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Duck Tales: Jim Klonoski: Deep Questions and Gored Oxes
Let’s begin with what he considers the worst of his more than 1,400 Register-Guard columns to date, then work our way back up, shall we?
Home Games in Portland
Notes on the long history of University of Oregon football in the Rose City
Imagine: Plans are announced to build a football stadium in Portland with a seating capacity exceeding that of Autzen Stadium. The University of Oregon announces that future home games against Washington and USC will be played there. A spokesman for the athletics department explains that increased revenue is necessary if the Ducks are to remain competitive with their traditional West Coast rivals.
Think about the uproar that would follow.
Far-fetched as this sounds, it is nearly what occurred in the mid-1960s, with one difference: the new stadium with the larger seating capacity was Autzen and the jilted venue was Portland’s Multnomah Stadium (now PGE Park). Oregon had played its home games against USC, Washington, and such major intersectional opponents as Texas and Nebraska there for half a century. Multnomah Stadium could seat 37,000. The all-time record football crowd at Hayward Field in Eugene was 23,500.
Announcement of plans to build the stadium in Eugene caused consternation throughout the state but nowhere greater than in Portland. Norv Ritchey ’53, assistant to UO athletic director Leo Harris and later AD himself, was in charge of the construction project. He understood the opposition. “The Washington game was always a sellout. It was a weekend party–type thing, the biggest social event in the state of Oregon, bigger than the Rose Festival. . . . It was the largest income producer for the city of Portland at that time and, of course, that’s why they didn’t want to lose that game.”
Nevertheless, many Portland-area fans supported the new venue. “They backed our plans to build Autzen,” Ritchey says, “perhaps not thinking that every game would be played there.”
“It wasn’t such a controversy among our alumni, our supportive alumni, because they knew that games should be played on campus.”
Seating 40,000, Autzen Stadium opened in 1967, built for a cost of $2.5 million.
“There was still resistance to playing games there after it opened,” Ritchey says. “The freeway [I-5] was just being constructed and some people thought it went one way and that was to Portland. They thought it was halfway to Mexico to go down to Eugene.”
The era of UO football in Portland started in the 1890s, with most of the earliest games played against the Multnomah Athletic Club, many times on Thanksgiving Day. The Ducks—or Webfoots, as they were also known through the pre-Autzen days—played more than ninety games in Portland, often three a year.
In 1908 the University of Oregon defeated Oregon Agricultural College (later Oregon State University) 8–0 on what the Oregon Journal described as “rain-soaked sawdust” on Multnomah Athletic Club’s field. The Model-T Ford went into production that year, but players and rooters would still travel to Portland on the Southern Pacific Railroad for many years to come.
Nearly half the Portland games drew crowds that exceeded Hayward Field’s capacity. “It was one of our major income producers with crowds of 25,000 or more as opposed to 5,000 to 20,000 at Hayward Field,” Ritchey says. Eleven Oregon vs. Washington games attracted crowds of 30,000 or more in the Rose City. A record 37,263 attended the 1959 battle.
A 50–50 split of gate receipts was common practice in college football at the time, and schools that had large home stadiums didn’t want to come to Eugene. Washington played at Hayward Field once, in 1924, and that was only after the Ducks had gone to Seattle eighteen times to play the Huskies.
The history was similar with USC, whose home field was the massive Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, built to stage the 1932 Olympic games. Its capacity was more than double the entire population of Eugene through most of the pre-Autzen era. Of the first fourteen games between Oregon and USC, thirteen were played in Los Angeles. The Trojans never played at Hayward.
Several landmark games in UO football history took place at Multnomah Stadium.
In 1938, Oregon played Gonzaga there at night, a fairly uncommon occurrence in college football at the time.
Three years later the Webfoots played Santa Clara in a game that began at 2:30 on a Tuesday afternoon. It was Armistice Day, November 11, still a widely observed holiday in 1941. One of Santa Clara’s assistant coaches was Len Casanova, who later would become Oregon’s head coach.
The UO opened the 1942 season in Portland against St. Mary’s Navy Pre-Flight School, a team of naval officers and cadets—half of the St. Mary’s players were twenty-five to thirty years old. Their quarterback was Frankie Albert, who had led Stanford to a 1941 Rose Bowl victory. Pre-Flight’s coach was Lieutenant Commander Tex Oliver, who had been Oregon’s head coach until the outbreak of World War II. The official game program listed most of the UO players as nineteen- and twenty-year-olds and noted the draft status of each. St. Mary’s Pre-Flight won the game 10–9.
After the UO defeated USC 8–7, coach Jim Aiken gave the 1948 squad permission to stay in the big city for the weekend. Like teams everywhere at the time, Oregon’s roster was liberally sprinkled with World War II veterans. More than thirty were of legal drinking age. It’s doubtful the victory over the Trojans went uncelebrated.
Television was still in its infancy when ABC showed the Oregon-USC contest to the nation in 1954. It was the first-ever UO home game shown on TV.
A more select television audience watched a night game against Penn State in 1963. While 30,355 fans witnessed the action live at Multnomah, another 4,047 viewers watched on black-and-white closed circuit TV across the river at Memorial Coliseum.
Later that fall Oregon recorded its first-ever victory over a Big Ten opponent. Bob Berry’s twenty-nine-yard pass to H. D. Murphy with eleven seconds left gave the Ducks a thrilling come-from-behind win against Indiana. Perhaps not coincidentally, it was the first time a Big Ten team had ever come west to play Oregon in a regular season game.
There was no open discontent from coaches about having to play so many home games so far from home. “It was basically a home game for us,” Ritchey says. “We just said ‘that’s the way it is’ and there weren’t any great complaints about it. The big games, the so-called money games, were scheduled in Portland. They had to be. The only real money game we had at Hayward was the Oregon–Oregon State game.”
Even that annual prize sometimes went to Multnomah Stadium. Seven Civil War battles were waged there between 1908 and 1952, several attracting larger crowds than could have been accommodated in Eugene or Corvallis.
Oregon played its final game at Multnomah Stadium on September 12, 1970. Following an NCAA vote to expand the college football season from ten to eleven games, Ritchey and the Cal AD both needed another opponent and agreed their teams should play each other. But where? Cal accepted Multnomah as a neutral site and a deal was struck. The game drew a crowd of 25,556—less than would watch games later that season against Stanford and USC at Autzen.
—Richard Leutzinger ’62
Turning someone topsy-turvy when they’re already suffering constant dizziness might seem a cruel trick. But when Carolyn Tomei first heard of the Epley maneuver, she would have tried anything to stop the room from spinning, to regain her balance, and to tame the nausea—all symptoms of the vertigo that has plagued her for much of this decade.
“I’ve had it so severely that I was flat on my back and couldn’t lift my head to eat,” says Tomei, a state legislator from Milwaukie. During the worst spells, she adds, death would have been welcome relief.
That first experience of someone manipulating her head through a series of odd movements “worked like magic” to relieve the symptoms, she says. “It’s like going from a dark room into daylight.”
Months later, Tomei sought out Dr. John Epley ’53 himself to ease her chronic symptoms. She arrived at the modest medical office Epley has occupied for more than forty years, in a northeast Portland neighborhood as suited to forklifts and greasy spoons as it was to lab coats and stethoscopes. Another patient, also vexed by vertigo, was sobbing in the waiting room. Tomei almost left. She’s glad she didn’t.
She soon found herself strapped into the Omniax, Epley’s computer-driven, multiaxis rotating chair. With camera-equipped goggles capturing every involuntary twitch of her eyes for Epley, who was staring quietly at his computer screen, Tomei started spinning into various positions, stopping briefly at one then spinning off toward another.
The motions weren’t as pleasant for Tomei at age seventy-three as carnival rides were at seven. But after about twenty minutes in Epley’s contraption, the maneuvers had cleared debris that had clogged her inner ear’s ability to maintain balance. It vanquished her vertigo.
This year, the $100,000 Omniax became the first of Epley’s numerous inventions to reach the commercial market through Vesticon, the company his daughter Cathy helped found in 2003. Its headquarters are in the same neighborhood as Epley’s clinic. Even at age seventy-nine, he still sees patients three days a week and continues his research two days a week at Vesticon.
Like so many of Epley’s patients through the years, Tomei had a condition known as benign paroxysmal positional vertigo. That mouthful, usually shortened to BPPV, is the most common form of vertigo but one that had defied simple treatment before Epley solved the puzzle. All forms of vertigo, which also can be caused by disease and accidents, strike about 15 million Americans a year. At some point in our lives, half of us will be vexed by a bout with the dizzying disorder.
Epley developed the Omniax chair over time, tweaking it as he went. But today, the Omniax is a gleaming apparatus that looks more like an astronaut’s training station than medical device. It has modern engineering and full computerization with the help of Vesticon’s small technical staff.
During treatment, infrared goggles like those Tomei wore closely track various eye movements, which Epley has learned to read like a map pointing him directly to the locations of problem debris. Now the computer is programmed to guide doctors without Epley’s experience through the right maneuvers. It also stores data from each session to track changes and also helps diagnose other forms of vertigo, which may require different treatment.
The Omniax has been tested at “beta site” clinics around the nation and in Australia. One of those sites is in Dr. Owen Black’s office, also in Portland. “We use that thing continuously. It’s just such a great advance,” Black says. “I can’t even remember when we operated on someone for BPPV.”
John Epley is small on small talk—but big on big ideas.
When he discusses them, he often closes his eyes in thought, then blinks them open. His demeanor, and the slight stoop of his shoulders, led one writer to describe him as “turtlish.”
When Epley first went into practice, the accepted treatment for BPPV was to cut the inner ear’s vestibular nerve. The surgery solved vertigo but left patients feeling strange. Epley did that surgery early in his career, but he never felt right about it.
The inner ear is the body’s balance control center. As the head tilts, one chamber uses tiny particles and sensitive hairs to detect gravity while, next door, fluid flows back and forth through the semicircular canals across more tiny hair sensors. The sensors send signals that allow the brain to translate the motion into balance.
Earlier researchers had found the loose particles in the inner ear but didn’t implicate them in BPPV. By the late 1970s Epley, with some research help from audiologist Dominic Hughes, realized the particles breaking off in the one chamber were working their way into the semicircular canals. Once there, they were clumping up and damming the fluid, causing the hairs problems, in essence, garbling the messages they sent to the brain. These scrambled messages result in dizziness.
Epley discovered that simply moving the particles out of the canals solved the problem. Along the way, he also learned how to interpret certain involuntary eye movements, called nystagmus, to reveal the location of the debris in the inner ear without surgery.
Once he perfected his procedures, his own trials started showing close to 100 percent success. He wrote papers, but medical journal editors rejected them as “against existing theory,” Cathy Epley says. He gave presentations, but mainstream surgeons walked out. Other doctors thought he was a quack and reported him to the medical board on charges that proved unfounded.
Epley never lost faith. Over time, outside researchers confirmed the effectiveness of the Epley maneuver, which has transformed from novelty to protocol.
“To my mind, this was so incredibly obvious,” says Dr. Black of Portland, an internationally known researcher in his own right. He remains incredulous that some colleagues once dismissed a man he says has contributed more to vestibular medicine than almost anyone.
“I could go on and on about John,” Black says. “He’s a genius.”
John Epley was born in Eugene to a couple of journalists and spent his boyhood in Klamath Falls, fishing nearby rivers and rambling around the high desert country with his older brother. They remember their father, “Mac” Epley Sr. ’28, as a poker-playing, scoop-chasing journalist who was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his World War II–era reporting for the Herald and News. Their mother, Jane Dudley Epley ’28, sold advertising at the Herald and News and was a correspondent for the Oregon Journal in Portland.
Mac Epley Jr. ’50 followed his parents’ footsteps to Eugene and a journalism career before switching to marketing. But brother John Epley didn’t take to the family profession. “I couldn’t handle those deadlines,” he says.
John also was a talented musician who would complete his brother’s piano lessons, with their unsuspecting parents listening from another room, while Mac Jr. sneaked out of the house. “He wrote a love song for every girlfriend he ever had,” recalls Mac Jr.
But music seemed an impractical career choice, so Epley turned to physics—“it was easy to me”—and later to medicine. With financial help from the Air Force’s Reserve Officer Training Corps, he graduated from what was then the University or Oregon’s medical school in 1957. An internship in Miami included a rotation in the vestibular department. That experience led to a stint as acting flight surgeon and head of an ear, nose, and throat clinic at an Air Force base while fulfilling his military obligation. Then it was on to residency at Stanford Medical Center, where he was an early researcher of cochlear implants.
Epley never lost a taste for innovation. Besides the Epley maneuver and the Omniax, he has invented other devices that correct hearing and balance problems. At times, Epley had brushes with commercial success with his innovations, but it never quite panned out.
“I’m not much of a promoter,” he says today. “It wasn’t until Cathy came along that we actually put something together.”
“This is my dad’s legacy,” said Cathy Epley, Vesticon’s CEO and majority owner. “I’m taking his ideas and turning them into things people can use in the clinic.”
Seated at the conference table at Vesticon, John Epley still talks about ways his Omniax machine may continue to evolve, perhaps one day by integrating artificial intelligence. And he talks about ongoing work to bring more of his inventions to clinics to reach more patients.
What the doctor pushing eighty doesn’t talk about is retirement. He still puts in some sixty-hour weeks and attends medical conferences around the world.
“I tell everybody,” he says, “I’m beginning to catch on to things and starting to hit my stride.”
—Eric Apalategui ’89
Late development: Following publication of our story, Dr. Epley suffered a stroke and, according to his daughter, has retired from clinical practice. A foundation is being created to continue his work.
Sum-Sum-Summertime
Campus is tranquil and sunny for summer students.
UO Alumni Calendar
Go to uoalumni.com/events for detailed information
September 3
The Oregon Tailgate pregame party
Oregon vs. Boise State Boise
October 4
UOAA Travel Program*
Chianti in a Tuscan Villa
October 10
The Oregon Tailgate pregame party
Oregon vs. UCLA
Los Angeles, California
November 7
The Oregon Tailgate pregame party
Oregon vs. Stanford
Palo Alto, California
November 21
The Oregon Tailgate pregame party
Oregon vs. Arizona
Tucson, Arizona
December 2
Thirteenth Annual Tailgate Auction
Eugene Hilton
(*For detailed itineraries, see uoalumni.com/join/travel)
Jim Klonoski: Deep Questions and Gored Oxes
I learned about his death on Facebook. My friend Russ’s “status update” said, “R.I.P. Jim Klonoski.” Ah, I thought sadly: The end of an era.
Back in the late 1970s when I was an undergraduate political science student at the UO, Professor Klonoski was my adviser. I took every class he taught during my four years at Oregon. And thirty years later, I still thought of him often, spoke with him occasionally, and knew so much of what I know because he taught it to me or taught me how to figure it out.
To survive in Professor Klonoski’s classroom, I learned to thrive under his direct questioning. Even in a 150-student American Government class, he would pepper the room with withering questions about the reading assignments. And he would often comment on a student’s hometown or high school baseball team. He knew his students, and he took the time to know more than just our names.
My first out-of-class experience with Professor Klonoski was when I needed his approval to go on an exchange program at a college near Philadelphia. After drilling me on what I would gain from leaving Oregon and going back east, he granted me permission to go.
When I got back, of course, he demanded a report on what I’d done and what I’d learned. So began a conversation that lasted more than three decades. I’d go somewhere and do something and then would run into Jim (as I later learned to call him) and he’d ask, “What are you doing?” and I knew it meant much more than what I was doing at my job. He expected a report on what I had seen and what I had learned. It was not a superficial question. Jim never asked superficial questions.
During my senior year, I applied to law schools. My impression was always that Professor Klonoski didn’t like lawyers much. So, it was with a bit of trepidation that I asked if he’d write my letters of recommendation. He tried to talk me out of it. He thought a career in public service was more important than being a lawyer. At the time, I thought maybe he didn’t believe I had the stuff to be a lawyer. But now, I realize that he just wanted to test my commitment. He wrote an amazing letter of recommendation for me.
Once I got to law school, I was amused by my classmates’ terror at being called on in class. Our law professors mostly used the Socratic method, which, to the uninitiated, seemed like an opportunity to pick the most obscure part of a legal case and ask an even more obscure question about it, and then mock the student who didn’t know the answer.
But I was never afraid.
I had Professor Klonoski.
He taught me a few really important lessons. One was that if you’re prepared, you can figure out the answer. The other was that if you couldn’t figure out the answer, it meant that the professor hadn’t properly asked the question. Professor Klonoski took full responsibility for teaching us. And he respected that we were smart enough to figure out the answers if he encouraged us properly.
He asked deep questions. The one that he asked every class (or at least it seemed that way to me) was, “Who rules America now, how, and why; and what can we do to maintain, gain, or regain control?” He taught us that, to understand most issues in American government, you had to ask, “Whose ox is being gored?” In the classroom, he was just as likely to critique the Democratic Party for mistakes it was making as he was to tear apart Republican Party ideas. Though I think we all knew his political leanings—he was chair of the Oregon Democratic Party during the years I was his student—I never felt they interfered with his teaching all sides of the issues (though perhaps that was because I shared his political leanings). And he taught that political will and political discourse was a pendulum. It swung left and it swung right. We just had to determine the direction it was swinging and do what we could to push it along toward justice.
Early in the 2008 presidential campaign, I ran into Jim on the street. We talked presidential politics and bonded over our awe of the skinny young senator from Illinois whom we both hoped would become president. On election night, I thought of Jim—and thought of that pendulum.
Jim and his family learned on Inauguration Day that he had a malignant brain tumor. He watched President Obama being sworn in, and, I hear, pumped his fist in celebration. He died just ten days later, the cancerous tumor destroying more quickly than anyone could have imagined.
But also, I have to believe, Jim must have felt that he didn’t need to be around to agitate any longer. He could finally rest assured that the pendulum was swinging in the right direction.
It’s now been almost thirty years since my last class with Professor Klonoski. And as the word spread of his death among my friends through e-mails and Facebook, I realized that my closest friends from my UO days are all men and women I met in or through his classes. When we gather, we always share “Klonoski stories” and we did so again electronically.
I know that years from now, when my Duck friends gather again for a birthday or a wedding or a picnic, we will still be telling Klonoski stories. And we will be comforted in knowing that, wherever he is, Professor Klonoski must now know—indisputably and always—exactly whose ox is being gored.
Rita Radostitz lives in Eugene with her twelve-year-old twin daughters, who help keep her on her toes by asking esoteric questions just like Jim hoped they would.
