Portland State Magazine, Spring 2021

looking back ROOTS OF RESILIENCE PORTLAND STATE’S REPUTATION for being student-centered, enterprising and resilient began with the personality of its founder, Stephen E. Epler. A Navy veteran with a doctorate in education, he saw the need for a higher education institution in Portland to serve veterans returning from World War II. He led the charge to create a new breed of school from scratch, despite natural disasters, political battles and many premature predictions of its early demise. Born in 1909 to a Disciples of Christ minister and his wife, Epler grew up incorporating his parents’ strong sense of independence and responsibility into his “indefatigable” work ethic, according to the late Professor Gordon B. Dodds in his seminal history of PSU, “Te College Tat Would Not Die.” After some teaching assignments and World War II service, he and his wife, Ferne Misner Epler, landed in Portland with their children in January 1946. At that time, few of Oregon’s colleges had enough housing— particularly family housing—for returning soldiers ready to take advantage of the GI Bill. Epler saw this as an opportunity. Why not open a program for veterans at Vanport, where many (including himself ) already lived? Built as a temporary housing project for the Kaiser Shipyards in the lowlands near the Columbia River, Vanport ofered afordable housing, public services and building space, with many facilities now vacant after the war. So Epler and his resourceful team did just that. In just 86 days, they took the idea of the Vanport Extension Center and turned it into a program serving more than 200 students its frst summer term. But then, not two years after Vanport Extension Center was founded, disaster struck.Te memory of this turning point in PSU’s history—the great Vanport food of May 1948—is forever etched in the minds of Epler’s two children, Charlotte Gezi and Stephen M. Epler. Since the student and faculty apartments stood so close to the waterline, the younger Epler, now a retired college president living in Rocklin, California, remembers his dad and other staf were “Education is a form of wealth that bankruptcy or depression cannot destroy.” —Stephen E. Epler in the first Viking yearbook among the frst to see the levy give way under the force of the Columbia River. “I remember them moving typewriters into one of the big army surplus trucks that they got after the war,” he said. “Dad hopped in the truck and drove to the house where we were living and warned the family. Dad went through the building and knocked on doors and warned people to leave.”Ten it was of to Portland, with their mother, Ferne, driving their big, black ’38 Plymouth behind the fully-loaded truck. “Te government had put out a notice saying that the dikes were safe at present,” remembered Charlotte, a retired teacher now living in Sacramento, California. “Tey said: ‘You’ll be warned. You’ll have time to leave. Don’t get excited.’Tankfully, many of the students and teachers had left Vanport to visit other families because of the [Memorial Day] holiday weekend.” Fifteen people perished in the food, which hit the Black commu- nity particularly hard. (See a related story on p. 25.) “Many students carried on rescue work, trafc direction and frst aid,” the elder Epler later recounted in a report. “Te death toll would have been much higher had it not been for the valiant work of the college students.” Within weeks, classes restarted, thanks to Ferne securing space in Grant High School where she taught. “I don’t know how my Dad could have done it,” Charlotte recalled. “As people were moving and gathering their lives back together, the school carried on.” As historian Dodds put it, “overcoming obstacles was a way of life at Vanport.” And that drive, that commitment to persevere despite all odds, born out of the hope and trauma of Vanport, has come to be a hallmark of Portland State. —KURT BEDELL OREGON HISTORICAL SOCIETY UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES