During the early 1920s, and the brief but frenetic heyday of the Ku Klux Klan in Oregon politics, this postcard was one small instrument of alarm and persuasion. At issue in 1922 was a vote for or against a bill that would abolish private elementary and high school education in Oregon. The target: Catholic schools.…
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We’ve been to Denmark, and we’ve been to Norway. We haven’t yet made it to Berlin, but we have perused nearby Waterloo. This past weekend, we hit both London and Holland. Hotel at London, 1945 Ben Maxwell photo, Salem PL We did all this by automobile, and without leaving the state, for all those places…
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Alvin McCleary, left; Myrtle Gay Kent, far right I have learned some more about the photograph of the cozy dining room described in “Springtime Mirrored in Waldport.” Many thanks to Colleen Nickerson of the Waldport Heritage Museum of the Alsi Genealogical and Historical Society for identifying two of the people in the photograph. My…
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The summer 2014 edition of Oregon Humanities magazine has a short post from Dave Kenagy, “Starting from Osmosis,” about coffee, how much he likes it, and how he began drinking it. It all began at the Brand Café in Redmond in 1956, when Dave was four and went there with his father. Dad a penchant…
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Here are a couple of Oregon foodways oddments: banquet menus printed on wood. Both menus make a nod to regional foods, and both make it clear that eating locally wasn’t easy, even in the 1920s. The “Road, Rail and Sail Banquet” was held in Marshfield (renamed Coos Bay in 1940) in the spring of 1925.…
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Menus from small town eateries are usually predictable in their offerings, as much so today as they were seventy-odd years ago. The good eats at the White Restaurant in The Dalles, Oregon, as presented in this menu from about 1940, feature breakfast: eggs, bacon, sausage, hotcakes, some omelettes (plain, cheese, ham, bacon, jelly, or Spanish).…
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New York Public Library Though he was born in Missouri and died in Maine, he was an Oregonian. Though he achieved fame as a music critic and a popular writer about the likes of Wagner and Chopin, he also wrote about food (Food and Flavor, 1913) and love (Primitive Love and Love Stories, 1899) and…
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“No banquet is considered complete without oysters in our modern life, and here is a delicacy that surpasses the oyster, but that cannot be shipped.” Postcard view, Nye Beach, Newport, Yaquina Head in background An exemplary bibliographer and city planner of my acquaintance, Nicholas Starin, asked me an unexpected question. Namely, “What do you…
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The tea room craze came to Portland just as prohibition appeared on the horizon. A tea room was a place for women—not exclusively, but most especially—to socialize over a hot beverage and a light meal. Tea rooms were a fixture of downtown city life through the 1920s and into the 1930s. They were fond of…
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This post is an edited version of a talk given June 24, 2014, at McMenamin’s Edgefield, Troutdale, for the Oregon Encyclopedia, titled Your Grandmother’s Cook Book: A Century of Oregon Eating, 1880 – 1980. A number of images and recipes have been omitted. Dora Engeman Half a century ago, when she was in her 90th year with…
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