Parents hit the desks in school switch day

EO file photo

Jill and Allen Stiffler attempt to solve an algebra problem sitting at the desk of their daughter Kim Carter at Weston-McEwen High School Feb. 23, 1994. Parents filled in for many students at the invitation of the school.


Parents of Weston-McEwen high school students entered the wayback machine in February of 1994 when they switched places with their kids and went back to school for a day. It was a chance to see what their kids were learning and doing, and most parents were pleasantly surprised.

Librarian Ruth Kostur and teacher Jennifer Riley were the brains behind the switch, which proved to be both instructive and frustrating for adults who scrambled to make it to class on time and stared blankly at math problems scribbled on a white board. The idea, said principal Wayne Kostur, was to get parents more involved in their students’ academic lives.

It wasn’t exactly a fair trade, though — while parents were dealing with sticky lockers and hypotenuse triangles, their teenagers were sleeping in and watching TV.

“It’s great,” said Tim Pupo, who switched with daughter Tammy for the day. “They ought to make it mandatory.” Pupo said his daughter had planned to make the trade mutual, and cover his job at Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution in Pendleton, but a basketball injury put a kibosh on those plans.

For most of the 40-something students-for-a-day, school had changed considerably in the ensuing decades. Computers were now a mainstay in the classroom, and science classes were much more challenging. Some things, though, remain the same — math is still hard, and impromptu speeches still aren’t any fun.

The point wasn’t correct answers or perfect attendance, however. “If you had to struggle a little bit,” said teacher Elvin Taylor after his sixth period math class, “then it will help you understand the struggles your kids go through sometimes.” He was talking about trigonometry, but he might as well have been talking about the whole exercise.

Tiny heroine saves parents from fire

Former Pendleton residents George Waterman and his wife Ina were living in Spokane, Wash., in 1955 where George owned and operated a tavern. In Pendleton George had worked as the manager of a paint store, while Ina was an assistant in the Pendleton Chamber of Commerce office. Their pride and joy was daughter Shelley, born in Pendleton three years earlier.

The precocious toddler repaid their gift of life that year when she saved her parents from a house fire in mid-April.

Early that morning (the East Oregonian did not have an exact date for the incident) a short circuit in the family’s living room caused a desk lamp to catch fire. The fire began eating away at the wall and burned a large part of the living room floor. At about 6 a.m., Shelley got up to get herself a snack in the kitchen, as was her regular routine. She smelled smoke and went to the living room to see the flames gaining headway. Because the window in her parents’ bedroom was open, they did not smell the smoke.

Did three-year-old Shelley panic and run screaming from the house? On the contrary, she walked into the bedroom and announced calmly, “Mommy, the house is on fire.”

The Watermans fled the burning house and called the fire department from a neighbor’s home. Firemen were able to save the rest of the home, and though most of their belongings were damaged by smoke and water, the loss was covered by insurance.

Had Shelley not been in the habit of getting up early and taking care of herself while her parents slept, which undoubtedly gave the little girl self-confidence and resilience beyond her years, she might have been an orphan that day.

Teens and dynamite a volatile combination

Missing dynamite is a worrisome problem, especially when it starts showing up attached to the underside of bridges inside city limits. So Heppner police and Morrow County officials were breathing a little easier in February of 1964 after three 15-year-old boys admitted they were the culprits in the theft and subsequent explosive mischief that had been plaguing Heppner and its environs for some time.

According to a Feb. 24, 1964 story in the East Oregonian, after finding several city bridges wired with dynamite, officials checked the powder building (apparently located near the new high school in Heppner), and found 150 pounds of dynamite and a spool of primer cord missing. Some of the explosive devices they found were rigged with gun shells, from which the bullet had been removed, inserted in the end. Police were alarmed because it looked as though the shells had been pounded with rocks or hammers; anyone succeeding in setting off a blast in that manner would have been killed or seriously injured.

The boys also took their lives in their hands when they used primer cord as a fuse for some of their homemade bombs — primer cord also contains explosives. The boys admitted they used a .22 to set off some of the blasts. And they also confessed to blowing up a cattle guard on Black Horse Road.

The case was referred to juvenile court by District Attorney Herman Winter. At sentencing, Morrow County Judge Oscar Peterson ordered the boys to clean the county road from the city limits to the city dump once a month until the end of the school year, and serve as laborers for road work during the upcoming spring break. They also were ordered to make restitution for damage to the locks on the powder house and the cattle guard.

Most of the stolen dynamite and primer cord was recovered; the boys had used only 10 sticks of dynamite in their attempts to “make a big noise.”

Frigid climate sparks Senate campaign, contest

Considering the recent polar weather systems ravaging the Midwest, I thought this Associated Press story from the Feb. 20, 1989 East Oregonian was appropriate (and amusing):

Byron Chamberlain, a high school assistant football coach from Sheridan, Wyo., was declared the winner of a tongue-in-cheek contest sponsored by the Billings (Mont.) Gazette to rename the state of North Dakota.

The contest was a response to North Dakota state Sen. Tim Mathern’s campaign to rename his state “Dakota.” Mathern said he wanted to dispel the notion that North Dakota was “some sort of arctic wasteland,” and blamed the word “North” in the name for the misconception. The 159 Gazette readers who entered the contest, however, for the most part made suggestions based on North Dakota’s famously frigid winters.

Among the entries were “Darn Dacolda,” “Zipdacoatup,” “Weardakotandhat,” “Saskatchacolda,” “Subtopia” and, bluntly, “Land of the Frozen Dead.”

Chamberlain’s winning entry? “Manitscolda.”

Chamberlain won a one-way bus ticket from Billings to Bismarck, N.D., or the cash equivalent of $45. He took the cash. Considering the high temperature in Bismarck of 5 degrees that weekend, it was a smart move.

Lincoln turned down appointment as Oregon governor

Abraham Lincoln’s birthday is celebrated every Feb. 12 as a national holiday. Lincoln is one of the United States’ best-loved presidents, the man who brought an end to slavery and saw us through the Civil War. But how many people know that he was once offered the governorship of Oregon? And how would history have changed if he had accepted?

According to a Feb. 12, 1964, Associated Press story by Paul W. Harvey Jr., Lincoln completed his service as a U.S. representative from Illinois on March 4, 1849. He didn’t want to return to Springfield; instead, he was hoping to land an appointment as a U.S. land commissioner. President Zachary Taylor had promised the job would go to an Illinois man. But since Lincoln had opposed Henry Clay at the 1848 Whig convention, Clay retaliated by blocking Lincoln’s appointment to the plum job. President Taylor then named Lincoln a secretary of the Oregon Territory and offered him the governorship.

Lincoln’s presidential secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, wrote in their biography that Lincoln wanted to go west and some of his friends urged him to accept the appointment. They claimed Oregon would soon become a state and then Lincoln could return to Washington, D.C., as a senator. But Oregon statehood did not come about until 1859 — the eve of the Civil War. And by then Lincoln was well on his way to becoming president.

Lincoln did not accept the appointment, his biographers said, “on account of the natural unwillingness of his wife to remove to a country so wild and remote.”

But while Lincoln did not become governor of the Oregon territory (he did not, in fact, ever visit Oregon), he did change life in our state through three key pieces of legislation, according to an Oregon Public Broadcasting story from 2009. The Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 gave railroads thousands of acres of land and brought many people west. Lincoln’s Homestead Act also brought thousands of homesteaders to the area. And Lincoln was also responsible for “land grant colleges,” where senators and congressmen were given land for state use. Oregon State University, Washington State University and the University of Idaho are all located on land from these grants.

Prohibition leads to local moonshining

Prohibition began in the United States on Jan. 17, 1920, when the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution went into effect. The temperance movement first gained ground in 1826 with the formation of the American Temperance Society, but the consumption of alcoholic beverages was a contentious subject as far back as colonial times.

Prohibition did not, of course, stop the making or consuming of hard alcohol. “Moonshiners” set up their own distilling equipment wherever it could be hidden from local lawmen, and Umatilla County was certainly no exception when it came to hidden stills. For example: In Freewater, a washboiler still in the bedroom of Claude Anderson’s home near Crockett Station was raided by Sheriff W.R. Taylor and officer Robert Sinclair Dec. 21, 1920. As no one was home at the time of the raid, the officers waited for Anderson so he could be arrested. Anderson disclaimed ownership of the still, but frequent visitors to his home, with quite a line of autos calling, had aroused suspicion and Sheriff Taylor confiscated a 50-gallon barrel of fruit mash and two jugs of alcohol during the raid. Another still was raided five miles from Milton on Dec. 28, 1920, in a three-room cave in a hillside on the Upper Walla Walla river. A Kentucky native was caught red-handed when officers waded waist-deep through the river to reach the cave undetected. Four hundred and fifty gallons of corn mash was confiscated along with a 50-gallon capacity copper still and five gallons of finished liquor. Both men was arrested and taken to the justice court in Athena for trial the following day.

The Jan. 5, 1921, edition of the East Oregonian had a short story about the downfalls of making your own liquor:

In Omaha, Neb., a gory drunken battle broke out on a farm owned by George Fred, an alleged moonshiner. Five were wounded in the battle, a two-on-three fight. Since the trio had imbibed more freely than the other two combatants, they received the worst of the injuries, but not without inflicting serious damage on their foes. The wounded? A dog and a hog against three goats. All the animals had become inebriated by eating corn mash from Fred’s still. Local officers found six operational stills and confiscated 600 gallons of corn whiskey.

Pendleton family follows mission call to Africa

Andrew and Barbara Clark of Pendleton met in Africa while both were members of the Peace Corps. A Jan. 6, 1978 story in the East Oregonian interviewed the couple and their children as they were preparing to return to the continent on an agricultural mission in Kenya. Excitement was running high for the family. “We have a long-term romance with Africa,” Andrew said.

Andrew Clark served the Oregon Department of Agriculture as a veterinarian for five Eastern Oregon counties, and also had worked as an employee for the African government after his Peace Corps service was finished. Because of his experience, he was picked for the three-year stint in a cattle-producing area in Kenya, helping to build up production of both cattle and crops. Though the area did not place an emphasis on farming, the Clarks hoped increasing the water supply to the region might change that.

Barbara planned to home-school their five children, Sam, Jamie, John, Benjie and Mary, with help from a correspondence course available to missionary families. The flexible school situation would allow Andrew to take the children along on his extensive travels around the region. The Clarks also vetoed the idea of placing the children in local schools so as to not take up space that African children could use.

In addition to clothing, some medications and other items that would be hard to find in Africa, the Clarks were taking many tools and a “standard missionary” square-tub gas washing machine. Children at the Pendleton Presbyterian Church also bought a Polaroid camera for the family so they could send photos home to Pendleton without having to find a place to develop the film. Letters telling of their life and travels also would be routed to their friends through Dr. Myron Nichols of the church.

What would the family miss? Trick-or-treating at Halloween would be out, as would a white Christmas, though the family planned to discover new holidays while celebrating the usual ones. And what about the children’s favorite toys? “I’ve never seen African children with commercial toys,” said Andrew. The classics — sticks and rocks — and bugs, which are much bigger in Africa, were the staple for African kids. Considering each of the family members would be allowed only two duffel bags for the move, ordinary items and a little creativity would have to make do for playtime.

Being accepted by the African people didn’t worry the Clarks. They had learned on their previous stint in Africa that acceptance was dependent on how the native people were greeted, how they were entertained in the home and the respect they were shown. Also, “The African people love children,” Andrew added. Their children, two of whom were adopted and were African-American, would be door-openers for them, the Clarks said.

Renee Struthers is the records editor and book reviewer for the East Oregonian. Contact her at rstruthers@eastoregonian.com