Larry's Column

By Larry R. Matthews

A TRAGIC BEGINNING FOR A NEW YEAR

Most memories tend to fade but extraordinary events seem to remain clear in the mind even after many decades.

It was 1:30 in the early morning of Monday, January 1, 1968.

There is a parking lot that is located in downtown Oroville, California at the corner of Myers and Montgomery Streets. That morning if you were to stand in the parking lot and look South you would have seen a row of 100+ year old buildings on Montgomery Street. They consisted of a barber shop, two liquor stores, a restaurant and several bars.

If you looked over your left shoulder to the North you would have seen the Municipal Auditorium sitting on the top of the Feather River levee.

Earlier that evening the auditorium had hosted a teen dance to celebrate the brand new year of 1968. Some of the teenagers discussed the new Beatles song, "Hello Goodbye" that had come out in December. Some liked it but I thought it marked the decline of the band. I was wrong.

Some of the Senior boys from my high school had other concerns. They wondered how the draft would effect them when they graduated the next June. They kept hoping for an end to the Vietnam War but it never seemed to go away. By 1 AM most of those teenagers had left the area.

Down on the corner, at the Eagles Club, 100 people were continuing their celebration of the new year.

About 30 patrons sat at the bar or played pool at the Liberty Club on Montgomery Street.

A man and his wife had been celebrating in a nearby bar. As the 39 year old man left the bar he told his wife he would go to the parking lot and drive back and pick her up.

Patrolman Gary Fry was standing on the levee next to the Municipal Auditorium when he heard a tremendous explosion. He turned and looked down at the parking lot where he saw a fireball and saw the roof of a white vehicle soar 80 feet into the air.

At the Eagles Club, windows shattered and those on the dance floor froze as if they were expecting the ceiling to collapse on them.

The windows blew in on the Liberty Club and those escaping out the front door on Montgomery Street were faced with the sight of fire and destruction.

Wreckage was strewn over a city block area. A car door lay on the sidewalk in front of the barber shop and most of the windows on Montgomery Street were shattered.

Officer Walt Ferguson tried to put the fire out in the packed parking lot but his fire extinguisher was not sufficient to do so. He had to retreat when ammunition in the white car began to cook off.
After the fire was put out, the Oroville Police Department began to make sense of what had happened. A bomb had gone off in the parking lot. There was damage to several vehicles and glass breakage to local businesses; mainly those within 100 feet of the blast.

The people in downtown Oroville had been lucky. Miraculously, no one was injured. But the man who had gone to his car was dead.

How many would have been killed or injured if the explosion had happened around midnight when there had been many more people in the area?

But what about the man? Why had he died? The investigation found that the man was a construction worker and had been helping to construct the New Bullards Bar Dam in nearby Yuba County. He had worked with explosives.

The man had left the bar and gone to his 1957 Chevy station wagon. He sat down in the front seat and set off 6 sticks of dynamite by attaching the explosives to a 6 volt battery.

Sometimes a 16 year old doesn't use his head and lets his curiosity get the better of him. I joined a crowd that had gathered around the parking lot area just before noon that same morning. The wreckage of the incident was still there and they were just pulling out the station wagon to tow it away. Its entire top and passenger side door were missing. A shrapnel-damaged Chevy Corvair sat to the left of the destroyed car. A much younger boy stood there next to his Stingray bicycle with a stunned look on his face. I wonder what he still remembers.

I don't know what the man was trying to avoid by killing himself. I do know that by his action he missed knowing about all of the terrible events of 1968; the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and riots in many American cities.

But he also missed seeing the fabulous beauty of the pictures of the Earth that Apollo 8 sent back from orbiting the moon that next Christmas. He missed the moon landing and he also missed all of the other good things that have happened in the decades since.

You can never put yourself in the mind of someone else and understand why they would end their own life. But ending your own life means that you will be missing that next really good thing that would have come along.

Today that parking lot in Oroville has many more trees and the type of businesses have changed in those now 150+ year old buildings. The Municipal Auditorium still looks down at all of the changes that have occurred in almost half a century.

I am sure that few in Oroville will remember that early one morning, 47 years ago, an explosion occurred and a scorched and twisted car door lay on the sidewalk in front of a business on Montgomery Street.

The memory of this sad incident has always helped me keep things in perspective, be grateful for the good things I have and appreciate each day as it comes. I hope that this New Year brings you only good memories.

If you have comments about any past article or a suggestion for future topics for this column you can contact Larry R. Matthews at writerlarry@hotmail.com. You can review all past columns at "LARRY'S COLUMN - Tripod.com".