EVENT HIGHLIGHTS

Excerpts from Remarks of Chet Orloff
Adjunct Professor, Urban Studies & Planning, Portland State University
Managing Director, Pamplin Institute
Director Emeritus, Oregon Historical Society
Founding President of the National Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Commission

Tonight we’re talking about history, for good reason: At 100, you’ve earned the right to be proud of plywood’s past.  But history isn't necessarily what we think it is. It isn't about yesterday.  It’s the conversation we have about yesterday.

Even more, history is about today’s ideas, and how we apply them in planning for tomorrow.

In a real sense, then, history is all about the future, which is just about where, I think, the founders of this industry would appreciate our applying yesterday’s and today’s knowledge.

A good question to ask yourselves, at the ripe age of 100, is: what do we have of the industry’s past with which to look forward? Let me suggest that you have those eight or nine traditions we have just seen and heard described in the video. It is in them, in fact, that we will find not just the essence of the American plywood industry, but the potential in its future.

Allyn Ford, Don Deardorff, Dave Leland, and others talked about:

• Vision -- building individual companies and industry associations
• Talent -- inventing and perfecting processes, designs, and products    
• Workmanship -- building and maintaining plants, crafting materials
• Practicality and improvization -- making do and making things work
• Innovation and continuous improvement -- increasing productivity and decreasing production times
• Cooperation -- making companies competitive and working together with competitors to build the industry itself
• Intrepidness -- having the courage to try new products and directions, and the guts to compete
• Tradition itself --  appreciating that an industry is worth sustaining and constantly re-inventing itself.

These are the industry’s qualities. Now, if we could take one individual in our nation's history who personified these traditions, who might he/she be? Each of you will have your own. I'll choose Thomas Jefferson.

In this man, who did so much to create and build the nation--writer, governor, president, diplomat, inventor and tinkerer, architect and builder, restless visionary--we have an individual who lived the qualities of your own work:  a man of great talent and vision who pushed himself and others forward to be creative and innovative, then turned around and applied his practical workmanship to everything from agriculture to zoology, and who constantly, doggedly, maintained an active interest in education, enterprise, and continuous improvement of the human condition, the three things that he believed must become American traditions.

In 1803 Jefferson put his vision, interests, and energies into what he called his “darling project,” his Corps of Discovery, the Lewis and Clark Expedition. What was this consummate American Odyssey about if not all these traditions with which you are so familiar: vision, talent, cooperation, workmanship, practicality, innovation, intrepidness.
But enough said about Lewis and Clark themselves. (In this bicentennial year, you’ll hear much more about them, so let me continue with another, though related, story.)

Nearly 100 years after the army captains came west, some captains of industry in Oregon determined to build on the expedition's traditions and they launched efforts for a centennial observance, a world's fair to be modestly titled, “the Lewis and Clark Centennial and American Pacific Exposition and Oriental Fair.” (As I said, “modestly” titled.)

Portland, like many western towns and cities, began the 20 th century with a flourish of self-promotion. After half a century as the Pacific Northwest’s leading city, it was looking nervously at the pushy cities to the north—Seattle, Tacoma, Bellingham. Seattle, in particular, had begun to boom as the staging point for the 1896 Klondike gold rush.

Portland’s business leaders realized that they had to reassert their city’s importance and commercial advantages. The Lewis and Clark Exposition was a spectacular example of the kind of boosterism necessary to maintain Portland’s tenuous regional lead.

As the exposition’s planners got to work in 1902, downriver from Portland another group of Portland businessmen were setting up a new enterprise to be called the Portland Manufacturing Company, a manufacturer of fruit baskets and crates and, soon, a laminated wood product called plywood.

By 1905, the forest products industry dwarfed other businesses in the Northwest. It was no surprise that a centerpiece of the Lewis and Clark Exposition, therefore, would be a Forestry Building.

The building was Oregon’s unique contribution to the architecture of world’s fairs (not unlike what the Space Needle would be nearly 60 years later). It was an enormous log cabin, the likes of which no pioneer ever built.

Complete with pinecone decorations, it stretched 105 by 209 feet and was fronted by a portico of natural tree trunks. The interior was modeled after the nave of a cathedral, with colonnades of tree trunks supporting the high ceiling and setting off balconies and exhibition galleries filled with samples of lumber, dioramas of elk and panthers, and photographs of American Indians by Edward Curtis.

One of the more intriguing exhibits in the Forestry Building—and one that caught the particular attention of door manufacturers and builders—was that of Portland Manufacturing Company’s new product, plywood panels.

On opening day of the Exposition, Vice President Charles Fairbanks, representing President Theodore Roosevelt, sounded the theme for the Northwest’s—and the nation’s—new century:

Yonder is Hawai’i, acquired for strategic purposes and demanded in the interest of expanding commerce. We must not underrate the commercial opportunities which invite us to the “Orient.”

We humans, especially we Americans —eternally optimistic as we are— esteem foresight, the ability to see into the future. Foresight, though, is really hindsight, a mere reflection of the future revealed to us when we look back upon the past. When we look back, we actually see many good ideas. And that’s pretty important. In order to have an agreeable encounter with the years ahead, to continue to reinvent and build this industry’s future, we’re going to have to take into that future some good ideas, not to mention some good traditions. And it’s in the thicket of history where we’ll harvest those ideas and traditions.

But even more significant than its good ideas and traditions is history’s character. Unlike engineering or chemistry or electronics or mechanics—all crucial to the future of the plywood industry—history is not a subject, but an approach to things, an attitude, a way of seeing and thinking that encompasses all that has transpired before this instant.

When you consider having that kind of knowledge and perspective at your elbows as you plan and organize this industry’s future, you can be evermore confident that you will be living up to the expectations of your founders, and doing justice to their great legacy.