Skip to main content

Powell’s City of Books Experience



I want to thank everyone who came for helping to make last night wonderful thing (to paraphrase a Steely Dan lyric). I would say that it was "awesome," but I am no longer a teenager.

From the young man who helped us park to the young woman in charge of the events space the employees were friendly and helpful. The tech person helped work out a difficult problem in getting my presentation onto the large screen, much to my relief. I felt as though I was among friends.

Having a great audience made me more animated than usual and I enjoyed rattling off the top of my head for about 40 minutes while showing pictures, maps, and diagrams pertaining to my book, The Oregon Shanghaiers. Following my talk I answered some very good questions and then signed a pile of books. It was, for me, a flawless, wonderful experience.

Barney Blalock at Powell's City of Books

Warning: Complete Subject Change

Someone who works in local TV just told me, with the voice of authority, that when the "shanghai tunnels" were underwater the crimps used wheelbarrows to take their victims to the ships. Everyone is an expert on this subject, but me.

I have read that for many years Front Street was deep mud in rainy weather. From Turk’s boardinghouse to Mersey Dock was about an even mile. Now I can’t get this image out of my mind: Charles Turk pushing a wheelbarrow with a landlubber-soon-to-be-sailor draped over it in a stupor.


 




I can also imagine Harry White pushing a wheelbarrow up and over the old Steel Bridge to Montgomery Dock in lower Albina. Hard work, that shanghaiing lark! I hope that all y'all know that I am kidding and still hold fast to my research that shows no one ever shanghaied anyone through a tunnel in Portland. Wheelbarrows? Maybe for someone too cheap to pay for a wagon. But Bunko Kelley was too scrawny to push a grown man in a wheelbarrow.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Last Word on Shanghai Tunnels - Including 14 reasons why the stories are bogus

I have never been on a tour of Portland's so-called "shanghai tunnels," so I am unable to comment on this attraction, except that I have heard that the tour is quite entertaining. Neither have I been to the Pirates of the Caribbean in Disneyland,  the Magic Carpets of Aladdin, or the Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, for that matter. The closest I have come to this sort of tourist entertainment was while visiting the ancient city of York I took my family on the "York Ghost Walk." This tour is a bit of innocent fun with some old ghost stories mixed in with distorted history—just for the tourists.  It may be true that I have no experience with the tourist tours of these basements in the northwest regions of downtown, but I do know a bit about them. There is a great deal of documentation in the newspapers, and in old court records. They were built by Chinese back in the days when Chinatown was the center of gang activity related to the different tongs...
17 comments
Read more

The Steel Bridge and the Railroad

I don’t know if anyone has noticed this, but the Steel Bridge on old postcards is often designated as being owned by any one of three different companies. Most often you will see the words “O.W.R. & N. Co. Bridge across the Willamette,” or something to that effect. Other times the card might read, “O. R. R. & N. Co. bridge, Portland, Oregon.” Then, on occasion, a card might say, “Union Pacific bridge, Portland, Oregon.” This was confusing to me at one time, until I read a little something on the history of the Union Pacific lines in the west, then I became even more confused. The lines were in and out of receivership, leased, sold, given different, but very similar names, and called different names by different levels of railroad hierarchy. When the first Steel Bridge was built in 1888 the company behind the construction was the Oregon Railway & Navigation Company (O. R. & N. Co.), an old and powerful entity that had evolved from the Oregon Steam Navigation Company...
Post a Comment
Read more

Good old O Dock

O Dock, foot of North Holladay When I started working on the waterfront the first place I was assigned was to a place that was indicated on the dispatch roster as "LDC". This stood for Louis Dreyfus Corporation, but few people called it that. It was known to the longshoremen and most everyone else as "Globe". The dock has gone through a number of names over the years and is now wearing the name O Dock. I am of the opinion that this is an older name than Globe, harking back to the Portland practice of naming docks after the streets of which they were the "foot". "O" referring to Oregon Street. At one time Victoria Street ran all the way down to the river having its foot in this same area. In those days there was a Victoria Dock. It was burned to the ground in 1902 by an arsonist who had spouted threats while spending a bit of time in the Oregon State Penitentiary that he was going to "burn Portland to the ground." He got as far as l...
1 comment
Read more