Word: vanport
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Vanport, Ore., on the banks of the Columbia River just outside Portland, was the nation's biggest wartime housing project. It was built in nine months, housed 40,000 people in its nearly 800 structures. At war's end, though many went elsewhere, 18,700 still remained...
Last week, as the massive Columbia shouldered against its banks, surged muddily over low-lying farmland and gnawed at its retaining dikes, the people of Vanport got a warning: the Columbia was 15 feet above flood level, highest in 54 years. It might overflow. One afternoon it did. The railroad fill protecting Vanport broke suddenly, and Vanport's jerry-built structures crumpled like matchwood under 15 feet of muddy water. In the wild scramble for safety, wives were separated from husbands, mothers from children. Bewildered and shocked, survivors told of seeing "hundreds" trapped by splintering walls or crushed...
...juked it up was Dr. Stephen E. Epler, first heard from as the inventor of six-man football.* An energetic young (36) Navy veteran, he had been made counselor on veterans' education in Oregon. He found a home for himself at Vanport, began mulling how to get all the applicants into Oregon's overcrowded colleges. Vanport City gave him the idea: "Why try to take housing centers to the colleges? Let's bring colleges to the housing centers...
Last month "Vanport Center College" opened for business in the half-deserted city's junior high school. Ideaman Epler had talked 17 vacationing Oregon professors into teaching the first session. It was a cinch to sign up 221 students, all but 14 of them veterans. In Vanport City, the students and their families found cheap apartments ($30 to $47.50 a month), nursery schools, stores, theaters, a hospital and library...
Oregon's board of education quickly approved the Epler summer school, just as quickly approved Epler's bid to keep Vanport Center College open next fall-as an accredited junior college. Last week Epler had 577 applications for the new term, and more were coming in every mail. And the idea was catching. Just across the way-on the Washington side of the Columbia River-another new college was in the works. Seattle's overcrowded University of Washington was eyeing the Army's abandoned Vancouver Barracks...