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Milwaukie Ecosystem Plan Memories
Residents Reminisce: Stories from Johnson Creek Then & Now
CHILDHOOD MEMORIES


Works Projects Administration waterfall near the trailhead of the Springwater Corridor. Courtesy A.G. Flynn, 2000.

These excerpts come from an oral history archive created by the Johnson Creek History Capstone course in Spring 1999. Interviews are archived at and available through the Oregon Historical Society. We thank those who so willingly shared their stories with us.

Tony Birch interviewed by Michael Turner, 1999:

  • The Creek was looked upon…as this incredible source of life and incredible focus of curiosity, and you know when I was a kid I was always in it.

Miles Aubin interviewed by James Hausen, 1999:

  • Adults would go down there along with the kids, with a pitchfork so they would catch those salmon and they'd take them home and they'd feed them to the chickens. And then some of them, there were people who, probably kids, who would take a gun down there, you know shoot them, and then they'd just leave them. And sometimes they'd catch them and throw them on the bank, and the dogs would get a hold of them, and of course they'd get, it was very common for dogs to get salmon poisoning and they would die. I guess if the dog gets over it, he's immune to it.


Johnson Creek in the 1930s. Courtesy of City of Portland, Stanley Parr Archives and Record Center

I remember one of my jobs when summer came along, there was, because we had dogs, you had to get the dead fish away from them. Because there's something in there, and I don't know the history of it, it's either there or it grows there shortly after death. But there is a substance or a virus in the brains of dead fish that's quite fatal to dogs. So one of my jobs was to keep watching the banks of the creek around the house to make sure there weren't any dead fish, and to get those dead fish safely put away in a compost pile out of the reach of the dogs. And I'd used a pitchfork to do that, and occasionally I would pitchfork a fish that I later found wasn't dead. – Tony Birch

Longtime resident of Johnson Creek interviewed by Michael Turner, 1999:

  • Of course you know that Johnson Creek at one time was known as Cougar creek…because there were cougars on the creek….I never saw one but that was what the newspaper said.

If we called a creek by name, we'd probably call it by the farmers place that it passed through.- Miles Aubin

Miles Aubin interviewed by James Hausen, 1999:

  • JH: What activities did you do along the creek?
  • MA: Well, we fished, but we just played along [it]. You know, when I was young we just played along the... and we found things in the creek. We caught crayfish. There was a lot of crayfish in Johnson Creek all the way up. There is a lot of crayfish.

David Schwitzer interviewed by Jake Lancaster, 1999:

  • One day I was just walking the bank…I don't even know if I was fishing, but right at the mouth of Kelly Creek that runs into Johnson…I was just standing there and there's kind of a, oh about a three foot just kind of little pocket in the creek there. And all of a sudden I seen some splashing in the water and all of a sudden a silver went and beached itself up on the sandbar there, and little female mink had a hold of it and was dragging it up on the bank. Yeah as soon as she saw me, she let go and it flopped back into the creek.

Us kids used to …you know when I mentioned that you never fish right below the sewer, the old sewer treatment plant in Gresham. And how you would decide where to fish was by the existence of fresh water snails. If there were no snails the water was polluted. And then there were no snails right below the sewer treatment plant, and eventually you would start picking up snails and when you had a full crop of snails you know that the water was o.k. to fish in. And there's not many snails left in the entire creek. – Tony Birch.


Oaks Park, 1990s. Photo courtesy of Portland Parks Bureau
Pat Broust, interviewed by Wanda Berry, 1999:
  • WB: Did you go to Oaks Park as a child?
  • PB: Yes, we use to by way of the inter-urban street car. It hasn't changed all that much, but of course things do change. . . there was a wooden ramp you would walk down over the marshy areas and come right out in the middle of it and that's where you bought cotton candy. The train that goes on the track there isn't the same as the old one, of course. The old one is in kind of a museum that the owner of the park has. Parking was way down at the south end. Now you can park down at the north end. They filled in the area near the Oaks rink, the skating rink, and that is parking now but used to be marsh land.
 
Car on early Willamette Valley street. Photo courtesy of Milwaukie Historical Society
Miles Aubin, interviewed by James Hausen, 1999:

I lived seven miles from Gresham by automobile. The reason I know is because the doctor -- you know, most of the kids, I have younger brothers and sisters and when they were born, you know, they were born right in the house. A doctor came out from Gresham. And the cost of delivering a baby was twenty bucks but he also charges seven dollars one way. So if you took it by driving it, it was seven miles. Of course, gasoline at that time was about twenty cents a gallon.

When we were younger, yeah, like ten, twelve years old or something, we all went down, it went up to the top end of the field up there, and that was the swimming hole all the neighbor kids and everything. – David Schwitzer

Jason Leomark interviewed by Brian F. Parks, 1999:

  • JL: We moved to the farm in 1918……….181 Acres from Powell Blvd down to the center of Johnson Creek, pretty good piece of ground in size. Initially it was not a berry farm but my father got interested in berries so he planted amongst others what's called cuspard red raspberries, the brand has kind of gone out, but it was probably the tastiest of raspberries. At one time we had about 97 acres of cuspard red raspberries, and it was the largest red raspberry farm in the world.
  • JL: Did you get water from Johnson Creek?
  • JL: The only water we got from Johnson Creek, my father got interested in irrigation some years after being out on the farm, and he had a pumping station on Johnson Creek with two pretty good sized pumps and he had irrigation ability, a couple set lines and a portable line that could irrigate all the farm. But as far as water from the creek for other purposes no, and it's even questionable whether the water from Johnson Creek was that good for irrigation, it was a lot of runoff water in it, and the quality of water for irrigation may have been questionable. But it is not a viable stream as far as using the water for bathing, or drinking, or so forth or so on. Basically a stream that had developed a run off, a potential where many things drain into it. One of the large drains in the city of Gresham itself, in fact our water rights were based on the overflow of water from the Gresham berry grower plants. They used a lot of water in the berry plants and we got the rights to use that water, and that was our basic water rights, was overflow from the city of Gresham not so much the creek itself. As far as I know we were the only one that had water rights on Johnson Creek in that area and a particular type of water rights, it was overflow water. And my father was very well carried away with it, and he wanted to irrigate all the raspberries and I said, I had a background at Oregon State in agriculture and I said no, no just this month part of them. But he irrigated them all and we lost most all the raspberries all except ten acres. Of course he laughed and went on to something else, and we planted filbert trees and holly trees.


Raspberries. Courtesy of the Oregon Department of Argicultural