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OROregon Famous People
The only two Nobel Prizes nobody had to share
Linus Pauling was born in Portland in 1901, spent part of his childhood in the wheat town of Condon, and enrolled at Oregon Agricultural College, now Oregon State, at sixteen. He worked out the nature of the chemical bond and the alpha helix in proteins, and collected the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954. Eight years later he collected the Nobel Peace Prize for the campaign against atmospheric nuclear testing. That makes him the only person to hold two Nobel Prizes he did not share with a single co-recipient. The State Department had withheld his passport in 1952 over his politics and returned it in time for the trip to Stockholm.
Springfield is Portland with the street signs swapped
Matt Groening grew up in Portland and named The Simpsons after his own household: his father Homer, his mother Margaret, his sisters Lisa and Maggie. The street names in Springfield came from the city he left. Flanders, Lovejoy, Quimby, Terwilliger and Kearney are all real Portland thoroughfares. Beverly Cleary, born in McMinnville in 1916 and raised in Yamhill and Portland, set Henry Huggins and Ramona Quimby on Klickitat Street, which also exists, in the Grant Park neighborhood where bronze statues of the characters now stand. Ken Kesey was raised in Springfield, Oregon, wrestled for the University of Oregon, and wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest out of night shifts at a veterans hospital. Ursula K. Le Guin was born in Berkeley but lived in Portland from 1959 until her death in 2018, writing The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed there.
A waffle iron, a track coach, and a shoe company
Bill Bowerman coached track at the University of Oregon for a quarter of a century from 1948 and took four NCAA team titles. One of his middle distance runners, Phil Knight, born in Portland in 1938, started importing Japanese running shoes in 1964. The two of them ran the business as Blue Ribbon Sports and renamed it Nike in 1971. Bowerman poured urethane into his wife's waffle iron looking for a better sole, and the Waffle Trainer came out of the mess. Steve Prefontaine, from the mill town of Coos Bay, ran for Bowerman, held every American record from 2,000 to 10,000 meters at the same time, finished fourth in the 5,000 at Munich in 1972, and died in a car crash in Eugene in May 1975 at twenty-four.
Chief Joseph and Abigail Scott Duniway
Chief Joseph was born around 1840 in the Wallowa Valley in the far northeastern corner of what became Oregon, and led the Wallowa band of the Nez Perce through the flight of 1877, a running retreat of more than a thousand miles that ended about forty miles short of Canada in the Bear Paw Mountains of Montana. He never got the Wallowa back and died in 1904 on the Colville Reservation in Washington. Abigail Scott Duniway came over the Oregon Trail in 1852 at seventeen and buried her mother on the way. From 1871 she published a suffrage paper in Portland called The New Northwest, spent forty years being voted down, then wrote and signed the equal suffrage proclamation when Oregon finally passed it in 1912 and registered to vote in Multnomah County.
The president Oregon raised but did not produce
Herbert Hoover was born in Iowa and orphaned at nine. At eleven he was put on a train to Newberg, Oregon, to live with his uncle Henry John Minthorn, went to the Quaker academy there, clerked in a Salem land office, and entered Stanford with its first class in 1891. The Hoover Minthorn House in Newberg is now a museum. Elected Oregonians have tended toward the contrary: Tom McCall, raised on a ranch near Prineville, was governor from 1967 to 1975 and signed the Beach Bill that kept the entire coastline in public hands and the 1971 Bottle Bill, the first container deposit law in the country. Wayne Morse, long associated with the University of Oregon law school, was one of only two senators to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964. Mark Hatfield of Dallas, Oregon, went from governor to the Senate and stayed until 1997.
Oregonians nobody realizes are Oregonians
James Beard was born in Portland in 1903 and spent his summers at Gearhart on the coast; the American cooking awards handed out every year carry his name. Doc Severinsen came from the Columbia River wheat town of Arlington and led the Tonight Show band for Johnny Carson. Esperanza Spalding grew up in Portland's King neighborhood and won the Grammy for Best New Artist in 2011, the first jazz musician to take it. Ty Burrell is from Grants Pass. And in a Portland studio in April 1963 the Kingsmen recorded "Louie Louie" in one cheap session, so indistinctly that the FBI spent two years trying to work out whether the lyrics were obscene and gave up.
Questions people ask about famous Oregonians
Has any president come from Oregon?
No president has been born in Oregon. Herbert Hoover, born in Iowa, was raised from age eleven by his uncle in Newberg, Oregon, and is the closest the state comes to a claim.
Who is the most famous person from Oregon?
Linus Pauling has the strongest case on achievement, with two unshared Nobel Prizes. Matt Groening, Beverly Cleary, Phil Knight and Steve Prefontaine are the other names raised most often.
Is Matt Groening from Portland?
Yes. He grew up there, named Simpsons characters after his own family, and lifted Springfield's street names from Portland streets including Flanders, Lovejoy, Quimby and Terwilliger.
Who founded Nike and where?
Phil Knight, a Portland native and University of Oregon runner, and his coach Bill Bowerman. They began as Blue Ribbon Sports in 1964 and adopted the Nike name in 1971. The company is based in Beaverton.
Which writers are from Oregon?
Beverly Cleary was born in McMinnville, Ken Kesey was raised in Springfield, and Ursula K. Le Guin, though born in California, wrote her major novels during nearly sixty years in Portland.
Where did they come from
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