Education: The Vanport Idea

In not much more time than it takes to lay a keel, war-born Vanport City became Oregon’s second largest city (pop. 39,000). When V-J day came and its Kaiser shipyard workers left, the city—midway between Vancouver, Wash, and Portland, Ore.—began to die. Last week the joint was jumping again.

The man who juked it up was Dr. Stephen E. Epler, first heard from as the inventor of six-man football.* An energetic young (36) Navy veteran, he had been made counselor on veterans’ education in Oregon. He found a home for himself at Vanport, began mulling how to get all the applicants into Oregon’s overcrowded colleges. Vanport City gave him the idea: “Why try to take housing centers to the colleges? Let’s bring colleges to the housing centers.”

Last month “Vanport Center College” opened for business in the half-deserted city’s junior high school. Ideaman Epler had talked 17 vacationing Oregon professors into teaching the first session. It was a cinch to sign up 221 students, all but 14 of them veterans. In Vanport City, the students and their families found cheap apartments ($30 to $47.50 a month), nursery schools, stores, theaters, a hospital and library.

Oregon’s board of education quickly approved the Epler summer school, just as quickly approved Epler’s bid to keep Vanport Center College open next fall—as an accredited junior college. Last week Epler had 577 applications for the new term, and more were coming in every mail. And the idea was catching. Just across the way—on the Washington side of the Columbia River—another new college was in the works. Seattle’s overcrowded University of Washington was eyeing the Army’s abandoned Vancouver Barracks.

*Football on a smaller field, with more passing, less rushing. Some 3,500 little high schools play it.