CIVILIAN DEFENSE: Portland Spotted

Visiting Portland, Ore. last week, Howard (“Buzz”) Gardner, 23, saw his first streetcar, his first traffic light, rode in his first elevator. In return he gave Portlanders a gander at himself—the first U.S. airplane spotter to see and report an enemy plane over his native land.

Shy, naive Buzz Gardner was performing the dull duties of a U.S. Forestry Service fire watcher at his lonely station on the western slopes of the Coast Range near Brookings, Ore. on Sept. 9 when, at 6:24 a.m., he sighted a lazily circling two-wing seaplane, without markings. It got so close that “I could have shot it if I’d known it was a Jap.”

Not knowing, Buzz Gardner picked up his phone, notified Army flight headquarters in Portland that a strange plane was hovering over the southern Oregon coast. At 11 a.m. an Army patrol plane sighted an unidentified submarine some 30 miles offshore, bombed it with undetermined results. About 12:20 p.m. Buzz noticed a small fire near Mt. Emily. Investigators found there incendiary bomb fragments with Japanese ideograph markings. Without doubt an attempt had been made to start a forest fire.

Last week, to reward Buzz Gardner’s diligence, Oregon’s Defense Council invited him to Portland.

Down from Paradise, Ore., where he was born and reared, he came to gawk at the city’s sights—coatless, tieless, one tooth missing, one eye black, one suspender strap out of kilter so that he had to keep hitching up his pants. To Buzz, Portland was a fearful, flustering place. When asked about his spotting exploit, he could only gurgle nervously.

Four days were enough for Buzz. Heading home he said: “I’ve had a lot of swell grub. It beats eatin’ acorns and skintails [soreback salmon]. But I’ll sure be glad to get back home. These streetcars give me a headache.”