John Parr
1960’s – Eisenhower’s federal interstate highway program is in full swing! The two-lane Columbia Gorge Highway is completely torn apart from hell to breakfast (so to speak) with multiple construction contracts ongoing! Roy Houck Sr. has the contract section from The Dalles dam westward through The Dalles city.
The Oregon State Highway Dept. (OSHD, now the ODOT) performed their own engineering during that time frame. Our survey crew staked the main highway complete with the boat basin and all overpass interchanges.
General Construction Dredging was subcontracted to pump gravel fill out of the Columbia River, placing thousands of cubic yards into the area east and west of the boat basin. From out of the dredge pipes came hundreds of ancient Indian artifacts that included agate spearheads, arrowheads, beads, net anchors, stone knives, scrapers, and (1) paint pot. A sad issue here was that many baby sturgeon were sucked into the dredge and came flopping out onto the gravel fill! Many of the survey crew members stopped working just to pick up artifacts and to take some of the baby sturgeon home into their fish ponds. Nobody took the time to release them back into the river.
During construction it was common in the morning to see Indians loading U-Haul trailers with 8 and 9-foot sturgeon and then heading for Portland with their catch.
Roy Houck Construction also moved thousands of cubic yards of fill from a slide area south of The Dalles dam, utilizing twin engine TS-24 scrapers pulling belly dump trailers. Roadbed work was accomplished fast! The sub-grade became so tight, our survey crew had to jackhammer holes just to place grade stakes. The July temperature was 110° to 115° with no shade.
Construction is not without danger, and two people died on this project. To remove the old piling in the boat basin, a ring of cast iron sash weights with dynamite was dropped around the piling. The explosion cut the piling off at the mud line. One such piling came down and killed a worker. This was followed by another death where a heavy scraper tire snapped a rock sideways, hitting a worker just under his hard hat.
In those days construction workers were called “boomers.” They were everywhere in the Columbia Gorge. You could be hired and fired in the same day, move on up the gorge, and get hired again! Everybody worked. I shared a basement apartment in The Dalles with construction workers and others. We had a rather strange diet, with an Arden Dairy man bringing all the cottage cheese, ice cream and milk we could handle. Our game poacher brought in trout and venison from the Hood River area. Not to be left out of this equation was a drunk that supplied us with “Old Overholt,” a straight grain whiskey. Chess just happened to be the game of the evening.
Our survey crew worked from Rufus, Oregon, through The Dalles. Most of the time we ate our lunch inside the old government dock warehouse (remember it??) and our favorite card games were “Cribbage” and “Hearts.”
History is easily buried in the ashes of time.
