Retirement Association of Portland State Portland State University—RAPS Post Office Box 751 Portland OR 97207-0751 Campus Public Safety Building Second Floor, Room 212 SW Montgomery at Broadway Office Manager Eben Yemoh Telephone: 503-725-3447 Email: rapsmail@pdx.edu In office: 10 am-2 pm Wed-Fri Remotely: 10 am-2 pm Mon & Tue Campus mail: RAPS Web: www.pdx.edu/raps Board Members Co-Presidents Pat Squire Bruce Stern Secretary Brian Lewis Treasurer Ansel Johnson Members-at-Large Nancy Eriksson Cheryl Livneh Michael Taylor RAPS Sheet Editor Doug Swanson Website Editor Larry Sawyer RAPS Representative to Regional & National Retirement Associations Larry Sawyer Committees Awards Steve Brennan, Chair History Preservation Eileen Brennan, Chair Membership Pati Sluys, Chair Program Dawn White, Chair Scholarship Joan Shireman, Chair Social Nancy Eriksson, Chair The RAPS Sheet The newsletter of the Retirement Association of Portland State MAY 2022 A COMMUNICATION METHOD called “Supported Conversation for Aphasia,” developed to encourage conversation when working with someone who has lost the ability to communicate, is the topic to be presented by Susan Ginley at the RAPS member meeting beginning at noon Thursday, May 19, over Zoom. Ginley is associate clinical professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences at Portland State. Prior to joining the faculty in 2001, she worked as a speech-language pathologist in a medical setting for 15 years. Her clinical area of expertise is adult-acquired neurogenic communication disorders. Ginley was a PSU supervisor for 13 years for Aphasia Camp Northwest, an intensive two-day camp for stroke survivors with aphasia and their families. Students under her supervision were able to work with clients in a naturalistic setting. She has also worked with stroke survivors with aphasia and their families in developing and maintaining self-help support groups in the community. APHASIA is a disorder resulting from damage to portions of the brain responsible for language. Aphasia usually occurs suddenly, often following a stroke or head injury, but it may also develop slowly, as the result of a brain tumor or a progressive neurological disease. The disorder impairs the expression and understanding of language as well as reading and writing. (Source: National Institute of Health.) The May 19 meeting will begin at noon with a few announcements, followed by Ginley’s presentation. RAPS will provide the link to the Zoom meeting several days in advance of the event. Communicating with victims of aphasia Susan Ginley RAPS ballots due May 10 TIME IS RUNNING OUT to vote in the RAPS Board election. Ballots were emailed to RAPS members in April. The deadline to respond is Tuesday, May 10. If you did not receive your ballot, contact Eben Yemoh, RAPS office manager, at rapsmail@pdx.edu or 503-725-3447.
2 THE RAPS SHEET MAY 2022 CO-PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE Making much progress amidst a pandemic RAPS HAS MADE some amazing progress over the past couple of years, especially considering that many of our board and general meetings have been on Zoom. n Our few in-person meetings were well attended and highly rated: Our tour of the Schnitzer Museum of Art in September; PSU’s Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in October; a meeting with Ame Lambert, vice president for global diversity and equity in November; the Holiday Gathering in December; and the everpopular Opera presentation in March. Zoom meetings were also popular, with Grant Farr talking about Afghanistan in January and Scott Burns talking about wine and terroir in February. n Thanks to our generous members and an anonymous donor, we increased the RAPS Robert Vogelsang Scholarship fund to almost $90,000 and agreed to establish a $50,000 quasi endowment in the PSU Foundation and increase the annual scholarship award to $9,000. n Our special interest groups are alive and well and meeting via Zoom or in person. This is a great way for our membership to stay engaged. n We are coming closer to getting our website revamped to meet new University standards with the help of Steve Brennan, Larry Sawyer, and others. Stay tuned for this exciting and long-awaited development that became a challenge we did not anticipate. n We recruited new board members and look forward to welcoming them to the leadership team. This is my last column as co-president, and I want to thank Steve Brennan and Bruce Stern for partnering with me over the past two years. They’ve both made the job fun and rewarding, and I’ve enjoyed working with the board members, many of whom I’ve known for years. But that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Renewing relationships and finding new friends in RAPS. —Pat Squire THIS ISSUE OF The RAPS Sheet is the last you’ll see in your email in-box until about August 1. Your fearless editor will attend to other duties—building bookshelves, tending to the yard, and pulling out that depressing biography that I just couldn’t continue reading during the dark days of winter. I do have a favor to ask of you. If, during the warm days of summer, any ideas germinate among you for improving The RAPS Sheet, I’d certainly like to hear them. Please send them to me at vikingdoug@comcast.net. Here are a couple of ideas to get things going: A SEMI-REGULAR TRAVEL COLUMN. With the pandemic waning (well, maybe), some among us might be considering, however cautiously, the possibility of traveling again. If you’re among those who will soon venture beyond the gentle confines of your neighborhood to distant cities or even foreign lands, write a brief description of your adventure—say, 500 words, more or less—and send it, and a snapshot or two (see photo at right for an example of what not to do), to me at the email address I mentioned a sentence or two back. Curious minds would like to get an inside look at the world of travel from a friend like you. Plus, you’ll see your byline in The RAPS Sheet. Exciting! CONTRIBUTIONS TO PAST TENSE. Every so often, a Past Tense column appears in The RAPS Sheet. It’s usually about a personality or an event from Portland State’s past, or even how a program got its start or the day PSU hosted a distinguished visitor. Do you have a PSU story to share? And please don’t think, “Ah, nobody cares about my story.” I assure you a lot of people care about your story. As to length, short enough to be interesting, long enough to cover the subject. And a photo or two would be nice, although not a requirement. Have a wonderful summer! —Doug Swanson ‘The RAPS Sheet’ bids so long, farewell, adieu for the summer A really dull photo of Abbey Road in London. Are you capable of much better photography during your travels? Of course!
3 THE RAPS SHEET MAY 2022 RAPS Group Reports Book Group THE RAPS BOOK GROUP met via Zoom on April 19 and discussed The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos by Judy Batalion. This is a remarkable book, the product of years of study of original documents in multiple languages, accounts by other writers, and interviews with the families of the women portrayed. It is the story of amazing feats of courage and determination by a large number of Jewish women, in multiple ghettos of Poland, as they resisted the Nazi occupation of their country and the Nazi destruction of their people. It is detailed in its description of the cruelty of the German occupiers. We were all impressed by the courage of these women, and distressed by the tortures they endured. With its setting in Poland, we were also drawn into discussion of the roles of Russia and Ukraine and the long shadow of history. In May the book group will read Anxious People, a novel by Fredrik Backman. We hope it will be less intense than our April book. The book group meets on the third Tuesday of each month at 1:30 p.m. Traditionally we have met in members’ homes; now we are meeting through Zoom. All RAPS members are welcome to join the group. —Joan Shireman Bridge Group THE BRIDGE GROUP is alive and well after its long COVID hibernation. That means in-person play begins (post-pandemic) Tuesday, May 3. The room location is still not settled, so I will send an email note to our known bridge group membership before the event. We plan to begin play at noon on May 3. If you have questions please contact Steve Brennan, 503-889-0146. My email address is: the.steve.brennan@ gmail.com. —Steve Brennan Hiking Group THE NEXT HIKE is scheduled for Tuesday, May 3, on the Lacamas Park Trail in Washington. (It was originally scheduled for April 26.) The May 24 hike will be on the Deschutes River Trail near The Dalles. On the misty moisty morning of March 22, four RAPS hikers strolled the flat Dike Trail along the Columbia River in Washougal, Washington, from the Steamboat Landing Park through the Captain William Clark Park to the temporary closure at Steigerwald Wildlife Refuge. A northwestern extension of the river trail from the Steamboat Landing Park may warrant further exploration as well as a return to Steigerwald when the conservation restorations have been completed. The early river mists, which made for wonderful photography, dissipated in time for a picnic lunch and a sunny walk back to the car. —Tom Dieterich Three RAPS hikers, Tom Hard, Mary Lane Stevens, and Cilla Murray, walk along the misty Dike Trail along the Columbia River in Washougal, Washington, on the morning of March 22. The Hiking Group will take on the Lacamas Park Trail in Washington on May 3.
4 THE RAPS SHEET MAY 2022 Upcoming RAPS events AUGUST Thursday, August 18 Mark your calendars for the August picnic! Details will be announced in the summer issue of The RAPS Sheet. SEPTEMBER Thursday, September 15 Guided Tour of the Vanport Building, new home of PSU’s College of Education and the OSHU-PSU School of Public Health. Seventh Vanport Mosaic Festival highlights collaboration with PSU THE 7TH VANPORT Mosaic Festival, described by longtime editor Bob Hicks as “a highlight of Portland’s cultural calendar, blending history, culture, arts and activism into a living and highly creative memorial,” will run from May 20 to June 7. As part of the 2022 festival, the Vanport Mosaic will present at the Smith Memorial Students Union building: n A display of selected archival photos and material from the exhibit “Vanport: A Surge of Social Change.” n “Lost City, Living Memories: Vanport Through The Voices of Its Residents,” a screening of short oral history documentaries, part of the Vanport Mosaic’s large collection of interviews in the process of being archived at PSU Special Collections. n Presentations by Ed Washington, Vanport survivor and director of community outreach and engagement at PSU, and faculty members. The Vanport presentation at Portland State continues the Vanport Mosaic’s long-standing collaboration with the Portland State University Department of History, Special Collections & University Archives, Portland State University Library, and the Office of Global Diversity & Inclusion. This year’s “memory activism” centers on the 80th anniversary of the building of the city of Vanport, once Oregon’s second largest city. Built by industrialist Henry J. Kaiser in 1942 to house the thousands of people pouring into Portland to work in his company’s shipyards, Vanport became the most racially and ethnically diverse city in Oregon at a time when exclusion and racial segregation were the norms. Looking west at Vanport City. When a dike protecting Vanport from the Columbia River broke on May 30, 1948, the resulting flood destroyed the city and, with it, the Vanport Extension Center, the forerunner of Portland State University. This thriving small city was also home to the Vanport Extension Center, which later became Portland State University. On May 30, 1948, a devastating flood destroyed the entire city, killing at least 15 people and forcing Portland to open its doors to thousands of local refugees. Many stayed, forever changing the social, economic, and political fabric of our region. Since 2014 the Vanport Mosaic—a multidisciplinary collective that amplifies the silent histories of our city and region—has been collaborating with former residents of Vanport and survivors of the 1948 flood to preserve their experiences. This community-driven collaborative effort received the Oregon Heritage Excellence Award, the Spirit of Portland Award, and the Columbia Slough Watershed Council’s Achievement Award. Portland State, with its own roots in Vanport and its rich archives, has been a critical partner in these efforts, culminating in the naming of the newest addition to its campus. The Vanport Building, a collaborative project among Portland State, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland Community College, and the city of Portland, opened early this year with a Vanport Mosaic permanent tribute to the “spirit of Vanport” at the entrance. Oregon Historical Society, No. 68762
CHARLENE LEVESQUE, who served Portland State as an events coordinator and RAPS as an active and invaluable member, died March 15 at age 86. Ms. Levesque was born on January 5, 1936, in Chicago. As a child she developed a great interest in art and design, and after graduating from high school, she attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Wilson Junior College (now KennedyKing College), and Chicago Teachers College (now Chicago State University). In the 1960s she moved to San Francisco, where she shared an apartment with friends and became involved in social change movements. While visiting Southern California, she met her future husband, Ron Levesque. The couple lived in Huntington Beach, California, and adopted their son, Shawn. The family later moved to Eugene, where Ms. Levesque became a community volunteer, participated in 4-H, and served as a community coordinator. Another move brought her to Portland, where in 1994 she was hired as a scheduling officer and campus events coordinator at Portland State. Ms. Levesque brought her organizational skills and her love of art and design to her new job. She forged partnerships with patrons of the arts to bring exciting artwork to In memoriam: Charlene Hoffman Levesque, 1936-2022 campus, including The Veil, which is installed in the Cascade Room. The Walk of the Heroines was another project in which she became involved, helping to obtain funding and siting for the innovative Portland State park that gives artistic recognition to the vital contributions of women. Ms. Levesque’s name is among those on the curved walls of The Walk. She also initiated “The Women’s Circle,” which connected women in PSU staff positions, enabling them to exchange information and develop ways to collaborate. After retirement, Ms. Levesque remained engaged on campus and in the community. She was an active participant in RAPS, serving on the board and on the program committee, where she used her skills to coordinate major events. In 2012, she was honored with the RAPS Award for Outstanding Service at the President’s Annual Luncheon for Staff and Faculty. Her community involvement included serving on the Metropolitan Community Church Board, the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Celebration Committee, and the African American Visual Arts Committee. Ms. Levesque’s university and community work was recognized by former U.S. Representative David Wu and former Oregon governor John Kitzhaber. She is survived by her son, Shawn; her daughter-in-law, Michelle; her grandson, Brandon; and many cousins. Some families gift flowers, others gift chocolates. Please celebrate and honor your mother with a gift that will honor another important person—a student at Portland State University. Your mother was ingrained with a love of learning and a desire to excel. Your gift to the RAPS Scholarship Fund and the gift of education are ones that keep giving, and no one is more aware of that than you, the gracious donor who contributes to our Mother’s Day Scholarship Appeal. Many of the students seeking your help are first-generation Americans and often the first in their families to attend college. Many are older women returning to the workplace. You are someone who is committed to changing the future for these promising students. Thank you, and Happy Mother’s Day. Please make your check payable to the Portland State University Foundation. On the memo line write RAPS Scholarship Fund. You may mail it to RAPS, Portland State University, PO Box 751, Portland Oregon, 97207-0751. mother’s day appeal RAPS SCHOLARSHIP FUND 5 THE RAPS SHEET MAY 2022
In memoriam: Victor Charles Dahl, 1928-2022 VICTOR DAHL, who served Portland State as both professor and administrator for three decades, died January 27 in Portland at age 93. Professor Dahl was born December 11, 1928, in Wibaux, Montana, a small town on the far eastern edge of the state. His parents, Charles and Nora Dahl, had six children: four boys, Victor, Carl, John, and Phillip, and two girls, Camilla and Elizabeth. After graduating from Missoula High School in 1946, Professor Dahl entered the University of Montana, graduating in 1950 with a bachelor’s degree in history and, in 1951, a master’s degree in political science. He entered the Air Force the following year and served on active duty as a lieutenant until 1954, the same year he and Beryl Brechbill married, a union that was to last 68 years and produce four children: Victor, Camilla, Antonia, and Marcy. Professor Dahl continued his graduate education at the University of California, Berkeley, where in 1959 he received a Ph.D. in history with an emphasis on U.S. and Latin American studies. He joined Portland State the same year, stepping into a career of scholarship, teaching, and a wide range of administrative positions, including directing programs in undergraduate studies, international programs, Central European studies, and graduate studies and research. Professor Dahl also served as assistant to the president, was chosen five times to serve as a member of the President’s Advisory Council, was a member of the Interinstitutional Faculty Senate—including a term as chair in 1974-75—and served three terms as a member of the University’s Faculty Senate. Professor Dahl’s teaching centered on United States history, Latin American and Mexican history, and the histories of Inter-American relations, the Caribbean area, Hispanic heritage of the United States, the westward movement of the United States, the Pacific Northwest, and historiography. He served on the board and was president of the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies and was regional editor for the Journal of the West. One of his scholarly articles appeared in the Hispanic American Historical Review, a journal regarded as the most distinguished in the field of Latin American history. Professor Dahl was an early advocate of international education. As fellow PSU history professor Charlie White recalled, “He was one of the best overseas leaders in our study programs abroad. He had an amazing ability to absorb and use foreign languages quickly. As a result, he was very valuable in guiding our student abroad programs in multicultural Eastern Europe.” Professor Dahl’s work in international education was often in cooperation with other institutions, including the Saudi Arabia Ministry of Higher Education, the University of Guadalajara, and the University of Zagreb, where he served as director of the Zagreb Institute for Central European Studies from 1970 to 1972. The Dahl family lived in Zagreb while Professor Dahl served as the institute’s director, an experience that reflected the Dahls’ passion for international travel. Over the course of their marriage, the Dahls visited all seven continents and more than 60 countries, including Cuba. Closer to home, Professor Dahl’s wide-ranging interests included home brewing, gardening, entertaining, and handball. Among his favorite activities was taking his children and, later, grandchildren sledding and enjoying long conversations with them on any topic. Professor Dahl retired from Portland State in 1990 and was promoted to professor emeritus. His retirement activities included membership in RAPS. He and Beryl were regulars at RAPS events, and Professor Dahl’s byline often appeared in The RAPS Sheet under the many comprehensive obituaries he wrote of Portland State colleagues. He is survived by his wife, Beryl; his children, Camilla Dahl, Antonia (Dahl) Green and Darwin Green, and Marcy (Dahl) Rebar and Bob Rebar; and grandchildren Michael and Joslyn (MacLaughlin) Green, Geneva Green and fiancé Erik Eagon, Jarell Rebar, and Avery Rebar. Professor Dahl’s death was preceded by the death of his son, Victor. PSU Archives Digital Gallery 1986 6 THE RAPS SHEET MAY 2022
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