Pharmacy and racial integration at Oregon State University, hydrogen bombs, and old age dementia

Day 486 of 1000

My parents are getting older.  Lately, my brother, sisters, and I have worked hard on getting Dad and Mom out of their rented house into assisted living.  Mom has fairly normal old age dementia. Dad, on the other hand, has a fairly odd malady.  It was odd enough that his neurologist has asked that he donate his brain to OHSU for further study after he is gone.  At first they thought it was Alzheimer’s disease.  After that, they thought it was Frontal Lobe Temporal Dementia (FTD).  The PET scan showed that it was both and neither.  His brain scan manifests something that is somewhat less than Alzheimer’s and something less than FTD.  But the both of them together are something that is fairly rare.  That is pretty much the story of Dad’s life.  Both Dad and Mom have long term memories that are intact.  In light of that diagnosis, I have decided to try to do some interviews to document their amazing lives.

Mom is one of the first women to graduate with a four year degree in pharmacy from Oregon State University.  There was one woman in the year before her and she graduated with one other woman.  There were other women who graduated before that, but that was well before her time when pharmacy was a two year program.  She worked with one or two women who graduated from the two year program at OSU as early as 1917.  It will be fun to interview her about her memories of these topics.  In additon to that, she attended OSU with the first black man that graduated that ever graduated from there with a pharmacy degree.

For his part, Dad had a wildly improbable life.  He saw the first two hydrogen bombs go off when he was a cook on Eniwetok in the army.  He is journey to that position is a story onto itself.  Before that, as a five or six year old child, he traveled to Portland on a bus on his own so the Dornbecker hospital could operate on a growth on his throat.  He was the prime mover in a business that grew to be the largest producers of doll house kits in the world, selling to store chains such as Walmart, Home Depot, Sears, Lowes, and many others.

I hope to be able to get some interesting interviews on these topics as well as their upbringing in rural Oregon.  They are a product of the logging/sawmill culture that is truly unique to Oregon.  I am very much looking forward to these interviews and hope that time and health permits me to do this work over the coming few years.  I took a new job specifically to be able to spend time in Oregon with my parent for this purpose.  If they are willing and have the time, my siblings might add a guest post to this effort as they have made the effort to get a scanner to accumulate old photos and have memories of their own.