Wartime gift restored to peaceful luster

Gate came from man bound for internment during World War II

By Eric Bartels

The Portland Tribune, Jul 18, 2006, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Courtesy of Glenn Pullen

The newly restored torii gate at Camp Adams will have a rededication Sunday featuring Oregon poet laureate Lawson Inada.

In August 1942, a downtown Portland businessman entrusted a treasured possession to a local pastor before leaving for Idaho. Nearly 65 years later, it’s still in good hands.

The businessman, a Japanese-American shopkeeper, never returned to Portland, his life forever changed by Executive Order 9066, which forced him and more than 100,000 others into relocation camps during World War II.

But his gift to Portland, a hand-hewn Shinto symbol called a torii gate, stands proudly once again. Through the efforts of a Southeast Portland congregation and others, it has been restored to the place of honor accorded it by a church pastor determined to reject wartime hysteria.

The gate will be rededicated Sunday at Camp Adams, a sylvan Clackamas County retreat that remains part of the summers and the memories of parishioners at Southeast Portland’s Waverly Heights Congregational United Church of Christ.

Glen Pullen, a computer specialist at Portland State University who grew up in the neighborhood, remembers the gate from his youth.

“I grew up in this church,” he says. “That torii was always part of the environment. Just part of the landscape.”

Pullen says Lee Lynne was pastor of the church for six years beginning in 1936. His decision to install the distinctive gate on a shady stream bank generated controversy. Church members reportedly objected to the presence of a symbol of Japanese culture so soon after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the 9/11 of its day.

Church lore holds that the gate was once dumped into the stream below it. Pullen wonders if the acrimony led to the pastor’s departure from Waverly Heights Church in early 1943.

“He might have been fired. I really don’t know,” he says.

Oregon poet laureate Lawson Inada, who will speak at the rededication ceremony this weekend, says Japanese-Americans such as the gate’s donor were woven into the fabric of life on America’s West Coast by the time of World War II.

“What it shows is our long-standing relationships in the community,” says Inada, who was interned as a child. “My grandparents entrusted longtime neighbors with things. People would even watch over property. Our neighbors took our pets.

“There were a lot of people like that who were extremely helpful. It shows the human side of things.”

Still, Inada wonders how President Franklin Roosevelt could have sent Japanese-Americans, some of them here for generations, into isolation.

“I sometimes think maybe he had never met any of us,” he says.

Gate became a fixer-upper

It was Pullen who noticed that the gate, which stands roughly 8 feet tall, had fallen into disrepair in recent years. Nature had taken its toll on the wooden structure, and unknown humans had used it for target practice.

“The past couple years it deteriorated quite badly,” Pullen says. Then, last winter, he saw a profile in a weekly neighborhood newspaper about a Southeast Portland woodworker named Dan Miller.

“He specialized in toriis, of all things,” Pullen says. He called Miller in November, and the soft-spoken 58-year-old former seminary student agreed to take on the job.

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