Have you heard about the seedy, sordid history of the Portland underworld? I am a bit of a history buff, not because it’s our task, just because I care about it.
I study lots of books, & spend a lot of time doing deep-dive research on the computer, but between the libraries & Google I always have more information than I can possibly handle, after moving to Portland, OR a few months ago, I started to focus our studying on local history, & found a treasure trove of fascinating stories.
In the 1940s & 1950s, Portland was a notorious hub of criminal hobby, and under the stern hand of a local gangster named Jim Elkins, Portland was the center of a giant underground criminal organization that went up & down the seaboard… Elkins drew a lot of scrutiny on a national level for Portland, however the funny thing is that it didn’t seem to hurt the city’s image at all… That same phase of criminal hobby was also a big boom in the local economy of Portland. There have been several books written about Elkins & the Portland mob, however entirely the most famous version of it is a movie called Portland Expose made in 1957. It is not an simple movie to track down, however anyone interested in Portland history should check it out! Soon after Elkins is when the hippies migrated to Portland from down south, & brought with them the cannabis that helped make this city famous in later years; Of course cannabis isn’t a criminal offense in Portland, OR, however it used to be.