Outage Map
Story and photo by Brent ten Pas
Local wordsmith finds outlets in songwriting, reporting, podcasting, and blogging.
Despite growing up in a Los Angeles suburb, it’s no surprise Jim Cornelius ended up in the frontier logging town of Sisters, where he is a permanent fixture easily recognized by his iconic hat.
“My parents had a cabin in a place called Wrightwood, California, which was in the mountains, the Angeles National Forest,” Jim says. “I grew up running around in the woods.”
Inspired by Walt Disney’s television shows “Daniel Boone” and “Davy Crockett” and fueled by reading materials given to him by his older brother, Jim developed a lifelong love for stories: historical fiction, American Revolution, Westerns, pulp, and more.
This access, combined with Jim’s insatiable curiosity, had him reading at a college level by age 10, sometimes causing concern.
“My mom got a phone call from my 4th-grade teacher when I brought Hunter S. Thompson’s ‘Hell’s Angels’ to Free Reading Day at school,” Jim says with a laugh. “Great book. Yeah, probably not something a 10-year-old kid should be reading.”
A good story for Jim is “high drama in historical events and the involvement of ordinary people caught up in these tides,” he says. “That is always my go-to kind of thing.”
1 such ordinary person was Simon Kenton, a contemporary of Daniel Boone.
As a teenager, Jim repeatedly read “The Frontiersmen,” a book on Simon, until the book’s covers fell off. What appealed to him about Simon—who served in the American Revolutionary War, the Northwest Indian War, and the War of 1812—was his resourcefulness, bravery, and heroism.
Simon was the topic for Jim’s honor thesis in history at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Returning to Southern California after college, Jim quickly abandoned his pursuit of teaching history in the classroom, realizing it wasn’t for him. Feeding his enthusiasm for hunting, fishing and guns, Jim was working for a gunsmith retail store when he met his future wife, Marilyn, who was in the travel business.
The 1992 Los Angeles riots gave the young couple pause about raising a family in the area.
“I had a gut feeling things wouldn’t get better in L.A., so we started considering moving out, yearning for a forested, mountainous place to call home,” Jim says.
A job offer for Marilyn to work in a travel agency in Sisters brought them to Central Oregon.
“It felt like a now-or-never moment,” Jim says. “We knew if we didn’t make the leap, we’d settle into life in L.A. and never leave. I mean, we were broke, no money, and I didn’t have a gig when we moved up here, but it was like, ‘Yeah, we got take this shot.’”
Jim juggled freelancing for The Nugget Newspaper in Sisters with day jobs at Ace Hardware and Paulina Springs Books. His persistence paid off when the news editor brought him on as a staff member, where he balanced editing with reporting.
Jim’s first city council meeting assignment was anything but mundane. A heated debate over operating snowmobiles in town ended abruptly when a man had a fatal heart attack. Jim remembers thinking, “Is this always so dramatic?”
“It was a wild introduction to local reporting, but it cemented my place in the community,” he says.
Jim’s interest in Simon Kenton and others like him had not waned. He created Frontier Partisans in 2011, a blog about frontiersmen in North America and Africa.
The blog served as a “sort of a proof of concept for this book that I’d conceived,” Jim says.
Jim’s book, “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans,” was published in 2017.
He continues to post fresh content on his blog, attracting 450 to 600 reads daily.
Jim took to storytelling via podcast in 2020. Listeners can gather around the electronic campfire to hear stories about Kit Carson, the Texas Rangers, the early days of a small frontier town called Los Angeles, and more.
Music also serves as an outlet for storytelling. Jim, a musician who plays guitar and harmonica and sings, enjoys writing lyrics. Just like writing history, Jim writes the lyrics as if they are historical fiction, but with the need to rhyme.
“The best example is about a dear friend of mine, Jack McGowan,” Jim says. “I found out that his grandfather had been murdered in a speakeasy in New York City by a guy who called himself 3 Gun Turner. I think it was in 1931.
“My initial reaction was, ‘Oh man, Jack, that’s terrible.’ My second 1 was, ‘Can I write a song about that?’ It was just a natural thing. And he said, ‘Sure.’ He brought me a whole bunch of New York Times clippings about the case, and I just told that story.”
The song is called “Bad Man’s Hand.” Jim’s passion for music led to helping start the Sisters Folk Festival, an annual event bringing world-class music to a small town.
“I was working with Dick Sandvik at Paulina Springs Books,” Jim says. “He and Diane Campbell, owners of the bookstore at the time, wanted to find a way to extend the shoulder season for the retail business in Sisters.”
The idea, born out of a series of brainstorming sessions, included considering having a chili cook-off accompany the music. However, organizers quickly abandoned the idea after discovering health officials’ multiple requirements, eventually settling on a folk festival.
The festival launched in 1995 as a 1-day event.
“It was very well received, and it kind of built from there,” Jim says. “I have to say, that the only reason that it happened is that a whole bunch of other people with skills that neither Dick nor I had came in and said, ‘We want to help this succeed and make this a thing.’ And it’s grown into quite a thing now.”
Jim’s iconic hat has a story, too. Sisters resident and custom hatmaker Gene Baldwin routinely donated a hat at an auction to raise funds for the Sisters Folk Festival. He brought the Boss of the Oregon Trail hat as a sample, but the winner could have any hat custom-made.
1 year ago, a long-time friend and supporter of the festival, Cris Converse, bid on the hat. Jim, who volunteered as an auction spotter, was stationed near her. During the bidding, Cris turned to Jim and said, “That’s for you,” leaving Jim stunned and deeply touched.
Afterward, Jim went to see Gene, pointing at the Boss of the Oregon Trail hat, and said, “I want that hat!”
The sample didn’t fit, so Gene customfitted it for Jim.
“The hat means a lot to me because it was a gift and because it is associated with the folk festival,” Jim says. “I wear this hat every day. Every damn day.”
And every day, Jim continues to tell stories.