ON ONE GRIM winter morning, near the end of the Second World War, a young Coast Guard seaman named James A. Gibbs, Jr., was looking apprehensively out over an angry sea from the rail of the 52-foot motor lifeboat Triumph. Far out over the field of towering pyramid-shaped waves, a tiny speck was just coming into view — his destination.

“Tillamook Rock,” the boatswain muttered, as a seasick Gibbs silently fought to hang onto his breakfast. “I wouldn’t take that duty on a bet.”

Gibbs might not have either, but he didn’t have much choice. That tiny, lonely speck in the middle of an angry gray ocean was his new duty station: Tillamook Rock, a half-acre hunk of granite with a lighthouse perched dubiously upon its crest in the middle of the open sea, known to the initiated as “Terrible Tilly.”

In his book, written many years later, Gibbs referred to Tillamook Rock as a “pint-size Alcatraz,” and indeed, his transfer there had a lot in common with a prison sentence. It was widely known that assignments to Tillamook Rock were given as a punishment for troublemakers, and Gibbs fit that profile pretty well. His record with the Coast Guard was, as he puts it, “checkered.”... (Tillamook Rock, Clatsop County; 1940s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1510d.tillamook-rock-ghost-goose-362.html)