Lake Oswego Vignettes: Illiterate Cows to College-Educated Cabbage

With tales of a mayor who knew the town’s cows by name and a singing pig drunk on moonshine, Marylou Colver captures the quirky anecdotes of Lake Oswego’s past. In the twentieth century, visionary real estate developers touted Oregon’s Lake Oswego as an ideal place to “live where you play,” a reputation the city maintains today. But this playful paradise is a far cry from the small town developed by iron company entrepreneurs in the nineteenth century. Colver, founder of the Lake Oswego Preservation Society, chronicles the transition from gritty to pretty by recounting the people and events that shaped Lake Oswego. From bathing suit bans to a robot circus, enjoy the legacy of unusual facts, some recently discovered, that inspired Lake Oswego Vignettes.