The blast froze the men in their final acts.

A police officer waving cars away from the warehouse fire, a gas station attendant aiming a hose at the flames, a fire chief directing the battle and the teenager who first saw the blaze helping with the fight.

Only moments before, they had noticed the word Explosives on the red delivery truck parked only four feet from the burning building. The truck's sides curdled in the heat. One man tried to move it but the doors were locked. Then the truck caught fire and someone yelled for everybody to run. Seconds later, a flash consumed them all.

The force of the exploding truck raced outward. Many in Roseburg had come to watch the fire, unaware of the danger, and where they stood determined if they lived or died.

A family watched the warehouse burn from their window about a block away. The husband had stepped away to use the bathroom. When the blast hit, collapsing walls saved his life as razors of glass shredded his wife and 4-year-old daughter. Parked less than a block away, a pregnant woman -- the wife of the teenager fighting the fire -- survived in her car as her husband and the buildings around her vanished.

The blast moved on. It caught two women who walked side by side away from the fire. One woman flew straight down the street and lived; the woman next to her went sideways, through a car dealer's plate glass window. They found her a few days later, impaled.

The blast -- faster than the sound of the explosion itself -- then met one person running toward the light. George Rutherford was the first person who understood what the flames meant. That was his truck -- carrying 6 1/2 tons of dynamite and blasting agent -- parked by horrible coincidence next to a building now on fire.

Rutherford ran down Oak Street from his hotel three blocks from his truck. He had to get it out of there. If he could only get there in time --

Rutherford came to among rubble and glass. Other survivors found him, his nose hanging by a thin band of flesh. They didn't know who he was, just a crazed man trying to run back toward the scene of the blast, and they held him back.

"Let me go, let me go," he cried. "I've got to go back to see how many people I've killed."



In Roseburg, this moment -- 14 minutes after 1 in the morning of Aug. 7, 1959, a Friday -- is known simply as the Blast, one of the worst disasters in Oregon history.

The blast killed 14 people, hurt 125 and destroyed or seriously damaged more than 100 buildings, including a school and a Coca-Cola bottling plant, apartments and homes. The percussion tossed people from their beds, and windows burst nine miles away. Some people saw a mushroom cloud that clear summer night and thought the Russians had attacked.

Roseburg, then a town of 12,000, made worldwide news. Lawmakers rewrote the rules about how explosives are handled, the federal government issued a damning report and the city tried to rebuild. Investigations piled up and lawsuits flew.

Then 50 years went by. More than 100 commemorated the blast this month with a solemn walk to the blast site, now marked by a boulder and simple bronze plaque. The blast has been documented in articles, studies and a film. But a lot of what people know about it comes by way of legend and rumor and twice-told tales. Together, their voices sing a chorus of confusion and loss of a moment that for many people divided their lives into before and after.

The story has always lacked one voice.

George Rutherford wasn't from there. He drove deliveries for Pacific Powder Co. in Tenino, Wash., and lived in Chehalis. After he got out of the hospital he went home and didn't have to hear the Roseburg coffee shop chatter about what kind of a fool parks a locked truck loaded with dynamite in the heart of their town.

He didn't have to hear it. He knew what he had done.

He lived with it for the rest of his life, and kept the story within him as if a chunk of the city had been blown deep into his chest.

George Rutherford ran away from home when he was 13. He fled the cruelty of his father on the family ranch in Durkee, near Oregon's border with Idaho, and went off to work on his own for a hard season haying. When he went to collect his $130 check at season's end, he found that his father had claimed the money and taken it for himself.

He learned how to drive buses and trucks, he married a girl named Doris and they moved to Seattle. For years he drove a bus and later a laundry truck; then he heard about a job with Pacific Powder Co. The company wanted a driver to deliver its explosives around the West. People, laundry, dynamite -- he could move them all, it didn't make a difference to him.

Rutherford and Doris had two children, Joy and Lonny, and he wasn't around as much as he wanted to be, what with all the driving. When he was home, his children saw a cheerful, energetic man. He was a blur around the house, building this and fixing that, taking his son to ballgames, helping neighbors and folks from church.

"He was always a jokester, always laughing and making people smile," says Lonny Rutherford, who was 13 at the time of the explosion. "He was just one of those guys you wanted to be around."

On Aug. 6, 1959, when he was 46, Rutherford rolled into Roseburg, a routine delivery. His new Ford had a cargo area with metal walls and a roof, and a tarpaulin curtain in the back. He was hauling 2 tons of dynamite and 4 1/2 tons of the bagged blasting agent nitro-carbo-nitrate, sold under the name Car-Prill. Rutherford arrived at Gerretsen Building Supply, a regular customer, around 8 at night.

Someone at the store -- it's not clear who -- told him they'd unload the truck the next day and that Rutherford could leave the truck on the street. Rutherford said he was told a security guard -- called a merchant policeman -- would watch it. Rutherford locked the truck and walked three blocks up Oak Street to the Umpqua Hotel, had dinner and tried to sleep.

He couldn't. Something about the truck didn't feel right. After 10 o'clock he walked down to check the truck. All looked fine, so he went back to the Umpqua and slept until sirens woke him.

Years later, people who should have been at the Gerretsen fire talked about how lucky they were to be somewhere else -- and how tragic it was that others ended up there.

No one is sure how it started but the fire broke out around 1 a.m. in the Gerretsen warehouse, where they kept barrels of paint thinner. Dennis Tandy was a 17-year-old millworker driving home with his pregnant wife, Marilyn, after a swing shift. He was the first to spot the fire, and told Marilyn to call it in and stay in their Fiat, well away from the flames.

A young policeman, Norm Neal, said he should have been on duty that night but was working another job as a rural firefighter. His crew was sent out after the blast. Another officer, Don DeSues, 32, worked that night shift. A gas station attendant, Richard Knight, 20, had experience fighting fires and volunteered to take over for Lyle Wescott, a firefighter whose hands were seriously burned in the first few minutes after arriving at the warehouse blaze. Wescott lived because he went off to the hospital before the truck blew.

The flames spread outside the warehouse walls and someone noticed the truck with its cream-colored letters that warned: Explosives. Someone -- probably Assistant Fire Chief Roy McFarland -- told everyone to get away. When the truck blew up, McFarland, Tandy, Knight and DeSues died instantly.

Bonnie Jo Berg had grown up in Roseburg but was visiting from out of town when she met her childhood friend, Carol Marical, after Carol's shift at the Umpqua Hotel's restaurant. They had stopped on their walk home to watch the fire, felt the heat grow and decided to move away from the blaze just seconds before the explosion. The blast threw Berg through the car dealer's windows. All Marical could remember was trying to stand up amid flying ash and sparking snakes of power lines. Doctors later took a quart of bolts, nuts and washers out of her back. She couldn't feel the pain then. "I just wanted to find Bonnie," she said. "But Bonnie had disappeared."

Harry Carmichael worked at a cigar store and was on his way home when the blast knocked him down. He got up and helped direct rescue workers to where people were trapped in the rubble. Then someone noticed Carmichael's arm had been blown off. He refused help. Later at the hospital he bled to death.

Marilyn Tandy got out of her car. She had been less than a block from the blast. The Fiat was smashed, the windows blown out, but she was largely unhurt. "I walked up the street and looked back, and there was nothing or nobody there," she says today. "I knew my husband was gone."

Dawn revealed the smoking ruins. The truck had opened a crater 52 feet across and 20 feet deep. The local newspaper, the News-Review, rushed out an issue within hours filled with eyewitness accounts. The next day, the newspaper's lead story opened by telling readers the disaster area smelled of burning flesh.

Rutherford's family was away from home when they heard his truck had exploded. They didn't know if he had died. His son-in-law drove to Roseburg and found him in the hospital. The Rutherfords returned to Chehalis and found reporters and photographers at their house. Writers from papers and magazines such as Life and Look begged for an exclusive interview. The Rutherfords holed up in their house for a week. Rutherford's bosses at Pacific Powder told him to disappear for a while and keep his mouth shut. The family slipped off to Grayland Beach for 10 days. When they returned, reporters still were camped on their lawn.

Meanwhile, investigators swarmed over Chehalis asking people what kind of man Rutherford was. They got the same answer: kind and thoughtful, God-fearing and sober. The federal Interstate Commerce Commission and the state Public Utility Commission convened a hearing in Roseburg three weeks later. Rutherford was ordered to testify.

His bosses from Pacific Powder dropped all the blame on him. The company's supervisor called the blast a "failure in judgment of the man."

But investigators had already discovered Pacific Powder's troubling record. Three days before the Roseburg blast, a federal safety inspector visited the Pacific Powder plant and was alarmed by the shoddy safety practices. The company, the inspector learned, often left explosives trucks unattended.

Investigators also found the company had created problems for Rutherford on the Roseburg trip. The company often used an explosives depot outside town to park loaded trucks, but Rutherford's boss ordered him not to park it there. The company was afraid someone might steal the cargo. Then they sent Rutherford on his way, knowing he would have to park the truck overnight but lacked an approved place to do it.

Rutherford testified he thought a security guard was watching the truck. The questions were withering. "You mean," one investigator asked, "you believed you were attending a vehicle if someone might occasionally see it, who wasn't paid to watch it or hadn't been contacted about it, comes around once an hour?"

"Yes," he replied.

Darkness fell over Rutherford.

"He was quieter and sad a lot," his son Lonny says now. "No one ever talked then of seeing a counselor or asking for help. You just had to take it, to live with it. Sometimes we'd find him just sitting in the chair looking off into nowhere."

The pressure mounted. The federal government charged Pacific Powder with breaking safety rules. The Douglas County district attorney had a grand jury indict the company (but not Rutherford) on manslaughter charges. Lawsuits piled up -- from families of the dead, from the injured, from property owners. The damages went into the millions. Process servers delivered lawsuits to the Rutherfords' house. Lonny recalled reading one suit in which a Roseburg resident sued to recover the cost of a damaged coffeepot.

"They kept coming back asking him the same questions again and again," Lonny recalls. "He felt they were trying to trip him up. So he just never talked about it. We just never talked about it around him. He would just clam up if someone wanted him to talk about it."

If Rutherford left the house, Doris would whisper to friends about the blast. She might even take out a hidden scrapbook with clippings and photos and show them to people so they might understand what Rutherford had gone through.

In time, memories of the blast faded. The lawsuits got settled and insurance paid most of the costs. The federal case was thrown out of court on technical grounds, and the Oregon Supreme Court told the Douglas County DA he couldn't charge a company with manslaughter. Pacific Powder had given Rutherford a desk job but he didn't like it and quit to take up carpentry. The darkness lasted years.



Rutherford died from lung problems in 1996. He was 83. Reporters had come around through the years -- usually near anniversaries of the blast -- seeking interviews. He always said no.

He and Doris moved to New Mexico in 1982, near where Lonny had opened a construction business a decade earlier.

Rutherford by then had all but emerged from the sadness. He worked with Lonny now and then, and he and his wife hosted dances at the senior center. He finally found a way to enjoy life again.

About four years before his death, he and Doris hosted a dinner for a woman named Marilyn Mobley, Lonny's new girlfriend and future wife. Marilyn didn't know Lonny's family very well yet, and knew little about their history.

Rutherford was in good spirits at dinner, funny and interested in what Marilyn had to say. For some reason -- she can't recall now why -- Rutherford looked at her and said, "You know, I'm the one who drove the dynamite truck that blew up Roseburg, Oregon."

Everyone at the table got quiet. Marilyn, who knew nothing about the taboos of the subject, asked him, "What are you talking about?" In a deliberate rhythm Rutherford told her the story.

"If only I had done something else that night," he said.

Today, Marilyn recalls the pain in his eyes. "He was never trying to excuse himself," she says now. "He took full responsibility for his part in it. It was almost like he let me see into his heart -- all of that trauma and this overwhelming burden to carry."

That night at dinner, Marilyn kept asking questions -- had he been hurt? Yes, he told her, but that was nothing compared to what others went through, all that damage, all that loss. Then he told her he had been running for his truck and was within a block of it when it exploded.

"I should have died. I was that close to the truck. I should have died."

Then he looked at Marilyn.

"An angel picked me up and carried me away."

Rutherford told her he was running toward the truck and was almost to it when a pair of powerful hands lifted him by the shoulders and carried him through the air, floating away, away as the truck exploded, and then set him down back at the Umpqua Hotel.

"That's where the angel carried me," he said. "To the steps of my hotel."

What Marilyn didn't know -- what no one at the table knew that night -- was that the Umpqua Hotel was three blocks from where Rutherford was when the blast hit him.

Could the force have thrown him back to the Umpqua Hotel? No. He probably staggered about after being knocked down, his nose slashed by metal and glass, and somehow wandered through the ash and heat back the way he'd come.

But Rutherford had it right -- it's near the Umpqua where dazed hotel guests came out into the street and found him. That's where they heard him beg to be let loose so he could run toward the fire and see how many people had died. And that's where they put him into a taxi for the hospital.

No one knows for sure how George Rutherford ended up back at the hotel. But he knew.

"An angel carried me there," he said.

Brent Walth: 503-294-5072; brentwalth@news.oregonian.com