During the early days I spent a lot of time with Keith, one of the owners at Elite Broadcasting. We were fairly close in age and had a few things in common. Quite a few weekend evenings were spent at the Bayfront Brewery, now called the Rogue Ales Public House.
Trivia nights with Mr. Bill were in full swing there on Fridays and Saturdays. He put on a great show. Multiple rounds of trivia, music between questions, and fun prize giveaways. Being clever shoestring marketers we used our call letters as a team name, but there were quite a few, shall we say — questionable — team names. And as the night wore on and the kids were kicked out of the pub, the music became more risque, too: Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs’ L’il Red Riding Hood and Garry Lee and Showdown’s Rodeo Song are a couple tunes that come to mind. My eyes popped out of my head the first time I heard the latter.
Over the years KSND donated a lot of CDs as prizes. I got out of there a few times winning coveted Mr. Bill and Rogue Ales tee-shirts that I still have to this day. Fun times! The only problem was that smoking was allowed in pubs back then, so my clothes always smelled like an ashtray when we left. It’s a toss-up which was worse: the clothes or the smell on the bayfront when the fish processing plant across the street was busy.
It wasn’t just the cigarette smoke or fish smells that were troublesome, either. It stands to reason that on the coast, it’s going to rain. I expected that. What surprised me was that it rained…sideways. The wind was determined to blow rain whatever direction necessary to soak the unlucky person caught outside.
The wind made the weather interesting, though. Like the ocean, it demanded respect. The year after I moved to Newport we had a major windstorm in mid-December of 1995. It actually knocked the power out, which was very rare at the coast. Schools were closed. Buildings were damaged. Trees were blown across Highway 101. The peak gust was 107 miles per hour in town.
The wildest thing to happen was the roof blew off the Izzy’s restaurant during a senior citizen luncheon. The restaurant was unprotected on a small hill at the entrance to Yaquina Head. The roof ended up in pieces at the bottom of the hill along Highway 101. The Portland TV news crews came out for that. For the longest time following the incident and the restaurant’s prolonged closure, the locals called it, Wuzzy’s. No one was hurt, as the manager had sensed the roof was about to go and evacuated the building just before the roof gave way.
A few pictures:
Most of the time the wind wasn’t like that. Sure, I could sometimes walk on the beach, lean backward, and have the wind prop me up. Other times it would be nearly impossible to open the car door, especially at a coastal headland, if the wind was active. Mostly though, it was just a nuisance when coupled with the rain. That killer combination made one of my first jobs at the radio station a nightmare: changing the outdoor reader board.
More to come in Part IV…