THE ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2019 • B1
WATER UNDER
THE BRIDGE
COMPILED BY BOB DUKE
From the pages of Astoria’s daily newspapers
10 years ago
this week — 2009
W
hen 60 Tongue Point Job Corps Center
s eamanship students got underway on the
180-foot c utter I ronwood, they knew they
had special cargo onboard.
It was round, bright yellow and weighed 450
pounds.
Strapped down to the buoy dock of the former
U.S. Coast Guard buoy tender, it looked like a giant,
lemon-colored gumball. The students were helping
install a much-needed wave buoy off Clatsop Spit
just outside the Columbia River B ar.
For years the focus of the National Park
Service , particularly in natural regions, has
been to allow nature to take its course. But
in places like Lewis and Clark National His-
torical Park’s Netul Landing, which was an
industrial area for more than 150 years, the
ability of the site to repair itself has been
removed.
Hundreds of years of operating trains
and trucks on top of hauled-in fi ll has
transformed the property.
But construction of picnic areas and
grass-covered sections along the site’s
southern end will complete a new trans-
formation park leaders started almost six
years ago.
Contractors completed development of the
north end of the site alongside the Lewis and
Clark River at the site of a former log-sorting
yard in time for the 200th anniversary of the
arrival of Lewis and Clark Expedition in 2005.
2009 — The Tongue Point Job Corps Center buoy tender
Ironwood navigates downstream Tuesday on its way to
place a wave buoy outside of the Columbia River Bar.
The Port of Astoria Commission voted unanimously
Tuesday to execute a lease option on the North Tongue
Point industrial facility in Astoria.
The deal, once signed by the Port and property
owner Washington Group of Missoula, Montana, will
allow the Port to lease the site while building revenues
and working toward a possible purchase.
The Port has been trying to buy North Tongue Point
for more than a year, but now Port Executive Director
Jack Crider says a lease option is “the only option avail-
able to us.”
He said the facility — which includes fi ve fi nger
piers and 140,000 square feet of building space used by
the U.S. Navy during and after World War II — doesn’t
generate enough revenue to cover the debt service on
a mortgage as well as the costs of operating and main-
taining the site.
McGOWAN, Wash. — Little remains of
McGowan, the Washington town that bears the
same of an entrepreneur who built a salmon
pickling and packing plant along the Colum-
bia River in the mid-1800s.
Roads are all grown over. Only a few build-
ings are left. One sturdy sentinel, St. Mary’s
Catholic Church, still stands resolutely facing
the river, but after 105 years keeping watch
over the river, its days might be numbered.
St. Mary’s Church’s blue-gray painted sid-
ing apparently defi es North Coast weather.
But the church’s resilience to weather is
weakening, and church goers hired Kevin
Palo, of Ilwaco, to slow the damage by making
repairs to church windows.
Over the years, ill-informed repairmen have
tried to caulk the windows, but caulk doesn’t
stay sticky very long and loses its grip in the
wood or glass, allowing water to pass through.
Palo is basically re glazing the old, nearly
8-foot tall windows, pressing linseed oil putty
into the joints where the glass panes in the win-
dow meet the wood.
1969 — Near the climax of buoy handling operations as
new Bouy 29 heads for its watery home.
50 years ago — 1969
The men of the U.S. Coast Guard buoy tender Ivy set
out one day to show their wives, girlfriends and other
guests “what they do all day.”
Their skill and ballet-like precision in buoy handling
made an undoubtedly very diffi cult and often danger-
ous job look easy.
Occasion was the Ivy’s dependents’ cruise, with
about 25 guests aboard.
Hammond Mooring Basin has come a long
way since it was a “little slip full of mud” in
1959. Hopes are that it will go much, much
further . Total number of launchings have
increased from 411 in 1959 to approximately
5,350 this year.
Because of the location and possibilities
here a request was made by the Port of Astoria
that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers make
a study of the basin at Hammond. Just a few
weeks ago, Wendell Wyatt’s offi ce received
verifi cation from Robert L. Bangert, c olonel,
Corps of Engineers, that authority and funds
to make the study have been received.
Work will proceed on a preliminary report
currently scheduled for 1970 that will include
study of the necessary building or rebuild-
ing of breakwaters and a study of the basin’s
perimeter.
Fish commission personnel, state police and Clat-
sop County fi shermen today took issue with a Portland
newspaper columnist’s “conservative estimate” that
50,000 to 100,000 pounds of Columbia River salmon is
caught illegally each year.
Charles Davidson of the Fish Commission’s Port-
land offi ce commented, “That’s ridiculous. We don’t
have fi gures on illegal catch and I think he pulled his
fi gures out of thin air.”
Davidson characterized the column, written by Don
Holm, outdoor writer for T he Oregonian, on extent of
The Hammond Marina.
fi shing piracy and minor penalties given those con-
victed as “really an insult to the state police. They’ve
been working very hard.”
He added that he felt there was no need to make
an estimate because he believed that what little illegal
salmon fi shing did go on was “not that signifi cant.”
A routine maintenance job turned out to be
quite a shock to workers at the Warrenton Boat
Yard and to the owner, George J. Perreault, of
Portland. A 56-foot tugboat, the Crest, fell to
one side when it was being brou ght into the
boat yard for a yearly maintenance and repair
job.
75 years ago — 1944
A comprehensive report covering activities of the
U.S. Naval Air Station at Tongue Point from June 1943
until the present has been approved by the 13th N aval
D istrict and was released today after Capt. John E.
Beck turned over command of the station to Com. H.J.
McNulty .
The report reveals the important part the naval air
station has played in connection with the pre commis-
sioning activity of the naval station at Astoria’s port
docks.
Merle R. Chessman, editor and manager of
the Astorian-Budget, told the Astoria Kiwanis
C lub Thursday that a newspaper “should be
a very active part of a community’s life; that
it should try to make itself a vital and con-
structive force for the community’s well-be-
ing and should be a spokesman for its commu-
nity to champion all its legitimate causes and
interests.”
Chessman was speaking upon occasion
of his 25th year in Astoria, and also in con-
nection with the Kiwanis C lub’s recognition
of National Newspaper Week, which closes
Sunday.
The Astoria publisher reviewed some jour-
nalism history of the state and of Astoria,
tracing the appearance and disappearance
of many newspapers here and their changing
ownerships. He said Astoria had its fi rst news-
paper in August 1864, with establishment of
the Marine Gazette founded by James Newton
Gale. He said the Budget was founded in Octo-
ber of 1892 by O.W. Dunbar.
The weekly Astorian was founded in 1873,
later published three times weekly and subse-
quently was published daily after May 1, 1876.
Hoarders were left today holding bags of coffee
that will soon be stale as the government put its foot
down hard on rumors that the nation’s favorite bever-
age would soon be returned to rationing.
War Mobilization Director James F. Byrnes, after
a hectic weekend which saw a run on coffee supplies
of grocery stores develop, announced defi nitely that
“rationing is unnecessary.”