A Town Called Seaside

The town of Seaside, Oregon, isn’t very big. It boasts sixty-five hundred full-time residents but gains an enormous boost in population every summer. Thousands of tourists flock to its beaches, restaurants, and art galleries. Gloria Stiger Linkey, Seacove Publishers, is a historian and tour guide of the town. She takes readers through Seaside’s origins as a summer resort town in the 1940s to the thriving tourist attraction it is today. Linkey’s historical research conjures up beautiful images of the original 1940s town, where people could walk on the “Prom,” go to the state-of-the-art aquarium, and watch Lone Ranger serials at one of Seaside’s two movie houses. At that point in its history, Seaside had twenty-five hundred residents, but the number would swell to twenty-five thousand during the summer months. While Linkey preserves Seaside’s past, she also shows how the town has grown and changed for the better. She shows how Seaside’s government and chamber of commerce changed the town’s status from a summer resort point to a tourist town that operates all twelve months of the year. Seaside’s economic development is a perfect case study on the establishment of resort towns and the tourism industry.