In the boys’ defense, it was hot as blazes on July 3, 1905. They were out of school with nothing to do, and the Willamette was right there. Complaints, from all along the river, reached police headquarters quickly. Capt. Gritzmacher dispatched a quartet of officers, and they brought back patrol wagons bursting with boys, 50 of them, who were then booked for the crime of bathing, per The Oregonian, “in Nature’s bare garb.”

The boys—among them Willie Williams, Hans Ball, Walter Spludd, Rheinhard Neugibauer, Stanley Clobb, Axel Berg, Max McCoy—appeared two days later before Judge Arthur Frazer, of the newly established juvenile court. One after the other, they told the same story. The public baths were too far away. Opened in 1902, these wooden structures floated on pontoons and were moored on the east bank of the Willamette, between Morrison and Yamhill. These boys lived up north, and they’d have had to walk four miles. And on such a scorching day?

So Frazer (“infinitely less inclined to punish than to reform,” according to the Oregon Journal) began a campaign for two more baths. They were to be particularly humble affairs: “nothing more than sheds where the boys can don their bathing clothes out of the public view,” stated the Journal. Businessmen pledged donations, mills donated the lumber, and the boys who’d been booked were enlisted to help determine the sites—and, of course, to provide the labor.

Local history writer Doug Decker’s best guess is that the bath pictured here was near the Inman-Poulsen Mill, which sat south of Hawthorne. (Decker provided valuable sleuthing on this Oregon Historical Society photo.) The bridge in the background looks to be the second iteration of the Madison Street Bridge, a wooden swing-span that rotated on a pedestal. It’s likely before 1909, when work on the Hawthorne Bridge disrupted the area. 

The following July, Judge Frazer paid a visit to the North Portland bath, built on a sand spit near the North Pacific mill. The Journal reported that as he approached, he was spied nearly a quarter of a mile away. Sunburned boys “scurried into the water to do stunts” for him. “Well, you are a pretty good lot of boys, anyway,” he told them. “We have not had a complaint to the juvenile court about the boys in this part of town for a long time.”