Comments from Portland Citizens
Picture of edge of South Auditorium area (circa 1965) showing Spatenhaus tavern in 3-story building with white wall, across the street from the Auditorium. Before Bud Clark dispensed a lot of beer at the Goose Hollow Inn, he served it up here at the Spatenhaus. Note that the block where the Spatenhaus is located is now the location of one of the most interesting of downtown Portland parks. See Bud's comments below.
Ernie, I bought the Drop In Tavern in May 1961 and was forced out by PDC November 29th, 1967. This picture was taken after Benjamin Franklin S&L bought the block as the house that was on the corner of 3rd & Market is gone. It was my parking lot for a few years. Also the buildings on the 4th Street side are gone and replaced by parking. It is before the remodeling of the auditorium was begun. Estimating from those 'markers' I would say the picture was taken in 1965 or 66.
When the auditorium was gutted for remodeling, Nick Taylor a cameraman from CH 6 and a customer of mine, wrote on the plywood fence around the auditorium across from the Spatenhaus, "HOME OF THE POLISH BALLET". The Oregonian ran a picture of it.
I had wanted to buy Ann's Tavern in 1961 but Ann changed her mind so I bought the Drop In Tavern which was within our means, and a location I thought would work. We only had $1600 in cash and Joanne and I ran up another $1,000 on the credit card. At that time you had to buy an existing license. When I finally got permission from the OLCC to open I had to go to Dye Finance to borrow $100 so I could buy a keg of beer and have change for the cash register.
I thought being across from the Auditorium would be a bigger asset than it turned out. I discovered that regular customers were much better for business than intermission and after concert business that came from the auditorium. Concert nights also took up all the parking, excluding many of my customers.
Your comment was right on, about people working downtown at that time, parking in the South Auditorium area since it was all vacated, and therefore walked by the Spatenhaus when they got off work. I gleaned a lot of customers that way, from office workers to construction workers building the Hilton Hotel and the Standard Insurance Building.
Ann called me in 1966 and said she wanted to sell. We finally came to agreement and I bought Ann's Tavern on May 15th, 1967. I had no idea that on August 30th, 1967, I would receive notice to vacate the Spatenhaus by November 29th, 1967. I was in the middle of remodeling Ann's to become the Goose Hollow Inn when I received the notice.
It all worked out better than I could imagine, since the majority of the customers from the Spatenhaus followed to the Goose, and for many years the Goose sold more beer per square foot than any tavern in the USA, a fact confirmed by Budweiser. Sigrid built the deck in 1986 while I was in office, which enlarged the square footage. I kidded her about losing our record of beer sales per square foot. The deck has been a great asset as you know.
In thinking back, Joanne was killed November 13th, 1962, and I think Benjamin Franklin bought the block before she was killed. Whether they had torn down the buildings on the Market and the 4th Street side yet or not, I'm not sure. I was out of my mind with grief for a year. A friend of mine Bret Kelly, uncle of Gill Kelly, current Portland Planning director, ran the Spatenhaus for most of that year, 1963. Sigrid and I married February 29, 1964. That was a good benefit from being across from the auditorium.
Enough for today,
Bud Clark
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A comment in the "small world" department. Prior to moving to Portland, I wrote a requested paper for the U.S. House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Housing, which described the problem of having a myriad of categorical grant programs and recommended consolidating them into a single grant, the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG), and giving local governments control over the use of the funds. The paper was welcomed and became the basis for the 1974 act.
The request for the paper came out of other work I had done as a staff member to the President's Advisory Council on Executive Organization chaired by Roy Ash, President of Litton Industries. The Council was nick named the Ash Council and recommended among other things the creation of the Office of Management and Budget and the Environmental Protection Agency. Doug Costle was the point person on the EPA recommendation and became the first director of EPA.
I am rather pleased that the CDBG approach has been maintained over the years and the program has maintained the basic integrity of allowing local governments to make decisions about urban development without oversight by HUD.
Kurt Wehbring
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Friday, 10 October 2003
In the early '70s I was at PSU, in charge of the undergradute urban studies certificate program, which pre-dated all the other urban studies programs. Thanks to all of you out there who helped make that program a success - coming into the classroom, attending presentations, and taking on students as interns (paid and unpaid).
The Urban Studies program was housed in Harder House until we moved to Francis Manor. (Note: The door to the library in the new College building was the Francis Manor front door.) The Urban Studies faculty and Center Staff included Lyn Musolf, Denny West, Lee Brown, Meg Lynch, Rena Cusma, Ken Gervais, me, and others whose names escape me. Nohad, Ken Dueker and others arrived in the mid to late '70s. After the Ph.D. program was added, the urban studies programs and staff/faculty really began to grow. Quite a difference between then and the College of Urban and Public Affairs now.
I remember Connie McCready, whom I did not know personally, calling me and asking me if I was willing to serve on the Mt. Hood Freeway Advisory Committee. She wanted to appoint Lee Johnson, First Interstae Bank President and he favored the freeway. So she wanted to know where I stood. I said I was conceptually opposed, but open to the facts that would be presented and willing to listen. She clearly wanted to appoint two members who represented opposing views so the committee would be balanced. And as you know the committee after hearing from the community and after many environmental impact reports and presentations, recommended against the freeway.
On a personal note, in 1978 Margaret Strachan and I were married by Betty Roberts at Mitzi and Bill Scott's house, followed by one of the best parties we have ever attended at Gretchen Kafoury's house on NE Stanton. Gretchen, unfortunately, was called back to the legislature and missed the party and this was noted by her in the record of the legislature.
Sumner Sharpe
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Friday, 10 October 2003
Ernie, I enjoy your ramblings of PDX planning. I do recall the effort by Elizabeth Furse, myself and others to modify the Ross Island application (Corps, DSL, PDX) to remove the entire island (late '71, early '72). We got the new owners (Pamplins) to agree to a plan which would in the end yield some shallow water lagoons. For several years, Mike Houck and others went on a tour of the islands to monitor progress and see that the heron rookery was not dredged. Somehow, PDX planning lost the great drawings which Pamplins provided (I think Brainard did the work) and which illustrated great natural plantings which never have happened.
John Frewing
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Penny Allen writes from her Paris sanctuary with memories of her good friend Corky Hubbert, who passed away recently. For those who remember Corky, he was a bright, energetic and distinctive personality. He wasn't a planner, exactly, but then neither were most of those who made Portland different then--and still different today.
Corky Hubbert
born Carl Hubbert
later known in L.A. as Cork Hubbert
Part One: Mirage
The show called Mirage was a biting musical, created and performed mostly at the Euphoria tavern during Corky's early period, in 1974, when he was still living in Portland and was still known as Corky. I found Corky doing his own show, The Lola Desmond Story and recruited both him and Lola Desmond (a totally made-up name) for a new show. Mirage, amazingly enough, was a raucous singing satire of the Middle-East morass, with Egypt, Syria, Israel and Palestine duking it out. Inspired primarily by the Yom Kippur war beginning in October, 1973, Mirage put the leaders of numerous countries on trial and on stage with huge nametags on their fronts so the audience would know who they were.
The fact that very little has changed in Middle-Eastern politics since we wrote that show 30 years ago is not a promising thought--except that now, the terrorism on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides is more frequent and more efficient, but in Mirage, we already had the terrorism central and at least comically efficient, so we must have seen the future coming even then. The one thing that happened in our show that hasn't happened in reality, or at least not yet, as I write this on October 6, 2003, was that in Mirage, a belly-dancing Israeli woman spy assassinated Arafat in his tent. Plot-wise, in Mirage, this seemed like the way to make the whole situation blow, which it did.
The fact that we succeeded in writing a truly funny show about such a subject was because of Corky Hubbert's comic brilliance, exquisite sense of improvisation, capacity to imitate the famous, and unsurpassed adrenaline. We would identify a leader's weakness, or tics, or the absurdity of his or her (Golda Meir) political stance, and Corky would fly with it. He had an ability to seize upon raw material and then synthesize seemingly everything he ever knew into a memorable comic insight. Corky's most unforgettable piece in Mirage was when he played a threatening Colonel Muammar Khaddafi, the Libyan president transformed by Corky into a perfect imitation of Bob Dylan, circa Highway 61 Revisited, singing words he wrote himself: "Sleep With One Eye Open, Moshe Dayan," the song went, and it was a show stopper. In case you've forgotten, Moshe Dayan only had one eye. The other was covered with a patch.
I never heard of anyone doing another show like Mirage until 1999, when some satirical group did a show in Cairo. I read about it in an article in the International Herald Tribune, which I sent to Corky. The article made the Cairo show sound like Mirage redux, only this time it was Arabs doing the satirizing, so the focus was no doubt different. As a show though, it was apparently maniacally comic and organized around one very funny, very short comic, just like Mirage. I couldn't help thinking that some student from Egypt had been in Portland at Portland State University's Middle-East Studies Center in 1974, and had seen our show. Then he went home and years later did something similar himself.
Bravo, Corky, for being so memorable.
Part Two: The Sisters Hotel
In 1985, Corky came up to Central Oregon for a visit to the ranch outside of Sisters where I was living. He came with Joe and Charlotte Uris, their daughters Rachel and Elisa, and David Horowitz. We went into town for lunch to the Sisters Hotel, which was an authentically old two-story wooden Old Western building with a boardwalk, high ceilings, and many little rooms upstairs along a hallway. Certain people in town enjoyed saying the Hotel used to be a whorehouse, but then people always enjoy saying that about some building in their town. Anyway, Sisters at the time was largely an undeveloped, straight, fundamentalist Christian, sincere, even innocent place.
Our gang sat down at a big table in the middle of the first floor restaurant, and we weren't being particularly loud or unusual or raucous at all. The teen-age waitress came over to take our order, glanced around at us all open-faced, and then she fixed wide-eyed on Corky.
"Are you guys from the circus?"
The thing is, the waitress had asked her question in all innocence, no wit or irony intended, but Corky in particular was outside her scope, so she'd blurted out her thought. Without excluding the girl, Corky seized upon this choice raw material and riffed uproariously about innocence and the circus and correct behavior and being an outsider, getting funnier and funnier on everybody's energy pouring in his direction. He had a subject going that he knew a lot about, and he wouldn't let it go.
Corky grew up in a small Oregon beach town, so he was small-town himself, under the manic urban facade. And a relative, his grandfather I believe, had been a Pentecostal preacher, whose style of delivery Corky would later excel at. These past experiences were rich sources for Corky, who knew how better than anyone to take the small guy's point of view and, when he was hot, transform it into Everyman's.
Bravo, Corky, for being so smart.
Part Three: Ciao, Cork
I never saw Corky perform stand-up comedy in L.A. under the name of Cork. He changed his name to Cork when he went to L.A., because there was already another guy in Hollywood named Corky. Anyway, I never saw him doing stand-up comedy at The Comedy Store or other clubs, where he performed in the big-time L.A. comedy scene. People say he was brilliant, with his own great material, a rapid-fire socio-politically astute mind in a manically comic body, just as I will always remember him.
Too bad Corky and I--or Corky and somebody else--too bad we didn't make that movie together, the one that would make him a star: Corky as a newsstand guy with a secret life, a life full of sexual passion, good works, and a tragedy that, try as he might, he doesn't succeed in preventing. We threw ideas back and forth about this movie from time to time during the '90s, when we saw each other in Portland, but we did not even come close to doing it.
So many people felt intense love for that man Corky. Nothing will ever fill up the holes in so many hearts. Nothing. Not even laughing like him. Or maybe laughing like Corky will help for a minute. He could laugh in so many different ways, all of them vaudevillian, most of them pretty villain:
Hehhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Ho, ho, ho, from the stomach.
Heh, heh, heh, heh.
Nicker, nicker, in the bottom of the throat.
Haaaaaaaaaaaaaa, with head thrown back.
Others?
Everybody who knew him, you can remember how he laughed, you can still hear it... pull it up out of your memory... find it... think about it... hear it... and on the count of three, everybody laugh like Corky. One, two, three.
That's better. Lots. Thanks. Since I got the news of Corky's death, I've been walking around, laughing like him, unconsciously shouting his name out loud. CORKY! CORKY! And I've been pumping adrenaline like mad. CORKY, we're all working together again!
Bravo, Corky, for teaching us so much.
Penny Allen
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Thursday, 10 July 2003
I had just quit my job, having been working for two years straight at Multnomah County in their first rendition of a Budget Office for Ross Hall (later one of the 3 people that started the original Willamette Week) as staff to Bud Kramer/Don Clark. That work had included a joint project between the City and County to create a computerized finance system, which I think the City paid for substantially out of HUD 701 Planning grants originally intended to support "planning" activities... Doug Butler was part of that, and then he went to work for Stout about then too. The City decided to go their own way on that project, causing us at the County to pull out, with the result that the City received its first ever "No Opinion" on their audit from Coopers, I think for the 1973 or 1974 fiscal year. Scandal, scandal...
After spending the last half of 1973 on the road in my truck, I returned to PDX and spent the summer of '74 hanging out. Butler called me in the fall of '74 and told me to go talk to a guy named Ernie Munch, and in October I went to work as Bike Program Manager in the Planning Bureau, which had little to do with bikes, and everything to do with capital project budgeting. But it turned me into a Biker...
Dick Hofland
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Wednesday, 9 July 2003
As you know, I was with FJI (Frank Ivancie) reviewing your recommendations and generally siding with you, much to Pat Bell's chagrin. Fast forward 30 years to Vera and her south-of-downtown plans. Looks like building "stair-step" concepts as they approach the river are losing to "in-fill" concepts. What happened to PDX livability? Cram 350' towers next to the river and views be damned. Oh well, at least you'll see Mt. Hood from Terwilliger. I guess the canyon winds created will cool river residents except for summer east winds. Progress.
I hope all is well with you and yours. Keep up the good work because it's great to compare today's realities with yesteryear's dreams.
Dwight Nickerson
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Wednesday, 09 July 2003
Those were the days when we could move tall buildings with a single hearing... provided that Bob Frasca was ready to give in. I recall the hearing before the Planning Commission (I was representing NEDC at the time) where, with a flourish, Bob agreed with the PC to move the PGE Tower back a block.
John Platt
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Wednesday, 9 July 2003
In the third quarter of 1973, I was building 30 units of elderly housing in Hines, 40 units of family housing in Hermiston, and getting ready to start a farm labor housing facility in Milton-Freewater. I was constantly, enjoyably all over Eastern Oregon, and I'd never even heard of Mike Thorne! The I-80 posted speed limit was 75, but you never got tickets until you exceeded 90. I once made the Enterprise-Portland "milk run" in 4 hrs, 3 minutes, but never achieved my goal of "under 4." Since it's only 338 miles, and I'm always in a hurry, I never thought my goal unreasonable. Some things never change.
Tom Walsh
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Friday, 11 July 2003
Re: your question of where I was in the third quarter of 1973: This was my starting date at the City of Portland: August to be exact. Just before that, I biked down to the coast, up to Astoria and from there, all the way down to the first stand of redwoods in California, the Jedediah Smith Redwoods.
Ranjana Blackett
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Thursday, 10 July 2003
In the third quarter of 1973 I was traveling from Detroit to Portland via the Canadian Rockies moving back to Portland to enter PSU Urban Studies doctorate program and to run for the legislature. While in the Rockies, I called Ron Buel to set up an appointment with he and Neil to discuss potential of working for the City on transportation. I met with them in September, they hired Doug Wright but sent me to Ed Wagner at Tri-Met. I was retained on contract, and proceeded to prepare a report on behalf of Tri-Met on the Mt. Hood Freeway and begin planning the transit mall.
Rick Gustafson
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Wednesday, 9 July 2003
Hey, Ernie! How ya doin'? Frances and I are right now in Santa Fe [which she insists has had some good planning, including leaving streets unpaved to discourage too much through traffic and heavy development--why didn't we think of that in Portland?] where we've bought a house. Now that we're further West, it's not hard to think of those days back in PDX--30 years ago. Whew! Say hi to Lynn and take care of yourself.
Alan Webber
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I have enjoyed your article planning events thirty years ago. It was in 1973 when Frank Ivancie was in charge of parks that I tried to get another basketball standard in Laurelhurst Park as my son, Jack, asked. Jack said all of the big guys would always take over the one and only basketball standard which was then situated on the Oak street side. Frank finally agreed, but when the paperwork got to his desk he would not sign it. It wasn't until Mildred Schwab took over the parks and a new director came on that we were able to do something. The new director (I forget his name) called me and stated that someone told him I had been trying for 3 years to get another basketball standard. He said if I would select a site and a plan he would see that we had a "real" basketball court. I selected the current site and when the court was finished, Mildred and her staff played a group of my children's friends in a basketball game to initiate the court. Unfortunately, my son, Jack, had died prior to this going in. But, every
time I drive past it, I think of my son, Jack.
It was also in 1973, that we tried to talk the city council into putting in a left turn lane on 39th and E. Burnside. Frank told us we were crazy and that in order to do it we would have to take out all of the trees along 39th on the Laurelhurst Park property. I was on the street committee at the time and through the friends on this committee, we came up with the plan as it is today and I got Channel 2 to televise what we wanted and how we could do it without removing the trees. Frank grudgingly gave us three months for it to work. This project, I am told, was the forrunner for all of the left turn lanes that came afterwards--squeezing in a left turn lane where there was only the four lanes.
The '70s were an exciting, growing time, a time when many of us were really working with and for the city. I can't remember if this is the year, also, that the ODMV was trying to take out 57 homes in the Laurelhurst area in order to widen I-84. I was president of the LNA at that time and had several friends who worked for the DMV and also, the head of ODMV was an old school chum of my brothers. They told me about this development before it was public and I had the first committee working with them in order to save more homes. Quite a time! We ended up having only 21 or 19 homes removed thanks to a retired engineer, Bob Brown, who lived in Laurelhurst.
Shirley Klug
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I do enjoy your updates of the past. And I appreciate your reference to Dad (George Baldwin). Incidentally, he made a couple of other moves coincident with the one you mentioned. In the same month, he contradicted the strong recommendation of his staff and the regional FHWA director to exclude a no build option in SOM's EIS study... and directed us to develop a no build option that would work. (Shortly thereafter he moved his recalcitrant project manager to a post in eastern Oregon). I also know that he told Glen Jackson that he could not decline to meet with the new Mayor of Portland. Glen and Neil met... and the rest is history. Anyway... some day I would enjoy sitting down and visiting about three decades past. It was simpler then... but the unknowns were more monumental... and yet folks who didn't even like each other... pulled in complementary directions
Greg Baldwin
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I remarried and moved to Aptos, California, three years ago. Aptos village was founded in 1851. Now it's a beach resort area just south of Santa Cruz on Monterey Bay.
I recently started a company that designs and manufactures pet funeral packages. It's for parents to help kids deal with the loss of a beloved pet. Manufacturing and product coordination are done in Portland. I still have a house there so I still visit frequently. Portland still feels like home. I miss it and would love to see old friends and colleagues again.
Suzanne Guest
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Spencer Vail dropped off an obituary for Bob Austin who passed away in January 2002. He retired from the Planning Bureau in 1983 after 35 years of service. He was 80 years old and survived by his wife and 5 children.
Carolyn Johnson
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I was sorry to hear about Bob Austin passing away. I'd wondered about him over the years. It's impossible to believe that it's been 19 years since he retired from BOP!!
I'll always remember one occasion: It happened in the years when BOP was located in the "City Hall Annex", the small building where the Portland Building now stands (once known as McElroy's Spanish Ballroom, a great local jazz and dance club). In those days, smoking was allowed anywhere, and Bob smoked a pipe. One day he was walking down the corridor, and passed Marc Rutherford, a particularly vehement anti-smoker. As they passed, Marc grabbed Bob's pipe out of his mouth (or maybe his hand) and threw it down the hall. I don't remember what words might have been exchanged before, during or after, but it was a memorable event, especially for those of us who knew both of them.
Anne McLaughlin
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Ernie, I remember well when we interviewed Charles Jordan and brought him to Portland to be Director of the Model Cities Program--a really good man.
I also remember when Connie was a Commissioner and her being at the funeral for Rev. Edgar Jackson, a Model Cities Board member. It was held in a tiny wooden church in Albina. The police chief and all the commissioners were there. R. L. Anderson, former head of the Brown Berets, was escorted from the State Prison that night to give a eulogy. He strode from the door way at the rear of the church to the pulpit near the casket, delivered an amazing extemporaneous tribute and then immediately strode out to the State Police for the return trip to Salem. As I recall, R. L. had been convicted for his role in the Union Avenue fires and also for " ex-con in possession of a weapon." He once took me on an unforgettable tour of the underside of Albina.
A footnote: No doubt one of the important contributions that the Model Cities program made to Portland was bringing Charles Jordan to town.
John Gustafson
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February 15, 2002
Mr. Bonner: I greatly enjoyed your website about the origins and history of Portland planning. The interview with Richard Ivey reminded me of a weekend morning in 1970 or 1971 when my father, Clifford Alterman, took me with him to meet Dick Ivey for breakfast to talk about how the plan was going. Dick described the plan, going through a copy he brought with him, and gave it to Cliff to take away with him. (I have that copy now.) My guess is that this also was one way that Dick passed information along to Terry Schrunk and Frank Ivancie without leaving a paper trail.
(I asked Dean if I could publish his story on this web site.) His reply:
You may publish my story, and I would be pleased. I think my father would be pleased also, from wherever he may now be working behind the scenes. At that age I did not understand why he was unhappy whenever his name was in the newspaper, other than below a letter to the editor he had written.
If I can locate the book, I would be happy to show it to you. My guess from how it was prepared (plastic comb-ring bound, big and square, soft-covered with an aerial photo of downtown on the front) is that it was either a late draft or the actual first edition of the downtown plan. I read it several times when I was a student, and again when I was on the Multnomah County Planning Commission. It had the essential elements of downtown and was, if not the final product, close to it.
Several of the people you interviewed alluded to bits and pieces of this fact, which I think is very important to the story and makes Portland's leap into serious downtown planning all the more remarkable. In 1968 the city council included Terry Schrunk, who was the mayor; Bill Bowes, Stan Earl, Mark Grayson, and Frank Ivancie. Ivancie had been elected in 1966 when he was 41 to succeed Ormond Bean; the others were in their 60s or higher. All the commissioners except Ivancie had first been elected in the 1950s, and they were generally part of the same business-political axis. (Ray Kell and Cliff Alterman at one time or another represented and advised all of them and, in fact, Stan Earl lived in a house that Ray and Cliff owned).
Then in the winter of 1969-70, Commissioners Bowes and Earl died in office, and Mark Grayson retired when his term ended in 1970. Schrunk announced in 1971 that he would not seek a fifth term, partly in response to a committee called, if I remember rightly, "Committee for a New Mayor." At the time, midterm council vacancies were filled by appointment. My recollection is that Neil Goldschmidt was elected to Grayson's seat and Lloyd Anderson and Connie McCready were appointed to the Bowes and Earl seats. Then after Goldschmidt became Mayor on January 1, 1973, the Council appointed Mildred Schwab to fill his seat. So within a very short period (January 1967 to January 1973), the entire council turned over, as did the mind-set of the city council.
Hidden in this changeover was a big changeover in what "public participation" meant in Portland. When the downtown plan was first discussed, "public participation" meant that the downtown business and property owners had been consulted (e.g., Glenn Jackson, Ira Keller, Paul Murphy, and others). By the time the plan was finished, "public participation" meant that people who used and valued downtown not just as a place to have a business, but as concerned citizens, were also part of the process. A good part of city politics, and city life, became more open and transparent.
Interestingly (and my view at this time was from offstage), the city council continued to use Ray and Cliff as intermediaries and "honest brokers" until Bud Clark became mayor, in 1985, maybe because they could negotiate agreements without embarrassing one another in public. Others have stepped forward to fill that role since then.
Forgive me for plaguing you with one more recollection. In about 1973, the Portland Labor Press (?) identified Ray Kell as one of the 40 most powerful people in Portland, and Ray complained that for a while after the story hit the press, none of the city councilors except Frank Ivancie would give him an appointment.
Dean N. Alterman
Lane Powell Spears Lubersky LLP
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Ernie: I enjoyed the interview with Betty Merten a lot... A couple of comments:
1. She mentions her friend and fellow activist "Deenie Rousch." I knew Deayne quite well and here is the correct spelling of her name: Deayne Roush
2. She and her fellow activists in STOP were very effective and I'm glad you have covered this (I mentioned Betty almost in passing in the piece I wrote, and made no mention of STOP at all. She and they deserve much credit, not only for their particular issues, but for the kind of grassroots organization they were, a quality I didn't fully appreciate at the time. And Jim Howell is still an activist on transit issues)
3. Betty talks about the Deleuw-Cather 1990 Regional Transportation Plan. I thnk it is hard for people who weren't around to realize what hubris this so-called plan represented, literally covering the city in freeways... or how close Portland came to suffering this assault. Except for the sustained efforts of the citizens in STOP and in the lawsuit against the Mt. Hood Freeway. These folks made our job in government a lot easier. I used to have a copy of the Deleuw-Cather report, as well as the environmental work done by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (which she mentions), plus the Highway Division's environmental impact report on I-205. I gave all this to the Oregon Historical Society some years ago, and people could go there to read this stuff. Everybody, just for fun, could read Robert Cato's "The Power Broker," a biography of Robert Moses, the powerful consultant hired by the Portland City Council long ago to set all this madness up.
4. She talks about Larry Griffith and says: "I doubt that we would have MAX today if it hadn't been for Larry Griffith." I completely agree with this, and also agree that people treated Larry like a kook. Such is the life of visionaries, but Larry took things with good humor. I also agree that Betty's work was essential, and her relationship with Larry is a good example of mentoring. People in portland owe these two a lot.
5. Referring to when the Mt. Hood money actually began to get transferred to specifically light rail and not just generically transit, you say: "I haven't yet found out how that changed from that list of projects which basically had the Banfield bus line in there, to one where the Banfield corridor had the light rail in it." And Betty said she didn't know either. I don't remember the exact details of the process, but it went something like this:
*After the Mt. Hood Freeway died, Governor McCall appointed a high-level task force to study the alternatives for this money. As staff they hired a guy named Lowell Bridwell, who had been a federal highway administration top dog for Lyndon Johnson (or maybe Nixon's first term, i just don't remember). I think Glenn Jackson was the chair, and Goldschmidt and Mel Gordon were on this commission. I remember some of us lobbied Bridwell's staff technicians really hard to give light rail a fair shake. Coming from the packed-in cities of the east, they were much hung up on population density and were skeptical that Portland density was sufficient to support rail.
As I recall, Bridwell's final report was generally supportive about transferring money to light rail, and maybe that's what broke the ice.
*The report done by Lon Topaz was absolutely essential because it gave local credibility to the light rail option, including some preliminary cost estimates (which turned out to be way too low, but so were the Mt. Hood's). As soon as the Topaz report was done, highway engineers were out there in the Banfield corridor checking the alignment. Not that they knew much about light rail, but i think the highwaymen saw an opportunity to get some money to fix the Banfield, and the busway idea wasn't really going to work on that freeway anyway. They officially were participants in a public process to move the idea along
*I believe around that time there was a change in federal law that opened the door for the light rail possibility, and this was something Bridwell knew a lot about, plus he had lobbying power in congress. One thing to remember: activists across the country, including many of those mentioned in Betty's interview, had worked hard to bust the highway trust fund, and had failed to bust it both at the national level and the state level but they didn't fail completely. There was much sentiment among the public to do something about the hideous inequities between the automobile and transit. The "bust the trust" effort laid the groundwork for whatever modest reforms came foward in Congress. Buel might know about this, because he was involved in the trust busting effort
*As I recall, the work of your staff, Doug Wright and Ernie Munch, was instrumental in securing the transfer. I remember Doug, in particular, laboring over position papers or staff briefings about the transfer nuts and bolts, so that the effort would be credible in the details
*I know that the proposed I-205 freeway was a factor here. As well, this freeway was a high priority for Glenn Jackson, and he was apoplectic about the hangups his baby had encountered (I experienced his frustration in person.) Eventually, Mel Gordon used the I-205 issues to apply the only real leverage the county had concerning transfer of the money for light rail (the Mt. Hood Freeway was entirely contained in city limits and thus involved no county road closures outside the city limits). Initially the issues the county had about I-205 concerned its massive impacts on growth in east county, the excessive number of interchanges, and the completely unacceptable ramps to Government Island, then, as now, an undeveloped island. But Mel Gordon was fully committed to light rail, so he insisted as well that the state seriously pursue light rail, and build both bikeways and a rail corridor along the alignment in Multnomah County, as well as on the bridge. Mel's position was the best we could get; some of us wanted to kill I-205 completely.
I left the county before the negotiations on I-205 were completed, so my memory is incomplete. You might ask Buel, who stayed in close touch with things, even though he had left to start Willamette Week. You might also ask Mel Gordon, former Clark County Commissioner who lives in Vancouver. Last time I saw him his memory was as sharp as ever.
For a highwayman's view of those times, Bob Bothman might know -- I believe he lives in Beaverton. Also, a guy named Ted Spence may still be around.
Again, a wonderful interview and keep up the good work on this interesting effort. It seems to me to be a lot of work, but worthy work to recall those heady days.
By the way, I hadn't seen or talked to Betty for more than 20 years. After reading this interview I looked her up and we had a nice chat thanks to your web site.
David Hupp
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I have lots of information on the history of Oaks Bottom and I was at the hearings that Elizabeth testified at... Believe it or not we paid a consultant, Dr. Scott English, a whopping $100 to represent us before City Council... That's the council hearing at which Mildred Schwab got up, lit a cigarette and walked past Scott, while he was engaged in formal testimony and went out into the audience and sat down next to Bob Pamplin, Sr. and started joking out loud. What an era!
Mike Houck
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Ernie, congratulations on an absolutely superb treasure of a web site.
I spent 17 years as a reporter in Portland, on the air at KGW-TV8 (NBC), from 1983 to 2000, and although my tenure there overlapped just briefly with the major early events that you chronicle, I crossed paths with and had the opportunity to get to know many of the leaders and urban thinkers of the time. And of course, I covered many of the issues that sprang from those seminal decisions of the '70s.
As a reporter, I always sensed a very strong affinity among Portlanders for connections, links, continuity to the city's recent and distant past. Stories that I broadcast that touched on PDX history, or which included old photos or film, inevitably got tremendously positive response. Did you know, btw, that KGW-TV has an amazing and little-known historical resource? My station has saved essentially every frame of its news film from December 1956 (when it first began broadcasting, with Tom McCall, Richard Ross, Ivan Smith, and Doug Lamear) to the present. Nearly all other broadcasters in America, and certainly all those in PDX, have long since discarded their film as ancient and worthless. The KGW film archive, in its own way, is a visual and editorial archive of many of the events you chronicle on planpdx.org.
Planpdx.org should be mandatory reading, in its wonderful and evolving entirety, for all journalists who purport to cover Portland city and urban affairs.
This is what the WWW should be all about: top-quality information, thoroughly sourced, complemented by photos, graphics, and other multimedia.
Thank you for your fine work.
Walden R. Kirsch
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Hi, Ernie, I love this interview with Betty. When we moved to Eastmoreland in '73 I met many of these folks and joined their babysitting group toward the tail end of it (they were 5-10 years older than I). Still hear about them from friends like Aliki Anderson who was the driving force behind the recycling program for the neighborhood. That required such drive to make it happen that we were really saddened when success was achieved and it became part of the garbage service. I also run into Elsa once in a while. They were all such competent women.
You're absolutely right about the loss of that rich resource of stay home mothers.
Ingrid Stevens
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Ernie, I just read the "comments" section on the web site. A minor correction for the drawing of you appearing before the council at the bottom of the page. I'm sure it was by Jack Ostergren, an Oregon Journal reporter, who had the City Hall beat before I did. Jack was a fabulous doodler, and I recognize his lettering as well as his artwork. (Jack was the one I told you about who sent the teletype message to the newsroom, "Connie looks ashen...must be Mildred" when Schwab was appointed to the City Council.) I succeeded Jack on the City Hall beat in May, 1973, but I must have been on vacation or away from the office on the date of that hearing.
Fred Leeson
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Awhile back I read the interview that you did with Dick Ivey. Dick was either confused in his illness or didn't know the facts surrounding the Morrison East and West parking garages. Meier & Frank did not build the East garage. They contributed $500,000 and agreed to sell their old parking garage block (now Pioneer Square) to the City if we had 2 elevators at the SE corner of the garage and built it with a high-speed exit system, different from the West garage. Naito's did not build the West garage. They paid for reinforcing the bays where their sky-bridge from the Galleria landed on the structure. They also signed an agreement to pay for the parking spaces their connection eliminated. The planning, financing, construction supervision and leasing of the ground floor retail space was carried out by the Portland Development Commission and then turned over to Ivancie's Facilities Management staff.
Dave Hunt
(past Executive Director of the Portland Development Commission)
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Ernie, You are getting closer to the Griffith years at the Bureau of Buildings. I became involved in 1975 and stuck it out until 1984!! Its interesting to note that once a person is involved in City Administration its difficult to leave. I still have my consulting business with helping people through the bureaucratic review process, i.e., Land Use Planning and Construction Permit Processing.
I also have a second job now in that I am the Mayor of Tigard, which is now the 11th largest City in the state, and still growing.
Please keep me on your e-mail list as I am enjoying the articles and knowing what people are doing today.
Jim Griffith
(Past Bureau of Buildings Director for Portland)
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Hi Mr. Bonner: I am a relatively new transplant to Portland. In the 1970s, I was a sullen teenager with bad fashion sense in a rural Northern California town called Sebastopol. Nonetheless, my interest in Portland's history is considerable, which precipitated my "thank you" message to you.
(Incidentally, we have spoken once by phone before; I was curious as to whether you might be interested in proofing sections of the rough draft to my book, AN ARCHITECTURAL GUIDEBOOK TO PORTLAND.)
Best regards,
Bart King
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Ernie: Great info. Thanks a bunch. I came back to Oregon in July of 1973 when all these things had just been put in place or proposed. As I remember, you guys were just beginning to sort out a number of the issues. Campbell, Yost, Grube brought me to town to work on the Northwest Natural Gas Project (Flanders Square). When that stopped, I started my own firm in May 1975. By then, you guys were already institutions in the city. It seems like yesterday. And look what you accomplished!
Don Stastny
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Hi Ernie: About this time 30 yrs ago I was holding the largest yard sale in our city's history to raise money to support my litigation against the City of Milwaukie, aka Baker v. Milwaukie.
One phone call at a time, I contacted people in my community and explained our need to raise money to mount a legal challenge which, if successful, would require governments to adhere to adopted comprehensive landuse plans. At that time, it was rare that people knew of these plans, or that they carried the weight of law! While it then seemed as a difficult concept for elected officials to understand, neighbors and friends in the environmental movement had a firm grasp on it -- NECESSARY!
So, we labored that summer, soliciting people to contribute goods, services, money, and labor to be used in the effort to pay for trip to circuit court, and subsequent final, and winning round in the Oregon Supreme Court.
What a summer that was! We made history!
After the win, it became a priority to put the then vauge phrase "citizen participation" on the official map of required planning protocol. That is another story...
Jean Baker, Milwaukie
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Ernie: Thirty years ago I was at the Pentagon playing Army. Needless to say, I had lived in Portland briefly until I won the only lottery I've ever won. Unfortunately, it was the draft lottery and they whisked me out of town in '70. It took me until '72 to return. Planning and politics were not yet on my plate.
CETA gave me a job in Frank's office. I vaguely remembered his face from '70s TV campaign ads. I didn't know him from Adam but soon found out. Without that dreaded government job, I wouldn't have found all you fine folks and my lovely wife. I guess you might say we put the Ivancie-Jordan relationship to a good test! [Editor's note: Dwight worked for Frank Ivancie; his wife, Liz, worked for Charles Jordan.]
Keep up the good work stitching those memories together. Take care and keep those missives coming.
Dwight Nickerson
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I was just finishing my 4th year in the B. Architecture program at the U of O. I applied for summer work at the Bureau and was directed to take a civil service test. I did, but was not high enough on the list to be considered. Roughly 18 months later I was invited to interview from the list, and hired by Dale Cannady.
Michael Harrison
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30 years ago Elizabeth Furse and I were working on some kind of limitation for Ross Island gravel mining. It ended up with a permit which lasted 40 years, at which time the island would be restored to natural conditions.
John Frewing
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Thirty years ago, the women of NW Portland were organizing their first-ever protest. They marched in front of the door at Good Samaritan to oppose the plans for the hospital to expand. And therein lies a tale. Love to all,
Mary Pedersen Blackett
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You know I remember, Ernie. I was just arriving -- from the University of Iowa planning and law school -- in Portland as these things were happening. It was a great experience and environment for a novice like me. But we were full of ourselves and the notion that it was really possible to design the future of one's community. It was a "peak" experience to be sure, working in the company of many committed and creative people. And here I am, after a 26-year hiatus, working on the development side of that equation. In fact, we are living Downtown, in what was the South Auditorium Renewal area and a large Italian and Jewish settlement before that, pushed out by the forces of urban renewal of the time. Thankfully, renewal activities have changed a bit and promise to change even more in the years ahead.
Don Mazziotti
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I thoroughly enjoyed your video script on the Square.
As an aside the contribution of Phil Bogue should not be overlooked. It was Phil who kept the fund-raising efforts going to a successful close. I recall him saying he had never realized the stand-pat opposition of some of the establishment before. Without Phil I don't think there would be a Pioneer Square (which is what we called it at the time). Also the efforts of the late Ilo Bonyhadi in overseeing early volunteer efforts should be acknowledged.
Bob Weil
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Hi Ernie, I just enjoyed your message about the originator of the Greenway idea but continued on to enjoy even more, Steve Jolin's eulogy to Connie McCready. I was out of town when the funeral occurred, otherwise I would have been at the funeral. She was a great lady.
Steve's insight into Connie's 'spiral' thinking was wonderful. When the decision on whether I-405 was going to wipe out Thurman Street or not, Connie was the critical vote. She toured the neighborhood, the day of the vote, and came back to the Council meeting after lunch at a Chinese restaurant. She read from a fortune cookie fortune, stating that it had been a major factor in her decision to reject the freeway going down the Thurman-Savier corridor. Everyone from the NWDA laughed from joy and relief, and Connie's humor. I don't remember at all what the fortune cookie stated, but who cared, the neighborhood was saved.
Bud Clark
Editor's note: Does anyone know what the fortune cookie said?
Answer (from Marjie Lundell): "There is still time to choose an alternate path."
Will everyone please give Marjie a round of applause.
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Ernie, I think Karl Onthank of the University of Oregon deserves credit as the original "father" of the Willamette Greenway concept. Bob Straub simply proposed it publicly before Tom McCall did. My information comes from Tom McCall's autobiography "Maverick," which he wrote with Steve Neal in 1977. On pages 68 and 70, speaking of the 1966 governor's race in which Bob Straub was the Democratic nominee, McCall says:
"I gave Straub credit for first enunciating from the platform the Willamette Greenway concept. We both had gotten material on it from the same man, Dean Karl W. Onthank of the University of Oregon. Onthank, who was an avid outdoorsman, had sent us both a file on the American River Greenway near Sacramento. He was a friend of both of ours -- so he made it available to both of us. I had been keeping it and thinking about it and considered it a good idea. Straub and I both were speaking to the Parks Association in the Eugene Hotel and that's when he said we ought to have the Willamette River Greenway. He did it in the morning and I followed him the next day. There was enough interval in between so that the Oregonian attacked him for proposing such a far-out idea, not worthy of consideration. But the Eugene Register-Guard, being more reflective and having worked with Straub when he was county commissioner and state senator, said it was a great idea. So I went over to the Register-Guard and said, 'I think it's a great idea, too.'
"The editors were really relieved. They said, 'God, we just thought we were going to get chopped up in the campaign because one guy brought it up and usually in politics the other candidate has to attack it. That's what makes the issues.' My grandfather in a 1917 address to the Massachusetts Legislature, talked about preserving the greenery along scenic highways with a greenway, and I had talked about greenways in the parks' sense. But I have always made it clear that Straub first endorsed the concept from the platform."
Jewel Lansing
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Bob Straub is clearly the father of the [Willamette Greenway] idea. His notion was essentially public access along both sides of the river for its full length (or at least from Eugene to Portland). McCall supported the concept but was particularly mindful of the concerns from the farming community (I think L.B. Day in his Teamsters/Cannery Workers role, and maybe dairy farmer Hector MacPherson sensitized Governor Tom) Boaters and hikers tramping through productive agriculture, scaring cattle, opening fences, etc. scared a lot of people.
When Straub became Governor, Janet McClennan (his Natural Resources Assistant) and L.B. Day agreed to address the issue through the Statewide Planning Goal process.
Dave Talbot's Parks Department had previously held some public meetings on the Straub concept and pretty well pissed off everyone. In at least one case Parks simply sent a tape recorder and a technician to take testimony! Really smart public involvement technique! So the issue was pretty sour in the minds of many, but the farming community was particularly outraged.
And as you may recall we (DLCD/LCDC) went through an exhaustive round of public hearings in 1975 and finally adopted Goal 15 (Willamette Greenway)---which is incredibly complicated. Since the death of Herb Riley, the principal author of Goal 15, I doubt there is anyone around who can really explain the damn thing.
I think the goal has had some positive effect, particularly in Portland where under your watch there was increased emphasis on access to the water. That also happened in Corvallis, Eugene, maybe Albany. At least Goal 15 put the greenway notion in a planning context, quieted the farmers,and got away from Straub's original notion of two permanent bankside trails from Eugene to Portland. This concept, while perhaps attractive on the surface, was always a political loser.
Eldon Hout
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