Press Releases: Northwest
April 28, 2009
Kaiser Permanente Funds Roadside Marker Telling History of Vanished 1940s Oregon Town
PORTLAND, Ore. — Kaiser Permanente is proud to sponsor installation of Oregon's newest historical marker commemorating the vanished community of Vanport City — the second largest city in Oregon when it was swept away by the Vanport Flood on Memorial Day 1948.
The 102nd Oregon Historical Marker is being dedicated by the Oregon Travel Information Council, which identified Vanport as a high priority historical site in its 2006 interpretive plan. The marker is to be located off Exit 306B of I-5 on Expo Road near the Portland International Raceway on Portland Parks & Recreation property.
Kaiser Permanente's relationship with Vanport, originally nicknamed Kaiserville, dates from the medical care program's own birth on the Home Front of World War II to serve the medical needs of the Henry J. Kaiser workers building ships in Portland and Vancouver. With other Home Front operations in Richmond, Oakland and Fontana in California, it was the largest civilian medical care program on the U.S. Home Front.
Vanport — Van from Vancouver and port from Portland — was a boomtown built starting in 1942 on the south bank of the Columbia River by Kaiser, who had persuaded the U.S. Maritime Commission to fund the largest public housing project in U.S. history for his new shipyard employees and their families coming to Vancouver and Portland. And, at a time when most workers in the United States had no health insurance, Kaiser partnered with a physician, Sidney R. Garfield, MD, to provide prepaid health care. Today's Kaiser Permanente grew out of that wartime health plan.
"The story of Vanport is one of triumph and tragedy," says Kaiser Permanente's director of its Heritage Resources department, Tom Debley. "The spirit of the Home Front that helped win World War II lived there — complete with health care and one of the 20th Century's greatest child care experiments.
"Yet, within a day," Debley added, "the city was destroyed with 18,000 people, about a third of them African Americans, left homeless. Tragically, 18 people died. However, almost miraculously, the huge majority were able to escape."
The flood came when the Columbia River, following weeks of intense rain and an early spring snowmelt, crested 15 feet above flood stage. At 4:17 p.m. on May 30, 1948, water roared through a breach in a Northern Pacific Railway embankment.
Historians say so many people survived because water first filled sloughs in Vanport, giving people about an extra 40 minutes to escape before raging waters overturned cars and swept Vanport's buildings from their foundations.
Vanport has several important legacies, among them:
- African Americans in Vanport during World War II were the first black school teachers and policemen hired in the state. And the Vanport Interracial Council worked to establish a Portland office of the Urban League
- Vanport also was the site of one of the most important child care experiments of the 20th century when Edgar F. Kaiser, Henry's son who was running the shipyards in the Pacific Northwest, saw a pressing need for child care. The Kaiser Child Care Centers, funded by the U.S. Maritime Commission, are still viewed by scholars as examples to be learned from
- Vanport also was the site Vanport College Extension Center — its facilities in the building the housed Kaiser's Oregon Shipbuilding Corporation destroyed in its second year of operation. It survived to become Portland State University, nicknamed "the college that would not die" by its historian, Gordon B. Dodds.
A medical role with the children started even before Dr. Garfield, who co-founded Kaiser Permanente with Henry Kaiser, was released from the Army by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to build the wartime medical care program. With the child care program under the leadership of Lois Meek Stoltz from Columbia University, medical care was a key component of the child care, along with good food service, including carry-out dinners for the families that parents could pick up at the end of their work shifts.
So even before Dr. Garfield's release from military service, a doctor named Forrest Rieke was hired as the first physician in the Portland Swan Island Kaiser Shipyard. As medical consultant to Slotz's project, he witnessed first hand the results of round-the-clock child care for the shipyard families.
The experiment, Dr. Rieke told the Oregon Historical Society in a 1976 oral history, was expensive, "as experiments often are," and "very successful."
The medical outcomes especially impressed him. Depression-era children often were malnourished and ill when they arrived with their out-of-work parents. But with shipyard jobs for the parents, child care and medical care for the entire family, their world rapidly improved.
Said Dr. Rieke: "There was no question in any of our minds about what we proved. That was that kids, in these circumstances, thrive. They gain weight, they get pink-cheeked and they start getting happy ... This made a great difference, in my judgment, and I've said so ever since..."
The federal government ended funding for the child care program when the war ended. However, confirming Dr. Rieke's earlier observations, David L. Kirp, professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, concluded in his 2007 book "The Sandbox Investment" (Harvard University Press), "If the Kaiser Child Service Centers ... were now operating nationwide, no one would be fretting about the quality of child care."
