COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL | THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2019 | 9A
Offbeat Oregon
How Abe Tichner hustled rubes at 1870s fairs
By Finn J.D. John
for The Sentinel
W
hen Abe Tichner
died, on April 29
of 1935, he was
one of Portland’s most respect-
ed citizens.
He was also one of its ear-
liest, and if the editor of the
Portland Morning Oregonian
had been on the ball, his obit-
uary would have run on the
front page, alongside a sum-
mary of the changes Ore-gon’s
largest city had seen since his
arrival, exactly 65 years before,
on a sidewheel steamship out
of San Francisco.
“Portland had less than
6,000 inhabitants at that time,”
he remarked on May 1, 1920,
on the 50-year anniversary of
his arrival in Portland. “All the
dead were counted when the
city tried to get an extra clerk
in the post office. The east side
was one long swamp as far as
Union Avenue, which was high
land, except for a stretch oppo-
site Stark Street where there
was a roadway and two houses.
A ferry on which the fare was 5
cents paddled across.”
Abe Tichner was born in
New York on Dec. 10, 1852;
but, when he was 11 months
old, his parents packed up and
set out on a steamer for Cali-
fornia, crossing over the isth-
mus of Panama and arriving
in San Francisco in 1853. He
grew up, through age 18, in
that city.
If one was asked to describe
Abe Tichner in a single word,
it would probably be “enter-
prising.” There does not ap-
pear to have been any point in
Abe’s life in which he was not
wide awake, on his feet, and
hustling like a pro. He seems
to have had a real knack for
nosing out potentially lucra-
tive enterprises and working
his way into them.
He started out as a very
young boy by taking on a pa-
per route for the San Francisco
Chronicle, and he handled it
so well that he soon was be-
ing entrusted with other cir-
culation-department duties,
including delivering each day’s
papers to the post office for
mail subscribers.
When he was 18, his family
moved to Portland, arriving
via sidewheel steamer. In his
new hometown, he continued
in the newspaper business,
delivering papers and later set-
ting up a news stand at which
he also sold cigars.
For a few years he pursued
the sort of ordinary career
that most of us do, parlaying
his active membership in the
Republican Party into a nice
job as a customs inspector for
the Port of Portland in the
1880s and, when that sinecure
ended five years later with the
election of a Democratic pres-
ident, taking a job as an officer
in the Portland Police Depart-
ment. He was with the PPD for
six years, during which time
he rose rapidly to the rank of
Captain.
But during the time when
Abe was working these regular
jobs, he was also working dil-
igently on side hustles — and
his first one was quite literal-
ly a hustle. Starting in 1873,
and for most of the rest of the
1870s, Abe Tichner was one of
the most successful vendors on
the county-fair circuit. He sold
cigars and cheap jewelry out
of a booth there — and came
home from each fair with more
money than his salary would
have brought him in decades.
I
n the mid-1870s, county
fairs were, of course, some-
what different from the happy,
wholesome funnel-cake-and-
prize-roosters
institutions
they have since become. For
one thing, they were a lot less
kid-friendly.
“On the [fair]grounds
drinks and cigars sold for
25 cents; gambling ran wide
open,” writes former governor
Oswald West, recounting one
of many conversations he had
with Tichner in his golden
years. “The games of chance
were many and varied in char-
acter.”
Each one of those games
of chance, West added, was
run by a different member of
a cadre of itinerant Portland
swindlers who would set up
shop at the fair, eager to sep-
arate all the pastoral “rubes”
from any cash money that
they might have managed to
accumulate over the course of
a year’s hard labor in the fields
and orchards. Not a single one
of them was honest.
There was a roulette wheel,
equipped with a “snake” — a
concealed button on a cord
that activated some sort of
ball control. There was some-
thing called a “Red and Black,”
which was basically a Bin-
go-ball cage, only with a hid-
den compartment, so that the
ball that dropped down from
the cage was not the same
as the ball that fell out of the
chute. And there was a very
popular “wheel of for-tune” —
“where the boys were told they
could win 20 to 1 on the eagle
bird — but they never did,” ac-
cording to West.
“When (Washington Coun-
ty) fair time approached, the
gamblers and horse players of
Portland booked passage on
the Monitor, a six-horse stage-
coach operated by ‘Little Sam’
Bernheim, who boasted that he
was always ‘drunk and dressed
up,’” West writes. “When the
hour of departure arrived, the
roulette wheel, the wheel of
fortune, and the red-and-black
outfit were lashed securely
behind and their owners took
their seats within the coach.
Little Sam, properly ‘likkered,’
mounted the box, took the
reins, released the brake and
headed for Hillsboro.”
Abe was not one of these
characters. He wasn’t that
kind of hustler. But he proba-
bly made more money at the
fair than any of them did. He
later told West that he usu-
ally cleared $2,500 — that’s
the equivalent of $57,000 in
modern currency — on each
fair. His profit margin hovered
around 92 percent.
How did he do it? By selling
cheap cigars — wrapped in an
expensive story.
Apparently
working
from memory, West para-
phrase-quotes an Oregonian
article from the 1870s that de-
scribes his hustle:
“Heedless of the rain, Abe
mounts his showcase on a
goods box in the center of
the grounds and doesn’t allow
bashfulness to trouble him.
He sells five ‘pure Havana’ ci-
gars for one dollar, and as an
inducement to purchasers,
throws in a ‘gold’ watch and a
set of ‘diamond’ shirt studs. On
this generous plan he manages
to do a brisk business.”
That wasn’t exactly right,
West added. Each cigar pur-
chaser got to take an envelope
containing a number, which
corresponded to a piece of
jewelry. Not every cigar buy-
er got a free watch … in fact,
most likely none of them ever
did.
“In my innocence, I asked
Mr. Tichner just what chance
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A
be Tichner’s county fair
years were one of his
most treasured memories lat-
er in his life, which is why he
spent so much time reminisc-
ing on them with his friend
Os West. The money he made
usually didn’t last long after
he got back to Portland – the
crooked dealers at the faro ta-
bles in Port-land would get it
from him over the course of a
few weeks of playing high-roll-
er. Abe was, after all, a very
young man.
Abe Tichner went on to a
very successful and respect-
able career in Portland, mak-
ing the most of his money as a
financier and warrant broker;
he frequently appeared in the
newspaper as the successful
bidder for various city bond
offerings.
And his early, profligate
years at the faro tables seem to
have been a phase he was go-
ing through. Later in his life,
no matter how rich he got, he
watched every dime: in 1902,
when a county clerk tried to
short him 10 cents on a series
of $1 notes, Abe punched him
in the eye.
He partnered with Aaron
Maegly to build the six-story
Maegly-Tichner Building at
610 Broadway in 1911; and in
1918, he had a gorgeous home
built for his family (he’d mar-
ried Mary Baker in 1874). The
Abraham Tichner House, lo-
cated on Southwest Kingston
Avenue, is still immaculately
kept and was added to the
National Register of Historic
Places in 2010.
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the purchaser of his cigars had
to get a watch,” said West. “His
answer: ‘Just about as much
chance as a snowball has to roll
through hell.’”
But for Abe, the mon-
ey-making magic was in the
markup.
“Abe’s cigars cost him $15 a
thousand — a cent and a half
each,” West writes. “His jewel-
ry (plain junk) from a dollar a
gross for collar buttons to $5
a gross for watch chains and
necklaces. His ‘gold’ watches
were white metal, gold plated.”
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