🥪Monday. Overcast Monday, high 68, low 54, light SW winds, basically no rain. The big local story is a fugitive ex-county commissioner picking up 19 more felony charges while she's somewhere not here. Plus a local teen who found gold at the Bins.
🚨 THE NEWS
photo from Wikipedia
A Portland teenager picked a $3 Goodwill jacket out of a bin. It might be worth a quarter million.
Quinn Brown was digging through the Goodwill Bins in January when another shopper tossed back a gold and purple jacket. Brown grabbed it. The Lincoln High grad suspected the stitching matched Wilt Chamberlain's old Lakers gear, and after months of photo-matching and authentication, Sotheby's confirmed it. The warmup jacket was worn during the 1972 NBA Finals, the series the Lakers won over the Knicks. It goes to auction July 1, estimated at $150,000 to $250,000. Brown, now 19, has been reselling Bins finds for three years, previously topping out with a $250 vintage Sub Pop shirt. He's not naming which of the four metro Goodwill Outlets he found it at. Can't blame him. He's planning to put the windfall into an index fund or real estate, then take a trip to Vietnam. Willamette Week
A Clackamas County commissioner allegedly fled the country. Now she's facing 19 more reasons not to come back.
Melissa Fireside won her county board seat in November 2024. By February 2025 she was indicted for identity theft. By March she'd resigned. By October investigators believed she'd left the country with her nine-year-old son, possibly on a fake ID through Mexico, with a reservation booked Mexico to Amsterdam on an Austrian passport. Now a grand jury has piled on 19 new felony counts, alleging she used the identity of an elderly man, her mother's boyfriend, to open credit cards and snag a PPP loan between 2021 and 2025. There's still an active warrant. Nobody knows where she is. Oregon's most committed game of hide and seek continues. KPTV
St. Johns gets its library back, bigger and weirder in the best way.
The neighborhood's century-old Carnegie branch reopened this weekend after being closed since late 2024 for a renovation that added nearly 2,900 square feet. There's a new teen room with art from a Portland Street Art Alliance painter, a kids' area with a Carson Ellis mural inspired by Forest Park, and the kind of automated materials handling system that makes a librarian's whole month. The ribbon-cutting was Saturday, with programming running through today. It's the kind of public investment that doesn't generate a controversy, which around here is its own headline. Hoodline
☕ COFFEE SHOP SPOTLIGHT
photo from Google
Heretic Coffee: On SE 28th and Steele is a coffee shop that I am so excited to tell you about. This place is a nonprofit, run by volunteers, and they feed anyone who is hungry for free- no questions asked. We went to check it out and found the coffee to be absolutely stellar- with a miso caramel latte, from beans that they roast right there with an electric machine. We also tried the chai- sorry to say it didn’t impress us like everything else did. There’s plenty of room inside and outside too. You can see their website HERE and we made a video about it HERE
📚 ON THIS DAY
June 29, 1953: William L. Finley, the Portland naturalist and photographer whose advocacy led to three Oregon wildlife refuges, died. A fourth refuge now carries his name.
🥳 UPCOMING EVENTS
