How An `Instant College' Became A State University

PORTLAND, Ore. - No single event or chain of events changed the modern United States more than what happened after Johnny came marching home again after World War II.

Veterans used the GI Bill to become the first members of their families ever to go to college. Then they met and married co-eds and other girls from different states and religions, made a baby boom, and looked for houses in places that never existed before, called suburbs.

Portland State College was one of the schools that had to be invented instantaneously to handle the vets. In 1946, people just changed the signs on the gates and doors of wartime buildings along the Columbia River, and defense workers' housing became dormitories and classrooms. Two years later, floods washed the buildings into the river, and about all that was left were 92 books from the library.

Classes were moved into abandoned shipyard buildings and then into an old high school. The joke was that Portland State was the flunk-out extension center of the University of Oregon and Oregon State University. But the vets kept coming, and so did other students whose parents had never seen a ``real'' college campus.

Then in 1965, with 7,500 students paying tuition of $110 a semester, four young men from Portland State caught the attention of the whole country. They weren't athletes; they were video scholars, retiring undefeated as the champions of the NBC Sunday night television program, ``The College Bowl.''

The boys from Portland in narrow lapels and narrow ties, three of them wearing horn-rims, wiped out every record set in the show's seven years of throwing questions at students from institutions old and new, great and small, rich and poor.

Obviously it was a different kind of television then. People watched in prime time as students raced the clock and one another to answer questions about the discoverer of carbolic acid and what word means both monks and monkeys. (Joseph Lister and Capuchin.)

The kids from Portland beat the University of San Francisco, Kent State, Coe College, and two other schools, rolling up 1,725 points in five contests against 450 scored by all their opponents.

Jim Westwood, Mike Smith, Larry Smith and Robin Freeman were greeted by crowds at the airport when they came back from New York and the last contest - against Birmingham Southern, which they won 415-65. They donated $13,200 in scholarships provided by the show's sponsor, General Electric. The Legislature quickly made Portland State a university.

The school has 16,000 students and a graduate center now, 25 years after that triumph. I happened to be there, one of the speakers on Alumni Day, when the university sponsored its own College Bowl, pitting the alternates on the 1965 team against four undergraduates and graduate students.

Westwood, an attorney in Portland, was the quizmaster. The questions seemed as tough as ever, particularly for the alumni team, which included a woman this time, Molly Ingram, a management consultant. The students clobbered the old folks in a dress rehearsal.

It turned out that the younger team, including two graduate students, had been drilling for the contest. Alan Kotz, a 1965 alternate who became an insurance agent, said he kept in shape by playing Trivial Pursuit once in awhile.

Things looked pretty bad for the oldtimers on the big day in front of an audience of other alumni. Neal Schultz, a candidate for a master's degree in political science, hit his buzzer and correctly gave the dates of the 30 Years War - 1618 to 1648. Then Hilary Hill, a senior, rattled off the names of the planets in order of their distance from the sun.

But the boys of summer 1965 hung in and came back. Kotz knew the name of Ian Fleming's oddest book, ``Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang.'' And the alumni team knew that Hannibal crossed the Alps before Caesar crossed the Rubicon.

They missed one when Marvin Foust, a city real-estate inspector, said that Peter Martel, Charlemagne's grandfather, defeated the Saracen army in 732. No, his name was Charles Martel.

Then the old folks began pulling away. They knew the connection between the Willamette River and the Nile - both flow north. The kids could not name the capitals of Honduras and Laos.

The veterans missed one question: They could name only three of Oregon's five members of the House of Representatives. But who wants to these days?

Final score: Alumni 420, Students 160. The kids seemed shocked. Tough. Better shape up. When we were your age, we were older.

(Copyright, 1990, Universal Press Syndicate)