Robert Glasgow

Fuks:  Bob, thank you for doing this.
GLASGOW: You’re very welcome.

Fuks: Let’s start, if you wouldn’t mind, with your date of birth, and then we’ll just talk.
GLASGOW: OK. I was born November 13, 1944, in Portland, at the old St. Vincent’s Hospital, which is now condominiums.

Fuks: It sure is. Your home isn’t too far from where you were born.
GLASGOW: That’s true.

Fuks: Let’s start with early life. What are your memories? You were born in Portland.
GLASGOW: Yes.

Fuks: Tell me about your childhood.
GLASGOW: My parents moved here from Brooklyn with my older siblings who had been born in Brooklyn, Sarah and Ed, who is now called Bo. My father came here in 1943 to work in the shipyards, then my mother joined him, and I was born approximately nine months after she arrived. Then Will, my youngest sibling, was born a little less than two years after that. We initially lived in two government housing projects that had been put up very rapidly for shipyard workers. One, where I was born, which is a place called University Homes, was right across the railroad tracks from where Columbia Villa is today. Columbia Villa still stands and was a number of years ago totally rehabbed. University Homes was torn down. It was a small, two-bedroom, attached unit. I think it had a hot plate [laughs] for a stove and a ringer washer. Actually, there was a laundry room in the — these buildings were built like a courtyard.

Fuks: So the laundry room was a common laundry room for multiple households?
GLASGOW: It was a common laundry room, right. And we had an icebox; we did not have a refrigerator. We probably couldn’t have afforded any of those things, but my guess is that at that point in the mid-’40s, during and shortly after the war, consumer appliances were not readily available. They probably cost a lot of money. Those became a thing of the ’50s. But anyway, that’s what we had. The milk used to get delivered to our door by the milkman. I think there was a bread man, too, for Franz Bakery or one of the bakeries. He used to let us in the back of his truck. He actually was the father of a child who was a friend of ours. They would have trays of maple bars, and when he was finished with the day he’d come by and we’d get to lick the frosting off the wax paper that the maple bars had been sitting on. We thought it was… 

Fuks: That’s a big treat.
GLASGOW: That was a huge treat. There was a big community center there, and I remember going there for activities. You could go at Christmastime, and the firemen gave everybody a gift and one thing or another. That was the first five years of my existence. We then moved to a second government housing project by Pier Park. What was that called?

Fuks: Was that also in North Portland?
GLASGOW: Also in North Portland. I went to a school for first grade called the Oregon Shipyard School that was right on the bluff, I don’t know how far from the University of Portland, but right on the bluff overlooking the river and whatever. This was a school that was a K-3 elementary school, as many schools were at the time. It was built in the round, with the playground in the center. It was obviously built for young kids because it had bathrooms right in each room. I didn’t mention this before, but my mother actually worked in the shipyards, bucking rivets.

Fuks: Really?
GLASGOW: My father learned to be a pipefitter on Liberty ships, which was something he then did later but had never done before he came out here. He had a small heating business in New York which struggled in the Depression, and obviously came out here to get a good-paying job even though it was something he had never done before. Getting a good job at the shipyards was something that thousands and thousands of people did. My mother, who you knew . . . 

Fuks: Indeed.
GLASGOW: Had no muscles ever in her life that were ever visible, no muscles in her arms. If she tried to shoot a basket, she couldn’t get it up to the rim. But she bucked rivets. So there were a lot of Rosie the Riveters.

Fuks: She was truly one of the Rosie the Riveters.
GLASGOW: Right, because of the shortage of men. My father actually wanted to go in the service, but he was too old and there were some other health issues. He was born in 1899, by the way, in Lithuania. My mother was born in Brooklyn, and both of her parents were born in Russia. 

This Oregon Shipyard School was interesting because when I read the book, maybe a decade ago or whatever, that Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote that won a Pulitzer Prize, called No Ordinary Times — the title was either Franklin and Eleanor in No Ordinary Times or No Ordinary Times: Franklin and Eleanor in the White House [it is called No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II] — it was about the buildup to World War II in terms of America’s involvement and then actually entering World War II. Because so many men were gone and women had to work, this was sort of a school that was built for the times, this secure school for little kids, and very close to the shipyard, just above Swan Island. Eleanor Roosevelt, because she was beating the drums for women to work and whatever, actually came out for the dedication of it. This is before I went there. It actually was mentioned in the book. 

We didn’t stay there that long, maybe just one school year, then we moved, which was sort of a major event in our lives. We moved to the Westside, to Southwest Fifth and Grant, and my mother took a job at the Jewish Community Center in 1951 as a secretary.

Fuks: So it was a move into basically the old South Portland neighborhood.
GLASGOW: Exactly. And as I’ve said on a couple of occasions when — I remember giving a speech at the Jewish Community Center once when I was president, about [how] that was probably the single most important event in my life and my siblings’ lives, in terms of our development. Certainly as Jews, because we were pretty isolated where we were out there, although I think we did drive in to services occasionally. For most of our lives we didn’t even have a car in our family, other than my dad had one that broke down. I guess he had it. It was still working when we lived in North Portland, but by the time we got to the Westside it sat idle in front of the house until someone towed it away at some point. When you lived on Southwest Fifth and Grant, which is now a freeway overpass, and which is just a block and a half due east of where you come off Broadway Drive, at the bottom of Broadway Drive, two blocks . . .

Fuks: Sure. That’s I-405 now.
GLASGOW: Yes. This was the old melting pot neighborhood, with the Neighborhood House, although we never went to Neighborhood House for reasons I’ll mention, but it was far enough away that we would walk to things that were closer. But by the early ’50s a whole lot of Jews had already moved up and out, first to the Grant High School area and maybe other Eastside locations and then later out to the Wilson High School area. But at the time we moved into our rented house, which was sort of like an old Victorian — it was owned by a woman named Dinah Rosen, whose grandson became, and he’s a good friend of ours, Stewart Director. She owned about 30 or 40 of these old houses that were rentals, that apparently her late husband had bought up during the war, and ultimately probably became quite wealthy from selling them or having them condemned. We lived in that house for 11 years, from 1951 to ’62, as I recall. It had plenty of room for everybody.

Fuks: How close was the JCC from you?
GLASGOW: The JCC was walking distance. The JCC was on 13th and Mill, or 13th and Montgomery, depending on which street you want to call it. It was eight blocks west and maybe another six or seven blocks north. We spent a lot of time at the old JCC. We went to Shattuck Elementary School, which is now part of Portland State. It was not quite midway between our house and the Jewish Community Center, but it was about a third of the way. A lot of the time we would be going to the J — I never called it “the J”; it’s a sort of an eastern thing to call it “the J” — we’d go to the JCC from school, from Shattuck. Maybe it was only an eight-block walk or something like that. Anyway, it didn’t seem like much. Shattuck was right on the Park Blocks.

Fuks: So the routine was go to elementary school and then at the end of the day go to the JCC?
GLASGOW: Yes, but what was included in that — and I started at Shattuck in the second grade, so I went from the second through the eighth before going to Lincoln High School. My sister Sarah, who has passed away, was five grades ahead, I think, and Bo was two grades ahead, so they started at a later point. They were farther along at Shattuck when we started. And brother Will started in kindergarten at Shattuck. So yes, we’d go to the Center, and from a very early age, maybe starting at age six, I started Hebrew school. Initially it was four days a week, and a little bus picked us up, driven by either of two partners who owned a couple of parking lots and a couple of these buses. They were Ross Cohen’s sons. They owned and operated these buses that took Hebrew school kids back and forth.

Fuks: Where was Hebrew School held?
GLASGOW: Initially, the Hebrew School we went to was in the Jewish Community Center. It was in the old Center. There were a couple of classrooms, facing 13th. They were held in a couple of those rooms. I remember watching the construction of Ahavai Sholom across the street. As a kid I was very interested in those things. It was excavated, and then there was a foundation put in. There was rebar, and then the winter came and there was snow on there. I remember going over and playing a little bit in there. I remember then when it got finished, and whatever. Ultimately, the Hebrew School classes shifted to Ahavai Sholom after it was completed. I’m not sure exactly of the timeframe. Rabbi Stampfer came and was the rabbi there and continued as the rabbi even after they built…

Fuks: Neveh Shalom.
GLASGOW: Well, the current synagogue is actually number three. The one that they built across the street from the Center in the early ’50s was fine, and then that got taken out by 405. Then they built the current one. We went to Neveh Zedek. Neveh Zedek was on Sixth and College. Shattuck Elementary School was on Broadway and College, so it was a block away. It was maybe five blocks from our house to walk to the synagogue and another block to Shattuck Elementary School and then maybe another eight blocks beyond that to get to the Jewish Community Center.

Fuks: So in a ten-block square radius, more or less, you had your home, your elementary school. The high school was relatively close.
GLASGOW: Well, that was a little further away.

Fuks: It is. Then the JCC and then your synagogue.
GLASGOW: Right, and throw in downtown Portland. Add another couple of blocks because we would often walk to downtown if it wasn’t raining, when we took the bus. We’d walk down on a Saturday to go see a triple feature, or sometimes five feature movies, at the Roundup Theater or the Blue Mouse Theater, the two that had the Westerns and other films that we liked. 

At the time we moved in — I was mentioning how this was a transitional neighborhood, and that’s what the Neighborhood House was for originally, for immigrants. At the time we moved in in 1951, every house on our block — so all four sides, which would be Grant on one side, Sherman on the north side, Fifth, where we lived, and Sixth — all the houses, so say maybe 16 to 20 houses, owned or rented, were occupied by Jews. It wouldn’t surprise me because I knew the other blocks around us. It was probably the last block in the city of Portland you could say that about. There were still Jews who lived in the neighborhood, and sometimes several on a block, but not every house. We had all those things within walking distance. In fact, the custom was during the High Holidays — and Neveh Zedek was a Conservative synagogue, which later merged with Ahavai Sholom to become Neveh Shalom, but clearly Ahavai Sholom was the bigger and stronger congregation. 

Fuks: So you were talking about Hebrew School a little bit. Originally you went four days a week.
GLASGOW: Yes. At some point it transitioned to two days a week. My brothers and I still went. I went all the way through grade school, and I didn’t get bar mitzvahed because my birthday is in November. My bar mitzvah didn’t happen until I was in the eighth grade. I was in Hebrew school the whole time and of course went to Sunday school at Neveh Zedek. That was also all walking distance. 

We spent a lot of time at the Center for a couple of reasons: its proximity, our mother worked there, and we didn’t have much money. She didn’t get paid a whole lot, but as I told somebody recently when we were talking about BB [B’nai Brith] Camp — I’m on the board now, and I guess it was after a board meeting I was discussing with Michelle Copeland, who’s the executive director — that all of us went on scholarships to the camp. Now it probably wasn’t technically a scholarship because it was a fringe benefit of the job, but we never would have gone to BB Camp but for being able to do it for free. We also went to — when we weren’t at BB Camp in the summer — day camp. 

Later we became counselors at these camps and worked there and often would go to — they might have run special camps during the school vacations during the year, not summer vacation. So we all went to those things and ultimately worked in one capacity or another as a counselor or, in the case of B’nai B’rith camp, I think my two brothers and I all worked in the kitchen because you could do that at a younger age and get paid, and you got to stay through girls’ camp. The camps were gender-segregated at the time. There was boys’ camp, two sessions, and girls’ camp. If you worked as a dishwasher, as I did two summers, you got to be there for the girls, and it was kind of nice being one of maybe five males in a hundred.

Fuks: That’s not such a bad place to be.
GLASGOW: About a hundred girls.

Fuks: Did your sister go to the girls’ camp?
GLASGOW: She went to girls’ camp. Sarah thrived there. Ultimately, Polly [Harry Policar] who was the Camp Director for many years and also the athletic director at the JCC, liked her and hired her at a young age to be the program director for at least one summer, something that was replicated by my wife, Lesley, who at a young age was the program director at B’nai B’rith Camp. But my two brothers and I, I don’t think ever were counselors. We worked in the kitchen after our camper days were over. We were involved in all manner of programs at the Center and at the camp. We did very well at the camp. They used to hand out awards every session for everything, from the top award being “Honored Camper,” senior and junior depending on your age, to who won the ping-pong tournament. 

It was a very sports-oriented camp. Polly was very sports-oriented. There was a minimum of religion. You said the brachas before and maybe after each meal, and there was some kind of a something a little special on Friday night. That was about it. It was heavily built around sports, especially in boys’ camps. There were teams, either by cabin or determined in some other way. We spent a lot of time on the softball diamond, but there were other sports like badminton, horseshoes, ping-pong, swimming, and boating. 

You could get awards for these things. Between my two brothers and I — my sister may have won some, too, but she was older and maybe she was a counselor most of the time — we had a pile of these plaques. They would be made by counselors up in the craft shop. Usually they’d be slices of a log that was maybe five inches in diameter round. It would have your name and the name of your award on it, and then it would be shellacked over it. They’re probably still around someplace, or my mother threw them out.

Fuks: That must have been really fun to receive those.
GLASGOW: We had probably, collectively, more than just about anybody because we all went for so many years and we were all honor campers. I came by mine somewhat belatedly. I had sort of a checkered start at BB Camp where I don’t think anybody would have considered me for honor camper, but at some point I said, “I’m really going to be good this session.” And I succeeded. It was a major act of discipline on my part, but I succeeded, so I got an honor camper award, which was out of close to 100 kids.

Fuks: Not breaking the family tradition is great.
GLASGOW: Right. 

Fuks: Polly was around when I first moved to Portland. I remember him as a very sweet guy.
GLASGOW: Polly was a major force in our family. We all liked him. We worked for him. I guess I’m not breaching any confidences; he’s been gone a long time. When I was a young lawyer in town in the early ’70s, he asked me to do a will for him and his wife. He used to give my mom a ride home a lot of times because it was a longer walk for her to walk home than for us. His only child, Joey, was down there, and we became good friends with him, first because he was Bo’s age, but later on Joey became a good friend of mine. Then there was Mrs. Polly, and as much as I am speaking for posterity here, she was there because they lived in a house on the campgrounds all summer. Joey didn’t get along with his mother. Not unusual, a mother-son thing. She was embarrassing to him, I’ll leave it at that. 

But Polly was a sweet guy, he was. He had been a good athlete in his time. There were a lot of these Jewish guys of the same vintage, like Harry Glickman, who became a great sports promoter here in Portland, brought the Trail Blazers here. Polly was probably never good enough to play pro ball, but he was good enough to be competitive and to beat all of us at games like softball or basketball. So we had all of those things at camp.

You go to camp and you make friends. Seattle didn’t have a camp at the time. About half of the kids that would show up during boys’ camp and girls’ camp were from Seattle, so we made these relationships with Seattle kids that we never would have had. In Lesley’s case, when she went to school at the University of Washington, a lot of these girls became her sorority sisters, that she had known from years at camp, and a lot of their husbands were people I knew because I had gone to camp with them years before.

So we did a lot at the Center. We took crafts classes, we took drama classes, we were in plays at the Center. Will and I were even in some adult plays because there was a program. Charlotte Schwartz was involved in some stuff. Elaine Cogan. So there were some adult plays that were put on. They were probably young adults at the time, but we were kids so they’d — I was in Our Town. They needed the newspaper boy. I’d be one of them. I think I was also in The Crucible.

Fuks: Interesting.
GLASGOW: Yes. I could have had an acting career, David, but I was led to believe, or told, when I went to high school, that taking drama was not academic enough. My family frowned on it. But I always regretted that because — I took other acting classes outside of the school. So the Center became the central focus of our life. We were in clubs there. They had social clubs there besides the BBYO stuff that was there. Sarah was heavily involved in BBYO and became a regional officer. I was involved to a lesser extent. Will was involved to a lesser extent. I don’t remember Bo being involved, but he probably was. They had another boy social club called Eta Phi. Well, first there were the JBs. Can you guess what that stands for?

Fuks: The JBs. The Jewish Boys.
GLASGOW: Exactly. This was for the younger guys. I just remembered it. We had T-shirts that actually said “JBs,” and we walked around with these silly things. We were Jewish Boys.

Fuks: Well, the goal was to be a NJB, right? A Nice Jewish Boy.
GLASGOW: I think we all thought we were nice anyway. In high school there was Eta Phi. It sounds like a Greek fraternity. We had cooler shirts. We met, and people that you know around town today — Stan Rosenfeld was a contemporary of mine and other people like that. We had some serious parties, dances every year. There were a couple of girls’ clubs: QED and K’maia. We had an annual thing with them. 

Fuks: So this was an alternative to, or in addition to BBYO.
GLASGOW: In addition. Some people might be in this and not BBYO, but we were in both. But I didn’t go trekking off to conventions for BBYO.

Fuks: But your social life really was at the JCC, then camp, then BBYO and Eta Phi.
GLASGOW: Yes, with this addendum: when we all got to Lincoln High School we became integrated in the social life pretty quickly. There were Jews at Lincoln, too, some of whom we never knew before because they went to Temple Beth Israel. What I was going to say before that I forgot was that you were saying that within a ten-block radius there were all these things, Jewish. During the High Holidays the custom was that children were supposed to leave during the yizkor [memorial] service. Now, I only learned as an adult that nowhere was that written. 

Fuks: I had the same experience.
GLASGOW: It was a great tradition because what we did was — Neveh Zedek was a Conservative synagogue that by today’s reckoning would be considered to be Orthodox or close to that. It was an old-fashioned Conservative synagogue. We went two days on Rosh Hashanah, all day. We went erev Rosh Hashanah. We went to Kol Nidre, and we went all day Yom Kippur and many other times during the year. 

Anyway, what we could do during that break of the yizkor service is we could walk to every synagogue in town, with the exception of Temple Beth Israel, which was a long ways away for us. I’m not sure they would have let us in. But the synagogues were very welcoming, and you’d go in, including the Sephardic synagogue, which was only a few blocks from our house. That was interesting because it sounded so different when we went in. But we had Sephardics that lived right across the street from us, so we were friendly with some Sephardics. 

Lesley and her family, when we first moved in, lived across the street and down a couple of houses. So the Veltmans and the Menashes — Barry Menashe and his siblings and parents lived right next to the Veltmans. They’re first cousins. Their grandfather, Pop Schnitzer, was a junkman with a pickup truck and went around. He was a thin, wiry guy.

Fuks: This would be Sam Schnitzer?
GLASGOW: He was the other Sam Schnitzer, not the multi-millionaire [laughs]. Well, he was related to; he was second cousins. Shmelik was his name. I always liked Shmelik. He owned these two houses. He had saved some money, owned these two houses, and either gave them to his children and their spouses, his daughter Annette and Ruth Menashe, either gave it or lent it to them and said, “You live here as long as you want.” Within a couple of years they both built houses in the West Hills. Lesley’s family built one near Wilson, and the Menashes built one that was in the Wilson neighborhood but someplace else. So they lived across the street, and actually, because we didn’t have a television set until late in the game, like ’56 or ’57, we needed a place to watch television. The Veltmans were one of the places we’d go on a Friday night. I don’t know if you remember this, but there was a whole string of shows from My Little Margie, to Topper, to Cheyenne, to Gunsmoke. I think they were all on.

Fuks: That’s classic 1950s television.
GLASGOW: They were all half-hour shows. We’d go to Lesley’s house and lie on the carpet. That was big in those days, wall-to-wall carpet. We didn’t have anything like that in the house we rented. We would watch TV and her mother would make popcorn. Sarah was a babysitter for Lesley and her brother at times. Well, they moved. They had the audacity to take the TV with them [laughs]. So there were other people. You’ll know some of these names. They weren’t all Jewish. Isaac [Kevit?] for several years lived across the street from us, across Grant Street. They were very nice. They were Greek Jewish refugees. It was the first time I saw a number tattooed on anybody’s arm when I saw it on Isaac’s mother’s arm. We would watch TV at their house for a while. This was at the point when it was just Will and I. Bo was older and not that much into TV. We were kind of hooked on it. Even after we got our own TV, because we didn’t have an outdoor aerial — we were at the foot of Broadway Drive. We got no reception. It would be 90 percent snow. Do you know what snow looks like on a TV?

Fuks: Sure.
GLASGOW: You would sit with your face glued to the TV trying to make out the images, so Isaac’s house. The Matzas, David Matza, they lived about three blocks away. We watched TV at their house for a year or two. That was an interesting household to be in. There was a lot of stuff going on there. And I’m sure some other ones. Everything was compact there. As I said, we visited all the synagogues. We’d go down to Shaarie Torah. That seemed so much different. I never quite could get it. It was Orthodox, which meant to me stricter, but there was so much more noise and mayhem down there. It was everybody making noise and wandering around and the kids running up and down. On Yom Kippur they had apples with cloves in them that they would wave in front of your face, and I thought that was sort of strange because you’re not supposed to be eating. Why are you making people feel bad? You can’t eat. 

Fuks: This is if somebody was faint? They would be …. 
GLASGOW: I don’t know. It was some custom. The kids that had these apples with cloves in them weren’t violating whatever the local rules were down there, but it just seemed out of place. It was different than ours. Ours was very proper and quiet. Then, of course, later when I ended up going to Temple [Beth Israel] as a young adult, I realized that this was totally to the opposite end, with organ music and whatever. 

All of the other accoutrements of the Jewish neighborhood were there, too. We could walk to Korsun’s Kosher Delicatessen, which later moved to Northwest Portland but which was down on First or Second Avenue. Mosler Bakery, Jewish bakery. He was a crusty old guy who you never wanted to say too much around. You were not sure what mood he’d be in. If he liked you, he’d give you the extra bagel. So we had all that. 

When we went off to high school — as I said, we were involved heavily in Lincoln High School, from being class officers to, in the case of my two brothers, they were both student body president. I was junior class president, and they were class president. We were involved heavily with other stuff at Lincoln, which also had social clubs. I don’t know if they allow them anymore in Portland Public Schools. So there were a lot of school dances to go to and one thing or another. I kept up my Eta Phi business. I may have stopped doing BBYO after my sophomore year in high school. I’m not certain. 

We were involved at Lincoln, sometimes dating Jewish girls, sometimes not dating Jewish girls. I committed a major — I don’t know if it was a sin, probably it wasn’t officially a sin, but I was president of Eta Phi at some point when I was a senior or junior in high school. I was dating a woman who was a senior, so I must have been a junior. She was very attractive; she ended up being the homecoming queen or something or other. I took her to our annual dance with the Jewish girls’ club. There were people who told me I shouldn’t do that, but she was the most special person in my life for about two months [laughs].

Fuks: Well, back then, that’s very intense.
GLASGOW: She was blond, too, natural blond. Anyway, that didn’t work out. The following year I dated a Jewish girl, and I took her. She was also the May Queen. I could be the only guy in Lincoln history who dated the May Queen at two successive May Courts.

Fuks: That’s a profound achievement.
GLASGOW: It was big to me in those days.

Fuks: I’m sure it was. 
GLASGOW: In any event, we were heavily involved in all that stuff.

Fuks: It sounds like a really rich, great childhood.
GLASGOW: But again, we were passing through the Center to do all of this. We were still involved in athletics at the Center, going up to the Center every Sunday and playing basketball. That never really stopped. When we were living on Fifth, you’d either go up to the Center to play, or if you were just doing stuff in the neighborhood, you’d walk to Shattuck. You could play on the outdoor playgrounds, the baskets. You could walk to Duniway Park, which was four or five blocks due south of us. It wasn’t part of Portland State. There was no Y next to it. And so we’d go up there and play football. So we had all that. 

Originally, the street itself was a two-way, sleepy little neighborhood street that we could go out and put wooden bases down and play ball with our own little rules about what you could do and couldn’t do, or play football out in the street. Occasionally broke a window. I don’t know how we resolved it, but I guess we resolved it at the time. Got yelled at a few times. But ultimately they made it a one-way through street, and it became too busy to play ball in the street. In the early to mid-’50s you could do that, and you could probably do that in a lot of neighborhoods then. 

There was a mixing of kids. It was interesting. Besides the Jewish kids, there were a couple of Japanese families we were really close with, and the ages ran the gambit. If we had an evening touch football game out in the street or something or other, you could have everybody from a third or fourth grader to an eighth grader or a freshman in high school or whatever. There was always a role for somebody: you could block, you could — the best guy was the quarterback. So we did a lot of that stuff. 

I sort of duplicated that when we moved into this house, where we’re sitting today, 34 years ago. This is a very hilly neighborhood. The only flat part is right in front of our house for two blocks, so it’s a good place to ride bikes. It’s a good place. When we moved in here, I remember, the first summer — my kids were six and eight, I think — I got these wooden bases. They were just square pieces of wood. Put them out there, got some old tennis balls and a whiffle bat, and all the kids — well, not all the kids — within a block or two came. They were all different ages. A couple of girls were 14, and my kids were six and eight. I was the pitcher, and they all got to hit and they had their teams. It was kind of the same thing I had done growing up, so that was good. That probably covers most of my childhood.

Fuks: How old were you when your dad passed away?
GLASGOW: Much, much older. He passed away in January of 1982, so I was 37? Is that right?

Fuks: OK. So while your mom was working at the JCC, where was he working?
GLASGOW: By that time, when I was about 13, he continued to be a steamfitter, or pipe fitter, whatever you want to call it, after World War II, and was a member of the local union. I don’t know the numbers exactly, but there were maybe 40,000 members of the union. Once they stopped building Liberty ships here, there weren’t any jobs to go around, so there were major periods of unemployment for him and other periods where the only way to get a job was to be sent by the union off someplace else, once as far as Alaska for six months.

Fuks: Wow.
GLASGOW: And Alaska was not a state.

Fuks: It was still a territory.
GLASGOW: He actually had some legal problems getting back into the country because he was not a US citizen. Anyway, the unemployment caused a lot of stress in our family, and being away on some of these jobs. 

When I was about 12, my brother Will and I were both at BB Camp as campers, and we got word from our mom. Our parents were either divorced or separated at the time, and my father was working on an oil refinery in Bellingham, Washington, and would travel back and forth, I guess, every couple of weeks with some other men from Portland who were working up there with him. They had a motel room that they shared with a couple of beds in it. Anyway, Mother called down at camp and said that our father had a massive heart attack and was in the hospital in Mt. Vernon, I think, Skagit Valley Hospital. So Will and I came home from camp, went back with these men, took the seat that our father usually had, went up there with them, and stayed in the same motel room with these men. 

We walked in the next morning — we had to find our way; our mother gave us some money — to this hospital. We each got ourselves a cherry milkshake, I believe, at the hospital, which we thought was very nice, and visited our father for the first time. Apparently, he had had another heart attack the night before, so he was pretty close to being a goner. He came alive when he saw us, literally. 

He had been short and heavy and a big smoker. He was 57 at the time, or 56, or whatever. He never fully recovered. He went back to work a couple of times; he probably shouldn’t have. He desperately wanted to get enough hours, or quarters of work in to qualify for Social Security. Ultimately, I guess he did. 

He lived in Portland for a while, and then he moved back — he had two sisters who lived in Spring Valley, New York, who we had never met before, but we did as each of us went to the East Coast to go to school. They were wonderful people. Spring Valley is a small town about 35 miles up the Hudson from New York City. At one time, I guess, it used to be mainly Jewish, this little town of eight, or ten, or 12,000 people. It had about four kosher butcher shops. By the time we got there, it was maybe half Jewish and half African-American. People would come out from the city to get fresh air. It didn’t look like a resort town to me, but I guess for people who grow up and live in New York City all year round anything is. So a lot of these people, including my two aunts, rented out rooms to people, generally older people who weren’t off taking fancy vacations. 

When I was a student at George Washington and I couldn’t afford to come home for holidays and things, I’d go up there sometimes. There were a couple of Jewish hotels that held Passover Seders. They’d fill up with people from far and wide. Once again, it was sort of a learning experience for me because they were not as disciplined, and there were people shouting and doing different things. It was sort of an East Coast thing that I wasn’t used to yet. Anyway, my father went and lived with his two sisters.

Fuks: So your mom really was the principal parent?
GLASGOW: Yes, she was the principal parent, but all of us had good relationships with our father. I think there were some times when Bo was sort of on again, off again, but he kept in touch with us and we kept in touch with him. For instance, he came back for my bar mitzvah. Just as I told you that I may have been the only guy ever to date two homecoming queens, or May Court queens, I should say, two years in a row, to be their date, I was also one of the few who had two bar mitzvahs. 

My parents, again, were either divorced or separated at the time, but they weren’t communicating really well at the time. My mother always did things well within her means, and that was important, so I was going to have a bar mitzvah on the Saturday, and there was a little old lady in the area who did the catering. Her name was Mrs. Hyman. You got tuna fish, crackers, little pieces of rye, herring, and wine. Whatever it was, it was what we were used to, and it was fine. My father, because my birthday was on a Thursday, concluded that I needed to have something on the day of my birthday. So I went early in the morning to the minyan. I think they maybe drank schnapps instead of wine [laughs].

Fuks: It was a little less formal.
GLASGOW: And I got to say the brachas. So I had a double bar mitzvah. He came to that. But he lived in Spring Valley for a number of years, and then — Lesley and I returned to Portland after I finished law school in 1969. Sarah and Nathan moved back from California sometime after that. My dad moved back here in about 1972 and lived in an apartment in Northwest Portland and then later in one of the Section Eight houses across from the temple, I think — I don’t know if its Rosenbaum Plaza or one of those — until he died ten years after that. I was, as I said before, 37 or 38 when he died.

Fuks: So you finished Lincoln High School, and then you went to GW in DC?
GLASGOW: I went to George Washington in DC. It was not part of the plan. I’m not sure I’d ever heard of GW before. If I had, it certainly wasn’t on my radar. I had applied to Columbia and the University of Chicago and Brandeis. I got into Brandeis, but no scholarship. I got turned down at Columbia, and I got waitlisted at the University of Chicago, where my older brother, Bo, was going. I didn’t get any scholarship money from any of those places. I did send in $100, or whatever the fee was to hold your place, to Brandeis. That was the plan. I had a couple of thousand dollars that I had saved up from working all these summers at BB Camp and other places. I could get through a year and then, hopefully, maybe get a scholarship or something. 

Then along came a letter that I got from Senator Maurine Neuberger’s office. Her niece was working for her at the time. Her niece was a year ahead of me at Lincoln High School and was a friend of mine. To this day, I don’t know what she knew or didn’t know about my situation, but looking back on it she must have known that I didn’t have a firm place to go to school because I got this nice letter from her — her name was Anne Goodsell —and she said, “The Senator has these patronage jobs.” 

It turns out patronage jobs cover elevator operators in the Senate and also in the House, Capitol policeman. Believe it or not, if you were 21 they would strap a gun on you with minimal training. The officers, police sergeants, lieutenants, and captains, they were all professional police, but not the other guys. The doormen at the Capitol who open the doors to the chambers, and of course the pages, who were high school kids, are patronage jobs. So every senator, and on the House side, every representative, has a certain number of these positions they can hand out. They don’t pay you. You’re paid by the sergeant of arms or whoever is paying all the staff people. 

So I got this thing in June after I graduated from high school. “We have these jobs. You could run an elevator. A lot of students come from all over, and they do it for a year or two and go to school at the same time.” She had checked it out, so she knew there were maybe five or six universities in the area. There’s Georgetown and George Washington, American University, Catholic University, a couple of others. So she checked it out and said, “GW accepts late applications.” If I’d thought about it soon enough, I probably would have applied to Georgetown.

Fuks: Well, GW is a fine school.
GLASGOW: It was fine. So I went there, lived in a dorm my first year, worked, didn’t come home at all until that summer. I couldn’t afford to come home.

Fuks: Sure, it’s 3,000 miles.
GLASGOW: I made enough money. I remember that my gross salary was $3,750 a year.

Fuks: $3,750 a year. This is when, in the ’60s?
GLASGOW: The fall of ’62. Think about it. And that was before taxes were taken out. I made enough money to pay 100% of my tuition and living cost at a private university. No one could dream of doing that now when the costs are $50-60,000 a year. I was paying room and board. My first year I lived in a dormitory, which had no meal plan. GW is an urban campus. They bought up a couple of old apartment buildings that were on or near the campus, and you ate at the local restaurants. At the Senate, when I went up there, I could eat real cheap in the Senate cafeteria, but I lost about 25 pounds in my first year of college because I thought I didn’t have enough money [laughs]. I had a dollar a day to eat on and I managed. So ultimately I stayed. It probably crossed my mind a couple of times about applying someplace else and transferring, but it worked. It was a bird in the hand. And likewise, when I went to law school, it worked.

Fuks: You got your law degree also from GW?
GLASGOW: Yes, and I did it in seven years.

Fuks: You went straight through undergraduate then the JD degree?
GLASGOW: Right. After my first year out of the dorm, I lived in apartments, either near GW or on Capitol Hill.

Fuks: So you were in DC from ’62 to ’70.
GLASGOW: To ’69.

Fuks: That’s an interesting time to have been in DC, in terms of what was going on.
GLASGOW: It was an interesting time.

Fuks: Kennedy, Johnson, right up to Nixon.
GLASGOW: That’s true. One of the things that happens when you work in the Senate or the House, you get a building pass and you kind of learn your way around. I didn’t have a lot of time going to school full time and working. It was like 32 hours a week. But then I had the travel time back and forth. So I had this building pass. I still have it, I think, with the little gold trim around the edges. It’s smaller than a 3×5 card. And it was signed by Lyndon Johnson. Why was it signed by Lyndon Johnson? Because as vice president he was president of the Senate. 

When Kennedy was assassinated, and I’m sure you remember how huge that was, and I think you were still in Detroit, but it was monumental in Washington, DC. People that I knew came from New York, came from all around. When the body was lying in state in the rotunda at the Capitol, and it was bitterly cold then, there were people coming that I knew from New York, from other places, and other people just calling me, my brothers and my sister wanting to know what was going on. They remind me from time to time about the theories I had about the assassination, which may or may not be true [laughs]. But I had a pass to get into the Capitol. This thing was so heavily guarded, and I could take people into the Senate office building, ride the subway across, flash my pass, and take them so they could get right up to the rotunda instead of waiting in this line that was ten people abreast that was from the Capitol all the way to RFK Stadium, which wasn’t called RFK Stadium at the time. It was a distance of I’m not sure how long. 

So I was ferrying people back and forth. I was very emotionally affected by the whole thing, but it was also a sort of a high. I don’t think I slept more than 12 hours in four days, if that. And watching all this stuff. I was working in the Senate office building when Ruby shot Oswald. We were watching it on TV. I was watching it with a Capitol policeman. It was a Saturday or something or other, and there was nobody else around. We were sitting there, and he’s got his desk and I have my desk, and he brought in a little TV. I saw there were balconies in the old Senate office building that were part of the building, and when the funeral cortege came from the White House up Pennsylvania Avenue and then Constitution Avenue, I think — [it] comes up on the side of the Capitol — I stood on one of these balconies and saw all of these foreign dignitaries. I remember Haile Selassie.

Fuks: From Ethiopia.
GLASGOW: From Ethiopia. The Lion of Judah. He couldn’t have been more than five feet two inches, if that, with a military type uniform on bedecked by more medals than you could possibly count. But then he was the Emperor, so — Charles De Gaulle, who had about a foot and a half on Haile Selassie, who was 6’5”, 6’6”, or something or other, everybody was there, and this horse-drawn funeral cortege came all the way up and then turned at the Capitol where the body lay in state in the Capitol rotunda. So all of those things were — and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. I was there for some of these things. 

But even when you weren’t right there, you were there, because you were close enough that it was sort of all going on around you. I sort of developed an abiding interest for politics and Washington — well, for politics — that I still have to this day. Not everyone shares that interest in politics. People in Portland talk about the Blazers now, in particular. I talk about the Blazers because I’m a sports fan, but people in Washington, DC, there’s nobody who doesn’t talk about politics. There’s a daily diet of it.

I got married to Lesley in Portland in June of 1968. I had come home the prior summer. It was only the second summer after my first year of law school. So four years of college and one year of law school, it was only the second time I had come home for the summer. I spent the summer here, and my brother Will and I — he was home from the University of Pennsylvania — we were living with my mom and my step-dad, Kurt, in their small, two-bedroom condo out on 62nd and Halsey, I think. Will was working as an activities director in the Portland Parks, handing out [inaudible] and checking out basketballs. He seemed to be able to fix us both up with dates every night, usually somebody different, none of whom were Jewish. Well, you can guess that this was not something that our mother was fond of. So when Lesley was at camp, she was the program director. I hadn’t seen Lesley in years. Even when I knew her, when she lived across the street from me, she was two and a half years younger. The age difference when . . .

Fuks: When you’re that young, yes.
GLASGOW: I was eight and she was five and a half, you know what I’m saying? She wasn’t on my radar at all. I remembered her brother better because he was just a year older than me. But the camp bus came to the JCC, which by that time was where it is now, and my mother was still working at the JCC, and she said, “Guess who I saw? I saw Lesley Veltman.” I probably said something like, “So?” She said, “Well, she looks very nice” — or very pretty or something or other — “You should ask her out.” I don’t know if my mother had ever suggested to me before that I ask a particular person out, but if she did, I’m sure I rejected the advice. But this time for some reason I said, “OK.” 

I called Lesley and it very quickly developed. We had a month or six weeks left in the summer, and we were going out every night, to her father’s great chagrin. He couldn’t go to sleep until I brought her home [laughs]. We knew we were going to get married by the end of that period of time. She had her senior year still to finish at the University of Washington and I had only finished one year of law school, so I had two more years of law school, so we knew we were going to get married the following summer. We announced that. I came home during winter break of 1967, and then we got married in June of 1968.

Fuks: Was the marriage the determining factor about your moving back to Portland, or did you always see yourself as moving back to Portland after all of that time in the east and in DC? 
GLASGOW: There were two major factors: one was Portland. As a girlfriend that I dated in my freshman year of college kept reminding me — she was from Charleston, West Virginia; she was kind of a southern girl — she said at some point, “You know, I’m sick of hearing about Portland. All you ever talk about is how nice Portland is” [laughs]. I said, “Jeez, I didn’t realize.” It dawned on me at some point that Portland is a pretty nice place to come back to. So that, and Lesley and I, obviously, were both from Portland. The other critical factor was the election of Richard Nixon. You did not want to be in Washington when your party is out of power. It’s not fun, especially when somebody as reviled as Richard Nixon is the new president. 

Fuks: Even in ’68 he was reviled.
GLASGOW: Democrats hated him from the things that he did when he was in the House. The Helen Gahagan Douglas thing, his — whatever.

Fuks: The Un-American Activities Committee, all of that.
GLASGOW: Yes. In a way, there are some similarities between him and Donald Trump. We could spend a lot of time talking about that. But the one thing I can think of, Nixon was certainly more of a policy wonk than Trump is or ever will be. I don’t think Trump really cares about policy a whole lot. But it seems like they both were, and Trump still is, very mean-spirited, and that was sort of known about him, too. But, yes, it was a brilliant time to be in Washington as a liberal Democrat to have Kennedy and then Johnson. The war in Vietnam certainly intervened and took the bloom off of a lot of new Great Society programs and everything. That’s probably one of the worst things that resulted from the war in Vietnam. Johnson’s attempt at “guns and butter” together didn’t work. Not only was the war a terrible waste, but it basically cut off all those social programs and sort of made liberalism a bad name for the next 20 years. But in any event, it wasn’t going to be fun being in Washington, so I applied for jobs out here, to law firms, and we came back.

Fuks: You came back here and got married?
GLASGOW: No, we got married the summer before. We got married in the summer of ’68, and Lesley was with me in Washington during my last year at law school and she taught. She came back to interview for teaching jobs spring vacation of the year we got married in June, so she would have come back in March, April, whatever it was. She had all these interviews set up with Washington, DC, schools, with whatever the surrounding counties were in Maryland, so she had three or four of them. The Martin Luther King assassination happened.

Fuks: Summer of ’68.
GLASGOW: No, this isn’t the summer. That was the Bobby Kennedy assassination, which followed a few months later. So Washington in particular was affected by it. The city was under martial law. Dormitories emptied out. I had gotten her a room at one of the GW dormitories, and she and I would go out to eat dinner. We went up to New York to see my father and my aunts and whatever, but we were in Washington together a couple of days. You had to get off the street by 7:00 PM at night, 7:30, whatever it was. There were military chiefs riding up and down the streets, soldiers with fixed bayonets, and parts of Washington were burned. 

One of the things that happened that was kind of interesting was the day she interviewed with the DC school district. Their offices were on K Street, which is a busy street and a lot of offices. So sometime in the afternoon, maybe 2:00 PM, 2:30, maybe as late as 3:00, we parked on the street. I had a rented car and we had done some shopping. We had a few packages in the car. I think her interview took longer than we expected; maybe she just had to wait. Because by the time we got down to the street, the car had been towed. It was towed to a police precinct on, as I recall, 14th and U Street. I don’t even remember much about the geography of Washington, but all I can tell you is that is . . .

Fuks: It’s a trek.
GLASGOW: It was worse than a trek; it was in the heart of the African-American. There is more than one African-American neighborhood because Washington is so heavily African-American, but this was one of the worst neighborhoods in DC.

Fuks: My recollection at the time was, and I grew up in Detroit — Detroit had a tough ghetto — and if you met an African-American kid from DC you called him “sir” because he was from a tougher one.
GLASGOW: OK. Well, I remember once in my first year in Washington, that fall, working on a Saturday or Sunday running elevators and deciding instead of taking the bus back down to the campus, I’m going to walk back. I didn’t know the directions or anything, and I guess I started walking the wrong way. I went through that whole neighborhood, the whole area, until I finally got righted, where I never saw a white face. Nobody bothered me, it wasn’t troubling, and I don’t know that I felt particularly scared, but it was an experience that I never, coming from Portland which is unusually white for a large city. So we had trouble getting a cab driver to take us to this precinct.

Fuks: To get your car out.
GLASGOW: To get our car out. Nobody wanted to drive out there, including African-American cab drivers. Somehow we got out there. We must have found somebody to give us a ride up there, and the police precinct was surrounded by soldiers with fixed bayonets. So we go in, we pay the fine for the tow, we get the keys to the car, and where’s the car? It’s like three blocks away on an open lot. This was daytime in probably April; it was a nice day. Everybody was out on their stoop or standing in groups on the street corners. African-Americans were deeply affected by this; everybody was. But it was scary. Nobody bothered us. Nobody said anything. We got to the car. The windows were rolled down. I don’t know why the tow guy did that. We had packages, some things we had bought, sitting on the back seat of the car. Nobody had touched them. But it was a somewhat scary event, or at least anxious. It made us anxious.

Fuks: This was an era during the country, as I recall, when there had been riots in several cities: Watts Riot in ’66, Detroit Riots in ’67. So when Dr. King was assassinated, it was an incendiary event.
GLASGOW: Some of those were before Dr. King’s, before Bobby Kennedy’s. There were major riots. It’s interesting. We had an apartment that I had rented for us before Lesley arrived that was in a little hollow. It was in an area that I had lived before because I had lived very close to either GW or to the Senate, one or the other. By the way, my last two years in Washington I didn’t run an elevator anymore; it became an intellectual burden.

It was interesting because you saw people and you talked to them. Especially because of my seniority as an elevator operator, I ultimately graduated to become the operator of the “Senators Only” elevator. Only senators and their top staff people would take this elevator. I would either listen to people talk, or I engaged in conversation with them during the floors that I took them in. I had a conversation with Teddy Kennedy about the upcoming Harvard-Yale game on the Friday morning that his brother was assassinated later in the day. I took him down to the basement to go on the subway across for a vote in the Senate, and we stood there and talked for three or four minutes about the Harvard-Yale game that was going to take place the following day. 

By the way, there were phones in all the elevators and there were also desks outside the more senior elevators with lamps and phones because we were all students, so if you had a quiet elevator you could get a lot of studying done. I got a call one day. You may remember a guy named Joe Valachi.

Fuks: Sure. The Valachi Papers.
GLASGOW: Right. Valachi was a made man in the Mafia. He was, I think, the first of the guys to break the oath, the “Omerta,” the oath of silence.

Fuks: Yes. They gave him the kiss of death.
GLASGOW: They held the Senate hearings in the Senate caucus room, which was this very big room where they did a lot of this stuff. I had an elevator near there at one time, and I just got a call. It said, “Take your elevator to the basement, turn the light off, and wait.” This was obviously under a lot of security. This elevator happened to go to — one of the places I would take people to was the caucus room. All of a sudden, coming through the door — it must have been, “Take your elevator to the ground floor — coming through the outside door was this group of very large men, burly, tall. It turned out they were US Marshals, and only after they piled on the elevator did I realize that there was somebody small in the center of the group, and that was Joe Valachi, who was quite short, had reddish hair that must have been waxed or something. It was like an old-fashioned crew cut, standing straight up. And they took him up two floors and off to the Senate caucus room. Anyway, so . . .

Fuks: Let’s make the leap from DC back to Portland. In your young career, you’re a new attorney and making a life here. Let’s talk about that era and your engagement with the community that ultimately occurred.
GLASGOW: So Lesley and I moved back here in 1969. She taught in Portland Public Schools. At some point, she stopped to get a master’s at PSU, an MAT, Masters of Arts in Teaching. She taught at Franklin and then stopped when we had kids, I think. Maybe part time there after a while, then she ultimately ended up at Lincoln High School where she taught her last 18 years until she retired about 12 years ago. 

I went to work at a law firm that had 10-12 lawyers: Dusenberry, Martin, Beatty, Bischoff and Templeton. A fellow named Jack Beatty was one of the senior partners. He later became a judge. He was Edith Green’s campaign manager. He was heavily involved in local politics. That’s sort of where the connection was made because somebody who worked for Edith Green in Washington, DC, who I played basketball with in Washington, DC, told me that this was a good firm and that I should apply there. So I started my law career, spent seven years there, became a partner, set up a firm after that with a couple of other guys for several years, and then later ended up with Black Helterline, where I was council for 17 years. 

My first formal involvement with the Jewish community was going on the JFCS board, in probably 1972, so I was three years out of law school. I liked that board a lot. Alvin Rackner was the executive director. I liked what they did. I liked the services. I didn’t mention this before, but I already knew, or I learned from my mother, that when we moved into this rented house on Fifth and Grant in 1951, most of the furniture that we had in there was from the JFCS. Long before — who is it, Liz Babener or somebody?

Fuks: Babener.
GLASGOW: Operated the community warehouse with all of this furniture.

Fuks: Roz Baebner.
GLASGOW: Roz Babener. They still were in that business somehow. Alvin remained a good friend of mine from then on. I always sort of considered him to be a mentor. He could be a little feisty at times. He was never feisty with me. But he stood his ground on issues even when it was painful, and I felt I learned some things from him. There were a lot of really — if I read off the names to you or listed the people who were on that board, they were major players in the Jewish community.

Fuks: For example?
GLASGOW: Well, there were young people like Jack Schwartz and Merritt Yoelin. There were people like Alfred Davis, Dick Davis’s father. There was a young Laura Meier, older than me but young at the time. There was Charlotte Schwartz, maybe?

Fuks: A lot of good people.
GLASGOW: A lot of good people. So I was on that board for probably six years. I had two stints on the Center board. I overlapped with JFCS. At some point I was on both boards. I was on the Center board for just a few years and didn’t really get too heavily involved. I wasn’t in the office or anything. Those were back in the days when the Center board was — every ex-president stayed on the board for life. There were people like [Milt Carl?] and [English Rosenberg?]. They were active on the board. I’ve heard this expressed by a number of people, this theory, and I subscribe to it myself, is that when you have people like that who are major figures who stay on boards for ever and ever, it sort of has the unintended consequence of suppressing the development of younger leaders. In fact, I found myself in that position much later, being on, for instance, the AJC board for a dozen years and saying, “I’ve got to get off this board.” Because new people are coming on who are really good and they sit there listening to what we few who had been around a long time say, “This is why we did it this way before,” and that sort of thing.

Fuks: Is the converse also true, that you have the opportunity to have mentorship experiences with these people?
GLASGOW: Yes. Absolutely. Later they just made this an honorary thing. I remember, years later when I became president of the Center in about — I want to say that I was president of the Center between ’90 and ’92 — that English Rosenberg still came to the meetings. Sometimes I would pick him up; he didn’t live that far away. He didn’t drive, and he had trouble walking. He would always present us with a check for $100 at every board meeting as a donation. He was really a fine gentleman. But he was just an honorary member of the board by then. Milt stopped coming at some point. 

But the bylaws got changed. Sure, mentorship. But there was always the feeling that it didn’t impact me in a negative way. There was always the feeling that people who were a half a generation older — think about it. You can think of guys like Arden Shenker, Garry Kahn. But try to think of too many more than that who have been major players in the Jewish community who were in that — I’m 71. They’d be like 80 today. I haven’t done a scientific study on this, but again, I’ve heard other people say this years ago, that it probably impacted that half generation more.

So anyway, I was on both of those boards. I really liked the JFCS board. I liked the Center board because there were a lot of substantive things going on, although as I say, I didn’t play a major role. I was more involved with JFCS. I became treasurer. If I had stayed around for another term, I probably could have become president or something. I don’t know that, but . . . 

Fuks: You were on the Federation board as well?
GLASGOW: I was on the Federation board later. You were actually head of the Allocations Committee. I went on the Center board for the second time in about 1986 until about ’96. Does that overlap with your time as head of the Allocations Committee?

Fuks: Yes.
GLASGOW: I became president between ’90 and ’92, I think, and that’s when I became a member of the Federation board by virtue of the fact that I was the Center’s president.

Fuks: Back then it was a very large board, and the officers of the constituent agencies…
GLASGOW: One of the things I did as the Center president was I went to these two annual conventions of the JCCA in Washington, DC. I remember sitting at a — the Center building had been built in ’71 or something, so it was 20 years old. It needed some things, and it hadn’t been touched. There was a capital campaign that gets forgotten, in part on purpose by people who led the Jordan Schnitzer one, because it’s easier to raise money by saying that this building hasn’t been touched in 30 years than saying we did a bunch of things ten years ago. 

But you go to these conventions, and you go to all of these sessions, and I remember I went to one on capital financing, and I remember literally writing on a napkin points as I was listening to this thing about how we could have a modest campaign and not run afoul of the Federation rules. I didn’t know for sure what things would cost, but I actually did a pretty good job of ball-parking and sort of got the ball rolling on that. I was president at the time, so I think it was [not] the best thing to make myself chairman. I needed to get help from other people, and so I asked Stan Blauer, who was the immediate past president, to be the chair, and I stayed very active in the whole thing. We did everything from getting — we had to go to — the Center is a non-conforming use — just as, I think, Cedar Sinai did, right?

Fuks: Yes. Conditional use.
GLASGOW: To expand your footprint, there’s got to be public hearings and all that sort of stuff. So one of the major projects was to add that Abraham’s Children’s wing. But we did a whole master plan with Bev Bookin, she was an urban planner, and other people. So all of those things that have been built at the Center — in the back — since, were all in the master plan so that they were approved. We had to figure out how to handle the storm drainage from Fanno Creek because we were building on more and more land, and water saturates, certainly, the soil and all that. And Fanno Creek is protected, so they don’t want water just gushing into the storm drain system into the creek because it causes erosion. This is Portland.

Fuks: Sure.
GLASGOW: So we got engineering help and construction management help from — do you know who Doug Obletz is?

Fuks: Yes. I know him.
GLASGOW: He got involved with the Cedar Sinai stuff. He very generously donated time and helped walk some of this through to get approved and everything, and ended up with this one way to deal with the runoff problem is you put in this great big pipe — maybe it was six feet in diameter; you could stand up in it — underground, and you hold water back in the heavy periods, and then there is a gate that’s electronically run that then lets it slowly seep back into the creek, or whatever.

Fuks: It’s critical for developing up in the hills there.
GLASGOW: You have to do things like that. So there was that, and the weight room there off the gym was added. That was an excellent addition. The lobby was remodeled at the time. We got Harold Schnitzer to give us some money. He had been the chair of the original building campaign to build that building. I remember inviting him over for a tour before we started because we hoped he was going to be a major donor. I bought him a kosher hot dog, and I always thought, “Jeez, I bought Harold Schnitzer a hot dog.” But Harold was always very nice to me.

Fuks: He was a great man.
GLASGOW: I always enjoyed talking to him, and I can’t tell you how many times I called to ask him if he would be the honoree for an AJC dinner, and he’d say, “Bob, you don’t need to honor me. I don’t want to be honored. I’m still going to send you a check. Honor somebody else.”

Fuks: That’s really sweet.
GLASGOW: I wouldn’t have gotten that same response from some other members of his family.

Fuks: Bob, I remember asking you to join the Cedar Sinai board after your sister passed away.
GLASGOW: You asked me to join the Allocations Committee.

Fuks: Yes, I remember that, too.
GLASGOW: I was feeling like I needed to go in a different direction at the time. 

Fuks: But I was grateful that you were on the Cedar Sinai board.
GLASGOW: Thank you. I enjoyed it, but as you know, I had some frustrations. So I was on the Federation board for two years, that’s what you asked me about. There are times when I know that I have gotten probably too passionate about positions I’ve taken on non-profit boards. The trouble was that even after I calmed down and thought about whether I did the right thing, I usually ended up thinking, “I kind of wished I hadn’t done it, but I still think that I was right” [laughs]. So I don’t know where that leaves me, but . . .

Fuks: I generally don’t make comments during these things because you’re the interviewee, but I have to tell you there have been a number of times I’ve seen you take a position like that. You were right and it wasn’t popular when you were taking the position, but it turned out to be the right position. Your integrity really was important. So I want to express thanks for that, at least for this record.
GLASGOW: Thank you. So I was on those boards. I went on the Center Board again, as I said from about ’86-’96. One of the Jewish boards I feel proudest about is — I was on the initial founding board of the Oregon Jewish Community Foundation. In fact, there was no such thing. Charlie Shiffman, this was probably a movement at the — what’s the national organization of Federations called? The Council on Jewish Federations?

Fuks: UJC [United Jewish Communities, now known as the Jewish Federations of North America].
GLASGOW: This was a thing they were promoting. Instead of every year the Jewish community through the Federation just going and raising money for an operating budget, try to have a foundation that deals with things differently, that raises money. Especially from some of the generation that might be passing away soon and had built up substantial estates, or those substantial estates would be split among many children who wouldn’t have the same impact on the Jewish community, some of whom might not be involved in the Jewish community at all. 

So a staff person came out several times from either Washington, DC, or New York. This was in the ’80s. I remember I went off that board when I started the Center thing. I remember learning about Cleveland, which of course has a much bigger Jewish community, had something like $40 million. This was an example that was given to us. The theory was sort of “if you build it, they will come,” rather than have this money either get dispersed to other generations of people or to go to someplace like the Oregon Community Foundation. 

So we talked it all through, and then Steve Cantor and I did the basic legal work, the documents. We got help from some other people, Ozzie Georges at Miller Nash [inaudible due to interfering background noise]. Emily [Georges Gottfried’s?] father. He was a wonderful guy. A couple of other lawyers in town helped who maybe knew that area better, but we modeled it after the Oregon Community Foundation, the same kind of idea with donor advisements and whatever. One of the things I remember, there were lots of documents and — going to Steve Cantor’s office or him coming to my office, there were piles of things. In fact, we often had trouble finding the conference room that was clear enough for us to move in because Merritt Yoelin was one of the partners there and he was notorious for leaving all of his papers around. So Steve and I did all this work. 

Well, then we had to sell this to the different agencies because initially this wasn’t going to be individuals putting their money in. It was going to start with principally money that other organizations, in particular constituent agencies of the Federation and synagogues, would put money in and keep it there, and then that helps attract other money. People worry about who’s got their money, who’s managing it. Even if it was a capital fund for Cedar Sinai or a synagogue or something where the foundation wasn’t going to do anything more than hold it, invest it — it was going to be 100% restricted funds for somebody else’s use — it was still important to have that. Steve and I both went around and made presentations to agencies. 

This was not an easy sell. In particular a couple of the agencies, JFCS being one of them, had a healthy amount of skepticism about their relationship with Federation and anything associated with Federation. This foundation was associated with Federation. It was initially staffed by Federation; there was no money to hire an independent director or staff. So I was involved in making the presentations to all of the agencies involved. Steve did some of them but not all of them. For some reason, he couldn’t come to a couple of them. I remember even Cedar Sinai gave him a lot of questions from board members about this whole thing. I was trying to do my best to be objective and answer questions, but I knew I was also there to be a salesman and to be an advocate at JFCS. 

As it turned out, Temple [Beth Israel] — Steve and I were also involved there trying to set up a similar foundation. They were raising money for a capital campaign as well as for an endowment to pay for more Jewish education, more maintenance of buildings, whatever. We basically came up with a proposal that was almost a carbon copy of what we’d done in setting up the Oregon Jewish Community Foundation. The temple didn’t become an official member of the foundation, largely because its then-rabbi opposed it. Ultimately, even though Steve and I made a successful presentation, and the temple board on two occasions voted in favor of doing this thing, it somehow came back for a third vote on a third occasion, and was voted down. 

Now, sometime quite a bit later the temple joined the Foundation and put its money in there. They didn’t need to have their own separate foundation, but I know that Rabbi Rose was very concerned about — “Who will have control of the money?” was a question that he asked. I remember answering it at a board meeting by saying, “You can’t use this money the same way that you use operating funds. There will be a separate board for the foundation. Whoever wants funds will have to make a separate request.” Some of the board members would be chosen by the board of the temple, and some of the members of the temple foundation would have been chosen from the new foundation board itself. There was going to be overlap, and the rabbi would be an ex-officio member of both boards. 

I think his concern was the degree of control that he wouldn’t have and access to the money would somehow be — he would have to go through more hoops. He probably would have to go through more hoops because the purpose of foundation money is different than annual operating money. Enough about that, but . . .

Fuks: What’s interesting here, Bob, is the vast number of community organizations in the Jewish community that you’ve served as a board member and as an adviser throughout your life. You were impacted as a young person by the JCC, and the infrastructure of the Jewish community was an important nurturing part of your life, and as an adult you’ve, I’d say, more than given back. You’ve really participated actively.
GLASGOW: Well, I’ve done some things in the non-Jewish community, too. I was on the Multnomah County Legal Aid board for several years and was president for two years in my early 30s. I was on that board at the same time I was on the JFCS board or the Center board, or something or other. In fact, the fellow who was the executive director at the time subsequently became my law partner when I left the firm that I started with.

But besides AJC, whose board I was on for 11 years and was president for two — and I did a lot of work there, a lot of fundraising and other things, and helped keep it alive after basically it got cut off by the national organization and became an independent affiliate, which was just a euphemistic way of saying it was independent [laughs] with no help and with no real association with national. And we survived, actually, for about five years, part of which was the Great Recession. It became an independent organization July 1 of 2008. I remember when the crash occurred in September-October of 2008. So it was pretty good to survive. It only merged, or went out of existence, whatever you want to call it, with Federation in the last year. But the three organizations besides AJC and Multnomah County Legal Aid that I’ve been most involved with, I have a real emotional connection with and a real sense of the value and mission. The Jewish Community Center, where I spent a lot of my youth and where my family spent a lot of time and got a lot of services and benefits. JFCS, same is true. And Cedar Sinai, although I have — [politically?] I needed to be there myself. Over a ten- or 12-year period, between my mother, my stepfather Kurt, Lesley’s father, and a couple of other people who are more shirttail relatives, we spent a lot of time at Cedar Sinai, and got a lot of good services, so it’s easy for me to feel . . . 

I think people get asked to be on boards all the time — I’ve been asked to be on other boards — and I know young lawyers are often told by senior partners, “You need to get involved. That’s how you get clients.” First of all, that was never my criteria for joining a board; I needed to have a personal connection or to feel that the mission was really important. Secondly, the way I acted once I got on the board, often taking difficult positions [laughs]. I was probably doing the exact opposite of what one needs to do to get clients, and as a result, I’m here to say that I probably never got a client as a result of being on a Jewish board. I probably don’t know that for a fact because I had some Jewish clients, but that’s certainly not why I went on or stayed on Jewish boards. 

I’m doing two non-profit things now. One, for the last year and a half I’ve been on the board of B’nai B’rith Camp, where as I’ve already told you, I spent a good part of my youth and I have very fond memories of. So I have a connection there. I had a little trouble getting used to the idea that it’s a broader organization now and it has year-round programming involving teams and young people that has nothing particularly to do with the camp. But they made a strategic decision, thinking that having a full time staff all year round — otherwise, you’ve got to gear up and just hire counselors in the summer and other people, and — but the camp means a lot to me. 

And doing the SMART [Start Making a Reader Today] read program out at Vestal School, which is fun to do. I actually had my last day of the year earlier this afternoon. That’s why we were meeting at 3:00 PM; I had that at 1:00. That’s where my daughter Emily is the principal. I would have probably been doing the program at Laurelhurst, where my two grandchildren are, but Emily convinced me that Laurelhurst didn’t need me as much as Vestal, which is in a poorer area that has a very mixed population that speak about 26 different languages.

Fuks: Wow! That’s impressive. It’s great that you’re doing something at your daughter’s school, too. That’s kind of a sweet thing. 
GLASGOW: But I need to have that feeling of a personal connection or feeling about the mission. If somebody said — well, I’ll tell you, this guy Jack [Beatty?], who was a mentor to me, who was a senior partner in the law firm I started with, he called me and said — and he was heavily involved in Oregon politics, as I told you before — he said, I think it was the state highway commission, “Do you want to be on the state highway commission board?” It turns out it’s probably one of the more powerful agencies in the state. I said, “Well, let me think about it.” I got back to him, and I said, “No. I don’t really care that much about what they’re doing” [laughs]. It probably would have been a very interesting thing to do, but it didn’t grab me. How do you get passionate about gravel or pavement ? Well, I actually did when we were having a thing about repaving our streets here. 

Fuks: When it’s your own street, it can be a point of passion, for sure.
GLASGOW: So …

Fuks: We’re almost out of time, so this is when I ask you, “Is there something we haven’t talked about or something that you want to say, that you want to add?”
GLASGOW: Let me just add this because I didn’t say much about it. When my family came to Portland, we didn’t have a relative that was closer than 3,000 miles. We felt kind of alone here. It was just our immediate family. [Inaudible] Jewish kids, they were the Stan Rosenfelds, and they seemed to be related to everybody in town, and they probably were. Now when I meet new Jews who come to Portland and they say, “Bob, you must be related to everybody in town.” The Veltman family. [Anne?] married into that family. And the Cogan family, that Sarah married into, has given us a very large extended family in the area. And so the community feels more like our community now than it did maybe when I was eight or nine or ten years old. 

And Lesley’s been heavily involved in the Jewish community. As you know, my sister Sarah was. Nathan has, since his retirement, in particular. [Inaudible] two brothers that lived out of town a good portion of the time, so they haven’t, but my sister-in-law Linda Veltman has. Larry has in his own professional way been involved as sort of the community mohel. So it’s been an important part of our lives. 

I think I said this to you not today but on another occasion when we were talking about doing this. When you think back — and I go back in the Jewish community, in least in terms of my memory to the early ’50s. That’s 65, 66 years ago. That’s a long time. Portland has a longer history, and the Jewish community has a longer history than that, and there are those people who go back much further, but that still covers a lot of ground. It’s interesting when you stop to think about it, how much time it covers. You’ve been here 30 years…

Fuks: 42.
GLASGOW: OK. Well, you probably felt like a newcomer when you first came and maybe for the first ten or 12 or 15 years, but you’ve got lots of stories and a lot of memories because you’ve been here through a lot of transition, too. The Portland Jewish community is no longer a backwater. I don’t know what you thought when you came here from Detroit, in terms of the Jewishness of this place, but they used to say, when they would do the search for a new executive director of a Jewish agency, “It’s hard to get people here.” It’s probably not that hard to get people here anymore.

Fuks: I don’t think so.
GLASGOW: It’s a desirable place to live, and it’s very healthy Jewish community, and I feel good about the time that I’ve put in doing things in the Jewish community.

Fuks: Bob, I want to thank you for doing this interview, and I also want to thank you for all you’ve done for the community. You earned your place in this community; you didn’t just marry into it. You made your place by being engaged and by being a leader, and I’ve always appreciated that about you, so thank you.