Historic Hood River
David Jensen
3-19-2024
Notes
This Hood River News photograph of David Jensen is circa 1957. It looks like he is operating manufacturing machinery at the family business, Luhr Jensen and Sons, Inc. Strangely I don’t think we’ve talked about Luhr Jensen and Sons on this site despite the museum having a large display on the history of the company. This obituary of Dave Jensen fills on all the missing pieces.
Jeffrey Bryant
As kids we used to go behind the Luhr Jensen building on May Street and get miscut lures that may have been punched on a machine like this.
DALE NICOL
Dave is most likely setting up/adjusting a punch machine that makes spinning blades for the lures.
WAAAM has a display in Museum 1 of several Luhr Jensen display boards showing all of the various fishing mouse traps they made including those of other companies they acquired. These displays would be taken to sportsman shows, boating shows and fishing shows as sales tools that hooked more fisherman than fish!
Dave also was a collector of model cars, trucks and other things that are on display in Museum 2 behind glass faced display cases.
Judy Judd
My family lived on Prospect behind the plant. Heaven only knows how many toxins were in the water that streamed down from there. & kids were running around in it. I had a huge piece of “slag “ that I used as a door stop! 😱😂
No environmentalists to worry about in the sixties.
I was glad when the company moved. I knew several of the employees.
Marilyn
I worked for them in 1970. Started on second street making closed loop wire shafts, very boring.
Was sent from there to the Rand road barn to assemble and fill boxes with Little Chief Smoker fuel, also boring. When that ended I was sent to the print shop on Oak street where I ran a Heidelberg Press, not boring but after a few months it was very apparent that I was allergic to the ink, constant sore and swollen throat so I had to quit. It was amazing how many buildings they operated out of at that time.
L. E.
I thought I had read a post about Luhr Jensen way back. But, I couldn’t find it.
Here is a YouTube story about Luhr.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpWVbjqT16o&t=50s