THE RAPS SHEET March 2014 Retirement Association of Portland State Portland State University Post Office Box 751 Portland OR 97207-0751 Koinonia House, second floor SW Montgomery at Broadway Office Manager Alle Powers (503)725-3447, raps@pdx.edu Campus mail: RAPS Web: www.pdx.edu/raps Office hours: Monday,8am-2pm Tuesday 11am-5pm Thursday,8am-5pm Officers Susan Poulsen President Priscilla Blumel President-elect / Program Chair David Krug Past President / Elections Chair Robert Lockerby Secretary Susan Jackson Treasurer Mary Ricks RAPS Sheet Editor Larry Sawyer RAPS Representative to Regional & National Retirement Associations, Website Editor Board Members-at-Large Nancy Chapman Chik Erzurumlu Brian Lewis Committees Steve Brannan and Mary Gordon Brannan History Preservation and Pictorial History Book Co-Chairs Beryl and Vic Dahl Social/Friendship Committee Co-Chairs Brian Lewis Awards Committee Chair Membership Chair Priscilla Blumel and Nancy Chapman Scholarship Co-Chairs A Woman in Retirement …Continuing to Serve arbara Roberts will be the featured speaker at the RAPS meeting on Thursday, March 20. Roberts was elected Oregon’s first woman governor in 1990, becoming one of the first ten female governors in America. Previously, she held public office for 24 years, including ten years as a school board member, Oregon House Majority Leader, and Oregon Secretary of State. Governor Roberts has been a strong advocate for environmental management, human and civil rights, affordable housing and government reinvention. She advanced state-funded Head Start, the metro area light rail, and community funding for the Clinton Forest Plan. A native Oregonian and descendant of Oregon Trail pioneers, Roberts is a published author, active public speaker, mother of two grown sons, and grandmother of 18. She was married to the late state senator Frank Roberts for twenty years before his death in 1993. Frank was a member of the original faculty at Vanport. Following her time as Governor, Roberts spent a decade in higher education administration focused on state and local government leadership. She served those ten years at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the Hatfield School at Portland State University. Among her many recognitions are the naming of the Department of Human Services Building in Salem in her honor, the Barbara Roberts High School in Salem, and honorary doctoral degrees from both Willamette and Portland State Universities. She took leadership on the recently completed Walk of the Heroines on the PSU campus, where the community stage is named in her honor. Her recently released autobiography “Up the Capital Steps” was published by the Oregon State University Press. Roberts’ first book, “Death Without Denial, Grief Without Apology” was published in 2002 and will be released in an updated version in 2014. Governor Roberts accepted an appointment in March of 2011 to the Metro Council, the tri-county elected regional government in the Portland Area. Her appointed term ended in December of 2012. A potluck lunch at 12 noon (see details on p. 5) will precede Governor Roberts’ presentation at 1:00pm March 20, in Room 333, SMSU. B
President’s Message A primary mission of RAPS is to serve you, the members. Among other things, we provide a variety of monthly programs, several active ongoing groups, including the Book Group, the Hiking Group, and the Bridge Group. We are providing planning assistance for the President’s Annual Luncheon for PSU retirees in April. We are also working to extend some of the benefits currently available to some categories of retirees to a broader group – a RAPS proposal is under review by a University committee. Are these efforts serving your interests and your needs? If not, how can we better serve you, our members? I want to know. Please contact me with your thoughts and your ideas by phone at 503-725-3544 or by email at poulses@pdx.edu. --Susan Poulsen Shakespeare in October Going… Going… Going… Almost Gone… But there are still spaces available to RAPS members wishing to attend the Oregon Shakespeare Festival program October 20-25. Don’t miss out on what may become an annual RAPS event. Since we are attending one of the Festival programs that is open to the public, it is important to make your $100 deposit to insure a space with other RAPS members. You may sign up online today by going to www.siskiyoucenter.com and completing the registration form. Future events to look forward to this spring include sipping wine while one of our own colleagues provides us with insights and information to make our theater experience even more enjoyable. Don’t miss out! Register now! --Maxine Thomas The RAPS Scholarship The RAPS Scholarship helps students who are pursuing studies in gerontology. To contribute, please send a check payable to the PSU Foundation/RAPS Scholarship to PSU-RAPS, P. O. Box 751, Portland, OR 97207-0751. There is a link to a form for scholarship contributions on the RAPS website www.pdx.edu/raps under the “Scholarship” tab. To contribute by credit card, please contact the RAPS Office Manager at 503-725-3447 or raps@pdx.edu. --Nancy Chapman RAPS Scholarship Contributions The Robert W. Vogelsang Memorial Wine Raffle Correction: Terril Doherty contributed to the Scholarship Fund in January 2
Past Tense Past Tense Lasting Artistic Impressions of Portland State Presidents Cramer Millar Wolfe Blumel mages of the first four Portland State University presidents have been captured in three oil paintings and one sculpture. A portrait of John F. Cramer hangs in Cramer Hall in the third floor conference room. Cramer was the first Portland State College president (1955-1958), and State Hall, the second building on campus, was renamed Cramer Hall in 1969 in his honor. A portrait of Branford P. Millar, Portland State’s second president (1959-1968) is located on the first floor of the Branford Price Millar Library (built in 1969), named in his honor. Both of these portraits were painted by Florence Saltzman-Heidel (1917-1972), the wife of the first Art Department Chair, Fred Heidel. Saltzman-Heidel graduated from the Chicago Art Institute in the 1930s. She taught in California post-secondary institutions and occasionally at Portland State. She was an artist who did wood-cut print making and painted in several media, including gouache (opaque watercolor) and oil. She exhibited in several art shows over the years, with her last being a retrospective one-woman show in 1972 at the Portland Art Museum. Her works are in permanent collections in art museums in London, Paris, California, and Washington as well as in Oregon. The Florence Saltzman-Heidel scholarship was established for Art and Design students. A bronze sculpture (bust) of Gregory B. Wolfe, third president of Portland State (1968-1974), is located in the Market Center Building, 8th floor, President’s Suite. The sculpture was produced by Vera Prasilova Scott (18991996). Scott began her artistic training in photography at Charles University in Prague and continued her schooling at the Graphic Arts School in Munich. She pursued photography as a career in New York and Houston, becoming well known for her portraits. When she moved to Portland in 1937, she began her work in sculpture, which she successfully pursued into the 1980s. Her works have been exhibited in Portland, Eugene, Houston, and New York and are in the permanent collections of the Portland Museum of Art and the Museum of Czech Literature in Prague. Sally Haley (1908-2007), a well-known Northwest artist, painted a portrait of Joseph C. Blumel, the fourth President of Portland State (1974-1986). Joseph C. Blumel Hall (built in 1986) was named to honor him. Sally Haley earned a Bachelor’s of Fine Art degree at Yale University. Haley and her husband, Michele Russo, were active in the arts in Portland during the mid-20th century. She was known for her still life paintings and portraits. She held many solo and group exhibitions during her career as an artist throughout the 20th century. Note: Special thanks to Mary McVein, Visual Resources Curator, School of Art & Design, College of the Arts, Portland State University. --Mary Brannan I 3
RAPS Group Reports The RAPS Book Club will meet at 1:30pm on Tuesday, March 18, hosted by Maxine Thomas at 6535 SW Canyon Court in Portland. Contact her at thomasm@pdx.edu or 503-291-1279 to RSVP and for directions. We will discuss A Pigeon and a Boy by Meir Shalev, translated by Evan Fallenberg. It is described on the cover as follows: From the internationally acclaimed Israeli writer Meir Shalev comes a mesmerizing novel of two love stories, separated by half a century but connected by one enchanting act of devotion. During the 1948 War of Independence--a time when pigeons are still used to deliver battlefield messages--a gifted young pigeon handler is mortally wounded. In the moments before his death, he dispatches one last pigeon. The bird is carrying his extraordinary gift to the girl he has loved since adolescence. Intertwined with this story is the contemporary tale of Yair Mendelsohn, who has his own legacy from the 1948 war. Yair is a tour guide specializing in bird-watching trips who, in middle age, falls in love again with a childhood girlfriend. His growing passion for her, along with a gift from his mother on her deathbed, becomes the key to a life he thought no longer possible. Unforgettable in both its particulars and its sweep, A Pigeon and A Boy is a tale of lovers then and now--of how deeply we love, of what home is, and why we, like pigeons trained to fly in one direction only, must eventually return to it. In a voice that is at once playful, wise, and altogether beguiling, Meir Shalev tells a story as universal as war and as intimate as a winged declaration of love. Looking ahead, in April we will discuss Hallucinations by Oliver Sachs. --Mary Brannan The RAPS Bridge Group will meet on Tuesday, March 4 in the conference room of Friendly House’s Anderson Building. This building is on the north side of NW Savier Street, around the corner from the main entrance to Friendly House. This is a day change and a room change. From now on, RAPS Bridge will meet on the first Tuesday of each month. Switching rooms and regular meeting dates allows us to continue meeting in our usual 1pm to 4:30pm time slot. Please save the date, April 1, for our April meeting. (No April Fool joke, we will be meeting the first Tuesday in April.) If you wish to join us, please contact Steve Brennan by phone at 503-646-6297, or by e-mail at the.steve.brennan@gmail.com. --Steve Brennan On February 14, The RAPS Hiking Group walked the Springwater Corridor between mileposts 6 and 9 for a hike of approximately five miles. We were prepared for rain, but the weather held for us. We saw chickens, including crowing roosters, a goat, and a cat. The goat was a surprise to me. Johnson Creek was pretty high, but still below its banks. The March 14 hike will be the first of this year outside of the Portland area. We will hike the Lyle Cherry Orchard loop. Round trip will be five miles with an 1100 foot elevation gain. This is in the eastern section of the Columbia River Gorge a few miles east of Lyle, Washington. We hope some wildflowers will be in bloom. There will be panoramic views from the top. Bring a sack lunch -- we’ll eat at the turnaround point in what is left of the old orchard. The trail has poison oak just off it. Long pants are recommended. This is Hike #62 in Sullivan’s 4th edition of 101 Hikes in Northwest Oregon. Meet at the southeast corner of the Gateway Transit Center parking structure on Friday, March 14 at 9am to carpool. Please confirm with Larry Sawyer by Thursday, March 13. Larry can be reached at 503-7711616, or larry_sawyer@comcast.net. (There’s an underscore between “larry” and “sawyer” in that e-mail address.) --Larry Sawyer 4
The RAPS monthly meeting on March 20 will include a POTLUCK LUNCH to be followed by Governor Roberts’ talk 333 Smith Memorial Student Center Please bring your favorite Salad or Dessert Please contact Beryl Dahl at 503-636-5784 or Alle Powers in the RAPS Office (503-725-3447) or rapsmail@pdx.edu and let them know what you will bring. Lunch will be at noon, and Governor Roberts will speak at 1:00pm 5
In Memoriam: Donald W. Tyree, 1938-2014 meritus Professor of English Donald W. Tyree, born May 23, 1938, died January 25, 2014, from complications of pancreatitis. Friends and family members honored him at a memorial service at Riverview Cemetery on January 31, 2014. After earning a BA degree in English at Carson-Newman College, Franklin, TN, (1960), Don pursued graduate studies in religion, theology, and literary criticism at the University of Chicago Divinity School and Duke University (1960-1963). Subsequently he completed MA (1964) and Ph.D. (1980) degrees in English at the University of Chicago, and earned a Certificate in Victorian Literature (1966) at the University of London. Prior to joining the PSU faculty in 1970 as an assistant professor of English, Don had served as a research assistant (1965-66) at the University of Chicago and as editorial associate and instructor in English (1967-1970) at Northwestern University. At PSU he taught highly popular Victorian Literature courses and pioneered in offering innovative classes dealing with Native American studies. He successfully introduced the use of diagrams and graphics to support problematic concepts embodied in the material content of literature coursework dealing with folklore, legend and myth. His heavy undergraduate and graduate student advising workload included campus-wide multicultural outreach that attracted many Native American students. In 1994-95 he participated as a volunteer in “Project Connect,” a Student Activities program that provided mentoring and advising for underrepresented minority students. He actively engaged with the PSU campus Native American Student and Community Center, and regularly made outreach presentations informing public schools and metropolitan area organizations about its services and functions. He assisted various tri-county Native American organizations and served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Portland Urban Indian Council and the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission. Professor Tyree served on several significant campus-wide faculty governance and search committees, including the Minority Affairs Council, Affirmative Action, and Human Subjects Research Review. His able departmental service included, but was not limited to, Library, Curriculum, Promotion and Tenure and Graduate Committees. He actively participated in and contributed scholarly findings to several professional organizations, including the American Indian Culture and Research Journal. He chaired two departmental support groups, the “Friends of English” and the “Kellogg Committee.” In 1979 Don advanced to Associate Professor and upon retirement in 2003 was designated Emeritus Professor. In retirement he continued his many contributions to advancing our institutional mission to serve the metropolitan community. For these activities we owe Professor Donald Tyree our everlasting gratitude. Professor Tyree’s wife, Teresa (“Tisa”), died at age 45 in 1998. To his survivors: children, James, Joshua, and David, as well as four grandchildren, and his sister, Judy, we extend our heartfelt sympathy for their loss. All who knew him would concur with a colleague who remembers him as “a very kind man, a true gentleman and scholar.” An obituary and guestbook appeared in the Oregonian, January 28, 2013. His family suggests that donations honoring his memory be made to: “Native American Honor Day,” c/o Dean Azule, Diversity and Multicultural Student Services, PSU, 710 SW Jackson Street, Portland OR 97201. --Emeritus Professor of History, Victor C. Dahl, with assistance from Professor Hildy Miller, English Department Chair E 6
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