10 years ago this week — 2014

Walking sideways was not just for crabs this weekend, as locals and visitors packed into the Clatsop County Fairgrounds, side-stepping to get in line for a tasting and a bite at the 2014 Crab, Seafood & Wine Festival.

The annual festival in its 32nd year brought in approximately 16,000 to 17,000 old and new faces to its three-day event at the Clatsop County Fairgrounds.

Cannon Beach’s 12 Days of Earth Day celebration crescendoed Friday with the Gaylord Nelson Award Ceremony, followed on Saturday by the city’s annual Earth and Arbor Day parade and street fair.

This year’s Gaylord Nelson Award winner, Bob Lundy, is a man of broad environmental and ecological interests who serves on several local boards, commissions and committees.

Lundy is involved with land use, infrastructure and local food projects, and he volunteers with the Haystack Rock Awareness Program.

WARRENTON — Dick and Harriet Baldwin didn’t have kids. But according to local supporters, their baby was Warrenton.

The $1.2 million fortune they left to the Masons in 2000 provided 14 Warrenton High School seniors with more than $28,000 in scholarships.

Marion Blake plays bridge five days a week.

And at 96 today, she’s still got it.

“She actually coaches me,” her daughter Mary Blake said. “It’s one game where age is an advantage because of experience.”

But Marion Blake, formerly a veterinarian’s surgical assistant in Denver, has more secrets to life aside from the card game.

“Red wine and dark chocolate,” she says with a laugh.

Her other secret is a positive attitude. She lives by her own motto, “accent the positive, eliminate the negative and don’t mess with the mister in between.”

KNAPPA — What happens when the student body takes ownership of its prom?

Knappa High School’s students and staff pulled together to create a very memorable end-of-year party on Saturday.

“The men wanted ‘Duck Dynasty’ and the women wanted Enchanted Forest or a masquerade,” said freshman Angeleen Somoza, a student leadership member who helped put the prom together, about a junior vote on the prom’s theme. “They voted on it, and Enchanted Forest and ‘Duck Dynasty’ got combined.”

Somoza was dumbfounded when first asked to organize prom in her first year of high school. But the experience grew on her as students came up with the design, the dates and other elements.

50 years ago — 1974

BRADWOOD — There’s been lots of talk about Tansy Point in Warrenton as one of the last places in the area with both rail and deep water access suited to port facilities, but precious little talk about similar acreage in Bradwood 25 miles up the Columbia River in Clatsop County.

Bruce Starker, of Corvallis, owns 334 acres at Bradwood, at least 100 of which is flat, filled land. Just offshore, the water is 35 feet deep. The rail line runs right along the water.

Starker purchased the property with the idea of selling it to port interests or other developers one day. It is currently for sale for such use.

The Port of Astoria handles all port development in Clatsop County but has no reported plans for Bradwood.

The Bradwood tract was mentioned as a possible port site in a recent Columbia River study. The study also mentioned Tansy Point.

Veo Puckett, caretaker of the land, said Bradwood’s reason for existence had been the large Columbia-Hudson Lumber Co. mill built in 1934.

The mill depended on first-growth timber, and when the big trees ran out in June 1962, it shut down. Starker bought it and the surrounding acreage in September 1963 on speculation.

The mill burned in 1965, but the docks and piers are still there. So are the remains of about 30 houses, seven occupied, a school, a doctor’s office, a post office, a store and wooden sidewalks that connected them in the old company town’s heyday.

Puckett said there is about 1 mile of frontage with usable land extending back from it for some distance.

The port was apparently never dredged. Puckett said the deep water at Bradwood is a natural result of river action.

SVENSEN — At the starting time of 8 o’clock Wednesday night the candidates still were coming in.

They lined up at the table where a woman wrote their names on a piece of paper, gummed on the back, which they stuck on their lapels, up high where the citizens could see it.

Candidates, at least eight of them, for county commission, county assessor and state representative showed up at the Wickiup Grange Hall for the meeting.

It wasn’t a candidates’ forum. It’s just the time of year. Where there are meetings, there are candidates.

It was a meeting of common sense and the organization of dairymen.

On the agenda was a series of speeches by businessmen and individuals with a common theme: Big government and its henchmen, bureaucracy, are crippling, even killing, small businesses as well as industry by overregulation.

Lenee Logan, 9, marched proudly up Astoria’s Commercial Street Thursday afternoon at the head of the campaign procession.

“Vote Logan, he’s my dad — Astoria School Board,” the sign said.

Behind her trudged and elfish group of campaigners, their signs urging people to get out and vote May 7. And to vote for C.R. Logan, Lenee’s dad.

75 years ago — 1949

They took the “last” refugee boat out of Shanghai six months ago, ending an odyssey that took them through the World War II period in China to the brink of the current nationalist-red war.

Now the Kenneth Wong family, which includes Mr. and Mrs. Wong, Jean, 19; Doris, 14, and Kenneth Jr., 12, are living in Astoria.

Speaking of the family’s nine-month trip, Mrs. Wong said: “It began when the Japanese started bombing Hong Kong from across the river in 1941, and we knew we had to leave when looting broke out in the city.

“We traveled nine months by junks on the river, in trucks, in coolie chairs, in sedan chairs, and by train. Over the mountains, where the bearers could not carry us, we walked.

“Mostly, we cooked and ate by the roadside. We had the children and they were small, so we could not carry any belongings with us. We bought our food along the way and prepared it the best way we could.”

The nine-month trip ended when Mrs. Wong and the three children finally took up residence at Chenetu near Chungking, the nationalist capital.

The Wongs went to Shanghai after the Japanese surrendered.

SALEM — Fish fights loomed in Oregon today for the first time since the adjournment of the 45th Legislature.

Columbia River gillnetters yesterday filed a motion in Marion County Circuit Court to prohibit absolutely trappers and seiners from fishing this year.

Water storage in the city’s watershed area is excellent this spring and runoff conditions are good, City Engineer G.T. McClean reported this week.

McClean said storage in the watershed totals 215 million gallons in three reservoirs — main headworks, Wickiup Lake and middle reservoir. An additional 50 million gallons could be stored in Wickiup Lake Reservoir if all leaks could be repaired, McClean said.

A poor season will close all Washington beaches to commercial clam digging by next week, according to an announcement by C.S. Anderson, acting state fisheries director.

Copalis Beach, Washington, was closed at midnight Wednesday when diggers were to have passed the 450,000-pound quota. The beach produced 700,000 pounds of razor clams last year.

“Hard feelings” that come out aboard ship when “guys get gassed up” were blamed today in Astoria Justice Court by Able Bodied Seaman Bert D. Reinhardt, 25, of Long Beach, California, for the Monday night fight which hospitalized another crewman aboard his freighter.

Reinhardt was brought into justice court this morning on a disorderly conduct charge filed by city police. The charge was filed after doctors’ reports gave assurance that Julio Sanchez Torres, 38, now being treated at St. Mary’s Hospital for injuries, is not seriously injured and will recover.

Torres was knocked down a ladder of the freighter Julia Luckenbach during the fight, which occurred while the boat was tied up at Pier 1 at Port docks.