Portland State Magazine Winter 2016

26 pORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE winter 2016 Alumni Carolyn Davidson’s life has had a strong element of chance. She first enrolled at Willamette University, but switched to Portland State to be close to home. She started as a journalism major, but took a design course to “fill an empty elective.” It all led to a fateful hallway meeting in 1971, when she and another student were working on a drawing assignment. She had just told her classmate she couldn’t take an oil painting class because the fees were too high. A few minutes later, Davidson ’71 recalls, “a tall man in a suit walked up and said, ‘Are you the one who can’t afford to take oil painting?’” The well-dressed man was Nike co-founder Phil Knight, who at the time was a little-known start-up entrepreneur teaching a PSU accounting course to help make ends meet. Knight was also working with a Japanese footwear company and he needed someone to produce some nice-looking charts and graphs to show some executives who were coming from Japan. He gave Davidson the job. That led to more work with Knight and his fledgling company, Blue Ribbon Sports. Pleased with the results, Knight summoned Davidson to a meeting. He had been working with University of Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman to develop a new running shoe—and a new company. “Then every designer’s dream job came in,” Davidson says. “He said, ‘Would you like to design a shoe stripe?’ I didn’t hesitate and as luck would have it, I didn’t have any competition.” KNIGHT , Davidson said, really liked the three-band logo of Adidas and she knew the stripe had to look entirely different. It would be a tough sell. He gave her only one specification: “He just wanted it to look like speed.” It was no easy task. Davidson started drawing some possibilities, which she sketched on tissue paper and put up against a shoe to see how each looked. Time was running out; boxes were going to be printed. She had several designs, which she delivered to Knight. He had convened a group to discuss the choices, but he would wr i t t e n b y Harry e s t eve the woman behind the NIKE Swoosh