Visitors watch as volunteers enact scenes in the spring of 2000 at the Pendleton Underground Association fundraiser.(East Oregonian, File)

25 years ago this week — 2000

MILTON-FREEWATER — The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is scheduled to begin building a new fish ladder later this month at Nursery Street bridge on the Walla Walla River near Milton-Freewater.

The new fish ladder is designed to improve adult and juvenile fish passage on the river around an 8-foot dam at the bridge. Project costs are estimated at $3.6 million and will benefit listed steelhead and bull trout stocks in the Walla Walla River basin, according to Chris Hyland, project manager at the Corps’ Walla Walla District office.

“The existing ladder was constructed in 1966 and does not work well, especially during periods of low flows,” Hyland said: “Each spring a fish salvage operation is conducted at the base of the (Nursery Street) dam by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation fisheries staffers, as flows dry up completely in this reach of the river due to irrigation withdrawals. This new ladder is expected to reduce, and may even eliminate, the need for this effort in some years, providing passage for the fish to get back upstream on their own.”

Hyland said the new ladder is a “vertical slot” type, that works under a wider range of flows than the existing ladder. The ladder will also include facilities for trapping and counting fish.

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PENDLETON —  Graduating senior Erin Har-ral told a packed house at Pendleton High School Saturday that four years of high school gave her the time to become an adult.

“The last four years have been an opportunity to learn about ourselves and our place in the world,” Harral said. “After we step down from here today, we will all be adults. We will be individuals to be reckoned with.”

Harral was one of three student speakers at the Pendleton High School Class of 2000 graduation ceremony. There were 195 graduates this year.

It was standing room only inside the high school gym as Harral credited the support of teachers and friends for sustaining her class in its quest for social, emotional and intellectual growth.

“Sometimes, late at night, we had nothing more than dead poets to guide us,” she said. “These experiences will follow us all our lives.”

Harral said teenagers are often stereotyped and it can make them feel invisible because they are not taken seriously.

But she thanked the community for giving her this period of invisibility because it allowed her to be a teen-ager, with all the wide-eyed fancies and growing pains that entails.

“We are no longer invisible,” Harral said. “We are a force of nature.”

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PILOT ROCK — With a couple of firm turns of the large fly wheel, John Herald pushes life into his 83-year-old Hercules gas engine.

Soon, the five-horsepower engine, built in Evansville, Ind., is churning away, whisper quiet, except for an occasional loud crack and puff of smoke that explodes from the upright exhaust pipe.

Herald has photos of the Hercules before he began restoring it. Most of the metal parts were rusted and shovels full of dirt were inside the engine.

Now the Hercules looks and runs as good as new and will probably last another 83 years.

“In the old days, they didn’t build any of these engines to be obsolete,” Herald said. “These were made to be rebuilt.”

Around his family’s workshop, Herald’s tools and materials for rebuilding “old iron” are strewn about in such a way that it would be hard to find anything unless one was familiar with the floor plan.

But ​ inside his “museum,” Herald has meticulously placed his restored engines so they can be seen and appreciated.

Each one has its own story.

“This one had been thrown out in a junk pile in the mountains for 50 years,” he said of a Maytag washing machine motor. “In three days, I had it running.”

50 years ago this week — 1975

The Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association has approved the 1975 Pendleton Round-Up, Round-Up President Glenn Thorne announced today.

The Round-Up is among those rodeos normally approved at the RCA’s annual meeting in January at Denver.

But this year, agreement was not reached at the January meeting. The RCA said the Round-Up wasn’t offering enough prize money.

The Round-Up in January offered a 20 per cent increase over the 1974 purse of $15,425. The RCA asked for a 60 per cent increase.

A 30 per cent increase in purse was agreed on. This will boost the total purse to $19,820, to which is added entry fees.

Purse and entry fees are added together, and the two equal prize money. With some 300 contestants at the 1974 Round-Up, prize money totaled about $40,000.

“We think the increase we offered was realistic,” Thorn said at that time. He acknowledged there should be an increase, because of inflation, over the 1974 purse.

After the January meeting, Hugh Chambliss of Denver, rodeo administrator for the RCA, said he “would hope we could settle somewhere in between,” the Round-Up offer and the RCA figure.

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PILOT  ROCK — City Councilman Edwin Wesley Young, elected last November, was arrested in Pilot Rock Tuesday on a charge of being a convicted felon in possession of a concealable firearm.

The arrest was made by the Oregon State Police and Umatilla County Sheriff’s Department on a district court warrant. Young, 43, is being lodged in Umatilla County jail with bail set at $5,005.

According to Assistant District Attorney Bill Molloy, conviction on the charge would result in a mandatory penitentiary term. Maximum sentence for a conviction would be five years, he said.

The charge, according to Molloy, stems back to an incident Dec. 2, 1974, when Young reportedly was observed to be personally armed with an automatic pistol.

According to public record, Young was convicted in King County, Wash., in 1952 on charges of attempted robbery and assault in the first degree.

He was sentenced to 20 years in the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla on each offense.

Lately Young has been working at Louisiana-Pacific wood products plant in Pilot Rock and also operated his own upholstery store.

The question of whether the arrest will affect Young’s position on the council is probably moot.

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Another ​​ insect has reached epidemic proportions in the Blue Mountains of Eastern Oregon and the U.S. Forest Service says the result will be much worse than the tussock moth epidemic.

The mountain pine beetle, a small, black, bark beetle, has been killing lodgepole pine in the forests since 1963, according to USFS Forester Bill Carter, Pendleton.

At that time, Carter said, 2,400 acres of lodgepole pine were found to be infested with the beetle north of Johnson Rock near Vey Meadow in the Wallowa-Whitman forest.

In 1973, 126,330 acres were infested and 1974 saw this climb to 315,220 acres scattered throughout the Umatilla and Wallowa-Whitman National Forests.

Carter estimates over a million acres will be affected before the beetle is finished. He said between 50 and 55 per cent of the potential kill has been completed and he guesses the beetle will run its course in six or seven more years.

The beetle attacks large, over-mature lodgepoles 80-years-old and up, and kills them by girdling, Carter said. He explained that girdling is cutting through the cambium, or growing, layer of the tree and this stops the water and nutrient supply.

Carter said there is no effective way to control the beetle. It is resistant to chemicals because it lives in the bark of the tree.

He said that for every tree attacked this year, eight more trees will die next year as a result of the beetle.

100 years ago this week — 1925

Needlework, art work, penmanship and essays on various subjects were among the exhibits made at St. Joseph’s Academy during the past two days, when the pupils of the school, from the first grade to the senior class of the high school, inclusive, made a most interesting display of their work. Parents and friends called during the afternoon and evening, the school being host to scores of visitors.

Seniors who will be graduated this year and whose work is shown are Susan Doherty, Verona Bucsko, Ellen McGonigle, Marie Foster, Gladys Speegle, Ellen Dyer, Mary Carty, Madeline Dillon and Rose Bleichner. Their exhibit includes pen and ink etchings, essays decorated with painting and pen and ink work, penmanship work, china painting, plain sewing and hand embroidery. The girls have made dresses, underwear, and have done great quantities of beautiful needlework, including dresser scarves, pillows, luncheon sets and scores of other articles.

But not only the seniors have a remarkable display; every child in the school, including,

boys and girls, has an exhibit. The children of the first and second grades have penmanship displays and have done weaving and at work. The sewing begins in the third grade and pupils in this class have made towels and other embroidered articles.

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DALLAS, Ore., June 4.— Investigation here today of a report from Walla Walla, Wash., that Levi Ankeny, Jr., grandson of the late Senator Ankeny of Washington, was married here two months ago to Klysta Cornett, daughter of a former Prineville, Ore., businessman and niece of

R. A. Booth, former chairman of the Oregon state highway commission, revealed that a license had been granted to Lee Ankeny, 21 and Blanche Cornett, 18, on April 17, and that they were married here the same day.

The marriage ceremony was performed at the Presbyterian manse here by the Rev. J. E. Youel. Ankeny was described in the application for the license as a student at Eugene,

and Blanche Cornett gave her home as Rickrreal, a town four times east of Dallas.

Miss Marguerite Husser of Dallas, who was the witness, said Miss Cornett was visiting at Rickreal at the time. She said young Ankeny was the grandson of Senator Ankeny and that Miss Cornett was related to R. A. Booth.

The Walla Walla report said that Miss Cornett was graduating today from St. Paul’s school in that city.

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Fay Clark and Allen Boyden were the winners of the Lantern cups awarded last evening at the 1925 high school commencement for the boy and girl adjudged as being superior in leadership, scholarship, character and service.

Baynard Sager was awarded the Whitman College scholarship, valued at $135, and Miss Clark and Fred Bennion, Jr., were announced as the winners of the citizenship essay contest conducted by the Exchange club. Miss Clark received first prize and young Bennion, freshman, received second.

The exercises were held in the high school auditorium, and P. F Irvine, editor of the Oregon Journal, was the speaker. Mr. Irvine made a most impressive address, proving himself a master of the art of public speaking and delivering his talk with his usual forcefulness and sincerity.

He stressed the value of higher education, and emphasized the increased opportunities for service which the individual has today, because of the equipment which modern education supplies. His address was a practical one, with direct application to the struggle for success in the life of present times.

Mr. Irvine called attention to statistics showing that among men who have not even

completed grammar school, only one in several hundred thousands ever becomes a leader, and showed also that as men become better educated, the chance for leadership and success becomes correspondingly great.