President's Message
Larry & Ellie McClure at the (Gateway Arch)
Jefferson National Expansion Memorial
Welcome to the website of the Oregon Chapter of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation.
While some people think interest in Lewis & Clark will fall away now that the Bicentennial is history, here in Oregon we are simply moving to a new level of commitment.
Our congressional delegation is working to establish a new heritage area at the mouth of the Columbia, our Chapter’s first board meeting of the new year was well-attended, a year-long calendar was tentatively established, and Ted Kaye is leading us into a full-scale inventory of Lewis & Clark legacy projects.
I’m still meeting people who are impressed by the Corps of Discovery’s stories and how the Bicentennial commemoration reminded us of those lessons for 2007.
In that vein, I urge you to join Ellie and me on the afternoon of March 24th in Vancouver (details in the Newsletter) to see for ourselves how the future generation is making those connections.
We will hear from students, teachers, and community representatives in Oregon and Washington who created public art projects following the example of Maya Lin (www.confluenceproject.org/wp/). In each case they studied the Lewis & Clark story, the tribes they met, and the environmental context for their area, then created and documented indoor or outdoor artworks that will live on for future generations.
Let’s show these future Chapter members that we support their initiative and welcome them someday as members of our Foundation.
We're pleased to present two new uncontested candidates to serve on our Chapter Board for 2009-11 terms.
We will vote during our chapter meeting on December 6.
Marty Boehme
Marty is a retired mechanical design engineer with an advanced degree from Oregon State University, specializing in opto-mechanical design and state-of-the-art mechanisms. He’s a history buff with an extensive collection of hundreds explorer-type stories in book form. His wife, Katie is a Shields (via her mother), related to John Shields of the Corps. He belongs to the family of friends owning vintage-like teardrop camp trailers and edits a quarterly newsletter.He lives in Oregon City and also belongs to a number of car clubs, serving on the board of the Northwest Vintage Car and Motorcycle Museum located on the grounds of Antique Powerland in Brooks, Oregon. He has a street-rodded 1937 Ford 2-door sedan powered by a modern Chevrolet 350 cubic-inch V-8 engine. He recently completed two years as project manager in building a gazebo on the museum’s two-acre campus show grounds, and with a woodworking hobby he built his own house.
Tom Wilson
Tom lives in Astoria, having recently retired from teaching elementary school there for 30 years (he coached high school volleyball for 26 years). He began working with Fort Clatsop on its curriculum advisory board and later volunteered the n worked as a ranger.Since 2001, he has portrayed Corps members in Ft. Clatsop’s living history programs, and now focuses on William Bratton (Saltworks) and William Clark. He was Clark in “A Clatsop Winter Story” and the 2008 Ron Craig PBS film about York. He is president of Pacific Northwest Living Historians. His most memorable moments doing living history were during the Bicentennial: setting up camp in the woods at Ft. Clatsop just a month after the replica, paddling Native American canoes as the Corps arrived at Ft. Clatsop and departed, and skippering a canoe with Discovery Expedition of St. Charles for the last 50 miles down the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers into St. Louis for the big “Welcome Home” celebration in 2006.
Sincerely,
Larry McClure
President,Oregon Chapter, Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation