Milt Hasson

Widman: I am going to ask Milt about growing up in Portland, about his early life in Portland and have him just go ahead and talk a little bit about it.
HASSON: I was born in Portland, Oregon 1920, January 22nd, at the old St. Vincent Hospital that was located in Northwest Portland up on the hill. We lived in Southwest Portland where most of the Jewish people in the city of Portland lived. We lived in the West [Floral?] apartments for a while and then moved to a home on SW Fourth Avenue and Lincoln, which was almost in the center of South Portland. The fellows used to say to me that we lived in “upper South Portland.” But it wasn’t, it was in the center. I went to Shattuck School and graduated in 1933.

Widman: Who were some of your classmates?
HASSON: There was Jack Rosen and Howard Schatz and Milt Horenstein and all of us are still living in this year of 2004. We have all been close friends ever since. It has been wonderful for all of us that we have kept in touch with each other. It is a great thing for friends to stay together as long as we have.

Widman: Did you ever leave the community to go to school and then come back or did you stay pretty much in this area?
HASSON: I stayed here. After Shattuck School I went to Lincoln High School in 1933. I graduated from there in 1937. We went to the old Lincoln High School. Not the one that is presently located in Portland. It eventually became Portland State University. I recall the statue of Abraham Lincoln above the front steps to the entrance of the school. I remember the classrooms and our wonderful teachers. There was Mrs. Southworth and Mr. Foulk and I was manager of the basketball team. Our coach was David Wright. That year, our team was one of the best teams in the city and went to the State Tournament. They lost the championship in the last game to little old Bell Fountain which was a little school of about 15 or 20 boys.

Widman: Can I ask you, how many kids were Jewish at that time at Lincoln High School?
HASSON: I’d say that the majority of them were Jewish and the rest were Italian and a lot of them came from up in the Heights. They were the so-called Raicha [Rijeka?] Jews. It was a conglomeration of all ethnic groups. It was a great school. I remember that the gym was so small and the ceiling so low that they couldn’t play basketball. They couldn’t play games there. All of Lincoln’s home games were played at one of the other schools, at Grant or Commerce. We were without a home for a long while. Now, of course, when they did over the Lincoln Hall which is now part of Portland State University, they gutted the gymnasium and made a beautiful auditorium out of it. That was the forbearer of the Lincoln High School to come.

Widman: Milt, can you tell us about your career after high school?
HASSON: After high school, in 1937, I went to the University of Portland. I wanted to stay in town after school because I was active in AZA and all of my friends were here. I didn’t want to go out of town to college. I stayed here and went to the University of Portland for four years. I took the pre-med course. I was going to either go into medicine or dentistry. The University of Portland was a Catholic school and it was a wonderful experience. As Jews we were treated quite nicely. Jack Rosen was there, ex-judge Phil Roth, Lou Sherman and his brothers, Al (Buddy) Feves, Joe Hasson. There were quite a few Jewish fellows there. And the priests treated us pretty nicely. We didn’t have to participate in any religious activities. One thing we did out of respect for them, when the classes began we would stand up while they were reciting their prayers. That was just about it. They respected us as Jews and we received a marvelous education. 

I graduated in 1941. I made applications to medical schools. However, I wasn’t accepted. I believe that a lot of that was due to the fact that there were quotas in the medical schools at that time against Jews. I know that the classmates I had who had exactly the same grades I did but were Catholics were accepted. I decided rather than wait any longer I would go to dental school. I was good with my hands and I wanted to be in some sort of medicine, so I went to dental school. I was at North Pacific Dental College for four years. Actually, it was a four year course but we finished in three years because we became members of the armed forces in our Sophomore year. 

I was in the Army by the time we finished school. I had been a private in the Army, in a specialized training program and the government paid for the last two years of my education. That is how I was able to get married when I did and have a child. When I graduated from dental school I had to go into the service as a dental officer because I owed the government time and it was 1945 and the war was just ending at that time. They still needed dental officers in the service so I became a Naval Dental Officer. 

I went to Marietta, Idaho, to Camp Farragut for my orientation and then I was sent down to San Francisco and stationed there for a year and a half. The fact that I had a child and I was married gave me enough points (at that time they gave points for various things) and then with the war coming to an end, they separated me from the service. Being separated didn’t mean being discharged. It meant they kept me in the reserves so that any time in the future (which happened eventually) that they wanted me to come back, they could call me.

Widman: Would you then describe what happened when you got called back?
HASSON: Let me go back a little bit before I go into that. A lot of things happened in between.  I had been out of the service and practicing dentistry. I established a very good dental practice in Portland. I had practiced for five years on 50th and Hawthorne on the east side of Portland and then moved downtown to practice there for a couple of years. That is when I was called back to the service. What happened was that I was working on a patient and the phone rang. The nurse came to me and she said, “Your wife wants you to come to the phone right away because there is something very urgent.”  When I got on the phone she told me she had received some sort of a letter from the Defense Department saying that they had gotten a letter from the Defense Department waiving my physical defect (I was supposed to have been discharged from service instead of separated because I had a bad hip) and that I was to report to Fort Sam Houston for orientation in about 30 days. Here I was. We were building a new home in Raleigh Hills. I had established a practice with lots of patients and the thought came to my mind, “What am I going to do?” Anyway, I asked for a 30 day extension and they finally gave it to me because I was building a home and needed to do something with my practice. I was able to rent my office to another dentist for the time that I was in the service. And we drove down to Fort Sam Houston and I received my orientation down there. They selected me to go to either Germany or to Japan. Of course, I wanted to go to Germany because the war was over anyway and in Japan the war was still going on. Not that I wanted to avoid being in active warfare.

Widman: What year was this?
HASSON: This was about 1950.

Widman: There was no war in Japan then.
HASSON: No, you are right. It wasn’t in Japan, I meant in Korea. But then I was selected to go to Japan. I arrived in Yokahama. I was sent [by] the Army [to be] a Navy Dental Officer. I practiced dentistry in the Army but I wore my Navy insignia and was paid by the Navy. I was there for a year and then I was able to have my wife Jean and my two daughters come over and join me.

Widman: You were in Yokahama?
HASSON: No, I was moved to a little village where there was an Air Force base. It was a First Cavalry Division. Here I was, a Naval Officer in an Army uniform with Naval insignia. When my patients came in they often wondered, “Well, what service are you in, Sir?”

Widman: That is confusing. I’ve never heard of such a thing. So your family came over. How long did they stay?
HASSON: They stayed for a year. They were able to send the car over.

Widman: How old were your daughters?
HASSON: Cathy was about two and Susanne was five.

[Someone comes in and the tape is stopped. Interview resumes on March 27]

HASSON: I was a Naval Dentist assigned to the 15th Medical Battalion, the 1st Cavalry Division out of Hokkaido, which is a northern island of Japan. After spending a year there with my family we came home to Portland on a ship. That was as a Naval Officer. I didn’t get a chance to have so much sea duty. The only sea duty that I had was going back home to Portland on a transport.

Widman: What year was that?
HASSON: That was 1952. We came back home and I reestablished my practice. I had sub-let my practice to a Dr. Zingesser who was an orthodontist. So I went back to the same office that I had left when I went into the service. I practiced in downtown Portland, in the Marquam building for a few years. Then I was notified that there was a new building being put up in Northwest Portland with lots of parking places and spacious suites of offices. I jumped at it because I wanted to expand my practice a little bit more after having been in the service. I practiced in that location, on [NW] 23rd and Northrup, across the street from the Good Samaritan Hospital for 25 years. I terminated my practice after 40 years of practice. Then I retired when I was 62. That was 1982.

I want to tell you something. My last two years of my practice I decided to prepare myself for retirement so I took a course at Portland Community College at the Rock Creek Campus in building construction. I wanted to build some homes when I retired because I was always interested in building and mechanics and so forth. I took this course. I cut down my practice to practicing in the afternoon and going to school in the morning. I did that for two years and received a degree in building construction from Portland Community College in addition to my DMD that I had already. At the time that I retired I wanted to do some remodeling of homes in Northwest Portland; to buy a house and remodel it. Well, the economy had dwindled and homes were not selling. So I decided to give that up because I didn’t want to fix up a home and not be able to sell it. Then I would have to rent it and all the nice work that I had done would be destroyed. I decided to, as a hobby, we had been to a Street of Dreams show and there was a lot of stained glass being shown in the houses. My wife said, “You know, you could do that work just as well as they did. Why don’t you take some lessons?”  So I went to one of the people who had made the stained glass and asked about lessons. I took it upon myself to make some windows. My son-in-law suggested that I find a market for them as long as I was making them. So I went down to the “Real Mother Goose” and asked them. They said, “We would have to jury it before we could accept it for sale here at the gallery.” That was over 25 years ago. I consign the pieces to them. That is how I got started in stained glass. To this day I am still making them. I haven’t done too much lately because of the recuperation from my hip procedure.

Widman: I remember you have also been a substitute cantor.
HASSON: That was in 1964. Our synagogue, Neveh Shalom, was looking for a cantor and while they were trying out different candidates they didn’t have a cantor. I had been working with Chaim Feifel, a former cantor who is now in Israel. I liked the way he davenned and he taught me a few things. So they asked if I could do some of the Friday night and Saturday morning services. I did and I just stayed on, I didn’t receive any pay for it. I did it on a voluntary basis because I had been very active in the synagogue and I wouldn’t accept any money for that. I was a cantor for two and half years until they hired another cantor. I think it was Mark Dinken. I remained active in the synagogue. I was president of the synagogue and I was cantor and I stayed active in the community. I worked in the Robison Jewish Home and as Jack mentioned, he and I and Alan Rosenfeld do sing-a-longs on Saturday afternoons there. That sort of brings us up to date now.

Widman: Can you tell us a little bit about your family?
HASSON: I have been married for 62 years to my wife Jean who was originally from Seattle, born in Bellingham. She was a little blonde girl that I met at a birthday party. A bunch of us fellows were staying at a fraternity house and the phone rang and the gal that was giving the party said, “We need some fellows here.” These were all Jewish kids. We all went down to the party. I walked in and I saw my wife Jean in the window. She was sitting on the stairway, blonde girl that looked like a little shiksa. She caught my eye right away and the next thing you know we were very close. At that time we played Spin the Bottle and all those games that young kids did, which kids nowadays wouldn’t even think of doing. They wouldn’t even know what it is. [laughing]. Anyhow, we have been married now for 62 years. We had three children, two girls and a boy. Suzanne and Cathy and Mark. Mark came about ten years after Cathy. We had a wonderful life together. My son lives in Amsterdam now as a graphic designer. My daughter Cathy and her husband were living in Seattle for about 26 years. They are both psychologists and they just recently moved down to Portland, to our great happiness. Suzanne has lived here with her husband for around 35 years. She has just turned 60 so now I have a senior citizen as a daughter. I guess that makes me a super-senior citizen. That is my life up to now.

Widman: Wonderful. I know that you have been very active at Neveh Shalom.
HASSON: Yes I have. I have always tried to be active in the community.  There is bible class with Rabbi Stampfer and Mrs. Widman [the interviewer] is in our class.

Widman: Are you involved in other activities? I know right now you have a health problem.
HASSON: No, I have recuperated almost thoroughly from my hip operation. I have had three hip operations in my lifetime. I am doing fine and walking on two legs, fortunately.

Widman: Do you have a piece of stained glass to show me?
HASSON: I actually don’t have that much to show. It is all down at the Real Mother Goose. I have some photographs.

Widman: You should have those enlarged and shown at Neveh Shalom.
HASSON: I did the doors here at the Robison Home, for the Chapel. I also did some stained glass for the Neveh Zedek cemetery, for their chapel there – the side windows. I don’t do any large pieces anymore. I don’t have the room for it because we live in an apartment now. 

Widman: Do you do copper foiling or do you do lead?
HASSON: Both. But mostly copper foiling because my pieces are small.