50 YEARS AGO

from the Democrat-Herald

July 15, 1971

The city council amended the budget at last night’s public hearing meeting and included $3,600 for arterial dust oiling.

Four members of the city budget committee attended the meeting, compared to a no-show by their county counterparts.

25 YEARS AGO

from the Baker City Herald

July 15, 1996

The only heat U.S. Rep. Wes Cooler, R-Ore., felt during a two-hour public meeting outside the Baker County Courthouse Saturday was from the afternoon sun.

If there were any Cooley opponents among the 30 or so people who gathered in a shady section of the Courthouse lawn, they were quiet.

The congressman’s supporters, on the other hand, didn’t hesitate to voice their approval of Cooley’s work in Washington, D.C.

10 YEARS AGO

from the Baker City Herald

July 15, 2011

To say that Baker County is still awaiting its first heat wave of 2011 is an accurate statement.

But it also understates the situation rather severely.

Never mind heat waves, those prolonged periods of scorching weather that are commonplace around here in July and August.

We haven’t really had so much as a heat ripple this summer, to belabor the analogy of fluid dynamics as applied to air temperature.

This year’s highest temperature is 88 degrees on June 22. Almost two decades have passed since so much of a year elapsed without the Baker City Airport recording a single day when the temperature reached 90 degrees.

ONE YEAR AGO

from the Baker City Herald

July 14, 2020

In a normal July, Shelly Cutler, on this third Thursday of the month, would be signing papers and answering phone calls and quite possibly nurturing the sort of headache that afflicts people who have far more tasks to finish than hours to finish them.

This is not a normal July.

And it’s Cutler’s heart that hurts rather than her head.

She’s the executive director of the Baker County Chamber of Commerce, the sponsor for Miners Jubilee, Baker City’s traditional summer festival.

In past years Cutler would be busy today welcoming dozens of vendors to Geiser-Pollman Park for their weekend run of selling crafts and T-shirts and satisfying that peculiar summer appetite that only deep-fried foods can satisfy.

This year she mailed refund checks to many of those vendors.

“That was disappointing,” Cutler said.

If 2020 had an official adjective that might be the one.

Cutler announced on June 19 that Miners Jubilee wouldn’t happen. Cutler acknowledged on Wednesday that she canceled the event with a certain trepidation, even though it seemed all but certain Jubilee couldn’t comply with the limit of 250 people attending such events that Oregon Gov. Kate Brown had announced.

In the ensuing month, however, a major festival has seemingly become even less feasible, as Oregon’s number of COVID-19 infections has nearly doubled.