Mostly, I remember the green walnuts. That's my most vivid memory of the 1962 Columbus Day Storm that slammed Oregon during my childhood. Kids don't think in terms of damage to infrastructure. For me, it was wondering how I was ever going to get the green hulls off the walnuts which had been prematurely blown off our trees. The buyers wouldn't take them if they didn't look right and the spare change I made off those walnuts supplemented my meager allowance. I wasn't old enough to get a real paper-route and start making the serious bread.
Natural disasters are on everybody's minds these days. We argue about whether we had enough notice and whether people did the right thing once they had it. Well, we had practically no notice about this one and what notice we got vastly understated the danger and once the danger hit there was no FEMA to come to the rescue or blame for botching it.
Columbus Day Storm / October 12, 1962
It was a Friday and as the day started the air was unusually calm so when the Weather Service started talking about some wind gusts coming off the tail of Typhoon Freda out in the Pacific -- gusts up to 60 mph -- nobody really believed them. This was 43 years ago, mind you, and we trust the weather forecasts a great deal more today than we did then. So while people had warnings about Katrina and had the ability to act on or ignore them, we really had nothing.
I was in grade school -- Peter Boscow Elementary School -- and every day I walked the four or five blocks there and back. I remember on the way home that a wind gust came out of nowhere and blew me off my feet. Literally. We got a lot of rain in Hillsboro, Oregon back then, but winds like this I had never experienced.
As finally recorded, the gusts of the Columbus Day Storm reached 160 mph in some places and the entire coast was slammed by hurricane force winds. I've seen this storm called the "Biggest Extratropical Cyclone of the 20th Century." In less than 12 hours, up to 15 billion board feet of timber was blown down in California, Oregon and Washington combined. Let me put that in perspective. That number exceeds the annual timber harvest for Oregon and Washington at the time.
There's a wonderful web page where people who remember the storm have their memories posted. Reading some of their stories certainly evoked a lot of thoughts of my own. In the Willamette Valley, where I lived, it's said that the undamaged home was the exception and the damaged home was the rule. That was certainly true of our home.
I remember watching our front yard tree fall down before my very eyes as I stared out the window. It hit our roof and, at that point, I think my dad hustled everybody into the basement. I remember the power being out for several days. Mostly I remember walking out the next morning and being shocked. Most of our roof tiles had blown off. The tree was in a bedroom. Several other trees in the backyard had blown down.
And, of course, the walnuts were everywhere. An entire fall season's worth of walnuts were on the ground in a single day and it was my job (and my brother's) to salvage as many as we could. I remember crying about how my favorite tree, the one I would always climb when we were playing outside, had blown down and was being cut up for firewood. The back yard never looked the same after.
You go to Hillsboro today and there really isn't much evidence that the Columbus Day Storm ever happened. Probably most of the barns you'll see in the area were built after 1962 because the older ones were all destroyed. The biggest storm to hit after, though, was the economic one that happened when all the hi-tech companies like Intel and Hewlett-Packard moved offices into the area decades later, turning that little town of 6,000 that I grew up in into a city ten times as large.
Every year at this time, my mind always turns to the Columbus Day Storm. These days we debate whether we should even celebrate Columbus Day, of course, and the actual date shifts to fit federal calendars. Six years after the storm, in fact, President Johnson shifted from a firm date to the second Monday in October. But I remember the exact day. It was October 12. If you lived in Oregon back then, you'll never forget.
