Saul Zaik

August: We’re going to start off this interview by asking you to please state your name, and place and date of birth.
ZAIK: My name is Saul E. Zaik. The “E” stands for Elias, my grandfather on my mother’s side. His name was Halperin.

August: And you were born where?
ZAIK: In Portland, Oregon.

August: And the date?
ZAIK: November 17, 1926, at the Children’s. A lot of babies were born at that little hospital on 18th or 19th and Kearney.

August: Do you remember the name of the hospital?
ZAIK: No, but it was a birthing hospital. The other one was close by it, Wilcox, which is a Good Samaritan site.

August: Could you tell us the makeup of your family? Your parents, siblings who lived with you?
ZAIK: First of all, my son Peter . . .

August: No, I want to go back further, to your childhood — who your parents were and your siblings.
ZAIK: Excuse me. I’m an only child. My mother’s name was Miriam Halperin Zaik. My father was David Irving Zaik.

August: How about your grandparents? Do you remember anything about either your maternal or paternal grandparents?
ZAIK: Maternal ones would be on my mother’s side, correct?

August: Correct.
ZAIK: My grandfather on that side of the family, his name was Solomon Elias Halperin. That’s where I got Elias. He was quite a connoisseur, a musician. And my grandmother’s name was Anne. They came from the old country and lived in New York, came probably in the ’60s of . . .

August: The 1800s.
ZAIK: Yes. He played a coronet in John Phillip Souza’s band, and they had what they called a casino in New York, the Star Casino, where they had prize fights, dances, you name it. It was kind of a jolly place filled with actors and so forth.

August: Do you happen to know what countries they emigrated from?
ZAIK: Either Poland or Russia, because we’re 98 percent Ashkenazi. So Eastern European.

August: And how about on your father’s side? Paternal grandparents.
ZAIK: I always thought that my grandfather Harry Zaik came from Russia, probably the Ukraine. The story was that his family wanted him to get out of Russia, which he did, and that he walked halfway across Europe. He met my grandmother, Gussy — I hope I have these names right — and the thought was that she was from Poland. They ended up in New York in a Jewish neighborhood, and the story was that he was a cap maker. There was a man in Portland — I’m terrible with names — that was helping Jewish refugees, or immigrants — all over the country, of course, in Philadelphia or wherever — and he got my grandparents on my father’s side to Portland. My father was the second child. There were two girls and two boys. I had an Aunt Gertrude, an Aunt Anne, and an Uncle Sam, the youngest, and my father, David.

August: So those are your father’s siblings. What about your mother’s siblings?
ZAIK: That was always kind of a mystery. Somehow I think my grandfather on my mother’s side was married twice, and so there were siblings on both sides, a couple of each, but my mother’s sister Sylvia was a wonderful lady who I got to know.

August: Very good. When we talked last time, you brought up someone who you called Uncle Mack. Who was that?
ZAIK: Uncle Mack was my Aunt Anne’s husband. He was also a New Yorker.

August: This is on your father’s side?
ZAIK: Yes.

August: So tell us about your relationship with Uncle Mack and how he may have influenced your life.
ZAIK: It all kind of got entangled. My Aunt Anne met Mack Jacobs in New York, and they also came to Portland. The story was that my dad did every kind of job in Portland you can think of. Sold newspapers. At 12 he was the first bellhop at what is now the Multnomah Hotel. Of course, those kids worked everywhere. My grandfather must have had a farm in the old country, and they lived with other parts of the family on Sauvie Island. I would say in the 1890s, at that point in time, the only way you could get off of that island to Portland was on the steamboat that came by once or twice a day. Of course, all those kids didn’t want to sit out on Sauvie Island in those years; they wanted to come to Portland. They had a lot of friends, and they intermixed with the Jewish community and others too. He worked for the OWR and N, the Oregon Washington Railroad and Navigation Company. Started out, I think at about 14 or 15, and he gradually became a freight claim agent.

Somehow or other my mother was coming out to Portland to visit Anne, my father’s sister. There’s a family connection there because my grandmother on my father’s side, her name was Rosen. Anyway, since he had a railroad pass, he took the train to Spokane to meet my mother. I’ve got a picture in there somewhere. He dressed in a cowboy suit — chaps, a cowboy hat, and a gun on his side — meeting her. And they eventually married in 1920. They lived in Portland for a while. I was born in 1926, and my mother never — she was a New Yorker. She pronounced orange “ahrange.” Those relatives were spirited and fun people. But anyway, somehow or other they got back to Portland in 1926, when I was born, and I guess, when I was an infant, they moved back to New York. My dad . . .

August: Was there a reason for that?
ZAIK: My mother, I think, just said, “I don’t want to stay here in this hick town anymore with your funny relatives.” I do remember being on a train going back to New York, looking ahead and seeing a train around that part of the track. Anyway, he went into partnership with somebody that was always considered a rascal, in either a men’s or a women’s store on 189th and St. Nicholas, which is in Harlem. The crash came in 1929, and his partner said, “You might as well jump off a building like everybody else because there’s nothing left.” So back they came to Portland in 1929, when I was about four or five. We moved into a house on Northwest 22nd and Marshall, living with my father’s parents, Harry and Gussy. That was at the bang of the Depression here in Portland, and he really had a hard time. He was not well, and . . .

August: You’re talking about your grandfather?
ZAIK: No, my father.

August: Your father was not well.
ZAIK: Yes. My grandfather had a secondhand store on Third and Davis, and before that he had a tailor and cleaning shop on about Sixth and Washington downtown, and he made knickers. And everybody — you know the typical Jewish sarcasm — said, “He made terrible knickers.” But anyway, with help, he started a secondhand store at Second and Davis. I used to ride my bike down there on Saturdays and spend Saturday mornings with him. Whatever work there was here was in the timber industry, so he would be buying and selling stuff for the loggers — logging tools, axes, you name it. That’s what he pursued. I used to go down there and make little signs for him to put on the shoes in the window. He had a little gas stove in the back and made lunch, and he walked from 22nd and Marshall to Second and Davis every morning, with a shopping bag, and then he would go shopping at the shopping market and walk back home.

August: How about your mother, did she work?
ZAIK: Yes, always.

August: Did she have any one thing in particular?
ZAIK: When my dad was ill in the early ’30s, at the breakout of the Depression, they had a place to live, and my mother sold cosmetics door-to-door. And my father, I still remember, he used to come home with boxes of Abba-Zaba bars. He sold candy bars wherever he could to stores. In those years we had no cars; everything was on the streetcar. I think my grandparents lived in South Portland, on my father’s side. He was born in ’97. My eldest aunt, Gertrude, married a man by the name of Harry Vines, who came later. I’ve always remembered his accent. He was a very successful, thriving businessman and started Vines Jewelry on Fourth and Washington.

August: What year was that? Roughly, if you can remember.
ZAIK: Probably right after the Depression.

August: So later on then.
ZAIK: Yes. It was very successful, and he bought a house on the corner of 22nd and Marshall, and another one next door, and moved my grandparents in. That’s where we lived, next door. They eventually sold that house and built a really nice house in Irvington, on 17th and Stanton, Northeast. And they had a Cadillac. That was a big deal. They had three kids. He was very financially successful, and traditionally he supported all the family. Uncle Sam was employed in the store, and my mother would go down and work in that store on Christmas when people were buying gifts. Harry Vines became a very noted diamond broker.

August: So while you were growing up, were your parents observant about Jewish holidays or Shabbat or anything like that? Was there much of Judaica during the time you were growing up?
ZAIK: A little bit. That kind of came from my grandparents. Maybe it wasn’t affordability, but I would go to — what’s the synagogue south of Hillsdale? With the big . . .?

August: Neveh Shalom?
ZAIK: It wasn’t Neveh Shalom. It was . . .

August: Was it a Conservative synagogue or Orthodox?
ZAIK: Conservative.

August: So it was maybe one of the synagogues that proceeded — Neveh Shalom was the combination of two synagogues. There was Neveh Zedek, and there was another which I don’t know. But that’s okay.
ZAIK: They talked about that last night on that historic program. But I would go with him on the holidays . . .

August: So this was your grandfather? Or your father?
ZAIK: I would walk with him to . . .

August: To Hillsdale from Northwest?
ZAIK: Well, from 22nd and Marshall.

August: To Hillsdale?
ZAIK: No, it was . . .

August: Was it closer into town?
ZAIK: It was on Sixth Street.

August: So it was more downtown.
ZAIK: It was down by Portland State.

August: Okay. So anyway, did you go to Hebrew School or have any kind of religious training?
ZAIK: I loved my grandparents. He would never talk about where he came from. “Don’t ask. You’re lucky to be here.” That was what I would get from him.

August: How about for you, though, did you have any religious school training?
ZAIK: I’ll move on. Things got a little better for my dad. He got to be a traveling salesman. And what they did then, a group of two or three guys, one would have a car and they would combine their lines and travel together. He sold girls’ — what was the name of that firm in the early years? It was a name you couldn’t forget. Well, things got a little better, and eventually he got the BVD line [underwear, later bought by Fruit of the Loom]. They made women’s apparel too. And Ship and Shore blouses. We didn’t really live in that house for more than a couple, three years. We moved over to Irvington and rented a big flat; it was a big apartment. I started at Irvington School, and my mother’s wish was to go to Temple Beth [Israel] — the building was built when I was born, the same year, ’26 — because my Uncle Mack and Anne could afford to go there, and of course my Uncle Harry and that family. So I went to Sunday school, Rabbi Berkowitz, and I got confirmed.

August: Were you bar mitzvahed?
ZAIK: They didn’t bar mitzvah in Reform at Temple Beth.

August: Really?
ZAIK: The patriarch Goldsmith, Tom Goldsmith, who is my age, was in that Sunday school class. David Lipman. I can remember all those kids were in — Herb Goodman, all went to Temple Beth. At that time, the only thing that was built was the sanctuary. There was no Sunday school, and the administration was a small little office in the back of the sanctuary.

August: So where were classes held?
ZAIK: In a building that Herman Brookman designed, an Episcopal school on about 14th and Alder, in that neighborhood where the freeway crashes through there now.

August: So it was a separate building?
ZAIK: Yes, which they rented or leased.

August: So you evidently developed a circle of friends because of going through your education together?
ZAIK: Most of us kids had more means than my parents, who were doing a little better. I went to Benson. I’d ride my bike over to their house on 29th and Brazee, which was a part of Irvington, but my aunt would say, “Oh, we live in the Alameda” [chuckles]. Most of us kids in that group either went to Grant or Lincoln High School. I went to Benson at the encouragement of my Uncle Mack, who would talk to me — I must have been 13 years old, 14. He’d say, “You should go to Benson High School and take all the courses you can in math and science.” So I did.

August: That became a big influence on your future. At the time, you probably didn’t know it.
ZAIK: I didn’t know it. But I loved to take things apart and I still do. There were only two or three Jewish kids at Benson High School. We had one black kid, Art Shepard, who was a basketball player.

August: During your early years in primary school, and I don’t know if there was a middle or a junior high school in between — what was the school? You went to Irvington, you said?
ZAIK: Yes, Irvington.

August: Was there something between Irvington and Benson, or did you go right from Irvington to Benson?
ZAIK: No, it was all in the same neighborhood.

August: So during that period of time that you just mentioned, you were maybe one of just a small number of Jewish kids in that school. Do you recall any instances that stick out in your mind about antisemitism?
ZAIK: There were a lot of Jewish kids in Irvington, in that district. I never had the feeling of any religious prejudice. We moved to San Francisco when I was nine, and that was a very diversified — we lived on Fillmore and Jackson, a block from Pacific Avenue, but my mother always said, “Sticks and stones can break your bones, but names will never hurt you.” So that was my attitude.

August: But did you ever hear anybody call you names?
ZAIK: Once, at Irvington, on the playground. I smashed him, and he was a foot taller than I was. My comment to him was, “Don’t mess with me. I’m built low to the ground for speed and deception.” But anyway, I didn’t feel – and I got really involved in Scouting when I was nine years old in San Francisco, in Cub Scouting, and then I continued. I became an Eagle Scout when I was 16 or 17.

August: So you transferred your Scouting to Portland when your family moved back here.
ZAIK: Yes, we lived there for two or three years.

August: I want to backtrack a little bit there because you didn’t state specifically why your family moved to San Francisco.
ZAIK: They moved in ’32, and so I started at Irvington for a year or so. They moved in ’32 because times got tough . . .

August: Was this because of the Depression?
ZAIK: Yes, and the fact that although they worked hard, door-to-door candy bars and whatever — and we had an Uncle Sam Summers who had a beauty supply retail business in San Francisco and offered him a job. So he went there ahead of us and arranged to get us an apartment. We took the train and lived in San Francisco. I went to Pacific Heights grade school.

August: So you were there for maybe three years and then your parents decided to move back to Portland?
ZAIK: Yes, and actually I was thinking about it because I went to a Reform Sunday school on California Street. It has a name like Beth Israel. Obviously, it’s an old Reform [Sherith Israel, founded in 1851] . . .

August: Yes, I think I’m familiar with that one. I know what you’re talking about. Okay. I’m going to pick up the thread on the Boy Scouting again. So you moved back from San Francisco, you were already a Boy Scout, you enjoyed that and you continued to pursue that when you moved back. The troop that you belonged to, where was that located?
ZAIK: At Irvington.

August: Right in the school itself?
ZAIK: Yes. There were two troops, Troop 85 and Troop 48, at Irvington School, and Mr. Huggins, who was the father of Chet Huggins, who lived in our neighborhood, was a volunteer with that troop. We’d pack a lunch, he’d take us on the streetcar, and we’d hike through Forest Heights, at the end of the line on that Willamette Heights streetcar.

August: And you went all the way up to Eagle Scout. Did you remain with that troop all the way through until you finished your Eagle Scouting?
ZAIK: I was born in November, and the first summer I was 13 and I had a paper route. I earned enough money to go to Camp Meriwether, a Scout camp, which is still there, near Cape Lookout. I looked forward to doing that so much, and so I pursued it as I got older. I got to be a Star Scout and a Life Scout, a counselor, a leader.

August: Would you say that Scouting, or the outdoors, almost became your religion?
ZAIK: Right. And David Lipman was a good friend there, and a guy who I still see now, John Shipley, who has a bag business here in Portland. He is my age. he’s part of a group that we have that has lunch at the Dockside Restaurant on Front Avenue.

August: I was just there the other week.
ZAIK: Harry Glickman comes. Bob Tobias, who’s — they were connected with [inaudible name] in the tire business. The two Black brothers. The one who started Black and Company [a brokerage firm], he was a stockbroker. There are about eight of us that — I haven’t been there in two or three weeks.

August: So these are all friends that date back to Scouting?
ZAIK: We started in Scouting, and went on to being in the Sammy house [Sigma Alpha Mu, which was then an exclusively Jewish fraternity] at U of O. It was really kind of — hey, kid grew up, went to Benson High School, was involved in Scouting, no girls, I had no social life. I can’t remember any good friends from high school except one, who was one of the founders of Tectronics.

August: So most of these friends actually developed from your friendships in Irvington rather than at Benson?
ZAIK: Yes, Irvington, and then U of O.

August: I don’t want to jump too far ahead to U of O because I want to make sure we’ve covered through high school. You said that Uncle Mack encouraged you to take all the math and science courses while you were at Benson. Were they your favorite courses, or were there other courses you liked even better?
ZAIK: Here’s the interesting thing about the education at Benson in those years — your freshman year, you were in the foundry. This was hands-on. We packed molds and cast objects in our first year. Then we moved from there to what they called the blacksmith’s shop. I can’t remember if it was one term or two terms in high school. In the blacksmith’s shop, we had to buy a hammer, and we had to forge, and we made little twisty things like that firepower over there, and learned how things are made by a blacksmith. In the third year, we went to the machine shop. We were given a chunk of steel about two inches by two inches by a half-inch thick that had come out of a mold. Our first month or so, with a hand file, we had to file that absolutely flat. The teacher would come by and check it with an instrument. And then, your next term is you’ve got to file one of those sides, which has a right angle to it, perfectly flat, and a perfect 90-degree angle. And some of those things went from this size to about that size [laughing]. Next we went into carpentry shop and we made wood patterns that were taken into the foundry in — I know I’m running this out, but we had a course in plumbing, a course in electric –

August: So it was real, everyday stuff.
ZAIK: Yes.

August: I remember reading that, along the way, you loved to sketch and draw, and you were particularly taken with a 1936 Ford.
ZAIK: Right.

August: You were only ten at the time.
ZAIK: When we came back from San Francisco, it was 1936. When we first came back, we lived back in the house with our grandparents again for about a year before we moved over to Irvington, and that’s when I started to draw a little bit. Started drawing more, sketching, and a kid that lived in the apartment next door in the flats where we lived — that was owned by a Dr. Rosenfeld, that little apartment. But anyway, they came from Canada, and he had a Canadian accent. We went to a movie with Cary Grant, with the British army in India . . .

August: Let’s go back to the sketching and drawing.
ZAIK: Okay. But we saw that movie, and we would come back and draw scenes of that movie, of uniforms, with the pith helmets, and camels.

August: Okay. So when you went to Benson, did you carry that interest in sketching and drawing any further? Did you take any art courses?
ZAIK: We had a little mechanical drawing. I don’t remember much of that because that was T-square. It started to become engineering. But I continued to sketch cars and airplanes and . . .

August: That’s great.
ZAIK: I could do your face.

August: We’ll save that for later [laughs].
ZAIK: I don’t think I can now, but . . .

August: But you could at one time.
ZAIK: Yes.

August: Of all the people you can think of, and maybe you already answered this question, who do you think had the greatest influence on your life when you were growing up?
ZAIK: One of them was my Uncle Sam.

August: Could you describe that influence?
ZAIK: My Uncle Sam was sort of a dream. He married a gal from around the corner. He was single, worked for his brother-in-law in that store, and he had a 1931 Chevrolet with a blue body and black fenders and yellow spoke wheels. I still remember that. Gosh, that was a beautiful car. One of his best friends was Harry Glickman’s brother Reuben Glickman. God only knows what he did. Shot dice or — you know, South Portland. But my Uncle Sam, he bought a house in 1934 with his wife, who was not Jewish, so he was really less of that family. It sort of left after my grandparents.

August: He was one of your father’s brothers?
ZAIK: Yes. And like my father, they were too busy doing other stuff.

August: But you said he was an influence. Where did that come from?
ZAIK: He had an airplane.

August: He owned an airplane?
ZAIK: Yes, a little Piper, at [Schroe’s?] Airport out in Troutdale. I’d go out there and he’d take me flying. I was invited to go deer hunting with some friends of mine, and I’ve never been a gun man. I told my Uncle Sam, and he said, “Okay, I’m going to give you my rifle to take hunting, but before that, we’re going to spend a lot of time showing you how to use this and what not to do.” It was things like that. He was, early on, an outdoor fellow. Sam Zaik. But everybody smoked, and he died at a young age.

August: I think we have taken everything up through high school. If I remember the chronology correctly, by the time you finished high school, World War II had started. So we’ll just go one step further: tell us what happened at the end of high school.
ZAIK: Summer of 1942, right after December ’41, Camp Meriwether did not open. It was on the coast. That’s when the Japanese were shelling Astoria or whatever the fort was there, so there was no camp. There was in ’43, and that’s when I was 15?

August: You were born in ’26. You would have been 17.
ZAIK: Well, I was 17 in ’43. That was the end of my junior year.

August: So we’re going to pick up where we left off at the end of your junior year of high school.
ZAIK: My senior year, ’43, I bought a 1934 Chevrolet coupe with a rumble seat for $100.

August: Where did you get the money for that?
ZAIK: From my paper route. And I started working on it, probably didn’t help it any. But anyway, the next year, Camp Meriwether opened up again, and several of us, going back to that group from Temple Beth . . .

August: These are your Jewish friends you had developed from your . . .
ZAIK: A couple of them were counselors, and I was a Scoutmaster of one of the groups that summer. We got involved in the Sea Scouts before that, that year. With the Sea Scouts we had sailboats on the Columbia River, and I got interested in that. I liked the uniform. And so I said, “Well, I can join the Navy. I’ve got the uniform already.” So I enlisted.

August: This was after high school though? Or before you graduated?
ZAIK: That summer, after Camp Meriwether.

August: You did graduate from Benson, right?
ZAIK: Yes.

August: So this took place following your graduation.
ZAIK: Right. Bang, I went in the Navy in November of ’44 and qualified to go to radio tech school, learning about repairing radar and all kinds of — we didn’t even call it electronics; we called it radio equipment. They sent me to Chicago in about March or April. It was very cold and I was in pre-radio, which was a three-month deal, and then you went into — it was a year. It would be a year’s training. Pre-radio, basic radio, and on. I loved Chicago, but I hated the weather. It was so damn hot. So basically, they transferred me out. They said, “Okay, you’re going to go to San Francisco and be a radioman on a transport.” And this is how I got back to San Francisco. I’d left there ten, 12 years before that?

August: So everything came full circle.
ZAIK: Yes. Architecture wasn’t even a — I just happened to an architect.

August: Right. We’ll explore that in our next session. I think I’m going to wrap up for today. We’ve covered a lot of territory. We’ll pick up with your wartime experiences and go on from there to your education after your military service. Are there any other comments or things that you’d like to say?
ZAIK: I can’t express how much I got from my two years in the service. I got my college education in architecture. That included board and room, my tuition . . .

August: You’re talking about the GI Bill now?
ZAIK: Yes, the GI Bill. I got a state bonus, and then they had a federal bonus, and we had a VA loan here of $13,500 to build this house. I have no complaints.

August: And that’s going to end the interview for today, April 16.

END SESSION ONE AND BEGIN SESSION TWO
Date: April 23, 2019

August: Today is April 23, 2019, and this is part two of my interview with Saul Zaik. My name is David August. We’re going to pick up where we left off last week. Good afternoon, Saul. How are you?
ZAIK: I’m very good now. Started off not good in the morning, but I’m okay.

August: Good. One of the things I forgot to ask you last time was, as you were growing up and through high school, did you belong to any Jewish organizations like AZA? Or any youth organizations geared towards Jewish kids?
ZAIK: I was shy of most organizations, period.

August: I’m sorry, you . . .
ZAIK: I was never a seeker of organizations, Jewish or non-Jewish.

August: Except for Boy Scouts.
ZAIK: Yes. Well, why would I say . . .

August: That would be the main organization, but as far as any Jewish organizations, not so much.
ZAIK: Right.

August: Okay. That’s what I wanted to check. And we talked about one or two people who you said were a pretty big influence on your life. Your Uncle Mack, and also in a previous conversation you mentioned a cousin that you thought you were pretty close to and who was an influence on your life. Can you recall who that cousin might be?
ZAIK: I need to take a minute and think. Maybe Jerry Vines.

August: That would have been the son of Harry Vines?
ZAIK: Yes.

August: And Harry’s wife’s name is?
ZAIK: Gert.

August: Gert. And Gert was . . .
ZAIK: Zaik.

August: That was your sister, Gert.
ZAIK: No, that was my mother’s . . .

August: Oh, your Aunt Gert.
ZAIK: My aunt.

August: That’s right. So tell me a little bit about Jerry Vines?
ZAIK: He was a good-looking guy. He probably was six or seven years older than I. He went to Duran High School, and sometimes I got some of his leftover — he was a very good dresser for that era. He went to Reed College and graduated in 1940 or ’41. He was pre-med. His direction was to be a doctor after graduating from Reed, and it was very difficult for Jews to get into medical schools in that era. So he enlisted in the Navy as an enlisted sailor like the rest of us. He was probably 20 after graduating from Reed, and could not get into medical school, so he was a hospital apprentice, that’s what they were called — HA, HA2, or HA3 — hospital apprentice third class. They’re basically medics. Being close to the Marine Corps, he would have landed at all those major battles, but he was on the battleship California that I think was bombed in Pearl Harbor, somewhat repaired, went back, and was really badly shot out. That was a tremendous experience for him. He talked to me about that. A third of the crew was massacred, the ship was on fire, and that was his job. He only talked to me about that once.

He always asked me, “Do you still have my shoes, the shoes that I gave you?” They were really nice English brogues. But anyway, he married a local gal here, and it was a tough thing: he never could pursue medical education at the time. Got married, had a wonderful daughter, and worked for his father, which he hated. Harry also had a pawnshop. I don’t know whether I ought to talk about these things. But he did that, he worked in the pawnshop for a few years, and then left and moved to Phoenix. He was a good athlete, he was a golfer, and he went to work for the Arizona, not driver’s school, but Arizona licensing.

August: He ended up working for Arizona state government?
ZAIK: Yes, worked for the state licensing.

August: Is he still alive?
ZAIK: No. He always had back trouble, and he passed away fairly young.

August: Did you stay in touch with him? When he came back from the war you were in touch with him, but when he moved to Arizona, did you continue stay in touch?
ZAIK: We did stay in touch, but we were in different worlds.

August: Sure. I remember we ended last session with you signing up and enlisting in the Navy around 1943.
ZAIK: ’44. December.

August: So what was your parents’ reaction at the time?
ZAIK: I graduated from Benson High School, spent that summer as a counselor at Scout camp, at Camp Meriwether, and I enlisted in the Navy because my sort of major at Benson High School — they didn’t call it electronics; they called it radio then. Electronics was pretty high tech. I took the Eddy test when I was a senior at Benson . . .

August: What is the Eddy test?
ZAIK: The Eddy test was to see if you were qualified to go to radio tech school in the Navy. I didn’t pass it. I don’t know what kind of a student I was, but taking tests wasn’t one of my greater skills. Maybe other people wouldn’t agree with that. They would say, “You were very good at some things.”

But anyway, I went to boot camp in San Diego, looked about like that [must make a hand gesture to describe his body type]. All of a sudden, I met 17-year-old kids from Texas, Alabama, all over. Predominantly, it seemed like the Navy all came from Oklahoma or Texas. But anyway, that was a ten-week boot camp, and you learned a little bit about everything. How to put out fires on ships. We got marched out to Mission Bay. They had a big, covered swimming pool out there, and we jumped off of a 25-foot board. The water was on fire. We learned how to jump in the water that was on fire and save yourself.

Two or three weeks after that, I got very ill after donating blood at the naval hospital in San Diego, big hospital. After giving a pint of blood, two weeks later I was getting blood because I caught pneumonia. And that was just at the start of penicillin. In those years, they gave you a shot in the rear end every four hours. It was a miracle drug at that time. I got through that and went back to boot camp, and I was slated to go to Coronado and learn how to drive a landing craft. At the last minute they said, “No, you’re going to Chicago. You’re going to radio tech school.” So I went to Chicago and I started, and I didn’t do real well. I could never understand how you could send an electron through a wire and have a light bulb.

But anyway, I was at Great Lakes after they transferred me again, about August of 1945. I was there scrubbing hardwood floors in the barracks, hot soap and water, when they came running through and said, “The war’s over! We’re all going to go home.” So then they sent me to work at one of the big mess halls at Great Lakes Naval Training Station, and I was in charge of scrubbing those big flat pans that they shoved in the ovens to bake scraps of potatoes. Fed 25,000 mess hall style. Served 25,000 sailors. All the cooks were all predominantly Black — if that’s the right terminology — at that time. That was not a very good life. It was very restrictive and they were put in their own field, I suppose cooks and other things, so I really never developed kind of a, “Hey, Mac. How’re doing?” kind of a thing with those guys. I was a little guy, and they just kept bringing me more of those pans to scrape.

August: Did you ever get to serve overseas?
ZAIK: I met one good friend that was in radio tech school with me. We were in a transfer unit waiting to go somewhere, and he said that there were some beautiful lakes around Milwaukee. I wish I could remember the name of that lake. But you know how it went, we just got out on North Shore and put our thumbs out. Spent the weekend there . . .

August: That might have been Lake Michigan?
ZAIK: No, it was a small lake.

August: That’s okay.
ZAIK: This was the land of lakes. I had never been — I said, “This reminds of me of Lake Oswego in Portland, Oregon.” Anyway, they had a lovely dance hall on the lake, and Ron Monroe’s band was playing there, and Sam — he was a little older than I, and he’d already come back. He was something like a second-class radioman. He’d come back to go to tech school. The SPs [Shore Patrol] would go through that place and make sure that you were dressed properly. They were kind of haughty, if that’s the right word, and Sam said a few things he shouldn’t have. The last I remember, they took Sam away, the SPs, and sent him to Chicago for a captain’s mast or something. I sort of lost contact with him.

And the amazing thing, he called me. I knew he lived in Chicago. He called me on the phone and he said, “I’ve looked you up. I understand you’re an architect and so forth.” I said, “Sam, what are you doing?” He said, “I just sold my tech company. I came back to Chicago and started manufacturing tech equipment. I just sold it.” I said, “Well, my kids are in Boulder and I get back there. Next time I get back” — I still have his number somewhere — “I’m going to call you so we can get together.” But that was 60 or 70 years ago.

August: So tell me about your overseas . . .
ZAIK: I was on a transport, went to San Francisco. I first went to a big Navy base across the bay from San Mateo. Hayward. Huge base. Had CBs on one end. 25,000 of us — the war was over about a month or so.

August: I want to clarify that. This was the war with Japan, or just the war with Germany? It was completely over, or it was just . . .?
ZAIK: I can’t remember.

August: This would have been 1945. Do you remember what month it was?
ZAIK: Yes. I went back there in maybe August, just after Japan surrendered.

August: Okay.
ZAIK: Let me back off. No, the war was over in Germany. They’re still fighting in Japan. The other kids would all say to me, “Zaik, you’re lucky. You were headed to Coronado to learn how to run a landing craft, and after two weeks they would have sent you to Iwo Jima.” What do you say when you’re 18?

August: You follow orders.
ZAIK: Yes. I said, “Well, they’re sending me to Chicago.” But after that, in the fall, I was on a ship — they called it Magic Carpet [Operation Magic Carpet] because we were taking troops over and bringing troops back. We had this cache of personnel there ready to invade Japan. I’ve been very lucky all my life [laughs].

August: So you actually didn’t have shore duty, you were stationed on a transport that went back and forth across the Pacific.
ZAIK: Yes.

August: During this period of time, this is now after Germany has already surrendered, had you heard anything about the Holocaust, things that were happening in Germany?
ZAIK: Now that’s interesting. All those years growing up in Portland, and what was going on, I don’t remember even my grandparents talking about that. I’ve always kind of wondered how many Jewish people really were aware of what was going on. Maybe from clear out here on the West Coast it was different than in Philadelphia.

August: That’s not exactly true. I started Sunday school about 1948. I was born in ’39, so I would have been nine or ten years old, typical time, and I went to a Reform temple in Philadelphia. I do not ever recall hearing any discussion.
ZAIK: I was going to say that about Temple Beth, with what’s his name was the rabbi — Berkowitz. His brother Abe played the violin.

August: So I don’t think it was unique here on the West Coast. In Philadelphia, it wasn’t until much later that I heard any discussion about the Holocaust. But I don’t want to belabor it. I was just curious about . . .
ZAIK: I’m glad you mentioned that. I’ve always had that thought, and . . .

August: All right. But while you were in the Navy, and the stories started to come back from Europe, you never heard anything about . . .?
ZAIK: No, absolutely not.

August: Okay. I want to move on a little bit. So you put your time in, you were discharged from the Navy, in 1946 maybe?
ZAIK: 1946, September. Just about two years in Bremerton, Washington. I came across from Norfolk, Virginia, where we decommissioned the ship, on the B&O — Baltimore and Ohio Railroad — in a real Pullman. I ran into a couple of friends from Portland who were also getting out, and they said, “We’re enlisting in the reserve. They’re really going to make a good deal. We get a bonus, and we’ll get together and have meetings.” It was on a Friday or a Saturday. They gave us weekend liberty to come back home and then go back up to finish. I guess they put us on a train to Portland, and my dad said, “You’ve got some stuff up there. You can take the car back to Bremerton to bring your stuff back home when you get out.” And I said, “Well, I’m thinking about signing up in the reserves, so I’ll have to stay another week there.” I was 17 or 18.

August: You might have been a little bit older. You were born in ’26 and this was ’46, so you were 20 at least.
ZAIK: Well, I was 20 when I got out. I must have been 19 then because my birthday was in November. Anyway, he said, “When you come back home, you’ll have six weeks to decide whether you want to do that. Do you think maybe you ought to wait?” And finally he said, “If you’re going to sign up in the reserves, you can take the bus back up there to get your stuff.” That was one time in our relationship that he was pretty strident.

August: So he wasn’t too much in favor of you . . .
ZAIK: Oh, God. He was just, “You’ve done enough.”

August: It sounds like you did not sign up for the reserve.
ZAIK: No, I didn’t.

August: So now you’re back home, the war is over, and I assume you’re trying to figure out what you’re going to do next.
ZAIK: Yes.

August: Let’s hear about it.
ZAIK: I was headed to Oregon State. Keep in mind, this was getting to be really late in September; school was starting by the time I was home. I was going to go to Oregon State and be an electrical engineer, so I went down there. I didn’t really know anybody at that point in my life . . .

August: I want to back up a little bit. What made you decide on a career as an electrical engineer at that time?
ZAIK: It was my major in high school, and that’s what I did in the Navy, although I shifted from being a tech to a radio operator, which was sitting there all day and . . .

August: Was it something that you had a passion for? Or was it just like, well, I don’t know anything else?
ZAIK: That’s what I did. What did I know? I got down there, and I was surprised that they did not have a lot of veterans’ housing then. That was one of the first times I maybe had a little inkling that because I was Jewish — there wasn’t a Jewish organization there as far as I knew, or a fraternity, or a club, Hillel, you name it. They said, “We don’t have any housing, but I’ve got two or three places where you can go out and talk to people in their houses, and they rent places for students and so forth.” And I was not comfortable with that. That’s interesting because all my life I’d bounced around. But I didn’t feel very comfortable, so I came back and they said, “Why don’t you go to Eugene and take architecture now.” They had moved a bunch of buildings from the flood out . . .

August: Vanport?
ZAIK: Buildings down there and built vets’ dorms. They said, “You can have a nice room in the vets’ dorm.” What Oregon State said was, “You can spend your first year there, and then if you want to transfer up and go into electrical engineering you can do that.” Well, I immediately met a lot of people I liked there.

August: In Eugene?
ZAIK: In Eugene, in the architecture department. And a fellow from my neighborhood in Irvington named Joe Crane came to visit me and said, “Why don’t you consider joining a fraternity?” I was a non-social critter, and I said, “I did have an experience — one of the kids that was in my Scout troop two years ago when I was at Camp Meriwether is in a fraternity, and he invited me over to consider joining his fraternity, which was not a Jewish fraternity. They talked to me about this and that, and he came over and said, ‘I just think you’re great.’ He was in my troop, two or three years younger. And he said, ‘We can’t pledge you.’ That was all he said.”

August: This is the person in your scout troop?
ZAIK: Yes. Then Joe came to see me and said, “You know, the Sammy house is redeveloping after the war, and we’d invite you over to meet a few people,” mainly him and a couple of other kids. That was my . . .

August: Okay. So from your previous experience, did you get the sense that the person from the Scout troop who at first invited you over and then said he couldn’t pledge you, did you get the sense that was because you were Jewish?
ZAIK: Yes, I did. Of course. I was told that. He said, “Zaik, you’re a dumb freshman even though you’re 19 or 20 years old. It’s the real world.”

August: So that was obviously an experience you had about antisemitism at that time. But it sounds like at Sammy, which at the time was a predominantly if not all Jewish fraternity . . .
ZAIK: It was when I went.

August: Even when I went, it was all-Jewish too.
ZAIK: Were you a Sammy?

August: I did not belong to Sammy, but . . .
ZAIK: What fraternity?

August: When I was in undergraduate school, I did not belong to a fraternity because I lived at home. I was a commuter student, so I didn’t feel the need for it. But anyway, I’m familiar with Sammy. It’s a national fraternity. Just for the record, for the tape, Sammy stands for Sigma Alpha Mu. So you’re now a member of Sammy, or you’re pledging Sammy.
ZAIK: Right, which is amazing. That year, which is ’46, most of that — it was a small house, maybe 25, 30 — but most were returning veterans. Of that pledge class, there were four of us, and we were all my age, so we were also returning veterans.

August: So you’re starting your program in architecture. While certainly there are a lot of veterans that are likewise returning and taking various programs, there are also young men who have just graduated high school, and so they are maybe three years, four years younger than you are. How did that relationship go between the vets and the students at the time, and the professors as well? Can you talk a little bit about how that interaction worked?
ZAIK: Pretty interesting. Some of the profs in the architecture department were also veterans, but they were maybe five or six years older, maybe the age of my cousin. U of O architecture school is non-graded design. You do one project, and it’s either pass or no-pass. It’s pretty much an individual effort. You’re not competing. The professor says, “Did you see how nice Joe Smith’s building was that he designed?”

August: So it was very subjective at the time.
ZAIK: And that just fit me.

August: It allowed for very independent thought and creation.
ZAIK: Yes.

August: How many years did it take to complete your architecture program?
ZAIK: I was there six years. It’s a five-year course. I started in ’46, and my last year I got so into my thesis problem that I decided that I was going to spend a year doing it. Guess what it was? A ski area at Diamond Peak in Southern Oregon. So I had to do a lot of time doing on-site work, and spend time climbing and doing stuff like this [laughs].

August: So it wasn’t such a terrible assignment for you?
ZAIK: No. I still have that project because a group in Eugene, an outdoor group, was lobbying with the Forest Service to build a ski area there, and they used my project. They changed the name from a bachelor’s thesis to a project for the Eugene development group.

August: So that was your first major architectural project?
ZAIK: Right.

August: And it still stands to this time?
ZAIK: I will bring it home and show it to you.

August: Does it still exist today?
ZAIK: Yes.

August: Wonderful. Wow. So along the way, somehow or other, you must have met your future wife?
ZAIK: In those years, we usually lived in a fraternity for a couple of years and then moved out. Four of us rented a small apartment in Eugene, just about in the middle of the campus, and of course we were on the GI Bill. I still remember that the rent on that apartment was like $90 a month and four of us shared the rent. One of my roommates was a Jewish kid, Larry Black, and another kid from Portland, and a kid by the name of Mike Nobiello, who was an Italian kid from upstate New York. He was a veteran of the 10th Mountain Division, ski troops, so we all hit it off.

All three of those guys easily met girls and had dates and so forth, and I kind of tagged along sometimes, and Mike — my wife is sleeping I hope — I stayed after. I had a good job working for an architect in Eugene. I actually finished in the middle of the summer, in August. I shared a little cottage with another friend — old, old friend, also an architecture graduate — and I decided I was going to go back to Portland. They had a going-away party for me. I can’t remember whether Mike brought Chris to that party or not, but I do remember him dating her. He dated a lot of girls. He came over and said, “You know, Chris has a job in Portland. She really doesn’t know many people there, and you really ought to call her sometime and take her out.”

August: That was it?
ZAIK: That was it [laughs]. How did you meet your wife?

August: I will stop the machine so we don’t waste the . . . [recording is paused then resumes]. So we’ll get back to your adventures with your wife, but I want to go back to Sammy a little bit, mainly to find out about the Jewish fellow students that you met that were from Portland, those with who you may have ended up having lifelong relationships. Were there any people like that? And if there are, I’d just like you to mention briefly some of them, and . . .
ZAIK: There are six or seven names. Harry Glickman, who was the founder of the . . .

August: Trail Blazers.
ZAIK: Trail Blazers. Larry Black and Herb Black. Larry went to a master’s degree in New York City. I don’t know if he went to Columbia, but he went and got a second degree and specialized in bonds, and eventually he came back to Portland and started his own brokerage firm and got onto Wall Street, whatever that means. And Bob Tobias, who went to Washington.

August: DC or Washington State?
ZAIK: No, U of W.

August: Okay.
ZAIK: We could have gone to U of W with the GI Bill, but a lot of us from Portland didn’t, migrated to Eugene. I think the families that had kids go up there were mostly business people, you know what I mean? In the jewelry business or . . .

August: So maybe either in retail or manufacturing?
ZAIK: Retail and manufacturing.

August: So you had six or seven friends, and those friendships lasted as long as people lived, until the end of people’s lives. You all stayed in touch with each other.
ZAIK: Right.

August: Did your families get together for any occasions, or was it just mainly the guys that got together?
ZAIK: We’ve had two or three fraternity reunions, which two people have really done: Ted Rubenstein and Harry Glickman. Harry Glickman started a basketball team, so if you want somebody to organize a reunion . . .

August: He should know how to do it.
ZAIK: And Ted Rubenstein, the first thing that he did when he graduated — he’s from Medford — he started a business. His father had a wrecking business — I think it was the only Jewish family in Medford, by the way — in Medford, and he said, “I’m going to start a business, and a good business to start in Portland, which no one has ever done here, I’m going to manufacture raincoats and umbrellas” [laughs]. Which he did.

August: Was he connected to Stanley Blauer? Do you know Stanley Blauer?
ZAIK: Yes, I know Blauer.

August: Wasn’t he involved with Rainshed [ShedRain] or something like that?
ZAIK: Yes, he was.

August: Was that the same business or two different businesses?
ZAIK: No, it was the same business.

August: So what was the connection between Blauer and Rubenstein? They were partners? They weren’t related at all?
ZAIK: No, I don’t think so, but I knew both of them.

August: Yes, but they were not related?
ZAIK: No.

August: Okay. They might have been business partners. It’s possible.
ZAIK: They might have.

August: Okay. So let’s get back to your wife. You and Chris got together . . .
ZAIK: Her name is Francis, but she would not accept that name.

August: I’m sorry?
ZAIK: Francis.

August: That was her given name?
ZAIK: Yes.

August: Okay. So the two of you eventually decided to get married. How long did you go together before you decided to get married?
ZAIK: Two or three years. I went to The Dalles in 1954. I went up to work for an architect in The Dalles who was related to the architect I worked for in Eugene. He said, “See if Saul wants to go up there.” She got a job with United, applied and was a United stewardess, so she traveled all over. But she was based in Seattle. We used to connect, a lot of it because of the crazy weather. A lot of the time she would get deadheaded in Portland because Seattle was all fogged in, so she would be here for a day or so and I’d drive her back up to Seattle.

August: What year did you get married?
ZAIK: ’55.

August: 1955. And by that time you were back here in Portland?
ZAIK: Yes.

August: Had you started your own practice at that point, or were you still in . . .? Because you started working in Belluschi’s office in . . .
ZAIK: In ’52 or ’53. And we were married in ’55.

August: But you had started your own practice by ’55?
ZAIK: No.

August: You were still in that office?
ZAIK: I was still in that office, and a fella who has the house down at the bottom of the street, a friend of mine, wanted to hire me to design a little house for him, but they told me — we were scheduled to get married on August 19th, but my boss said, “You know, you’re just finishing this job” — and I was going to get the two weeks off, the 15th of August to the end of the month — “and we’d like you to delay your time off until September first, for two weeks.” Not that we had a big kind of a wedding or anything, but there were a lot of plans that had to be made, and I said, “My marriage has been scheduled.” And Dick [Ritz?] said, “I’ll tell you what. When you get back from your honeymoon, stop by and see if you still have a job” [laughs]. I said, “ I’ve got a house to do. I’m going to get paid $300 to do that, so I’ll just see how that works out.” That’s how it started.

August: You still had a job when you came back?
ZAIK: I’m not sure. They had just been hired to do the Veterans Coliseum, BSOM, and by that time it got to be Belluschi, Skidmore, [Owings] and Merrill, and we got that job to do, and for years and years, Dick Ritz, every time he’d see me, he said, “We should never have let you go.”

August: So you didn’t end up staying with them?
ZAIK: No.

August: They let you go.
ZAIK: Yes.

August: Wow! But maybe they did you a favor?
ZAIK: Yes, maybe they did.

August: So you did start your own firm then?
ZAIK: Yes. A bunch of us, like all the rest, we rented a house where the freeway is now, at 14th and Alder, and started working. There was work.

August: I remember reading you were part of the 14th Street Gang.
ZAIK: That’s it.

August: That was a really big deal. Could you tell all of us a little bit about that from your perspective?
ZAIK: Okay. My next-door neighbor, this house right here, was another recent graduate like us, Alexander Bolton-Pierce, and we had another friend, Don Blair. They were both a little older than I, and they had been working in little firms. Blair and I worked for a firm that was doing a lot of school work. Anyway, we each got these little jobs. I was a pretty good organizer then, and I found a nice house to rent on 14th and Columbia, and we had about five of us, all started there.

August: Great. How long did that last?
ZAIK: I think we started it in ’55 or ’56. Blair and I left in ’60 and started a firm, and Bill Fletcher and George Schwartz left, and they started a firm, and Alex worked for another small, next door, and that was the end of it.

August: So you were married in 1955, right?
ZAIK: Yes.

August: I don’t know exactly how old Tracy is, but I’m guessing she’s somewhere around 60, is that right?
ZAIK: Yes, she was born in ’59 and Peter was born in ’61.

August: Where were you living when you got married?
ZAIK: We rented a duplex, up and down, sort of at the top end of Vista bridge. I can’t remember the name of that little dead-end street.

August: It’s not on the 23rd Avenue side, but it’s on the other side of the bridge?
ZAIK: Yes. If you drove across the bridge, you’d turn right and go down that little street.

August: Okay.
ZAIK: Her name was Mrs. Lomboni, or — anyway, the rent was $35 a month, and I had to mow the lawn.

August: How long did you live there?
ZAIK: We lived there for about a year, and that guy next door, Howard Hermanson, who worked for a contemporary furniture — he’s an interior decorator in Beaverton — said, “We have a neat little bunch of apartments called Bamboo Court, and you can rent a one-bedroom apartment there for $65 a month,” or something. He showed up with their delivery van, a big truck. He said, “I’m over here to move your furniture.” We’ve been friends ever since. That was in ’55 or ’56. Ever since.

August: So Tracy was born in 1959, and you said Peter in 1961.
ZAIK: We still lived in Beaverton when Tracy was born, and Peter was born when we moved in here about 1960.

August: In your current residence here?
ZAIK: Yes. Right here.

August: We’re getting close to the end, but I’m going to ask you a few things that came off of Tracy’s email. You should have fun with some of this. I’m going to read a little bit of this, and then . . .
ZAIK: You have a daughter.

August: Sorry?
ZAIK: You have a daughter.

August: I do have a daughter. She’s going to be 54.
ZAIK: And she would say the same thing about you that Tracy said about me, maybe.

August: I’m not sure I would get a flattering review from her [laughs]. I’m not so sure. Anyway, Tracy says here, “In retrospect, I really don’t have much to add regarding growing up Jewish in Portland. The few Jewish memories I have are of going to my Uncle Mackie and Aunt Anne’s house for Passover: gefilte fish, yuck; jelly roll cake, yumm. And my cousin Bob and Erma Goldman for Passover too, but only a couple of times.” Do you remember those times? And did you prep your kids for this? How did that all come about?
ZAIK: I remember those times. I really laid it on about Jerry as a cousin, but I would say that my cousin Erma Jacobs, that was Mack’s daughter, and her husband Bob Goldman, who was a hematologist, probably was a close cousin. Bob died at a very young age, by the way.

August: How did the kids learn about the holidays? Did they learn anything from you about them, or mainly from . . .?
ZAIK: I started with that — and we don’t have any matzahs yet — but I was not a good learner in Sunday school. And we had a Christmas tree one year or two years.

August: Well, that’s understandable. Chris is not Jewish, you had said that from the beginning, but she was not all that religious, is that correct?
ZAIK: No.

August: So religion was not a big thing as far as your kids were concerned?
ZAIK: No. She’s very independent-minded. Kind of like talking about me. When you find out what you want to do, and you want to do it, go for it. But as Peter will always say, “Hey, we went skiing every weekend on Sunday!”

August: Right. So Tracy recalls that you might have gone to some seders, taken your kids to a seder at these relatives’?
ZAIK: Once or twice, but then . . .

August: She said these evenings were very boring.
ZAIK: Yes. Chris was pushing Unitarianism.

August: Right.
ZAIK: And we did go to the Unitarian church a few times. I don’t know what she would say about that.

August: She didn’t really mention much about it. But she did say, “My great-aunt Anne was lovely. My great-aunt Gerty terrified me. I would frequently see her downtown, and always would grab my cheek and give it a squeeze, even in high school. She was small with a lot of energy.” They were [Tracy’s] great-aunts, so they were your aunts. Your aunt Gerty, did she do that to you too? Did she squeeze your cheek and so on and so forth?
ZAIK: Yes. She called me “Saulie-paulie.”

August: Saulie-paulie.
ZAIK: Yes.

August: Did that stick in the family? Did that become a family nickname? Or just her?
ZAIK: Just her and my uncle Harry, behind.

August: Okay. The other thing is, “My most fond memories are of going downtown with my dad on the weekend to see his uncle Sammy, my great-uncle.” Did your uncle have a pawnshop and jewelry store?
ZAIK: That was Vine’s.

August: Because she said “pon-shop” . . .
ZAIK: My uncle Sam worked there.

August: But it was a pawnshop, is that right?
ZAIK: It was next door to the jewelry store.

August: Right. There were two shops. What was next door to the jewelry store? Was it a pawnshop?
ZAIK: Yes.

August: Okay. Because I didn’t understand. She said “pon-shop,” and I thought, “No, probably pawnshop is what she meant.” Okay, and that was around Fourth and Pine?
ZAIK: Fourth and Washington.

August: “They would always give me little gifts. I really didn’t understand what a pawnshop was, but my uncle Sam was so sweet.” So what were the little gifts they’d give to Tracy, do you know? Don’t remember. And then — and this was very poignant, I thought — Tracey says, “I also clearly remember asking my dad from the backseat of a car one evening who God was. I was having the hardest time wrapping my nine-year-old head around what he/she truly was. A good person, but not? My dad told me that God was everything — the beautiful mountains, the beautiful sea, the blue skies, the rain and the sun — all around us, all the time. This is a most prolific statement, and to this day, I have carried it with me always. It’s what I tell my children too, but I have changed God to Mother Nature. I like the idea of women running things.”
ZAIK: And she runs things.

August: That’s an interesting statement. Would you say that you had come to that conclusion just based on your love of nature and the outdoors and everything that was around you?
ZAIK: Yes. And I remember — other than getting back to where those kids are now — a good friend of mine, John Uni, a skier and a good buddy, was a Catholic, and we were good friends skiing, and I still remember one day— it was just a beautiful day up at the Meadows, clear blue skis, and we stopped in the middle of a run and I think we both agreed. I said, “Uni, only one real God and that’s where we are.” And I do remember him not giving me something about going to mass or what their life was by.

August: Great. Well, I think we covered a lot of ground today, so we’re going to wrap up. It’s been just a little bit over an hour, and I’m going to stop the tape now unless you have anything else you want to say.
ZAIK: The only thing I was going to say is that my next partner, Blair, was an exciting person. He said, “Everything is a challenge. There’s nothing better than a challenge. That’s what we do. It’s going to be a challenge.” We’d be riding back from Eugene or Corvallis, being interviewed for some kind of a job, and that sun — I’d be driving that old Volvo, I’d be going north and the sun was shining on my shoulder, and I still remember talking about, “Well, we’ll try another one.” But I never understood why I was made a fellow.

August: Made a fellow in what way?
ZAIK: AIA.

August: Oh, fellow of the American Institute of Architects. That was a very high honor.
ZAIK: Yes. Because the things like this house that I designed, I didn’t design it to become a fellow. I was learning.

August: I’m going to stop the tape now.
ZAIK: Tracy got interested in her birthright and did one of those DNA things, and she got one for me too. They don’t mean much; they’re very general. I talked to Henry about that a little. But the granddaughters said — Haley went to Israel with a group when she was in college.

August: How long ago was that?
ZAIK: She’s 26, so it was probably five or six years ago.

August: She probably went on something called the Birthright program. Does that sound familiar?
ZAIK: Yes. Never talked much about it, but I’m not as close with her as I am with Isabel, the younger one. She said, “Well, I’m 25 percent Jewish.” Isabel, if she said that sitting here at the table — she usually sat there — if I asked her that, she’d think a little bit and talk about that.

August: So your grandchildren are wondering about, or inquiring about, their roots, their Jewish roots.
ZAIK: They’re inquiring about it. But their roots are definitely — because Saturday, Isabel — she’s in Hood River now, but who knows where she’ll be next month — anyway, she said, “There’s no Easter bunny, no Easter eggs here.” And I’m sure Chris sitting here was thinking, “Well, we did that when you guys were eight or nine years old because all the other kids would be out hunting Easter eggs.”

August: That’s interesting.
ZAIK: Maybe they know who they are.

August: At least it’s interesting to know that they want to learn what their background is. I think that’s part of it.

END SESSION TWO AND BEGIN SESSION THREE
Date: April 30, 2019

August: It is Tuesday, April 30th. This is session three with Saul Zaik, and we’re at Saul Zaik’s house on St. Helens Avenue here in Portland. We’re going to pick up where we left off at the last session, and we’re going to cover some more topics. The first thing, because we’ve kind of been doing this chronologically — no, I’m going to backtrack a little bit because there is something else I did want to ask you that we didn’t go into detail about last time. I think it’d be interesting to hear about it. I want to go back to your confirmation at Beth Israel. Can you tell me roughly what year that might have been?
ZAIK: I know what year it was, 1940. I was born in in ’26 . . .

August: So you would have been 14. That’s when confirmation took place.
ZAIK: Yes.

August: Great. How many years did you attend Beth Israel? Do you recall?
ZAIK: Sunday school, or . . . ?

August: What age did you start going to Beth Israel? I guess I should ask it that way.
ZAIK: Probably ’38 or ’39, two or three years before.

August: Can you recall some of the subjects that were taught over that period of time? Did you have any Hebrew at all?
ZAIK: No. Zip. Zero.

August: Zero Hebrew, okay. You didn’t go for a very long time, it sounds like, two or three years, but during that period of time, were there any new friends that you made that you continued onto adulthood with?
ZAIK: Yes. David Lipmann, Leonard Kauffman, a couple of the girls, Phil Feldman and Barbara Feldman. That was a small confirmation class.

August: And it was boys and girls together?
ZAIK: Yes. I think so, maybe not. Did they? I can’t remember.

August: More than likely it was boys and girls, I would think.
ZAIK: There were no Schnitzers, no Steinbergs, the really wealthy . . .

August: Did you continue to socialize with some of these new friends even as you were into adulthood and had families and everything? Were there times when you socialized together?
ZAIK: Yes, I did houses for them [laughs].

August: I know you did houses for Feldman, right?
ZAIK: And Tobias. Oh, Tobias is from Seattle.

August: How about Zidell?
ZAIK: I don’t know if he — I’m sure he’s younger.

August: But it wasn’t through your friendship at Beth Israel or anything like that?
ZAIK: No.

August: So there were a few friends you picked up along the way during your confirmation that continued on.
ZAIK: Jerry Robinson, who was the son of the best dentist, who made all the plates, pulled everybody’s teeth. He was pretty well known.

August: We talked about your military time and then talked about going back to school. You ended up at University of Oregon, you became an architect, and you began practicing somewhere around 1952. Is my memory correct about that?
ZAIK: I graduated in ’52, summer. I started working.

August: Did you go right to Belluschi? Was it the BSOM, or was it another firm?
ZAIK: No. I worked for two or three other architectural firms and went to work for Belluschi in the latter part of ’54, worked in that office.

August: He was already at MIT by the time you were there.
ZAIK: Yes.

August: You became very well known as one of the great architects for Northwest Regional Architecture. Were there mentors? What are the things that helped you develop your philosophy of architecture?
ZAIK: A good chunk of it came out of the U of O school, the design. Classmates, and what we talked about. People like Marion Ross, who was the history prof, and some of the other — Bob Farrens, some of the faculty. Somebody with the last name Brown. That’s what they’d talk about in our crits. “Have you seen what who-sey’s doing in Chicago? Are you familiar with Chicago architecture?”

August: The Chicago school, which was probably earlier than that.
ZAIK: That came out of that school, historically too.

August: How about people like John Yan or John Stores?
ZAIK: John Stores was closer to us, although he came from New England and he had his start in ’51, ’52, ’53. But we visited on our own, always visited buildings in Portland, Eugene, Seattle, saw what was going on.

August: Did you feed off of each other? Or did you all go your own way and develop individually?
ZAIK: No, we sort of developed that style, which was related a little bit to what we called the Bay Area, what was happening there with wood and redwood.

August: A lot of natural materials and careful site selection?
ZAIK: Yes.

August: That was all part of the concept of how . . .
ZAIK: And then Belluschi came along and designed the Bank of California office building. Are you familiar with that at all?

August: Sure, on Broadway.
ZAIK: In Portland?

August: The one on Broadway in Portland?
ZAIK: In San Francisco.

August: No, I’m not familiar with the one in San Francisco.
ZAIK: It’s on California Street.

August: That makes sense. So I looked at your website, and one of the structures that you designed, if I read it correctly, was the Landau Chapel at the Beth Israel cemetery. Could you go into who approached you about doing that, and just the whole story on that?
ZAIK: That was Phil Feldman. And who else? Chris Rose? Rose was the rabbi then.

August: What year was that? At least for the record, we should know. I actually don’t know the year. Well, Rabbi Rose came in 1960, so it had to be after 1960.
ZAIK: It was in the ’60s sometime. It would have been in the later ’60s.

August: Did they tell you what they had in mind, or did they say, “Saul, make us a chapel.”
ZAIK: I’m trying to think of who else was on that committee. Was Landau?

August: I don’t know.
ZAIK: They don’t have a very good historical background at the temple either.

August: How did you come up with the design for that chapel?
ZAIK: There was a trashed chapel there. It was all rotten, falling apart. Wood. Ugly.

August: So there was an existing chapel already there?
ZAIK: Yes. Small, probably about the size of this living room. They always complained about the money, obviously. And I don’t know where the money came from, but I would guess we did that building for about $100,000, in that time. I wanted to do a building with a lot of wood like this house, but I really wanted to have an eastern orientation for that big window. And I really wanted it to be bright because, in those years, most of the services were always around noon. So I knew where the sun was, and of course they hired a wonderful stained glass person who designed that. I can’t tell you the name right now. The last time I was there, some of those panels had cracked, I think.

August: How long did it take for that structure to . . .?
ZAIK: That went pretty quick because they had the money and these guys were all movers.

August: So the funding was there for that to be built?
ZAIK: Yes.

August: They were very committed to having a nice chapel.
ZAIK: And of course Phil Feldman had excellent taste. The only thing I could never really sort out was the pulpit. There’s another name for it.

August: Bimah.
ZAIK: The bimah. More defined, because it ended up like that wall without any cabinets there. That’s where he was going to be, Rose, with his little deal. But there was a Jewish sculptor in Spokane that did large metal sculptures like that painting. They were abstract. Of course, this was all paid for by Schnitzer, by . . .

August: Harold and Arlene Schnitzer?
ZAIK: Arlene. She hired the sculptor and the stained glass. That window is huge. I love it.

August: And how about the interior design?
ZAIK: Somebody’s wife in the temple was an interior decorator. There wasn’t much for her to do.

August: How about the seating, how the seats would go? I’ve only been there a couple of times, but obviously there was a method of how the seating was designed.
ZAIK: Yes. It’s informal. It was not a rectangle. The seating was focused. But that sculpture that he did, nobody liked it, including, I think, Arlene. It was red, yellow, and blue, and it just didn’t sit right under that big window.

August: Is it still there?
ZAIK: I don’t know.

August: I have not been there for a long time, so I don’t know.
ZAIK: How long?

August: Years.
ZAIK: I really like the way that building sited, with that courtyard or that area, and at one point, what they wanted to do was have some kind of an elevator over that wall so they could put people in that mausoleum, take them out of the sanctuary and move them out, have a giant lifeboat launcher or something. And we just said, “You know, that’s ridiculous to spend a lot of money like that right now. That could be handled another way.”

August: Anyway, it’s certainly a beautiful chapel. It’s very peaceful and soothing.
ZAIK: That’s what I wanted, like where we are right now.

August: Yes, exactly. So Brian Libby gave a lecture featuring your work on the Zidell house with a mast. Can you maybe spend a couple of minutes talking about that project?
ZAIK: Zidell was a real, early-on hippie kind of a kid. I didn’t know his brothers, but like any big family that were really in that business — of course, this was after World War II when they were wrecking ships. He was a hell of an athlete and a skier, and he had another good friend, I can’t remember his name, and they rode big motorcycles.

August: I’m just going to interrupt for a minute. Since there are some brothers, I guess we should identify which Zidell this is we are talking about.
ZAIK: Arnold.

August: Arnold Zidell.
ZAIK: Arnie.

August: Okay. Just wanted it for the tape.
ZAIK: I got it. How about that?

August: Good for you. Right away. So this is Arnie.
ZAIK: He’d seen a photograph somewhere. Somebody had built a house in upstate New York that wasn’t 40 feet in the air, but it was on a sloping site and it had a big pedestal under it, and it moved in a circle. And he said, “I want a round house, and I want it to be able to move.” I said, “That’s not the kind of house I would do, but I know how to do a house on a shaft.” I think his comment was, “Well, I’ve got about 50, 36-inch round masts off of ships. Could we put that on a ship’s mast?” I said, “Sure!” We had an excellent structural engineer then who was innovative and listened and would get excited about doing that. I said, “But I want to make it an octagon rather than a circle.

August: Was he okay with that?
ZAIK: Yes. He was too busy with his lifestyle at that time. Somebody else came on and put that Japanese garden between the street and the house. Originally that was just an open parking deck.

August: You’re talking about the current Japanese Garden?
ZAIK: No. What I had was a place there to park two or three cars and a motorcycle. You’d just come off the road. They came in and put in big rocks and plants, made something like my yard up here on the hill, so you couldn’t see the house from the street. You had to come around the corner.

August: Is that still there, that structure?
ZAIK: Yes.

August: I don’t even know where it’s located.
ZAIK: I don’t know. I do know who lives in the house.

August: Or the neighborhood, at least?
ZAIK: My wife isn’t here, so I can’t . . .

August: Okay. We’ll move on.
ZAIK: I’ve got fantastic photographs of that house. It was published in Germany, it was published in Japan, but he would never allow it to be published here or enter it into any of the design stuff.

August: So it never got any publicity in the United States?
ZAIK: I think offhand it probably did, but not without him.

August: Not with his blessing.
ZAIK: Right.

August: That’s pretty interesting. Evidently it was a pretty big deal, so we’ll just spend a couple of minutes talking about your 80th birthday party. How did that come about?
ZAIK: Maybe a little my daughter, and maybe somewhat my wife jumped into the spirit, and my partner at that time, Jim Miller. They talked to me about it and said, “We’ll have a nice dinner, cocktails, and no slides, no . . .” [laughing]. We looked into where that might be held, and I said, “No, I don’t want it at the MAC, the Multnomah Athletic Club, or the Benson Hotel. Let’s have it at in the restaurant at the railroad station, the steakhouse.”

August: Wilf’s.
ZAIK: Wilf’s, right. They have jazz music, and that’s more my style. So we invited — God, there were a lot of people there.

August: How many would you guess?
ZAIK: Maybe up to 50 or 100.

August: I’ve been in Wilf’s. You must have taken the whole place over.
ZAIK: We did. I had friends that came from — either worked for us or that I knew in school, involved with my life and what I was doing. And Howard next door took a lot of photographs of everybody. Not too many of them are still here.

August: So that was quite an evening for you.
ZAIK: Yes.

August: That’s wonderful.
ZAIK: I do have a picture, I think, of myself and Tracy and Peter.

August: Is that the one right behind you?
ZAIK: No.

August: Is that more recent?
ZAIK: Yes. That was taken at Wilf’s. Do you ever go to Wilf’s?

August: Yes.
ZAIK: Is it still kind of the same?

August: It’s the same. They have jazz in the evening. They’ve gotten to be pretty pricey.
ZAIK: Really? It wasn’t. Good steaks.

August: It’s pretty expensive right now, but they’re still there. They seem to be doing okay. I got friendly with — there were two sisters who were running it by the time I moved here. They took the business over from their father. But anyway, that’s neither here nor there. I’m going to stop the tape for a moment, and we’re going to move on to the next thing.

[Recording is paused and then resumes.]

August: Okay. Picking up where we left off. We just went through a series of six or seven pictures sent to myself from Saul’s daughter, Tracy, and we went ahead and dated the pictures to the best of our ability. They will all be submitted to the museum to be included in the archive. One of the things that we came across was a picture of Saul in Camp Meriwether as a Sea Scout. Saul has related that he did become an Eagle Scout. I’m going to let Saul pick up from here [and tell] how he became an Eagle Scout and where.
ZAIK: That was the second or third summer that I was a counselor at Scout camps. One was Camp [inaudible name]. That was during the war. We didn’t get back to Camp Meriwether until 1944. They were so worried about the Japanese landing on the Oregon coast.

August: So the camp was closed for a couple of years?
ZAIK: Yes. I had most of the merit badges I needed, and some of my friends that were also counselors there that summer said, “You should get your Eagle Scout so they can have the court of honor here and award you that.” Basically, some of my friends could pass me on merit badges. That was the requirement. You had to have about 37 merit badges.

August: I kind of remember the merit badge thing. With this Scout troop, because you said you were a Scoutmaster at one time . . .
ZAIK: Pardon?

August: You said you were a Scoutmaster.
ZAIK: Yes, at Camp Meriwether.

August: That was the leader of the troop. So was there somebody above you that approved these merit badges, or . . .?
ZAIK: Yes.

August: So who was the person who . . .?
ZAIK: In the camp council, they had mature, senior people. They had about five camps. They had the [Bundy?] Troop, the Lookout Troop, the [Struen?] Troop, the Pirates, and they had a dryland Sea Scout ship. And they had a Horse Troop and a Nature Troop. Guys our age were Scoutmasters of those troops. Mainly what we had to do was keep track of those kids and get them down to the mess hall. We never had any bad accidents or fatalities in all the years that I was there, and I was there from the time I was 12 until I was 17, five years. We had a kid drown in that summer of 1944, drowned in the lake, with the buddy system.

August: It still happened, though, even with the buddy system?
ZAIK: Even with the buddy system. Those kids had just gotten there, first day at the camp. It was a hot day, and we really didn’t have the system totally worked out. They said, “You guys have to go in here with a buddy and stay close to them and watch each other.” Well, the kid was so scared when his buddy disappeared that he didn’t tell us until dinner. We said, “Where’s so-and-so?” We spent all night in that lake dragging that lake to find that kid, and finally the Coast Guard came in. The Coast Guard had a base in Pacific City, and they came in with some equipment and found the kid. But I thought that was . . .

August: So that must have put a damper on the activities for the camp?
ZAIK: That was close to the end, to the last session, as I remember. Today that would have been a big deal. Well, it was a big deal then.

August: So we’ve covered a lot, and I think at this point, if you have an opinion or an observation, I’d like to have you reflect back and talk about things that you’ve seen here in Portland change. This whole oral history project started with talking to the people who were displaced out of South Portland in the ’60s, and their stories were the first recorded ones of this oral history project. By that time, when that happened, you had already started your architectural practice, so I’m going to ask you to reflect back, as an architect — and I don’t know if you did much in the way of city planning or anything like that — but as an architect, or as a planner, reflecting back on your feelings as you saw what was happening in South Portland. If you thought it was a good thing, or thought it was a bad thing, or don’t have any opinion, that’s okay. And other things that you’ve seen happen to Portland in the many decades you’ve been around here.
ZAIK: I was away at school, came home weekends, worked every summer, somewhere. One summer I traveled with my dad on the road, schlepped his dresses out of the back of the car, and decided right then that wasn’t what I wanted to do, be a traveling salesman. The next summer, we built a house in Eugene, four of us from the architecture school. We did the whole thing, started it in the summer session and finished it. And then the last couple of years, I worked in Astoria fishing, and one year I worked for the school district in the architecture office. So I’m remembering, the closest I would think about planning was working for the school district, and that was in ’51 or ’52. I don’t know where all the money came from to build the new schools, but that’s what we were working on in that office. Lincoln High School was a good example of that. What are my thoughts about that? Well, they’re going to build a two-story, three-story brick building.

August: How about South Portland?
ZAIK: The story was that after they came from New York, my father’s family lived in South Portland, on Gibbs Street somewhere. They never, ever talked about anything that happened there.

August: But what I’m talking about, as an adult, already as an architect, and seeing this whole area sort of kind of going away, what were your feelings about it?
ZAIK: Part of it was, I was working for SOM when they developed the South Auditorium site. SOM did that original planning and many of those original buildings when I was in that office. I was sort of a cold-blooded guy, like a surgeon or a dentist, “These are just teeth.”

August: Just buildings.
ZAIK: Just buildings. I have one comment about that. I always thought that was the best bit of planning in the city, those few blocks in that area where the two or three high rises — that was very Chicago. Open planning. Low-density high rises.

August: So you didn’t have any sense of nostalgia for the removal and the displacement of that area? I’m not trying to lead you here. I’m just trying . . .
ZAIK: What I wanted to tell you is that most of the kids in that fraternity, Sammy House, came from South Portland families. Glickman. They all did. Harry would tell you, “My mother was a finisher in a suit and cloak factory.”

August: But not actually having lived there, maybe you didn’t feel that much of a personal connection to it?
ZAIK: No. I think maybe I would occasionally go over there with my grandfather if he was shopping for a live chicken, or go to Moser’s Bakery, but by that time, I was on a cloud somewhere.

August: I have a feeling that we’re pretty close to the end of this tape, so are there any final words you want to say before I cut it off?
ZAIK: One thing you talked about was something that I really reminisced about. I was going back and looking at some of the stuff. We had a good time in the Navy. By the time I got there, the war was over and we were visiting places like Panama and Hawaii. We were all the same age. Did we ever think we were going to get bombed or kamikazed? We didn’t know. How easy it was to make friends.

August: Okay. So as we end this, I want to thank you profusely for spending all this time. You’ve created, I think, a tremendous bundle of very valuable information about your life here in Portland and your contributions to the community. I want to thank you again very, very much.
ZAIK: I appreciate that.