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From small to large, from World War II to post 9-11, from all-male sports to Title IX. Portland State celebrates its 60th year and the milestones of its students, faculty, and community have experienced. Following are the stories of four students: two from Vanport days and two from today. They have things in common—the G.I. Bill, softball, and a need to help others. But their differences tell the real story—one of time, perspective, and progress.

A Veteran at Vanport

The mood among returning American veterans after World War II was, if not upbeat, then certainly determined. They arrived home in droves ready to make up for lost time—time spent away from their families, careers, and for some, their education.

Capt. John Hakanson was one of these ready-set-go veterans, but he took his return a step further. As he pursued his own education, he helped transform Portland State’s precursor, Vanport Extension Center, into a permanent college.

In 1946, because of the GI Bill, Vanport Extension Center had a lot of students, and they were mostly World War II veterans.

Hakanson, now 86, was born and raised in Oakland, Oregon, and saw action in New Guinea, the Philippine Islands, and Japan as a first lieutenant of the 123rd Infantry Regiment. He returned home a captain.

“After the war, colleges were so crowded with people, they could hardly function,” Hakanson says. Vanport’s makeshift halls were choked with students from 7 in the morning to 11 at night.

They were not college preppies.

“Most of us were older than the typical college student and a good deal more experienced in the world,” Hakanson says. “Many of us had families, too.”

No one realized the long-term consequences when President Franklin Roosevelt signed the GI Bill into law. In fact, many people who would never have had the chance to go to college—working class natives of Oakland, Oregon, for instance—took up the government’s offer of books, tuition, and a stipend.

The problem was, there weren’t enough facilities to educate and house all these would-be college graduates. Vanport Extension Center became the institution of choice among local veterans for its location in Portland and its plentiful housing, previously occupied by shipyard workers.

That housing came in handy when Hakanson enrolled in 1945, and his new bride, Helen, signed up for the nursing program at the University of Oregon Medical School now OHSU.

As a summer project, Hakanson researched and wrote a fact-filled essay calling for the establishment of Vanport Extension Center as Portland State College through an act of the Oregon Legislature.

His essay was featured prominently in The Oregonian, and soon the issue was indeed taken up by state law-makers.

Hakanson continued his education at Willamette University in Salem, where he drafted a bill establishing Vanport as Portland State College. Rep. Rudy Wilhelm introduced it and guided it into law.

Hakanson never went back to Portland State. He earned advanced degrees at University of Oregon and University of California at Berkeley. Later he helped establish Clackamas Community College, serving as dean of instruction and retiring as college president in 1984.

He and Helen raised three sons and one daughter, each of whom made a personal mark in their home communities through teaching in public schools, and involvement in neighborhood sports programs and the community college system.

Now that the adults are stepping back to watch the family’s 10 grandchildren enter college, Hakanson finds his strong feelings about access to education remain undimmed. Indeed, some of the same issues that plagued Oregon in his day remain unresolved, generations later.

“The thing I think about now is how difficult it is for some people to go to college at all, even community college,” he says. “We probably are shooting ourselves in the foot in that respect.”

A new GI Perspective

World War II veterans returned home to a society that rallied around the success of the war. Today, young veterans must come to terms with their war and service experiences without the same sense of support.

Where big crowds of veterans once filled classrooms in Vanport, creating their own culture, today’s veterans tend to feel more isolated from fellow students as well as from society.

Wilson Bowlby, 27, comes from a line of soldiers stretching as far back as the Oregon Trail. “In every generation of the Bowlby family there’s been someone in the military,” he says.

“So far, I’m the only one in mine.”

Bowlby traveled over half the world with the U.S. Air Force, then moved to Portland a few years ago from Fort Walton Beach, Florida, to be near his father, Kenneth—who retired from the Air Force—and attend Portland State.

This June Bowlby receives a degree in business marketing with support from the GI Bill. He has yet to settle down with a family of his own, but he definitely plans on it. Eventually he plans on going for an MBA.

Bowlby enjoys travel, he likes to work out at a local gym, but above all, he’s passionate about changing the perception that military veterans have no options once they get out of the service.

“I’ve been part of the Veteran’s Administration work-study program since I started college and it’s provided me, as a full-time college student, so many opportunities,” he says.

Bowlby was raised a “military brat,” as he puts it. His parents, Kenneth and Min Hui, met and married in Korea in the early 1970s. Bowlby had already lived in Germany, Korea, New Mexico, California, and Washington state before his senior year in high school.

Enlisting at age 19, he went first to Japan, where he spent three years working as a satellite radio operator, learning the technical side of communications. He also spent all his free time traveling through the countryside, climbing Mount Fuji, and exploring Japanese food, art, and culture. While in Japan, Bowlby extended his tour for another year after his original two were up.

Next Bowlby was sent to a base in the U.S. Strategic Air Command in Nebraska. It was a more prestigious opportunity, involving a high-profile assignment. It was also tougher technical work in a freezing, featureless, and isolated location.

The young airman never saw combat, but he certainly prepared for it. On Sept. 11, 2001, Bowlby got to meet President George W. Bush, who stayed at the Nebraska base because it was considered one of the most fortified locations in the nation.

A turning point for Bowlby was the death of his mother in 2000. “Her big thing, while I was in the Air Force, was to get me to go to college,” he says. “She’s my motivation.”

Even though Bowlby’s father was living in Portland, PSU was not a shoe in. He shopped around the country before deciding on Portland State. However, when he got here, it was all about family. While visiting his father’s ancestral home in Cornelius, he was surprised to find out that his great-great-grandfather, Wilson Bowlby, was a covered wagon pioneer on the Oregon Trail.

“Moving here was a cool idea because I’ve been able to spend time with my father and learn about the original Wilson Bowlby,” he says. Born in New Jersey, the first Wilson Bowlby came to Oregon in 1852, became a doctor, set up practice in Cornelius, and eventually served in the Oregon Legislature, rising to Senate president in 1862.

Now that he’s out of the military and looking forward to a new career, Bowlby, it seems, will never quite leave the Air Force behind. He insists that the single most important thing
Portland State does is support veterans.

“It seems like a lot of the veterans today don’t know about the services available to them,” Bowlby says. “That’s the most important thing—helping the veterans.”

Going to bat

Walking through Portland State University’s 49-acre campus today, it’s easy to take Oregon’s only urban college for granted. It’s big, it’s international, and it nestles in the middle of Portland as if it’s always been there.

Few realize that every degree and every department was won piece by piece, carved by University advocates out of an intransigent higher education system.

Margaret Dobson, 74, was one of those carvers.

It was hard. For the first several decades of Portland State’s existence, officials from the Oregon State Board of Higher Education would not allow the school to offer any degree offered by the two downstate universities.

For Dobson, who joined the faculty in 1955 as an instructor and retired in 1990 as executive vice president of the University, it was a situation that required finesse as well as firmness.

“Every step of the way we fought a major battle,” Dobson says. “For every degree we got, I had to wine and dine my colleagues at University of Oregon and Oregon State to get their support before the State Board of Higher Ed.”

“Our first Ph.D. was in urban studies because, obviously, there was no conflict,” Dobson says. “People won’t believe how hard we’ve worked to get where we’ve come. In the last few years we’ve gained more students and have a larger student body than any other university in the state.”

Dobson’s accomplishments as an athlete often seem to eclipse her academic achievements.

In the late 1940s, Dobson started playing third base on a semiprofessional softball team, the Erv Lind Florist team of Portland. She was 16 years old. At age 19 she enrolled at the Vanport Extension Center, only to find the school had no softball team.

It didn’t matter; Dobson was so good at the sport she was invited to play on the men’s 1951 baseball team, where she earned a varsity letter and notice in Time magazine.

Dobson continued to play women’s softball and was voted Most Outstanding Player in the 1952 National Softball Playoffs. She set a record batting average, .515, at the 1954 Women’s World Softball Tournament.

Dobson made enough money from softball to put herself through school. Like many others from the early days, she attended Vanport but could not get a full baccalaureate degree there. Instead, Dobson earned degrees in physical education and educational administration from University of Oregon and University of Wisconsin.

The deeper she delved into sports and education, the more committed Dobson became to making both available for all children. In the early 1960s, she and a small group of like-minded people began lobbying influential people to provide sports opportunities for mentally challenged children. One of the people she met at the time was Eunice Kennedy Shriver.

As a result, in 1962 Shriver started a summer camp for the disabled at her estate in Maryland. At the same time, Dobson toured universities across the United States instructing future educators on how to teach disabled kids.

By 1968, the camp project had grown. Today it’s considered a global movement and known as the Special Olympics.

During Dobson’s tenure as an administrator at Portland State, the University added five new certificate programs, five baccalaureate degrees, four new master’s degrees, and four new doctoral programs. During the same period Dobson was listed by Sports Illustrated as one of Oregon’s 50 greatest sports figures of the 20th century, and named to the National Softball Hall of Fame.

This spring Dobson received the President’s Award for University Advancement (see page 28).

Which is her most enduring legacy?

“So often throughout my life I’ve been talked about as an athlete,” she says. “But I’m much prouder of what I did as an educator.”

Softball sisterhood

One Wednesday afternoon early this spring, Michelle Hext convened her usual Little League softball practice on a windy, green field in Hillsboro.

She may appear petite and quite feminine, but Hext is a stern taskmaster. The all-girl squad—this particular team is now, one by one, entering the teen years—came ready for Hext’s tough workout of running, batting, pitching, and catching drills.

Parents milled at the sidelines. One came over and huddled with Hext; it was a team member’s birthday, and someone had brought a big sheet cake in the back of her car.

“It’s just times like that where I say, okay, pitch for half an hour and then let’s have some cake,” says Hext. “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten better at coaching, including knowing when to goof off.”

Twenty years after Margaret Dobson, alumna and retired PSU administrator, won a varsity letter at Vanport, Title IX became law, requiring schools to give girls equal access to sports. By many accounts it took another 20 years—a whole generation—of lawsuits and additional legislation to put Title IX rules into effect. Which explains why the sports community supporting girls and women has flourished most in the past 10 years.

There is no better example of the growing trend of women, girls, sports, and community building than Hext.

In contrast to the barrier-busting Dobson, Hext had the opportunity to do every sport her brother did, right in the public school system.

However, although Hext could aspire to professional women’s sports, which are now booming in popularity like never before, she’d rather invest her time and expertise training female athletes of the future.

In that sense she definitely takes a page out of Dobson’s book.

Hext, 22, is one of the best softball pitchers in the Pacific Coast Softball Conference. Last year Hext, a right-hander, racked up a career-high 11 strikeouts in one game, which ended in a PSU shutout against University of San Diego. She’s been named to the All-Conference Second Team for two years in a row.

Her biggest challenge? Keeping her schedule straight. “I have every second of my planner filled out for the next three months,” she says.

Every day Hext goes to class, then to softball practice with the Vikings. She then heads to Hillsboro for her part-time coaching job. Late in the evening, past dinnertime, she goes home to her own schoolwork. She’ll be graduating in June with a dual degree in English, and arts and letters.

A native of Beaverton, Hext started T-ball in grade school and began playing competitively at age 11. That was the year Hext’s dad, Steve, rearranged much of the family’s routine around Michelle and her baseball-playing brother, John.

Hext has been playing softball 17 years now, and the sport is more than just a game; it has a social fabric all its own.

Which Hext found out for herself a few years ago, when her high school softball mentor asked her to coach a group of girls. The job has kindled a fire inside Hext she didn’t realize was possible.

“I have a group that’s just going from 12 to 13 years old, and I’ve had them for a few years—now they’re coming in to practice with makeup and hairdos,” she says. “They’re changing, their attitudes are changing, and their attitude toward me is changing.

“Definitely I think they’re facing a lot more than I did,” she says. The kids are specializing at an earlier age, she says, in part because they have fewer electives in school. They’re also more competitive—all of which sometimes makes the kids’ lives more stressful.

Nevertheless, Hext says the community is investing more time and energy in its daughters, and the future payoff will be stronger, more fulfilled women. “Just interacting with them and their parents,” she says, “sometimes I just watch them and it reminds me of what my dad did for me.”

Lisa Loving, a Portland freelance writer, wrote the article “From Descartes to Diapers” in the winter 2006 PSU Magazine.