Harry Glickman

Rubenstein: Harry, today you are going to do most of the speaking. What we want to do is a quick review of your early memories of Portland, your teenage years, your military years, your years at the University of Oregon, the start of your sports promotion programs, the Portland Buckaroos, the Trailblazers, and on to retirement. That, on a brief scale is the great life of Harry Glickman. Now it is all up to you.
GLICKMAN: OK. Let’s start right at the beginning. I was born on May 13, 1924 in Portland. My mother was Bessie Glickman who came to this country from a shtetl in Poland after World War I. She later lost all of her family, a father, step-mother, two sisters and a brother in the Holocaust. My father was the oldest of eight children and my grandfather was Morris Glickman (who was one of the greatest men I’ve ever known). There is a tradition in the Orthodox tradition that you rarely, if ever bring a body into the synagogue for a funeral. Only for special people. He was one of the few that they ever did that for. Anyway, my father, very candidly, was mentally ill. He and my mother were divorced when I was five years old. She went to work in the ladies garment industry as a finisher. A finisher is the one who does the buttons and buttonholes. We lived for a time, I started grade school, in Irvington. We moved back and forth. I lived with my grandparents for a while and went to Laurelhurst School. And finally we moved to South Portland when I was in the second grade. I went to Shattuck School. I sold newspaper and carried newspapers as a young man. And then I graduated from Lincoln High School in 1941.

My intention was to stay out of school for a year, work and go to the University of Oregon. That summer my mother decided to get married again and move to Seattle. I was never going to go to Seattle and become a Husky so instead, a friend of mine, Ray Veltman whose father had a fruit stand out on Barbur Blvd., suggested I go down to Oregon and he would go to Modesto Junior College, get his grades up and meet me there for the Spring term. It never worked out that way. I went home and wrote three letters. One to Howard Hobbson the basketball coach, who didn’t have any need of my services; one to Joe Weinstein who had an Army/Navy store in Eugene and offered me employment; and one to a friend of mine, Aaron Buchwach who was then a senior at the University of Oregon and who wrote me a letter saying that he had come to Oregon with $13 in his pocket and made it through. He suggested that I come down and he would give me whatever help he could. He at the time was the assistant in the athletic news bureau, was the campus correspondent for the Oregon Journal, and for International News Service and the idea was then that I would inherit those jobs. I pledged Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity, one of the best moves I ever made. I was a very green and shy seventeen year old freshman and I don’t think I would have made it through had it not been for being a Sammy. That was a wonderful experience for me.

Rubenstein: Harry, I want to interrupt one moment. How did Buchwach spell his name?
GLICKMAN: Buchwach [spells out]. I guess this would be as good a time as any to interject a Buchwach story. When he went into the service, he was assigned as a machine gun instructor in Las Vegas, Nevada. The first time I ever heard the word Las Vegas. Of course his forte was journalism. He was a graduate, Phi Beta Kappa from Oregon, and he wanted to get out of there. Wayne Morse, who had been the dean of the Law School had just been elected to the Senate. Buck wrote him and Wayne arranged for Buck to get transferred to the Pacific edition of Stars and Stripes in the building of the Honolulu Advertiser. After the war, Buc was single and he had a jeep. They asked him to stay on at the Advertiser. He said he would stick around for six months and have a ball. He stayed there for the rest of his life. He did everything. He was managing editor, city editor, had a tremendous career in journalism. He is buried very close to Ernie Pyle at the cemetery there in Honolulu. As editor of the Honolulu Advertiser, he had a lot of juice. They just built the Sheraton Maui and some friends of my in-laws arranged to go there over the Christmas holidays and invited my in-laws to go along. My father-in-law had Cohn Brother’s furniture and didn’t figure he could leave at that time. Finally they persuaded him that he could get away. But by then they could no longer get a reservation. So my mother-in-law says, “Get a hold of your friend and see if he can get us a reservation.” I said, “It isn’t going to do any good.” She said, “Please try.” So I sent him a telegram saying, “Please get my in-laws a reservation at the Sheraton Maui starting Christmas Eve” Back came the following response: “Jesus Christ couldn’t get a reservation at the Sheraton Maui starting Christmas Eve, which as you will recall is how we got into all this trouble in the first place.” [laughter]

OK. Now I am at the University of Oregon. Pearl Harbor comes along and they decided to curtail some of the sports activities. We are out covering a track meet during the spring term and I notice Bruce Hamby who had been the director [inaudible] and Dick Strite, the sports editor of the Register Guard. Finally Bruce came over and said he was leaving to go and work at the Oregonian in Portland and would I be interested in taking over his job as campus correspondent for the Oregonian. Well, does a kid like ice cream? Of course. So the next year, as an eighteen year old sophomore, I became director of the athletic news bureau and campus correspondent for the Oregonian. I had to work my way through my freshman year waiting tables in the house and some other odd jobs, I had it pretty good. A hundred bucks a month at that time was pretty darn good dough. We were living it up because we all knew we were going into the service. Eventually I was in the enlisted reserve corps of the Army. We got called into the Army in April of 1943, got inducted at Fort Lewis, Washington, went to basic training at Camp Roberts, California. From there they started a program in the ARMY, the ASTP (Army Specialized Training Program) and we were sent to Compton Junior College (which produced Hugh Macalhaney). It was a nice, quiet little suburb in those days. We had a great time there. Two of my fraternity brothers, Bob Hasson and Irv Potter were there with me. Irv got sent to Louisiana, Bob to the University of Idaho and I got sent to the Texas College of Mines and Metallurgy. It is now called University of Texas, El Paso. I spent about a term and a half there. I am getting ahead of myself here, but when we went overseas, I had a pass to London and I saw a guy walking with a patch of Potter’s division. I sent him a letter saying maybe we could get together in London while we are both here. The letter came back KIA, killed in action. My first fraternity brother that I lost in World War II. He was a very dear friend.

Anyhow, from El Paso we went to Camp Barkeley, Texas for some more training. I then became the battalion clerk and went overseas with the 12th armored division, landing in England. We stayed there for about six weeks and then landed at Le Havre, France on Armistice Day, November 11, ‘44. We were originally assigned to the ninth army and then to the seventh army in southern France and I got transferred back to my line company and became a staff sergeant in Company B of the 56th armored infantry battalion. I saw about six months of action.

After the war we were on occupation duty in a place called Dillingham on the Danube, Germany. I came down with a bad case of hay fever and they were sending guys to a hospital in Augsburg, Germany and I figured I would report to sick call and go to Augsburg where I could see a very dear friend of mine, Paul Basche from Baker, Oregon. Instead, they had a tent hospital that they were closing to the Pacific and they flew in some C-47s and flew us all up to Paris to a beautiful general hospital in the suburbs of Paris. I remember getting there, I hadn’t had a shower in about six months, and they had these beautiful marble showers. I think I took five of them the first day I was there. I was there for a while and then I got sent to a replacement depot at a place called [inaudible], a suburb of Paris. And from there to Namur, Belgium. And then home to the University of Oregon for spring term of 1946. The school year of 1946-47 was one of the great years of my life. First of all I got to be the editor of Old Oregon, the alumni magazine. I got my job back as campus correspondent to the Oregonian. And of course, we were all on the G.I. Bill so finances were not a problem. In fact, I was in pretty good shape then. I got tapped for the Druids (the Junior), and Friars (the Senior) men’s honorary society. I was president of Sigma Delta Chi, the journalistic fraternity, and was president of my own fraternity, Sigma Alpha Mu. It was a really proud time of my life when I went to Chicago to the national convention and Sigma Tau chapter of Sigma Alpha Mu was named for the Founder’s Cup as the best chapter in the national level. Max Rubenstein happened to be there from Eugene and we filled that cup full of champagne and had a great time.

Now it’s time to go to work: I had a very dear friend at the Oregonian, Don McLeod, who was the executive sports editor. We were such great friends that when he passed away I was honored to give the eulogy at his funeral. And Don had always told me, “There is a job here for you as soon as you graduate.” Well it turned out that when I was ready in December of 1947, a fellow named Pat Frizell who had been there came home from the service that week. They had a law at the time that you had to give a returning service man his job back. So Don said, “We’ll get a couple of publicity accounts, keep you going and we’ll give you the next job opening.” And he helped me. I got a job as publicity director for the boxing promoter in Portland Tex Salkeld, did the publicity for the annual Shriner’s Hospital all-star game and for the Multnomah Kennel Club. I did that for about five years. I didn’t go to work for the Oregonian because I kind of liked being my own boss. I wasn’t making any money; in fact, I made less money than I did my senior year at Oregon for a while. But anyhow, in December of 1951, I was in L.A. and I was scheduled to go to dinner with a fellow named Benny Woolbort who was the executive sports editor of the Examiner. He had been in the Navy with a cousin of mine. That is how I met him. Benny called me that day and he said, “I have to go to a cocktail party. Meet me there and then we will go out to my house for dinner.” He gave me the name. It was called the Sportsman Club in downtown L.A. What had happened was that the Los Angeles Rams had just won the world championship and they were throwing a party for the media. I went down there to meet Benny and I kind of got left alone for a minute and a guy came over and introduced himself. He said, “My name is Harold Pauley” He was one of the owners of the Rams. Pauley Pavilion at UCLA is named for that family. And I said to him (just to make conversation), “You got Van Brocklin from Oregon, you just won the championship, why don’t you play one of your pre-season games up in Portland?” He said, “Funny you should ask, we talked about pre-season today and we thought about Portland. Are you from there? What do you do? Would we draw?” I said, “You would sell the stadium out.” At that time of the year the stadium held about 29,000. We went over to talk to Dan Reeves, the president of the Rams. And he took a liking to it and I said, “What would you have to have to come up to Portland to play?” and he said, “A guarantee of $40,000. $20,000 each team and the other one would be the Chicago Cardinals.” I said, “Well, when would you have to know?” He said, “I’m going to Philadelphia for the league meeting. I’d like to wrap up our pre-season by the time I go.” I said, “Give me some time to get back to Portland.” I went back and talked to everybody who I thought owned $40,000 to no avail. Meanwhile in boxing, we had a fight coming up between Harry Kid Matthews and Rex Layng which we moved to the P.I. building because they had a capacity of about 10,000. I ran into Dave Horenstein, my friend Earl’s brother, and was telling him how well it was going to do. And he said, “You are telling me that is going to sell out?” I said, “Dave, it’s an absolute cinch.” He said, “If that sells out, I’ll put up the $40,000 for the football game.” That’s how it happened. They put up the dough because the fight did sell out. And that game drew, I can always remember the number, 29,122. Primarily because of Van Brocklin who was a very close friend. From there on in, we had an annual pre-season football game in Portland. Sometimes two. We brought in just about every team in the National Football League at that time. I never could get the Baltimore Colts here even though they had George Shaw Morrigan. And I never got the Bears or the Detroit Lions. I think we had every other team in the National Football League play in Portland.
That’s how I got started as a promoter. I also started a relationship with Abe Sapperstein of the Harlem Globetrotters. We first started that in 1952. The only place that we could play them was in the new gym at Lincoln High School. We turned away more people than we let in that day. That started a relationship that lasted about 25 years. I could sit here and tell you that in those 25 years, Abe and I never had a scrap of paper between us. He would send me a telegram every year, give me the dates, and that was the end of it. Everything else was a handshake. That’s the way it was when I was raised in this business. I wish it still was but of course it is not.

From there I became, for a short time, manager of the Multnomah Stadium, which was then owned by the Multnomah Athletic Club. We had just passed a ballot measure in Portland spearheaded by the Oregon Journal, for a new zoo and a coliseum. It finally passed and we were going to have a new building in Portland, which we sorely needed. I was very anxious at that time to bring a National Basketball Association team to Portland. But they had a commissioner, Maurice Podoloff and anything west of Brooklyn was beyond his mentality. So instead, as I went on the “luncheon circuit,” when I was at the stadium, everybody started asking about hockey. I had been a hockey fan as a kid. In fact when I got out of school, Hal Saltzman and I used to go up to the old ice arena just about every Sunday night and see a hockey game. I was a pretty good fan. So one day I was in Seattle. I called Al Leader, the president of the Western Hockey League and asked if they would be interested in returning to Portland. There hadn’t been hockey here because the building up on Marshall Street had been condemned in 1951 by the fire marshal. Al said, “Yeah, we are very interested. We have been holding that for New Westminster to move there.” I said, “Would they be interested in selling the team so that we could move it to Portland?” He said, “They might.” He put a meeting together. It was then owned by a gentleman named Fred Hume, the mayor of Vancouver, B.C. He came down with his coach, Hal Laycoe. We hit on a purchase price of $85,000. I put a group in Portland together of Al Forman, Ted Gamble, Howard Lane to buy it. Oh, also at the time, Hume mentioned that it had to be in Canadian funds and they were worth more than American funds. So the actual purchase price became $88,500. Forman and I drove up to Vancouver, closed the deal and moved the team to Portland. We had a year before the Coliseum was going to be open so we loaned the players that we had acquired with that purchase to Victoria. They played there for a year and then moved to Portland. We had great success with the Buckaroos. From Year One we won the Lester Patrick Cup championship. We broke every attendance record in the Western Hockey League. We went for thirteen years, finished in first place eight times, second place three times, won the Lester Patrick Cup three times and it was just a delightful, wonderful experience from day one.

Rubenstein: Wonderful wonderful. Well, we just finished the very interesting era in early Portland professional athletics. The Buckaroos won the hearts of everybody in Portland. Harry was certainly the backbone of that entire organization. The city was proud of him and the team.
All right, are you ready to go on?
GLICKMAN: I’ll not drop hockey for a moment. I’m getting way ahead of the story. I was 80 years old last May. Last summer, when I returned home from the desert, the hockey guys put a luncheon together in honor of my 80th birthday. I am pleased to say that there were 80 guys there. They came from Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Tucson, Arizona, all over. It was one of the greatest times I ever had. They were a great bunch of guys. Many of them moved to Portland. We had a lot of fun and success together.

I still thought Portland belonged in the Major Leagues of professional sports. I will go back to my first Pro football game. They had a rule in the National Football League at the time that the publicity director traveled to the city in which they are going to play a week ahead of the game. The Rams had just hired a young kid out of the University of San Francisco as their new publicity director. He came to Portland on his first assignment. His name was Pete Rozelle. We became pretty good friends to the point where every year when I had to go to the hockey meetings in Montreal in June, I would go from there down to New York and visit with Pete and see about getting a franchise for Portland. I will always believe that, had we passed the measure for Delta Dome, we would have the football team that now exists in Seattle. The NFL was anxious to come to the Northwest and they would have come to the first city that had an adequate stadium. It turned out that it was Seattle and not Portland. In lieu of that, I turned my attention back to the NBA and by then there was a new commissioner, Walter Kennedy, whom I had met when he ran the Harlem Globetrotter office in New York. We weren’t close friends, but we were friends. So I had a friend in court and the NBA had just expanded into Phoenix and San Diego and Seattle, all those natural rivals of Portland back to hockey and baseball days. They were anxious to come to Portland. We put a group together and we were going to carry it public. At the time, interest rates were running close to 20% and that fell through. Literally at the last minute, a gentleman came down from Seattle named Herman Sarkowsky. He said “I’ll take it if I can get two other guys to go with me.” The two other guys were Larry Weinberg in Los Angeles and Bob Schmertz in New Jersey. They had all been very successful in the home-building business and got to be very good friends. They had always talked about the possibility of owning a professional basketball team. That’s how it happened. The purchase price was 3.7 million dollars. We had a real haggle over getting our fair share of the television money, which wasn’t very much in those days, but we wanted to sit with both feet under the table like everyone else. We moved into a new headquarters in the Lloyd building in Northeast Portland and got started in the 1970-71 season. We had a year over-lap where we still operated the Portland Buckaroos and the Trailblazers. We struggled like all expansion teams do. Although in our first year we won 29 games, which is the most that any expansion team ever won. We had a colorful coach in Rolland Todd, “Mod Todd” as he became called. We enjoyed some success and then in 1976, Larry Weinberg took control. Bob Schmertz became so excited about the NBA that he bought the Boston Celtics so he had to sell his interest in Portland to Weinberg. Herman Sarkowsky got involved in the football team in Seattle so he sold his interest to Larry and Larry became the majority owner. We appointed Jack Ramsey the coach for the 1976-77 season and without ever before having made the playoffs we made them that year and went on to win the NBA championship.

Rubenstein: Unbelievable season.
GLICKMAN: Yes, it was. We had great success from there on in. We were financially successful. We always had a profitable year. We had some great success on the court up until Larry decided to sell out. He sold the team about 1988 to Paul Allen of Seattle. I stayed on with the Trailblazers through about 1993 or 94. We won the conference finals in 1992, but lost to Detroit and Chicago in the League championship series. But we had some success and I think we hold the all-time record in professional sports for consecutive capacity crowds – at Memorial Coliseum. We had a lot of luck, a lot of success, and a lot of fun.

Rubenstein: It was a very hot ticket.
GLICKMAN: Oh yes. A real hot ticket. I will never forget that parade the year we won in 1977. The year we played Detroit and went to the finals. We had another parade here in 1990. That was quite and event. It was an exciting time.

Rubenstein: What happened after you decided to retire?
GLICKMAN: I decided to retire. We had vacationed a couple of times at Palm Springs, California. I’ve got to admit, I was never a huge fan but I kind of fell in love with it. JoAnn always liked it and we decided to buy a little condo back there and we eventually retired down there. I was still coming back to Portland a week of every month to continue working in some capacity with the Trailblazers and then I retired officially in 1994. We live about half of the year down in Palm Springs and the other half here in Portland in a condominium at a place called “the Legends” right here near the Multnomah Club. We both work out fairly regularly and I play a lot of golf down at the desert. We play cards, I read a lot. We have a very good life-style. I like it very much.

Rubenstein: So, your memories of Portland are all good memories?
GLICKMAN: Pretty much. As a kid we “lived” at what was first called the B’nai B’rith Center and was later the Jewish Community Center. My mother once threatened to move my bed there. She said, “I might as well, you are there all the time anyway.” We played basketball there under the direction of a saint named Harry Policar. Every summer I went to the B’nai B’rith camp where “Polly” was the director. I wound up eventually as a counselor there. I had a great time. South Portland was a way of life. It was a great experience. Primarily a Jewish and Italian neighborhood. I went to Hebrew School at the old Neighborhood House. Portland was great in those days. Nobody ever locked their doors. Nobody ever got into any serious problems. I don’t remember any of my friends that I grew up with (many of whom are still my closest friends today) getting in any serious trouble and many of them became hugely successful.

Rubenstein: Did you ever have any experiences with antisemitism?
GLICKMAN: Yes I’m sure there were some times, but not really. It never really hit me until I went to the University of Oregon and it wasn’t blatant antisemitism. It was just that Jewish kids couldn’t get into other fraternities; we had our own Jewish fraternity. Gentile girls didn’t date Jewish boys in those days. That changed eventually. My first real blatant antisemitism was when I got in the service. There were a lot of antisemitic remarks. There was a lot of that.

Rubenstein: I think a lot of our contemporaries found that in the military. Do you have much family in Portland?
GLICKMAN: OK. In 1959 I married JoAnn Matin. She had had a little daughter, Lynn, by a previous marriage and then we had two children of our own, Marshall and Jennifer. Marshall is currently the director of marketing for the Euro League – basketball in Europe. He has an office in Boston. I have a grandson, Harrison Lazarus, who is now going to be five this summer. Jennifer remarried and recently had a baby girl who is now six months old. She continues to work part time in radio and her husband, Mark Lett works in advertising. That is pretty much the extent of the family. I have a brother-in-law Jerry Matin. Most of the Glickman family (there were eight kids) are gone. I still have two aunts living in Seattle, Minerva Sanders and Nettie Maizels.

Rubenstein: Is there anything that you would like to add to what you have already said about the many different parts of your life?
GLICKMAN: I think I covered most of the bases. The teenage years in Portland were great. I ran around practically only with Jewish friends. South Portland was a great place in those days. Nobody had any money. We all worked; we sold papers or something. We got by. My mother was a finisher in the ladies garment industry where they had five seasons: fall, winter, spring, summer, and slack. Slack meant that there was no work. We had a lady who had a little grocery store, Toby Bornstein on Fourth and Lincoln and when my mother wasn’t working, she carried us so we always had something to eat. She eventually moved back to Connecticut.

Rubenstein: The Jewish community always took care of its own. Most of us didn’t realize what the Depression was because everyone we knew was already poor.
GLICKMAN: Exactly. We didn’t think it was so bad. We had a lot of fun. We played ball on the streets.

Rubenstein: Well Harry we certainly thank you for this interview. I’m sure whoever is going to do the transcribing may want to call you about names.
GLICKMAN: Sure, I would be happy to give them anything. If they want me to embellish it, I would be happy to do it.