Tag: history

October 29, 2026 – Brew Crew Rules

October 29, 2026 /

This could be the year that the Milwaukee Brewers finally win it all. I am writing this a couple days ahead of the outcome. I may come out and edit this before it posts if something drastically changes but this is not really a story about the the Brewers being champions. It is about the journey to get here.

The pillow in the picture was made for me by my wife and at that time, we were both teenagers. I have kept it around all these years not because I am a huge Brewer’s fan but because she made it. The funny thing is I would be shocked if she did this today. There is hardly a domestic bone in her body. In fact, we joke that the sewing machine I claimed out of her parent’s estate is my sewing machine.

Being a Brewer’s fan has had it’s ups and downs. Mostly downs if I am to be honest. There are a couple of reasons that I don’t follow them too closely. One of them being that it is nearly a miracle that they are ever on TV. Unlike the Seattle Mariners, you can find those games on the radio in most markets here even if they are not on TV. Mostly, I just check in every couple of months to see if they are trending up or down. It is kind of like your 401K.

Last year, I was really hoping for a Seattle vs. Milwaukee World Series. Two teams that have never one one. Unfortunately, both teams had the same results, a series loss to the eventual series contenders. After having the best record in MLB and getting swept by the Dodgers I didn’t hold much hope that the Brewers were going to be contenders. In fact, the year before they got beat in the Wild Card series by the Mets after winning the NL Central. They have had kind of a recent history of choking when it counts.

There are some things about me that apparently my kids don’t even know. We were sitting around grieving after Raya died and talking about how we watched the game when my son said “where did this obsession for the Brewers even come from? It seems kind of random.” To be fair, I had never really ever talked with him about it.

When my dad was midway into his career, the company used to staff projects with people from different offices. At that time, they offered to provide weekly travel or long term lodging. My mom wanted to see places and so we went to Milwaukee for a few months. We lived in a town house and I started Kindergarten. One of the things I got to do was go to a Milwaukee Brewers game with my dad. That became my team.

If I do my math correctly, the year was 1979. I spent the fall in the Milwaukee school district. A couple of years later, the Brewers faced the St Loius Cardinals in the 1982 World Series. I was a kid, what did I know? I didn’t know that this was a small market team that didn’t have the staying power to not get back until 44 years later. It was my first real sport’s loss too.

One of the things I got when I went to the game was a Milwaukee Brewers hat. I still have it, but it looks 47 years old. I consider it retired now but I broke it out for the games. In this age of new uniforms every game a.k.a. purple and black Oregon Duck uniforms it is common to have alternate logos and colors. But when they announced a new, all blue hat instead of the yellow on blue, I decided to get one. I was in high school.

Moving on from high school to college, I took my Brewers hat as a badge of pride. You saw Dodgers, Angels, Giants, Yankees, Red Sox, White Sox and even some Athletics hats but never a Milwaukee hat. It didn’t matter if they were not contenders, the fact that it wasn’t popular was good enough for me.

When I moved into my dorm of 75 kids all of the sudden, there were two other guys wearing Milwaukee Brewers hats there. What are the odds? They were Brewers fans because brewers made beer and that was an extremely important profession particularly on Friday and Saturday night. But still, I found my people. Not only were they Brewers fans but also Raiders fans.

One particular drinking game that I liked to play is called “Asshole“. Our version included the Asshole having to use the term “Brew Crew Rules” before playing a card. With three out of seven being Brewers fans, we had a distinct advantage. That was thirty years ago, maybe it will finally be true.

End Your Programming Routine: I now have a slightly newer Brewers hat that is the original blue and gold. My brother bought it for me about twenty years ago when Nike was offloading baseball hats. Of course nobody was buying Milwaukee so there was ten of those to any other team. There would be a pile of Milwaukee hats, some Cleveland or Detroit hats and then some Montreal Expos or something. Winning a world series won’t change my world but it sure is nice to see two teams that are not there every couple of years.

October 28, 2026 – Pacific Northwest Beer Culture

October 28, 2026 /

There is a little town just south of us that has posted some signs about all of the movies that have been filmed there. That kind of spurred an interest in watching them ourselves. A couple of weeks ago, we rented the movie “Sometimes a Great Notion” filmed right here staring Paul Newman in 1972.

Watching the movie, most of the in town scenes looked to be filmed in Newport, OR. The featured home is still identifiable and is on the Siletz river, still only accessible by boat. I wont go too much into the plot of the movie but it is about an Oregon logging family and their struggle to fulfill obligations in the face of a logging strike. One consumer placement (intentional or not) was copious amounts of Olympia beer.

We are all aware of the Pacific Northwest beer revolution. Brands such as Rogue and Redhook kicked craft beer into national prominence in the 1990s. So much so that they made a major impact onto the national brewers causing industry consolidation and to a large degree decline.

When I was a kid in the 1980s, Budweiser was the self proclaimed “King of Beers”. The big three brands were Miller, Coors and Budweiser. To some degree, the first two were regional with Miller being the most prevalent in the midwest, Coors being largely contained in the mountain west and Budweiser for everyone. They were all here, but what reigned above all were the regional brands of Blitz-Weinhards, Olympia and Rainier.

After watching “Sometimes a Great Notion”, I began to think about those brands again. It used to be that every tavern would have one of those regional signs in the window. Rarely would you see a Coors Light or Bud Light sign in the window. I started doing some quick research to see what became of them. Now, you have to sort of follow the industry in general to get the full picture but I will try to consolidate it into a few words.

The year 2008 was a big year. Remember “too big to fail”? In 2008, Interbrew and Ambev merged and purchased Anheuser-Busch. That same year, Miller and Coors merged to form SABMiller. Later in 2016, InBev merged with SABMiller. There are some other players in the conversation namely Constellation brands (think Mexican beers), Heineken (think European brands) and Pabst brewing. For domestic labels, it is either inBev or Pabst as the current owner.

My dad used to drink Blitz-Weinhard beer, an Oregon beer. This was the cheaper cousin of Henry Weinhard’s Private Reserve considered a higher end choice because it mostly came in long neck bottles and locally sourced ingredients. In 1999, Henry Weinhard’s was purchased by Miller and shutdown the Portland OR brewery. That was the beginning of the end with production ceasing in 2021. However, the name was revived by Hop Valley, an inBev company and has limited PNW distribution.

Rainier definitely had the least penetration into Oregon. So while it was known, it wasn’t as popular. Rainier was already owned by Stroh’s (also owned Miller) but was sold to Pabst in 1999. Ironically from 1999-2003, Rainier was brewed at the Olympia brewery after the sale from Miller to Pabst.

That brings us to our subject, Olympia Beer. Pabst purchased the brand from Miller in 1999. At that time, Pabst bought the label and Miller kept the brewery. Miller eventually closed the brewery and both Rainier and Olympia became homeless. Both were moved to California and Olympia continued until the pandemic. 2021 saw the Olympia brand disappear for the foreseeable future.

After watching the movie, I thought I want to see what this Olympia beer was what I remembered it to be. I was reading that at one time it was the sixth largest brewery in the United States. To my surprise, I couldn’t find it anywhere on the shelves. That is actually what lead me down this trail today.

I cannot always say that the old ways are the better ways. The gold rush of post World War II into Oregon forests eventually cut down all of the old growth forest and all those mill towns that existed as proximity to the resources dried up just like Olympia and Blitz-Weinhard. At the top of this post I mentioned Newport OR. That used to be a shipping hub for logs going to Asia on major container ships. Aside from logging, the fishing fleet also had a strong presence. That too has largely gone boutique just like beer and logging.

End Your Programming Routine: Probably someday you will be able to buy Olympia beer on e-Bay like you can buy Billy beer. I myself won’t really miss Olympia having had it in the last ten years. From my memory, it was metallic and somewhat unpleasant when compared to other options. That being said, I cannot deny that my nostalgia for what I remember as ‘good times’ is strong. That beer fueled a generation that is rapidly disappearing and made us what we are today.

August 4, 2025 – The Patriarch of Birthday Week

August 4, 2025 /

Maybe there is something about me that old people like to talk to. I have heard stories from my wife’s grandparents that she has never heard. That being said, this story is not one of them. But, it is quite a bit out there as in unbelievable. Believe it or not, but this is the story of my wife’s paternal grandfather who had all the kids and was also the first birthday in what I call ‘Birthday Week’.

April 15, 2025 – It Can’t Be True, But It Is

April 15, 2025 /

Oregon is awash with idiocy. I am sorry to say but it is true. Because measure 114 has been tied up in court since 2022 and both the senate and the house have a Democrat supermajority there are now eight different bills that are going through to supplant measure 114, just in case.

I have been receiving notifications from both the National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) and Oregon Firearms Federation (OFF) to go to the capitol and show my indifference to the bills sometimes more than once a day. As if going there and holding a sign is going to stop this. My own neighbor, that claims to be pro-second amendment is going to vote for these bills to pass.

One theory that I heard the other day is that because gun control has been beaten so badly in most of the United States they are focusing their efforts in states that are the most receptive like Oregon, Washington and Colorado. I do have to say that as much as I see much of my second amendment getting written away, so far Oregon has nothing on the other two. It won’t be long.

It sure seems like this is the case when I look at the pro-second amendment advancements throughout the country. What is the drive for all of this gun control in the first place? In my opinion, it is the fictitious phenomenon that gun violence is increasing and that mass shooter events were created at Columbine.

The other day, I was reading the local newspaper and I saw this article saying that there was sniper fifty years ago. You can read the entire article in the picture below. I looked up the census information and saw that the population was 6,361 in 1970 and 8,530 in 1980. Presumably, the population was 7,500ish in 1975.

The reason I looked up the population is that Dallas is a small town today, I figured it was smaller fifty years ago. More than that, it was an active shooter in a small, homogeneous town twenty years before Columbine. I had never heard of it, probably because the shooter was not successful.

“If we could save one life…” is a phrase commonly uttered in these kind of political situations. But really? I could think of a lot of things to ban. What about airplane travel of any kind? How about eliminating the 0.08 blood alcohol limit? For that matter a lot of people die in car crashes, I think driving can be dangerous. People die skiing, mountain climbing, hiking and swimming. People literally kill themselves with their diet.

If we were serious about eliminating risk then there would be a whole lot of things no longer permitted. I think that it really comes down to all the things that I think are risky and don’t effect me should be eliminated. As an example, I believe that there certainly is a place for wolves in the landscape but when they are killing your livelihood then it is a different perspective. The best compromise I can think of would be that wolves should be allowed to exist and they should be allowed to be eliminated when causing damage.

It is an ecological fantasy to say that man does not effect the environment. It is also part of the same fantasy that man is not part of the environment. Self defense is a God given tenant that pre dates our country and goes back to the origin of our species. Firearms are the best tool for self-defense and codified in our American heritage; not a specific type or construction or even needs based. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like it or whatever baggage you bring to the conversation.

I understand the pain of loss, especially when it is senseless or even innocent. My own 16 year old cousin committed suicide with his shotgun in 1994. It was hard on my young 19 year old psyche. We were relatively close and it changed our family forever. I have never blamed the firearm or the access to it. I blame the choice of the individual.

Would that have happened if the shotgun was locked up or not there at all? I don’t know. I don’t have an accounting of how the situation unfolded and the other circumstantial parameters. It doesn’t matter in the slightest because it doesn’t change the outcome. It also wouldn’t be addressed in this latest round of gun control bills. This was a common, pump action shotgun with bird shot setup and used for hunting. It was not a high capacity, rapid shooting, already possessed tool.

I am not for any further restrictions. If you told me that if enacting all of these bills I would be having a conversation with my cousin tomorrow I would still say no. Something tells me that a person in that kind of mindset would subject to other ills of life like drugs or even worse violence against others regardless of the means. There is something sick and psychotic about wanting to keep other’s tortured in their own life in the name of do-goodery. Besides, mental health is a conversation significantly deeper than a one day blog post.

End Your Programming Routine: When I declared that I was going to leave this state in November 2022, I did not fully consider the complications. I can see that this is not the state that I want it to be and I still do want to leave. It is just quite a bit more than just reacting to legislation. I am under no delusion that I can save this state and preserve my rights no matter what I do. Doing what I can means writing my thoughts down trying to persuade the world in my point of view. I doubt it will work but it is what I can do.

April 9, 2025 – I’m a Lumberjack and I’m OK

April 9, 2025 /

You may have seen the Stihl Timbersports competition on ESPN. This is the logging related competition where competitors cut through a log the fastest called ‘hot saw’ with souped up chainsaws. They also chop through telephone pole thickness poles with an ax in less than 20 seconds. Like other competitions, rodeo as an example, timber sports have their origins in practical skills.

When I was a kid growing up, our town hosted the biggest timber sports competition in the world and the competitors reflected that. It was called the Albany Timber Carnival. As with the fall of timber in the mid 1990s, so too went the Timber Carnival. But the lasting tradition of the competition and quietly preserved skills can still be found, if you know where to look.

I shouldn’t be surprised but I ran across the Oregon State University’s competition area when I was doing some of my practice hikes. One of OSU’s foundations is a strong forestry school. The hiking I have been doing is in the forest owned and managed by the college for teaching purposes. Why wouldn’t they have a competition program and the facilities to perform?

Ultimately, these competitors have to come from somewhere. My cousin competed on a team in high school in the late 1990s. I remember asking what the secret was to chopping with an axe. He said that there is definitely technique but a lot of it is how you sharpen your tools. That part I don’t quite know but I spent a couple of days sharpening my ax one time. I put a whole new bevel on the blade that was much sleeker. That thing definitely cuts like a house of fire.

I am no expert in this by any means. I have never competed or trained let alone barely watched one of these competitions on TV. I just think it is pretty cool to see this of throwback activity (to me and my past) is still alive. I takes me back to when I was a kid and timber was king. It was a time when my town crowned the world champion in each of these events.

End Your Programming Routine: I would love to be able to climb up a pole and know how to sharpen an ax so that I could whack a giant log in less than ten swings. Even more than my sentimental pride, the point of my writing today is you never know what you are going to find in the world. You have to get out there and explore that world to find it. TV and internet can expose and publicize things but when you just run across it incidentally, it is pretty neat.

March 24, 2025 – Think You Know Vietnam?

March 24, 2025 /

There are a lot of movies where I think, I’d like to see that. Ken Burn’s The Vietnam War is one of those. I have watch his Civil War series many years ago. This is less of a review of his work than an analysis of what we as a people should learn from Vietnam. I consider myself fairly well versed but I learned quite a few things from this. To be honest, nothing should be a surprise but I have been fooled by the Team America propaganda over the years.

March 6, 2023 – What Your Ukraine Flag Is Really Saying

March 6, 2023 /

I did quite a bit of reading on this one. I knew in my head, from trusted sources that things weren’t exactly what they seemed. All that being said, everyone still needs to do their own research. Just because a source is trusted, doesn’t mean that it is always right.

I think that intuitively, we can all see the Ukrainian flag as a symbol of virtue signaling. It is a sign of the times. We have become a society of icons and false bravado when we perceive an injustice. Just like the ‘drop the mic’ podcast, unfortunately I think that society has turned. We have moved into a decadence phase like ancient Rome where we have more interest in other people’s problems than our own. But, that is a story for another day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Ukraine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Crimea

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_of_Dignity

End Your Programming Routine: Virtue signaling is certainly a form of programming. The concept implies a level of ignorance or blind faith. Now, is this something that is a major problem? Only when you are concerned with liberty and individual thought.

May 17, 2022 – Does Preserving History Matter?

May 17, 2022 /

I had an experience over the weekend. Quite out of the blue, my mom called on Saturday and said that the TV wanted to interview me about my experiences with the North Palestine Church. Not all of those details turned out to be completely accurate, but that doesn’t really matter. I swung into action to gather memorabilia to share and rushed out of the house to participate.

We called it Palestine Church growing up. It was about half a mile from my parents house. This was about as close as anything was. The only other public space was Fir Grove Elementary (about the same distance). The reason the church was in my life is that we used it as a meeting place for Boy Scouts during the summer time. It was also the fallback camping location for our monthly campouts (mostly wintertime).

The church was moved in 2012 from it’s cemetery location where it was built to about three miles down the road to Adair Village. The county now owns the building but it has essentially been closed since the move. They are slowly making improvements to get it ready for eventual use. However, there is no current vision on what it will be used for or even what needs to be done to make it usable.

As it turns out, the county was taking a video record of some of the people that were involved with using the church throughout the years. This is where the story I have been writing and my story intersect. Since Boy Scouts was such a fundamental building block of my youth, having a place to meet was an extremely vital component to having the entity exist. It also helps that it was extremely close and didn’t require a ride to get there every week.

Being speculative, would I have continued if I couldn’t easily get there? Would the troop exist without a permanent meeting place? If restored, will it ever hold the significance in the new location that it did in the old? These are all questions to be asked and not everyone in the troop many hold the same regard that I do.

These are photos inside the church at my Eagle Scout Court of Honor June 28, 1992. Each individual was asked what we would like to see the use of the church be. My response was that it maintains to be a venue that impacts people’s lives the way that this one did to mine.

End Your Programming Routine: If I am intellectually honest, the significance of Palestine church had a context of time, place and my personal interaction with the building. Just maintaining it as an available venue may never reach people in the same way. A fact that it was moved from it’s very rural location to a much more populated location removes the intimacy that us near it had. It could be anyplace anywhere really. So, while I have a strong emotional connection to the building, my real wish is that people make those connections wherever they are.

December 7, 2021 – In Contrast to Yesterday…

December 7, 2021 /

I have an experiment going on. I got this bicycle light for Christmas in 1994. I got the batteries for this light at the same time. Guess what, they still work. That is 27 years later, functioning alkaline batteries.  I like to check the light every couple of years to see if it is still working.