10 years ago this week — 2013

Oregon State University Extension Clatsop County celebrated its 25th annual master gardener graduation at a ceremony Thursday for 11 new graduates.

To qualify for the master gardener designation, participants were required to complete 60 hours of training and 60 hours of volunteer time.

Activities included staffing plant clinics at the Astoria Sunday Market, the River People Farmers Market and the Clatsop County Fair.

They also supported the annual spring into gardening seminar and maintained the master gardener seminar and maintained the master gardener demonstration garden at the fairground. In addition, 46 people were re-certified as Oregon State University master gardeners.

Around a dozen Oregon Connections Academy students from first through eighth grades from the North Coast were treated to a field trip to the Columbia River Maritime Museum in Astoria Thursday.

The students were joined by a couple of their teachers, who helped them explore maritime history, fisheries and marine commerce. When they arrived, they were fortunate to see a river pilot boat assisting a cargo ship in the Columbia River.

The children also participated in a scavenger hunt that allowed them a chance to explore the various exhibits.

It was late at night when Terri Vineyard and her family returned home last week from a trip to Tacoma, Washington. But with three young children in tow, Vineyard and her husband, Charles Lane, quickly realized something was wrong.

But there were no flames and the home was still standing. They later learned that was because of the heroic act of their neighbor, Phil Brown.

“If it wasn’t for Phil Brown, everything we own and the rest of the building would have burned to the ground,” Vineyard said. “We would have come home to ashes and bones.”

The laundry room of the family’s Emerald Heights apartment caught on fire Thursday afternoon.

The laundry room is damaged and currently unusable, but because of Brown’s quick action to get inside, find the fire extinguisher and put the flames out, there was no further destruction.

The family owns therapy cats for their son, who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. The cats were home while the family was away.

HUMBOLDT BAY, Calif. — Victoria Taylor, who grew up in Pacific County, Washington, has recently become one of an elite group. She is only the sixth woman in U.S. Coast Guard history to achieve the designation surfman.

According to BMCM (Master Chief) Jon Gagnon, officer in charge of the U.S. Coast Guard Station in Humboldt Bay, California, “I have a remarkable young lady stationed here who earned her Surfman qualification in late September, allowing her to operate rescue boats in surf.”

This qualifies her to boat in places like Grays Harbor and Ilwaco, Washington, Gagnon said.

50 years ago — 1973

SEASIDE — It’s official, Oregon and Clatsop County now may claim the state’s and perhaps the world’s largest spruce tree.

The giant rests majestically in all its splendor in the Crown Zellerbach Klootchy Creek park 2 miles east of Cannon Beach junction on U.S. Highway 101.

Dubbed the Klootchy Creek spruce, the gnarled old tree is a record 216 feet high, has a 52-foot, 6-inch average circumference at 4.5 feet above the ground and boasts an average branch spread of 93 feet.

PORTLAND — A legal challenge appears almost certain to the aluminum plant air emission standards adopted Monday in Portland by the Oregon Environmental Quality Commission.

The commission adopted the controversial standards over the objections of the aluminum industry which asked for more time to show that the regulation was impossible to achieve with present technology.

A spokesman for American Metal Climax Co., which plans to build an aluminum smelter in Warrenton, didn’t say definitely Monday that the company would challenge the new standards in court.

However, he said the company “ought to” because the standard was based on a faulty staff report, rested on misleading statistics and was influenced by political pressures.

A second commuter airline has applied to the Oregon Public Utility Commissioner to provide air service to Astoria and a third airline is contemplating applying.

The commuter, or so-called third-level air carrier, is applying in anticipation that Airwest will ask the Civil Aeronautics Board for permission to abandon its present air service to Astoria.

Airwest hasn’t applied to the board for that permission yet, mainly because Oregon transportation officials have threatened to fight the airline’s withdrawal until a financially sound substitute is found to serve Astoria.

KNAPPA — Ever wondered about the similarity in the names Knappa and Knappton?

Browse through Carlton Appelo’s “A Chronicle of the Early Days of Knappton” and you will discover that a pioneer family named Knapp founded the two towns on either side of the Columbia River.

Knappton, Washington, was a thriving logging town before economic conditions and as fateful fire transformed it into a ghost town for several years, Appelo says.

Knappa also was a logging community that survived through combining fishing, logging and farming. Appelo describes early Knappton as “a bustling metropolis on the north shore of the lower Columbia. It was the magnet which brought many European emigrants to this region with its industrial payroll promising some economic security.”

There was talk of railroad terminus for Knappton in 1880s and it served as a market for agricultural produce raised in the Grays River and Deep River valleys.

A sawmill was built in 1869 that boosted the town’s economy, and Knappton served as a port of entry for most of the early settlers in the 1870s and later.

75 years ago — 1948

An air search for the abandoned 67-foot drag boat Goodnews was underway today by the U.S. Coast Guard after the cutter Balsam returned to port at 4 a.m. without having sighted the tanker-rammed vessel.

Coast Guardsmen at Coast Guard Station Point Adams said today that a U.S. Coast Guard PBM patrol plane was dispatched from Port Angeles, Washington, at 7:30 a.m. Wednesday to search for the Goodnews.

A large four-horned Japanese mine was washed up on the Washington coast 1/2-mile north of the approach to the Oysterville beach by storms which have whipped the Pacific Northwest for three days.

The mine was reported Thursday afternoon to the U.S. Coast Guard Station Cape Disappointment by an unidentified person.

A guard detail from Cape Disappointment was immediately dispatched to find and guard the mine until a mine-disposal officer could be summoned.

Lightning that struck a tree on the Seppa brothers farm in the Lewis and Clark area early Thursday morning electrocuted two head of cattle and frightened three other animals so far away that they had not been found by Friday morning.

The bolt hit the tree about 2 a.m. Thursday. A herd of eight beef cattle was standing beneath the tree at the time.

Could television broadcasts from Seattle’s new station, KRSC, be picked up in Astoria and seen on receiving TV screens here?

Radio engineers say it’s possible, that chances are better here than anywhere else in Oregon. But don’t start buying yourself a television receiving set yet.

It would require a powerful television relay transmitter here that could pick up Seattle signals — if they come in strong enough — and rebroadcast them for Astoria fans. There is no such relay set in town.

With the exception of longshoremen themselves returning to work as their strike ends, settlement of the longshore strike will probably have no great effect on Clatsop County employment, Guy Barker, manager of the Astoria unemployment compensation office, said Saturday.

Barker pointed out that county lumber mills, anticipating an end of the strike, already have resumed operations.

Beach visitors reported considerable crude oil and another oil, apparently linseed oil judging from its smell, was strewn along the shore in the vicinity of DeLaura Beach Sunday.

There was speculation that the oil may have originated in the wreck of the freighter Mauna Ala, which went ashore near there in December 1941.

Visitors speculated that the storms over the weekend may have broken open compartments of the Mauna Ala that had held together all the seven years since the vessel was wrecked.

The Mauna Ala’s cargo included considerable linseed oil.