Eugene Weekly

“My mom is white and my dad is black,” says Rena Dunbar, who learned about racism first-hand, growing up along with her twin sister Leah in Fort Wayne, Ind., a segregated steel mill industrial town. “Seeing discrimination made us activists.” The twins won scholarships to DePauw University in southern Indiana. They majored in English, started a chapter of Amnesty International and protested the first Gulf War. After graduation in 1994, Rena followed the Grateful Dead on tour as far as Autzen Stadium shows in June, and decided to stay on in Eugene. Continue reading →

A member of the Klamath Tribes, Rowena Jackson spent her early childhood in Klamath Falls and Chiloquin. “My dad passed away when I was 9,” she says. “He died of alcohol poisoning when he was 25. Then we moved to Portland.” Feeling that she didn’t fit in at school, Jackson dropped out at age 15, took GED classes at Portland’s Urban Indian Center and passed her exams at 16. “After that, I played,” says Jackson, who had $15,000 in an account derived from termination of her tribe’s treaty rights in 1954. Continue reading →

The daughter of parents who each became a teacher while she was growing up in Sacramento, Phyllis Haddox majored in education at Sacramento State and found work as a reading specialist at racially diverse Del Paso Heights Elementary, where she had gone to grade school. “The district had adopted the Direct Instruction model,” says Haddox, who came up to the UO in 1971 for training in DI, a highly scripted and fast-paced teaching method for young children, with its founder, Siegfried Engelmann. Continue reading →

After high school in Cleveland, Ohio, and a year at Case Western Reserve, Eric Schiff followed his older brother to Eugene and the UO. “We had done summer trips out here with the family,” says Schiff, who learned metalsmithing from Max Nixon, made jewelry, played fiddle in a few bands, studied computer science and worked as a pre-school teacher at the UO Child Care Center, on his way to a bachelor’s in sociology in 1977. Continue reading →

“I think of myself as a New Englander,” says Hope Crandall, who grew up in Connecticut and went to boarding school in Massachusetts. She moved west to Lake Forest College in Illinois for a degree in philosophy, then continued on to Woodburn, Ore., in 1970, for an Office of Economic Opportunity job in migrant child development. “I realized I wanted to pursue multilingual, multicultural education,” says Crandall, who enrolled in a grad program at UC Santa Barbara, earned a California teaching license, then returned to Oregon. Continue reading →

Born and raised in Eugene, Julia Harvey got interested in marine biology as a second-grader at Spring Creek School. “We did a unit on marine mammals,” she recalls. “In fourth and fifth grade, we went to see tide pools and the aquarium.” Harvey took every science course available at South Eugene High School, then enrolled at Occidental College in L.A. “We shared a boat with other small colleges,” she says. Continue reading →

After high school on Long Island and a year at Brooklyn College, Marc Friedman hitchhiked west in 1971. “When I was in Banff,” he says, “I was recruited to fight forest fires.” Inspired by the experience, Friedman left New York for Alaska the following summer. He worked at many jobs, from building log houses to the construction of the Alaska Pipeline. He also returned to school at University of Alaska Fairbanks, completed a degree in geography and regional development in 1978 and worked in land management for the university. Continue reading →

Raised on a farm in southern Oregon, Sherry Whitmore graduated from Eagle Point High School and worked at a Sizzler restaurant in Medford. “I came up here for management training and met Brian Whitmore,” she says. “Three months later, I moved to Eugene.” She got married, spent summers as a forest firefighter, then had three kids, Shelby, Maddie and Trevor, and became a stay-at-home mom. “I coached volleyball for 13 years, at Kidsports and at South Eugene,” she notes. Continue reading →

“I started work as a bus boy when I was 14,” says Mike Grudzien, then a Catholic-school kid in Northwest Chicago. “I’ve never not worked.” A straight-A student, he pumped gas during high school, put in a year at Wright College, then joined the Marines. “I was looking for adventure and college benefits,” says Grudzien, who served on embassy security duty in Bucharest, Romania. He made sergeant in 22 months, but he left active duty to return to college and earned a master’s degree in advertising from the University of Illinois. Continue reading →

“I’m on my ninth life,” says Jimmy Jennett, who grew up amid drugs and dysfunction at home in Sacramento. “I got addicted to hard drugs at 16.” Jennett was an all-city basketball player, but needed a second senior year at Cottage Grove High School in Oregon to get his diploma. After one year of school and hoops at Sierra College, he dropped out and into a life of drug dealing and aggressive behavior that landed him in Folsom Prison at 27. Continue reading →