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Now it can be told. Ron Callvert is the Green Hornet.

Many people know that the Green Hornet secretly works for a newspaper. Various radio programs, TV shows, comic books and movies would have you believe he is Britt Reid, publisher of the Daily Sentinel.

However, I know he is really Ronald G. Callvert, a former associate editor of Portland’s other daily newspaper who won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1939.

How do I know?

Go to OMSI and look at the clock from the old Oregonian building that once stood at the corner of Southwest Sixth and Alder streets. Then look at archival photographs of the building. Now that was a newspaper office, the kind where men in fedoras and trench coats would write editorials by day and fight evil by night.

So it seems only logical that Ron Callvert moonlighted as the Green Hornet – at least to my admittedly overactive and romantic imagination.

I suppose some people just see a clock.

I see an artifact from a graceful and charming era of architecture that fires both my imagination and curiosity. It really was a wonderful old brick building with its 138-foot clock tower. I imagine there were all the usual reasonable and practical reasons to tear it down in 1950.

The current building is fine. A candy store just opened on the corner. That’s nice. Nevertheless, the old building was a jewel. I wish it could have been saved. Barring that, I wish it could at least be remembered. There is much history on that corner.

The Oregonian Building was constructed in 1892. The newspaper staff moved to its current digs on Broadway in 1948 – two years before the building was demolished.

Of course, the stately building was not the newspaper’s first home. When the paper started in 1850, it operated out of a two-story building at the corner of First Street (now First Avenue) and Morrison Street. It moved to the Sixth and Alder building in 1892.

The building calls to mind the equally evocative New York World building, built by Joseph Pulitzer in 1889 and demolished five years after The Oregonian building to extend the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge.

In 1948, the paper moved to its present building, designed by Pietro Belluschi on the site of what formerly was the palatial home of the William S. Ladd mansion. The new Oregonian building was supposed to be far grander than the utilitarian structure we see today.

However, under heavy national inflation and a shortage of construction supplies, as well as problems with Belluschi’s original designs, the project was scaled back. It nonetheless cost $4 million – twice the original estimate.

I wish the paper could have stayed put at Sixth and Alder. I wasn’t even alive yet, but I still miss the old building.

Of course, the four-dial clock still stands at OMSI. It was built by the E. Howard Clock Co. of Boston, and according to the plaque at OMSI is a Number 4 Heavy Duty Hour Striker, serial No. 1629. It was shipped from the factory on Sept. 30, 1892, along with four sectional dials 12 feet long (six inches in diameter) glazed with salmon-tinted plate glass. The pendulum is 10 feet long with a 175-pound bob.

It cost $17,450 at the time.

When the old building came down in 1950, workers for the Cleveland Wrecking Co. were supposed to sell the clock for scrap.

Dr. Samuel Graf, the head of engineering at Oregon State College (now Oregon State University), would not hear of it. He bought the clock for $300 and moved it first to the college engineering laboratory and then to his own garage. He eventually donated it to OMSI.

When OMSI was next to the Oregon Zoo (or the Washington Park Zoo, as we geezers still call it), the clock was next to the pendulum in the lower level of the building. While OMSI’s new building was under construction on Water Avenue, the clock was stored in a vacant building.

Members of Chapter No. 31 of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors struck an agreement with OMSI officials in 1996: they would restore the clock on the condition that it be prominently displayed.

According to OMSI’s website, the clock was completely dismantled and years of grime were removed. It was polished, and painted parts were repainted with original colors and materials. Missing parts were faithfully reproduced.

Restorative work required more than 2,000 hours. It was worth every minute.

Then again, I would say that. I am an old newspaper man getting older by the day. I know Billy Joel was right, that the good old days weren’t always good, and tomorrow is not as bad as it seems. All the same, when I see old photos of the building at Sixth and Alder and walk by what is there now, I cannot help feeling that we have lost something irreplaceable.

A chocolate bar is small consolation. However, as an overgrown kid who still believes in the Green Hornet, I would be lying if I said it wasn’t any consolation at all.

“Building Curiosity” investigates intriguing, historical and obscure tidbits of the built environment. Tom Henderson is a reporter for the Daily Journal of Commerce. Contact him at 503-802-7226 or [email protected].