Point of No Return

When Bernie and I started our job search in Portland in September of 1972 there were economic forces at work that we hadn't been aware of... The country (as a whole) was in something of a downturn that (in my opinion) was exacerbated by the wage and price freeze Nixon imposed in 1971, but the northwest had been particularly hard hit. And that was because of Boeing...

Between 1968 and 1971 the number of people employed by Boeing in the Seattle area dropped from around 100,000 to 32,700. (Much of it due to the cancellation of the SuperSonic Transport project in 1971.) In other words, almost 70,000 skilled aerospace workers had been laid off in a very short period of time... But that was just the tip of the iceberg. Almost the entire Boeing supply chain was located in the northwest as well, not to mention all the local businesses that depended on all those aerospace workers for their existence. The aggregate job loss was probably in the hundreds of thousands. It was catastrophic...

Of course, many of those who couldn't find work migrated south, so by the time Bernie, Karina and I arrived in Oregon jobs were all but impossible to find... And so it went... Bernie had once been an orderly, so we made the rounds of the local hospitals. That was usually pretty easy work to get, but there was nothing. Bernie also checked out all the music stores, and again, no luck...

I don't recall how many days we spent in the Portland area, but we did do quite a bit of exploring, and I can't help but be amazed at how much it has grown in the years since.

One day after stopping at St. Vincent hospital (no job openings) we had lunch at the Love's Barbeque (long defunct national chain) on Cedar Hills Blvd across from the Beaverton Mall (under construction at the time). That was pretty much the "outer bounds" of the Portland metro area. (I had no idea that 13 years later I'd be working a few blocks from there.) Then we headed south on 217 (a two lane rural road with stop signs) all the way to Lake Oswego, a rather tiny (albeit well-to-do) community - there wasn't a stoplight anywhere.

O.K. This is funny (or not)... One day when we were heading up Skyline Blvd I saw a "No Barking" sign... I thought that was one of the weirdest things I'd ever seen. I mean, the idea that there was a local "anti-barking" ordinance and they put up signs and everything... It took a full five minutes to dawn on me that someone had "doctored" a "No Parking" sign. (That's the funny part)... In my defense, the modification had been quite well done. You really couldn't tell :-)

We also spent some time poking around the inner southeast part of town (Buckman area - rents were cheap there) and I also recall that there were two sets of ridiculously tight curves on the locals freeways. One was at Terwilliger on I-5 south and the other at 39th on the Banfield. Fortunately, they've both since been significantly straightened (the latter one when they built the east side light rail in the early 1980s.) Yeah - the Banfield was pretty dangerous at the time...

All in all we really liked the area. We just couldn't find jobs anywhere...

And then one morning we realized we had reached the "point of  no return". We had just enough money to either drive back to Dallas or rent a cheap apartment and eat for a few days - and that was it... So we decided it was time to throw in the towel, head back home and regroup...