Marge White

At the age of 88, Marge is one of Willamette’s oldest residents. She is a fiercely independent and private woman who continues to do as much for herself as she possibly can. She is forward thinking and believes, “there is no use in looking back because that’s not the direction you are going in.” Delightfully frank and intelligent, with impressive clarity, Marge recalls for us a little bit of her life growing up in West Linn.

She was born in Oregon City in 1927 but tells us her mother was raised in West Linn and wanted to move back to be near her family. When Marge was five, they moved back to a family home in the Willamette area.

Marge attended Willamette Elementary beginning at the age of six. She loved school and was a good student. She recalled her teacher Mrs. Harris and a small class of 15 or so children. She said it was common knowledge at this time in West Linn’s history that the teachers were excellent. “Mabel Larsen taught third grade and Etta May Hawley taught seventh grade. We had weekly book reports, diagramed sentences from the Declaration of Independence and read ‘Up from Slavery’ by Booker T. Washington.” Marge remembers this early preparation allowed some students, like herself, to skip freshman English and move up a grade to take a literature class in high school.

We asked Marge about the fire destroying the Willamette Elementary School. She corrected us, “there were two. One started in the attic when I was in the 6th or 7th grade but it didn’t interrupt school. As I remember, it happened in summer. The fire department was a volunteer station with a siren that had to be manually turned on and off in those days.” She remembered the loud siren, early one morning warning about the fire at the school. Her uncle was among the volunteer firemen. Sometime later, the school had a second fire and was rebuilt.

West Linn was a small town; her extended family lived close by and “people knew everyone in town back then.” Marge recalls her grandfather, Charles Andrus, delivered the mail with a horse and buggy from his house on 9th street. She also rode the trolley as a child, her uncle was the trolley car driver. The trolley ran from the Methodist church down to the station at the Arch Bridge. Much of the trolley tracks were eventually covered by the street but there are still original stairs that once led down to the tracks in between 7th and 9th at Willamette Falls Drive.

Willamette was a bustling part of West Linn in the 30s. Marge recalls all sorts of stores and shops along the main street. Buckleson and Milliken’s grocery was on 14th, Ritter’s was a post office and dry goods store located where Cooperstown is now, and there was a barbershop called Walston’s. Willamette had a drug store and a butcher shop that made deliveries. Grossman’s meat market was on the corner of 12th with a small cafe next door. Outside Willamette you would find mostly farms. On the hillside above the present day Albertson’s store, there were 2 dairy farms and on Johnson Road there was a “filbert” (Hazelnut) orchard (Marge recalls multiple filbert trees in the orchard were lost back in the Columbus Day Storm of 1962).

As kids, Marge explained, “We pretty much made our own fun. We would go down to Willamette Park and spend the day. There would be councilors there in the summer to organize games and crafts. We’d climb trees and sometimes hide up there at dinner time to see if someone would find us. We could swim in the Tualatin at Devil’s Elbow (now Swift Shore). In winter when it snowed, and it snowed a lot, we had 12th street for a good steep run with a sled. Mind you, we’d make a quick turn at the bottom to avoid shooting into the river.” Fishing and camping along the Clackamas and vacationing at Detroit Lake are also fond memories for Marge.