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.
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- Artist: www.offbeatoregon.com (finn @ offbeatoregon.com)
- Copyright: Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (all commercial use OK)
Podcasts:
William Gladstone Steel, founder of the Albany Herald, fought for nearly 20 years to get iconic lake set aside as a public park; he founded the famous Mazama Club as part of that battle.
In Gold Rush-era Oregon, the most skilled miners were probably the Chinese — but they were in constant danger. To avoid being robbed, they entrusted their gold to professional couriers who masqueraded as penniless vagabonds. "Cheng." was one.
By far the most embarrassing jailbreak in state history happened when a murderer simply walked out the back door of a Motel 6 during an unsupervised “date” with a woman officials thought was his fiancee.
He'd spent thousands of hours re-creating history's most mysterious aircraft. Something had gone wrong, and he was about to crash it. When he did, somebody would die — who that would be was up to him.
Water seems to run uphill, and people's height appears to change from one end of a plank to another. Is it a fantastic optical illusion, or a mysterious force? Opinions vary
Chunks of beeswax that still occasionally wash up on Oregon beaches have been carbon-dated to the early 1600s, and are believed to be from a wrecked Spanish galleon.
After the only skipper willing to brave their fearsome river bar died, the only way to get wheat and cheese to market was to build their own trading ship — which they did
Crater Lake was discovered by miners were searching for a fabulous source of gold, formerly belonging to a friend who'd mysteriously disappeared. They never found it; could it be that it's still out there somewhere?
Warm Springs Indians struggled from 1871 to 1972 to get back a piece of land taken as a result of a survey everyone admitted was in error
The tiny town was owned by the sawmill, which bulldozed and burned it in 1984 when the mill closed so it could put the land back to work growing huge trees. Today, it's just a wide spot in the highway.
Lappeus came to Portland from the gold fields of California, where he was a gambler, saloonkeeper and general mining-town rowdy. His career as a cop was dogged by rumors he'd offered to spring a murderer for a $1,000 bribe.
A presentation given at the Willamette University bookstore on Sept. 7, 2012, on the timely subject of political corruption (MP3 audio, 53:59. There is no text version of this talk.)
The movie was 'The General,' starring Buster Keaton; in the scene, a real locomotive is crashed through a real burning bridge into the river, at a cost (in 2010 dollars) of more than half a million dollars
Town paid plenty of money to build jetty that changed the ocean's currents, washed it away; the town slid into the sea, house by house, having paid for its own doom.
While they were ashore, their sailing ship sank in a storm, leaving four fur traders alone in a vast wilderness with no prospects for rescue. So they set out for Louisiana – and two years later, they arrived.
