Bob and Sally Landauer: Terwilliger Plaza Members
Bob and Sally Landauer
Terwilliger Plaza Members
Bob, you are originally from the east coast.
I was born in New Rochelle, NY to German Jewish immigrants. We moved for a time to Beacon, NY. My mother and father were part of a larger community who supported refugees coming into the country in the late 30’s. My early life was shaped by this immigrant experience.
Then, in 1942, we moved to Bridgeport, CT when my father got a job with the Navy as a machinist. In the late 40’s my parents bought a house in Fairfield, a community just outside of Bridgeport, CT. My father thought there might be a depression after the war so he bought a rural newspaper route, at the time thinking that people will always need want ads and employment ads.
We ran the largest rural newspaper route in New England delivering among many publications, the Herald Tribune, The New York Times, Daily News, and the Bridgeport Herald. I got an occupational driver’s license when I was fourteen to work in the family business.
Sally, you are originally from the Pacific Northwest and returned after some adventurous Pacific Ocean crossings.
I was born in Bellingham, WA. When I was two we moved to Portland and I lived here through my high school years, until I went to Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA to study fiction, poetry and drama. After graduating I went to Radcliffe College in Cambridge, MA for a graduate program that was called “Publishing Procedures Course” and then moved to New York City to work for a small publisher.
I wasn’t in New York very long when a college roommate from Whitman persuaded me to move to San Francisco, which she said was Mecca.
What year was Mecca?
1961.
Bob, you also took the path to Cambridge, MA and then, New York City.
I went to Harvard and studied International Relations. After college I moved to New York City, where for a short time I worked as an insurance underwriter, and soon realized it was not the profession for me. While there I also enrolled at Columbia to study Mandarin Chinese and got a Republic of China Fellowship to go and study in Taiwan.
Sally, is it true that you both lived in the same apartment building in New York City?
We both lived in the same apartment building at the same time and never met. Even though I was only there for a few months, I was in the apartment adjacent to Bob’s.
What adventures in San Francisco influenced your continuing journey?
I was in San Francisco during the Beatnik era. I was 22 yrs. old. My roommate and I were adventurers. We went to Laguna Seca Raceway to see British Formula One driver, Stirling Moss drive. We went to the Monterey Jazz Festival and ended up at Joan Baez’s house with a bunch of musicians having a post-concert jam session. Then, I fell for a folk musician and my roommate fell in love with his buddy, also a folk musician. We sang folk songs for our dinner on Friday nights at a bar in Berkeley, called the Blind Lemon, one of the city’s first folk clubs named after Blind Lemon Jefferson, the father of Texas Blues.
This led to the first Pacific crossing.
Our folk boyfriends, who had been studying Mandarin, were also in the Defense Intelligence Agency and got transferred to Asia. Soon after, my roommate and I hopped on an American freighter to join them. My roommate got off in Okinawa and married her folk musician. I got off the boat in Taiwan and realized that maybe this relationship wasn’t going any further. I stayed for three months and while I really enjoyed living there, it was a small island for the two of us and decided it was time to go home.
Now to the second Pacific crossing – on a Chinese freighter.
I bribed my way onto a Chinese freighter which was an old Liberty ship on its last voyage. It took 32 days to cross the Pacific Ocean, and this was with a tailwind. I was the only Caucasian on board. It was one of the best times of my life. I took a lot of books that I had always intended to read if I had the time. I played a lot of “Catch Pig” which is a rough translation for Gong Zhu and is similar to the card game of Hearts. We played every night from 8pm – midnight in the officers’ galley.
I got off the freighter in San Francisco. The next stop was supposed to be Los Angeles, although it was rerouted to Tacoma where it picked up Bob Landauer.
Bob, now you are on this same freighter. Was this a common way to travel in the 60’s?
No. This was the Chinese government’s way to give me a scholarship for my fellowship to study in Taiwan. My parents were beside themselves. Their only son was going to disappear into the wars in Asia.
What is a Liberty ship?
Bob: The Liberty ship was a 10,000-ton freighter mass produced at the Kaiser Shipyards in Oakland, California and Portland, OR. Rosie the Riveter was a riveter in making these ships. They carried eight passengers in bunks, and were slow, maybe eight to ten knots per hour.
Sally: This ship was powered by cockroaches. The world’s largest cockroaches.
Bob: I traveled with Fifty dollars in my pocket, one suitcase and peanut butter, which was on the recommendation of Sally.
Sally: It was a matter of survival. The food was not gourmet.
Sally, how did you and Bob meet if you had gotten off the freighter in San Francisco?
I had made my way back up to Portland. The ship had received orders to go to Portland from Tacoma. One day I get a phone call and this man who introduces himself as Robert Landauer, informs me that he is a passenger on the freighter. The second mate asked him to call because I had left something behind and asked if I would like to come get it. I hadn’t left anything. My freighter friends just wanted to see me again.
I was thrilled to come see my friends. I hopped in the car with my mother who wanted to see this freighter I traveled on across the Pacific. Once on the ship I was introduced to Bob. We went back to the officers’ galley and had tea and cookies. Bob mostly talked to my mother because he was the only person she could understand. I invited my friends to go sightseeing and my mother nudged me and said, you invite that nice boy.
Two days later Bob asked me to marry him. I asked for 24 hrs. to think it over. I went back to the ship and said yes. Four days later he went off to Taiwan for a year-long fellowship. We wrote a lot of letters, and then we were married a year later in Hawai’i.
Bob, what was it about Sally that had you proposing two days after meeting her?
I had been reared in a fashion that you make a commitment and it’s going to be for life. Your obligation is to make sure that this person never regrets the decision. I saw in Sally a set of traits, -intelligence, empathy, and compassion. I was positive we could build something together.
Sally: He leaves out the romantic side in his answer. You should read his journal from that time. I love Sally…oh, I love Sally. He was very much in love with me and just doesn’t want to acknowledge it. It would break his teeth.
Eventually, after living in Hawai’i, Seattle and Taiwan, and then back to Hawai’i you found your way to Portland.
Sally: We had gone back to Hawai’i so Bob could finish his thesis. He started looking for a job and sent out resumes to newspapers west of the Mississippi. The Oregonian offered him a job and I agreed to go back to Portland for two years.
Bob, what was your path at The Oregonian?
I was at The Oregonian from 1966 – 2006. I did just about everything. I first came in as a basic reporter. After getting familiar with the paper, I was sent to what was referred to as the cop shop. This is where you learned about the city. Not long after I initiated a series on illegal police detention. After three of the articles ran, the chief of police called the paper and said he would cut off the phones to the press room at the police station if they didn’t get me out of there. Two days later I was the financial editor.
Two years turned into decades.
Sally: Being the very honorable man that he is, after we had been in Portland for two years, Bob asked, where do you want to go?
Bob: Sally’s reply was that she wanted to buy a house in Portland. I had received several offers. I got an offer from Newsweek, Detroit Free Press, and an opportunity to be the Assistant Financial Editor at the Washington Post. We both agreed that Portland was the right place to be. At the time I was also a stringer for Time magazine which kept me in the national and international conversation while doing local and regional news and having a family. I was happy and stable.
You were on the editorial page for 26 years.
I was the editor of the page for 16 years and then a columnist for ten years.
In 1993 you were a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
This was for a series of columns that I wrote against Measure 9, which was an initiative put forth by the Oregon Citizen’s Alliance, a conservative group in Oregon that wanted to amend the Oregon Constitution so that members of the LGBTQ community would lose their protections. It was a very severe anti-gay measure.
What are the attributes that one needs as an opinion editorialist?
Bob: Compassion and the capacity to listen. Attention to facts, and an awareness of our shared humanity to form your perspective. In essence, a search for truth and a vision of the common good.
Sally: In Bob’s case it was helpful to have an extremely thoughtful and deep mind. He thinks differently than most people. He comes up with ideas that others don’t think of and was very generative of ideas for his columns and those of his columnists.
Sally, when you came back to Portland you became involved in politics and community activism.
We had just moved into an apartment in NW Portland. I was in the process of unpacking when I heard a voice – a very strong Brooklyn accent, say “Jessie Katz get your ass up the stairs right now. I’m tired of your dawdling.” I ran out into the hall and said, where are you – I love you. It was Vera Katz, and we became very good friends. We spent many years being what was referred to as housebrides, taking care of the house and family.
One day as we were stripping wax off a linoleum floor, Vera said, you know there’s a lot more to life than this. I’m going to go work for the Bobby Kennedy campaign. And I said, well I’m going to go work for the Eugene McCarthy campaign. And we never reupholstered or sewed again.
Then we worked on the Wayne Morris campaign, and Neil Goldschmidt recruited us to work on his first campaign for City Council, and we worked on the Tom Walsh City Council campaign. I also ran a school bond election doing election and precinct analysis. Then Vera decided to run for the legislature, and I worked on her first two campaigns.
You also led the charge to have the City Club admit women?
Sally: In 1970 many of the women that I knew from working on these campaigns formed a women’s group called the Politically-Oriented Women – or POW. We got together weekly for lunch and wine and talked politics. One day one of the women said, we need to start doing something. Let’s picket the City Club. They don’t admit women. From then on every Friday for a year we picketed out front of the City Club with our signs and shamed people, including Sid Lezak the US Attorney for the State of Oregon. He eventually resigned and then others started resigning. Soon, the City Club faced the inevitable that they had to let women in.
Bob: She understates her influence.
From there, you made the decision to go to law school.
Sally: I decided to go to law school at the age of 35, with four kids at home, a blind mother, a large dog, a small cat, a large house and a big garden. I learned how to compartmentalize. I did estates and trusts and taxes. For a long time, I was a partner at Ball Janik Novack. My practice was a standalone. I was able to practice law for 32 years and didn’t retire until 2010 when I was 72 years old.
Bob, you retired from The Oregonian in 2006 after 40 years. How do you encapsulate that experience?
Among the most satisfying things I did as a reporter and as an editorial page editor was mentoring people. Nicholas Kristof, who I just introduced at a recent Saturday Forum, was one of my interns. I wrote his recommendation for a Rhodes Scholarship to study law at Magdalen College, Oxford. And, then recommended that he go to Cairo to learn Arabic. When he told me he was going to interview with the International Herald Tribune, I telegraphed him and said do nothing for ten days, I’ve got something going. I called Jack Rosenthal, the editorial page editor of The New York Times and said, this is a generational mind. You cannot afford not to interview him. A week later Nicholas was with The New York Times.
What brought you to Terwilliger Plaza?
Sally: Bob was the first to think about senior living, although I was already familiar with Terwilliger Plaza. My mother lived here. She was totally blind for the last six years of her life and was able to function here independently until the last two years, when she needed more help and moved into Assisted Living. After she died I served on the Terwilliger Plaza Foundation Board. I was able to see how Terwilliger Plaza functions and got to know the community very well. I came to admire the people on the board. They were such intelligent and impressive people.
Bob: I also had the perspective of having a mother and father on the east coast. My father got cancer and I was trying to juggle their needs. It gave me a forward view of what happens over time. We’ve been here now for eight and a half years. We were fortunate because we were young, in our mid-seventies, and any decision wasn’t going to be forced.
Sally: We looked at a lot of places, but there was no question in my mind that we would be here.
Why is that, Sally?
The people. The people that live here. It is better than we had expected. I thought when you got old that your friendships restricted. Instead, we moved in here and our friendships expanded. I wasn’t sure how I could pack more into my schedule when all my friends moved into Parkview.
How do you like retirement?
Sally: What do you mean retirement?
Bob: You can’t be involuntarily isolated. There is so much going on here that there isn’t enough time to do everything you want to do.
Sally: Just to name a few, we attend a class on Mesoamerica. We don’t miss a Happy Hour. We each have our appointments at the salon and physical therapy comes to me twice a week. I also participate in the Conversations on Aging group organized by a Member who is a psychologist, and there is the Low Vision group that I attend. Bob has meetings with the Saturday Forum group and meets weekly with a men’s discussion group – on very important topics! There’s Friday Night Music, films, talks and programs. Our calendars are filled.
Bob: There is an evolution that I hadn’t anticipated where the people you knew on the outside now live here. There are also opportunities to host events both in our homes or in the amenity spaces. For instance, Sally’s book club now meets here, and we sponsored a Happy Hour for our 60th wedding anniversary.
Sally: I am quite blind from macular degeneration. I am limited visually and have difficulty with my walking. But look where I live. There are no stairs that I have to negotiate and with all the walkways and skybridges connecting all the buildings, I can get anywhere on the campus. I am not restricted at all.
Bob: It’s a huge comfort that help is nearby should something happen. All our kids, and their spouses, our grandkids are relieved that we are not living alone in a huge house.
Sounds like this was the right decision for the two of you.
Sally: This is a great place to live. The people here are incredible. We are in a group of very like-minded people. It’s very comfortable for us. I love it. We have not regretted our decision for a single day.