thedrifter
02-01-08, 05:21 AM
Time in a bottle
Collector sees gems in glass from ’48 Vanport flood
By Jennifer Anderson
The Portland Tribune, Feb 1, 2008
Most of the surfaces in Bob Thompson’s North Portland home are covered in bottles.
There are green ones, blue ones, brown ones, clear ones. Clean ones, dirty ones. Whiskey bottles, wine bottles. All of them are empty. And all of them are old — 60 to 100 years old.
Thompson, a nimble 79-year-old with wispy white hair, has spent the past several decades of his life collecting artifacts from the Vanport flood of May 30, 1948.
Vanport City, then Oregon’s second-largest, used to occupy the site of what is now Delta Park until the area was wiped out when the Columbia River dike broke.
Thompson has made it his passion to collect the glass relics from the flood, which have held up surprisingly well over the years. None of the bottles in his collection is broken — he throws those away. After all, he needs the space.
“I’ve got just about everything they used in those days,” Thompson says proudly, surveying the rows upon rows of neatly organized bottles that sit on shelves in his garage like toy soldiers. “Food, pop, wine, whiskey, beer, poison. Here’s some little shoe polish bottles. And small milk bottles — or this could be a pickle (bottle), too — I don’t really know.”
He’s not really sure how many he has; he’s tried to count, but the enormity of the collection makes it difficult. His entire garage is filled, and more are stored away in boxes and trunks in the garage and in his home, wrapped in newspaper for safekeeping.
His best guess is 10,000 to 12,000, which he says would fetch a small fortune if he ever wanted to sell.
He doesn’t.
In fact, he’s grown so attached to the bottles that after he discovered some of them were getting stolen from an overhang next to the garage, he moved them into a more secure location and got a dog — a black lab and retriever mix — to stand guard and alert him to would-be thieves.
He also moved his bed into the dining room of his large two-story house, just a couple of steps away from the back door so he can check on his “girls,” as he calls them, at a moment’s notice.
“Aren’t they pretty?” he says, admiring a row of freshly washed bottles on his kitchen windowsill, their bright colors glinting in the sunlight.
The bottles aren’t just objects to him — they’re symbols of history, which he’s lovingly salvaged from being lost in time. “Younger people, they don’t know about Vanport,” he says. “You can tell them, but you can’t describe it.”
‘I started looking’
Built in 1943 as the nation’s largest public housing project for shipyard workers during World War II, Vanport City housed about 40,000 people at one point, including returning veterans and a large black population.
When the dike broke, the river swept homes, barracks and trailers underwater, stranding thousands and killing 15 people in a matter of 20 minutes. While Thompson never lived in Vanport, he was 19 at the time the flood happened, and recalls seeing and hearing about the devastation from his home in Vancouver, Wash.
Born in southern Illinois, he said he came out West as a teenager in 1943, during World War II. He served with the U.S. Marines in China, then returned home and began a 20-year career in construction, which led him to his current obsession.
One day around 1960, he was working with his crew constructing the second span of the Interstate Bridge. “I looked down, seen all these bottles in the water, and seen these Caterpillars leveling off the (Portland International Raceway) racetrack,” he said. “The earth-movers moved the dirt, and the Cats spread it. I started looking.”
Later, he started excavating the dirt with his bare hands and a bucket on his days off and on vacations, sometimes taking a sleeping bag out to the site and spending two to three days searching at a time.
He and a helper would load the bottles into his truck, carefully so as not to break any, and take the bounty home — where he’d display them or wrap them up to be stored.
He finally quit his digging expeditions three or four years ago, for one reason only, he says: “I ran out of space.”
Bottles aren’t the only thing cluttering Thompson’s place. Reams of unused fabric also fill his garage from the 20-something years he spent doing furniture upholstery, more relics from his past.
Lately, he’s been spending time on his other passions: chess, pinochle and cribbage. He considers himself pretty skilled, even having taught chess at the master’s level. “I can’t be beat,” he says.
Rain washes up treasure
Looking up at the Tuesday morning the sun, which was shining after days of rain, Thompson is woeful about his bottles again.
“On good days like this, I kick myself because I should be out there, but I’m not,” he says. The best times to go out to the Delta Park area typically are after a big rain, when the ground is moist and he’s usually lucky enough to catch a flicker of a bottle in a glint of sun.
And he considers himself unusually lucky. “If I need something, it’ll come around. I’ll sell certain things at a garage sale and hate to part with them. Then I’ll run across it again.”
He’s got a little collection of cold cream jars, which look like little white candles with crusts of dirt on top where metal has rusted over.
He has fruit jars, jugs that look like they might have held bleach, and an eight-sided bottle with a spout that could have held some sort of syrup or sauce. There are some Coca-Cola bottles, but not many — for some reason, most of them turn up broken, he’s found.
He unwraps a slender liquor bottle from its newspaper protection and smiles. “This one is for ladies only,” he says knowingly. “Bad tasting. I thought it was extract one time when I was a little kid. I made chocolate candy with it. Tasted terrible.”
Two of his favorites out of the whole lot are a brown whiskey bottle that pictures a minuteman and elaborate naval scene, and a whiskey bottle from Mohawk Liqueurs, even its cap intact. “I’d been looking for this one for a long time,” he said. “A month or two after I found this one, I quit.”
Now Thompson is in the process of washing his most precious and eye-catching pieces to take to City Hall next week for a presentation on Vanport. He can’t wash all of them — it’s a time-consuming process, he says, that’s already clogged three of his garbage disposals.
jenniferanderson@portlandtribune.com
Ellie
Collector sees gems in glass from ’48 Vanport flood
By Jennifer Anderson
The Portland Tribune, Feb 1, 2008
Most of the surfaces in Bob Thompson’s North Portland home are covered in bottles.
There are green ones, blue ones, brown ones, clear ones. Clean ones, dirty ones. Whiskey bottles, wine bottles. All of them are empty. And all of them are old — 60 to 100 years old.
Thompson, a nimble 79-year-old with wispy white hair, has spent the past several decades of his life collecting artifacts from the Vanport flood of May 30, 1948.
Vanport City, then Oregon’s second-largest, used to occupy the site of what is now Delta Park until the area was wiped out when the Columbia River dike broke.
Thompson has made it his passion to collect the glass relics from the flood, which have held up surprisingly well over the years. None of the bottles in his collection is broken — he throws those away. After all, he needs the space.
“I’ve got just about everything they used in those days,” Thompson says proudly, surveying the rows upon rows of neatly organized bottles that sit on shelves in his garage like toy soldiers. “Food, pop, wine, whiskey, beer, poison. Here’s some little shoe polish bottles. And small milk bottles — or this could be a pickle (bottle), too — I don’t really know.”
He’s not really sure how many he has; he’s tried to count, but the enormity of the collection makes it difficult. His entire garage is filled, and more are stored away in boxes and trunks in the garage and in his home, wrapped in newspaper for safekeeping.
His best guess is 10,000 to 12,000, which he says would fetch a small fortune if he ever wanted to sell.
He doesn’t.
In fact, he’s grown so attached to the bottles that after he discovered some of them were getting stolen from an overhang next to the garage, he moved them into a more secure location and got a dog — a black lab and retriever mix — to stand guard and alert him to would-be thieves.
He also moved his bed into the dining room of his large two-story house, just a couple of steps away from the back door so he can check on his “girls,” as he calls them, at a moment’s notice.
“Aren’t they pretty?” he says, admiring a row of freshly washed bottles on his kitchen windowsill, their bright colors glinting in the sunlight.
The bottles aren’t just objects to him — they’re symbols of history, which he’s lovingly salvaged from being lost in time. “Younger people, they don’t know about Vanport,” he says. “You can tell them, but you can’t describe it.”
‘I started looking’
Built in 1943 as the nation’s largest public housing project for shipyard workers during World War II, Vanport City housed about 40,000 people at one point, including returning veterans and a large black population.
When the dike broke, the river swept homes, barracks and trailers underwater, stranding thousands and killing 15 people in a matter of 20 minutes. While Thompson never lived in Vanport, he was 19 at the time the flood happened, and recalls seeing and hearing about the devastation from his home in Vancouver, Wash.
Born in southern Illinois, he said he came out West as a teenager in 1943, during World War II. He served with the U.S. Marines in China, then returned home and began a 20-year career in construction, which led him to his current obsession.
One day around 1960, he was working with his crew constructing the second span of the Interstate Bridge. “I looked down, seen all these bottles in the water, and seen these Caterpillars leveling off the (Portland International Raceway) racetrack,” he said. “The earth-movers moved the dirt, and the Cats spread it. I started looking.”
Later, he started excavating the dirt with his bare hands and a bucket on his days off and on vacations, sometimes taking a sleeping bag out to the site and spending two to three days searching at a time.
He and a helper would load the bottles into his truck, carefully so as not to break any, and take the bounty home — where he’d display them or wrap them up to be stored.
He finally quit his digging expeditions three or four years ago, for one reason only, he says: “I ran out of space.”
Bottles aren’t the only thing cluttering Thompson’s place. Reams of unused fabric also fill his garage from the 20-something years he spent doing furniture upholstery, more relics from his past.
Lately, he’s been spending time on his other passions: chess, pinochle and cribbage. He considers himself pretty skilled, even having taught chess at the master’s level. “I can’t be beat,” he says.
Rain washes up treasure
Looking up at the Tuesday morning the sun, which was shining after days of rain, Thompson is woeful about his bottles again.
“On good days like this, I kick myself because I should be out there, but I’m not,” he says. The best times to go out to the Delta Park area typically are after a big rain, when the ground is moist and he’s usually lucky enough to catch a flicker of a bottle in a glint of sun.
And he considers himself unusually lucky. “If I need something, it’ll come around. I’ll sell certain things at a garage sale and hate to part with them. Then I’ll run across it again.”
He’s got a little collection of cold cream jars, which look like little white candles with crusts of dirt on top where metal has rusted over.
He has fruit jars, jugs that look like they might have held bleach, and an eight-sided bottle with a spout that could have held some sort of syrup or sauce. There are some Coca-Cola bottles, but not many — for some reason, most of them turn up broken, he’s found.
He unwraps a slender liquor bottle from its newspaper protection and smiles. “This one is for ladies only,” he says knowingly. “Bad tasting. I thought it was extract one time when I was a little kid. I made chocolate candy with it. Tasted terrible.”
Two of his favorites out of the whole lot are a brown whiskey bottle that pictures a minuteman and elaborate naval scene, and a whiskey bottle from Mohawk Liqueurs, even its cap intact. “I’d been looking for this one for a long time,” he said. “A month or two after I found this one, I quit.”
Now Thompson is in the process of washing his most precious and eye-catching pieces to take to City Hall next week for a presentation on Vanport. He can’t wash all of them — it’s a time-consuming process, he says, that’s already clogged three of his garbage disposals.
jenniferanderson@portlandtribune.com
Ellie