An Oregon original

Maverick senator put his stamp on state’s land-use planning

By Eric Bartels

The Portland Tribune, Mar 19, 2004, Updated Oct 30, 2009

In a photo of Ted Hallock as a 22-year-old bombardier, circa World War II, the twinkling blue eyes and proud chin radiate the aw-shucks charm of a young Jimmy Stewart.

But Ted Hallock never uttered anything as family-friendly as “Aw, shucks” in his life.

Propelled by a daunting intelligence and a righteous resolve, the former state senator from the west side of Portland has worn many hats in addition to the jaunty Air Corps cap Ñ and gotten things done underneath every one of them.

He’s been an artist, a warrior, a journalist, a statesman and an image-maker. But he brought his unique stamp down hardest as a legislator from 1963 to 1983, often with the heartless precision of the Norton bombsight he operated in a drafty B-17.

“A lot of what I’ve achieved has angered a lot of people,” he says. “I would really like not to have wounded some of the people I wounded. That’s the price I really have to face up to. ”

“He did wound a number of persons. He knew how to do that,” says historian and filmmaker Thomas Vaughan, a friend of Hallock’s for more than 40 years. “But he also knew how to convey certain things that he felt were very important to the human spirit and the Oregon community.”

As a state senator, Hallock was a key figure in shaping a progressive political agenda that branded Oregon as a maverick state willing to protect its natural beauty at any cost.

“There are fewer and fewer people who are willing to lose an election over a principle,” says former Gov. John Kitzhaber. “Ted was part of a group of people who clearly put the state first.”

Hallock introduced a bill giving the state the power to close down industries that polluted the environment, including those that harmed the Willamette River, which had become a toxic quagmire. He excoriated opponents of the bottle bill, an anti-littering measure that made Oregon the first state in the nation to place a deposit on bottles and cans. And his fierce determination helped to make Senate Bill 100, the state’s innovative 1973 land-use planning law, a reality.

“People have no idea the amount of work that went into those accomplishments,” says Vaughan, who was director of the Oregon Historical Society for 35 years. “They were desperately fought for. There was opposition at every point.”

Stephanie Hallock, 57, is head of the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, an agency her father helped create. Once, speaking before a group of citizens in Eastern Oregon, she noticed a disgruntled-looking man in the front row. When she invited questions from the audience, the man stood and asked if she was related to Ted Hallock. She said she was. “Well then, we’re all doomed,” the man huffed, and stormed out.

The man was Hermiston Mayor Frank Harkenrider, whose constituents had failed to persuade the elder Hallock, then a member of the Northwest Power Planning Commission, to allow irrigation water to be taken from the Columbia River.

“The farmers up here and everybody else here’s been cussing Ted Hallock for a long time,” Harkenrider says.

“He did have his share of enemies,” Stephanie Hallock says. “People were afraid of him because he was so intelligent. He eviscerated people.”

Even at 83, slowed by health problems and mellowed by an unexpected spiritual awakening, Hallock’s reflections on a remarkable career still come peppered with the saltiest of language.

“Am I kinder and gentler to mankind? Probably not,” he says. “The only good thing about me is that I operated on the premise that you leave the planet better than when you got here.”

Wartime brings mission

The son of an electrical engineer, Hallock was born in Hollywood, Calif., in 1921. The family Ñ Hallock was an only child Ñ moved to Portland when he was 6 years old, settling in Irvington.

By the time he graduated from Grant High School, his love for jazz music inspired him to become a competent drummer who later formed his own dance band. He spent a year washing dishes and working in local radio Ñ sometimes on the air Ñ before enrolling at the University of Oregon in 1940. “I wanted to go to Reed,” he says. “But we didn’t have the money.”

While in Eugene, he covered jazz for Downbeat magazine, once traveling to New York by bus to report on the scene there.

Hallock’s life changed with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. “Within an hour or two we had a plan to go down to the beach and defend the country,” he says. “I enlisted in June of 1942 here at Portland Air Base.”

“In a little more than a year I went from being a kid from Portland, Oregon, to a seasoned veteran of 30 combat missions. Extraordinary.”

Hallock cheated death repeatedly in the skies over Europe, sometimes dramatically. On one mission, a German fighter came in fast on one of the B-17’s unmanned guns. “The navigator was busy doing something. Navigating, I guess,” he says.

A 20 mm shell pierced the plane’s thin fuselage and exploded; shrapnel severed the cord to Hallock’s headset. “Twelve inches from my head,” he says. “I don’t know why I wasn’t dead.”

By the time of the Allied assault on the beaches of Normandy in 1944, Hallock was on his way home. He had earned a Purple Heart, the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Air Medal and the Presidential Unit Citation.

At home, back on the air

Back in Oregon, Hallock earned a journalism degree, married for a second time Ñ fathering three children Ñ and went back to radio, winning the prestigious Peabody Award in 1952 for a news talk show. His work took him to England and the Soviet Union and introduced him to a hard-drinking former newspaper reporter and political flak named Tom McCall. The scion of New England society who grew up amid the pine and rimrock of Central Oregon, McCall would go on Ñ at Hallock’s urging Ñ to become one of the most popular and influential governors in the state’s history.

“He was so bright, so good,” Hallock says, “the first guy I knew to have noble aspirations.” Ideological compatriots, the two men would work together closely at the state capital.

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