100 years ago

For the week ending May 27, 1906

TWO NEW FOREST RESERVES

The Forest Service at Washington will in the near future recommend the creation of two new forest reserves in Southern Oregon, which will embrace about 3 million acres of timberland withdrawn several years ago. One of these reserves, The Fremont, will lie in the northern part of Klamath Lake counties and the southeast corner of Crook County. The other, the Goose Lake reserve, will embrace the southwest part of Lake County.

It is known that Senator Fulton will soon submit plans showing the outline of these two reserves to Bend parties and other Crook County people and after a thorough investigation if it can be shown that any part of this land should not be included in the reserve, the plans will be so changes as to eliminate such land.

The object of these reserves is in part to preserve the water supply of Southern Oregon and thus make permanent the water supply for the great Klamath irrigation project.

NOTICE TO THE PUBLIC

I have now a complete line of Gents’ and Boys’ Suits, fresh and clean, just arrived from the East. Also hats, caps and a full line of shoes. In fact everything to wear from head to foot. Come in and see them at PINE TREE STORE. E.A. SATHER, PROPRIETOR

75 years ago

For the week ending May 27, 1931

DEATH CALLS BEND PIONEER

William H. Staats, pioneer who watched Bend grow from a ranch home into a village, known to early day residents of interior Oregon as Farewell Bend, and from a village into the second largest city in the state east of the Cascades, died Thursday.

Born in Monmouth, Oregon, in 1861, Staats first came to the Des-chutes country in 1879 as a youth and returned in 1880 and became interested in the stock business with his brother Charles. The Staats cabin, erected on ground now occupied by the Brooks-Scanlon Lumber Company plant was destroyed by fire only a short time ago.

Staats married Miss Emma A. Turpin of Cottage Grove in 1885. They settled on the Deschutes River, near the place where the forest merged into a sagebrush covered plateau, to make their home. Their nearest and only neighbors were members of the John Sisemore family, on the J.Y. Todd place at the site later known as Farewell Bend.

For many years Mr. and Mrs. Staats’ visitors were range riders hunting for cattle and horses which ranged over the midstate plateau, or stockmen on their way into Cascade ranges with flocks of sheep. In early years Staats established a store and was appointed postmaster. His patrons were stockmen, with a few exceptions. The mail was brought here from Prineville over a road that meandered through the sagebrush country east of Pilot Butte. Then in the early years of the present century, came the so-called timber rush, when hundreds of persons flocked into the upper Deschutes country to file on timber claims. It was in those days that J.N. Hunter and Staats became associated in a business partnership which lasted for more than a quarter of a century, until Staats death.

In the early years of Bend, the Staats home, store and post office were known as Deschutes and still retained that name after the coming of the early irrigation companies, ancestral to the Central Oregon Irrigation company and district. Gradually, the center of town moved a little to the north, after a new townsite was platted by A.M. Drake, and some 20 years ago the Staats family left the old homestead and moved into the town which is now the city of Bend.

50 years ago

For the week ending May 27, 1956

DENTAL PRACTICE OPENED IN BEND BY ILLINOIS MAN

Dr. Harold M. Kemple of Gibson City, Ill., a graduate of Northwestern Dental School in Chicago with the class of 1955, has opened a general practice of dentistry in Bend. He has purchased the dental equipment of Dr. Melvin Amsberry, and has also bought the Amsberry home. Dr. Kemple is temporarily in quarters in the office of Dr. R.K. Wood, 955 Wall St.

Dr. Amsberry, who has practiced here for four years, is entering the U.S. Public Health Service, and will be stationed in Denver, Colo.

Dr. Kemple, who served four years as a pilot with the U.S. Marine Corps with overseas service in the Pacific Theater of war, has arrived here with his wife Twylla, and their three children, Kip, Kathleen and Kobey. They are all in school.

Dr. Kemple was discharged from the Marines with the rank of captain. Following his graduation from dental school, he took special training in children’s dentistry in Chicago, and is a member of the American Society of Dentistry for Children.

A native of Gibson City, Dr. Kemple taught school for three years before entering the service and was a Boy Scout troop leader.

25 years ago

For the week ending May 27, 1981

COCKROACH PILL POPPERS SWEAR BY ‘EM

Self-styled entomologist Josef Gregor and a band of zealous followers say the ”cockroach-hormone” pills they gulp down once a week cure everything from acne to anemia and even make them invulnerable to nuclear radiation.

Gregor said the pills, produced in a secret laboratory, combine vitamins a minerals with a ”hormone-extract” from a special ”super” roach breed he developed.

And just as the household cockroach can survive repeated visits by the exterminator, Gregor and his 70 followers claim his pills are making their bodies capable of withstanding disease chemicals and radiation.

”The roach is the only species to survive every environmental change over a period of 350 million years and it can survive 500 times the amount of radiation as man,” Gregor said recently at a gathering of followers, members of a group called ”Metamorphosis.”

”This is our alternative to the survivalists, who store guns and food and will fight to survive. We will survive a nuclear holocaust by learning from the cockroach,” said Gregor, who claims to have earned a Ph.D. in entomology from a South American university.

Gregor acknowledges some people might call him a ”mad scientist,” but claims the pill works the same as horse serum inoculations – it transfers certain immunity factors found in the roach to the pill swallowers.

”This isn’t some sort of cult group or a crackpot idea – the pill really does work,” said one of his followers, a registered nurse who says she and her dentist-husband have taken the pill for a year.

”I used to have a lot of allergies and colds, but since I’ve been taking this I haven’t had one.”

Other followers, some of whom admit they were wary at first, claimed the pill had cleared up a wide range of ailments, including asthma, acne, arthritis and anemia and even helped allow them to live on less food.

Gregor, who says he uses his own money and unidentified ”private sources” to fund his research gives the pills free to his followers – many of whom heard of Metamorphosis through word-of-mouth and local advertisements he had placed.

”I don’t want to make money from this,” he said, ”just help mankind.”