John Yeon interviews, 1982 Dec. 14 - 1983 Jan. 10

This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: John Yeon interviews, 1982 Dec. 14 - 1983 Jan. 10, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview with John Yeon
Conducted by Marian Kolisch
At the Artist's home in POrtland, Oregon
December 14, 1982-January 10, 1983

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with John Yeon from December 14, 1982-January 10, 1983. The interview took place in place at the artist's home in Portland, Oregon, and was conducted by Marian Kolisch for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview

MARIAN KOLISCH: Well, we can start with your biographical data. Maybe if you would tell me when and where you were born?

JOHN YEON: I was born on October 29, 1910 in a house where I lived till the early 30s. The house was a square, white house, very ordinary house. It wouldn't be exceptional in most other districts in Portland, but it stood out there because, well, for one thing, it was alone and surrounded by fields on three sides.

MARIAN KOLISCH: This was what part of Portland?

JOHN YEON: Oh, it was out on the peninsula. And the peninsula was mostly a working class area where most houses were very small and crowded together.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Was this what was called Mock's Crest by any chance?

JOHN YEON: Well, it wasn't Mock's Crest then. Although it's interesting because Mock was my maternal grandparents' name. Mock's Bottom [is named after them]. But my grandmother lived, oh I suppose a distance of a block or so-- through a field. She lived on Willamette Boulevard. The land around us was a pioneer land grant that my grandfather had taken out. And it existed for about a mile around the bluff of [where we lived in Mock's Bottom] which is a crescent-shaped formation [which is] flat on top and very steep down to the bottom. And this pioneer land grant was still undeveloped when I was young. There was just fields and a great big barn with a painted sign on the gable advertising Studebaker wagons. My grandmother's house stood surrounded by fields; sort of an oasis of a tall, Victorian gingerbread house with sort of a private arboretum around it.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Where did she come from, John? Was she a Northwesterner too?

JOHN YEON: Well she was born in Portland, among the first white children born here, I guess. Her parents, of course, came in a covered wagon. And they settled opposite Fort Vancouver, which is an area which is now [by] the Humane Society. They settled opposite the fort to have the protection of the fort. And I guess my grandfather came across in a covered wagon. They built an earlier house which was a log cabin which was burned down during their absence. They always assumed it was burned by the hired man in order to cover up a robbery. And then this Victorian house was built, which is still there, and, much to my surprise, now it's a city landmark. It's a high gingerbread house with lots of [spindle] work, porches around it, turrets. And it had art glass and lots of paneling with bird's eye maple and so forth.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Did they build it?

JOHN YEON: Yes. And it had fresco ceilings.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Oh, marvelous.

JOHN YEON: My grandmother lived in the kitchen, and only went into the rest of the house at Thanksgiving or some such time.

MARIAN KOLISCH: What was their name?

JOHN YEON: Mock.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Your grandfather's name is Mock?

JOHN YEON: David Mock. Oh, her name wa-- I don't know, somethin-- before she married. But all these fields belonged in my time to my father because he bought the farm from my grandfather because he couldn't properly farm it any longer or pay the taxes on it. My father bought it [just so they wouldn't be] impoverished in old age. And later my father subdivided it into Mock's Crest.

MARIAN KOLISCH: And so, well, tell m.

[Break in tape]

JOHN YEON: Often happened --became more of a bond between grandparents [than parents] and children. I loved my grandmother more than anybody else in the family. Her name was Baba and she was short and stocky. She loved flowers and we would go over catalogs together picking out things... And she was very indulgent, of course. I remember she let me dig up some of her plants and I would take them back to our house. Our house was separated from her house by a boardwalk through the fields with a gravel driveway on the side. I'd dig up these plants and bring them back to a large doghouse that my father had built for a dog I don't remember; it must have been a very large dog. And I'd have a florist shop and my grandmother would come and buy them and take them back and plant them back in her garden.

MARIAN KOLISCH: It's kind of like little children's lemonade stands on the road.

JOHN YEON: Yes. And she had me design a rose garden for her later, which was my first job.

MARIAN KOLISCH: How old were you then?

JOHN YEON: I don't remember; I was quite young.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Do you think you were in grade school?

JOHN YEON: I might have been in high school. Now the garden around my family's house was very plain, and I built my own garden in back which was a serpentine river that crossed under the boardwalk. I cemented it and took all the skin off the [ground]. But this river flowed around and under the walk [and all] and I had water running in it from the hose [and it had islands and ___________ landscaped it]. It lasted until I went away to school, I guess.

MARIAN KOLISCH: You could say then your interest, even before architecture, was gardens and landscape?

JOHN YEON: Yeah. I remember in grammar school we had to stand up and give a little talk on what we were going to be when we grow up and I think I said I might be an artist or a florist.

MARIAN KOLISCH: So you've done both.

JOHN YEON: Well, my grandmother was, I remember later on when I was in my early twenties and she was bedridden, I was going up to say goodbye to her because I was going on the Mazama trip. And she just urged me to go on the trip-- do all the trips I can and do all the [things I could]. She was very supportive.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Would this have been your maternal grandmother?

JOHN YEON: Yeah.

MARIAN KOLISCH: So she was really a pretty great influence on you.

JOHN YEON: Oh yes ____________.

MARIAN KOLISCH: And she gave you your start in gardening.

JOHN YEON: Yes that's true. Her house was full, not full, but the first floor had many paintings by my mother, who took painting when she went to Portland Academy. She was taught by the nuns there. And this house had these very large oil paintings in very large gilt frames hanging about. Most of them, I suppose, were copies of other paintings, but occasionally there were still lifes and things that she'd done from a fresh object. And there were paintings of old [paintings]: Yellowstone Falls and Rooster Rock. And Indian paintings: Kiss of the Dying Day from the Peak of Mount Hood and Time for the Indian Maiden to Come Down and Wash Her Feet.

MARIAN KOLISCH: I wondered if she was responsible for taking you around to have you exposed to all kinds of painting?

JOHN YEON: No, not at all, [oddly enough]. When she got married and started having children, she seemed to stop everything else in her life. She [gave up] painting and didn't seem to be much interested in it. She was just raising children. And so there was no intellectual nourishment from that source.

MARIAN KOLISCH: There was no education in art.

JOHN YEON: No.

MARIAN KOLISCH: But what about from your father? He was a lumberman, right?

JOHN YEON: Yes, my father had been a lumberman. That's one of those Horatio Alger stories and he was quite often written up as such. But he came from French Canada at some period, and I don't know how he got out to Astoria, but he started working in logging camps and saved his money. He spoke only French, I guess, when he arrived. And eventually he saved enough to be able to buy a little timber and then he introduced donkey engines in a profession where only oxen had been used before. And he had [some invention...]?

MARIAN KOLISCH: When he got to Oregon.

JOHN YEON: Yeah. That's true, I don't know how he became skillful in the logging business. I guess just by experience, because he began work in Horatio Alger fashion, digging ditches for a dollar a day. But by the time I was born he was completely out of the logging business and he invested in Portland real estate.

MARIAN KOLISCH: So he was then a city man, really, except that he had done something about the Columbia River Highway, right?

JOHN YEON: Yes. He built the Yeon Building, which at the time it was built and for a long time afterwards was the highest building in the state. And he had an office on the 15th floor.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Skyscraper.

JOHN YEON: Yes. And it was hung with large photographs of the Columbia River Highway. I don't remember much about the building of the highway because I was seven years old when it was finished. I did carry the tail of the flag at the dedication of the Vista House, I remember. But building the Columbia River Highway was the big thing in his life. He was very proud of it and it absorbed him. Do you want to talk about that?

MARIAN KOLISCH: Yes, because I read what it had been called in some quotation from Harvey Scott, I think, in the Oregonian. He said that it was called "the road from the Garden of Eden"-- which was Portland, of course-- "to the Temple of Nature"-- Mount Hood-- which I thought was kind of a flowery description.

JOHN YEON: Yes, well, you have to realize that before the highway was built, there were no public roads in Oregon to any extent at all. And my father became passionately interested in building a road system for Oregon. I think he got steered into the Columbia River Highway project by Sam Hill, of Seattle, who was a friend of his.

MARIAN KOLISCH: A railroad...

JOHN YEON: Yes, he was connected at that time (although his name was Hill independently). [I don't think he was from] the railroad people. But, as you know, I saw him only once, which was at my father's funeral when I was17. He had a cape and long flowing white hair, [like God]. And I admired him enormously because he was the only one around with a large-scale romantic imagination. ______________ _____________. But he was interested in good roads, too. He had bought a property up at Maryhill and constructed a road from the top of the plateau down to the [Columbia--Ed.] river, which was sort of like a Swiss path road. He had a dream of a highway through the Columbia Gorge, and he got my father to put it across along with Amos Benson. The role of my father doesn't seem to be of any significance now because there's no equivalent of it now. He was known as the builder of the Columbia River Highway, but he had to get political support with public funds, and he actually ran the crew that built the road. It wasn't just as it is now where you have a contractor do it. He did the contracting. But it was built by workmen who lived in, like logging camps; they lived out there. And he managed all of that.

MARIAN KOLISCH: And the political funds came from the state or...?

JOHN YEON: From the county. But he had to be influential in getting those funds, [as well as all this...]. He was just out there every day and he was paid a dollar a year.

MARIAN KOLISCH: A dollar a year?

JOHN YEON: Yeah. He did it for nothing but that was just to make it-- he was the County Road Master [in order to do it]. He was in charge of the section ________ the county. And as you know, it was a remarkable project, unlike other roads in Oregon. It was a very, very civilized public works project. I think Lancaster was chosen by Sam Hill, who took him to Europe to study roads.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Who was Lancaster?

JOHN YEON: Lancaster was the engineer on the highway. He was a brilliant choice because Lancaster did an excellent job. And at this stage, of course people are interested in Lancaster and not interested in the process which actually brought it about. Which is very understandable.

And they brought many Italian workmen from Italy to do the dry masonry walls. And trees that were injured by blasting, there was tree surgery to save them and the road was located to avoid destroying formations and disturbing things any more than was necessary.

MARIAN KOLISCH: That's quite remarkable in that time. The highway was built at about what time?

JOHN YEON: Oh, 1915 to 1917, I think.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Well, at any rate, your father was really one of the earliest conservationists we had, and left you with that strong feeling?

JOHN YEON: Well, yes. But I don't think he considered himself a conservationist at all. He was interested in good roads. But he was respectful of landscapes and appreciative. It's interesting that both he and Amos Benson, who made their money in cutting down trees, were both very responsive to landscape because the highway was a promoter, primarily, a way of making the scenery become even more accessible. It was built as a scenic highway and of course, unfortunately, it...

MARIAN KOLISCH: You said something earlier about the Vista House.

JOHN YEON: Oh. Well, yes. The Vista House was built for no reason, actually.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Did they do that also?

JOHN YEON: Yes. And it was quite extraordinary that they could talk the body politic into spending that much money on a folly, really. It's like a folly in an 18th-century English garden. It really serves no purpose except-- it was called an observatory and it had toilet facilities in it. I guess it was Oregon's first rest stop in that sense. And the toilet facilities there seem very large now, but ______ after the fact. It was just sort of a...

MARIAN KOLISCH: Scenic stop.

JOHN YEON: ...scenic stop and sort of a paying homage to the view in from Crown Point. And curiously enough it does serve the function of an eye-catcher in an English garden because the views which encompass the Vista House are more famous than the views from it. You know, it's kind of a focal point.

MARIAN KOLISCH: As you look up to it from across the river.

JOHN YEON: Yes, or from Installation Point approaching it.

MARIAN KOLISCH: I was going to ask you if you feel that some of your major influences-- let's say as a role model-- would one of them be Mr.Hill, do you think?

JOHN YEON: Oh, well I don't...

MARIAN KOLISCH: You just admired him.

JOHN YEON: I admired him and I don't know quite why I admired him so much except, you know... Of course his life was fascinating. He went to Europe and had a penchant for royalty. And I guess when he knew the King of Belgium, it was rumored that he built Maryhill as a refuge for the King of Belgium. That can't possibly be true because it wouldn't have been ready or it couldn't be built in that much of a hurry. But he had known Queen Marie of Rumania. And I think he probably loaned her some money or gave her some money and she probably said, "If there's anything I can ever do for you, let me know." So when he had this unfinished chateau on the mesa above the Columbia he decided to turn it into a museum and he said, "All right Queenie, there's something you can do for me now. Come over and dedicate it." And she did and she was the first royal personage to visit America, I believe.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Oh really. America! Not just Oregon.

JOHN YEON: No. And her trip across the continent on the train was ill-fated because it was full of reporters who quarreled among themselves and she endorsed [cold cream and everyone thought that was] kind of ________. She dedicated the War Memorial in Kansas City and came out here and went up to Maryhill. The grande dames of Portland went up and tried to tidy up the Meadowlark Inn, which was just a very small wooden building. They put down red carpeting and they scrubbed the place up. I don't think she spend [sic] the night there, but Mrs. Harry Corbett describes the dedication ceremony, saying how grim and really hopeless it all looked, unpromising, until she began speaking. And then she just really became a queen and was very inspirational.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Interesting.

JOHN YEON: She came back to Portland and the horse show at the stockyards was going on. She rode around the ring in an open phaeton-- that's what you call an open carriage-- with her son. The crowds just went wild. She was gesturing like a queen and...

MARIAN KOLISCH: Oh my. That was...

JOHN YEON: ...really an occasion.

MARIAN KOLISCH: When the queen came over it was sometime before 1920 and after the highway was built.

JOHN YEON: Yes.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Around then. She wasn't a mistress of Sam Hill. I don't know where I heard that story.

JOHN YEON: No, no. Oh, I don't know about that.

MARIAN KOLISCH: And she gave lots of the...

JOHN YEON: ...lots of things to the museum. And I'm sure that at the time she gave them, she thought this was going to be a worthy enterprise. Her sister, who was Queen of Greece, also gave things. Actually, she gave some very good early Greek pots.

MARIAN KOLISCH: What about some of these things that had been given by the queen-- the two sisters. The quality of them now.

JOHN YEON: Well, it's all very interesting as evidence of American's infatuation with royalty, because Queen Marie's things are just a bunch of mementos. Her throne chair must have been from a summer palace. It looks as though it's a Hollywood concoction. All that is very amusing, and all these photographs of royal personages, because that's what interested Sam Hill. I remember some of Queen Marie and her veils. And she wrote: "Among My Columbines" and "Marie."

MARIAN KOLISCH: And the drawings by Rodin were given by her, too.

JOHN YEON: No, I don't think so. Queen Marie was a fried of Elma Spreckels in San Francisco, and I think they came over from that connection.

The Greek pots that were given by the Queen of Greece were very good, but she also gave some extremely beautiful [counterfeits] which are just too good to be true. Well, they're not. But they're very pretty.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Are they still there?

JOHN YEON: I think so. Unless they've retired them because of the suspicion.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Suspicion of what?

JOHN YEON: Well, of being, not forgeries, but later.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Not real.

JOHN YEON: Yeah. I actually first brought this up. I just said, well, it was just too good to be true. And that turned out to be the case.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Then the basket collection is another much later addition.

JOHN YEON: Yes. I don't know how those were ________.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Indian baskets. They were later on, anyway?

JOHN YEON: Yeah. I don't know the story.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Well, should we talk a little bit about...

JOHN YEON: Well, about the museum, which I thought was fascinating, before the recent [bucking up]. It was a folk, art museum. Not a folk-art museum, but a folk, art museum.

MARIAN KOLISCH: I see.

JOHN YEON: Going in, what you would find would be an exhibit of chess sets and early 19th-century sculptures that any other museum in the country would have suppressed. And they were fascinating to see. It's just the kind of museum that a bunch of simple country people-- given rather extraordinary things-- would conjure up. There was an attempt to make it over and sophisticated and scholarly, and I haven't been back since. [I imagine] all that aspect was spoiled. And among all these things were [very] real surprises. Things that were good, just mixed in with the...

MARIAN KOLISCH: ...with some that was not good at all.

JOHN YEON: Yeah.

MARIAN KOLISCH: When did they do that reproduction of Stonehenge?

JOHN YEON: That was done after World WarI by Sam Hill. It's supposed to be a reproduction of Stonehenge on a somewhat reduced scale. It's done in reinforced concrete and poured in forms formed by hammering sheet metal into forms to give it a rough surface. And it's as Stonehenge never, never was. It's completely restored and just a full circle and had no relation whatsoever to Stonehenge. But even so it's rather a successful form in that landscape. Looking at the view through these tall, vertical slots frames it in an unexpectedly successful way.

MARIAN KOLISCH: It really is. It's quite remarkable. And in some ways it's very-- I mean the museum itself is kind of corny, but there are some aspects of it that are lovely.

JOHN YEON: It's sort of a Renaissance palazzo. And it's a very [improbable] plateau overlooking the Columbia in a [arid,] Egypt cataract phase, and just a snow-capped mountain-- very dramatic sight.

MARIAN KOLISCH: I don't know that we should go on into the subject of the directorship of that at all, but could you venture any guesses as to how much of the early original contributions are still there?

JOHN YEON: I haven't been back there. I was sorry to say that I thought Bob Campbell would... I didn't know why he wanted to become director, but I wrote a letter that he asked me to write recommending it. I remember distinctly saying that I didn't think he would change things there. Oh, boy, did he ever!

MARIAN KOLISCH: Forever, I think.

JOHN YEON: I just haven't been back since he churned it all up.

MARIAN KOLISCH: It was quite a mess for a while. I don't know what state it's in now.

But maybe we could go on to your education. Can we start talking about school?

JOHN YEON: Well, let me talk a little bit more about my father. Because of his interest in roads, he would take these trips to the various parts of the state. When I was old enough I would go along with him as well as my brother and sisters and my aunt. And so I saw many parts of the state that weren't yet accessible by roads. I remember particularly the coast, [and we] were able to poke in at various spots there. And at the time I saw a lot of the coast, it was, of course, completely undeveloped, and just fantastically beautiful ________. And then a flashback of something I remember. I must have been quite young because it was during World WarI, and my father was head of the Spruce Division, it was called. He was appointed [an unpaid] job to get spruce out of the coast range because spruce was used for building airplanes. This had to be, obviously, a quick operation and I remember going with him on a train over trestles through the forest and the coast range and then coming through an area that had been logged. And I was just brokenhearted to see the devastation. I remember just being shocked and horrified by it because [I couldn't ________]. Well I was around six or seven, I guess. Seven, maybe. But there seemed to be something in that. There was indication that I had...

MARIAN KOLISCH: Your concern...

JOHN YEON: ...agonies I had in store for myself.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Because of this concern for nature--is that what you think?

JOHN YEON: Yeah. That's what I mean. And of course I was in the Columbia Gorge with him, frequently. And then when I was finally able to drive and get there on my own I spent a great deal of time [there _______].

MARIAN KOLISCH: As a very small aside here, do you think the lumber companies are doing a better job now as far as cleaning up and not destroying the forest?

JOHN YEON: Oh, yes. When I was young, it seemed that driving, for instance, to the coast-- my first memories of that are going over plank roads and down on the train. But hillsides along the Columbia then were quite ugly because the old growth had been logged and they only took best trees and easiest trees. And there were all these snags all...

[Tape 1; side 2]

JOHN YEON: As a result the logging then left these tall snags that just burned or bleached in the weather. It's odd that Jane Platt once said that Oregon's better looking now than when she was young because you don't see those vast areas of that kind of devastation. When the logging is done now it's clearcut and, anyway, the snags are not left. It greens over quite rapidly.

MARIAN KOLISCH: With deciduous or with new growth?

JOHN YEON: Well, new growth [where] very often there are certainly alders, but you're spared this kind of boneyard stuff, which was on a large scale when old growth trees were involved.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Is it partly because they replant also? That now the lumber companies do some reseeding?

JOHN YEON: There's replanting, natural reforestation. The trees don't have to get very far before they cover the stumps, before they begin logging again.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Well, you don't see the great, big, wide logging roads, too, through hills.

JOHN YEON: And you don't see old-growth forests any more.

MARIAN KOLISCH: And I find it rather shocking to see some of the messes that are still left, going over the Cascades.

Well, could we talk a little bit about what schools you went to, starting maybe with high school?

JOHN YEON: Let's go back a little behind that. I went to Portsmouth Grammar School down on the peninsula. The big wooden school...

MARIAN KOLISCH: Excuse me, the peninsula where?

JOHN YEON: Between the Columbia and Willamette rivers. Down where I was born. And I want to talk about that because it's a sort of bitterness. I [really] can't say I had a happy childhood, contrary to all the myths and legends about childhood. One reason was that we were sort of socially isolated from the people who lived in that area, with whom I went to school. I was allowed to see just very few kids, and they'd walk home with me sometimes and get within sight of the house and run away. And to make it all the worse, we had all this land, you know, farm land. We had ponies. And, oh, for a while we were driven-- not only me, but my brothers and sisters-- were driven to school in, I guess, a surrey, with a fringe on top and a wicker basket thing.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Oh. Ponies?

JOHN YEON: Pony cart with seats facing each other and an umbrella with fringes. We were drive down to the school yard [and you know how you go to school with all these] kids observing you. And I just died, oh...

MARIAN KOLISCH: It was embarrassing.

JOHN YEON: ...it was terrible, just awful. God, people just don't realize.

MARIAN KOLISCH: So that you felt totally different than everyone.

JOHN YEON: Oh, yeah. It's really a lousy thing that any kid... Well, anyway, the last year of grammar school I went to school in Washington [state--Ed.] on Bainbridge Island-- [Moran] School. That's quite a few years [on]. I remember being there. I was interested in theater, because I had made little miniature theaters with many changes of sets.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Models?

JOHN YEON: Yes. They were little things out of _____ and wood and paper. Those were all burned up when I had scarlet fever so the bugs wouldn't crawl around and affect others...

MARIAN KOLISCH: Oh, no. It's a terrible shame!

JOHN YEON: But that was just one year and didn't have much influence. Then after that I went to Allen Preparatory School, three years, and the last year of that I went to, of all things, Culver Military Academy. I went there voluntarily, but the idea was obviously my father's. He thought it would make a man out of me.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Culver is where?

JOHN YEON: Culver, Indiana. It's south of Chicago a bit. It was a very good military school at the time. And, oh, I was a success there in various ways, and various ways I wasn't. I made the Black Horse Troop, which involves all sorts of acrobatics. You're not supposed to do that in one year.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Acrobatics on horse?

JOHN YEON: Yes. You know, mounting it without saddling and running and jumping over onto another horse. And I did a lot for the literary magazine-- things were published-- and began illustrating articles. I hated it. You had to go there two years in order to graduate, and I was so anxious to get out of there after one year that I took college entrance exams in everything and passed _______. I was so desperate to get out I did very well, [could have gone anywhere].

MARIAN KOLISCH: Then you were done in one year.

JOHN YEON: Yeah. I didn't have to go back, because I could enter college without graduating. Actually, I didn't graduate from anything. I didn't graduate from grammar school, from high school, or college. I did graduate from Sunday school.

MARIAN KOLISCH: That's all. From Sunday school.

JOHN YEON: Yes. Now at Culver I was appointed to or given the chance to go on a YMCA tour of Europe; it was sort of an honorary appointment. Because the YMCA took charge of the religious aspect of Culver the way it had in World WarI. It was a very, very proper military establishment. And as it turned out there were a few boys who were rather pious, but most went as a chance to get to Europe sans famille. It was a wild, rambunctious tour. That was my first trip to Europe.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Do you remember being very impressed with what you saw in the way of architecture or art?

JOHN YEON: Yes, I was. I liked Stockholm. And particularly the two cities that looked the way I thought European cities would look were Nuremberg and Prague. Both full of medieval buildings, I guess. I remember the experience very well.

MARIAN KOLISCH: You would probably have been 17 or 18 at that time?

JOHN YEON: Yeah.

MARIAN KOLISCH: How much of Europe did you see?

JOHN YEON: We landed in England and went to Scandinavia, and didn't go into Italy, but came through Germany and France.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Were you particularly turned on by old buildings?

JOHN YEON: Oh, yes. By then I was already getting passionately interested in architecture.

MARIAN KOLISCH: You say already by then. When do you think it started? At Culver or before?

JOHN YEON: Oh, no, but I was interested in houses and architecture. I don't know when it started. But when Mock Crest was developed, of course, there were houses built and I watched very, very carefully. I seemed to know that's what I was interested in because I stopped going to the beach in summer at my own request and stayed in Portland and worked as office boy in the Doyle office. And later an office boy in Brooklyn's office. I didn't learn much architecture then because I always ended up either making models or doing renderings or fancy pictures.

MARIAN KOLISCH: In those times, were you able to work in an architect's office without any training?

JOHN YEON: Oh I was purely an office boy. I wasn't doing any structural...

MARIAN KOLISCH: No drawing.

JOHN YEON: No finish drawings. I was just doing pretty pictures or renderings or models or that kind of thing.

MARIAN KOLISCH: But to go back just for a minute down to the theater. Were you every interested in pursuing the theater as a career?

JOHN YEON: No. I was just interested in [space] design.

MARIAN KOLISCH: That was in the design, stage thing.

JOHN YEON: Yeah. There was a theater at the school I went to which put on a few plays. I suppose that's how I got particularly interested then.

MARIAN KOLISCH: But your trip to Europe was just that one year from Culver.

JOHN YEON: Yes. That must have been in '28 because there was the Olympics in Amsterdam that year, I think it was. And then in 1930, after my father had died, my mother made a trip to Europe with me and my two brothers; my sister was already married. And, of course, I was able to act as guide because I had been there only two years previously. We went to Scandinavia again and attended the 1930 Exposition in Stockholm, which was a very modern exhibition. At the time, I regretted it very much because I was a great admirer or the town hall and the architecture in Sweden that had preceded this international style. It was sort of a renaissance, romantic architecture which I still admire very much. It's been out of fashion in the meantime, and now people are interested in it again. But I saw this exposition as the end of that, as indeed it was.

MARIAN KOLISCH: I don't think I have my dates quite right, but was that just before the new Bauhaus movement?

JOHN YEON: Well, this exposition already was very much the influence of Bauhaus.

MARIAN KOLISCH: So that was the beginning of the end of the romantic style, until very recently.

JOHN YEON: Well, the interest in the romantic style. The romantic style hasn't revived, except post-modernism. But for a long time I think architects were not scornful but disinterested in that Swedish [design]. It had some influence even as far as Portland. The Masonic Temple and the [Neighbors] of Woodcraft Building [were built in that] Swedish romantic renaissance.

[Break in tape]

MARIAN KOLISCH: The trip to Europe with your mother. Could we mention here, just for the family record, the names of your brothers and sister?

JOHN YEON: Yes. My sister's name was Pauline and my brothers were Eugene and Norman.

MARIAN KOLISCH: When you came back from Europe, was that when you went to college?

JOHN YEON: Well, no. I went to college in 1928 or '29. I was only at Stanford one quarter and my father died. He died-- what year was the crash? Was it '29?

MARIAN KOLISCH: '29.

JOHN YEON: Well, then it was in '29, because I came back at the time of his death and never went back to Stanford. Instead I went to New York and worked at an architect's office by prearrangement from Portland, and went to Columbia at night. I got the job in the New York office because [they were] the architects who were remodeling Meier & Frank [Portland department store--Ed.].

MARIAN KOLISCH: Do you remember the names?

JOHN YEON: [Young], Moskowitz and Rosenbloom. Julius Meier was a friend of my father's, and I think an executor in my father's will. So he just told them to give me a job and they did. Simple as that. I lived in a little room up by Columbia. However, Columbia was excruciatingly boring. I had to take courses on, you know, how to put water tanks on top of buildings in New York and so on. And I'm afraid I misbehaved very badly. I kept the job but I kept dropping out of classes and New York became very glamorous at night. Instead of night school, I met fascinating people and that interrupted my formal education.

MARIAN KOLISCH: It was surely not uneducational to do this.

JOHN YEON: Not at the time, no. So that trip-- I don't know how long I was there. Anyway, I wanted to come back and did come back because Julius Meier was running for governor. He ran for governor because a friend of his, George Joseph, had been elected governor. George Joseph was an attorney, interested in public power, I think. But he was elected governor, and then in the interval between the election and the inauguration, during a speech down on the coast near Astoria, he had a heart attack and died. So his friend Julius Meier carried on his [great] campaign and was elected. And then later George Joseph Jr. married my sister.

MARIAN KOLISCH: The son of the governor.

JOHN YEON: The son of the governor-elect. And anyway, I came home. I was impatient, terribly impatient. I had all kinds of things I wanted to accomplish that more formal education wouldn't [allow]. And while I was east, I also saw many parkways around New York City which I was very wildly enthusiastic about.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Was that pre-Moses or Moses time?
Could use on ed note that this is Robert Moses.

JOHN YEON: Well, actually, I guess pre-Moses. The parkways out at New York City were the earliest of that sort of thing and sort of set the example for others in the East. Now they're just networks out of [the city]. When I came back I was distressed at the destruction going on in Oregon in various ways, but I was also, oddly enough, distressed at the way highways were being built. My father was so anxious to get highways into all corners of the state, and I was very apprehensive of what would result to the face of the land as a result of building highways as they were then being built in Oregon. They built a road and in no time at all it was choked with local traffic because everybody could build a house or a roadside business along it. And pretty soon this road intended to get you cross-country became choked with local traffic. Then they built another one and the same thing happened. So I was for trying to get freeways built, you know-- a curious turn of events. I can't explain how I got into any position of having any influence in all of this, but when I was twenty-one, I was appointed by Governor Meier in the State Park Commission. Well, the State Park Commission was purely advisory. It was appointed because Lesley Scott, who was chairman of the State Highway Commission then, was against any money on state parks. And state parks were under the Highway Commission. So in order to get around this impasse, Governor Meier got together a group of people who he thought would persuade him to change his mind. Other members of the commission were Aubrey Watzek, and J.C. Ainsworth, and Rodney Glisan, and Mrs. Dr. A.E. Rockey. And I was there, too, obviously much younger than the others.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Twenty-one.

JOHN YEON: Yes. I don't know whether Meier knew I was that young or not. I had grown a mustache and tried to look older, and did look older than that.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Still fresh from New York.

JOHN YEON: Yeah. And, I had to go all over the state on that job. It soon became apparent that Lesley Scott was not going to be influenced by anyone and at some crisis, the whole commission resigned. But by then I was in the fray. I had an office in the Yeon Building and I guess anybody whose name in John Yeon, and his address is John Yeon, Yeon Building, Portland, Oregon, gets put on various committees. The American Civic Association, headquartered in Washington, D.C., nabbed onto me and made me chairman of the Oregon Chapter.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Maybe you could explain what the American Civic Association is?

JOHN YEON: Well, it was interested in planning and national parks, and advancing the planning and...

MARIAN KOLISCH: For national parks?

JOHN YEON: Well, planning generally, and promoting and advocating and defending national parks particularly. And, oh dear, one of our scraps with the Highway Department was over Neahkanie Mountain. Let me explain the attitude of the Highway Department then. Lesley Scott was the chairman. He was the son of Harvey Scott, the founder of The Oregonian. And when I would go and talk to him about things-- try to change his attitudes-- I remember distinctly what he said to me once: "Trees. All they're good for is birds." He said, "I was here when it was all trees and mud and it was terrible." And Baldock, who was even then, I think, the chief highway engineer. He held the job longer probably than any other chief engineer in the country, because it's a job that usually is involved in fraud, or often involved in fraud, and kind of a plum; appointments get changed very frequently. He had it for a very long time and he was honest, and no doubt efficient, and an absolute barbarian. He was going to build roads straight as a crow flies and he wasn't interested in any of this nonsense about freeways or parkways or anything of that sort.

So they were planning a road around Neahkanie Mountain and they had a great, straight line across the base of the mountain which involved blasting great portions of it into the sea. And also, by then, they were planning the new highway through the Columbia Gorge. That was in the early thirties, because the new highway had to be built through the Gorge as a result of planning a dam there for one thing. Anyway, the scenic highway was accommodating all the truck traffic through there. Hard to imagine now. And below Crown Point, Baldock had designed this great gash across there three miles long through the bottomlands. Well, right after the Park Commission resigned without influencing the Highway Department in regard to Neahkanie Mountain, particularly, I guess, I gathered together aerial photographs of Neahkanie Mountain and the Columbia Gorge and other photographs, and took off for Washington, D.C. I don't know whether I made an appointment with the chief of the Bureau of Public Roads before I left or just took a chance when I got there. Anyway, he received me. He was at a desk at the end of a big, long office, [like Mussolini's desk] at the end of an empty space, you know. [I entered this] impressive office with fear and trembling, and he was very, very nice. He looked at all my photographs and they interested him, and he sent out his chief landscape architect, Wilbur Simonson, who had designed the Mount Vernon Parkway between Washington and Mount Vernon. That had been designed as a demonstration highway. Wilbur Simonson came out and consulted with the engineers in the Gorge and persuaded them to put in a very gradual curve through the bottomlands below Crown Point which is there now. It's unnoticeable now, but a straight gash across there would have been a very angry scar. And at Neahkanie Mountain, he persuaded them to give up this straight line and modulate the alignment, so that the pinnacle and the buttresses were not blasted into the sea. But that was just by going right to the source; Scott, or Baldock, wasn't very influenced by me at all.

The Neahkanie project, oddly enough, had other influences in that because there had [been] an exhibition in a museum-- oh, I don't know what it was. I shouldn't even mention it since I can't remember the theme. But whatever it was, it was appropriate, and I had made a model of the road on Neahkanie Mountain, how I thought it should be. I made it in clay, just four or five feet long, and photographed it. It showed masonry retaining walls holding up the road instead of blasting [out of] concrete. And one picture of this (where the little bridge crosses the chasm alongside that pinnacle-- the picture had the pinnacle and the bridge and the eroded forms of the mountain) was in the Oregonian in a review of the exhibition. And the state bridge engineer, McCullogh, saw this and decided to try and do it. So the masonry retaining walls around Neahkanie Mountain are the result of that model. I never wanted to take credit for it because they didn't build them the way the model showed them. The model showed them sloping with the slope of the mountain, leaning against the mountain. And they built them just vertically. So they look as though they're kind of leaning, actually they're really not. But anyway, they're masonry walls and they have some indication of breaks, rather than smooth surfaces, which my model had. But the breaks in my model were very deep.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Something I've always been curious about, is when there's a retaining wall built vertically, straight up and down; I should think it wouldn't hold nearly as well, the land.

JOHN YEON: No, it shouldn't of course. But I don't know whether when they built it they actually relied upon the stone for support or whether they faced a wall. Anyway, I had my finger in the Neahkanie Mountain project. Years later, there wouldn't have been a raid around Neahkanie Mountain at all. They would have gone inland in order to preserve it.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Your interest in Neahkanie, of course, has continued over a long, long period. I don't know if we want to talk yet about the cottage there.

I wanted to ask you if at one time you talked about not being approving of the Bauhaus School of architecture. What was the difference between that and the Beaux Arts School?

JOHN YEON: Oh, well, I didn't mean to sound disapproving of Beaux Art except that it put an end to a movement in Stockholm which I admired very much. And it was a death verdict on that. Obviously with no formal architecture training I wasn't involved in Beaux Arts training. While I was in New York working in this office I entered one of their programs...

MARIAN KOLISCH: Maybe you should define what Beaux Arts really means?

JOHN YEON: Well, it can mean most anything, but now it usually means classical architectural training. It's a classical or traditional architecture, versus the Bauhaus which broke with traditional architecture. And the Beaux Arts training for architecture, previously, was making your own elaborate drawings of public buildings in the classical style [________].

MARIAN KOLISCH: And that is opposed to, I think you've said, regional design?

JOHN YEON: Well, yes. Beaux Arts is classical European architectural training. It is not regional because classical [_________________]. And my one brush with it, I did enter this thing when I was in the office in New York. It didn't get to first base because the program specified a half-inch margin between the various elements-- side views and front views.

[Tape 2; side 1]

My first visit to Neahkanie, I remember very clearly. I had met Harry Wentz in A.E. Doyle's office. He was a good friend of Mr. Doyle-- where I was an office boy-- and we met. And eventually, I wanted to call on him at his house in Neahkanie and I went there on a typical sort of beach day. There was fog shrouding the mountain. But I remember going into the house and it was the first really beautiful piece of architecture, at least in Oregon, that I had experienced.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Excuse me, but I wonder if here maybe we should say who Harry Wentz was?

JOHN YEON: Well, he was head of the art school at the museum and had been I guess, virtually, since the museum was founded.

MARIAN KOLISCH: In Portland.

JOHN YEON: In Portland. And he was an artist who produced very few works, but his work I still admire very, very much.

MARIAN KOLISCH: And he was a good friend of Mr. Doyle.

JOHN YEON: Yes.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Were they contemporaries in age?

JOHN YEON: I suppose they were.

MARIAN KOLISCH: But a generation older than you.

JOHN YEON: Oh yes. It's hard to remember ages then because everybody seemed so old when you're that young. But he [Harry Wentz] died ten or fifteen years ago at the age of 80.

The house was all wood, of course, and the inside was exposed structure. It wasn't built the way an ordinary house is in Oregon, on two-by-fours with an air space. The structure was built more like a barn, actually, with the timbers exposed and just [sheeting] on the outside. All this was in spruce, which had never been finished and had a very pearly lustre like the inside of a sea shell. Looking out of the big north window you looked right down the side of the mountain-- the mountain coming out of the sea. And the window was surrounded with a spruce tree [_________], spruce tree branches, all making a very nice composition. The day I was there, the fog was settled on the mountain but it was silhouetting the pinnacle along the road, which made it stand out, and it made the whole thing seem very vast and mysterious. It never has looked as well since.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Did he build that? Or he designed it?

JOHN YEON: Well, he saved up money to go to Europe, I guess, just after World WarI. And instead he saw a picture of Neahkanie in a real estate promoter's window downtown and went down there and bought some land and built the house. The architect was A.E. Doyle. But the mystery of all that is that nothing else Doyle did looked anything vaguely like that house. Wentz never claimed that he designed it, but he must have had a very strong influence.

MARIAN KOLISCH: I would think so.

Did you at anytime go to the Portland Art Museum School?

JOHN YEON: Well, the one encouragement that I got from my mother, [I suppose with the consent of my father], was that I went to a children's class on Saturday at the museum art school. And I really didn't like that at all because I wanted to make pretty pictures, and even then they would encourage students to just express themselves in sort of childlike drawings which I thought were indeed very childlike drawings. I'd seen Chu Chin Chow just after World WarI and I was full of Arabian Nights fantasies and wanted the slave girls in pantaloons with brass brassieres; and it just didn't go over at all with these children doing their flat dimensional, flat visions. So that didn't last very long. But later I went to Harry Wentz's composition class and also took life drawing at night.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Did he teach that too? The life drawing?

JOHN YEON: No, well, he'd stop in occasionally, but usually not. But the composition class was extremely interesting, because he would assign a subject for composition and then you'd bring it in next week. Then they were all put up on this board in front of the class and you would discuss the compositions. And in the course of discussing the compositions I remember him putting his hands over parts of it and explaining that this didn't work or that did. And in the course of all this he would have examples of works by famous painters. The museum had a large collection of brown photographs of old masters and also there were colored reproductions available. His selection included a very wide range of things from ancient Egyptian to Chinese to modern Impressionists. The museum was a very advances and courageous place in those days, more so than most museums.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Do you have any idea why? I've always heard that our museum was rather outstanding in the times, in its beginnings.

JOHN YEON: I don't know exactly why. Of course it was due to individuals. Anna Crocker, who was the curator, was a very courageous spinster, and au courant and concerned with what was going on in the world. My goodness, the museum had shows of modern art before most other museums did.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Rather surprising for a little place out on the west coast at that time.

JOHN YEON: Yes, and the mystery of all that is it was an early start. It's much earlier than Seattle museums. Maybe not earlier than San Francisco museums, but it was a very clean, progressive place. But through the years, it's become a very unsuccess story in the museum field.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Very sad.

JOHN YEON: Yeah. There was too much democracy.

MARIAN KOLISCH: I think you're right. And the same thing probably with the school. The school has suffered the lack of somebody like Mr. Wentz.

JOHN YEON: Yeah.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Tell me some more about Harry Wentz. He saw Neahkanie as a place for this particular style of house?

JOHN YEON: Well, the house seemed appropriate to the place. It certainly did to me, and, of course, it also did to Belluschi. Belluschi and I went down there quite often.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Was it this time you were working in Mr. Doyle's office?

JOHN YEON: I wasn't actually working in Doyle's office then. That came later.

MARIAN KOLISCH: But Belluschi was.

JOHN YEON: Oh yes, indeed. Doyle was then dead and Belluschi was doing all the designing in the office. Belluschi and I were very good friends at that point, I suppose partially through Harry Wentz. Harry Wentz had a very strong influence on Belluschi, too.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Mr. Doyle and Mr. Wentz were roughly the same age.

JOHN YEON: I think so, yes.

MARIAN KOLISCH: And Pietro Belluschi came to work for Doyle. Then you had known both of them before you went to work in that office?

JOHN YEON: Oh, well, that's another story. It's probably too long for the battery.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Oh, no. Let's have the story.

JOHN YEON: But let me go back, before we get into that, to more with the landscape. I can't explain why I was such a sucker for landscape, but it's been a great interest in my life, in particular the Oregon landscape. I suppose just because I was born here. It's what I knew early on. I early on was interested in architecture which would fit that unique landscape that I liked so much. And I remember going on those trips to Europe-- the things that impressed me most were things that I felt would work in Oregon. Not copied, but would suggest solutions for Oregon. And, of course there are different parts of Oregon. The east and west are very different. Along with all that was my interest in saving the landscape, which was being brutalized at such a rapid stage when I was young. Probably much faster than now, because roads were being built and virgin areas were being opened up and messed up at a great rate. And along about the same early time in my life, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected. All this was during the Depression; my father died just a few days before the crash or a month before the crash. And one of Roosevelt's interests was in planning. The whole Northwest regional planning movement got started because of him. It caught on like a prairie fire then, and I got sucked into that. And it just took all of my time and energies. I think the reason there was such enthusiasm for it is that people saw it as an open sesame for public funds, because early on, there'd be no public works projects except as recommended through the planning process. Roosevelt later discovered that he couldn't quite work it that way, and things had to be done for political reasons. And when that came apparent the whole planning movement collapsed [oh, it was terrible]. But while it was going there were conferences and speeches and [other things]. There used to be conferences in Spokane, Seattle, and Portland...

MARIAN KOLISCH: How many states were involved in this?

JOHN YEON: Well, this was the regional planning commission. I guess there's Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, I think. I don't think Montana was included. The planning wasn't the kind that I was interested in. But it left it up to me to carry all that side of it. What they really were interested in was sort of economic plans: port development; forests, particularly. That's when there was some of the first loud talk about sustained yield. And all this is very good. But as far as actual, physical planning, in other words a good road versus a bad road, it wasn't in there at all. I tried to carry that end of it and it was just an awful burden. I was chairman of the Recreation Committee for the whole state of Oregon, which was nothing less than picking out where all the state parks should be. And, oh, of course, freeways. I was in there pitching freeways.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Did you get...?

JOHN YEON: Well, I was chairman of the Committee on Highways that recommended freeways. No. The recommendation went through all the proper channels. There was also state planning. Jamieson Parker was chairman of that. And it got up to the legislature and Baldock refused to support it. He said, "I think we have enough power already."

MARIAN KOLISCH: Enough power?

JOHN YEON: Yes. So they didn't enact it. I don't know when there was freeway legislation enacted in Oregon. I think during the war. I think it was finally because the federal government said that any state that didn't have freeway legislation wouldn't get federal highway funds.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Second World War.

JOHN YEON: Second World War. But I'm sorry to say that while I no doubt did a lot of propaganda in favor of it, I was not responsible for the actual legislation. But, oh, what other committees? As a subcommittee of the Regional Planning Commission there was a Columbia Gorge Commission.

MARIAN KOLISCH: That was a part as long ago as when?

[Break in Tape]

JOHN YEON: The Columbia Gorge Committee was under the Pacific Northwest Regional Planning Commission, which was under the National Resources Board in Washington, D.C. And I was made chairman of that.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Probably in 1936?

JOHN YEON: No, earlier than that. Probably 1935-- maybe 1934. Bonneville Dam was authorized and it was under construction. The committee members were from the states involved. But the report covered recommendations for the standards-- wide right of way, control of access, and landscape considerations in the design. A very, very progressive highway-- four lanes, divided road and acquiring a wide right of way through the Gorge. That was all illustrated with examples of what happens to an ordinary highway and the advantages of a freeway.

MARIAN KOLISCH: And that was accepted.

JOHN YEON: Well, yes, the whole report was accepted, but the report also included power policies of Bonneville. It wasn't actually accepted in the form recommended, but in another form accomplishing the same ends. And that recommended the flat rate for power from Bonneville to areas outside of the Gorge, so that there'd be no incentive for industry to crowd into the Gorge in order to get a cheaper rate by being closer to the dam. At that time, of course, that's exactly what the Portland Chamber of Commerce wanted to happen. In these words, they wanted a second Pittsburgh in the Columbia Gorge.

MARIAN KOLISCH: They even said that?

JOHN YEON: They said it in those words. So this was trying to thwart that ambition. Which it, as I say, indirectly did because the final legislation provided that power couldn't be sold for any use that could damage the scenery of the Gorge. But the flat postage rate wasn't the way of doing it. And it recommended, oh, Forest Service not logging in the Gorge, of course, and county converting to parks any land that became tax delinquent. That was never done except in the case of the Beacon Rock State Park, which was a direct result of that recommendation. But the highway report was completely ignored. They went ahead and built the highway through the Gorge-- not to the standards recommended. They built a three-lane highway and before it got to the Dalles, it was such a death trap that the state had to start it all over and rebuild it into a four-lane divided road at enormous additional expense.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Go back and begin again.

JOHN YEON: Yeah. This was a scandal that has never been aired.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Oh my.

JOHN YEON: And it's all very curious that the Highway Department was so stupid in concentrating so on the surface of the roadway. Henry Cabell was the chairman of the Highway Commission and he was an educated man, had been around a great deal, and you would think he would've influenced highway policy. But he just worshipped Baldock as an engineer in a field he didn't know anything about. He just worshipped Baldock and thought his job was to defend whatever Baldock said. And, of course, that's a hard job in itself because everybody was after the Highway Commission to build a roadway there.

MARIAN KOLISCH: And Baldock was interested mostly in the surface of the road.

JOHN YEON: Yeah. Get it from here to there in the straightest line.

MARIAN KOLISCH: So it was started and then they had to stop and back up and go at it...

JOHN YEON: Well, [they went] over to The Dalles and then they started right over again.

MARIAN KOLISCH: After they finished all the way to The Dalles?

JOHN YEON: Yeah.

MARIAN KOLISCH: At a cost of at least double what it should have...

JOHN YEON: Oh, well [it was enormously _______]. It's a fine road now. It could have been an absolutely marvelous road if it had been properly planned. I remember at one point I was trying to get the federal government to design and build it since most of their funds were the funds with which it was built. I wanted to get them to do it as a demonstration freeway such as they'd done in Mount Vernon. But there wasn't any legislator who was willing to go to bat. Well, then the report, once it was finished, that was the end of that committee's work. Of course the war came along not too long afterwards. And the Columbia Gorge committees that are still extant now, they were not a continuation of this committee. They were something quite different.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Well, you also talk about the State Park Committee. That was very early when you were twenty-one or so, right? And then this one later.

JOHN YEON: Yes. January 1937, '38. I was twenty-six when this was completed. I wrote all of this myself except the letters of transmittal.

MARIAN KOLISCH: So you were very, very full of energy. [You got an] early start. Was there another conservation society? That's all I know, that there was something called the Conservation Society, of which you were chairman?

JOHN YEON: Oh, I don't know. I don't remember. There were lots [of things]. I was sounding off on such subjects all along. Here are pamphlets on freeways I had published. [I don't know] if it did much good. And articles in the Commonwealth Review. And then there was a City Club committee on the Columbia Gorge Highway; I wrote that report and presented it. Then, here's a magazine called American Forests, the June 1936 issue. There's an article on the issue of the Olympics by John B. Yeon.

MARIAN KOLISCH: The Olympics.

JOHN YEON: Olympic National Park. I was a very strong supporter of that movement.

MARIAN KOLISCH: You mean as it was being begun?

JOHN YEON: Well, it was proposed under the Roosevelt Administration and it was very bitterly opposed by the Forest Service and the community all around the peninsula, and the State of Washington.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Why was it opposed?

JOHN YEON: Well, Olympic Park contains a large expanse of old-growth timber-- the biggest expanse left. It's as though you were talking about the Amazon. There's nothing left of any size except in the Olympic Peninsula; this Northwest rainforest type. And the land involved was under the jurisdiction of the Forest Service and, of course, they're set up to produce timber and they're a very powerful bureaucracy. This magazine, American Forests, is essentially a loggers' magazine. Supposedly the Forest Service [knew]-- they had had an article in here previously against the park by a Seattle photographer. Very strong article. And I wanted to rebut it, so I wrote this issue. And oddly enough, they accepted and published it. And it was influential. Richard Neuberger, for instance, read it and went to bat for the park. I was dragged back to Washington to testify at a Senate hearing as an example of local sentiment. Of course that was absolutely the opposite of the way it was. In fact, they had a price on my head out there. There was only one other person in Washington, Irving Clark, that I communicated with in Seattle, who was for it. Anyway, it happened and I'm proud of my part in it.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Was Neuberger the one who was able to...

JOHN YEON: He did most to push the park. There were others, too. He was influential as being a western senator.

MARIAN KOLISCH: That's rather remarkable, isn't it, that he was able to do that against the efforts of the rest of them?

JOHN YEON: Yeah. I was also interested in the North Cascades National Park. And before the Olympic Park was finished, I was involved in a camping trip through the North Cascades with a woman from Washington who was head of the American Civic Association. I invited her out to get her interested in North Cascades as a national park, because actually I thought that that was an even more remarkable area than the Olympics.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Where do you mean, the North Cascades?

JOHN YEON: Well, at that time it was a large area starting at the Canadian border and running south, not as far as Mount Rainier. This camping trip was organized mostly, actually, by Aubrey Watzek because he was good at that sort of thing. This woman, [Harlene James], was along, and Aubrey Watzek and Harry Wentz. We had this wonderful trip through the North Cascades. Well, she was impressed with the area, indeed, but she said that it was most unwise to promote it at that time because the Olympic Park was not settled and it would be divisive. She said if the Olympics was not created soon, the forest would be logged, whereas the assets of the North Cascades would last longer because commercial timber was not involved there.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Uh huh. She was from the east?

JOHN YEON: She was from Washington, D.C. She was Executive Secretary of the American Civic Association. Later the name was changed to American Planning Association.

MARIAN KOLISCH: She advised you to wait.

JOHN YEON: Yeah. Which I did. And eventually I don't think I had any influence at all in the North Cascades Park project. It came from another bunch of supporters.

MARIAN KOLISCH: But perhaps because of the success of the Olympic Park.

JOHN YEON: Well, I'm afraid the North Cascades was inevitable. Such a marvelous area. I just mention that because it's another national park project I was trying to promote.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Are there any parks in Oregon, [forest parks], that you've had something to do with?

JOHN YEON: National Parks, no. The Columbia Gorge, which is a whole 'nother story...

MARIAN KOLISCH: The freeways, before we leave those completely, is a subject that I think is debatable now. How they're doing with freeways at this point. They're using up so much land, it seems to me, for every entrance and exit.

JOHN YEON: Yes. It's odd that now, probably, I would have been fighting freeways. But that's a whole 'nother question. If you're going to build a road, then it should be a freeway. That was my interest in it. I wasn't promoting the proliferation of highways, but just building them properly so that they don't turn into city streets and become choked and have to build them over, occupying more and more land.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Which is what they seem to be doing now.

JOHN YEON: Well, I think in Oregon, at least, the freeway binge is over. The main ones are built.

MARIAN KOLISCH: In a good way, do you think, mostly?

JOHN YEON: Oh, well, they're underbuilt. That's the only trouble. In contrast to the State of Washington I think the Oregon ones have been underbuilt and they've become inadequate much sooner than necessary.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Lack of foresight?

JOHN YEON: Yes. Actually the ones around Seattle, you know, have many lanes and I think do a much better job.

MARIAN KOLISCH: This involvement with the Gorge Commission that we've talked about _______ into what is now the struggle of what is going with the present Gorge Commission.

JOHN YEON: Well, yes. It's the same effort and it's revived and still unsolved. A solution doesn't seem imminent to me at the moment or even very hopeful. The present effort is...

[tape ends]

TAPE-RECORDED INTERVIEW WITH JOHN YEON
AT HIS HOME IN PORTLAND, OREGON
DATE: DECEMBER 16, 1982
INTERVIEWER: MARIAN W. KOLISCH

JOHN YEON: JOHN YEON
MARIAN KOLISCH: MARIAN KOLISCH

[Tape 2; Side 2]

MARIAN KOLISCH: This is a continuation of the interview with John Yeon in Portland, Oregon. Today's session is December 16, 1982.

JOHN YEON: Well, let me add a few comments regarding what we talked about last time that occurred to me since then, about my grandmother's house and the pioneer land grant. At one end of the pioneer land grant, they gave the land for the campus for the University of Portland that's there now. At the time they gave it it wasn't a Catholic school. But some religious denomination started the university, and they gave the land for it. Then there's a park between Columbia Park and Willamette Boulevard that was given later by myself, my brother and sister. It stretches from Columbia Park.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Oh, to the university.

JOHN YEON: Yeah. Or to Willamette Boulevard. There are a few sequoia trees around this horseshoe crescent that Willamette Boulevard surrounds. I'm responsible for those, because I envisioned a very brave site with giant sequoias around this semi-circular bluff. I wrote to the California Forestry Commission to find out where I could obtain enough to accomplish this. And they wrote back that they had small plants and they would be glad to supply them. So they sent them up and they were heeled in for a year by the city park service, and then planted by the park service; not very well, I'm afraid.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Do you remember roughly when that was?

JOHN YEON: Oh, yes, it was about 1932, I think. They just dug holes and put them in and went away and left them and didn't water them or fertilize them. Very few of them survived. But there are still some up there.

MARIAN KOLISCH: And they're gigantic now.

JOHN YEON: Yes. And they are relics of an unfulfilled dream. Park Service planted some of the left-over sequoias in other parks, which I recognize occasionally.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Do the landscape people when they're doing around freeways and so forth, often plant something and then go away and forget about it?

JOHN YEON: No, well, there's very little planting done now because of budget problems. Ordinarily they take good care of them. But in that case, this wasn't really a park project, and [I just wanted to get it over with]. And Paul Kaiser was appointed the superintendent of Portland Parks. He was an engineer for the Park Department, and a very good park superintendent resigned in a huff, and Kaiser was promoted to park superintendent. And while he was park superintendent nothing imaginative happened in the Portland park system.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Why did he resign in a huff?

JOHN YEON: Oh, the previous man was Mish. He was a brilliant park superintendent. [____________] Park was created under him, and Laurelhurst Park, I think, and other well-landscaped parks. He had rather grandiose plans for the park system. And, at the time, Bill Brewster, Sr., was a member of the city council in Portland. Brewster objected to some of the projects which he thought were extravagant and Mr. Mish resigned. A great loss to the city, because what happened afterwards was, I think, a very dry, dull period and much would have been accomplished with more imagination and energy. I've always, in the back of my head, held this against Bill Brewster, Sr., who was otherwise quite a fine chap.

MARIAN KOLISCH: But not very foresighted in this respect.

JOHN YEON: No, not in this instance. Well, so much for the sequoias. The old Victorian house of my grandmother's was occupied briefly by my sister after the war. But since then, until my mother died in '55, she maintained it, kept a caretaker there, for no use whatsoever except she couldn't part with what she called her old homeplace. And when she died I thought, of course, that it would be torn down and sold. Instead, the land around the house was sold off, and the garden part was sold off and built upon, and the house was kept and various fountains and other things were added to it. I wish it had been torn down, but it's still there.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Is it a sort of a historical landmark?

JOHN YEON: It's a city historical landmark.

MARIAN KOLISCH: But they've added to it to gild the lily.

JOHN YEON: Well, yes.

MARIAN KOLISCH: And the development and the land around had been [__________]?

JOHN YEON: Yes, the highway is now choked with houses right up close to it. My sister's husband, Joseph, whom I mentioned before as son of the governor-elect who was never inaugurated-- he was a wonderful influence in the family. When everything got rough he would just start laughing and everyone would pull out of it. But he was also very generous for things that I was interested in. He gave most of the Larch Mountain corridor-- it's a timber corridor going to Larch Mountain-- and the other part was given by the Bridal Veil Limber Company, although that project was the brainchild of Martin Munger, who was a grand old man in the Forest Service. And he also gave George Joseph State Park, which is in addition to the Latourelle Falls Park.

MARIAN KOLISCH: That is where?

JOHN YEON: It's above the Latourelle Falls [___________]. And then he gave the area that's now a lake and meadowland between the freeway and Latourelle, which is part of Rooster Rock State Park.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Which is all land that had belonged to him.

JOHN YEON: To his father. He had inherited it from his father, who had a house, who had relatives in Latourelle. Well, so much for that.

We were talking about the Columbia Gorge last time. And I wanted to explain that the recent, modern Columbia Gorge Commissions had no direct connection at all with the previous commission that I was involved in. In fact, the revival was a result of Gertrude Glutz Jensen's effort, I believe, and the Portland Women's Forum. This was a group of well-intended ladies, and Gertrude Jensen had a pink-and-white complexion and wore enormous garden hats and accomplished quite a bit. In a sense, she was responsible for the exchange effected by BLM [U.S. Bureau of Land Management] next to Benson Park, which contains Willamette Falls, and _________ Falls. Next to that was a large area including Mist Falls and Angel's Rest which became tax delinquent after the war and reverted to the county. Instead of the county hanging onto it and making a park out of it, they auctioned it off and shortly thereafter it was to be logged.

MARIAN KOLISCH: When it was auctioned off, it was bought by a lumber company?

JOHN YEON: Yeah. Mrs. Jensen worked to get the BLM to exchange it for land outside of the Gorge, which is its present status. She effected a couple of other land exchanges in the Latourelle area. And that was all to the good. She very kindly says that she used my report as her bible. She got into trouble with Governor McCall and she was sacked, when he became governor, because she was opposing the scrap iron mill in Columbia Gorge, at Cascade Locks.

MARIAN KOLISCH: And he was in favor of that?

JOHN YEON: He was in favor of it. This is very surprising because he was an environmentalist.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Yes it is. It definitely is.

JOHN YEON: He was opposed in it by lots of people, but Mrs. Jensen was on the front lines and got sacked. And he appointed instead, Nani Warren, because she's a large contributor to Republican politicians and also she lived on the Washington side of the Columbia Gorge. She had previously been chairman of the Multnomah County Planning Commission, which is indeed hard to understand. But that didn't work out and they got rid of her. So this was another job of, vaguely in that area. And, I think it's true to say-- although he didn't say to me-- Governor McCall has said to others I know that that was the worst mistake of his administration.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Do governors frequently fill this kind of a position with political appointments?

JOHN YEON: Well, I suppose they do. But this is no plum, because there's no salary connected. Should be just a lot of work. But Nani Warren-- I remember the conference she had shortly after she was appointed. It was held in the Thunderbird [at Jantzen Beach--Ed.]. It was a large conference because people were interested, and it lasted all day. And it was deadly dull. Just long-winded. Governor McCall was there with Governor Evans [Washington State governor--Ed.], although they were there for other reasons. They looked in briefly at noon and both gave speeches. But the whole program, there wasn't much constructive material offered. But I made two speeches, and one of them was urging that the Columbia Gorge Commission obtain a federal study of the Gorge as a possible national recreation area. This was an entirely reasonable proposal then because such things were being done.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Did we say about what time this was? When you originally made the proposal, that was shortly after McCall was elected?

JOHN YEON: Yes. What would it be? 1970?

MARIAN KOLISCH: I don't know.

JOHN YEON: As I say, it was just a request that a study be made. Mrs. Jensen was at the meeting and she got up and made a little speech. She proposed that it be the sense of the conference to pursue this endeavor. And it was voted unanimously. It was the only thing that the audience voted on. So I thought the thing would proceed. And I waited and waited for something to happen and I called the office, where they had a secretary. They didn't seem to know what was being done, and were very cagey about it. And over a year passed, I guess, maybe longer, and I ran into Nani Warren at a party, I think it was at Tommy Kerr's, actually, and she started talking about the Gorge. And I said, "Well, what in the world is happening? Why doesn't something happen on the national recreation area study?" And she says, "I don't want it to happen. I'm determined to keep the feds out of the Gorge." Actually, what she said is, "I'm against parks. All they bring is noise and litter." So that's why nothing happened at a time when indeed such a proposal would have been conducive of positive concrete results. It was still feasible then.

MARIAN KOLISCH: So the proposal just died.

JOHN YEON: Yes. And most anything that you's bring up, well, the timing was wrong, the timing was wrong. Of course she waited until the timing favored her attitude of keeping the feds out of the Gorge, because now it's very difficult to get the feds to do anything in our state. I was unhappy about this to a degree but I had to let off steam in that occasion. And, well, to backtrack a little bit, there was finally a study made by the Park Service that wasn't instigated at all by the Columbia Gorge Commission, which it should have been. Their report was, I thought, a very good one. It was certainly exhaustive, and very favorable to federal protection of the Gorge. It offered four alternatives, ranging from nothing to a little more protection to finally a national recreation area. This was to be voted upon by the Gorge Commission in the middle of the winter. And this was the time that I thought really I had to sound off. I drove up-- with Nancy Russell who was just beginning to get involved in all of this-- and we went to Bonneville and waded through the snow to the meeting. There was by then an organization called the Columbia Gorge Coalition, which was formed to advance the same objectives that I was interested in.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Did that include Washington State, too?

JOHN YEON: Yes.

MARIAN KOLISCH: So before that it had been just Oregon.

JOHN YEON: Well, the Columbia Gorge Coalition was formed, I think, because the Gorge Commissions weren't accomplishing anything. It was prompted by this park study, wanting to support it.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Because it had been mostly Oregon people on the commission before.

JOHN YEON: Well, there are two commissions. There's an Oregon commission and a Washington commission. And they acted separately, although in recent years they've tried to get their acts together and meet together. So the man who ran the coalition had alerted the press to this meeting and there were television cameras and reporters there. And I got up and others spoke, too, in favor of the Park Service report. But I got up and let go on Nani Warren, and explained her attitude. I also explained that it was rather strange that she was against federal help in the Gorge because from their house at Prindle, the view they looked upon with such pleasure and pride is all under federal protection. And anyway the Washington side would be protected by the same process. I won't go into all that was argued, but it was an impassioned speech. And the television camera got it. The only time there were sparks or friction was when I maybe unwisely mentioned that a personal philosophy was legitimate, anybody could have one, but when they're in a public job that it shouldn't influence their decisions. But I said this seems to be a family thing and I cited Bob Warren's objections to the Landmark District.

MARIAN KOLISCH: That would be her husband.

JOHN YEON: He had scuttled back, for no other reason than that he didn't want to live under another layer of bureaucracy. So she says, "Don't get personal." And I said, "Well, what I know about that is what I've read in the papers and the papers are full of that." So the result of the meeting was-- it was terribly complicated, this maneuver, as far as the Commission point of view-- the Commission voted, I forget, three to two, in favor of federal help in the Gorge. And against Nani Warren. She tried to scotch it. And then, oh, I forget all the sequence of these events, but Governor Atiyeh, of course, doesn't like the feds either. And the governor of Washington then was Dixy Ray Lee, Dixy Lee Ray, or anyway, Dixy.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Dixy Lee Ray.

JOHN YEON: She wasn't at all interested in the Gorge. And Atiyeh wrote a letter opposing the feds in the Gorge, in opposition to the majority of his Columbia Gorge Commission recommendation. It was signed by Atiyeh and Nani Warren and Dixy Lee and sent to all the delegation in Washington. And Nani Warren signed it even though her Commission had...

MARIAN KOLISCH: Had voted in favor.

JOHN YEON: Yeah. So it got quite sticky. And she still has the job. Now, I think, she has changed her position somewhat. Governor Atiyeh was forced to change his position because there's very prominent people like Bob Wilson and others who wanted to do something to help save the Gorge and persuaded him to change. And then Nani had to change her position. This had one embarrassing consequence. They had a caretaker at the Prindle property and they wanted him to run for county commissioner to keep the feds out of the Gorge. He was just living on their property and didn't have any property of his own in the Gorge, and so they gave him a piece of their property up on the other side of the highway. And he ran for county commissioner and was elected.

MARIAN KOLISCH: In Washington.

JOHN YEON: Yes. Then, after they changed their position because Atiyeh changed his position (and maybe she changed her mind, anyway), they had this man in that position. And he's fought teeth and tong against any federal involvement in the Gorge.

MARIAN KOLISCH: And still is?

JOHN YEON: And still is. And I was told-- it may be sheer gossip-- that they tried to get the land back. But I don't know what luck they've had in that respect.

Then, of course, after this movement towards the feds in the Gorge, got going, Nani, who was still opposed to it-- she went to Seattle. Let me backtrack again, because the Garden Club in Seattle had come down and spent two days touring the Gorge with Nancy Russell. And they were very impressed and were going to vote on this as a position of the Seattle Garden Club. And Nani Warren-- someone got wind of this. There was one lady on the Garden Club that was a friend of the Stevensons in Stevenson, Washington. And I think it was she who alerted one of the Stevenson ladies who alerted Nani Warren, and I guess Mrs. Stevenson and Nani Warren went up to [see the] Seattle Garden Club and told them that there was no problem in the Gorge at all. Nani told them that she knew practically every property owner in the Gorge and they had no intent of selling their land or changing the use of it. And I don't know whether, yes, I think they stopped the Garden Club from taking any action. Although later I think they did anyway. But the Mrs. Stevenson is a member of the Stevenson family. Stevenson is a close-knit family with many investments in lumber and interest in the Gorge. And, well, they don't all agree with the one who went up to testify, I'm sure-- I don't mean to involve the whole clan in this. But the one who went with Nani Warren was sharing Nani Warren's opinion. And the Stevensons owned the land that is right on the river starting at the base opposite Crown Point and extending west. It's an area called (Starterwall) Lake. It was a flood plain with a lake in it all the time until the federal government diked it. Now it no longer floods and it's just agricultural land. The west end of that has been developed by the Port of Washougal into various factories and storage yards and then it stops and this beautiful area of meadows and grazing cows and all goes all the way till opposite Crown Point. So obviously it's the foreground of the famous view from Crown Point. If you look west, you look right down on the [Starterwall] area. And this is zoned by Clark County for heavy industry and owned by the Stevensons.

MARIAN KOLISCH: But if the proposal were to be accepted, they would not be allowed to develop it for heavy industry.

JOHN YEON: Oh, well, that's true-- if they were successful in getting a scenic easement or buying it and leasing it back for farm purposes. I don't think a federal program could automatically change the zone. There would have to be compensation of some sort. But I'm going to length with this because the lady was representing that interest with Nani Warren before the Garden Club in Seattle.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Well if the Stevensons at present own that land that is zoned for heavy industry, so they could...

JOHN YEON: Yes. They want it zoned for heavy industry.

MARIAN KOLISCH: And they could sell it, because if they do...

JOHN YEON: Yes, they intend to. And there's no reason they shouldn't if that's what they bought it for and that's what they pay taxes on. Zoning itself isn't the solution to that problem. There has to be a scenic easement or they have to be compensated in some way for the difference between the income from the present use and the income from industrial use. It's a very sticky problem but it's a very strategic area in preservation of the Gorge.

MARIAN KOLISCH: It certainly is. And what is the present status then?

JOHN YEON: Well, Friends of the Columbia Gorge are trying to get a federal program instituted in the Gorge. It's very complicated legislation. And it's terrible timing.

MARIAN KOLISCH: It has to be federal legislation.

JOHN YEON: Yes. There's absolutely no way of saving it otherwise. The Oregon side is not in such bad shape, but there's no present preserved areas on the Washington side. There are many state parks on the Oregon side and large areas of national forest and there's nothing of that sort on the Washington side.

MARIAN KOLISCH: What's the position of the Washington commission? State of Washington.

JOHN YEON: They're in a bind. The State of Washington commission is even more ineffective than the Oregon one. You see, these commissions are purely advisory. They haven't any teeth at all. And the Washington commission, of course, is subject to local influences more than the Oregon one is. It's a very different situation from Oregon. In Oregon, much of the Gorge is in Multnomah County and Portland is in Multnomah County. You could make a park of the whole east end of Multnomah County and we wouldn't be devastated as far as tax income. But on the Washington side that isn't the arrangement at all. There's no large city; it's entirely rural. And as far from Seattle as it can get; and the people in Seattle are interested in the San Juan Islands and the North Cascades. Skamania County in Washington is just sort of the Appalachia of the West. It's largely a great number of people on relief and it's not very agricultural. They get a lot on money from the federal government through the sale of forest lands which they can spend on roads and schools. But they are gung ho for subdividing, developing the Gorge.

MARIAN KOLISCH: With a change of governor, do the committee members or the commission members change?

JOHN YEON: Not necessarily. They change slowly.

Well, this was the reason that the two sides of the Gorge are an indivisible landscape. If anything is to protect the Washington side, it will not be protected locally. It cannot be. That's just too big a job from that [point]. It should be administered by an agency that can be concerned with both sides.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Yes.

JOHN YEON: Anyway, it's the worst time in my lifetime for proposing anything of that sort because Reagan is interested in states doing everything, and James Watt is Secretary of the Interior, and there are enormous budget problems. The Gorge will go down the drain unless some miracle happens.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Oh, let's certainly not let that happen.

JOHN YEON: It's being subdivided in Washington from the shore to the skyline. Not everywhere, but that's the tendency. And the only thing that's prevented it in recent years is the high interest rates. And now that the freeway, the new bridge across the river is built, suburbia will flow over that and into the Gorge.

MARIAN KOLISCH: But is there any hope that since Atiyeh has changed his position on this, that he could influence the Washington commission and something could come of that?

JOHN YEON: Well, Atiyeh has changed his position, but he hasn't been...

MARIAN KOLISCH: Active.

JOHN YEON: ...active. Changed to passive.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Just let it go on.

JOHN YEON: But, however, that was important, and as I say, I think...

[Tape 3; side 1]

MARIAN KOLISCH: Go ahead.

JOHN YEON: Well, as far as I'm concerned, Nani Warren has done a great deal of damage in the Gorge by preventing the advancement of a program when there was some real hope that it could be fulfilled. I've been known to say that I think she's the worst thing that happened to the Gorge since Bonneville Dam, and that was inevitable. The Friends of the Gorge program is very timid and very conservative compared with what needs to be done is the Gorge.

MARIAN KOLISCH: So that would just be the minimum [__________].

JOHN YEON: That's the minimum. And in my opinion they've placed too much hope on zoning rather than acquisition. But then that's the strategy of the moment and anything else is hopeless.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Was Carter's administration more responsive?

JOHN YEON: Oh, yes. The national Park Service is just really paralyzed at this time. They can't acquire anything and are afraid to stick their neck out.

MARIAN KOLISCH: ____________. You were talking about Mr. Cushman.

JOHN YEON: Mr. Cushman, yes. He seems to be devoting his considerable talents and life, in fact, to defeating efforts of the National Park Service when they want to expand or protect areas. He's momentarily stopped the Big Sur project and all around the country he's galvanized opposition to federal programs, conservation programs. Skamania County paid him ten thousand dollars to come into the Gorge and get people organized fighting federal help in the Gorge.

MARIAN KOLISCH: And he's not a government person; he's just a private citizen.

JOHN YEON: Yes. His organization is called the Inholders Association-- something of that sort. And he's been ultraeffective. He was appointed to the National Park Advisory Committee in Washington D.C. by Reagan. And is a great friend of Watt's.

MARIAN KOLISCH: And lots and lots of money, I imagine, to use.

JOHN YEON: Yes indeed. Inexhaustible. And he appears here whenever there's an important meeting.

MARIAN KOLISCH: And he's able to influence the right people.

JOHN YEON: Oh yes. He can get people so roused up; the feds are going to run them off their land and all kinds of grim scenarios [proposed by him].

MARIAN KOLISCH: Well, let's hope for the best. Maybe we can hang on.

JOHN YEON: One thing, I don't know whether I quoted Mr. Scott right the last time. I want to requote it, because it's brief. I was talking to him about saving timber along the proposed Sunset Highway to the beach. And it the went through a magnificent forest and I hoped that the Highway Department would acquire a wide enough right-of-way to protect timber on both sides of it, timber corridor. Well, he took a very dim view of anything of that sort and he was also, you remember, head of the state parks because they were under the Highway Department. And that's when he said to me, "Trees. What good are they left standing there? All they're good for is birds. I was here when it was all trees and mud and it was terrible." He wouldn't spend a cent on state parks under his administration-- says it's like dumping money in the ocean.

MARIAN KOLISCH: So they didn't buy the...

JOHN YEON: They didn't buy the trees. And in this case it turned out just as well because before the highway was built, there was the great Tillamook burn that burned all the trees along the highway. They could, of course, have bought a wider right-of-way thereafter for practically nothing. And then it would have been protected. The way it is now, the trees are there just because they aren't large enough to log. There's going to be a great slaughter along that beautiful highway. [______________]

Let's see, advisor, State Park Commission trying to overcome Lesley Scott. As I mentioned, I traveled around the state a great deal looking at...

MARIAN KOLISCH: I'm sorry to interrupt again. I'd like to get a date in there.

JOHN YEON: That was about 1931, I think. Yes, because when I was appointed to that commission, I was 21 years old. But going around the state, I went with other members of the commission including Aubrey Watzek, and I became well-acquainted with him at that time. He liked to go mountain climbing, so I joined forces with him and we explored. I got to many places I wouldn't have otherwise found. We climbed anything in sight-- Mount Hood and Mount Rainier and Mount Olympus and Mount Shuksan and Garibaldi in Canada. I also went on Mazama trips to these places.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Mazamas were mountain climbing groups?

JOHN YEON: Yes. Also as a result of knowing Watzek I got to go up to the Snowshoe Club on the north side of Mount Hood. And later I joined the ski club that only had maybe ten members on the south side of Mount Hood. It was in an area that was closed to any development. They had built the cabin, but they let the Forest Service have it in the summer as a ranger station and that's how they were able to use it in the
winter. It was stocked in summer with provisions-- canned goods-- and they would take off from Government Camp and through trackless snows that would change every week because of the storms and end up in this little cabin, some spot on this big mountain. And it was quite wonderful. Well, as a result of this skiing experience, I got interested in the idea of a winter resort on Mount Hood. It wasn't the first interest. There had been something proposed on Cloud Cap site. In fact, I saw in the paper a rendering of a proposal that was an equilateral cross in plan, and just went up with a square top. It's like the apartment houses that they were then building in the area around [Tilly Jane?, Tillicum?]-- a completely urban concept for this beautiful spot. And I thought this would be a pretty grim outcome.

MARIAN KOLISCH: This was to be put on Mount Hood?

JOHN YEON: On the Cloud Cap site. But there's other format about studying the mountain too. At that time, there was talk of an aerial tram to the top of the mountain, I think from the north side, also. There was a lot of opposition to that, of course, they never got off the ground. But I [took to designing] a hotel for the Cloud Cap site. And, my goodness, it was a very ambitious project. I made a great model about six or eight feet long. The hotel was a very modern building and sort of influenced by Mendelssohn, who's a modern German architect who made forms with lots of motion in them. I made the model and it had trees and everything, other features of the site. When it was done, it was exhibited in one of Meier & Frank's windows with placards that such a development would make Mount Hood a very popular and famous ski resort, in winter. And it was lit with a lurid bluish light. Getting it into the window-- it was so big that it had to be sawed in two. It was pretty well battered up by the time it got out of the window. But as far as I know, that was the most substantial effort at the time toward winter resort development on Mount Hood. I later came to hate the design of the hotel. I was just being too-- well, the forms were too soft, too rounded. But it was an exceptional thing, with a very dramatic lobby and the composition was sort of like a ruined medieval castle. Not imitating that, but that was the effect of it-- as far as assymetrical forms with one higher tower. And on top of that was a glassed-in observatory, or cafe, and there were big decks for areas for viewing the landscape.

MARIAN KOLISCH: And a capacity of how many?

JOHN YEON: Oh, I forget. Maybe eighty rooms or something like that. With an underground garage. Anyway, I learned from experience with the Snowshoe cabin in contrast to the little ski club on the south side, that the north side was not the area to develop. The south side was infinitely better, both in the slope and the southern exposure. The north side was steep and icy and shadowed. So I started working on a plan for the south side. I chose a ridge on the edge of Salmon River Canyon. It was a ridge that grows up against the general downward slope of the mountain, so you got a perspective of the mountain where you weren't looking up an incline which tended to make the mountain flat. And then the view over the canyon is very dramatic down the canyon to Eastern Oregon. But mainly I chose the site because it stuck up somewhat by itself and the snow blew off of it in winter and blew into the canyon. This project I was much more satisfied with. It was a very modern building but it had more bite and a better character for a dramatic landscape.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Were you doing this on your own?

JOHN YEON: I was doing this on my own. But since I had lavished so much time and care in the other model, I never did the same thing for this project. It existed only in a little plaster model, plus very mechanical drawings, not renderings. In fact, the only drawings I have now were made by Belluschi from the drawings I gave to him, because if the thing went ahead, I hoped to do it in his office. That was the Doyle office (Doyle was long dead). But there were just sort of architect's drawings. They weren't pretty pictures. Then, I don't know how I met E.J. Griffith, but he was interested in a resort on Mount Hood, too, but at Government Camp, down below the Government Camp. And he had a plan that was sort of a French chateau scheme that someone had drawn for him. Maybe I met him through that showing in Meier & Frank's window. I don't know. Anyway,I persuaded him that his project below Government Camp was not at all the place for a resort on Mount Hood-- it wasn't really cold enough there-- and that it should be at Timberline, which was superb skiing there. And he very willingly scrapped all his plans and felt that was a fine idea and wanted to join forces with me. Well, okay, but he didn't have any-- he was just a promoter. But he told me that the Democrats owed him something and he was going to Washington to try and get a job. He would try and promote this hotel at the same time, and would I grubstake him? And I said, "Gosh, I can't do that." Anyway, he went to Washington.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Would you grubstake him? I'm not sure that I understand what that means.

JOHN YEON: Oh, would I pay for his trip, that's all. And I thought, if anybody's going to Washington at my expense, I'd rather go myself. Anyway I didn't, which might have been a fatal error, but it turned out it wasn't. The Democrats apparently did indeed owe him something. He came back as Federal Housing Administrator for Oregon. And he was still interested in the hotel, but he couldn't do anything about it in that capacity. And so in due time he became Works Project Administrator for Oregon and then he could do something about it. But all during this period, which was some time of months or a year or something, he was supporting my plan. I don't think he was particularly interested in architecture and I think any plan might have suited him pretty well. Certainly my plan couldn't be more different that the one that had been cooked up for him at Government Camp. The he seemed a little more hopeful, but there was a long interval, because by then I was pretty well exhausted by all this maneuvering. But when it was about ready to go, the federal government insisted that some local group raise some token local money for the project and that's when a group was formed, of which Jack Meier might have been chairman, to raise this local money. And as soon as they were formed they didn't like my plan at all and decided that there should be another architect for it. As I say, I wasn't too unhappy about that because it was too many committees and had been blow hot blow cold for so long. Anyway, I was involved in other things. But they wanted more of a national park-type hotel. And it's my impression that they contacted the architect who did the lodge at Sun Valley which was brand new then. I'm not not positive about that because the architects who were eventually involved-- there seemed to be so many of them that I don't know how to distribute the credit of the design. But that was the end of my involvement in Timberline Lodge. I mentioned all that because it isn't really mentioned in the book that I was just reading this morning, an official report on Timberline Lodge.

MARIAN KOLISCH: It isn't?

JOHN YEON: No. I'm mentioned, but not in any sense of having promoted the idea originally. I got the thing rolling. And in the end, it isn't very important because there would inevitably have been a development on Mount Hood.

MARIAN KOLISCH: But the placement of it is very important [for a ____________].

JOHN YEON: Yeah. What I mean to say is that I just happened to be the first one who proposed the hotel there. And I don't think that's of great historic significance because somebody else would have done it. But it's a little strange that it hasn't...

MARIAN KOLISCH: That it's not mentioned.

JOHN YEON: ...that it's not mentioned. Yes. And others have taken credit for it.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Especially as long as you had plans for it.

JOHN YEON: Yeah. But the thing was, you know, well advanced on my plan before the shift was made. Typical of the difficulties that I foresaw was that E.J. Griffith, when he would go up to there in the summertime, would pick out a different place for the hotel every time. My hotel couldn't be moved because it was designed specifically for that ridge and designed so that the snow would blow off of it and land in the canyon and keep itself pretty well dug out. Whether it would have worked that way or not, I don't know. I think it would have. And the places that he picked out for the hotel were ones that were in summer very much more hospitable and friendly, they were open meadows and protected places, and very alluring. Well, the reason they were open meadows and without being covered with trees is that they were pockets for the snow accumulating in winter, too deep for trees to grow. Trees grew on the exposed places where the winter winds blew the snow away from them. When they went to start, he moved the site even after the plans had been drawn, I think. But when they started to build the hotel, they had to have a steam shovel up there excavating the snow from the site, whereas the ridges around with the trees on them were bare. And that's caused, you know, a lot of trouble with...

MARIAN KOLISCH: This us the site where Timberline Lodge is, right?

JOHN YEON: Yes. But my hotel was much smaller than Timberline Lodge. It was to be a private project when it started. It had to be very economical. And also it was a hotel, not a public accommodation. Nobody saw the vast hordes that would be going up there. I'm very glad my hotel wasn't built as a matter of fact. I'm sure there would have been snow problems and leaks and, as indeed there have been with the [________].

But, I can understand, too, why a group who just moves into a project like that all of a sudden wouldn't care for my design, because it was daring at the time. It would have been a famous modern building, and I think was in collusion with the dramatic forms of the landscape.

MARIAN KOLISCH: It would be very interesting to see what it would look like now.

JOHN YEON: Yeah. But most people would very much prefer the present lodge, which was the art of the oversize, you know.

MARIAN KOLISCH: It's sort of the style of the European chalet.

JOHN YEON: Well, sort of, or national park architecture. It's kind of a hybrid. In fact, one feature of it that is neither here not there, but the octagonal center part of it with the chimney coming out is actually a motif that Frank Lloyd Wright developed for some of his resort projects. But my hotel couldn't possibly have been built by the WPA, or with everybody carving something. It was a very controlled design. It wouldn't have allowed additions later, unless they were...well, [___________]. So a lot of trauma was avoided on my part in this.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Probably just as well.

JOHN YEON: Yeah.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Do you feel like talking about the beginning of your working in Doyle's office?

JOHN YEON: Well, yeah. I mentioned I'd been an office boy there and I met Wentz a long time ago. And I'd become well-acquainted, a friend of Belluschi, so I would stop in there occasionally and visit. Doyle was dead. And, oh, I was familiar with the place. And when Watzek decided to have a house in Portland-- he'd been living at the [___________], and his mother was moving out after his father died-- I was naturally interested in designing him a house. But I don't think he was much interested in the house that I designed for him. First he went, I think, to Ernie Tupper who then was doing Colonial houses. And with my interest in more original architecture than that, I found that hard to keep quiet about. So I said, "Oh, at least go to Belluschi and he'll give you something better than that." So he did, and, I don't know why, but on my own, as usual, I had designed him a house. I picked out the site for the house, and he bought it. It was a beautiful site. Then I designed a house for it without being asked to. I made a little model of the house and had it drawn, and the model, and it just seemed, maybe too original and not conventional enough. And that's when he went to Ernie Tucker and then I said go to Belluschi. Well, Belluschi took a crack at it and his scheme didn't seem any less conventional and, in fact made mine seem...

MARIAN KOLISCH: Really, really mild?

JOHN YEON: Yes, mild. And, Belluschi's wasn't wild, but it just wasn't any better than mine. So by then, Watzek had rather gotten more adjusted to the idea of a house of that sort. And, actually, Belluschi wasn't satisfied with his scheme either. So then it was changing architects three times. I was in no position to execute the working drawings without hiring help. And I didn't want to cause the embarrassment of a third switch in architects so I proposed taking the job to the Doyle office and using their technical staff and their space.

MARIAN KOLISCH: You weren't working in that office.

JOHN YEON: No, I wasn't working in that office at all. So, that was fine with Belluschi and it was okay with Watzek. So I moved into the office on the first of the year of 1937. And as I say, the model was already built and the plan was all ready to go. That's why it was possible to make the working drawings and get the house built all within one year. So from the year I went into the office, the house was moved into. But I wasn't in the office very long, just during the period of making the working drawings. And, well, it wasn't working out. When I moved in, Belluschi proposed that I would do the house, domestic work for the office.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Domestic work means residential?

JOHN YEON: Houses. Residential. But it wasn't working out very well and, oh dear, that's a long story. Maybe you shouldn't even get into it.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Well, how many people were there working in the office?

JOHN YEON: It was still during the Depression and they were trying to hang onto as many of their old crew as possible. They wouldn't ordinarily have taken on anybody new. They took me on along with the job. And I was just paid a hundred dollars a month, which wasn't very much. But I wanted to get the house built, so I was in the office what, maybe four or five months. So for designing the Watzek house, I got five hundred dollars. And they had expenses with making the working drawings, certainly, but they got the usual percentage for the house.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Because Mr. Watzek paid Belluschi's office.

JOHN YEON: Yeah. Anyway, I shouldn't be so hesitant about going into this; it was just a matter of Belluschi having done all the designing in the office for several years and I can understand that it wasn't easy to have somebody else designing in the office. He didn't go up to the Watzek house during construction, at least, never when I was there. And it was just the writing on the wall that I should clear out, which I did. I continued to supervise the house through the rest of construction and designed the garden and designed most of the furniture.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Oh really?

JOHN YEON: Yeah. After leaving the Doyle office.

MARIAN KOLISCH: So you began the whole thing in the five or six months in the office and then during the rest of the time you were out on your own, but supervising...

JOHN YEON: Yeah.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Did Mr. Watzek consider it-- certainly it has always been known as a Yeon house.

JOHN YEON: Well, it hasn't, though. That's the story I hesitate to get into.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Oh? Well, I think you should.

JOHN YEON: It was a very unhappy development. Unhappy for me, unhappy for everybody, I'm sure. But the work that had been done by various designers in the Doyle office throughout its history had all been considered under the term of Doyle. Well, Belluschi had been the designer since before Doyle's death.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Could we clarify, John, the difference between-- you say the designers in the office, and Belluschi was the architect. What does that mean? Who were the designers?

JOHN YEON: Well, under the Doyle firm name through the years there had been different designers responsible for the work that came out of the office. Including Doyle's own designs. But all of it has been credited to the Doyle office. And since Doyle's death, Belluschi had done all the designing and the Doyle name had become a sort of trade name for Belluschi. There was no confusion whatsoever. And they wanted that to continue because there were advantages. If they were remodeling in buildings that the Doyle firm had done they naturally got the job whereas they might not have got it if it was Belluschi's name.

MARIAN KOLISCH: The designer is not an architect? I guess this is what I'm coming to.

JOHN YEON: Oh, well, the designer is responsible for the appearance, obviously in that sense...

[Tape 3; Side 2]

The designer is the one who conceives the building and is responsible for its form and appearance. He could be called the architect. Nowadays architecture's a very complicated business and engineers and plumbers and electricians and-- oh, many, many sciences involved. So I use the term designer as the one who is responsible for the visual conception of the building.

The local architects succeeded in getting a bill passed through the state legislature requiring that if an architect dies, the name of the firm has to be changed to reflect the actual constituency of the firm. That was because of the Doyle situation. And you can already maybe foresee what happened here. Dave Jack was the business manager of the firm, and he was a tough cookie. The first intimations of things happening that I was unhappy about was that he just sent a photographer up to the house to take pictures for publication without mentioning anything to me about it. And I had a run-in with him on this, that having spent so much time on it I was concerned about how photographs would be taken, when they would be taken, and whether things were ready or not. And he ignored all this, and he gave me in no uncertain terms to know that I had nothing to do with the future credit of the house. They would just treat it as office work. Then-- this is what makes the difficulty-- Belluschi's later work, like the Suiter house across the street which was done the next year-- motifs...

MARIAN KOLISCH: Across the street from?

JOHN YEON: From the Watzek house. There were motifs similar to the Watzek house. It had a portico which was actually different from the Watzek house, but the same open portico was the main feature inside the Watzek house and the treatment of the eaves was an [irreverse] angle of the slope of the roof; the [fascia board roof sloped] in reverse so it came out to a triangle. Then other houses he did also had similarities to the Watzek house, and it naturally became the assumption that he was also responsible for the Watzek house. And my only..., he could have cleared it up very early, but it's one of those things that got going until it got pretty sticky to clear up. I remember Henry Russell Hitchcock, who is still alive. He was an architectural critic of great importance in this country, and he'd written a book with [Philip Johnson] on the International Style. And he was out here at the time. He was touring around with Agnus Ringe and came to Portland. He was taken through the Watzek house with Belluschi and other houses that Belluschi had done, and he went back to New York and said, "Why, there's no such thing as John Yeon-- it's all Belluschi." And then things appeared-- the Watzek house appeared in books and so on, one of them mentioning Belluschi's fine Italian hand is evident in the Watzek house.

MARIAN KOLISCH: He literally didn't have anything to do with the design.

JOHN YEON: No. But, it shows what people deduced then, because he was still using the Doyle name and the office wanted the Doyle name attached to the Watzek house. But apart from all this, I don't know how it happened, but the Museum of Modern Art was interested in the Watzek house and included it in an exhibition of Art in our Time. And by then I was insisting my name be connected to it. And Hitchcock went back and said, "Oh, it's all a phony business."

MARIAN KOLISCH: [____________]

JOHN YEON: Yeah, an impostor. And through the Watzek house I had met the chairman of the Architecture Department at the Museum of Modern Art, [John McAndrew], and he got in very hot water over this and misattributed lots of facts. In fact, it contributed to his losing his job. Oh, dear, and then the war came and I was in Africa and I would get reports of similar things going down and I [once mentioned] when I was rotated back to this country, I wrote a long, long letter to Belluschi trying to get all this straightened out. And it's long since been straightened out, but it was very...

MARIAN KOLISCH: But it was quite a while there where there was confusion.

JOHN YEON: It was quite a while. And, as I say, not getting credit for the job is one thing, but as a result, being an impostor, was another.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Also, I would think, having your special features incorporated in the later houses of Belluschi's would be somewhat bothersome.

[Break in tape]

JOHN YEON: One thing about my strange career is that I've been anxious not to have an architectural office that I had to keep occupied. The most I've ever had were two draftsmen at one time and that wasn't for a very long period. So, I've been sort of like a cuckoo that had to lay my eggs in other people's nests. I do the designing and then on occasion I had to work with other people in making the working drawings and doing the work that would ordinarily be done in a well-staffed, ongoing office. This has enabled me to do lots of other things that I'm interested in doing, like conservation work, that I couldn't possibly have done if I'd been tied down to a large office and had to keep work coming in and out. Of course, there are penalties for that, such as my experience in the Doyle office, but mostly it's worked out very well.

MARIAN KOLISCH: This is one thing we said between recordings here, that Belluschi has always had an office and I guess a number of draftsmen. But would you say that that was the end of your friendship, when you...?

JOHN YEON: It certainly put a great strain on it, and I haven't seen Belluschi very much since then. When I have seen him he's been extremely nice and very kind to me. I wish very much that things had turned out differently because I really enjoyed his friendship and enjoyed him very much. And it may be my fault that I haven't made more of an effort in recent years, but that was the cause of a break.

MARIAN KOLISCH: I think a single-purpose person or a single-minded person sometimes pays the penalties for that.

JOHN YEON: I'm sure that he probably didn't have any idea of the consequence to me or to somebody like John McAndrew and other supporters of mine. John McAndrew, incidentally, became a very good friend of mine and I had some nice trips with him in Mexico. He did a great work on Mexico that was widely acclaimed and he did a big work on early Renaissance architecture in Venice which wasn't finished at the time of his death, but his wife published it after he died. He was vice chairman of the International Save Venice Committee. He was a wonderful man.

MARIAN KOLISCH: A Portland architect?

JOHN YEON: No. He was the one who was chairman or head of the Architecture Department of the Museum of Modern Art. And, mentioning the things I could do by not having an office, he was involved in a big Mexican show at the Museum of Modern Art and his job was to collect folk art and records of colonial architecture in Mexico for this show. And he said, "Why don't you come down and join me while I'm down there." He spoke Spanish and I went down and I had an absolutely glorious tour of Mexico traveling to places I never, never would have gotten to on my own. A wonderful experience.

MARIAN KOLISCH: It didn't influence any of your later design?

JOHN YEON: Well, in a sense it did. I was already veering away from exclusive interest in architectures in the Northwest. And being in Mexico was just the other side of the coin. Through McAndrew I also met Eugene Berman, who was a painter in New York. And his work I immediately liked when I saw. He was known as neo-romantic. His main interest was the art of the Mediterranean I suppose--again, the other side of the coin-- and I just took to it with a vengeance. Mexico was part of that same European... Before I went to Mexico I thought surely the thing that I would like would be the pre-Conquest pyramids and monuments. Not at all. Just the Spanish colonial architecture. I just fell flat on my face. I didn't expect to react that way and I just didn't have any time for the pre-Conquest monuments. But the great churches or the exuberance...

MARIAN KOLISCH: Instead you wandered in the colonial houses.

JOHN YEON: Yes. Churches and buildings and palaces and cities. And I enormously enjoyed the villages in Mexico. Those almost invisible villages that climbed up hillsides, and sometimes they were just the color of the earth and almost completely camouflaged. They seemed so beautiful in the landscape.

MARIAN KOLISCH: Is that part of what you say when you're talking about building your houses into the landscape?

JOHN YEON: Well, let's skip that for another time because that's kind of a thing unto itself. Let me talk a little more about my late conversion for the European side of things. Berman, I don't know whether you know his paintings; there's no reason you should. He was a modern painter, born in Russia, but lived [___________] Revolution, but lived in Paris among all the modern artists. And he was in revolt, in a sense-- not militant, but he just had nothing to do with the trend of modern painting in Paris, abstract painting and cubist painting. He was known as a neo-romantic. People confuse him with Dali and Surrealism. Both are realistic in their techniques, but they're two different schools. There're not many in Berman's school. His own brother Leonid was included, and [Tollichef]. But when I first saw some of his paintings, actually it was at the house in Connecticut of James Soby. Berman had designed a dining room for him and painted the murals on the wall, but he had some of Berman's paintings and one particularly of a sort of a moonlight night scene, Souvenir of Ischia, which is an island near Capri. It was very serene and mysterious and it had composition that was acceptable as an abstract composition but the building was recognizable as a building and there was perspective and atmosphere, climate. It was a specific place and reaction to it. And I liked that. I never was swept off my feet except in the sense of respecting abstract art.

The curious thing of this is that recently someone was referring to what my reaction might be to the new Graves Building in Portland. This was an architect speaking to someone. And he said, "Oh, he probably likes it because he likes Berman." It was a revealing observation because Berman was a post-modern painter. I'm not implying I like the Graves Building, but it was an astute observation on the part of this guy because I've never thought of Berman as a post-modern painter. But that's exactly what he was. He was in defiance of the course of abstract art. You might know Berman through his designs for ballet. He did lots of ballet designs and he's one of the best-- some of his best work is ballet designs in Metropolitan Opera. I have a few of his paintings. I have, maybe the largest Berman painting, that's in my mother's house. You saw the mural in the lib