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Regional history / folklore vignettes · Syndicated (Pacific Power & Light)

Stories of Pacific Powerland

October 17, 1966 – January 27, 1967 · 45 broadcasts

Stories of Pacific Powerland was a five-minute radio institution across the Pacific Northwest -- short, vivid tales of the region's history, biography and folklore, sponsored by the utility Pacific Power & Light and heard three times a week on dozens of stations from northern California up through Oregon and Washington and east into Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. It premiered on October 23, 1961, and ran for sixteen years and roughly 1,273 programs before its cancellation in 1977. The genial, sonorous narrator was Nelson Olmsted, a veteran NBC storyteller who had voiced the similar Ohio Story for a decade before; the freelance writer John Forbis researched and scripted the early programs (Thomas K. Worcester took over the writing in the 1970s), and Portland announcer Clint Gruber introduced each one. The subjects ranged from Oregon Trail pioneers, fur-trade survivors and cattle kings to glass fishing floats, covered bridges, the largest meteorite ever found in America, and a town that picked itself up and moved four miles to meet the railroad. This Golden Radio Theater collection preserves 45 of those vignettes -- production numbers 391 through 435, broadcast between October 1966 and January 1967, every one from the Forbis era and narrated by Olmsted.

Collection status: 45 of 45 held (100% complete)
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Episode Spine

Grouped by year. Jump to the full list below, or open a season on its own page.

1966

October 17, 1966 Flying School Listen (MP3)
October 19, 1966 City That Moved Listen (MP3)
The story of Yakima, Washington, which in the 1880s picked up and moved some four miles -- buildings and all -- to meet the new Northern Pacific rail line after the railroad bypassed the original townsite.
October 21, 1966 Glass Floats Listen (MP3)
How the glass fishing floats of Japanese and other Pacific fleets, carried thousands of miles by wind and current, came to wash up as prized beachcombers' treasures along the Oregon and Northwest coast.
October 24, 1966 Thompson's Mill Listen (MP3)
Thompson's Mills near Shedd, Oregon -- the Calapooia River grist mill raised in 1858 as the Boston Mills and long run by the Thompson family -- which survives as the oldest water-powered mill in the state.
October 26, 1966 Ida Oerdling Listen (MP3)
October 28, 1966 Survival School Listen (MP3)
Almost certainly the U.S. Air Force Survival School, which relocated to Fairchild Air Force Base near Spokane, Washington, in 1966 -- the very year of this broadcast -- to train aircrew in wilderness survival, evasion, resistance and escape.
October 31, 1966 Jean Goedicke Listen (MP3)
November 2, 1966 Birdseye House Listen (MP3)
November 4, 1966 Willamette Meteor Listen (MP3)
The Willamette Meteorite -- Tomanawos to the Clackamas Chinook, and the largest meteorite ever found in the United States -- carried to the Willamette Valley by Ice Age floods and unearthed near West Linn, Oregon, in 1902.
November 7, 1966 Wy'east Legend Listen (MP3)
The Native legend of the Bridge of the Gods and the warring brothers Wy'east and Pahto -- the peaks we now call Mount Hood and Mount Adams -- whose fiery quarrel is said to have shattered the great natural land bridge over the Columbia.
November 9, 1966 Nesbitt Brothers Listen (MP3)
November 11, 1966 John Wolford Listen (MP3)
November 14, 1966 Covered Bridge Listen (MP3)
Oregon's covered bridges -- the roofed wooden spans, once numbering some 450, that early builders sheathed to shield their trusses from the rain, leaving the state the largest surviving concentration in the West.
November 16, 1966 Robin Goodfellow Listen (MP3)
November 18, 1966 Thomas Toliver Listen (MP3)
November 21, 1966 John Day Listen (MP3)
John Day, the Virginia-born hunter of the 1811-12 Astor overland party who, robbed and stripped by Natives near the river's mouth, left his name on the Oregon river, town and fossil beds that bear it today.
November 23, 1966 Hay Palace Fair Listen (MP3)
November 25, 1966 Miller and Lux Listen (MP3)
The cattle empire of Henry Miller and Charles Lux, whose Pacific Live Stock Company grazed well over a million acres from California across Nevada and into the ranch country of eastern Oregon.
November 28, 1966 Julius Neils Listen (MP3)
Lumberman Julius Neils, whose J. Neils Lumber Company built its Northwest fortune on the sister mills at Klickitat, Washington, and Libby, Montana, and pioneered sustained-yield forestry in the 1930s.
November 30, 1966 Echo Listen (MP3)
The eastern-Oregon town of Echo on the Umatilla River -- an Oregon Trail crossing and the site of Fort Henrietta -- platted in 1880 and named for a settler's young daughter.
December 2, 1966 Howard Collins Listen (MP3)
December 5, 1966 Madame Dorion Listen (MP3)
Marie Dorion, the Ioway-Metis woman and only female member of the 1811 Astor overland expedition, whose winter survival trek through the Snake River country to the Walla Walla ranks among the Northwest's great endurance stories.
December 7, 1966 Pony Express Listen (MP3)
The short-lived Pony Express of 1860-61, whose relay riders raced the mail nearly two thousand miles across the West until the transcontinental telegraph made them obsolete.
December 9, 1966 Dolly Varden Listen (MP3)
December 12, 1966 The Castle Listen (MP3)
December 14, 1966 Pioneer Museum Listen (MP3)
December 16, 1966 Vernon Jackson Listen (MP3)
December 19, 1966 Lt. Mullan's Diary Listen (MP3)
Lt. John Mullan and the military wagon road his crews cut in 1859-60 from Fort Walla Walla to Fort Benton -- the first wagon route across the northern Rockies into the inland Northwest.
December 21, 1966 Forest Products Lab Listen (MP3)
December 23, 1966 Robert Beck Listen (MP3)
December 26, 1966 First Women on Jury Listen (MP3)
Likely a story of the first women to serve on juries in the Northwest -- Washington empaneled an all-woman jury at Olympia in December 1910 and, in 1911, became the first state in the nation to authorize women as jurors. (The exact case the vignette recounts is not confirmed.)
December 28, 1966 Captain Elfying Listen (MP3)
December 30, 1966 Lefty Wild Eagle Listen (MP3)

1967

January 2, 1967 Walter Granger Listen (MP3)
Water engineer Walter N. Granger, who organized the Yakima Land and Canal Company in 1889 and built the Sunnyside Canal that turned the arid Yakima Valley into irrigated farmland.
January 4, 1967 Mrs. Albert Powers Listen (MP3)
January 6, 1967 Dr. Ernest Fine Listen (MP3)
January 9, 1967 T. J. Starker Listen (MP3)
T.J. Starker, one of Oregon Agricultural College's first forestry graduates in 1910 and a longtime forestry professor there, whose family tree farms grew into Starker Forests.
January 11, 1967 Broughton Flume Listen (MP3)
The Broughton Lumber flume, a nine-mile wooden water chute between Willard and Hood, Washington, that sluiced rough lumber down to the Columbia and became the last operating log flume in the United States.
January 13, 1967 Chief Red Cloud Listen (MP3)
January 16, 1967 Eugene Bennett Listen (MP3)
January 18, 1967 Reuben Long Listen (MP3)
Reub Long, the witty Fort Rock rancher, horseman and self-taught naturalist of Oregon's high desert who co-wrote the classic The Oregon Desert (1964) and helped preserve the Fort Rock country that bears his mark.
January 20, 1967 Glacier Park Listen (MP3)
Glacier National Park in the northern Rockies of Montana -- the crown-of-the-continent country of peaks, glaciers and alpine lakes set aside as a national park in 1910.
January 23, 1967 Henry Failing Listen (MP3)
Henry Failing, the pioneer Portland merchant who arrived in 1851, twice served as the city's mayor, and as president of Oregon's First National Bank became one of the Pacific Northwest's leading businessmen.
January 25, 1967 Bob Lockwood Listen (MP3)
January 27, 1967 Rye Grass Listen (MP3)
The Willamette Valley grass-seed industry -- born when Linn County farmers sowed commercial ryegrass in the wet valley soils in the 1920s -- that made Oregon the grass-seed capital of the world.
The Story

Stories of Pacific Powerland was a five-minute radio institution across the Pacific Northwest -- short, vivid tales of the region's history, biography and folklore, sponsored by the utility Pacific Power & Light and heard three times a week on dozens of stations from northern California up through Oregon and Washington and east into Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. It premiered on October 23, 1961, and ran for sixteen years and roughly 1,273 programs before its cancellation in 1977. The genial, sonorous narrator was Nelson Olmsted, a veteran NBC storyteller who had voiced the similar Ohio Story for a decade before; the freelance writer John Forbis researched and scripted the early programs (Thomas K. Worcester took over the writing in the 1970s), and Portland announcer Clint Gruber introduced each one. The subjects ranged from Oregon Trail pioneers, fur-trade survivors and cattle kings to glass fishing floats, covered bridges, the largest meteorite ever found in America, and a town that picked itself up and moved four miles to meet the railroad. This Golden Radio Theater collection preserves 45 of those vignettes -- production numbers 391 through 435, broadcast between October 1966 and January 1967, every one from the Forbis era and narrated by Olmsted.

Full story — coming soon while it's being curated.
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