Dave Knows Portland

December 6, 1976: Kitty O’Neil Sets Land Speed Record in Oregon’s Alvord Desert

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Article in The Oregonian, 7 December 1976On the alkali flats of southeastern Oregon’s Alvord Desert, deaf stuntwoman Kitty O’Neil set a new women’s land speed record on December 6, 1976.

For one second after she blasted off, the force of acceleration pushed Kitty’s guts gently back against her lungs, but except for this minor discomfort, the ride was a smooth one. Within five seconds she was going 180 mph. In 15 seconds she was a mile down the course, doing 500. Five seconds later she was going 200 mph faster than any landbound woman had traveled before, reaching a speed of about 600 mph and clocking 514.120 through a one-kilometer speed trap.

The international rules for land-speed attempts require the driver to complete a second run in the opposite direction through the same timing trap within two hours. There was almost an hour to spare when Kitty streaked back through the same kilometer in 4.375 seconds (only 24 thousandths of a second slower than her first run) for a two-way average speed of 512.710 mph. [Sports Illustrated, 17 January 1977]

Further reading:

December 5, 2006: New Fort Clatsop Replica Dedicated

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Heather at Fort ClatsopMembers of The Lewis and Clark expedition spent the winter of 1805-1806 at the hastily constructed Fort Clatsop at the mouth of the Columbia River.

Probably built of fir and spruce logs, the fort measured only fifty feet by fifty feet, not a lot of space for more than thirty people. Nevertheless, it served its purpose well, offering Expedition members shelter from the incessant rains of the coast and giving them security against the Native peoples in the area.

Local community members built a replica of the fort in 1955 to celebrate the sesquicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Alas, in 2005, just as celebrations of the bicentennial were beginning, the replica fort burnt down. Hundreds of volunteers rebuilt the fort, now a National Memorial, and on December 5, 2006 the new replica fort was dedicated.

History Pub: The Pacific Northwest & The American Civil War (5-December-2011)

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The Pacific Northwest & The American Civil WarThe Oregon Encyclopedia invites the public to the Mission Theater (1624 NW Glisan) this Monday, December 5, 2011 for the latest installment of History Night: The Pacific Northwest & The American Civil War.

Fort Vancouver was an important base of operations for the U.S. Army just prior to the Civil War. Captain Ulysses S. Grant arrived in 1852 to facilitate the settlement of the Northwest by establishing posts, building roads, and outfitting surveying expeditions. When war broke out, he and the other professional soldiers stationed at the Fort were sent east, and their positions were filled by hundreds of volunteers. Their Civil War task: to control the Native populations and secure the land for the Union and its sympathizers. The Northwest played an interesting role in the Civil War—not only because its states and territories were part of the ongoing battle over freedom and slavery—but also because of the army’s particular relationship with the region’s Native American groups. Chief Ranger Greg Shine describes the Civil War period in the Northwest, the significant people and events that influenced the outcome, and the role memory plays in our understanding of the Civil War, 150 years after the first shot.

The presenter is Greg Shine, Chief Ranger and Historian at Fort Vancouver.

This history pub is free and open to the public. Doors open at 6pm, presentation begins at 7pm.

December 3, 1971: Oregon Trail Game Played for the First Time

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Oregon Trail screenshotOregon Trail, one of the first simulation computer games, was first played in Don Rawitsch’s history class at Bryant Junior High School in Minneapolis, Minnesota on December 3, 1971.

The history teacher created the game as an educational aid. Originally a board game, Rawitsch and colleagues Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger realized it would make a good computer program. Dillenberger and Heinemann spent two weeks crammed into a former janitor’s closet at the junior high school programming a teletype machine, a screen-less, electromechanical typewriter connected via telephone to a mainframe computer that could issue prompts, receive commands, and run primitive programs.

With no monitor, the original version of Oregon Trail was played by answering prompts that printed out on a roll of paper. At 10 characters per second, the teletype spat out, “How much do you want to spend on your oxen team?” or, “Do you want to eat (1) poorly (2) moderately or (3) well?” Students typed in the numerical responses, then the program chugged through a few basic formulas and spat out the next prompt along with a status update.

In 1974 Rawitsch was working for the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) when he made the game, with many updates, available to classrooms across Minnesota. It quickly became one of the most popular programs. Eventually the game was made available on the Apple II, and later DOS and other platforms. Over 65 million copies of Oregon Trail have been sold since 1971, making it the most popular educational game of all time.

The Economist on Portland’s Vegan Stripping

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The EconomistThe Economist reports on Vegan Stripping in Portland:

Peaceful, green, and liberal, Portland has a reputation for being unusually socially conscious. So visitors are sometimes surprised to learn that it is a plausible contender for the title of lewdest place in America. It has more strip clubs per head than any other city; in its compact downtown, sex shops are scattered amid the bookstores, coffee bars and social services. This is apparently down to the combined influence of west-coast liberalism and frontier manners. (In the 1960s, there was a public outcry in Oregon when the Bureau of Land management briefly renamed one “Whorehouse Meadow” with the euphemistic “Naughty Girl”.)

Like most articles on this topic, the author fails to touch on the real reason, however, Portland has so many strip clubs: Article 1, Section 8 of the Oregon Constitution.

Courts and voters (e.g. Oregon Ballot Measure 19 in 1994, and Measure 31 in 1996) agree: the Oregon constitution provides greater individual freedom of speech than the First Amendment to the Federal Constitution.

“[W]e have little trouble in concluding that the people who framed and adopted Article I, section 8, as part of the original Oregon Constitution intended to prohibit broadly any laws directed at restraining verbal or nonverbal expression of ideas of any kind.” – State v. Ciancanelli (Oregon Supreme Court, 2005)

So in Oregon you can’t zone “strip clubs” or “adult bookstores” into particular “nightlife” districts, nor can you label anything they provide “obscene.” Oregonians (I’m a particularly proud one) take freedom of speech seriously.