Off Beat: Ringing out the old year with notable tales waiting to be told

Bill Kalenius Vancouver Lake Crew founder

Rachel Worthy, 17, a senior at Columbia River High School, warms up Tuesday morning at the Vancouver Lake Crew facility. She’s using a rowing machine donated by the family of slain Seattle rower Karin Osterhaug. At left is Toresen Golberg, 16, a Columbia River sophomore. (TROY WAYRYNEN/The Columbian)

A brick found at Fort Vancouver has imprints of a kitten’s paw made 2,000 years ago, when Brittania was a Roman province. Archaeologists say it was shipped from England to the Hudson’s Bay Company post here in the 1800s. (FORT VANCOUVER NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE)

Paw prints created 2,000 years ago by a provincial Roman kitten aren’t exactly breaking news. But their location brings things a little closer to home: The paw prints were discovered at Fort Vancouver … in a brick.

Then there’s the former Vancouver grade-schooler (now a movie star) who inspired Barack Obama’s most bizarre campaign slogan.

And the story of a rowing machine that came to Vancouver because of a tragedy, then triumphed over a tornado.

Plus the local band that flew to the Middle East and played for our troops — after the band and some pro football stars bribed their way out of an airport.

The topics reflect some major news events of 2008, but never showed up in print. So chalk this up as our last chance at telling some tales of the year gone by.

When the Vancouver Lake Crew began in 2002, it depended on donations and contributions for equipment. Bill Kalenius, founder and president, recalls one particular donation. The rowing machine had belonged to Karin Osterhaug, who captained the University of Washington women’s crew in 1993.

Osterhaug was killed in 2003. She was shot by her husband, Tom Gergen; their unborn daughter also died.

“It was tragic. I never knew her or her family, but I got a call from the Lakeside School,” where Osterhaug had been a high school athlete, Kalenius said. “Her family wanted to give her rowing machine to the newest startup rowing club in the Northwest. That was our club.”

On Jan. 10, a tornado shredded the club facilities on Vancouver Lake. More than 50 boats were destroyed, along with almost all of the club’s 15 rowing machines.

But they weren’t totally wiped out. As the crew members cleaned up and rebuilt, they had one piece of equipment left: the rowing machine donated by the Osterhaug family.

“It was the only machine that was usable after the tornado,” Kalenius said. “I found that fascinating.”

During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain showed up in April on a television show produced by World Wrestling Entertainment. They were invited to tape greetings and court the vote of America’s pro wrestling fans.

Obama ended his pitch with a phrase familiar to the body slam-and-pile driver demographic when he asked: “Do you smell what Barack is cooking?”

President-elect Obama was riffing on a catch phrase created by a pro wrestling star, “The Rock.” That would be Dwayne Johnson, who’s now a Hollywood star — and who once was a Vancouver schoolboy.

Johnson spent some of his childhood in Vancouver when his dad, Rocky Johnson, was wrestling in Portland. Vancouver school officials confirmed that Dwayne Johnson attended school for a while at the former John Rogers Elementary, which closed in 1992.

A local band spent almost four weeks entertaining the troops in the Middle East back in March. But first the musicians had to find a way out of the airport in Kyrgyzstan, said The Columbian’s Derek Boone, who was the drummer and a singer for Pete Ford & Texas Hold ’Em.

At the airport in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, they crossed paths with an NFL tour. It included defensive linemen Luis Castillo (San Diego), Tommie Harris (Chicago) and Mike Rucker (then with Carolina), as well as Peter King, a Sports Illustrated writer and NBC football analyst.

When security guards wouldn’t let anybody leave, “King and their manager helped us out,” Boone said.

On his Sports Illustrated blog, King wrote how a translator negotiated with airport officials. Basically, Boone figures, they were dickering over the bribe.

Other members of “Hold ’Em” were Dwayne Gibson of Ridgefield, Paul Stevens of Louisiana, Steve Sarber of Troutdale, and Pete Ford, a Portlander who used to play organ at Uncle Milt’s Pizza in Vancouver.

The tour was supposed to include stops in Afghanistan and Iraq, where Boone’s stepson is a Marine. But the itinerary was changed.

“We never did learn why. We were sorry we couldn’t play for the troops in the war zone,” Boone said.

As a small-time band, they definitely were under the radar.

“You never could bring celebrities to some of those places; they’d draw too much attention,” Boone said. “It worked to our benefit not to be famous.”

It’s the final thought on 2008, at least according to the calendar published by the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site.

The bottom of the December page includes a small photograph of a brick.

A couple of things make it a special brick. Paw prints are imprinted in the clay; they were created when a kitten walked on the brick before it hardened. … which very likely was about 2,000 years ago.

According to historians, the brick probably dates back to the time when the Romans ruled England. It came here as ballast aboard one of the ships that delivered goods and supplies between England and the Hudson’s Bay Company post at Fort Vancouver.

Karl Gurcke, a National Park Service historian and one of the world’s experts on brickmaking, said its dimensions match the bricks that were made in the Roman province of Britannia.

Over the centuries, it was not unusual for British builders to recycle ancient building materials. The style of brick was so distinctive, Gurcke said, that British manufacturers started to turn out replicas of the Roman masonry.

But the Fort Vancouver brick isn’t a replica, according to Gurcke. It was recovered during the excavation of Kanaka Village, which housed workers at the fort until about 1853. English brickmakers started making their reproductions in 1886.

Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story, or just tell a story.