The daily Astorian., February 18, 2020, Page 9, Image 9

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THE ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2020
THE ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2020 • B1
WATER UNDER
THE BRIDGE
COMPILED BY BOB DUKE
From the pages of Astoria’s daily newspapers
10 years ago
this week — 2010
S
potted this month: Six men heaving hundreds
of dead bodies into Clatsop County’s Lewis and
Clark River.
OK, so they were dead fi sh bodies — or what remained
of them after six months of storage.
“Liquid with a maggot crust,” is how retired state biol-
ogist Walt Weber described some of them, as he and Ore-
gon Department of Fish and Wildlife assistant biologist
Troy Laws drove six totes of rotten salmon up the side
of Saddle Mountain. “These are the worst we’ve put in
— ever.”
Weber and Laws belong to the Rainland Flycasters,
a group of fl y fi shers whose members volunteer every
year to sling surplus hatchery fi sh back into North Coast
streams. For each of the last 15 years, they’ve put up to
60,000 pounds of carcasses back in local rivers to deliver
vital nutrients to the ecosystem.
It’s a dirty job, and this year it was especially icky.
Some of the fi sh sat out for several days after being col-
lected from Big Creek and Klaskanine hatcheries in Sep-
tember. Then they were frozen, stored and thawed this
month for the stream enrichment program.
To empty the most putrid tubs of fi sh, Laws hitched
them with cables to his pickup and pulled away slowly
until they tipped off the trailer, falling upside down on the
ground and sending rotting fi sh blood spraying into the air.
“Some said it couldn’t be done,” said The
Astorian’s Systems Manager Carl Earl. “But we
did it.”
The Astorian successfully dismantled and
moved an old press, installed a new press and got
it running in 11 days — a process that normally
takes a month.
The new press began rolling Monday night
with the printing of TV Week. By 10:30 a.m.
Tuesday, the daily edition was making its way
through the new blue towers recently installed in
the offi ces at Ninth and Exchange streets.
Do you have one of the bicycles used in the 1985 fi lm
“The Goonies”?
Or were you an extra in any of the 300-some movies
fi lmed or produced in Oregon?
McAndrew “Mac” Burns wants your stories.
The executive director of the Clatsop County Historical
Society is counting down the days to the opening of a new
Oregon Film Museum with both panic and anticipation.
The museum will open for the Goonies’ 25th anniversary
celebration in June: 106 days and counting.
Rainland Flycasters Ernie Palmrose, left, and Bob May, put their noses to the test while volunteering to heave rotten tule
fall Chinook, coho and hatchery steelhead into the waters of the Lewis and Clark River in February 2010.
Pages of TV Week magazine spin through the rollers and
into the folder of The Astorian’s new press during testing
in 2010.
From left, Mrs. Larry Seward, in charge of cataloguing;
Herbert Howell, Fred Cordiner and Lloyd Halsan arrange
displays in the new Navy room at the Columbia River
Maritime Museum in 1970.
50 years ago — 1970
On March 1, when the Sisters of Charity of Providence
are scheduled to withdraw from St. Mary’s H ospital, it will
mark the end of 90 years of service to the sick and the poor
of the Sunset Empire by the members of his order.
St. Mary’s was established Aug. 4, 1880, in the former
Arrigoni Hotel building at the southeast corner of 15th and
Duane — the same site occupied by the modern brick hos-
pital of today.
In the intervening 90 years the hospital has occupied
three successive buildings, all in the same city block, and
for periods of several years the sisters operated a school
of nursing and a nursing home in addition to the hospital.
The Sisters of Charity of Providence order was estab-
lished in 1844 in Montreal, by a widow who had lost her
husband and three children. Hospital work has been the
order’s major function.
In 1856 the order entered the Pacifi c Northwest when
fi ve sisters arrived on the steamer Brother Jonathan in Van-
couver, Washington , coming to establish St. Joseph Hos-
pital there. It was the second hospital on the Pacifi c c oast.
The mail poll of Lewis and Clark and Warren-
ton-Hammond voters on the proposed merger of
those two school districts shows sentiment in the
Lewis and Clark district against the merger and
in the Warrenton district in favor of it.
Astoria City Council members asked the city manager
Monday night to obtain cost estimates on two more sites
for the controversial sewage treatment plant.
The council, aware of opposition to the lagoon facil-
ity being situated near Bumble Bee Seafoods’ cold-stor-
age plant at 39th and Lie f Eri kson and adjacent to Port of
Astoria property next to Pier 3, looked at another site on
a city map.
The N avy room, a new display room at the
Columbia River Maritime Museum, will open
to the public possibly next week, according to
museum d irector Rolf Klep.
The main fl oor room, which Klep said is the
second largest display room at the museum, was
approved for museum use in January by the Ore-
gon Military Department , owner of the building
which houses the maritime museum in Astoria.
Used in past years as a National Guard class-
room, Klep said the room had been in use for
storage recently. When National Guard activi-
ties were moved to Camp Rilea, Klep said, the
museum made the request for the room for dis-
play space.
The original St. Mary’s Hospital with an annex built in 1895.
But here this week the graying, slender captain told,
with a set jaw, the heroic effort the fi rst Astoria’s crew
made to save their fi re-bathed man-of-war, and fi nally lost
when they thought they had the battle licked.
Two guests of the club were introduced to the board.
They were members of the Women’s Army Corps from
Camp Maxey, Texas , Cpl. Cleota Rogers and Pfc. Marjo-
rie Mayberry. The girls are “seeing the west” on a 15-day
furlough and were invited by William Badger, whom they
met in Portland, to visit at his Gearhart home and see the
ocean.
The social and psychological attitudes which
servicemen bring back with them from military
service are going to be just as important and seri-
ous as the problem of fi nding jobs, it was stressed
by Dr. Carl R. Rogers, head of counseling for the
United Service Organizations , when he spoke to
a group of Astoria USO staff members and vol-
unteers in Portland last weekend.
Chinook salmon passing over Bonneville dam
in the Northwest have decreased to the low-
est number recorded, the interior department
revealed today.
When the fi rst count was made, in 1938,
272,158 salmon went over the dam. The number
rose in 1941 to 461,713, but has declined steadily
since then. The 1944 count was 241,718.
Report of the fi rst donut and pie nights conducted at the
Exchange Street USO by women’s groups of the city was
made at the Wednesday night meeting of the club’s board
of operation.
Director Thomas M. Dent announced to the board that
he is planning to bring girls coming from Portland and a
band from Fort Lewis for a dance in March.
A steady parade of Clatsop County farmers, their wives
and children poured through the 4-H club building Satur-
day to study with interest the exhibit of farm labor-saving
devices sponsored by Oregon State C ollege. The exhibits
were explained by Mrs. Mabel Mack and Clyde Walker,
state superintendent of the farm labor experiment service,
and Don Jossy, county agent.
A gillnet boat owned by Ed Koski ready to go in the water
in 1970.
WASHINGTON — The United States reported today a
defi cit of $6.99 billion in its balance of payments for 1969,
the worst year on record.
75 years ago — 1945
Capt. F.E. Shoup, captain of an attack transport com-
missioned by the N avy here recently, was executive offi -
cer aboard Astoria’s fi rst cruiser, the Astoria christened in
1933, when the ship was pounded into oblivion and sent
to the bottom of “Iron Bottom” Bay off Savo Island in the
early-war tragedy of 1942. Captain Shoup’s ship, the Cler-
mont, is now in shakedown cruise.
The area between the Port of Astoria docks and the U.S. Highway 101 bridge, on Youngs Bay, is being examined as a
possible site for the city of Astoria’s sewage treatment lagoon in 1970. Site A is next to the fi ll land west of the port’s Pier
3, and Site B is one suggested by Bumble Bee Seafoods as a possibility.