A customer enjoys a promotional horse-meat taco sale at Old Hawthorne Market. (Oregonian archive)

The cartoon in The Oregonian shows a cockroach-like man carrying a box of meat. A beam of light from a big flashlight has frozen him in his tracks. The caption says, simply, "That's All, Brother."

This was the journalistic coda to the discovery in 1949 that rogue Portland meat merchants had been labeling horse meat as beef and turkey. "Police Nab 2 Meat Dealers, Charge 'Horseburger' Trade," a headline blared.

The scandal boosted the political prospects of Portland Commissioner Fred L. Peterson, who led a raid -- newspaper reporter in tow -- on a butcher shop that was fraudulently selling horse meat. The meat was being delivered to restaurants around the area as well as to at least three Portland school cafeterias.

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An editorial cartoon depicts a scurrilous meat dealer being exposed. (Oregonian)

Horse meat was legal to sell -- if it had been inspected by health officials and labeled correctly, which this hadn't. "The horselaugh is on the consumer, perhaps, but the tables should be turned in court," The Oregonian's editorial board declared. "There must be no disposition to deal leniently with any member of the horseburger ring, whose operations have made picking pockets seem comparatively honest."

The editorial went on to congratulate Peterson "on busting the horseburger ring wide open," because Americans "take their hamburger seriously, partaking it by preference more than for economy -- for of late years it hasn't been cheap."

Portland voters remembered Peterson's horseburger-busting actions when they went to the polls three years later. They chose the former pharmacist as their mayor over the incumbent, Dorothy McCullough Lee, who had focused on battling illegal gambling and prostitution instead of the fraudulent horse-meat trade.

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A front page of The Oregonian in 1949.

After Peterson's election, horse meat fell off the news menu in Portland, but almost 25 years later, more deceit about the foodstuff -- and an even worse economic situation than in 1949 -- brought it back to the headlines.

Portland's Second Great Horse-Meat Frenzy started when Ed Rooney looked at the front page of The Oregonian on March 8, 1973, and unexpectedly found his name in an article.

A bigger shock for Rooney came in the next paragraph when his wife confessed, via the newspaper, that she'd been feeding him horse meat for three years while saying it was beef.

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Ed Rooney, here coaching at Grant High School, liked horse meat. (The Oregonian)

"I guess it's time he found out about it," Delores Rooney told the reporter. "I just haven't had the nerve to tell him before."

Ed, a math teacher and championship-winning basketball coach at Grant High, took it well. The story made newspapers across the country, and he and Delores ended up joking about their horse-meat odyssey on Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show."

Delores explained that she wasn't trying to get back at Ed for some long-held grudge. With "stagflation" taking hold of the country in the early 1970s, the cost of beef had become exorbitant, and desperate shoppers like Delores were seeking cheaper alternatives for favorite family meals.

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J&H Market's Ed Carroll handling horse meat. (Oregonian archive)

Hence the success of the J&H Market at 3953 S.E. Hawthorne St., where Delores bought her officially inspected and correctly labeled horse meat. At the height of the store's success during the Me Decade, proprietor Ed Carroll was selling around 3,000 pounds of horse meat a day. A queue of J&H shoppers regularly snaked down the street.

"They're working me to death," Carroll said of the sudden surge in business. "I had to get my sister and two high-school kids to come down to the market and help out." He ended up running out of product and had to temporarily close.

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A hand-written sign on J&H Market's door tells the story of its sudden success. (Oregonian)

Business reporter Stan Federman called Carroll "one of the nation's most spectacular success stories."

Not surprisingly, J&H Market soon had competitors.

"A lot of people prefer horse meat for itself [rather than for the cheaper price]," one local butcher said. "It's low in fat. Sometimes doctors recommend it for heart patients because of the low cholesterol."

Sales were booming for Carroll and others who had followed him into the horse-meat business, but they knew that modern medicine's stamp of approval wasn't adequate ammunition against the power of myth. Raised on stories of the Wild West, millions of Americans continued to have a strong, sentimental attachment to horses, and so resistance to eating them persisted.

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The 1949 raiding party included city health officer Raymond Meador, Commissioner Fred L. Peterson and chief meat inspector E. E. Chase. (Oregonian archive)

"I can't imagine Roy Rogers letting Trigger get cut up into T-bone steaks," admitted a shopper at Lake Stevens, Washington's Buz Hunt's Country Butcher Shop, which began offering horse meat shortly after the Rooneys' appearance on "The Tonight Show."

In a letter to The Oregonian, a Pennsylvania resident named Harry Persing Jr. wrote that the Rooneys "put on a most disgusting performance praising the virtues of horse meat" on Carson's show. "What kind of people are you all? Cannibals? If you cannot do without meat, why in heaven's name don't you consider eating each other? It would be much cheaper and spare the poor horses, who have a hard existence as it is. It also would rid the world of such callous individuals as you seem to have in abundance in that area of the country."

Former Mayor Peterson, in his late seventies and working as a pharmacist again, liked to talk to customers about his days in public service, including that predawn morning when he, a police detective and the city health inspector waited outside a butcher's shop "for the horses to arrive." But even though he toiled at Grant High Pharmacy, half a block from Rooney's school, he didn't weigh in on the surprising horse-meat craze all these years later.

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Ed Carroll in the 1970s. (Oregonian archive)

That was just as well. The phenomenon proved short-lived. When beef prices came down in the mid-1970s, horse-meat sales leveled off, then dropped precipitously. Sen. Richard Schweiker (R-Penn.), who would later serve as President Ronald Reagan's Health & Human Services secretary, sponsored a bill to ban the sale of horses for human consumption.

Even some customers who preferred the taste of horse meat returned to eating beef, said Portland butcher Steve Metje.

"It's strictly a case of cultural prejudice and your heart running interference against your logic," he said in 1981. Metje had taken over J&H Market from Carroll, renaming it Old Hawthorne Market.

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Joseph D. Penrod, director of city laboratories, grinds meat taken from a butcher shop during Commissioner Peterson's 1949 raid. (Oregonian)

The solution for some Northwest denizens who wanted to keep serving horse to their families: follow Delores Rooney's example.

"My family isn't even going to know what they're eating," said a new horse-meat customer at Buz Hunt's. "I'll marinate it first."

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Robert Mitchell and his wife published a specialty recipe book at the height of horse meat's popularity. (Oregonian)

-- Douglas Perry

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