Sunday, November 23, 2008

Practicing with Friends

I joined Ron Marson, Mark Allyn and others for some shop talk this morning, John Wish clerking, regarding the new Faith & Practice, currently available in draft form from the Annual Session.

We adopted a worship-discussion format and plunged in to all manner of metaphysics, mainly centering around issues of inclusiveness versus exclusivity. "When are Quakers not Quaker enough?" those kinds of queries.

Speaking of Quakers, although Douglas C. Strain did a lot for our group, his middle name was Campbell and he was a Campbellite first and foremost, I think it's maybe safe to say, certainly it ran in the family to profess such allegiances.

The memorial service was very Scottish, ending with bag pipes.

Here's an excerpt from a longer recent posting to Quaker-P, me yakking up Doug's overlap with our local Friends:
Doug's Electroscientific Instruments, a Silicon Forest
original, later endowed the Multnomah Friends with
their meetinghouse in the late 1950s, which at that
time sheltered AFSC offices. ESI had inherited said
structure from the Jantzen Company, a swimwear
manufacturer you may have heard of ( jantzen.com ).

[ Fri Nov 21 19:43:26 PST 2008 ]
Regarding said memorial, although not as printed in the program, Don Wardwell delivered Impossible Dream, with no instrumental accompaniment, and did splendidly I thought.

I enjoyed getting to see many friends at the reception, including Joyce Cresswell, Julian Vos-Andreae, Patrick Barton, Terry Bristol and Jim Buxton.

Glenn Stockton had never been to Forest Grove before and was happy to repair to Grand Lodge, joined by Jim and myself, for an ongoing celebration of Doug's friendship and good times with us in the Pauling House.

Some history I hadn't known: after ESI burned to the ground on Macadam, Portland rallied to assist, with Tektronix donating its older workbenches, then warehoused, such that ESI could get its Stark Street property back in the game for awhile, as yet unspoken for (not sold yet), along with other small sites all over town.

So the Quakers must have gotten the building after ESI had a second crack at it, getting back up to speed after an event most small businesses would not have survived.

I really enjoy exploring my Portland neighborhood's heritage, the Hawthorne district having been the birth place of Tektronix itself.