A daily (5-day-a-week) podcast feed of true Oregon stories -- of heroes and rascals, of shipwrecks and lost gold. Stories of shanghaied sailors and Skid Road bordellos and pirates and robbers and unsolved mysteries. An exploding whale, a couple shockingly scary cults, a 19th-century serial killer, several very naughty ladies, a handful of solid-brass con artists and some of the dumbest bad guys in the history of the universe. From the archives of the Offbeat Oregon History syndicated newspaper column. Source citations are included with the text version on the Web site at http://offbeatoregon.com.
A hard-pressed crew tried to snake just a few more logs out before quitting for the day, hoping nothing would go wrong in the tinder-dry forest. Unfor...
Settlers in John Day in the late 1800s learned the healer of Kam Wah Chung could cure diseases others couldn't; all his patients survived the fatal Sp...
The case of John Ottoson (ne Otokichi) in 1832 illustrates what can happen: Blown off to sea by a gale, he and his comrades rode the Kuroshio Current ...
Ashamed to show his face in Astoria after causing the loss of the biggest passenger liner on the West Coast, Thomas Doig slunk away to South America a...
Prolific Portland inventor Victor Strode designed a boat that was half airplane and all art-deco-age futurism, and early tests with a smaller model we...
“This is an age of do-it-first,” said Silas Christofferson, and proceeded to launch his spindly kite-like “aeroplane” from the roof of a downtown hote...
Calling himself “J. Hawker,” David Heesh dynamited several high-voltage powerline towers, then threatened to keep it up unless ransom was delivered; t...
The alcoholic derelicts of on Burnside Street knew they could count on denatured alcohol for a cheap-but-nasty buzz; it might make them sick, but it w...
IT WAS A little after 10 p.m. on a Friday evening in the summer of 1921. In their little house on Druid Street in the St. Johns neighborhood of Portla...