Salem’s Shitty Sidewalks — Reflections from Aimless Walks During the Time of Covid

Kristy Arbuckle Lommen
Human Parts
Published in
23 min readDec 21, 2024

Preface

I had worked for the State of Oregon for about a year and a half when, one gray March morning in 2020, I came to the office to find everyone packing up their laptops. Take your external monitors and keyboards too, we were instructed. Hell, take your desk chair if you think you need it. With very few exceptions, we were all being sent home to work remotely, hoping isolation would slow the spread of COVID.

It was disorienting, but not shocking. We’d been hearing about COVID’s imminent arrival since the first of the year. We had no idea when we arrived to work that morning that D-day had arrived, but that’s when everything changed.

This far removed from that date, it’s easy to forget all the uncertainties that fell over us like a shroud. How would we work without seeing each other every day? How long would we stay home? Would a vaccine be developed in time? The presence of refrigerator trucks in hospital parking lots (serving as temporary morgues) drove home the hardest questions. Would we lose people we loved? Would we survive?

So we tried to drive these questions out of our heads with distractions. We Oregonians, like most Americans, made a competition of stocking up on toilet paper and hand sanitizer. We learned, many of us for the first time, how to place a pick-up order for groceries… the important differences between N95 masks and bandanas masks worn cowboy-style… how to turn a doorknob without actually touching it.

But in those very first months, more meaningful distractions were hard to find. Restaurants and theaters were shuttered. Even some grocery stores were metering the number of people who could be inside. And many of those customers inside gave not a single shit if they might expose you or your vulnerable loved ones to a disease that could be a death sentence. I’ll never forget walking through the aisles of my local Target amid a sparse number of shoppers, most masked and even gloved, shopping with a purpose, picking up what we needed and getting out fast. At the back of the store I looked up to see a 40-something white man with the physique of a football player, no mask (although mandatory at that time), a MAGA hat, and a handgun in full display, holstered on his hip. His arms were crossed and he ignored the items for sale around him. He wasn’t there to shop; he was there for no other reason than to provoke confrontation.

It was wild.

It was terrifying.

So I took a lot of neighborhood walks and began to notice the names stamped in the sidewalks. I’d photograph the names, research them to the extent possible, and contemplate their lives. Sometimes I’d stand outside of their still-standing homes. There I realized that these were the very same houses where their families rode out the influenza pandemic of 1918.

I felt the stirrings of a kinship.
— Dec. 23, 2024

March 18, 2020

A sign of spring! I’m regularly walking further afield and scored a new “D. Korb” sidewalk stamp for my efforts today. David Korb was born in 1885; his last year on the planet was my first. But even though we weren’t contemporaries, I know which house he lived in when he would have been my Salem neighbor. I know where he’s buried. And, based on the quality of the cement work that he insisted on signing at every property line, I feel like I know everything there is to know about his character. What are you doing today that will still be — beautifully — serving it’s intended purpose more than a century later?

It’s worth thinking about.

April 13, 2020

Ultra-rare dated Korb signature — mage powers unlocked!

David Korb, Patron Saint of Salem Sidewalks, 1913

April 18, 2020

I look down when walking to avoid breaking my neck on Salem’s hazardous sidewalks, so I notice things in the cement. This week, it was this “E.B. Millard” stamp in a home’s walkway on D Street. And because, yes, I am that historically snoopy, I decided to uncover the story of this person’s life.

Millard concrete stamp on D Street, Salem, Oregon

Unlike “D. Korb”, I suspected E.B. Millard was a homeowner rather than a cement mason. Here’s a summary of an hour’s research. If you’re not inclined to read it all, just notice how much info can be discovered from a single name found, like this, in a particular context. I find this kind of fascinating.

Everett Bowen Millard was born on Feb. 25, 1876 in Whitewater, Wisconsin (if you’ve read Laura Ingalls Wilder, he was born about the same time in about the same place). Most of his large family made their way west before the turn of the century, including Everett, who completed a single year of college somewhere along the way.

Everett was eventually employed as a bank teller at Ladd & Bush bank in downtown Salem. It appears he built a large home on a half-acre lot on D Street as a family home for himself and his bride. He married Fanny Guttery in 1901. He finished their home, stamping his name proudly in the walkway in 1902. Their son Harold was born in 1903, followed shortly by three sisters. Ten years after the birth of their youngest, Everett and Fannie may have been surprised to find themselves parents again. Baby Evangeline was born in 1918, perhaps dashing son Harold’s hopes that he would ever have a brother to share the burden of all those sisters.

Daughter Neva Millard, c. 1920s

Over the years, Everett Millard continued working for Ladd & Bush, always as a teller. Little changed at home either. The children grew up, married and moved. Son Harold and his wife Margaret presented the Millards with their first grandchild in 1937 — a little boy they named “Everett” after his grandfather. But Everett and Fanny remained in the big family home that had become the mainstay of their lives together. It’s difficult to say, but they were probably still living there during the hot summer days of 1951 when Everett passed away at the age of 75. He and Fannie are buried side-by-side in Salem’s City View Cemetery, along with Harold, several of their daughters, and even some of their grandchildren.

Although the Millards are gone, their house still stands today; Its seven bedrooms and 3,800 square feet make it easily one of the largest homes in this part of Salem. It represents a job well done for a young bank teller, one who had the foresight to proudly sign his accomplishment with his name.

The Millard Home today. Imagine being able to build a 3,800 square foot home and raise five children on a bank teller’s salary. Times were different.

April 21, 2020

Let’s talk some more about our favorite topic of the day. Covid-19? Home delivery? The Tiger King? No! Better than that — let’s talk some more about historic Salem, Oregon, concrete!

Today’s story begins in 1910, the earliest documented date we have to prove John Thomas Henry Koeneke was, at that time, our neighbor. His name was present in the census that year (listed as a cement contractor) and his name is present in the sidewalk just up the street from the house that he shared his wife Karoline and their 14-year-old daughter Lena.

1919 REO (Speedwagon?) Truck

By 1919, John Koeneke had joined Oregon’s growing ranks of automobile owners, registering an REO truck that he surely used to haul the tools of his trade from his home (adjacent to Englewood Elementary School) to his worksites. Unlike David Korb’s signature stamps, Koeneke sidewalk stamps are pretty rare, so I suspect he came to focus on foundations and other building construction. By all appearances he was doing well, even bringing his son-in-law Edmund into the business after his daughter Lena married. But in 1926, things changed in the neighborhood, and things changed for the Koenekes.

Englewood Elementary School, Salem, Oregon

Englewood Elementary was built in 1910, the same year Koeneke stamped the sidewalk he installed directly across the street from the school’s front door. He might have even been employed to work on the new school, situated, as it was, less than a block from his home. But in 1926, the City of Salem got the idea that they wanted to build a park on the grounds just north of the school. They enlisted Lord & Schryver, the local (woman-owned!) landscape firm who had designed the gardens at Bush House and Deepwood mansion to draw up the plans. It was to be Salem’s very first public park. And it required the space occupied by the Koeneke home. The house was condemned to make way for the project that would soon become Englewood Park.

Koeneke’s stamp in the sidewalk directly across from Englewood Elementary School — with cherry blossoms.

Did Salem provide fair compensation for the loss of the Koeneke home? I imagine the answer depends on whom you ask. We do know that in 1930, John and Karoline seemed adrift, occupying a spare room in their daughter’s home on Center Street. Ten years later, the couple had moved on, but they no-showed the 1940 census. It’s difficult to tell where John Koeneke resided during his last years in Salem.

When John passed away in 1948, Karoline made what some would consider an extravagant decision. By then it was clear that there would never be grandchildren to provide for (their only child Lena having never had children), so Karoline decided to bury her husband, a simple concrete contractor, in style. She bought vaults for both John and herself in Salem’s Mt. Crest Abbey, fashionably located on a landscaped hilltop in south Salem. After spending a lifetime working outdoors in all weather, John Koeneke would rest for eternity under the roof of the Abbey — a building designed in a classic Greek-revival style, and which features columns, pilasters and pediments made, fittingly, of bare, unpainted concrete.

May both John and Karoline continue to rest there in peace.

Mt. Crest Abbey Mausoleum, City View Cemetery, Salem, Oregon

April 24, 2020

We need to talk more about Salem’s sidewalks…

I surmise that there is something about working with a substance as permanent as concrete that makes a man think about legacy. It shows in our early contractors’ mania for signing and date-stamping their work as they poured and leveled Salem’s original sidewalks, and it shows in their attempts to get their sons to follow them into the trade. They undoubtedly hoped their pride in their work would inspire the next generation; instead, the sons and sons-in-law observed how hard and disagreeable a career as a cement worker could be. We see several examples of sons humoring fathers in one census report, only find them moved on to the comforts of indoor work by the next. And who can really blame them?

So it was with James Pinckney Veatch, the grand old man of Salem’s cement masons. Born in Iowa in 1839, Veatch came of age just as the country entered the Civil War. And although he had a wife and a two-year-old son named Albert, the Enrollment Act of 1863 left all men between the ages of 20 and 45 vulnerable to conscription into the Union Army.

Perhaps that timing was merely a coincidence, but it was also in 1863 when James Veatch packed up his young family and moved west to Oregon. Here there was little chance of being drafted at all, and less chance of being sent to the South’s bloody battlefields even if he were drafted. Once here, he did carpentry work and later became one of our earliest (if not our first) cement contractors. In fact, in 1910, just as our friend John Koeneke was beginning his career, at age 70, James Veatch was still pouring the cement on which Salem was built.

From the Willamette Heritage collection:
“The photograph is labeled with the name Ethel Veatch Timmerman. Ethel is the daughter of James Pinckney Veatch and Alcinda E. Lawrence, pioneers of 1863. The Veatch family purchased plot no. 722 of Odd Fellows Cemetery in the year 1880 following the tragic deaths of two daughters; baby Minnie Myrtle on February 23, 1880 and their eldest daughter, sixteen year old Jeannette May on April 11, 1880 following an eight week illness. It would not be far-fetched to assume that the photograph represents the family attendance at the Memorial Day observance in 1885.” At today’s Salem Pioneer Cemetery.

Veatch’s son Albert became a furniture packer and later, a cigar store salesman in downtown Salem. His other son John had a brief career as a reporter before decamping to Idaho to pursue a work as a real estate agent.

Selling cigars. You can just see old man Veatch shaking his head over the very idea of such a frivolous career. The father chose to write his legacy in cement; his son chose ashes.

Veach sidewalk stamp (with more cherry blossoms) on Court St., Salem, Oregon

April 25, 2020

Take a look at the photo below.

There is a sidewalk in a better part of Salem that has a similar signature stamp that was lovingly preserved in place when the sidewalk was rebuilt around it. Of course, in that neighborhood, the sidewalk would never have been allowed to decay to this extent. The signature pictured here will not be preserved. This sidewalk is still undoubtedly years from being replaced.

Despite the skill brought by the cement masons working a century ago (their work impervious to just about everything except root lifts, as we see here), this is typical in much of the city — Salem’s shitty sidewalks.

Adolph Bombeck signature stamp. 1922 (I think).

April 26, 2020

One of the best “Woodmen of the World” concrete grave markers I have ever seen, not just in Oregon, but anywhere. A concrete work of art.

Aimless COVID drive to Amity, Oregon

April 30, 2020

And now, I’d like to introduce you to Salem cement contractor Ed Kyle.

I’d like to — but I can’t.

So instead, allow me to introduce you to his landlady, Annie Harlow. Specifically, let’s check in on Annie on the morning of April 30, 1910 — yes, 110 years ago TODAY.

Imagine Annie drying her hands on her apron as she answers the door. She isn’t accustomed to visitors at her little rental house on Trade Street and might have welcomed the distraction of company. Her visitor, with a briefcase full of forms and pens, identifies himself as Paul Sims from the U.S. Census Bureau, and could she spare a few minutes of her time? Of course, she’d answer, offering to put on the coffee. Mr. Sims politely declines, knowing he has only so much time to spend at each address. Dispensing with the pleasantries, he gets down to business by asking who is the head of this household?

Perhaps with just a hint of pride, Annie answers that she is. And your occupation, he asks, ignoring the piles of clothes and the jungle-like steam that even the open windows can’t dissipate. Annie smiles wryly at what should be obvious. Laundress, she says.

1910 Federal Census Report

So your husband, he asks, has passed?

No…Annie says, he has not. And after a brief silence, she admits that he does not live in the household.

And now it’s Mr. Sims’ turn to smile wryly, as if code had passed between them. He would know that a woman just a generation removed from Ireland — almost certainly Catholic — would never divorce. What Annie had essentially told him was that she may have still had a husband somewhere but no longer a marriage, and she was taking in laundry to support herself because he’d abandoned her — physically and financially.

And if there were any doubt about her unfortunate circumstances, her report on her children confirmed her struggles. Son Raymond, age 22, lived with her and worked as a railroad brakeman. And son William, at age 10, had been taken out of school to sell newspapers on the street.

It was a sad report that Mr. Sims would have been eager to conclude. And is there anyone else in the household, he asks hurriedly. Well, she says, we do rent out our extra room to a lodger. Mr. Sims would have recognized the vanity of referring to any portion of the small home as “extra” — every square foot was clearly dedicated to producing income to support the family. Annie identified this lodger as Edward Kyle. She estimated his age, but had no clue about his place of birth or family background. As for his occupation, she knew only that he did some sort of construction work. By this time, she was might have been as anxious as Mr. Sims to conclude what had almost certainly become an awkward and uncomfortable conversation.

Annie’s name in cement: Calvary Cemetery, Tacoma. She is laid to rest aside her younger son William. Son Raymond tragically passed on Christmas Eve in 1917 — just a few years after the 1910 census report — at what is now the Oregon State Hospital (then the state asylum).

And that’s it — that one hurried census report and a couple of directory listings identifying Edward Kyle on Trade Street as a cement worker — to prove that a man name Ed Kyle ever lived or died in Salem, Oregon. No other census records, no marriage record, no birth or death record. Just Annie’s distracted comments and a single concrete plaque commemorating Ed Kyle’s name in Salem’s Court-Chemeketa Historic District. By placing that plaque, Ed Kyle ensured his name would be remembered in Salem. But unfortunately, those half dozen letters are all that remain.

Ed Kyle’s maker’s mark adjacent to a sidewalk in Salem’s Court-Chemeketa Historic District in Salem.

May 27, 2020

If you haven’t been in the market for a house recently, you might not appreciate just how small an 850-square-foot house is. The stunning part is that those 850 square feet, in the Homyer home, included FIVE bedrooms. How cramped those bedrooms must have been! But they accommodated the proud homeowner August Frederick Homyer, his wife, two daughters and his mother-in-law in evident comfort.

Homyer (Homeyer) Home 2020

Homyer was not a concrete worker, but he was in the trades. He was a skilled plumber, and undoubtedly knew several concrete tradesmen through his work. Korb, Veatch, and Koeneke, just to name a few, all lived within easy walking distance of the little house Homyer built on Thompson Avenue in 1916. And just like Everett Millard (whom we met in an earlier post), Homyer decided that he would like to have his name stamped in the walkway leading to his front door. It’s likely he enlisted one of his work buddies to do the concrete work, and that contractor, whoever he was, stamped, “A.F. Homeyer” in the walkway at the edge of the curb where it would be the first thing seen by anyone visiting the house.

Homeyer sidewalk stamp, Thompson Ave., Salem

The only problem was that the family name was “Homyer,” not “Homeyer.” A typo, if you will, but in concrete — and concrete so well made that the error is clearly visible to anyone who sees it, even more than a century later. One has to wonder if this unfortunate mistake ended a friendship.

But was it really a mistake? August Homyer was the son of German immigrants. And in 1916, when he built the house on Thompson, World War I was already blazing across Europe. The Lusitania had been sunk by a German U-boat just the year before, igniting strong anti-German sentiments in America. Once the U.S. entered the war, President Wilson legitimized the growing persecution of people of German ancestry by declaring all Germans in America to be enemy aliens. Is there any chance that August thought the alternate spelling of his surname seemed a little less German? Perhaps more English or Dutch? Was he intentionally trying to dim the spotlight his surname shined on his German heritage? Did his American neighbors even recognize this subtle distinction?

Or did he just acquiesce to what was probably just a very common misspelling by adopting it, as first-generation Americans often did?

A hundred years on, we have no way of knowing if the spelling in the sidewalk was intentional or not. If it was, however, it was clearly an experiment. The family evidently never used the spelling after this one enduring instance. August F. Homyer signed his name as such for the remainder of his days. And today he rests beneath a tombstone inscribed with his name — as it was originally spelled.

Homyer grave marker, Belcrest Cemetery, Salem. Oregon

May 29, 2020

This new-fangled idea of diverting a sidewalk around a tree would have shocked, or at least greatly amused, the men who installed our first sidewalks a century ago. As far as they were concerned, it was a sidewalk’s manifest destiny to proceed uninterrupted from corner to corner. They would never have imagined the way Salem now venerates trees. Times have changed.

Mill Street, Willamette Heritage Center, Salem

June 3, 2020

Impermanent artwork on an immortal canvas. Which one will better reflect the permanence of the sentiment? Only time will tell.

Black Lives Matter messaging appears on a Salem sidewalk in response to the death of George Floyd.

June 5, 2020

Something about this — just so delightful! I have no reason to believe these sidewalks were poured on the same day, but I love the idea of Korb and Bombeck reporting to their respective worksites on the same morning and realizing those sites abutted each other mid-block. “Morning, David,” Bombeck would have grunted. “Dolph,” Korb would have reluctantly acknowledged with a tip of his hat. Then they’d get to work, marking their respective sections of sidewalk so there was no danger of anyone ever confusing one man’s work with the other’s.

Statesman Street, Salem, Oregon

Aldolph Bombeck’s house occupied a corner lot a mile or so north of this particular location. He marked all four corners of that intersection with his name, the names of the cross streets, and the year he poured the sidewalks. But if you walk only a block away, you can’t go more than a few yards without seeing Korb’s name in concrete every time you look down.

At the same time, over at David Korb’s house (about a half mile from the location in this picture), Korb too poured and marked the sidewalk in front of his home. And several yards away, a cement contractor named Ward — who all but never signed his work — left his stamp where Korb would have to see it every time he walked away from his front door.

Professional rivalries? Personal vendettas? Who knows. But something certainly drove these men to mark their work like dogs leaving their own territorial calling cards. History has been written on much less.

June 7, 2020

Mill Creek concrete bridge repair, finally! ❤

Court Street — ? Salem, Oregon

July 21, 2020

There are people with far more interesting and ambitious delusions than I have. My delusions consist of walking a section of original Salem sidewalk and, in the absence of a maker’s stamp, imagining that I can identify the contractor who built it. Not delusions of grandeur then, but instead very pedestrian delusions.

I was walking in Salem’s Fairmount neighborhood last week — plenty of historic sidewalks there to go along with plenty of historic homes. But, unlike some of the NE neighborhoods, there are no maker stamps to speak of. We can blame the Americans with Disabilities Act for that; as most of these stamps were embossed on the corners of the city block, they were sacrificed for the benefit of wheelchair-accessible curb ramps. These newer corners now are in excellent shape. The runs of concrete between the corners, on the other hand, are mostly falling to rubble courtesy of tree roots — the typical Salem shitty sidewalk aesthetic, in other words.

But I passed over one section of what I presumed was original sidewalk that remained in remarkably good condition. The edges where crisp. The margins between the panes had not eroded and opened into valleys of weeds. The surface layer had not worn off to expose the cobbled aggregate beneath. Lovely, in other words (at least to myself and fellow concrete aficionados).

It could have been the work of David Korb (the patron saint of Salem Sidewalks), but my instincts told me something different. Korb panes would have been perfectly square, whereas these where a bit thinner than they were tall — a style which Korb had rejected before the era indicated by the age of the adjoining houses. No, I told myself, Aldoph Bombeck was here.

This work is very, very Bombeckian.

And that’s my weakness as a historian — assuming I can know facts about the past in the absence of any confirming evidence. Like the sidewalks themselves, it’s a path researchers must tread carefully.

But as I was heading back to toward my car, I came across the one and only maker’s stamp I’d stumbled across in the entire neighborhood: “A. Bombeck,” as crisp and pretty as spring, and in every bit as pristine a condition as when it had been placed probably a hundred years ago.

Sometimes you just know what you know.

Adolph Bombeck stamp in Salem’s Fairmount neighborhood

August 24, 2020

Hi Jen & Jase:

Salem

Hi Chuck & Cherie:

Salem

Hi The-Artist-Formerly-Known-as-Prince:

Salem

Hello Kitty!

Y’all just pale, sad imitations of lost originals. Concrete poseurs.

August 31, 2020

With all my walks, I’ve run across dozens of makers’ marks in Salem’s sidewalks, but only three homeowner stamps: one at the house of a plumber (Homyer), one at a bank teller’s (E.B. Millard), and one at an Oregon governor’s (Hatfield’s house on High Street) — that one just last Friday. Clearly pride-of-ownership transcends class.

Another Friday find was this delightful mark. Look how the City of Salem preserved it when they otherwise replaced the full run of original sidewalk. Look how they put their own “C.O.S. 2015” stamp alongside it to distinguish the reproduction from the original. I have NEVER seen a C.O.S. (City of Salem) stamp until this moment, even though, by now, most of Salem’s sidewalks have probably been rebuilt at some point by the City of Salem.

Ed Kyle’s original signature stamp. 10 27 13

When I think of all the stamps that the City surely destroyed over the decades (some because of the ADA and some through old-fashioned apathy), I wonder why this mark by Ed Kyle has been so thoughtfully preserved. Was it because the City had some inkling about what an ultra-rare pokemon Ed was? If you’ve been reading these weird valentines to concrete contractors, you might remember that all we really know about Ed is what his harried landlady reported to a census taker in 1910.

Could it be because of the additional rarity of a specific date being stamped into the original sidewalk? It is evocative. 10–27–13. Imagine Ed pouring concrete, contemplating events of the day, perhaps the explosion of a zeppelin over Germany that happened that week — that worst air disaster in history up to that time. Or imagine Ed removing the sawhorses and opening the new sidewalk just in time for trick-or-treaters to skip between High Street and Liberty, safely avoiding the manure from the city’s many horses (horses still outnumbered cars in 1913).

Certainly I’ve never seen anything like this north or east of downtown. Was it perhaps because this particular mark is closest to the home formerly owned by an Oregon governor rather than the plumber or the bank teller? Are swankier neighborhoods permitted the whim of preserving even the small pieces of history under their feet, but other neighborhoods are not?

Let’s just say I wouldn’t be shocked.

September 24, 2020

Autumn can be a challenging time for me…

Leaf-obscured Korb stamp.

Febuary 16, 2021

Aw, winter — when Salem sidewalks turn their seasonal green!

September 8, 2022

Paved sidewalks pre-dated paved streets by about two decades.

Jim Lowen: 4th of July parade in downtown Salem, possibly along State Street, 1902. Note the streets are dirt, but there are concrete sidewalks

November 20, 2022

Something new: a Portland sidewalk contractor! Something else new: a Wikipedia article on the company — a company, unfortunately, made Wiki-famous for all the wrong reasons. It would appear Anton Geibisch was not much of a business man.

Portland, Oregon

What Wikipedia gets wrong is identifying his partner, “Joplin”, as his wife Ada Joplin. Instead, he was in business with his wife’s brother William T. Joplin, at least long enough to create this sidewalk we stumbled upon in Portland today, date-stamped 1910.

Anton Geibisch and Ada Joplin Geibisch

Who misspelled Geibisch’s name in concrete? Surely not Geibisch himself. Would Joplin have not known the spelling of his partner’s (and his married sister’s) last name? Was it just a flunky for the company who committed the eternal typo? We don’t know. I can only imagine it was a very sore subject once discovered.

We do know, for sure, that the “Geibisch & Joplin” company, not long after 1910, no longer included William Joplin. Joplin evidently distanced himself when the company went on to commit questionable investments in the dairy business in McMinnville and later on the Coast. William T. Joplin continued contracting on his own in Portland and has a lengthy biographical article in one of the business yearbooks from the early 20th Century — probably a vanity article purchased with the intent to distinguish himself from the “Geibisch & Joplin” company that continued to operate under its original name, bringing a certain dishonor to the Joplin in-laws.

Imagine sitting around a Thanksgiving table with the extended Joplin Family all those years ago. Just like Thanksgiving itself, family tension is certainly a long-standing American tradition.

January 27, 2023

A sure sign of an early spring — all of Salem’s concrete trees are already blooming!

Church Street, Salem, Oregon

Afterword

The American Legion Post Band at the Oregon State Fairgrounds in Salem. Which musician is Adolph Bombeck?

January 8, 2025

I have a delightful photo of an American Legion band posed in front of the grandstands at the Oregon State Fairgrounds. Each musician is nattily attired in boots, breeches, and bowties. Three players in the back row also proudly wear their sousaphones, flashes of polished brass still evident in the black-and-white print. A mighty bass drum, proudly identifying Sheridan, Oregon, as the Post’s location, dominates the foreground.

The year was 1907.

It’s a wonderful image, provided to me at the height of Covid by the Yamhill County Historical Museum. I didn’t find their photo collection online, but I did find a digitized index of photo subjects. That index included the name Adolph Bombeck.

Tom, an exceedingly helpful museum member, agreed to unlock the covid-shuttered museum in McMinnville long enough to locate the photo, scan it, and send a digital copy to me. On arrival, it became evident that the musicians’ names had been listed on the back (including Bombeck’s), but they were not identified individually in the picture.

Although there is no way to know which band member is actually our storied cement contractor, I fully intended to publish this photo along with a fuller biography of Adolph Bombeck — his birth in Germany and immigration to the States, his struggles with that heritage his new country went to war with his native land, not once, but twice. The gradual collapse of his dream of being a professional musician as the costs of supporting a wife and three daughters instead drove him to more practical work pouring sidewalks. I intended to write out all of that, but my concrete fever broke before I put his story down on paper.

David Korb is also a victim of my benign neglect. The Patron Saint of Salem Sidewalks was arguably the most skilled and certainly the most prolific of all of Salem’s concrete masons. His maker’s marks still endure by the dozen all across the city, usually on runs of concrete that remain in excellent condition even now, more than a century after their creation. Except when corrupted by root lifts, Korb’s sidewalks could easily last another hundred years, maybe more.

Yes, I snooped into Korb’s life here in Salem, just as I had with other men featured in these writings. Yes, I was ready to put digital pen to paper to flesh out the skeleton of his biography. But, just as with Bombeck, enchantment that kept me coming back to the research reached the end of its shelf life for Korb too. But also — and more importantly — in my imagination there is something mythical about David Korb, something almost heroic. I didn’t want to kill that delicate essence by performing my usual historical autopsy. I’m going to hold that saintly image of David Korb close and celebrate its conjuring whenever I see his name in cement.

It’s not lost on me that I concentrated on these biographies with the same intensity that the country concentrated on the covid pandemic. My interest seemed to run its course in sync with the country’s tiring of covid protocols. Eventually, both evaporated like shallow rain puddles on an Oregon sidewalk.

Not everyone lived through the pandemic; by God’s grace, I did, and life, so far, goes on.

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