Sally Landauer

Frankel: Good afternoon.
LANDAUER: Good afternoon.

Frankel: I’ll ask you to begin by stating your full name, date, and place of birth.
LANDAUER: OK. Full given name is Sarah Katherine Clarke, now Landauer. My place of birth is Bellingham, Washington. Date is June 21, 1939.

Frankel: So is Bellingham where you grew up?
LANDAUER: No, I grew up here. We moved to Portland from Bellingham when I was two years old.

Frankel: Who lived in your household?
LANDAUER: I lived with my parents and my younger brother. I had an older half-brother who lived for many years with my grandmother, then with my mother and father. When they moved to Bellingham, he was 15 at the time, and so he moved back in with his grandmother for a couple of years, and then he moved out on his own.

Frankel: Can you name names? Parents?
LANDAUER: My father was Milton Clarke, and my mother was Katherine. My grandmother was, pretty obvious for those days, a homemaker. My grandfather was a lawyer who had a private practice in Bellingham and who also was attorney general, for one term I believe, of the state of Washington. And in whose chambers Monford Orloff studied for the bar exam.

Frankel: And what was your maternal grandparents’ name?
LANDAUER: Whitcomb. Yes.

Frankel: So they stayed in Washington state?
LANDAUER: My grandparents stayed in Washington, yes.

Frankel: What did your parents do?
LANDAUER: My father was a small shopkeeper on Morrison Street, and before that he was a shoe salesman. My mother was a teacher, but when the Depression came, she had to give up her job because my father had a job. That was part of the reason for the move to Portland. He had an opportunity to buy a shoe store on Morrison Street, which he did, and then they moved to Portland, and he ran that store until it burned down in probably 1949. That’s the way I remember it. My memory, of course, is often faulty. That was when they built Nordstrom’s.
Frankel: Do they know how the fire started?
LANDAUER: Yes. The theory is that a rat was running across the extremely ancient wiring and started a fire, and it burned the whole block.

Frankel: And your brother’s name?
LANDAUER: My younger brother was John. My older brother was Robert. My dad’s name was actually Robert Milton Clarke, but he was always known as “Milt.”

Frankel: Did your family belong to a church?
LANDAUER: Sort of. When we moved to Portland, our only relatives here were the Bettleheims, and so our Jewish relatives lived here. They had no children, so they basically considered us to be their little grandchildren. When I was a little kid, my parents would drop us off at Ascension Chapel because it was the closest church with a Sunday school to where they lived on Council Crest. They could drop us off, go home, and go back to bed. That’s my theory, but I think it’s probably accurate.

Then when we got too old for Ascension Chapel, we went to Trinity, but at the same time we went to Temple Beth Israel with Uncle Hugo and Aunt Maud. So I grew up with two voices in my head. One was the voice of Rabbi Nodel, and the other was the voice of Lansing E. Kempton at Trinity. And those are two very, very God-like voices. The problem for me with Trinity was that it was about things that I didn’t believe in. When I was a little girl of five years old, I came home from my first Easter service, and I walked into the kitchen and threw my little Easter bonnet down on the ground, and I said to my mother in a loud voice, “That’s impossible!”

And she said, “That was when I knew we would never keep you” [laughter]. So I was brought up in this multicultural-for-those-days environment. Since my dad was a small shopkeeper, his friends were all Jewish merchants. We belonged to the Jewish Community Center. He belonged to Tualatin Country Club. All his best friends were Jews, and so those were also among the family friends. We didn’t know from differences. We didn’t. It was a great way to grow up.

Frankel: You say your parents dropped you off at Sunday school, which means they did not attend church?
LANDAUER: No, not at all. Even at Trinity, I honestly do not remember being in church with them ever, although I think my mother was brought up Congregationalist. I don’t think she ever believed in God; I never got the impression that she did. I don’t think my dad ever thought about it. He may have been brought up Episcopalian. I have no idea. He was of English stock, so probably Church of England, but I don’t know.

Frankel: So which generation on each side of your family came to the United States and from where?
LANDAUER: My grandfather was descended from Puritans or Pilgrims or something.

Frankel: Paternal?
LANDAUER: My maternal grandfather, the one I knew. I didn’t know my other grandfather. We have a family history that shows the Whitcomb name and the entire family tree going back to 1630.

Frankel: Wow.
LANDAUER: My grandmother was of English stock, and I have little paintings, miniatures and things, of her family — which was the Howard family — in England. Allegedly, Katherine Howard, the fifth wife of Henry the VIII, was a cousin. I always bragged about that since she was beheaded after 15 months of marriage for immoral conduct. I thought she was a lovely model, a lovely model. My paternal grandfather I did not know. He died before I was born. He was a Canadian logger, and his family actually — no, that was the Gates family. His family I really don’t know anything about, except that it’s Clarke with an “e,” so it’s obviously an English name rather than Irish or Scottish Clark.

My grandmother Ida was a Gates. She was from England. My paternal uncle found her home when he was in England after the war. He worked for the Smithsonian, and one of his jobs after the war was to reassemble the collections for the British Museum from all over the country, where they had been scattered during the Blitz, and reassemble them to help the British Museum. The Smithsonian contributed a lot of manpower to doing that. So he went out and found my grandmother’s birthplace, and somewhere I have a photo of that, that my cousin sent me. She’s trying to figure out where that family came from because we really don’t know much about it. I do know my grandmother was an immigrant from England, and her family settled in the San Joaquin Valley. They were farmers.

How she got to Bellingham and married my logger-grandfather, I have no idea. My older brother, who tried to learn a little bit of that, wrote down as much as he knew, but he really didn’t know much either. That grandmother did not like girls, and so I was never ever, ever close to her. I never knew anything about her. She only liked boys.

Frankel: Did she live in Portland?
LANDAUER: No, thank God. She lived in Bellingham. She stayed there. I have one photo of her that I just saw. I was just going through some family stuff the other day. It’s a classic example. She is sitting on an end chair in our living room, over on 20th where we lived originally, holding my little brother as the new baby, and my brother Bob is draped around her arms, sitting on the arm of the chair. I am standing off to the side. She didn’t even have a hand out to me. She did not like girls. I called her “Grandmother Clarke.” My little brother called her “Sweetheart.” In one of the talks I had with my father before he died, I was asking him to explain his dissolute lifestyle, and he said, “My mother told me and my brother that we could be, we could do whatever we wanted because we were boys, and it didn’t matter what we did. But girls were supposed to stay home and take care of the family; they weren’t supposed to do anything else.”

Frankel: Did she have daughters?
LANDAUER: Yes, she did. And of course, who was the one that took care of her in her old age? Her daughter.

Frankel: You mentioned “Bettleheim.” Were they relatives or something?
LANDAUER: Yes. Bruno Bettleheim’s cousin, Uncle Hugo, was my Uncle Hugo’s cousin [??]. It’s all by marriage.

Frankel: And so did you celebrate holidays?
LANDAUER: Oh, yes. We celebrated Pesach, we celebrated Hanukkah, we celebrated Christmas as a Santa Claus thing. Once when I was in high school, I went to a midnight service on Christmas Eve, which was very beautiful. We didn’t do Easter after I was five years old because clearly I was not going to handle that at all. I did go to a Good Friday service at Trinity the year I was confirmed there. I went through confirmation and never went back ever after I was confirmed. That was the end. I was doing it because that was expected of me, so I did it, and then I got the hell out.

But I did go to Good Friday, and the church was all draped in black, and the cross was draped in black, and Lansing E. Kempton got up with his big voice and his flowing hair and stood and preached to us about humility and giving to the poor. And all the while his great, huge jeweled cross was flashing in the lights, and all I could see was this cross with diamonds and emeralds and things flashing in the light, and all the while I thought, “You hypocrite. You hypocrite. I’ve got to get out of here.” That was my last experience in a church except for weddings and funerals. Ever. Well, no. I did go to the one Christmas Eve service at the Presbyterian Church, which I went to when I was in high school because they had a youth group that was very active, and in that youth group were the cutest boys. They all went to Beaverton. They were fabulous.

My college years, I thought, “Maybe I’ll try Unitarianism.” My mother had become a Unitarian by then. So I went to the Unitarian church twice, and it was cold and sterile. I had been brought up with Beth Israel and Trinity: music, beauty, richness, lushness. And Unitarians were very simple and plain and excessively boring. Ergo, I abandoned that one too.

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I had decided that if I ever wanted to do anything, maybe I’d convert to Judaism. Maybe I’ll be a Jew. In the meantime, I want you to know, my father sent me off to college with three pieces of advice. The first was: “Always drink Scotch and water. At first you won’t like the taste, and when you start to like the taste, the water will keep you from having a hangover.” Number two: “Always carry your own protection. You cannot count on the boy to have it on him.” Number three: “Marry a Jewish man. They make the best husbands.” And I followed his advice to the letter [laughs].

Frankel: That’s amazing. But before we get to college . . .
LANDAUER: Isn’t that nice though? Isn’t that great advice?

Frankel: You said you lived on 20th. What was the exact address?
LANDAUER: I don’t remember. It was 20th between Hawthorne and Division.

Frankel: Southeast.
LANDAUER: In Southeast. It was on the edge of Ladd’s Addition.

Frankel: What school did you go to?
LANDAUER: I started at Hosford. Then we moved to Council Crest, so I went to Ainsworth the rest of my years.

Frankel: And high school?
LANDAUER: High school, Lincoln.

Frankel: Did both your parents have a college education?
LANDAUER: My mother had a master’s degree in American History. She had graduated from UW, and then she went to Colombia, after she had been teaching for a few years, for her masters. My father went to UW until he had his little collegiate accident, my older brother. That’s how mother and I always refer to my older brother. So he had to drop out of school to support his wife. He married [Son?] to make Bob legitimate, and then they got divorced. For a short while she reared him, but she was a very active communist. She had a printing press in her basement, and she was very, very not interested in a child. So my father took him to live with my grandmother, which is how he got rather spoiled until my mother got hold of him, and then it was all over [laughter].

Frankel: When you mentioned that you had Jewish friends at Lincoln, where there were a lot of Jewish kids . . .
LANDAUER: Interesting question because I noticed the other day that when I think about my friends in high school — first of all, I did not like the social thing at Ainsworth, and I didn’t like it at Lincoln even worse. So when I got to Lincoln, I happily went out to become friends with all the “flatlanders,” we called them, which was very, very nice for me. I realized just fairly recently that almost all of the people that I still feel close to and, for instance, at reunions I want to talk to, are the ones who went to Couch. They were all from South Portland, before urban renewal. They all grew up in the neighborhood. And those were the ones that I knew. They were Jewish and Italian.

I only had one really close friend from the Heights, who is still a close friend. They were OK; I liked them. I still like them when I see them. We go back a long way. I’m fond of a number of them, but I wasn’t particularly close to them. I always felt like an outlier. But my two best female friends outside of the Heights were two Jewish girls, and the guys — it’s really funny when I look at it, how many of them were Jewish. I was just going in that direction. I was destined. I didn’t have a choice. That was where I felt most comfortable.

Frankel: Also you said you belonged to the Jewish Community Center?
LANDAUER: We belonged to JCC, so that was where I met kids. If we socialized at a golf club, it was always at Tualatin. It was simply my milieu. My two good friends from high school who were also Jewish were Jonie Sitchel and Barbara Katz, and Barbara Katz was an outlier. She came from Brooklyn, New York, and she had an accent. My God, we thought she was an alien! Portland was so insular, so narrow. As far as I could tell, we didn’t even know about antisemitism because everybody just all lived together. I did encounter it eventually. I found it, though I didn’t find it very often.

Frankel: In high school?
LANDAUER: In high school my best friend fell madly in love with the quarterback of our championship team. He was Jewish. From Coos Bay, mind you. How the hell there was a Jewish family in Coos Bay, I don’t know. They moved to Portland, and she fell madly in love with him, but her parents said she could not date him because he was Jewish. We were all, “Huh?!” All that little crowd of Heights kids said, “Huh?!” We just hadn’t experienced it. And the funny thing is after she married and divorced and was very much an adult, she called me one day and she said, “Guess what? I’m getting my Jewish boyfriend after all.” Not the same guy. She ended up marrying a Jewish guy, very happily. Isn’t that nice? And her parents accepted him just fine because times had changed.

Frankel: Right. So what did your family do for vacation?
LANDAUER: Long Beach Peninsula, Seaview. To the beach for two weeks. Lying in the sand dunes, clamming a lot. I got to ride a pony, usually bareback. I slid off him a lot; he was very fat. That was two weeks, with a couple of other couples. One of those couples was the one that my father had a long-standing affair with, another reason he told me to marry a Jewish man. And then we went to Bellingham, of course, to visit my grandparents, in our 1938 or ’39 coupe with a little tiny seat in the back and the plush upholstery and my parents smoking the whole way. And that was a long ways to Bellingham in those days. It was a long way in a smoky car.

Frankel: Since you were in high school in the ’40s, do you recall any Holocaust survivors or refugees?
LANDAUER: I wasn’t in high school in the ’40s; I was in high school in the ’50s.

Frankel: Even in the ’50s, do you remember . . .?
LANDAUER: No, but you see, one of my relatives was a refugee from Vienna. She escaped from Vienna after Hitler, and she — well, the Bettleheims were all from Vienna, but her name was Wringer, and she came and lived with us when she got out of Vienna. She was a doctor and lived with us because she got a job, not as a doctor, of course, because that couldn’t happen, but she did get a job as a lab assistant kind-of-thing at OHSU, which was not OHSU at the time. So she lived with us for a while, and then she moved into a rooming house. We moved into that house in 1941, so it must have been 1942 that she moved in with us. I never knew her story at all.

She moved into a rooming house in the Northwest hills. There was a big old, to me, mansion with a great big huge circular driveway and stone walls around the driveway. We would go to visit her in that house. My father would take me. I don’t remember my brother or my mother being there. What I remember, besides the fact that the house was really big and really dark and really scary — and of course, everything was dark because of the blackout — he would pick me up and set me on the stone wall so I could look at the city. There was a whole city browned out. You could see there was a lot of city there, but of course, the light was very, very dim. Those were very strong impressions. Then we would go inside and we would have tea with cousin Margaret. After the war, she moved into her own apartment, and then she got cancer and died.

Frankel: Oh.
LANDAUER: She died in 1949. She had stored two trunks of hers from Vienna in our basement, and she had never taken them. She had never even opened them, to our knowledge. After she died, Uncle Hugo and Aunt Maude came to open the trunks, and what were they full of? Ball gowns. No wonder she never opened them. Ball gowns, feather fans, boas, opera capes. And her violin.

Frankel: Wow.
LANDAUER: We all looked at those, and Uncle Hugo said, “These will make beautiful dress-up costumes for you, Sally, and here’s a violin. You take the violin and learn to play the violin.” So I did.

Frankel: Do you still have that violin?
LANDAUER: My grandson does. He’s 16. He’s not playing the violin now, but he’ll go back to it someday because he’s an extremely good violinist.

Frankel: What a story! And she came by herself?
LANDAUER: She came by herself. She was the only who got out that I know of, from the Wringer family, because she never had any contact with anybody here. But she was related by blood to the Bettleheims. Then after the war, I corresponded with another relative in Czechoslovakia, and I had a pen-pal relationship with her. She was another cousin. We sent care packages to them as soon as the war was over. We couldn’t get them through until Hitler was kicked out of Czechoslovakia, but we sent care packages. I remember every month assembling a care package and putting my letter to my cousin into that package and then getting a letter back from her.

Frankel: Did you ever meet up with her?
LANDAUER: Never met her. And the terrible thing is I have none of those letters left. I don’t remember anything about it except that I had this correspondence, we did the care packages, and that she was some kind of cousin.

Frankel: You must have been very young, maybe kindergarten or first grade, but what about Japanese kids disappearing one day?
LANDAUER: They disappeared before I was in school; they disappeared in 1942. They were sent away. The ones I knew, of course, were the ones I knew in high school. They’d all been interned, and nobody really talked about it.

Frankel: They didn’t talk about it?
LANDAUER: They didn’t talk about it, no. They really didn’t talk about it. Now Bob’s family was totally different. His family was on the East Coast, and they talked about the Holocaust a lot. We talked about the Holocaust, obviously because of Margaret, and because, of course, we were living in this environment where to be Jewish was part of the environment, and it wasn’t something separate and apart to be put in a camp somewhere. But I don’t remember as a child equating the internment of the Japanese with the Jews. I don’t remember anything like that.

My father may have said it. My father was the one who made sure that we grew up to know what was important. My mother was a great moralist, but my dad did examples. He took us to the Celilo Falls to see the falls, to see the Indians fishing there before the Dalles Dam was built. He took us to the upper Santiam to see the area of the Santiam River running wild and free before they built the Detroit Dam. He took us to places because he wanted us to see what we were losing. He took us to the Tillamook burn to help plant trees. He was a very good man in spite of his peccadillos [laughter].

Frankel: That’s fascinating. So after you graduated from high school was there ever — how to decide where to go, what to study?
LANDAUER: It was easy. I only had two choices. I wanted to go to Radcliffe, but I couldn’t afford to go there, not because of the tuition but because of the transportation costs. My father died my freshman year. My grandmother had died, leaving a small inheritance. That small inheritance grew, and so we have been very lucky. She left me $7,000, 2,000 in cash and 5,000 in stock. It was stock in a paper mill company that my grandfather had been corporate counsel to, and he had been paid in stock.

It eventually got purchased by Georgia-Pacific and grew and grew and multiplied and multiplied and helped us pay for our first car that wasn’t falling apart, our first house, our little cabin up at Mt. Hood. It was put away for my children’s educations. They didn’t need it because we made enough money to pay for them. That kind of thing. Eventually I gave theirs to them, and they all used it for down payments on their houses, and then there was still some left over. Georgia-Pacific went private, and we were going to get cashed out, and I didn’t want to pay capital gains, so I gave my stock to Whitman College and got an annuity from it [laughs]. That was all from my little $5,000 inheritance in stock. Isn’t that interesting?

Frankel: Yes. One thing about the Bettleheims. They were not born in this country?
LANDAUER: No. Uncle Hugo was born in Vienna.

Frankel: And when did he come?
LANDAUER: He came in the early ’20s.

Frankel: What was his profession?
LANDAUER: He had been a haberdasher in Vienna, and he worked here in the haberdashery department at Lipmann-Wolf.

Frankel: So you had two choices, Radcliffe and . . .?
LANDAUER: Radcliffe and Whitman. I went up to visit Whitman and said, “Yes, this is for me. I love this place. It’s close to home. I can get here by car.” So I applied to both. I got into both, just because I wanted to prove that I could get into Radcliffe, and then went to Whitman. I went very happily. Eventually I ended up doing a graduate program at Radcliffe, so I got to go there after all. And there I discovered antisemitism.

Frankel: At Whitman or at Radcliffe?
LANDAUER: At Radcliffe, not at Whitman. In Whitman there were too few Jews for anybody to notice. I can name them probably on one hand.

Frankel: Were you always aware of who was Jewish and who wasn’t?
LANDAUER: Yes, but it didn’t mean anything except that they were Jewish and we were Christian or whatever, or we were not Jewish. That was all. It didn’t mean anything. And Barbara Katz was weird, not because she was Jewish, but because she was from Brooklyn.

Frankel: What led her parents to move here?
LANDAUER: I don’t know. Oh, and another weird thing about her: she lived in an apartment. It was the St. Clair. Oh, she was soooo weird. We liked her, there was no reason not to like her, but we thought she was a very exotic person.

Frankel: Because you were surrounded by Jewish friends, also family, did the word Zionism or the State of Israel when it came to be, did that have any . . .?
LANDAUER: Everybody celebrated that, but that was because — my God, after the Holocaust, I think everybody celebrated it. I wasn’t aware of it being a Jewish celebration, at least not in my family. It was a celebration that this was something that the Jews needed. Uncle Hugo was not a Zionist. I don’t think he was a Zionist. I don’t know whether cousin Margo was. It wasn’t that big in the circles that I knew in Portland; certainly none of the kids paid any attention to it.

Frankel: Can we go back one more time to that cousin from Vienna who left her trunk? Was there any Jewish artifact in those trunks?
LANDAUER: Nothing. Not a single thing.

Frankel: Books? Letters?
LANDAUER: No books, nothing. She had packed her ball gowns. She left in a hurry, and she packed the least practical things she had. You have to see her standing there looking in her closet and thinking, “Oh, my God. What am I going to take? I’ll take this dress and this dress and this cloak.” Not thinking about it at all, throwing things in. And they were kind of thrown in; they were not in good order. They were not laid out carefully. There wasn’t tissue paper or anything like that. Silks, velvets. Amazing. I still have some remnants of some of the lace that was on these things, some buttons from things, that were just so beautiful. I kept them as little mementos of Margaret and Margaret’s amazing choice of things to flee with.

Frankel: So at Whitman, what did you major in?
LANDAUER: English Lit.

Frankel: Were you thinking of being a teacher, or . . .?
LANDAUER: Oh, God no. I wanted to go to medical school [laughs]. But that was not possible according to my counselor, “No, you can’t go to medical school. You’ll just get married and waste your medical school education. You should go to nursing school.” I said, “I don’t want to be a nurse. I want to be a doctor.” She said, “No, no, no. That’s impossible. You go to Columbia-Presbyterian; it’s the best nursing school in the country. You go there.” “I don’t want to be a nurse.” And at that point I had a lot of good biology classes under my belt, and so I basically had almost all my classes [in biology]. Well, no. I took some history. I took basic history, basic political science, basic sociology, a little psychology, but I took a lot of biology because I really was interested. I took French because I needed to, and I took English Lit. Everything else was kind of not important; those were the things I cared about. I didn’t even care that much about French. I just needed to learn it.

Frankel: Right. I’m just curious, but in those days, what was the ratio of men and women at school?
LANDAUER: That’s a good question. There were only two places for women to live: the freshman women’s dorm and the upper-class dorm. We couldn’t live off campus, so those were the only places. The men had two dormitories and five or six fraternity houses, so probably at least 60-40.

Frankel: Did you join a sorority?
LANDAUER: Yes. We had the freshman dorm and the upper-class dorm, and the upper-class dorm was divided into the sororities and one wing for independents. So you were either going to live in a sorority or in that one third-floor hall for the independents.

Frankel: Independents, meaning not a sorority?
LANDAUER: Yes. Not a sorority. Not affiliated. And so I joined a sorority, which I am proud to say, did not really like me but really liked my grades. After having my pin lifted for misbehavior my sophomore year — which they gave back to me a year or two later. I don’t remember because it wasn’t important to me. It was a great thing to have my pin lifted because I didn’t have to go to sorority meetings. Then when I got back, I just started making demands. “I want to live in the single room.” Well, junior year, I lived with another girl across the hall in the Alpha Chi. We were Delta Gammas. We lived in the Alpha Chi section because they had rooms on the main floor, which meant that you could sneak out. Out the window we went. That was junior year. Senior year there was one single room on the main floor in the DG section, and I demanded that. That’s what good grades will get you [laughs]. It was wonderful. I snuck out the whole time.

Frankel: Was it common in those days to study abroad for a semester?
LANDAUER: No, not at all. The only thing people ever did was occasionally they would go somewhere else for a semester because they wanted to go to a bigger school or something.

Frankel: In the country though?
LANDAUER: Yes, in the country. My best friend went to Kent State, and she spent, as far as I could tell, her whole time telling me how much she hated it and how much she wanted to come back [laughs].

Frankel: That’s funny. So what did you do in the summer? Would you come back home? Work?
LANDAUER: Yes. I worked all the way through. I worked all the way through high school too. All my friends were rich and belonged to country clubs, and they spent their days by the pool. I worked.

Frankel: What type of work?
LANDAUER: I started out babysitting, and then I worked, interestingly enough, at a medical placement bureau as the receptionist, starting when I was 16. So 16 and 17, I worked there. At 18 she got me a job out at Morningside Hospital, which was the Alaska Mental Hospital [patients were sent there from the then-territory of Alaska]. She sent me out there for an interview. They had never hired a young person to be the receptionist for the hospital. Reception there did not involve [inaudible]. Alaskans did not come in to visit families. But it did involve handling the mail and handling the drug salesmen that came through and all the other salesmen, and handling the patients.

The reason I got the job was because as I was being interviewed, Harris [Pudagood?] came in to talk to us. Harris Pudagood was about yea tall. He had tuberculosis of the spine, so his little chin rested on his belt. He was very, very delusional. Jesus was a big thing in his life, and Jesus talked to him all the time. He didn’t have very many teeth, so he said “Zheezhush.” He came into the office where I was being interviewed. They had free range, free range patients, and he came in and was introduced to me and said, “Sally, do you see? Jesus is up there, and he’s talking . . ..” And he told me all about this. “That’s really interesting Harris. Does he talk to you a lot?” “He talks to me all the time.” “Oh.” Then in the middle of the interview I said to him, “Harris, would you mind if I tucked you in?” He had not zipped himself up, and his little wispy penis was hanging out almost in my face, since I was sitting down. He said, “Oh, that would be fine.” So I pushed it back in and zipped him up. He left, and the person interviewing me said, “You’ve got the job” [laughter].

And Harris loved me. He came and gave me his money every week. They all had allowances, and people would steal it from him, so he let me keep his money. He didn’t want to put it in a safe; he didn’t want to give it to anybody else. But when I arrived, he decided he trusted me, so I kept his money for him. And when I went off to school, I kept it. He said, “Wait until you come back, and then you will give it to me.” So I got back at Thanksgiving, and he got his money. I got back at Christmas, he got his money. Spring break, he got his money. Came the end of May, he got his money.

Frankel: So in the summer would you go back and work there?
LANDAUER: I worked there every summer.

Frankel: Does it still exist?
LANDAUER: No. They built their own hospital eventually. They didn’t have to fly people down here. It closed, and it’s now a mall something or other, out at 102nd and Stark. Torn down, completely gone. It was a fabulous hospital. 450 beds, open plan. The patients could go anywhere because they had nowhere to go. If they ran away, they couldn’t go back to Alaska. We had our own farm. We had our own herd of cattle. We had our own dairy herd.

Frankel: And they worked?
LANDAUER: Yes, they all worked. It was a really therapeutic community. Very few doctors. Drugs had just come into being, and a lot of them were probably pretty heavily drugged. There was one psychiatrist on staff and some others who came out. He was kind of a blustery old guy, but it was very warm and loving and caring, and very therapeutic.

Frankel: Wow. So when you graduated from Whitman, what did you have in mind?
LANDAUER: I didn’t know, so I went to Radcliffe for a graduate program that was called the “Publishing Procedures Course.” It was for the summer. I had applied for a master’s program at Radcliffe in English Lit. I thought, “I’ve got to earn a living, so I’m going to learn about publishing first.” So I went to Radcliffe, and I learned about publishing, and then I decided I’m not going to do a master’s degree at all. I’m going to New York. So I went to New York, and I worked for a little publishing company that published primarily a lot of recipe books and a lot of other stuff, doing editing and proofreading. It was a half-time job, which meant I worked mornings, and in the afternoon I got to go to the Cloisters on Tuesday when they always had concerts, MOMA on Wednesday, Metropolitan Museum on Thursday, Guggenheim on Friday. I got to go to museums every afternoon.

Frankel: Did you know anyone in New York?
LANDAUER: I originally moved into the Jewish Y on 92nd Street. Of course, where else would I go? That’s why it’s so funny. It was my destiny. That was of course where I went. Then I literally ran into a college classmate, and she said, “We have room in our apartment. You can come and live with us.” So I moved in with them. It was an adjacent apartment to Bob’s apartment. 110 Morningside Drive. He was in D; I was in E. We never met!

Frankel: He was still living there?
LANDAUER: Yes. As far as we know, we never even saw each other.

Frankel: That’s very funny.
LANDAUER: Again, destiny. Right?

Frankel: How long did you spend in New York?
LANDAUER: August, September, and October, I guess. Then my best friend from college, who had gone to New Orleans — thinking that was the end of the rainbow and had then decided no, it wasn’t — moved to San Francisco and said, “This is the end of the rainbow. Call me up. You’ve got to be here.” I quit my job. I had paid my rent for the month and got on a train to go to California with $7.50 to my name. I had paid up everything including my ticket. So of course, I went to the bar to have a beer and try to figure out how I was going to get across the country with $7. At least they had peanuts in the bar. While I was sitting there, there were three young men sitting in a corner shuffling a deck of cards and talking. I eavesdropped, and it was clear they needed a fourth for Bridge. I volunteered.

Frankel: You had played Bridge?
LANDAUER: Yes. Oh, my God. I had been in love my sophomore year with the Bridge champion of Whitman College, so I had sat at his elbow for months learning to play Bridge from a very good Bridge player. I played a few hands with them. They allowed as how I would be a very good partner. They wanted to play Bridge all the way across the country. I said, “I would love to do that. One problem, I cannot do it here in the bar because I can’t pay for drinks or food.” They said, “Not to worry. We are on our way to a fraternity convention. We are on an expense account.” I arrived in California with $7. Never spent another dime [laughter]. Bridge stood me in good stead. Then I lived in San Francisco with my roommate and got it all out of my system.

Frankel: San Francisco, or your roommate?
LANDAUER: Life. All the adventure I ever wanted to have, I had. She was a catalyst, always has been the catalyst. I call her my kite, and she calls me her rock. She is always off somewhere. At the moment, she’s in China.

Frankel: As we speak?
LANDAUER: Yes, as we speak. I am here, married to the same man, being a rock, and she has been married a number of times. She has flitted off here and there, and she’s my free spirit. We had a wonderful time living together. We spent a lot of time wandering the alleys of Chinatown at 3:00 AM looking for discarded soy buckets and things. There were wonderful discards in Chinatown. We went to little all-night Chinese diners down in the bowels of Chinatown and ate noodles at 3:00 AM. We did a lot. We went to Laguna Seca to see Sterling Moss race, and then we went to Canyon Ranch, whatever the name was — some kind of ranch south of Monterey, which has a huge bar and lots of rooms — where we picked up somebody whose name escapes me. We called him Yancy P. [Devenswitch?]. That was not his name.

She decided that he was paying too much attention to me, and she wanted him, so she had to find somebody for me. She went into another bar and found David and brought him back, and I immediately switched my attention to David. Yancy faded fairly quickly. I think maybe one week later David arrived in San Francisco with Mike. Mike became Dodie’s eventual husband, and David and I eventually, besides being lovers and all that kind of stuff, got engaged after he had been shipped out to Asia. He and Mike were both students at modern language school. They were both there in the Defense Intelligence Agency. They got shipped off to Asia. They called us a month after they got there and asked us to marry them, so we hopped on an American freighter and went to Asia.

Frankel: Were your parents aware of all this?
LANDAUER: Oh, yes. My mother, she just shrugged. You know, she went galloping off to Colombia on an American freighter going through the Panama Canal. She was a great adventurer. She had a flaming affair with some border guard when she was up teaching in [Cedro Wooly?] or someplace. She was a free spirit herself, and she had a roaring 20s, very definitely, and 30s. She went galloping off to Hawaii, and she and her two girlfriends that were going to Hawaii missed the boat. They arrived at the dock to see it out in Vancouver Harbor. “Oh, my God. What will we do?” Well, they took a seaplane to the boat. Yes. They took a seaplane to the boat and boarded the boat by Jacob’s ladder.

When she was in Hawaii — they lived there for the summer, they were all teachers — she fell madly in love with somebody. I have her journal, and she spent every evening, it sounded like, at this guy’s apartment: “We danced, and we ate, and it was glorious. It was glorious.” She was clearly screwing her brains out; it was very clear, but she couldn’t say it in reality. She had a very wild singlehood too. I was having mine. Anyway, I worked as a medical secretary when I was in San Francisco because I had been doing that at Morningside. Then . . .

Frankel: You could just get on a freighter and go?
LANDAUER: Yes. We paid our passage on a freighter that left from San Francisco and went to Japan for ten days and Korea for five or six days, and then we dropped her off in Okinawa, which is where Mike was, and I went to Taiwan where David was, got off the boat and thought, “Well, maybe this wasn’t a good idea” [laughs]. We spent three months trying to put it back together, but as soon as I got off the boat, I thought, “You are marrying your father. What were you thinking?! And he’s not Jewish. What were you thinking?” [laughter].

So we agreed it was time to part, and I bribed my way on board a Chinese freighter. This is not top-class accommodation. It was its last voyage. It was an old Liberty ship. It was scrapped after that voyage for good reason. At night, when I went up to my bunk after playing Hearts — they called it Catch Pig — for four hours in the officers’ galley with the other officers, I would perform my ablutions, pick up my blanket, shake it out — the cockroaches would all run back into the wall — shake out the pillow, wrap myself in the blanket, jump into my bunk, put my head on the mattress, and go to sleep in ten seconds!

Frankel: By then you were alone. Your friend . . .
LANDAUER: She married and stayed in Okinawa. She had actually written to me the day that I was leaving saying, “Wait for me!” She was going to leave, but she didn’t. Instead she married him. She got a couple of kids out of him, which was nice, and a long-term relationship. They stayed friends. But he was a raging alcoholic. Anyway, so she stayed with Mike. I went back to San Francisco, 32 days on board. Our top speed was nine knots with a tail wind. It was one of the best times of my life.

I read every book that I hadn’t been able to get through. I read Thomas Mann. I read Henry James. I read Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire because you could buy anything for ten cents — all of them pirated editions — in Taipei. So I read all those things. I ran calisthenics on hatch covers every day at four. I sat out on a table back on the tail where I would watch the sunset and the albatrosses following the boat. One of the waiters from the crew’s galley would come out and talk to me. He was from Beijing, and he spoke fluent English. He had had an excellent job in Beijing, but when he fled the mainland he couldn’t get a job in his old profession, so he was working on a ship. The third mate fell in love with me and posted classical Chinese poetry to me on my door every night, which nobody could read, including the Chinese. There were two young Chinese women on board who spoke English, but by then I knew some Chinese. I got along fine. I had a wonderful time. I loved it.

Got off the boat in San Francisco and decided I’d better not stay here, I will only lapse back into my old-time days, hanging out on North Beach, weed smoking, drinking, partying, folksong going — the whole thing. So I hopped on a train and came to Portland, and two days later the phone rang. Now my ship was supposed to go to LA and pick up some scrap metal or something, and that was why I got off in San Francisco. Instead, it was sent to Tacoma, where Bob Landauer got on, and then it came to Portland. So the phone rang, and a voice said, “My name is Robert Landauer. I’m a passenger on the [Hi-Dee?]. We’re at Terminal Four.” I screamed for joy. “Oh, and the second mate says that you left something on board.” It was a box of Kleenex. It was all a ruse. So I grabbed the car keys, and my mother said, “I want to see this tub you traveled on.” I said, “Come on!”

So we went out to the Hi-Dee. I was introduced by Yao Chen Chung, the second mate, to this young man, and we went back to the officers’ galley, where we had tea and cookies, and where my mother talked to Bob, because he was the only person she could talk, to and I talked to my friends. At the end, I invited some of my friends to go sightseeing because they never leave the port because they don’t speak enough English. My mother nudged me and said, “You invite this nice boy.” So I did.

The next day we went driving all over. We were on Terwilliger Boulevard between the Chart House and OHSU, and he said, “Why did you leave the East Coast?” And I said, “Well, among other things that I didn’t like about it was the antisemitism.” Because I kept running into it. He said, “It’s not so bad.” And I said to him, “This is how oblivious we West Coast, assimilated people are.” I said, “What do you know about it?” He said, “I’m Jewish.” I almost drove off the road. I’m not kidding. So we get out to the ship at 6:00 to drop them off, and he said, “You know, if you weren’t so damn tall, I’d ask you out.” I said, “I’ve gone out with shorter guys than you.” So he did.

We ended up the evening in a bar in St. John’s where he was drinking me under the table. I thought, “That is something really in his favor.” I took him back to the ship, and we talked until 5:00 AM. I went home, went to bed, got up at nine, went back to the ship and picked him up. We spent that day together, we spent most of the next night together, and about 4:00 AM in the morning, he asked me to marry him. I said, “I need time to think it over. Give me 24 hours.” I went home, slept for about three hours, got up, and wrote a list: pros and cons. There were lots of pros. Number 1: he was Jewish. Number 2: he was smarter than I was. Number 3: he had a sense of humor. Number 4: he’s kind. All these things. And the con was, “You don’t know him” [laughter]. “Aaah. That’s really not important at all.”

He was in town for five more days, and then off he went to Taiwan for a fellowship for a year, and we wrote letters for a year. No Facebook, nothing like that. We just wrote letters. Then he got a fellowship at the East-West Center at University of Hawaii, and I agreed to meet him halfway. I wasn’t going back to Taiwan, I can tell you, to marry him. I had been there, done that. So I go to Hawaii and we meet, and two weeks later we got married.

Frankel: In Hawaii?
LANDAUER: In the synagogue. The only rabbi in the United States in those days who would marry a non-convert was in Hawaii at the shul there. We went to the Unitarian minister and talked to him — they’re a block apart up on the Pali highway — and we talked to the rabbi, and then the two of them got together and decided where we should get married. The Unitarian minister said, “She doesn’t give a damn about her religion and he does, so they should get married in the shul.” So he agreed to marry us. We got married, and because of his openness and willingness, and then inviting us to seder and things like that, it was clear that I was going to have to convert at some point.

We were there for a year, and then we moved to Seattle for a year. Then we went back to Taiwan. Then we went back to Hawaii. We finally got to Portland, where I went to Rabbi Rose and said, “I need to convert.” He said, “You’ll have to read these books.” I said, “I’ve read them.” “OK. So we need to make it look good. You need to take one term of Jewish education classes.” “Fine, I’d love it. Now what about the fact that I don’t believe in God?” He said, “Can you say the Shema?” I said, “Yes, I can. If there is a God, there’s only one.” He said, “You’re in” [laughter]. Isn’t that nice? I thought that was really, really nice. Again, I was welcomed. I always felt like I was welcomed. So I’m a Jew by choice.

Frankel: Right. Now when Robert was in Taiwan after you had agreed to get married, what did you do and where were you?
LANDAUER: He was in Taiwan going to school. I was here working for the State Board of Health as an audiometrist, traveling all over the state testing hearing in pre-schools and schools, in Baker County, Wasco, Sherman County, Hood River County, Douglas County, Washington County.

Frankel: Did you take a course?
LANDAUER: No. All you have to do is put little earphones on the kids and push buttons and record their responses.

Frankel: At that point, did you have an idea what you wanted to do?
LANDAUER: I had a liberal arts education. I could do anything I wanted.

Frankel: Right.
LANDAUER: OK. We were in Hawaii when we got married. I worked as a medical secretary. Actually, I was a receptionist and secretary for an oral surgeon, who hired me because I was a haoli [Hawaiian for “white person”] because he was a haoli and had a lot of haoli patients. I could not get a job for two months because I couldn’t get past the Japanese receptionist. The first time I’d been a minority, a real minority, one that you can tell by the skin. Right? So I was a minority, and I had trouble, but finally he went to the State Board of Employment and said, “I need a haoli.” I had registered with them, and so I interviewed and he took me because I had quite a bit of experience.

Then we moved to Seattle, where I was pregnant. A little hard to get a job when you’re seven months pregnant. I went to UW and got a job as a reader for an English professor, who the second term actually got sick and had to take the term off. So I taught her class, which was great. I worked for the UW that year. Then we moved back to Taiwan, where I taught at the Taipei American school. I taught junior-year English. Then we moved back to Hawaii, where I taught third-grade at Punahou, all this without any teacher training or anything, but I had that liberal arts education.

Then we moved to Portland, where I cried for six months because I had married him so I would not have to live in Portland. Portland growing up was not the town that it is now. Insular. Insular. It was so narrow, and everybody here was from here, and that’s why Barbara Katz was so alien. My best friend went to Stanford, and she came back and went to the University of Oregon because it was too far away. Yes. That’s how insular we were. Everyone from my high school class that went to college went to University of Oregon. Some went to Oregon State. They didn’t even leave the state.

Frankel: So what year was it when you came back with Bob to live here?
LANDAUER: I came back with Bob in 1966 and cried. We had taken a little, dark apartment over on the East Side. I was dark, and boy, this is not the climate to be dark, so I cried. Then I realized that I didn’t want to live in that neighborhood; I wanted to live in an urban neighborhood. So I had to look in Northwest, and I found a huge, falling-down apartment on NW 25th. Three bedrooms, a condemned boiler, a dumbwaiter to take the garbage down, which sometimes had opossums or rats on it waiting for the garbage. The whole thing. It was wonderful. I loved it. One night we were having a dinner party, and the ceiling fell down on the table. Fabulous place, utterly wonderful.

The first day, we’re moving in and I’m already happy because there’s lots of windows, and I hear a voice coming up the stairs. I do not do accents, so I cannot do a Brooklyn accent, but it was a very heavy Brooklyn accent, “Get your ass up the stairs, Jesse Katz!” It was Vera. I ran out into the hall and said, “Where are you? I love you.” She lived next door. So we had two years of living next door to each other. She and I became housebrides together.

Frankel: You had a child?
LANDAUER: I had Mark, yes, and she had Jessie. We made gourmet meals, and we had four friends that we ate with frequently — Carlos from Italy, his wife Inga from Germany, Heather from Australia, and her husband, whose name I know as well as anything. It was French, but he’s Algerian. And then Mel and Vera and Bob and Sally.

Frankel: They all lived in the same apartment building?
LANDAUER: No, but they were all good friends of ours. We cooked off against each other all the time. Vera and I got so that we would cook our good meals for our husbands, and then we would split them in half so that we shared, that kind of thing. We made our own clothes. We made our own curtains. We learned how to upholster furniture. We went to Giant Johnson’s together and tried to shake the fat off of our butts.

One day we were down on our hands and knees stripping the wax off of a linoleum floor that had probably been there since 1906. The wax must have been that thick. We were stripping the wax, and we looked at each other and said, “You know, there’s got to be more to life than this.” She said, “I’m going to go to work for the Bobby Kennedy campaign.” I said, “I’m going to go to work for the Eugene McCarthy campaign.” So she went to work for Kennedy. I went to work for McCarthy. Mel was for McCarthy. Bob was for Kennedy. And we never stripped another piece of wax, we never upholstered anything, we never made our own clothes, we never did any of that again. We still kept cooking. It was the only thing we retained of all that.

Frankel: That was the beginning of a political . . .
LANDAUER: Our political lives, yes.

Frankel: How did Vera end up here?
LANDAUER: Mel was at [Kuvinik?], and there was a couple, maybe both were artists. The man got a job at the Portland Art Museum school, what there was of it at that time — they were just moving into a degree program — and he got a job and came out here. Then he wrote to Mel and said, “You need to come here.” So Mel and Vera and Jessie moved here. It was foreign country for them, but they had those friends here. And of course, you get to know everybody, especially in Portland.

Frankel: Right. So what happened next? You became involved . . .
LANDAUER: We did those two campaigns, and of course, McCarthy lost and Kennedy was assassinated, so we went to work for Wayne Morse, the two of us. When Wayne Morse was defeated by Bob Packwood, Neil Goldschmidt had decided to run for City Council. He called Vera and me and asked us to come and work for him. So we did; we worked on his campaign.

Frankel: Was that all volunteer?
LANDAUER: Yes, all volunteer. Then we did . . .

Frankel: What was it like working for Neil Goldschmidt? What was it like working for him?
LANDAUER: I still love him dearly. I don’t care what he might have done, or did do. I know too many facts about that, and I know that he’s not a victim, but she was sure as hell aimed at him by her mother. He was inspirational, and he should still be, because he did so much for this city. He was inspirational, and the first campaign we worked on for him — and I think maybe I did his first two campaigns — because after that Vera went on to form the Kennedy Action Corps, doing the migrant labor work that she did. But I did two campaigns at least for Neil.

During that time I had a spinal fusion, and I couldn’t go out and canvas or anything. I was in a body cast for six months, so it was perfect just doing door-to-door stuff. It was the beginning of that. My job was to take all 615 precincts in Portland, 3×5 cards with each voter’s name and address on it, and arrange them into walking-list order using a city map and these 3×5 cards. On the couch every day sorting cards for the map. I love maps anyway. I know this city really well. I could have become a cab driver after that. It was a great job. I’m totally anal, and it’s the perfect job for somebody like me. In the morning my kids went to Neveh Shalom to nursery school, and Judy Kahn and I carpooled. Of course I couldn’t drive, but she . . .

Frankel: Judy Kahn?
LANDAUER: Yes, she lived up the hill from us. So Judy drove, or sometimes Bob drove the kids and Judy would pick them up, but often my mother would pick them up and deliver Robert and Mark and Laura and Sarah. Anyway, we had a very good arrangement that way. I would lie on the couch. First I would read the newspaper cover-to-cover, of course, and then I would start doing cards. Mother would bring the kids home and I would keep doing the cards, and then they would go down for naps whether they wanted to or not. They didn’t have to sleep; they just had to be in their rooms, lying down supposedly, and I would do cards. Then at 4:00 PM, we would all hop into my bed. By then I was allowed to go up and down the stairs, and the only TV set we had — we had gotten it because I had the spinal fusion — a little black and white, was up on the dresser. We watched Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers together, and the kids got to get into bed with me and snuggle up next to my cast.

Frankel: How did it happen?
LANDAUER: I had a birth defect. It was a great time. I had a wonderful time. I just loved it. The other day — every once in a while we show our apartments to prospective buyers, and the marketing people brought a couple by, and the woman walked in and said, “I thought this might be you. I’m Nancy [Kanoki?].” This is a woman I knew when I was lying on my back sorting cards. I have a photo of the two of us in my living room, me lying on the couch in my body cast covered up with my muumuu or whatever I wore over it, the cards on the coffee table next to me, and Nancy sitting on a chair across from me. I hadn’t seen her in 45 years.

Frankel: Wow.
LANDAUER: Absolutely amazing. Anyway, that was what I did. My mother had gone on a nice tour of Europe before I had my surgery so that she would have lots to talk to me about, and then she would fix dinner. Sometimes my cleaning lady fixed dinner. She was a good cook. I don’t remember much about the cooking. We didn’t let Bob cook much because he was terrible at it. But we made it through. The biggest adjustment for the kids was if they woke up in the night, they had to call daddy; they couldn’t call me because I couldn’t get up and take care of them. Then after six months they cut the cast off of me, and three weeks later I went backpacking.

Frankel: Really. Wow.
LANDAUER: It was great.

Frankel: Were you still living in the apartment in Northwest?
LANDAUER: No, by then we had moved up to our house on Culpepper. The reason I even knew about the house on Culpepper was that I had decided after two years — I had told Bob when we were coming back to Portland, “No, you can’t do that to me.” He said, “Just do it for two years, and then you can go wherever you want.” I said, “OK.” At the end of two years he said, “Where do you want to go?” I said, “I want to buy a house” [laughter]. Portland had changed! All the people in my dining room were not from Portland. It was a totally different town. It was marvelous. I loved it.

Frankel: Right.
LANDAUER: So we lived in that house. The kids were brought up there. We moved in when our daughter Laura was one, and they lived there all their childhoods and teenage years.

Frankel: What did you end up doing?
LANDAUER: During that time, I ran campaigns. Then I ran campaigns for money. I ran a school bond election, I’m proud to say, the first one that had won in 16 years. I ran that. I did election analysis, precinct analysis. I was a freelance writer for Time and Fortune. I had assignments, usually economics ones. Time was every other month. Fortune was every three months. I did politics and freelancing basically. Then I got called to jury duty, which was a month long in those days, and I came home from jury duty and said, “The law may be crowded but not with good lawyers. There are lots of lawyers, but they’re not all good. I could complete with that.”

And I decided right about that time, when I was just finishing off a precinct analysis for the school district, that maybe I should go to law school. I think I could do that. I’d been doing a lot of advising. All my friends were having their mid-life crises; they were all getting divorced, and they were all coming to me and telling me their problems. I thought, “I could be a divorce lawyer.” But at the time I didn’t know that. So driving across the Broadway Bridge to the school district, I went straight to the phone and I called everybody I knew and said I was going to go to law school. Because I know myself. I back out. I had to push myself into it. Then I had to take the LSAT. And I thought, “I probably will do really terribly on it, so then I won’t have to go to law school.” Of course, I aced it because I’m very good at standardized tests. I may know nothing, but I can really do them. I know how to play the game. So then I had to go to law school, and I did. I went to law school.

Frankel: At Lewis and Clark?
LANDAUER: At Lewis and Clark, yes. Bob wanted me to go to Harvard, and he’d take care of the children for three years. I said, “In your dreams. Not going to happen, buddy.” So I happily went to Lewis and Clark, dropped Justine off at the school bus. She went across the river to help integrate Martin Luther King School. Of course, when she signed up because of her neighborhood they thought she was white. She’s not; she’s Asian. But nonetheless, they took her. So she was bussed into Martin Luther King. Dropped her off, went to school. Spent my day . . .

Frankel: Justine? Who?
LANDAUER: Our youngest daughter. An adopted daughter, Asian daughter. We lived in Asia, and we’ve had a number of foster children, some Asian, some white, some mixed, some Black, and one who is permanent and is still our daughter at the age of 53. We see her more often than the other kids probably. Anyway, so I’d go to school and I’d go to class and I’d read all my cases and everything, take my notes and everything, and then I would go pick her up at MLK at 5:00 PM and come home, fix dinner, and hang out with the kids, help with homework, and do whatever needed to be done. They all had to be in bed by nine. Then I typed up my briefs and went through the same thing. It never got in the way.

Now one of the reasons I could do that was that I had a wonderful next-door neighbor, Sanny Snell, and Sanny said, “I will take care of the kids after school. You go to law school. I’ll be here for them if they need me.” And the other thing was that our foster-daughter Sarah said, “I’ll come home from school every day to be there for the younger kids.” So I didn’t have to hire a babysitter or anything. Sanny was working at home, always a homebody at that time, and she had two little kids. One Justine’s age, and Ben, who was two years younger. So that was easy. So I knew they were safe, and they knew where they could go.

We just had a very, very open neighborhood anyway. There was a little boy who lived up the street, Peter, who was the fourth of four. Nobody ever knew he existed. Every morning he’d stop off to walk to school with our son Mark, who was a year older, and every morning I had a wet washcloth waiting for him and a comb to comb his hair and an extra lunch packed in case he didn’t have one. Sometimes an extra T-shirt because nobody even looked at him. He just walked out. And he was still unable to spend the night at anybody’s house at the age of ten because he still wet the bed, but he could stay at our house because he wasn’t ashamed that we knew that he wore diapers at night.

Frankel: Oh.
LANDAUER: Yes, and we’re still very close to Peter and to his sister, who was a very dear friend of the kids also.

Frankel: What became of Peter?
LANDAUER: Peter is now an exceptionally successful real estate guru in Seattle. Incredibly successful. Peter did very well.

Frankel: So did you enjoy law school?
LANDAUER: I loved it. What’s not to love? But then Justine had already turned awful. She was very different and very difficult. Now she’s very mentally ill, but then she wasn’t mentally ill; she was just awful. We got her too late. She was very damaged. We got her when she was two, and she had been in three foster homes in Korea. Before that, her mother had abandoned her, and then she was put on a plane and handed her to some people who look like nothing she’s ever seen and who don’t speak her language. She never got over the trauma of all of these changes; she never bonded with me. She probably bonded with her own mother, but that got broken, and bonding is more important than anything.

One of my babies that I had was a Vietnamese baby who came out of Saigon when Saigon fell, and he was dying when we got him. They thought he was going to die. He only weighed four pounds. He had been in the hospital, and he had failure to thrive because they would just prop him up with a bottle in his mouth and a pillow. They don’t even hold them. I had worked in an orphanage in Taiwan, and so I knew what you do. The whole neighborhood never put this baby down the first week he was with us, except to change his diaper. And I also nursed him. I did not intend to bring in milk, but having nursed my own children, I did. He needed a lot of that kind of love. At seven months we had to give him to his adopted family that he had been promised to before we got him. We had to agree not to try and adopt him. I cried for months.

His mother and I have been able to stay in touch. He did fine until he was about 18 years old, and then he went off the rails for a while. She called me when he was going to be 35 and said, “I’m doing a scrapbook. Do you have any old pictures of him or any old memories?” I said, “I certainly do. I’ll write everything down and send you photos.” And she said, “How is Justine?” At the time, I guess, she was not yet homeless, but she never passed being 16 years old. She thinks that we should support her. She’s 45 now and thinks we’re the most horrible parents, especially me, because I don’t pay for everything for her, because she’s 16 years old in her head. She never, ever, ever grew up. She’s much younger-behaving than her children, and it’s awful to watch them together. She behaves like a kid, and they behave like young adults.

Anyway, so I told about Justine, and when she had a suicide attempt in high school because we broke her up with her 28-year-old boyfriend who was screwing her, by whom she had become pregnant. She tried to kill herself. We knew what to do when a teenager does that. They go to bathe in the bathroom, they take every pill in the thing, and then they go and get in bed because they don’t want to die on the cold, hard floor. So you give them a large class of water, tell them to drink it down, and then you take them to the hospital to be pumped out and they go to Cedar Hills. OK? So that is what we did with her. We’d been through this with another foster daughter, which is where we made the mistake of breaking the door down, and instead she jumped out of the second-story window. She didn’t hurt herself fortunately. So we had learned; we knew exactly what to do.

I described some of the things that Justine did to share with the mother, and there was this dead silence. I told her about the diagnosis they gave her in the hospital, which was the bond had been broken. She said, “He bonded with you, didn’t he?” I said, “Well, I certainly bonded with him.” She said, “We broke his bond. That explains everything. This is going to make it a lot easier for all of us to figure out how to deal with him and for him to figure out how to deal with himself, when he knows what’s wrong.” Since then I’ve had letters from her saying that it’s really helped him to know that that was the problem. Isn’t it interesting? Bonding is so important.

Frankel: Yes.
LANDAUER: So important. Anyway . . .

Frankel: So you finished law school.
LANDAUER: I finished law school.

Frankel: What did you specialize in?
LANDAUER: Tax. Anal, right? I love tax. There’s an answer at the bottom of the page. The rest of the law, you can make it say anything you want, but [with tax] there’s an answer at the bottom of the page. Now you can make it any answer you want, I learned, but there are certain restrictions. And estate planning, because it’s based on ancient English history and it’s social work — it’s 85% just social work, getting people to talk to you and tell you what’s really wrong in their families so that they will have a plan for them. They don’t want to tell you what’s wrong, but when you tell them that you have a crazy daughter and my older brother was nutty as heck, my adored son-in-law’s brother is schizophrenic, and my niece is a stripper. She’s now retired at the age of 45, but her daughter is a drug addict and a stripper, and Katy was a drug addict for a long time too. I just tell them about my family, and guess what, they can tell me anything because nobody can beat me [laughter]. Yes. I have a normal family, and so do they, but they don’t know it until they can talk about it.

Frankel: So you went to work . . .
LANDAUER: I went to work for a firm of guys that I had gone to college with. They called me up; I didn’t have to interview or anything. They just called me up and said, “We want you to come to work for us.” I said, “I have to be able to leave at four every day because of my kids.” And they said, “Fine.” I never did, but I had the freedom to do it if I had wanted to. I did that for four years, working full time, and then I started getting terrible stomach pains and things. The doctor said, “Stress. You need to drop down your work. You’re doing too much.” I dropped to three days, and I couldn’t get the work done in three days, so then I did four days, and I did that for the rest of my career. It was perfect. I had that one day off a week, usually Monday. If you take Friday off, you still go in on Saturday to do the stuff that you didn’t get done. If you take Monday off, you’ve already bagged it. Or you’ve already worked Saturday, so you don’t have to go in. That gave me the flexibility to trade it for Thursday afternoons when I had to go to Laura’s cross-country meets or Tuesdays when I had to go to Mark’s tennis games or Mondays to take one of the kids to the doctor. It gave me the flexibility to run a family.

And then my mother was blind and required attention. She lived here the last ten years of her life, thank God. It saved my life. That’s why we live here. They saved my life, and I’m saving my children’s lives. She was this half-full person, or half-empty person. She was negative, and she was demanding. My brother died when he was 43, and so I was the only one. Fortunately, my older brother’s wife, they liked each other, and so Bonita tried to be attentive to her, which helped. But she lives in Coquille, so how attentive can she be? So it was me and the dog, a cat or two, usually only one, and my life. I had a life. That was it, and through the whole thing, I’m a very inattentive, rather non-religious, happy cultural Jew. Loved, loved being Jewish. It’s the only religion I’ve ever been able to identify with, the only one that makes room for me because it doesn’t have a theology that I can’t go along with.

Frankel: So did you raise your children Jewish?
LANDAUER: Absolutely. Son was bar mitzvahed. Daughter Laura was not because she saw what Mark went through and said, “No way!” [laughs]. And she was a very, very dedicated athlete, and she could not take the time away from her running. She was a state champion in running and all sorts of stuff, and that was OK with us. But we insisted she go to religious school, so she was confirmed.

Frankel: At Beth Israel?
LANDAUER: Absolutely. Justine would not have been able to do a bat mitzvah. She doesn’t have the attention span; she’s very ADHD. But she did go to religious school, so she was confirmed also. And she considers herself Jewish. In fact, my mother, who seldom let any of her prejudices show through except when she was sick — when she was ill, she was really nasty, so nasty they almost kicked her out of Good Sam after she had a heart attack because she was so mean to everybody. She hurt herself when Justine was five, and we were over at her condo. She lived in a townhouse over in the Northwest by then. She was in bed, and Justine was on the floor playing and I’m talking to her. I said something about Bob or something, and she said something nasty about him being Jewish or about my converting, or something about being Jewish anyway. Justine pops up off of the ground, goes over and looks her in the face and says, “But, Mimi, I’m Jewish.” It shut my mother up.

Frankel: Wow.
LANDAUER: Let me tell you. When we left I said, “Where do you want to go, McDonalds? Anything you want. You just earned yourself a place in heaven, girlfriend” [laughter]. Isn’t that nice? Her children, they want to be here for Hanukkah, they want to be here for seder. Their grandfather was Catholic, but I don’t think they’ve gone to church. I don’t know that they have, frankly. I don’t think they would; I don’t think they’re interested. But they do like to celebrate Jewish holidays with us.

Frankel: And Mark and Laura, where did they go after?
LANDAUER: Mark went to Whitman. I have two grandsons there too. He went to Whitman, and then he graduated and went back east to work in Washington, DC, where he lived for eight and a half years. He worked for Hatfield, and that was where he met Casey, his wife, and put her through medical school. Then they got married and came out here for her residency at OHSU. I think she might have been brought up Episcopalian, but she was not interested, and when he asked her to marry him, he said, “There are two conditions: we have to raise the children Jewish, and we have to live in Portland.” She said, “I agree to both.” And she’s been very, very good about it. She decorates the house for Hanukkah, bakes Hanukkah cookies, comes to all our events. She has lived by her promise. She even has considered converting. She has said, “But I don’t believe in God, I don’t believe in any of that, so it would be sort of hypocritical.” I told her what Manny had said to me. She said, “Well, you got away with it. I’m not sure I could.”

My daughter went to Cornell, where of course, there were more Jewish boys than you could ever count [laughs]. So she married a boy whom we adore. He was brought up on welfare. His mother was the most god-awful flake of the western world. His father abandoned them when he was nine. He went to Cornell with no help from home. He had good grandparents. Otherwise, he put himself through Cornell on loans, working. He lived with an elderly couple to be there at night for them. He was a maître’d at a restaurant every evening. He ran cross-country and track.

He went to the hotel school [School of Hotel Administration], where the tuition was the lowest, because he had a very, very smart college counselor in high school who said, “Ron, you need to go somewhere where you have a job the day you graduate. Go to the hotel management school. You have the right personality for it, and when you go there, you take the minimum number of required hours for hotel management, and the rest of your courses at arts and sciences, and you get an Ivy League education on a hotel budget.” And that’s exactly what he did. He is really amazing. He has exceeded Laura’s expectations. He has a very, very successful software business. They make so much money that they had to set up a fund at the Oregon Community Foundation.

Frankel: They live in town?
LANDAUER: They live in Bend. So she went there, and he did not convert because — who married them? Oh, Manny married them in our backyard, which was great, with a huppah and everything. It was marvelous; we had a wonderful time. And because it was in the backyard, it was fine with Manny. Three or four years later — they were living in Oakland at the time. They lived in DC for a couple of years, and then they moved to Oakland where he worked at the Claremont for a while, and then he took over this software company.

So they were living in Oakland, and we’re in the backyard. He’s grilling chicken for dinner. I’m drinking a glass of wine. He has his back to me as he’s grilling, and he says, “So I was going to leave to come up to Black Butte” — because they spend parts of the summer with us in Black Butte — “I was going to leave on Wednesday with the boys, and we were going to camp on the way up.” The boys were three and a half and one or something at the time. “Then I realize that no, I can’t do that because I have to go to the mikvah Thursday morning.”

Frankel: He said that?
LANDAUER: He said that. My son said that.

Frankel: Your son-in-law.
LANDAUER: My son-in-law. And I said, “Stop. Rewind the tape. You have to go where on Thursday morning?” He said, “The mikvah.” I said, “Why?” He said, “I’m converting.” And I said, “Why?” He said, “Because the boys think I’m Jewish, and I don’t want to disappoint them.”

Frankel: Amazing.
LANDAUER: Isn’t that lovely?

Frankel: Wow.
LANDAUER: So he did. He converted. Her three kids have all had bar/bat mitzvahs at their wonderful little temple in Bend. If I lived in Bend, I would go to shul regularly because he’s this warm and loving, inclusive man [the rabbi], and it’s a little tiny congregation. When we were in Taiwan, we went to shul every Friday night because if we didn’t go, there wouldn’t be a minyan.

Frankel: Everybody counted.
LANDAUER: Yes. Once every three weeks, the circuit-riding rabbi came through, and the other two times we ran our own services. My favorite part of it is when we arrived at the armed services chapel, which is where we held them, I got to turn off the neon cross [laughter].

Frankel: That’s so funny.
LANDAUER: Yes.

Frankel: Wow, that’s amazing. So have you kept in touch with Vera Katz?
LANDAUER: Yes. She isolates herself. She has to do dialysis three times a week, and that exhausts her. It takes up the only time that she can stand even to be out because the rest of the time she’s pretty tired. Her cancer treatment killed her kidneys. She and I go out to lunch once in a while. We talk on the phone very occasionally, often she won’t answer the phone, and we communicate by email. She and Bob have communicated by email a number of times too. So we’re still in communication.

Frankel: Does she live by herself?
LANDAUER: Yes, she does, in an apartment down on the Park Blocks. A really nice apartment.

Frankel: She doesn’t need help?
LANDAUER: She doesn’t need help, or she doesn’t have help, we’ll put it that way. Actually, she has been having help the last few months because she broke her hip in May, so she has had help. Now that she’s able to walk again and everything, she may not need help, but she did have help. I would hope she kept it on, but who knows? She doesn’t drive, so she takes the streetcar to her things. But I think nowadays she has to go by cab or by Uber or something.

Frankel: So are you still involved politically?
LANDAUER: After this year, you could ask that? I am no longer involved. When I became a lawyer, and when Bob got elevated to the editorial page, I stopped doing anything political because everybody assumes that if I’m political, he will have the same opinions that I do, which of course is utterly untrue. So I stopped doing anything political except supporting judges, which is appropriate, especially since I don’t do any trial work. I also kind of have had it. I had done it for a long time, and I’d sort of been there, done that. It’s time for the younger ones to take over. So I don’t really get involved in politics doing anything.

I wanted to do a little bit for Hillary, but I quickly realized that what I wanted to do for her would have been in Oregon, where it wasn’t really needed. I had friends who went to Ohio, but they’re younger than I am too. At this age, no. I have a friend here, Peggy, who is still going off and doing everything, and she’s 80. She sneers at me because I’m not going off and doing everything. She’s got a lot of energy.

Frankel: You mentioned how non-cosmopolitan Portland was in the early years. How would you describe the changes, and what maybe accounted for those changes?
LANDAUER: Influx of people from elsewhere, huge difference. I didn’t live here basically from the time I was 18, except during vacations, and then I was working the whole time. I wasn’t here to see all the things that were changing. But we all out-married, or at least my friends who were brought up here, who stayed active and involved, who are still my friends, a lot of them out-married. I out-married. My friend Mitzi Scott, who was from Connecticut and married Bill Scott, she came in. The people who became my good friends, like the Buchanans from Chicago, they came here either because of jobs or because it was more attractive than where they were living, or because they married in. So there were people from other points of view here, lots of Midwesterners, lots of East-Coasters, and they had changed dramatically.

That’s why we could sit at dinner; there was one person at that dinner table who was brought up in Portland. We had another dinner party one night, and I realized that six of the eight people at our table were from Connecticut, for God’s sake! And one was from New York. Nobody except me. But then, of course, I go out, and that was why I went out from the Heights into the flatlands. I’ve always gone out. So you accumulate that way other outlanders.

Frankel: What about the role of women? How has that changed?
LANDAUER: Well, I was in the picket line at the City Club, an original picketer. After the first campaign, which was Goldschmidt, and then Tom Walsh ran for the city council. A bunch of women worked for Tom, and a bunch of us worked for Neil. After the campaign, we realized we had a lot in common, and we started a women’s group. This is in 1970. We formed a women’s group. We called ourselves POW, Politically-Oriented Women, which the men immediately changed to “Penis-Oriented Women.” So then we all called ourselves, “Prisoners of Wedlock.” But we were really the “Wednesday Winos.” We got together for lunch every Wednesday with all our kids and our sack lunches and our bottles of wine, our jugs of wine. Those were the good-old jug days, Almaden Mountain Red. We sat around and talked politics while the children played in another room, utterly unsupervised.

Frankel: Would you meet in each other’s homes?
LANDAUER: Yes. Gretchen Kafoury’s house, my house, Vera’s apartment, Mary Anne Buchanan’s house, Allison Belcher’s house, Kathy Walsh’s house. There was this bunch of us. Margot Perry one day said, “You know, we’re a bunch of do-nothings. We haven’t done anything.” We were all working on more campaigns, but we really weren’t doing anything as a group. “We’re a group. We should do something.” Betty Merton was in this group too. She remembers it as Gretchen suggesting that we do this, and I wouldn’t debate her about it at all. Gretchen saying, “We need to picket the City Club and get them to admit women.” We’ll do it!

From then on, every Friday we picketed the City Club. We had our signs, and we walked up and down, and we accosted people who tried to go in, and we accosted Sid Lezak and shamed him into resigning. We did the whole thing. We had a wonderful time. It was marvelous. I worked for Sid while I was in law school, so that was really fun too. That was a good experience. But of course, he called me up and said, “I want you to work for me, but I can only pay you $3.25 an hour because I can’t treat the clerks any differently.” I said, “That’s OK. I don’t care.” So that’s what I made working for Sidney.

We picketed the City Club, and we convinced speakers not to speak there. We did it for a year. It took two votes, but we got it done. And also, at the same time, we picketed “Perkins Pub,” which was in the basement of Lipman’s, which was men only. It only took them a month to cave. They did not want a bunch of loud women picketing in front of their commercial establishment. So yes, we did that. We all marched against Vietnam in ’68; we all were out there on the streets. I actually worked the medical tent at our “Woodstock” out at McIver Park. That was the summer that I got my cast off, so I was able to do all that kind of stuff. Women’s issues were part of who we were at the time. That was how to be political in those days.

Frankel: Anything else you care to share about Portland, your involvement in the Jewish community?
LANDAUER: The Jewish community. OK. The best thing that Manny did was insist that I do Jewish education classes. I met Yonah Geller that way, and I met Josh Stampfer. They were teaching classes, which meant that when I wanted my kids to go to nursery school, Neveh Shalom was where I wanted them to be. That’s where Josh Stampfer was, and he was what a religious leader should be. So was Yonah Geller, but his conservative synagogue was not for me [ed: She must mean that Shaarie Torah’s practice was — lowercase-c — socially conservative in nature. The synagogue was actually Orthodox at the time, whereas Neveh Shalom was part of the Conservative movement].

But he — for instance, I was in the hospital. The last time I was there, I think it was when I had malaria. I was in the hospital a number of times. When I had my spinal fusion, I was there for three weeks. Josh Stampfer came and visited me every day. I wasn’t a member of his congregation, but he came and visited me. When I was in for my gut, for my malaria, Yonah Geller came and visited me. Needless to say, Manny of course never did. No. He’s not that kind of hands-on kind of person. He does the best funeral services in the world, but he just can’t do it. I would have liked it, but I got to see Yonah Geller and I got to see Josh Stampfer every time I went to the hospital. I loved it. And they were part of the community for me, you see. They took me in.

Another funny thing about my family that you have to understand is that my younger brother was married twice, first to a woman that I actually went to high school with. She was a year younger than I, and he was two years younger, so they were a couple years separated, and that marriage lasted until the kids were in their early teens. He then ended up with Susie Goldsmith and ended up marrying her. So he married a Jew.

My ex-sister-in-law, his first wife, my mother introduced her to her second husband, who was an Orthodox Jew, and they were married, and they belong to one of the little Orthodox ones, I don’t remember which. I think it’s Kesser Israel. She sat upstairs with the women. She did the whole thing. She was a born-again Christian when he met her. She dropped it like a rock. So she and Allen Visnick were married for many, many years. When she got Alzheimer’s, and he was very, very ill in the last year of his life, my daughter Justine, who has her faults but is the most wonderful caregiver in the world, moved in with them and took care of Judi, especially because Allen was either out at Robison or in the hospital almost all the time. Justine has not ever married a Jew, but our family very carefully has intermarried because that’s where we belong, which I think is interesting.

Frankel: Absolutely.
LANDAUER: Both of my father’s natural children married Jews, and actually, Bonita, his wife, if there was a Jewish community that she could belong to, she would have converted years ago. But in Coquille there’s not much of a Jewish community. She likes to come here for Hanukkah, and she likes to come to seder and everything.

Frankel: Wonderful.
LANDAUER: So it’s just one of those things. Somebody in our past was Jewish, obviously. We clearly had a Jewish grandmother somewhere.

Frankel: And just one last question, did any of your children or grandchildren visit Israel?
LANDAUER: Laura was on the US Maccabiah team, so she ran in Israel. She was in Israel after her senior year at Cornell, which was great. That’s a wonderful experience that she got. The other children have not gone. Now my grandchildren, the boys, are definitely going to go. Jillian, our granddaughter, Laura’s daughter, will go. Ben and Sidney, on the other hand, Mark and Casey joined Beth Israel. When it came time to start looking at bar mitzvah time for Ben, they went to talk to the rabbi, who informed them that he would have to go to classes every Saturday morning, and this and that. Mark said, “He’s got soccer games.” And they said, “He’ll have to give up soccer.” Well, this kid is a varsity soccer player at Jesuit, and let me tell you, he wasn’t giving up soccer. They were so rigid about it that they resigned.

When we went to talk to them about his bar mitzvah [their son Mark’s], they said he’ll have to give up whatever his athletics were, or he can have private Hebrew lessons with Yonah Geller. What’s to choose? So of course, he had a wonderful experience studying with Rabbi Geller, and it worked wonderfully. But they were not given any option; they had to do it the Beth Israel way or not at all. And so they resigned.

So how do these kids get to know their Jewish? They go to BB Camp. They have gone to BB Camp since they were old enough to go to camp, and the longer the better. Ben is 16, and he really wanted to be a counselor, but he had some stuff that he had to do in the summer. I don’t remember what it was, but it was important. Unfortunately, his sister, who’s 14, is on a national lacrosse team, and she has to play lacrosse all over the country, so she couldn’t go to BB Camp this summer either. But they have gone to BB Camp. They are very definitely Jewish. Of course, I went to BB Camp too. I forgot to tell you that. Absolutely. It was part of what I did. If you go to JCC, you go to BB Camp, right? I think it’s interesting.

Frankel: It’s fascinating.
LANDAUER: I think my story is really weird.

Frankel: Right. And especially thinking of Portland, Oregon, where the Jewish community is not that big.
LANDAUER: No. And not that much of a community, unless you were at one of the really conservative synagogues. All those guys that I was friends with, and still am friends with, Morry and Barry Hornstein. Oh my God, they were wild. That’s why I liked them too. They all were not particularly religious, but they all belonged to Kesser Israel or Ahavai Sholom or something like that because they were in the neighborhood. They went to ones in their neighborhoods. None of them went to Beth Israel.

Frankel: Fascinating. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
LANDAUER: Thank you.

Frankel: Anything else maybe before I turn it off?
LANDAUER: Not that I can think of. We’ve hit the high points.