Memories of Vanport Vanporters remember the first years of PSU from 1946 to 1948 Interviewed by Katlin Smith lucille Walker, Vanport staff LW: One reason we came to Vanporl was because my husband wanted to go to Oregon Stale bUI we couldn't find housing out there because we had two boys. The walls were paper thin. We aU had to sleep in one bedroom SO we had bunkbcds for the boys and then finally they leI us have two bedrooms. OW: When the flood came it washed all the walls oul in ber.veen so you could see how it was buill. They iust collapsed. They were made oul of that fiberboard and it just melted. I was 26 and I gal oul of high school when I was 17 so it was nine years since I'd been in school. The hardest part was the mathematics. LW: Dick Walton, who taught physics and Don Parker, who was in business administration - Bill was older than they were. BW: We didn't have any classrooms so I took chemistry over at [he dental school by lloyd Center. And then I went over to Benson High School and had some lab courses in electronics and electrical engineering. We were going all over. We had 10 gel our own way over there. Very few of the guys had cars so anybody who had a car, we'd scrounge enough money to buy him gasoline and he'd haul us around. The physics book was loose-leaf. It hadn't been printed even. It was just stapled together. The p a ~ 4 1 PSU Perspective, Winter 1986 Bill Walker, Vanport student high schools were better outfitted than we were. lW: In one section of the business office we were in a little building so that if somebody closest to the window wanted to gel up and go out the door, everybody had to scoot their chair forward. We were so packed in that we were just desk¥to-desk and chair-to--chair. BW: The original faculty were spedal people. They really were. Dr. Epler and Phil Putnam and Dr. Black and Dick Halley and Don Parkeryou just couldn't have asked for a more dedicated bunch of people. lW: BiH was working as a janitor and we knew the (flood) water was getting high and the Housing Authority assured us that they would notify us by sirens to get out. Well, it never happened. They found out that the Housing Authority was moving out their records and so the college decided that they better start moving their records. BW: We walked clear around the dikes and those dikes were just trembling they were so water soaked. Lucille and I were down at the college helping them load equipment in trucks and the dike broke so we ran home. We gathered everything we thought we could. lW: I had a brand new sewing machine and we didn't take much out but we took thai sewing machine. I'd saved my money to buy that machine! I packed my mother and my Persian cat and jumped in the car and drove out from Iowa City to Vanporr... M)' (Vanport) library al that time consisted of a big, leftover, unabridged dictionary of no standard brand that somebody had left around. Of course it was practicall), impossible to get books. The service had had Ihe monopoly of all the books althat time so they hadn't been printed. o We ran literally from 7 in the morning until 10 at night b e c a u ~ we didn't have space and because some of the men had jobs. .My first library was a little bigger than my dinette, but not much....(Just) my unabridged dictionary to begin with and then the next thing I remember gelling, the text for psychology, was a Munn. Munn was also used at the University of Oregon and we hadn't been able to gel them. Then the University of Oregon had 50 extra and they condescended to send us some for the library... This was their text. I would line them (the students) up and find out where they lived and they got the book. One would gel it Friday night, the night I was dishing them out. They had to promise to pass it on [0 another one on Saturday. The Saturday one had [0 promise 10 pass it on to the Sunday one and the Sunday one brought it back on Monday. They used to get pretty annoyed bUi I would say, "Well, better to have it for 24 hours than not at all." o (When the Vanport flood washed away the campus, Dr. Black was 0 0 the East Coast attending a library convenr;on.) Our name was Vanport Extension Center and that was what I had on my name card at the convention. Pearl Buck was one of the speakers... She wanted to know if it (Van port) was going 10 re-start and I said I didn't know, that I hadn't heard that, and she said thai if they did re-open and I would let her know, she would have sent to me a copy of everyone of her books that was in print. And she did it. She autographed them. o We had a lot of fun. I think we should have a club called "The Antediluvians" for the first generation before the flood people... "the creme de la creme." We went through some wild times.
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