It's Your Oregon: Andrea Hunter

It was the first day in what became an incredible experience, first as administrative assistant for Larry Williams, and later John Platt, with a brief interlude as acting director.

Following in Judie Hansen’s footsteps should have been, and was, impossible. Present at the creation, she knew everything and everybody. She was an excellent organizer, and she could type. I, on the other hand, knew very little and typed miserably. Larry must have sensed that I wanted desperately to contribute.

I had joined OEC several years before, and had been a home-based volunteer. Don Waggoner, OEC’s president, had a large volume of correspondence relating to his evaluation of Oregon’s Bottle Bill. I had an electric type-writer, and volunteered. On the strength of this, Larry took a chance and hired me. I think he hoped my “people skills” would make up for my typing deficiencies.

Day-to-day operations at the house on Water Avenue involved a small staff and an army of volunteers. Larry and I were the full time staff members, and in legislative years we added a lobbyist. We had CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) positions, legal interns from Lewis and Clark Law School, and part- to full-time young people who did everything from filing to making coffee to car-rying mailings to the post office. From time to time we had folks fulfilling community service required by the courts. One of the adminis-trative assistant responsibilities, as I recall, was maintenance of the storage facility in the bath tub. The house had been a residence, and from time to time extra paper, reports, leftovers from the holiday sale and such were stored there.

In the basement resided two mechanical monsters, the off-set press and the folding machine, both critical for the printed materials so important for communication with our members and the press. Earthwatch Oregon, our award-winning newsletter, was published in-house as were all membership mailings and press releases. Al Miler, and later Bill Ket-tler and Mike McCurdy, fought a valiant fight with that press. It would, on occasion, go off on a tangent of its own, sending the operator up the stairs muttering (sometimes shouting) things not fit to print. The folding machine could run amok, spewing countless pages onto the floor, if not tended carefully. I never knew when or how Larry acquired these ma-chines, but they were terribly important and worth all the coddling required to keep them happy.

Mailings kept members informed, generated calls and letters to government officials, and promoted new members and funds. It worked like this: Larry dictated the message, I typed it, and together we did the layout. We sent it out to be photo-copied, and when it came back Al Miller printed and folded it. Address labels came from another source. Somebody had to go and pick them up. We hand applied them, sorted and bundled, and took them to the Post Office. Anyone who came through the door at Water Avenue was fair game for mailings. When a board member came in to see Larry, she’d be seated at the table in what had been the living room to stuff a few envelopes while talking; when a volunteer came in to work on a project, he’d be repositioned to attach a few address labels. Larry and I did it between and sometimes during phone calls. It wasn’t unusual for me to take a mailing home with me. I enlisted even my Michigan in-laws more than once when they visited.

They were board members who were concerned about water, energy, timber management, recreation. Sometimes volunteers simply walked in off the street, in need of a family, or even a meal. Somehow we provided all that, and several of them became part-time employees—the best we could have wanted.

It all sounds impossibly low tech, and it was. We were a family. Larry’s mother maintained the clippings file and his father did maintenance and cared for the lawn. We furnished the office with used furniture from No Fault Walt’s and volunteers did minor and some-times major repairs. But the house on Water Avenue was alive and vibrant. People believed, and they connected. It was, all in all, a wonderful place to be. Some evenings I went home with ear pain from being on the telephone so much, but like all the early staff and volunteers, I think, I wouldn’t have traded it for the world.

Cheers to us all!