Oregon III. [antikvár]

You could put nine of the nation's Northeastern states — Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland — inside the borders of Oregon and still have 9,903 square miles left over. We are not crowded here. On better than 62 million acres of land, there are 2,660,000 of us. That's about forty-three people to every one thousand acres. Land gives Oregonians room to be different. This robust mix of population ranges from loggers to cowboys, from artists to ranchers, from makers of wine to silicon wafers. To comb through this rich diversity and accumulate a wealth of stories about Oregon's people from which to select the few that space allows here, my wife, Barbara, and 1 spent long weekends traveling the state, often to places that in our thirty years of living in Oregon we had seldom, sometimes never, seen. Here was our chance—a chance to visit the familiar and well-loved as well as the unfamiliar and to talk with the movers and shakers and with scores of individuals who never made a headline. Our usual practice was first to seek out the area's newspaper editoror publisher. People in the news business usually know the citizens who are making a difference in the community and others who are just plain interesting. Our visits confirmed the pervasive presence of a hot-blooded independence among people across this state. You don't tell an Oregonian what to think or how to dress or how to vote. Furthermore, they are conservationists to a fault. They recycle their bottles and they zealously guard their fresh air, forests, and beaches. Oregon has 429 miles of ocean beach. The most popular of the northern beaches borders the city of Seaside, fifteen miles or so south of the Columbia River. Brooks Dareff, Managing Editor of the Seaside Signal pointed out to us some of the people who are making a difference in Seaside. Among them are two remarkable young graduates of Seaside High School. Still in her thirties, Rhonda Tuveng is a corporate vice president and manager of the Seaside Branch of the Bank of Astoria and the president of the Seaside Chamber of Commerce—a professional standing she has achieved without a college education. Her boss is also without a college degree. A 1963 graduate of Seaside High School, Cheri Savage is President of the Bank of Astoria and, at this writing, the only female bank president in the state. Cheri worked her way from an entry-level job as receptionist to Chief Executive Officer. On a whole different level, another person putting her talents to work for the community is Teresa Taylor, who plants and tends all the flowers in the plantings along Seaside's redesigned Broadway, the main street of the city. Teresa grows her flowers from seed. At first she simply volunteered, but now she has a contract with the Chamber of Commerce. Then there is Bunny Doar of Gearhart, who began with the Signal back in 1947 as a photo technician. She recently wrote a book describing Seaside's history over the past eighty years. A neighbor of hers is Royal Nebeker, an expressionist painter who studied in Oslo, shows his work all over the world, and teaches at Clatsop Community College. A recent addition to the entrepreneurial colony in Seaside is a couple from the Spokane area, Pat and Rosemary Link. After ten years in Seattle and fifteen years in Chicago, where Pat worked for Time Magazine, they decided they had had enough of big cities. In Seaside one warm March night, Pat spotted a classic three-story house set back from the beachfront promenade. They bought it and set about restoring it. This is the century-old house built by Alexander Gilbert. A former Astoria saloon keeper who moved to Seaside and developed most of the city from Broadway, south, Gilbert was sixty-five when he served as mayor in 1914. Now Gilbert's House has been rewired and replumbed, and the Links operate it as a bed and breakfast and a place to hold mini-conferences. They can accommodate groups of up to twenty people. Nine miles south of Seaside is picturesque Cannon Beach. Artists and craftsmen by the dozen have come here to live and work. To name but a few: Harry and Hanne Greaver, who create their own drawings and paintings and then they make prints which they sell in galleries in Oregon and around the world; the Hannens, Jim and Deborah, who do beautiful stained glass work; and the Worcesters, Bill and Sally, who blow glass. There is also Jean Auel, the nationally known writer who has specialized in novels of prehistoric times. We gleaned a great deal of this information from a delightful visit one forenoon with Judge Herbert Schwab and his wife, Barbara, sitting in their cozy home on "the front" as we say of Oregon beach homes that are right on the ocean shore. Herb, as he is known to his friends, is the brother of retired Portland City Commissioner, Mildred Schwab, with whom he swaps stories daily by phone between the beach and Portland. A circuit judge for seven years, Herb resigned and went back to private law practice because, he told me, "I had to get three kids through private colleges." About the time they left school, the Oregon Court of Appeals was created, and Schwab was appointed to that court. He served from 1969 to 1981. When he retired, he was Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals. Herb told me a delightful group meets most informally every morning at a local cafe for coffee and conversation. "Sometimes there will be two of us, Alfred Aya and me, and some mornings there will be as many as a dozen. And it's everybody from people like Les Shirley, to whom the cost of the coffee was a significant thing, to fellas who are millionaires two or three times over."