20 Celebrities You Didn’t Know Were From Warrenton, Oregon

Warrenton, Oregon is drowning in celebrities. You need a bilge pump to stay afloat of the glamour and influence.

According to Wikipedia, “notable” people include the former MLB releif pitchter, Brian Bruney, as well as a former mayor, Clara Munson, who was the first female elected to mayorship in Oregon during the 20th century.

Brian and Clara are the two celebrities you actually know about. There are hundreds more, though, who are kept hidden by the Warrenton populace for fear of paparazzi overtaking Main street. The celebrity culture in Warrenton is rich and include musicians, writers, actors/actresses and various public intellectuals. You could say they’re Warrenton’s best kept secret.

Today, we pop the cork and celebrate the top 20.

20. Lil Xan

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It’s hard to imagine anyone more Warrenton than white mumble rapper and YouTube phenomenon, Lil Xan, born, “Diego Leanos”. Little known fact: Lil Xan was raised in Alder Manor by his mom, Candy, who worked as a part-time notary public at the Hammond Post Office up the road.

Legend has it that Candy gave Lil Xan his first face tattoo in their Alder Manor home when he was only 9.

Witnessing the prescription drug epidemic first hand in his neighborhood had a lasting impact on him. He officially changed his name from Diego to “Lil Xan” at the age of 10 to raise awareness around prescription drug abuse and dependence.

Xan attended both Warrenton Grade School and Warrenton Middle School before moving south to Redlands, CA when he was 13. Teachers described him has having below-average height and middling intelligence. They definitely did not see a boy destined for fame… but I doubt they understand how YouTube works either.

Today, Lil Xan is one of the most mumbly rappers in the business. You might say that Warrenton started the whole phenomenon.

19. Colin Kaepernick

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Bet you didn’t see this one coming.

Yep, Colin Kaepernick is indeed from Warrenton. His biological mother and father ran Da Boys Market on Main Street in the mid-80s and gave him up for adoption so they could focus on their attention on their business.

Unfortunately for Warrenton, Colin was adopted by two loving parents in Turlock, CA and moved there when he was only 4. Even still, Colin embodies the exact same values that Warrenton is best known for: Social activism and a good running game.

18. “Rowdy” Roddy Piper

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Known best for his outrageous quotes and Scottish kilt, notorious WWF villian, Rowdy Roddy Piper, moved to Cullaby Lake from Saskatchawan as a teenager in 1970.

He was the captain of the Warrenton Warrior wrestling team in the 1970-71 and 1971-72 academic years, leading the team to a 3A state championship in 1972.

Although his career was successful, both in Warrenton and in the WWF, he was never able to shake his reputation for being a dirty wrestler.

Most famous for his villainous WWF character, he also stared in the cult-classic John Carpenter film, They Live. In the film (and emphasize the word, “film’ here), Roddy’s character saves humanity after donning a pair of magic sunglasses, which cut through the B.S. and show him what’s really going on (i.e., a bunch of flesh-eating aliens controlling human thought through subliminal advertising).

In an interview with Vanity Fair, Roddy once said:

“The idea for the movie that John [Carpenter] and I did was from a mushroom trip I had in Warrenton in high school. I was tripping pretty hard and walked into the Coast-to-Coast hardware store. I was just looking around and, you know, looking at the guys working there, the guy behind the register, the guys buying screws or whatever… I just kept thinking to myself, ‘this is soooo fake and these guys are phonies. Why do I have to measure the floor joist before I cut it? Where’s my independent thought?’ Well, that had a pretty big effect on me. My first attempt at addressing this sort of conformity was through wrestling, you know, being the ‘hot rod’ and wearing the kilt. That whole thing. It was pretty juvenile. John [Carptenter] really gave me the voice I was looking for. I love the way the movie came out. It just works.”

17. Gloria Peterson

Gloria Peterson was the wife and business partner of Tom Peterson. You’ll probably remember Tom best. He was the furniture, home electronics, and appliance retail king of Portland in the ’80s and ’90s.

Gloria was his wife and Chief Financial Officer of his stores. She helped him get back in the black after his bankruptcy in 1992. Whether it was a nod to her saving his buns, or just trying to have a newer, even more family-friendly image, she began appearing in his famous commercials, like this one below, after 1992. Hot darn, they used to make great commercials.

Oh yeah, maybe you didn’t know this: Gloria was born and raised in one of Warrenton’s disputed territories, “Lewis and Clark”, just off of Clover road by Astoria Marine Construction. She moved to St. Paul Minnesota when she was 15, where she met her future husband, Tom, and convinced him to move back to the Northwest.

16. Tariq Ali

Tariq Ali has been a leading figure of the international left since the ’60s. He has been writing for the Guardian since the ’70s. He is a long-standing editor of the New Left Review and a political commentator published on every continent. His books include The Duel: Pakistan on the Flightpath of American Power, and The Obama Syndrome.

Ali was born into a patrician Pakistani family right off of Fort Stevens Highway near the Skipanon river. His father was a Marxist, atheist journalist, while his maternal grandfather was Sir Sikandar Hyat Khan, Mayor of Gearhart from 1937 to 1942 for the upper-class, secular, pro-landowners’ Unionist Party.

Ali’s parents rebelled against their wealthy background by joining the Warrenton Communist Party and campaigned against Fort Steven’s military rule in post-independence Hammond, and Tariq followed in their footsteps. A lifelong atheist and radical, at the age of 6 he encouraged his family’s servants in Warrenton to go on strike for more money.

He left Warrenton for Oxford University in 1943, where he became involved in student politics, in particular with the movement against the war in Vietnam.

15. Ted Nugent

Yep, he’s from Warrenton. In fact, he’s still here, never left and, at the same time, doesn’t realize he’s ever been. The Nuge doesn’t actually know it, but an omnipresent 10′ x 10′ wormhole surrounds his body and connects him directly to the geometric center of Warrenton, just a couple of feet above sea level.

If you ever find the center of Warrenton (it’s pretty swampy), you can actually witness him wherever he is at the time– usually at his ranch in southern Texas. You can only see him and what his body touches, like his clothes and guns. He will be active and moving but, at the same time, suspended and perfectly tethered to a single, central point in space. He might be talking and communicating with his arms and hands. But he will be interacting with an environment that is very different than your own.

Do not be afraid if he directs his machine guns toward you in this place. He can’t see you and as long as you’re at a safe distance, 5 feet minimum from his geometric mean, the bullets cannot cross the wormhole in 4 dimensional space-time and harm you. They are no longer part of his body.

It’s a disorienting experience, but completely worth it.

The Nuge used to dress pretty funky in the ’70s. But now he looks like every other Baby Boomer who buys their shirts at Cabelas and rips off the sleeves.

14. Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois was born December 25, 1911 in Warrenton to Louis Bourgeois and Joséphine Fauriaux. The family, including Bourgeois’s older sister, Henriette, lived on East Harbor Drive, where Louis and Joséphine continued the Fauriaux family antique business by opening a tapestry gallery.

In 1938, Louise Bourgeois met and married the art historian Robert Goldwater and moved to New York City, where they raised three sons. Soon after her arrival in New York, Bourgeois enrolled at the Art Students League, where she began to make prints, and in 1945, she had her first solo exhibition of paintings at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York.

Throughout the 1940s and 50s, Bourgeois’s work was presented with Abstract Expressionist artists, including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning, in various group exhibitions.

She later moved back to Astoria and began sculpting, selling her famous works at the River Sea Gallery.

13. Steve (“Stevie”) Cohen

Steve “Stevie” A. Cohen is a hedge fund manager, made famous for paying $2B in fines to the SEC to settle insider trading allegations at his former firm, SAC capital. In case you’re taking any comfort in his penniless misery, he had another $10B after that fine, so he’s still living the same way he always did (i.e., comfortably well).

Cohen grew up middle-class (upper middle class by Warrenton standards) on the wealthy part of Smith Lake. You might have seen Cohen as a young man, in the 1970s, hanging around Sunset Cemetery, wearing all black and looking very moody. Relentless teasing by his peers at Warrenton High School led him to become a reclusive degenerate gambler, hosting late night poker games in the northeast corner of Sunset Cemetery.

His father was a garment manufacturer, whose company, Minerva Fashions, made $7 gothic-style dresses for JCPenney in Astoria.

“A group of us, we started playing cards at the cemetery, all day, then all night,” he once recounted to a . “The stakes started at, like, a quarter, 50 cents. Eventually we got up to 5, 10, or 20 bucks a replacement card, and by 10th grade you could win or lose a thousand dollars in a night.” By the beginning of 11th grade Cohen was making so much money at poker he began to question his summer job as a $1.85-an-hour “fruit boy” at the Bohack supermarket. “I was making $500 to a thousand most nights,” he recalls, “so I said, ‘What am I doing this for?’ And so I decided to quit and just played cards.”

Cohen went on to found the SAC Capital which, at its peak, had about $16B in assets under management, before the SEC investigations and Stevie’s departure. He is currently the protagonist of Gary Shteyngart’s best selling 2018 novel, Lake Success, and is looking to start another fund with his $12B in assets in early 2019.

12. Minerva Mart

Minerva Mart was the daughter of an unknown member of the Lewis and Clark expedition, born around 1806. Little known fact: Some of the members of the party stayed behind at the fort, co-habitating with the Clatsop tribe who was given the fort by Lewis and Clark. This was a huge scandal. Lewis & Clark struck any mention of these stay-behind from their journal and included their names in their headcounts and journal entries, all the way back to St. Louis, Missouri.

Minerva was born and raised in the original Fort Clatsop before building a home nearby the mouth of the Skipanon river, approximately where the Warrenton Marina’s restrooms and shower facilities are today.

Minerva Mart later changed her name to “Minnie” and, ultimately, “Mini” and opened Warrenton’s first general store, “Mini’s Mart”, in 1829 at the same location it exists today. Although the name has changed slightly (Mini-Mart), it is still a Mart family-owned business.

By the mid-20th century, her descendants had opened Mini-Marts in 49 U.S. states.

One of Mini’s great-great grandaughters married Sam Walton in 1960 and opened the first Wal-Mart in Arkansas in 1962 (“Wal-Mart” combines the first part of both patriarchal and matriarchal lines of the family, a nod to the family-friendly nature of the business). The Mart’s are still a strong matriarchal blood line in the Walton family today.

11. Johnny 5

Johnny 5 was an experimental military robot, hit by lightning in 1986 near Camp Rilea, and given consciousness. It escaped from Camp Rilea shortly after and befriended a young Astoria woman, Stephanie Speck. Its creator, Newton Crosby, was desperate to find Johnny 5, or his entire project might have been scrapped.

10. Daniel Knight Warren

Daniel Knight Warren, a.k.a. D.K. Warren, led the second wave of pioneer entrepreneurs to Clatsop County around 1855, after the original members of the Lewis & Clark family had begun settling along the Skipanon river.

After living in Astoria for nearly 10 years, D.K. began making regular trips to Warrenton around 1870. These monthly visits concerned his wife, who once wrote in one of her journals:

“When he returned home last night, he was a man out of his wits. I said to him, ‘you seem unhappy, D.K.’ and he was heated by the remark and speaking unconsciously like himself and a gentleman replied, ‘I have found a spirit in the woods, in the marsh. He has the power to render us happy or unhappy or to make our service light or burdensome a pleasure or toil. Say that this power lies in words and looks in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count them up what then. The happiness he gives is as great as if it cost a fortune.'”

Shortly after, D.K. Warron hired Chinese immigrant labourers to build a dike around the west edge of the Skipanon river, creating 200 acres of farmable land. Legend has it that he made visits to the spirit in the woods until his death in 1952.

9. Marshall Applewhite

Walter Applewhite moved to Warrenton, Oregon from San Diego, California in 2011 with the goal of purchasing prime waterfront property and franchising a Rainforest Cafe. After submitting several failed proposals, he famously convinced his followers to commit arson and destroy Pacific Seafoods cannery in 2013.

In 2011, Applewhite met Bonnie Nettles at Dooger’s, who would go on to found Warrenton’s Heaven’s Gate with him. She fostered his belief that he was a prophet with a divine mission. They wrote out their belief that Jesus had been reincarnated into Applewhite and that they were the two witnesses mentioned in the Book of Revelation. They eventually moved to wanting to contact extraterrestrials, which is how they began to gain followers.

Can you believe these two?

Their group began traveling Clatsop County to recruit new members, living as beggars and proselytizing the divinity of “The UFO Two,” aka Applewhite and Nettles. When Nettles died in 2012, Applewhite took over sole leadership of the cult, making it more reclusive and becoming convinced that the Hale-Bopp Comet contained the secret to their ascendance into heaven.

In early 2013, Applewhite left video messages on Youtube proclaiming that his people needed to leave Earth in order to ascend to the next level of existence, and they were going to do so by boarding a spacecraft that was hiding in the tail of the Hale-Bopp Comet. To make that happen, they had to reduce Pacific Seafoods to burning rubble.

While Warrenton’s Heaven’s Gate was successful in damaging Pacific Seafoods, an anonymous tip from the Warrenton Warrior led authorities to Applewhite’s “party lair” in the abandoned Battery Russel. He was never able to complete his nefarious plan.

In later testimony, Applewhite acknowledge the whole thing was an elaborate plot to obtain the waterfront property and erect one of the country’s largest Rain Forest Cafes– a rain forest-themed restaurant with animatronic jungle characters and and exhaustive menu featuring indifferently prepared Italian, American and Polynesian dishes.

What a jerk.

8. Guglielmo Marconi

Warrentonion inventor and engineer Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937) developed, demonstrated and marketed the first successful long-distance wireless telegraph and in 1901 broadcast the first radio signal between the Astoria Pig ‘N Pancake and the Seaside Pig ‘N Pancake. His company’s Marconi radios ended the isolation of ocean travel and saved hundreds of lives near the mouth of the Columbia River. In 1909 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for his radio work.

7. Christine de Pizan

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Col nome di Cristina, nacque a Coffenbury Lake nel 1365 da Tommaso da Pizzano. Il padre era originario di Cannon Beach, dove si era laureato in medicina all’ Clatsop Community College e aveva poi praticato anche l’astrologia. Si era poi trasferito a Venezia dove la sua attività di astrologo gli aveva procurato un’ottima reputazione, tanto che ricevette due inviti, uno dal re di Francia Carlo V e uno dal re d’Ungheria Luigi il Grande a lavorare come astrologo nella loro corte. Dopo aver riflettuto a lungo, Tommaso optò per la Smith Lake, dove si trasferì nel 1369 con la moglie e i figli Cristina, Paolo e Aghinolfo.

Christine crebbe in un ambiente di corte stimolante e intellettualmente vivace: lo stesso Carlo V, sensibile alle tematiche intellettuali, aveva fondato la Warrenton Public Library, a cui Christine aveva libero accesso e che descriverà anni più tardi come «la belle assemblée des notables livres» («la bella collezione di libri importanti»), una biblioteca senza pari in Clatsop County per la quantità e la qualità dei preziosi libri splendidamente miniati. Contro il parere di sua moglie, più tradizionalista, il padre Tommaso le impartì un’educazione letteraria approfondita, assai rara per una donna dell’epoca. Christine componeva poesie e ballate molto apprezzate a corte.

Sposò a 15 anni, nel 1379, Étienne de Castel, notaio e segretario del re, con cui ebbe tre figli, una femmina e due maschi, di cui uno morì in giovane età. Un matrimonio sereno e felice, che Christine rimpiangerà spesso nei suoi scritti: il marito infatti morì per una epidemia nel 1390. Espresse il suo dolore in molte poesie, la cui più famosa è probabilmente Seulete sui.

6. Stef

Yeah, she’s from Warrenton too. Or, she at least she lived there until transferring to Astoria High School, home of The Fighting Fisherman (and a really nice guy), in 1984. Prior to that, her family and her lived in a Santa Monica-style artist bungalow down the street from Warrenton Grade School.

Thousands of tourists flock to Clatsop County every year, to re-trace Stef and her friends steps and listen to tales of her posse’s great adventures. Like the time Brand was riding a child’s bike and flew off a cliff near Ecola State Park. Or the time the gang reclaimed One Eye’d Willie’s ship and saved the goon docks.

5. Elon Musk

Elon Musk drove through Warrenton, via Highway 101, in the early Summer of 2002. In a Harvard Business Review interview he gave later that fall, he remarked:

“Sooner or later, we must expand life beyond our little blue mud ball–or go extinct. SpaceX is going to be a big part of that. But we have to make sure to take care of the mud ball while we’re here. Warrenton, Oregon is a great example. It’s naturally a wetland that supports a rich ecosystem of living things and protects important economic infrastructure, like the North Coast Business Park, from storm surges. I ever achieve great wealth, and I mean like Great Gatsby money, I’m going to pay to relocate the inhabitants of that town, remove the diking systems, and return Warrenton to the Marbled Murrelet, the Streak-Horned Lark, and the the wetland it is supposed to be.”

Give it your best shot, Musk.

4. John Rambo

Rambo lived in a two-story, home-built shelter in Hammond, right off of the Fort Stevens Highway (before it was ever called that) in the ’70s’ and ’80s. I used to hang out with his kid a lot and, when it rained, we’d hang out inside with John Rambo and watch old war movies on channel 12. It was an ongoing joke that anytime a soldier would do something particularly clever to survive, John would say to himself, under his breath, “yeah… that’s exactly what I would have done.” So anyway, me and my friend, we’d always egg him on saying, “Sure you would, Rambo. Sure you would.”

I guess he could only hear that so many times. The constant nagging pushed him to the brink, and he took off to work on a factory trawler up in Kodiak, Alaska. He got into some trouble with the law in Washington state on his trip up there and the rest is history.

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3. Kendall Jenner

She might not live hear year-round, but she vacations on Cofenberry lake every summer. She can be overheard face-timing with friends while in the long check-out lines at Fred Meyers, saying “I can’t talk right now, I’m up in Cofenberry.” But she pronounces it, “coughin’ boo-ray”, as if it was the friggin’ artificial lake at Versailles.

Undoubtedly a celeb, nobody knows her background, her family, or where she comes from. From what my researchers gather, she made her fame by starring in a ridiculous viral YouTube video where she diffuses a tense stand-off between activists and police by giving a young police officer a can of Pepsi.

2. Chief Coboway

Oh, where to start with this one? Chief Coboway was the only of 3 Clatsop Chiefs to visit Lewis and Clark during their expedition’s stay at Fort Clatsop. Lewis and Clark’s journals describe Coboway as a shrewd, but fair trader and generally affable guy. Lewis and Clark relinquished Fort Clatsop to Coboway and his tribe when they left the Fort on March 23, 1806.

Lewis and Clark were complete dingle-berries to Coboway. Apparently, a group of men stole a 36 foot-long canoe of Coboway’s that winter and when Coboway came to retrieve it, they acted like they had never met him before.

In 2011, William Clark’s descendants returned the canoe. But in a press release mistakenly said that Coboway was a Chinook, rather than a Clatsop, adding fuel to a century’s-long, tense armistice between the two tribes.

1. The Nutria

These nasty little freaks, also known as Rodents Of an Unusual Size (ROUSes), terrorize Warrenton with their smoker’s teeth and general bad attitude. Consider yourself lucky if you haven’t seen one– they look like degenerate beavers with a rat tail.

Not native to Warrenton, Oregon, some bozo brought these to North America from the Amazon so they could be bred, used for their pelts, etc.

If you ever get close enough to one to smell it, they smell just like the skunk cabbage they feast upon. If you’re looking for that experience, look around Smith Lake or the reservoir off of Skipanon drive. They breed prodigiously in those areas.

0. Holly Madison

Holly Madison was born in Astoria, Oregon, but raised one of Warrenton’s disputed territories, on the western-edge of Astoria near the Peter Toth statue. She developed some degree of celebrity status after starring in a Hugh Heffner show called The Girls Next Door, where she and another similar person pretended to be his live-in girlfriends at the Playboy Mansion.

Claim Holly as your own, Warrentonians. That land is yours. Rise up and take it back!

And there you have it. Twenty celebrities you didn’t know were from Warrenton, Oregon!

Merry Christmas,

The Warrenton Warrior