Portland

The University of Portland Magazine

Brian Doyle

One Minute Ago Twenty Years Ago One Minute Ago

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by Brian Doyle

Was driving past my children’s grade school the other day and started to laugh, thinking of all the entertaining and hectic and chaotic and hilarious moments our children had enjoyed there, and I pulled over behind the school, where the muddy field and wood-chipped playground and moist basketball court and dense fringe of forest all crowd together with their edges spilling over gently so that moss marks the boundaries of the court and hawthorn trees finger the field, and I wandered around remembering stuff.

In my experience, if you wander around long enough with your reasoning software disabled, you might be plunged back thrillingly through time, and find yourself grinning as you watch your small daughter do soccer drills in the mud, and your elfin sons playing wall-ball with a ball very nearly as large as they are, and your tiny daughter swinging so high on the swings that you quietly position yourself to make the catch of a lifetime if necessary, and your headlong sons thrashing through the understory picking blackberries, and your exuberant daughter leaping from Utah to Ohio on the huge painted map of the United States on the pathway, and your grinning sons taking heroic cuts at a stationary baseball perched innocently on a tee, and your shy daughter and sons holding your right hand as you walk them up the hill to kindergarten, and bringing them their forgotten lunches, and looking all over the field and playground for lost jackets and hats and gloves and sweaters and basketballs and shin-pads, and a thousand other moments like that, all floating in the misted air over the scraggly field and along the uneven pathway and among the snowberries in the fringes of the forest.

They rocketed along on their bicycles and flung footballs and hatched conspiracies and gazed tongue-tied at girls and ran in packs and troops and gaggles. They played every sort of game most of which I will never know. They were scratched and bruised here and they sliced open their knees and elbows here and they bled here and surely they wept here and I know for a fact they laughed so helplessly here that their cheeks and stomachs hurt from laughing. There were field days and carnivals and picnics and assemblies and lines of burbling children ambling back into the school in that wonderfully motley way that lines of children move, two or three kids in cadence and then the next two gawking at a hawk and the ones behind them shoving and the next bent over tying his shoelace and the next kid trips over him and there is a pileup and the teacher at the back of the line says hey! and in a minute it will start to rain so incredibly hard that kids inside will press their faces against the windows in awe and leave perfect fading circles of their holy and magical breath.

I saw and felt and heard all these things as real and powerful and immediate and tender as the instant they happened ten years ago fifteen years twenty years ago and I wanted to weep and laugh at the same time and I had to go sit down on the swing where my daughter was swinging one minute ago twenty years ago one minute ago. The swing was rocking ever so gently when I went to sit down on it, and you might say it was the wind, or a flicker of breeze from a heron walloping by overhead, or the butterfly effect, whereby a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state, but you know and I know that my daughter had just leapt off the swing to run giggling through the tunnel of immense truck tires, and the swing still felt her slight weight, and always will.

I am a Hard Worker

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by Brian Doyle

We are in Iowa. We are near the Raccoon River. It is snowing gently. It snows more months than not, in Iowa. A girl and her brother are hiding behind a tree on the corner of Caulder and Seventh. She is ten years old. This is on the south side of Des Moines where most of the Italians live. Her parish is Saint Anthony’s. Her grandfather is Anthony. Her brother is Anthony. Her family is from Tuscany. She and her brother Anthony are making snowballs. They are plotting to attack cars and one particular car comes into view, a pristine meticulous beautiful 1967 Ford Mustang owned by a hot-tempered boy whose family runs the local Dairy Queen. His name is Francis. His family is from Sicily. They hear the car grumbling faintly through the snow and they take up their positions and when Frank Renda’s car thunders past they pelt it with snowballs and then Tony and Larree Moro take off running as fast as they can from the burly boy who leaps roaring out of his car, not ever imagining that someday, amazingly, incredibly, this girl sprinting into the whirling snow will be his beloved wife, the mother of their beloved children; but amazingly, incredibly, this will come to pass. More things are possible than we ever imagine are possible.

…

She went to Abraham Lincoln High School. She was a terrific athlete, a sprinter, a hurdler, a softball star. She was a terrific student. She thought about the University of Iowa. She would have been admitted in a heartbeat. She probably would have earned a scholarship. She thought about being a doctor. But her dad withered and faded and died. Cancer ate him from the inside and by the time he died he was half the burly sinewy man he had been. He never stopped being the gentle cheerful man he had been, though. She remembers that. Cancer could not kill the man inside the broken body of the man. She remembers that. He was buried on her sixteenth birthday. Her mother was gone. Her stepmother was cold and dark. Her stepmother sold the family house out from under the brother and sister. She graduated from high school at seventeen. She never went to the prom. She worked furiously to afford an apartment. She baby-sat and shoveled snow and raked leaves and worked at the Iowa State Fair frying chicken fourteen hours a day in the hot dense thick blanket of high summer in Iowa. One day she walked down Ninth Street in Des Moines knocking on doors and asking for work. I am a hard worker and I could start today. First stop: Dairy Queen. No. Second stop: Bing’s Stationery. No. Third door: the Safeway grocery store. I am a hard worker and I could start today. Answer: Yes. You can start tomorrow.

…

She bagged groceries for two days. Eggs on top. Fragile things on top, where the customer can see them and register that they are fragile. On her third day she was promoted to checkout girl. Four-hour shifts, eight hours on the weekends, Sundays too. Then she was promoted to the booth, handling checks and money. She stocked shelves. She mopped floors. She cleaned the windows and the toilets. She wrote orders and checked inventory and changed prices and flagged shoplifters. I am a hard worker. She was promoted to manager of the produce department. She was eighteen. Her friends went off to college. She was promoted to assistant manager of the store, and then store manager of her first store in Des Moines. I am a hard worker. She was twenty-one. One day she fell in love. He was dashing and handsome and amazingly, incredibly, he was Frank Renda, the boy with the Mustang, and the girl who had pelted his car with snowballs was now a very alluring and accomplished young woman and they laughed about those snowballs for the rest of their married life.

…

At age twenty-two she was promoted and sent to manage a store in Houston. Then she was promoted to a “show” store, and then to a gleaming new store, and then came The Test. You do not advance to district manager at Safeway unless you pass the grueling draining strenuous Test. Three days of judgment, decisions, grace under duress, behavior patterns, management style, knowledge of industry, intelligence, creativity. The woman who never got a chance to go to college nailed The Test. She earned the third-highest score in the United States. I am a hard worker. She was promoted to district manager. She and Frank married. They had three children, each one born in a different Safeway district. At thirty-three she was a vice president. Then she was in charge of 120 stores. Then she was a senior vice president. Then she was the executive vice president. Then she was named president of Safeway Health. And along the way, she founded and chaired The Safeway Foundation and right here is where Larree Renda’s face lights up and she gets passionate and tears come to her eyes, and the girl who walked down Ninth Street knocking on doors so that she could eat and pay the rent at sixteen, the girl who was the first woman ever in several different positions for one of the biggest and best corporations in America, the girl who dreamed of being a doctor but never got a chance to chase that dream — that girl starts to talk about what she is proudest of in her glittering career, what she truly loved, what would have made her dad proudest, what might help make cancer a faint dark bleak memory, something that you have to find in dusty history books. That might happen. More things are possible than we ever imagine are possible.

…

“It started because we felt we had a responsibility to help our employees be healthier,” she says. “Then the idea grew. We were not just selling groceries. We were in the community business. We were in the social responsibility business. You are a stupid company if you are not socially responsible. It saves money. You make more money. People want to work for you. The best people want to work for you. And we went for it. We pushed the whole industry. I am very proud of that. Free-range chickens, non-caged eggs, betterraised pork, fresher and more local produce and producers, smaller carbon footprint — we really pushed, and we changed for the better, and we changed the industry for the better.

“And we pushed in so many other ways. We started a jobs program for veterans. Incredible employees, smart and honest and disciplined and incredibly hard workers. Why do companies not leap to hire veterans? Stupid. And we were raising money in all sorts of ways for all sorts of causes and charities that meant the world to our employees. We raised money to fight cancer, and money to fight hunger. Why are there so many hungry children in America? That’s sinful. That’s not acceptable. As a food company we were responsible to fight that, I thought, and fight we did. We raised money for education, and to work with people with disabilities, and for health and human services. We raised over a billion dollars. We gave away $250 million a year. Those are good numbers. Believe me, after forty years of studying numbers, I know good numbers. But it’s the money we raised for cancer that makes me the most proud, I think. It meant the most to me. My dad died of cancer, and my husband Frank died of cancer, and I was going to be a doctor to fight the cancer that killed my dad, but I never got the chance. That didn’t happen. But I played the cards I was dealt. I got a chance to start a foundation that changed a lot of lives, that meant a lot in healing, that might play a key role in beating cancers. My dad would be proud of that. Frank was proud of that. You know what’s worse than watching your husband die? Watching your kids watching their dad die. That was terribly hard. That was awful. All I can do is hope my work made that a little less possible for others someday…”

…

The girl who whipped those snowballs through the swirling snow, the girl who walked down Ninth Street desperate and brave and knocking on doors, the girl who never got to go to college, the woman who rose faster and higher through her company than any other woman ever, the woman who married the man of her dreams, that woman retired from Safeway last year, at age 56, after forty years of hard and creative work. I am a hard worker. She earned pretty much every honor her industry awards. She serves on several boards, among them, rivetingly, the International Speedway Corporation — “honoring my dad, who raced cars on dirt tracks on Friday and Saturday nights.” She might —might — take one more job running a big company, if the right one appears. Her children are out and about — Tommy (who pitched for the Pilots) with Safeway, Kristina (who also earned a degree on The Bluff) teaching third grade at the family parish school, and Tony playing pro baseball in the New York Yankees’ system (where he was the Carolina League’s batting champ in 2014). She’s building a new house. She’s figuring out the next steps. But she was on campus in May 2015, not only as a University regent (since 2008), but to receive an honorary doctorate, and to give a terrific Commencement speech to the Class of 2015. She was nervous before the speech. She had never given one like this. But she wrote her own — I am a hard worker — and she delivered it with eloquence and passion and tears, and when she finished there was a thunderous roar, and she got a standing ovation from the students and their families, five thousand people standing and applauding the girl from Iowa who never got to go to college. But that girl now has a doctorate, and from the way she clutched that document to her heart as she resumed her seat on stage, it may never leave her hand ever again.

“The girl who wanted to be a doctor,” reads her official citation, “the woman who was forced to watch as her father and her husband died from cancer, used every bit of her relentless energy and creativity not only in her profession, not only in her whirlwind of volunteer efforts, not only as a beloved wife and mother, but to better the lives of countless thousands of people. That is holy and remarkable work, and that is a prime reason the University today confers the degree Doctor of Public Service, honoris causa, on Larree Renda, of Hillsborough, California.”

Amen to that.

A Tangle of Bearberry

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by Brian Doyle

My mother is driving me through the rain to the beach. I am applying for summer jobs. The rain is thorough and silvery. We do not speak. The trees along the road are scrubby and gnarled and assaulted by reeds. I am huddled in my jacket. No one else is on the road. You never thank your mother enough. The road is so wet that our tires send up tendrils and spouts of water behind us. I can see them flaring steadily in the mirror on my side. My mother is intent on the road. She would like to say something gentle about the interview I will have in a few minutes but she knows that I will not hear what she says. I will hear what I thought she said, which is not what she said. I heard a lot of what was not said or meant then instead of what was.

My mother woke me that morning, and fed me, and handed me clean folded clothes, and handed me the plethora of forms I was supposed to have filled out but had not filled out and of course filled out hurriedly scribbledly scrawlingly as she drove me through the rain to the beach. We drove along silently as I scribbled and she maybe thought about all the things she would have liked to say but was too wise to say.

This would have been a perfect time for me to say or whisper or even mumble my gratitude to my mother for eighteen years of extraordinary love and care. This would have been a great time for me to say something like I see your hard work, mom, and I see your weariness with all these kids, and I see how quietly worried you and dad are about money, and I can only faintly dimly imagine what it must be like to bear and coddle and raise and protect and educate and love children and have them be rude and vulgar and dismissive and contemptuous and worse. That would have been a great time for me to say something gentle for once. Rarely were we alone together for thirty minutes as we were that morning in the rain on the road to the beach. That would have been a great time for me to say quietly I see you, mom, and I love you, and I never say that, and I should say that every thirty seconds every blessed day, and I should touch my head to the holy earth every dawn and say thank you for you to whatever it is that we mean when we say The Mercy and the Coherence and The Imagination. That would have been the perfect time, alone in the quiet car in the quiet rain on the silent road among the gnarled little trees.

By the time we got to the state park headquarters it was too late for me to say anything, and I hurried off to the interview, and I don’t know what my mother did for the next few minutes. Probably she went for a walk along the boardwalk, or sat in the car writing letters; she was always in motion, always quietly doing something even in moments when nothing needs to be done; that was how she was and still is, though now she moves very slowly indeed and does not drive at all. Now I drive, and she sits in the passenger seat, and we talk freely and cheerfully and deeply and avidly and eagerly and every time I talk to her I say I love you. We don’t say that enough. We don’t. After a while I came back from the interview and she started the car and we drove home through the ranks of the bent twisted little trees. There were pitch pines and salt cedars, and here and there beach plums, and thickets of sumac, and I thought I saw a tangle of bearberry but I could not be sure.

The Best Professor in the State

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By Brian Doyle

Becky Houck

Died four years ago, just about when you are reading this. She was a biology professor here. She had the coolest smile you ever saw, one of those smiles where when it starts it can’t stop and it lights up her whole face and then everybody else’s face lights up for about a mile around. It was one of those smiles that was nuclear like a star. It was one of those smiles that when it really got going you thought you might get sunburned. Her hair leapt up in aureoles and frazzles and you could tell it was Becky from all the way across the quad if the light was right. She had once won an award as the best university professor in the state of Oregon and if I saw her across the quad walking briskly I would happily shout O my god is that the best professor in the state of Oregon? and she would blush quick as a wink because of course she did not think she was the best professor in the state, although she was, and everyone else in the state knew it, even people with egos so big they have to cart them around in wheelbarrows. After she blushed she would smile that tremendous smile and everyone else on the quad would smile also, a remarkable thing. It always seemed to me that after she smiled there were more swallows and damselflies in the air than there had been before she smiled, but I could never prove that.

As a child she craved the ocean and she became a marine biologist. One of her study projects was an octopus who spit at her every time she removed the lid of his tank; she had once accidentally pinched his tentacle and he never forgot or forgave. Not so many biologists can say they have been so thoroughly hated by an octopus, as she said. She also grew fascinated by embryology and the study of bats and antipodean fauna and she was so brilliant that she ended up teaching university classes in all of those subjects. She taught in classrooms and in her office and on the quad and on ships and while walking through the desert. Among her scholarly feats was identifying a new species of octopus and discovering that many bats are left-handed but her greatest feat as a professor was identifying the loneliness of freshmen and their despair at being far from home and losing their high school sweetheart and failing their first test and being afraid they were not cool enough to make new friends. She made the university create a whole thorough attentive huge project to care for these frightened children, and that was the best thing I ever did as a professor, she said, and she was right.

How did you do that? I asked her once, fascinated, for I have studied university administrations for thirty years, and they are vast creatures who move toward new ideas with the alacrity and eagerness of telephone poles. I laid out all the facts, she said, and then I kept talking about all these children weeping alone in their rooms, a remark I never forgot.

She was small in stature. She wore loose clothing that did not fit her form. She did not command the room with her beauty. She knew this and did not care a fig about it and laughed about it as she laughed about most things that we value that are not valuable. She knew children were valuable, and life, and laughter, and kindness applied like water to those who thirst. She knew who she was and did not care what the world thought. She knew her work and she did it with every iota of energy and creativity she possessed and in those sweet gifts she was rich beyond measure. She was blunt and glorious and her amused generous soul poured out of her face and eyes like she was lit from inside. She was more beautiful a being than I can ever find words for and by god I have tried. I will keep trying as long as I have fingers and a full heart. Rest in peace, Becky Houck. Rest in peace, my friend.

Why Not Us?

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By Brian Doyle

The long and riveting road of the University’s dean of engineering.

Face to Face

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By Brian Doyle

On September 27, 2013, University of Portland president Fr. Bill Beauchamp announced that he will retire at the end of the 2013-14 academic year. Fr. Bill’s dedicated leadership has steered the University over this past decade, and UP has risen to remarkable heights during his tenure, many of which you can read about here.

But we thought it would be fun to look back to 2003, when Fr. Bill was first named president.

In this piece by Brian Doyle from the Fall 2003 issue of Portland Magazine, Fr. Bill shares some of his own personal story and discusses what he hoped to accomplish during his tenure at the helm.

* * *

Notes on the character and history and memories and convictions of the University’s new president, Father Bill Beauchamp.

He grew up under oaks and elms and maples. He played stoopball in the street from dawn to dusk with Butch and Larry and Fred and George and Billy. He went to Saint James School and at lunch he’d run to the family grocery store for soup or a sandwich and then run back to Saint James. His sister went to Saint James and his mom went to Saint James and his dad went to Saint James and his grandparents were the first parishioners at Saint James when the church building was still a chicken coop and Ferndale was pretty much still farms even though it bordered the city of Detroit.

“That was just after my paternal grandfather had come down to America from French Canada,” says Bill Beauchamp. “He started the first grocery store in town, Beauchamp’s Market. My maternal grandfather was an  organ and piano player who played in theaters during silent movies, but when the talkies came in he never played  again, not even in church, not once. It was the oddest thing. He started working for the city, and when he did  there were crosses burned in their yard.Fr. Bill

“My mom and dad and sister and I lived in a little house near Eight Mile Road. I remember listening to the Lone  Ranger and Sergeant Preston of the Yukon and The Green Hornet on the radio, and being an altar boy, and walking  the golf course where my cousins and I caddied. I even remember the night we got our first television set. I was  eight years old, and I remember it was a Wednesday in Lent, because we went to church instead of watching  television.

“I was a straight arrow as a kid. I loved sports but I wasn’t much of an athlete. You know how a kid knows inside  himself whether he’s a good athlete or not? I knew I wasn’t so good. I was the romantic lead in the senior play,  though – Jenny Kissed Me, by Jean Kerr – and I won the religion medal, and I was the salutatorian, and like every  Catholic teenage boy in America in 1958 I thought about the seminary, and I interviewed for it, and took a test  and all, but I just didn’t feel any real feeling for it then. I just wanted to be a typical guy, you know – get married and have kids and have a job and be independent.

“I wanted to go to Notre Dame for college, but we just couldn’t afford it. I remember having one of those real honest conversations with my dad about that. So I went to the University of Detroit, which was a big commuter school in 1960. Started as a chemical engineering major but I was awful at chemistry, so I switched into accounting, partly because I took an aptitude test right about then which told me I had empathy for people, a sharp sense for business, and a talent for pastoral matters – predictions which fascinate me now, looking back at a career as priest and accountant and attorney.

“I worked all through college, for a direct mail firm and a visiting nurses association and for an engineering firm and as comptroller of the student council, and I did pretty well, finished first in the business school, and then I started in to work right after graduation, as a financial analyst for Burroughs. This is 1965 now and I had registered for the draft but I was never called up – I suspect because my local draft board had so many enlistees that they never dipped into the student deferment pool.

“In 1966 I got an offer to teach accounting and business law at Alma College, right in the middle of Michigan. Well, I was 24 years old and still living with my parents, so I took it, and I did that for three years, and then worked in the admission office for three more years, and I made dear friends there, and dated some lovely women in Alma – let’s see, Linda, Sharon, Shirley, you don’t need to know more – but I was still restless. It was time to move on, so I applied to law school. This time I did get into Notre Dame, and I started in 1972.

“I needed a job, though, and the only one I could find was to be an RA in Grace Hall. I’d never set foot on the campus, never lived in a dorm, and I was thirty years old – not your usual RA profile. But I figured I could do anything for three years, and that turned out to be my first step toward Holy Cross. I owe my vocation to that job. I met really generous and fascinating priests – men like Don McNeil and Tom McNally and Claude Pomerleau and the late Mike McCafferty. I became aware of priests who were also scholars and teachers and activists and counselors. I began to think it might be possible to be a lawyer and a priest, which intrigued me.

“But I figured maybe this was all just the aura of Notre Dame, so when I graduated I figured I had to get away. I went back to Alma, this time as a lawyer with my friend Bill Goggin, and I was a lawyer for three years. Then I got an offer from a firm in Cincinnati, and I was all ready to take it, but one day I faced the fact that I had never resolved that nagging thought about being a Holy Cross priest.

“So I figured I’d face it, and I went to see the vocation director, a great guy named Father Joe Carey.

“’I’m not holy and I don’t pray,’ I told him.

“’Then you’ll be a great priest,’ he quipped.

“Well, I took the application home and thought on it for two months and finally I filled it in and I was accepted as a candidate. My mom and dad drove me to the seminary. My dad didn’t say anything and all my mom said was if I was going to quit the order, at least I should leave before ordination.

“Dry Irish sense of humor, my mom.

“In seminary I was out of synch with the other guys – I was 35 years old by then, and used to being on my own. But I was calmer too, maybe. I didn’t have to answer the interior questions they did, about marriage and children and independence.

“Well, I didn’t quit, and I spent one summer here at the University of Portland, working downtown with alcoholics at the DePaul Center and living on campus. I was ordained in 1982, and started teaching law at Notre Dame, and working as assistant to the executive vice president, Father Ned Joyce. I learned a lot in those years – primarily that I was wrong to think that being a priest fit into being a lawyer. It had to be the other way around for me – being a priest first and everything else second. That took a while for me to get straight, and by then it was 1987, and suddenly Father Monk Malloy was named president of Notre Dame and I was named executive vice president.

“That was June first, I remember that, because a hundred days later the police found my parents.”

Ed and Marion Beauchamp were murdered in their little house near Eight Mile Road in September of 1987. The man convicted of their murders was sentenced to prison for the rest of his days. Bill Beauchamp celebrated the funeral Mass for his mother and his father and then he presided at their burial and then he went back to work.

“I threw myself into work,” he says. “I did. It took me years and years to arrive at a peace. First I blocked it out and then I had a crisis of the soul. Did I believe what I preached or not? Did I believe such evil could exist in a world filled with holiness? And I found that I did believe. I came face to face with my faith. I believe in God’s grace and mercy. My parents are at peace. They are together. They are with God. We here are left to deal with it and we grapple the best we can. There is evil in the world that God made. I don’t understand why. Neither do you. No one does. But because we don’t understand it doesn’t mean we can’t battle it.”

Thirteen more years as vice president and professor at Notre Dame, thirteen years of running capital campaigns (more than a billion dollars raised, and Notre Dame’s endowment went from $400 million to $3.2 billion during Beauchamp’s tenure), and thousands of days and nights overseeing athletics and events and construction and maintenance and investments and legal affairs and finances, “everything except academics and student affairs,” and when the century turned Bill Beauchamp was worn and weary, and so when changes in Notre Dame’s administration needed to be made that year, he stopped being everything except a priest.

“I took a semester off,” he says. “I read a lot. I was appointed steward of the Indiana Province of Holy Cross. I got ready to teach law again, I had my class all lined up, I was eager, and then I went for a walk with David…”

Father David Tyson, that would be, then president of the University of Portland, now superior of the Indiana Province, a verrry persuasive man, who invited Beauchamp out west, and Tyson knew he’d hooked his man when Beauchamp hesitated a moment, there by the bookstore at Notre Dame, and then asked Tyson:

“Could I live in a residence hall?”

He could: he moved into Corrado Hall in the summer of 2002, when he started as the University’s senior vice president. In 2003 he became a finalist for president. In 2004, at age 61, he became the University’s 19th president (and moved out of Corrado into the president’s house in north campus). And what does the lad from Saint James School dream for the Catholic university he now leads?

“We are on the road to greatness,” he says. “We are. There’s not a lot that needs fixing. We are focused. But we need a lot more money. We need a lot more endowment. We need unassailable financial security. We are committed to faculty excellence, to our Catholic character, to a national athletic reputation, to creating an education of moral and civic and intellectual depth that will draw students from around the world. But to reach greatness we need much more support. We need a new recreational sports center, a new student center, new residence halls, a renovated library, a renovated engineering hall, a nursing center, more classroom space, more land, more money for faculty, and those are just the pressing needs.

“Can we do it? Yes. Will we? Let me put it this way: I believe in God and I believe in us.”