The Delight of the Duckie
Squeaky, yellow, and full of surprises
Let’s admit it: a duck isn’t exactly a fearsome creature. As much as we love our amphibious mascot, ducks have an utter lack of the teeth, claws, blood-curdling shrieks, and medieval weaponry that lead other teams into battle. In fact, with the exception of Donald’s infamous temper, there’s not much about our chubby, webfooted pal that’s likely to strike fear into the hearts of our opponents. But despite (or perhaps because of) that fact, we still adore our patron waterfowl. And we’re not alone.
In their rubber duckie incarnation, ducks have captured the hearts of people the world over since their invention in the late 1800s. Oregon fans are likely to have a rubber duck or two in their possession (the campus Duck Store has dozens of varieties for sale), but the cheerful yellow toys can be found in bathtubs from Sesame Street to Buckingham Palace. Queen Elizabeth has her own rubber duck, said to sport an inflatable crown.
For some enthusiasts, however, a rubber duck (or a whole flock of them) has a larger significance than simply bath time companionship or honoring one’s alma mater. Duckie devotion inspires works of art, science, community, and philanthropy—big work for little quackers.
Duckies in the Viewfinder
The duckies were posed perfectly against a New York landmark, and Colleen Fletcher was lying on the sidewalk beside them, focusing her camera, when an oddly familiar voice asked what she was doing. “I turned around . . . and there was Alec Baldwin,” Fletcher says. Shaken but excited, she showed Baldwin her duckie photo shoot, and gave him her website address. “I should have taken his picture,” Fletcher says with a laugh.
Most of Fletcher’s fans aren’t quite so famous, but her Internet gallery of rubber duck tableaus attracts visitors from all over cyberspace. A collection of nearly 500 rubber ducks (which, she says, is all her tiny Manhattan apartment can hold), a camera, and a finely tuned sense of humor make up Fletcher’s artistic palette. Her rubber ducks pose for seasonal portraits, re-create movie posters (American Beauty’s rose petals a la duckie, anyone?), and go on sightseeing adventures to famous Big Apple locales.
Fletcher loves connecting with other duck and photography enthusiasts on the Internet. “Everyone’s a little goofy,” she says fondly. But since no one should live on megabytes alone, next year Fletcher and her husband will host Duckfest ’09, a weekend convention of rubber duck collectors. Until then, there are always new ducks to buy, pose, discuss, and photograph. “They make me laugh,” Fletcher says of her squeaky rubber friends. “They remind me not to take life too seriously.”
View Colleen Fletcher’s photographs at duckshow.com.
Department of Duckie Studies
It was never Charlotte Lee’s goal to break a world record: she just wanted a few rubber ducks to decorate her bathroom. But friends began giving her duckies, and soon she had a dozen, At that point, Lee decided she was a collector. “And what do collectors do? They get more,” she says. Today her Guinness-world-record überflock contains almost 3,700 ducks (with no duplicates!).
Lee created a webpage named “Duckplanet” and posted pictures of her collection for her family. To her surprise, she began receiving e-mails from other rubber duck devotees, and Duckplanet grew. Today, the site has more than 400 registered members and greets thousands of visitors a month. New members are “just jubilant,” Lee says. “Everyone says, ‘I thought I was the only one.’”
Duckplanet’s growth sparked Lee’s intellectual curiosity. (She just happens to be a research scientist who studies humans’ interactions with technology.) With the help of a colleague, she conducted a formal study and developed a typology of collectors. There are “serious” or traditional collectors, “casual” or passive collectors, and a new group, “social collectors,” who enjoy bonding with other enthusiasts more than the act of collecting itself. The Internet, Lee believes, has given rise to this third category of collectors, and has revolutionized the very nature of collecting—duck-oriented or otherwise.
Visit Duckplanet at duckplanet.com.
We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Bathtub
As any duck worth his webbed feet knows, when life gives you puddles—or a French estuary—learn to float. Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman took that advice to heart when he created a 105-foot-high inflatable rubber duck for a 2007 art show on the Loire River near Nantes, France. Hofman designed his grand canard with a large, toddler-like head and no neck, which, he says, “makes it more friendly.” The wildly popular sculpture was also designed to float from place to place along the river, and visitors never knew just where they might encounter it. “The Rubber Duck knows no frontiers,” Hofman says. The result? A jovial—yet notably peaceful—daily duck hunt.
See more photos of Florentijn Hofman’s giant duck, and his other whimsical works, at www.florentijnhofman.nl. Under PROJECTS click on “Canard de bain.”
Duckie Derby
A dumpster isn’t generally a very cheerful place. But when you fill it with 63,585 yellow rubber duckies, even a big metal trash bin can provoke a smile. Especially when those duckies are about to go for a swim in the Willamette, all in the name of charity.
Turning twenty-one this year, the Great Rotary Duck Race (organized by the United Rotary Clubs which includes clubs representing Cottage Grove, Eugene, Fern Ridge, and Springfield) is now legally an adult—but still happily playing with toys. Since its inception, the race has raised a combined $4.4 million to combat child abuse in Lane County. The Eugene race is the second largest held in the United States, topped only by Cincinnati, Ohio, where some 86,000 duckies bobbed down the Ohio River this year in support of the local food bank.
Duck races got their start as entertainment in an Irish pub, where patrons placed bets on a race between duck-hunting decoys. The concept migrated across the Atlantic, the decoy ducks were traded in for sunglasses-sporting rubber duckies, and hundreds of communities all over the country began reaping the waterlogged rewards.
At noon on a gray and drizzly race day in Eugene, the dumpster’s duckies were deposited into the drink, and the yellow flock swirled downstream toward the finish line. While only a few lucky ticket holders would take home prizes, the knowledge that thousands of dollars had been raised for local charities—and the sight of a river full of bath toys—kept a grin on the face of every Duck, duckie, and duck-lover in sight.
—Mindy Moreland
Better Late . . .
“I am submitting my honors college thesis to you forty years late. It was due in 1967. . . .”
So begins a September 2007 letter addressed to Clark Honors College director Richard Kraus. Phil Hansen ’67, J.D. ’70, certainly intended to complete his honors thesis on schedule, but his senior year presented him with some tough hurdles to overcome.
A steeplechase runner for Bill Bowerman’s Pacific-8 Conference track-and-field championship team, Hansen was firmly entrenched in the legendary coach’s running regime. By 1967, his senior year at the UO, Hansen was doing three daily workouts and running a cool hundred miles per week while “hashing”—serving food and washing dishes— for his meals at the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority house.
That year, Hansen placed fourth in steeplechase and Oregon won the Pac-8 meet, held on the cinder track at Hayward Field. Hansen missed his own undergraduate commencement ceremony while running in the NCAA championships in Provo, Utah—and while there, gleefully streaking the Brigham Young University campus with other distance runners, a stunt that the bawdy Bowerman never heard about, but might have approved. Hansen posted a respectable 3.2 final GPA in his major, Germanic languages. But his honors thesis—a planned dissertation on Friedrich Dürrenmatt, the Swiss dramatist—fell by the wayside.
“After that, law school and a career in law and public accounting got in the way . . . .”
That fall, Hansen joined the flock of Duck law students in Fenton Hall. Living in typical student squalor, driving the Tino’s Pizza delivery truck at night, he stretched his academic wings and prepared for a career in tax law. Now married to his college sweetheart, Susan Pennington ’68, Hansen added a full load of undergraduate accounting courses to his law school curriculum and responsibilities as senior class president. Upon graduation he accepted a Bay Area position with accounting giant Ernst and Ernst (now Ernst and Young), which segued into a sixteen-year stint as income tax manager and trial attorney for United States Leasing International in San Francisco.
When he wasn’t dashing around the country trying tax cases, he and Susan were busy with their three children. “I was very lucky,” says Hansen. “I had a great career. I was able to travel, plus I spent a lot of time with my kids. I was a Little League coach, sort of a part-time ‘soccer dad.’ I got to know every gymnasium in Marin County.” Sadly, Susan Hansen passed away after a long illness.
Eventually, a company merger altered his job and his focus. “Suddenly, my kids were out of college, I didn’t need to work anymore, and I just quit. Retired at age fifty-three, and never went back.” Hansen played some golf, took up walking and hiking. He met and married his second wife, Teresa, and they traveled to Germany and Italy. And Hansen reconnected with the University, working with the law school’s alumni committee to solicit funds for scholarships.
In 2005, a German department newsletter caught his attention. “Susan Anderson was the department head at that time,” Hansen recalls. “And she had written a little blurb about wanting to fund some scholarships . . . and a light went on in my head. My kids were grown, and I was financially comfortable enough to do something for my school. The law school was already doing very well, and I realized that my heart was back at Friendly Hall.”
Memories of his undergraduate days inspired Hansen: He reminisced about warm student gatherings at the home of Professor Astrid Williams, who prepared authentic Norwegian dinners and pastries for her guests. He recalled donning a silly cape and costume to perform as Übermensch [Superman] in a German play for Professor Ed Diller. Thoughts of recent increases in educational costs also helped propel him to action.
Costs were more manageable back then. “I worked summers in the Diamond A [Agripac] cannery,” says Hansen. “In the 1960s, tuition was $110 per term, and you could earn enough in a summer to cover a year’s expenses. It’s a changed world—I think that’s impossible now.” Hansen contacted Anderson and endowed a scholarship for an undergraduate German major. “That was so much fun,” he relates, “that I set up a second one a few weeks later.” Since 2005, the Philip and Teresa Hansen Germanic Languages and Literatures Scholarships have been awarded annually to two undergraduate German majors nominated by the faculty. In 2008 Hansen added an annual $2,000 stipend for a deserving graduate student.
“The department was overjoyed with Hansen’s generosity,” says Susan Anderson, “and the scholarship recipients are so very, very happy for this wonderful help from Phil.” Hansen started visiting Eugene annually to meet with his “Hansen scholars” and to rekindle friendships with his former professors.
“The writing I have done will probably be a bit more useful than what
I would have written forty years ago
. . . which would only have yellowed and
collected dust.”
Then, early in 2007, Hansen’s daughter Meredith unearthed her grandmother’s college German textbook and handed it over to her dad. The 1931 text’s editors were University of Oregon professors Edmund P. Kremer, F. G. G. Schmidt, and J. H. Mueller. Out of curiosity, Hansen contacted Susan Anderson to see if the German department had any information about these professors.
The answer was no. Hansen was stunned, and volunteered to do a little digging himself. “I should have shut my mouth!” he laughs. “My little research project turned into a full-time job.”
Starting with Internet sources, Hansen gleaned information from libraries and archives at the UO and Multnomah County. Enlisting Teresa as a research assistant, he travelled to Eugene, interviewed former faculty members and their spouses, and pored over dusty scrapbooks and photo albums. As his piles of notes took shape, Hansen asked for editing help from Associate Professor Emeritus Helmut Plant. “He was a godsend,” says Hansen. “My German skills had diminished over the years, even though back in the Sixties I was speaking, reading, and dreaming in German.” The project was organized chronologically, and nine months later, Hansen self-published his work. On a whim, he decided to submit The History of Germanic Languages at Oregon to the Clark Honors College as his much-overdue thesis.
“It was always his intention to make the book interesting and readable, not just a dry, historic recounting of events,” says Susan Anderson, “and he did an amazing job. We’ve had so much fun seeing the old photographs, reading about times past, and sharing with our alumni and other departments.”
In October 2007, Hansen received a response from the Clark Honors College:
“We are going to treat your work as
a slightly tardy but splendidly completed Honors College thesis, and include it proudly in our library.
We also may brag about you from time to time.
Sincerely, Richard Kraus, Director.”
—Katherine Gries ’05
For more information on Hansen’s book, visit www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/107480.
Sprechen Sie Deutsches?
An excerpt from The History of Germanic Languages at Oregon.
The activities of the Oregon German Club usually involved a sampling of German culture. Not surprisingly, the most popular activities involved food and drink. In the 1960s the German Club met from time to time at the Bavarian Restaurant underneath the Ferry Street Bridge, which was a regular meeting place for the Eugene citizens of German heritage, as well as university students, the so-called “town-and-gown” community. This was immensely popular with the beer-drinking crowd. Who can ever forget the hasenpfeffer and German beer on tap at the Bavarian on Friday nights? The restaurant’s owners and waitresses were German, and sitting at the large round table and conversing in German with the locals was a worthy challenge for the more advanced students.
Pen Pal Pre
Runner’s small act of kindness encourages a kid on the way up
Today John C. Mellott is the publisher of one of America’s premier newspapers, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, but in 1973 he was a skinny high school kid working hard to become the best he could at his chosen sport of running. Mellott received a surprising bit of encouragement one day in the form of a letter from a most unexpected source.
Mellott recounts the story:
Dear President Frohnmayer,
Enclosed is a letter I received in 1973 from Steve Prefontaine. I had forgotten about it over the years but came across it recently while cleaning a dresser drawer at home.
At the time it was written I was an above-average high school runner—not great, but okay. Knowing I admired Steve, my older brother Tom wrote him asking if he would write a letter of encouragement to me. Shortly thereafter, to our amazement, this letter arrived.
I think the letter is significant—not in its actual content but as a reflection upon Steve’s character. He took the time to write a perfect stranger a nice, kind note. I’m not sure that in today’s world, athletes of Steve’s stature would have responded.
I am sending the letter to your attention hoping the University may be able to do something better with it than just sitting in a drawer. I will always have a pleasant memory of Steve’s kindness and do not need the physical letter itself.
Perhaps it could be placed in your athletic archives or used as a silent auction item at an athletic fundraiser. Better yet, if anyone in the athletic department has contact with one of Steve’s relatives, maybe this letter would bring a smile to their face knowing that Steve had brought a brief moment of joy to me.
Sincerely,
John
Here is the text of the handwritten letter.
Nov 23
Dear John,
I have heard through the grapevine that you’re a young runner. I’d just like to say keep it up and some day all of the hard work will pay off for you. Running is an investment, I’ve been running for 10 years and I still have a long way to go.
Remember this one, that the name of the game is train don’t strain.
Wishing you the very best in your future running.
Sincerely,
Steve Prefontaine
The Department of Intercollegiate Athletics now has the letter and is considering options for what to do with it.
UO Homecoming Parade 2008
Photos of the University of Oregon’s 2008 Homecoming parade. Photos by the University of Oregon Alumni Association. Pirate photo is by Michael McDermott.
UO Alumni Calendar
Go to uoalumni.com/events for detailed information
November 10–17 | Provence, France
UOAA Travel Program
“Provence Escapade”
November 23–28
Maui Invitational
Join the Duck basketball team as they travel to Hawaii for the EA Sports Maui Invitational Tournament.
November 28
Portland Trail Blazers vs. New Orleans Hornets
Join the Lundquist Alumni Network chapter for this Civil War Night at the Rose Quarter. Contact Ashley O’Hollaren ’04 at ashley.ohollaren@trailblazers.com.
December 5
26th Annual Holiday Music Fest
Join the Portland chapter for a special evening of music and celebration with President Dave Frohnmayer at the White Stag Block.
December 7 | Hawaii chapter
Christmas Brunch
Enjoy brunch and socialize with other Ducks at the Outrigger Canoe Club, Honolulu.
December 10 | National Capitol chapter
Alumni Holiday Party
Washington, D.C.
Expanding Classroom
Educator puts kids and nature together
When Larry Callister ’79 accepted a job at Reynolds High School in Troutdale just after graduation from the UO he didn’t know it would launch a lifelong campaign to help kids stay in school—by getting them outside. Reynolds High had a large percentage of low-income students and a high dropout rate. Callister believed that for many students, a traditional school with square classrooms and rows of desks—what he calls the “Big House”—was not the best environment for learning. An avid outdoorsman, he wasn’t much of a Big House guy himself.
To expand the classroom, he led field trips to nearby creeks and forests. He organized hiking and biking clubs and an ecology club, focusing on simple but far-reaching projects, such as planting trees. It was a start, but he dreamed of bigger things.
What about an outdoor school—away from the Big House—that would interweave core courses with environmental science? When he heard about Environmental Protection Agency funding available for innovative environmental education programs, he proposed the idea to the Reynolds school district, and in 1997 the Reynolds Natural Resources Academy was born.
He and three other teachers secured a bus from the district and leased an old Forest Service ranger station in the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area to serve as a base camp. From there, academy students explore calderas with geologists, core trees with foresters, meet hydrologists from the U.S. Forest Service, and learn about range management from ranchers. They even visit Salem to talk with politicians about environmental issues.
What’s different when teaching outdoors? Callister has collected animal bones for a student interested in anatomy and gave a student who spotted a bear treed in a K-mart parking lot in Bozeman, Montana, a best tracking skills award. The academy started with almost 100 students and now enrolls about 160 with others lined up on a waiting list.
Some academy students go on to four-year colleges and careers in natural resources, but Callister considers the big successes to be kids who “were going to drop out, but stayed in school and went on to a job or community college—far more than their parents or counselors thought they would do.”
—Julie Whitmore
DUCK TALES
Two Thumbs Up
This past summer, I fell in love. With hitchhiking.
It began on a camping trip to Washington’s San Juan Islands. On a Friday morning in August, Matthew and I left the car in Anacortes and boarded a ferry to Orcas with just the packs on our backs. I thought we’d hike to the hamlet of Doe Bay—about twenty miles, but I didn’t care. It was a perfect Northwest summer day—the sky a Monet blue, a cool light breeze, warm sunshine.
Then Matthew stuck his thumb out the first time—about five minutes after we left the ferry landing—and my heart skipped a beat. I’d hitchhiked once. With my parents. I was eight.
A few minutes later, a full-sized white pickup truck pulled over. Matthew leaped into the truck bed. It took a minute to wedge myself in between the scuba equipment, the two dog kennels, and the cases of soda and beer. Matthew thunked on the window and I took a deep breath as we drove off, gravel kicking out from under the tires. From the bed of the truck, we could see the way the light broke through a canopy of towering cedars and smell the richness of blooming lavender. The wind whipped my hair into my eyes and my mouth.
We didn’t learn the names of our first drivers. They dropped us off a half-mile outside town, so we walked in and had lunch. We stopped to ask about renting kayaks. The woman there told us the best spots to hitch rides out of town.
Of course, we were in another world. Hitchhiking is actually the preferred mode of transportation for many on the fifty-seven-square-mile island, population 4,400. Many visitors are, like we were, just getting from one end of the island to the other.
It wasn’t always easy. Yeah, we did look a little gritty after a few days of sleeping in a three-by-six tent, but someone would eventually pick us up. And every last someone was nice.
I started sticking my thumb out without waiting for Matthew.
An older couple picked us up on a rainy Sunday afternoon in their luxury extra-cab truck. In the twenty minutes it took to get from Eastsound to Moran State Park, I knew where their children had gone to college and what they’d studied, along with the names of all the grandchildren. They apologized profusely for not going any farther than their destination and wished us luck.
Susan, a woman in her late twenties, delivered us to Rosario, a huge family vacation spot with peeling paint that didn’t eclipse its grandeur. She told us she was getting ready to leave the island for a bartending job in Florida. She also told us a bit about the resort’s history—so we spent a couple hours in the main building, which was created by shipbuilder Robert Moran (and looked like a ship), and on the sprawling grounds, looking at hundreds of starfish on the rocks and fantasizing about buying one of the sailboats we saw.
We became part of the community, got in on the gossip. Our next driver worked at the spa at Rosario. Her car smelled like lavender oil. She wanted us to fill her in on Susan’s plans.
A couple in their early twenties picked us up in their battered van and asked if we knew where they could get some pot (we didn’t); our next ride was a sixteen-year-old lifetime resident driving his girlfriend’s Volvo (he definitely knew where to get pot).
We were rescued from pouring rain by an older man in a dog-hair-covered Subaru listening to Mendelssohn through radio static. He dropped us off right at our proverbial door, but he clearly didn’t want to talk.
Others did. Seeds of dreams sprouted: Tina had previously spent seven years on a houseboat—maybe we could live on a houseboat. And thoughts of people far from us: Camille was leaving to care for her father, which reminded me how much I miss my own dad. And wishes sort of fulfilled: Matthew had been wanting to test drive a Honda Element; instead we sat on the floor in the back of one during a ride to Doe Bay.
We got to share, too. We traveled from Doe Bay with Glenn, who had been there for the summer and “couldn’t wait to get off this damn island.” He seemed a bit lost. I like to think we helped: Matthew had both navigated the rental market and worked in kitchens in the Bay Area, where Glenn wanted to move, and we both had suggestions about how he could launch his career as a pastry chef. He left us in Eastsound.
And there we were, waiting for our last ride back to the ferry. Despite the extra dirt on the clothes in my pack, I felt much lighter than when we’d arrived.
Across the street, a woman dressed in what looked like interview clothes had her thumb out. We let her go first. The road there was narrow and curved, with little shoulder. Jim pulled over on the other side in his truck and waved us over.
“Sorry about the mess,” he said, tossing tools and coffee cups into his truck bed. We squashed into his front seat. He was on his way to work. He had lived in Eugene, at some point. He and Matthew talked about an irrigation project he was working on. Somehow, the topic shifted to Washington’s banking industry and then to Jim’s father in California, who had led a corporate lifestyle with a three-hour commute, among other things—a contrast to our weekend, a warning.
And then we were off, the island receding in the fog that seemed to roll in as we headed back to the mainland.
I’m not thinking of taking up hitchhiking as a regular mode of transport—but I do hope to go back to Orcas next summer with just my pack and my sweetheart. And when I pass someone on the highway or in the hallway, I’ll try to remember to slow down.
Zanne Miller is director of communication for the UO School of Journalism
and Communication.
