Arnold Labby

Frankel: Good morning. I will ask you to begin by stating your full name, date and place of birth.
LABBY: My name is Arnold Myron Labby, and I was born August 25th, 1924, in Portland, Oregon.

Frankel: Let’s begin with your early memories. Tell me who lived in your household.
LABBY: My earliest memories. The picture I have in my mind is of walking up the hill in Laurelhurst, where we moved from the house where I was born on Hazelfern Place, up the hill with the maid. I was on one side, and she was on the other side and had the bird cage in her other hand. We walked two and a half blocks up the hill from Peerless Place to Royal Court, where we had just purchased a home. So if I was walking, I was probably a couple of years old. The house was on Northeast Royal Court, and I remember that very vividly. 

Then there’s a leap ahead of I don’t know how much time. My mother was a surgical nurse, and since I was the youngest she needed to have some kind of reason to continue her nursing, so I was going from pediatrician to pediatrician for I don’t remember what. I think I had asthma. I had endless allergy tests from nice old family doctors, the kind Norman Rockwell used to paint [laughs]. I always had pleasant memories of going to these doctors, and they were very nice to me, patting me on the head and speaking to my mother. I remember that because of the so-called asthma my mother devoted a great deal of time to me, which I didn’t object to at all. 

My brothers were self-sufficient. My oldest brother Dan is ten years older than I; he will be 98 next Saturday. I was 88 last Saturday. Brother Bob was born on New Year’s Day 1921, so he is 92½ now. They, being older than I, had their own boy things to do. Dan, being ten years older, was kind of the identified parent among the three boys, so if there was any supervision he was the supervisor.

Frankel: Besides the siblings, your parents lived in your household. Was there anyone else?
LABBY: Yes, my parents lived in the household, and my mother had an interesting set of projects. She wanted to have live-in help in the house, so she would somehow arrange to have high school girls who had just graduated high school come and live and help out in the household, taking care of me, helping with laundry and other household details. There was a mandate, and the mandate to the girls was they could have Thursdays off and they had to go to night school. And at night school they had to take what was then a very important occupational preparation, secretarial work. They had to learn shorthand and typing and bookkeeping and so forth. Then when they were proficient, she would terminate their work at the house and send them forth to go get a job.

Frankel: So she was concerned that they continue their education?
LABBY: Yes. So that was the household, which also included from time to time dogs, canaries, goldfish, whatever pets we boys wanted to bring into the house. 

Frankel: What are the names of your parents?
LABBY: My father was Harry Abraham Labby. The name on the manifest that I have of the ship they came to the United States on was Nochim [spells out], which he said in Russian was Noah. Middle name Abraham because my grandfather, following the tradition, named all his sons with his name for their middle names.

Frankel: In his lifetime? [She expresses surprise because, according to Jewish tradition, children are not named after a still-living relative.]
LABBY: In his life, yes. So my father’s middle name was Abraham. My uncles’ names were all Abraham.

Frankel: Do you know where that tradition came from?
LABBY: It was just said to me by my father to be a tradition [this seems to be following the Russian custom of assigning the father’s first name as a patronymic, which in this case in Russian would actually have been Abramovich]. Now my grandfather’s father, whose name I have here somewhere, was born in Tbilisi in Georgia, as was my grandfather. So if my grandfather’s first name was Abraham — I don’t know what his middle name was, [but if I did] then I would know my great grandfather’s name.

Frankel: On the manifesto was the last name Labby?
LABBY: Labkowsky [spells out], I believe. I’d have to look.

Frankel: When did it become Labby?
LABBY: It became Labby in Portland. I really can’t pinpoint an accurate time. It would be before I was born, to become a Yankee, probably when my father graduated dental school, which would have been 1913. Coincidently, my dad said that my grandfather said to him, after he had lived in South Portland and had his dental practice there, “You must now move to the east side of Portland as so many other Jewish families, join a Reform synagogue, and assimilate your family.”

Frankel: That was your father’s father?
LABBY: My grandfather.

Frankel: He told your father to do this, to move away from the Jewish community and join a Reform synagogue?
LABBY: Not necessarily move away from the Jewish community. To remain in the Jewish community, which we of course did, but to assimilate from South Portland, which was a focal point for several migrations of people. 

So getting back to your initial question about who lived in the household and my earliest recollections. I had that privileged childhood. We moved into the Depression, I think, unhappily because some of my father’s assets which were in the Hibernia Bank on Fourth and Washington, across from his office, which was also on Fourth and Washington in the McLeay Building, some of the assets were lost. But my father and a man he met put together a plan, a group called the Merchant’s Exchange, which later became called, I think, the Purchasing Exchange, which was a bartering system. As a dentist my father needed to have income so he could provide food, clothing, shelter for the family. In turn, he would provide dental services, and people would provide us with vegetables, chickens, rabbits, other kinds of services, which I very distinctly remember. 

During those Depression years my mother solicited specific — this was very clever of her because she was also helping out in the office from time to time. She would go to the Portland Farmer’s Market on Yamhill Street, and she would select vendors and then encourage them to have their dental work done at my father’s office. So the vendors became kind of family friends. Mrs. Casey from, I think, St. Helens, provided us with chickens and rabbits, Carl Duhrkoop with red meat, the Gianninis with green grocer products, all vegetables, and so on. 

Frankel: The Merchant’s Exchange, was that an official group?
LABBY: It had an aim, and a man named Mr. Fryer was the person who operated it. We also had endless movie theater cards with little numbers around the edge, and when we would go to the movie theaters they would punch the numbers, so we children could go on Saturdays to the movies in the afternoon. There were restaurants. It got larger and larger, and that, I think, is not the only organization of its kind. There was general bartering.

Frankel: So how did the system actually work?
LABBY: You mean for dollar value?

Frankel: Did you have to sign up and list what you could provide?
LABBY: I’m sure that was it. I can tell you about the benefits, but I can’t tell you about the actual organization. We did get through the Depression quite well. We had new floors put in the house. I’m sure my father had to provide funds for the materials and so forth. We had the house painted. We even, I think somewhere around the middle 1930s, acquired a 1934 Pontiac automobile, which might have cost several hundred dollars. I remember my brother Dan, the oldest, lying on his side painting the wheels. It had wooden wheels, and he was painting the wheels. The spoke of the wheel was painted green, and it had a red arrow because the Pontiac Chieftain was named after an American Indian. So these are vivid scenes I can replay.

Frankel: When you moved to the Eastside, was your father’s practice still downtown?
LABBY: It was still downtown. I think it was still over Cotell’s Drugstore in South Portland because frequently we would go on Saturdays to the First Street Shul to see my grandfather. We would then go down a few blocks to Mosler’s Bakery and load up on Mosler’s bagels and Russian rye, and across the street to Callistro’s. They were loud and wonderful, and the place had oiled floors and barrels with herring and pickles, and we were always invited to dig in and have whatever we wanted by Pete Callistro and Mary. They were very loving, and they were fixtures.

Frankel: Were the grandparents you were talking about maternal or paternal grandparents?
LABBY: Paternal. If you want a little sidebar, my mother’s father, Meyer [spells outs] Goldfarb, came here in 1929, I believe. That’s where I got my middle name, and my first name, Arnold, is a derivation of Aaron, which was my maternal grandmother’s father’s name.

Frankel: Did the maternal grandparents also move to Portland?
LABBY: No, they remained in Woodbine, New Jersey. I’m sure you know the story of Woodbine.

Frankel: I just recently read about it. Were they part of the agricultural or that early settlement which was . . .?
LABBY: Yes, I think they came originally because my mother’s sister, Enuta, was married to Dr. Joseph Joffe. He was born in Palestine, became a physician, wanted to do some good in the world, and along the line somewhere encountered the Baron de Hirsch organization, was sent to Brazil. In Brazil — this is a story that we have many pages of documentation on from my mother’s side of the family — the story goes that he saw that the people managing the colony apparently came there to do good, but also did very well. He didn’t exactly like the idea of funds going inappropriately into pockets they should not have gone into, according to his observation. 

So he blew the whistle and was promptly recalled and sent to this new place in New Jersey, Woodbine, where there had the 3,000 acres that were sold and probably had a half-inch of topsoil, which was fairly quickly discovered, and then the colony decided to do light manufacturing. Yuditski’s hat factory, which incidentally nobody seemed to have a record of when we were there a couple of years ago going through the museum and talking to the docent — there are other hat factories, but not Yuditski’s where my father and grandfather worked. 

But to get back to my mother’s family. Because Dr. Joffe and her sister Enuta were there, the rest of the Goldfarbs came from Russia. My mother, who was born in 1890, was left with her parents in Moscow and a wet nurse, she said, for about the first three or four years. Then her grandparents, this is according to story and I don’t know how embellished it was, moved to Paris for a year or two, taking the nurse, whose name was Adarka, with them, and then they remained in Europe. I don’t know if they stayed in Paris or went back to Moscow, but Adarka brought my mother here in 1895, to Woodbine, and there she was reunited with her mother. Her mother then also had another child, my Uncle Lou, or Lazar. He was the baby of the family.

Frankel: And how long did she stay in Woodbine? 
LABBY: My mother met my father — let’s see, my father came here in 1905 because he was 14 in October of 1904 and was just primed to go into the Czar’s Army, and my grandfather managed to get him out of the country. They came from Galta, which is now Pervomaysk, to Hamburg, and from Hamburg they came to New York, and from New York — they were somehow only briefly there — to New Jersey. That places my father in Woodbine meeting my mother in a very unique way. He was 14 and wanted some education and was working as a utility boy in Yuditski’s hat factory. My mother’s sister Enuta had an uncle whose name was Achilles Joffe. He was a scholar, and he taught my father at night so my father could pass high school equivalency there and still work during the day and provide income for the family. Grandma came a year or so later, and she has a story, too. My father then met my mother, of course. They were childhood sweethearts. 

So maybe more than a year after being in Woodbine, their neighbors, the Rosumnis, came to Portland. Rosumni, I think, had a bakery here near Mosler’s, and when Mosler died Rosumni took over. Fine bakery, but it wasn’t the same bread, as you’ve heard, I’m sure, countless times. Mosler’s formulas went to his grave [laughs]. So the Rosumnis somehow convinced my parents to come here to Portland. My mother stayed, went to school, and then at 18 she graduated high school and went into New York City to the Lebanon Hospital Training School to become a nurse.

Frankel: Why was it called the Lebanon Nursing School?
LABBY: It was in the Bronx, way up in the high numbers of the Bronx. It was called the Lebanon Hospital Training School. Lebanon Hospital, I don’t know if it was a Jewish Hospital. I’m sure it wasn’t Lebanese. She graduated in 1911, so she would have been 21.

Frankel: Did she keep in touch with your father?
LABBY: Endless letters. I saw them when we were cleaning out her little storage area after she died. They were tied with ribbons. My father was very handy, and he made little art things and sent them to her, and she also had those. So she came here in 1911 and worked as a traveling nurse, going up and down the valley on the electric train, bringing basic sanitation into homes. She had lye soap in one hand and a scrubbing brush in the other and was helping deliver babies. When my dad graduated dental school in 1913, they were married. During that time she lived with my father’s family and helped raise the kids.

Frankel: Whose kids?
LABBY: The kids being my father’s younger siblings. They were into trouble all the time. We had a very large Bowie knife that my father kept in his fishing bag, and we got to look at it and play with it. It had a staghorn handle. It was really something for us as kids to look at. It came into the family because of my father’s two brothers, Bob and Manley, who were always into mischief of some kind. Mostly they sold papers in the saloons, newspapers, and they saved up their pennies and bought this Bowie knife and went into the hills above Portland State now where there’s an old kind of a castle. They were going to hunt for bears [laughs]. The main thing they did was get everybody angry, up all night with lanterns scouring the hills. They were found, as my father said, hiding under a log, cold, wet, and frightened, and holding onto the Bowie knife [laughs].

Frankel: Was it common for women like your mother in the early 1900s to go to school beyond high school, and even finishing school?
LABBY: From what we’ve read, it was not, probably, encouraged, but my mother’s family was pretty advanced in terms of general education. Her sisters, one became a singer, my aunt Rose. She probably trained as a classical singer because my mother’s second oldest sibling was a concert pianist in [Kewality?]. She was always the dainty one according to my mother, given to fainting spells when becoming agitated. But she taught my mother to play the organ and the piano classically, and my mother always had her Clemente exercise books and played Baroque music beautifully, early music, and encouraged music in our family. My mother’s other siblings, let’s see, Aunt Bertha — I think they were all well educated.

Frankel: How many siblings did your mother have?
LABBY: Seven. There were four girls and four boys, and my mother was next to the youngest. Four of them had diabetes; four did not. The four that did eventually died from complications.

Frankel: At a relatively young age?
LABBY: No, they lived. Interestingly, they lived well into adulthood, into their 70s. Her oldest brother, Uncle Joe, was the so-called Mayor of the Bronx. Maybe this was said to glamorize him, I don’t know, but he was a diabetic, and I think he finally died of a heart condition when he was very old. Somehow they managed. 

Frankel: How often did you see your maternal grandparents?
LABBY: Never. I’m sure my maternal grandfather, Meyer Goldfarb, saw me because if he was here in 1929, I would have been five years old. I have no recollection. Maybe he was here earlier. But there are stories of his walking up to Council Crest for exercise from South Portland. That would be a pretty good trip. My brother Dan has plentiful memories of him. My mother, also in 1929, taking my brother Dan with her, took the train back to Woodbine. She went every couple of years, incidentally. She had a great attachment to her family. She nursed her mother in her mother’s final illness in 1929.

Frankel: Who still remained in Woodbine?
LABBY: Yes, her mother had septicemia from some very bad pelvic surgery. My aunts and uncles eventually moved into New York City, established themselves in occupations, professions. They were poets, artists, intellectuals. They got into dentistry and medicine and considered themselves, I think, several levels above my mother’s husband’s family [laughs].

Frankel: Were they religious? Did they come from Europe as Orthodox Jews?
LABBY: I really can’t answer that. I would suspect they were probably secular, observant but secular, which is the way we ended up ourselves.

Frankel: What about your paternal grandparents who lived here, did they continue to be observant, or were they observant when they came?
LABBY: It was my grandfather’s total occupation. He was the collector for Shaarie Torah, and as collector they bought him a streetcar pass, and he went around town and knock on the doors of the members — some of them must have lived far enough away that he’d have to use the streetcar — and ask for their dues. At least that was his title. But it gave him a privileged seat near the eastern wall, I’m sure. And he also had installed, because he was so devoted to the shul, a stained glass window with the name Labby.

Frankel: Which synagogue was it?
LABBY: Shaarie Torah.

Frankel: But they called it the First Street Shul?
LABBY: It was the First Street Shul as differentiated, perhaps, from the Second Street Shul or Ahavai Sholom or those that came later. It was a wonderful place to see the old Orthodox Jews. And Nusky Rose’s grocery store was very nearby, and Grandpa Korson’s delicatessen was nearby, and everything clustered around there.

Frankel: Do you recall attending services there?
LABBY: Yes, because on the high holidays we would go to Beth Israel. We would go to children’s services, and Rabbi Berkowitz was wise enough not to make them too long. Then our parents would take us over to have lunch at grandma and grandpa’s house at 921 College Street, which is now the athletic pavilion for Portland State. It was just across the park from Shattuck School. 

Then after lunch we would go to see grandpa at the First Street Shul, and there he was all decked out in his white robe, a religious garment of some kind, and right down front with all the old boys. My mother would have to go upstairs and tell us to sit in the back. Grandpa would find us, and he would eternally be blessing us and kissing us on top of the head. He was very observant. He had a hat factory. When my father and grandfather came to New York and then went to Woodbine, probably later in 1905 because they landed there in February of 1905 from Hamburg, my grandfather worked in Yuditski’s hat factory learning to make hats. Then when he came to Portland he had a little hat shop downtown near what is now the Hawthorne Bridge. 

Frankel: What was it called?
LABBY: I’m trying to remember whether it was called Imperial Hat Works, which was kind of a travesty since he came from Imperial Russia, which didn’t treat him well at all — could be. I once knew. Anyway, when my mother would take me down to visit grandpa, he would take me in the back where he had a little steam boiler for shaping hats, and he would always say the same thing to me, “Do you want to hear a fire engine, or do you want to hear a train whistle?” And whatever I said, he would make the little whistle that lets steam off. I’d always hear the same whistle [laughs]. He was a jokester.

Frankel: Did he learn English?
LABBY: His English was pretty good, but mostly he spoke Yiddish.

Frankel: To you, too?
LABBY: To me, too, and I would look up — but he spoke enough English so that I could understand. But he had to speak English because he got around Portland. One of his closest friends was a banker, Earnest B. McNaughton, who was the president of the First National Bank here. How that occurred, I don’t know, but E.B. McNaughton, — who later became interim president of Reed College, when they were in a financial bind probably — was an amateur oil painter. He painted an oil portrait of my grandfather, which my oldest brother now has, and they became friends. Everybody in Portland thought Mr. Labby, my grandfather, was Mr. Wonderful, and he was. He was a striking figure, six feet at least, dressed in black with a white shirt and black tie. He wore a homburg hat, had a Van Dyke beard and mustache, and was quite striking and always smiling, but he was kind of a martinet at home.

Frankel: So would you go for Friday night dinners at you grandparents’ home?
LABBY: This was a given in our family. Friday night after services at Beth Israel we would all congregate at 921 College Street. Grandpa would already be home from shul; he always came home after Friday night shema. Grandma would have Friday night dinner. She rolled out her noodles so thin you could read through the dough. She would have chicken. Everything was just typically Friday night dinner. She would do the blessing over the lights, and Grandpa would come home afterwards. We would all be there, my mother, my father, and we three boys. When the Marshaks — that is my Aunt Bess Marshak and her husband and three boys — were in town —because they often lived out of town — they would be there. Aunt Miriam and Uncle Wolfe would be there, and their two children. Bob and Manley would be there unless Manley — he was a labor organizer for the ILGWU, and he would have meetings, but he would eventually come.

Frankel: So every Friday night all those families would congregate?
LABBY: All the family. My brother Bob, who was over for supper Saturday night, we somehow got to talking about how Grandma’s house looked and what we did when we were there, the things we played with, and our memories were totally parallel. The old wind-up Victrola, playing the records that we liked. They were comic records, old Irving Berlin things, Cohen on the telephone, novelty records. Playing in the basement, which had a dirt floor, and some old World War I relics that my uncles had brought back, a gas mask and a helmet, things that fascinated kids. Going down the basement landing to where Grandpa had his dozen bottles of soda water and having soda water fights and getting the place all wet [laughs]. The upstairs bathroom had an old-fashioned flush box way up high above and a chain hanging down with a little iron pinecone that you had to pull. We would take turns swinging the pinecone at each other, because it was heavy and if you got hit in the head it hurt. Odds and ends. At the top of the stairs there was a little library that had a set of books of an early detective, Craig Kennedy. My father said, “Craig Kennedy was the first scientific detective. You have to read all his books,” which we did as kids. These are little memory bits, but Grandma’s home was the place for the family. 

Frankel: Did she have help? That would require a lot of work to prepare these meals.
LABBY: No, she was a trooper. And she was beautiful. She was small, but being petit she had the finest skin — it was like a baby’s skin — and very fine silver hair. It was so fine that if you had a single hair, you really couldn’t see it. And blue eyes. She was absolutely splendid.

Frankel: Do you recall if your grandfather would make the kiddush? Was it a very traditional Shabbat dinner, blessing of the wine and blessing over the bread?
LABBY: Yes, she baked a challah.

Frankel: What about in your household, was there any Jewish observance?
LABBY: I have some pictures in my head. Of course, at Hannukah time we did the candles. That was an absolute given. All the other observances, I don’t think very often. I hope I’m not doing a disservice, but I don’t have very many recollections that we did Friday night service.

Frankel: What about holidays such as Passover?
LABBY: That was always at 921 College Street. We all looked forward to it because the kids had unlimited wine and unlimited matzo and much encouragement early to soak as much matzo in as much wine and get as sleepy as possible and then be taken upstairs, which the younger ones did. As far as asking the questions, the kashes, my grandfather had a leather purse that had silver dollars in it, and whoever found the hidden matzo, the afikoman, my grandfather would take out the silver purse — it was about that long and so wide — and bring out silver dollars, and that would go to the person who found it. And we had two nights. The children didn’t have to go the second night; we could stay home with the maid. But everybody was there and there was singing, endless singing. Then there were people who came: Jake Singer, who had Singer’s Market down on Barbur Boulevard — these were fishing buddies — Morris Collins. He felt very privileged because he wore a uniform. He was an elevator operator in one of the buildings downtown, so he would often wear his uniform.

Frankel: Would that be after the seder?
LABBY: After dinner. They would come for the singing and “endless more entertainment,” we called it. Then came Joe Schlossberg. Joe Schlossberg was only known for one thing. He had a wooden leg [laughs]. Joe Schlossberg was the center of our entertainment. We always counted on asking Joe to show us how he held his sock up, and he showed us. He had a thumbtack. It was a real wooden leg. The kids got to stay up till Joe got there. We had great times. Grandpa, no matter what was going on around the table, he ploughed ahead through the hagaddah, and I swear the hagaddah was that thick because it never stopped no matter what was happening, who was being disciplined, or what. And eventually the food came, and Grandma had just an endless supply of food. 

The wine was made in the basement. Grandpa had a permit to make wine, and he had a special wine room that was probably six by eight feet. I have his grape crusher out in the garage still. He made Concord grape wine, which is so sweet it was dreadful, and he would provide lots of that. Sometimes he would sweeten it; he sweetened it with Brer Rabbit Pancake Syrup. He would bring up the wine, put it in a little aluminum pot on the stove, and put the pancake syrup in and sweeten the wine. 

He had a very unique diet for himself. If I can just anecdotally tell you, he would go to Korson’s delicatessen and get the fat from corned beef and bring that home, and he would get bread from Mosler’s, and he would get, in later years, Pepsi Cola. He would pour the Pepsi over the bread, and he would cut the fat up and eat that with the bread and the Pepsi. If you look at it, it’s kind of basic. He had some nourishment from the fat. Good heavens, he lived until he was 94, 96, so his cholesterol must not have gotten in his way. He certainly got his carbohydrates from the white bread and the Pepsi [laughs]. He was unhesitating about this; he loved it. He ate everything else, too. But this dreadful wine . . . 

Frankel: Coming back to your household . . . 
LABBY: I left off with my earliest recollections. I have more. 

Frankel: Go ahead. 
LABBY: OK. Up to where I was probably five, six years old and doctoring from time to time, going to these wonderful doctors, all of whom had something for me, either a vaccine or drops in water to take, or something for my eyes. I was very nearsighted then. And trips to the beach. We would go to Seaside, and we would go on the train. 

Frankel: How long did it take?
LABBY: About four hours. It was wonderful. You could smell the locomotive smell because we got to keep the windows open, and we’d go down along the Columbia River through all the little towns from Portland, going through Linton and St. Helens and Scappoose and Goble. I could name them all the way down. When we got to Astoria, we went through a great big cut in a hill with high walls on either side and then out onto a long trestle out over the bay that was several miles long, and you’d see nothing on either side except water. Every once in a while there’d be a little structure out that had a red barrel that said “fire.” If we were bad on the train, the threat was the conductor would put us off to stay on one of those until the train came back again.

Frankel: So you would go for several days? A week?
LABBY: A month. Twenty-five dollars a month at Camp’s Cottages in Seaside. Mr. Camp was a very nice man who rented cottages. So we could stay in Camp’s Cottage for a month for about $25, and sometimes my mother’s sister, Aunt Rose, if she was on tour. I remember once she was on tour singing in Seattle, and she came and stayed with us in Seaside. The SP&S — Spokane, Portland, Seattle Railway — took us there in four hours, and it would stop at the foot of Broadway, where the train station was in Seaside. I remember one trip where, as soon as we got nearer Seaside, I began to have some kind of asthmatic reaction, sneezing, coughing, snorting, all kinds of problems. We got off the train, bought tickets, got back on the train, and came back to Portland. That must have been before 1934, ’35 when we got our first automobile. I was constantly reminded of that trip. 

Frankel: That summer you didn’t spend a month at the beach.
LABBY: No. But at Camp’s Cottage, what fascinated me there was that next to the sink was a pump, an old farm pump, and that’s how water came in.

Frankel: And did you know people who rented other cottages?
LABBY: Yes, we met Julius and Ethel Hearns and their son Armand. We all went fishing, of course, endless fishing at Columbia Lake and Sunset Lake. It was known as Hall’s Lake then because it was on Mr. Hall’s farm. The fish would jump in the boat. It was just wonderful. Even I could catch fish.

Frankel: Was your father able to spend the month at the beach?
LABBY: He would come down on the “Daddy Train” on Saturday morning. He’d be there by Saturday noon and then Sunday night take the train home at 4:30 PM or something like that.

Frankel: They called it the “Daddy Train”?
LABBY: Yes. My brother Dan would surf fish and catch pogies, sea perch, and bring them ashore. My brother Bob and I would push on them and make millions of little baby fish come out, and we’d hold the little baby fish in our hands all squirming, and then we’d throw them in the water. Who knows if they lived. And then we would take the fish in a gunnysack. We had a gunnysack with a rope, and we’d go from house to house and sell the fish. It was wonderful fish; it was beautiful white meat, just freshly caught. We’d sell them for 20 cents, 30 cents, and then we could go to the penny arcades. Once my brother Dan caught a sunfish that had somehow lost its equilibrium. It was floating in the surf. It was a big round fish like this and about so wide. It looked like a sun mandala, and it was in the fish market on display on lower Broadway next to Roth’s drugstore and across from Mrs. Walker’s bakery. So we had grand times. My brother Bob and I would fish on the 4th Street Bridge. We weren’t allowed to fish on the 12th Street; it was too far. Seaside was wonderful for us kids.

Frankel: So fishing was the main thing you did at the beach. Did you play in the sand?
LABBY: We played in the sand. And airplanes landed at the north end of the prom, old biplanes. For five dollars they would take people up for a “hop,” they called it.

Frankel: Did you ever?
LABBY: No.

Frankel: That was expensive?
LABBY: Yes, five dollars was something. My most vivid memory is we were all on the blanket. I still have the blanket; it’s in the back of our station wagon. We use it as just a blanket for going places, wrapping up things, an old cotton Indian blanket about six by eight feet. It was just called “the blanket.” By then we must have had a car because somebody said, “Arnie, would you run up to the car and get such and such? Here are the car keys.” Between the blanket and the car, the car keys disappeared. Fortunately, of course, there was another set, but I had to live that down because it probably had house keys to Camp’s Cottage and so forth. But we had wonderful times anyway. I do remember the airplanes at the beach, and the pilots who were so wonderful to us kids. They would hold us up and put us into the cockpit and let us work the controls, with one eye on our parents [laughs]. The old-time pilots were wonderful to the kids. They always made sure to tell us to, “Stand back! Stand back!”

Frankel: Back to the city, where did you go to school?
LABBY: We lived on Royal Court. Laurelhurst School was about six blocks away on Royal Court, just a straight walk. My brother Dan started at Laurelhurst School before it had the name Laurelhurst, when it was just a clear playground and they had portables, and it was called Harvey Scott School. He was one of the first editors of the Oregonian, I believe. Then when they built the real school, Dan already was gone, I think, to Grant High School. My brother Bob and I went there, and we walked. 

I vividly remember my first day of kindergarten. There were not enough chairs in the circle. My mother was encouraged to leave me with Miss Lawrence, a lovely young lady. I remember she wore a golden smock, a cotton smock, and she said, “Well, sit on his lap.” It was Earnest Potts. Immediately I sat on his lap, he wet his pants [laughs]. So both Earnest and I had to have a change. That was my first day in kindergarten. From then on it was all uphill. 

I do remember the names of most of my teachers, and Eva, who got there some years after I did because she came to Portland later, she had some of the same teachers. My brother Bob and I had the same teachers. We were only three and a half years apart. They were wonderful women, they really were, so dedicated. Of course, they were “Old Lady This” and “Old Lady That.” Probably they were 25 or 30. We marched in a platoon from class to class. We had English in one class, then we’d form up in twos and hold hands and march to a writing class, then to arithmetic. 

Frankel: Even in elementary school?
LABBY: Oh, yes. Each teacher was very specific in subject matter. History, geography, and library were the classes I liked best because by the time I was six, seven, eight years old I could read very well, and I read everything I could get my hands on. I loved reading, and I loved geography because it was such a mystery. I discovered there was a world and there were other people, and in geography they were called natives. We were Americans and they were natives. They dressed differently and ate differently and lived differently, and they came out to the ships in little boats. From that concept it all got larger, and I learned more and more about other cultures. Geography fascinated me. 

Frankel: In Laurelhurst, the neighborhood, were there many ethnic groups like there were in South Portland?
Frankel: I don’t think so, no. Laurelhurst was pretty much middle class, upscale. Across the street lived Olaf Laurgaard, who was the city engineer who built the sea wall in Portland. Down the street was Mr. Wells, who was the official weatherman. Next door to the Laurgaards lived Harvey Johnson. Across there were two ladies who taught English. The Packouz’s lived next door to us, an old Portland family. Max Packouz had an insurance business. The Goldbergs lived a couple of houses down. It was just coincidental that there were three Jewish families in a row.

Frankel: And besides the public school, were you also given a religious education?
LABBY: My father, during the Depression years, had a patient whose name was Urman, Ben Ezra Urman, and Mr. Urman was a Hebrew scholar. He was also an artist, a wonderful artist. He did relief panels about 16 by 16 inches, flat in the back, but they were done in relief of scenes in Hebrew school, in cheder, of children and older men as teachers, and they were gorgeous. 

Frankel: Out of wood?
LABBY: The castings he gave my father, probably in return for dental work, were in plaster and they had been bronzed. My father had, probably, a set of six, which when they broke up the house after the war and we moved, I think they were packed away. My mother, in 1951 when my dad died, gave them to the Jewish Community Center when it was on 12th or 13th. And who knows, they disappeared somewhere. She gave his large collection of Sholem Aleichem stories in Yiddish — he used to read them to her and she’d laugh; I guess they were very funny stories — that disappeared somewhere from the Jewish Community Center. Incidentally, my father, who was the least important person in Yuditski’s hat factory, was given the job of escorting Sholem Aleichem through the factory because nobody could take the time.

Frankel: In Woodbine?
LABBY: In Woodbine, when Sholem Aleichem came to the factory, to Woodbine, to visit the agricultural colony.

Frankel: Are there any pictures?
LABBY: No. It’s just an anecdote from my father. I guess that got him interested. But I do remember him always making references to Sholem Aleichem stories.

Frankel: So back to Mr. Urman.
LABBY: Ben Ezra Urman. What a nice, kind, patient, gentle man. He gave my brother Bob and me Hebrew lessons. Once a week, I think on Thursdays in the afternoon, 3:00 PM, we sat in the dining room. Mr. Urman sat in my father’s chair at the table, I sat here, and my brother Bob here. We went through vocabulary, and we would make up funny little rhymes after he left using the vocabulary [laughs]. We didn’t pay any attention, but he worked off his bill. I’m sure he was so relieved.

Frankel: What was his story?
LABBY: I don’t know what Ben Ezra’s story was, but he was the sweetest man.

Frankel: So that was the extent of your Jewish education?
LABBY: Yes.

Frankel: Your family did belong to Beth Israel.
LABBY: Beth Israel, absolutely. Yesterday Eva showed me a graduation certificate signed by Rabbi Berkowitz that I completed high school.

Frankel: Do you have any memories of that?
LABBY: Oh, yes.

Frankel: So you did attend the religious school at Temple Beth Israel?
LABBY: Absolutely, yes. And we had Belle Joseph. Miss Joseph was the kindest, most wonderful woman. She taught Sunday school to us. We went to see her because she was so wonderful and she had all these great stories. Then we would have assembly, and Rabbi Berkowitz always had all of us kids up front, and he would tell stories of his being a boy in Philadelphia. He came from an old Philadelphia family. I think they were all rabbis. He was a very high-class man, and we all just loved him so.

Frankel: But Hebrew was not taught at Beth Israel?
LABBY: If it was taught, I wasn’t invited [laughs]. Oh, in our confirmation class there were girls like — I remember a Finklestein girl who was very bright. She majored in math everywhere. She took private lessons in Hebrew over at Irvington. The kids that went to Irvington school, there were a lot of them. But when it came time for confirmation, Rabbi Birkowitz wrote all our confirmation speeches.

Frankel: You didn’t have to do anything?
LABBY: We had to learn it. I remember the opening of mine. And he said you must make it very dramatic because mine started out — in my high-pitched little 13-year-old voice, which was squeaky because it couldn’t decide if it was 13 years old or 17 — it started out, “Led by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, our people struggled from bondage to freedom,” and so on. I remember a few more lines. He drilled it into us. And then came, “Who are you going to go up to the ark and be blessed with for confirmation?” It was a given in our family that my cousin Herbert, Herbie and I who grew up together . . . 

Frankel: Whose son was he?
LABBY: He was my Aunt Bess’s, my father’s next-in-line sibling. She was gorgeous. Bess Marshak. Herbie and I grew up together, and my family never knew if I was sleeping at their house or Herbie was sleeping at our house. That’s the way we grew up. We would go up and be blessed together. But somehow family politics got into this. My brother Dan was at that time going with Margaret Selling, and the Sellings were a socially different family. They lived in Portland Heights. My mother and Mrs. Selling had sometime before that gotten young Benny Selling — who was named for his grandfather Ben Selling — and me together, so I summered at his house in Seaview, and Benny and I did things on Saturdays. So politically it was maneuvered that Benny and I went up to be blessed together. That was never forgiven in the family. But Herbie and I, we were the same.

Frankel: So there was confirmation only and no bar mitzvah?
LABBY: No. 

Frankel: Laurelhurst School, did it go up to eighth grade?
LABBY: Laurelhurst School went up to the eighth grade. I remember the day in June when we graduated. Our class as a gift planted zinnias along the concrete walk from the street up to the front door of the school, except a half dozen of us who were captive in the school auditorium where Mrs. Lowe the auditorium teacher said, “You may not get your graduation certificate until you can recite Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, as I think you should.” So we sat there miserably on those wooden chairs, one by one, “Try again. No, go back and study some more. Try again.” And the doors to the auditorium were open, and we could see the classmates out there planting zinnias and having fun and enjoying each other for the last time before we all went off for high school. 

Finally there were just two of us left, Bobby Lyman and Arnie Labby, and all of a sudden she handed me a note. It said, “Take this to Miss Roberts in the office.” I took it, and Miss Roberts smiled and handed me my diploma from Laurelhurst School, gave me a big hug and said, “Come back after you’re at school, at Grant, and tell me how you like it.” She was very pretty. 

So I ran out there, and they were just scraping and sweeping and putting things away, nothing left to plant. I said goodbye to the few who were there, and I ran across the street to the popcorn wagon. The popcorn wagon had been there for years and years. A lovely man from India, Mr. Singh, had the popcorn wagon, and for a nickel you could get a huge bag of popcorn. He was there for graduation day. On the front of his popcorn wagon there was a sign lettered, “My horse’s name was Napoleon.” The story was that he had a horse-drawn popcorn wagon that caught fire, and now this one had a motor and a steering wheel. So I ran home and that was that. 

Shortly before graduation in the spring, instead of coming home on Royal Court I came home on Laurelhurst Street below, and as I walked by a large home with a porch a woman was sitting out there. She waved at me, I waved back at her, and she motioned to me to come up. It was an older woman and we got to talking. She told me her name was June McMillan Ordway, that she had been born on the trail coming from the east out to Oregon, she was a pioneer child, that she was a poet, and that she had written words for the bugle call of “Taps,” which I found since somebody else really wrote the words to. But she had apparently written a version. 

But what was most important to me was she knew George Himes, who was the curator of the Oregon Historical Society. It was in the basement of what’s now the Keller Auditorium. I had known already there were artifacts from early Oregon in the City Hall rotunda, and I would go down there on Saturdays and look at the old Indian skulls and things, and my father had an Indian bow that an Indian had given him. We got to play with the bow and so on. So I went down and met Mr. Himes and told him I was sent by Mrs. Ordway. And he said, “You can come down on Saturdays and help me,” which I did, and I got to see all kinds of early Oregon artifacts. It was just amazing. I did that for a year or so into high school; when I got too busy then I didn’t.

Frankel: Were you involved in sports at all in school?
LABBY: I was a little kid with thick glasses, and the extent of my involvement in sports was, “Do we have to take him?” when they were choosing sides. And Miss Chenoweth or Miss Bothman, whoever was the gym teacher that day, said, “Yes, you have to take him” [laughs]. If I was up to bat — I guess we were playing softball or something — I would close my eyes and swing, always afraid of being hit by the ball. I remember once I somehow connected with the ball, and they said, “Throw the bat! Throw the bat!” So I threw the bat, and it must have hit somebody in the leg, somebody was crying. Then they said, “Walk! Walk!” And I said, “Where should I walk to?” [laughs]. That’s the kind of sportsman I was. 

But later on in high school my brother Bob ran track, and he was very good, especially fall track, which was cross country, and so he encouraged me to do that. He gave me a pair of his old track shoes. I always followed along behind the rest picking up things they dropped. I do remember that was the extent of my sports. 

But one of my father’s patients during the Depression in this Merchant’s Exchange was a fellow named Charles Chapman, who had a riding academy at Jantzen Beach. Getting all his teeth and his family’s teeth fixed, I got to have horseback riding lessons. So my friend Eddie Winebaum, who was a year behind me, and I would get on the streetcar and go out to Jantzen Beach, and we would then walk down on Hayden Island to the Columbia Riding Academy, and we would get horseback riding lessons for probably two years. 

This I remember, my Uncle Barney who was my father’s youngest brother, had lived in Seattle and had also done some horseback riding, and he had some white ripcord britches, riding britches, that were very elegant, and he had some boots, brown leather, high, horseback riding boots that were called Friendly Five — a big label inside, Friendly Five with a big five dollar sign — and he gave them to me. They were about that much too big, and my foot moved around. My mother said, “I know how I think we can fix that.” She got a Kotex and cut it in two and stuffed half in each of the fronts of the boots, and they fit beautifully. They were my size then. I would clomp in these huge boots. I felt so elegant [laughs]. 

My horse was a great big, black horse named Whitney, and they saddled me up, pushed me into the saddle and said, “Ride out into the arena and wait for us.” I rode out there, and there was a young man with a hose who was watering down the tanbark, and as I came in he turned around with the hose and hit the horse. The horse reared back, and I slid off the back of the horse onto the tanbark. Then Eddie came in on his horse. Later on when we were through and getting ready to come home, they gave me a certificate that said I had joined the Prince of Wales Club or Society. When I got home my father explained the Prince of Wales, who later was Edward VIII, was famous for falling off his horse. So they had the Prince of Wales Society. I was a member [laughs]. These are great bits of childhood recollection. 

Another one of my father’s patients, [Franz?] Steiner, was a cellist, and quite an accomplished cellist. He had to have his teeth fixed. One day when I came home for lunch from Laurelhurst School, my mother said, “Miss Southwick” — well, she was Miss Strange then — “Miss Strange will ask you if you want to play the cello. Tell her yes.” So I went back and went to Miss Strange, and she said, “Do you want to play the cello?” I said, “Yes.” She said, “Do you know what it is?” We had the instruments all around the music room, big posters. I said, “That’s the cello.” She said, “Yes.” Another one of my father’s patients, Rudolph Schmall, had a violin repair shop, and he had an elegant cello. It was a beautiful Italian cello, much too good for me. I abused that instrument. I used to bicycle to school and have it on the handlebars against the basket.

Frankel: With no case?
LABBY: Oh, it had a case. It had a cloth case so I could carry it, put my hand under a handhold. It was a beautiful instrument because when Steiner would play it, it made gorgeous music. But I used to have to go down to the corner of 39th and Multnomah once a week and take lessons with Alan Herndobbler, who really was interested in the cello and really practiced at home, and another little girl, who also practiced at home, and I was the [bollo?].

Frankel: You didn’t enjoy it?
LABBY: I didn’t enjoy it. My brother Dan played the violin, and he was very accomplished — he was in the early junior symphony here with Gershkowitz — and my mother, the piano, and my brother Bob, the piano. My father said, “I play the phonograph,” which he did [laughs]. There was always music in our home, good classical music. And it’s been 24 hours a day in my life. The minute I get up in the morning this goes on, the good music. So I had the cello through at least a year or two of Laurelhurst School with a dreadful music teacher, Mr. Preston, who called me Hershel.

Frankel: Why was that?
LABBY: Because that was his not-so-veiled way of putting me down.

Frankel: Did you sense antisemitism?
LABBY: No. What good would it have done me? But the last day that we had an orchestra picnic I didn’t bring a lunch, and he and his wife shared their lunch with me. Go figure. So whatever it was, he called me Hershel. When I got to Grant, I had four years in the orchestra playing the cello and working really hard at it and played in the All-City Orchestra. We were directed by a man from Hollywood once when we played for the Rose Festival in what’s now the soccer stadium. A man named Constantine Bakaleinikoff came from Hollywood to direct the All-City Orchestra. I remember the first day of rehearsal he had a crate of little milk cups from the cafeteria, milk cartons, and if you didn’t play well he stopped everything and said, “Go drink this, and come back and you’ll play better.” We played heavy things like Finlandia. I remember the boys with the big tubas pumping out their parts, and the drums. Yes, we worked hard. Our music teacher was a wonderful man at Grant High. He was very patient with us.

Frankel: Now you mentioned the incident about you befriending Margret’s brother
Benny from the German-Jewish community. Did you have any other such incidents where you were perceived as Eastern European or lesser than the German Jews? Was there a divide?
LABBY: There was a divide more acknowledged by adults than by us kids. When the newcomers came in the late 1930’s . . .

Frankel: When you say newcomers, German Jews?
LABBY: German Jews.

Frankel: Refugees?
LABBY: Yes, we called them newcomers. In our house that’s all they were ever called, “the newcomers.” Some of them became patients in my father’s office, and they didn’t have any money. Dave Weinberg had a Leica camera which my father acquired, at least before my brother started medical school, and Dan started medical school in 1934. He had that camera all through medical school and recorded with it and made a book of his four years. So we had a Leica probably in 1934. Somehow we became further acquainted with more and more of the people coming in, the newcomers. Elsa Boyer, she was Ralph Feinberg’s sister. Wonderful people. They worked hard. They came to our door selling donuts and real silk hosiery, which my mother always would buy. She said, “It’s our obligation. We came here, and now they’re coming here.” That was very important learning for us. But the old established German Jews in Portland Heights, my mother called them the dogem [laughs], they were pillars of Temple Beth Israel.

Frankel: So you belonging as Eastern European Jews to Temple Beth Israel, was that unusual?
LABBY: No, because I was born into the Temple Beth Israel. My parents must have been members of Beth Israel probably before the new one was built.

Frankel: But were there many other Eastern European members of Beth Israel?
LABBY: Yes, all my parents’ friends — the Savinars, the Herzogs. I could just go on endlessly naming.

Frankel: So it wasn’t just the German Jews that belonged there?
LABBY: Right. When the new temple was built, they needed to have a base to pay it off, I suppose. But a very cohesive congregation, mostly because of Rabbi Berkowitz. He married Flora Fleischner, and the Fleischners were very early wholesale grocers here, like the Durkheimers, who were the in-laws of the Sellings. And they were wonderful people. They were so secure socially they had nothing to fear, and they reached out and were just wonderful to everybody in the community in terms of philanthropy, amazing. I got called into Rabbi Berkowitz’s study one day, and he said, “The Washington Heights post of the American Legion wants to send somebody from the congregation to the Boys’ State in Salem. Would you like to go?” 

Frankel: What was the Boys’ State?
LABBY: That’s what I said to the rabbi [laughs]! He said, “Young high school people from all over the state go to Oregon State University Campus for two weeks” — I think it was two weeks — “during the summer, and they occupy positions of state government and county government and city government from every large city and county in the state. And they have a replica of the state government. They elect a governor, they elect city commissioners and all other officers, and you learn their duties and you learn about the constitution of the State of Oregon, and would you like to go?” So I said, “I’ll ask my parents.” But it had already been arranged anyway. My parents said, “Yes, I think you should.” 

And so I went and spent the time down there, and it was wonderful. I was elected coroner of Coos County, and I was elected something else from another county, and we did things recreationally. We got to go to the ROTC shooting range underneath the stadium, and they let us shoot at targets, all supervised. They let us organize a little musical band and put on plays and do all kinds of things, sports, recreationally. But we also did organized government, and we all had our learning to do about our duties. Then we spent one day going to the State Capital and having a tour. I have no idea who conducted the tour. It could have been the governor.

Frankel: Who was the governor then?
LABBY: The governor in about ’39 or ’40? Probably some kindly old fellow.

Frankel: Socially did your parents have many non-Jewish friends?
LABBY: I don’t think so because during the Depression families tended to group together. Oh, yes. The neighborhood. Our Laurelhurst neighborhood was very cohesive. Everybody knew everybody. Down the street a few blocks next to Pee Wee Johnson’s house lived Ferdinand Reed, and he made a living probating estates. He was a buddy of the probate judge, and when people would die without a will the probate judge would appoint somebody to probate that estate. Statutorily, there’s a fee involved, and Mr. Reed lived very well. He had a big green Cadillac, and he had a pistol in a holster strapped to the steering wheel post. 

Frankel: Why?
LABBY: I have no idea. He was an honorary policeman of some kind. He had a police radio on his front porch. It would broadcast police calls, and the police patrol cars in the neighborhood would often stop at his house. One day, in the middle of the day as one of the police cars was going by slowly, I stuck my tongue out and gave them a Bronx cheer, and wiggled my ears at them like that. So later that afternoon I got a call from my father from his office, who said, “The police are looking for you” and described what he heard I had done. I don’t know how that got out. Maybe my brothers were with me, and they squealed on me. But he said, “Mr. Reed wants to see you after supper.” Mr. Reed always had a box of candy about the size of my suitcase on his front porch for the kids, Van Duyn’s chocolates, two layers. So I went down after supper, and Mr. Reed said, “Come on up, sit down, have some chocolates.” And we talked. “How was your day,” and so forth. He said “What’s this about you?” 

Frankel: How old were you then?
LABBY: About ten, 11 maybe. Because he and I were pretty good friends. As an aside, he had ordered a grandfather clock. It came to his house, and it was packed in a huge wooden crate, beautiful pine boards. He gave me the lumber, which I took home and built a big airplane in the basement. We couldn’t get it out. We had to take the wings off and then take it out [laughs]. He and I were pretty good buddies. 

He said, “I heard you were disrespectful to the police. Let me tell you a story. There was once a colored officer in the army, and once a private was supposed to salute him and didn’t because he was colored. And that colored lieutenant, instead of getting him in trouble he sat him down and told him, ‘You know, you’re not saluting me because I’m colored, you’re saluting the bars on my shoulders and what they stand for. I want you to remember that.’” And Mr. Reed said, “Now do you get anything out of what I’m telling you?” He said, “You may have done what you did to the men, but what you did was dishonor the police who protect you. They’re out there up all night while you’re asleep taking care of you.” He made it really heavy for me. “Now have some more candy, son.” I went home feeling OK, but he had taught me a lesson about that. These are just little vignettes that have stayed with me for 80 years.

Frankel: You mentioned one of the stories taking place in 1939, 1940 when you went to Boys’ State. When did you become aware of what was going on in Europe?
LABBY: I would say when my parents became more widely acquainted with the newcomers, and we would occasionally meet some of them. For instance, when the one who sold Bulgarian buttermilk donuts would come to the door, he would be invited in. Or the one who was selling real silk hosiery, and so forth. That was my mother’s heart. We became further acquainted into the community of newcomers. 

Then Eva’s sister Gertrude was in my confirmation class. I remember at a confirmation party — we had lots of parties — she came. I have a photograph of her, of all the other kids, too. She was wearing a dirndl, which probably was very normal for her to wear in her homeland in Germany. But everybody came in costume. I don’t know if I knew many of the other young kids. I certainly didn’t know Eva, even though she lived at that time three blocks away. 

We knew the Shoyers because Saulie Shoyer had a meat market, and Hedwig, his wife, worked there. And my father, in dentistry, took care of Celia Shoyer, who was Saulie Shoyer’s sister. She was a nurse from Germany. She had two children, Beatrice and Freddy. And there was another brother, Ernie. Ernie’s now retired, I think, taught math in California. So we met the Shoyer family. They were wonderful! And it always pays to be friendly with your butcher. We had two butchers, Karl Durkoop, who was a fishing brother of my father’s brothers, and the Shoyers.

Frankel: Did you have any relatives left in Europe?
LABBY: No. And we didn’t know the Lamfroms, except my mother sort of superficially knew Eva’s mother because they would both take the same streetcar downtown, the Montevilla Streetcar, Eva’s mother to go to work at Columbia Sportswear, Columbia Hat, and my mother to go help in my father’s office. But we had no social interaction with them. After the war, when we all came back, we all partied together and got to know each other much more intimately, and I dated some of the girls, but I didn’t know Eva until probably 1947.

Frankel: So back to Grant High School, were there many Jewish kids in the school?
LABBY: Yes, mostly from the Irvington District. They’d gone to Irvington School. They knew each other. They were in my confirmation class. And they were a clique of their own because they all grew up together and went to Irvington. We didn’t see them socially, not really. I dated some of the girls, yes, because the girls were in the confirmation class. We had lots and lots of parties. I think that was because Rabbi Berkowitz saw to it that there were parties. And there was a club he organized called the Octagonal Club.

Frankel: I’ve heard of that. Where did the name come from?
LABBY: I’ve no idea. I was the last treasurer. I still have two bank bags that say, “First National Bank.” Stuart Durkheimer handed me the bags, and he said, “You’re now the treasurer. I’m going off to college” [laughs]. So I was the last treasurer. When I went off to war I gave the money to somebody, but I don’t know why I kept the bags. I still have them hanging in my closet. 

Frankel: What did the Octagonal Club do?
LABBY: Social, purely social. Dances. Most of us could drive by the time we were 16, 17, 18, and so we could pick up our dates. My brother Dan acquired a 1929 Model A Ford for $69 when he graduated dental school, and I inherited it the last year I was in high school, so I could drive somewhere on dates. It was just social, purely social. And coincidently, kids got married to each other, like Leah Kinspel married Stuart Durkheimer, and so on. And the Kinspels were definitely not Portland Heights German Jews. That was a wonderful bringing together of the two cultures.

Frankel: Besides belonging to a synagogue, were your parents involved in other Jewish institutions or . . .?
LABBY: I think they were members of the B’nai B’rith, and my mother was very active in the Council of Jewish Women. She always was having ladies over for tea. We still have in the front room the samovar that my grandmother brought with her, a beautiful samovar. It’s from Tula, where they made the best ones, near Moscow. I can see that samovar where Mr. [Erman?] used to sit at that end of the table, and the coffee was at the other end. It worked; it made hot water. My grandmother brought that over on advice from my grandfather. He told her you probably can’t get a very good samovar over here, so bring a good one with you. 

Incidentally, my grandma came over a year or so later. Instead of coming through Ellis Island and New York as my grandfather did, she came to Philadelphia as her port of entry as an immigrant. When she was applying for her passport for herself and her children, they said to my grandma, “How many children do you have?” She started naming my father first, so on her passport and her visa for departure was named my father. And they couldn’t come up with my father; he was already here. So they brought a neighbor child. He came as her child, came to Philadelphia, and nobody knew what became of him because he was by then 15. He disappeared into America someplace. Is that a fable, or is it really true? Who knows? I have somewhere — I put it away so it would be so secure it wouldn’t get lost — my grandmother’s papers. I want to find them, then I’ll know. 

Frankel: Did you go to the Jewish Community Center?
LABBY: No. I was busy. As a kid I began building little model boats and airplanes because I wasn’t big enough to do anything with sports. I could play hockey out in front of the house on skates with the kids under the lights at night in the summer, and that was OK because I was pretty fast on skates, and I could bicycle. I had a friend who was handicapped. He’d had polio and had a short leg, and he was my brother Bob’s age. He and I began building model boats and ships and airplanes. Neither of us were very socially acceptable because we weren’t into sports, so we would take our bicycles and go out to St. John’s or out to Rocky Butte on Saturdays and did all kinds of things. As far as sports, we rode bicycles. So I didn’t do very much of that. 

I spent most of my time building little models of ships and doing photography because everybody in our family did photographs. My father built a dark room. He was an early photographer here in Portland, and he took pictures on wet glass plates. My brother Bob has a whole collection of glass plates of my father’s. Dad built a darkroom in the basement of our house on Royal Court, and I was not permitted to go in until I learned chemical cleanliness. Instead he built me a darkroom where my mother had her fruit closet where she canned fruit. He cleaned off the shelves, and he built me an enlarger. 

He was so clever as a dentist, working with metals. He went to the Eastman Kodak store, and he borrowed a Leica enlarger and took it home and copied it, drew pictures of it, took it back to them, and he duplicated it. It was in my brother Dan’s darkroom until they sold their house this year. It looked perfect. That was my enlarger. 

So I did photography at Grant High School. Eva showed me another piece of paper yesterday that I hadn’t even known existed where I won first prize in a hobby contest for photography at Grant High. I had no recollection. I did things that were more with my eyes and my hands because as far as hitting a ball I was a danger to other people. And I did horseback riding, of course.

Frankel: Right. What year did you graduate from high school?
LABBY: June of 1942.

Frankel: What do you recall from Pearl Harbor?
LABBY: My brother Dan graduated medical school in ’39, took his internship at Johns Hopkins through 1940, and then was called into the service. He was at Fort Lewis. He was married. He married in December of 1940 to Margaret Selling, and she followed him to Fort Lewis. He was in a medical battalion in the 15th Infantry Division, even took me up there for a weekend and let me play soldier when I was in high school. It was wonderful. I met his commanding officer, they gave me a campaign hat, and so on. I felt like I was a big soldier when I was 17. 

So Dan was down visiting with Margaret for a weekend, and Pearl Harbor occurred. I remember we heard it on the radio at home. We turned on the radio on Sundays to hear the New York Philharmonic at noon, and instead we got this broadcast that was so shocking. Then came a phone call from Fort Lewis for Dan to report back immediately. Dan and Margaret were out there on Hamilton at the Sellings’ acres where they were clearing the land so that Dr. and Mrs. Selling could build a home, Margaret’s parents. We drove out and told Dan that he and Margaret had to go back immediately. 

Then we began listening more closely because my father’s sister, Bess Marshak, had moved in 1938 — after Herbie and I were confirmed separately — moved to Hawaii. Her husband, Meier Marshak, who was a wholesale dress salesman, what they called a shmata business, and Uncle Meier had moved to Hawaii. He was always looking for a new horizon. He’d gone up to Alaska, and there was nothing in Alaska for him except that he brought back silver fox furs for the ladies. I could see my mother Friday night at temple with her fox furs, the black ones with the silver tips, and on High Holidays, of course. 

So the Marshaks, in 1938 had moved to Hawaii, and we were concerned that they would be hurt. We eventually heard that their house on Kahala Drive had taken some bullets through the roof, but that’s quite a ways from Pearl Harbor. They had a dress manufacturing business over there called Island Fashions. And then as friends — a number of them Jewish, the Korasics and other people — as they moved back to the mainland, Uncle Meier bought their properties. He died in 1943 from a heart attack, and so Aunt Bess and the kids were there for the duration of the war. 

My oldest cousin, Irv, who’s my brother Bob’s age, was in the intelligence in Diamond Head. He was in the Army. Herby was in dental school here, in the Navy, and Jerry was too young. So we had family over there; we were very concerned. As it turned out they were safe, and they sold that house that had been damaged and moved into another house in St. Louis Heights. But that’s the extent. 

Frankel: Where was Bob?
LABBY: My brother Bob? Bob was an avid skier from the time he was in high school, and that meant hiking up somewhere because Timberline hadn’t been built until 1937. Bob was a very avid skier and climber, and they were then seeking people to be in the 10th Mountain Division, in the ski troops. And the essential regiment for the ski troops, the 87th Mountain Infantry Regiment, coincidentally was at Fort Lewis. So he was encouraged to apply, and it took him six months or more of getting applications and endorsements. It was very difficult to get into the 87th Mountain Infantry Regiment. To qualify you had to walk on water probably. You had to be a member of the National Ski Patrol Association and have endorsements from well-known skiers and instructors. 

He finally succeeded, and so in, I think, the summer of ’42 he went in and was stationed up there. From there, they joined the 10th Mountain Division. In August of 1942 they invaded Kiska Island in the Aleutians with the Canadian Special Service Forces and found the Japanese had very quietly evacuated. But there were a lot of casualties because opposing American forces shot at each other in the fog up there, and there were a lot of casualties. 

They then came home and went to Texas and prepared to go to Italy. They shipped over to Italy in 1944, and they were up north near Pisa, near Florence, and Montecatini, and he was very active over there. He had one serious wound; a piece of shrapnel cut the end of his thumb. He said, “I was ashamed to show it to anybody. I just bandaged it. I never went and asked for a Purple Heart” [laughs]. He was over there a long time. In April of 1945, when Germany surrendered, they were then prepared to go to the South Pacific to fight the Japanese, and just as they were being prepared for that Japan surrendered in August of ’45. He had his share, and he has his citations, but he’s very modest about all that. 

Frankel: So when you graduated from high school the war was still on?
LABBY: Yes. In the spring of ’42 after school each day we were encouraged to go to Benson High School, those of us who wanted to work in the shipyards, to take marine blueprint reading courses, which we did after school from three to five in the evening. Then when we graduated we were all sent downtown to the Union Hall, and we were encouraged to become union members of the Local 72 of the Iron Ship Builders and Workers of America [International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, Iron Ship Builders, Blacksmiths, Forgers and Helpers] and pay our $20 initiation fee. I still have my union button and union card. Then we were eligible to go to the hiring hall and be available to work. As what? We could read marine blueprints [laughs]. 

So I was sent along with several other friends to Willamette Iron and Steel Works, which is out on Yeon Avenue past the Broadway Bridge a mile or two. I was a burner’s helper and so were several others. One of our friends from high school had a great old car, and we would all congregate at that car in the morning and drive to the shipyard, put on our helmets, go find our journeyman, and report to him. 

At the end of the first week, Mr. Thorple Bakky, our lead man, came to me and said, “Say, are you a little slow?” I said, “I don’t understand.” He said “Well, you know, a lot of the other helpers are already journeymen.” “I don’t know that much. I’ve been watching my journeyman and helping him.” He said, “You go home and ask your daddy for a bottle of whiskey, and you bring it to me on Monday and we’ll see what happens” [laughs]. That was Friday. 

I went home and came back on Monday and showed my journeyman, Mr. Delinio, and he said, “Oh, great! Congratulations! Give it to Bakky.” So I gave it to Mr. Bakky and he said, “Come with me.” We went to the tool crib, and he said, “Give me your hat.” I gave him my green helmet, and he handed it to the fellow in the tool crib and said, “Give him a burner’s helmet.” So he gave me a burner’s helmet, which was the same one with a white stripe around it, and he shook my hand and said, “Congratulations! You’re a burner now. I’m gonna get you a helper.” 

Alright. So little Arnie Labby was a journeyman burner. I went from $1.35 to $1.65. What was I going to do with all that wealth? But I was all ready to go to college in the fall. So they brought me a helper. Of all people, it was a fellow named Maurice Kreigel who we all grew up with. He was my brother Bob’s age, maybe half a year behind, and he was a pianist, a wonderful musician. His father had the Multnomah Cleaners and Dyers on 28th and Sandy and was most notably famous in the community for using bad language. 

Maurice was my helper. When I needed him he was nowhere, but his job was the same as mine was, to provide settling tanks and oxygen tanks and keep my hoses clear, and to give me new tips for my burning torch and so on, to be kind of a helper. Where was he? He was always down far side of the ships gambling with 50-cent pieces. When I needed him I’d yell down, “Is Kreigel down there?” “Yes, what do you want? I’ll be there shortly.” So anyway, that was the summer in the shipyard.

Frankel: But you knew that wasn’t going to be your career?
LABBY: No. I was going to be an architect. Why an architect? I had gone up to visit my cousin Irv Marshak, who was at the University of Washington before he went to Hawaii. He wanted to have his graduation over here. He was in the Sammy House, the Sigma Alpha Mu, and I was a guest. He took me around the campus. So I thought, “OK. I’ll go to the University of Washington.” They took me in with open arms though I had a very modest grade point average from high school. I was more interested in listening to music and reading and history than I was in science. I was going to be an architect. 

So I registered for architectural engineering at the University of Washington, and I lived in the Sammy House. I was a houseboy. I worked in the kitchen with Lynn Gurion from South Portland. We were the houseboys. At the end of a couple of weeks, my structures professor, a Russian named Sergev, “Mr. Labby, would you remain behind a moment.” He said, “Have you had trigonometry?” “No, I went as far as algebra.” He said, “You’d better withdraw. I don’t want you to fail the course. You really need to have trigonometry. It’s a structures course in architecture, and you need to know it. Come back after you’ve had trigonometry.” 

I went and talked to my counselor, and the counselor said, “Why don’t you withdraw from architecture? What do you really like?” I said, “I like to read. I like to write. I like anthropology.” I was already taking an anthro course. He said, “So do anthropology.” I said, “OK.” So I took a couple of more anthropology courses. 

Then by Christmas time at the end of the term I was home and thought, “I don’t belong in college yet. I’m not ready.” So I enlisted. Enlistments were going to be up on the 16th of December, and I just made it. They said, “We’re now calling enlistments Voluntary Induction, so you’ll enlist through your draft board.” So I went to my draft board and said, “May I come in, please?” And they said, “Yes, you’re in. We’ll call you when we’re ready.” I stayed home for another few weeks, and then they called me at the end of January. I went up to Fort Lewis and took all the tests, and they shipped me to Camp Roberts in California.

Frankel: Your eyesight was not an issue?
LABBY: This is so funny. Stuart Durkheimer and I went in the same day for induction at the old Elks Temple downtown. He was right with me. We took our eye exams. His eyeglasses were heavy glass, and they sent him back home and he worked in the grocery business. I really wanted in; I wanted to be a soldier. So I peeked. I looked at the eye chart. Squint, squint. And so I got in. The examining doctor said, “You’ve got pretty thick glasses, you know.” I said, “Yes.” He said, “We’ll find a place for you.” So I got in, and they shipped me to basic training at Camp Roberts. 

Frankel: Where was Camp Roberts?
LABBY: It was north of Los Angeles near San Miguel, central California between San Francisco and Los Angeles, near San Louis Obispo. I got into the 89th Infantry Regiment, heavy weapons. We trained in machine guns and heavy mortars. 

I’ve had breaks all my life. Here’s what happened. After the second day or so when we’d all learned to make our beds and had our uniforms and everything, we were standing out in morning formations. The company commander, Captain James Butler, said, “Anybody here had ROTC?” Up went my hand because I’d had three months of it. He said, “Do you know close order drill?” “Yes.” “Do you know the manual of arms?” “Yes.” He said, “OK.” There were probably half a dozen of us, and he said to the platoon sergeant, “Dismiss your platoons. You other fellows remain behind.” He said, “You’re going to be temporary sergeants.” The first sergeant had some black felt armbands that they pinned on us. They had three stripes. Temporary sergeants? 

Frankel: Two days into the army?
LABBY: Two days into the army. I was this big, and all the other guys were big Polish guys from Minnesota and Michigan. They worked in the coal mines. They were that much bigger than I was, full of muscles. Each platoon had two sections, so two section sergeants. I had two squads of seven. I had 14 people that I was supposed to teach close order drill marching and how to do the thing with the rifle. Captain Butler said, “Where’d you have your ROTC?” I said, “University of Washington.” He said, “I’m a graduate there, and I have my commission through ROTC.” So it was just a stroke of luck. Our platoon sergeant, Sergeant Stokes from Alabama, I could hardly understand him. It was my first encounter with this kind of deep-Alabama accent. He liked me. He called me “little Jew boy.”

Frankel: Where did that come up? How did people find out?
LABBY: I guess they looked at me or something [laughs]. The glasses or whatever it was. He said, “You’re a little Jew boy, aren’t you?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “OK.” He said, “Me and you are going to get along just fine.” He took such good care of me. He made it plain to the two squads that when I woke them up in the morning, they had to get up. My bunk was right next to the wall, and he slept on the other side of the wall in the platoon sergeant’s little bedroom. He would bang on the wall, wake me up, and say, “Wake ’em up!” He made sure those guys paid attention to me. He gave me legitimacy. 

Our second lieutenant, who was our platoon leader, probably hadn’t been a lieutenant more than two weeks. I don’t remember his name, but we were talking one day and I said, “I really miss hearing the opera on Saturdays.” He said, “I’ve got a little radio I’ll give you.” I put it on a shelf next to my bunk, and I could hear the opera on Saturday. Then Sergeant Stokes, when I broke my wristwatch that they gave me for confirmation — it got hit by a swinging fixture in the woods when they were teaching us bayonet, and it broke the crystal — he gave me a watch that he had. Whether he stole it or won it in a card game or not, he gave me his watch, and I wore it all through the war. That’s how I was treated; it was amazing. I held that temporary sergeant thing all through basic training.

Frankel: So that brings us to what year?
LABBY: That takes us into the middle of 1943. I did not ship out with my group because I fell off a wall and hurt my knee, and so they all left and I stayed behind for a couple of weeks making fly traps for the mess hall out of wire and things [laughs]. They taught me how. Then I was sent to Michigan to the military police school. But I was always sorry I didn’t go with my bunch of guys because they were nice guys.

Frankel: So you were never shipped?
LABBY: I was never shipped overseas, no. In the military police school I was taught to be a military policeman. I didn’t like that because our job was to guard German prisoners, and I didn’t want that at all.

Frankel: There were German prisoners in the United States?
LABBY: We went to pick them up. They were brought over. The troop ships went over with troops, came back with German prisoners from Africa. In November of 1942, my brother Dan’s division was over there in Africa, and Hitler’s elite troops, the Africa Corp, were brought over. Then later on in 1944 the Atlantic Wall, the Volkssturmen, and the remnants of whoever was available, they came over.

Frankel: Where were they brought?
LABBY: They were brought to Nova Scotia, to Halifax, then the ships turned around and went back. We picked them up there, and my group took them down into Arkansas. I didn’t like that kind of duty. I met another fellow, a Jewish boy, Sydney Krass, who grew up in an orphanage in Philadelphia. He knew how to play the horn, and he convinced the company commander we needed buglers. There were two bugles there, and so the company commander said, “OK. Find somebody else who wants to play the bugle.” So we got out of guard duty that way; we didn’t have to march around guarding the prisoners with shotguns. We had shotguns that were so huge. They were donated by the Michigan Gun Club when we were in training in Fort Custer. So he took me off into the woods and because I could read music anyway, we learned to play all the bugle calls. We would pull guard duty, but we only had to play the last one at 11:00 PM and the first one at 6:00 AM. We didn’t have to walk around with a rifle at 2:00 AM around the huts where the prisoners slept.

Frankel: Did you ever have any encounter with any of the German prisoners?
LABBY: Always. They were so happy to be here. They were so happy. They traded their hats and some of their uniform pieces to us for things that we would give them. We got along fine. They spent most of their time playing foosball. They had a very high incidence of malaria, especially those who’d been in North Africa, so we had funerals. We would blow our horns at the funerals, Sydney and I, and they had Nazi flags over the caskets, and they had rifle salutes. They got full military burials.

Frankel: Were they then shipped back?
LABBY: I wonder after the war if the coffins were exhumed. That’s interesting. They had a blacksmith’s shop, a schmied, and they made all kinds of decorations for their barracks out of iron. Nobody ever made any weapons. They had a Red Cross representative who interacted with the camp commander at Camp Robinson where we were stationed. They got 25 cents a day in PX script. They could buy the dreadful beer that we had. That beer was like a week old; it was awful. It was made in St. Louis. It was dreadful. They could buy razor blades, toothpaste. They got packages from Red Cross. Trucks would come in from the post office, army trucks. Packages from the homeland and from Red Cross. You wouldn’t believe. I still have a couple packages of cigarettes that the guys gave me, dreadful. They were oval cigarettes called Echt Orient, and we would trade them for our cigarettes. Or they could buy Phillip Morris or any other kind. They had no reason to want to leave or to run away.

Frankel: What happened after the war?
LABBY: Repatriation. I didn’t want to do this. I wasn’t really happy doing that. I wanted a little more action. One day several of us were up at the post theater seeing a movie after work, and there was the post photo lab right next door. I went in and saw a light on, and I knocked on the door and somebody opened it. It was the sergeant in charge, Chris Button, and I said, “I do photography, mostly 35 millimeter. I can do printing and developing and so on. Please, can you use somebody?” He said, “We just had one fellow transfer up to Fort Smith. We’ll see what we can do. Leave me your unit number.” That was probably early in the fall because in the spring our first sergeant called me. He hated me, he really did. For some reason he just hated me. Again the Jewish thing. I was “Jew boy” to him, too. He was regular army, Sergeant Lures. He made it very plain he didn’t like me.

Frankel: It was clear that it was because you were Jewish?
LABBY: Yes. When we were at Fort Custer learning to be MPs, I didn’t like military police duty. I took something from the office up to battalion headquarters one day, and somebody was trying to make signs, and I said, “I know how to make signs.” I’d taken a commercial art course at Grant High School, and I knew how to paint with a brush. He said, “We can use you.” I said, “I’m pulling guard duty, chasing prisoners here.” He said, “We’ll fix that.” So they got me transferred to battalion headquarters to make signs — turn here, do not enter, so forth. To Sergeant Lures this was “Jew boy” stuff, getting a soft deal. It worked. But when we went off to get the prisoners, I went with them. 

Anyway, Sergeant Lures said, “I’ve got orders here.” We were in a side camp at that time in the spring of ’44. I was in a side camp where we had taken some of the prisoners to work in the rice fields in Arkansas, and again, I was bugling. A lot of Jewish boys were in the outfit. There were probably eight or ten, and we all were buddies. They were from New York, all of them. So he said, “I have orders for you to go back to Camp Robinson to join the signal unit.” The photography was part of the signal unit. He said, “Did you arrange that?” I said, “Yes.” And he just kind of hard-timed me. He had this little truck. Sam Chavinski, one of the New York boys, drove me in a truck back to Camp Robinson. We said good-bye. I reported in and became a photographer, and they sent me off to school to learn to be a photographer. 

Frankel: Where was the school?
LABBY: New Jersey, in Fort Monmouth. I did that for a while and came back and was a photographer and a lab technician. I got promoted to corporal, and then I was promoted to sergeant. I was a real sergeant then. I had my real stripes that could be sewn on; they’re still sewn on my costume somewhere in the attic. I got to go places and do things and be a photographer. When movie stars, swing bands came to camp, I got assigned to the movie stars. There were generals who would come visiting. I would take their pictures. I was a news photographer for the rest of the war. I had a wonderful time. 

A fellow came to the lab one day from one of the artillery outfits. He wanted to know if he could use the lab, and I checked it out with Seargent Button, who said it was OK. This fellow had been a commercial photographer in Chicago. His wife was a model. She had a friend who was a movie actress who came to visit, and we dated one evening. But this supply sergeant said, “Listen, I can get you a parachute.” I really wanted a parachute because if you had a parachute and you got some time off, you could go out to Adams Field in Little Rock and go to the Army side and check in at operations. If you had a parachute, you could go anywhere. I could get a hop home to Portland, and I could get lots of time off because our signal captain was a really nice guy. 

There were only six of us in the whole outfit. I could get time off because we had another opening, and a young Italian-American boy, Louie Testagrossa from New England, came in, and we taught him how to do photography. He could take my place when needed, and he was as good as anybody. So I could go off to Operations with my parachute and fly from there to Dallas, and from Dallas I could get a hop out to Alameda, California. If I couldn’t get a hop here to Portland Air Base, I could get on the train in Oakland and come home overnight. I could be home for a week or two visiting my parents. So I spent the rest of the war just beautifully there. 

At the end of the war, I was the only one left in the lab. I closed it down, and they said, “Send all this stuff to the salvage yard.” The enlargers, all of the photography stuff. I said, “I can’t stand that.” They said that you’ve got to close down a Navy lab so many miles away also, and send that to the salvage yard. Just to be junked. It was terrible. They were dumping airplanes, trucks, and everything at the end of the war. It was just “get home.” Why bring that stuff home in the ships when you could bring home the troops?

Frankel: But it was in the United States?
LABBY: Yes, but overseas they dumped all of it. One of my last assignments was to go to Walnut Ridge Air Force Base in Arkansas and photograph airplanes for the Treasury Department, which was in charge of war surplus at that time. I never saw so many airplanes. All on their noses so they could stack them up behind each other, airplanes from all over. They had this all over the country. They were flying them in and stacking them up and taking off the guns. But they were full of gasoline, and you could buy the airplanes from the war surplus Department of the Treasury. I took pictures of hundreds and hundreds of airplanes — it was just amazing — and sent them back to the Treasury Department.

Frankel: Then they got rid of them?
LABBY: War Surplus, yes. Tools, all kinds of things. So I came home and because I was a sergeant I got 3,000 pounds of baggage. I didn’t have that, so I packed up film and chemicals and things from the photo lab. I had friends downtown at the newspapers also, and I just gave them film and chemicals and stuff because there was a real shortage of film. And flash bulbs, they were just a rarity.

Frankel: Did you have color film?
LABBY: Yes. The government had taken over Agfa and had formed a new entity called Ansco up in Binghamton, New York, and they gave us 35mm color film and 4×5 sheets of color film to use. But you had to process, and it was too much trouble. We had to have separate red, blue, and green filters on the enlargers, and we just didn’t want to take the trouble. So we stuck to black and white, which we preferred anyway. 35mm we had to send away to be done; we didn’t know how to do it. So I had lots and lots of color film. I gave it away to everybody. 

I went to the Jewish USO in Little Rock, and there was a wonderful couple, Jesse — Jesse what? And his wife. There was a separate Jewish USO, and they always had wonderful food for us, and dinner, a Sunday dinner. Through Sergeant Button, my friend and my sergeant in the lab, I met Buddy Schrader and his father, and they were commercial photographers in Little Rock. 

It was impossible for them to get film and chemicals during the war, and so Button had provided them with film and chemicals kind of on the side. Buddy and his wife Geral took care of me and had me over. They had a little teenage daughter. I’d have Sunday dinner there. Buddy always wanted to take pictures of me. I don’t know what became of them. I only have one military picture. It was taken by a photographer here in town who was a patient of my dad’s. He was a pictorial artist. I was in the uniform with the hat and the costume looking very serious. I also met another Jewish supply sergeant through the one who had the parachute for me, and his name was Fred Shrek. If I had a name like that I would get rid of it [laughs]. Fred’s wife’s sister came to Little Rock, a pretty little girl, and we dated for a while. So there were occasional Jewish girls I dated through the Jewish USO. 

And through the Jewish USO, there was a man whose name was Reutlinger who had had a soft drink business. His daughter was either a senior in high school or first year in college, and she had a Chevrolet convertible. Ilene was her name. She used to take us around on Sundays in her convertible. He had gas he got somewhere. He always had picnics for us, Mr. Reutlinger. So we had a good time. 

I met my brother Bob in Dallas just before he shipped off to Italy. I remember I kept him in cigars because he was a pioneer, he dealt with explosives, and always needed cigars for lighting fuses. So I kept him in cigars, which I would buy at the PX. We had a big weekend in Dallas, some of which we remember [laughs], He doesn’t remember much of it at all because somebody met us at the USO and gave us a bottle of whiskey called Black Velvet. We drank the whiskey most of the weekend at someplace called Pappy’s Pirates’ Den. I have no recollection, but he took us all over Dallas.

Frankel: And so the war is over and you go back home?
LABBY: I went back home. My brother Bob was already home, going to college. My mother had worked as a surgical nurse at Providence Hospital during the war. She had this big house, a 14-room house. She said it was killing her. My dad came home from work one day, and my mom said, “I sold the house today to Dr. O’Toole, somebody I was working with today in surgery at the hospital.” So my folks bought a piece of land about two miles from here on Hamilton, just the other side of Safeway. They bought a couple of acres, and they built a barn and moved everything from the house out there. Things they didn’t think we wanted they threw away. A lot of my high school stuff just went away, and I was sad about that. Everything went in the barn. They built a little summerhouse, and they got an apartment across the street from Providence Hospital. So when I came home in early February ’46, my brother Bob was in the second bedroom of the apartment, and he and I . . .

Frankel: So all this happened while you were away?
LABBY: Yes. Bob and my mom and dad were living in the apartment. Bob and I moved to this little second bedroom, and then my mom said, “We need to look for a house.” Larry Herzog, the architect, was designing a house for my mom and dad out in the country.

Frankel: Where was out in the country?
LABBY: On Hamilton.

Frankel: That was considered the country?
LABBY: It was so far out of town you had to take sandwiches. I remember a story that Eva told. Her Uncle Max lived in Raleigh Hills on Dogwood Lane, and their family could never figure out why Uncle Max lived so far out of Portland. There was nothing out here.

Frankel: Was it farmland?
LABBY: This was all farmland, yes. Where the Sellings were on Hamilton. Aunty Glad lived on the corner of Hamilton and Scholls Ferry, her acres, and the Sellings had six acres, and my folks had several acres. The Georges, many of the Greek families lived out here. The Georges had a couple of acres, and the Lewises had the store down in Raleigh Hills, and the Poppases and the people who owned Jolly Joan Restaurant, and the Meekuses had land from Hamilton all the way down to the Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway. The Meekuses wanted to sell my dad five acres on Raleigh Hills where Safeway is. He said, “What do I need that for?” 

Frankel: But your parents considered it a country home? 
LABBY: Yes. The house was sold, so they bought a house up on Alameda, and Bob and I would have a bedroom. We had the whole upstairs, and they had the bedroom downstairs, and we lived there while the house was being built. They didn’t like the house that Herzog designed, so they had Wade Pipes, who designed my brother’s home, which was built next to the Sellings, he designed a home for them. It was built in 1949, and we all moved out there. But I do remember this — when we lived in Alameda and Leonard Schnitzer was having an engagement party out at the Tualatin Country Club, my brother Bob had a blind date with Lorie, his wife, Lorie Carrow. She wasn’t quite sure about him, but the blind date was to go out to Leonard Schnitzer’s engagement party. So she brought along Eva, and the next thing I knew Bob was yelling up the stairs to me, “Get dressed! You’re going out.” “Who am I going out with?” “You’ll find out when you come down.” It was Eva, and that’s how we met.

[End of Tape 1]

LABBY: So that brings us up to 1947.

Frankel: When you came back in 1946, what did you decide about school?
LABBY: My father had the wonderful idea that my brother Bob and I should go to dental school and go in practice with him, which would have been wonderful because I spent so much time when I was a little kid in my father’s dental lab playing with the wax and the plaster, fiddling. I

Incidentally, my father was such an artist. When Sylvan Durkheimer had a new yacht built, in 1940 probably, built a 40-foot yacht, he asked me to make a model for him because he liked the models I was building. So I got a set of the plans, and I built it just exactly as a person would build a yacht, with a backbone and the frames, planking and everything, got some linoleum for the floor and made it for the floor inside. I put batteries inside and got electric lights, and for the ice box I said I wish I could have a piece of ice. My father said, “I’ll make you a piece of ice.” And out of dental materials he made a little block of ice. I carved it out of wax, and he molded it out of clear Lucite and he said, “Ice always has bubbles inside.” So he injected with a hypodermic needle a drop of water and then when the heat cured it, the drop of water exploded and made it look just like ice with all the bubbles in it. 

I still have it because when I delivered the model to — we called him Uncle Sylvan Durkheimer — he kept it for years and years and years, and when he died it passed to Stuart, and then as the Durkheimers got older it went finally to Jimmy. Jimmy and his wife Rita and Eva and I were good friends and saw each other socially, and Jimmy gave it back to me. 

My father said, “You like to do little things. You could make beautiful teeth.” I said, “OK. I’ll go to dental school.” So when I got out of the service, my brother Bob and I finished pre-dental in college. We went to Multnomah College, which was a Junior College here. Bob got out in late winter and I got out in February, of the army, and you couldn’t get into college except in fall. We didn’t want to wait around doing nothing. We could get in mid-year at junior college, and we both had lower division to complete anyway the first two years. We took pre-dental. That’s all you needed was two years of pre-dental, of math, chem, physics, biology, the required basic science courses. We applied to the dental school.

Frankel: OHSU?
LABBY: It wasn’t OHSU then; it was North Pacific, which was my father’s alma matter. My father, poor guy, he got out when he was so young that nobody thought that he looked old enough down in South Portland to be a dentist, so he grew a mustache. He went back to the dental school and taught anatomy and histology, and one by one he could get a few patients in that office over Kotel’s Drugstore. I remember that office. I remember Dr. Gordot, his office partner. Mostly I remember Charlie Kotel’s father, the old man, who had a mixture he called Kitsap Cough Syrup, which we called “Indian cough remedy.” It tasted so good we all wanted to have sore throats. It was wonderful. 

Anyway, so Bob and I finished, and we applied for the fall of 1947 at North Pacific and the registrar said, “There are a lot of people who want to go to dental school. We’re going to take only one from your family. Who’s it going to be?” So I said, “It’s got to be Bob. He’s three and a half years older. He goes.” So he stayed for about a year, a year and a half, and didn’t want to. He preferred salmon fishing [laughs]. He finished his degree in bacteriology and then became a representative for ethical drug companies, sharing corporations, and so on, and had a fantastic career with them. 

So there was I. What am I going to do? I got a job with the Veteran’s Administration as a medical photographer because I knew a little bit about medical things, coming from the family, and I’d been a commercial photographer here in town. After I got out of the Army, I made pretty good money. I took pictures of the Stendhal Exhibition of northwest coast Indian art for the art museum, and I worked for some architects shooting their stuff, and tried to give good service while I went to college. I thought, “OK. I’ll get a job at the VA.” It was offered to me through some photography friends. I stayed there through part of 1948, and then in the fall of ’48 I thought that I may as well finish college and go to Reed College. Reed College in the fall of ’48 was very welcoming to veterans. I think all you had to do was see lightning and hear thunder and you could get into Reed College if you were a veteran.

Frankel: Was it on the GI Bill?
LABBY: Yes. Tuition was like $450 a semester and a large account at the bookstore. I had two GI Bills. Everybody from Oregon had two GI Bills because Oregon accumulated so much local tax money during the war that they could offer returning Oregon veterans a duplicate of the federal GI Bill. So I had a duplicate of 36 months of college and subsistence, and mortgage if I bought a house, and all other peripheral veteran’s benefits. Oregon was totally grateful to us. 

Off I went to Reed, chock full of veteran’s benefits, and I was going to become a physician. I took, again, more formal, heavier college-level courses of math, chem, physics, biology, and I took some more anthropology and language and so on. I found that Reed College was a lot more challenging than Grant High School. It was really hard to be at Reed. I stayed and stayed at Reed working to get a GPA that would be suitable to apply at the medical school. After all, my brother Dan was in the department of medicine there, and if I was going to apply at medical school I didn’t want to come in looking like a low-level student. They’d go through the formality of interviewing me, but then they’d probably shake their heads and say, “Go somewhere else.” So I really tried hard. Then I became more interested in psychology because I was taking psychology courses. It was really attractive, and I’d finished all my basic sciences and didn’t want to keep repeating them anyway. I was working also at the same time. My father had died in 1951.

Frankel: How old was he?
LABBY: He was just 60 and five months.

Frankel: Of what did he die?
LABBY: He had pancreatic carcinoma, so he went pretty quickly. I stayed home and helped on our acreage taking care of the orchard and helping my mom stay settled. Then while I was at Reed, I decided I was going to go into psychology. In order to graduate as quickly as I wanted to, I would have to take experimental psychology and statistics simultaneously, and they weren’t taught simultaneously. They were very heavy, demanding courses, so they were taught consecutively. But the head of the psych department said, “I’ve got a friend over at Lewis and Clark, Folnay Fah, and he’s a nice guy. Why don’t you go over and talk to him and see if he’ll let you double up.” So I went over and talked to Dr. Fah, and he said, “Yes, I got a call from Fred Korts, and if you’ll work hard I’ll work with you.” He said, “I went through on the GI Bill, University of Chicago. Let’s do it together. Besides, I teach the course. I’ll get you through.” So I spent a year there and got through and graduated in ’51 after my dad died.

Frankel: From Reed?
LABBY: From Lewis and Clark. He said, “I’ll get you into graduate school, too.” I had wanted to go to graduate school, but I couldn’t outside Portland because I was taking care of the house and my mom and the property. He said, “We’ve got a good graduate school run by the Jesuits out at the University of Portland — they are going to work you hard — and you can get a PhD in psychology out there. I’ll call them up.” 

So he called them up, and I went out and interviewed and got in. It was interesting because during the summer the head of the school was building a home for himself. I can’t remember his name. It was very politic for all of us to come out and help, all of us guys and gals who wanted to get into the graduate school at the masters level, so we all went out and we helped him build his house [laughs]. 

Graduate school started in September, and one of the teachers was a fellow named William Botzum who was a Jesuit from University of Chicago. He had a PhD in theoretical math but also was teaching in the psych department. He was teaching statistics, and it was dreadful. He was so difficult. Coinciding with this, I was working at the medical school in the department of medicine as a medical photographer, no longer at the VA. 

William Sheldon, who was an MD and a PhD, had a theory that he developed at the University of Chicago, and also at Harvard, with Professor Hooten, who was an anthropologist, that there were three basic body types of human beings: thin people, fat people, and muscular people. Kind of a triangle. But there were variations of thin, fat, and muscular in between to fill in this triangle. He managed to sell it to enough people so that Rockefeller gave him $100,000, which in 1951 was generous. It was supervised by the department of medicine at the medical school. They brought the project out from Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City along with Barbara Honeyman, who was a woman from an old pioneer family here. Barbara was a friend of my brother Dan’s, and she was looking for a medical photographer.

Frankel: What does a medical photographer do?
LABBY: At least in the Veteran’s Administration, I worked mostly in surgery taking photographs and movies of surgical procedures for training purposes. In the pathology department, pathological specimens to record them to go along with the anecdotal, written evidence for pathological specimens. I had a studio and a darkroom right next to the morgue, so I sometimes assisted with the autopsies. They could free up one person, and there didn’t have to be two doctors. I was there to kind of help push or pull and get the specimens I wanted so I could photograph them.

Barbara interviewed me and said, “OK. Any brother of Dan’s is good for me.” So I worked there with William Sheldon and Barbara, and we took pictures of patients who came to the county hospital. Pictures of the front, side, and back views, and then, according to a formula, categorized them as being somewhere in this triangle and gave them a number between one and seven, whether they were mostly fat or slender or muscular. We even, through Barbara’s interventions, got into the Oregon State Penitentiary to take pictures of all the inmate population, including the women. Everybody was delighted to show off, yes. Then we evaluated them. 

I was telling this to Father Botzum, the statistics teacher, one day, and he said, “That sounds like a good master’s thesis for you. I’ll do your statistics with you.” He was known nationally at that time. Life Magazine did a story on him. He said, “We can get a little publicity out of it.” So Sheldon was my thesis director, and Father Botzum was my statistical director. We did a study at the penitentiary, which was interesting because supposedly then we could tie the three body types to three types of criminality which all of a sudden surfaced. There were crimes against persons — violence, crimes against property, and then so-called sex crimes. 

Dr. Sheldon figured out that the crimes of violence, of course, were done primarily by the muscular people, and the crimes against property, maybe cutting checks or stealing money through forgery and so forth, would be done by thin people. Furtive robberies, second story robberies in homes, and sex crimes would be done by fat, helpless old men. That’s how he artificially categorized these three things. So okay, let’s see if we can work that out into a study at the penitentiary to see if crimes of violence are done by the muscular people, the bank robbers, the kind of Robin Hood types, and the so-called sex crimes in Oregon, and then the crimes against money, other than bank robbery, would be done by skinny little men, helpless. 

We worked it up into a statistical study, and Father Botzum said, “Let’s use the null hypothesis where it doesn’t matter if it comes out positive or negative. We’ll do a very rigorous statistical study, and that will essentially be the basis of your master’s thesis, not so much the narrative but the statistics. That should be interesting.” We did it, and it worked, and it’s buried somewhere. I must have a copy.

Frankel: When you say it worked, it followed the hypothesis?
LABBY: The hypothesis, of course, was that there would be a relationship, or in parenthesis, there doesn’t really have to be [laughs]. That’s the way it worked out. At the .0005 level of confidence there wasn’t even a hint, but it was very rigorously done statistically. It had to be because Father B was overseeing the statistics and Dr. Sheldon, the notorious Dr. Sheldon, was supervising also. So it worked. 

We went down to the penitentiary, had a very interesting time because they had torn down the old walls after they built new walls on the outside. They had gotten a new warden. The old warden was brought up on charges of fraud or something because he had his finger in the furniture factory, in the cannery, and several other places. So they created a new office called Superintendent of the Institution, and they kicked him upstairs to where he had no authority and no responsibility. They brought in a new warden from San Quentin, across the bay from San Francisco, Virgil O’Malley, who had been captain of the guard down there. They gave him the new position of Warden of the Penitentiary. They were tearing down the old blocks that were built of brick. 

At the same time, they were constructing new blocks of reinforced concrete, and the only people who knew where anybody was were the inmates. They established a place called Central Station. It was essentially run by the inmates. They knew where everybody was, and some of the administrators. Captain Dutch Hurder was the captain of the guard, and he maintained the discipline, as well as fellow whose name I can’t remember other than that they called him Snake. He ran the inmate population. He was the “con boss.” It was really interesting. 

We went down there in the midst of chaos. We took pictures of everybody. And also out to the farm annex where they raised hogs and corn and everything else, and took pictures of the trustees out there. I remember one of the trustees, a fellow called Al Kotsoff, called himself a trustee, resident trustee [laughs]. He was a trustee of the penitentiary. It was wonderful; we had a great experience. William Sheldon and I stayed down there over weekends when we weren’t at the medical school. 

Finally, after I got my masters in ’53, I decided that I had to do something now to earn a living. My mother and I had sold the farm and the acres on Hamilton to some very lovely people who’d retired from a shoe factory in Massachusetts. We were living in an apartment downtown. I didn’t want to live in an apartment with my mother forever, working in a master’s-level psychology position here in Portland. Who knows what that would be? Or get a job as a social worker. I could get a job as a social worker anytime because I had the qualifications. 

So a woman friend suggested, “Why don’t you go to San Francisco? It’s a nice place for young boys who want to meet other young people.” I said, “Okay.” So I went down and kind of looked it over. My cousin Gary, who was my father’s youngest brother’s only child, was just getting out of the Navy after the Korean War or Korean Conflict. He was taking an artist’s apprenticeship in the city, in San Francisco. Gary and I had always thought, “Wouldn’t it be great to go to Europe together, at the end of the summer of ’53?” I didn’t have enough money because during the summers I was working in the summers as a lookout, and hoping to work fires and get enough money working fires. You could make $1.75 an hour then, but on my lookout I wasn’t making that much, so we didn’t make enough money. Gary was broke, and I was broke. 

I took my few hundred dollars and moved to San Francisco. Gary’s folks were living in the East Bay in Concord. His father was building houses. Gary and I looked around San Francisco, and we got an apartment in Chinatown. It was wonderful. We paid probably 50, 52 dollars a month or something like that. It meant that each of us had to come up with 25 or 30 dollars and utilities and telephone. We lived at the north end of the Stockton Tunnel. Just walk up the stairs and there was the apartment, right in Chinatown. 

In the fall of 1954, after my last service working in the Forest Service, I drove down with all my worldly goods. No job. I stayed with Uncle Barney and Aunt Fan and Gary in Concord, and went into the city looking for work. The only jobs I could find working as a psychologist were in the alcohol treatment program, and I didn’t want that at all. I’d seen enough of it in the penitentiary. I didn’t want any more penitentiary stuff. I’d been to a few executions then and seen how people behaved.

We moved into the city anyway. We had our apartment, Gary had his apprenticeship, and it was easy living. We were very poor; we lived on almost nothing, but we were happy. And we were living in this wonderful, glamorous city of San Francisco, a couple of single guys. I got a job delivering telephone books in the fall, and from phonebooks I got a job . . . 

Frankel: Did you have a car?
LABBY: Yes, I had a little 1952 MG. I could pile as many phonebooks as I could then go back and get more. I have a ’53 MG out in the garage now. If you can imagine, I towed a quarter-ton trailer with that MG from Portland down with all my books and all my toys. Parked the MG right outside the door, over the top of the tunnel. 

Then I got a job from the phonebook delivery company as a Revlon representative. My job was to take new Revlon nail polish and hair products into the drugstores and look at the bottom of the bottle and see if the code number was a certain color and had a certain ending number. If it did, I would take that away and put new stock in. So I ended up with thousands of bottles of nail polish and hair treatment stuff. They were pushing then, a very brilliant nail polish called “Fire and Ice.” That name stuck with me because a Swedish yachtsman, a fellow who had a steamship line called the Isbranson Line, had a sailboat called Fire and Ice. I loved seeing that sailboat. Something else was called “Russian Fire” or “Russian Winter.” Anyway, I had all these thousands of bottles. I gave them away to everybody I knew.

Frankel: How come you ended up with so many bottles? You had to buy them?
LABBY: No, I took the old stock back. We’d bring it back to the Rubin Donnely Agency, and they’d say, “Do you want to keep any of this stuff? We’re going to burn it.” What they did was they took it out and heaped it up and broke all the glass and set fire to this. So yes, you could have as much as you wanted. Then these outdated hair products, whatever Revlon was selling. It came in blue plastic bottles then. 

I did that through the winter of ’54, and then I saw an ad in the paper that said United Airlines was looking for telephone sales agents and that you could travel on United Airlines and earn good money. Good money then was something that looked good, and the office to work at was on Union Square on Post and Powell, and that was four or five blocks from my house in Chinatown. I went down and applied, and I was accepted. They said, “You have a master’s degree in clinical psychology. Work for a while as a telephone sales agent, and maybe we can use you in training.” Their maintenance base and training was in South San Francisco at the time. 

So I worked as a telephone sales agent at Post and Powell learning to say, “United Airlines Reservations” in a deep voice [uses deep voice]. “May we help you?” Then I began to do training, helping the sales agents learn to be nice on the telephone and be obliging and be very customer-oriented. They promoted me a couple of times. I really had no goals. I could fly anywhere. I’d take my mother on trips. It was wonderful. I’d take her to see her family in New York. 

By then I was getting $365 a month. I didn’t know what to do with it. I had a house on Telegraph Hill with my cousin, and we had three Jaguars. I had two and my cousin Gary had one. I bought a sailboat from two gay guys in Berkley who couldn’t get along. One wanted to sail, and the other just wanted to sit on the boat. I still have the mattresses. They were upholsterers, and they made gorgeous mattresses for the boat stuffed with kapok, which we still have. We put them in the Volkswagen bus, and the children would ride on them. 

So I saw this ad and answered it and got employed, but then they wanted me to work a midnight shift as a supervisor, and I tried it and found sleeping during the day was not possible. Working all night was not what I was destined to do. I really thought that I wanted to do something different. 

In the interim, my cousin Gary had a Navy buddy whose father and mother lived in San Francisco, and the father was Chief of Medicine at the VA. Martin, my cousin Gary’s buddy, was selling insurance trying to make a living, just having gotten out of the Navy. He sold some insurance to some of his father’s employees in the VA, one of whom was in the VA Psychological Counseling Center, a psychologist whose name was Looney [spells out]. A great name for a psychologist, Jim Looney [laughs]. My cousin told Martin that I was looking for work as a psychologist, so Martin, who sold insurance to Jim Looney in the VA Psychological Counseling Center, mentioned that he knew somebody who was looking for a job as a psychologist. Jim Looney said, “Send him around. We need somebody here in the clinic.” 

When I quit United Airlines, I had prior to that time gone out and met Jim and interviewed with him, and he said, “We’ll keep you in mind. As soon as I can find somebody and we can get the funding, I can move out of my job to a different level of counseling, and my job will become available doing psychometric testing. The normal progression here is you work as a psychometrist, then you move up to be counselor.” 

So three days after I left my job at United Airlines, Jim called and said, “Come in and meet my supervisor. She would like to meet you.” I came in and met his supervisor, a wonderful woman who had a PhD in counseling from Columbia University. She had known about Dr. Sheldon and this somatotyping of body types and was quite familiar with it. Plus the fact that she was a Scotophile, anything that was Scottish. She was born on the Isle of Iona in Scotland in the Hebrides, and everything that was Scottish was good. 

Incidentally, I was a bagpiper. That loops back to Portland. My father, when he was practicing downtown, became acquainted with a man who had a Scottish goods shop. He sold tartan ties and little imports, jams and jellies from Scotland and so forth. His name was Scottie Shulman, and he was from Edinburgh. My father would take his lunch hours and go over and talk with Scottie, who was like a block away. My father was just so in love with everything Scottish. He wanted to change his name to Harry Maxwell once, because he loved the name Maxwell. 

When Harry Lauder, an old Scottish musical performer, would come to town, my father would take us to hear all these old tunes. Somehow, when I was at Reed College, I saw the bagpipers marching in the Rose Festival Parade, and I went down to Scottie’s and said, “Where can I learn to play the bagpipes?” My dad had already died then. Scottie said, “I’ll get you in touch with the pipe major of the Clan MacLea.” So I met the pipe major, and he said, “We have Duncan McKenzie, one of our pipers, is a tutor. He’ll tutor you.” So while I was at Reed College for a couple years I took lessons just up the street from Reed at Duncan McKenzie’s. I played with the Clan MacLea here for a couple of years. When I went to San Francisco, they gave me the name of the piping band down there, which was the Caledonian Pipe Band. They were associated with the Clan Fraser of the East Bay clans. 

I told Dr. Logie, which in Scottish, in Gaelic, a logie is a small hole. Iona Logie said, “You must work here. Yes, definitely you must fill our opening. And tell me about the Caledonian Society here.” She was a member of the Daughters of the British Empire, very formal. They had teas and they did everything very formally British. So I was in. I don’t know whether it was because I had any ability as a psychologist or because I was a piper. Dr. Logie would want to come to the Burns Day celebrations, where everything Scottish was done, in February on Robert Burns’ birthday. Mostly the pipe band rehearsed once a week in a parking garage, where we had room to march back and forth, and we had a Scotch-Canadian drill sergeant.

Frankel: And you were wearing the outfit?
LABBY: Not during practice. Actually, once a week we had chanter practice first. You learn the tune on a little thing that looks like an oboe, and then when you learn the tune you concentrate on keeping the bag expanded and the tune is in your mind, so you pipe that with the big chanter. Our job mostly was to turn out at openings of drugstores and supermarkets and parades and anything where people would like to hear bagpipe music in the Bay Area. That’s what weekends turned out to be, decorated up in all this gear, and it was so heavy. The kilt is 27 feet; it’s nine yards with four-inch box pleats, military. The plaid we wore was another 12 feet of heavy material that was all wrapped around us. The uniforms we wore were military, with a choker collar, and they were very heavy Melton Cloth. I inherited somebody’s uniform. It smelled so bad; none of the other pipers wanted to be next to me. Until I was with the band a year and then they measured and had manufactured in Glasgow my own uniform, which did not smell. I still have a lot of my gear. 

So then I went to work for the Veteran’s Administration, and I figured out that eventually I’m going to have to get my doctorate, and I’m going to need an internship, so I managed to have the time that I was at the VA in San Francisco count as an internship because after I was married I needed to go to work right away. Looping back then to when I was driving to work one morning in San Francisco, and I really had no plans to do anything. I was building a sailboat, a 30-footer, a double-ended sailboat. I was going to sail down to South America and then over to Easter Island and then over to New Zealand and then to Australia. I had taken courses from the American Power Squadron in San Francisco. I had my certificates and everything and had big maps on the walls in my apartment of how I was going to do this.

Frankel: Were you still living with your cousin?
LABBY: No. I introduced him to a girl at United Airlines, and they got married. She was an artist. She did [eicot?] work, which was just beautiful. He finished his apprenticeship and became a commercial artist, and he was doing album covers. There was a band called Dave Brubeck at the time that was very popular in the Bay Area, modern jazz, and he did album covers for Dave Brubeck and for several other people. So he was already big time. Gary got married to Jodie White. 

They went separate ways, so I had my own apartment in the Fillmore District. I think I was the only white person on the block in a black community. I had the dirtiest car on the block, too, because I was building a sailboat. One day when I was driving to work — I was putting all my money into the boat; I wasn’t saving anything. I had maybe a thousand dollars in savings. At the VA, I was getting ten thousand dollars a year, $9,790, and that was in 1954. I didn’t know what to do with it all. 

One day driving to work down Pine Street, alongside me there was this little Volkswagen with this cloth roof, and inside is a girl who had the mirror tipped this way. She was doing her whole face. She wasn’t touching the wheel; she wasn’t shifting at all. It was this little old 1954 Volkswagen with the little window in the back, and I kept — from stop street to stop street to stop street — that looks like Eva Lamfrom, except I remember she had a little pug nose and this girl doesn’t. I got to Van Ness, turned off down to the clinic, to my office, and she kept going with the face. I wrote home to my sister-in-law Lorie. I got a letter back. She’s living three blocks from me in San Francisco. Yes, it was Eva. This was in the fall of ’57. 

So I phoned Eva and said, “Would you like to go to the opera?” She was living in a guesthouse and having a lot of fun playing bridge, drinking brandy, going out on the town with young guys in the guesthouse on Pacific Heights. She had lots of relatives in San Francisco, the old early Germans like the Ehrmans and the Bissingers. She didn’t have to associate with an Easterner. But we’d had that one date years before, and we saw each other at a wedding where her roommate, who was the daughter of my Aunt Miriam’s husband’s brother who made pickles here in town — Sarah Neusihin. She was famous for making pickles. We always went to Sarah’s house and had pickles. Irving, her son, and I were classmates at the University of Washington, but he was kind of square. Irving and I didn’t see each other very much. Eva and I had just seen each other that once in between the ten years. 

So we went out. I said, “I’ll take you around North Beach.” I’d lived in North Beach with my cousin way up on Telegraph Hill. We had started at United Airlines. One of my buddies, Jim Silverman, had another buddy, Freddy Ku, who collected old furniture, fifty-cent furniture at second hand stores. He didn’t have any place to put it, but there was a burned out spaghetti factory on, I think, Green and Upper Grant Avenue. It had a flash fire and was vacant, so Freddy rented it and put all his old furniture in it, and we said, “Why don’t we open a spaghetti joint?” There were two gay guys, Ruben and I forgot the other guy’s name, and they said, “We’ll cook.” So we whitewashed the entire inside of this old spaghetti factory and the front where this retail store had been. We rented it out to some kids who wanted to have a flamenco studio, teach flamenco dancing, which we all loved and was very popular. Jose Greco was very big then, and touring flamenco companies, and he was very authentic. 

So we all worked, kids from United Airlines. Hal York and I built the front doors. We got a bar from Schroder’s down in the financial district and got steam beer. We set up a bocce ball in the back for old people in North Beach. They had two of the drying booths, and one of them had a label that said “psychiatrist’s booth.” That was my booth, even though I was a psychologist. We had all this old furniture and tables. We opened in August of 1956, and by October we’d paid it off, didn’t owe anybody a penny. We called it The Old Spaghetti Factory. Years later a restaurant guy who we went to high school with, Gussie Dussen, stole the name and negotiated with Freddie to get some money back for the name, and he started this whole chain of Spaghetti Factories [see http://www.noehill.com/sf/landmarks/sf127.asp].

Frankel: So did you work there or you just owned it?
LABBY: Didn’t own it. All of us who worked there were called “plank owners.” In the old-time navy, the first crew on board a navy ship were called plank owners. They were the original crew on the ship, and so they were plank owners. All of us who worked there to help build the place, we were plank owners. Ralph Sweet was a bartender. Audrey, can’t remember Audrey’s [last] name, she worked there off and on. We all hung out there, and it was wonderful. We loved the place. 

So I took Eva there. We crawled around North Beach. The bakeries there were great. The Figoni Brothers Hardware Store, they’d been there all their lives. North Beach was so Italian then. My cousin and I had lived up on top, and we rented a place for $57.50 a month. All the North Beach kids were just great. And on Upper Grant Avenue — here’s a bit of history — across from the first Italian coffee place. One of the kids from United Airlines, his mother was living in Rome. She brought the first Gaggia coffee machine over with her lover, and they opened right on the corner of Upper Grant and Vallejo across from La Pantera Restaurant, where for $1.75 you could get a seven-course meal. On the other corner, Freddy Block opened a little coffee shop not much bigger than this called the Coexistence Bagel Shop. A lot of the young kids and poets used to come in. This was 1954-57 mostly. Across from the coffee shop, he opened up the Coexistence Bagel Shop. It had a little cold case with meats and bagels and things. All the young kids came in, and they brought in marijuana, and it got a bad name. One of the police guys came down on us, a detective, he had an Irish name. 

Then the name “beatnik” came in, and Larry Ferlinghetti’s bookstore, City Lights, was a couple of blocks up Broadway. Fred Rosco had his bookstore. Ken Rexroth was one of the poets. And the Blackhawk opened up. Then on Broadway around the corner there was another nightclub. We kind of all hung out together. Then somewhere around 1956, ’57, a drug fellow came up. Somebody named Eric Nord came up from Venice, California, and he brought the hard drugs. Nobody was having a bad time with the marijuana; it was kind of peaceful. It was just before Jack Kerouac had been up there, and Eva’s buddy from Reed College, who became the poet laureate of California, Gary Snyder. He hung out with them, with Ferlinghetti. Alan Ginsberg was there. The Purple Onion opened up and the Hungry Eye. And from Berkeley came over the comedian, Mort Sahl. He was followed by the lady who died last week with the wild hair, Phyllis Diller. She was at the Purple Onion later. Before that it was the Hungry Eye. Its very artistic owner who used to lead the Columbus Day Parade up Columbus Avenue, always drunker than a skunk. It was always such a wonderful bunch we had there back in the middle ’50s.

Frankel: So that date with Eva, did it go on or . . .?
LABBY: Well, the date with Eva panned out. We went to the opera; I think we saw Rigoletto in the fall with Cornel Wilde [note: Cornel Wilde was a minor movie star, not an opera singer]. Then I wanted her to go to see Boris Godunov, but she didn’t make it. I didn’t see her again until March maybe. We went to see a road show of My Fair Lady. I remember the only seats available were so far up everybody was this big. It looked like if you had tweezers you could pick them up off the stage and put them in a matchbox. We were right up against the top of the ceiling. But it was beautiful; we had a great time. So we would go out from time to time and go out with kids from the guesthouse. As the spring came along, we’d go out to the beach. There was one big picnic at the beach where we went. She was wearing a swimsuit and she certainly passed that test. She looked like a size two; she was very tiny. 

So we kept dating here and there. She was dating kids, playing tennis and going out to parties and playing bridge, just living the life of a single girl in her 20s in San Francisco. I was working on the boat. That’s where all my assets went. I was at the VA, had to somehow support the boat. I was maybe dating one or two girls who Jim Looney, who worked at the clinic — yes, by all means, before that at New Year’s, Eva was not available, so a friend of mine from United Airlines, Ernie Bloom, a nice Jewish boy, had married another nice girl, Fern, and he called me up at Christmas.

My observation at Christmas was maybe to go to Chinatown, have a nice dinner. Ernie called me up and said Fern has an old roommate from Berkeley — Ernie was a local boy, from San Francisco — Fern has a roommate from Berkeley, and they have tickets to the East-West game, which was a big football game played at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco. I thought, “Great! I can get out of having to play bagpipes on New Year’s Day at Kezar Stadium.” It was always very cold. So I said, “All right.” I didn’t know the girl, but I was to meet her — the seats were all assigned —  at Kezar Stadium. So I appeared at Kezar Stadium, actually found a place to park, appeared at my seat, and there was a girl. She was not particularly attractive; she was kind of interesting. But her roommate had brought along a blind date, a fellow named Austin Frank, and so . . . 

[Day 2 Track 1]

Frankel: Good morning. We are continuing the interview which we started a week or so ago.
LABBY: Thank you, and good morning to you, Sylvia. I am reminded, as we’ve been talking, of how I met Eva. I had known her sister because Gertrude was in my Sunday school class and confirmation class. I knew she had a younger sister, and when they moved into our neighborhood I still had not connected with Eva. When I was in San Francisco — skipping because I think I already mentioned how I first met Eva on the blind date — this would have been in the summer, late summer of 1957, I was driving to work down Pine Street in the morning, and alongside me was a little 1956 Volkswagen Beetle, and the girl inside was keeping up with my car as we were in the traffic, going from each stop street to the next stop street. What was interesting is that she had the mirror tilted toward her face and was totally engaged in putting on her morning makeup, not touching the wheel or the shifting knob as far as I can see, at least with her hands, and successfully doing this. When I got to Franklin, I had to turn down to my office, and she continued on down into downtown San Francisco.

As I went along, I kept thinking, “That looks a lot like Eva from Portland, Eva Lamfrom.” But as I remembered Eva had a little pug nose, and I’m not sure this girl did. Anyway, I wrote home, and my mother asked my sister-in-law Lorie, who said yes, Eva was living in San Francisco. They sent me her phone number, and as it turned out she was living on Pacific when I was living on California, so it was only several blocks away, and also just a block away toward the city. It was five minutes walking distance between our two houses. She was living in a guesthouse on Pacific.

I phoned her sometime in September, October, and I don’t remember if we went to the opera later on or not, but our first date was walking through an area that I knew well, having lived there for so long, and that was North Beach, Upper Grant Avenue, San Francisco. Stopping in at all the little places I had known, including the Spaghetti Factory, which I helped build, we got well acquainted, and I hoped I impressed her favorably. That was our first date. We also met somebody she knew from college, so that made it a nice evening. I think we saw each other maybe one or two more times through the winter. I know we did go to the opera, and we did see Rigoletto in San Francisco. Later on in the spring we had another date or two, but usually it was just going out and having dinner or going back to North Beach because that was such a nice, comfortable place for both of us. No threat at all about romance. 

I had vacation time left, and so I said to her one day, “I’m driving up to Portland tomorrow. Are you interested in getting a free ride up and back? I’ll stay about a week or so.” She was between jobs at the time. She said, “Yes, fine.” So the next morning at 6:00 AM I’m at the door of her apartment with a pot of coffee. She is thoroughly unprepared, having gone out the day before with a dreamy date, had a wonderful day, played tennis, did all kinds of much more interesting things than we ever did together. So I waited while she got a few things together, had some coffee, got some things together, and off we went in my little 1952 MG. She got to drive partway up to Portland. 

Just as we came into Portland — I was dozing, she was driving — suddenly the little car we were in veered very sharply to the right and hit the fender and bounced off the car next to us. I had my eyes open just enough to see that a car was coming down the freeway the wrong way toward us in our lane, and because the little car responded so quickly to a sharp turn, we were clear. The car shot past us and crashed head-on into the car behind us. We later found out it was not a good outcome. 

We pulled over. An elderly couple — elderly for us, somebody in their 60s back then — were confused as to why we bumped into their car. We explained that Eva, who was driving, saw this car coming. We exchanged information, and our insurance company fixed their car, I’m sure. But Eva, having saved my life, according to the old Chinese custom was then responsible for me for the rest of my life, although that didn’t come out until we were married [laughs]. 

We stayed in Portland for a week or so, and my sister-in-law Lorie had a party and Eva was at the party and looked very, very attractive. She’d been tanning at the beach in San Francisco and just looked too good to let go. We then drove back to San Francisco, and however fate programmed it, we became much closer. Within two weeks after returning to San Francisco, we got married.

Frankel: Married?
LABBY: Yes [laughs].

Frankel: In San Francisco?
LABBY: No. We were watching an old movie at my apartment one night, and Eva still hadn’t found any work. I asked her, “What are you doing tomorrow?” She said, “I suppose I’d better look for a job.” And out of my mouth, totally spontaneously came the words, “Well, let’s get married.” I didn’t have time to edit or even think. She paused for a moment, and we talked about it. I said, “Take your time. I know this is not something we’ve talked about at all. I’ll be out at the boatyard on Friday working on the boat, so come out and tell me.” This was like 2:00 AM Wednesday morning. 

I was at the boatyard working, and she came out and brought a lunch and looked very dreamy. We sat there and she said, “Well, of course the answer is yes.” So we packed up everything, left the boat, drove quickly back to the apartment, and called our parents, my mother and her mother and father. Her mother and father and my mother in two weeks put together a wedding here in Portland. Rabbi Nodel at Beth Israel did the officiating, and her sister’s husband and her sister Hildegard signed the certificates. Back then we needed physical examinations, so we had our physical examinations, went to the courthouse, got our license, and moments later we were married. 

Eva’s mother planned a late lunch after the ceremony on July 25, which was my mother’s birthday. It was a nice celebration at the Lamfrom house, and all the relatives were there. We took off then to the beach. Eva’s father gave us his beautiful little car to use for the week, and we had our little honeymoon on the Oregon Coast. We came back and then had a more formal reception at the Lamfroms’. So we actually had two wedding cakes and two little bride and groom figures on top, which we still have. Then we went back to San Francisco and set up housekeeping in my apartment, which was an apartment made out of a ballroom of an old Victorian house on California Street. We paid $60 a month rent, including all utilities except telephone.

Frankel: Was it considered a lot then?
LABBY: No. Well, it was for me. At that time I was putting everything I had into building that sailboat. We just continued our honeymoon down there and had a great time. I was working still at the Veterans Administration in the psychological counseling clinic. This would have taken us from our marriage date July 25th, 1958, into 1959. All our friends here in Portland, when they found out we were getting married just two weeks or so after having been in Portland, they all thought that we “had” to get married [laughs]. So we decided to wait on that issue some respectable amount of time, and then we got to work on our family. 

Then finding ourselves with the prospect of children, we decided I should finish my PhD. We had sponsorship from our GI Bill money, and so we thought, “Where’s the best place to raise children? Portland, Oregon!” So I wrote back to my old graduate school, the University of Portland. One of my old mentors, Father William Botzum, by then was dean of the graduate school, and he said, “Of course, come back. We’ll work together.” We came back. Eva was six months pregnant by September of ‘59 when we drove up here. We drove up with everything we owned in furniture stuffed into a Ford station wagon towing a trailer with our mattresses and other odd pieces of furniture. Because Eva’s doctor said, “You can’t drive more than 150 miles a day,” it took us a long time, a long week coming up from San Francisco driving very carefully. But we were young and full of enthusiasm, and nothing was insurmountable. So for us to drive 150 miles a day, six months pregnant, all our worldly goods piled into and on top of the car, of course, doesn’t everybody? 

We stayed with Paul and Marie Lamfrom, Eva’s parents, while we looked for a situation, and the situation we were looking for was to manage a small apartment for rent, and I could go to graduate school, and I could work part time. And we did all that. We found a brand-new apartment that had not yet been fully rented, 12 units behind Fred Meyer Burlingame on SW 13th Drive. The owner/builder was well enough impressed that we could do the maintenance work. They had all new washers, dryers, everything, and I said I could fix any of those things that needed adjusting, which I occasionally did. Eva worked renting out the apartments. In January we had our baby, and we lived there very nicely while I went to graduate school. At the same time, I was working at the medical school in a psychology clinic up there to augment our income from the GI Bill money, which wasn’t very much.

In his usual way, Eva’s father — and this goes back to when we were moving up here — he said, “Put everything in boxes, and consign it to Columbia Sportswear. We’ll pay the freight.” That’s the way he was. When we got here, he gave me his Chevron gas card and said, “Spend all you need to keep your car going, and the bill will come to my office.” That was Paul Lamfrom. He was a real father. So we went to graduate school, we had our baby Lisa in January of 1960, and we stayed in that apartment. 

One day I got a phone call from somebody who said, “Would you like to work for Multnomah County Mental Health?” I said, “Yes.” “It’s on 122nd and Glisan, Northeast.” “Oh, that’s a long ways out.” We were living here on the Westside. So I went out there and it was working as a peripatetic psychiatrist, driving from one school to the next consulting with teachers and administrators about problem children, and giving psychological tests with parents’ permission and so forth. I did that for close to a year. In the meanwhile, we decided why not move out there, so we moved out and found a model home that the builder really wanted to move very quickly, and we bought it with all the furniture and everything. It was wonderful. It had been in two national magazines as a prize-winning home, and it was only two blocks from my office.

Frankel: What was unique about the model home?
LABBY: It had a clerestory window situation, so it was a vaulted ceiling, and it was all very modern, an open plan. We wanted to be very modern and open, so it suited us beautifully. The only thing we lacked was a refrigerator. Coincidentally, at that time Eva’s reparations money from Germany came in — in the huge amount of $360, I think — for her having been denied a German education [laughs]. I think that was it by the time the attorneys in Germany had taken what they needed and so forth, and here also. So we got a refrigerator. 

I stayed there for almost a year at Multnomah County Mental Health, met wonderful people. The Multnomah County health officer, Sydney Hanson, was an especially interesting man. He had been born on an old sailing ship where his father was the captain, sailing between the United States and Australia. That was right up my alley. I’m sure in my previous life I had been a sailor on an old sailing ship in the 19th century. We left our boat, by the way, in the harbor in San Rafael. 

So going back to business, I stayed there and one day I got a phone call — all these fortuitous phone calls to get better and better employment situations — from a friend in San Francisco who said that he was working, when I last left him, for Consolidated Freightways in psychological research. He was now up here in as the manager of employee relations at an electronics firm called Tektronix, which was a company I didn’t know anything about. He said, “Come on out to lunch.” 

So I went out to Beaverton one day for a lunch, and without knowing it that turned out to be an employment interview. What my friend, Tom Sloan, had in mind was that I would come out and provide psychological counseling services for the employee population, for people who had problems at home, problems at work, anything that, according to current thinking then, in 1960, would interfere with their work as a producing employee, making oscilloscopes. I had met his manager, who also had a PhD in psychology, and we had a very amicable couple of hours and a nice lunch. A few weeks later came another phone call, “Would you like to come out to Tektronix and be the employee counselor for about 10,000 people?”
 
Frankel: Were you still working on your PhD, or had you completed it?
LABBY: I was still taking classes at University of Portland in the evenings, and I was still working in my job at Multnomah County Health, and so I said, “Here’s the situation. We’re pregnant again, we have a child who is two years old, and I’m still going to school. I still have to produce income to support the family. He said, “How about this? We’ll arrive at some amicable income for you, and we’ll sponsor your PhD. Whatever you need, we’ll provide the time. If you need to go to class during the day, that’s fine. You can make it up evenings, if you want to do some evening consulting with some of our employees. We have IBM resources to take care of your statistical problems, so think about it.” I thought about it for a few weeks because we wanted to be very careful and make sure everything was all right. We negotiated a salary that seemed at the time sufficient. So I was once again commuting from 126th and Glisan, this time, out to Beaverton. Fortunately the car held up, everything worked, and for about a year that worked out nicely.

Frankel: So you clearly had to resign from Multnomah County?
LABBY: I did. I was sorry to leave them because they were lovely people, and we still saw them socially. As a matter of fact, now all these years later one of my friends from out there, another psychologist, still calls once a year for a get-together at Heidi’s out toward Mt. Hood for the old health department gang. 

So out to Tektronix. I learned that I was one of only two people in the entire corporate structure who had a door to my office. One was the corporate counsel, the attorney, and myself. Everybody else worked out in the open, including the president, Howard Vollum. I liked that kind of setup, and I enjoyed my time out there. They did everything they said, gave me all the time I wanted. I managed my own time, set up my own appointments. They said, “We don’t want you to keep any records, nothing written about any of your employees.” Over the next 13 years, that worked out very nicely. I didn’t keep any records; nothing in personnel records showed that any employee ever came to visit my office.

Frankel: But you kept your own records?
LABBY: I had only appointment books. I developed, as best I could, a pretty good memory for who I saw and what the issues were. And in telling them that I was giving them this kind of privileged relationship, I asked them to please remember also where we were in the issues we were dealing with. 

Frankel: Was this very progressive and very unusual to be told not to keep records?
LABBY: It was both. The first part that was progressive and unusual was that the owner, Howard Vollum, and his co-owner, Jack Murdock, were very staunch supporters of mental health. Jack Murdock was a very large benefactor to the clinic in Wichita, Kansas, which was psychoanalytically oriented. The name slips out of my mind for the moment. And also, Jack Murdock and Howard Vollum helped establish the Washington County Child Guidance Clinic, which was in Beaverton at that time. They helped to staff it. So it was very natural for them to want to support some kind of effort to ensure that the employee population could devote their full energies to making oscilloscopes. 

We eventually moved out to Beaverton for the summer in 1962 after all this commuting back and forth just became a drag, and we had our second child, happily another daughter, Andrea. She was born in the fall of ’61. Since we had our choice of when to deliver because Eva delivered through C-sections, we chose my father’s birthday, October 4th, and had our beautiful daughter. Then we decided it’s time to look for a more permanent home. Again, I had another mortgage possibility through the GI Bill, from the State of Oregon this time. We looked and looked through the summer, and in the fall we found this house. In the fall, the week of the Columbus Day Storm, we moved in, in October of 1962. We’ve been in the house ever since. 

I stayed at Tektronix, and Tektronix at that time was a magic name in Portland. As a result of being affiliated with Tektronix, I received many offers to do consulting, but what I did was always with the agreement of my manager and the corporate structure that I would not accept any remuneration. I learned a lot. I learned a lot about corporate structure. I learned a lot about alcohol and drug problems in business and industry and was asked to write the corporate policy for Tektronix because they didn’t have an alcohol or drug policy at that time. I became educated in pre-retirement planning and counseling, which was a very young kind of field at that time. So I immersed myself in that also and went to a number of seminars. 

As a result, outside sources began — because I was affiliated with Tektronix, and if you’re with Tektronix, you’re supposed to know everything. So I was asked by the State of Oregon to become involved in the Welfare Department’s child development programs and child daycare, and I had to educate myself. I don’t know where my resume is, it’s disappeared into papers here, but I have lists of boards and committees that again, because I was at Tektronix, I was asked to participate in. One was Metropolitan Family Services. I joined the board there and eventually became board chair. Another was Albertina Kerr Children’s Agency, joined the board there. Eva eventually joined the board there also, and we’re still very active members at Albertina Kerr, but now I think more on the gardening committee [laughs].

Frankel: Your field was clinical psychology. Was that a new field, or had clinical psychology been around for . . .?
LABBY: Clinical psychology essentially got its name and legitimacy after World War II when so many returning veterans had what’s now known as PTSD. Then we called it “battle fatigue,” and many, many boys came home severely traumatized from, essentially, the same kinds of experiences. So the Veterans Administration in the middle-to-late 1940s began offering PhD programs at veterans’ hospitals and then into universities in clinical psychology. That’s how I happened to go into the psychology program at Lewis and Clark because it showed an ever-expanding future, and the American Psychological Association was underwriting these programs and building criteria for people who wanted to become, or at least have that appellation, clinical psychologist.

Frankel: Would you say that your work at Tektronix was also in that field, or more industrial psychology?
LABBY: That’s a good question because they had their own industrial psychology group there. It was called the Human Relations Group. It was headed by John Wallin, who was a very well-known psychologist, came out of the University of Chicago Psychology Department and had met Howard Vollum and Jack Murdock at one time at a seminar. They became very impressed with John and asked him to form that Human Relations Group, which was essentially a research group. They were very obvious. They would walk into a department with a clipboard and a stopwatch, and the anxiety level would go sky high. It’s kind of the stereotypic industrial psychology picture. Tom Sloan, my manager in Human Relations — it was called Employee Relations at that time — what Tom had in mind was low profile, don’t call yourself anything to do with psychology, you’re Arnie Labby, employee counselor. And that worked beautifully. So it went from, we hoped, zero threat in the work I was doing, very low key, to a much higher level of threat when the Human Relations Group came into any department. Yes, there was that dichotomy. 

I was licensed, just as a sidebar, in California in 1958, when they were first beginning to license psychologists. They took the first 200 who were eligible and licensed them. Actually, they weren’t licensed; they were certified because that was the precursor to licensing in California. We were a sub-board of the Board of Medical Examiners in California. They wanted to keep an eye on us. Fortunately, I was licensee 144, so I got in very early. Later on, after we’d moved to Oregon, they sent me a license because licensure was then passed. We were still a sub-board of the Board of Medical Examiners until the Board of Medical Examiners was changed to the Board of Quality Assurance, and so we had parity with them. 

There was no licensure in Oregon yet. I was a member of the American Psychological Association and a member of the San Francisco Psychological Association — we were all seeking identity — and a member of the Portland Psychological Association. We met, and we had study groups, and we were seeking, again, authenticity through legislation. The far-off goal was to have parity for reimbursement through health insurance, same as physicians, which we achieved. But it took a lot of us working together, going endlessly to legislative committee meetings, working with the Oregon Psychological Association and other mental health groups here. I was also active in another group called the Oregon Academy of Professional Psychologists and went through a number of offices there, too, and the Oregon Association of Marriage and Family Counselors, and went through a number of offices there, including national office. 

All the way along we were helped in legislation by Eva. Eva had spent two legislative sessions as an administrative assistant, to a senator one time and to a representative another time. She knew her way around the state house and both houses. She knew what it took to get a bill written, sanitized by the legislative counsel’s office, who incidentally also went to Grant High School with her, so the legislative counsel was available to us nicely. She was a fierce woman who would sanitize the bill so that no legislator who sponsored it would ever be embarrassed by any of the language in it or its intent. Eva knew how we should behave at sub-committee meetings, at Ways and Means Committee meetings. She knew a lot of the names and even knew some of the lobbyists and how to work around them. She was endlessly valuable to us. Several of us who sat around and wrote bills and then had them sanitized, we were always in good shape. We had the best legislators to introduce our bills. They were people who understood what we wanted, understood the value to the public of what we wanted. No bill should ever go to the legislature unless it has value to the citizens of Oregon, positive value.

Frankel: In what year did the legislation pass and psychology was recognized as a field which insurance would cover?
LABBY: In the spring of ’73, despite many roadblocks by some people who had personal reasons for not wanting psychologists to have any authenticity. We, by then, already had certification. Certification moved to licensure with the Board of Examiners. Fortunately, I was grandfathered in — the examination was fierce — because I had already been licensed in California and had more than 15 years of clinical practice. We worked hard, and we worked cooperatively. This is important: the Oregon Psychological Association, the Portland Psychological Association, the Oregon Academy of Clinical Psychologists, even the social workers were supporting us because they knew that they would want us to support them when they went for their legislative thrust, which I think we did nicely. 

I was very active for maybe 15 years or more in psychological associations here and was appointed to the Board of Psychologist Examiners at one time, which I declined because — and this is interesting as a short sidebar — I was given a direct appointment by Tom McCall, who was the governor at the time. When I came down to be sworn in by the head of the Department of Health, who should appear but a delegate from the Oregon Psychological Association who said that even though I was on their short list to be recommended to the governor for appointment to the vacancy on the Board of Psychologist Examiners, they were not consulted by the governor when he made a direct appointment of me. Therefore, they speculated that this was an event representing patronage and accused me of making a political contribution to the governor, which I did not do, even though he and I had known each other and had been on a committee before he was governor. We worked together on a legislative committee for rewriting laws pertaining to the mentally retarded, as they were called back then, in Oregon. I worked with a legislator.

Frankel: That was on the day you were to be sworn in?
LABBY: Yes. The Oregon Psychological Association was going to bring an ethics charge against me. I said, “I hope you realize that if you bring an ethics charge against me, I am currently the chair of the Oregon Psychological Association Ethics Committee. Therefore, any charge against me cannot be dealt with locally and must go to Washington DC directly to the Ethics Committee of the American Psychological Association. Is that your intent? To save you all of that, I will decline this appointment. I don’t want anything to delay, number one, filling an appointment to the Board of Psychologist Examiners, and I don’t think that I want to spend my time having to get legal representation. So I will decline this, though it’s an honor. I don’t need honors.”

Frankel: Was it a hard decision for you to make?
LABBY: Not at all because I wanted psychology to keep moving forward in Oregon. The only honor I cared for was to be the husband of Eva and the father of our three girls; that’s all I ever want.

Frankel: So when was your third daughter born?
LABBY: Third daughter, Karen, was born just a few weeks after I got my PhD conferred. Let’s see, I passed my orals in the fall of ’64, and I was conferred in May of ’65. Karen was born in June of ’65.

Frankel: She was born to a PhD father.
LABBY: She was my gift.

Frankel: How long did you work at Tektronix?
LABBY: I worked at Tektronix — by the way, I have a lovely letter, a personal letter from Tom McCall.

Frankel: After the . . .? 
LABBY: After that debacle. He referred to the behavior of the Oregon Psychological Association as scurrilous [laughs]. It’s a very sweet, intimate letter from Tom, which I have in my letters somewhere. As time went by and I realized that the income I was getting at Tektronix, even though I had all the advantages of being a public person also, and being on all kinds of boards and committees and being invited all over the country to speak and give seminars on loss control in populations, especially alcoholism problems and drug problems, and to speak on retirement planning, I still needed to have a better income. I was constantly getting requests to do private work, which I could not do. 

Frankel: Is that common? In other words, you mentioned that you were allowed to accept consulting jobs on the condition you were not remunerated for that while you were working. Is that common?
LABBY: I don’t know if it was common, but it was my personal ethic. I didn’t ever want there to be any question, any kind of overlap. I remember there was a very large potato company called Simplot in Idaho. They make prepared potatoes for grocery stores and corporations and probably for the armed forces. They came down and took me to lunch and picked my brains about some particular personnel problems. I said, “OK, I’ll let you take me to lunch so long as it’s at a coffee shop.” And indeed we did. We went to a coffee shop, and I think the total expenditure for my lunch was something around $1.25. I thought I could justify that, and so I let them pick my brains. That was my personal ethic. I just didn’t feel comfortable doing anything like that. 

So I began looking around for possibilities of private practice. I think I felt comfortable enough to do that because I’d been out in the community and had some visibility. One of my classmates in graduate school, Loyal Marsh, was practicing downtown, and I had made referrals to him from Tektronix because I couldn’t handle all the work there. It was agreeable that I make referrals out to people in the community because Tektronix’s very liberal health plan would pay for mental health consultation at that time. That was pioneer work on their part. Loyal said, “Let’s go into practice together.” So we set that up, and in the fall of 1969 I was ready to do it.

But before that, I had discussed this at length with my manager and his manager and the vice president of operations at Tektronix, and they came up with a proposal. They said, “We don’t expect you to be making an instant living downtown. We would like you to phase out of here as you phase in to your practice downtown. Would that be agreeable with you?” I said, “That’s wonderful.” They said, “Spend whatever hours you need to downtown as you’re building, and spend the balance out here. We’ll make your salary adjusted accordingly, of course.” That worked out very nicely. Oh, they said one more thing, “If you can keep that going until you are 50 years of age, then we’ll consider you a retiree and you can have retiree benefits.” They were totally generous. 

So I left Tektronix full time in 1969. Eva would go downtown to our office. By the way, at the last minute Loyal Marsh and I decided we would have offices separate from each other, across the hall in the same building, still have our collegial relationship. But since he already had somebody working in his office taking care of all of his secretarial work and his appointment work, she couldn’t possibly do the same thing for me. So Eva, ever the efficient organizer, said, “I’ll do it for you. I’ll go down at 10:00 AM in the morning till you come down at 1:00 or 2:00 PM, so you have mornings at Tektronix. I will stay in the office from ten to two, then come home, get Karen and the girls and take care of them the balance of the afternoon after school.” That’s what we did. It worked out very nicely.

Frankel: They were all in school by then?
LABBY: Karen was four and was in preschool. All the girls were in preschool.

Frankel: What preschool did they go to?
LABBY: There were a couple of churches around here — Eva would remember their names — but they were very, very wonderful Montessori-oriented schools and the girls still remember the teachers, still remember events, still remember and have contact with some of those friends. It was really invaluable because the girls were bright. Lisa, for instance, already knew how to read and write quite well by the time she was into kindergarten, and she was giving reading and writing lessons in our attic to her younger sister, who is two years younger. No complaints. So Eva did that very nicely, and we had high school girls come here in the afternoon when the older girls got out of school, and then we would pick up Karen on the way home from work.

Eva was then working full time. That worked out beautifully; the girls never suffered. As a matter of fact, sometimes on cold, wet, rainy nights they would pop a watermelon roast [rump roast] into the oven, slather it with mustard and things and have it all ready for us with potatoes. They became very self-sufficient, and I don’t think they were abused at all by that. That was back in the days when we ate more red meat. 

So Eva operated the office, and she did it so well that the Portland Psychological Association, then the Oregon Psychological Association, then the Oregon Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, and the National Association for Marriage and Family Therapists all asked her to run an information and referral service. Eventually, we had to put her name on the door as a mental resource consultant, and she had her own practice for many years as a mental health resource person here in Portland.

Frankel: Did that require some kind of degree?
LABBY: A degree of intelligence [laughs]. She had a degree already from UCLA, a very good degree in psychology, a better psychology degree than mine from Lewis and Clark.

Frankel: How did it work with your partner who, in fact, was not a partner?
LABBY: We were only psychological partners and best friends until his demise two years ago, very close.

Frankel: But there was no competition?
LABBY: No, we actually cross-referred to each other. If there was a referral that looked to me like it was much better for Loyal Marsh — because he did very long term, very deep therapy, and I tended to feel much more comfortable in my own special areas of anxiety and depression and kind of a medically-oriented practice of working with people before, during, and after illnesses and surgery. We were very active in the Portland Academy of Hypnosis [now Oregon Society of Clinical Hypnosis] and also at the national level.

Frankel: Was that part of the education you received, the hypnosis, or was that a side thing you added to your . . .?
LABBY: That was post-graduate.

Frankel: Right. So how did you become proficient in that field?
LABBY: I took post-graduate training through the two national organizations that conducted post-graduate courses here in Portland. After I was certified as proficient, the Portland Academy of Hypnosis had its turn to hold a national annual conference here in Portland, and Eva and I were asked to set it up and be the hosts. Again, because I was working all the time, Eva quite literally set up the entire operation to have the national conference here in Portland. She arranged everything, including entertainment and hotel space and so forth. That went off very successfully, trips to Mt. Hood, cruises on the rivers. She was doing information and referral service for the national also. She was very proficient. 

People always seemed to call her, whether it was social workers, physicians, dentists, any group, hospitals would call Eva. Somehow the word got out. And she developed these long lists of people who were proficient in specific areas of psychological counseling, psychotherapy, hypnosis, marriage and family, and so forth. So she became naturally the nexus of all of this.

Frankel: So with Tektronix did you indeed continue that . . .?
LABBY: I continued with Tektronix until 1974, and in the fall of 1974 they formally said, “Would you like to retire now?” Because I was spending only a couple of mornings out there to fill in the gap, they hired a clinical social worker, a wonderful woman who was very proficient. But she preferred not to do any therapy. She was a Black woman, and she also had some responsibilities for equal opportunity and for compliance at that time. There was an interesting paradox. The company was not allowed by law to keep a record of minorities, but at the same time they were required by law to report who the minorities were. Gwen was a very skillful person and managed somehow to balance this and also to do the social work of referrals out. My agreement with her was that she was never to make a referral to me [laughs], because again, we didn’t want any appearance of patronage. That worked out fine. 

Gwen eventually, I think, hired another person, also a clinical social worker. Then I lost track over the years as Tektronix changed. The principal owners died, and the focus became somewhat different. It was purchased several years ago by Danaher Corporation, a private equity group out of Washington DC, who incidentally, I think, has the same kind of humanistic value system in supporting the insurance of those of us who are retired, a very generous health insurance program. Generous in benefits, but we pay a lot for it. 

My years at Tektronix were literally a wonderful gift to me professionally. I was exposed by virtue of having that nametag, “Oh, he’s with Tektronix.” I was exposed to so many opportunities to increase my knowledge and my contacts here in Portland, so being in private practice, we were amazingly successful. It also didn’t hurt that our name was fairly well known in professional circles through my brother Dan at the medical school, who taught generations of students. I had many people out in the medical community with name familiarity. My brother Bob was working as a drug detailer and knew every physician for miles around. So the name Labby was OK. Hopefully, the success of our practice was due to many things, and maybe from time to time, too, the fact that we gave pretty good service.

Frankel: Did you ever take on another partner? Or you stayed?
LABBY: No. Just by chance I had a very active partner in the office, Eva. I swear, more people came to see her unprofessionally than came to see me professionally. It was kind of a standing funny story that numbers of patients who came to the office would come early to see Eva and get whatever interaction going so by the time they came in to see me they were ready. And they stayed after. Sometimes I would come out after seeing my next appointment, and they were still there talking to Eva, and they became kind of conversational friends with people waiting to come in. 

It was a kind of very strange social-psychological-therapeutic community of clients who all knew each other, because Eva was the focal point and she was providing some kind of psychological chicken soup for them. It wasn’t recipes or things like that; it was garden information, exchanges of human wisdom, and being an older person — put that in lower case letters — they related so well to her and would very often share with her, much to my chagrin, information that they would say, “I didn’t get a chance to tell him. You tell him” [laughs]. I would verify that at our next meeting. 

I would do a moment or two of dictation in between seeing appointments, and then Eva would have that tape for the next morning. I’d speak into this little gadget, and she would type up those notes. I made it very clear to everybody who came into that office, “These are not my notes; they are yours. Any day that you want to see this folder that has your name on it, I’ll put it in your lap. There’s nothing in here that you shouldn’t see, or if you have questions about, we should not discuss. Ethically, I’m much more comfortable with you knowing everything that’s going on. If I have something written down in there that doesn’t seem to be an accurate perception, let’s straighten it out so that I don’t know anything about you that you don’t know.” That worked out beautifully for 26 years.

Frankel: Is that how long you had your practice?
LABBY: That’s how long we were downtown.

Frankel: Did you move elsewhere, or was that when you retired?
LABBY: We retired.

Frankel: Shall we move to the family now a little bit?
LABBY: Back to the family. The fact that we have seven grandchildren with two of our daughters, I hope attests to the kind of family life that we had and the kind of mother that Eva was to the girls to encourage them to want to be mothers. And they brought us the most wonderful sons-in-law. We couldn’t have hand picked better. Even Lisa, our oldest, who now has a second husband, we still love the first husband. She does too, fine guy. We’re in touch with Frank. Her current husband’s name is Frank also [laughs]. So we hope we had a good family life. I think one of the criteria is that we’re all still speaking to each other. They all want us to move next door. They want us to come, as our youngest in Los Angeles says, “When you come, two weeks minimum, preferably buy the house next door.” 

Frankel: So the youngest lives in LA? Where are the others?
LABBY: Lisa lives in Philadelphia. She’s currently busy all the month of September shooting a film. She’s sending us some of the rushes, and they look good.

Frankel: Is it a documentary?
LABBY: No. The current genre of film seems to have something to do with Grimm’s fairy tales and European fairy tales. She takes a spin off of that, and this is called Kinderwald, about two lost little boys during the period of Western movement from back east to out west. She’s busy shooting that and very happy. She says, “It’s raining and I love to shoot in the rain.” That takes guts. She sent us some photos of the crew. They’re all wearing rubber boots and ponchos, but they’re shooting.

Frankel: And your middle daughter, Andrea?
LABBY: Andrea, our middle daughter, lives on Bainbridge Island with her husband and their four children. The two oldest are back in college in Los Angeles. They cannot believe that there’s that much sunshine in the world.

Frankel: You were talking about your own childhood and going to your grandparents for the Jewish holidays. Did you maintain any of the Jewish tradition that you grew up with?
LABBY: I think we ended up pretty much being secular.

Frankel: After you got married, or even before?
LABBY: Even before. After my father died in 1951, I would go to religious services at Beth Israel, taking my mother, on Friday nights. But my interests were never deeply into being observant, I think because the rabbi we grew up with, Rabbi Henry Berkowitz, made such a profound impression on us that I could never see myself observing Judaism in any way but the way he did it. 

Frankel: Which was?
LABBY: Which was “Reform” — put that in quotation marks — in the way in which he defined it. Very liberal, and none of us observant. But I think my parents were also liberal; they didn’t force it on us. So I would go to Beth Israel with my mother, but I didn’t pay attention to the rabbis they had then. I’m sure that they were nice people. When Eva and I moved back to Portland, Rabbi Rose then, I think in 1959, became the rabbi. Both Eva and I tried but found ourselves feeling so distanced from Judaism as it was presented by the rabbi. I don’t believe he ever knew my name.

Frankel: But at home did you try and maintain some of the traditions?
LABBY: Yes, when the children were growing up. Absolutely. We did Friday night as often as we could.

Frankel: What did Friday night mean?
LABBY: Friday night we didn’t have a challah, we did the candles, mostly when the children were in religious school.

Frankel: So you did join, you continued to belong to Temple Beth Israel?
LABBY: I’ve been a member since before I was born; it just never occurred to me not — I was born into Beth Israel, and that’s until I’m not here any longer. We have our space already reserved at Beth Israel Cemetery. All our family’s there. There’s no question. It’s easier now because we’re a lot more comfortable with the current religious leadership. You can quote us. But the girls brought home from religious school new information to them, which they shared with us, old information to us. I think that brought back to Eva and me many of our Sunday school experiences where we had wonderful teachers. We often talk about some of those women who came from the community, especially Belle Joseph, so dedicated to taking care of us little Jewish children and making Judaism a part of our lives. I have no regrets about those experiences. And so the children brought us around to being observant when they were in religious school. When they were no longer in religious school, we would go during the High Holidays to the Lamfromm house when Paul and Marie Lamfromm were alive. We’d go for en bisen.

Frankel: En bisen is before the fast?
LABBY: Yes. So it was kind of hit or miss. Still is hit or miss. But we’re feeling much more inclined, as I said, to be positively affiliated because we really like the current leadership.

Frankel: Did your daughters have a bat mitzvah at Temple Beth Israel?
LABBY: No. Andrea was confirmed, I don’t think Lisa was, and Karen, I don’t think so. But they went for social reasons, because girls at that age felt it was very important. And they made very good friends. 

Frankel: Did they ever attend Jewish summer camp?
LABBY: Lisa went to a camp near Puyallup, Washington, to Solomon Schechter; she went one year. Yes, she did.

Frankel: And besides Shabbat, would you celebrate Passover or Hanukkah?
LABBY: Yes, Passover. This kind of goes back a couple of loops. When Lawrence Selling, my brother’s father-in-law, was alive, they always had wonderful streamlined Passovers. Some wonderful old family haggadahs, which are still around. Bud Selling would have a streamlined service. Everyone would have a wonderful time, the message would get out. All the appropriate rituals were taken care of. When Bud was no longer here, Dan took over, when he lived on Hamilton, and for his children and for all of us in the family, every year would continue the streamlined because it only was on one night. Margaret’s matzoh ball soup was amazing. We all joked that you had to hold the matzoh balls down or they would float to the ceiling [laughs].We all have wonderful memories of Passover at Dan’s house. I don’t think we have done much about it here. I think once or twice when the children were little we may have done some kind of streamlined. Eva has, I think, some German haggadahs.

Frankel: Which they brought from Germany?
LABBY: Yes.

Frankel: Now you mentioned a lot of the associations you had with professional awards and so on. Were you also involved, besides temple, with Jewish institutions?
LABBY: Not at all. They asked me to usher once, but I didn’t think that was very interesting, so I declined and was then informed that this was an honor that I had declined, and I should be ashamed of myself. So I was not asked again. I’m not a joiner of social organizations in that sense. The time that I had available to do joining, I put into professional organizations where we could move forward the agenda of the professional organization, society. There seems to be some affinity on the part — maybe this is only a social myth — some affinity on the part of Jewish men for baseball, and I consider baseball an American horror. I want nothing to do with it. It makes no sense to me. Football I class the same way. Grown-up Jewish men seem to want to do sports or play cards. Playing cards has no attraction to me as far as using my time here on Earth. They used to have “smokers.”

Frankel: What was that?
LABBY: A “smoker” is where they went to, I think, boxing. I don’t do that either, and I don’t play poker; that stuff just does nothing for me.

Frankel: Whatever happened to your yacht in . . .?
LABBY: San Francisco. Well, that’s interesting. We brought it up here in about 1961, ’62. It was being taken care of by a dear friend in San Rafael. It was in the yacht harbor. We would go down occasionally and clean it up, haul it out and clean the bottom, put it back, and my dear friend Sid Kolken would take care of it. We decided to bring it up, and we had it brought up on a truck, those big trucks that haul automobiles on the highway. It filled an entire truck. 

We had it brought up, and we had it here, and in the 1963-64 flood it washed away. It was moored in the Willamette. The water rose so high the dock floated away. I didn’t know this. I got a phone call from Zidell’s ship dismantling yard that they had seen my boat floating by and had captured it, somehow got a line onto it as it was floating by one of the wrecks they were dismantling. They had it tied up there, and they would appreciate it if I would come down and remove it. They didn’t want to feel liable. I thanked them profusely and then thought, “How am I going to do this? How am I going to get a 90-pound marine battery out through the flood waters onto that boat?” Somehow they had constructed little floating walkways so that I could maneuver this thing out. I hoisted it onboard, because I kept the battery here for the winter on charge.

Frankel: So you did it yourself?
LABBY: I did it by myself. Eva was here with the girls. Got in the boat, started the engine, checked out to make sure there weren’t too many holes in the boat. There were a couple of deep gouges, but it was floatable. I looked out into the river, and it was flowing so fast, and there were great big oil drums bobbing up and disappearing and then shooting up to the surface again, and logs floating by. I thought, “One way or another, I want to make my way down to the police dock,” which is right where the Marriot is now, just south of the Hawthorne Bridge. “I’ll throw myself on their mercy, ask if I can tie up.” 

So heart in mouth, I swung the boat out into the tide and didn’t get hit by any of the debris, stayed close to the shore, got down to the police dock, tied the boat up, went upstairs, told them my story, begged for mercy, and they said, “We don’t care. Tie up for as long as you want until things are better. Make sure your boat is secure and you’re insured” — which I was — “and we have no liability, we’re telling you right away, no liability.” They were very generous, the harbor patrol. I did that, and weeks and weeks later when the water was down, my boat was floating out nicely there. It always had floated nicely because it was very tight. There was no water inside. I put a charger on the battery, and they said I could use the electricity. I got a big trailer, hauled the boat home, hauled it up the driveway and had it here, sitting here for months and months.

Frankel: Did you use it much?
LABBY: No. It sat about nine feet high, had a big keel, and it was all propped up. Eventually, and this is interesting, I sold it because I had already bought shares into a 36-foot sailboat with some fellows at Tektronix. We preferred to sail on the Columbia. I didn’t have any masts or anything. My boat just wasn’t fit. I sold it to a fellow psychologist who wanted to sail down to Rio de Janeiro. He outfitted the boat here in Portland and sailed out through the Columbia River Bar and down the coast. Coming into San Francisco, he didn’t come in far enough south and got into a particularly shallow area called Potato Patch Shoals — because that’s where they used to dump loads of potatoes to lighten the ships who got caught there — and the mast broke. That’s my responsibility because I designed the mast too narrow, too thin. It was beautifully built, but it snapped at a point that I hadn’t counted on. So he came into Sausalito, got an aluminum mast, put back out to sea, and when he got to Newport Beach, California, decided to come ashore and make Black documentaries. He was a Black man. And that’s the last of my boat; he gave it to the Sea Scouts.

Frankel: So he never made it to Rio de Janeiro.
LABBY: The boat never made it to Rio de Janeiro. I asked a friend who knew him, my old manager at Tektronix who introduced us. I said, “Do you know if Rufus” — Rufus Butler was his name — “if he ever made it there?” “No, he’s still living in the Los Angeles area. But he gave the boat to the Sea Scouts.” If you give a boat to the Sea Scouts, you can be sure they’ll take care of it for 1,000 years. So the boat’s down there someplace, and they have it. And that’s the saga. The boat’s name was Galatea.

Frankel: The name you had given to it?
LABBY: Yes, I don’t know what it is now.

Frankel: Why that name?
Frankel: She was one of the daughters of Neptune, a sea nymph, and it was kind of a romantic name.

Frankel: Can you give us a sense of how this community in which you’ve lived for so long has changed in terms of either the Jewish community, or the ethnic groups in the community, or however you wish to address the changes?
LABBY: When I was growing up, we had mostly the immigrant community, and then later, we were enhanced by the newcomers who came because of WWII or Nazi Germany. For this population in Portland, they came at the right time. They brought wonderful Western European new blood into our community and just gave it a moon shot.

Frankel: How did it manifest itself, that moonshot?
LABBY: In the first place, it was mostly western German-Jewish culture that came, as opposed to the previous wave at the turn as the century as I understood it, my father and his family being a part of it, Eastern European people. I’m sure they were just as highly intelligent, but having been denied educational opportunities, professional and business opportunities, many of them I believe didn’t come from long lines of well-established families in terms of cultural, social, and economic backgrounds like the Lamfroms and so many others. Having had those kinds of backgrounds, they gave their children opportunities for higher education and entry into professions.

Those people then, not only the businessmen but the professionals, came into our community, and they were aspirational. They came in with that same kind of aspiration for their children, and they married into whatever our community was, the mix of German-Jewish and Eastern European. So they brought with them a much higher level of aspiration. With those expectations we see today, more than 50 years later, what’s been communicated and lived out in our community. I think it was just a marvelous opportunity for this community. 

And incidentally, in the time that Eva and I have lived here in Portland, when we returned from San Francisco to raise our children here  — because both of us, in a heartbeat, said Portland is the best place to raise children in the world, not just because we grew up here but the whole environment, clean air, clean water, clean everything, good opportunity. We left Portland pretty much because we didn’t know anybody that we cared to stay here and get married to. When we came back, Portland had art and music and literature. It had theater. Its educational level was so much higher. Is it because that all occurred in the magic five years I was gone? Or in the magic five years I was gone my perspective changed so that I could then see, both of us could see, maybe what we hadn’t seen before because our needs were different? We left here as single people, and we came back preparing to be family people and members of an active community. 

In addition, so many other people then began having splinter-group congregations. I was just reading in the new Jewish magazine, which is a killer. I love reading it. It’s one of the only magazines I think I read now from cover to cover. It’s really just outstanding. Deborah is [Deborah Moon, the editor of Oregon Jewish Life magazine] doing a fabulous job of editing. I even saw in there that you’re teaching a Talmud class. So there are so many new approaches to the concept of Judaism here. We’ve been to some bar mitzvahs and bas mitzvahs in several of them, and they’re just full of outstanding people. If I wasn’t so one-sided in my commitment to Beth Israel, which I’m not totally experiencing, I think it would be fun to go to a new one every week. 

Incidentally, some years back when Rabbi Stampfer was younger and physically much more able, we would do things together. Backpacking. He would phone me up at the office and say, “I want to go cross-country skiing. You want to go tomorrow or the next day or next week?”

Frankel: How did that connection between you and Rabbi Stampfer begin?
LABBY: I’m trying to think. Because Eva and I were very active backpackers.

Frankel: Before children or with children?
LABBY: I have been since John Selling took me when I was 16. Then later on Eva became one of the boys [laughs]. She could beat any of us up a mountain trail carrying not only her pack, but she collected rocks [laughs]. It’s just amazing. She’s strong. How this came about, Hershel Tanzer and a couple of other guys, somehow we all got together — Steve Stolzberg, who was a neurologist. I guess it was through Steve. We all decided to go backpacking down the Pacific Crest Trail. Hersh had already done the Grand Canyon, either from the top down or from the bottom up, maybe both ways, which is a tremendous feat. So I went along on that one. I only went part way and then got a stomach bug, had to come back out. I’d never had a stomach bug on the trail before. That’s no fun. 

Frankel: Was Rabbi Stampfer part of that?
LABBY: Oh, yes.

Frankel: Backpacking on the Pacific Crest Trail?
LABBY: He was up for anything. So then we socialized a bit when we could fit it in. Josh and Goldie would come over for supper. He is just indescribable, the most amazing man, truly. We’re not actively seeing him now because we’ve just gotten so busy, but we follow, we read about things that he does. I hope he lives to be 150. He and I were on a panel with Elie Wiesel here in Portland, also with that wonderful rabbi from New England who wrote When Bad Things Happen to Good People.

Frankel: Harold Kushner.
LABBY: Yes, what a sweetheart. So the four of us were on a panel at the Jewish Community Center sometime in the late ’70’s, early ’80’s. We were talking about psychological survival, and that’s how the panel was made up: Rabbi Kushner, about his son who had progeria; Elie Wiesel, who just had endless tales to tell; and Josh and I. I guess I was speaking to some specific psychological aspect. We went out to supper first and kind of planned how we would make our presentation. The stories that Elie Wiesel told about his resolve at age 14, 15 in the camp, his resolve to survive. When they would have formation in the mornings where everyone would turn out. It was just amazing. He talks so offhandedly about this. But what an impressive person. 

Again, I have been so fortunate to meet such outstanding people. I remember working at the medical school with William Sheldon, and he said one day, “I’ve got a lunch guest coming. Break some time loose if you want to have lunch with us.” It was that British Author, had a brother — I’ll think of it later, very well known. Anyway, they said, “Let’s go to lunch.” So we went into the medical school cafeteria, each had a bowl of chili, they talked, and I sat with my eyes wide open, followed them back to the office. That was my lunch with — umm, I can see he had one dead eye, and I kept staring at it [laughs].

Frankel: That’s wonderful! We were talking about you relationship with Rabbi Stampfer.
LABBY: Yes, Josh Stampfer.

Frankel: You were hiking companions and backpacking companions.
LABBY: Yes. I remember occasionally going to services at Neveh Shalom, and what was different about it, being a Conservative synagogue, was that people stood up and walked around. It was more like a social club.

Frankel: Less formality, less decorum.
LABBY: That’s it. They just came and went, stopped and talked to each other, and it kind of put a picture into my mind that — it was very much like the old First Street Shul, Shaarie Torah. People came and went, and they stopped and talked. Except men and women sat together there. I thought, “Maybe this is what Jewish life is like, as opposed to Beth Israel where you came, you sat for an hour and a half, you got it out of your system, were seen by the right people, you shook hands with the rabbi, then went home and did the same thing next Friday night.” You’d see some people in the lobby you knew and wish them a good Shabbos, and then see them the next Friday and wish them a good Shabbos again. Meanwhile, you didn’t see them in between. Going to Shaarie Torah and to Neveh Shalom was what I would think much more a Jewish life would be.

Frankel: But it never occurred to you to change congregations?
LABBY: Oh, no.

Frankel: Anything else you would like to tell us about? Your personal life, changes in the community, professional life, political events?
LABBY: We’re very liberal politically and always have been. In 1957 I remember, when Eva and I were kind of dating, she had me out ringing bells in San Francisco for the Democrats, out in the avenues where the private homes were. She was already politically active long before I was. She convinced me that we should both support Democratic party lines, which we do now. We’ve encouraged our children to vote. We sent emails to our two campus kids in Los Angeles and have reassurances that they’re registering to vote on campus and will vote. We don’t carry it any further than that. We’re not saying for whom to vote; we’ve never done that. 

Where we are now in our lives, now that I’m newly 88, I’m healthy, happy, and my most immediate goal is not to leave a pile of junk for our children to have to put into dumpsters. That’s what Eva and I are concentrating on now. Here’s a house filled with 50 years of accumulation and inherited stuff we had to deal with that nobody else wanted to deal with from relatives. Now we have to dispose of it. That is our mission for the next few years, and I think we’ll accomplish it. We’re healthy, as I said. We’re happy. We’re planning a small kind of nostalgic vacation in San Francisco next week. We’re all set for that, seeing some old friends who are still down there. 

And our lives go on. We spend all of our time with each other. We work outside until we’re tired, then we come in, eat modestly and moderately. We give all our energies, really, to our children and grandchildren. And that, we feel, is appropriate. Because what else is there? There’s just family. Since Eva has had her opportunity to share bits of her life last year — she worked all of 2011 on that project with that museum at Auxburg, and then her interview with you. I worked kind of peripherally on that Auxburg project. Both of us have gotten more of a sense of family and who’s behind us. On my mother’s side, they can go back to the 18th century, but on my father’s side, we pretty much can only go back to my grandfather’s father, who we only know as a name and where he grew up, know nothing about my grandfather’s father. We know almost nothing about my grandfather. 

So maybe sometime, if and when we have time, we’ll figure out — I don’t think it’s appropriate now to take a trip to Georgia, in Russia, and probably may never, but we’ve traveled, Eva and I, all kinds of places. We’ve traveled several times in Africa, the South Pacific, all over Europe. Wherever we decide to go, we just go. No reservations, we just go, and when we’re through we come home. We’ve found that all over the world, at least wherever we’ve gone, people are wonderful. 

We have been treated so beautifully in the most remote places. I’m sure we haven’t been to the most remote places. We thought, a couple of years ago, of taking the Trans-Siberian Railway and then were talked out of it by a friend at Reed College who was conducting those trips, who said, “If you want to see miles and miles of nothing, do it” [laughs]. I think our greatest rewards other than our children and the friends our children have — and they’ve shared their friends with us, and we’ve been taken into the families of our children’s friends — the people we’ve met all over the world who have opened their arms to us, and we’re still in active email communication with people from all over Australia, to Germany, to Switzerland, to you name it. 

Frankel: I thank you very, very much. This has been a wonderful experience.
LABBY: It has been for me. Oh, let me take a little sidebar back. In 1981 we thought it would be wonderful to have a child from somewhere else in the world come and live with us for a year. So we applied to the ASSE, American Swedish whatever it is [American Scandinavian Student Exchange], and we were sent a whole pile of applications with pictures. Our youngest, Karen, was at that time a junior in high school. Suddenly we saw a picture of the blond girl in that picture up there, the one with her arm sticking out. Sophie was from Sweden, and she was wearing a sweater with an Izod emblem. That little green alligator sold our girls on it. She was blond and blue eyed and gorgeous. We invited her, told her who we were, and she said that she had missed the year before because she hadn’t earned enough money to pay her passage, but she did this year and she accepted. So Sophie came over here in August of 1981 and stayed until August of ’82.

Frankel: Was she your youngest daughter’s age? 
LABBY: She was just a year older.

Frankel: So she was still in high school?
LABBY: She went to Beaverton High School. She graduated from Beaverton High School, then went back home and took another year of high school and graduated from Sweden. She is still our daughter. She became an art historian, has travelled all over the world writing books on art history, and is a very significant person in Sweden and, I guess, all over Europe as an art historian. We visited her and her family with our daughter Karen in 1988, far up into the reaches of Sweden. Her father’s a judge. Her mother’s on the city council. They took us in as family. We’re still in touch with them. We get letters back and forth and exchange gifts at Christmas time. Sophie is our Swedish daughter. So we actually have four daughters. I have to show you a picture.