IN THE SUMMER of 1981 a little action-adventure movie titled Raiders of the Lost Ark came out, and fans have been speculating ever since on who the character of Indiana Jones might be based on.

The most popular speculation — Vanity Fair magazine goes so far as to opine that he is “almost certainly” the basis for Jones — is Roy Chapman Andrews, a globe-trotting paleontologist and former director of the American Museum of Natural History.

Well, the fact is that Jones probably wasn’t based on any real person. Indy is the brainchild of George Lucas, the Star Wars guy. Lucas was a serious fan of pre-war pulp-magazine fiction, and the adventure pulps back in the day were full of characters like Indiana Jones.

But then again maybe he WAS based on a real person, because in the era Jones was set in, the real world was full of those characters too.

Oregon, too, has a couple candidates it could field as potential proto-Indiana Joneses.... (Fort Rock, Lake County; 1930s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/24-02.luther-cressman-oregons-indiana-jones-630.html)