Bruce Haney - Eccentric Tales of Boring, Oregon

PREFACE

Despite what the name tells you, Boring has never been boring. The town, in fact, has a lot of interesting stories in its pastif you know who to talk to or where to look. Lucky for you, I have done all the legwork and research for you. I have talked to many of the long-term Boring residents, and I have spent more time searching newspaper archives than most people spend on social media these days.

In these pages, you will read about some of my favorite non-boring Boring stories. Exciting stories that I have come across in my years of researching the town of Boring.

My interest in the history of Boring started a few years ago. I had been working in the town for several years, and I started wondering how old some of these interesting-looking buildings were in the downtown area. The building that is now the Boring Bar, for example, intrigued me. With a bit of research, I found out it was known as the Morand Building. It is a square, flat concrete block building built in 1913. It was originally built as the post office by William Morand. From that bit of town history, my interest grew, and now, five years later, I am a walking encyclopedia of the history of the town of Boring.

When I first started doing this research, I wanted to share what I found online in case anyone else happened to be interested. My original thought was to create a blog. But I decided it would be better to create a Facebook group; that way, people could share and comment on what I post and hopefully add their own personal memories to the page. I could find out the history of the town that was never documented. I did not think many people would join the group. But it has grown into its own community, and through it, I have become friends with many people in the town of Boring.

One Boring resident who was an early member of the group was Dan Bosserman, a fellow Boring writer. He liked the group and what I was sharing, so he asked me to take over the Moment of Boring History segment during the Boring Community Planning Organizations monthly meeting. This is what led me past just looking for the history of the buildings. That history is interesting to me and fun to talk about, and I do sprinkle a little bit of it into the stories in this book. But this monthly speech now gave me an audience, and each month I wanted to wow them and surprise them with stories from their history that they knew nothing about. The quest for stories made me up my research game, and I started searching deeper into the newspaper archives and visiting the historical museums in nearby towns.

The Sandy Historical Museum is an amazing local museum with great displays about the history of Sandy, and it has a vast amount of research material for the area. Its focus is Sandy, of course. But there is plenty of Boring information to find there if you know where to look. Hint: start with the Miles Aubin binders. Miles was the original town historian, and he is the reason I am never quite comfortable when people call me the town historian. I guess I am. Miles passed over ten years ago now. But I always think of myself as the current town historian. I have been doing this for five years, but Miles did it for decades.

I have found that all this research and sharing the history of our town has enriched my life. Through it, I have become friendly with the many other people in town who care about Boringthe theater people and members of the Community Planning Organization, the Boring Oregon Foundation, the Boring-Damascus connection and other local interest groups.