Built nearly overnight during World War II, Vanport was the second-largest and most integrated city in Oregon until it was destroyed by a flood in 1948. Remarkably, the meaning of Vanport continues to deepen and expand, thanks in large part to the annual Vanport Mosaic Festival. In this episode we hear from Laura Lo Forti, Laveta Gilmore Jones, and Kelly Bosworth, three people whose lives are wrapped up in Vanport and the Vanport Mosaic Festival and whose work has helped show so many of us how our lives, too, are part of what Vanport means to Oregon.
Show Notes
About Our Guests
Kelly Bosworth is the Mary Jones and Thomas Hart Horning Assistant Professor of Public History and Ethnomusicology at Oregon State University, where she teaches courses such as “Social Change and American Popular Music” and “Musical Worlds of the Pacific Northwest.” Her research on music/sound/noise in US history delves into the diverse archives of music making, reconstructing often-silenced histories through the songs and sounds associated with place.
Laveta Gilmore Jones, a Vanport descendant, is the outreach coordinator for Vanport Mosaic and a member of the organization's board of directors. She was born in Portland and comes from a family with deep roots in ministry, labor unions, healthcare and education. She is the former co-executive director of Leaven Community and a retired educator.
Laura Lo Forti is a multimedia producer, cultural organizer, and a “story midwife” supporting communities in defining how their stories should be told and shared. She is the cofounder and director of Vanport Mosaic.
Further Detours
- Vanport Mosaic's website hosts oral histories, exhibits, and an events calendar. The 2025 Vanport Mosaic Festival takes place May 16 through June 1 in Portland.
- Kelly Bosworth's article about Vanport and Vanport Mosaic, "Imagine a City," was published in the Spring 2025 issue of Oregon Humanities magazine.
- "Portland Expo Center: A Hidden History" explores how the Livestock Exhibition Center adjacent to the site of Vanport was used to imprison Japanese Americans in 1942.
- In "Walk On," Marty Hughley wrote about a program that connected physical activity and memory to improve the health of Portland communities affected by change.
- Past episodes of The Detour relating to memory and history include "Reimagining Monuments" with David Harrelson and Clint Smith, "A Kind of Immortality" with Paul Susi and Sallie Tisdale, and "A Place for Us" with Zachary Stocks and Kellen Akiyama
Transcript
The Detour Vanport Mosaic (Podcast)
Adam Davis: [00:00:00] Hi, this is Adam Davis from The Detour with some bad news. In early April, the grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities that funds much of Oregon Humanities' work, including this show, was abruptly terminated, along with many other grants to hundreds of organizations in Oregon and nationally. Now we're facing uncertainty like never before about the future of our organization and field.
If you enjoy The Detour or think any of the work Oregon Humanities does is important, please contact your US Senators and Representatives and ask them to protect the National Endowment for the Humanities. Visit oregonhumanities.org/neh to learn more about how you can help.
Various speakers: We live down there. That's Vanport, but I'm like, okay. Delta Park. Yeah, where? Where, yeah, where? It's huge down here. It's huge. It was a city. Imagine all this stuff, all this underwater. Yeah. [00:01:00] Isn't that something? Oh, that's, yeah. To imagine all of that is really something under, it was underwater.
Adam Davis: That was audio from History from the Bottom Up, a short documentary about the Vanport Mosaic Festival.
Every city is built on other cities, every community, on the many communities that preceded it and led to it and keep living through it. During World War II, Vanport was the second largest and most integrated city in Oregon until suddenly it was washed out by a flood. But if that flood destroyed Vanport's housing and overturned, and in some cases took the lives of, Vanport's residents, it did not take away what Vanport was before the flood or what it has come to mean over the ensuing decades.
Remarkably, the meaning of Vanport continues to deepen and expand, thanks in large part to a growing group of people who've gotten together to tell more and more stories of Vanport and the people connected to it. This work of bringing Vanport to life today, even as the city and the flood recede further into the chronological past, lies at the heart of an annual set of events called the Vanport Mosaic Festival.
This episode of The Detour revolves around a conversation with Laura Lo Forti, Laveta Gilmore Jones, and Kelly Bosworth, three people whose lives are wrapped up in Vanport and the Vanport Mosaic Festival and whose work has helped show so many of us how our lives too are part of what Vanport means to Oregon and to the experience and the sounds of belonging.
Kelly, Laura, Laveta, thank you for joining The Detour and Oregon Humanities here up on Albina. And I want to start by asking about festivals and maybe even ask if as a kid you can remember one festival that you went to, what the festival was, and sort of what stands out in your memory.
Laura Lo Forti: But I remember, not one specifically, but a type of festival that is very popular in Italy, which is sort of like the village celebration of the saint.
Wherever you are, there's gonna be a saint to be celebrated. And so I just remember the communal aspect as a kid and at some point, elders, children, everybody's dancing and eating, of course. And it just did really fun chaos with a lot of joy and safety, not that I thought about this back then, but I'm thinking about my daughter now.
Probably she hasn't experienced anything like that except in Italy as a child running around, your parents are not even looking at what's happening, where you are.
Adam Davis: Do you know who put that festival on, who the organizers were?
Laura Lo Forti: They're usually the church with the community, like at the Business Association.
I don't know exactly, but usually everybody's involved because it's a big deal for small places.
Adam Davis: Laveta, anything come to your mind?
Laveta Gilmore: Yeah. The Rose Festival. For me as a kid, it was the Rose Festival: going with our family, getting our spot on the sidewalk. I loved the bands, the music, looking at the floats.
And then, later on when they would have the waterfront park, the booths and things. I enjoyed going to those, but I think for me it was just the parade itself that was the highlight that we just always looked forward to.
Adam Davis: Oh yeah.
Kelly Bosworth: I thought of the Rose Festival too, and I grew up in the Hollywood neighborhood in Northeast Portland and we would get so excited for the Junior Rose Parade that would go right through our neighborhood. And you know, the first best thing about it was that you got out of school early. But then when I was in middle school, I was in the middle school band and that was just about the biggest stage I could imagine–in the middle school band marching in the Junior Rose Parade. Part of why it's a great question to start with is because the Vanport junior high band was in the Junior Rose Festival parade. I can think about that sense of pride when you're that age to be participating in a festival and feel like you're part of the performance of it.
Not, not only experiencing it as a, as a watcher or a listener, although maybe that's part of what festivals do is we're all participants, whether you're watching the parade or in the parade. Mm-hmm.
Adam Davis: Well, what you just said is maybe that's part of what festivals do. And can I just ask, what do you hope this festival does?
The Vanport Mosaic Festival?
Laveta Gilmore: I think one of the things I hope it does is just bring people joy. That's something that we see a lot especially when we have the reunion luncheon for the descendants and the former residents of Vanport and just the joy on their faces. Just being able to come together, eat together, talk about their experiences brings up so much joy in them.
What else do you want, Laura?
Laura Lo Forti: Hope? I always find hope in our work. But I think now we need it more than ever. And I think the way we gather is very intentional. And I think that is why we find hope. It doesn't happen by accident. It's about the stories that we share together.
It's about the art, it's about the invitation that is really especially important, I would say, where everybody is invited. It’s something rare, especially in Portland, where everybody doesn’t feel invited. It doesn't feel exclusive or really just for one group. It really is a place where we cross, we share stories and we realize how much we have in common.
And I think that's where I find hope, and that's where I hope to bring more hope for all of us. Mm-hmm. Because I think we lost that idea and the knowledge, that belief, that we have a shared humanity and that our survival is connected and there is a lot of joy in remembering.
That we are together and we are gonna survive together.
Adam Davis: It's interesting thinking about joy and hope, and there's also a lot of attention to the specific history, which is not always joyful and not always hopeful. And there's tough parts of it, including the fact that there's a flood and displacement and segregation and I would say stratification of different kinds. So I think I'd like to ask about the relationship between looking for joy and hope and also focusing so clearly on tough parts of our history.
Laveta Gilmore: I think something that really came to me yesterday as I was reflecting on our conversation we were gonna have today was that in order to have that joy, we also have to have that collective grieving. And I remember that when we had our first gatherings, people's focus was a lot on the day of the flood because they hadn't had a chance to process that collectively together.
Adam Davis: Even all these years later.
Laveta Gilmore: All these years later. I don't know what existed back in the late forties, but I do know that when Vanport Mosaic came on the scene and opened up the space to talk, it gave people a chance to say I remember when. We're talking people in their seventies and eighties and nineties who had just carried this with them for that whole time. Mm-hmm. So it gave them an opportunity to come together and do that collective grieving and recognition that this was a trauma we went through. There are things that we did lose. Mm-hmm. But when you're able to do that collective grieving, then you're able to find healing.
Mm-hmm. Because then the stories of what was it like before the flood started coming out? Different people's memories of that.
Kelly Bosworth: I was thinking about healing as a word. And I think you're so right, Laveta, that it's a process. You can't find the joy if you haven't had a chance to be heard.
As you said, the real losses are here. Mm-hmm. The fear, the pain, the displacement, racism, the uncertainty. And there's so much about if you can find community to hold those things with you, which I think from hearing you all, from hearing other Vanport survivors, I mean, having that community to hold that together then moves you ten years later. Not that some of those conversations weren't happening before Vanport Mosaic, or of course people were having their own individual threads through the story and experiences of reconnecting with each other. But to hold a collective for a decade where people are coming back and building a new community, new friendships and sharing and, and I think that's one of the things that it makes me think about the analogy built into the Vanport mosaic too. That mosaic that you weren't asking people to resonate or agree at the start, it's share your story.
Laveta Gilmore: Exactly.
Kelly Bosworth: It doesn't have to be, it isn't the same as someone else's, and it doesn't have to be, and you don't have to pretend it is. And you know, when we think about memory, sometimes we misremember, we forget, someone jogs our memory or I say, well it went this way and someone will say,
It went this way. And to allow people to really kind of share their experience, including how they now have remembered it decades later.
Adam Davis: Mm-hmm.
Kelly Bosworth: That is its own experience of remembering it in the present. To hear that at the 10th Festival we're holding joy and holding hope within this community is really a beautiful thing.
And it's a gift to people like me who really learned the Vanport story through your early programming and have hopefully joined in. As participants watching the parade and joining in the parade.
Adam Davis: Can we go to each of your entry points into Vanport and the Vanport Mosaic because…
Laura Lo Forti: Sure.
Adam Davis: Not identical, right? Let's start with Laura.
Laura Lo Forti: All right, so my entry point. I moved to Portland from New York and I found myself in a place that I chose as a home and yet not feeling like home. And so for me, I had this need to find the reason why the city is the way it is, because it's a little bit of a mystery or a puzzle when you come from anywhere else, right?
It's a beautiful city. People are so kind, and yet if you come from anywhere else there's something that doesn't feel welcoming.
Adam Davis: Mm-hmm.
Laura Lo Forti: And that's because you can see if you want to see that not everyone is welcome, right? This is a very homogeneous city and for a good reason. So when I moved here, I really wanted to understand why. Why this city is the way it is, and if I wanted to stay.
It was really this very selfish inquiry. It's like, what is this? What, what's happening? Is this a good place to raise my daughter, who is a brown girl? Mm-hmm. And so I'm a recovering journalist, and I cannot let go of those curiosities and the need to dig out the why of things. And so in research, I became really interested in the history of Vanport because it was just incredible to realize that there was an entire city and then there wasn't anymore. And that city was the most diverse, semi-integrated city in the forties.
So I became very interested in understanding more about the history of this place that doesn't exist anymore. And so I, I'm a recovering journalist, turn into a story midwife. That's what I call myself. I'm just here to support the labor of others telling their own stories. I develop these practices that are really to create space for communities to tell their own stories.
And so it seems like a good idea to apply these principles of participatory media and community storytelling to the story of Vanport. And so it became, with a little oral history project, I would facilitate these workshops for anyone. But I centered on those few survivors that I knew of, I was connected to, and again, this was supposed to be a short project.
We started to produce documentaries based on these stories in this participatory way. Not in an extractive way, but creating a space for those who live the story to really lead and reclaim the narrative and explore the story themselves. These documentaries started to kind of have a life on their own, and so they became an invitation to more stories. I feel like the story really found me and I'm grateful.
Laveta Gilmore: My entry point to Vanport was through the story of my mom and my aunt. It was actually through the story of my grandfather, Euro Cannon, my grandmother. Beatrice McKinney Cannon, my mom, Beatrice, my Aunt Marjorie, and my Uncle Euro Jr.
Bring in their spirits here with us today.
Adam Davis: Nice. That's nice.
Laveta Gilmore: And my mom was getting ready to celebrate her 80th birthday, and I wanted to create a presentation, the story of her life, and that's when I actually became acutely aware that they lived in Vanport, that they had experienced the flood.
That was my first real, like really aha moment. And when that happened, that was in 2011. That's when it really came to my radar that my mom and my grandparents and my aunt and uncle had lived in Vanport and what that story meant to them. And then my mom had a chance to share her oral story with Laura.
My aunt had a chance to share her story with Laura. And one day I got a phone call that there was going to be a reunion luncheon, and my mom told me that I was going to produce it. She said you're gonna meet with these people and we're going to create this reunion for ourselves. And that was, that was, I was ‘voluntold’ what I was gonna do.
And of course I did. And that's, that was my big entry into Vanport Mosaic.
Adam Davis: All right. And you've been in it since?
Laveta Gilmore: I've been in it since.
Adam Davis: All right. Yeah. Great. Thank you.
Kelly Bosworth: I very much became inspired by the early Vanport Mosaic. I mean, I think I must have seen an oral history screening early on, or I don't even remember exactly the first moments. I grew up in North and Northeast Portland. I didn't learn about Vanport in my public school. We didn't talk about it at my dining room table. It was not until I was an adult that I really, you know, had kind of, I think a similar moment of, oh my gosh, this city existed, this tragedy occurred.
So this is, you know, a story of the place that I am from. I'm a white Oregonian, a European American. You know, I have a lot of learning to do about what it means to belong to this place, to be a guest. The reason I'm in Oregon is because of my great, great, great, great-grandparents deciding to just come here.
And this place means a lot to me. And also I think understanding how to belong to it, in it, and of it is complicated. So to realize there's this incredible story of thriving and of loss that wasn't a part of how I understood my home. You know, it's shocking and it's also a kind of call.
And then Laura, you'll remember I really kind of started haunting the Vanport mosaic events. I would go alone often or bring my mom or my sister or friend, but I would just go to every one I could. And, I was very aware at the beginning that this was a community and that I wasn't networked into it.
And so I was going very much to just kind of observe and soak up what I could, but kind of often standing on the edges and, and kind of taking it in. And then it wasn't until later that I was doing graduate work in history and ethnomusicology and just kind of thought for a class project I would do some research on Vanport and originally, you know, I didn't know where that was gonna go, but it ended up becoming a project on music in Vanport.
And not just music, but sound. The soundscape of this place and the noise. This is a really noisy place. Thin walls, a pluralistic community, people who are, you know, kind of thrown together and trying to make it work in extreme circumstances during the war and after the war, when the reason for Vanport, the shipyards are gone, but it's still a home.
And so I then followed that research and I'll say too, that it would have just stayed a term paper if I hadn't then started to have relationships with Laura and with a few Vanport survivors and saw how much the research was contributing something new to the collective storytelling of Vanport. And you know, I mean, your mom, Ms.B, the way her eyes would light up when I said the name of the music teacher in Vanport?
Laveta Gilmore: Yeah. Oh, okay. And the pictures of the band, pictures that surfaced. All of a sudden these pictures of the band surfaced and it was like there was my mom, there was my aunt. Ed saw his brother. Someone else saw their sibling, and it was like, oh my gosh, this is an ever expanding story.
Kelly Bosworth: Yeah. And that's about the joy that they had in the community. And not just about the flood. So that then opens up all of those threads of storytelling about wow, we really lived here. We lived here in all the good and the bad, and, you know, created experiences that have stayed with people for their whole lives. And passed on.
Adam Davis: You're listening to The Detour with Laveta Gilmore Jones, Laura Lo Forti, and Kelly Bosworth.
How does it happen that something that's getting further away chronologically is surfacing more deeply and more vividly?
Laura Lo Forti: Well, I think that that could happen to any story, really. I think we are not that creative in the way we ask questions of history and of stories. And so they remain a little bit small. They simplify to the point that they are not alive. And so the Vanport story is an example because when I started to research, what I would find would be articles that every year would be written around the anniversary of the flood. Memorial Day weekend. And so that was a time that you had to say something: that it was the city; there was a flood; there were only 15 people drowning. So that was like a very small story. If you think about that, this was a city that was built in 1942, became the largest federal housing project in the United States, the second largest city in Oregon, and it was destroyed by a flood in 1948.
So it wasn't the story. It didn't exist for one day, the day of the flood. But that's where we gravitate. We always think and care about communities when something terrible happens to them. Then we leave. So not only we don't think about who they were before this tragedy happened, but also what happens after? How do they recover? And so I think what happened with the Vanport story is that we simply created a space for the story to be remembered. You are saying it's collective grieving and I think it's collective remembering, right? And so then what happened is that in the way that I facilitate these workshops, the only contribution I provide is that I remind people to ask different questions. More generous questions. Questions that allow new stories to emerge. And so it was incredible for me to witness throughout all these years, and especially at the beginning, where people were so used to being asked about the flood, and so immediately that's what they would say if they wanted to still talk about it.
Because again, often they would say, I told these stories. I don't even know what happened to my story. Right? It was extracted and ended up in some book or archives and never came back to them. And so it took the community care and the intentionality to create more breadth and more space for the story to return to reactivate itself.
And it was done by the people who were there. So we really say we tell a story with and not about. And I think that's a big difference because when you allow people to reclaim their story, to remember it together, then it becomes something else.
Adam Davis: Mm-hmm.
Kelly Bosworth: That's making me think of I don't know if it's like the motto of Vanport Mosaic or its mission, but I've heard you say at so many events, the idea of in times of collective amnesia, remembering is an act of resistance.
And also these ideas of silenced histories. It's so powerful in the way you tell the story of why Vanport Mosaic exists and why it's so important right now.
Laveta Gilmore: Yeah, and sometimes we wanna keep a story in 1948. And for me, it grew beyond 1948. First of all, for my mom. She didn't talk about Vanport [00:26:00] really, although she knew people, but she didn't talk about her life in Vanport, and it wasn't until Hurricane Katrina happened that it started, I would say, boiling up inside of her.
Right? So something that happened in 2005 took her back to something that happened in 1948. The story of Vanport is just a microcosm of a larger story. And if we think that we are…that things are not interconnected, we only delude ourselves.
Adam Davis: Mm-hmm. Somehow, while you were talking Laveta, put me back to Laura, what you said about coming here from New York with your daughter and thinking how are we gonna belong in this place when it's clear that it's been tough on the capacity for everyone to belong. And now, I'm thinking about new arrival. Portland's a place where people keep coming. Is it mandatory that people that come to Portland learn about Vanport and if so, what's the best way? I'm thinking? I came out here 12 years ago, so it's been like you described Kelly. It's been a process of learning and my work connected me to the story in ways and, but for that it would've taken me longer to connect to this story. I'm wondering about that, about how much can we expect that people in this city or frankly any city learn these kinds of stories.
Laveta Gilmore: We… in the work of Professor James Harrison, he uncovered the document in 1961, the ordinance where the Portland City Council called an emergency, said it was an emergency and it was for the wellbeing of the city. That the land formally called Vanport and East Vanport be changed to Delta Park because it was for the well-being of the city and it had to happen. So there was a deliberate erasure of that. And it also goes to show that you cannot erase people's stories even though people were scattered. There's always a remnant who hold the story and who can tell the story and for whom make that connection there. And I think for people coming to Portland, I think it's about what you said, finding your place of belonging. If we share all of the parts of the stories of Portland and how Portland came to be, people will find their place of belonging, but if we withhold it, they may not find their place of belonging and move on.
Kelly Bosworth: I know there are a number of people who've heard that story and said we should change it back to Vanport. And that becomes complicated as well because Delta Park is actually a name that kind of precedes Vanport in terms of the Delta being an important place for Chinook and people's…And so there's an interesting layered history there. So it's an erasure to change the name and there are other erasures that can happen.
If we change the name again–so it's interesting, and I think that's part of the Vanport story too, it's like it's not an act of repair to put a city back on Vanport. It's an act of repair to remember and to reseed communities today.
Laveta Gilmore: Right.
Kelly Bosworth: And so there, there's just something interesting in terms of that like returning something is not always the repair for erasure.
Laveta Gilmore: Right. And it wasn't so much about returning it, but it's just acknowledging that it was done. Exactly. As a matter of saying, we don't want the memory of this on this land anymore. We don't want that flood and that temporary community to be remembered anymore.
Laura Lo Forti: And that's why, going back to your question about remembering. Why should new people even know about this story? It's because history is not a thing of the past. History is a living movement. It's always. We are doing history as we speak right now. History is now, right? So these stories are not done. The stories of Vanport or the story of oppression, displacement or building places that are not supposed to be where people live because they are vulnerable to any sort of climate tragedy.
That story is ongoing. And so going back to your mother remembering and making the connection, that's because it's her story. And so I think it's important, first of all, to acknowledge the harm that's been done to communities, but also to realize that this story is ongoing and we are part of it.
So if you are coming to the city, you are part of this story. And you need to be, you need to decide what stories you want to tell. Right? And then I would say that knowing the Vanport story to me is a way to fall in love with Portland because it's really not what you expect to be important, but I would say it's something that we lost a concept of, of communities.
They come together by accident, but they figure out how to overcome their differences by necessity, realizing that their survival depends on each other and how they build community, right? So that's a beautiful story of how people figure it out. So these stories keep reminding us what it takes to build a healthy, thriving community, even when they're not supposed to, because that's not what was the design of this place. They were supposed to leave after the war and many stayed. And so I think it's a story that actually is inspiring because see, it's a story of a tragedy. It's a trauma story, but it is also a story that is about resilience and today I think we do need to figure it out again.
Laveta Gilmore: Yeah, because you know, the way that Portland has evolved as a city. I mean, when many of the African American families were washed into Portland, we were, they were, washed into a neighborhood.
But then, you know, I had the interesting opportunity to see how that migration went from Albina to the Elliot neighborhood. How it moved to the to the King neighborhood and the Vernon neighborhood and the Woodlawn neighborhood. And I followed my granddad's story of the houses that he was able to finally buy and how he moved on and moved on and ended up where he ended up, you know?
And then I also had the opportunity to see how gentrification shaped Portland and how there are all kinds of people of color in Albina. And now we're even spread out further. And so it's always interesting to see what are the patterns of migration, forced migration and voluntary migration.
Why are we in different pockets of the city now? We started here, now we're here. But how does that story, how does that connect for someone coming here? How does that story connect with where you came from? What are the patterns that we see in our stories, no matter what city you come from?
Kelly Bosworth: I was thinking about the power of an invitation to a story. And I think of Vanport Mosaic as an invitation into a story. I'm also thinking, Laveta, of you asking your mom on her 80th birthday, tell me about your life. Know that there are these moments, we kind of forget to invite the reflection. And I know I'm very guilty of this, that I take the present moment for granted. I don't really always notice what's here that won't always be here. And I think, you know, in terms of Vanport being something that did exist in the past. It has a kind of limited quality and time and space. And also it blows through all of those limitations when we keep telling our stories and inviting new people into the stories.
And there's an idea I always come back to with why it matters to study history that I think over and over again I see when I study the past. That the future is made in the present.
Adam Davis: Mm-hmm.
Kelly Bosworth: So we are living in the present. That was future to somebody else. And what we plant today will bloom tomorrow. And So we have a lot of power in the present moment to invite new people in to really think about what we're building.
Adam Davis: What you just said about invitation made me think back to Laura, what you said about generous questions before. And I went like, what are, what are some generous questions that bring out both new people and stories that maybe hadn't yet emerged?
Laura Lo Forti: Well, what is home for you? Where do you come from? Where did your parents come from? What brought you here? What are you hoping to find here?
Laveta Gilmore: What kind of community do you want to see?
Laura Lo Forti: And so when you ask someone about the past, right? The story of Vanport, it's like, who were your parents? Why did they move? And so that's the story of migration. That is incredible. They came from all over the country. And then you have them share stories of looking for something better. Trying to build a better future for yourself and your family. So there you go. Share a story. What games were you playing with, with the other kids?
And it becomes this lively moment where kids now think like, oh, that sounds fun. You know, when we have the exhibit and we have some of the artifacts, we had marbles. The kids, the kids now go crazy. Like, what is that?
Laveta Gilmore: Or Jacks!
Laura Lo Forti: Yeah. So there's just a moment of humanity in the story, right?
So when you allow that to happen, I think of the story of the tragedy. We can hold both, but I think we can feel more empathy and care for the communities who suffer such a tragedy when we understand what they lost, right? So what was your life before the tragedy? What did you build?
Like you came from so far away. You build a community, you build, you had a job, you were saving money and you have your things and you lost them all. Then the story of the flood is much more horrifying to me than the mere fact there was a flood. And then what happened? What happened afterwards? How, how did you survive?
How did people rebuild their communities? And so that's another beautiful story that continues. Right? And then thinking about what, why this story is an invitation also to really meet the city in its complexity–the bad and the amazing elements that make this home now for me. And it's the people who survive the flood and what they built, and this is what they contribute to the city in this region, and they made this our home.
We wouldn't be here probably if the Vanport former residents didn't continue rebuilding their community.
Laveta Gilmore: Mm-hmm. And I think that's what happened after the flood. Mm-hmm. That story then continues to be told. And you know, that's where I learned my grandfather became a union member when he lived in Vanport.
But that union membership in Vanport ended up with him becoming the president of the union, becoming the general manager of the union, being on the Executive Council of the union for the local laborers union for years. But it started there and his being in a union opened up jobs for other people.
Or I stop and think about Senator Jackie Winters. You know her stories in Oregon began in Vanport, but she became an elected decision maker representing people in the state of Oregon, you know.
Laura Lo Forti: And she did remember Vanport. So much that she sponsored a resolution at state level for a proclamation a few years ago.
Laveta Gilmore: Before she passed away. Yeah. The story of the Panthers. The Black Panthers. Some of the people that helped form the Panthers were children who supported the Panthers, who gave guidance. Those women, those men came out of Vanport. Mm-hmm. They knew what mutual aid looked like.
They knew what it meant to empower your community to take care of itself, mutual care.
Adam Davis: So earlier we talked just briefly about how it sounded. As we're talking about the world coming more clearly into view, I wonder, Kelly, how would you describe what Vanport sounded like?
Kelly Bosworth: It was noisy. I feel like that's one thing to know. I mean, this is buses, buses, buses. You have, during the war, this is a 24 hour city. Day shift, swing shift, graveyard shift at the shipyards. Buses picking people up and taking them.
Laveta Gilmore: And the radios.
Kelly Bosworth: The radios. Every apartment had a radio. And then the walls between apartments are so thin you can hear your neighbor sneeze.
Maybe even that one person claims not just your neighbor, but your neighbor's neighbor’s sneeze. So imagine what that does for the sound of being in your apartment. They made the ridiculous decision to put these vents on the front of the apartments facing out to the street. So any street noise is coming into your apartment with dust as well.
So your neighbor's sneezing and playing the radio. You're working day shift. The next day at the shipyards and the swing shift gets off and they have one of their very popular swing shift dances at the recreation center, and they're getting raucous. There's a swing band or the jukebox in the recreation center and you're trying to sleep and your neighbor won't stop sneezing, you know?
And then there's the kid who just started playing the trombone in the junior high band who’s two apartments over. So I think about the kind of cacophony of this. And there's a lot of music-making in Vanport that is very much a part of every day and very collective, very shared.
This isn't the music of today, right? Where we have portable computers in our pockets and noise canceling headphones. A lot of musicing happens in the air. And you know, if you go into the recreation center and put a song on the jukebox, someone else hears that at the same time. There's also, I mean, there's church services, there's the music program in the schools which is incredible.
Laveta Gilmore: And then there are the birds, the herons, and the kids playing outside. Stickball. Getting into fights, figuring it out themselves.
Ed Washington: It really was a 24 hour city at the height of the war. There was always sounds, I remember when people would be sleeping during the day, a lot of times they would turn their radio on and you could, you sort of got used to hearing the theme songs from all the soap operas.
Adam Davis: You just heard the voice of Vanport survivor Ed Washington recorded for the Vanport Mosaics Living Archive. This is The Detour with Laveta Gilmore Jones. Laura Lo Forti, and Kelly Bosworth.
Kelly Bosworth: I think, you know, we romanticize in memory these soundscapes that are lost. And I try to both romanticize it because it's beautiful and it's so wonderful to think about this kind of bustling community and this sense of community life. And there's also– it really was challenging to sleep, to find peace and quiet, to navigate this soundscape. So I think about that as well. Especially during the war when you have peak population and a lot of people who are thinking of it as a very temporary community. And we do have some preserved reports from the rental office of neighbors complaining about each other. There you go.
Laura Lo Forti: I was thinking about what you were saying about romanticizing, and I think that's the danger of a single story, right? If you tell only the story of what people want to remember now that you know this. They were the kids, the people we interviewed said they were kids.
So their memories of this place are very different from the memories that their parents would've had. And so that's why the Mosaic concept is important because it allows you, since it's an open narrative, everybody can add the piece and often they're, you know, they contradict each other. You know, they're, they're in the exact opposite.
It was a great place. It was an awful place. It was integrated. No, it wasn't. And so the ability to hold all these stories is important. And that doesn't mean that we don't know the facts. The facts remain the story. But the facts, without the experience, the memories, they're just a sequence of events that we can very well forget.
And so the story and the way we continuously reopen it or invite into the exploration of this story is to embrace the complexity. It's very dangerous as we can see right now, to have this binary thinking about people's stories and then who gets to tell the story determines what the story is.
Adam Davis: So this is all now making me think about Portland today. And scale–that maybe there was something about that scale in Vanport that allowed for the mosaic to emerge even decades later. And I guess I want to ask the three of you as you're working on this project, like, is Portland telling its story?
Where might it be telling its story in these kind of connected multiple perspective ways?
Laura Lo Forti: I don't think we are doing a good job on telling the full story of Portland. What do you think?
Laveta Gilmore: The trauma that Portland has experienced has not been collectively shared enough in order to tell that story.
Adam Davis: That's interesting. Yeah.
Laveta Gilmore: Okay, because there was a trauma in Portland when the banks divested in the community. There was trauma in Portland when neighborhoods were razed for freeways, not just in Albina, but over in Southeast too, with the 205. And then the latest trauma, the pandemic.
How have we really processed that? How have we really come together to really talk about the impact of that? Or are we just saying, we're just gonna power through this, yet it happened. It happened. It's over now, let's move on. And yet the ongoing trauma of that is still with us.
Adam Davis: What you just said, Laveta, about the different challenges that maybe different communities have faced instead of a shared challenge.
It pushed me back to this idea of the flood. That, yes, it takes our attention and it pushes our attention to the day of the flood instead of everything that preceded it and much of what followed. But there is a kind of shared story that invites people to go, we were part of that, right? Even Covid weirdly. Still not shared enough. Like is there a time when we will look back and it will be shared enough that we can have the ground for Mosaic? As you think about the next 10 or 20 years of Vanport mosaic work.
Laura Lo Forti: Mm-hmm.
Adam Davis: You know, what do you hope happens there?
Laura Lo Forti: Well, first of all, I hope there is even just a few more years, given the state of things, given the sudden…this type of work is controversial and is subversive almost. Remembering is dangerous. Right. And that's because stories are powerful in one way or in another. And so I hope we continue telling the stories that bring us together and that demand that we reckon with the full story. And I also hope that we continue. This is really what memory activism is, right? So we don't only remember and try to repair and reclaim stories. We need to also reimagine a new story. And I think it's, I'm not even speaking about what's next for Vanport Mosaic, I'm speaking about what's next for all of us. I think it is this space of imagination, radical imagination that now we need to intentionally create, otherwise there's not gonna be 10 years of Vanport Mosaic. But for those matters, I don't know. I'm not, I don't, I don't like the story that I can imagine is in front of us.
Laveta Gilmore: I think for me, I can't tell you what I want Vanport to look like 10 years from now, because I want to hear everyone who is part of this movement, what their imagination is, and we've started to have some of those conversations. What do you want it to look like 10 years from now?
What do you want your grandchildren or the kid down the street to know? So the people will design what the work looks like.
Adam Davis: I come from a culture that as a kid, the short phrase that my culture gave me the most was never forget. So these are refugees from the Holocaust. And I remember feeling like, how could I forget?
This is what you keep telling me. I'm older now, and I think now I have more recognition of the power of that imperative and why it needed to be repeated. But I do remember how it felt as a kid–the imperative to remember something that didn't feel like mine in quite the way that it felt like theirs.
So I just wanna offer that up and see, see if it kicks anything off for you.
Kelly Bosworth: Well, there is something. As we look forward there are gonna be fewer people who really experienced Vanport firsthand. And yeah, that does raise the stakes of remembering because it gets way more distant for us and for the people who will come.
And I hope that is part of the joy and the hope of the festival and that it's kind of creating a new social experience to remember because we will come to a place where we're remembering Vanport through a prism of storytelling and relationships and descendancy and lineages.
But so can we create something in the present that also has relationships and lineages? And so maybe that is one of the tasks and one of the reasons why it's important to have art be a part of the festival, right? To have children be a part of the festival, to have multi-generational spaces, multiracial spaces, multicultural spaces that are fun, that are asking, you know, how do you relate to this part of the story?
You know, if you….
Laveta Gilmore: You just reminded me that when we talk about the story of Vanport we talk about the people who were there, like our Japanese-American families that lived in Vanport after they came back from the internment camps.
And that story is remembered. And the Native American siblings who had been at the boarding schools whose families came and lived in Vanport. That story is part of it. So this is like, it's not just Vanport, it's the story of many peoples who were in a location for a period in time, but now who are woven into the city in Portland and who make up the threads of this city.
And I think that the question is how do we keep Portland from always being tagged as the whitest city in America? Because that's an erasure of the people who have contributed to this city. And I think the cities of Portland, Gresham. Beaverton, Hillsboro, Clackamas, Oregon City, Gladstone, we all have a duty to recognize the stories of all of the people who came here and who make up the city and honor our stories and do the collective work of creating a space of belonging for all.
Laura Lo Forti: Truly, when we say never again, right? And now we are seen. Over and over and over “never again” is now. And somehow we always end up repeating this horrifying erasure.
Adam Davis: Yeah. Literal erasures.
Laura Lo Forti: Erasure of community. And so for example, now this year we are elevating more than ever the story of the Japanese American incarcerations.
And we are gonna be at Expo, which is the former temporary site of detention before they were sent to concentration camps. That's how we call them now. And we'll do it through the arts and we'll do it through music, a place for grief and altar. Any way to enter the story in a, not in an intellectual way, because I think we know the facts and still they don’t do much to avoid repeating them, but I think it has to be felt and together it has to be a collective remembering, a collective grieving and a collective imagining something different, a new story, and a collective committing to tell the story together to make it a new story.
Adam Davis: Laveta, Lara, Kelly, thank you for the conversation today. And also thank you for building the festival. It feels to me like the festival home belonging. Thank you. Thanks for so much of that.
Kelly Bosworth: Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having us.
Various speakers: It was 68 years ago when the cold, muddy waters carried away my first ever bike. That bike, along with the household and personal belongings were lost in the fast swirling waters. Life would not be the same. Oregon's second largest city was now underwater and thousands of our families had defined shelter in nearby Portland or in Vancouver, Washington.
Whereas, and in order to understand where we are going, it is critical that we understand where we have come from. Yes, yes.
Adam Davis: That was Senator Jackie Winter speaking at the Vanport Mosaic Festival. The tenth festival will take place from May 17 to June 1, 2025. Learn more about the Vanport Mosaic at vanportmosaic.org and in our show notes at oregonhumanities.org.
The Detour is produced by Anna McClain. Ben Waterhouse, Karina Briski, and Alexandra Silvester are assistant producers. This is Adam Davis. See you next time.