On a recent lunch stop in Oakridge, I stumbled into the Peugeot 505 I wrote up here. Rather than hit the road home, I decided to drive around a bit and shoot on-the-go, in the main residential area. Oakridge is located on Hwy 58, and is something of a gateway to the Cascades. It was once a booming lumber and railroad town, but fell on hard times in the 1980s when the mills closed up.
There’s been a bit of an uptick, thanks to being in the heart of a popular mountain biking area, and now sports a pub and other amenities. But driving around, it’s pretty obvious that many residents are still driving genuine curbside classics, starting with this old Chevy “box” pickup.
A VW lover lives here.
This is the back lot of the little Oakridge History Museum. There’s an old fire truck back there.
I got a better shot of it from here; it’s a Ward LaFrance Series 700 from about 1950 or so.
I shot and posted this Mack FN log hauler before. But in case you missed it, here it is again. The Hines Lumber Company was the one that had a huge mill in nearby Westfir.
A painted Tracker two door. Obviously, I’ve started noticing Trackers and Suzuki Grand Vitaras more now.
There’s a 1970 or 1971 VW Beetle back there.
Can anyone ID what this started out to be? Metro?
The second gen1 Odyssey. Same color, even.
A Riviera hiding behind the fence. These have gotten so rare now.
Gen1 Ford Probes have become quite rare too.
Now you know what driveways in small town Oregon look like—the 1980s and 1990s, for the most part.
The car under the tarp has some Metro-ness, but I’m thinking more Nissan Sentra? At least the rear half. The front wheels, which may or may not even be attached to the vehicle, look like they’re from a 5 lug Toyota pickup. I thought I had taken some outtakes on one of my drives through Oakridge, but all I could find was a snapshot of my excellent lunch at the Lion Mountain Bakery.
Clearly, to keep up with the Jones’s in Oakridge you had to have a pickup truck with cap plus a trailer waiting in the weeds.
Regarding the question: Probably a Metro convertible.
Of these sights, I’d say the two-tone grey compact pickup nineteen pictures down is my favourite. Yes, it’s a mediocre GM vehicle…but one with a confluence of rarities:
1) It’s a GMC S-15, not a more common Chevy S-10.
2) It’s a scarce early model (’82-’84), readily identifiable by the hyphen between “S” and “15.”
3) It’s equipped with the high-level Sierra Classic package, with three mountain peaks on the emblem. Lesser models had two, or none.
Took a second or two to “get it” after reading the headline. While I see what you meant, perhaps this isn’t the best time to mention drive-by shootings. Just sayin.
321 Americans are shot every day. I’m not going to change the title of a series I’ve been doing for years because there was a bump in these mind-numbing statistics recently. When would be a better time?
I’m not being glib; it’s my little way to draw attention to this American nightmare.
So in two days more people are murdered than in a year in the UK. 2021 national figures 584!. Portugal 84 in 2020.
Shot, not killed. Only a mere 123 are killed by guns every day, 45,222 in 2020. 54% were suicides, 43% murder, and 3% other (accidents/etc.).
The suicides are overwhelmingly by men who already had a gun(s). Suicide rates by men who have a gun at home are drastically higher than by those that don’t.
Some of the eventual suicides then use that gun to take others with them just before…I think the best thing I’ve seen re gun infatuation in the US is by an Australian comedian named Jim Jefferies, it’s on YouTube, it’s fantastic, and quickly and completely lays bare the idiocy of the most common rationales for gun ownership that any 4-year-old can understand and then delves into the suicide aspect in an oh so correct and on point view. And of course the Uvalde, Texas massacre as well as Parkland completely blew up the myth of the “good guy with the gun” and “School Security Police”, in both instances they were too chicken to actually confront the shooter, i.e. do the exact job they signed up to do, it’s not like these were anywhere even close to near the first such incidents so a reasonable expectation of performance did exist. A reasonable enough of an expectation anyway for all of my kids to continually be forced to endure “active shooter drills” instead of learning in school and be taught what makes a good defensive weapon in a classroom setting.
I (and I’m guessing I’m not alone) don’t necessarily disagree with the right or desire to *own* or *use* a gun (as opposed to the apparent *need* for many to do so), but there’s no reason it needs to be so simple or easy to do, and depends on the actual weapon. People seem to happily elect people that want to allow others to slaughter children (presumably other people’s kids (?), oh if only politicians would have enough kids to have one in every classroom across the country…) but also don’t want to allow those same or similar kids to be aborted pre-viability should that be a parental desire or need. And of course flat out refuse to actually themselves offer to care or provide care and services for the resulting non-aborted, often non-wanted or even more often non-able-to-be-otherwise-adequately-cared-for children. Pro-Life is really Pro-Birth full stop, and then F ’em after that and let them be gunned down in second grade.
And of course the 2nd Amendment (the right to bear arms) is just that, an Amendment to the Constitution, which doesn’t at all mean it has to be permanent forever. Amendment 18 was another Amendment that was in fact repealed almost fifteen years later after being ratified.
I somehow get the strong impression that while I personally have no problem with the 18th Amendment having been repealed, that a lot of people who insist that the 2nd Amendment cannot be changed simply due to it being an Amendment to the Constitution would have no issue with the 18th Amendment to the same Constitution being changed if it was still in force today. Hmm.
Without getting into it any further, the second amendment’s vague wording has been interpreted in two distinct ways, most recently by a conservative-majority Supreme Court.
My thoughts. For a moment i thought Eugene had be come the North Wests “Compton “.Mind you most of the reported shootings in the nation have been at schools and shopping mails..
With all these guns what stops America from civil war I wonder?.
No they are everywhere, not just schools and malls. Concerts (59 killed at one Las Vegas concert in 2017), nightclubs (49 in Florida in 2016 and 13 in Thousand Oaks, CA in 2018) and many many more including tons of workplaces, those are just the ones I recall offhand.
Actually one of the first school shootings was way back in 1979 at an elementary school in San Diego, CA, with two killed and nine injured, the perpetrator was a 16year old girl (the girl part is the oddest part of the whole thing, it’s relatively rare). This event was memorialized in Bob Geldof and The Boomtown Rats’ song “I don’t like Mondays” which you’ve likely heard.
Few communities in the US are untouched by this scourge. Eugene’s sister city just across the river, Springfield, had its own school shooting that made the national news back in 1998 at the high school, 2 dead, 25 wounded, 15y.o. perpetrator. Of course the two most famous ones are likely Columbine High School in Littleton, CO in 1999 with 15 dead and Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, CT in 2012 with 26 dead as a result.
I think lots of people think that the guns themselves are what stops a civil war. Lots of people though have delusions of wanting to be “the good guy with the gun” when someone tries to rob a WalMart or whatever, they’ll likely end up shooting themselves in their excitement. Or just piss themselves in fear. Very few of the gun nuts actually sign up for the Armed Forces or are volunteering their expert services in places like the Ukraine for some reason. I don’t know why that is…
Thank you Jim .
To directly answer your question ;
It’s COWARDICE .
Frightened people are easy to control, that’s why the 1% wants you to be scared all the time .
-Nate
Thank you for these pictures Paul ;
I used to drive up to Washington a fair bit and always enjoyed car spotting as I passed through Oregon .
I love the long bed ‘Square Body’ in pic. #1 ~ I had a 1976 GMC 2500 that looked similar and was a great truck but too darn long to fit inside my yard .
-Nate
I have a ’74 C10 longbed, Inline 6. Love it.
@ John ;
Is it a 250 or 292, SM465 box or TH350 ? .
-Nate
Oh yeah ~ I’m a staunch Conservative who believes in firearms but there’s something bad going on these days .
The gated school one of my foster boys goes to had a drive up to the gate shooting Wednesday.
Need to teach young men how to handle firearms so they won’t glorify them .
-Nate
Need to get young men’s heads out of their asses……………
I’m with you Woodie Man ;
K try really ard with my teenage foster boys, I can’t reach all of them though .
-Nate
I’m surprised you didn’t spot an Aerostar. I still see then for sale in the PNW. I miss mine.
Oakridge is a fascinating little town. I used to pass through it regularly on business trips between my home in Southern Oregon and Portland.
The town is rated as a Gold-Level riding center by the Indernational Mountain Biking Association, one of only four in the USA and six in the world. The trail network is a result of a dedicated group of local volunteers working for decades to take advantage of old logging roads and the rugged terrain, resulting in amazing riding opportunities.
The pub Paul mentioned, the Three Legged Crane (formerly known as Brewers Union Local 180), serves great food and pretty good beer. Definitely worth a visit if you are in town.
If you are wondering what that large rusty object is in the foreground of the first picture from the grounds of the Oakridge History Museum, it’s a steel arch, used for dragging big old-growth logs out of the woods.
Yeah nar dont change the title Paul I like your drive by shootings, the other kind Im not so fond of but its getting popular over here they’d be better off with cameras getting pics of dead cars.
If there was a live-action movie adaptation of the cartoon Gravity Falls, Oakridge would be a good spot along with Kernville where most of the scenes filmed for the movie “Sometimes a Great Notion” starring Paul Newman and Henry Fonda was filmed.
Both Oakridge and Kernville are popular mountain biking spots. It’s probably correlation, not causation, but it’s an interesting coincidence.
My question would be: what is car 7C *trying* to be . . .?
What a great tour of small-town rural America, where who can afford to be pretentious ? The vehicles, the houses, the landscape–all of a piece.
I’ll take the late ’60’s Chevy pickup.