100 years ago — 1922

The Pendleton city council, with only four councilmen present which does not constitute a quorum for passing ordinances, last night considered two such measures, listened to a request from a representative from the central trade council that the wages of common labor be not lowered by whatever contractor secures the contract for the construction of the septic tank, and discussed various other matters. The two ordinances read and then tabled were the police code and an ordinance providing that it shall be unlawful for masked persons to parade in the streets without a permit from the mayor and without the list of names of the paraders being submitted to the authorities.

50 years ago — 1972

Sen. George McGovern, D-S.D., a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, spoke Sunday night at Hawthorne School in Pendleton. The crowd attending was estimated by the Secret Service to be at more than 1,100 people. There were more than 100 people outside the building, trying to get in. A Secret Service man described the crowd as “wall-to-wall friendlies.” McGovern discussed the Vietnam war, tax reform, farm parity, truth in government and amnesty. His speech was interrupted numerous times by cheers from the crowd. “We should put our country on the path to peace. We should put an end to death and destruction going on in Southeast Asia,” McGovern said. “Never again should we send troops to defend a corrupt military dictatorship 10,000 miles from our shores.” McGovern saluted the farmers in the Pendleton area and said one of his first acts, if elected, would be to establish 90 per cent parity for farmers.

25 years ago — 1997

Nine months after fires scorched 300,000 acres in the Blue Mountains south of Ukiah, mushroom hunters have begun to descend on the blackened slopes in search of morels. “We’ve got a lot of pickers,” said Bob Wolfe, a law enforcement officer with the U.S. Forest Service in Ukiah. “We’ve got about 1,500 people selling in Ukiah. It’s only been going for about the past two weeks,” he said. “I don’t know when it’s going to peak.” The hot spot so far, Wolfe said, has been the 43,000-acre Tower Fire-area that blazed late last August about five miles from Ukiah. With snow still on the ground in some places, the mushroom picking season will continue all summer, depending on Mother Nature. “It’s all weather-related,” Wolfe said. In March, law enforcement agencies met to plan how they would maintain order in the mountains, which officials estimated could see as many as 10,000 to 15,000 hunters during the picking season. Wolfe said so far, there haven’t been any major problems that could be attributed to the hunters.