The community of Boring has experienced a surprising array of unexpected
and unusual events during its 118-year history.

The small Oregon town, with a name that leads to easy jokes about its sleepy
nature, has been the home to a rich array of eccentric characters and events
over the years. From the time the future heavyweight boxing champion of the
world was hired to fight the town bully, to a massive fire blamed on fireworks
that left half the town in ashes, the history of Boring has been anything but,
and was populated with moonshiners, runaway trains, wild west gangs and a
wild man who lived in the woods among other notable characters.

Boring resident and unofficial town historian Bruce Haney has gathered these
unorthodox stories in his new book “Eccentric Tales of Boring, Oregon.” Haney
gives a monthly speech about the history of Boring for the Boring Community
Planning Organization and runs a popular history group called Boring Oregon
History.

“I started looking in the newspaper archives for the most un-boring Boring
stories I could find. After a couple years I realized that I had all these great
stories that only myself and the people that attended these meetings knew
about,” Haney wrote in an email. “That is when I decided to take the best
ones and deep dive into researching them and make a book out of them.”
The tales Haney researched and collected for his book largely take place in the
early years of the 20th century before the second world war. Haney touches
on secret societies such as the Odd Fellows and Rebekah’s influence on the
social life of the community, the proliferation of bootlegging operations during
prohibition and the logging industry’s physical toll on workers in the region,
plus a one-armed band on the vaudeville circuit comprised of maimed mill
workers and further accounts of death and disfigurement of the town’s mill
workers.

“I hope that readers get a better understanding of early 20th century
America,” Haney noted. “I hope that when someone jokes ‘How boring is
Boring,’ they will be able to tell the person how truly un-boring Boring is and
has always been.”

Haney sheds light on an incident of historic prejudice that resulted in murder
with the grim recounting of an assault on a trio of East Indian millworkers. A
band of white millworkers began firing on the cabin occupied by the East
Indian workers in an effort to intimidate them until one of the assailants
began firing into the cabin and struck and killed Harnam Singh, a recent

immigrant whom little is known about. One newspaper stated he was only in
the country for two weeks at the time of his murder.

As a whole, the collection encapsulates a cross section of the driving
influences and impulses of a community and the region during the first half of
the twentieth century.

The book is Haney’s first foray as an author. Haney stated he is currently
researching and planning his next book.

“I love researching and building stories using history. I have a few different
possibilities for the next book ... I’m enjoying the feeling of being published
for the first time,” Haney wrote.

The process of researching the book on Boring led Haney to develop a deeper
connection with the town and its residents.

“When I was wondering how old that bar or that two-story brick building was,
I never thought that it would lead to me finding and being welcomed into such
a wonderful community,” Haney wrote in the preface to his book. “I grew up
in the big city nearby, Portland, but I never felt part of a community there. In
Boring, I do.”

“Eccentric Tales of Boring Oregon” in published by Arcadia Publishing and the
History Press.

More information is available online at www.arcadiapublishing.com and
www.historypress.net.