George J Noakes, Part 8--College Life and Other Pursuits

To left:  The main administration building at Oregon State College, Corvallis, Oregon  (later Oregon State University), circa 1948, the year my dad entered as a freshman.

  It's a public land-grant school founded in 1869.  The chief rival of the more famous University of Oregon.  My dad had thought about going to the bigger school, located in Eugene, but he found that campus to have too much of a "country club" atmosphere he didn't much care for. Corvallis, smaller and less elitist,  suited him better 

Oregon State's chief  claim to international fame in academics is that it was the university-home of Doctor Linus Pauling, a double Nobel Prize Winner (for Chemistry and later for Peace.)   Currently, OSU holds the distinction  for having won the National  Collegiate Baseball World Series in 2006 and 2007.  For a relatively small university, it was a major accomplishment to beat such baseball powerhouses as USC, Texas, Stanford and Arizona State.

Like most cross-state rivals, the University of Oregon Ducks and Oregon State Beavers have long been sports rivals.  The annual football game between the Beaver squad and the Ducks (called by the media, apparently without irony, "The Civil War") is the biggest sporting event in a state which has no NFL football franchise.   

Though he only went there two years, dad was a keen follower of Beaver sports all the way through his life.   We went to some basketball games OSU had in Berkeley against the University of California Bears when I was growing up in the Bay Area.  HIs biggest passion though was baseball and I was glad that OSU managed to win those baseball titles before he left this world.  I found some clippings of the baseball college championships in one of his old yearbooks.

Anyway, in his own words:

"I enrolled at Oregon State College after two years in the Marines in September of 1948.  My major was business with  a minor in "forestry--business and technology".  I was told by my advisor I would be better off going forty miles down the road to the University of Oregon in Eugene, mainly because he wasn't too impressed with my math and science scores...but I didn't feel comfortable on the campus in Eugene, so I stayed put."

"My first year I had a girlfriend and was doing pretty well in my classes.  One of the things I did as far as extra-curricular stuff was become a student volunteer in the Presidential campaign between Harry Truman and Thomas Dewey, who was governor of New York.  Dewey had been a "racket buster" district attorney back in New York in the 1930's and was very popular.  Most of the magazines and newspapers picked him to be the next President. To me, he was a banker-type and a phony to boot, unlike Truman who made it up on his own bootstraps.  I remember seeing Dewey on a newsreel trying to milk a cow in Wisconsin or somewhere--the guy was milking this cow wearing a suit!    

"Among other things, I drove a truck with a loud speaker and a banner for the Democrats.  We worked hard at  getting out the vote for President Truman.  Oregon was a tough state for him to win,  because of all the conservative farmers who had started making big money in food exports to Europe and other places after the war. The farmers naturally jumped back to the Republicans from the Democrats now that the Great Depression was over.  Despite the fact that he was predicted to lose the race and all the white southerners went over to Strom Turmond over the segregation issue and some progressives went to Henry Wallace(ex-FDR vice-president 1941-45) , Truman won."

That he did, to my father's surprise and delight.  Truman engineered his famous come from behind victory by hitting hard at (i.e, "giving hell" to) the "do nothing 80th Congress" for its lackluster record and attempts to roll back elements of the New Deal.  Dewey turned out to be a lackluster campaigner who said little and went about spouting  platitudes like "the future is ahead of us", taking for granted the Democratic hold  on the White House was over. Although Truman was not a strong Civil Rights President, he was open enough about the changes in the racial divides in America to lose the Deep South in a rift within the Democratic Party that had been growing under Franklin Roosevelt's tenure. 

My dad for years maintained Truman had won Oregon voters as well as the national vote. His memory was actually a little faulty--years later when I looked up the 1948 vote and discovered that Oregon had actually voted for Dewey and awarded its electoral votes  to the Republican. He was a little crest-fallen at that update, but it mattered little because Oregon was the only Western state Truman didn't carry in November of 1948.    

  

Nominee		Harry S. Truman	Thomas E. Dewey	Strom Thurmond
Party		Democratic	Republican	Dixiecrat
Home state		Missouri	New York	South Carolina
Running mate		Alben W. Barkley	Earl Warren	Fielding L. Wright
Electoral vote		303	189	39
States carried		28	16	4
Popular vote		24,179,347	21,991,292	1,175,930
Percentage		49.6%	45.1%	2.4%

from Wikipedia 

To continue my  dad's narrative: 

"The first year went by fast with no problems.  The GI Bill paid our room and tuition and we got so much a month for living expenses. It seemed funny because many of the other students around me were so young, just out of high school, and I had already seen so much and aged.    

(Here's' my dad, taken about the time of his return from college.)   "The next Summer (1949) I got a job driving a taxi cab in Portland.  It was different, to say the least.  Some riders made me nervous when they insisted they ride up in the passenger side of the taxi with me.  Drunks were my least favorite fare. I met a whole lot of people from all walks of life.

"Back to school in the Fall, I made a big mistake academically and otherwise: I enrolled in the Army ROTC program.  It required a lot of math and figuring coordinates and I was just not good at that type of thing. The regular courses became harder also and my grade point average suffered.  After the second year I resigned from the ROTC but it was too late.  I had to leave Oregon State.  I enrolled up at Vanport College (later Portland State).  I concentrated up there on business and accounting courses.  My grades started going back up. Before going to Vanport that (Summer 1950) I worked as a route manager for the Oregon Journal newspaper.   I hired all the carriers and supervised the delivery.  I got my first real experience in sales, selling newspaper contracts to dealers who carried the paper at sidewalk stands.   

"While at college,  I saved up  some extra money working graveyard at a plywood mill. In the Spring of 1951 I found I was just tired of school.  I bought myself a railroad ticket and took off for the East Coast.  When I got to Washington D.C., I found I liked the place.  I interviewed and got a job for the Washington Post in the circulation department. But I thought it over the night before I was going to start and decided to get back on the train again for the West Coast. When I got back to Portland, I took a job with the International Harvester  Company in the accounting department.   Conditions were very good.  Wish I could say the same for the pay."

Considering all the work and the Marine hitch and all, I think my  father was just restless and bored with school.  To me, he was lucky he did so badly in the ROTC; had he done well he would have stayed in and been on for the Korean War.  (The Army called after he was dropped for the course when war broke out.  They wanted him to enlist as a soldier; my dad later said he thought "if the Marines couldn't kill me in two years, why give the Army a second chance?")   I'm not sure why he even went in to ROTC program at Oregon State at all, but he did once tell me that if I was drafted  into the military he hoped I could stay in school as long as I could so I could go in as an officer.  The idea of me as an officer in anything but the Salvation Army is, frankly, laughable but my dad's experiences were his own and some things can't be answered unless you are with that person and in that environment. 

The other big "what-if" was what would have happened to my dad if he had stayed on the East Coast.  I know Washington's atmosphere must have been heady stuff for him.  (Portland was not a big city  back then; it was really a large town.)  Next to sports, politics  was a major passion of his, and most of his reading of biographies and history was of a political nature.     

So it's 1951-2 in this life-story and my dad is fully grown and on his own with a decent job and a car and a hankering for romance and all that.   The next part of the story I will tell about his finding his real calling and his true love in life.