Portland's Lost Waterfront

The Lone Fir Cemetery on Memorial Day from an 1888 West Shore magazine As my research has had me absorbed in reading Portland newspapers from many long years ago I have come across collected reminiscences of Portlanders recalling events in their lives decades earlier than the year the newspaper was printed. These were published in the Oregonian under the heading, "Do You Remember?" Since these dear people are long gone, and their memory is just a few kilobytes of scanned image OCRed in a database, I think it is safe to refer to these tidbits as  "ghosts of memories." I am intending to share some of them here, from time to time, for your enjoyment, and thoughtful consideration. Sometimes little flashes like these will bring a period of history into sharp focus, like a burst of lightning on a dark day. And there is no darker day than the one that is behind us. We are carried along so swiftly by the arrow of time that we rarely get a chance to conside...

Terminal 4 warehouse filled with the baggage of Japanese awaiting repatriation As some of you are aware, I spend a day every other week at Tom Robinson's Historic Photo Archive located in an old medical building in Saint Johns. Lately I have been going through boxes of negatives of photos taken by Larry Barber, an Oregonian reporter who covered the waterfront for most of the 20th century. The negatives are in envelopes with sometimes cryptic messages scrawled on them by Mr. Barber. My duties are to decipher the scrawl and search the Oregonian database to see if I can find news articles related to the photographs. Most of the images are interesting in one way or another, but sometimes I stumble upon an image that reveals a story so unexpected and fascinating that I lay aside my other projects and share it with you, dear readers.   Today I came upon an envelope with the following words scrawled thereon: " Jay baggage 23 frt earloads from Tule Lake Ariz + N Mex. ...