No Man is an Island, but Eugene is a City in Oregon

On my 40th birthday I received a Peanuts birthday card from a close friend that knew I was born in Eugene, Oregon.  The front of the card read 'No Man is and Island', and the inside 'but Eugene is a City in Oregon!'  This card was special to me, and I kept it posted in my office at Pfizer for many years.  Why?  I think it brought back memories from my youth in Eugene, and I was proud that Charles Schulz made reference to my town in a clever way.

Eugene was named after Eugene Skinner who was resident 'number one' when he built a cabin in 1846 at base of a small butte called Yapo-ah by the Calapooya tribe.  By the time I was hiking up to the remains of his cabin in the early 1950s, the butte had been conveniently renamed Skinner's Butte.  As I grew older, I realized that many Indian names were changed by the 'White Man'.  Too bad, the Indian names always had such a nice sound to them, and they named them first!  The view from on top of Skinner's Butte was really fantastic.  Below I could see the Willamette Valley (pronounced 'will-lam-ette, dammit'); it was surrounded by tall mountains to the east, west, and south.  The Willamette River was at the base of the butte, and it flowed north up the valley to Portland over 100 miles.  I guess you could say that Skinner had an 'eye for a view'!

My father, Charles, first traveled to Oregon from his home in Redwood Falls, Minnesota in November, 1936 in his new Ford Coupe. He and his brother Aubrey visited their Uncle John Durlam in Lebanon, which is 50 miles north of Eugene.  Uncle John, and one of his brothers who lived in Iowa, changed their name from 'Dirlam' to 'Durlam' when they both got jobs with the U.S. Post Office.  They felt that they should have a phonetic spelling of their surname now that they were government workers!  My grandfather, Philip, kept the original spelling from his father William who came from the village of Dirlammen in Hessen, Germany.  I visited Dirlammen in 1992, and it was quite a thrill to meet a farmer with whom I shared the same last name, perhaps he was a distant relative.

During my father's visit to Lebanon, he went down to Eugene in search of a job.  He had graduated from Dunwoody Institute (now Dunwoody College of Technology) in Minneapolis, and was eager to move to Oregon if he could find a suitable job.  Times were tough after the Great Depression, and fortunately he was able to do so when he was hired by Hope Refrigeration and Electric in Eugene.  Little over a year later in January, 1938, he married his fiancée Lois, who was also from his hometown.  My oldest sister, Deanna, was born in Eugene in 1940, and I came along in 1943.   My youngest sister, Terri, was born in 1949, and my brother Ron in 1953.  I was named John after my father's Uncle John, and given the middle name Philip from my grandfather.  Of course we kept the original spelling of our surname!

Eugene, with a population of 50,000, was a center for the timber industry in Oregon, and as a young boy I became aware of the many sawmills and plywood factories on the outskirts of town.  The rusty, steel 'teepee sawdust burners', which were 50 feet high, could be seen belching smoke from a great distance.  Logging trucks carrying gigantic Douglas fir logs, sometimes up to 5 feet in diameter, were a common sight whenever we traveled east toward the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, or west into the Coast Range on our way to the Oregon Beach.  We later learned that the largest logs came from 'virgin' or 'old growth' forests, and these trees were over 150 years old, and in the case of some cedar groves 500 to 1000 years old!  We would see large tracts of land 'mowed down' along the highways when we would take car trips into the mountains, and it would always make me feel sad to see tree stumps and dirt instead of a beautiful forest.

Weyerhaeuser Timber Company would invite our grade school class to see their mill in nearby Springfield, and their folks would tell us that their company had a program to reforest the logged areas with Douglas Fir seedlings in order to protect the future of their industry.  We were told that within 60 to 70 years there would be a mature stand of trees, ready for another round of logging.  Somehow this timeline didn't compute when you're only 10 years old!  The mill sounds were ear-piercing inside the factory, and the smell of 'rotten eggs' from the paper pulp process was really bad.  I didn't understand how the mill workers could smell this odor all day long and still do their jobs.  As we took the long bus ride back to school, I was quite certain I did not want to work at Weyerhaeuser when I grew up.  Fortunately we were given souvenir wooden patches that were football shaped, but flat, that were used to patch the knots that had to be cut out of the thin veneer before they were stacked and glued to make 4 x 8 foot plywood sheets.  These little 'wooden boats' about 4 inches long made the trip to the mill worthwhile!

Farms and orchards were numerous in the Willamette Valley.  The fertile soil and mild weather were very conducive to growing fruits, vegetables, and nuts, as well as grain crops.  Each fall my folks would buy bags of filberts (i.e., hazelnuts) and English walnuts, still in the shell, at local orchards.  Deanna and I learned how to crack nuts without smashing them or our fingers, so that mom could freeze the nuts for use throughout the year.  We always had our own family garden, so we had plenty of berries and vegetables in the summer.  Mom would routinely get out her Mason jars and can any extra produce.

However, living in Eugene did have a downside in the winter.  It would often rain or drizzle, and dense fog would hang in the valley.  Folks would often joke how they hadn't seen the sun for days on end.  We later learned that SAD was more prevalent in our climate, and light therapy was a useful treatment. Perhaps my biggest disappointment as a child 'weather wise' was that we rarely had snow.  Thank goodness my folks would occasionally take a drive up the McKenzie Highway to the 'snow line' so that we could play in the snow for an hour or two!  Only in January, 1969, when I was a graduate student in sunny Los Angeles, did 'The Big Snow' dump over three feet of the white stuff on Eugene.  The attached photo taken by Sam Blackwell at Lane Community College gives you an idea of how much snow fell.  My brother Ron, who was 15 at the time, proudly sent me a photo showing him standing in snow up to his waist.  And to think that Eugene did not have a single snow plow in their Department of Public Works!

Now and then as a boy, I would hear the famous quote by Horace Greeley, 'go west, young man, go west'.  I would immediately think of my father, and how he had done exactly that at a very young age.  I believe that my folks really felt that they had found the 'Promised Land, flowing with milk and honey'.  I too was very grateful that fate would lead them to such a wonderful place as Eugene.  Again, 'no man is an island, but Eugene is a city in Oregon'.