By KATHLEEN O’CONNOR/YachatsNews
Chip Russell believes he and his partner, Nicole Frederickson, purchased the last home in Waldport that sold for less than $200,000 when they retired in 2017. They purchased it sight unseen, knowing it needed quite a lot of work. But it has proved to be the perfect retirement home for them.
Upon arrival, Russell set out to find his place in his new community, and he found it as a volunteer at the Waldport Heritage Museum and as the host of a bluegrass radio show on KYAQ, Lincoln County’s only independent community radio station.
Although he set it aside for many years, Russell has always been fascinated by history. Until 1998 he lived all his life within 10 miles of his birthplace in Springfield, Va., which is in the middle of an array of Civil War battlefields. At one point he lived in a building named Battery Heights in Manassas. He graduated from college with a degree in history and a teaching certificate, but in 1973 there was a plethora of college graduates looking for positions. He found work in landscape design instead, managing crews of up to 10 people.
Russell visited a friend in Portland in 1998 and fell in love with Oregon, shooting 14 rolls of film while here. Within months he left Virginia behind. In Portland he found work at Safeway, glad to leave the exhausting physical work of landscaping behind. He and Nicole had thoroughly explored the Oregon coast by the time they retired and knew that Waldport was where they wanted to live.
Question: How did you become involved with the Waldport Heritage Museum?
Answer: I think learning about the history of a place is the best way to feel connected to it, so I visited the museum, which used to be on Grant Street. I got to know Colleen Nickerson, the museum director and a Waldport legend, and volunteered to help one day a week. Grant is not a busy street, so we didn’t have a lot of visitors … two in a day was a crowd! I had a lot of time to peruse the 20 large notebooks full of pictures that had been donated and collected over the years, pictures that had been loosely organized in notebooks with labels like “schools”, “people”, or “cemeteries.” The pictures were fascinating and told me so much about Waldport.
Q: How are you going about digitizing the photos that the museum has collected?
A: I just started a month ago. A lot changed about two years ago when the museum moved into the same building that houses the Alsea Bay Visitor Center and the Chamber of Commerce, and Reda Eckerman became our director following Colleen’s passing. It took a while for all of us to settle in, and finally the time seemed right to begin digitizing all the photos in those notebooks.
It’s quite labor intensive; each picture must be scanned individually, and each takes about 90 seconds. I’ve been working on it at home, 15-20 hours a week, and I’m happy to say that I’ve completed one of the 20 books.
I decided to share a picture once a week on the Waldport Community Facebook page, and the response has been wonderful. People comment on the site, telling me the names of people or places in the pictures or memories the pictures help them recall. Once they are all scanned we will have to organize them, probably in several different ways, and delete all the duplicates.
Q: Would you please explain how you became a bluegrass music fan?
A: I am a classic Dead Head. I have been to 103 Grateful Dead concerts. I know that sounds like a lot, but I know people who have been to 400-500. Music is always playing for me, in my house, in my car, in my head.
In Portland I lived not far from the Alberta Street Pub which has live music almost every night, including many bluegrass bands. I went so often that I was hired as the sound person for the pub, and I became entranced with bluegrass music. Right now, my favorite band on a national level is the Del McCoury Band from Virginia, and my favorite Oregon band is Jackstraw. I served as the president of the Oregon Bluegrass Association for three years.
I started recording the bands and posting and trading them on a peer-to-peer computer site called the Bluegrass Hub. When music lovers first started doing this the bands thought we were stealing their music, but soon people started telling them they had purchased concert tickets because they had been introduced to the music on the Hub, and now it’s an accepted way to share music and gain followers. I literally have terabytes of music recorded.
Q: What are the characteristics of bluegrass music?
A: Bluegrass music has its roots in the music that immigrants from England, Ireland and Scotland brought with them to Appalachia. Most bands have a guitar, banjo, bass, fiddle and mandolin and never a drum. The songs are usually short, only two or three minutes long, and are usually in two/four time. There is a particular type of instrumentation, and people often associate it with square dance music or string band music. There are traditionalists and innovators, just like in any type of music.
Q: When is your radio show on the air?
A: I have two bluegrass radio shows. One is every Wednesday at 2 p.m. on KYAQ in Newport, and one is once a month on KBOO in Portland, the oldest community radio station in Oregon. It’s at 9 a.m. on the fourth Saturday of each month. Before Covid we often had live bands on KBOO, and we hope to restart that soon.
Tell us a secret.
I would have absolutely loved to have seen the Stanley Brothers when they were alive. They were one of the cornerstone bands of bluegrass music, along with Bill Monroe. They performed together from 1946 to 1966. I have a sweatshirt that reads “I don’t need therapy. I just need to listen to the Stanley Brothers.” They were a fabulous duo.
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To learn more about the Waldport Heritage Museum, go here
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