Post by whollygoats on Jul 12, 2016 22:10:26 GMT
My home town is not the town in which I now live.
I was born premature in a hospital in Pendleton, Oregon, in the United States.
When I was sprung from the incubator in the delivery unit, I went home to a snug rowhouse unit in a US government housing project known as 'Ordnance'. That was the town's name...Ordnance, Oregon.
It still exists, sort of...it's a ghost town. It can be found here on Google maps. The water tower still stands and is used by the landowner, but the units are all flattened and rubble and a double-wide has been placed on one edge of town, so evidently there is a 'caretaker'. It's private land now.
Back then, it was US Army housing. And, as you might expect, it was spartan. The units were basically tilt-up precast concrete walls on concrete slabs, with wooden insert windows, doors and roof beams. It was built to serve the civilian workers at the US Army Umatilla Ordnance Depot, an official ammo dump for the army. As you might expect, it was quite a ways from most habitated locales. It was in the semi-arid high desert of the 'Inland Empire'. The depot itself was a forboding set of post-industrial buildings set far from the highway and surrounded by a couple thousand mounds in the desert....storage spaces, underground. The community it supported was small and dependent upon most services to the commercial interests in nearby Hermiston, or, like the hospital, bigger and more distant Pendleton. I would guess that Ordnance, in my day, was somewhere near 250 souls.
The town was located right on Highway 30 and it's commercial district, such as it was, was also right on the highway. That was a gasoline service station, a small market, a barber, and a large enclosed concrete slab that served as a town hall and roller rink, all in one extended structure. On the other side of the commercial district, such as it was, was First Avenue. Parallel to First were Second and Third Avenues. And, of course, in good US rigid grid style there were crossing streets, upon which most of the addresses were located...Those were Arsenal, Bomb, Cannon, and Detonator Streets, and Market Drive. We lived near the end of Bomb Street.
Now, we only lived there for about three years after I came home from the hospital. My father was a construction worker and that was, at that time, a bit of a mendicant profession. He had been a tumbleweed, moving from construction job to construction job, and McNary Dam had finally been completed. But...my father had been taking correspondence courses and had gotten himself certified as a 'construction inspector'...even better, a major architectual firm of the day, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, hired him to supervise the construction processes at the building of a new hospital in Kellogg, Idaho. That job was short lived. but SOM found him new opportunities galore in the big city of Portland (aka 'Puddle City'). We moved to the big city (aka 'big shitty') when I was five years old, just as I was to start kindergarten in the local public schools. That was 1958.
So...Flash forward to 1975. I'm in university at Portland State University and I get the opportunity to make new friends and acquaintances on an almost daily basis. On occasion, I'd hear comments about traveling east along Interstate 84 to locales like Pendleton, La Grande, Ontario, or Boise. I'd show interest and note that they'd probably passed right by my home town. When asked if they would know it, I'd assure them that they most likely would remember it. When they asked how, I'd ask if they remembered seeing the Umatilla Army Ordnance Depot out in the desert near Boardman, just five miles before the off-ramp that took drivers to Hermiston. Most would stare off in to the distance, trying to picture in their minds...some would remember, many would not. Until. I'd ask if they remember a stench so bad they rolled up their windows in a vain attempt to shut it out...To which the universal response was, "EWWWWWWWWwwww...Yeah. That pig farm! That was disgusting!"
I'd say, "Yep. That was Ordnance. My home town."
You see. Ordnance was never what one might call paradise on earth. It was Defense Department spartan and not a wonderful place to live if you wanted 'amenities'. So, post-war, more folks managed to scrape together a better life and get better mobility in the form of an automobile. Then, they discovered that instead of driving in to town to buy what they needed, they'd instead move to town (being Hermiston) and commute the five or six miles to work at the Depot. Ordnance only survived much longer because of the gasoline service, but even that died when the US Department of Transportation and the Oregon Highway Department decided to make Highway 30 in to Interstate 84. Then, to get to Ordnance, drivers had to exit the roadway. Finally, in the mid-1960s, the Defense Department decided that the town was a bigger liability than it was a benefit. They put the town up for sale...lock, stock, and barrel. Or, Arsenal, Bomb, Cannon and Detonator, if you will.
A local agribusiness mogul, a fellow by the name of Stafford Hansell, bought the town from the DoD. Potatoes made the Hansells rich, but he wanted to try something different. He put up barbed wired topped cyclone fencing tight around the entire town. Then, he tore all the doors off and took all the windows out. He installed slop troughs in every front yard to go with the extant irrigation ditches. Then he stocked the town with pigs. Those pigs would be the bane of noses traveling that road for a couple of decades.
Mister Hansell went on to be an advisor to three governors of the state. His specialty was resource management and land use. He is one of the cadre responsible for creating the 'Urban Growth Boundary' concept used in Oregon in an attempt to curb uncontrolled urban sprawl. His pigs were some statement, I guess. Anyway, Stafford is long gone and the pigs are, too. All that is left are the crumbling foundations of my home town...even the pig shit has composted in to the soil and it no longer offends the nose.
So...What's your home town?
I was born premature in a hospital in Pendleton, Oregon, in the United States.
When I was sprung from the incubator in the delivery unit, I went home to a snug rowhouse unit in a US government housing project known as 'Ordnance'. That was the town's name...Ordnance, Oregon.
It still exists, sort of...it's a ghost town. It can be found here on Google maps. The water tower still stands and is used by the landowner, but the units are all flattened and rubble and a double-wide has been placed on one edge of town, so evidently there is a 'caretaker'. It's private land now.
Back then, it was US Army housing. And, as you might expect, it was spartan. The units were basically tilt-up precast concrete walls on concrete slabs, with wooden insert windows, doors and roof beams. It was built to serve the civilian workers at the US Army Umatilla Ordnance Depot, an official ammo dump for the army. As you might expect, it was quite a ways from most habitated locales. It was in the semi-arid high desert of the 'Inland Empire'. The depot itself was a forboding set of post-industrial buildings set far from the highway and surrounded by a couple thousand mounds in the desert....storage spaces, underground. The community it supported was small and dependent upon most services to the commercial interests in nearby Hermiston, or, like the hospital, bigger and more distant Pendleton. I would guess that Ordnance, in my day, was somewhere near 250 souls.
The town was located right on Highway 30 and it's commercial district, such as it was, was also right on the highway. That was a gasoline service station, a small market, a barber, and a large enclosed concrete slab that served as a town hall and roller rink, all in one extended structure. On the other side of the commercial district, such as it was, was First Avenue. Parallel to First were Second and Third Avenues. And, of course, in good US rigid grid style there were crossing streets, upon which most of the addresses were located...Those were Arsenal, Bomb, Cannon, and Detonator Streets, and Market Drive. We lived near the end of Bomb Street.
Now, we only lived there for about three years after I came home from the hospital. My father was a construction worker and that was, at that time, a bit of a mendicant profession. He had been a tumbleweed, moving from construction job to construction job, and McNary Dam had finally been completed. But...my father had been taking correspondence courses and had gotten himself certified as a 'construction inspector'...even better, a major architectual firm of the day, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, hired him to supervise the construction processes at the building of a new hospital in Kellogg, Idaho. That job was short lived. but SOM found him new opportunities galore in the big city of Portland (aka 'Puddle City'). We moved to the big city (aka 'big shitty') when I was five years old, just as I was to start kindergarten in the local public schools. That was 1958.
So...Flash forward to 1975. I'm in university at Portland State University and I get the opportunity to make new friends and acquaintances on an almost daily basis. On occasion, I'd hear comments about traveling east along Interstate 84 to locales like Pendleton, La Grande, Ontario, or Boise. I'd show interest and note that they'd probably passed right by my home town. When asked if they would know it, I'd assure them that they most likely would remember it. When they asked how, I'd ask if they remembered seeing the Umatilla Army Ordnance Depot out in the desert near Boardman, just five miles before the off-ramp that took drivers to Hermiston. Most would stare off in to the distance, trying to picture in their minds...some would remember, many would not. Until. I'd ask if they remember a stench so bad they rolled up their windows in a vain attempt to shut it out...To which the universal response was, "EWWWWWWWWwwww...Yeah. That pig farm! That was disgusting!"
I'd say, "Yep. That was Ordnance. My home town."
You see. Ordnance was never what one might call paradise on earth. It was Defense Department spartan and not a wonderful place to live if you wanted 'amenities'. So, post-war, more folks managed to scrape together a better life and get better mobility in the form of an automobile. Then, they discovered that instead of driving in to town to buy what they needed, they'd instead move to town (being Hermiston) and commute the five or six miles to work at the Depot. Ordnance only survived much longer because of the gasoline service, but even that died when the US Department of Transportation and the Oregon Highway Department decided to make Highway 30 in to Interstate 84. Then, to get to Ordnance, drivers had to exit the roadway. Finally, in the mid-1960s, the Defense Department decided that the town was a bigger liability than it was a benefit. They put the town up for sale...lock, stock, and barrel. Or, Arsenal, Bomb, Cannon and Detonator, if you will.
A local agribusiness mogul, a fellow by the name of Stafford Hansell, bought the town from the DoD. Potatoes made the Hansells rich, but he wanted to try something different. He put up barbed wired topped cyclone fencing tight around the entire town. Then, he tore all the doors off and took all the windows out. He installed slop troughs in every front yard to go with the extant irrigation ditches. Then he stocked the town with pigs. Those pigs would be the bane of noses traveling that road for a couple of decades.
Mister Hansell went on to be an advisor to three governors of the state. His specialty was resource management and land use. He is one of the cadre responsible for creating the 'Urban Growth Boundary' concept used in Oregon in an attempt to curb uncontrolled urban sprawl. His pigs were some statement, I guess. Anyway, Stafford is long gone and the pigs are, too. All that is left are the crumbling foundations of my home town...even the pig shit has composted in to the soil and it no longer offends the nose.
So...What's your home town?