Portland Magazine Winter 2020

Winter 2020

(Human) Nature

FEATURES

2 ON THE BLUFF 4 The Experts 5 Campus Briefs 7 Sports 9 Visiting Voices 10 En Route 11 Second Look

40 CLASS NOTES 44 In Memoriam 49 For the Love of It

28 Affordable Affordable

12 Home and Free

by Rosette Royale A photographer who makes his home on the streets of Seattle introduces this writer to new places of beauty.

by Marcus Covert ’93, ’97 Rob Justus ’87 has built 512 low-income housing units, and he’s just getting started.

32 At the Root

by Fr. Patrick Hannon, CSC An exploration of history, language, and family memory.

Winter 2020 Vol. 38, No. 2 President Rev. Mark L. Poorman, CSC Editor Jessica Murphy Moo Designer Darsey Landoe Associate Editor Marcus Covert ’93, ’97 Contributors Roya Ghorbani-Elizeh ’11, Anna Lageson-Kerns ’83, ’14, Hannah Pick, Celeste Robertson, Amy Shelly ’95, ’01 Cover Photo by Bryant Carlin Portland is published three times a year by the University of Portland.

Copyright © 2020 by the University of Portland.

All rights reserved.

Editorial Offices Waldschmidt Hall, 5000 N. Willamette Blvd., Portland, OR 97203-5798 Email jmurphymoo@up.edu Online up.edu/portlandmagazine

22 The Clinic the House Built

by Amanda Waldroupe University of Portland alumni started the Blanchet House to build community with our houseless neighbors.

Nearly 70 years later, three more alumnae, along with UP’s School of Nursing, are establishing health services for Blanchet residents.

Printed on 10% recycled and FSC-certified paper in Portland, OR.

34 Bedside with Mr. Lopez

by Jessica Murphy Moo UP’s Simulated Health Center prepares student nurses for the workforce in new ways.

Third-class postage paid at Portland, OR 97203.

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Opinions expressed in Portland are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University administration.

Postmaster: Send address changes to Portland Magazine, University of Portland, 5000 N. Willamette Blvd., Portland, OR 97203-5798.

EDITOR’S LETTER

Fellow Travelers I KNOW IT’S A BOLD STATEMENT to say you’re about to read the best (human) nature story you’ll read all year. It might even be unwise for me to do so. Who am I to tell you what your “best” is? Still, I think it’s true. Even if the phrase “nature writing” makes you head to the nearest shopping mall, I think you’ll be moved by the human story behind “Home and Free.”

It was years ago that I first heard writer Rosette Royale tell the story of his ventures into Olympic National Park with nature photographer Bryant Carlin, and it was the kind of story that wouldn’t let me go.

Someone had recommended I reach out to Rosette to be a guest speaker in my University of Washington writing class because they’d heard him speak on storytelling at the Search for Meaning Book Festival. I invited him to my class, and my students thought he was the best speaker I’d brought in all year. So I brought him back again the next year, and the year after that.

Then I moved here to Portland and asked him to write a version of the story for us, and I asked if we could include Bryant’s photography. Seeing through Bryant’s eyes is an important element of the story, as was making sure we paid Bryant for his photography.

There was some uncertainty to this endeavor. Bryant was dealing with homelessness, and Rosette’s correspondence with me was honest about how Bryant was facing some obstacles: Bryant’s phone broke, so Rosette wasn’t sure when they’d be able to connect; Bryant’s backpack had been stolen at one point, and with it, some photography; Bryant didn’t have a mailing address or open bank account.

But we figured it out. Working with Rosette and Bryant has taught me something about solidarity and taking risks for our fellow human travelers and taking risks for our own growth too.

And the writing. Wow. The other feature stories in this issue offer me the same example, human-integrity-wise and qualitywriting-wise. These stories throw me toward a kind of hope.

It was the kind of story that wouldn’t let me go.

Jessica Murphy Moo, Editor

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ADAM GUGGENHEIM

PORTLAND

ON THE BLUFF

UNIVERSITY OF PORTLAND is home to a new, well-worth-a-trip-to-visit work of art: an outdoor grotto by local sculptors Mike Suri and Scott Foster.

Situated in the northwest corner of the Marian Garden and adjacent to the Chapel of Christ the Teacher, the work was dedicated on November 24. In the tradition of many natural grottoes the world over, the shape suggests a cave or an arc; in the tradition of Catholic grottoes, there is a dedicated place to light a candle for a prayer or intention.

The grotto was carved and cut by hand, made of cedar, and clad in bronze, copper, and, it seems, light.

At night, the light from the candles reflects and dances off the textures of the hammered bronze. The piece comes alive with the intentions placed in it.

“We wanted the inside to be radiant,” says Scott Foster, to “broadcast the light.”

Light was also where the inspiration for this piece began more than 10 years ago. A student who had lost a family member came to Fr. Jim Gallagher, CSC, who was a seminarian at the time, and asked if she could light a candle somewhere on campus. She wanted to do something to mark her grief and offer an intention. At the time there was nowhere to light a candle.

When Fr. Jim returned to University of Portland as director of Campus Ministry, he was still mulling over this idea. He partnered with Todd Yuratich, the physical plant’s purchasing advisor, who set out to find the right artists to create it. Yuratich has a background as a visual artist and furniture craftsman,

BOB KERNS

New Light

George Galati ’54, ’60 lights a candle at the dedication of UP’s new grotto.

and he knew how to ask the right questions while also allowing the artists freedom to take the risk to create something new. He couldn’t be more pleased with the result and remarks that the work looks as though it has always been in the space—notice how the pillars that were already in the Marian Garden align with the arc, how the texture of the hammered bronze and copper complements the sculpture of Mary, how the handcut metals took inspiration from the chapel doors. The piece has a timeless quality, and it stands on its own as a work of art. “It starts taking on a

presence of its own and asking its own questions,” says Yuratich. Like any important work of art, it’s also worth revisiting. “The details are there—they have to be discovered.”

Which leads us to an invitation to you. If you feel the need to light a candle, please do come on by. UP’s newest work of art, its details, its meaning to our community are now being discovered.

A special thank-you to the Lou Holtz Foundation for the inspired gift that made this work possible.

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ON THE BLUFF THE EXPERTS

CHRIS HO

CARMEN RUIZ Day Custodian

Respect

ON MOVE-IN DAY, Carmen Ruiz welcomes the new first-year students along with the male residents of Villa. Ruiz, who works in custodial services, has been the dorm’s housekeeper for six-and-a-half years. With a smile, she also calls herself the “mom” of the dorm, and she does her part to ensure a warm environment. “Everybody helps each other in any way they can,” she says, “which makes a warm place, and makes it feel like home. The kids are so respectful.”

She says she loves the community in Villa. “I love my work,” she says. “I love what I do.” She also believes it’s important to respect people because you never know the past experiences that have brought them to the present.

In her native Peru, Ruiz was an accountant. Her son is studying medicine in Spain, and her daughter is finishing

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high school nearby. She speaks Spanish, English, and some Portuguese (she lived in Brazil when her late daughter was undergoing medical care there, and Ruiz learned the language out of necessity). She is now taking social work courses at night at Portland Community College, working toward her eventual goal of becoming a counselor. “I want to work with abused women. I was one of them. That is why,” she says, “I want to help. You need to learn how to listen to people.”

Ask Carmen Ruiz what she likes to do outside of work and her face lights up. “I love to dance,” she says. Specifically salsa. When she’s dancing, she doesn’t feel tired, she doesn’t feel any of life’s stresses. She feels free.

Thank you, Carmen, for your contributions to the University of Portland community.

ON THE BLUFF CAMPUS BRIEFS

True Mentor HEATHER DILLON

UP BIOLOGY PROFESSOR Tara Prestholdt won the 2019 Excellence in Teaching Award from the Association of College and University Biology Educators (ACUBE). The award is offered annually to honor faculty who practice and promote effective, innovative teaching in the biology classroom. ACUBE prides itself on focusing on smaller four-year colleges and universities, community colleges, tech schools, and research institutions. Members include junior faculty, senior faculty, graduate students, support staff, administrators, and others. While many here are aware of Prestholdt’s polymathic proficiency, mathematics professor Stephanie Salomone explains it best: “Tara is a true mentor to her undergraduate students. They don’t just enjoy science, they find science exciting, the process of discovery exhilarating, and the task of explaining science to laymen motivating.”

Mission Affirmed In October, a team of individuals from the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities visited the University of Portland.

The good news: the reaccreditation process went smoothly, and the school met all eligibility requirements and received three commendations for how UP carries out its core mission. “We can always strive to be better,” says Provost Thomas Greene, “but it was very gratifying that UP’s good work was affirmed over the threeday visit with commendations and no recommendations.” Greene commends the two years of preparation by UP’s entire accreditation team, driven by Michael Johnson, Coordinator for Assessment and Accreditation in the Office of Institutional Research.

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ON THE BLUFF CAMPUS BRIEFS

MLK’s Radical Vision Today A “Day On” UNIVERSITY OF PORTLAND observed the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday as a “day on.” One hundred and seventy students and staff spent the morning volunteering at 12 nearby nonprofits—working in a community garden, painting, folding and storing clothing donations at a women’s shelter, tearing up a rug at a church before its transformation into affordable housing, and more.

BOTH PHOTOS BY BOB KERNS

THE AFTERNOON MLK DAY CELEBRATION involved a musical performance by Julianne Johnson ’83, Sharif Morton ’21, and the UP Choir, followed by keynote speaker Walidah Imarisha, who is an author, historian, educator, and public scholar. Imarisha detailed the ways in which racist laws in Oregon—from the founding Black Exclusion laws to the redlining laws—are at the root of present trends of gentrification, poverty and incarceration rates, and displacement of longtime black residents.

“Without understanding history, we can’t know where we are or imagine ourselves into new futures.” She invoked the challenge of Dr. King’s radical vision and the resiliency of the black community in the work for racial justice.

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ON THE BLUFF SPORTS

WHEN THE TAP on the shoulder came, when the sit-down with the University of Portland president was requested, Donald Wilson ’06 was not the least bit surprised. He knew something would be coming. He had been keeping his secret for nearly a month, after all, slithering around The Bluff under the facade he was a student athlete, when, in reality, he was only fulfilling half of those obligations.

Wilson had arrived at UP with the world in front of him, a superb 6-foot-4, 200-pound basketball player from the Crenshaw neighborhood of West Los Angeles, whose easygoing smile, goofy sense of humor, and hardworking ethos were almost as impressive as his tenacious defense and versatile scoring ability.

But shortly after stepping foot on campus, Wilson lost his way. The relentless rain and gloomy Northwest skies had softened his smile, and the demands of college courses on top of basketball practices quickly became more overwhelming than a Gonzaga full-court press. At Dorsey High School, Wilson could grind through homework with ease, usually before school ended, allowing him to shift all of his focus to basketball, his passion. But college life proved to be different, and Wilson was unprepared for the academic rigors. He fell behind in one class. Then another.

And another. Eventually, he didn’t see the point, so he stopped attending classes altogether. A month breezed by.

Then the tap on the shoulder came, and Rev. E. William Beauchamp, CSC, and men’s basketball coach Michael Holton requested the sit-down. “I had a plan,” Wilson says. “I knew they were going to kick me out of school, so I figured I’d go back home and come up with my next move. My mom said, ‘You’ll have three months to either get a job or join the Army.’ ” But a wholly unexpected thing happened when Wilson sat down with UP leaders.

They didn’t force him to leave The Bluff. They didn’t admonish him.

They figuratively—and literally—put their arms around him. Beauchamp told him he was not going to let him fail. Holton told him he was going to

KARL MAASDAM

Wilson Returns

help him graduate. “They could have kicked me out,” Wilson says. “But the community and the school were invested into me. They said, ‘You’re going to make it.’”

Suddenly, Wilson had a group of supporters—Rev. Art Wheeler, CSC; Melanie Gangle; Dan McGinty; among others—working to help him succeed.

And quickly, they determined that Wilson’s problem wasn’t that he couldn’t handle the work; it was that he didn’t know how to manage his time to nurture success. So they taught him time management skills and crafted a daily routine, and he vowed to get back on track. Wilson returned to class, then attended summer school to maintain eligibility, and he didn’t just rebound, he flourished. By the time Wilson left The Bluff, he not only started 111 games over four years and finished 12th in school history in scoring, but he also graduated. He went on to play seven years professionally in Europe, where he and his wife, Alysha Wilson, started a family that now includes three children.

Now Wilson’s life has brought him back to UP. This winter, he joined the University’s broadcast team to provide color commentary for men’s and women’s basketball games on radio and television, one of many roles he’s embraced since moving to nearby Vancouver, WA, where Alysha is from.

Since returning to the Northwest,

Wilson has become a walking billboard for UP’s mission of teaching, faith, and service. He helps run a nonprofit youth basketball club (Oregon Basketball Club), serves as the athletic director at St. Joseph Catholic School in Vancouver, coaches girls’ basketball at Seton Catholic Prep in Vancouver, and partners with Sidewalk PDX, a nonprofit that facilitates the donation of shoes to underprivileged children.

On top of it all, in perhaps Wilson’s most selfless act of kindness—what he calls a “pay-it-forward” endeavor— he and Alysha welcomed a homeless teenager into their home three years ago, setting him up with a loving home, a chance to play for Oregon Basketball Club, and an opportunity to attend school at Seton Catholic.

He’s on pace to graduate high school and attend college, a success story even more inspiring than Wilson’s.

An ominous tap on the shoulder, it seems, has spawned a life’s work.

“The foundation at UP helped mold who I am today,” Wilson says. “My roots are here. This is where I grew up, where I went out on my own for the first time, where I matured. I could have gone in a different direction.

But they believed in me, supported me, and I’ll never forget it.”

—JOE FREEMAN ’99 covers the Portland Trail Blazers and NBA for The Oregonian/OregonLive.

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ON THE BLUFF SPORTS

Meet

Michael Meek communication (both on and off the court), and focus, along with being a great teammate and being coachable.

“The longer I coach, it has become less about the game and more about the people,” he says. “As a coach, I want to help teach our players life skills they can utilize in their future jobs and relationships.”

In addition to his successful programs, his coaching has been recognized. In 2012, he was named the D3hoops.com NCAA Division III National Coach of the Year and was three times named the NWC Coach of the Year, including in 2019.

“Coaches never know when jobs are going to open or when opportunities are going to be there,” he says. “I love my job, and I love that I get to coach here at UP.” Come to the final game of the season against Gonzaga on February 29, and you’ll see not only a committed team, but you’ll also see Meek courtside in his signature sweater vest.

Although he admits to being “teased from time to time,” Meek’s gameday sweater vest—now in Portland Pilots purple—is the only tradition he swears by.

—Roya Ghorbani-Elizeh ’11

UP ATHLETICS

MICHAEL MEEK WAS NAMED coach of the Portland Pilots women’s basketball team in April 2019, and his team is off to a strong start.

Over the past 25 years, Meek has built up a number of successful basketball programs. His nine years at George Fox University led to eight NCAA Tournament appearances overall, including NCAA Division III championship game appearances in 2012 and 2015. Before George Fox, Meek coached at Southridge High School, where his team won five state titles. Meek now ranks fourth in career winning percentage among active coaches with five-plus years of experience at all divisions of women’s college basketball.

But wins or track records aren’t his primary goals. For Meek, a positive experience is both the beginning and the end.

“My goal as a coach is to create an environment where our players can have an awesome time,” he says, smiling. “I feel that teams get off track when they aren’t having fun together.”

Through the years, Meek has developed a system for his teams to follow. His “non-negotiables” include effort,

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ON THE BLUFF VISITING VOICES

Walking with Two Feet of Love: Following in the Footsteps of Dorothy Day to End Homelessness

PUBLIC DOMAIN

Linda Plitt Donaldson, associate dean of the College of Health and Behavioral Studies at James Madison University, came to University of Portland to speak about Catholic social justice icon Dorothy Day and the lessons we can still learn from her today.

Donaldson also walked through the root cause of homelessness—the lack of affordable housing in this country—and the ways in which the “housing first” model—namely, getting people into secure housing and then tackling any other potential health issues second—is backed by evidence and research.

HEAR THE WHOLE THING Listen to Linda Plitt Donaldson’s entire talk at: up.edu/dorothyday

IN DECEMBER 1932, Dorothy Day went down to Washington, DC, to cover the hunger march for the unemployed. In Catholic social teaching, we talk about human beings as the subjects of their lives, not the objects, and that work should provide dignity and purpose. Dorothy Day not only wrote about this, but she showed up. She joined workers on the picket lines at strikes; she was a peace activist. She went to jail. It was the time of women’s suffrage, and she was a justice seeker.

While she was in Washington, DC, she went to the Shrine at Catholic University, and she asked for guidance and advice. She was a deeply spiritual person, and she developed a set of spiritual practices and was very disciplined in adhering to them. At the Shrine, she prayed that some way would be opened up for her to work for the poor and the oppressed.

She went home, and Peter Maurin was waiting for her outside her apartment. He wanted to talk to her about a great movement, what eventually became the Catholic Worker Movement.

Within five months, on May 1, 1933, they published the first Catholic Worker newspaper. This was in the midst of the Great Depression, massive unemployment, massive poverty. She let unemployed journalists who wrote

for the Catholic Worker stay in their offices, and she always made sure there was coffee and soup on the stove for anyone who was hungry. Word got out, and pretty soon there was a soup kitchen. People started showing up.

It was one of the first “housing first” programs. What an incredible legacy.

The newspaper still costs one penny an issue. There are 178 Catholic Worker communities across the United States and more around the world today.

Day was the living example of “the preferential option of the poor,” [a major tenet of Catholic social teaching]. She opted for voluntary poverty. She said, “I’m going to choose the life of poverty. I’m really in the struggle with you, having the same worries.” They were evicted, they had bills, they had bill collectors, and they had all kinds of Catholics upset about what they were writing in the Catholic Worker newspaper.

Solidarity is that commitment to persevere. It’s not: “There but for the grace of God go I.” Solidarity is: “There go I; that’s me.” When you see homelessness on the street, that’s telling you that your world is broken. When you’re advocating for justice, really partner “with”…not “for.” It’s not them despite us. It’s more that our world is broken because their world is broken.

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ON THE BLUFF EN ROUTE

TWENTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD Steve Johnson can hear his heart beat. “Tick” might be the more accurate word. In a quiet room other people can hear it tick too, and the sound has sent his fellow classmates looking for the source, looking for the clock they can’t find. But there is no clock. Not exactly.

The sound comes from the opening and closing of his new grade On-X heart valve, which he received through open heart surgery on October 28. On his right hand he wears a ring made of the same lightweight, unscratchable, and uncrushable material as the valve in his heart. Turns out his ring finger’s diameter is only one millimeter smaller than the diameter of his aortic valve.

Steve received his bachelor’s in mechanical engineering at UP in 2019 and then went straight into UP’s master’s program in biomedical engineering. So he describes his heart valve with the fascination of an engineer whose life’s work involves studying materials and heat and the process of making things work.

After heat treating the pyrolytic carbon, it turns into a material so tough “a car could run over it,” and he describes with wonder the invention of a “material your body can grow with… which is nuts.”

Steve got the heart surgery in October. He was born with congenital heart disease called aortic stenosis.

Before the surgery he couldn’t lift more than 40 pounds and had limits on how much he could exercise. In June, after an episode of chest pain that wouldn’t go away, a hospital stay, and many, many tests, he learned his heart valve was collapsing when his heart rate increased. Surgery was his best option.

If we go back four years, Steve’s heart is the reason he came to University of Portland in the first place.

University of Portland was the first on his list of college tours. He knew he wanted to pursue engineering, but somehow he missed UP’s connection

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BOB KERNS

At the Heart of It

Steve shows Darlene Shiley his heart valve ring.

to Donald P. Shiley until he came for the tour and everything added up for him. He knew about Donald Shiley and the advances he made in the heart valve field, and by the end of the tour, Steve knew he wanted to go to the same school as the pioneer. He didn’t tour another school.

To be clear, the valve in Steve’s heart is not a Shiley valve, but that’s because the technology has continued to advance. “Without the Shiley valve and the progress that came from him, my life would be totally different,” Steve says.

He is still recovering from surgery in some ways. He has experienced some depression because of the many life changes he’s had to accept post-surgery.

He is nervous about being behind the wheel of a car. He sometimes has trouble sleeping because of the ticking of his heart. And sometimes the sound makes him anxious. It makes him think of a clock. It makes him think he has somewhere to go, something to do, somewhere to be. And if you have a keen awareness of the way your heart is

working, that invites all kinds of ideas about it not working. “It’s kind of scary to be honest.”

“At first I felt sorry for myself.

But then I realized everyone’s got something.” Going through these experiences has motivated him to share his story with others.

But he is adjusting, and it has been important to him that he keeps up his schoolwork and graduates on time with his cohort in May. He says they’ve been a great support. In his backpack, he always carries the cards loaded with heart puns that his classmates sent him in the hospital.

In January, Darlene Shiley came to University of Portland to meet with students and to celebrate her late husband Donald P. Shiley. Steve waited in line for a chance to speak with her. He told her his story.

He showed her his heart valve ring.

She asked him to write down his story and send it to her, and he said he would. Meeting her meant a lot to him. “I owe my life to them,” he says.

ON THE BLUFF SECOND LOOK

UP’s School of Nursing Turns 85

Every year the new nursing graduates take part in a pinning ceremony, an event rich in tradition that hearkens back to the “badges” originally awarded to nurses who had completed their training. The Nightingale School of Nursing at Bellevue Hospital in New York first gave out pins in 1880. As the UP tradition goes, nursing graduates choose a person to “pin them,” typically a person who has been a positive and pivotal influence on their academic success.

Pins courtesy of University of Portland Museum

1923–1960 Prior to the founding of University of Portland’s School of Nursing in 1934, this pin was used for those who completed their studies at St. Vincent Hospital School of Nursing. The red cross is meant to symbolize the Cross of Calvary and stands for the symbol of mercy. University of Portland continued to use this pin until 1960.

ADAM GUGGENHEIM

1960–PRESENT UP’s current pin includes the following symbols (from top right, clockwise): the mountain and trees for the Pacific Northwest; the open book for knowledge and learning; the cross for the Congregation of Holy Cross and founders of University of Portland; and the “M,” the heart, and the crown for the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

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Home and Free The writer knew he’d never see the beauty of the rain forest until something melted the terror inside him. Lucky for him, he had the right guide.

S T O RY B Y R O S E T T E R OYA L E

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P H O T O S B Y B RYA N T C A R L I N

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B

RYANT CARLIN SEES the natural world through shutters and clicks. This makes perfect sense. He’s a photographer—or, to be specific, a “wilderness-immersion photographer,” Bryant’s way of saying he embeds himself in a remote outdoor location with a camera.

He’ll establish a basecamp, heading out each day to survey his surroundings. If he sees something on Monday that’ll make a good photo—a pristine pool of water, an elk carcass— he might wait till Tuesday or Wednesday to shoot it, when the light is better. After a couple weeks, he’ll move his basecamp and start all over again. It’s a painstaking process, one Bryant prefers to undertake alone, which is wise, because his backcountry treks can last months. Yet as soon as he leaves the wilderness, he wants to return. In the woods, he once told me, he’s free. In the woods, he’s home.

Bryant’s favorite place to shoot is Olympic National Park, a modern-day Shangri-la on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. The park encompasses close to a million acres, and within its borders exist multitudes, from mountains encrusted with glaciers to coastal zones dotted with tidal pools. Yet much as Yellowstone is known for thermal geysers and bison herds, Olympic’s renown rests on its temperate rain forest valleys. Those valleys are the wettest place in the continental US, receiving, on average, 10 to 12 feet of rain a year. That precipitation, combined with cool temperatures, nurtures a primeval realm comprised of a shrubby understory, dangling lichens, mossdraped bigleaf maple, and gargantuan Western hemlock and Sitka spruce. For more than 20 years, Bryant has trained his camera lens— and his eyes—on this park, paying special heed to its rain forests. He calls Olympic one of the world’s most beautiful places, and he swore, when I visited, I’d fall in love.

But when I finally joined him there, years after he first invited me, my feelings for the park amounted less to love and more to fear.

Part of my terror was tied to Bryant’s furious pace. If he wasn’t hunched over his camera lining up a shot, he was bolting down the trail, his right arm clenched to his Canon-mounted tripod to keep it perched, like a soldier’s rifle, on the bridge of his shoulders. I worried we’d be separated in a place that overwhelmed my senses. The park contained so many shades of green—I couldn’t comprehend them. The air smelled new yet also centuries old. Trees stretched to such heights, they sometimes created a verdant vault where sunlight yearned to reach the forest floor. And surrounded by dense foliage, gauging distance or direction proved impossible. Nearly every marker I used

to get my bearings in Seattle, where I lived, became useless in the rain forest. Forget trying to enjoy its majesty: I just wanted to go home.

I was too embarrassed to tell Bryant how I felt.

Bryant made his first attempt to get me to join him in Olympic National Park in August 2011, when I worked as assistant editor for Real Change, a weekly Seattle newspaper sold by vendors who are homeless or low-wage earners. (Portland has a similar newspaper, Street Roots.) Bryant was a Real Change vendor.

He slept on top of a picnic table in a city park in North Seattle, and when it rained, he slept under the picnic table. When I heard about his photographic forays into Olympic, I interviewed him for the paper. Bryant was earnest, well-spoken, eccentric, and, judging by color slides he showed me, talented. I liked him.

The interview lasted more than an hour, and when we finished, he asked if I wanted to go camping. I burst out laughing. Me, a black queer man with zero experience in the backcountry, hike miles into the wilderness? I told him I wouldn’t last three hours. He said he’d be my guide. It was a sweet offer, but I declined.

Yet over the next few years, whenever I saw him, he kept inviting me. I always said no— until February 2015, when it struck me (in a way that might sound totally woo-woo) that maybe the rain forest was calling out to me through Bryant, that he was acting as a messenger. But what was the message? The only way to know was to visit the park. So I finally said sure, let’s go.

Some friends voiced caution: Was it safe, heading into the wilderness with a straight, white homeless man I barely knew? It was a valid question. Growing up, relatives and childhood friends taught me the woods weren’t safe for black people. The wilderness belonged to white folks, and any black person who ventured into their domain might not come back. If someone hurt me—or worse— while I was out there, I’d have only myself to blame. Those were high stakes. And while I understood the troubled American history that fueled those beliefs, I didn’t want to be constrained by racist ideas of what black people could or couldn’t do. Besides, Bryant didn’t scare me. Bears did.

In May 2015, after months of preparation, I drove us to the Bogachiel Rain Forest, the northernmost of four rain forests that mark the park’s western flank. During the drive, it was easy to hide my nerves about the trip since Bryant was consumed with another reality: He had told me he was a drinker, and after weeks spent binging on malt liquor, our trip

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marked the start of him going cold turkey.

In the van, Bryant guzzled a gallon of milk to settle his stomach, while his complexion turned sallow. On the trail, whenever we took a break, sweat cascaded down his face.

Looking at him only made me more nervous.

We planned to stay a week. But that first night, as I lay in my (borrowed) sleeping bag in my (borrowed) tent, fear churned my mind. I knew I’d never see the beauty Bryant claimed was here unless something melted the terror inside me.

I just didn’t expect that something to show up the next morning.

Moments after we finished our riverside breakfast, Bryant said, “Think you’ll be all right if I leave you alone for a bit?”

My stomach hit my feet. Leave me alone?

The trailhead lay some four miles behind us, and even though I knew we were on the Bogachiel trail, I couldn’t tell, when I looked at my map, precisely where in the park we’d pitched camp. I was lost without Bryant.

And now he wanted to separate.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

A friend of his had worked as a volunteer ranger for the National Park Service, he said.

She’d tucked her camp in the woods a mile or so back. He wanted to see if it was still there.

“Why can’t I go with you?”

She’d told him her camp’s location was secret. He couldn’t share it with anyone.

Not even me.

“Are you serious?”

Bryant nodded. I saw in his face, which had regained some color as he sobered up, that I couldn’t talk him out of leaving me alone. Even with my fear, I understood he was being faithful to his friend. I respected that.

He grabbed his backpack, camera, and tripod. “I should be back in an hour, hour and a half.”

“What am I supposed to do while you’re gone?”

“You can write in your journal.” Then he cast his free arm out to the wilderness like a carnival barker announcing the next act.

“Or enjoy the view.” Seconds later, he left.

I pressed my back against a giant tree and slid to the moss-covered earth. That spring, the rain forest was in the grips of a drought, and the crispy moss stabbed through my pants. I barely noticed. My seat lay near a 20-foot drop-off with a clear view of the swirling Bogachiel River.

I didn’t care. All I could think was a mountain lion might scale that drop-off and rip me to shreds.

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Who knows how much time went by, maybe 15 minutes, but I couldn’t calm my thoughts. Around me were gigantic trees— some of the largest coniferous trees on earth are in Olympic—but I never noticed. The sky, the river, the nurse logs, and Douglas squirrels: They might as well have been invisible.

All I saw was danger. What if something bad happened to me? Or worse: What if it happened to Bryant? What would I do? How would I get— A loud buzzing surged past my left ear.

I almost screamed. What the hell was that?

All I could imagine was it was my death, coming for me in a national park. My life was over.

When my eyes focused, I saw it wasn’t death, but a Rufous hummingbird. The size of a plump apricot, he hovered six inches from my face. When he turned his head, the sun transformed his iridescent throat feathers into golden armor. The bird zigged away, then

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zagged back a nanosecond later to gaze at me with obsidian eyes. He hung in the air a good 15, 20 seconds, his wings a non-stop blur—until he pivoted and sped out of sight.

It took several moments to catch my breath and another few to realize the irony. I was so consumed with forecasting a terrible future I forgot to acknowledge the wondrous present.

There, in a park so singular it’s the only UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Pacific Northwest, I was blind to a quality so many people seek: the beauty of the world.

Bryant returned about an hour later, and after describing his side-trip, he asked if anything had happened to me. I filled him in on the hummingbird. He grinned. “See? Didn’t I tell you this place was great?”

I wish I could say that great feeling lasted the entire trip. It didn’t. New situations always tried to bully it into submission.

Our intention was to head deeper into the backcountry. Bryant mentioned that if we stuck to the main trail, we’d see nice trees, but if we forded the Bogachiel River and took another trail, we’d see incredible trees. I reminded him we’d chosen the Bogachiel because he said I wouldn’t have to worry about a river to ford.

That made me happy because I’d never forded a river. The prospect unnerved me. He understood. He just thought…maybe…I’d be interested. I wasn’t. He proposed a test run.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s try.”

At the ford, he found a five-foot staff and showed me how to cross the riverbed’s slick stones: step, step, place the staff; step, step, place the staff. He was a good teacher, clear and direct. He handed me the stick and told me to take my time, not to rush. The river spanned some 20 yards. From the shore, I ventured about two yards into the Bogachiel, but when the water’s pace nearly toppled me, I turned right around. I felt like a failure.

The next day, we forded the river for real.

Bryant kept balance with his tripod while I used the staff. The water crested mid-thigh.

I almost slipped, twice, but somehow I made it.

“Hey,” he said. “You just forded your first river.” He seemed proud.

I followed him down the alternate trail.

Less than 100 yards into the woods, I realized Bryant was right. We’d entered a valley of giant trees. Their grace humbled me.

From our new basecamp, we journeyed out once in the morning and once in the afternoon.

We bushwhacked through red alder branches and stomped through creeks. My waterproof hiking boots stayed sopping wet.

But for nearly every frustration, there came an equal, or greater, reward. Bryant wanted to ford the river in a different spot, to shoot one of his favorite water pools. We crossed, and bisecting the trail lay a downed red cedar, its trunk so massive we had to clamber around it.

When I leaned in to examine the drying sapwood, its resinous aroma made me smile.

Another day, as Bryant wandered the trail in front of me with his camera, his right hand shot up in the air: a signal to stop.

“What?” I asked.

“Elk,” he whispered.

“Where?”

He pointed. All I saw were sword ferns.

Then a female elk raised her head. She froze.

Behind her, a second elk lifted a foreleg. She set it down. She stood still. A third elk moved.

And a fourth. For almost 10 minutes, their buff hides rose from and receded into the green as they passed before us. A Pacific wren trilled.

It was magical.

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In that week, Bryant estimated we covered 70 miles, most of it off-trail. The last afternoon, I expected to rest. Not Bryant.

But magic can be exhausting, and Olympic wore me out. In that week, Bryant estimated we covered 70 miles, most of it off-trail. The last afternoon, I expected to rest. Not Bryant.

Invigorated after a week of not drinking, he wanted to use up every minute.

Earlier on the trail, he’d noticed a rivulet crossing our path. To me, it was just water. To Bryant, it was a sign. He suspected that hidden deep in the woods lay the rivulet’s source, which he guessed was a waterfall. My map didn’t indicate any water where he wanted to go, but Bryant didn’t care. So when he suggested we head off-trail to find this hoped-for waterfall, I nearly lost it. Was he nuts? But as he set off, I knew it was catch up or stay at camp.

Bryant broke through underbrush and stormed up a steep hill. I tried to mimic him but kept slipping to the bottom. When I reached the top, panting, he told me we’d gone the wrong way. Time to turn around. He backtracked, confident as he struck out on another route. I tripped over a root. He scurried up a ridge. I crawled on my knees. He salamandared over a damp, enormous rock and disappeared. I cursed his name. Too far in to turn around, I kept going, exasperated and winded. Just when I was ready to give up, I heard, off to the left, water. I slid into a small crevasse and hoisted myself up the other side.

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By then I could feel the temperature drop.

I snaked around a tree and stood slack-jawed at a waterfall nearly 100 feet high. The water tumbled over the edge in a riotous ivory plume. Droplets misted my glasses.

As if on cue, a shaft of sunlight struck the top of the falls, and the air seemed to dance with diamonds. Bryant took a dozen photos, and then we both sat in awe. Time disappeared. It was one of the most beautiful experiences of the trip.

As we left the next day, I felt a swirl of emotions: thrilled I’d made it out safe, sad the adventure was done, and mournful that while I’d be returning home, Bryant—who I realized had become my friend—was heading back to a gritty urban park, to face countless nights of homelessness. I couldn’t overlook that a man many people would disdain had given me a chance to see the world in a new way.

And along with the dirt and grime and smelly boots, I knew I was taking something else with me: a reminder that beauty exists in more than a tree or slug or waterfall. Beauty exists in people, too.

ROSETTE ROYALE is a Seattle-based writer and storyteller. He’s working on a book about his experience exploring Olympic National Park’s temperate rain forests with photographer Bryant Carlin.

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Kay Toran, Kelly Fox, and Emily Harrington (left to right) in front of the Blanchet House of Hospitality.

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The Clinic the House Built B Y A M A N DA WA L D R O U P E P H O TO S BY A DA M G U G G E N H E I M

University of Portland has played a central role at the Blanchet House of Hospitality, which provides food, community, and housing for many of our housing-insecure neighbors.

Now, three UP alums and the School of Nursing are aiming to usher the organization into a new, even more robust chapter.

THE BLANCHET HOUSE OF HOSPITALITY may be the busiest restaurant in all of Portland. Since its founding in 1952, the organization’s mission has been simple: provide warm meals to whoever walks through its doors, without question. Six days a week, the social service agency serves three meals a day to between 1,000 and 1,500 homeless and impoverished Portlanders.

The diners are men and women, young and old. Some carry backpacks laden with possessions. Others use walkers or wheelchairs. A few mind their children. They all sit at tables of four where they are served restaurant-style by volunteer servers. There are easily 100 people in the space at a time, coming and going throughout the day, but often the loudest sounds are the quiet clink of silverware or the sound of a plastic coffee mug hitting a table’s surface.

Through the kitchen and down a short hallway, two undergraduate nursing students from University of Portland’s School of Nursing are available to the Blanchet House’s 58 male residents and diners who can come to the students for care of minor ailments and injuries.

This small exam room is central to enormous changes that will soon take place at the Blanchet House.

Over the last decade, the Blanchet House has grown to add 58 units of housing for formerly homeless men, as well as health care services in the form of nursing students from University of Portland who do their clinical rotations at the Blanchet House. Now, to address a shortage of primary care providers and lack of access to health care, the Blanchet House will add a fully staffed nurse health clinic, which would be the first nurse-led primary care clinic founded with an academic partner in the state of Oregon.

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AT THE CENTER of the efforts to establish this clinic are three UP alumnae: Emily Harrington, Kay Toran, and Kelly Fox. Harrington, a family nurse practitioner, is a UP double nursing alum (’03, ’06) and the first woman to serve as the president of the Blanchet House’s board of directors. Toran ’64 is the president and CEO of Volunteers of America Oregon, an organization that offers wide-ranging services to those in need—from correctional re-entry support to affordable housing, as well as assistance to the homeless, to those living with a disability, and to families and children. Kelly Fox ’90 is the assistant professor of nursing leading the charge on new clinical and telemedicine curriculum for UP’s nursing students.

The nurse-led clinic—under current plans, it will be called the Harrington Health Clinic—will provide primary care to the Blanchet House’s residents. Two UP nursing students doing their rotations will provide the bulk of care, under the supervision of an onsite nurse practitioner.

Volunteers of America, which has expertise in providing care to vulnerable and at-risk individuals, will oversee the administrative functions of the clinic, which it already does in its other services: They will enroll clients in the Oregon Health Plan and other insurance plans, maintain clients’ electronic health records, and manage the billing, scheduling, and other administrative aspects of the clinic. Volunteers of America Oregon will also provide mental health counseling and Substance Abuse Disorder treatment services to individuals referred by the nurse health clinic.

Harrington thinks that to serve homeless people effectively, services must be cohesive and support one another. She thinks of it as a three-legged stool: housing, employment, and health care. So while the full-fledged clinic is a big step for the Blanchet House, it is needed. “If we are feeding people and providing them shelter…part of that restoration should be engaging in the physical and the mental health of these individuals.”

Harrington hopes the Blanchet House can honor its past while also tapping into the strengths and training of nursing professionals. “There’s that simplicity in our mission of offering a warm meal, offering shelter without question, and meeting people in stride and accepting where they are. It’s really beautifully aligned, I think, with how nursing care is delivered.”

Toran and Volunteers of America Oregon became involved in the project in early 2019, when Toran was meeting with staff of UP’s School of Nursing on a different project. (Toran has been a member of UP’s Board of Regents since 2006.) The more she met with the UP nursing staff and Blanchet House, “the more we could see where there is synergy, there is opportunity,” Toran says.

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IN 2018, HARRINGTON became the president of the Blanchet House’s board of directors, after serving on the board for five years.

But her relationship with the Blanchet House began in a far humbler way, when she was a student at Central Catholic High School, which requires students to volunteer and be of service each year. Harrington served meals at the Blanchet House during her first year. The following year, she served meals at St. Francis Dining Hall. Part of the requirement of those volunteer duties was then spending the night at the shelter and, the next day, panhandling enough money for lunch.

She walked underneath Portland’s bridges and visited the homeless camps under them. As she spoke to the people she met, she realized “the differences between their lives and ours was imperceptible,” she says. “They’d had a snowball of bad things happen. Many of them had lived fairly normal lives.”

Both Harrington and Toran are convinced that homelessness in Portland can no longer be ignored. Harrington, who is at the Blanchet House at least once a week, says she has watched as the demographics of homelessness has changed to include more families with young children and elderly people dining at the facility. “[Homelessness] has certainly become in our face in our very city, and people are losing their compassion and becoming more and more jaded,” Harrington says.

Homelessness in Portland, as everywhere along the West Coast, has grown dramatically since the 2008 Great Recession. According to the city-county Joint Office of Homeless Services, there are 4,015 people who are homeless in the region.

Harrington got the idea to start the clinic by seeing the “enormous need” of the 58 residents in the Blanchet House’s transitional housing program. More than 95 percent of them are on the Oregon Health Plan, and it is common for them to wait weeks to months to see their doctors.

The Blanchet House, in partnership with UP’s School of Nursing, has been systemically addressing these challenges in recent years and has become part of the School of Nursing’s curriculum. Kelly Fox has largely been responsible for implementing these curricular changes for UP’s student nurses, drawing on her experience establishing nurse-led clinics for employers. Every six to eight weeks, two nursing students do their clinical rotation at the Blanchet House, either for their community or mental health rotation.

They play the role of a community or public health nurse: Once a week, they teach classes on all manner of topics including nutrition, mindfulness, ways to cope with stress, first aid and basic care, and sleep hygiene.

They also meet individually with the male residents to provide community-based care—such as blood pressure checks and flu shots.

Fox also saw the potential benefits of providing telemedicine to Blanchet’s residents. Starting in 2018, the Blanchet House, through a partnership with Providence Health & Services, began to offer telemedicine—the ability to Skype with Providence nurse practitioners in order to access immediate acute care for diagnosis and treatment of minor illness and injury.

The nursing students help clients use the telemedicine portal at Blanchet, which Harrington says fills a serious gap in health care: a shortage of primary care physicians, which sometimes makes for the long wait times.

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A student nurse from UP (right) consults with a Blanchet House resident (left).

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began serving soup out of a truck to impoverished Portlanders living in Old Town. Eventually, and under the guidance of Father Francis Kennard, they rented and then bought an abandoned brothel that became the Blanchet House.

“They believed in… the essence of dignity and humanity [in each person],” says Fox. “How they saw that expressed from a social justice standpoint…is that each individual deserves a warm meal.”

With this new clinic, the leaders at Blanchet House are expanding this initial vision to the overall health and wellness of their guests.

With this new clinic, the leaders at Blanchet House are expanding this initial vision to the overall health and wellness of their guests.

GROWING UP, HARRINGTON saw firsthand how nursing can effect social change: her grandmother and two of her aunts are also alumnae of UP’s School of Nursing. “The craft of nursing is providing that one-on-one attunement, being very person-centered,” she says, helping patients—especially vulnerable ones—“know that they’ve been heard and that someone else is wanting to hold them in that embrace, too.”

Social workers have this same person-centered focus.

And social work is the field where Toran began her career.

(After getting her BA in sociology and psychology from UP, she earned her master’s in social work from Portland State University and became an assistant professor there.)

Toran describes the foundational tenets of her work as the following: “integrity, excellence, inclusivity, and respect for those who are different, who are challenged, who have less than most.” While she was at UP in the 1960s, she was inspired by people standing up for social change—she, along with many in her cohort, participated in the protests against the Vietnam War and advocating for civil and women’s rights. From there Toran has built an extraordinary career, centered on finding solutions to big, seemingly intractable societal challenges. Before leading Volunteers of America Oregon, she was director of Oregon’s State Services to Children and Family and was Oregon’s Affirmative Action Director under Governor Vic Atiyeh. She has a reputation for centering the underserved and including their voices in the work to find solutions.

In many ways, Harrington, Toran, and Fox all echo the values that led to the Blanchet House’s founding. Eight men, who were students at University of Portland and inspired by the values of the Catholic Worker Movement,

THE BLANCHET HOUSE’S board of directors heard a presentation about the clinic during its January 2020 board meeting, and the board—along with Volunteers of America Oregon and University of Portland—are moving “with great speed,” Toran says, to complete the necessary due diligence before a memorandum of understanding among all the organizations is finalized.

It is still unclear which entity will be the legal owner of the clinic—legal ownership will be addressed in the memorandum of understanding, and currently, it is expected the Blanchet House will be the clinic’s legal owner.

Toran says each organization is now defining what its particular role in the clinic will be, along with identifying financial responsibility and other questions that the “boards [of directors] want to know.”

It’s unknown at this point when the clinic will open.

“All of the partners are proceeding and planning that the clinic will open soon,” Toran says. “We have some serious challenges in Portland with our homeless population.

What I love about this clinic we are developing is that all of the partners are talking about solutions.”

AMANDA WALDROUPE is a journalist and writer based in Portland, OR. Her feature writing focuses on homelessness, poverty, inequality, other social justice issues, and politics.

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Rob Justus ’87 has a track record of building Portland-area housing— 512 units and counting—for individuals on a fixed income.

He’s just getting started.

affordable affordable B Y M A R C U S C O V E RT ’ 9 3 , ’ 9 7 P H O T O S B Y S H E L D O N S A B B AT I N I

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OR THE PAST 10 YEARS, Rob Justus ’87 has been building homes for low-income residents in the Portland area. He’d be the first to tell you that he can’t build them fast enough.

Then he’d likely want to specify that he works in the affordable affordable housing industry. The repetition is intentional, and you’ll often see him putting his hands up into air quotes while discussing the more conventional affordable housing industry, because those rents are often still too high for individuals living on a fixed income.

As of the end of 2019, Home First Development, the company Justus co-founded in 2009, had completed 512 affordable affordable apartment units, with 244 under construction and 320 in the predevelopment stage. Rent in Home First buildings can range from $450 to $900, lower than rent in some government-funded units and significantly lower than the Portland average.

“The bottom line is, we have to reduce the cost of building affordable housing, so we can build more housing,” he says. “We need units now.” With an estimated 13,000 to 14,000 affordable units available now, Portland is indeed falling short. According to some estimates, as many as 48,000 units are still necessary to meet the need.

Justus has worked with people facing housing insecurity and homelessness since his days at University of Portland. Spending time with this population has become his calling, the specific way that he aims to stand in solidarity with marginalized and oppressed people.

At UP, he learned about the tenets of liberation theology from his spiritual director Fr. Richard Berg, CSC, and his theology professor Russell Butkus gave him a copy of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. “It introduced me to the idea of ‘Profound Dialogue’—what it means to really listen to people and to be in solidarity,” he says. He finally had a framework behind the work he was called to do.

Volunteering at St. Francis Dining Hall gave Justus his first interactions with Portlanders who were living on the streets. He eventually started

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a service organization, JOIN (Justice, Outreach, Immersions, Networking) in 1992, and he made Pedagogy of the Oppressed required reading. “The experience of homelessness is one of alienation,” he says. “The program’s goal was to reconnect homeless people to a supportive community, family, and a network of services to help them successfully end their homelessness.”

JOIN’s philosophy was to get people into stable housing first, then to work to get them services—and JOIN was implementing this practice before the “housing first” initiative had really been accepted broadly. “We found at that time that private landlords were willing to take JOIN clients while publicly funded programs were not,” he says. “By using private landlords, we could attach our services to the clients themselves, not the housing units.”

Seeing an increasing need for affordable housing and fewer landlords willing to rent to his clients, Justus left JOIN and co-founded Home First in 2009 with retired PGE executive Dave Carboneau. They knew they would need a unique business model.

He keeps making his case, and he keeps building.

By starting out with a truly affordable rent figure, Carboneau was able to work out how much money each project would need to spend. For a minimum wage earner, that would mean around $600 per month. Home First used that formula, along with private financing, to keep project costs and debt service payments as low as possible. For the past two years Home First has tapped into State of Oregon subsidies and has still maintained a lower cost per unit than traditional affordable housing developers.

They keep the average cost per unit at $125,000, even as they aim to increase the quality of their units by adopting Earth Advantage building standards. “Compare that figure to those built by nonprofits that take large developer fees, utilize high-end consultants, and use large general contractor companies, which can cost

$250,000 to $307,000 or more per unit,” Justus points out. Home First also charges a flat developer fee as opposed to the 10 to 15 percent charged by most nonprofit developers.

If he sees that costs are going up without the interests of the tenants in mind, Justus can get, well, vocal. He can’t abide profit on the backs of poor people. There are those at City Hall and at developer conventions who know Rob Justus—and his perspective—well.

He keeps making his case, and he keeps building.

After first building in outer East Portland, where lower land values helped keep costs down, Home First is starting to work in Portland, Salem, Burns, and Vancouver. Home First is also helping Portsmouth Union Church, just down Fiske Avenue from the UP campus, navigate the many hurdles they must clear to build an affordable housing complex on their property.

For all his frustration with the systemic side of things, Justus makes it clear he finds great joy and hope in his work, and that joy and hope is always attached to the people he has met throughout his career.

One of his clients is a senior citizen on a fixed income, who had been staying on her daughter’s couch. “She moved into one of our units, and she could actually afford the rent,” he says. “She told me, ‘Not only do I now have a home, but I also know where I’m going to die.’”

He also recalls helping a previously homeless veteran move into one of his units. “He turned on the hot water and burst into tears. A simple thing like that.

Having stable housing transforms people’s lives. The joy for me lies in maintaining these genuine relationships.”

MARCUS COVERT ’93, ’97 is the associate editor of this magazine.

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B Y F R . PAT R I C K H A N N O N , C S C

•

I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y J O D I E B E E C H E M

THE BOTANIST CARL LINNAEUS called it Amoracia rusticana, words whose Celtic roots mean “near the sea” and “of the country.” One strains to understand how any human could possibly have settled on such benign descriptions after having gazed upon the gangly protuberant taproot of a horseradish plant. Cut through its knotty skin—its color a blend of latte and hazelnut—and you expose hard white flesh. You release a pungent aroma that will open wide the most stubborn of sinuses or leave you gasping, as though your nasal cavity has experienced a surprise gas attack.

Nothing of the horseradish suggests the salty ocean breeze of Normandy or the musty earthy loam of Iberia.

The Germans call it meerrettich, or “sea root.” Awhile back someone in England mispronounced it “mare radish” and then, given that language can sometimes be lazy and slipshod, someone decided to call it “horseradish.” (Who knows why that farmer or his neighbor might have thought—as they shaved the root into a wispy pile of scob to be ground with mortar and pestle and mixed with salt and vinegar—this root should be identified with a female equine? Nothing feminine about this stubby gibbosity.)

Later, muuuuch later, horseradish would become slang for heroin, which makes sense. It can be deadly.

Horses, ironically, will die if they eat the leaves of the horseradish plant. One of its active compounds, allyl isothiocyanate, is found in mustard gas. With horseradish, you’re playing with pungent, hot, peppery molecular fire.

sacred memory invoked with the Seder meal, I realize I don’t want to taste such bitterness, such unfathomable suffering. But if I do—and I somehow survive it—I hope I have the guts of the Jews never to forget.

In the early 1900s, Czech immigrants settled in the Klamath Basin in northern California. Along with their children and furniture and stories and songs and faith and hopes and, I bet, their tears, they brought their Czech horseradish root stock. The deep lakebed soil, abundant sunshine, crisp mountain air, and the colder winter climate allowed the stubborn horseradish plants to thrive. Just down the road from our family farm in Tulelake, California, off Highway 39, sits the old Tulelake Horseradish Company, founded in 1952 by a man named Burton Hoyle. By the 1960s this company’s thousand acres were producing nearly 40 percent of the horseradish sold in America.

Hoyle called that Czech root stock “Tulelake No. 1.” The company that bought Hoyle out in 2001 moved production down to the Napa Valley.

A Tulelake farmer named Scott Seus, whose family came from Eastern Germany, near the Czech border, still grows horseradish on his land. He’s one of only 20 horseradish growers that remain in the US.

Horses, ironically, will die if they eat the leaves of the horseradish plant.

One of its active compounds, allyl isothiocyanate, is found in mustard gas.

With horseradish, you’re playing with pungent, hot, peppery molecular fire.

At the Seder meal during Passover, Jewish families gather at tables at sundown, light a single candle, and begin their prayer with “Baruch Atah Adonai…” (“Blessed are you, Lord our God…”). And so they recall the night the Lord, with a mighty hand, liberated their ancestors from the yoke of slavery and how at dawn’s first light they began, triumphantly, their Exodus from Pharaoh’s Egypt. Part of the Seder ritual involves the eating of maror, that is, bitter herbs—horseradish—so they would always remember what oppression and humiliation and suffering tastes like on the tongue. My brother once gave my unsuspecting nephew—who was still in a high chair at the time—the tiniest sliver of an ounce of horseradish one day.

Of course, the boy’s face turned an unnatural shade of reddish purple, and he screamed for a half hour. I was told later my brother’s cruelty so enraged his wife they almost separated. When I consider my nephew, when I consider the

My father grew up on a potato farm on Osborne Street, a significant stone’s throw from Seus’s farm. (“We don’t do potatoes,” Seus says. “And I’m not saying anything bad about potatoes. Potatoes is a pretty tough market. There’s farms that do it really well, and kudos to them for being survivors.”) My dad loved horseradish. He’d put it on his baked potatoes, mashed potatoes, scalloped potatoes, hash browned potatoes. He demurred when I asked to taste it once. I was only around five years old. “You’ll hate it,” he told me, as he took another bite of his potato, a dollop of horseradish carefully smeared on top. Tears—happy tears they seemed to me, for he was smiling—were streaming down his face. He couldn’t get enough of his Tulelake Old Fashioned Horseradish. It took me years—well after my father had died—before I would try it. I believe it blew a hole in my sinuses. I’ll never forget how painful it was. It made me cry.

It made me miss my father.

FR. PATRICK HANNON, CSC, ’82, is an essayist. He teaches writing at University of Portland.

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BEDSIDE WITH MR. LOPEZ

BY J E S S ICA M U R P H Y MO O

STEVE HAMBUCHEN

Student nurses practice clinical judgment— sooner and more often— through University of Portland’s new Simulated Health Center

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ERNESTO LOPEZ, 75 YEARS OLD, was admitted to the hospital two days ago, after his wife had difficulty waking him up from a nap. Two weeks prior, he’d fallen and bumped his head on the coffee table, which caused a subdural hematoma (bleeding in the brain area) near his right temple. Mr. Lopez reports that he is perfectly healthy—hasn’t been to see a primary care doctor in more than 10 years. He smokes two packs a day, and his spouse mentioned that he drinks socially. He has a grown daughter and some grandchildren who live nearby.

He has been a great patient, and he can’t wait to get home.

These are the details University of Portland’s student nurses know before entering the hospital room themselves.

The hospital room, fully equipped with IV drip and heart rate, blood pressure, O2 , and respiratory rate monitors, is actually on University of Portland’s campus—in the School of Nursing’s new Simulated Health Center, a key element of the school’s new curriculum. Ernesto Lopez is being played by a professional actor (or a standardized patient, an “SP” in medical-acronym speak).

Two student nurses greet Mr. Lopez, while four others watch the scene from the debriefing room. Then the scene unfolds.

Humans being humans, Mr. Lopez throws them a few curveballs. He is a little disoriented. He keeps coughing and asking for a cigarette, and the nurse reminds him they’ve given him a nicotine patch to help him, but there’s no smoking in the hospital. His right arm isn’t exactly shaking, but he’s holding it close to his heart and moving it around.

“Who are you?” he asks.

“I’m your nurse,” one of the student nurses responds.

He tells the nurses that the previous nurses were rude.

“I’ll try not to be rude,” the nurse says. “Do you know where you are, Mr. Lopez?”

“I thought I was at home.”

They scan his wristband, and he says, “You’re trying to kill me.” Then he asks for another cigarette.

The nurses try to assure him that they are there to help him as they take his vital signs. His blood pressure is high, and he complains of a headache, so they administer some medication to alleviate that pain.

Then the nurses are called into the debriefing room to join an instructor and the other student nurses who have been observing and taking notes.

In this scene, the student nurses are the nurses; their observational skills are paramount, and they are making all the judgment calls.

“We’ve flipped the classroom,” Chris Blackhurst ’11, ’14, director of the Simulated Health Center, says of the new experiential and concept-based curriculum that invites students to do more hands-on learning from the start.

“They can practice their clinical judgment,” says Simulation Operations Manager Stephanie Meyer ’08.

She compares the simulation setting with the in-hospital clinical setting, where student nurses’ responsibilities are more limited while they are still in training. In the simulation setting, “they can practice being a nurse versus practice being a student nurse where the preceptor is making all the calls.”

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Two student nurses greet Mr. Lopez, while four others watch the scene from the debriefing room.

Then the scene unfolds.

STEVE HAMBUCHEN

Stephanie Meyer guides students through a scene in the debriefing room.

Through simulation, these student nurses also get the opportunity to experience patients with a wide scope of symptoms, depending on the scenes created by Michelle Collazo ’17, and the students can also revisit patients later in the semester, so they can see the progression of a patient with a particular condition. When a student nurse is in a hospital on a clinical rotation, they don’t get to control the patients or the symptoms that they see. If they have a whole day of patients with flu symptoms, those are just the cards they are dealt.

Another advantage of the simulation is that student nurses can make mistakes in a safe space. Should they have prioritized Mr. Lopez’s blood pressure over the headache? Did they miss an arrhythmia? Should they have prioritized tasks over trying

to soothe the patient’s nerves? They get to practice all those moment-by-moment judgment calls that nurses make all day every day. And they also sometimes bump up against some unconscious biases they might have about, say, the elderly, or about those suffering from addiction. The debriefing instructors are trained to pull at the thread of these questions and guide the students to new understanding.

To observe the simulation, I sit in the tech room with Stephanie Meyer. After the debrief, the next two nurses get ready to enter the scene. Before they arrive, Meyer turns to me and says, “Are you OK with vomiting noises?”

I shrug. I have kids. I should be fine.

“It’s pretty loud.” She gestures toward the actor on the screen. “He’s good at it.”

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Someone who gets a job on a medical surgical unit at a hospital will more than likely encounter a patient experiencing withdrawal symptoms.

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NASHCO PHOTO

Now these students know how to look for it.

The nurses walk in to Mr. Lopez leaning over his bedside, vomiting into a bag. They’d known about the blood pressure and the headache, but the nausea is new information. They arrange for the nausea medication. They take his temperature.

They try to make sure he doesn’t get out of bed.

Mr. Lopez stops vomiting, but he is moving around on his bed, clearly uncomfortable.

One of the nurses notices something off about his heart rate and calls the cardiac telemonitor technician to verify that what she is seeing is indeed an arrhythmia. Good catch.

They take next steps to address it.

Meanwhile, Mr. Lopez’s anxiety escalates. He scratches at his skin and complains about spiders crawling on the walls.

“Are you trying to poison me?” he asks, as the nurses hand him his anti-nausea medication.

At this point, the nurses know that Mr. Lopez is experiencing withdrawal symptoms, and they try to ask a couple more pointed questions about his drinking frequency, though they don’t really get a straight answer.

One of the nurses calls the attending physician to determine whether Tylenol or a different medicine would be better for a patient if they have concerns about kidney functions. They also discuss the dosage of anti-anxiety medicine.

Meyer, watching from the tech room and answering the calls as the telemonitor and the attending physician, and later as Mr. Lopez’s daughter, spent nine years working on the medical surgical unit at PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center before coming back to UP as an instructor. She points at the actor playing the symptoms of withdrawal, and she says, from experience, “That’s very realistic.”

And so here is another benefit of the simulation. These scenarios don’t include code blue situations—the ones that might make for good TV. “These are regular challenges in an acute care setting,” says Meyer. Someone who gets a job on a medical surgical unit at a hospital will more than likely encounter a patient experiencing withdrawal symptoms.

Now these students know how to look for it.

Blackhurst notes that a lot of what the student nurses might do—involving dietary needs, bathroom assistance— is important but might not always involve the critical thinking part of the job. Plus, Blackhurst says, many cities don’t have enough clinical placements. Simulations mean student nurses can gain a wider range of experience before they graduate.

This doesn’t mean University of Portland is moving away from onsite clinicals. Quite the opposite. The opportunities with clinicals are expanding too. The Dedicated Educational Clinical Model, started by former associate dean Susan Moscato ’68, has expanded, and University of Portland now works with 14 sites in the Portland area under the direction of Larizza Limjuco Woodruff ’08, Center for Clinical Excellence Director, who finds and develops new

partnerships and opportunities for clinical education— some in hospitals and some out in the community.

The truth is there is such a wide range of career paths for nurses, and the opportunities are growing and diversifying. Their careers may never be in a traditional hospital setting. The new simulation lab and new curriculum are University of Portland’s way of responding to rapid changes in the health care field. UP wants to prepare nurses who are ready to work to minimize health care disparities and who will be leaders through today’s primary care shortage and the shift in care from hospitals to other outpatient and community settings. UP nurses will be on the front lines of all these changes.

Technology is also a big part of the changing landscape of health care. Not only do nursing students practice with telemonitoring and electronic records (and you notice that the student nurse scanned Mr. Lopez’s wristband and called the cardiac telemonitor tech), but there are new careers for triage nurses and telehealth nurses that will use screens and mobile technology to bring health care directly to people who need it. But these new technologies require different skills. How, for instance, do you assess a patient remotely or on a screen?

Telehealth might be particularly beneficial to patients in rural regions who don’t have access to a nearby hospital, enabling a patient and provider to have a timely screen visit with a specialist. “If a baby is born with complications in a rural area, requiring specialty care,” says assistant professor Kelly Fox ’90, who has been charged with creating the new telehealth curriculum, “we can use telehealth technology and potentially keep the baby at home versus transporting the baby to Portland.”

The telehealth classes will use University of Portland’s new telehealth suite for their own simulations, along with the new home health settings.

Time to check back in on Mr. Lopez. The third shift of student nurses enters the room.

With a little time, his anti-nausea and anti-anxiety meds start to work. He is a bit calmer, but he does start trying to get out of bed, which could mean a risk of falling. As they assess him, Mr. Lopez’s daughter calls, and one of the nurses picks up.

“I’m thinking about bringing my kids in to see their grandfather. Would now be a good time?” the daughter asks.

The nurse needs to update the daughter on the new information they have learned. Does the daughter know about the father’s drinking? How do you offer a status update with sensitivity? Would bringing the grandchildren in right now be upsetting to them?

The nurse makes these snap judgments and responds.

JESSICA MURPHY MOO is the editor of this magazine.

THE UNIVERSITY OF PORTLAND WOULD LIKE TO AGAIN EXTEND HEARTFELT GRATITUDE TO THE LATE ELSIE FRANZ FINLEY AND TO MICHAEL (’76) AND ARLETTE NELSON, WHOSE GENEROSITY ENABLED THE SCHOOL OF NURSING TO BUILD THE NEW SIMULATED HEALTH CENTER AND THE AMBULATORY CARE CENTER, RESPECTIVELY.

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UP ATHLETICS

Forward We spoke to Rey Ortiz ’19, Major League Soccer SuperDraft pick for FC Cincinnati, the night before he left his home in San Diego for preseason. He hadn’t yet packed his bags, but he wasn’t worried about getting ready. He’d been working toward this next step for a long time. Even back in middle school, he remembers taking the train from San Diego to Los Angeles every day to play with the LA Galaxy, sometimes leaving at 5 in the morning and getting back after 9 at night. He was ready.

But he is quick to say that playing pro was never his only goal. “It’s one of my biggest achievements,” he says, “next to being a first-generation alum of UP. I’m most proud of being

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the first in my family to be a graduate.” He has two younger siblings he’s hoping to be an example for.

He holds his family and those who have supported him very close. He has always worn custom-made shin guards with images of the people who helped him on his journey.

It comes as no surprise that these shin guards took a beating in the 64 games he played for the Pilots. So he’s getting new ones made. This time, he said, he’s including some imagery from the UP part of his journey, where he scored 14 goals, had 26 assists, earned more than one All-West accolade, and graduated with a degree in organizational communication and a social justice minor. He’ll carry all this forward.

Best of luck, Rey. Your UP family is cheering you on.

CLASS NOTES

50s 1955

Ed Cameron ’55 took part in “Coastal Confessions: True Stories,” a night of nonfiction storytelling about the Oregon coast at the Newport Visual Arts Center on September 28 in Newport, OR. Ed has been a Newport staple since arriving in 1979, bringing a career newsman’s keen eye to his beloved Oregon coast ever since. His graphic novel, Gilmore by the Sea, recorded the history of the Gilmore Hotel and the surrounding community.

60s 1967

A really wonderful class note from alumni relations director Craig Swinyard ’98: “So here’s a cool story. Juan Carlos Martinez Zepeda ’67 went to St. George’s (a boy’s school run by the Congregation of Holy Cross) in Santiago, Chile; found out about UP; and then attended here in the 1960s.

A few weeks ago, he got in touch with our office and

SEND US YOUR NEWS Share the latest on your family, career, or accomplishments.

Even a failure or two would be fine. We just want to be in touch.

Send updates to mcovert@up.edu

let us know he was bringing his wife, Marilu, to Portland (celebrating 50 years of marriage), so she could see the campus he once called home. At some point in the past few decades, he lost his diploma. Juan was able to coordinate with our wonderful colleagues in the registrar’s office to get a new diploma, which I was able to present to him on October 19 when he visited campus. He said he wanted to show his grandchildren he graduated from ‘such a fine institution.’ He was so proud to have his diploma and so excited to see all of the changes on campus since he was here in the 1960s.

“We had a wonderful tour of campus—Juan and Marilu are such kind people.

He’s even interested in helping us start a Chilean Alumni Chapter!” Thanks for sharing, Craig, and thanks to all who worked so hard to make Juan’s and Marilu’s visit one to remember.

80s 1984

Bill Lavelle ’84 was honored

by The Dalles High School during its inaugural 2019 Booster Club Hall of Fame ceremony on September 14, joining 14 members named to the highest honor of interscholastic athletics.

Bill earned eight varsity letters: four in baseball, three in basketball, and one in cross country. Among his many accomplishments, Bill threw 60 and one-third scoreless innings, at the time the second-longest streak of consecutive scoreless innings in the history of US high school

Character

Hawaii News Now recently featured a “Hometown Hero” story on Wendy Richards ’87 and her late husband Reid ’88, and the foundation that Reid’s family started to help students who have lost a parent reach their educational goals.

Wendy and Reid started dating on The Bluff. They were both from Hawaii, naturally gravitated to UP’s robust Hawaiian Club, and both became business computer systems majors (though Reid earned an additional degree in accounting and Wendy stayed with information systems). They used to go to the Sunday evening Mass together. “Reid suggested it,” Wendy says. “It put me in a good place for the week.”

When they moved back to Hawaii, they started their family. Reid became a CPA, and Wendy got a job at University of Hawaii, where she is now the director of information technology at the Cancer Center. In 1997, Reid was diagnosed with an aggressive lymphoma; he died one year later.

Wendy soon found that losing a parent was a unique experience that required unique support. When she mentioned her struggle to find resources in Hawaii for children who had lost a parent, Reid’s family determined that this would be the focus of the foundation and a way to honor Reid. They started with bereavement programs and evolved to scholarships. At this point the Reid J.K. Richards Foundation has awarded nearly 50 scholarships. Wendy says she is always amazed each year when she reads the scholarship applications, how, in the face of their adversity, their “character comes through.”

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baseball. As a Pilot he earned Student-Athlete of the Year honors in 1984, became the Pilots’ all-time leader in earned run average (2.02), and was top-10 in school history in six pitching categories. Bill was drafted by the Baltimore Orioles in 1984. He joins Pilots teammate Ken Dayley ’82 in the inaugural Hall of Fame Class. Ken, of course, had his own run in Major League Baseball, including an appearance in the 1987 World Series with the St. Louis Cardinals.

1989

The University of Rochester Medical Center’s Department of Ophthalmology has named David DiLoreto Jr. ’89 as chair of the department and director of the Flaum Eye Institute. David earned his MD and PhD at the University of Rochester.

90s 1992

Eddie Lincoln ’92 was named program manager at NAMC-Oregon, a local affiliate of the National Association of Minority Contractors, in August 2019.

The organization’s mandate, “Building Bridges—Crossing Barriers,” focuses on construction industry issues common to African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinx Americans, and Native Americans and is open to members of all races. Eddie worked previously for the Urban League of Portland’s employment department, specializing in helping dislocated workers keep up with changing workplace technologies. He spent

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21 years at Portland Community College in case management, career exploration, and workforce training. He is a longtime advocate for women’s pay equity and living wages. All of that and a man of faith who embraces the fellowship of his church and Bible studies.

1993

Three Portland-area Catholics were ordained permanent deacons on Saturday, October 26, at St. Mary’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception.

One was Greg Pashley ’93, who was assigned to St. Agatha Parish in Southeast Portland, where he and his wife, Christine, and children Theo, 14, and Justine, 12, are longtime members.

Greg serves as a lieutenant in the Portland Police Bureau and has stepped up in a number of roles at St. Agatha, including service on the school board and as a regular server at Mass.

1996

Bob Beckham ’96 has been appointed COO of Franke Tobey Jones, a nonprofit senior living facility in Tacoma, WA, now entering its 95th year. His past experience includes working in an organization that provides in-home care and management services to seniors. He has also worked in association with Alzheimer’s research and other clinical research laboratories.

Jami Resch ’96 was sworn in as Chief of the Portland Police Bureau on December 31, 2019, one day after her predecessor resigned to become police commissioner in Philadelphia. She had served as assistant chief of investigations since May 2018 and before that was acting commander of the

Racquet Man

The new CEO and executive director of the United States Tennis Association (USTA) is none other than 1989 UP alumnus Michael Dowse. He now heads the US’s national governing body for tennis at all levels, from recreational tennis to world-class professional events like the US Open.

Michael played on the Pilots tennis team for four seasons, with MVP awards in 1986 and 1988 and Most Inspirational Player in 1987. He met his wife, Jennifer (Rooklidge) Dowse ’88 back when she was a star Pilots volleyball player. He has stayed close to tennis throughout his career, with a stint as director of tennis footwear for NIKE and most recently as president of Wilson Sporting Goods.

Michael knows he faces big challenges and responsibilities when it comes to growing professional as well as amateur tennis. “It’s actually bigger than tennis,” he says.

“We have a big national issue with inactivity among kids, and we need to get them active in sports again. I can personally contribute to that cause, but tennis as a sport can be a big part of that as well.” He points out that participation numbers are down for most sports, including football, basketball, and even soccer. He plans to tackle the problem from the ground up. “We’ll need to be grassroots driven. A big national campaign that tells kids to play tennis won’t work. We have to have a pathway for them; we have to put rackets in their hands when they’re very young.”

CLASS NOTES

North Precinct. Jami majored in allied health sciences with a minor in psychology on The Bluff and joined the Portland Police in 1999. She climbed the ranks from patrol officer to crime analyst officer to sergeant to lieutenant to East Precinct criminal intelligence unit to captain, and she takes part in the PPB Muslim Council, Refugee Integration Program, and many other service and mentor programs. Her immediate plans include promoting transparency and equipping officers with body-worn cameras. One of her main challenges is police staffing levels in the face of waves of officer retirements in the near future.

00s 2005

In November, Monica Enand ’05 was elected to the board of directors of Northwest Natural Holding Company.

She founded the Hillsboro software company Zapproved in 2008 and serves as chairman of the board, CEO, and president. Before that she had a 16-year career in the software development field, managing business development and marketing at Avnera; overseeing global software development teams for IBM in the US, Canada, and India; and managing the compiler team for Intel from 1992 to 2000. Her honors include the 2018 Sam Blackman Award for Civic Engagement, the 2016 Portland Business Journal Entrepreneur of the Year award, the 2016 Oregon

Entrepreneurial Network’s Entrepreneurial Award, and the 2010 Portland Business Journal Orchid Award for achievement for women in business.

2006

Montana State University nursing professor Sally Moyce ’06 recently received a 2019 UPS Foundation Occupational Health Nurse Research Grant of $5,000 from the American Association of Occupational Health Nurses Foundation to examine how regulatory citations affect water access for workers at agricultural worksites.

Sally serves as a faculty member at Montana State University’s College of Nursing. People who work in agriculture are exposed to a number of threats to their health, one of which is excessive heat, and policies are in place to make sure employers provide workers with drinking water. Sally hopes her research will shed light on the effectiveness of occupational enforcement and citations.

Portland Pilots and Thorns fans knew it was only a matter of time until Christine Sinclair ’06 took her rightful place as alltime highest scorer in international soccer— for both women and men. Christine beat Abby Wambach’s record of 184 goals on January 29 with two goals scored in the Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF) Olympic qualifying tournament. Her 185 goals edge out Wambaugh on the women’s side and retired Iranian men’s star Ali Daei with a record of 109. “The

world’s greatest goal scorer.”

Let’s all savor that as Christine moves on to concentrate on the 2020 Summer Olympics.

2008

Let’s hear it for international soccer phenom Megan Rapinoe ’08, who capped off an extraordinary year by being named Sports Illustrated’s 2019 Sportsperson of the Year. In the 66 years since Sports Illustrated established the annual award, Megan is only the fourth woman to win unaccompanied, joining Chris Evert, Mary Decker, and Serena Williams.

10s 2013

We heard good news recently from Laura Schrader ’13, who writes: “Hi! I’m a 2013 grad, and I am getting married this month (November 15, 2019) to my fiancé, Tyler Hames! He’s a US Coast Guard officer, and we met while I was in the Army stationed in Hawaii and he was stationed in Seattle.

We are getting married at the Old Stone Church in Cleveland, OH, where we are currently stationed. I am also now an ICU nurse in the cardiothoracic ICU at the Cleveland Clinic. Cheers!”

Cheers indeed, Laura.

Thanks for your note, and congratulations and best wishes from your UP family.

2014

Katie Husk ’14 has joined WHPacific in Boise, ID, as a water resources engineer, assisting the company’s water resources department

and larger team by designing bridges, stormwater facilities, hydraulic structures, and river/stream enhancements. She worked previously as a stormwater designer and team leader in Portland, OR.

2018

Kimberly Miles ’18, principal at East Gresham Elementary School, has been named Instructional Leader of the Year by the Gresham-Barlow School District. “Kimberly was selected because of her outstanding leadership at East Gresham Elementary, a Student Improvement Grant school,” according to assistant superintendent Lisa Riggs. “The staff has increased literacy rates, focused on overall growth of each student, and moved a school in need of improvement to one of successful educational outcomes for our students.”

2019

Sophia Aguirre ’19 and Gabriela Garcia ’19 were selected for the Margaret Nielsen Financial Award by the Beta Beta Chapter of Delta Kappa Gamma Oregon State. The award was established to support female college students with the potential to be-​ come outstanding educators in Oregon. Sophia received $4,000 in support of repayment of tuition costs and licensing fees, and Gabriela received $2,000 to aid in payment of her student loans. The Beta Beta Chapter is an organization of working and retired educators whose purpose is to serve and support education and educators in the Tigard, Tualatin, and Sherwood areas.

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CLASS NOTES IN MEMORIAM

Our heartfelt prayers and condolences go out to the families of the following individuals. Requiescat in pace.

Inarose Ries Zuelke ’41 passed away at her Lake Oswego home on August 28, 2019, at the age of 94.

She earned a nursing degree at UP and met Paul Edward Zuelke at St. Vincent’s Hospital. Their 60-plus-year marriage was blessed with nine children, including Paul ’69. Inarose was the rock upon which their sizeable family stood, and she traveled with her family around the world, including 16 months as volunteers in Lesotho, Africa. “Just six weeks ago she was able to walk on the beach one more time surrounded by 94 descendants at a family reunion,” according to her family. Survivors include her children, 22 grandchildren, 27 great-grandchildren, and three great-great-grandchildren. In lieu of flowers, memorial donations may be made to Mary’s Woods Resident Fund or The May-​ belle Clark Macdonald Fund.

Robert “Bob” R. Carney ’44 died on October 1, 2019.

A World War II veteran, Bob received the Purple Heart after surviving a kamikaze attack on the USS Bush in April 1945. He and his brother practiced law for 52 years, and Bob served as assistant attorney general, assistant district attorney, assistant US attorney, and in private practice at Dunn Carney.

“Bob enjoyed telling jokes,” according to his family. “Some were funny.” He lost his beloved wife, Kathy, after 65 years of marriage, and he is survived by their five children, five grandchildren, and two great-granddaughters.

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Jerry P. D’Angelo ’49 passed away on September 18, 2019. He was a World War II veteran and worked as an aide to Gen. Dwight Eisenhower. He worked for many years as CFO of Hyster Sales Co. “Jerry enjoyed golf and had 8 holes-in-one during his lifetime. He was a loving husband, gentle and wise.” He is survived by his wife, Anna Marie (Thome) D’Angelo; two sisters; and many nieces and nephews.

John Patrick Little ’50 passed away peacefully at the age of 93 on June 21, 2019. John attended Central Catholic and Lincoln high schools and Columbia Preparatory, then earned a BA and MA at University of Portland. He was a veteran of World War II and Korea, and he dedicated his personal and professional life to social justice.

He was the first director of the Blanchet House and the first director of the CYO’s Camp Howard. After five years as a Papal Volunteer in Ibarra, Ecuador (1961-66), John became the first director of the Valley Migrant League in Hillsboro and Woodburn and a board member of the Colegio César Chávez in Mount Angel. He was also director of migrant education in Marion/Polk counties for 21 years. Survivors include his wife, Norma Autenrieth; her two children; and four children by his first marriage.

Dr. C. Allan Brown ’51 died on August 8, 2019, in his apartment in Mount Angel, OR, with his family nearby.

Allan was a dentist and

spent much of his career attending to the dental needs of hundreds of challenged children at the Fairview Institution in Salem. Survivors include his wife, Teresa; four children; and two grandchildren.

According to Allan’s family, “He had many skills as a farmer, dancer, pickle ball player, and was beloved by all who were fortunate to have known him.”

Richard “Dick” Keenan ’51, ’60 passed away on August 8, 2019, at the age of 94. He was born November 20, 1924, in Saint Vincent Hospital, Portland. Survivors include one niece and three nephews.

Harvey J. Osborn ’51 passed away on August 31, 2019, in Portland, OR. He was a US Army 82nd Airborne Division veteran and worked for a time in the Portland Fire Bureau. He entered the legal and business fields and was a co-founder of Cascade Steel Rolling Mills in McMinnville. Harvey’s wife, Eleanor, died earlier in 2019; survivors include two children and five grandchildren. As is always the case, the family said it best: “He lived life triumphantly.”

Philip “Phil” Kearney ’54, ’60, professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, passed away peacefully on September 28, 2019, in Ann Arbor, five days after his 87th birthday, following a nine-month battle with cancer. An Astoria, OR, native, Phil met his wife, Julia, there in the early 1950s. His academic career

included service on the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and positions as deputy director of the Institute for Educational Leadership in Washington, D.C.; associate superintendent of public instruction for the state of Michigan; and president of the American Education Finance Association. He served as presiding officer and as one of seven public members of the US Department of Education’s National Advisory Council on Education Services.

Survivors include Julia, one daughter, two granddaughters, and one grandson.

Sad news from Dr. George Vennes ’54, who writes: “My dear wife, JoAnn (Eisele) Vennes ’57, passed away on September 8, 2019, at home, surrounded by family. She was the first of three generations of graduates from University of Portland School of Nursing. She is survived by our seven children, including Stephanie Fortner ’84, ten grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. She graduated from St. Rose Grade School and St. Mary’s Academy in Portland.

Following 14 years of Army life while I served in the Medical Corps, we settled back in Portland in 1966. For many years we attended class reunions and U of P theater productions and participated in the senior monitoring program for the School of Nursing. JoAnn was an active volunteer at St. Pius X Parish, Maryville, and the RIO Guild at Good Samaritan Hospital.” Thank you, George; our prayers and condolences.

Joseph F. Gooley ’55 passed away on June 26, 2019, surrounded by family.

He enlisted in the US Navy in 1943 and served in the Pacific until 1946; he was a decorated veteran.

He earned his degree at UP using the GI Bill, then went to work for US National Bank, where he spent his entire career as an assistant vice president in commercial loans, until retiring in 1986.

He spent countless hours in service to others, and, most importantly, he devoted his life to his faith and his family.

Survivors include his wife of 66 years, Kathlene O’Donnell Gooley; two daughters; one son; five grandchildren; four greatgrandchildren; and one sister.

April 24, 1928– June 30, 2019 John Freeman ’51 passed away on June 30, 2019, in his home in Indianapolis, with his devoted son, John Freeman IV, by his side.

He was 91 years old. John was born and raised in Portland, OR, and attended Sabin Elementary. He excelled in track and basketball, but football was the sport he loved. Local sports writers agreed—after John’s passing, his son found a box of newspaper clippings about his father from the 1940s and was impressed to see articles from the The Oregonian and Oregon Journal.

John was a standout football player for University of Portland for three years, but in 1950 the University discontinued its football program. Other schools expressed interest, but due to NCAA rules he would have had to sit out a year, so the end of UP football effectively ended John’s college football career. The Oregonian illustrated the news on the front page of their sports section with a photo of John. The Los Angeles Rams were interested in signing him, but in 1951 the Korean War was in full swing.

In August 1951 John married his sweetheart, Pearl Bernice, and enlisted in the Navy, all in the same week. An injury to his knee got him an early discharge, but it also permanently ended John’s football days. John moved to Chicago and eventually settled in Indianapolis, where he and Pearl raised their family. John was a teacher and administrator for the Indianapolis Public School System for 30 years, retiring in 1992. Pearl passed away in 2008 after 57 happy years together. In addition to his son, John is survived by his loving daughter, Brenda Hickand; four grandsons; and five great-grandchildren.

John Freeman

Lynn (Silva) Lawrence ’55 passed away on September 6, 2019. After earning her RN degree, she settled in Eureka, CA, to work at St. Joseph’s Hospital. She married Charlie Lawrence in March 1963. While raising five children, she was an active church volunteer, participating in Bible study groups and volunteering at St. Vincent DePaul and various other community activities. Lynn’s hardearned cooking talents once won her and Charlie a trip to Palm Springs, compliments of Sunset Magazine. Lynn took up running in her 40s and continued well into her 80s. She lost Charlie in 2016 after 53 happy years of marriage. Survivors include her five children, nine grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

Lila Natalie Goodman ’56 passed away on June 24, 2019, her loving husband by her side. She was a child of immigrant parents and moved to Portland when

she was three. She met her husband, Doug Goodman, in 1955, and they were married for 63 years. She put her graduate degree in art science to good use, volunteering as a docent at the Portland Art Museum and also the Palm Springs Art Museum. “She was also, as one of her friends aptly described her, ‘the essence of sense and sensibility,’” according to her family.

Survivors include Doug; their two sons, Greg and Mark; five grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.

Lawrence Farrell ’61 passed away on September 15, 2019, of esophageal cancer. “His mother died when he was two, and his sister Bernadine broke off her engagement and raised Larry as well as the rest of the siblings,” according to his obituary.

“The rest of the siblings” numbered 12, with Larry the youngest. He attended Blessed Sacrament Grade School, Central Catholic High School, and University of Portland. He worked for Montgomery Ward from 1961 to its closing in 1983, then began a career in his family’s namesake real estate business until his retirement in 2001. Survivors include his wife, Nancy ’63; three sons; 10 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. His older siblings predeceased him.

Suzanne (Rundle) Sheehan ’62 died on June 24, 2019, after a courageous struggle with cancer. She was a cheerleader for the Pilots during her time on The Bluff, where she met her husband of 59 years, Bill ’60. “She always saw the good in everyone and never lost her witty and wonderful sense of humor no matter how difficult things became,”

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CLASS NOTES IN MEMORIAM

according to her family.

Survivors include Bill; their four children, Teri, Mike, Kristy, and Molly; four grandchildren; and two brothers.

Leo Michael Cary ’64 passed away on October 7, 2019. He served in the US Air Force after graduation and worked as a controller, CFO, and consultant in Eugene, OR, for more than 30 years. On August 24, 1968, he married Doris Thiel, and together they raised two sons, Justin and Sean, and daughter Shannon. Doris passed away after 46 years of marriage.

Survivors include their children; his wife, Regina; and four grandchildren.

James Louis Kahl ’64 died on August 22, 2019. A longtime Pacific Northwest resident, he moved to Reno, NV, in 2018 and lost no time in getting involved with the Reno Rodeo and Knights of Columbus. “His friendly smile, hearty chuckle, and outgoing nature will be missed by all.” Survivors include his wife, Karen; three daughters; one son; three grandsons; and two siblings.

Suzanne Stewart Montgomery ’67, ’70 lost a valiant battle with lung cancer on October 27, 2019, at Maryville Nursing Home in Beaverton, OR. She was 75 years old.

She was a career librarian at The Oregonian newspaper and in the Portland Public Library system. According to her family, “Throughout her life, Sue was an avid reader, moviegoer, and keen letter writer in the Jane Austen tradition. She had a traveling spirit and was always looking for her next adventure.” Survivors include two brothers, one niece, cousins, and friends.

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Mary Terese (Walsh) Jones ’68 died on April 1, 2019. A lifelong lover of languages, literacy, and literature, Mary studied English at UP and spent a year studying abroad in Salzburg, Austria. At Central Washington College, Mary joined The Quaker Friends Society and met Keith Jones of Omaha, NE. They married in Seattle, WA, and moved to the Midwest, where she worked at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and for the City of Omaha before her 2012 retirement.

Mary is survived by her nine siblings, seven nieces and nephews, and nine grandnieces and nephews.

Roger William Van Dyke ’71 passed away on August 17, 2019, after a battle with cancer and dementia. He married Anne Marie Neilson ’72 in 1970 and graduated in engineering from UP. “He was a sweet, humble, and patient man of great integrity,” according to his loved ones, “and his many friends remember him most for his quick wit and zinging one-liners.” He was an active and involved parishioner at St. Ignatius Catholic Church.

He was immensely proud of his six children, who survive him, as well as his four grandchildren. Other survivors include Anne Marie, two brothers, and one sister.

In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation either to the Archdiocese of Portland or to the Cole Parker Randall Foundation for children with spinal muscular atrophy.

Richard “Rick” Robert Earl ’72 passed away on July 31, 2019, in his home surrounded by the love of his girls, after a long battle with failing health. He was a dedicated coach for multiple soccer and basketball teams of all ages

and ran his own successful business, Rick Earl Construction. Survivors include his wife, Margaret; three daughters; and one brother.

Sue Cannard ’74 passed away on August 31, 2019.

She was the eldest daughter of deaf parents and was called on from an early age to help her siblings learn to speak and to translate for her mother and father. She married Don in 1950 and taught sixth grade in Vancouver, WA, where they started their family. After earning a degree in special education, Sue taught deaf and blind students at the Washington State School for the Blind for 17 years. Her volunteer work spanned everything from PTA to Boy Scouts to community development to the Audubon Society to lobbying for open spaces and more. In 2001 she received the Clark County Woman of Achievement Award. Sue is survived by two siblings, her seven children, 13 grandchildren, and 14 great-grandchildren.

James Coleman ’76 passed away on August 25, 2018, in Las Vegas, NV. He served in the US Army during the Vietnam War and was a construction superintendent.

John Matthew Keller ’76 passed away peacefully at his home on December 9, 2019.

It was during his time on The Bluff that John met Delphine Pope ’76, and they married in 1977. A thirdgeneration attorney, John began practicing law with his father, the late Bill Keller ’48 at Keller & Keller, P.C. in 1979.

John was later joined in the practice by his son David.

John was a founding member of the La Salle Educational Foundation

Board and was active with many organizations over the years, including The Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, La Salle Catholic College Prep board of trustees, Legacy of Faith Foundation, Knights of Columbus, and more.

Survivors include Del; children, William ’02, David, Patrick ’03, Charlie ’05, Elizabeth Jones, and Angela; seven grandchildren; and siblings, Joseph ’75, Jim, Paul ’81, Bob, Margaret ’85, and Anne. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to the La Salle Educational Foundation, Class of ’73 Scholarship Fund, or the Providence Foundations Cancer Fund.

Catharine Beall Byrd ’77 died on August 19, 2019.

She moved from Alabama to Vancouver, WA, but never was able to shake her love of Auburn football. While at Auburn University, she met Bill Byrd, who was to be her husband for 69 years after they eloped (“THAT is a story!” according to the family).

Catharine was a very involved mother and loved to travel with Bill in later years. She volunteered with Friends of Hospice for decades, raising thousands of dollars for endof-life care. Catharine was predeceased by Bill and leaves behind four children, seven grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.

Susan Mary Harrington ’77 passed away peacefully on September 2, 2019, surrounded by family members. She was a life-long elementary school teacher and second oldest of eight children.

John L. Martins Jr. ’77 passed away on September 10, 2019.

He served in the US Army for 20 years. As a platoon sergeant in Vietnam, he was awarded two Purple Hearts and three Bronze Stars, one for valor, in part for his

service at the Battle of Hue. In July 2019 he celebrated his 60th anniversary with his beloved wife, Delores. A lifelong Catholic, John was a member of the Knights of Columbus in Mt. Holly, NJ. Survivors include Delores, one son, and a number of nieces and nephews.

Charlene Ann Snow ’78 passed away on October 4, 2019. A beloved wife, mother, educator, and environmental activist, she was surrounded by family, including her beloved husband (and retired UP biology professor) Mike Snow. In her final words, she asked that they (and we) remember to be compassionate with one another.

Charlene meant business when it came to keeping Oregon green—she spearheaded the effort to raise funds and acquire land that became the 222-acre Tualatin Hills Nature Park in Beaverton. She dedicated her 25-year teaching career to advancing literacy, helping disadvantaged middle school students read at grade level across the Beaverton, Lake Oswego, and Pulman, WA, school districts. “Charlene was a loyal friend who brought light to every occasion,” according to her family, “while also being a straight shooter.” She was also a devoted Catholic.

Survivors include Mike, their two children, and one sibling. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made in her name to the Children’s Literacy Initiative.

Gregory Darrel Snyder ’80 passed away on November 4, 2019, in Encino, CA, after a battle with pancreatic cancer. The words of Greg’s children Matthew, Haley, and Nicholas graced the program for his celebration

of life on November 11. They described Greg as a kid: on the river, in the office, in the casino, as a father, in love, and in life. “His fishing buddies called him ‘Hoover’ because he managed to vacuum up more fish by far than anyone else…. People left his tax meetings forgetting that business was involved because he brought it with laughter and an overwhelming sense of security and comfort….

There was no such thing as something we couldn’t do because there was no such thing as something he couldn’t do.” Survivors also include his wife, Rebecca, and former wife, Amy. Samantha May (Schanaman) Van Handel ’81 passed away on October 31, 2019, in Vancouver, WA, after a hard-fought battle with brain cancer. In 1991, she and her husband moved to California, where they welcomed their son, Stephan. After moving to North Bend, WA, Samantha was a self-employed tax preparer/accountant, and she also played an active role in North Bend’s art and music scene. Survivors include her son, sister, and many special friends.

Prayers, please, for Mary Kathleen (Cullerton) Kjemperud ’83, on the death of her mother, Kathleen Cullerton, who passed away peacefully on July 24, 2019, surrounded by her loving family. Kathleen met her husband, Pat Cullerton ’50, through mutual friends at University of Portland.

Kathleen and Pat were married in 1950 at St. Andrew Catholic Church. Survivors include her five children, seven grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.

July 23, 2001– October 20, 2019 Prayers, prayers, and more prayers, please, for Owen Klinger ’23 and for his family and friends and community. Owen left this world much too young on October 20, 2019. “Eighteen years with our laughing, loving, loyal, and hard-working son, brother, grandson, and friend were not enough,” according to Owen’s parents, “but we hope all will remember Owen’s joyful smile and wit, his passion for music and sports, his love for his family and friends, and his big, kind heart.”

We here on The Bluff barely had two months with Owen in our midst, but his loss is in every way a death in our family. Nearly 2,000 attended Owen’s funeral Mass on October 30 in the Chiles Center, where his parents offered a beautiful tribute to their son, which they titled “More Owen,” inspired by the word Owen loved to sign when he was a baby—“more food, more kisses, more dancing.” As he grew, his parent saw the word “more” apply to Owen’s burgeoning interest in music and sports, more visits to the ER to patch up “Owen-related incidents,” more friendships around their cabin campfire, more driving mishaps, more jobs he saw through to completion and with pride, more laughter, more humor, and more bacon. “I never heard him brag,” said his father, “except about how much bacon he could eat at his grandma’s house…. He was a genuinely humble and unsure kid in many ways.” His family has established a scholarship at UP to honor his life and memory, and the UP family can stay connected with them through their public More Owen Facebook page. Rest peacefully, Owen.

Owen P. Klinger

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CLASS NOTES IN MEMORIAM

Kimberly Ann Doctor ’84 passed away at sunrise on August 21, 2019, at the age of 56. She waged a valiant and determined battle with early onset Alzheimer’s.

She was a gifted and fearless athlete, and after a decorated high school athletics career, she played basketball for the Pilots. According to her family, “The highlight of her life was meeting her soul mate and life partner of 17 years, Brenda Schantzen.

They both loved the excitement of travel and went from Europe to Mexico, Machu Picchu, and the Galapagos Islands, even to Bora Bora.” Survivors include Brenda, her parents, two siblings, her stepmother and stepsister, and her beloved dogs, Stella and Jett.

Sandra Lee Merringer ’93 passed away peacefully in her sleep after a long and hard-fought battle with cancer on November 1, 2019, in Naselle, WA. A dedicated teacher, she taught history and English in the Naselle-Grays River Valley School District for 32 years. A wonderful mother and respected educator, Sandy was actively involved in family life, her school, and the larger Naselle community until her retirement in 2001.

Survivors include her three children, four grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.

Michael McClafferty ’95 passed away on October 28, 2019. Michael was employed at Vancouver Pizza Company where he positively impacted many coworkers and customers with his charm and off-beat sense of humor.

“Michael was a gentle, sweet, loyal person who loved his children and his family deeply. All who knew him loved him.” Survivors include

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his wife, four children, brother, and sister.

Meghan Brianne Evans ’03 passed away peacefully at Peacehealth St. John Medical Center on June 24, 2019, surrounded by family and friends. She had a happy, busy upbringing in Kelso, WA, taking part in many school activities, but she suffered the loss of her childhood home in the 1998–99 Aldercrest landslide, one of the worst urban landslides in US history.

She obtained her AA from Lower Columbia College, attended University of Portland, and graduated from Washington State University Vancouver with a BA in social studies. She had a zest for life and was loyal, sensitive, funloving, compassionate, and adventuresome. Survivors include her parents, one sister, and her current Bichon fur baby, Chayse E. Bear.

FACULTY, STAFF, FRIENDS Please keep the voluminous, vivacious Beeler family in your prayers on the loss of patriarch Dan Beeler on October 19, 2019, after a brave battle with pancreatic cancer. Dan was husband to Fay Beeler ’09; father of Becky ’95, Jeff ’99, the late Dan Jr., Jen ’04, and Chrissy ’05; grandfather to Elle and Campbell; and friend to all.

While he started out in the banking business (and met his beloved Fay at First National Bank), Dan soon discovered his gifts for building and remodeling and went on to a long career with his own contracting company, Stepping Stone Homes. “He had an uncanny ability to make anything into a competition, including Easter egg hunts,” according to his family. “Dan never turned down any chance to

help friends or family with a project, and he fervently supported his kids and grandkids in every activity.”

He spent his final months in much the same way he spent his previous 49 years: loved and supported by Fay and his children and grandchildren and friends and admirers, most likely figuring out some way to love and support them all back, just a little bit more. Always a competition.

Please remember longtime UP Regent Mary R. Boyle and her family in your prayers on the loss of her mother-in-law, Gert Boyle, who passed away on November 3, 2019, at the age of 95. Recipient of an honorary doctorate from UP in 1997, Gert was an icon in the outdoors-obsessed Pacific Northwest, thanks in large part to her “One Tough Mother” advertising campaign for Columbia Sportswear. She stepped into the role of company president after the sudden death of her husband in 1970. Through a combination of grit, determination, and perhaps force of personality, Gert and her son Tim took Columbia Sportswear from the brink of bankruptcy to the position of the second-largest apparel and footwear company in Oregon.

Anthony “Tony” Ortiz passed away as the result of an automobile accident on October 28, 2019, near Gresham, OR. Tony worked for the University’s physical plant for a number of years.

He leaves behind a wife, four children, and four grandchildren.

John A. “Jack” Teske passed away on November 10, 2019.

Jack was the brother of the late Rev. Lloyd Teske, CSC, a

longtime faculty fixture on The Bluff, and father of Meri ’73 (Michael ’73) Backus, Kristy ’77 (Sean ’87) Dillon, Liesl (Doug) Sullivan, John ’70 (Diane), and Michael (Gretchen). His daughter, Margaret “Peggy” Teske O’Reilly ’80, died in February 2015. He retired as president and CEO of The Garrett Corporation, an engineering and manufacturing company that specializes in aircraft engines, turbochargers, and life-support systems for the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space missions. Under his leadership, the Teske family endowed two scholarships at UP: the Lois Teske Endowed Scholarship, named for Jack’s late wife, and the Rev. Lloyd Teske, CSC Endowed Scholarship.

We lost the irrepressibly cheerful and engaged Rev. John Wironen, CSC, when he passed away on October 16, 2019, at Holy Cross House in Notre Dame, IN, at the age of 79.

John became a candidate for the Holy Cross Brothers in 1958 and made his final profession of vows in August 1964. After becoming a registered nurse in 1966, he was assigned as director of nursing at Holy Cross House. Brother Wironen taught nursing at UP from 1973 to 1976, when he returned to Notre Dame to join the priesthood. He was ordained on April 21, 1979, by Bishop Paul Waldschmidt, CSC. Fr. Wironen’s long career in health care and the clergy took him to Oregon Health Sciences University, the UP Salzburg Program, and Providence Portland Medical Center. He held pastor positions at St. Elizabeth of Hungary in SW Portland; Francis Xavier in Burbank, CA; Holy Cross Parish in North Portland; and others.

He lived for many years at Holy Cross Court and spread his signature warmth, good cheer, and conversational skills with all he met.

BOB KERNS

FOR THE LOVE OF IT

Grandmother’s Fan WHEN IT WAS MY TURN to receive one of my mother’s hand-sewn quilts, my mom and I flipped through pages of a book of traditional patterns: log cabin, double wedding ring, and the pattern that caught my eye, Grandmother’s Fan. As she began designing, she pulled her fabric scrap boxes from the closet. A child of the Great Depression, my mother saved everything. A scrap of dinner became the next day’s lunch, a scrap of paper served for a grocery list, and a scrap of material was organized with an artist’s eye for color, pattern, and texture.

She sorted through an array of blues ranging from soft powder to deep midnight, then followed the same procedure with her box of red, then yellow fabric scraps, until she’d settled on a color for each wedge in the fan. Each fan was then stitched to one of 30 squares of fabric, which were arranged and rearranged on our dining room table like puzzle pieces.

My mother always deflected praise for her artistry. She said she was just following a pattern. Her natural humility was endearing but baffling to me when I witnessed her skill.

I wonder how many hundred stitches went into making my quilt and how many thousand stitches created the quilts for

my five siblings and for my mother’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren, until she lost her vision. Each quilt always included an embroidered note in her own handwriting—the most beautiful stitching of all.

My quilt is filled with memories of my childhood and of my mother’s care. Here was a piece of cloth from my favorite flannel nighty that stretched long enough for me to tuck my toes up in to ward off a chill. Here I saw the halter top I begged her to make so I could keep up with my stylish friends, here the bright curtains of my childhood bedroom, here a tailored, striped blouse to add polish to my emerging professional wardrobe. The pattern is Grandmother’s Fan, but the quilt itself—each hand-sewn stitch—is an affirmation of my mother’s love.

ANNA LAGESON-KERNS ’83, ’14 is University of Portland’s senior online communications and multimedia production manager. In October, her mother, Betty Lageson, died in her own home surrounded by her children. At her funeral, her beautiful quilts hung from the church balcony and the pews.

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BOB KERNS

A NEW TRADITION Martin Luther King Jr. Day is now a day “on” for UP students, faculty, and staff to volunteer in the community. UP students pull up rugs at the First AME Zion Church before its transformation into affordable housing.