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About Hermiston herald. (Hermiston, Or.) 1994-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 15, 2018)
WILD RIDES AT FARM-CITY PRO RODEO » PAGE A8 WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 15, 2018 HermistonHerald.com $1.00 INSIDE NEW FIELDS Lacrosse program asks for new fields at EOTEC PAGE A3 DRIVER SHORTAGE Looking for a job? Bus drivers always in demand PAGE A6 HISTORY Blaze near Hat Rock in 1992 sent firefighter to the hospital PAGE A2 How a fast-growing city maintains its past “There were some other great buildings torn down. Some just wore out, like the Old Oregon Hotel.” DICK LOWRY, HERMISTON BY THE WAY Help steer EOTEC’s future with survey Have an opinion about the Eastern Oregon Trade and Event Center’s future? The city wants to hear it. EOTEC has been oper- ating for over a year and in the city of Hermiston’s control for a few months, and the advisory commit- tee is offering an online survey in English and Spanish at www.eotecsur- vey.com. “If you don’t know where you’re going, then any road will get you there,” said city manager Byron Smith in a state- ment. “We want to use this process to get a clear mes- sage from the community about what the EOTEC facility should look like 10 years from now, and that will allow us to avoid short-sighted opportuni- ties which may compro- mise our path toward the community’s ultimate goal.” Anyone who fills out the survey will be entered to win a $50 Visa gift card or family passes to the Hermiston Family Aquatic Center. The city will also solicit feedback specifi- cally from EOTEC cus- tomers, partners and oth- ers with an interest in the project. • • • The American Red Cross is still facing a crit- ical blood shortage, and See BTW, Page A14 Preservation of Hermiston’s limited historic buildings is a struggle By JADE MCDOWELL STAFF WRITER ermiston only has one museum, and most of its residents haven’t even been there. “People say, ‘I’ve lived here all my life and never heard of that,’” Connie Maret said. Maret runs the Maxwell Siding Train Museum next to Hodge Park with John Spinden, offering up tours for a few hours each Saturday of antique train cars “chock full” of historical artifacts from Hermiston and the railroad. A majority of the free muse- um’s visitors are from out of town. Maret and Spinden would love to pass the museum on to some younger volun- teers (at age 84, Maret said, he’s “no spring chicken.”). But they have had trouble inter- esting the next generation of Hermiston res- idents in preserving the town’s history, of which the railroad is a major player. “I know the stuff I’ve saved ever since I was a little bitty kid, my kids won’t want it,” he said. “Once it’s gone, it will never come back.” There are pieces of Hermiston’s history that have been preserved, in boxes of photo- graphs at locals’ homes and a few scattered ABOVE (Photo contributed by Mitch Myers): Hermiston’s Main Street in the early 1900s. BELOW (Staff photo by Jade McDowell): Hermiston’s Main Street today. historic buildings. An archway from the last iteration of Armand Larive Middle School stands near the public library as a testament to the many school buildings Hermiston has seen come and go over its more than cen- tury-long history. But Hermiston doesn’t have any buildings on the National Register of Historic Places, despite being the biggest city in a county that has 42 sites on the regis- try (Pendleton has 16 of those; Echo has 10). Carlisle Harrison, one of Hermiston’s history enthusiasts, said some of Hermis- ton’s lack of historical preservation has to do with how the town developed. It was small and very poor for the first few decades of its existence (the town was incorporated in 1907), then saw a population explosion during the building of the McNary Dam and Umatilla Chemical Depot in the 1940s. At that point no one was as worried about eye-pleasing architecture as they were about getting buildings up fast and cheap. The results, he said, were a lot of build- ings that were “nothing to write home about” and not built to last into the next century. “Things were practical and inexpen- sive,” he said. “In Pendleton the moneyed wheat farmers came into town and built nice houses.” Harrison said that wasn’t necessarily a See HISTORY, Page A14 Fair weathers the heat, learns from 2017 By JAYATI RAMAKRISHNAN AND JADE MCDOWELL STAFF WRITERS Another year, another fair. Uma- tilla County Fair employees and community partners called the 2018 event a success, sticking with the things that worked and changing those that didn’t. Fair coordinator Angie McNal- ley said they wouldn’t have num- bers for fair attendance until later in the week, but said the busiest day of the fair was Saturday and the busiest evening was on Friday. She said fair employees learned from last year’s fair, the first in the new Eastern Oregon Trade and Event Center venue, and changed a few logistical things. “We learned a lot last year about foot traffic, and where to place things,” she said. “We’re still work- ing on getting the flow moving in parts of the fair that people can’t see right when they walk in. But we vastly improved (the flow).” She said they also made parking more efficient than last year, bring- ing in people from the Toyota Center in Kennewick to help. Though it was hot and windy, McNalley said people still came out, and that the weather sent people into the air-conditioned building more often, driving traffic to vendors and to the 4-H exhibits. “We can’t plan the weather,” she said. “We tried to make up for that with misters, and some of our ven- dors stepped up as well.” See HEAT, Page A7 STAFF PHOTO BY E.J. HARRIS A pair of hogs sleep next to each other during the mid-day heat Friday in the swine barn at the Umatilla County Fair in Hermiston.
