Scott Swanson
Richard Ikola has lived in Sweet Home for 35 years and he loves the community.
So much so that he’s built up an extensive collection of Sweet Home memorabilia.
“I’ve probably collected close to 200 pieces,” said Ikola, 69, a quiet man who becomes noticeably animated when discussing his collection.
His accumulation includes a nearly complete selection of commemorative buttons from past Frontier Days and Sportsman’s Holiday celebrations, yardsticks, old phone books, photos, calendars and all sorts of knickknacks bearing various references to “Sweet Home.”
Ikola moved to the community in 1977 after working elsewhere for the U.S. Forest Service as an engineering aide.
Born July 4, 1943 in Cook, Minn., his family moved to Cottage Grove when he was 5 and he was raised there, going to work as a high school student as a pin-setter at the local bowling alley.
“A lot of folks don’t understand, but we set a lot of bowling pins by hand back in the 1950s,” Ikola said.
After graduating from high school in 1961, he took a job on a commercial fishing boat – which he’d done during summers in high school.
“During the last couple of years in high school, my buddy’s dad had a commercial fishing boat out of Florence,” he said. “It was an awesome experience.”
Ikola worked on fishing boats for about five years, out of Astoria, Newport, Charleston, for black cod, halibut, albacore and salmon, and on a crab boat out of Humboldt Bay in California. Then he decided it was time to come ashore.
Back in Oregon, he “knocked around for a while,” taking a few odd jobs in the woods until he saw an ad for “youth employment” at the unemployment office and decided to apply for it, which turned out to be a survey engineering job working for the USFS in Mapleton.
It was a career move. Ikola wound up as an engineering aide for the Forest Service, working in Mapleton, Corvallis, Lincoln City and the Hebo Ranger District before moving to Sweet Home, where he worked 15 years for the local ranger district.
After the spotted owl shut down most of the logging in the national forest, he took an early retirement at 59 and teamed up with his brother Bob Ikola, who ran Sweet Home Motors, a local used car dealership, as a car buyer.
He also launched his career as a garage saler. He and his wife Diane had married in 1989 and Ikola said she came into the union as an “avid collector.”
“That’s how I got into it, big time,” he said.
That was also when he started looking for Sweet Home memorabilia.
“Along with buying cars, I had no time clock to punch,” he said. “I went throughout the valley, locally, and started acquiring Sweet Home collectible stuff.”
He enjoys learning about the history of the community as he’s collected the items, he said. His collection includes old phone books, pictures and postcards showing the Sweet Home area, the Willamette Industries mill, and the downtown area.
“You can see the businesses in the photos,” he said.
He particularly loves the old yardsticks, which include one from Hoy’s Hardware when it was located at 1256 Main St. in downtown Sweet Home, and others, from Parker-Zurcher Real Estate, Epps Furniture, the Bank of Sweet Home, Coast Chimney Sweep.
His favorite is one from Fred Chevrolet, boldly advertising “Drastically designed! Distinctly different! Daringly new! 1968 Chevrolets.”
“From everything I gather, Sweet Home was a boom town, basically, back in the 1950s,” Ikola said. “There was lots of hustle and bustle. Business was brisk. There were taverns and hardware stores and mom-and-pop stores.
“Everything was doubled, tripled up. That’s where a lot of this 1940s and ’50s stuff came from – that era. They had competition so they started advertising.”
One thing that sticks out for Ikola is the small-town familiarity of it all, he said.
“There is no address on most of this stuff. Maybe a phone number or just ‘M Street’ or ‘Main Street.’ They weren’t interested in people coming into town. They knew where these people were. A lot of people flourished in those days and made them what they were. They weren’t worried about addresses.
“Today, what would they put on it? Everything imaginable.”
His favorite piece of all is a license plate frame advertising “Sweet Home.”
“I put a license plate in it because I collect that kind of stuff, but I would venture to say that you’d have a tough time finding another one,” he said of the frame, which he thinks was “part of a car club deal.
“I know quite a few people in town and a lot of garage-salers and people haven’t seen one like it,” he said.
Ikola tends to be pretty picky about his collection. “I’ve bought basically better stuff.”
His favorite sales are those featuring estates of old-time residents and those out of the area, where the sellers have no real connection to Sweet Home.
“What’s cool is when you find one out of town – Eugene, Salem. They’re priced right. They can’t sell it. You can find good stuff in Lebanon, Albany, but they want more for it.”
Sometimes he finds a real treasure trove and someone who just wants to get rid of it.
“That’s the kind of thrill you look for – running into somebody who has been in the area 50, 60, 70 years and started collecting when they were 30 years old, back in the 1940s,” Ikola said.
“The younger generation just sells it off and I’ve gotten in on it two or three times. They kept bringing out collectible Sweet Home stuff and I kept buying it.”