What's Your Story?

After graduating from the UO Honors College (Major Asian Studies and Japanese) in 1976 I worked in Tokyo in 1976-77 and then returned to Portland where I worked as a steamship agent for three years. When Mt. St. Helens erupted on May 18, 1980 we watched with amazement from Portland until learning via the Merchant's Exchange call service that the Columbia River had been closed to all ocean going vessel traffic at Longview and had silted in with volcanic ash, mud, and debris from a depth of 40 feet to only 14 feet. I had to telex inbound vessels to divert to other ports and then go to a US Coast Guard briefing on the status of the disaster and learn that several of our ships would be stuck at upriver ports for months until the river could be dredged. So I spent the summer visiting ships that could not sail and we never knew if one of the continuing eruptions of Mt. St. Helens would be "another big one." See photo taken on board a Japanese log ship at Longview during the July 22, 1980 eruption with the smoke plum rising in the background of the ship's bridge where I am standing between the Japanese ship captain and the supercargo.

Photo on my facebook album at

http://www.facebook.com/p.php?i=727653254&k=34BZ34U5QT6G6BD1XCY2WRVSU6BAX46B3RGS&oid=1298334982013

On May 18th, 1980, I was flying my family from Bremerton to Portland after a visit with my brother. I am a private pilot and an airplane was a nice way to make fast trips. Leaving the Bremerton airport in mid-morning I noticed a strange vertical cloud to our south. As we got closer, it was obvious that Mt. St. Helens had erupted slightly earlier. We did not have a camera aboard or I would be still showing fantastic pictures. Getting closer, air traffic control advised us to divert to the west as a precaution. My son was fascinated by the long line of automobiles stopped on I5 due to bridge closures. After landing and getting the television news, we realized what we had seen from the air. Truly unforgettable.

Jack Gjovaag
BA 1961 Mathematics

On Sunday morning May 18, 1980 I was in my living room in Corvallis listening to NPR. I felt and heard two "thumps" a few seconds apart - my windows actually rattled. I mused briefly about gas mains going up. A few minutes later the Mt. St. Helens eruption was reported on the radio.

About six weeks later I was part of a research team that set up studies to monitor surface erosion in the blast zone. The helicopter trip into the area was thrilling, but spending two days working among the huge trees that had been flattened by the blast was an awesome experience.

George Lienkaemper
BS 1969 Geology
MS 1976 Interdisciplinary Studies

I drove to Lincoln City from Portland on May 16, 1980, to visit my parents. On the way, I picked up a hitchhiker who hitched from Wyoming to see the ocean for the first time. I dropped him off to camp on the beach.
The next day, he spent part of the day at my parents' home. My mother was so taken by this young man with Swedish heritage that she invited him to spend the night.
The following morning, everyone else still sleeping, Mom heard a loud "boom" and the house shook. Her first thought was, "Oh, my, that kid has blown up our house."
The hitchhiker bolted into the room, saying, "What was that?" They turned on the tv and learned the truth.
He and I returned to Portland that morning to be part of the event, watching billowing smoke clouds from my horse pasture on the Columbia River.
The hitchhiker and his family remain good friends to this day.

After graduating from the U of O in Dec. 1977 in Computer Science, I took at job at Pacific NW Bell (now Qwest) that I got through a campus interview. I was to be in Seattle for a year then my permanent post would be in their underground Portland data center.

By May, 1980, I had a Seattle fiancee and had taken up my duties in Portland. On Sunday, May 18, I was returning from a Seattle visit with my future ex-husband and was on I-5 returning to Portland when Mt. St. Helens blew up. I apparently just missed the closing of the freeway. I knew nothing about the disaster until I reached my apartment in Portland. I was listening to music and didn't hear any loud noises like everyone in Seattle heard. I found out later that the sound went up and then out like an umbrella shape and I was apparently too close to have heard it.

The underground data center's front doors faced Mt. St. Helens and more than one time I emerged to see huge clouds bellowing out of the mountain. Depending on the wind, the Portland streets would get ashed. We had visitors from Western Electric in North Carolina soon after an eruption. They brought glass jars to collect ash and were like giddy kids over the opportunity. They told us later that they created a very popular display in their building foyer with the ash and were treated like royalty for having collected it and brought it back.

My brother was a timber faller during that time period. When it came time to clean up the downfall, there were many logging crews assigned to it. He complained that it was miserable to work in and dulled and ruined saws very quickly. He found another job away from it as soon as he could.

On May 18th, 1980 I was 15 and working on my grandpa's garden/farm in Dallas, Oregon. It was a beautiful, warm May day with blue sky. Eventually we noticed a gray mushroom cloud rising in the north. Burning massive slash piles from clearcut logging on public lands was common in those days so we assumed at first that was what it was. Within a very short time the plume climbed so high we knew it had to have been the mountain blowing. St. Helens dominated the news in the weeks leading up the eruption because of the tremors and bulge in the mountain side so it wasn't hard to put two and two together. We went inside and watched the events unfold on the TV, frequently stepping outside to watch the magnificent and surreal plume. For the 2nd big eruption on June 12th I was in Portland at a Grateful Dead concert at Memorial Coliseum. The eruption occurred during the second set when they were jamming on "Fire on the Mountain." After the show when we went out it was dark and ash began coming down hard. Local businesses that were still opened graciously ushered people inside to get them out of the ash. We spent a few hours in the local Red Lion as I recall.

In May of 1980, my husband and I had just graduated from UO and moved up to Portland. On the morning of the eruption, we were at the coast near Yachats for the weekend, and my husband heard a distant whoomp-WHOOMP while he was on a morning run on the beach. He thought at first it was construction blasting, but it seemed strange because it was Sunday. We drove back home to Portland later that day, and as we came up through the Terwilliger curves, we noticed all these people standing on the Ross Island Bridge looking north. We crested the hill, and there it was erupting: surreal, prehistoric, dominating the sky with a rolling vertical column of ash. We didn't feel excited or scared at first; we were simply awe-struck.

The winds took most of the ash east during the first eruption, but some subsequent eruptions sent the plume south over Portland. We'd stay indoors during the worst of every ashfall, watching it drift down like some kind of apocalyptic snow. It was very hard to clean out of the gutters -- it slid around like mercury if it was wet, or just dispersed and re-settled if it was dry. My husband, who biked to work, wore a respirator outdoors for many months.

For many years after the eruptions, I carried in the trunk of my car an extra air filter and a couple of gallons of water, remembering that cars had gotten stranded on I-5 from clogged filters and running out of windshield wiper fluid.

On the morning of May 18, my family was eating breakfast on our deck just south of Eugene. We heard a loud boom far away but thought someone was maybe blasting dynamite or something like that. We didn't know what had happened until that afternoon. What we heard must have
been the big eruption. My relatives in western Kansas got more ash from that first one than we did in Eugene, and we got ash later on the top of our sailboat at Fernridge
Reservoir.

The first time we traveled in the Portland area and north on I-5, we were amazed at all the volcanic dust along the roads, on the tree leaves, and later the maammoth piles of ash cleaned from the rivers in the Toutle area.

I still remember the white bottoms of the trees by that river showing how high the river got, leaving a high water mark on all of them.

Since we live only two hours south of Mt. St. Helens, we have watched all the reports about that volcano.

It was quite an experience.

Beverly Andrews ('59 General Social Science)
Dave Andrews ('59, Law)

I was a student at University of Oregon and was up early that morning working on a paper. It was about 8:30am when I heard a "pop"! It was a sound I've never heard before. Shortly thereafter, the power went out. I looked outside to see if there was an accident which might've caused the power outage. Nothing there. It wasn't until later that morning when I heard Mt. St. Helen's had erupted. I think the "pop" I heard might have been Mt. St. Helens! To this day, I have never heard that same sound!

30 years ago, on the day of the eruption of Mt.St.Helens, my husband, Andy, and I were playing tennis at our local club in Tacoma, WA, and our two young daughters were at a nearby children's playground. An unusual black cloud became more prominent, and we became puzzled and somewhat alarmed at the sight. We picked up our children and headed for home where we were glued to the television. The four of us will never forget where we were on that day in May; we remember it well.
Suzanne (McWhirter) Jordan
Class of 1959
B A English

We were living at Grants Pass then and my wife Maxine wrote this poem in calligraphy for the 1981 Josephine County Fair: fair:

Ode to Mount St. Helens

From great St. Helen's withering blast
That filled the whole Northwest with ash
Clear to Montana and beyond, they say,
Where traces can be seen today.
We gaze upon the awesome crater, one mile deep
And one mile wide,
And the gray, moonlike appearance
Of the entire countryside.
What is the future of this mountain,
Once a beauteous thing?
Will the trees grow once again
And the flowers bloom in spring?

Frank Walsh,Class of 1951

We had been waiting days for the mountain to erupt so on May 18th we went up to Skyline to get the best view. Skyline cemetery was crowded with people with binoculars, cameras on tripods and just spectators. A very strange site indeed among the graves and headstones. We were lucky as when it blew we were all there to see it - amazing! A friend of mine's father was a pilot so on the 19th we took a small plane from PDX and flew up to Washington as close as we could - I remember thinking looking down that the it looked like someone had dropped a game of "pick up sticks" as all you could see were the trees lined up on the ground down pointing in the exact same direction away from the mountain - perfectly straight and completely bared of all branches and bark, an eerie yellowish-white against the darker solid mud and ash. I have some great pictures from the plane. After that the ash made everything a mess and the fire department allowed us the use of the fire hoses from the hydrants to wash the streets in our neighborhood. Ash got in to the air vents in our cars, in the gutters on the houses in thick globs and was just a total mess covering everything especially after the rain. We tied handkerchiefs over our noses and mouths as we walked to school for weeks afterward and I remember it was hard to see driving at night when it all stirred up as it created a thick, heavy, swirling dust storm. We still have some ash in bottles as we kept some momentos!

May 18 is my birthday. I was 33 in 1980, employed at the Museum of Northern Arizona, Flagstaff, and working on an archaeological site in southwest Colorado, the Escalante Ruin. My crew knew nothing of the blast until we left camp for the local tavern a few miles away, the Hollywood in Dolores. Many rounds of longneck Buds lined up in front of me, I performed 33 push-ups, and naively celebrated the eruption, from a great distance, as one helluva candle. In the winter of 1973, while at UO, I snowshoe'd across a frozen and pristine Spirit Lake. When I got back to Flagstaff and saw the photos of the former lake, I realized how utterly complete was the devastation.

Living in Portland on May 18th 1980 woke up to two very loud "bangs" that I thought were backfires from a car, or maybe gunshots. On my way to visit someone in Salem, and was told by him about Mt St. Helens erupting. On way back to Portland saw the cloud. WOW!
I am confused by what the article in the Cascade said about there being no indication that an eruption was coming, and that Mt. St. Helens was "very quiet seismically before the eruption". I remember hearing for weeks, maybe months before of the harmonic tremors that were being monitored and that people were warned to evacuate the area around the mountain. I remember Harry Truman was told he needed to leave his cabin on Spirit Lake, but he refused to leave and he died as a result of the eruption. I'm no volcanologist, but I have always understood that the eruption was no surprise.

I was a member of Hoedads, Inc., a Eugene-based worker's cooperative that planted trees throughout the West. In 1979, we had Forest Service contracts in the Gifford-Pinchot National Forest on the flanks of Mt. St. Helens. At that time, the mountain had become active and frequently there would be ash and steam venting. The next spring, we were working in the Mt. Hood National Forest, just across the Columbia River from Mt. St. Helens. As the crow flies, we were about 50 miles away. We were hard at work on the morning of May 18, 1980, when all of a sudden there was this loud, rolling blast. Blasting noises were not that unusual since road building in the National Forests often involving blasting, but we all looked around and said "What was that?!" The rumbling noise subsided and we went back to work. A short while later, the Forest Service personnel who were monitoring our work gave us the news. Their trucks had radios so they were getting the news from their headquarters. Since the ash cloud went northeast from the blast and we were south-southeast of the mountain, we received very little ash. Many of our other crews were working in Idaho and Montana and they really had a mess to deal with as the ash coated everything.

Then in 1981 or 1982, we returned to Mt. St. Helens and started replanting the blast zone. At that time, salvage operations were in full swing and the blast zone was closed to the general public for safety concerns. One of the slopes we worked on had a blasted car, surrounded by a chain link fence, at the end of a spur road. They decided to leave everything right where it was. It was kind of creepy. The slopes were covered with several feet of pumice gravel and planting trees in that was like trying to dig a hole in a giant bowl of popcorn. It will fill up as fast as you could dig. The pumice absorbed the heat of sunlight and would not retain water. I can't believe that any of those seedlings survived.

At the time in question I had been in Hamburg, Germany, for two weeks on sabbatical leave from Eastern Washington University, near Spokane. One morning, I bought a newspaper and, to my great surprise, found a story about the eruption of Mt. St. Helens on the front page, accompanied by a photo of an ash-clouded street scene in--Spokane. I had to travel some six thousand miles to witness the effects of the eruption on my home town.

Herb Rowland,
Ph.D., U. of O., 1973

The morning Mt. St. Helens erupted I was outside my house in Eugene waiting for my housemate to come out. I heard a very loud boom that sounded like a sonic boom. A few minutes later we left town in an old VW Bug, that didn't have a radio, to do recon for a field trip for my Geomorphology class at the U of O. We were up in the mountains most of the day not realizing what had taken place. When we returned to Eugene that evening we heard about the eruption. The Geomorphology class ended up taking a field trip to get as close as we could to the mountain to use it as a real world example of a volcanic eruption.

Hard to believe it has already been 30 years!

Joel Enking
BS Geography, U of O, 1981

May 18, 1980 was my very first birthday, so while I don't remember the blast itself, my parents love to tease me by telling me it was their first clue that their daughter would have an explosive personality!

Katie Breene
BA Political Science, 2001

I was 10 years old in 1980 and lived in Tigard (a suburb of Portland). Mt. St. Helens was a big deal! At school we learned all about volcanoes and started singing the Jimmy Buffet volcano song in music class. I still have a little jar of ash that I collected from the front yard following one of the early eruptions in March of that year.

I was atop the South Sister with a mountaineering class from the U of O my freshman year. We heard the eruption as more than one loud explosion, which we thought must have came from logging. After returning to campus that evening we found out that Mt. St. Helens had erupted. Only a thin layer of ash ever made it south to the campus, visible as a coating on my bicycle seat. I graduated with a degree in geology three years later, and have kept an ash sample I got from a friend in Portland and which my kids have shared with their classmates when they study geology.

I was at Lane County Fairgrounds in Eugene setting up my table for the Picadilly Flea Market when all the windows suddenly rattled in the old building like there had been a loud sonic boom from a jet! Consider the distance! That loud!

A buzz ran round the vendors saying it was the volcano...people tuned in the old radios they'd brought to sell to listen to news reports all day.

May 18th, 1980

For me May 18th, 1980 began on November 4th, 1979. That was the day that the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was stormed by militant Islamic students and over 90 hostages were taken. Although some were freed a few weeks later as many as 52 were held in captivity for over a year.

On that same November 4th I was welcoming my new daughter into the world. My husband and I were living in a mountain cabin in the northern panhandle of Idaho, almost on the border of Washington state. We were ’off the grid’ as they say these days. So she was born by the light of kerosene lamps with the assistance of two local midwives. In a cosmic celebration, the first gentle snowfall of the season began.

Now we were off the grid but I did have a small black and white television set that ran off a twelve volt battery and got one fuzzy station in. I watched the news about once a week so I always knew how many days old my baby was. They would begin the news with “this is day 167 in the hostage crisis“ or whatever the number was.

During these first few months the chatter I heard was always so dooms day. People kept saying the hostage crisis could lead to WWIII and they used terms like ‘limited nuclear war’.

Sometime in March or April there were news reports on Mt. St. Helens with scientists saying they didn’t believe there would be a big eruption. But that was hundreds of miles away and I thought it would never impact us if it did erupt.

I was just happy to be taking care of my baby and cooking dinners on my wood cook stove for my husband. It was all so groovy, and, I would NEVER do it again. For one thing you had to chop the wood to build the fire to heat the water just to wash the dishes….what was I thinking??????

May 18th was a beautiful morning. Sunny and very blue sky. My husband went off to work clearing trees for a local rancher. I bundled up the baby and went across the lane to my new little garden. I was planning on weeding some spinach rows that were getting wild and maybe putting a few more seeds in the ground.

I laid the blanket down and put my daughter down with some toys. She wasn’t crawling yet and liked to chew on toys and tell me little things she thought were funny. So I went to work.

I was working with the hoe when my daughter made some sweet sounds and I looked up to answer her and I saw he darkest storm cloud coming down the valley I had ever seen. I decided to finish up the row I was working on and then head back. I thought I should have plenty of time. When I looked up a few minutes later the cloud had advanced quite a bit and that made me nervous, I’d never seen a storm come on quite so quickly.

I put down the hoe and went to pick up the baby, but as I did, I began to see something falling from the sky. I recognized it as some kind of dust or fallout. I was momentarily stunned and then all the comments about nuclear war and the Middle East came rushing back. Above me the sky was still sunny but the cloud was coming fast.

I got back to the cabin as quickly as I could trying to cover my baby and cried knowing that nothing I would do would make a difference. It was dark outside now and cold. As I cleaned my little daughter as best as I could I wondered where the strike had taken place. Were my friends and family gone? I was numb. My little TV set was out of battery and the only radio was in the car with my husband.

I never would have thought that a volcano hundreds of miles away would be the cause of all this. Turning day into night and making the air difficult to breathe.

As the baby napped I watched her sweet baby breath going in and out and wondered how long we would survive.

After about an hour a neighbor who lived up the valley came by with a portable radio. He stopped in to check on me and to give me the latest update on the eruption of Mt. St. Helens. I was sorry for the destruction but I had never been so happy to hear a bit of news than at that moment.

For that one long, lonely hour my world was gone and I was afraid I would have to watch as my child sickened and died from radiation and I and my husband would surely have the same fate. I had no idea if my husband would make it home through the fallout.

The neighbor left and I laid down next to my baby and kissed her sweet little head. Life was good.

May 18, 1980 was a beautiful spring day in Portland. I was playing frisbee with my wife and sons in Gabriel Park when a park worker came by, gesticulating wildly and flailing his arms in the air, shouting "The mountain just blew up! It just blew up! It's still blowing up!" He was so excited we couldn't get any more than that out of him. St. Helens had vented a few times earlier, turning the sno-cone top of the mountain black, so we weren't too surprised. We drove up to Terwilliger which has a great view of the mountain, and the guy was right - the top of the mountain was gone and a vast column of ash rose and was being blown to the east. It was stunning in its power and size. We had a clear view and got some good photos. There were several smaller eruptions later that dusted Portland, and my son swept a jar of ash off the street in front of our house in Raleigh Hills. We still have the jar - the ash is extremely dense and heavy. It brings back some amazing memories and was great for the kids to take to show and tell as they got older.

I was 16 and living in Eugene on May 18th, 1980. All I really remember of the first eruption was the song...However, I spent every summer picking strawberries with my cousins in Hillsboro. The second eruption on June 12 I was in Hillsboro and remember having to wear surgical masks because of the clouds of ash that would erupt from the plants as we tried to find the strawberries underneath. It was miserable wearing a mask in the heat breathing sweat and hot stale air. When the boss wasn't looking we would often lower the masks and let them dangle around our neck as we picked even though the ash we stirred up would send us into coughing fits. The rain made breathing easier but we couldn't shake the ash off the berries. I believe the season ended early that year because the canneries were paying such a low price for the berries it became unprofitable to pick them.
I also remember the gutters of my uncle's house filling up with ash, it was so heavy when wet that it tore some of the gutters from the house. There was probably at least 4 inches of ash on the streets. When the ash dried huge clouds would follow any car moving down the road and would take a very long time to settle. Everyone in the neighborhood including my uncle, stood out in the street with garden hoses just trying to keep the ash wet enough to keep it on the ground and out of the air. I collected nearly a gallon of ash to take home as a momento.

I was a mountain climber back in those days, and a former member of the founding cadre of the UO Outdoor Program. I also had hankerings as a guitar player and loved the Neil Young music my good friend Bruce Faddis was playing on his Martin guitar.

During April of 1980, I had pulled together a group of friends to do the "Dogshead" route on Mt. St. Helen's NE side, We'd scheduled the climb for the very morning the mountain blew off its entire north side! I wasn't there, thank God, but I had been very tempted to ignore the Forest Service's many warnings--it was somewhat unusual of me at that time in my Life to have heeded such warnings. But the same was not true of my guitar-playing friend Bruce Faddis. He is one of the dead, his body, his Datsun station wagon, and his Martin guitar were never found. I did not realize he'd been lost for several months after the eruption. I think of Bruce everytime I see anything about the Mountain. I've posted quite a bit of material about this mountain and Bruce on my website http://www.oregonphotos.com/pagenineteen-O.html Thank You. Bruce B. Johnson, Masters grad in 1972.

The 30th anniversary of the Mt. St. Helen's eruption has brought Bruce Faddis to my mind once again.

I believe that my husband and I were the last people to see Bruce on the mountain.

We were about his age (young) and we were driving in the Red Zone on one of the logging roads. I had grown up in the area and knew it very well.

We knew that the fine for venturing into the Red Zone was $500. per person, if caught. It was like a moth to a flame for us.

As we drove along we saw a young man, red hair, hiking boots and small pack walking along the side of the road. Our eyes met and for an instant we all thought the same thing. Oh No, caught.

We pulled up and asked if he wanted a ride and he jumped in our little truck and off we went.

I asked his name, and where he was from. He said his name was Bruce and he was from Bend, Oregon where he worked at a golf course. From there on, all talk was about the mountain.

We arrive at Camp Baker and stopped. Bruce stated he was going to continue to hike in and we wished each other luck. We told him that if he changed his mind we would give him a ride out.

We made it home. The following Tuesday a friend of mine from California called me and stated "Thank God you are alive". That was when I realized that our Bruce may not have made it home.

I called directory assistance in Bend to get the phone numbers for the golf courses in the area. At the time I was lucky there were only two. When I reached the course where Bruce was working I asked if they had a red-haired young man working there named Bruce and if they did, had he been to work the last two days. I was then informed that he had not shown up for work. The gentleman I spoke with at the course gave me the telephone number for Bruce's mother and I made the most difficult call of my life.

The only difference between victim and survivor in this case is timing. All of us knew the possible danger of going somewhere that is off limits. I could tell by Bruce's hiking boots that he was no stranger to the mountains and hills. My family still doesn't know that I was up at the mountain during those times, but I couldn't stay away. Each news update about the changing conditions made it a more tantalizing experience.

We are now 30 years older, but I know I would still go up to the mountain, time and again to see for myself what was going on.

You didn't include the most recognizable song about the Mt. St. Helens eruption by R.W. Stone, "Harry Truman, Your Spirit Lives On.

It can be found at: www.2guyzmusic.com which shows the You Tube video and plays the audio of the eruption accompanied by the song.

Here's to Harry!

I live in Eugene. When Mt. St. Helens erupted I was visiting Seattle and was scheduled to take the Amtrak train down to Portland. When I arrived in Portland, although it was midday, it seemed like nighttime because of all the ash in the air. The street sweepers had done their job and ash was piled high along all the street curbs. Everyone was walking around with white dustmasks on.

But my fondest memory was when I went into Hamburger Mary's in downtown Portland to get a bite to eat. All the hundreds of items that adorn and decorate their walls were wearing facemasks. It was hilarious and an image I carry with me to this day.