1975 — If a man’s a clam digger, he does what he has to do to get clams. That includes digging by the light of the lantern.

10 years ago this week — 2015

John Ginder marveled at the stunning, 1,200-pound, 8-foot tall, iron-framed chandelier that is the centerpiece of the majestic Liberty Theatre.

The videographer, who has lived in Astoria for about a year, had never been inside before a free open house Saturday afternoon to celebrate the historic theater’s 90th anniversary and the 10th anniversary of the grand reopening.

“It’s beautiful. I love old theaters like this,” Ginder said, pointing up at the chandelier. Ryan, 13, and Will, 11, bolted up the staircase to get a better view from the balcony.

His partner, Judith Niland, a writer and director who works with the Astor Street Opry Co., is a longtime Astorian who remembers when the old vaudeville house and movie theater was not exactly a source of civic pride.

“It was really sad to see that,” she said of the time when the theater was in disrepair. “So it was great that they did this.”

The city’s renovation plan for the Astoria Public Library is in doubt due to the uncertainty of two new city councilors and an organized campaign by preservationists to save the old Waldorf Hotel.

The City Council voted last January to accept a renovation plan that involved expanding the library into the long-vacant Waldorf Hotel, also known as the Merwyn.

But two new city councilors — Cindy Price and Zetty Nemlowill — have said they want more information about the plan before making a decision. The Lower Columbia Preservation Society and others have also launched a drive to save the Waldorf as a historic example of 1920s architecture.

Axel Englund opened Englund Marine on July 22, 1944, in a 50-by-50-foot building on a rebuilt dock at 101 15th St. with three employees. It was, at the time, one of at least four marine supply stores in Astoria.

Seventy years and five months later, his son Jon and grandson Kurt, CEO and president of Englund Marine group, respectively, gathered more than 100 of their employees in the warehouse on the backside of their 44,000-square-foot retail center in Hamburg Avenue Saturday.

Their employees came during the company’s slow season from the Pacific Northwest Coast and west from Montana, south from Westport, Washington, and north from Phoenix, Arizona. The company now employs 126 at its 11 locations across the Western United States.

In an innovative trade-off, Astoria has agreed not to aggressively harvest timber in the Bear Creek watershed over the next decade in return for carbon credits that could help industrial polluters offset carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to climate change.

The city is partnering with the Climate Trust, a Portland nonprofit that would purchase the carbon credits. Utilities with fossil-fuel driven power plants pay the trust to fund projects that offset pollution and meet the requirements of Oregon’s landmark emission standards law.

50 years ago — 1975

SEASIDE — The Seaside City Council, by a three-to-one vote, resolved Monday to support AMAX in its bid to locate an aluminum reduction plant in Warrenton.

The resolution urged the Oregon Environmental Quality Commission to approve a permit allowing the company to operate there.

Seaside joins governing bodies in Warrenton and Astoria, and Clatsop County in approving similar resolutions.

The commission is considering designating the Youngs Bay-Warrenton area “a special problem area” that would make it difficult to build an aluminum plant there.

The sole dissenting vote on the Seaside council came from John Truhy, who said AMAX isn’t the kind of industry that would benefit Clatsop County.

SALEM — Gov. Bob Straub, making the strongest statement to date on AMAX, said Friday the benefits of building the aluminum plant in Warrenton don’t outweigh the potential risks to the nearby lower Columbia River estuary.

In a meeting with a delegation of individuals from Clatsop County who support the AMAX plant, Straub said he supported the Environmental Quality Commission’s intention to designate Youngs Bay-Warrenton as a “special problem area.”

A spokesman said the pro-AMAX group organizing a bus caravan to the Feb. 7 Environmental Quality Commission hearing in Portland will continue its efforts despite a lukewarm reception Friday from Gov. Bob Straub.

CAPE MEARES — A state highway division crew will begin digging a deep hole on the beach just north of this coastal town.

The hole will become the grave for a dead 30-foot-long, 10-ton gray whale which washed ashore Jan. 16 about a quarter of a mile north of here.

SEASIDE — At 15, Jeanne Scoggins is a national champion.

And not just once but three times, becoming the first person ever to win three American Horse Show Association championships in one year.

That’s not bad for a young woman who only started riding four years ago and competing the last two.

A sophomore at Seaside High School, Scoggins was awarded the championship at the Annual American Horse Show Association Awards Banquet in San Francisco earlier this month.

She won championships in three areas of horse show competition: open western pleasure (walk, trot and canter events); open youth (events similar to open western for riders under 17 years of age); and open stock horse (ranch work events).

75 years ago — 1950

Irving Avenue residents between 21st and 22nd streets were in serious danger Monday of losing their homes because of sliding earth. Nine houses were affected.

Street paving had burst into gaping eruptions at a dozen places. City water lines through the entire block had pulled loose at the joints; breaks were so numerous workmen were laying new line instead of attempting to repair the old.

But residents of the block, on both sides of Irving, had more serious troubles. Their homes were leaning, cracking, crumbling, and some apparently were in imminent danger of collapse.

G.B. Rush, 945 Irving, was moving his family out Monday morning. Rush had rented the modern, cheerful house from Mr.. Carl Nyquist and had furnished it himself. But he called a moving van Monday after locating a vacant duplex during the weekend. “I don’t think this house will ever fall over,” Rush said, “but it’s breaking apart.”

Residents of the Irving area told the Astorian-Budget today they consider the city of Astoria responsible for the slide condition there, and denied they had ever been warned against building on the area because it was subject to slides.

“The city had a system of drains there before World War I,” said Ordway. “When that drainage system plugged up, the sliding condition began. For 20 years, the earth did not move in that area.”

A severe cold wave in the wake of flash blizzards clamped down again on the Pacific Northwest Tuesday, ending for the time being the threats of floods and snow-slides.

The arctic front sent temperatures skidding from the mid-forties down to the zero mark. The weather forecaster said the new cold snap would probably be as severe as the one that gripped the region last week.

Astorians awoke Tuesday to find their city again sheeted with inch-deep snow, making hills all but impassable for automobiles without chains or special snow tires.

The slide area on Irving Avenue between 21st and 22nd is still moving slowly downhill, traveling 0.6 feet in 24 hours up to noon yesterday, City Engineer G.T. McClean said today.

The slide area has moved about 5 to 6 feet northward down the hill since it began moving Friday.

A super race of Douglas fir trees is being planned for the West Coast, Chief Forester W.D. Hagenstein told the annual meeting of the forest conservation committee of Pacific Northwest forest industries here today.

Hagensgtein called it a “real milestone in American forestry” and said the Douglas fir industry in 1949 made forestry history when it adopted a regionwide seed certification policy for assuring superior trees from artificial reforestation.

WARRENTON — The recent melting snows and high water are again giving the city water department troubles.

The 121-inch main line crossing Cullaby Lake, serving Warrenton and surrounding areas, is bolted and trussed to the bridge on the south end of the lake at the county road by the old Maki place.

Since the melting snows, the water has risen so much that both ends of the bridge are underwater and the center is beginning to float. Any additional raise in the water may cause enough movement in the bridge to break the pipeline, E.R. Baldwin, city manager, reports.