Jim & Linda Schwartz: Love for a lifetime at Eastmoreland

At the Portland City Championship just a few weeks ago I had the pleasure to meet Linda Schwartz and learn her story of Eastmoreland.  I already knew her husband Jim Schwartz, who works as a starter and ranger a few days a week. 

Linda learned about the Eastmoreland 100 Project from the advertising of the Launch Party and from her sister, Carol Jolly, a longtime women's club member.  Linda herself isn't much of a golfer, even though she played for the Cleveland High girls golf team. "She didn't like playing golf at all" One reason may be that she already spent so much time at Eastmoreland working for her Uncle Arnie Inman and Aunt Dottie Inman in the shop and restaurant.

The photo below is of Linda & Jim's wedding from 1966. In the photo is a literal "who's who" of top golfers from the neighborhood in the young prime of their lives.  Linda included a lovely note to help share the story which I've included below with a typed transcript.

Dear Mr. McGee -

My husband is currently a starter/marshal - full circle since we both put in many hours for my aunt Dot and her husband Arnie Inman.  I began working in 1959 at the old (wonderful) clubhouse on the opposite corner and know lots of old timers.  The photo enclosed is of our wedding in Aug - 1966, so we have passed the half century.  My point is, that besides my husband Jim Schwartz - 'our attendants' are friends  and some good golfers.  In the photo is Best Man -Gordon Herbert - John Orr and Jim Orr, Gay Davis, Kathy Martin and my little sis, Carol Rhoton Jolly.  We had a lot of Eastmorelander's at the wedding, and still use the dishes from the men's club and have the sweet Lenox pitcher from a young Clark Cumpston. Fond memories all around and quite an education for Jim and I managing to do 16 things at the same time!                                 Happy 100!      -
                                    Linda Rhoton Schwartz

---

Linda & Jim are lifelong residents of the neighborhood along with Uncle Arnie and Aunt Dot, all the golfers became their extended family.  All the guys in the wedding party were avid golfers and most competed in the City Championship, which was "very big deal" in the 195-'s and 1960's according to Linda.  

Gay Davis specifically changed Oregon golf as one of the founding members of Pumpkin Ridge.   In 1996, Pumpkin Ridge hosted the U.S. Amateur, where 20-year-old Tiger Woods won his unprecedented third consecutive title on the Witch Hollow course and then turned professional, with Nike founder Phil Knight on hand.  (from Wikipedia)

Below is a photo from the card and gift received from the women's club, a state-of-the-art electric blanket for those rainy evenings. Many invited guests were from the men's and women's club as well as fellow employees including a young Clark Compston (who along with his brother Rob currently manages the shop and restaurant) who worked the range shagging balls under Gay Davis' watch.

Linda, Jim and I had the pleasure to share some coffee and some swedish fish candy and reminiscence some of the 'old timers' they both remember from the clubhouse.  For now I'll just publish a beautiful picture of the clubhouse.  

In time, I'll be writing posts in more detail about the original "old clubhouse" where Linda and Jim worked and where Ron McPike lived upstairs a few years earlier from 1957-1958.  Soon there will be a more detailed list of all the "old time" players and the club managers like Arnie & Dot Inman, Rob & Clark Cumston and pros like Tom Marlow, Ted Westling, Ray Comella and more.  Of course even these "old timers" had their own connection to "old times" of their generation like Frank Dolp and John Rebstock and Don Moe.

Special thank you to Linda and Jim for reaching out to share their story - and for the readers there is much more to come. 

If you have a story on Eastmoreland, please Share your Story today!  We have a quick online form you can share and then our volunteers will be in touch.  This community story project exists because of your contributions.  Thank you!!

Extra bonus :) Here's the Sellwood Bee's interview of Linda Schwartz for their 100 year centennial.  She shares her story on growing up in the sellwood neighborhood in the 1950's

From the Sellwood Bee's 100 year celebration. Click here for the original.

A recent conversation with lifelong resident Linda (Rhoton) Schwartz provided details about growing up in the neighborhood beginning in the mid-1940s. Her earliest memories are of living in the wartime housing project called Kellogg Park (south side of Ochoco Street).

She enjoyed those years, because she had so many playmates of the same age. Her dad was a railroad brakeman, working from the Brooklyn train yards.

She remembers walking by the Barnum & Bailey circus train that parked on the tracks north of the Bybee overpass; she watched Harry Truman speaking from the caboose of a campaign train, and saw flatcars of camouflaged tanks, trucks, and other large equipment passing through the neighborhood, bound for the Korean War.

For a few years, peddlers continued to call on homes, including the man who sharpened knives, vegetable vendors, and best of all, the Ann Palmer bakery truck from North Portland: A nickel for a fresh glazed doughnut was a highlight of her grade school years!

Later, her family lived in several houses in Westmoreland, before settling into the one in which she lived while attending Llewellyn Elementary School, Cleveland High School, and college. Linda recalled that until the 1960s the neighborhood remained self-sufficient, and “you could buy anything you needed, from plumbing supplies to a prom dress” in Sellwood or Westmoreland.

For her, the closure of Brill’s Department Store on 13th Avenue marked the demise of that street as a shopping destination.

Linda recalled that compared to her parents’ childhoods, she and her sister were very fortunate. Her father had a steady job, and her parents, who had lived through the insecurity of the Depression and WWII, did not want their two daughters to have to do the same.

Her mother would shop at Rapp’s clothing store on Bybee Boulevard (today the space holds a sushi restaurant). According to Linda, that store featured expensive designer outfits that her mother found hard to resist. Sometimes, too, she and her sister were live fashion models of Rapp’s outfits at ‘Young Oregonian’ motherand-daughter luncheons.

Linda found ways to earn money by catching the early morning “picker’s busses” to outlying farms, where she harvested strawberries and string beans. When she was older, she worked at the Eastmoreland Golf Club to pay for tuition at Portland State University.

She eventually married Jim Schwartz, a fellow student from Llewellyn School (their first date at the Moreland Theater; their wedding was at Moreland Presbyterian Church), and they settled into a house on Rex Street, where they raised two children.

​She now designs the display windows in the Stars Antiques Mall on Milwaukie Avenue, which she recalls as being the location, first, of a Mode O’Day dress shop, and later a Cornet variety store.