SEPT. 1, 1962, WAS an unusually sultry day for the north Oregon coast, and the little beachside resort town of Seaside was crammed with high-school and college kids.

They had come from all over the state and beyond for a rowdy, high-spirited end-of-summer Labor Day beach-party weekend that had become almost like a tradition in the postwar years.

Something was a little different this year, though. The crowd was larger than usual, for one thing. Actually, it was a lot larger. The first baby-boomers, born in 1946, were 16 years old in 1962 ... and there were a lot of them on the beach that day, and they were a bit wild.

Something else that was different that year was the attitude of the Seaside cops. They were being noticeably more hard-nosed than they had been in years past. Seaside had elected a new mayor, Maurice Pysher, a 68-year-old former heating engineer who had retired to Seaside from Portland a couple years before.

Pysher didn’t like his new town’s reputation as a place where kids could blow off steam, and he’d seen that they were getting noticeably rowdier year after year. He wanted visitors to Seaside to be quieter, more respectful, and less rambunctious. So he had fired Seaside’s longtime police chief and replaced him with someone who would be more strict and firm about keeping things orderly.

The crowds of college kids and high-school students who flocked to town for Labor Day had always been a little high-spirited, and the town’s cops had learned to strike a balance with them. They’d be there if somebody really needed help, and they’d stop any actual vandalism or other criminal activity; but they wouldn’t accost anyone on the street and hassle them for carrying an open beer, or ticket them for disorderly conduct for getting too loud around a beach bonfire.

But, not any more. Today was the start of Labor Day Weekend, 1962. The crowds were enormous, the beer was flowing freely, and the cops had a new attitude.

It wouldn’t take long for that combination to explode into something close to a worst-case scenario for the town: the first  Seaside beach-party riot. (Seaside, Clatsop County; 1960s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/2412b.seaside-riots-gidget-goes-berzerk-679.510.html)

Was the flying saucer photographed over the Trent farm near McMinnville real, or a clever hoax? Either way makes for a great story. (McMinnville, Yamhill County; 1950s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1807c.mcminnville-ufo-sighting-504.html)

While looking for a crashed plane, aviator Kenneth Arnold saw a squadron of strange shining metallic things flying by Mt. Rainier. His description of them led to the coining of the term 'Flying Saucer' by the local paper. (Pendleton, Umatilla County; 1940s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1807b.flying-saucer-UFO-stories-started-in-pendleton-503.html)

A handful of California newspapers started a UFO scare in 1896 with a series of stories of sightings. But were they making it all up? Oregon newspapers sure thought so. (TL;DR: Yes, they were.) (Statewide; 1890s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1807a.oregon-called-bs-on-california-ufo-stories-502.html)

IT’S WIDELY KNOWN that the first newspaper west of the Mississippi River was the short-lived Oregon Spectator, which published its first issue on Feb. 5, 1846.

But that’s only true if you define “newspaper” very narrowly. In truth, there was an earlier publication that met every definition of a newspaper but one ... specifically, it was “printed” by hand, every copy, with pen and ink — longhand. No printing press was involved.

This early newspaper was called the Flumgudgeon Gazette and Bumble Bee Budget, and it first appeared in the spring of 1844 just in time for the first legislative council of the Oregon Provisional Government. Its editor identified himself only as “The Curl-Tail Coon,” and it’s not entirely clear if that was just for fun, or for protection from revenge by those whose feathers he ruffled in its pages.

It was a tri-weekly, with a press run of roughly 12 copies (written out longhand, remember, and with original art depicting its author hand-drawn individually on the front page of each by a friend of the editor, a German artist named Springer).

Now, “Flumgudgeon Gazette and Bumble Bee Budget” is a very long name, so to save time we are going to refer to it by a shortened version, in the spirit of Windy City residents who call their daily “The Trib” instead of “The Chicago Tribune” or Stumptowners calling theirs “The Big O” instead of — well, “The Oregonian,” of course ...  In the present case, we’re going with “The Gudge.”

The Gudge was a mercilessly satirical publication. Its motto, printed prominently on the front page of every copy beneath the flag, read “A Newspaper of the Salamagundi Order and Devoted to Scratching and Stinging the Follies of the Age.” Above that appeared a drawing, by Herr Springer, of the Curltail Coon himself, with the caption “Don’t stroke us backwards! There is enough of villainy going on to raise our bristles without that!”

If the editor was pseudonymous, so were the legislators he lampooned — which makes it a bit hard to dope out who was who in the little bit of surviving text we have from the Aug. 20, 1845, issue. Historian Lawrence Powell suggests that “The Big Brass Gun” may have been Jesse Applegate’s nickname, but confesses himself baffled as to who “The Blueback Terrapin” was. (Oregon City, Clackamas County; 1840s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/2412a1007a.flumgudgeon-gazette-first-newspaper-handwritten.678.078.html)

At a time when anarchist terrorists had Americans good and scared, a rumor got started that a cell of Polish radicals based in the White Eagle Tavern was planning to assassinate President Roosevelt ... luckily, one of the local newspaper reporters spoke Polish. (Portland, Multnomah County; 1900s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1806b.white-eagle-anarchists-499.html)

By the 1990s, support for keeping Monmouth's ban on booze wasn't about morality; it was about the cachet that came with being the only “dry” town west of the Mississippi. But that wasn't enough to overcome the economic issues. (Monmouth, Polk County; 1850s, 1970s, 2000s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1511c.thirsty-monmouth-last-prohibition-town.html)

IT HAS BEEN said of Karl Marx that he was a fine diagnostician, but a lousy prescriber.

Obviously, Marx remains a super polarizing figure even today, a good 175 years after he set the world on fire with The Communist Manifesto. But, in light of what’s been done in his name over the years since then, it’s certainly fair to wonder if ideas like “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” and “the workers should own the means of production” can actually work in the real world.

So it’s ironic that the closest thing to Marx’s ideal vision of society was a little utopian community of devout but antidogmatic Christians in Oregon — none of whose residents had probably ever heard of him.... (Aurora Mills, Clackamas County; 1850s, 1860s, 1870s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/2404c-1110a.aurora-colony-best-of-utopias-080.645.html)

PORTLAND, 1901 — The police wouldn't return her call, and she knew the thieves would be gone by morning. So Mrs. Whitlock picked up the phone and woke up the District Attorney. And it turned out theft wasn't the only crime Jack Wade and William Dalton were guilty of ... (Portland, Multnomah County; 1900s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1804c.dalton-wade-murderers-ratted-out-by-snoopy-landlady-491.html)

Thomas Condon didn’t set out to become a geologist; he was a Congregationalist minister with a hobby of collecting fossils. And although over the years his hobby took over, he never lost touch with his ministerial kindliness. (Oregon Caves, Josephine County; 1880s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1610e.thomas-condon-oregon-caves-415.html)