Yesterday November 3, 2022, Richie Schroeder passed away after a short illness. I met Richie back in the late 1997 when my wife Annie and I moved into Surf Pines. However, it was not until fall of 2018 that we happened to be both sitting at the bar at McMenamins that I finally got to know him better. We shared our love of local history, and I explained that I was working on a video piece about the 50thanniversary of Surf Pines becoming an association and the 70th anniversary of it being developed by Barney Lucas in 1949 for our annual association meeting in August 2019. He then told me he literally was…

Driving the lower Surf Pines Road, my wife and I saw a friend who is one of Surf Pines more energetic walkers heading south. We stopped to say hi, to which she replied that she was on a mission investigating a rumor about a property owner at the south end of the lower road setting up a RV rental park on their property. We got a good laugh out of that and went down the road and observed a couple of homes that had trailers out in front. It was obvious that these trailers were family members here for the Fourth of July weekend. Subsequently we forgot about it until yesterday, when…

After returning from Portland, I received a phone call from a gentleman who explained that as a young lad he was taken under the protective wing of Lila Colwell a prominent Interior decorator based in Portland and had a beach home in Surf Pines. Steve was just 18 when he first came to Surf Pines with Lila and her family in the early 70s. Now 73 he was trying to capture his past. So he called Debbie Eddie our Administrator to see if Lila’s home was still in Surf Pines. Debbie referred Steve to me, since I have been collecting much of the history of SPA and the Clatsop Plains. After over…

Here is some interesting History for Surf Pines. The Krohn’s house at the west end of Horizon and the two homes on either side have something in their back yard! Turns out that the Bark Galena, a ship that ran aground on November 11, 1906, is actually laying in the back yard of all three neighbors. This is based on some old tax maps I found. The reason it seems so far up the dunes is do to the fact that in 1906 the beach actually came up close to where the homes are now. The beach has credited over 1000 feet in the last 70 years. This is mostly a result…