4A COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL MAY 31, 2017
O PINION
Offbeat Oregon History: Cold snaps and ice rinks
A
s late spring warms up an
exhausted and weatherbeat-
en Willamette Valley, Ore-
gonians are looking back on one of the
grimmest winters they can remember.
But memorable though it was, the winter of 2016-17 — with its
month-long cold snap and torrential rains — wasn’t that much of
an outlier.
The worst cold snap in living memory is probably the winter of
1948-49. That’s the winter thousands of Oregonians learned to ice
skate … on Cottage Grove Reservoir.
The ugly weather started on Dec. 12 in 1948, according to back
issues of the Cottage Grove Sentinel. For more than a month and
a half, the temperature never got out of the teens, and stayed in
single digits much of the time. By the last day of January, the cold
snap had broken records for both length and depth; the mercury
bottomed out at one degree below zero on Jan. 24.
By that time, someone had discovered that the six- to 10-inch
sheet of ice covering Cottage Grove Reservoir from shore to shore
was thick enough to support foot traffi c. On Jan. 10, the day the
mercury plunged to seven degrees, and someone went down to the
lake with a pair of ice skates.
Soon skaters of all ages had hit the lake. On one day, the Senti-
nel reports, a crowd of 1,500 was down there, ranging in age from
toddlers to 91-year-old lumber patriarch A.L. Woodard — who, ac-
cording to the newspaper, “took off across the lake where it was
a mile from shore to shore and returned as though it were a daily
habit.”
It wasn’t as if there was anything else to do. Cottage Grove’s
timber-based economy had skidded to a halt when the temperatures
dropped below 10 degrees. Mills in Western Oregon just weren’t
built to work in such conditions; and log trucks and skid loaders
struggled to stay on the icy, snowy logging roads and landings.
Of course, ice skates were not a regularly stocked item in Cot-
tage Grove’s sporting-goods establishments. No problem; roller
skates were, and most Cottage Grove youths had a pair that were
used in warmer weather. It wasn’t much trouble for the local mill-
wrights and fabricators to remove the wheels, sand a couple old
fi les smooth, and weld them to the skates’ trucks.
The Sentinel reports that the cold snap wasn’t the coldest —
Christmas Eve on 1924 had seen seven degrees below zero; and it
wasn’t the most snow: that honor went to the 15 inches that fell on
Feb. 24, 1917. But no cold snap, before or since, has approached
this one’s depth and duration.
There have been some bad ones since then, of course. The cold
By Finn JD John
For The Sentinel
snap of 1972 saw temperatures at 12 degrees below zero on Dec.
8, 1972, at the Eugene Airport — which is the coldest weather ever
recorded there. And more recently, the cold snap of December 2013
got well down into the single digits.
Of course, when temperatures in the valley get down that low,
pipes burst and engine blocks freeze; but there was one cold snap
that did more than just that.
The night of Jan. 16, 1943, was a bitter cold one — around 10
degrees. It was cold enough that residents of the Laurelhurst neigh-
borhood in southeast Portland were able to ice-skate on the shallow
pond there in the park. The brand-new 523-foot, 16,000-ton steam
tanker S.S. Schenectady, which had just rolled out of the Kaiser
shipyard in Portland a week or two before, was docked there on the
river, building steam to put out to sea.
And then, around 11 p.m., with a crack that one bystander said
actually shook the ground, the huge ship suddenly broke in half,
folding like a jackknife. The bow and stern plunged down into the
water and wedged into the muddy bottom of the lagoon, pushing
the middle of the ship high into the air. And the 30 crew members,
who had been preparing the big ship to cast off and head out to sea,
surely thought they were about to die.
Luckily, the water beneath the dock was shallow — barely deep
enough to fl oat the ship, which drew up to 30 feet depending on its
load. The crew members were easily able to get up on deck. In the
rush to escape, the third mate hurt his ankle, but that was the only
injury.
sea. But they did have one consolation: They were headed for the
Pacifi c Theater … so at least it would be nice and warm.
This being war time, suspicions naturally turned to sabotage. But
authorities quickly ruled that out. Eventually it was determined that
fl aws in some of the steel used to build the ship had made it brittle,
and the temperature differential between the 10-degree air and the
40-degree river water had been enough to start a crack, which had
raced around the ship from one side to the other, splitting the big
vessel in half.
Because of where the ship was, the repair was relatively simple.
The ship was simply sunk the rest of the way, so that it rested en-
tirely on the bottom of the shallow lagoon; this naturally forced the
crack closed as the weight of the ship straightened her out. Then
scabs were welded across the crack, and she was refl oated, and
limped back upriver to the shipyard. A few weeks later, good as
new, she was heading out to sea with a load of gasoline to power the
American war machine.
We can only imagine how apprehensive the sailors assigned to
the Schenectady’s crew must have been as the big, freshly patched
ship cleared the Columbia Bar and headed out into the deep blue
Dr. Fuhrman: Soda depletes your body's calcium
The average American drinks 216 liters of soda each year. Soda
drinking overall is associated with lower bone mineral density in
women and children, and one recent study focused specifi cally on
the effects of diet soda on bone health. The authors commented
that this research was sparked by the observation that diet soda
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Kudos to The Cottage Grove Police Department for their con-
tinuing dedication to keep this community very safe and build trust
within the local area. These folks potentially put their lives' on the
line every day. Next chance, shake a cop's hand; it'll make you
feel good.
Respectfully submitted,
M. Gotcher
Cottage Grove
drinking behaviors are often different than regular soda drinking
behaviors – women often use diet sodas in an effort to avoid weight
gain – either to stave off hunger between meals or as a replacement
for calorie-containing beverages. Many women drink over 20 diet
sodas per week.
These researchers discovered that parathyroid hormone con-
centrations rise strongly following diet soda consumption – this is
troublesome because PTH acts to increase blood calcium by stim-
ulating bone breakdown, and as a result calcium is released from
bone. What happened to the calcium after it was released? Women
were given 24 ounces of either diet cola or water on two consec-
utive days, and urinary calcium content was measured for three
hours. Although caffeine is known to increase calcium excretion
and promote bone loss, caffeine is likely not the only bone-harm-
ing ingredient in sodas. A 2006 study in the American Journal of
Clinical Nutrition found consistent associations between low bone
mineral density and caffeinated and non-caffeinated cola, but not
other carbonated beverages. One major difference between the two
is the phosphoric acid in colas, absent from most other carbonated
beverages.
In the Western diet, phosphorus is commonly consumed in excess
– at about three times the recommended levels, whereas dietary cal-
cium is consumed much less. Although phosphorus is an import-
ant component of bone mineral, a high dietary ratio of phosphorus
to calcium can increase PTH, which stimulates bone breakdown.
Studies in which women were given increasing quantities of dietary
phosphorus found increases in markers of bone breakdown and de-
creases in markers of bone formation. Therefore, it is likely that the
phosphorus content of colas is what triggers calcium loss.
Diet soda is simply water with artifi cial sweeteners and oth-
er chemical additives. The safety of many artifi cial sweeteners is
questionable, and their intense sweetness disrupts the body’s nat-
ural connection between taste and nourishment, promoting weight
gain. Diet sodas don’t just weaken our bones; they are linked to
kidney dysfunction and promote obesity and other common medi-
cal problems – there is nothing healthy about diet sodas.
C ottage G rove
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