The Oregon Story; Small Towns

[steady beeping] Funding for production of the Oregon story was made possible through a generous grant from the United States Department of Agriculture Rural Development. [music] [music] [music] [cheering] [crowd noise] "Je sam -- "Je die, bien" This is a story about several small towns in Oregon-- all similar and

different. All struggling to adapt to all that was changed, without losing whatever it is that made them special. Some of the conversations you hear may seem familiar. [Radio announcer] "Next to the post office is the town hall, James in the basement." As though they've been lifted from a classic play and film written more than 60 years ago, called Our Town, about the overlooked wonders of everyday life in a typical American town. [music] [Old television show sound] "It's a nice town, you know what I mean?" [woman] "These people here are friendly." [girl] "I know everybody's name at the school, and probably know a lot more about them than they want me to know, but, that's the way small towns are." [man] "You know a town, we like to know the facts about everybody." [woman] "All small communities are concerned about change, and we fear it." [man] "Still you'd be surprised though on the whole. Things don't change much around here."

But by the end of the play everything had changed. [conclusive music] [violin] Which takes us to Gardner, Oregon. Gardner can be found by following the Umpqua River to the Pacific Ocean. When you pass a large herd of elk, you're almost there. It's hard to know what Gardner's population is: Five hundred? Three hundred? Gardner's residents have different ways of counting, and different ways of describing what has happened here-- whether it was good, or bad. [man] "Devastated us. We had five employees, we now have one employee, and one part-time lady that helps us out." [man 2] "Yeah, life is very tough over there." [woman] "Well, I don't worry about

Gardner, where it's going." [man 3] "This is one of the last economically depressed areas on the coast." [man 4] "I just really like it here." The town of Gardner began partly by accident. About 150 years ago a ship, the Bostonian, wrecked off-shore. Rescued crewmen simply stayed on, and built the town. Some of those founders are buried in the terraced graveyard, which overlooks the Pacific Coast Highway at what used to be a busy seaport. [violin music] Gardner became a timber milling center, and a major port for shipping the timber. Ships once docked right beside the main street. [woman] "This is a four-masted schooner. Part of them were three masted that came in. Part of them were four masted. Donna Fulhart's family has lived in Gardner since the 1800s. [Donna Fullhart] "Quite a few of the local girls married sea captains, and when I was

growing up, I- I used to say it was an idyllic type childhood, because everyone was so close in the town, and I knew everyone in town, and everyone watched out for everybody else, and they were all so good to me." Gardner was, in most respects, a company town, a mini boom town. At one time, it had two hotels. But the harbor silted in, Fish became scarcer. The forest all around that supplied the mills evolved from resource to complicated issue. Gardner's huge saw mill shut down. And on February 15th, 1999, the big paper mill next door did too. The company town was without a company. The hotels are no more. No grocery store. Just a tavern cafe, a repair shop,

A school whose students are almost all bussed in from nearby Reedsport. And an odd store that seems to stay closed. What are the people of Gardner, Oregon to do now? [woman] "I hope something fun will happen, and you know, really neat will happen to Gardner." [man] "I don't see much of anything happening." [Birds chirping] A lot of other towns in Oregon have faced the same problems as Gardner. Towns created by farmers, ranchers, fishermen, lumberjacks, out of the forest, land and water around them. And then something happened. The things that created them disappeared. Attitudes changed. Times changed. Around the town of Wasco, in the high desert, farmers are disappearing

as their machines get bigger and costlier, and the price of wheat stays the same. David Conley is leaving for the city to find a new occupation as soon as this crop is in. Wasco's highway also disappeared. It was rerouted. After that Wasco's population gradually fell from sixteen hundred to four hundred. Fifty miles further south, the town of Shaniko was deserted by its railroad. A century ago, sheep farmers scattered across 20,000 square miles of high desert, all brought their sheep and wool to Shaniko, because this was the Columbia Southern railroad's last stop south. Shaniko was one of Oregon's most important towns. Sheep capital of the world. But after only 10 years of prosperity, the bubble burst. Another railroad laid tracks a short

distance away. The farmers and their wagon loads of wool went elsewhere. And, finally, Columbia Southern trains quit running to Shaniko at all. Shaniko's solution, if it can be called that, occurred naturally. With no commerce, the population of Shaniko shrank to the point that the town barely functioned at all. The remaining residents simply made it official. They proclaimed Shaniko a ghost town and turned its demise into a tourist attraction. Jim Hogan is the mayor of Shaniko and minister of the town's wedding chapel. He concedes that marketing is tricky here. You can't very well have a thriving ghost town. "What our plan basically is to continue like we are. We don't want to really grow, and there's nobody here -- everybody came here because it's unique." Even if Shaniko manages to use calamity as a virtue, one professional ghost town is probably all the market will bear in Oregon. Other towns in trouble

would have to find their own solutions. [music] The town of Dundee found a better road to prosperity. But was it prosperity that found Dundee? Like Shaniko, Dundee was built around a railroad depot 30 miles west of Portland. That was a hundred-twenty years ago. The depot also served as headquarters and offices of the railroad and as a hotel for the railroad's employees and passengers. After the railroad went out of business, Dundee became a farming community. The land nearby was particularly good for fruit trees and walnuts and hazelnuts. But with the trains gone, outsiders tended to look on Dundee as little more than a nuisance, a narrow spot in the highway between Portland and the Pacific

beaches. A speed trap, some motorists complained. Then in the late Sixties, a handful of people discovered that the same soil that produced nuts and prunes would grow something more lucrative than that. Grapes. Grapes that become fine wines. Dick Erath was one of the first to discover the region's possibilities. "Oh, yeah, we have a little extra pinot gris here that they missed and we have to taste these, mmm, sweet. A lot sweeter than what you get in the store. I started planting grapes in Oregon in 1968 and back then there were just three of us here in the valley, and I think we all knew it was going to be a great place to grow grapes but it's just the way it's exploded. I mean it's tremendous the number of vineyards now in wineries in Oregon and the international recognition. Oregon wines age really well because the basic good acidity that we have here and the acidity is sort of like a skeleton. And then the fruit is sort of like a flesh covering that skeleton and in Oregon, because of our long, cool season,

we are able to develop a good structure there, and that gives the life to the wines." But for more than a decade, wine making in Oregon was little more than a novelty, considered experimental. Birds, insects, early frosts, October rains, and all manner of exotic funghi capable of wiping out entire vineyards, made winemaking seem risky. But gradually the taste of the Oregon wines, and their steadily rising prices, lured more vintners to the Willamette Valley. The three original vineyards have become 60. The traffic through Dundee has become an almost constant traffic jam. [traffic noise] But now, some of the drivers aren't just passing through. They're stopping to taste the wine. [laughter] The wine makers themselves often sample each other's wine and talk shop at Tina's restaurant.

"I love that grape but I hate it at the same time because when it was ripe, it was really great, but when you get [inaudible] dehydrated, you just go [inaudible]". If the discovery of wine around Dundee can be called a modern version of the gold rush, these are the prospectors. "Well, so what are you guys going to pick?" "I think the weekend...[inaudible] The conversation is more serious than it may sound. It's mid-October. Harvest is at hand. A tense time, as everyone tries to find the magic moment to catch the grapes at their peak, before the birds and the rains arrive. "You have to Essentially not be prone to ulcers, because every year's been different this is no exception and it is also a suspenseful time when you're ready for the [inaudible]. Here we are in the middle of October and we could be standing in a downpour right now, which is probably what the last couple years have been like. And then when that happens, and the migratory robins coming out of the Gulf of Alaska and they come in and they decide to do a little carbohydrate loading on their way to California. And so then

not only do we have the bird problem, we have the moisture uptake from the rains, we have...and that triggers detritus rot in the fruit." But 1999 appears to be a lucky year. John Paul is owner of the Cameron winery, just three miles outside of Dundee. He left marine biology to become a wine maker. "If you look at them through the sun, you can start to see the seed inside that grape. So the berry's becoming translucent. That's a good indication that it's getting ripe. The berries are turning yellow. They're getting little spots on them, and most importantly, they're just starting to taste fantastic. They've got a certain zing to the taste, it's just wonderful. I have one word. Wow, wow, wow. I think we're really close. Yeah, I think we're really close. The bottom part is not quite as ripe as the upper part, which is interesting."

Bill Wayne owns the vineyard and tends the grapes. When they're ready, he turns them over to John Paul, whose winery turns them into zinfandel, pinot noir and chardonnay. Both are ecstatic about this year's crop and the mid- October weather as harvesting begins. [music] The grapes are picked at high speed as everyone races the coming rainy season. Vineyards compete for the best pickers, who are mostly permanent residents. They are paid by the bucketful and work all day on the run. "I'd say this is a great way to make a living. Oftentimes when we're out tasting fruit, Bill and I will look at each other, especially if it's gorgeous weather like this, and I'd kind of be unbelieving that, you know, this is what we actually get paid to do."

[music] [voices] Seemingly, overnight, Dundee's population exploded. Expensive new houses are going up. "Dundee is sitting on a gold mine. I think you've seen a lot of people with money moving into the area, and Dundee is quite an affluent community, anyhow." Dundee's mayor, Jerry Coke, says you couldn't give away property in Dundee 10 or 15 years ago. But that's all changed. "We've got wineries out of California and France who are coming in and buying land. Just the price of the ground is what is becoming more and more expensive, is what it costs for the ground itself, because vineyard property is

very very expensive. All the hazelnuts are going away fairly much in the area, and the vineyards are going in." "Dundee, this little teeny tiny community, Dundee, has three of the best restaurants in the Greater Portland area. It's just, you know it's just amazing, and people come out from Portland just to go to these restaurants, maybe to tour a winery. What they need now are inns out here, and once there are inns and places for people to stay, as in the Napa Valley and as in Tuscany, there's just there's no doubt about it, I mean it's a gorgeous area and they have good restaurants and so, yeah, I think it's all headed in that way. Tourism is going to be an important part of this." Which is not to everyone's taste in Dundee. "A large group of people in this community who would like to just stop growth. And, OK, I'm moved in and I'm the last one here, let's shut the door and have nobody else come in."

"People out here are very conservative. I think that's probably the other battle that we'll find, is there are a lot of conservative farmers that have been here forever, generational families. That aren't always happy with lots of new people moving in. The traffic is going to be the one limiting factor, I think, for everything, so at some point they're going to have to make some decisions about whether they want to keep building roads, houses built, and how they're going to do that." "Now people are saying this is the next Napa Valley of Oregon. Is that true or not, I don't know. Is that good or not, I don't know. It won't be a small town anymore. But people are going to have to make some choices about that. And that'll be the hardest part." [buzzing] "The sky is already beginning to show some streaks of light, over there in the east, back of our mountain." In the northeast corner of Oregon, where the highway dead ends against towering

mountains, is the little town of Joseph. Joseph is going through a bigger change than most Oregon communities. Not long ago, many of the elements existed here that might have turned Joseph into a ghost town. Quite clearly that did not happen. On this particular evening, almost everyone in Joseph visits school, to celebrate Homecoming. [crowd noise] That's something practically all small towns in America may have in common. A fierce attachment to their schools. But Joseph does seem to carry that devotion a step or two further than most. [crowd cheering] [crowd cheering] [crowd cheering] [crowd cheering]

[crowd cheering] [crowd cheering, music] [crowd cheering, music] [crowd cheering, music] [crowd cheering, music] [crowd cheering, music] [crowd cheering] The town's remoteness seems to suit most of its residents, and so does its name, Joseph. A name chosen in honor of Chief Joseph, who led the ?Nez Perce? tribe in defiance of the federal government's forced removal of American Indians from their lands 150 years ago. And who finally said, famously,

"I will fight no more forever." The white man's homage to Chief Joseph came late. The ranchers and settlers who arrived here in the 1870s looking for rangeland for their cattle and sheep played a part in the tragic dispersal of Chief Joseph's people. Not long after that happened, the first ancestors of Arlie and Glenna Isley arrived in this hollow, between mountain ranges, and began to ranch. Like many others, they found it hard to leave. "You'll see a lot of fourth- and fifth-generation families here. My grandparents homesteaded this country, too, in the 1800s, and my grandmother was the only Tippet girl out of nine children, and they all came here, lived here, and many of them left, but they came back, and we left for a short period of time and we came back.

But I have to say, as a people, you never meet a stranger in Joseph." "And I think this started way back when there were just a few settlers. They realized, that in order for them to survive; they were dependent on one another. So if someone has an accident or something, there will be people there immediately to help them out. If someone burns their place down or something, there will be help around almost immediately. As I remember Joseph the first times, there was a livery stable toward the north end of town. And there were hitch racks along Main Street. And the main street wasn't paid. It was gravel, and they had sidewalks, but it wasn't paved. And by the time I was starting high school, they had paved Joseph, and prior to that time we used to have horse races on the main street." The Isleys remember a lot of economic ups and downs around Joseph, as horses gave way to combines, farm prices rose and fell, and rose again. A

World War began and ended, and with that came the need for houses and timber. And now that period is ending. "Some people credit the environmental consciousness period of bringing cyclic up and down to the economic status of the county, but that isn't true in my memory because we had the cyclic agricultural prices which made things go up and down economically prior to that time, and so there were good times and there were bad times." Bad times seem to have settled in for a long stay 20 years ago. Farmers were losing money and the last timber mill shut down. "Many of these things are somewhat predictable. And you can see that the world is going to change and you're either going to change with the world or it's going to go on and you'll be left on the sidelines." Change had already been creeping in on Joseph. Skiers,

hikers and sightseers were discovering the place, and so were artists. Like Shelley Curtis, who arrived in Joseph in the early eighties. She found it the perfect place for a sculptress interested in nature. "Not to sound too New ?Agei?, but it has a good energy to it. You know, it just feels good. Get out of your car and walk down the street. See the mountains in the background. Clean, crisp air. It's just good." Curtis began to specialize in stylized sculptures of wild animals. Today, she's working on a cougar to decorate the town's main street. "This is the small version of a cougar that I did several months ago. What I'm doing is I'm enlarging it three times. You know I've got this wax pattern here that I can look at and measure with my calipers. And these calipers are set to a 1-to-3 ratio. So if I measure the size of

this face right here, then I can turn this over and measure the face up here, and I can see how close I am to a 1-to-3 ratio." But that's only the beginning. To turn the clay models into bronze statues, the artists need help from a foundry. "This here is just getting very finished to go to the foundry." The problem was, in the early eighties Joseph didn't have a foundry. Artists had to lug their sculptures to some other part of the country. But one day a Portland developer visited the studio of Joseph's most famous artist, David Manuel, bought one of his sculptures for $9,000, and before long, sold it for $50,000. Smelling money, the developer, Glen Anderson, decided to build a foundry in Joseph, and went looking for people to operate it.

"He called me up one day and said, 'Hey, how would you like to come up here and check this out? I've got it built but I'm not a businessman, I don't know how to run a foundry. I just built a building I like and the concept.'" [machine running] In a bewildering process, rubber molds are made of pieces of the original sculpture. The pieces of sculpture are removed, the molds filled with wax. The wax is coated with silica, which forms a cast. The wax is then melted and poured out. And heated bronze will be poured in. We never know what's coming in tomorrow. Sometimes it's horses. Sometimes it may be an abstract form. Sometimes human figures. Sometimes it can be things we've seen, things that we know about, sometimes it's out of a fantasy world. [music, machinery] At this point, you can't tell what you're looking at, a tube or a can or might be a part

of a body on a human being." The new foundry was a hit. 150 artists now bring their sculptures here. And it created jobs. Between 55 and 75 skilled artisans work at Valley Bronze. And there are now five other foundries in the county. Now, instead of Joseph's artists hauling their models all over the country, artists from all over the world are bringing their work to Joseph to be cast into statues. Like Barbara Chan, who lives in Washington. We're [inaudible] over a seam this point. When the mold is pulled apart sometimes there are seam lines on the wax, and when wax cools, like most materials, it shrinks. And since sometimes there's just a little bit of distortions, we're very very subtle." Chan is a very successful artist. Her easily recognizable jolly

round maidens sell for several thousand dollars apiece. "One day I was working in a lovely piece of pink stone and I wanted to do a nude figure, but I realised that the stone was so soft that if I did a slender figure it would break. So I decided to make it just as absolutely. round and rotund and thick as possible, and actually what I came up with was the original version of this sculpture, which I call Eve." [machinery] So, the scenery and the friendly remoteness of Joseph had attracted artists, who attracted foundries, which attracted more artists, and then galleries to display their work. A symbiotic merry-go-round that began to turn Joseph into something other than a cow town. In fact, bronze works

produced in Joseph have all but taken over Main Street, inside and out. The trickles of tourists who once came only to enjoy the mountains have become fairly steady streams on the weekends, and many of them are spending as much time in the galleries and shops as on the slopes. All of which inspired Joseph's civic leaders to cast about for other ways to enliven the town. [music] An annual blues festival was one idea. [music] [music] [music] And then why not remodel the town. To fit its changing image. [music]

[music] The idea soon gathered steam, because one of the town's artists had become mayor -- Shelly Curtis. "I personally spearheaded that because I felt like in order for us to promote ourselves with credibility, you know, as an art community, we needed to look pretty on Main Street. I literally sat down at the table with these guys from economic development from Salem and said, look at the statistics. We need help." Curtis and other town leaders quickly raised $2,000 seed money. "And it snowballed into three and a half million dollars. Which is what, you know, happened on Main Street. Which is presently happening."

[clatter] The sidewalks and streets are being reshaped and cobbled, and fitted with trees and benches, and... "I think it'll look lovely." Too much change to suit some of Joseph's residents. Mack Andrews, who's lived in Joseph a long time, says he and a lot of others are confused. "They don't know what to think about it, I don't think, they just don't know quite what to say. Because it was a timber and cattle country until then." "All small communities are concerned about change and we fear it. We're not sure how it will affect our way of life and we don't want to lose that. "We have the whole gamut of opinions. Some people thought that it was really OK

when 15 years ago we had about 80 percent of the storefronts vacant on Main Street. They liked it like that. And didn't want things to change. But, you know, there are other things. The timber industry has forced us to look at more economic diversity. Forced us to take care of ourselves in other ways. If your timber mills are shutting down you need alternative methods for people to have jobs." "Well, directly for ranchers and farmers, I don't know how it affected us much." Farmer-horse dealer-insurance agent Steve Solomon is one of Shelley Curtis's closest friends, but he is one of the skeptics about the renovation project. Doubting that the changes in his town will be either its salvation or its ruin. Nor does he think there's any real feud between the farmers and ranchers and the artists. "When they first came, I know we had a little art show or something and somebody

show up with a piece of bronze about this high. Somebody looked at you and said, 'Ah, that's seventeen hundred dollars.' There was a lot of comments along the lines of 'You're kidding'. Now, we don't have anybody, I think, that doesn't go over and say, 'You know, that statue down there is worth $300,000.' That's just not that unusual. And we kind of cheer for 'em when they have a success." [cheerleaders] [cheerleaders] On this particular weekend, neither art nor Main Street renovation concern the citizens of Joseph, but rather the Homecoming game coming up against the town of Nyssa. A bigger town and bigger team. The consensus is that a miracle is needed. But football coach Rusty Esler's speech is not so much fiery as sentimental. "You know I don't think you guys realize how lucky you are to be living in a town of this size, and going to a school this size [cheering]

You know, it's the school spirit." The warmth of the Homecoming bonfire gives way to the cold reality of the Homecoming football game. The Joseph Eagles in blue uniforms trail the Nyssa bulldogs by 10 points near the end of the first half. An icy hard rain has begun and much of the cheering has died away, in part because most of the cheerleaders are candidates for Homecoming queen and have gone off to change into formal gowns for the halftime ceremony. "So what can we do? What can we do? What what can we do? Their defensive front got their butts chewed and they're fired up ready to play and our guys are flat, we're just sitting out there going through the motions." [crowd noise] [cheering] Most of the school's male students are on

the team. There are barely enough. Some of the players serve as escorts for the Homecoming queen candidates, which means they miss the coach's halftime talk. "All right, remember [inaudible] tight end [inaudible] not in here. Remember, when this kid's doing this, right? Let's seal right here. Let's see if we can't get this bubble seal this outside guy. All right." "Tackle's been lining up on me a lot." [cross talk] [cheering] [cheering] Josephs threatens to score in the final seconds. [yelling] But a desperation pass is intercepted.

No one seems especially dejected by the loss. Instead, there's a kind of satisfied exhaustion. They had done all they could and had come close against a bigger town. "Some highly interesting fossils have been found. I might say unique fossils. Two miles north of town in Silas Peckham's cow pasture." The next story is about Fossil, Oregon, which actually was named after the discovery of some Mastedon and saber tooth tiger bones found embedded in a nearby hillside. But bones from the Ice Age matter less to the 500 residents of Fossil than something which existed only a few years ago but is now equally extinct. They've painted a mural about it on a wall in the center of town. The mural shows happy people working and playing in a place called

Kinzua. Rick Shaeffer used to work in Kinzua and is one of the few people who can still find it in the hills near Fossil. "This is the old mill site of Kinzua. The mill set over there." Kinzua is now an honest to goodness ghost town. Nothing is left of it but a few pieces of collapsed walls and some rusty pieces of metal. "This is one of the old railroad ties from the car line." It sprang into existence in the late 1920s as a timber mill. "The majority of the houses were back on this hill back here." At its peak two hundred fifty people worked here and 800 lived in its company town. "The people paid a very minimal rent on those houses, like maybe $25 a month." And it was the engine that made the town of Fossil go. "The jobs paid well, good benefits, pretty cozy little community."

"Everybody here just pure relied on Kinzua. The kids got out of school and they knew they had a job at Kenzua. They never, I don't know if any of them, they didn't hardly go on to college because they just went straight to Kenzua to work, most of them. And yeah, girls were the most likely ones to go on to college, boys had the idea at the time, 'well I can go to work for Kinzua' and that was their thoughts at the time." "Young people all lived and worked in Kinzua and all, so we had dances every weekend down here and they had card parties and all kinds of things going on during the week. Up at Kinzua and here both, and so actually there was a lot a life then, there was a lot of life." Exactly 50 years after Kenzau appeared, just as suddenly it disappeared. Like timber mills in their company towns all over Oregon. And everything changed in nearby Fossil. But Fossil is still alive. [cheering]

And as with most small towns, it's heart is the school.[cheerleading] [cheering] Kenzau had filledd Fossil schools with children. Now students are in such short supply that all 12 grades need to turn out for every pep rally, and each student is expected to make enough noise for three. [cheering] [inaudible] [inaudible] Each class has students from two grades and still there aren't enough to fill the room. Elizabeth Lange teaches third and fourth graders, all eight of them. "And the fourth graders can help the third graders, and so everybody works pretty well together." The tiny classes do have advantages.

"You can spend more individual time with each child, um as opposed to having to work with bigger groups of kids. So it's a great benefit for the kids, educationally. Definitely. And for the teacher, too." Fossil even has what some city schools don't. A music program. "Everybody needs to find an A string. Can you find A string, you know where it is? We're playing on the A string. This is the A string. One, two, three, four." [violins] But the tiny numbers of students leave the town to wonder if the school might cease to become viable. "OK, that was lot better than the first time." Pictures of all the school's graduating classes displayed in the hallway tell a kind of suspense story. "When I graduated there were 13 of us that graduated, and then,

oh, I don't know how many years it was ago, there was one student who graduated." "Once a community hits a certain size, it's a struggle just to exist, and Fossil's had that problem." Among the kids, there's an ambivalence about life in Fossil. There is boredom. And there is something else. "In most places you have somethin' to do on a Saturday night. Here, you really don't. You can't go to the mall and hang out or go to the movies. Well, you can travel to a distant town and go to movies or stuff. But school's great. You get lots of student-teacher interaction and lots of one- on-one help when you need it and kids don't get lost in the shuffle. I know everybody's name at the school. And probably know a lot more about them than they want me to know, but that's the way small towns are. When you feel alone, you know everybody in town and so you can go to just about anybody to talk to." "Somebody is always watching out for you whether you think they are not.

You know, you only think parents do that, but when you have a community this small you have parents everywhere." "It's a small town of about 520 people, I think, and Main Street consists of the Merc, Post Office, car dealership, a bank, and the cafe. That's pretty much it. The old folks home." Bill and Barbara Bowerman men came to live in Fossil's old folks' home, as Dan Baustian calls it. Bill Bowerman grew up in Fossil, went off to college, became probably the most famous track coach in America and co-founded Nike. Like a lot of other people raised in Fossil, he came back after he retired. "It was my mother's home, my grandfather's home, and my great- grandfather came in to get away from the great Civil War that separated the North from the South."

The Bowermans and others in town have established scholarship programs to help every high school graduate go on to some form of higher education. And almost all do. It's a sad irony that Fossil's resolute efforts to educate its young people only hurries the day when they will go away, because the town is unable to put that education to use. "There's not a lot of jobs here, especially in the field I'm going into. So, I might plan to come back and retire here, though, and that would be all." "We don't want to them to grow up in the shell of a small town. You know, at some point they may very well have to move away from Fossil because they can't make a living here." "Yes, we are in a predicament there's no question about it." Jean Birch is the Wheeler county judge. Since by her own estimation the nearest thing to a crime wave in Fossil is loose dogs, she devotes a lot of time and energy to Fossil's predicament. "We have the very young and a few young children, and then we have people that are 60 and

65 years old and more, and we don't have that center. And that's so important. And of course they have to make a living. And we know that there is a whole city full of people that have grown up in his area or had connections with this area will come back in a minute. I'm one of them. When they give us a chance to to live wherever we wanted to, we headed right back to Fossil. But we had a way to make a living. We have a lower per capita income than Appalachia does. The ranchers are struggling. The logging is gone, the timber is gone. It will not be here for the purposes that we knew for another 100 years. We have to reinvent ourselves." So saying, Judge Birch and other town leaders formed a community development association to devise ways to revitalize Fossil. To get people, especially young people, to consider moving here. They could promote the natural beauty of the area, and its friendliness, but lots of

places in Oregon have that. There is one thing that most places don't have -- prehistoric fossils. Those tiger and Mastodon bones were only the tip of the Ice Age deposits in Wheeler County. The hills are full of fossil beds. There's one right in the backyard of the high school. Why not promote them, Which they did. Anyone who wants to can be an amateur paleontologist, dig for fossils and keep whatever they find, at no charge. No woolly mammoths or saber-tooth tigers have turned up recently. But almost everyone finds something. Usually the fossils of leaves that fell 30 million years ago or so. "See it? Uh huh." Fossil hunting hardly amounts to an industry. But it's a start. Lure young families in for an unusual adventure. Send them home with fossils from

Fossil, and maybe some will notice what a beautiful place this is and begin to wonder if they couldn't live here. To sweeten the pot, they hope to equip the area with broadband cable, or in some other way make the town a place where people looking for rural tranquility with high speed access to the world could make a living. Or better still, a place where Fossil's future graduates can make a living. Merton Homer had another idea. A variation on the thing that it brought people here in the first place. Cattle ranching. Except that he would raise gourmet cattle. "With the Painted Hills, we're running just a natural program. We don't give them no steroids, hormones, or anything of that order and we don't feed them any antibiotics.

And, we never realized that there was so much to, you know, promotional material. All those things, you know. The ranching, it hasn't made any money for several years, actual ranching, or any amount of money, and so, you know, you can't do it the same way you did 25 years ago, I guess is what you say, you know. It doesn't work and it really isn't working and so that's why we've started doing something different and everybody's going to have to sooner or later. They're going to have to do something different or they're not going to be in the ranching business." Are Fossil's ideas realistic or only pipe dreams? "Well, it's got to be more than a pipe dream because it's very clear that we're going to be left behind. Everything is moving fast. The state of Oregon as a whole is behind the rest of the nation [inaudible]." [voices, music] There are no fossil pits around the town of Gardner, no foundries turning

out costly sculptures, no lush grape vineyards, and ideas for Gardner's rescue are in short supply. What are the dwindling number of residents of Gardner to do with a silted in harbor, a derelict sawmill, an abandoned paper mill, forests that are either out of bounds or out of trees. A few historic houses and graves, and a nearby elk herd. Well, some here would say, enjoy it. That's the advice of the proprietor of the curious shop on Main Street which always seemed to be closed. Not so, said Johnny Rivera. The store is open. And you're going to laugh at me. This is a grocery store. This is a health food store. [inaudible] This is a secondhand store. This is a dry goods store. This is a seed store. This is a mail order store.

You need a doorbell? Antiques galore. [laughter] This is an educational alternative medicine conference is held here once a month. We got A library room but it's not finished yet either; I mean people come and use it. But it's not done. Johnny Rivera bought the store shortly after the paper mill closed. The store and the adjoining empty lot which he had no trouble filling. It now contains a bus, a car he converted into battery powered, the shell of what he hopes to turn into a restaurant, a donkey, and a horse he has recently rescued from starvation. And building materials to turn two of the buildings into hostels for passing bicyclists. And as we've been here like I say, I've put three people to work. I put two people to work full time. I've done some programs with the community where I've got different people out of jail,

so that they could get a chance to get back in the workforce. And I'm taking a chance doing that. All part of Johnny Rivera's plans for revitalizing the town. He has gone so far as to paint his philosophy about it on the side of one of the buildings. 'Look', the mural says, and an arrow points toward the bleak undeveloped landscape leading to the scene. Gardner doesn't need rescuing, Johnny Rivera contends. The disappearance of Gardner's industries was in itself a rescue, an opportunity. This side is just to stop people to take a second to look at the bay. To look at the natural beauty here. We have eagles and osprey that live here. Now that the mill has shut down we have egrets at to comeback and wildlife of all kind have come back into the bay, because it's not polluted anymore. Johnny Rivera believes that Gardner's future is tourism. Why not. Get a couple of ships out here. Why not put a boardwalk out here.

If there's boardwalk here people will stop. Not all of Rivera's neighbors share his visions, nor even necessarily appreciate what he has done so far. Steve Reese is a member of the region's economic development forum. That group is counting on attracting some new industry to Gardner. And they saw the opportunity to purchase Bolon Island, which is an industrial zoned island just across the river here. And it's our hope that we can attract some major users for that island to bring some jobs to the community. We'd like to see some blend of maybe a few employers providing 30 and 40 jobs, industrial, light industrial. There. That's how they're going to save Reedsport and Gardner is by buying an island, paying eight hundred thousand dollars for it. And it'll sit there. It should be a resort. I'd like to see the government take an interest in what's going on here.

So far, I haven't seen any government person or forces or group come in and make any suggestions. I haven't seen any government agency come in and lay out any plans or any ideas. It's all been just the people that are living here, and people that are living here don't have the resources to do what needs to be done. So, many people I hear about in the area, do not want to leave the area. They love it here. Their family loves it here. [child's voice] You know, I think we'll all survive. It's a difficult role the small town plays. A symbol of constant American values, but forced constantly to change.

Bound to a cycle of educating it's youth only to surrender the graduates to the cities. At the mercy of politics, trends and fickle industries that may abandon it. Dependent on the arrival of newcomers but uneasy with what they may bring. A town too close to a city is eventually swallowed by it. One too far away may disappear from neglect. Less than a century ago, most of us lived in small towns. Now just one person in four does. And yet, even the city dwellers still is likely to think of some small town as home. The reassuring preserve of his past. And in Oregon alone, well over a thousand little towns still carry on, and are full of life. [music] [music]

Novelist Willa Cather had one of her characters try to describe what it is that makes a small town important and different. It amounted to five words. Here you would be missed. [music plays] Funding for production of the Oregon story was made possible through a generous grant from the United

States Department of Agriculture Rural Development.