Offbeat Oregon History podcast
Summary: A daily (5-day-a-week) podcast feed of true Oregon stories -- of heroes and rascals, of shipwrecks and lost gold. Stories of shanghaied sailors a1512nd Skid Road bordellos and pirates and robbers and unsolved mysteries. An exploding whale, a couple shockingly scary cults, a 19th-century serial killer, several very naughty ladies, a handful of solid-brass con artists and some of the dumbest bad guys in the history of the universe. From the archives of the Offbeat Oregon History syndicated newspaper column. Source citations are included with the text version on the Web site at https://offbeatoregon.com.
- Visit Website
- RSS
- Artist: www.offbeatoregon.com (finn @ offbeatoregon.com)
- Copyright: Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (all commercial use OK)
Podcasts:
Ashland festival's 1935 debut went head to head with a festival of fistfights, and to the astonishment of many city leaders, the Shakespeare plays kayoed the boxing in the first round.
Olympic gold medalist and OSU legend Robin Reed might have been the best wrestler of all time; throughout his 20-plus-year career he was never once pinned. But his plan for the "Delake Rod and Gun Club" was more than he could pull off.
Wall Street financial wizard Thomas Lawson — Gov. Tom McCall's grandfather — just happened to be in town and betting on Prineville. With Silver Lake up 9-0 halfway through, he knew just what to do.
In the days when Portland was a rough, tough, hard-drinking, hard-punching dockside town, the city's “crimping” activity actually generated international incidents with foreign governments.
An inexperienced highway engineer guessed wrong about how much dynamite would be needed to rid beach of 8 tons of rotting whale carcass, with expensive and stinky results.
Slippery rascal T. Edgenton Hogg, a genuine ex-pirate, hoped the little city would eat Portland's lunch with cheaper, faster passenger service to San Francisco, but two suspicious shipwrecks left him in financial ruins.
John Hipple dumped his family, changed his name and moved West. A dozen years and a few easy-money real-estate swindles later, he was a hugely successful railroad-and-timber lawyer and a U.S. Senator.
The former miner shipped gold hidden in candle boxes, where stagecoach robbers wouldn't think to look
A good-natured "tall tale" (if a somewhat bloodthirsty one) from an unnamed Oregon backwoods pioneer, about the world's meanest housecat
Fans of the tiny Lincoln City waterway and partisans of the Roe River in Great Falls, Mont., swap good-natured gibes and call each other's rivers 'drainage ditches'
Some historians think famous explorer's "Nova Albion," in which the Golden Hind stopped for repairs and provisions in 1579, is in Oregon, not northern California.
Bride of Christ cult sought perfect righeousness, Christ-like simplicity and total humility. In practice, though, it spawned nothing but misery and madness, and a legal precedent for “honor killings.”
The hordes of awestruck visitors at the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition would have been shocked if they'd known the beautiful little lake would be gone in 20 years — filled in for industrial lands.
Just one thing was precious to the bitter, coldhearted old cattle king: his three-year-old grandson. But when a hated neighbor rescued the little tyke, at great risk to her own life, it changed his attitude forever.
Powell, a pioneer preacher and Baptist circuit rider, gave the first invocation in the Oregon State Legislature, but turned out not to be quite the sort of pastor the lawmakers expected.
