Co-President’s Message As we welcome a new president and a new school year gets underway, I find myself waxing nostalgic. Fifty years ago this fall, I was a 16-year-old first-term freshman at Portland State College. Branford P. Millar was its second president. The four main buildings along SW Broadway were known as Old Main, State Hall, College Center, and South Park Hall. My first job at PSU was a work-study position in the Sociology Department, situated in a rickety old house called Francis Manor on SW Montgomery between Broadway and 6th Avenue. Oh, how times have changed! In August this year Rahmat Shoureshi came on board as the University’s ninth president, leading a campus whose footprint now covers 50 acres. Most of the old buildings scattered around campus back in 1967 were demolished decades ago. Francis Manor was torn down in the 1980s to make room for a new building housing PSU’s School of Business Administration and School of Education. Now that building, too, has been altered. In 2015 work began on an upgrade to the existing building and construction of an addition to the north half of the block, resulting in a new home for the School of Business: the Karl Miller Center, dedicated just last month. To think my memories of Portland State go back a half century! That seems like a long time but there are several RAPS members whose histories with the institution go back further than mine, to the early 1950s. Some even remember Portland State’s earliest beginnings in 1946 as Vanport Extension Center. If you’d like to take a trip down memory lane yourself, a book published by RAPS in 2009 is an excellent companion. Portland State: A History in Pictures remains a timely look at where we’ve been and where we’re going. Find out more at this link on the RAPS website: https://www.pdx.edu/raps/publications. —Dawn White, Co-President RAPS Portland Japanese Garden tour on September 21 --Photograph by Larry Sawyer 2
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