

GM: Well, yeah, one thing. The same guy that started this regatta, he has some plans drawn up for boat acces for non-motorized boats. Right down there down at the foot of Denver Avenue there is a little lagoon they dug out to get some ground to repair some of the dikes after Vanport flood. It’s like the slough runs that way, and then the lagoon is here like this. The lagoon was dug out to use as fill for the dike, and that’s right down there at the foot of Denver Avenue. This man proposed a little floating dock and a walkway down to it for canoes and kayaks. The plans are there. They’ve got the permits to do it. They got a permit to close off a little section of Schmeer Road and to make available parking, but why isn’t it being done? I don’t know. It could be done.

That would be one of the good things to happen. If that could be developed and in a few other places have access to the water would help the most. That would have immediate impact. Cleaning it up would have a tremendous impact too, but an immediate impact — people could go down there to enjoy. People like to be on the water, you know, boating. They don’t want to swim in the place or maybe even fish in the place. Those people that come in that regatta every year, they’re not fishermen, they’re canoeists, kayakers. They like to go different places. So if they had better access to it that would be the most dramatic impact you could have, initially. . .

[Interview Ends]