On Thursday, Nov. 12, 1970, an event happened that put the town of Florence on the map. A highway engineer, faced with the need to dispose of an eight-ton whale carcass that had washed up on the beach, tried to vaporize it with a half-ton of dynamite. People who know about dynamite could have predicted the results.

People like Walt Umenhofer. He was a businessman who happened to be in town with his brand-new car, an Oldsmobile ’88 Regency, which he later told The Springfield News he’d bought days earlier at Dunham Oldsmobile in Eugene during its ironically named “Whale of a Deal” promotion. Umenhofer had received explosives training during his World War II service. What he saw on the beach that day made him very, very nervous.

He knew project manager George Thornton either needed a lot less dynamite, so that the whale would just be pushed out to sea, or a whole lot more, so that it would be blown into tiny pieces. Umenhofer told the Springfield paper he tried to warn Thornton but was dismissed.

Uemenhofer shrugged and got back to his business, not realizing how personally Thornton’s mistake would end up affecting him.

The story was covered for one of the Portland TV stations by Paul Linnman, then a fresh-faced reporter in his mid-20s. As one would expect given his young age, Linnman made a few errors in relating the story (chief among them was assuming that it was a California Gray whale when it actually was a sperm whale). But in his book, he makes up for all of it with one line, which you’ll find on Page 77: “Explosions in the movies usually look like a blast of fire and smoke; this one more resembled a mighty burst of tomato juice.”

Linnman’s story was, of course, snatched up by the network and played all over the country. Fifty-year-old retired Army ordinance guys all over the nation, who learned how to blow stuff up during World War II, wondered what the heck Thornton was thinking. Twenty 50-pound cases of dynamite sound like a lot, but in the context of eight tons of meat, they dwindle to insignificance.

And Thornton actually said, on camera, to Linnman, that he wasn’t sure how much dynamite he should use. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s pretty easy to wonder why he didn’t pull someone who knew explosives into the project, even if that someone was a know-it-all stranger with a brand-new Olds parked 450 yards away — a stranger like Walt Umenhofer, whose brand-new car was flattened by a pool-table-sized chunk of flying whale flesh after the explosion.

Umenhofer, who still lives in Springfield, now owns and operates “The Baron’s Den,” a gun store and indoor shooting range just south of Eugene, visible from Interstate 5.

He tries to avoid talking about the exploding whale, mostly because he’s sick of telling the story.

In any event, the exploding whale — with the help of syndicated humor columnist Dave Barry, who had great fun with it — has become part of our entire nation’s pop culture and has been mistaken for an “urban legend.” Many Florence residents were not pleased. They felt this was the wrong way to get one’s hometown on the map. But today, almost 40 years later, even the crankiest among them chuckle about it — sometimes a bit wistfully.

But not Thornton — who, ironically enough, was promoted to the Medford office six months later. Contacted by Linnman in the mid-1990s, he refused to be interviewed on camera, and seemed to feel the news coverage of the event had converted a successful exercise into a disaster. “What do you mean, ‘What went wrong?’” he asked Linnman tersely.

(Sources: Linnman, Paul, “The Exploding Whale,” c. 2003 by West Winds Press; The Springfield News archives)

Finn John writes about unusual and little-known aspects of Oregon history. He lives near Albany with his family and can be reached at finn@uoregon.edu.