I've not been blogging a lot lately. That's because work has been keeping me busy. I've also become more involved in volunteering in community projects. Consequently, I'm learning quite a few new skills.

I'm finding working at a small town newspaper a very interesting job. It's all brand new to me, & it's totally absorbed my interest. This kinda looks like my editor's desk, if you took away the old fashioned typesetting equipment & add a couple of computer monitors.

The newspaper office is right downtown,& at street level. It's furnished with comfy couches & antiques. The atmosphere is inviting & people come in to chat all the time. All kinds of characters walk in off the street with all kinds of stories.
Today we sponsored a book signing for a local author named Andie Jenson, his book is titled "Hangman’s Call: the executions and lynchings of Coos County Oregon — 1854-1925", it is a historical account of the hangings and executions which occurred within and for Coos County, Oregon. (Sorry, I could not find a link for the book) It's an absorbing book of local history, very well written.

Of the 7 recorded hangings & lynchings in Coos County 1 was an African American. (A link to the following excerpt is here on a site about Oregon's Black Pioneers)

Alonzo Tucker was a black man who worked as a bootblack and operator of a gym in Marshfield(Coos Bay). In 1906 dubious charges of rape were leveled against him by a white woman. When a mob of 200 armed men marched on the jail, the marshal freed Tucker, who hid beneath a dock. The next morning he was twice shot and then hanged from the Fourth Street Bridge by a mob that had grown to more than 300. The coroner's inquest found no fault; the victim, the report said, had died of asphyxiation. No indictments were brought. The local paper observed that the lynch mob was "quiet and orderly" and that the vigilante meeting was no "unnecessary disturbance of the peace."
In 1907 the Marshfield school board instituted segregated education, alleging that the four African American students "will materially retard the progress of the 500 white children."

Although this type of history is not something that is new to me, I always find it shocking. I was going to post a picture of a lynching here but I find them all too disturbing. It is the carnival atmosphere in some of the pictures that bothers me the most.