THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, JULY 1, 2016
COMMUNITY
1B
MARSHMALLOWS, ANYONE?
CREAM AND SUGAR?
T
‘A WEALTH OF FOND MEMORIES’
ockaway Beach was featured in a United Press International
Odd News story recently about a video of an unusual way to
get your caffeine ix (http://tinyurl.com/cafedrone).
Filmed by YouTube user and drone aicionado Keepingitba-
sic, the video, “The Way Coffee Should Be Delivered,” shows
a cup of coffee, suspended from the drone via ishing lines and
sticks, gingerly traveling across a lake to reach to a couple in a
rowboat who are eagerly awaiting its arrival.
Keepingitbasic did offer a caveat, however: “Don’t try this
at home. All parties had been warned that they could have had
scalding hot coffee dropped on them without warning.” Happily,
that didn’t happen.
R
DOWN ON THE FARM
eave it to a Scandinavian country to be at the forefront of
ish-raising: Norway’s SalMar Group, known as being
one of the largest producers of farmed salmon, is developing the
world’s irst semi-submersible offshore ish farming rig, to be
built and delivered by Rolls-Royce, World Fishing and Aquacul-
ture reports (http://tinyurl.com/norskrig).
A picture of the proposed project is shown, courtesy of Sal-
Mar/Ocean Farming. Combining the technologies used for both
oil rigs and aquaculture, the completed ish farm pilot rig will be
220 feet high, 360 feet in diameter and have a volume of 6.6 mil-
lion gallons. It is expected to be completed in the second half of
2017, and will be anchored by an eight-point mooring system to
the seabed off Frohavet, Norway, a location with the “good bio-
logical conditions” to farm ish stocks.
L
ere’s a little Fourth of July nostalgia for you: An E.W.
Kelley Library of Congress stereograph from 1906, and
a story by Eleanor Barrows Bower, who was the grand-
daughter of Carl and Bridget Tanger, written for the Sum-
mer 1968 edition of The Sou’wester magazine (http://tinyurl.
com/4thwagon):
“Growing up in Chinook (Washington) ... the most antic-
ipated event of the year was the Fourth of July Liberty
Wagon! Then Festus Plumb’s hay rack wagon was converted
into a two-tiered platform. His gray stallions, with red, white
and blue ribbons braided into their tails, drew the wagon.
“Beginning at lower Frogtown (so called because of the
croaking of frogs in the early springtime) the wagon drove
slowly through town. The sides of the wagon were draped
with red, white and blue bunting. A Goddess of Liberty and
a costumed Uncle Sam stood on the wagon, waving to the
onlookers.
“As the wagon stopped at each child’s home (all the houses
were on the main route, as Chinook had only one street), the
children were lifted onto the wagon. As it went the entire
length of the town, each child waved and carried a small lag.
The wagon trip ended at the grove back of the school house,
where a picnic was held ...
“The Liberty Wagon, the newspaper, and the railroad are
all mementos that have vanished from Chinook. This way of
life is no more, but it has left a wealth of fond memories.”
he Ear knows what big fans
many North Coasters are of
bonires, so naturally this little
nugget caught her attention: Nor-
way was in the news recently for
having what is probably the big-
gest bonire ever in Alesund,
according to The Hufington Post
(http://tinyurl.com/155v142).
A photo of the event from the
Bypatrioten Ålesund Facebook
page is shown.
More than 30 people spent
several days building the 155-
foot tall towering inferno of pal-
lets. Oficially, however, the tall-
est bonire is still the one in Boštanj, Slovenija that was lit on April
30, 2007, which was a mere 142 feet, 6.2 inches tall.
Even though the Alesund bonire has not yet been certiied as the
new tallest one by Guinness World Records, Guinness says “that an
application for the record was received, and that they are awaiting
further evidence for review.” Hopefully, Norway will prevail.
BOOK NOOK
H
FIERY FOOTNOTE
or your reading pleasure, it’s time to take a literary tour of some
books with a local connection.
• “My Yellowstone book is inally out: ‘Wrecked in Yellow-
stone: Greed, Obsession, and the Untold Story of Yellowstone’s
Most Infamous Shipwreck,’” Mike Stark wrote, and the book is
available at Amazon.com. Some of you might remember that he was
a reporter for The Daily Astorian in the late 1990s.
In case you’re wondering (as the Ear did) yes, there really is a
shipwrecked steamboat in Yellowstone Lake. The book is the story
of how it got there, and of its owner, the infamous (and obsessive)
entrepreneur E.C. Waters.
• For you poetry and short-short story fans, Reba Owen has writ-
ten “Alchemy of Scallops,” which can also be found at Amazon.
com. Reba is a strong believer in the Wildlife Center of the North
Coast (www.coastwildlife.org), and her royalty checks from the
book will go to help them continue their good work. • And inally,
there is “The Adventures of Rat the Goldish,” by Patty A. Davis.
“I have written and illustrated three children’s books each featuring
one of my grandsons,” she wrote. “The last one I self published. It’s a
story about a boy named Aiden and a goldish he names Rat. Rat and
Aiden have several little adventures, one nearly disastrous.” Check it
out at, you guessed it, Amazon.com
“I now have a fourth grandson,” she added. “Looks like I will be
writing and illustrating another book!”
F
‘SHE DESERVES A MEDAL’
he Astoria ire of July 2, 1883, racked up damages of
around $250,000 (about $6 million now), but it was the
lawsuit of ne’er-do-well John Boyle, who sued the city for
$25,000 (about $600,000 now) that provided an interesting
footnote to Astoria’s history.
To set the scene, the city at the time of the ire was
described in the West Coast Reporter Vol. 1 by A.L. Bancroft
(http://tinyurl.com/boylesuit), as “ … full of people, more or
less transient and doubtful in their character, connected with
the isheries, and the riot and dissipation which seems to be
incident to that season.”
The opportunities provided by ire excited the rabble, who
looted the burning buildings with impunity — they were well
aware that there were only six regular policemen, who were
“fatigued and worn out with watching and running to and fro
night and day.” The roadway connecting upper and lower
town was partially destroyed in the blaze, complicating things
further. Consequently, a vigilante committee was formed to
restore order and drive out the trouble-makers, and Mr. Boyle
just happened to be one of them.
In his lawsuit, Boyle claimed that he was unlawfully
arrested and jailed, and received a mock trial that resulted
in a sentence of 25 lashes. The vigilantes then blindfolded
and gagged him, took him from jail at night and threatened
him with hanging and 200 lashes. Actually, he was a given
25 lashes with a cat-o’-nine-tails, put on his knees, sworn to
secrecy, and taken back to jail. In a “good riddance” move,
the next morning he was taken in irons to a steamboat and
shipped off to Portland.
The court agreed that the vigilantes were at fault in Boyle’s
lawsuit. The problem lay in how much Boyle should be paid.
There were no medical bills, so what compensatory damages
should there be when the person suing is of questionable char-
acter, and a bartender, professional gambler and vagrant?
Boyle didn’t get $25,000, according to the 1903 Oregon
Historical Quarterly Volume 4 (http://tinyurl.com/ire1883),
but the jury did award him a little vindication in the amount
of $1,000 (about $23,000 now), which was “raised by general
subscription, $20 being the usual individual contribution.”
STOP ’EM IN THEIR TRACKS
T
ou would naturally expect there would be many adven-
tures for the 66 intrepid cyclists who set off on the third
annual Trans Am Bike Race on June 4 from Astoria on a 4,400
mile race across country to Yorktown, Virginia,” Astorian, writer/
photographer and cyclist Peter Marsh (http://sea-to-summit.net)
wrote to the Ear. He is pictured, inset.
“However, (one) woman also overcame tremendous odds
to keep on riding,” he reported. “Her name is Amy Williams
(pictured in Peter’s photo) and she had lown from London with
her new racing bike, pannier bags, etc. When I joined the racers
for the irst short leg to Seaside, I rode at the back of the group
to keep out of the way and found myself alongside her — and
barely able to keep up! I snapped a photo of her (shown) at the
trafic lights onto U.S. Highway 101 before turning back.
“Three days later, she stopped at a café in McKenzie Bridge,
and came out to ind her beloved bike was gone, leaving her with
only a passport and a wallet. She returned to Eugene, where some
local cyclists helped her recover. Her sister in London immedi-
ately started a crowdfunding site that raised enough money to pay
for a replacement bike with a 48 cm frame in stock in a bike shop
in Colorado. She rode the bus east, bought the bike and the equip-
ment she needed, and rejoined the route with the slower riders.”
“I think she deserves a medal,” Peter noted, “just for getting
back in the race.”
‘Y
ongview, Washington inventor Michael Moormeier (pictured
inset) has come up with a new, and safer method for police to
stop a car they are chasing, The Daily News reports (http://tinyurl.
com/spike-tire). With MobileSpike, the oficer pursuing pulls up
alongside the leeing car, and simply pushes a button — deploying a
retractable metal arm that extends from the bumper, and has with a
spike trip on the end that punctures the other car’s back tire. It takes
about a minute for the tire to delate.
It’s so simple, it’s a wonder no one thought of it before, and a
lot safer than dashing out to throw spike strips on the road and risk-
ing getting run over. A photo of how MobileSpike works is shown
from Moormeier’s fundraiser page (yes, he’s looking for investors)
at www.lashfunders.com/mobilespike. A detail of the spikes is also
shown, inset.
The Wasilla, Alaska, Police Department put the device on ive of
its cars. As a result, “the criminals started telling police oficers that
they wouldn’t run anymore in Wasilla,” Jentry Crain, a former ofi-
cer, told TDN. “This concept of run and let them go, it’s dangerous
for the community, for the victims. It’s not the answer. The answer is
to have a safe mechanism to stop these.”
So far, 17 law enforcement agencies agree, and use MobileSpike,
which costs about $2,500 per unit. Ironically, Longview’s police
department isn’t one of them. Yet.
L