Multnomah Falls

I had quit my job as a pipefitter and gone to Warner Pacific College in Portland, Oregon to further my education. It was August and school wasn’t going to start for another month and I had to find a job and get myself settled in a dorm. I met many new friends during that month and we did some crazy things. One of them was to hike to the top of Multnomah Falls and one of our group, a photographer, leaned over the top of the falls and took a picture straight down. Let me tell you the whole story.

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Multnomah Falls is a waterfall as magnificent and memorable as any in the country and is located just a 30- minute drive east of Portland. Visiting Multnomah Falls, a 611-foot-tall roaring, awe-inspiring cascade of icy water, lets you experience the power and beauty of nature up close and with ease. From the parking area off of I-84, a 5-minute walk is all that separates you from the exhilarating spray at the base of the falls. Then it’s another 30 to 40 minutes walk to the top of the cliff where the falls cascades over.

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To see the falls from below you would think that a raging river was tumbling over the cliff but this is the farthest from the truth. The river that creates Multnomah Falls is only a foot deep at its deepest with many rocks that allow a person to jump from one to another and easily cross the river. We climbed a mountain trail to the top of the falls and stood at the edge of the river.

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There was a nice flat rock that had been worn down by thousands of years of water passing over it that sat at the very edge of the middle of the falls. This rock was about three feet across and a person could easily stand on it. But even if you could stand on it there was no way you could look over the edge of the falls. To do this you had to be able to lean out and look down. Our photographer wanted his picture so we, there were five of us, had to figure a way that would allow him to lean over the falls and take his picture.

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We finally figured a way that he could do this. I would hold the photographer’s belt and one of the other guys would hold my belt and another would hold his belt, etc. That was our plan. So, the photographer let out his belt to the first notch and I rapped my hand in and around it. I had a secure hold on him. He had a very stout belt and we were very confident that I could hold him with one arm. The next guy did the same to me and the others followed suit and we had a human chain.

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We were in the middle of the river and it was very slippery but, hey, we were 18 and didn’t know anything about hazard. The only important thing was to get the picture. The photographer leaned forward and I followed. I asked everyone if they had a secure footing and all said they did. So this guy lean a couple of feet out over the edge of the falls, me holding on with all I had and he snapped his pictures.

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We then crossed the river and walked around the side of the falls and walked down an embankment and sat and ate our lunch and laughed about what we had just done. If someone had slipped that day, we all would have gone over and had our fifteen minutes of fame. As it was no one knew what we had done and we were just as happy because we knew. One last thing. The pictures didn’t turn out to be that great. They didn’t show the scale of the height of the falls. But it was one of my life adventures.

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The WPC Choir

As a teenager I liked the popular music of the day. During my teens music transitioned from ballads and big band swing to rock and roll. Along with the music of the church this was all I knew about music. I sang in the church choir that was about 25 strong and sang songs from our church hymnal. But in the spring of 1957 my life changed.

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On a Friday night in March of 1957 the Warner Pacific College a cappella choir sang at our church and changed my life. I had heard very little classical music in my life and didn’t know anything about it, but when I heard the WPC choir I fell in love with their music. So much that the next day, Saturday, I drove to Sacramento to hear them sing the next evening and then to Fresno on Sunday morning to hear them sing again. It was because of that experience that I started thinking about going to college. I wanted to sing in the WPC choir.

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I quit my job as a pipefitter on July 31, 1957 and took off for Portland. I had been accepted at Warner. I didn’t know what classes I was going to take or what I was going to major in. I only knew that I wanted to sing in the WPC choir.

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Because of singing in our church choir I knew I sang bass. The day came for the choir tryout for the bass section and I was there with four other freshmen. Professor Lauren Sykes, the choir director and chairman of the music department had us all come into his studio and he sat down at the piano. He explained that we would be singing “Oh, say can you see,” from the national anthem. But because we were basses would not be singing the melody line. We would sing “Oh, say” as it is normally sung but “can you see” would be sung on the same note as “say.” And we would sing it repeatedly, dropping down a note each time. We did that until no one could sing the last three notes because they were too low. The last person to be able to sing was me. I was able to go a couple of notes lower that the others.

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Mr. Sykes asked us if we could read music and some of the others could, but I had no training and didn’t know how to read. He needed basses and I was the deepest and most powerful bass in the group so he said he would allow me in the choir if I would take voice lessons. I agreed and signed up for voice lessons twice a week. My voice teacher was Eveleen Calbreath, who was retired from teaching at The Juilliard School of Music. Miss Calbreath gave private lessons to a select number of people. For instance, one semester the person who had his voice lesson just before I had mine was the director of the Portland Symphonic Choir. Our dean knew Miss Calbreath and he had persuaded her to give lessons to WPC students.

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For the first two years of college I was a vocal music major, but then I realized that I couldn’t make a living with that degree and changed. But my time spent in the hands of Lauren Sykes and Eveleen Calbreath changed my life. I learned about music from two highly talented musicians who really cared about teaching me how to sing and enjoy classical music. They are two of the major influences in my life and I thank them for the world they opened up for me.

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How I Made It Through College

As I said in my last story I didn’t go to Warner Pacific College to get a degree so I could get the big bucks. I went to Warner to sing. But once I got there I discovered another activity that I became very involved in. My two big interests at Warner were music and drama. I got into music through the touring choir and the Oratorio Society.  The Oratorio Society was open to anyone that wanted to sing in it. It always sang Handel’s Messiah at Christmas and in the spring it sang another great work of classical choral music.

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I also got into drama in two ways. First, the touring choir had a twenty-minute drama that it performed at the end of each concert and the choir came into the story at the end and the final song was the climax to both the drama and the choir concert. The play was written by Mel White who was a student at Warner. Mel went on to produce a number of Christian movies and write biographies for many of the well know Christian leader such as Billy Graham.

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The choir toured for two weeks during Spring break. On the first choir tour I went on I had a role in the play that put me on center stage for about three minutes. But, I was really into the drama and memorize the entire dialogue. During the second choir tour we were also scheduled to give the drama but Mel could not go on tour that year. Mr. Sykes, our director, had to find someone to take the lead role and to direct the play. I talked to him about this and told him that I had memorized the whole drama and he seemed to be impressed.

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One day during play rehearsal of the new cast Mr. Sykes asked me if I would take over as the lead and the director. Most of the characters had been recast because students had dropped out of the choir and there were new choir members. We had to start from scratch and learn the play from the beginning. When we got to the character I had been the previous year, the guy who had the part read it very poorly. I jumped up and said, “No, you’ve got to understand this character and way he is saying what he is saying.” I went on to perform the role and show the new actor how the role should be played.

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Later, another new actor made another dull reading of his role, which was really quite dramatic so I stopped things and told him I would show him how the role should be read. I had listened to the former actor read this role during last year’s performances and I didn’t agree with his interpretation and I did the reading the way I thought it should be done. To my surprise I got a standing ovation after the reading, and that was how I got the lead in the play and became the director.

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My second attempt at acting was strictly accidental. I had a friend who was in a play that was being produced by the college drama club and I went along with her to listen to the practice. I had no intension of participating. But as fate would have it one of the actors didn’t show up that night and the professor who was the sponsor of the drama club asked me if I would sit in and read the part so the others could practice. This was a completely cold read. I had never even seen the playbook, let alone read any of the parts. I didn’t even know the story. As it turned out the story took place in 13th century Wales and the actors were using accents of the period.

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I caught on to the accent and I did a fairly good job considering I hadn’t seen the dialogue or heard the accents before that night. I did a good enough job that I was offered the role right there that night. The professor did as much as beg me to take the role. It seemed the actor who had the role was not very reliable and they needed someone who would take the part seriously. The role had some singing and I was a trained baritone so I said yes and we had a great show that year.

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From that point on I became very involved in drama and did a number of plays and other things such as narration for events and for choirs. That is I wrote and spoke an introduction to each song before the choir sang.

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Even though I loved music and drama I knew that I couldn’t make a living doing either. The chances of my going to New York and getting a role in a play were very slim and I knew it. So in my junior year I changed my major from vocal music to literature. What I didn’t realize until I had graduated and applied for jobs was that companies didn’t care what your major was, it was just the fact that you had a degree that got you into the interview.

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If it hadn’t been for music and drama, and of course Ruth Gray who became Ruth Bancroft, I believe I would have been much happier as a racing mechanic than a mid-level manager in a large corporation, or even as the consultant or the CEO that I later became. My heart really wasn’t into the business world that I had immersed myself in.

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The Race

I attended college in Portland, Oregon and my mother lived in Oakland, California. I would go to see her at Thanksgiving, Christmas and once during the summer vacation. I always drove at night because the roads were clear and I could drive faster. It was exactly 721 miles door to door and I made it in about 12 hours, with two stops for gas and food.

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There were no freeways in those days, but the roads were while maintained highways, mostly two lanes. It was on one of my trips during 1960 that I passed a new 1960 Ford just outside of Roseburg, Oregon at about 4:00 AM. The driver didn’t like the idea that I had passed him and so he roared around me and as he passed my driver’s window he turned and smiled and pointed his finger forward and the race was on. I was driving my 1955 Buick Century. The Century had the body of the smaller Buick Special and the engine of the larger Buick Roadmaster. It was Buick’s version of a muscle car and it did very well on the open road.

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We raced for maybe twenty miles through the winding mountain roads, sometimes doing a hundred miles an hour for some very short straight stretches. Then we came to a place in the highway that I knew was at least five miles maybe more of highway as straight as an arrow, and flat and I could see the on-coming southbound traffic for the entire stretch. I was behind the Ford when we reached the beginning of the stretch and I decided this was the time to pass this guy and see only his headlights from that point on.

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I pulled over to my left into the southbound lane and started around him and he began to accelerate and we both were in it for the win. I passed him and glanced at my speedometer and the needle was pegged (sitting on the peg on the speedometer that stopped the needle from going any further) at 125 MPH. I got passed him and turned back into the northbound lane and did a little wave and never saw him again. He must have decided to stop the race.

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When I got to Portland I stopped at the service station on 68th and Division which was just across the street from the main entrance to the college and it was where I bought all of my gas. The owner and I were on a first name basis and as I sat while he filled the gas tank and check the oil and water (they were really service stations in those days) he motioned for my to come up to the front of the car. I got out and walked up front and he pointed to my front tires and said, “George, I think you need new tires.” I looked down at the two front tires and both of them had been worn through the rubber and the fabric cords were showing. Steel cords had not been introduced yet. I had been driving at over 100 miles per hour on tires that were not just bald, but had worn below the rubber to the fabric.

I will never forget the shock I felt when I saw those tires. I bought a new set of Double Eagles immediately and I have closely watched my tires ever since that moment.

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Faculty Lounge 501

While I attended Warner Pacific College I worked for the college in the maintenance department. I had been a pipefitter for two years prior to going to college in 1957 and had experience with boilers and steam used to heat buildings. Warner used stream boilers to heat all its building, except the Old Main, which was currently the admin building, but had been the original building for the college when it moved from Spokane, Washington to Portland in 1937. It had a hot water boiler that had been made for a World War I submarine. When I applied for a job in the maintenance department, Howard Leveret, the superintendent of buildings and grounds, asked me about my knowledge of boilers. He needed someone to take the responsibility for the daily maintenance of the boilers on campus.  I told him that I quit my job as a pipefitter to come to Warner and that during my two year stint I had been part of a crew that had built a boiler. He smiled and offered me the job.

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During the Christmas/New Years vacation break of 1959/1960 Howard Leveret told the president that he was leaving the college. Howard had been a student studying to be a minister. He had graduated in June of 1959 and had just been accepted as the pastor of the Roseburg, Oregon Church of God. I was approached and asked if I would like to take the position of Supt. of Bldgs. and Grounds. We negotiated and I accepted the position as of January 1, 1960. Three days after taking on that job I turned twenty-one years old.

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In my new position I managed the tradesman who did the remolding and building on the campus and the students who did the cleaning and other odd jobs and was responsible for the campus security. I had worked for the college for two and a half years and had been given the honorary title of Assistant Supt. of Bldgs. and Grounds. So the transition went very smoothly and I didn’t really see much of a change in my daily work. The biggest change was the scheduling of jobs and of the people. It’s the one thing that all new managers, no matter what their field, have to adjust to.

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Then one day I was approached and asked if I would remodel the faculty lounge. The faculty had a room in Old Main that they used as their coffee room and hideaway. This was also the place where all important guests were hosted. The room really needed a remodel, but I didn’t have the time or manpower to do a frivolous remodel.

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At this point I’d like to make a comment about my position on campus. I believe it was unique. I was a 21 year old who was working his way through college. If a professor wanted anything done to his or her office they had to get my approval to have the work done. This put me in the unique position of having a great deal of power over the professors who I took classes from. And now the entire facility was asking me for a favor. I told them I had to think about it and that I would get back to them in a couple of days.

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I did think about it and tried to see if I could fit it in to my schedule. The only way I could do it was to do it myself and on my own time. I normally worked from 7:00 AM until 5:00 PM but my job was really a 24/7 job because I was on call for any emergency that would happen to something on the campus, or if we would have some kind of a security problem. I also did a walk around campus and checked all the boilers about 11pm. So saying that I had to do it on my own time was not really true. I didn’t have any time of my own. So I decided that I would do the remodel. But only if the facility would agree to allow me to use the lounge. There were some grumbles but they were out voted and I was given permission to use the lounge.

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Deciding to rebuild the lounge and to add my one condition was one of the smartest decisions I have ever made. I was allowed to go into the hallowed grounds of the facility. I was able to move amongst them and listen to them talk. These were conversations that were very private and would never had been spoken anywhere near the public arena where the outside world might hear them.

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I had been take aside by Dr. Milo Chapman, the president of Warner, and told this fact and made to promise that anything I heard in the lounge would remain in the lounge and never be talked about to anyone at any time. Milo was an old friend. I had known Milo and Merinda Chapmen all of my life. I had gone to their house for coffee and sweat rolls on many Saturday mornings with my parents as a child. And it was this conversation with Milo and my agreement to never talk about what I heard that had overcome the reluctance for me to have access to the lounge.

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For the next two and half years I got an education that far exceeded the one I finally got my BA degree for. I was able to sit and listen to faculty members discuss and debate many topics. And I got to meet all of the important people who came on campus. The hours I spent doing the remodel were more than made up for by the education I received from my access to the open discussions in the faculty lounge. It was a real growth experience that very few college students get. I titled this story “Faculty Lounge 501” because I believe that it was the only graduate course I was able to take during my time at Warner.

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Ruth Elaine Gray

I can still see her striding across the walkway from the girl’s dorm to 68th Avenue. I was standing on the sidewalk, down the hill from the walkway – she was so far above me. Ruth Gray was a very prominent person on campus when I started my freshman year at Warner Pacific College. She was the lead soprano of the vocal ensemble that would represent Warner in church services across the Pacific Northwest on Sunday mornings.

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As I watched her walk I could see the wealth bred in her. She was always so well dressed and she was just a bit aloof – not haughty, but one step away from everyone. How was I going to get a date with this lovely young woman?

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It wasn’t until the second semester that I got the courage to ask her for a “date.” I ask her if she would sit with me in the one the chapel services. (We had three a week) She said yes and that was our first date. There were more real dates and the more I got to know her the more I felt a special bond between us. We would talk about this years later as we developed our basic belief system.

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I had a few dates with Ruth and was beginning to think something could come of it until my best friend, Al Brown, told me he was going with Ruth and things were getting very serious. So I backed off.

Ruth completed Warner’s three-year churchmanship program. The program was put in place to train young people to take the position of Christian Education Director at a church. This was of course an unpaid position, but Ruth was well trained to fill it.

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Labor Day weekend of 1960 Ruth was moving to South San Francisco to room with a girl friend and start looking for work.  While she was only a few hours short of a B.A., she had nothing to help her get a well paying job. This was the 1960’s and young Christian women got married and became housewives. Careers were not yet the thing to strive for.

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My mother lived in San Leandro, just across the bay from South San Francisco and I was going home for the holiday. So I drove Ruth to her new home. We talked during the trip and we decided that we would write to each other. So for the next couple of years we wrote back and forth. These became very personal letters. I don’t think you could call them love letters but we shared some very personal information during those years. Finally, I drove down to South San Francisco and on my second night I asked her to marry me. She said she would give me her answer the next night. I kissed Ruth for the first time after I asked her.

The next night she said yes and I kissed her again. One of many more to come over the years. She set our wedding date for September 1st 1963. In April of 1963 I moved down to my mom’s house and commuted across the San Mateo bridge ever night and on weekends until September 1st. After we came back from our honeymoon in Monterey we settled into out new apartment on Bancroft Avenue in Oakland.

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During that first year we were both bank tellers. Ruth worked for Crocker Bank and I worked for Central Valley National Bank. Since you don’t know Central Valley I just say that we had the Oakland Raider’s accounts and John Madden was one of my customers. Really nice guy.

In the first years of our marriage, when I really got to know Ruth, I found out just how wrong I had been about her in those early days. She wasn’t rich. In fact she had been raised on a farm that had neither in-door plumbing nor electricity. She did not get either until her family moved into Willmar, Minnesota when she was in high school.

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Another thing I learned about her was that she was not aloof. She was very shy and reserved which gave that impression.

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But what about that fabulous wardrobe? I believe it was during our first year as husband and wife that we started talking about Warner and the clothes we wore. She told me that she had so little money for clothes that she had to buy mix and match components so that it looked like she had more ensembles than she really had. The main components were black and white pieces that she highlighted with colored accessories. Her clothes were so well selected that her roommate, who was from a very wealthy family, would always borrow Ruth’s clothes.

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Another thing I learned was that there had never been anything between Ruth and Al Brown. He was just boasting.

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Life has not always been good to us, but we have always had each other and stuck close together during the good and not so good times.  We both believe that we came to this life to see it through together. We are soul mates. I’m the lucky one.

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The Columbus Day Storm of 1962

The Columbus Day Storm of 1962 was a typhoon that ranked among the most intense to strike the United States Pacific Northwest since the January 9, 1880, “Great Gale” and snowstorm. On a larger scale, for the entire U.S., the Columbus Day Storm of 1962 is a contender for the biggest typhoon, outside the tropics, of the 20th Century. The Columbus Day Storm is unmatched in wind velocity even by the much-touted March 1993 "Storm of the Century” and the “perfect storm.”

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I worked the night shift for First National Bank of Oregon in Portland, Oregon in the computer department. We worked from 5:00 PM until we balanced the bank. This was generally about 3:00 AM, but this could go on until mid-morning. When I parked my car and walked to the corner to cross the street to go into the office the headlines on The Oregonian special edition read, “160 MPH Winds Hit Oregon Coast”. A couple of buddies I worked with were standing with me waiting for the light to change and we were laughing about the headline thinking it was some kind of joke. Actually, the maximum wind velocity that was recorded at Oregon's Cape Blanco put the peak velocity at 179 mph. And the wind was measured at 116 MPH in Portland that night.

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By 7:00 PM that night the wind outside our office building was blowing so hard the high-voltage electric wires were twisting so far they were touching each other and causing electric arcs every couple of seconds. We were also looking out the window of the fifth–story cafeteria where all the staff was convened for a department meeting and watching roofs being ripped off buildings below us. Finally, the manager told us to close the drapes and stay away from the windows because they (the windows) were twisting and pushing in and out like nothing I had ever seen. I didn’t know heavy glass could bend that much. This was not a joke. A window on the third floor did finally crack and sent glass flying out into the streets.

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We were getting stories from the shuttle drivers about how bad things really were out there. The shuttle drivers drove the branch banks’ daily teller transactions into the central proof department after the branches were closed and balanced. One driver said that at one branch office the wind had blown in at one end of the bank building and blown everything that wasn’t in a drawer or a cabinet out the set of door at the other end of the branch. Many customer transaction were lost and never found. It caused quite a problem for a long time.

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Driver’s were telling us that trees were blown down all over the city and they had to drive up on people’s lawns to get through some of the streets. When it was all over there was a six month waiting list for chain saws from equipment rental agencies. The city workers would saw any part of a tree that was blocking the street, but the owner was responsible for the rest of the tree.

I was without electricity, gas and telephone for four days. I learned how to live the primitive life.  Lots of candles and cold canned food and sitting around in my heavy coat rapped tightly.

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Going Back to Finish My Degree

When Ruth and I were married we lived in an apartment on Bancroft Avenue in Oakland as I have said. We were both bank tellers and she had a miscarriage that first year that hurt her far more than I could imagine at the time. I had no understanding of the female mind. I think I know a little more now, but I still have a long way to go.

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I wanted to get a better job but my lack of a degree kept me out of corporate management. So in the fall of 1964 we loaded up our car and a large trailer and moved back to Portland where I finished the 20 hours I needed for my degree.

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Graduating - My New Chance at Making the Bucks

When I quit high school to become a pipefitter apprentice my grandmother and aunts and uncles still told me if I wanted to make something of myself I needed to go to college. I was really too smart to be just a pipefitter. As I said in the last story I didn’t go to Warner to get a degree so I could get the big buck, but I went to sing.

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But it all ended in 1962 when my friend Dr. Milo Chapman, the college president, decided that he wanted to go back to teaching. He hated the politics of being the president and loved teaching. I took many courses from him and he was very good. So Milo resigned, as did his direct reports of which I was one. The new president would bring in his own “cabinet.”

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I had only 20 hours to complete my degree and I had a job as a mechanic in a garage about a mile from the college by the time school was to start in the fall of 1962. But when I went to sign up for my classes I found that the dean had completely changed the course offering and there were two classes that I needed for my degree that were not being offered. Warner was a small school and it rotated its class offerings and the students had to fit them into their schedule when they were offered or wait until the next time. The schedule that had been posted at the end of the last school year showed these two courses being offered.

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So I was not able to go back to school for two years. It was not all bad because during that time I got my job at First National Bank of Oregon and I proposed to Ruth Gray and she said yes and we were married on Sept. 1, 1963.

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But I was still without my degree and that made my job selections limited. So we decided that I should go back to Warner and finish. I contacted the college to make sure the classes I needed would be offered and they were so I went back for the 1964 -1965 school year. I graduated with my BA in June of 1965. Now I was prepared to go after the jobs that paid the bucks.

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Because I was a college graduate I was able to apply for management training programs with the large companies. I interviewed with IBM and GE and choose GE. My salary, because I was a college graduate was $425 per month. That was $125 more than I was making before I returned to college. About a 42% increase. Not bad at all. That is unless you consider the new contract that the Bay Area pipefitters union had just negotiated that summer. While I made $425 per month as a management trainee, a journeyman pipefitter  made $325 per week. I took me quite a few years to catch up to those journeyman without the college degrees.

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