Enriching our future by preserving our past
est. 1978
Dedicated to preserving the cultural and historical legacy of the greater Tigard area through the conservation of the John Tigard House and its collection, research and exhibitions of our unique heritage, and educational programs.
Quarterly Newsletter
April-May-June 2011
COMMUNITY GARDEN SPACE AVAILABLE Since Mitchell School has relocated to Tualatin, the raised garden beds have lacked loving care. Because of a lack of THA garden volunteers, the Board has decided to make the raised garden beds at the John Tigard House Museum located at the corner of 103rd and Canterbury Lane available to first our members and then the general public. In this era of expense food prices, having your own fresh vegetables will be a welcome addition to your kitchen. Also, fresh vegetables taste so much better. THA will provide the needed water. Each gardener will be assigned one raised bed. He/she will need to provide gardening tools, seed or plants. If interested please call Martha at 503-747-9856.
THA BOARD MEETING & 2011 ANNUAL MEETING 1-3PM, Saturday, June 11, 2011 9875 SW View Terrace (off 100th Ave, Tigard) Call for directions, 503-747-9856 Please join the Tigard Historical Association’s Board of Directors in celebrating the successes of the organization. See what your membership dues, donations and volunteer hours have accomplished this year. An election of officers for the coming year, July 1, 2010 through June 30, 2012 will be held. Refreshments will be served. All members are welcome and are encouraged to attend. It addition to the actual meeting, you are invited to view a 30-yearold garden. It is unusual in that it includes a cacti garden and Japanese-style pruning of evergreens.
The Tigard Historical Association asks you to help celebrate
CURTIS TIGARD’S 102ND BIRTHDAY! 1PM to 3PM, Saturday, April 16, 2011 The John Tigard House Museum 103rd and Canterbury Lane Tigard, Oregon Refreshments will be served.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
A CHRISTMAS CARD TO ONE OF OUR BOYS
April-May-June 2011
By Valri Darling
President: Mary Feller
In 1982, Martha Bishop, wife of former Tigard mayor Wilbur Bishop, donated a Christmas card to the Tigard Historical Assn. The envelope is postmarked Dec. 23, 1942 and the card is addressed to A/C Wilbur Bishop, Mather Field, Calif. It is from “Mrs. Hans Gaarde, Tigard, Oreg”.
Vice President: Martha Worley Secretary: Valri Darling Treasurer: Karyn Smith Exhibitions: Ruth Croft, Mary Feller, Valri Darling
Video Oral History Interviews: Martha Worley, Mary Feller, Valri Darling, Barbara Peterson
Collections Team Leader: Valri Darling Accessions Manager: Valri Darling Preservation Administrator: Valri Darling
Website Manager & Official Photographer:
Although the envelope is addressed to Wilbur, the personal note inside begins “Hello Bunnie” which we assume was a nickname of Wilbur’s. The note tells so much about the close community feeling in Tigard, the war time effort of those on the home front and the fear of sending a young son off to war. On page 3 is the note to A/C Wilbur Bishop.
Phil Pasteris
THE JOHN TIGARD HOUSE
Web Domain Master:
Address: 103rd & Canterbury Lane
Newsletter Layout: Lynn Parker
Mail:
PO Box 230402 Tigard, OR 97281
Children’s Education: Yvonne Brod,
Phone:
503-747-9856
Liz Christensen
Email:
[email protected]
Investment Manager: Don Feller
Website: www.tigardhistorical.org
Public Relations: Mary Feller
The John Tigard House Museum is open throughout the year by special appointment.THA encourages you to phone 503-747-9856 for such an appointment for your club, church, friends, family, or school class. You can call the same number and speak with Martha regarding our regularly scheduled events in 2011.
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Grant Writing: Susan Wilson, Mary Feller
Advisors: Pat & Oliver Keerins,
Paul Clark, Gary & Sue Lass, Betty Parker, Curtis Tigard, Sandra & David Tigard, Sally Jones
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If you would like to display a collection during one of our events, call Ruth at 503-245-0240.
THA Quarterly Newsletter
Hello Bunnie: Your Aunt Anna sent me your address so thought I would write and say hello and send Xmas greetings from us up here. How are you getting along with your training? Saw your father a few weeks ago. He was just fine at that time. We keep busy up here doing all we can to help out with war work. Hans and Richard are both working in the shipyard. Hans is a Burner Leader and Rich is a Shipfitter. I guess Rich will be in the draft pretty soon. I hate to think of it as he seems so young. He will be 19 in April. Robert Heilman has taken his first physical. He has been going to Willamette University at Salem, taking up medicine. Richard planned to go to O.A.C. next month but don’t know what he can do now. Hope your holiday season will be pleasant. An old friend, Hilma
MEMORIES DELIVERED - RECOLLECTIONS OF A FORMER PAPER GIRL By Susan (Tominac) Wilson, THA member and former Tigard resident As a pre-teen in the early 1970s, my best hope for augmenting a modest weekly allowance came in the form of berry picking, babysitting, or delivering the local newspaper. Babysitting gigs were scarce in my particular neighborhood, so I picked beans and berries for two summers before setting my sights on a job with yearround earning potential. My dad was pretty nostalgic about his own days as a newsboy, and his tales likely influenced my decision at age 12 to join the legions of boys and girls who delivered the Tigard Times. I was assigned a route that started at Pacific Highway and continued up Gaarde Street to Southwest 117th. I was issued a canvas saddle sack emblazoned with the newspaper’s name on each pocket. I April-May-June 2011
could wear the sack on my shoulders with newspapers loaded into the front and back, or I could sling it across the back fender of my bicycle, pack mule style. I arrived home from school each Wednesday to find a large bundle of newspapers waiting on the front porch. After changing out of my school clothes, I would roll the papers, secure each with a rubber band, and load them into the delivery bag. Given the distance from my home to the highway and the route itself, I walked or rode about three miles each week. Subscribers paid 35 cents a month to get the local weekly delivered. Fees were collected by the carriers See Memories Delivered on page 4 page 3
MEMORIES DELIVERED
from page 3
themselves. It seems miraculous now, but nearly all of my customers were home when I made my rounds one Saturday each month to collect payment. I would come home with about $11 or $12 bucks, including tips. After paying the Times their share, I netted about $6 dollars a month. Combined with my allowance of 50 cents per week, I was rich! After my first year of delivering papers, mostly on bicycle, I decided it was easier to walk the route. Gaarde Street’s gradual incline was quite the workout on a onespeed bicycle. The Times started producing a circular that went to all the homes along the route that didn’t subscribe to the regular paper. They paid me two cents per ad, and I immediately subcontracted that job to my friend, Julie. Having a pal to walk the long route week after week was a heck of a lot of fun. Sometimes, Julie would come along on collection day, too, and we would split the tips. One memorable customer, whose flashy clothes and high-beam smile defied his dismal apartment building, always gave us a dollar and told us to keep the sixty-five cents as a tip. Even after splitting it fifty-fifty, it was a significant chunk of change. Of all the routes I could have been assigned, I was privileged to deliver to two of Tigard’s most famous ‘pioneer’ families and several community leaders. In fact, the first house on my route belonged to Rosa Tigard and her daughter Grace Houghton. Opposite their home was the bungalow owned by Mr. and Mrs. Hans Gaarde. The Davidson’s who owned the local Frostop Drive-In lived on the route, as did one of my math teachers at Twality Jr. High, and a social studies teacher from Tigard Senior High. Mrs. Tigard was about 102 when I started delivering the paper, and I recall that Mrs. Houghton once invited page 4
Julie and me to come inside her home to meet Tigard’s aging matriarch. It was a short visit consisting of an introduction and a few pleasantries at Mrs. Tigard’s bedside. I remember that Mrs. Tigard nodded, smiled, and murmured a few words of encouragement, and that brief encounter left us feeling like we had just met royalty. The Gaarde’s worked in their yard a lot, but on the rare occasion they were inside when we came collecting, Mrs. G. always called her husband to the door to handle the transaction. He would stroll over, reach into his pocket for the required change, and pose a question. He was the kind of person whose simultaneous straight face and twinkle in one eye made you wonder whether his comments were meant to tease or to elicit an intelligent debate. There were many dogs on the route, including a handsome boxer named Chet, that lived on 117th. We got to know all of the residents and all of their pets, though contact was necessarily brief if we aimed to get home before dark. One Samoyed seemed to have an aversion to newsprint, because he would bark and growl and try his best to break the tether that tied him to his front porch. His owner was quick to reassure us that the dog “wouldn’t hurt a flea,” but we didn’t buy it. The Times’ office ultimately gave the owner a newspaper box to install at the end of his driveway so we wouldn’t have to deal with Ivan-the-Terrible Canine. By ninth grade, I started getting regular babysitting jobs. Not only was babysitting more lucrative, it didn’t require a three-mile walk and it didn’t turn your hands black from newspaper ink. I resigned as a paper girl in 1975, but in the space of three character-building years, I collected nearly as many memories as the number of papers I delivered. No doubt about it, those were good Times. THA Quarterly Newsletter
THE VINCENT FAMILY, A PROMINENT TIGARD FAMILY By Mary Feller Sylvester Ruel Vincent, affectionately known as “Ves”, was born in 1862 on the shores of Lake Huron. In the late 1880s he graduated from the American Institute of Phrenology. This was a body of knowledge which believed one could determine someone’s character and faculties by studying the shape of the person’s skull. He and his bride, Tillie Preston, moved to Oregon in 1885. In 1897 he graduated from Chicago’s Hering Medical College. As a widower with two small sons, Ves set up
in Tigard. He was taken to Portland unconscious. After treatment, he returned to Tigard via a train owned by same Oregon Electric Company. In 1918 he died from his injuries sustained in the accident. His brother, Dr. Arthur Vincent, moved to Tigard assuming Vac’s medical practice. Many Tigard High School teachers boarded with Dr. Arthur Vincent and his wife, Hannah. Their younger son, Arthur H. Vincent became a cashier at the First Bank of Tigard, founded by William
his medical practice in Tigardville and Tualatin in the early 1900s. His widowed sister, Anna kept house for the doctor, his sons and her daughter in a house located on today’s 102nd Ave. and McDonald Street. Although he lived in Tigardville, he set up his medical practice was in Tualatin in a wooden building on Boones Ferry Road facing the railroad tracks. In 1901 he had telephone service established between his office and his home in Tigardville.
Evans, C.F. Tigard and other local businessmen. Today, the bank’s brick original building on Main Street is still there. Arthur H. served honorably in World War II; he became Adjutant General of the 7th Major Port of the U.S. Army in Japan. Arthur returned to bank for two years before establishing a real estate and insurance brokerage company at the corner of Pacific Highway and Greenburg Road.
Dr. Vincent owned the first automobile in Tigard, a 1911 Maxwell. (However, Curtis Tigard remembers that his Uncle John Tigard had a 1911 Maxwell in his garage when the John Tigard House was situated on Pacific Highway. Who really has bragging rights to Tigardville’s first car?) At first he did not use his car for his medical practice. Its narrow, smooth tires were of little use on the wet muddy roads. Each autumn it was jacked up on blocks in the barn until spring. He continued to use an enclosed buggy. When confinement cases (birth) kept him away all night, his second wife, Elizabeth and his sons would find him asleep in the buggy which had been ferried home by his faithful horse. In 1915 Dr. Vincent’s car was hit by a train at the Main Street crossing of the Oregon Electric Train Company April-May-June 2011
Arthur was a charter member of the Tigard Lion’s Club; a member of the Tigard School Board for at least 15 years; a clerk of the Tigard-Metzger Water Board; Treasurer of the Tualatin Fire District; an active member of two Masonic Lodges (Sherwood and Tigard); a member of the Scottish Rite; a member of Al Kader Shrine Club; a member of the Tigard Grange; a member of Odd Fellows; a member of the American Legion; a member of Veterans of Foreign Wars; and a member of Tigard United Methodist Church. Finally Arthur H retired in 1965, enjoying recreational hunting and fishing until his death in 1973 of acute leukemia. George S., Dr. Sylvester Vincent’s older son, was also a great success. He graduated from Oregon Agricultural College (OSU). He earned an international reputation as a bridge expert.
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TIGARD HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION P.O. Box 230402 Tigard, OR 97281
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JOIN THE TIGARD HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION TODAY! Benefits of Membership: • Early notice about educational programs, special events & exhibitions. • Newsletters keeping you informed about local history activities. • Pride in supporting local heritage preservation. • Opportunity to meet, socialize & volunteer with others who care about local history.
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