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I’d heard the rumors, but I didn’t believe them until the photo arrived.
It was of our 17-year-old granddaughter Avin, who will graduate June 10 from Sheldon High. She was wearing an orange Oregon State University sweatshirt.
My first thought: Wait, what’s wrong with this picture?
My second: Absolutely nothing.
My momentary pause was triggered by deep-seated tradition, the fact that, with rare exceptions, our branch of the Welch family tree hasn’t worn OSU garb since roughly the time President Richard Nixon insisted he wasn’t a crook.
In the fall of 1972, despite being serious enough as a Beaver fan to have vivid memories of painting my bedroom orange and of crying — as a 5-year-old! — after a 15-14 Oregon State loss to Texas Tech, I left Corvallis to attend the University of Oregon. Now, 53 years later, Avin is leaving Eugene to attend OSU. And good for her.
It got me thinking of how my choice began a three-generation shift of allegiances to UO that had nothing to do with any dislike of OSU.
My wife, aka She Who Lived Four Houses Away in Corvallis and Briefly Attended Oregon State, has never embodied the born-again Duck experience like me; in religious vernacular, she’s more of a “Christmas-and-Easter” Duck. Her parents graduated from OSU. Her father taught agronomy at OSU. Her beloved late uncle bankrolled, in perpetuity, one of the school’s annual Benny awards for student-athletes.
That said, after we married in 1975, she willingly embraced the Duck flock, if for no other reason — her words, not mine — than “to keep you happy.”
Our two sons, on the other hand, were “all in.” After we moved to Eugene from Bellevue, Washington, in 1989, the year Oregon football finally got good, their boyhoods were marked by watching the Ducks in bowl games and playing one-on-one football at Autzen Stadium amid the (usually) happy post-game throng. (They knew nothing of their father’s college-days anguish of 14-game football losing streaks and falling to Washington 58-0.)
Jason attended Linfield University and Oregon; Ryan went to Linfield; neither lost their allegiance to UO.
A generation later, their children have embraced Oregon with the ease of ducks taking to water. True, Ryan’s wife, Susan, graduated from Oregon State, but like her future mother-in-law, she went with the fine-feathered flow.
Now, suddenly, this: Avin in a bright orange Beaver sweatshirt.
She will enroll this fall in a joint Oregon State/Linn-Benton Community College program and live on OSU’s campus.
To which I say: You go, girl.
I like her decision. How could I not? She’s doing exactly what I felt I needed to do half a century ago — going to the school that seemed like the best fit. She’s daring to take poet Robert Frost’s less-traveled road, which is rare in a day when many cling to the status quo for safety instead of daring to think for themselves.
Her decision made me think of how, just as she’s bucking the trend that one of her grandfathers had begun, so had I. Weirdly, Avin’s decision came just over half a century since I committed to UO. And my decision came just over half a century since Schu committed to Oregon Agricultural College, which began Oregon State Agricultural College and then Oregon State University.
At OAC, my grandfather, Ben Schumacher, was affectionately known as “Schu of ’22.” At the alert of his fraternity — “freshmen girls arriving from Portland!” — he met his future wife, and my future grandmother, when she arrived from Portland at the train station in Corvallis. (Now the Old Spaghetti Factory just north of downtown.)
Much of my youth was spent on OSU’s campus, a 15-minute bike ride from my house. We’d play pickup football games at Parker Stadium (now Reser Stadium) and basketball games in Gill Coliseum. At times, I’d pop in to see my father, who ran the photography department at the OSU bookstore; my grandmother, who was the store’s bookkeeper; or my nearby Mom, who was a secretary at the Landscape Architecture Department and later political science.
As a teenager, I worked for “Schu of ’22″ — the SAE’s longtime treasurer — as the fraternity’s groundskeeper. On breaks, he would regale me with stories of classmate Linus Pauling, who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry the year I was born, 1954. And of athletic stars of the past, including classmates Gap Powell, the university’s first All-American football player, and Slats Gill, a baseball player and all-conference basketball player who wound up coaching Beaver basketball from 1928 to 1964.
My life was Oregon State. My mother attended OSU. My father graduated from OSU, where he, too, like Schu, was an SAE.
When my second-grade teacher at Garfield School, Mrs. Toss, presented me with an autographed photo of Aaron Thomas, a receiver on the OSU football team who lived in her apartment complex, I was giddy beyond belief.
For career day, when my fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Wirth, arranged for me to interview Slats Gill’s replacement as the Beavers’ basketball coach, Paul Valenti, I walked out of his office on air.
If all of this didn’t speak of my love for OSU, there’s this, which may sound hyperbolic but is true: When, at some age, I came to understand the concept of death, what saddened me most was the idea of not being able to watch Beaver football games. (Entry on Kiwanis Kids Day: 50 cents.)
I had, since receiving it for my fifth birthday, spent much of my youth playing a game called the Tudor-Tru Action electric football set. It ran on good vibrations, the electricity jiggling the field and causing the two-inch-tall plastic players to “run” — or wobble in what looked like drunken stupors. Oddly, it wasn’t really fun to play until it broke. Then, I realized it could run on something more powerful than electricity: imagination.
I created my own games, crashed the players together, threw 90-yard passes and announced them as if I were TV broadcaster Lindsey Nelson. I don’t ever recall my beloved Beavers losing, especially to their dastardly rival to the south, Oregon.
I painted the players orange and black. Dad fashioned me goal posts out of coat hangers. Mom gifted me a record of college fight songs that I played before games — and something that would change my life forever: a portable Smith-Corona typewriter.
With it, I would write game stories after each one was played — just like the newspaper reporter that I wanted to be.
Year after year, I’d play the Tudor Tru-Action — until one day Mom spoke up.
“Bob, I think it’s time for you to move on.”
“What?”
“It’s time to experience life beyond the Tudor Tru-Action.”
“But, Mom, I —.”
“Bob, you leave for college in the fall.”
I hadn’t given it much thought.
“If you’re going to be a journalist,” she said, “you might consider the University of Oregon. They have a school of journalism. OSU does not.”
If, at first, the idea of attending the Beavers’ archrival seemed disingenuous, if not repugnant, three things swayed me: my friend John Woodman, a hurdler, having accepted a full ride to run for UO; the way Oregon running back Bobby Moore (later Ahmad Rashad) wore white shoes and super-high socks; and, most importantly, the wisdom of a mother.
After attending a UO campus preview in February of my senior year, I decided to be a Duck. It’s a decision I’ve never regretted. The journalism education was superb and a part-time sports job at The Register-Guard, invaluable.
That said, I know of classmates and, later, colleagues, who went to Oregon State and became stellar journalists. In the end, when it comes to education, it isn’t generally a question of quality as much as fit. And if you’re surrounded by good people, as I have been, nobody’s going to disown you because you’ve broken a family tradition. Blessedly, I remember no pressure from family to go to OSU and no disappointment when I chose not to.
Once, I left college — allegiances have an exaggerated sense when you’re a student — I could root hard for the Beavers whenever they weren’t playing the Ducks.
One of the nicest compliments I’ve received came from the late OSU fullback Bill Enyart, a hero of my youth whom I later got to know in Bend. “You are,” he wrote me, “a compassionate Duck,” my interpretation being that he believed the former canceled the latter.
I think Enyart, a deeply philosophical man, was suggesting people are more important than institutes. And I agree.
In 1975, Jay Locey — who’d been best man at our wedding exactly three months earlier and whose grandfather, Percy, had been a classmate of my grandfather’s and later OSU’s athletic director — intercepted a pass for the Beavers at Autzen and returned it for a stadium-record 94-yard touchdown. In the press box, covering the game for the Oregon Daily Emerald, I was happy for Jay. And glad his was the only TD the Beavers made in a 14-7 Duck win.
That evening, Locey had dinner, and spent the night, with She Who and me in our Eugene apartment.
Forty years later, when he was an assistant football coach for OSU, he called the night before an Oregon-Oregon State game in Eugene. The Beavers were staying at the Valley River Inn.
“Welchy, you up for a walk along the river before the game?”
“Sure.”
We did it — a Beaver and a Duck who’ve been friends since Little League baseball, walking together only hours before a game we each wanted to win, but only one of us could.
If I had any advice for Avin, it would be embodied by Locey’s commitment to our friendship: Surround yourself with people who care more about you than your school.
The Beaver-Duck rivalry is fun, but what will matter in the end is deeper than the rah-rah-rah stuff. It’s the relational stuff that you can only hope goes far deeper than the color of your sweatshirt.
Bob Welch writes a weekly independent column — Heart, Humor & Hope — on the Substack platform. More info: bobwelchwriter.com.
